Old friends and new. Salt, eyelids and coffee grounds.

I recently got an email from a good friend whom I've never met. How that internet thing goes. A powerful writer, an oyster, a forge, an extruder of thin, taut, spare, painfully true word, this old friend. Doesn't have a blog that I know of, or I'd link it. Yes, well, she asked, more or less, "What, are you living or dead?"

A new friend, whom I've never met, sends me a similar email. Another writer. Have no idea how she found this three times, at that time, posted to blog, but she did and she asked, more or less, "Why the hell don't you write more?" Wait, this one does have a blog: this stoney planet that we farm .

So, well, hell, I don't know why I don't write.

A paragraph bringing up to date, a sentence maybe. After all, it hasn't even been a year, quite. Finished school with the most useless degree imaginable--philosophy. Got married, beautiful woman with eyes, these eyes. Another cat, maybe two. Fatter, slower, and I think that's it.

So, with a little more nonsense of the past week to follow. I do love hearing from old friends and new. I just have this really horrible awareness of time.

The more nonsense part, hot, more or less, from the metaphysical brown star:

Parchment skin and lethargic smells. Old powder and cedar wood, Downy, down down down down. Aromas notwithstanding, the betrayal. What happened to her skin, the fissures and the crepe? The haunting and the haunting. That bow mouth of a child reincarnating with a sweet smile and slicing through the dreamspace, rusted barbed wire.

If life were only as glossy and simple as a Victoria’s Secret catalogue. Maybe it is. Just imagine the women are for sale, but not for their sex, rather for their meat. I know they don’t look very meaty, but extra-lean is hot now. Hot hot hot. Low fat and low cholesterol and think jellied nipples, Brazilian super-aspic, crisp, roasted soles of dainty feet. Specialty market. Pricing exotic, like duck-billed platypus or panda loin.

Which turn of the wheel is this? And if we were bubble jelly, if we walked with our yolk to the sun, bubble jelly, a taut shiny skin turned to the wind, puckered with abscission, if we walked with tender feet tasting stone and leaves, hard leather forming on our backs, between shoulder bones and blond wire hairs, a mantle hardening off, red leather yellow leather, just bubble leather rolling along?

We’ve all got our one obvious abscission scar, that mossy, lint-filled oyster in our bellies. The innies and the outies. The scars they leave, the living in the dead. The unquiet smiles and sleepless nights and sour stomachs that fill our shadows. Moving slower all the time. Progressive constipation, sluggish lymph, and the strained smile of yellow teeth. Worm ridden fruit scared to leave the tree. Purgatory in the tall grass.

Are there angry spirits? Ill-tempered gin and seriously pissed-off peach schnapps?

“I know,” she said. “I don’t know, but we’ve been over this. But, what happened?”

What happened? What with the squirrel paste and the cigar boxes?

“If you must,” she said.

“With beet salad and goldfish toothpaste?”

“I know,” she said. “That even if you’ve been born again you still only have one mother.”

“I know,” I said. “That you have two navels.”

Sunday was spent, as Sundays are, mostly sitting around having compassion for parasites. Even ear mites have mothers.

“All I want to know,” she said, “Is what happened between the beginning and the end.”

“But, but there’s no such thing. Between the alpha and the omega there’s just the alpha and the omega, again and again.”

“For God’s sake,” she asked, “Between a taco and its shell isn’t there some condition of being, some grace of lettuce and cheese, some uncertain potentiality?”

“Not so much, after it’s eaten.”
Ancillary fish paste.

Just walking down Concord Street, loose asphalt marbles and men with stained pants, too much old masking tape and not enough busses, ghosts almost cheerful and bewildered, bobbing along like balloons on a thread, peering into ugly plastic strollers in blue, and just out of nowhere she turns to a man who’s getting out of a shining Camry and cries,

“Pig Fucker!”

It’s not a joke. Said in earnest, loud loud, a little shrill. Bracing for a fight, thinking not again, I look at his face swelling from the vee of black wool, red bumpy neck and clotted whiteness, but there’s no fight. Of all things, he looks guilty, ashamed. But she’s left no space for him to confront his accuser, to defend, to apologize, the beg of forgiveness. Down the way she’s gone, a storm of weeds.

I shrugged at him as the jelly under his skill ticked.