Truth: Bliss and Helplessness

When the orange artificial fog
Doesn’t obscure my window,
I look down
To see the kids carving
Eight foot messages
In the ice.

Truth: American Desert

The frame twitches, and recomposes
Shadows on the wall of the apartment
Cast on posters, cast on television
On the news

Look into my eyes:
I’m tired of all the casual
Acquaintance talking
(and straight-line walking)

Everyone is so far away tonight
Distant.
Communicating by sonar
Beacons spread across
Neighbor states
Waves crossing above the
Amber waves.
The windmill spins in twilight.

Gray. All around. Gray.
In love with indeterminacy.
Something to peer into when
I can’t
See the eyes
Of my lover.

A plane flies overhead,
And the passenger side is empty
There’s a suitcase in the back
(an exit trap).

Send me perfumed letters
And I’ll sleep beside them.

Sonar.

Fields.

Vast. Corn crops. Of. Distance.

The great American
Desert.

Truth: Back And Forth Across The Giant

I step into the bus, quietly, unassuming, cell phone chatter suddenly dying in the shallow chasm of silence; until the casual acquaintances speak up and then it’s casual talking, casual talking until the casual talk slips and trips into the same chasm, deeper this time, headphones slip on and the music plays as headlight beams dance across my eyelids, little shooting stars falling, falling all of them down to the ground, just like me, coming down back to the place that they’ll call home, buried in earth, dust, astral debris and dinosaur bones. Keep a look out for UFOs in the countryside. The guy beside me chats on his cell phone maybe to his long distance lover, but I’m bitter because a barrier of courtesy stops me from connecting with mine over the cold but sweet country air, smelling of rocks and gasoline out on the tungsten evening highway. Gas station, gas station, gas station. We are only passers-by, red-white-black-yellow-green-blood-cells in the body of the greater good, the greater good stretching from Portland to the Cape of Good Hope, to Siberia and back to the happy hobo on 9th who loves boom-box tunes, bitter as they are to the rest of us. Screech. Terminal 1. Terminal 1, evacuate bus. Traffic. This is more than a wait, it’s a visualization of the world I am constantly a part of, tiny points of blue light recommend where the big blood-cell machines should couple with the even larger organelles, transfer the cells, and keep the machine alive. I filter in through the security checkpoint, non-confrontational, tao, but a girl I barely know is crying, and there’s not much I can do about that, is there? Searching, searching, am I a danger? Little beeps emanate from the invisible light machine that sees the world in two-dimensional cutouts. Bone marrow inside the laptops and iPods. My innercellularsense tells me to seek out a greasy double cheeseburger with bacon from the nearest processed food stand (in my case, a Burger King). I am a well-oiled little cell, give me my Dr. Pepper, wash down the French fries. It’s processed, a little upsetting, but tolerable and necessary, a reminder of my own complacent participation in the tough-to-follow switchbacks that lead up the hill of becoming a whole. Not whole, but one. Necessary evils are just that. One of the sleek silver Boeing 737-200s leaves, another comes in. This one, for the next hour, will be my home, my sanctuary in the very inhuman condition of being suspended thousands of feet in the air for lengthy times, moving at 100 times the average rate of speed at which I walk. I’m not walking now, not even up-and-down-the-aisles. Seat belt fastened, hurry us onboard, no time for checking if we can put the two halves together, sorry, but this basic knowledge will have to elude us for now; nevertheless, I manage to connect all the wires, build the machine. Engine roar. An uncomfortable memento of gravity. Then, nothing. Just air, and air, and air. The Great City unfolds below my eyes: God’s capillaries and veins and buses, cars, stadiums all beneath me. Pure gold coursing through His blood, biology of beauty, sparkles, grains of perfectly ordered symmetrical sand. The great spider web of our savior, our world, in light. I look at my reflection as a ghost in the view of the giant. The ghost smiles, still alive.

Deception: A Party

The birthday girl danced;
Scattered, stoic, disaffected.
Her party, her world, her deep drink
In her hand,
Pretension tending to guests.
I smiled in the back
And just thought of
Plane rides.

He’s passing in and out,
Laying on the couch.
Suddenly aware
Of the girl’s stare.
Look at me, momentary friend:
“Choose a different route”

Catching a glimpse,
A hole in my radar,
A girl I’ve never seen
Talks
Speaks
To me
In broken Spanish, slurred
“Solo hay cambios. una cosa cambia a ser una otra.
Todas las personas aquí también
¡Basta!
(and she fights back Sierra Madre tears)
¿Tu? No estas si mismo.”
I understood. But then, I wonder how
She knew me
So well.

Hustled.
I’m out the door.
Amicable, but cautious.
Friendly, but sober.
Unaffected, not Dis.
There’s a man hiding himself in the shadows
When the car turns the corner;
The mental state’s flowing from open wounds.
That one’s not me.

Not tonight.

She was confused.
It wasn’t us, but an
Unarrived stranger.
Now back away.

Slowly.

Truth: The Walls Around Us

I walked back into the apartment
Possibly drunk
With the aims all fucked up and familiar
I’ve felt the same way since she
Stopped by to say hello
And I wanted so badly just to kiss her

Remember her?
In Polaroids we were fine then.
What were we laughing at?
I tried my hardest to burn them
But they got put up on my wall
Instead.

Truth: Dusty Diary, Found in a Softball Field

Open the book, taste her smell in your memories
And just as quickly,
Shut it.
Shield your eyes.
Bound with dead
Animal skin
And filled with life;
An unnerving paradox.
Hands shaking, read the first line,
And the next,
And the next,
And it gets harder
When the little three-by-four inch square
That was engraved into your brain
Falls out
Faded yellows and de-saturated sky
Twist and turn
An autumn leaf that the book
Didn’t have a chance
To catch
Like so many others

Two kids smile back at you
From the floor

Pick them up,
Dust them off.
Their arms aren’t around each other
Now.

It was a book of astronomy,
But the only thing you read
Was
Just about a shooting star.
Stuck in the Perseids.

Lie: That Night, I Didn't Think We Would Make It

Onramp
Switch into 5th
Accelerate
Pass
Decelerate
Coast
And keep coasting
Past the dust gathering on the edge of the plain
Outside of your view, coming closer
Until tiny drops of medicine fall all over
Your body

Roll up the windows
Hit the accelerator
And hydroplane, tires loose, stop
Open up your arms
Open up your mouth
Open up your body

Drip.
Drip.
Drip.

So bright, natural-electronic
Flash, freeze frame it
And you’re placed on silver halides

Until the police push you in the gutter

Onramp.
Switch into 1st
Decelerate
Clean up you: Mess.

Lie: Signal

Bits of speech sparkle
Public radio debris
“It’s okay if you’re still a bit hung up on that”
Swish-swish-snap
And a country song starts playing
Your hand keeps turning the little knob
Further and further, the white line speeds past DJs you might have met
Looking for the semisweet aftertaste of the song you heard last night, overplayed
In the crowds
At the party
Or the sickly smell
In the bathroom
Maybe on the Pavement
Blasting from a loudspeaker
Overheard, forgotten,
And slipping down the wet storm drain
“Where were you last night”
-break for an advertisement-
It’s all a mess anyway
Better leave it in the static
Swish-swish-click
Un-sort-it

Deception: "Babelfish Hypothetical"

It turns out that Douglas Adams wasn’t only one of the greatest humorists of the 20th century, but he was also a sort of sage. Bacteria has been synthesized that essentially acts as a ‘babelfish’, which, if you haven’t read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, allows you to understand every language as if you had spoken it since birth.

Does this increase or decrease your desire to travel? If it increases it, where would you go first?

Do you think this will help or hurt international diplomacy?

What effect will the discovery have on the world's various cultural identities?

Lie: Worn

            The Victrola’s wooden needle skittered along the worn grooves of an old 72-RPM record as the kid in the flannel shirt stood and listened; the wrinkled proprietor of the store stopped his work on the miniscule gears of a golden pocket-watch to hear the tune. Jazz exploded from the tinny speakers in the cabinet; little reminiscences of roaring parties and the warm taste of illicit drinks, of the streets downtown and the discarded relics of day-to-day life they contained, of the high hopes and low expectations of the man with the trumpet on the corner. It all coalesced into a few moments of purely human joy and dusty but brilliant white light. The machine gave this to the world freely, and then fell silent. Leaning down, the boy sorted through the books of old records until he recognized a name on one of the paper labels. He sat the thick vinyl on the table, turned the crank, and placed the needle onto the first groove. In the dim light of the sunset window, the boy saw the proprietor smile as the twelve-string guitar sounded in a haze of static and noise, becoming its own echo in the quickly changing chords and vocal melodies. Other peoples’ memories swept over their mind and calmed them, so that when the boy left the store and disappeared into the orange glow of rural night with nothing in his hands, neither he nor the owner was left wanting.