Harness (complete)

Jesse S. Mitchell

 Like elephant poachers, like slave traders, centipeding over the mountain’s back, steady-stampeding through the valleys and passes, the low places, the dry places.  Keep the cold behind you.   the sun comes dawning every morning for no good reason, except that it is good for optimism, for realism.  Keep that in mind.
Good for whatever you need, in the eye-strain, in the freezing rain, good for whatever, whatever…
Safety, whatever…
Like hallucination, like confusion, but like euphoria, hungry ghosts of oxygen starvation.  Marching sores, creeping cranial aches, sleep deprivations, ifriti hell from panic.
But scaffolding is just scaffolding
And that’s all this is, building materials, futurism.
Two planetary systems swinging around each other in gravitational thrall
But separately, and the communication is a bore.
And then the Prussian Junkers run up the bank.
And then the Maoist Peasants run up the bank.
And then the long haul trucker’s son runs up the bank.
Rapid fire grease guns run up the bank.
Spilling paint like catching fire like blood leeching like rune reading all over the twentieth century
Like drop cloth, cut whole cloth, stain-sense tarot carded rotating shadows, discerning.
Logical positivism or existentialism, nihilism or full on quantum mysticism?
Entangled, searching, a bit mechanical.
But scaffolding is just scaffolding.
And that’s what we are doing, punching holes in everything, pragmatism.

 A few miles above Tintern abbey
Fresh out of lucidity, ill-composed, hearts racing,
The grand inquisitor and I making circles around the world, orbits.
Obituary devils, last drops of water in the sink,
We fear no drain, no depletion, no bleeding away.
It is all fade.
Schizoid, histrionic, borderline, Hellenistic
Personality disorder.
Let’s go somewhere nice, trim my beard, shine my boots.  Look real good.
Load up on lorazepam, tanked to the gills, good little fishes.
And we will swim, we will swim around.
Making oblong orbits, orbits, orbits, egg-shaped.
Cracking. Breaking down, descending.
Spiraling around.
Harnessed in, a great big spin.
And all of it is fade.

And dear wunderkind, my baby genius mind, we can help each other, you and I
Be nothing, nothing at all
But the little words at the ends of long silent sentences
That drive the waves and deep cold froth
Born from foam like Aphrodite gold.
But it is all novelty, unrecognizable, and we will approach it slightly
Like contraband, on our toes
Because scapegoat, slit throat, or burning effigy
Leave a wake
Let’s just make it to the lifeboats
And from there terra nova, new rules, new millennium.
All parking garage as ziggurat
Traffic lights as runic stone
Unscripted fellatio as love
Unfiltered light as plague
Cure the blind, miraculous, cure the blind (of desiring sight).
Nouvelle vague bipedal-shot-glass-depression-stained-glass-mammalian
Tired-of-living-paradise, we will stand up on the beach.
Sunlight in our eyes.

But coming up for air is an evolutionary step,
A step up out of…
And l'ignorance
Is the muck, is the gunpowder.

And the back alleys labor their genocidal breath but the boulevards are so broad,
So calm, lulled straight away to sleep.
Suffocated
Like to dream.
Because it’s all Messerschmitt and Metternich while we are digging in our ditches.
And all Messier and Kepler as we finish with the dishes.
But one story by an Alighieri, one little heresy by a Galilei and that’s it, that’s how it all begins,
The bumper cars spark and the real carnivals start.

A ring around the neck,
But this is my knife,
This is my knife,
This is our resnick blade.

And now I believe,
I believe in 16 sound.
I believe Yucca Flats, the beast of Yucca Flat.
I believe in St. Martins college.
I believe in lost aviators.
I believe in movie reels.
I believe in Bollywood bombs
I believe in Ford Mustang
I believe
I believe in blood spilt.
I believe in melody, like drifting humming.
 Because scaffolding is just scaffolding
And all of this is fade.

Brea, Ca (from 'Laramidia or The Last Soliloquy Of Hoarse Angeles')

Jesse S. Mitchell

And when our storming waves came crashing down on the cement shores of Brea, everything was lemon-yellow jaundice.  Overflowing with poison, backed up in the streets, toxin, the sky was a froth of clouds, nothing stirred, no release.  There were no bodies.  There were no people.  The well-to-do had left.  Gone.  Rats had flung themselves off the ships and into the painfully dusty desert harbors that surround.  Trying to avoid.  Trying to outrun and escape the inevitable.  But maybe not so inevitable, lord knows what money can buy, with all the excitement beside, the world is not so different.  Money can surely still buy sainthood somewhere.  Some place, these gilded souls probably still exist, still swagger, still live and breathe.
But not here.  Here, trees rustle over our heads as we climb out of the stopped truck, not even parked, just stopped, frozen, halted in the middle of a well-defined, well-financed streets.  Stores and strip malls with big watery eyes staring blankly back.  Traffic lights a wan, weak blinking.  Cyclopic glare, automated flickering.  
Paloma staring. Slowly craning her neck to take in every possible angle as she exited the truck. Her eyes red, raw, as red and raw as suspicion, as red and raw as hesitation.  Like the dawn beginning to come up, as calm as a haunt and as still as daybreak.
I opened my eyes big as well and took in everything.  Two tall swaying palm trees,  a fancy little three-tiered fountain, a short plaza, dark sliding-glass automatic doors.  Cold iron.  Hot sand.  Busted glass.
It is hard not to have memories.  Memories of human life, existence, the Crystal Palace, World’s Fairs, World Wars, immunizations, newspapers, space races.  It is hard to not get caught deep in the midst of that deluge, the way it consumes your mind.  Everything everywhere you look, ruins, headless statues, noseless Sphinxes, no secrets, Acropolises, just ugly old broken spines, just ugly old musty Doric columns stretched to heaven and now…and now threatening to fall.          
I look over the tops of the decapitated buildings, limestone, jimson dust waste funneling in the brisk busy air, I let my eyes go blurry and scan the high above clouds.  Armbone skinny thin, the horizon, naked, like the back of a knife.  The back edge of a very sharp and quick knife cutting, slicing into the sky.  And whatever light there is, and there is and it is diffused and obscure, is bleeding out of that very cut.  The wound purple, the blood light shine arterial.  Gold and grey and ultraviolet. Gleaming, streaming, silent, and strangely cold.
Strangely cold.  Cold. Cold.   And a wash comes over me, buckles me over inside, a deep sick sadness, a cocoon that surrounds.  The longer I think the deeper and thicker it gets.  It is hard to see through, a viscous liquid, a heavy fog.  I just want to stand still.  I just don’t want to move at all, or let a random thought invade my mind, nothing but complete silence and peace.  But that isn’t real.  It isn’t even really me.  It is getting stronger and stronger, harder and harder to shake.  It is disease.  Pure disease.  And I know eventually, I will die from it.   No matter how far I get.  No matter how hard I try.  The tide keeps rushing up on me.
But mostly, I am not sad.
This world…
This world is no enviable place to remain.
It is a web.  A great big spider web, easier and easier to get caught and tangled in, easier and easier to ignore and disregard.  More and more deadly and carnivorous with every passing thought, second, glance.
There is nearly nothing to do.
Brother slaps his hands against thighs, knocks the dust off, big swirling clouds plume up around him.  Makes him cough.  He squints his eyes.  His face a touch twisted, confused, holding hard to something, steely.  His arms dangle ashamed next to his body.  We are all three so skinny, so threadlike.
And then there was sunlight.
And it was radiant.
Up, the great gash in the air had opened, and you could see directly into heaven.  Deep inside the wound, visible, de sol, the sun had come out.
All of our existentialist appendages, exhausted, our senses, wasted, all philosophical inquiry was delayed.
Only living.
But nothing about life can make you live.  You just do or you just don’t.  That is truer now than ever.
But that is just that, no fire for speculation, no fuel for contemplation.
But the sun was out and it was bright and it was warm.  And it cast long black shadows in front of us.  Long, serpentine things, waving before us and slowly ivy-climbing the Santa Fe style façade of the shipping center.  They flickered like flame on the sandy concrete as we moved, grew as we walked, likely turning everything to ash behind us, as it felt very much, we were the ember.
You have to imagine things differently.  You have to see the whole world differently when everything begins to crumble down.  And first you must see it all new in your mind, and then your eyes.  Spirit first.  Blood and tissues later.  Get it right, where it all starts anyway.  Suss it out.  Construct it.
And we are talking whole galaxies, whole histories.  A lot of energy.
Like, you have to see your whole life as a bubble.  A thin gauzy film wrapped around you almost as tight as it can be, a shroud, an embryonic sack, a skin.  A single fragile random thing, a boiling bubble raising up off the effervescent foam of all the motion churning. A thing that happens but only happens because all these other things are happening but none of that sea of energy could be happening if your thing hadn’t happened.  It is electrics. Fanatics.  Gesticulation.  Theatrics.
You have to notice the boil you are in, the fizz, but you have to also perceive the raising up, the drifting off.  Float away.
And now here we are, the fiery forward edge of blazing heat, so much seething, a delight to just simmer, whatever hell it is to always be burning.  Here we are, all wrapped up in this bubble heaving up through the air, like dryness, like dryness is death, lack of moisture, of fluidity is torture, so much movement, evaporation towards the sun.
Our shadows walking up the front of the deserted shopping mall.  Dark glass doors, mostly shattered, broken through, you could clearly see the blood.  Some still stood.  The ones that still stood could be moved and we opened them.  Stood at the opening for a few minutes.  The breeze coming out was cool.  The yawning open door was a chasm, an awful degenerate perforation, a pit, a spear-wound into the side of all the world.  We were reculant to go inside.  
But we went, we went like a seeping, as infection enters an open wound.  Slowly.  Stealing around the red edges, creeping in, burn-rushing around the corners, down the empty corridors.  Our eyes big.  Everywhere demon-sounds fluttered in the vast broad spaces, electricity-dead and echo-chambered, a soft breeze tunnel.  Bone-crunch hard rubbish under foot, all kinds of cast off, papers, cups, glass, viscera.  Banners still hung in the high rafters.  Trees in indoor containers still grew, unruly.  Birds nested in every nook and cranny, long desert snakes slither, dangerous, everywhere dangerous.  Mislaid steps and topple down, come crashing hard on the floor, your body bruised, or cut, watching our every move.
Never enough light.  Never enough room.  Labyrinthine.  Dungeon-faced terror, confusion, breathless, time- rending, flesh-scalding, eye-blackening.
Brother put his hands over his face.  He stopped in his tracks.  I stopped behind him, put my arm out to stop Paloma safely after me.  I watched him carefully.  He lowered his head.  I could tell he was getting very sick.  He shook his head and rubbed his hands over his face, roughly.  Stood back up, straight, began walking again.
“Anybody got a flashlight?” over his shoulder as we walked.
I shook my head, “Nothing, I got nothing.”
“Be a lot cooler if ya did.”
I nodded.  Looked over both shoulders warily.  So morbid.  In every angle, in every corner, something dead or dying, or a plastic symbol of something dead or dying, something from a bit before, something that should still be living, something alive and well,  but all gone now.  Morbid.  Morbid.  Moribund.   The wind coming through the cracked and broken windows sounded deep, low bass brass, some symphonic gutteral grumble.
And we never dared to look down.  Not too much.  What the fire hadn’t burnt and what the feral creatures hadn’t gnawed or taken away still remained.  Remains, still remained.  And to keep the spirit up is essential.   Can’t let anything get inside of you, tear away at you, can’t let anything slow you down, weaken.  If…
In a big ‘t’ intersection, the corridors all met, a center point, a lingering nexus.  We stopped.  And to our left was the vivid storefront of an abandoned arcade, we inched our way toward it, shuffling our feet.  We dared not go into the cave of it but stayed along the doorway, sat down whatever we had in our hands.  I took off the grey flannel jacket I was wearing and folded it neatly, sat it on the floor.
“There, sit on that,”  I said to Paloma and she slowly lowered herself down onto it.  I cleared a space with my feet and sat down next to her.  Brother scanned around and walked to the right of us, to a small boutique shop, jewelry or something.  It was elaborately decorated.  Without a word he reached up over the store doors, jumped up a bit and grabbed a strand of rope lights and pulled them down in a loud and frustrated yank.  They hit the floor in a loud crashing pool.  He ripped a certain intact section off the rest of the length, he struggled.
Paloma and I watched him.  No idea what he was up to.  He handed me the string he had wrenched free,
“Clear out the lights.”
I shook the rope and little LED bulbs came falling out, broken and otherwise, tiny filaments and wires, dust.  Brother looked around, hands on his sides.  He was looking for a maintenance closet, a door, anything.  He saw something up the way and started off toward it to check it out.  Satisfied, he returned and took the long plastic tube out of my hands,
“Stay here.”
I nodded.
Paloma looked over at me.  Her face was tired.  Crimson.  Saggy.      
“I think he is looking for a generator, a gas generator.  You know, to siphon from,”  I say to her.
She just looks at me.  Intent on the side of my face.  Scanning me all over.  Uncomfortable.
“It is weird for it to be so quiet here, huh?” casually
She continues to stare over my face, trying to read me, looking for signs of disease or abuse most likely.
Suddenly she speaks, “Have you always lived in Los Angeles?”
“Yep.” I nod, “born here, both of my parents are native too.  My Mother was from Tehrangeles.”
“So, you are Persian?”
“Yep, half,” nodding again.
“Hm.”
“Yeah.”
“And your dad?”
“Hm, oh, yeah, native born too.  He lived all over though, all kinds of working class neighborhoods. His family, my family, came here after World War Two. From the south, the deep south, they had been sharecroppers before they moved. Slaves even before that, and before that, West Africans of some sort, I suppose, Yorubas or Fons or Ashantis… I don’t know.”
“Quite the combination.”
“Yep, only in America.  That’s what’s good about America, odd combinations, like barbecue chicken pizza and cool ranch chipotle anything.”
“Yeah.”
She seemed more at ease.  She stopped studying my face for danger.
A little left-hand tilt, a bit of the fuzz that hits the eye around the periphery, like a blurry photogaph.  Because that is what it all is anyway, an out-of-focus snapshot of a moment unfolding.
“You should try to rest.  You should try to get some sleep.”
Paloma agrees, she nods at me, and begins to stretch herself out on my jacket and puts her head against the faux stucco plaster wall. She closes her eyes, slowly, the lids close up tight and shut out all the light.
Brother came back, swaying, so cavalier.  Careless gait, a grin on his face, he had a red container in his left hand, you could smell the gasoline wafting up off of it.  In his right hand he had grungy bottle, he was drinking from it, probably whiskey, probably some kind of hard liquor he had found, pick up, along the way. He put the gas down at my feet, walked across the corridor, looking over his shoulder the whole time.  He sat down in the hallway across from me, under a tall tropical flowering tree in a fake plastic terra cotta container.  He took out a cigarette and lit it, took a swill from his bottle.  Pointed to Paloma with the cigarette smoldering in his fingers and said, “We can leave as soon as she is up.  I got some more gas.  We are gonna have to find some other place.”
I nodded.  There was no way we could stay here.  No way we could stay in Brea for long.
I watched as Hermano closed his eyes and began to sleep as well.  I took the still burning cigarette out of his hand and took a quick drag and stomped it out.
There was no way to stay put in Brea.

Nero Astro-Fellah and the Stars (complete)

Jesse S. Mitchell

Nero Astro-Fellah and the Stars (the whole Megillah)

Ut sentias tramine

1. The Narrative 
Ink dark blooded, paper thin skinned,
Lets you see everything working from deep within.
Heart-pounding-eyes that pull the light straight by the root from the bone.
These hands are made of wood
These hands are made of stone.
So waylay the gentry, kick out-eviction the gentle, and cash out your bonds.
Sturdy make study and invest all your dimes and all your trouble times in the remote control neutron bombs.
These hands are made of wood.
These hands are made of stone.
And all the rest of this body is long long gone.
And the lung collapsing sound, terrible, is nothing, nothing, but sea chantey-ditty-dirge that beats the drums-empty-page purge.
Like spider web-sailors and beating winged flies sexual merge, clocks in cannibalistic, all spiritual or suicidal gone.
And everything else is gone
Is gone
Gone but the China syndrome, palindrome, Paladin-knightfall, reads backwards and sideways and maternity ward.  The howlers howl, the folk tale devils unwind, the bottles collect in the loam
And we make better use of our time.

2. The Pastoral 
 And all the slowly ghosts that turn lowly and in front of the sun and blot out dark blocks of disturbing light.
Ricochet.
But who fears fluttering?  Who fears paganism but the pagan?
the old yellow moon. That’s who.  And me and you.
Terrified of sun up.
so
Too much to too few.  Champagne effervescing symphony of orchestral swelling, that sweeps clean over the hard red wheat, the fields baked starving in the sun.    wispy.  
The skull-and-crossbones breeze that falls, freezes and thrills the resolve, a’ tremble and a ‘quiver.
It is a reaper blade.
Glory shakes and entwined snakes that caduceus men flame and pitch, and so the medication is a success.
But it is the reaper blade that’ll take your shoulder from the plow, finally.
And this is why old rain drenched men keep their minds brimming with serious philosophical shit.
You get two words in this world when you are born.
This hand is life.
This hand is death.
And it is the reaper blade that’ll make them finally speak.

3. The Idyll
And a perestroika bloom will break red like dawn, with that old grinding Bolshevik kick, new tempo.
And the 1969-Parisian tractor batteries-battering rams, communal, will idle in the streets to contemplate
The greatest fears of famine.
Sein and Zeit, and Zeit, and Zeit, and total war.
Nothing, nothingness, oh nothing, nothingness.
So we will lay ourselves down on the soft mown grass and wait
And wait for the clouds to drop down atop of us,
And then out comes the old goji-faced (pansexual) hunger in full on raiment,
All messiah-bright and smackin’ asses, taking names, crucifuxin’, all empty geometry and sacrifussin’
But don’t dare misinterpret the same, the wild wind masses, the big cloud shapes.
It is tetragrammaton and evolutionary, all loose out of pocket energies.
And will divide out in our open hands all the atrophy and entropy and the potions of the chaos-breathing
That we cherish and build over us a canopy, a canopic glass, so the star lights do not perish, and will we burn away all the pariah words we so easily have uttered into the wasteless
Into the wasteless dark that surrounds around us and we will call it night, at our lacking…
Laying deep on the short shorn
The short shorn grasses in the calm and dream of no answers-not-ever and beautiful islands and curvy women.

4. The Refrain, how repetition begins
 and every ghost in Glasgow goes back to Egypt goes back to Nubia goes back to Gondwana.
(Have you ever been to India, They’ll ask.
I know my history of the world, you can reply)
Because to you,
In black and white old train stations, so much smoke as noir, and so much steam,
Hissing,
Or
On Juan Trippe red-airliner upholstery, high above, with yellow brass fittings.
You know how to get around.  Cause  and effect.  Your reason is sound, like logic for milk, deep in the blood cells, a modern mammal.  Analytical.  And savage-brutal.
(And they will say, come on lads, guilt-trip the stumbling masses, all our anythings, we’re on our ways to heavens.)
So, we all live together, in the prefecture of joy, the very center of the universe, the hungry hungry eye, the burning sun of calm furnace Glasnost of massive orbital pull, the very face of passion.  The brightest thing visible, the most luminous glow known to our limited senses.   

5. The Ekphrasisic Coda 
theend

First, the whole gestation process. Birth.
A couple of sunny days.
And then they wrap you in a shroud.
Bury you down deep under some shade tree.
But Yugoslavia is just a disco now, a restaurant, a brand of sour kraut.
If you remember it at all.
But memories are just lost thoughts, leaky thoughts, bleeding through thin paper, a grease stain.
A tip of the hat, a drop of rain in the big bay, an moment-ice cube frozen floating, bobbing up in down in your mind.
This is how you have to see the days,
The days

And just always melting away.

Bacchus-Liber

Jesse S. Mitchell

Albert has had his share of adventure.  Walking along the crowded commercial street, he began to catch sight of his reflection in the shop windows.  He grimaced.  He turned his head quickly.  He allowed his mind to completely and utterly indulge itself to distract his attention away from the ghastly mirrored manifestations.  All distorted lines and exaggerated motions.  They reminded him of his mortality.  He could clearly see himself dead in them, his corpse, he could envision it by the reflections he saw.  Storefront glass windows are hideous things.

Go Bold!  Blaze trails!  Venture where no feet have ever before tread!

He could still hear those words echoing in his ears from so many many years ago.  The speaker had so much force, so much passion.  Albert cannot recall his name or image; in truth he was paying precious little attention.  It was the commencement speech at his university graduation.  It was after the war, after the army.
He had endured the worst horrors of battle.  He had lived through college.  He had survived.   It was springtime and fat buds were fit to explode flowery on the tips of all the long spindly grey-brown elbow- bent tree limbs.   It smelled like rain always, humidity-drenched breezes, a great thick cloud of life trickling along the surface of the ground.
After the speech and after all the ceremony, he and several of his classmates gathered together for a last time in the back garden of the old Daniels house.  There was no electricity and the day was becoming just another contusion stain upon a long line of deep-bruised days.  The night was rolling in and the light was slinking away shy from the accumulating abuse.   The whole crowd of them milled about, heads down, not more than twenty words said between them.  The atmosphere was glooming and Albert, wise even then, watched on with a growing sense of obligation.   He couldn’t let the last time he saw any of these people be so very dour.  It would ruin the memories and sensibilities of every single person involved.  One has to paint the picture one wants seen.  
He watched as they bought out a few small gas lantern lights and placed them around them in a safe semi-circle.   They trimmed the wicks and lit them and turned the shades all the way around.  The oscillating yellow glow grew into a wide ring and enclosed them, a little flicker flame, a quick shake-like breath, punctuated every word they uttered after that, every move they made.  They brought out some single-malt whisky and slowly began to drink, Albert quicker than the others.  He soon found himself more lubricated than was his habit.  The war sprang into his mind, then as a drunk young man loitering and now a grown man struggling to purpose, and before long he was entertaining the whole group with extravagant but mostly true stories of far off places, rice fields and Nagaland, the Burma trail, Japanese and Germans.  Most of the other lads present were younger than he, by at least four or five years and to them.  He sounded like an elder statesman.  He suddenly had gained their respect and rapt attention. He poured liquor down his throat.   He pulled a white tablecloth  from someplace and in a flash of inebriated genius wrapped it around himself and stretched out his legs and sat half-laying on the ground beneath a tall and wide majestic tree and continued deep into the night.  Wild tales, one more wild than the next.  Drunken screaming and sometimes singing, chanting long stories, they acquired an almost musical quality.  He spoke more in one night then he had in ten years before, probably.  Talked so much that his throat hurt for a week and he could barely speak at all for two full days afterward.
And soon all the young men began to drink more eagerly.  And soon they all began to tell tales.  And the lantern light spilled everywhere and the moonlight and starlight beamed down everywhere and specks and flecks of light filled every space and collected in the margins of the night.  Everywhere was intense illumination.  All things blurred.  And what was dreary before was now raucous and loud, everything was revelry and Albert was their god that night, the center of all attention.  And the great Aristophanes of Fife preached on.  A congregation of trespassers, not only trespassers on the Daniels estate but also on the face of the Earth.  For most of the young men present found themselves confused to their even existence after the brutal events of the first part of the twentieth century and everything before.  If the wages of sin were truly death, then the whole of humanity had no right to set foot on ground but…there they were, the greatest of trespassers vainly wasting their time.  Growling and howling with self-approval, mad from youth.  And the night before they all went out blazing like unwieldy flames, roaring over all the verdant and healthy expanse they were stuck-stopped caught within the spell of a thin self-conscious deep terrified young Albert Cavers.
Albert was quite the storyteller when he got going.  Albert was also a very good soldier, once he got the hang of it.  Albert has always been a ’good’ anything once he waded out into the middle of it, but as always, timidity of the currents and waves had hindered him in unfathomable ways.  Few people are born with a greater chance to immensity and magnitude than Albert Cavers, a wealthy family of education and means and him with a talent and curiosity spilling out from each and every endeavor.
But things had ruined him.
Seeing Europe in flames.  Running his fingers through the bloody  underbellies of Empire’s finest.  All those Indian jungles.  Malayan emergencies.  Whole world of troubles.  Somewhere a Bren Light ejaculated steel bullets.  Somewhere a steel-wrapped solid-bodied death machine exploded, incendiary.
But things had ruined him.
It wasn’t until he was jarred--a passing lady absent-mindedly knocked into his shoulder--that he realized he had stopped.  He was standing stationary on the street, white-knuckle clutching his briefcase.  Steady stream of human transfer breaking and splitting around him, merging again after him.  He was a crag, a rock, an obtrusion.  Imposing.
 He was caught staring face to face with himself in a shop window, smoke-stained and frosted around the edges.  A reflection.  He shivered.  Mortality.  Ghosts everywhere.
Albert could find no solace in this world.  No peace.
Go Bold!

*****

If you could see Albert’s eyes it would help to understand.  But he keeps them hidden.  He keeps them behind thick opaque spectacles.  He claims they are weak.  The reality is, they are far from weak but instead are painfully too transparent, reflective.  Two gigantic deep blue pools deep set in his otherwise hoary face, they have the absolute appearance of water, shimmering but without trouble or ripple.  And however you meet them, that is how they will reflect back to you.  Look quickly at Albert’s face with bored dreariness and you will perceive the wooden gaze of a man awash in tedium.  No time for you.  Wrench your neck back with a parting glance of the slightest sadness, and melancholy will be written all over his expression.  Gladness, excitement, derision, deference, it doesn’t matter, Albert cannot control it and it makes all the difference in the world.  
Albert hides them away.  Albert hides most everything away as he finds that to be the most likely way to not influence his surroundings unduly.  Albert just wants to make it through this life intact.  Alive until the end of his days.
The rain weakens slightly but doesn’t stop.  He stands on a corner and waits for traffic to pass.  The air is acrid and enters his nose with a sting.  He tries to breathe through his mouth but the sweet taste of exhaust chokes him.  His hand trembles, his palm sweaty, he fears atrophy.  He clutches his briefcase with all his might.  He wishes life moved quicker.  He wishes he could settle into life, be a part of it.  He observes.  He wishes the hot dry atmosphere would find another way to rid itself of its moisture, humidity or fog perhaps.  Cowardly clouds eating up all the sunlight each and every day, little speckles of feeble thin rain falling flaccid. It is cold.  It is grey.  There is no point.
Albert’s mind becomes gripped with memory.  Memory of reality and memory of dreams, particularly a specific nightmare.   He ceases to see the world in front of him and drifts away.  He fears he is losing touch, losing his sanity, atrophy of mind.

47 Venezuela

Jesse S. Mitchell

I have a chapbook up at altpoetics.  It is available for free download.
check it out here.
and scroll through and check out some of the other chapbooks on the site.  Lots of good stuff.

that link again is http://altpoetics.wordpress.com/chapbooks/

thanks.

Crocodile (from '11 people who saw the world end in Veracruz')

Jesse S. Mitchell

Cocodrilo was a flintlock, a dry fuse, a man of business even if he hadn’t always been.  He always knew this day would come.  All days come, if you live long enough.  Some kind of smile on his face.
He had learned how to survive afternoons an Earth age ago in Poland, Ohio.  A psychedelic shine, a glint grown to glow.
Now he had jetlag.  And now he was breathing in pure fumes, burned his throat, petrol breath, heartburn, stomach ache.  The television set spurted static blood, all that Nazi tarmac dust settled all over his clothes.  All the gyroscoping planets pausing.  Time. Time itself grinding to a stop, a brief halt, the orbits realign.
And then, the gears return, teeth in teeth, small wheels turning big wheels, thoughts firing, reality returning.
 A simple pull back to the right direction.  Living is slavery.  Certain mouths to feed. Certain drives to be drove.
Sipping dark beer.  Having filthy thoughts. Natural as natural, nature is alive and inhabits every body.
And this airport hotel is a hell, a jail cell, a tiny shabby prison, a prism, refracted light, multihued, with cheap wallpaper and an uncommonly comfortable bed.
He doesn’t believe in sorcery, but he does know a thing or two about surrogacy and even synchronicity and now scanning the ceiling with blundering tired eyes, watching a big hairy black spider climbing and spinning acrobatically aloft, and looking down in turn, his eyes still murmuring-exhausted, he watches a martial trail of Myrmidon ants, scent-scrawling along the edge of the floor, he is reminded of things.  Of thoughts, smells, feelings, life.
Mental images and abstractions carrying mental images and abstractions, more than double their body weight, so gymnastically, so lithely.  Small wheels turning big wheels.  The world is awash in time and ideas and the likeness of both.
But mostly the insectual displays cause him a strong olfactory hallucination.  He smells moth balls.  A certain kind of moth balls.  The ones he used to fill the pockets of his clothes with, when he would fold them up and place them in the big cardboard boxes and drive them down outside of town to the storage facilities.  Slide open the big ugly bomb bay steel roll up doors and place all the out of season stuff.
And then the smell of mold.  The mildew.  The old grease of the fish restaurant across the street.  All of it mixed together.  His hands tingled.  And then, and then, he remembered the last time, the last time he ever did that, the last time he ever went there, to those storage barns.  His eyes, still tired, felt hot, they felt hot and red, and they felt heavy.  His heart threatened to start pounding, instead went the other direction.  Subterfuge. And it barely beat at all.
Scary.
But that was a whole bullshit lifetime ago.  Long long ago.
He could hear others moving around in the other rooms, the conjoining wombs, the opening and closing of the doors, the clanking and the strong confident footsteps, the shy and sly sliding of feet across threadbare carpeting.  Rugs rolled up and beaten out of  the big side windows, the housekeeping jangle and rush, the bits and grime and cleaning powder, the vacuums, the plastic garbage bags. The sound of people lugging too heavy luggage down the halls, hitting the bottoms of the walls, splintering the wood, scuffing the trim.  The fumble of keys.  The shaking of heads.
Like storms, thunderstorms, people move through this world.  But stifled storms, not much rain, just grand displays, a lot of lightning, a lot of thunder.  He could hear their thunder everywhere.  Busy day.  A lot of blustering.  A lot of noise.  Saturated with it.
He thought to himself, he was in the wrong business.  He hated to travel.  HE hated being in such close proximity  with other loud body-having flesh animals.  Too much.
But too late now.
“What this world needs is a bit more blasphemy, more heresy, a little more good old fashioned feel-good type sin.  Never did anyone any real harm, never hurt no one.  It is all this righteousness that is the real killer, all this following all the rules, it raises your blood pressure, gives ya ulcers,” he said out loud but to no one in particular. “Besides, it’s boring.”
But too late now.
He pulled off his shoes, set them next to each other at the foot of the bed.  Took off his socks, they struggled a bit, and for their reluctance, he flung them up against the wall.  Impotent.  They felt no pain.  No insult.  He unbuttoned his white dress shirt, slid it off his shoulders, the effort hurt a bit, sore back from sitting on the plane so long.  He had reached the age in his life where sitting could easily give him a sore back, or sore shoulders, or sore legs.  Standing too long could do it as well, and moving too much, hell thinking too hard.
There were aches.  There were pains.  Omnipresent.  Like a god.  All knowing.  All seeing.
He walked into the small bathroom.  Bathed in yellow tungsten light.  Pissed.  Washed his hands in the sink.  Watched the water rush around in circles in the basin and then drain away, fleeing.  He nodded.
He looked up and caught himself in the mirror.  Something about the reflection fascinated him.  He was suddenly bewitched.  There he was. It was him.  A craggy face in an unfamiliar mirror.  Old.  Rough.  Tired.  Cliff ledges, vine tripping lines, places to cling to, places to fall from.  Like landscape.  Dynamite creases for divots, wrinkles to be blasted away.  Whole mountainsides.  He put his hand on his cheek, moved it up and down.  Soft.  Flabby.  Anemic.
And then the mirror changed.  There was smoke or a smoky substance covering it.  
Some ragged skull.
Different reflections.  Different images.  Two young men, twins next to each other, Huangpu & Xbalanque.  He knew who they were from a tourist brochure he had picked up and read in the airport lobby.  Mayan gods, gourd-headed tricksters, death-killers, dismembered hope.
He raised his hand to the surface to try and touch them but they were gone but when his fingertips touched the mirror, a sensation shot through him.  Light burst out and blinded him.  He put his other hand on the mirror, whole palm against it.  He felt the quivering rippling movement.  He could feel the smoke swirl and entwine with the light and surround him and envelop him.  Engulfed.  It felt hot.  It felt peaceful.  It swirled over his whole body like the water around the sink basin.  He could feel it all fleeing and draining away and taking him with it, all the light and smoke and peace and radiance and calm.
And he grinned.
Cocodrilo smiled, and that is how he saw the end of the world in Veracruz.

Charon

Jesse S. Mitchell

To evolve into angels
To evolve into men.
That the only thing kept in our hearts
Is coldhearted whim.
That everything changes, like vantage points
Stations of the stars.
Just a pulse.

Distant some men making distant some plans
in some faraway distant places.

Around the world I may ripple.
Around the world I may roam.

Distant the distance between the days
In some ticktock distant time
So distant, some distance
This faraway from home.
Just a urging
On.