March 21st & Meredith and I danced like elephants on Los Feliz Boulevard. Elephants can’t jump, nor can they skip, but no matter, we glided with water shoulders, swapping body maps in the dusk of sound. She turned to me & says take me home. I paused, licked my devil teeth & plucked the Jazz from the trees while we walked towards an old car with forty four states worth of soul. I told her home is a half moon stretched thin, a cotton ball. We can chase it milky eyed, if we wish. We can chase it like we would chase buffalo, if we see fit. She nodded. And now we know the edge of noise, we know it is grand & the search is forever. We navigate by matchlight because the fall is deep as the night.
Filed under: Wirewalkers | Tags: Fiction, Los Angeles, Madness, Poetry, Prose
6.
It feels like I grew up in your mother’s kitchen. Summer in my mouth fourteen hours a day and mosquitoes hid behind the paintings. I killed them one by one on hunts that lasted all night. I was always disappointed if you emerged scratching your elbows in the morning. I would sit at the breakfast table defeated with bags under my eyes chewing ferocious air. When we were twelve you were taller than me and it felt so permanent. When we were sixteen I was six foot three and the springs in your bed would howl like an ambulance so we had sex on the floor as to not chase the night from our limbs. By then your elbows were smooth because insects knew not to enter, my reputation had reached the surrounding skies. I left the windows open and we enjoyed the air around our ankles. In Griffith Park we knew all the paths. When the place caught fire one year we cried louder than the coyotes. A friend suggested that if the arsonist was found we should pull out his eyelashes. We gave the idea serious consideration. I tell you this like you don’t already know. Maybe I feel as though you have forgotten. Maybe I feel as though your fingerprints are half hearted. Kora, I want you to exist so much more than this. I want you to wave your arms around in an aboriginal dance explaining what I don’t understand. I want you to bring me your library of hummed compositions and clear a floor on which to shake our knees. Interstate fifteen on the way to Death Valley we got stuck in Vegas traffic and waited with no radio, I heard you sing and you could sing. Three hundred miles of blacktop dreaming of the Devil’s Golf Course and you could sing. The hotels are empty and the schools are empty and the theatres are empty and the body is hollow and you could sing. Paradox after paradox, car after car, you and your drum circle of epiphanies, I have known no better. As a student I have more and more bores and chores but Kora Kora no, it’s not just that. All the engines of Los Angeles have failed because of your silly mood. I don’t know who you are. You should see the freeways frozen like the broken arms of a monster we once knew. A monster with a giant blue heart and a laugh as damp as a cave. I become upset when the trees are not upright. I have exhausted the trampoline springs of summer. I write notes on the bedposts thinking of everyone I’ve ever known, every world I have offered to black holes without permission. The ground splits like a coconut and the skeletons laugh merrily at my gentle mistakes.
1.
Meaning is no longer what I want from you. I want you to walk the wire barefooted. I want you to endanger the atomic leaves and burn the money behind the rose garden. Kora, we predicted it all as children. We would be godless. I am frightened because there is so much silence, and in silence I am restless like an empire. We are waiting like guests on the rooftops. Up here there is nothing but the pause between my body and the wind. But I was never accepted as a monk. I breathe too loudly, too often and my legs are too long. When crossed they form a shape which is neither beautiful nor satisfying. Long ago, let me remember, we drove to Death Valley and slept in a volcano. It was winter and we split our rations in the cold. If I had known the constellations like I do now no doubt there would have been stories with spears and shields. But since I was a boy with a simple heart I was content with the tragedy that you could not come any closer. Forehead to forehead, the impossibility was always enough. But now we are left planning the Great Escape through the holes in the wall. Now we walk like strangers in awkward shoes lonely and liquid on the boulevards. On the balconies, on the balconies, oh everything seems so rosy on the balconies. Listen, listen to this, the universe spilling from my lips like spit.
