Picadura, picadura, picadura.

Jesse S. Mitchell

previous part, And what they call reform . here

And then it is just me, me and it, nothing to slow or stop the constant flow of radiation or cosmic punishment or whatever reckless spilling over is always happening out there in deep space.  Everything hurled at me or deposed on me, leaked on, drained…
 just for having skin, just for being human.  No guard at all but some thin shell of atmosphere, always cracking and falling apart.  Nothing can stand the heat, nothing can endure being the thing stuck between it and me, between human being and aloof space deity, the distance is just so far. No advocate at all. Just dead bodies, canned meat, and ridiculous urban sprawl. Spirals of police cars and concrete bus stop benches.  Out of luck train depots been out of business twenty five years.  A lot of old rust from old factories now made of nothing but rust, piled up in unpretentious piles along the sides of the road.  Huddled in with trash bags waiting pick up.  Dead leaves and paper towels and broken up beach chairs.  You and me and the whole universe.  Energy that eats energy, of this I am sure.
  The pressure.  The exposure.
And here I am, in my yard, at war with the entirety of heaven and I’m admiring the greenness of the grass.  It is thick this year, the weather has been mild, wet.
A few nights ago, I dreamed that there were red mushrooms growing all over my yard.  And now, today, there are, legions of them.  Springing up in wild little bunches, clustered together in impressionistic dots and twinkles, collecting dew and mud and ugly dirt.
My dream world is invading my life.  Or I have developed second sight but certainly some new movable feast of un and sub consciousness has occurred, taken hold of my central cortices.
Here I am, a mass of cells and ganglia and only threatening to move.
But what does that mean?  And what am I even doing out here, in nature?  If you ever feel the stings of regret, of guilt…but of what?  What have we sinned against?  It is an old question but where do we stand in relation to everything?  What pulls on us?  What is the center of our orbit?  That’s all.
It feels so incredibly exhausting just trying to be a human being anymore.  But that shouldn’t be.  It should come naturally, it should be the easiest thing in the world.  You just fall right into it.  But you don’t and all I can do is wonder  why that is.  And it feels better doing that with a sunny morning on your back.  I used to think I could find some connection in nature but all these repulsive animals and birds hate us.  They ain’t talking to us.    I just like the sun.
Look around your horizons, and around each and every one, all directions, you probably see something happening.  Construction.  Airports and airplanes.  Huge buildings.  Billboards.  Busy busy busy human energy.  Not me.  I see nothing.  Every way, nothing, nothing but tree tops and low field hills that trail off forever.  And nothing but a leaf or clump of tall weeds ever ever moves.  I live in the forest.  And every thing is so very alive.  Nothing can fall apart so completely out here, so drastically.  Not having as far to go cushions some of the low parts and the high parts always feel so much higher.  It is out here in the wilderness that the laws of energy and motion are the most obvious, and pleasantly so.  Nothing gets wasted.
It is the patented awesome force of nature that keeps everything in constant motion, always driving forward.  Every bloody red dawn of morning the sun re-emerges from out the serpent’s belly, vomited up or eviscerated out, and the gods rejoice.  The rains come.  Wars are won. Praise the lords.
But
It remains,
It is the overwhelming strength of all things that surround us and yet are not us, but everything else, that makes this the home for us. A livable place.  The great blue planet.  An ocean.  A lung. Breathing.
 Churning the caldron, bottling the potion.
Or maybe you are like me and your skies are empty too.  No buildings, no signs, only big green lonely looking trees, tall purple topped thin grass. And don’t you feel glad?  Don’t you understand?
And here we are looking at each, a shimmery mirror reflection of the other, staring across the void.  Nature and humanity, some pandemonium, some pandemic schism, some rip deep down in our DNAs, a fissure from long ago embryonic days.  Healed together, an amalgamation, a scar tissue never quite repaired.
But here we are,
On this side
And them,
On that…
Never can the two match up,
The cloth is torn.
And we got our share to wrap ourselves in, to continue on with, to build with.  And now only we understand we and then only a little bit.  But we all share the same body, the same skin, the same aspersions, the same futures.   Going together.    
 And we all share the same nightmare, the one where we are blindly running down the road, a long empty run, when suddenly we are blocked.  Something hideous stands in our way, in my dreams it is a gruesome gigantic snake, laying straight across the way.  And you can’t go any further but only because of fear, the snake is not aggressive but it makes no sign of moving despite  loud screams and menacing actions.   You are stuck and it makes you think of eternity because it is in the middle of night when the dream happens and the sky over you feels so close and so big, so full that it seems an unnatural separation of pressure, the air around you so bare and then all that up there, suspended.  It makes everything shake, teeter, it is an uncomfortable atmosphere. And you know it is all symbolic and something probably stands for God but you don’t know if it is the road or the snake or the heavens above, the loneliness , the effort, or even yourself.  But you get used to standing there trying to figure it out and in fact, when I dream it now, I sit in a chair and the reptile and I hardly ever exchange glances. Time passes.
But I guess the whole thing matters more in relation to the contours of the mind.  What does a lonely road mean to you?  Why the running?  Was it fear?  Pain?  Running for immorality?  Or on a mad dash to see it all, while the light is still out, before we all get swallowed again by the Precambrian darkness and fossilize to the ground and whole eras of geologic time pass over us, our remains, our souled-out bodies, our kitchenettes and  plasma screens?  But that seems a bit much, wasn’t it for the fun of it?  Really? Who’s dying to leave something behind?  I don’t believe in immorality.  I don’t believe in an afterlife.  And I don’t want to live forever.  And I don’t want to go anywhere new.  I want to be left alone.  That is what I want from philosophy.
But then, a lightning flash and a thunder roll and a barrage of cold rain drops like bullets and still the snake makes no move.  And then the clouds die and the everything clears and sun comes breaking over the horizon and reveals a shadow retreating under the feet of  the-once-obscured tree.  No snake.
I don’t think we as a species can overcome thoughts like these, memories, fantasies, bad dreams.  They never mean anything.  They never lead us anywhere.  They are our the brain’s system check, our reboots, our power surges.  They are the things that break us, tear everything down, eat us alive and they never come from anywhere but glitchy circuitry, smoky connections, bad soldering.  
 And I am so filled with fire.  I can feel it inside, flaring up and lapping at my tender insides with its cruel tongues.  I can feel it, burning me, devouring me, leaving me to ash.  Leaving me all used up, nothing but wonder.  I can feel it, shooting back and forth, playing, swelling.  I can feel it in my pours, bubbling out, I am coming apart, boiling over.
 And built with such a mind with such a predisposition to hurl accusations around, levee horrible charges, predisposed to see and to charge the evil that everywhere abounds…and to make them hit, I mean really make them stick.  The complaints I have with life are oh so genuine, so legitimate.   To think I was born just a whisper, a quiet thing, weightless on the air like feathers or curly spiral shaped smoke, collected yellow and ugly with a tinge of acrid smells.
And Here on Earth
                                   is where I dwell, at least for a time and eventually I will lay down and die a cowardly old man all covered over in hoary wisdom and bleached out cuticles, paper cuts and tea stained hands and I will value peace above all else and I will not even try to make a sound and I will keep everything together.  The senses of urgency like dry wind will desiccate me, a soul searching for a heaven like a little mouse in search of a hole.
Gods forgive.
                      We will pray with our lips.
But tell the truth, that is life, that is apparently the way it is meant to go.  These seem to be the pathways, the avenues, human expression.  Alive.
But it looked good to me.
And that is what ‘s key.
It looked good to me.
All these people wandering down the streets all hours of the dark,
Looking for their homes
Lost
Drunk
Sick. Frozen to the bone.
Like a mist.   Like a fog rolling in
Because it is humid.
Because it is night.
Because it is the humid night.
Wilderness becomes me.  As does multitudinous thought.  So much chaos like a billion billion strings and wires all tethered and tied to each other.  Random threads woven to another, tangled and divergent.  To collect them together and pull them to me is my challenge.  And I do so sometimes, successively but mostly it tires me so greatly, I give up trying to make sense.  To myself, to others, with words or with actions, I just let go.
But let me come to a sputtering stop.
I’m more connected to everything than ever before…
Like everything that desires obscurity becomes ubiquitous, the Buddha, (the)Elvis.
That is how this world works,
Ironically or cruelly, but either way that is the tiny touch of honey,
The sweet scent of life.
It is the wandering remnants of time broken into pieces stuck in the corners of your brain, moments happened, frozen sharp, bloody at the edges, most of them.  Things that stick out when you close your eyes but can’t help you predict your future or give you any solace, any peace of mind, just little glints of shattered minutes.
but
Everything you might do is a bomb set to explode.  Detonate by movement, solid thought, opinion, bloody gore and mess to have a mind.  Best to settle down and try to keep still.  It makes the hands ache and body tremble, the mind shrivel to be so alone. Alone. Alone in this big empty world, arms out grabbing at things.  Shrinking days, the shadows get shorter and shorter every hour past. And here I am.  Here I am.
 But life, life is…I mean, here comes another sting, you spend your entire awful childhood figuring out where you fit and what you want, hmm…but that is never what happens though is it?  You can never tell your future, give up on self-divination and all manner of preparation.  You are loose in the world.
Even me,
I just needed it to be dark.
I just needed it to be grey.
I needed to be able to sit still and not worry about the approach of day.  It would come and I knew it, no matter what, no help from me required.
I just needed it to be silent.
I just needed it to be nothing.
 And that is all I thought I was ever getting.  All I deserved.  And I would slip away from this life undetected, some far off moment.  Not even a rustle in the grass.
But instead life gave me everything.  Everything instead of nothing.  Tricky bastard.  I thought I had it figured.  Now, now I am gripped by fear.  Constantly in panic.  Hovering over an intense ocean of churning guilty and paranoia.  I am afraid that somehow everything will be ripped away form me.  It is all too good.  Too beautiful.  Not for me.  It seems a rouse.  I do not deserve any of this and that is how life is killing me, anxiety, fear, apprehension.  Ever been so happy you knew it wasn’t right?  Wasn’t for you?  And somehow I will be punished for even assuming to get comfortable in this charmed existence.
Everything is the end of the world.
Everyday, apocalyptic.  
So, even me.  And I just needed to be insignificant.  I just needed to be left alone.
Loose in the world.
 Grabbing wildly at roots and stems, tipping over the petals and pulling down those showers of light, immersed.  Tripping about giant’s feet and boulders, half-blind and groping.
Here on deep blue Earth all covered in skin, waiting on the sky to change, stars to move, we grow old.  We grow old and die.  Our bones disintegrate and our memory dissipates and nothing has ended, nothing has begun, nothing happened at all but the shift from one transparent transitory sliver of time to another.  A flip book flipping loudly though its pages, a movie projector.  
In between the wide dark green leaves of a low slung yard-plant, on the creepy crawly light brown dirt, ants walk single file.  Marching, devoured by a sense of purpose.  Amen.  They carry little bits of bleached out rubble-food and straw long building specks.  So industrious.
Me and the world
Nothing between.
They climb-crawl up the slippery slopes of a soft encrusted hill, little opening off center at the top.  They go in.    Their tiny legs knock crumbs of dirt tumbling down the sides.  Avalanche.  The clods stumble falling like left over words edited out.  Cut away to let other syllables breathe.
Me and the heavens above.
Whatever looking down on me.
And this is the way of it, this is the way it always happens, the end, the winding down.

And what they call reformation.

Jesse S. Mitchell

previous part, The Laundromat , here

At first he seemed like Johnny Rotten.  Blasting holes in everything.  every time he spoke.  He would open his mouth not like a cannon but like a handgun, two arms like machete.  It was impossible.  You couldn’t write words around him, nothing fit, every one of them burst into tiny syllables.  A mess.   And unacceptable.  I had to let him go.  So, he is out there free now. Sorry really, but you know characters never die, law of conservation of matter and energy and all of that.   And I can’t keep them all around, real people are dying everyday and my brain just aches.
My um
My…
It rips your brain apart.
But bravery, bray-ver-reee.
The only thing ever lacking to anyone when they endeavor to take up letters, is a kind of bravery.  A sick masochistic courage like a gruesome curiosity, a willingness to poke your fingers into the deepest, goriest wounds.
That is what is lacking, lacking…that ole courage.  Courage and coldness but vulnerability too and long sight.  Good eyes and ears and a strong back.    
But I left him with the hair, close to the head almost shaved  but thick and bright red.  And with the eyes, big and expressive, like things that are alive.  Still alive… And with the slight but grimacing slouch to his shoulders.
Other than that, nothing the same.  A new person is coming.  They have collided.  And eventually they will fuse together like stars or atoms or galaxies in space and I’m just watching now for the explosion.  That explosion. When that happens, we will begin.
Not only, not only have I seen the shadows fall but I have watched them move.  The minuscule moment to moment movement, how they grow and shift from side to side and then die away.  I’ve studied them.  I know the importance of an hour of a day.  How we change as the hours decay and decline and go sliding away.  I know the differences.
We are naturalistic things.  Being a part of nature.  We let the seasons change us.  Seasons ghost me, they haunt my every thought.  Because I know, I know, I know that you are never closer to the worst greyest day of deep winter than on the high July summer after noon.  Right below you, beneath you, looking right back at you.  Every moment of your life is this way.  And what is more is that most of it is dictated by ancient primitive hormonal traits that only served to mark out zones of dominance, watering holes, toilet areas.  That sort of thing. You are mostly in control of nothing.  But everyone knows this, everyone feels it, the weightlessness behind your knees, the paranoia, so on with the runt.  Tusks to the ground.
A parsec from cosmic annihilation, a second away from respiratory failure, glimmer and then fade.  Now we are all gone.  Dead.
But I’ve gone berserk, left out in the sun too long.  Warped mind.  I don’t see straight.  Spent too long trying to tying together loose fragments, arms and legs, souls, too long cobbling men and women alive, all in my imagination. Brain as factory.   How industrious.  I mean, I can’t look down at my hands and not see a hundred different hands of hundred different arms, arms of a hundred different people.  People who all swung those arms for a million different reasons, they all need those hands of a million different reasons.     So, you lose your mind.
and
God is dead.  Fuck rock and roll.  Hold heaven for ransom.  Let it rain razor blades, screaming Jay Hawkins, Greta Garbo movies.  It’s the end.
And that is what it becomes a long rolling gasping rambling monologue speech given to yourself in the  mirror, with all the soap scum and speckles of toothpaste and shower fog.
But I would scatter it all to the winds, every bit, every bacchanal, every pandemic.  Every avenue, every Seagram building, every drug addiction, every war, every single last ugly festering word of it, I would scatter it all, civilization to the winds…
And let it blow away…
Lost
Hidden deep whenever it came to lay.
Whatever finds it, can keep it.
Forever and ever and ever and ever.
Or I take them from dreams, odd people with odd characteristics, little ticks and seemingly endless possibilities.  I take them whole cloth or bits and pieces from out of my slippery surreal slumbering imagination.  Souls who don’t belong anywhere, surrounded by events that should never happen, days that never should take place, wasted energies, empty hours filled with bizarre atonal moments.  Dead eyed dreaming, hands up to heaven, begging.
Or I make them wish for perfection, lust after it, I make them want things and that is how they are defined.
And then I disappoint them.
Or I make them believe they are Paul Newman, Steve McQueen. St. Augustine.
And then I disappoint them.
I take that away from them, I make them sinners and then force them to be selfless, or the any other way around.
If I had my way, I would find them, hidden away in my mind, and let them live.  Let them develop any way that the spirit moved them.  But that is not a possibility.  There are wild other compulsions at work.  Things must happen.  A kissing door between heart and head, a swinging pendulum that mark offs the rapid distinctions amid living and dead.
That is how I know I am alive,
The most alive.
And then I have to give him a villain.   Or a foil.  Or a sounding board.  An accomplice.
Some shogunate  sorceress, a fascist femme fatal.  Or maybe he’s the assassin.  Maybe he is a scoundrel.
And probably it is all my fault, beyond their control, for putting them in such situations.
Lift an eyebrow.  Take note of the time.
Because to be alive is to be full of possibilities.    Can’t commit to anything yet, you have to let thoughts just happen.   You can’t force it.
And you have to find some place for them and everything to exist.  Someplace real?  Too many details.  Someplace imaginary?  Too few.  But someplace else.  You have to build some other empire, new but completely out of old lumber, old brick.  You have to recognize it but it has to surprise you.  You have to know it by the creaks of the floor but still lose your way through the halls.
Or I take them from me, little pieces I rip away and roll between my fingers until pliable, like clay.  I have had no shortage of exposure to strong personalities, iron wills, awful abominable losers.  Lots of material.
And everything is like me, all mixed up, everything is loud, a lot of pushing and shoving, swinging legs, tapping feet, everything goes wild every minute on the minute, chaos but scheduled chaos.  Everything is always almost out of control, almost.  A spinning top.  A whirlwind.
Pull your balaclava down, more soul robbing to do, sit straight up and imagine.  Revolutionary.  Radical orphan words begging in the back of my mind to be written, something just to be uttered.  Silence is absorption of all the sound, like black devours light, to speak a single word is to make a tiny glint along the horizon-sea.  Watch the waves come up over it and drown it out, the dragon eats it, but you  saw it, you heard it, that slight momentary crackle, that lightning flash.  Wait.  Don’t think.  Wait for the effects.
Or I make them born pure animal beasts, milk-fed, all covered in hairs, just like me, just like everyone.
And then if they are monsters, it’s on their time.

The Laundromat as reading library for Nihilism and other personally pessimistic philosophies (or Who Will Lead the Charge? Not me).

Jesse S. Mitchell

first part, About the birds in the Air, here

Don’t break rank.
William Saroyan and Kurt Vonnegut, Virginia Woolf all sitting stacked on my desk.
I had to go to the Laundromat yesterday.  I am fairly sure that early trips to the Laundromat made me a nihilist.  All that bright white light digging into your skin, trying to eat out your eyeballs.  All those bleached rebleached chipped white vinyl tiles all stacked together on the floor with thick black lines in between, all running one way and then another until its all wavy and blurry, like forest fire and you lose your mind.  And in the front of the building a long big window with a elongated thick crack all through it.  Horizontally.  The crack was thick because the glass was thick and the very broken edge was clearly visible both top and bottom and you could see inside it a perfect reflection of everything happening inside the Laundromat and also everything outside the window, overlaid and hazy and flipped upside down, both ways, facing each other.  A provocative sight to a sensitive sort.  It is just this kind of thing that will make a person lose all faith in humankind. It sucks the soul away.
Yesterday, there was a new addition to further deepen the already sophisticated gloom and wretchedness of the place.  A television.  Not only a little grey box of blathering mercantile fuzz but a big one, a flat one, a loud one.  Loud enough to drown down even the mechanical hum of the tumbling dryer drums.  Some recklessness, some party political broadcast gone twisted and left to linger too long.  The kind of thing sensible minds are being made to endure all over this world since everything became merchandizing.  We got a file on you.   Know how you shop, how you vote.
I swear I heard a voice utter condemnation for every human ill, snake oilers, traveling circus tent preachers…, ears all piqued, all jealous.   Parasites.  I clearly heard that one.  I love the old chestnuts.  The swastika memories of these sad heathens that choke and surge down our streets, run long, they do…
It’s a fabulist’s  world anyway.  No one ever learns a thing, gets a punch line.
Like in front of the Laundromat, on the other side of a spiraling curve of the oddly circular road  between them stands a small globular park. Not a playing, bring the kids, kind of park, but one with neat lanes and short tasteful markers and one gigantic statue of a miner.  A coal miner in fact.  The major occupation of this area when it was still a job.  It is still around, in bits.  It is basically slavery is what it is…but not to the terrible limits, not yet.
But this is where I get off the boat.  This is where humanity and I usually part ways.  Because to most people, especially locals, it is some spot of at least half-hearted reverence and a little bit of pride.  To me, it is definitely in the running for one of the most legitimately depressing places of all the Earth.
You can walk up the sidewalks and paths and almost stand directly in the center. Past the scrubby boxwoods and quasi-feral rosebushes planted beneath the statue base and get yourself quite nearly smack dab in the middle, pause for a breath and look all around you, up, down, everywhere.
   But what does that tell you?  You are at the center of the universe?  Your universe?
Mostly.
And to most people who ever lay eyes on it.
How awful.
I have no pride in that at all.
I have no idea for sure where I was when I first realized I was all alone.  We are all alone.  I could have been on the cloudy banks of Iona or Skye, the ocean water mere inches from my feet, gray fog rolling over in billows.  Soundless.  On some solitary stroll when I first looked up and observed the heavens and noticed they were naked, devoid of any divine reflection.
I could have been there, quantum physically, but I wasn’t, never have been.  And a good thing too, I think it would’ve killed me, pulled me out of myself and left me like a fish to drown in the unfriendly thin air.  But instead when that realization came to me, I was surrounded by family and friends, in the normal course of my daily life.  This is the way such things should happen.  Such shocks to the system must be singular and must be buffered by stiff reassurance.  
It is also not wise to deal with life alone.  And I do not.  I have a large family.  A wife. Children.  All of them better and more talented than me.  More of that old time brilliance, glorious.   But far from threatening me, it relaxes me, relieves me.  I am free to be dimwitted to the very end, released.  Neil Innis singing in the background, playing the piano.
One should not look at life alone.  And one should not look at life from any bizarre angles or from afar. Not from top or from the bottom or sideways, glancing.  If you cannot look at life straight on, full on in the face, best not to look at it at all, keep your eyes off it.  Let it pass, like water, don’t bother.  Don’t make a splash or a sound.  Go your whole existence without, devoid of it.  That is if you can, if you’re lucky.
But there is so little life at all to see anymore.  The chance of a set of eyes mistakenly dooming themselves to a subsistence of introspection and insight is so mind bogglingly slight, so small, it is safe to cast about stares anywhere.  But be wary, lest you catch the old bugs of compassion or selflessness, both still communicable by way of hearing or reading.  Not that anyone listens, not that there is anything to read.
But it’s not so bad.  We are all alone together.  We sympathize.  We are in unison.  A lonely herd of ennui-beasts, blood red lips and weepy eyes, two long hands full of fingers slipping and probing into the surrounding everywhere darkness.  Shoulder to shoulder with each other.  We should understand.  We should.
I mean
Imagine trying to be a human being in this world today and all the multitudinous problems this age brings.  But you don’t have to imagine them, you live them, so just recognize them.  And recognition of what it means to be a living thing in a living world and empathy for its troubles, is all it takes to be a human being.
But like nothing more than zombies we wander over the surface of the earth, a cloud of caffeine, amphetamines, and television fumes.  Eyes eaten out by eagles.  Blind.  Groping.  Clumsy with perception and deficient of compassion.  We tear at each other.      
Imagine a thin magnetic film stretched over the surface of a tumultuous planet, pulled tight and held between Heaven and hell or between earth and sky, a translucent membrane, a continuous cloth, all woven together, a vast human field…of atoms and molecules, made of taste bids and finger tips, of the bottoms of feet and the corners of lips.  Just one thing, here we are, just one thing, a human race.
You can’t.  No one can.  We aren’t wired that way.  Not yet anyway.  We struggle and we grind our gears, the best of us even.  But something is amiss. Because as music is just one fire and each note a flare or spark, we too are just one ocean.  But it is tumultuous now, our sea.  That is what troubles me.  One note off and the fire flickers out of control or dies away.  
But enough about that.  In this window with the broken glass, the thick crystalline split makes a clear horizon but veers up into the high left and ends at the top of the corner.  And in that corner a spider had made a web, the web had collected all the sunlight, yellows and reds, like dewdrops and was reflected first in the top edge of the crack, reversed and then in the bottom, right side round but with a million strings of silk making a million lines and glares of refracted light buzzing over both images, everything tied together.  I saw that yesterday.
This is where I keep my fire-eyes.  I have them.  I can use them, see with them.
I use them for discerning.
Distinguishing
Between right and wrong
Up and down
Left and right
Life from death.
I coil my fingers together in my lap and rock slightly in my chair remembering the sensation.
But recollection of sensation is not creating, is not writing...  
But it is a start, a solid start.
And imagine yet, me, in the act of creation, having to put my hands in all of that, make something of it, pull something out of it.  Into the swarming midst of it, the Jungian sub-consciousness, like diver bird and come out with a pebble, a rock.  And build on it.
That’s how it is done.  It is an exhaustive process.  An introspective one.  It is a rookie mistake to take too much, or choose the wrong things.  To make the stories too dark, the setting too tragic, the characters too complex.  Nothing is that interesting, so it won’t be real, and if it isn’t real, no one will believe it.  If it isn’t believable, it isn’t read.
So it is best to only scan the surface.  Not trouble the water too terribly, make only the slightest of ripples, observe them out the corners of your eyes, unassuming.  But don’t be boring.  It is just as easy to make a world so perfect and pure, so blue, you give in to all manners of lunacy.  Nothing ever bites back, there is nothing to fight back, everything is crystal clear.
It never ends.
I could have been in the Pampas grasses or on the Okavango or in Muscat under a hundred thousand layers of sky and atmosphere a tiny dusty mite-covered speck of life begging to reflect some light back to some unseen, unblinking eye.   Like a meteor falling out the sky, a rough collection of skin and bone thrown down to earth all alone, left to realize I was on my own.
I could have been anywhere.  I could have been anyone in all of space and time.
I can’t remember where I was when I first knew that I was it, the end, you and me, us, that’s it.  All alone.
But more than likely I was in a Laundromat.

About the Birds in the Air

Jesse S. Mitchell

Nothing but the sounds of birds.
Nothing but the buzzing of the bees.

The glimmer glint of rebel-light, like steel in the sun.

The love of collapsing buildings
    And wayward planets that can support no life.
Escaping over sturdy fences into fields so close to barrenness
    That they are called barren, and you can see their barrenness
They are bare-exposed in their nakedness
Worthless except for the space.
The space that they inhabit.

But that is revolutionary
Living in full lux of time.
And when it is Sao Paulo or Sarajevo when we die
Vacant, all cauldron-eyed deep and hollow,
Nothing but a bunch of husk.
And me, as much as you, an uninvited guest,
I will say, the world has begun to turn without us.
Has begun to turn without us.

About the birds in the air…
Horseflies in a cluster on the screen. These are savage times.  It makes me wonder how there are so many of them, woven together, in insectual bunches, their little black legs twisted in with the vinyl string mesh of the storm door window.  It is a marvel to me that anything so small and soft and hopeless survives.  The secret is in their power of flight, or in their numbers, maybe their tenacity…
They usually only congregate like this before a storm.  They get all worked up together and swarm around in clouds.  And they bite.  Suck blood from cattle and horses and people.  Vampiric.  
Something about the change in barometric pressure or the humidity, incites them, drives them to this unholy madness.
The air before a storm is particularly sharp, very dynamic and I find that I myself am drawn to it.  I like to go out into it, walk around.  Feel the dark grey change of mist overhead, feel the deep dampening of the air around me, immersed.  
It is really the approach that is the magic.  For a while anything could happen, the sky could become anything, electricity everywhere, there is potential.  There is an energetic kind of potential.  And potential is the best thing ever.  The most alive thing ever.
A real thing.
And then the storm finally breaks, tears open that long grey sheet of heaven and bursts out.  The rain starts to fall, stinging and delicate at first., but it tires quickly and soon the long lethargic drops begin to splatter and drip over everything and all is set and all the questions answered.  This is the way things are going to be…and we all sink a little bit further down into the forgetful mud. 
The horseflies scatter.
And then an end comes to even that, and the bugs and flies flutter around, all funeral dirges and picking up the pieces.  But soon even all this woefulness ceases and the old moods return and cicadas chant out their mating hum and crickets and spiders nervously rub their legs.
The air gets thin again, lean and empty and clear as glass.  When all the blue finally fades back in, the birds return and begin circling and streaking, each depending on the breed and temperament.   
The sounds of the street begin to pop back out, more prominent now after the low droning hiss of rain.  The air conditioner kicks on, makes a clank in the vents and sends up the cold.  It isn’t really all that hot yet but the A/C unit is old and easily confused by the changes in humidity and evaporation.  A girl rides by on a bicycle, a slow repetitive squeak. Her hair, Scandinavian-straight, picks up the wind a bit as she passes a creeping police car and turns the corner.  She turns onto the road that leads to the western part of town, where they keep the industrial and commercial places. The few factories, a couple of mostly empty professional complexes, the stores, the green behind the community college where they are setting up an outside pavilion for a Tuesday Weld film fest, and finally the lake.  The lake is almost totally round.  And large.  And it was almost always glass-still.  Nothing disturbs the surface.  
The lake was also the spot where the last aboriginal peoples of this area stood some land for the final time and were then summarily slaughtered.  Gunned down and left to rot.  That blood is still there, as particularly iron rich soil that supports some of the tallest and sweetest water flowers and grasses anywhere.
The lake is now  a popular local week-end and holiday recreational area.  They have picnic shelters and camper hook-ups and extremely filthy trash cans chained to iron poles stuck in the ground, as if they were in some danger of being taken.  
The girl is most likely heading there.
It is depressing the way summer returns to the day after a storm.  It is a kind of boring-heaviness, a weight, a obnoxious mass, a crammed-wet-paper-bag-full kind of weight. A nuclear radiating kind of warm weight.  It is warm but a false warm.  Everything is too bright.  Everything is trying too hard.  But we’ll get over it. 
I wish I could write a book with a photo of Simone de Beauvoir on the cover.  I have no such book in mind.  I don’t even know what it could be about, could be about anything really, I just want to write something that would justify the use of such imagery.  
I look out the door for some sign of the horseflies.  I watch a few cars roll down the street.  Trees move slightly.  People getting their mail.  I lose focus.
These are the hot blasts of civilization that come creeping into my mind.  Totally unprovoked, I swear.  Uninvited.  Unwelcome.  And the biggest part of everyone of my days is spent running around this house and this life in general, sealing up all the cracks and patching all the holes.  But there is always that little draft.  I must avoid it.  
Here is my place in time.  How depressing.  So here I stand, my arms by my side, trapped by time, by gravity, by circumstances beyond my control, by science, by wild random science.  By events.  Best to get used to it.  Best to put the paper down and switch off the television.  Wait it out. 
I am a hurricane.  A hurricane is defined by the Oxford Dictionary of English as ‘a strong violent wind of with at least level 12 Beaufort scale force’ and the word comes from the Taino word for their god of the storms, Hurakan.  But that’s me, a swirling mass of appendages, mad tentacles of anxiety drunk numb fingers and toes, a clumsy destructive mess.  With an extremely calm core.  Not a thing moves, total stillness.
I am also a misanthrope.  I do not like people.  I think what I dislike most about them is their laziness.  I don’t mean physical laziness, I don’t care how many bales you tote, or hours in your day, I don’t give a shit about so-called ’work’.  I mean, our all over laziness.  How we allow the awfulness of this world to persist and even increase.  How we still perpetuate evil and violence on each other.  How we continue to allow some to go without and how we permit so many to die.  All before our very eyes.  
If I ever state this, I usually hear the old line ’but we don’t know any better. ’  But we do.  Have you ever  read a book, watched a film, studied religion, mythology?  We know exactly how to be.  The human story is beautiful.  It is rich and warm and so full of mercy and advancement, it draws even the iron tear.  There is such a promise, such a possibility of what our future could be, as to be so wonderful that it reduce any legend of heaven or hell a dull glint lost in the overgrown weeds.  The end.  We could be so much, it courses through our blood, it invades our imaginations (obliviously) , we breathe its air…but we won’t do it.
But we won’t do it.
And we will blame it on something else.
And we will avoid it and we won’t even talk about it and we will try to never ever think about it
And we certainly won’t look at it or deal with it.
But me either.  I’m not better. I’m no better.
Robert Heinlein said that ‘Sin lies only in the harming of others unnecessarily and all other sins are invented nonsense’.  Yes.  I agree with that.  But we won’t even follow just that one rule.  We cannot stop ourselves.  All we really need do, is never intentionally or  needlessly harm another living thing and we would be golden.  Humankind I could love you again.  I could live side by side with you again.  I could write your stories again.  I would grant you any reputation you wished.  Because we all want reputations.  Saviors. Heroes.  Don’t speak ill of the dead.  Dictators holding whole herds of scholars, dacha bound and restless, with cold gun pressed to warm throat, all to rewrite a little history.  Who is a liberator?  Who is an oppressor?  No one goes to the grave a villain.  
Just don’t kill.  Just don’t maim.  Don’t torture.  And don’t let it happen.  Let us move on.  Move us on.  Be happy.  Let everyone born on your watch go to the grave in their natural time and in one piece.  And I will grant you any reputation you desire.  Go out under the stars and breathe your saintly hymns to the moon.  Into churches or alleyways or caves or temples and do your things, I do not care.
But I’m no better of course, of course of course, of course I’m no better either. 
I’m no better.
I need to get myself together.
Walk into the other room, turn the computer on, pull open all the curtains. Let a lot of sunlight in.  oddly enough as reclusive as I am, I cannot stand the blinds drawn. I must have the sun. Electric lights are hideous yellow and they buzz.  I can hear the noise everywhere.  I feel it.  Echoing around inside my bony porous skull-head.  It is unnerving.  It reminds me of my cadaverous nature.  I am just a dead body tossed on earth alone for long enough for me to realize it on my own.  
I sit down to type.  I wait.  I think in my mind of my characters.  I visualize them.  I put them in situations and I wait.  I wait for them to react, to respond and when they do, I smile because their reply pleases me.  But then it does not.  Because it is not real.  They have done what I wished them to do and not what they would have done.  It is not honest.  
My universe is filled with deep thinking individuals in so far as their deep thoughts could only be as deep as mine, with all my limitations but then again, within my world, my thoughts are the deepest thoughts that can be thought.  Yes, they are conscientious, profound beings.  And they are hardly never wrong.  They kill me.  
You may say ’why bother?  What from Swann’s Way to Infinite Jest, there is nothing left to say in Modern literature.’  You many say that, and I might even agree.  But I don’t think we are still in the ‘Modern’, ‘post-Modern’, ‘Contemporary’ days.  That all ready happened and our out right refusal to move on is one of the biggest causes our recent malfunctions. 
    And then come those moments of perfect stillness.  Too introspective, pushing the brain too far. And our eyes go empty blank and it pours over you like water threatening to drown.  But you don’t, you hover on the verge of breathlessness and compulsion.  Compulsion to gasp for air.  We realize we are alive, we are life, this is life…
And we seem insignificant and we seem sad and we seem lost.  But we get over it, as is our nature, our nature is to survive, to surmount.  We get over it and we move to the next phase, pure delirium.  We shake overtaken with joy and we realize we are alive, we are life, all of this is life and everything is beautiful and wonderful no matter who you are or what you believe.  And there is where the real madness lies, because as it is beautiful and grand, it is also so fleeting and it is so quick and  the rapture pulls away from you, and you find yourself unable to stand it, the quick obliteration and the fading of all the light.
My fingers in front of me, all flesh and bone.  They tremble.  They shake.  
It is dangerous to think of characters this way.  
And we go rampaging towards an end.
And we go rampaging…
The birds swoop between the power lines outside the house and go streaming up over the neighbor’s roof.  

And the horseflies buzz hover in mid-air with the blood lust on their lips.   

Chicagospell (part 3 1/2)

Jesse S. Mitchell

part 3 here

As they walk down the aisle, shimmering-appearing next to them, on the right and on the left, transparent images of people start to appear.  Charlie looks over at them, holographic ghosts, automatons moving stiffly. Every set of thin, translucent eyeballs staring back at him and the cigar man as they pass.
As they walk down the aisle, shimmering-appearing next to them, on the right and on the left, transparent images of people start to appear.  Charlie looks over at them, holographic ghosts, automatons moving stiffly. All of them dressed in rags and torn clothes, dirty faces, stained, cracked hands, a hundred years of sun ruined skin stretched tight across their faces. Every set of thin, translucent eyeballs staring back at him and the cigar man as they pass.
Charlie feels his skin goose pimple up, a frown comes across his face, creeped out.
He shakes his head.
“Look at these people.”  He blurts out.
The cigar smoking looks over his shoulder and shrugs.
“You see, I never wanted to be these people.  A herd of mediocrity and feebleness, a bunch of hog butchers and ditch diggers, sans-culottes.  And don’t think they don’t have a taste for blood.  Oh no, don’t ever fail to take these monsters seriously, they’ll gut you right open.  Yeah.  But, don’t think I don’t sympathize.  I have no love for their enemies…some of their enemies, the rich, the cowardly wealth-mongers, the thirsty beyond any satiation.  But also, they hate the talented, the gifted, the new, the novel.  Slit your throat for showing up any of their deficiencies.  I grew up in a trailer park.  I did.  I really did.  I know this life.  I know these people.  They will steal the blood from your veins, the copper from your wires, the breath from your life, diminish their own kind, too frightened to lash out at real villains, too confused to see real life.  Wife-beaters, child-abusers, time-wasters.  This place makes me sad, churches always do, churches, temples, mosques, jails, joke shops.”
Charlie runs his hands over the dark red-brown wood of the pews.  Smooth, takes his hand up and looks over his fingertips, they are clean, impeccable the care people take to care for their sacred places.
“If only everyone of us was considered so special, so sacred.  What if every moment of every life was held so holy.  What would be different?  What would be so safeguarded?  What if we could accept what we saw with our own eyes as being so remarkable as the mythical things dreamt of by others and then related to our young ears by means of poetry…and if not poetry than by guile?”
“A different world.” a uniformed man barely says.
“Ah! So you can speak.” Charlie shouts
“A different time.”
“Hmm.  And I suppose you will tell me something about faith, faith in man, and love, and beauty, and hope and all the rest.  But I wouldn‘t waste my breath, you know.  Not that I don‘t see the benefit in that whole ball of bullshit.  Give a person a light at the end of a tunnel and they will keep chugging on.  A little bit of hope for something better some far off maybe someday, and as the years go by, and pile up all skeletal and bleached, they will smile on and on, their little pitiful face turned towards the sun, the setting, always setting sun.  Heaven makes good slaves, peace and hope and wild stories of charity and compassion makes good slaves.  Something to work towards, something to look forward to, and then you don‘t notice the shit around your waist, the rope around your neck.  I can‘t see why people can‘t ever just see the world like the Vikings?  Those people had the right way of looking at things, everything was going to end eventually, it was all going to come crumbing down, the world was going to end and everything you ever knew or love was going to crumble with it.  Good was not going to win.  But, but that wasn’t going to be for some time, better get your livin’ in, get the good times now, and even heaven, if you make there, warrior or saint, even heaven was in danger of total collapse, best get it all in while you can.  Now, that is a healthy philosophy for life. ”
The ragged ghosts flicker faintly, static, broken-breath, like bad TV reception, they start to disappear leaving the inside of the cathedral empty and quiet.  Charlie’s footsteps echo, sound like bomb dropping, going off.  Startled by the new reverberation, he steps gingerly, trying to avoid the little explosions.
“Look, put your arms out.  You can feel it all around you.  We two, you and me, whoever you are, whatever you happen to look like when I look back up and see you, whatever vision, imaginary or hallucinatory, real  practical living seeing breathing whatever, just listen to me.  You and I, put your arms out next to mine, here we stand on the absolute edge of all creation.  Standing, like gritting teeth, clinched fists, bated breath, chest-deep on the very cusp of the penultimate crest, the highest water mark of the nearest everything, the top of the wave of time.  Here we are, in the actual present, real time, real life, we are here, now, right now.  But are we crashing forward?  Or are we ebbing away?  Coming in on the tide, frothy surf, or relaxing, recoiling back under the cold currents?  Folding back into all the ocean that has come before us, carried us here?”
Charlie stand still for a second or more, a slight sly smile on his face, his eyes closed, a serenity blooming over his face, happy with himself, with his questioning mind.  The look fades, his face melts back to a acerbic scowl.  He waves his hand in front of his face.
“But forget it, I’m an old man now or at least old enough to know better, know better.  Yes, know better, know that I roll away with the peaks and the troughs, the deep way down, the deep red earth.  Made from dirt, deposited on the shore, stood up, strong legs, lived a life…sort of, did my time, sun come bleach my bones, birds come pick my flesh, grow new, grow new.  Greek ironic punishments.  Humph, but that’s life, an ironic twist on a violent birth, a slow wither.”
“We go forward as far as we dare, at whatever speed we choose.”
“Do we?  You put this on me, then?  But what have I been saying?  That I even wished to go further?  No, if you had been listening this whole time, you’d know, I’ve been sounding the retreat for sometime now.  Going to get away, put in my feelers, and try to avoid the disturbing air, the breeze, the flow.  Be an internal creature from here on out, a turtle, a snail, deep inside my shell, tired of cherry, tired of rice, tired of this whole world.  That‘s Basho.  That‘s the true hermit call.”

(The Bee-Skin Flint/Homusubi) Jubilee

Jesse S. Mitchell

Izanagi & Izanami 

Coming over the mountains
The wild animals cross over into our blood stream
Spark (tungsten, type b)
Electric lighting up our eyes.
Flash.
Driving us crazy from the bottoms of our humid lungs
To the very tips of our hair.
We burst
We burst into flame.
We glimmer, alive.

This is how I remember being born.

this poem is from 47 Venezuela which can be downloaded in its entirety (for free!) here, along with many other great chapbooks.  Check them out.  

Warwick Slavik isn’t the center of the Universe

Jesse S. Mitchell

The rain started suddenly and it began to end as abruptly, coming down in odd streaks and rivulets.   Precipitation as ribaldry, Deluge as mockery, the concrete could not absorb it, it just rushed and washed this way and that, aimless, in limbo.  The taxi lurched through the clogged streets, and Warwick saw them, two people huddled together in a doorway, asylum seekers, and their faces pressed together, oblivious now that the rain had stopped.  The scene looked black and white, sepiatoned, shades of grey, like a Vivian Meier.  A binary star system, twin suns locked in gravitational orbit of pure elation.  The epicenter of their own galaxy. Warwick felt the way he imagined it felt to be Jean Cocteau, or Mark Rothko, all alone in purgatory rain, adrift in empty space, watching, watching from the edge.

 Because nobody could be the center of an anything, anywhere, without an anybody else.