War Is Language : 101 Short Works (9781937316044) (9 page)

The drill sergeant ended up disgusted
with me in that machine gun shed a few months later and seemed to
feel I’d ruined his evening with my thoughtful awareness. Canadian
boys on cement pylons are one thing. But it might have been nice to
end up making out with this hot drill sergeant in the little shed
with that .50 caliber machine gun. Instead he was all pissed off
about me being so serious, so aware of bullets ripping out pieces
of the sky. I didn’t apologize. What had I done but stare grieving
into the night?

I accidentally stepped backwards onto
his hat when my feet were almost covered in shell casings. That did
it. He could never forgive me now.

At the river above the falls, I can’t
remember the structure we were on, not really. I’ve tried to
revisit the place in my mind, but there are only puzzle pieces that
don’t fit well with lemonade glasses in hospitable hostess hands or
with feet burning in sun-penetrating spit-shined Airborne boots.
But I remember falling from a rusted, jagged, abandoned metal
transom jutting out over the water from two huge cement pylons. I
remember going down, down, deep down, under an orange sky
cloud-filled. Those obfuscating cumulus vapors lay lowered right on
top of the sodium lights and roar.

38 — Grotto

Her: Can you really contrive: a simple morning
where the faded curtains lift out and away from a lovely dirty
weathered-wood sill? For almost a million dollars you can buy a
painting of a scythe in storage.

Him: It’s up to me to learn, to teach,
to know, to shatter the mug thrown and unharness its breakage, to
witness its fall, then, again to harbor her remnants.

Her: I wake up under a dumpster. I’m
bound and gagged in a makeshift body bag. My neck nearly strangled
with duct tape. I hear a slow bent vehicle in reverse, beeping,
blue, warning pedestrians.

Him: Do not love me symmetrically. Get
out of here and let me shave.

Her: If not that man, who is with me
in the lightening and darkening of the sky with these stations of
the cross, these mulched honorariums where iris and geraniums share
the quiet with koi swimming near eternal and not so eternal flames
flickering—purchased in earnest, in contemplative red
desperation?

Him: Thank God we don’t have to stand
looking through a hundred yards of pine trunks, across manicured
evening grass, to the infant fields of rising corn—momentarily
allowing for the fireflies—together.

Her: Exchange the lovemaking for life,
for coming undone from the duct tape inside, for produce and
bounty, for the bus pass, parking space, and retirement fund. Walk
away. If you can, wait for the bus, alone. Do not call anyone in
the sunshine under blue skies and don’t kick the children just
because they’re not yours.

Him: I don’t see anything happening,
like water moved by tail fins.

42 —
Centripetal/Tangential

She flips the
channel. There must be a way to replace the mind. Stand up for
peonies, pink. The stems are cut and crystal bubbles and rush
filling goes under the faucet. Brunette fosters herself, again.
Vases of flowers cold and wet should be carried with two hands and
placed carefully down on a shifted white bookcase with a blue lake
view. Hot air comes to look through the crystal, water, and stems.
The air leaves embarrassed evidence of its hot-on-cold. Drops.
Someone brunette should sit down, damn it, and wonder how cold
vases surrounded by humidity can begin to draw rivers, oceans, and
lakes out of the sky.

44 —
Creative/Destructive

Men move without ever
turning their heads to see if, maybe, someone they know is right
behind them. Whereas women just run. They know. They know for sure.
She is backed into a corner with a doe. Their four eyes rattle and
scan the darkened rooftops. She wears a pinafore and wields a
blazing torch; it is no use.

Nothing of disproportion remains even
if you cut the fingers off elastic lace gloves to let red talons
cross the wrenched sky with cigarettes, even if you ignore the
tattooed sign of a thresher for sale. In God we trust. And there
are no pink flamingos staked into the lawns on the money. What do
we do to stop denying our destructive pram-sugar-cube culpability?
“We don’t need another loan,” to acknowledge that greatest creator
and greatest destroyer in a world of dreamscapes all filmed against
a Southern California backdrop. Instead of looking up with blame
and asking, “Why, God?” hold up a squealing piglet as if Lady
Liberty gripped it by the hind feet. Let the crowd of extras get
paid to clap to the beat whether they’re wearing bandanas, beards,
fishnets, dress boots, or purple suits.

A planned demolition exists between a
woman in chains and a man in a red muscle shirt. She’s got her
suitcase all ready to go. He’s screaming in long johns. Grand. That
is their legacy. Or maybe stately is the best description for that
broken row of lakeside weeping willows ruined by a storm’s wretched
winds.

For years they lined up and spilled
down from some humidity-laden sky. During a storm intermittent ones
were struck, killed, then chipped, chain-sawed and hauled off.
Wind, unknown here, is more real than anything made with dry ice
and a fog machine. We fight hardest for all that we are entitled to
but must be aware that we are fighting not only for the best that
we deserve but also, with the subversive nature of
self-destruction, the worst.

Who cares about the bolo tie, the red
dye job, and the high school smiles? As Americans we must stop the
entitled acquisition of our deservings.

Fuck. We may have to bow down, humbly,
and acknowledge, “Oh God.” Even with a hookah on a mushroom it
seems, “We need a good price.” It’s the same in the quarry, in the
brick barn, in the parking lot, with the mulch man, or cheered up
with a big brother’s bright birthday bouquet of Mylar
balloons.

Just do it. Just say
good-bye.

The woman with the suitcase drives
between the wilted lake and the blinking lined-up high-rises,
soothed by her someday after an electric sky, entranced by the
coming and going water meter owners on the bicycle path and also by
this oncoming trafficked Lake Shore Drive—and oh God, the ache
fall. Because we will damn well get it. Oh God the lightning crack
in half and wood from which life barely knows the swirling flood in
a sewer gutter splayed everywhere, and weight-bearing bent drowning
branches in the grass.

45 — Identity/Id
entity

Under bedrock, the world moves molten. It seems
not at all possible when confronted by that crust of seeming
solidity. But denial is dangerous. You and I both know that rock
subverts great flows of magma. And below your exterior, your
countenance, your pleasant tolerance, the self melts where
mountains have yet to be made. You want a steam vent? I’ve got just
the nothing causing that kind of defeated hunt for entrance. We
both know there’s a way in. Because we see every kind of shattered
earth: snowy streetlight near cracked asphalt in a parking lot, but
also bedrock asunder, and exploding meadows. This is your version
of loving, eh? Okay. But I have diligently done all that, picking
over soft filth, pretending. Another damned mess made just to be
cleaned up. Shhhh! I know. We don’t have to talk about it. It will
go away. I’ll sift glitter and dust across that place where a steam
vent can’t exist because I must obstruct my loving, knowing
entrance to you. Just hush. Let the glitter come down through
nothing, falling dutifully bright, and likewise weightless, flat.
Don’t say anything. Not another word. Let this silence of my shaken
may-as-well-go-on morning be like powdered sugar on a bundt cake.
Uniform, perfect ash drifts down just the way nothing’s swept away
from the dusted dark, which remains as its own reality. We may be
able to prove and disprove ourselves sinister and sane continually.
Just shut up about it. Get some slivered almonds on the way home,
will you? And to these beginnings be, blessed white fires of
belonging, undone and rapt, and so Pinatubo, so what? Rim unclosed
and somehow surging, so much molten earth forced into our night
sky—how can it be? It is. Not a cake. Not a steam vent. Not any
kind of horrid, unprecedented eruption. Not anymore. It is nothing
in the morning. Only. Undone and cooling wrapped valley spurs,
through obsidian eyes, and so leave these unquestioned, these
blessed white fires of belonging: me, yours, your only own
pyroclastic flow.

60 — Pussy/Deterrent
Threat

Dear Fake Advice
Columnist,

I’m a guy and I’m sort of a pussy.
Sometimes I sit around with all my friends and talk about what a
bunch of pussies we are. Check this shit out. A girlfriend of one
of my buddies was on a train. Right in front of her this old man
was severely beaten and mugged. It was crazy. She had to sit there
and witness it. Just watch someone get brutalized and robbed. She
was really shaken. We tried to make her feel better, help her
relax. Just kept talking about how much we would have showed that
guy a thing or two. But you know what? Honestly? I’m glad I wasn't
there. I probably would have had to do something.

Dear Pussy/Deterrent
Threat,

It might not have happened if you were
there.

49 —
Security/Insecurity

I had a dominant dependence on several men in a
row. What? No. That can’t be right. (Nobody looks good in a thong.)
Wait, watch, wild, wonder, world over, skill, better, improve,
perform, control, get, do. This is my insecurity: that it is me,
that it is not. For forty-two minutes and twenty-eight seconds a
man in jeans with his shirt off gets a mechanical lap dance. So
hurried; then a woman lies down on a sandy path between green aloe
bushes. She’s secluded, ready, wanting. But never secure. There’s
nothing to tie her to: no mooring, no cleat, no tree, no bike rack,
no fence post, no tow bar. What will hold her weight if a storm
comes? She is free in the confidence-shifting sands and wears that
brick red nothing. Get mesmerized. Go to Milan with a fresh
manicure and pedicure. Do it May 30, 2011; October 8, 2011;
February 12, 2011; October 7, 2011; September 6, 2011; March 27,
2011; May 24, 2011; July 17, 2011. Indecision grows more powerful
in its acquisition, rationalizing any means necessary as a mode of
conquering and ascension. No matter what there is a metallic
plastic superhero with disproportionate tits French inhaling in a
midnight blue solitude. The ember tip of her cigarette lights the
contours of her hand, her cheek, her nose, her breast, her
shoulders. She’s been working on her deltoids, her biceps, her
triceps, her lats. Devastation ensues. (Address victim/victor,
predator/prey, dominance/submission, acceptance/rejection, and the
rest of interpretive inflexibility here.) The metallic plastic
superhero hunches forward exhausted by exertion against
defeat.

Her back curves slightly,
shoulders forward. No one would dare ask:
What is she thinking?
We’ll never
know. The bootleg copy of her adventure is spliced. Her thoughts
get lost in translation. Remember those animated
teach-kid-a-ma-things, Mr. Men and Little Miss? Like Kool-Aid
people. Remember? Well, there they are. Three of them. Blown way
out of proportion, climbing over buildings like Godzilla. They
stalk through their minimalist city finally ending up between a
riverfront and the bay. Blue. Red. Yellow. Primary and
smiling.

Let them fill the sky. Is it an
objective goal to have to build something permanent when one is so
simply impermanent? Creative destruction is our, “This is how it
is. It’s natural. It’s okay.” They can say it with emotional appeal
or just statistics, whichever you prefer.

I get it that we have varied ideas
about security and freedom, that we all feel our beliefs should
have a revelation. Good. Let them fill the sky. This time it’s a
flesh-burst sunset sky, not that cloud cover where the animated
shoulds conquer everything. I’m talking about a beach with thirty
feet of wet hardpack sands that reflect twilight. I get it. A man,
muscular as a matter of course, does footwork there with a soccer
ball. He is out of the way of crashing surf. But here's how it is:
he is barefoot. There’s no reef, not here. Fingerling distant
man-made things reach out from the beach, from the shore, into the
destructive breakers to say, “Hey. Slow down, why don’t
cha?”

Silhouettes of five naked women pose
in the high grasses. Targets and arrows help direct sunlight and
perspective. The purple flowers of wild onions never bend even
though these five naked silhouettes are captured dancing: hands on
cocked hips, spinning hair, carelessly-tossed arms, a tight ass, a
high-heeled foot kicked up, boobs bending forward, chest out, back
arched, head up, feet crossed at the ankles, and the last woman
bent over grabbing her ankles to prove the point, to make sure it
is absolutely clear: there is no limit to the resources we’ll put
behind our conviction.

Repeat after me: Every man is a
mother's son. There’s a basset hound in the backseat. Every life is
precious. A woman rests against her man. She’s spent, wet,
pleasured. Watch her trace the contours of her abs with the stem of
a red flower. But when it comes down to it, justice can prevail.
And did.

As topics of conversation go WWII was
black-and-white. Like porn and highway budgets. You cannot put
people in ovens and call that a country. Satin constricts the
cleavage that spills out from under a borrowed fedora. That is
unacceptable or fine. But Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq? I don't know.
There’s a real discussion there.