A Meditation Upon the Future

Today is the day, the moment when the first step is taken. The peak, the climax, wherefrom every step is easier, faster, closer to doom. This is where the foundation stone is laid, and the past is cleared away to make room for sidewalks, irrigation, and the rest. This is it. This is ground zero. The future blooms like a mushroom cloud. Shockwaves blast outward, searing the Earth, turning sand to glass, ripping trees from the ground, vaporizing houses, burning our shadows into the ground, laying waste to our past.

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Every Last River

Against the fall of night, over the phone, tell me things I have done. Tell me reasons. Say to me how I am lost, and you are found. Ignore yourself. Drive me to drink. Drive me to smoke. Sometime when silence comes, ask me to stray, to stay away. Promise me dazzling loneliness. Promise me remembrance and regret. Remind me that tears run away and away into the sea, and the sea remains salt. On some distant day, meet me by chance. Don’t recognize me. Walk past me, oblivious, carrying a newborn in your arms. Haunt me with that memory until every last river finally stops inching, ice.

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The Love of a Woman

The most haunting thing I ever saw: snow falling

gently as I walk down an alleyway at midnight.

The flakes glow in the streetlamp light, and the distance

is washed to whiteness by them. Something so soft,

so silent, something that fills our chests with such peace,

such cool warmth: it could swallow us all.

The sensation of ice crystals settling gently on your face

might be a seduction, a deceit. We could be taken

into that great long dark amidst all the drifting white.

For all we know, beyond that washed whiteness

there might be a wasteland of scorched earth

and razed buildings. The occupation may have already begun.

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The Symmetry of Loss

You sit in bed,

drunk,

writing by lamplight

on a humid summer night,

the womb-like droning of the box fan

drowning out the world

behind the window

and think back on the day.

At lunch,

you told the story to a friend

who had never heard it before:

how she was raped

and couldn’t look at you the same after that,

how she cheated on you

and how you stopped speaking after that;

two years for nothing.

You crawled through the afternoon

as the sun sank,

succeeding almost in forgetting her

for a few hours,

then failed as you always do;

the thought of her face creeps back:

the way her eyes sought yours

with tears in them

the first time you made love

in that hotel room.

Then it was off to the bars:

first a Long Island

then a Tom Collins,

then a Pabst bought for you

by drunk stranger,

some others you forget,

and finally

an Adios Mother Fucker.

Your heart beats but numbly

and one stranger follows another,

all of them the same:

their hair colored blond

with black streaks,

tribal tattoos on lower backs,

perfect rows of white teeth.

Finally the line to close your tab:

breathing fumes

in a crowd of wasted people

with vacant lonely stares.

This is the symmetry of loss:

the regularity of accordance or form,

the perfection of our sorrow;

we all remember what we left behind

in those days gone down

and we try in vain to forget.

We empty ourselves of feeling,

fill our livers with amnesia,

trying hopelessly to reduce our hearts

to what they were at birth:

nothing more than dense cardiac muscles

pumping blood to our tired extremities.

Ultimately you’ll forget pain,

finding the perfect oblivion of sleep

for those five blessed hours

before the alarm clock and work;

you’ll forget her face

and dream a black void.

But during your morning shower

you’ll see her again.

You’ll remember the first shower

you took together:

how she folded into your arms

like delicate origami –

each of you forming two seamless halves

of the same radiant creature –

as she whispered those unbearable words,

“I’ll love you forever.”

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We Surrender Again

Our hearts are beating in rhythm, beating as one. I know

because you’re sleeping in my arms, your cheek nestled perfectly

against my shoulder, our chests touching, your even breathing

as calming as the whispering of ocean waves before first light.

My eyelids are heavy, but I fear sleep in these unfamiliar waters.

The two of us are sailors, explorers, scarred pioneers adrift

and rudderless. Our only craft, our vessel, our ship is this bed.

Here we have shared longing gazes, gentle caresses,

careless pre-dawn hours and carefully planted kisses.

Here my hand searched the darkness for yours and found it.

You shift in your sleep and even as you make a soft sweet sound,

wake just enough to move closer and kiss me, I could swear

I feel the bed roll, bob and settle. My palm rests upon your cheek.

My lips find yours again. We tussle, roll, tangle and tease.

Finally, your back to my chest, my palm on your naked stomach,

we surrender again. Waves roll by. The fear passes with them.

I ask you, “What are you thinking about?” Your voice, like music,

hums down through my bones. “I’m thinking about boats,”

you say, “About how some float, and some don’t.” The silence

after your words is the same silence that paves the way for thunder.

Now I never want to leave, never want dawn to spill over our horizon.

You probably feel me squeeze you closer now – once – and kiss your neck,

though you cannot know my concentration, cannot see my eyes shut tight.

I am willing time to stop, willing the tides and currents to guide us.

My brow bends and my heart aches with the effort of keeping us afloat.

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This Life

I. First Memories

Rain is falling in my face. I’m held aloft, my tender cheek pressed against her shoulder. Even though I can hear two voices full of anger and rage surrounding me, I cannot fathom the depths of the emotion, its cause. I know only that a solitary refuge can be found in the one that holds me, in the one whose hair – soft, perfect, curled in brown ringlets between my small chubby fingers – smells of sweet berries even in this earthen and muddy glen.

I cannot see – cannot remember – her face that young. The only survivors of that moment are the scent of her hair, the caress of her fingertips in my hair, and the sound of her voice as she screams something back at the man’s voice behind me. She turns away from him to storm off, wracked by sobs, and only then do I see across her delicate shoulder the man’s face: grim, unhappy, etched in granite, eyes aflame with fire.

He stands in a copse of Douglas fir trees, though I wouldn’t learn that name for five years yet. Clutched white-knuckled in his hands: a jagged saw with pitch and wood-chips staining the blade. Next to him: a felled tree. Upon his countenance: a dark cloud, a baleful glare – I could not tell – turned either on her back or my face.

I would not understand in the weeks that followed how the living space where I found myself days was transformed around the tree. I would not know why it was fed and nurtured and adorned with radiant jewels while I was parked in front of a glowing box full of noise and light. I would not recognize the gifts that were placed at its feet: a pile growing steadily in size like a malignant tumor. I could feel then – even before I could speak, could form the words mother, father, love, hate, helpless, hope, desperation, danger, death, darkness or destiny – that something terrible was growing beneath that tree, within that house. Something awful was growing inside me. I could feel it moving, waiting to be born.

II. Childhood

As a boy, riding in the back seat,

I leaned against the glass and gaze at the sky.

The clouds then seemed bigger:

wispy, towering things like pillars

above the Earth. I imagined what

those clouds were like on the inside:

that God lived in those clouds,

sitting on a white throne,

angels to his left and to his right,

looking back down at my four year old face

pressed against a Honda Civic rear window.

I thought surely he could see me,

even if he was hidden to my eyes. No wonder

why today I read the Sunday newspaper alone.

III. Youth

This is how the world should end:

your favorite girl at your right hand,

sitting on a concrete back porch,

watching as lightning splits the night

and thunder peals it open.

You would watch the electric dance

playing across her eyes

and wonder at the flawlessness

of that moment. In those apocalyptic

pre-dawn hours, the past that led you

to this perfect future would be

illuminated behind the sundered

atmosphere:

how one spark

at the heart of the cosmos

led to a gargantuan light

unfathomable to you now,

how the light swallowed the old void,

cooling to matter, how hydrogen

made those new lights which hang

so impossibly over your heads

innumerable eons later, how those stars

collided just so, grew and receded,

coalesced and burst into celestial ash,

how those ashes made worlds

primordial and terrible,

how microbes suddenly

drew something like breath, born

amongst unblemished chaos,

how they were forged by time,

pressure, and faultless mystery,

how life dragged itself

onto the ruthless smoldering land.

So much, all for the two of you

to relish this last lingering minute:

the sky aflame like a movie screen

when the projector burns the film,

the two of you sitting arm to arm,

looking on awestruck. You don’t mind,

though, that the world is about to come

crashing down around you.

If time is a film projected before you

from behind, you’re content

to take your favorite girl’s hand

in this unstoppable theater,

to see how it all plays out,

how the credits roll

and the lights go up

at the end

of all things.

IV. Loss

Only hours before the bleeding started, as they drifted off to sleep entangled in each other’s arms, her face was aglow. She had placed her hand on his chest, feeling for his heartbeat as she did every night at that hour. He had said, “You know, you’re looking for that in the wrong place now.”

Her voice was like a gentle wind rustling leaves: “Where should I look then?” It was then he took her hand and placed it upon her own belly, swollen with the life inside.

“From now on, you’ll find it here,” he’d said.

But that was before she bled, and sometimes the currents of a river change before you can steer your raft true. He’d been the one to wake with a terrible notion in the middle of the night, to feel the sheets wet with red, to realize first something was wrong. Now I can see the two of them later in that sterile white room with only one other. Her skin is pallid and bloodless, her eyes ragged and sunken. I can see her sitting on the edge of that table in a blue gown, looking through everything at nothing, oblivious to the other two people in the room.

He stands face to face with the doctor who’s just asked the nurses to leave, who nervously fondles the surgical mask that hangs beneath his chin now, stained with sweat. Even while the doctor talks to him, I can tell he isn’t listening. He’s picking up only fragments – “…best not to… second trimester… unformed… curettage… pieces…” – as he gazes vacantly at the tray covered by a blue cloth nearby, red spots blooming on it. No doubt he can see what else I see sitting there discarded: the curette colored with crimson.

Every time I sleep, I dream this scene and I beg him not to say these words: “I’d like to see my son.”

I want to scream warnings about all the nights he’ll spend alone with what he’s going to find under that sheet, sleeping back to back with his lover like they were strangers until she stops coming home at all. But he can’t hear me; I’m still moments away from being born myself. Every time I watch helpless as he pulls back the corner of the cloth. Even the doctor averts his eyes. Even she turns away, tears filling her, brimming over through her eyes from the hollow void now left inside, flooding the arid plains now made of her cheeks. But he looks on.

He sees what I try to forget: the crimson remains, the sightless eyes, the slit of a mouth, lips never to form the words, “Mother, Father,” insides made outside, his cord – cut too soon – coiled next to him. The person who used to live inside this body was struck dead at that moment, each image before him piercing his soul like a bullet. His heart stopped beating as the flesh of his son’s body cooled. It’s always then I find myself in his place suddenly and it’s my fingers reaching out over the doctor’s protests to cradle my son’s tiny hands in the nook of my index finger, his digits not yet fully formed, not long enough to grasp my pinky.

The doctor takes my son from me as I look on – speechless – and carries him from the room, closing the way behind. I glance once at the woman in the room, unable to remember her name, fixated on her belly – now flat as it was when she was eighteen and we first met under a gibbous moon. Then I turn my new eyes back to the slit beneath the door through which the doctor took that stranger’s heart. Through that narrow gap, molten light pours out. On the other side, I’m sure something is being crushed under gargantuan pressure and faultless mystery the way coal is crushed slowly into diamonds within the bosom of the good Earth.

V. Violent Manhood

Where are my women now?

Where are their wet pierced tongues,

their soft bare asses pressed against my lap

in the middle of the night? Where are

their whispered words and flawlessly broken

promises? I want them all back.

I want to forget them all. I want them

all again, all at once. I want them in a line.

I want to marry some innocent brunette

who’s never seen the inside of a tattoo parlor:

a Christian, a Mormon, a Mennonite even,

with a scarf over her hair, plain fair skin,

and calluses on her hands. I want her to die

tragically: cancer, tuberculosis, aneurysm,

wheat-thresher accident – whatever.

As long as I can wake up the next morning

and remember every color was a girl, a woman.

Every whiff of perfume, every imperfect

smile, every tattoo, every nose ring, every breast,

every curve of every hip, every green eye,

every blond hair on every blond head.

As long as some crazy pagan redhead

comes to comfort and climbs into bed

instead: amazing sex, like plunging inside

the furnace of the Sun, and the long night

in her arms even better. It’s all too much.

But as long as she picks up the shattered

pieces of me afterwards. As long as a few

shards slip through her delicate fingers.

As long as the other women fight over what’s left,

stomping over me to get their share.

I love you, all of you, so grind me into dust.

What’s lost is lost, and what’s to come will come

on and on like waves, each one a leviathan

blue tongue, licking the lips of the world.

VI. The Wisdom Age Brings

A poem for my friends upon many partings:

Night has spilled over the world now.

I can feel myself suspended at the center of this web

I’ve spun with all of you in the middle of the Void.

The chambers of my heart are but spinnerets,

spinning silken strands of unbreakable blood

between us, amongst us and through us.

All of you remember these words:

No matter how far from me you drift

through darkness and distance the debt

of love I owe you is bound to and writ upon the walls

of that dense muscle at the center of my chest.

There is not a move any of you make – no matter

how far the proteinaceous strings that bind us stretch –

that I cannot feel tugging at the valves of my heart.

My memories of your smiling faces are the only things

that anchor me against the rising winds of winter.

Your voices echoing out of the past over the howling air

are what serves as my compass in this autumnal place.

Our friendship will always be bound by these glowing threads

woven from within us, without us and in spite of us.

Their ghostly illumination is my only promise of a distant dawn.

VII. Death

A voice said, “Let there be light,”

and there was electromagnetic radiation.

All was suddenly visible, and seen:

The upturned faces of all of us beneath

illuminated by the lamp of the Sun:

that luminous body, that match.

It reduces us. We breathe with the lungs

of animals: pale, whitish. Life is fuel.

Bodies burn by day, smolder by night.

We are windows through which light

shines, sparks, flares, flickers, blazes, bursts.

We are sudden flashes, here then gone.

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The Death Rattle of The Typewriter

Author’s Note: Thank you to the contributers at 365 who have invited me on as an occasional guest writer. This is a re-post of a classic non-fiction piece from my own blog: The New Apocalypse. You can find more like it there, but this one gives a special insight into my writing process. In the future on 365, I intend to branch sharply away from this kind of writing and contribute my poetry instead. Look for a gargantuan poem in seven parts soon (been working on that one a while), and more to follow.

A great swell of sadness overcame me this morning after I had gotten myself a head full of peyote while watching Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I saw Hunter Thompson (played by Johnny Depp) sitting in his violently savaged hotel room typing away on his red IBM Selectric and I thought to myself, No one will ever do that again. No one will ever find themselves barricaded into a flooded hotel room typing about a generation of failed seekers because this is a generation of seekers who – they think – cannot fail to find the so-called truths which they are seeking. The internet and the personal computer has destroyed the mystery of the world, and – I’ve come to believe today – some of the mystery of writing. Almost every word written in the world today can be deleted without a trace before it is ever fixed in print. The typewriter was the last machine which fixed the Word permanently even as it escaped the writer’s mind.

These revelations in my drug-addles mind, I decided to escape the confines of my domicile and the internet for at least a few hours and write something that would – for better or worse – exist in print and not just the ethers of the world wide web, something that would not vanish with the human race, never to be found by future space-faring civilizations.

I owned already an antique manual typewriter: a portableRoyal (pictured right) on which this is now being typed (at least in its first draft). But earlier in the morning I had already decided that I should set out to find an electric IBM Selectric – red if possible – and use that to honor the memory of the dear departed bard, Hunter Thompson.

Of course, the last Selectric model ever manufactured by IBM was made in 1980, and that wasn’t even the same model used by Thompson, so I was in for an adventure. I tried every antique and thrift store in town, tooling around in my beat up sedan, tires screeching, pedestrians screaming in mortal terror as I crossed their paths with grim death in my eyes: I was on a fucking mission.

After a lot of bad noise, I found that there was only one place in the entire city which eve sold electric typewriters of any kind: Goodwill. What a harsh trip, wandering through crowds of losers browsing over-sized twenty-year-old Bill Cosby sweaters, thrashed lounge furniture, urine-stained blankets, soiled coffee makers and vintage 1992 era computer hardware. Hell, I searched madly and desperately for twenty minutes through this cesspool of disease and despair, eventually becoming convinced that I had been misinformed by that motherfucker at the St. Vincent de Paul about the typewriters. Before I finally found the old crusters, I even found an ancient Polaroid camera with film still inside (I took a picture of my genitals and left it in the case for some poor unsuspecting bastard to find). By the end of the search, I was on the verge of giving up, and gagging from the foul odors that permeated the place.

Finally I stumbled across the old beasts sitting underneath other used office equipment. I shooed away an older Hispanic gentleman who smelled of oranges so I could get at them, and he stumbled down the aisle to get help from what I assumed to be his (burly six-foot-seven) grandson. They spoke in Spanish quietly, pointing at me with an incredulous look in their eyes. Shit, I thought, here it comes. I had to make a selection quickly and get the fuck out of there. I started tossing typewriters behind me in the aisle, looking for the fabled Selectric. Of course, there were none. I found mostly Smith Coronaelectrics circa 1975. As the gentleman of considerable stature lumbered towards me menacingly, I decided to grab the Smith Corona XE 1950 model (pictured left) and flee the scene. I sprinted to the front of the store, knocking over an old woman’s shopping cart on the way, and dropped the thing on the counter, paying with a wadded twenty dollar bill. “Yeah, yeah! Keep the change!” I shouted at the poor cashier as I ran out the door with my prize intact. The surly Hispanic gentleman appeared at the door, shaking his fist at me, just as I was peeling rubber past him in my howling beast of a car.

Christ, I thought. My troubles are finally over. Now I can go home, drink a six pack, snort some coke, an write a damn good page: a page that would be real, tangible and incorruptible. It would be a page never to exist inside the meta-god we called the internet, at least not in that draft’s form. And it would be a page that could never really be destroyed by the click of a mouse, or the stroke of a key.

I sat down at the dining room table, plugged the old saw bitch workhorse into the wall outlet, and flipped the power switch. I reveled in the loud whirring sound the thing made as it warmed up, and generally appreciated that I had just bought something that had a power switch and not some button or sensor or fucking touch screen. Then I slipped in some paper and began to punch the keys with my usual violence. My euphoria was short-lived, however, as I found that the fucking thing did not work at all. It was humming, but the keys were all dead, completely unresponsive. I pried the case open and went digging with the old toolkit in a vain attempt to stir the innards of the beast and get it jump-started, but to no avail. The thing seemed to be mechanically sound, which left only the possibility that there was some faulty electrical connection somewhere between the keyboard and the business end of things. With all the stuff floating around in my head, I was in no condition to start tinkering with something that could potentially electrocute me, nor was I in any condition to drive back to the Goodwill and buy another model (I had probably burned my bridges there anyway).

For a few moments I thought the whole thing had been in vain, that the written word had finally died with that crotchety old bitch of a Smith Corona. But I decided after a few minutes of catatonic despair that I would not give up, that I would get really archaic. I decided to dig out the old Royal that I knew was molding somewhere in the attic. I tied a rag around my face and climbed the ladder up into the dusty old lair, brandishing a dust pan at any would-be rodent attackers. It didn’t take as much searching as I might have feared. There the thing was in its ratty old green portable carrying case. I carried it down into the dining room, set the Smith Corona aside. I dusted the Royal off, fed it some paper, and got to work.

Now this was a superior machine. The experience of working its keys reminded me of driving a car without power steering after power steering was all you had ever known. Each punch of the key requires so much violent force and so much energy when it is all said and done, that by the time you are finished with the first page you feel you have to make every word count. A wasted paragraph at that stage is not an option. Who would want to make the fingers bleed and the cuticles bruise just for some useless bit of prose which would only be crossed out in the editing process?

It was invigorating. Every time I switched over to my Toshiba laptop to research something on Google or Wikipedia, or to find a picture of some old IBM Selectric (yes, there it is on the right), I found myself inadvertently pounding the meager plastic keys so hard that I was sure they would soon shatter under the force of my fingers. Switching back to the Royal made my blood run hot; the stainless steel keys with glass inlays covering the letter labels clacking under the assault of the fingers was a beautiful sound that I had not heard in person for too many long days and sleepless nights.

I’ve been working on this piece for over two hours now (in its original draft, that is) and I’m just finishing up the second page on the Royal. It’s not because I type that slow, but because I have stopped so many times to think about what I’m going to write. How many times do you normally do that when you’re writing on a computer these days? Hardly at all, of course. A computer-generated text can be tinkered with too easily, changed and changed back without enough thought or effort. Meanwhile, the typewriter is a pure machine which leaves the writer alone with his thoughts, unconnected from the internet and the electronic world. Furthermore, its a machine which forces the writer to be honest and hard-working, to be careful as he works the word. For that alone, I love the typewriter. And for nothing more than that, the typewriter will not survive in this modern world. The information age is choking this noble machine to death with its speed and thoughtlessness. The defiance of one drug-addled trouble-making blogger with a nostalgic trip dominating his morning cannot save the old beasts.

I can only recommend that from time to time all of you give one of the old bitches a try for old time’s sake – or, the gods forbid, for first time’s sake – and marvel at the pure creative urges that will surely wash over you and cleanse you. Please, if not for you, do it for me. Something is dying in this world that I would like to keep a memory of.

I’m reminded of a scene from The Road, Cormac McCarthy‘s savage tale of the post-apocalypse an a father and son who travel through it together. The main character’s son is a boy who was born on the eve of Armageddon and grew up in the apparent nuclear ice age that followed. In the scene in question, the father and son are wandering through a supermarket looking for edible food and potable water when they come across an unopened can of Coca-Cola. The son asks the father innocently, “What is it?” I was moved to profound feelings of sadness and sorrow at that moment in the story more so than any other. I mourned for the boy, who would never understand a marvelous shared human experience.

And if I ever have a son and if he ever finds a portable manual Royal typewriter in my closet and asks, “What is it?” that will be the day that I must go out onto the front lawn and eat a gun. But I would only do that after composing my will on this old bitch of a Royal and copying it in triplicate on my 1906 model Roneo Duplicator(pictured on the right, bitches!). The will would read something like this:

I am to be loaded onto a viking funeral barge with all of my worldly possessions. My wife should be tied to the mainmast of the ship before it disembarks. My Royal typewriter should be placed with reverence upon my chest with my arms crossed over it and my hands clasped over the keys. My friends and family should fire flaming arrows at the ship as it is launched into the Pacific Ocean with authentic Norse long bows. A viking mead hall is to be construct on the beach and my friends and family should celebrate my life and memory to excess by rinking copious amounts of mead, ingesting catastrophic doses of most drugs known to civilized man, and performing unspeakable public sex acts upon one another.

If only, friends. If only, dear constant readers. If only it were so…

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