Gum

I wake up in the night, worried about how to get rid of gum. I fear nothing will vaporize gum but a white hot star. I worry about our ignorance. If you put it in a mere earthly incinerator, the wet gum of a mouth will just scream and writhe and turn and pop and then crawl away. Just as Daniel came with a spring in his step out of that Biblical oven. It will lie on the street, charred, and wait for a really low mouth, for little hands to pick it up and pop it in. It might be a child. Or an art dwarf like Lautrec. And if you bury it deep in the earth, it will hold all our cells and spit in those brain-like grooves, and with the weight of all the trash above, pockets will seal over that DNA like amber over 99 million year old ants caught in the act of inter-species fornication. There is no solution. We should have never started with gum. You might swallow it, but then it's going to follow the great Excremental Highway to the sea. Think of all the people who throw their gum into the ocean. Right off cruise ships and PVC rafts made to look like a box of Crayola Crayons.You just know sea cucumbers are mating with our gum at the bottom of the sea. How do you sleep at night?  You probably don't even believe gum has genes, but at the beginning of creation a bunch of water bubbles "got" genes. They had nothing at the beginning. Just a dark dream and a fiction about themselves they told themselves constantly until it became true. The way you can hear gum talking, even when you stop chewing it. So it begins.

The Voice Problem

A fly went to see a psychiatrist for a troubling mental complaint. Every time he spoke, it sounded to him as though a fly were speaking. This was whether he was speaking aloud or thinking to himself, inside his own head. "It comes out as sort of fly-like buzzing!" he lamented to the psychiatrist, who was himself just then perched upside down on the ceiling of the consultation room, vibrating his wings. "Very interesting," the shrink thrummed and rubbed his fore-legs together to savor the conundrum even better. The fly psychiatrist was actually fantasizing about horse excrement, how sensuous and inviting it was. Even more than a fly femme fatale on her best day. "It's like a long didgeridoo sound that never ends," the poor fly told the doc. "Well, are you hearing it  even now?" the doctor probed. The fly paused a moment to listen to his thoughts."Yes, even now," he confirmed. "And my voice, the voice of a doctor with many success stories, do you hear it as only the drone of a fly, a small hairy bag of being with a striking proboscis, the sonic output of eight limited chromosomes?" "Yes, I believe we are both buzzing," the patient sadly admitted. "How worthless patients are," the fly doctor thought. "Patient is a terrible misnomer. If patients were patient, most of their problems would be solved by time or death." But they had to show up and bother him. "I'm going to write you a prescription for absolute solitude," the doctor concluded. "If you follow my treatment regimen faithfully, I will never see you again. Also, never feed again from anything that even vaguely resembles a proboscis. And your identity problem should swiftly resolve. Please stop at the payment window before taking to the sky."  The fly did as he was told and was soon starving to death. But the doctor was correct. His voice began to change. The buzz disappeared. There was only a thin sound that issued from his body now. It was translucent like the voices of clouds. On his last day, the fly realized the wings had been his problem all along. How had the doctor missed that? What a quack!  He castrated himself of his wings and his voice by flying at a razor-sharp piece of broken glass in the window of an abandoned house. He fell to the dank wooden floor of an empty house and listened to his own blessed silence. There was nothing even remotely fly-like about him. When a child exploring the vacant house stepped on him moments later, his final cry of anguish, he noted with pride, had not one iota of buzz left in it. It sounded like the scream of the paragon of animals. The pride inside him separated itself off from its animal. He stared at it a millisecond as a proud parent does with its newborn. And then he was something like a niggling doubt that he forgot.

A Muted Parade

I went walking in the fog of morning before morning. A voice told me to look for living things or — finding no living things — look for pieces of living things, parts of their bodies and body loves. Of course, the trees were all alive. The children below the trees, ferns and weeds, they are alive. Green spurning things. I saw a dragonfly wing. Glinting on the asphalt. A desperate iridescence signaling. Everything was wet with dew as the inside of  a very old man’s wrist watch. One tall cold one. A black umbrella going  to a black car funeral somehow like an umbrella. The first birds called, then, to the space before time. It was black and weirdly swaying, dappled, blotched with holes like an old Super-8 film-leader. We were all on it.


A breeze through trees whispered it was only passing through and inhuman. The BLOCK PARENTS had died, but the yellow blocky sign was still in the window of their empty house. The photograph of this is of everything, that spirit of guardianship in photos taken for unknown reason. It floats like  a summer dirigible’s shadow on the nape. Time says things behind a photo’s back. That feel of father, wet beer kiss of yesteryear on a naked knee. Oh, it’s just the breeze again. You carry your father’s camera and inside the body the fog. The sense that hands are superfluous only leaves the body slowly, slowly as the morning, many hours and loops later.

On a Day So Cold

On a day so cold, the neighborhood hawk uncharacteristically cries out as he flies overhead, advertising his services to freezing birds who might have had enough. Surprisingly, no takers. Winter's game of freeze tag continues, with most of the players already in stoic tableau.

Sun Drain

Every day, the old man sits high in a dour, tall building. He sits at a window. He watches a train that contains all the loved and loveless dead ones whizz down the oldest railroad tracks in the world. Always there are more and darker commuters. From his side, they look like the ghosts of jazz singers, with their dark hands and faces pressed to the morning-frosted glass of the train. From their side, he is a slight imperfection in the ice.

That Was the Year

That was the winter I went around making false graves. I would tie sticks together into crosses with twine and plant them in the earth in the middle of a forest where few would pass. I was often on all fours clearing snow and leaves with my hands, which were like paws in my big gloves. The gloves were ancient. They were so ancient, they remembered you.  Or I would erect little cairns with white stones. Once, I made a memorial cross using an old bear trap I had found. Such a horrible mouth to think of there in the darkness. In the night. Often, I wrote first names on these monuments, Christian names mostly, but sometimes I chose names that used symbols from other alphabets or languages that are ideograms. Google would help me make the graves. Sometimes I used the names of characters from novels who had meant something to me. I laid these beloved characters in the earth, on which they had never truly lived. For instance, I made a grave for Bartleby. Sometimes I would want the people who would stumble upon one of these hallucinations to think it was an animal's grave rather than a human's. Or I would want them not to be sure. Many names have this ambiguity. The important thing is the feeling the person would have and how the grave might change the person for an instant or longer. I don't think these made people afraid, although it probably did make them wonder. And fear is leaven, anyway. This had nothing to do with art and everything to do with being a person. This is, I suppose, a failing. The thing I didn't want to tell you is that you have to actually dig a grave for this to be convincing. Even if there is no one, no animal, no human within it. But this is good exercise. My blood pressure came down that year.


--after a photograph by Walter Stoltz