War Is Language : 101 Short Works (9781937316044) (10 page)

Look. Fuck deliberation and diplomacy.
I’m not involved in all that. I’m just talking about something to
say over dinner with a couple bottles of wine. Maybe you can beat
up on the Kurds, you know, just a little. One pole dancer with
fishnet sleeves plays chess with another in a tiger-striped string
bikini. Maybe you can bully each other with sectarian strife.
What's a lost life here and there? Here’s a sudsy pillow fight to
distract you.

Who needs a conservative backlash?
Those girls—all of them, the five naked silhouettes, the pole
dancer in the fishnet sleeves, the other one in the tiger-striped
string bikini—curl up together, satisfied, asleep. I think we play
a lot. All of us have amazingly playful lives. (Of COURSE paintball
is awesome, hello! And this is the most awesome ruse squad EVER!!
Helicopters?! Um, sign me up. We would TOTALLY kick ass. Anytime. I
will go, anytime.)

For blond curls and bending back over
fence rails. She doesn’t have to take off her jelly bracelets. Cubs
roll around, squabbling in a meadow so they'll be able to grow up
and tear each other to shreds for food, mates, and territory. Focus
on the screen: let her come toward you, come down from that height,
come toward you, let her come toward you, let her come, let her
come toward you, smiling, let her come down, let her come toward
you, let her come off the lava rocks and jump down into the sand,
let her come toward you.

So the question is, in our indulgence,
in our play, for what are we preparing? What skills and powers are
we refining? In what areas are we becoming great?... Read
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Or don’t. There’s a huge agave plant.
We are trained and prepared. Crow wings reflect morning sunlight.
But for what? What will the actions of our lives be? Let her come
toward you in the sunlight of a soccer ball-bouncing beach. Let her
smile, jump, plunge, dive, and surface, crushed. Why? I guess for
the party by the pool.

Get pushed in by the
thousands. He’s not the only one. None of us is. You’re not. She’s
not. I’m not. Everyone values money for the freedom it represents.
Release balloons. Make out. Carry your camera—always carry your
camera—wag your ass, bungee jump between the sound stages, kneel
down with another shaved girl. There are many other values that we
project onto the concept of
financial
independence.
(Isn’t that whole idea
passé?) No one has to actually say it in a yellow follow spot that
crosses the crowd and makes patterns with the red one: beat, beat,
beat, lines of light up and down, back and forth, crossing,
uncrossing, lighting faces, bodies, clothes, hats, skin, and
abandoning all of it as quickly.

No one cares. It’s normal. It’s fun.
It’s what you do.

But, this Fake Paintball War might
just be the most amazing display of freedom…ever!

That girl with the great hair wears a
watercolored ruffle that obscures and accentuates her tits. I can
appreciate that because I have a great respect for my friends who
prioritize freedom over security.

The applications of the balance of
Freedom and Security are everywhere. There’s a baby in headphones
helping the DJ. It is everything from War to cell phone record Big
Brother Surveillance stuff to getting your neighbor to stop letting
his dog shit in your yard.

There’s no pit of vipers under the
hood. If you know where you are on the spectrum, then you can start
to understand where others are on that same spectrum.

Maybe you aren't the guy who wears a
rainbow thong to commemorate Stonewall. Maybe that guy prioritizes
Freedom just a little bit more than you. Or maybe you aren't the
person who could detonate a Claymore mine to protect your rights.
Maybe that guy prioritizes Security just a little bit more than
you. Or vice versa. How should I know?

Well, thank God for you both, I say.
Because if the Claymore guy is blowing up other people so we can
sit around and live in fearful closets, that's no kind of fun. And,
if the guy in the rainbow thong doesn't have a trigger-happy
bodyguard, well, let's face it, somebody's definitely going to fuck
his shit up.

As an individual and as a nation—what
does "what we want" look like? Put on the floppy, pink fur hat as
we extrapolate this conceptualization to the enactment of our lives
in Isla Mamey. There are ways that we want to exert ourselves in
the world. One way is to drape a string of beads, loose, over your
belly and let it drape-cross your back.

17 — Carefully Placed
Patterned Pavers

They were
the only two people on an officially-dedicated pedestrian
bridge—its plaque still new, telling who the mayor was, who the
deciders were, ready to age well in the elements, riveted
indestructible bronze to the concrete bridge.

Who were they? Strangers. A girl and a
grifter. There were no handcrafted cocktails. She was doing
homework outside. An article sat flapping in her lap. The homeless
man just stopped wandering nowhere and asked her, “Are you
reading?”

She looked up at the beard and brown
arms, the paper bag and smile. Wind spiked bright with September;
what encounter is there, really? She offered a response. Not an
answer really, though.

The green shirt walked on toward
sultans and saints, toward re-invented elastic driveway gate Toledo
girls rinsed sulfate-free. Toward a castoff mid-weight cotton blend
twill reversible two-tone jacket.

Wabash River water oozed beneath their
distancing departure. He had been right to ask. Who could read with
so many beautiful distractions—the cicadas, flagpoles, shadows, and
breeze?

She noticed how suddenly he was gone,
with the water, and the wind, and the road of hum-cars, which had
long since streamed on by.

50 — Smart/Dumb

Tip back, pop, inhale acetone until fluttering
wings are stilled to rigor. Romantic people—men and women—forced to
pretend to be dumber get no happy, furry, Benji chrysalis base
camp. Only anesthesia.

If, when walking home, a reflection
accosts you, offer it something sweet. Sunglasses. Posture. A
little rouge. Because that shimmering reflecting pool will shore
you up and follow you home, riding shadows that at least exist
under your sole, if nowhere else. They are waiting to grow more, if
only conditions get sunny and slant.

Fumes suppress neither the
will nor the inevitability of a transformation. He looks. Look
away. Commute polite within the smell of a creosote hoard’s careful
descent with perpetual monotony of never-meetings. Hush, girl.
Flip-flop. Flip-flop. Betray quiet general blessings. Soap up
silent curses of an entire demographic segment of your own
neighborhood’s residential population. Stay with them and come down
temporary railway construction stairs together. They are a sector
of society swarming home from work. There is no each other
suffering an internal combustion in one of those hopefully deniable
hearts. Do not think:
And still my life is
a slow revolution on melting kite-type days.

How? Monies get paid for
lemonade frozen slush, small grains of sand falling out of suits;
assess this as some
good
enough
. Fine. Don’t fight it, the setting
of the mold, a demur, resignation of disposable ego. (The facades
and fronts and lies go here.) Reality screams itself undone, “Real
it, why?” Be cause. And knowing that, don’t ever ask
forgiveness.

So then turn slightly with the
whirled, turn toward another shiny surface and smile. Keep your
chin down for the photo. Get more highlights. Give up your mind. It
has no cultural currency—certainly not any bearing on the mating
game—where bullfighters reign supreme. Power through the takedown.
Naps, etcetera, and rain. Days later find the moment past exactly
where pink blown-foam ridges came down railway construction
stairs—hot flip-flopping, pulling up an unfelt tarry print, this
impression of the melt, the material structure, adhesive, and the
poor recanted light.

51 —
Subjective/Objective

An eye found heaven in
humidity's weight pressed, foiled, startled even, by an almost
forward motion. Dissection? Of what? Sailing tea pots sink halfway
down into illustrated oceanic pages with soldiers and animated dump
trucks, happy, broad-smiled, big-eyed, and American (Right to work!
Right to life!) But you have not replied. Sauna surfers cut through
mock waves of a comic book culture bored of asserting: I am not a
communist or an intellectual. Books don’t just write themselves.
Here is evisceration, and here is black wax. This sheer will arises
out of recanting and weakness. No rebuttal? Fine. Look here,
though! No, Look! What about these: plastic, permissive,
permutation, permeable, perhaps, all pliable, all the acceptable
ply would except you. So there must be another objective reason
that can liberate us from all this yammering subjectivity. Don’t
talk to me about any individual’s perceived illusion. Who would
assert some thermodynamic principle about what fluid kinetic model
bears meaning? Silly. Arrangement creates meaning. What else would?
Someone has to be to blame. Of course there’s an author. So. Shut
up. Don’t talk to me about alternatives. Gimme another dissecting
tray. Bring enough pins to hold back the skin. The objective point
of view has nothing to do with two generations of Martin on the
beach with a Mobius strip, a twist in a strip of paper held out in
a young man’s hand to a child unsure. Perceive this: the real thing
and the impossible concept fused—resolved by being undeniable.
Don’t forfeit your witness of a stillicide. Don’t stand up just to
unbutton a dress. Don’t give momentary dollars and leashes to
red-haired mange beard beggars. Don’t forget birthdays and
specificity or graves. Don’t maul or maraud or madden or crowd.
Don’t you dare. But damn. Oh, hello, Virginia's Septemberish
brambling ocean masted day. How did you manage to camouflage these
ships, barques, and liners?

7 — Commuted
Fantasy

Some woman thought:
That man really isn’t anything to look at on his
riding mower. Not good-looking. But. Don’t tempt me while I drive
past this hillside lawn being mown on a diagonal. I'm liable to
grab the edger and pitch in. It’d be downright
adulterous.

52 —
Tangible/Intangible

I have fallen down into
my pulse. Twice. Aunt Ginerva never knew. She stood unbuttoning her
blouse on the other side of the wall I painted battleship gray.
Still I heard her sigh through the panels from the other side of
the family. Even though the paint was wet, I leaned my forehead
against the wall. Burdened, I sat down, turning, on the low wooden
stepladder, felt the wet smear drying, forced myself to rub the
paint away. In front of me the bramble filled with motion: sparrows
and wind. I stepped forward, pruned my way into all the consumer
culture shit of greenery with paint-splattered tennis shoes filling
up sandy-soled. This is. It didn’t seem like it. Not enough like
the blue moons over Meigs Field where those wide pupils in
black-eyed Susans stood shedding their hot-wilt petals near the
green goldenrod readying itself between seasoned runways overcome
under displaced skylines attuned to how all the self-actualization
of objective correlatives fuel futility class strife in the name of
upward mobility. What to do? Dunno. Bare skin. Eyes have looked me
over but not like yours, love. Please. Don’t. Wait. Dammit,
sometimes on Easter Sunday in a little town where skies pressed
down against the river-eroding backyard and gave up against
ground-up loam, my father wore a burgundy beret and taught me how
to drive a stick. Where are you going? Come back. Listen. My father
wore that same burgundy beret in a little town that wait-watched
the corn and ostentatious soybeans. Even so things of value have
shifted back to the intangible. Haven’t they? It is hard to hold
anything memorable but your hand, Dead Daddy. Here in some store
you never knew about, I’m holding a hexagonal jar of Tupelo honey.
If I hold it hard enough the glass might cave in, waxen, or it
might shatter, and honey-stick drip-slow to thick shards and drop
bloody honey down.

94 — Stalker

Dear Fake Advice
Columnist,

I live in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I
was thinking about coming to see you so I could track you down,
look in your windows, and maybe freak you out when you’re on your
way to the mailbox or something.

Dear Stalker,

That is amazing! I was just thinking
that I could really use a semi-nefarious form of validation. I live
in Chicago. I’m not sure if you’ll fly or drive. But I figure if
you really want to intimidate me with your voyeurism, you’ll have a
car for all the surveillance equipment. The drive is beautiful this
time of year. It’s almost a straight shot. Just go towards
Nashville and then take I-65 North until it almost ends at the toll
road (that’s 90.) Drive west towards Chicago. It’ll cost you about
5 dollars but saves a hellish hour of unnerving traffic. Take the
Stony Island exit north to Lake Shore Drive. Trace the eastern
perimeter of Chicago as far as Belmont. Park your car wherever you
end up. Don’t drive further than two blocks in any direction after
you exit. Put your hazards on. Set up your tripod. You’ll find
plenty of places to mount your 64-bit compatible, remote internet
monitoring, weather resistant (IP66), 40-foot night vision, IR cut
filter (day/night), remote connect H.264 compression-capable
cameras. You’re always welcome!