#DAMNED AND #SAVED
Brad Green (@Green_Brad)
Part I
There have often been sudden, astonishing appearances of mice in great numbers. Some things can’t be escaped. Confusions. Showers of frogs and blizzards of snails—gushes of periwinkles from the sky. What we call intelligence is only an expression of in-equilibrium.
There is ahead of us a waste of parallaxes and spectrograms and triangulations.
Listening to the fetal heart monitor and the hush of the early morning hospital room. I feel a rush of blood in my ears, my hands. We shall have an outcry of silences.
Contraction. Didn’t seem too bad. Wife disagrees. Cables and tubes loop on wall hooks like spiders mating. Vast, black thing poised like a crow over the moon. We simply note the cold light of falling bodies. Terrified horses, up on their hind legs, hoofing a storm of frogs. Black rains, red rains, the fall of a thousand tons of butter. Punk and silk and charcoal.
A whirlwind runs amok and is filled with confusions. It rants trees, doors, frogs, and parts of cows. Something has selected them. That, whatever it may have been, it traveled against the wind.
In a farrago of lights and sounds and forms, I feel the presence of possible classifications. Nurse just opened the door and caught me picking my nose. Coffins have come down from the sky: also, as everybody knows, silk hats and horse collars and pajamas. But later, in the same place, blood again fell from the sky.
Ouch!
Awesome!
The dark is the same air as the day, only a different color.
Part II
I really like the smell of Play-Doh. A day where the air is damp on the skin and a grey shelf of clouds press. Trees loom and creak and a Frisbee hisses by my ear. Now the rain arrives like a mother-in-law with bad knees.
You know what’s freaky about babies? They blink very slowly.
The fields are black two properties over from our place. A fire. 20 feet from taking out a house. The grass is brittle as hay. A doom haze. There’s a squealing rat in the wall. Sometimes I hate the country and long for the bland concrete and sterilized land of the blinking city. The sheetrock is thin and I can feel the rat’s quick shiver under my palm. But since the rats are back, I know the snake is gone. I’ve killed 8 skunks, 4 copperheads, 27 scorpions, 4 black widow spiders, 6 brown recluses, 5 snakes of undetermined origin, and hope. One day I woke up and found 4 donkeys in the back yard. I didn’t kill any of them. And the cadaverous, grey coyote squirting through the back yard on occasion: I haven’t killed him either. But wasps. I murder wasps with abandon. And hornets. Every slithering snake, every foul-legged thing. Each creature with a poison barb. I protect my children.
What I really want right now is to watch a girl I don’t know dance in the back of a pickup truck.
It is in the records of the French Academy that on March 17, 1669, in Châtillon-sur-Seine, there fell a reddish, putrid substance. At 9pm, on May 22, 1884, sharp sounds were heard throughout the city, caused by a fall of flinty stones striking against windows. 1892, Lancaster, PA: People in a snowstorm caught falling worms on their umbrellas. Emissions of arms, bubbling of faces, fire and smoke and a lava of naked beings.
I’m going to take my talents to the booze store.
Is it wrong to ask for seconds from the wine sampler lady? Got seconds, but when I went back for thirds, the wine sampler lady offered me a sad expression and shook her head no.
This mosquito makes me want to fill this dark room with propane fumes and strike a bright match. A screaming baby takes all the fun out of post-oral-surgery Vicodin.
Our gravel driveway is white in the moonlight. The air is sheer and blue, full of whisper, death, and promise. Breathe in. Make a choice. These grapes are sour as my drunken aunt’s Sunday diatribes. If butterscotch were sex, it’d be the reverse cowgirl, I think.
The baby took her first step today!
It’s a wonderful thing when the heat of a palm opens a beauty in an ill-mooded wife. Sometimes you can feel a heartbeat all the way across an empty room. And sometimes you can’t even when the chest is pressed against you. I remember her hissing hips, how moonlight turned her belly magical. I seem to have found a way to make everyone say no.
Just got out of a meeting that was totally about whether to have additional meetings. Watched a woman with muscular calves sneak potato chips from her purse and then glance around. A noisy hotel. The sky is full of lights. My shadow blooms on the wall.
Today I saw a woman in a wedding dress standing outside a hotel at a pay phone, crying. Our worlds are never what we imagined them to be. On the highway, I saw a woman with the thinnest wrists. Her hands sharp with bone. Her knuckles shone in the sun. Also, black scraps of tire, the glint of a beer can, a congestion of yellow-headed weed, a dark snout, a gray paw, a blur of sun-hot fur.
I watched a young girl fog her breath against the silver elevator doors and furtively draw a happy face there with her finger. I saw a father twist a purple scar onto a misbehaving child’s arm. I stared at the white curve of this woman’s foot today during the conference. Her knees were sharp as elbows. Her mouth was wide. She stuck the tip of her tongue into her tea before sipping. She wore black eyeliner like a statement. A glass sweated on the table.
I wonder why she sat across from me. I wonder what motivates people. I looked at her and thought, you don’t enjoy grilled tilapia, but are fond of spoonfuls of peanut butter. On Sundays, she smells like lilacs. I’m sure she cried three days ago and found something in the mirror she didn’t like. Her teeth were crooked in an appealing way.
What would have happened had I taken her hand? Or touched her forearm with two fingers? She twisted her hands together over her belly and looked me straight in the face. My breath caught in my throat a little.
Each moment is so pregnant with possibility that it’s maddening. The Devil’s pussy probably tastes like biscuits and gravy. What I mean is that want is everywhere and oftentimes it’s intolerable. It’s that moment of wobble when one imagines movement in any direction is possible.
A longspur rattles. The wind is sly. Black settles in the square window frames. The wine leaves its legs on the curved glass. Everyone sleeps and I unmoor. Sometimes I feel like my life is just a syntax error.
The best thing about alternate reality theory is that there’s a chance a version of me might be thin and well adjusted. Lightning whitens the dark world. The dog shivers and moans. The damp air lifts my shirt like the hands of a forgotten girl. A tractor growls beyond the ridge of tangled oaks. The baby that was finally asleep is now screaming. There are moments where the table shakes, you grip it so hard.
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