" Shading? I know, is it?" I want to wrap your fingers around this umbrella. Each finger a spine of pine, the chicken bones in a sunflower round, bellied up with seeds with white thistled calcium causing all the lightning from the tips. And your eyes are fireflies.
Under the tar of this frothing swamp I look to see the whites of a floating body, the dark hair of the bottom scaring my legs which twitch as if on fire. Holding up the creature, which is weightless in the water, is simple. I can barely feel a tangible thing, any form of weight at all, until the bumping edges of the shore. There is fools gold in the eyelashes, bronze teeth which are ample cracking, the broken yolks of my nostrils. White body wrapped and bundled in white sheet. Starfish flesh, softer though than a dolphin's underbelly. It moves to be alive, which it really shouldn't be. I move to be alive, a shaker shaker shaker.
...
Throw salt! ON MY LEGS! FILL!
Shampooed the hair on it. It was clean, didn't have to bathe it in tomato paste like you're supposed to when a skunk gets irate.
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Buried half-way in the ground. A field in Folsom, before they cut down my oak tree. The fence there diminished, lacking any sign of character there ever. I believe they built apartment evenings over ghosts. El Dorado Hills is a waste. A fortress of laden-din-duns. I feel the old getting older in the hills, shitting away their lives in their boxes filled with mediocre middle-class living furniture... better yet, with NO LOVE, marble walls shrinking from the cigarette smoke that licks them day after day. But atleast they have the money to keep getting more things that break and become futile in matter of using. Of course, I am a liar in my own right. I have money, and I trade it in often.
There on the hill though, there in the rolling straw grasses matted from wind and... wind... and probably more wind, is the mind's eye. Distant mystic. My hands formed in a triangle. I yell down the hill, and over a small bit. Over the granite arches that poke through the dirt and taste the air. There to a friend of friends, and she's there forming.
A triangle over my mouth, " How is it? Can you make it invisible, or what? I still can't tell if you're even over, over, over there!"
It's quiet at first. I know she's there though, I can see her brown hair; Jessalyn's hair scrambled in leaves.
" Of course I can't make it invisible. I don't believe in it! Nit!" I know you're right, Jessalyn, you're my mother and I will do anything that you say.
I would like to walk back up the hill now. I pull myself out inch by inch, nearly impossible branches glued to my calfs. The red clay is scraping across my black dress, leaving wrinkles of beautiful scrapes on my chest. I've been holding my breath, and now I am faint. I will awake to the tide storm and red fire dripping from the night sky. Before this, of course, is a story. And Daniel, you're in it. Before this the roots will rip apart the skin and bone and tendons of my legs and the binding will rip apart to reveal (to myself of course) that I do not exist here. And without my legs, walking on my hands and leaving my lower half behind, I will shred apart a mile before slowing in the brush and becoming the stump of a tree.
...
Patten. Pattern. The music of earth. Reaching to the edges of the ripened vines sucking the water from the ice and melting in a melting pot sort of way. Patten is a black kettle on an old stove decorated in copper. The music of the steam that is baring the flesh of softened leaves. Boiled and Boiled, eggs smoked and becoming the eyes of a hanging pot, to look over it's own shoulder and see that's it been hanging for a terribly long time and is beginning to feel a little rejected. Rejection is, of course, not Patten. Patten, you are music in the backround. You hug the pot though, and it feel's a little better. The eggs are rolling over the floor and have found their way under the stove. They most likely will be there for a long time, because in the case of my own endeavors, if I drop something under a stove, I always know best to leave it. I'm sure the pot knows that too, if he's a smart pot. heh.
Then the Capricornus flew out from under the stove, whipping it's tail and screaming! Eyes bulging! Smoke from its flared nostrils! Breaking squash melons and cups and plates, and shattered! And the eggs.
It rounded the kitched, beating the ceiling like a wasp in a jar. Stupid Capricornus, the door handle is only a few feet away. You're just clicking! Once over and over, I went to pet you! comb your fur! feel your gums! And here you realize, Capricornus, that you don't actually fly. You were actually bent on swimming and so then you slap the floor hard with a wet THUD.
I am a merchant, possessor of earth bounty. I want to tell you, though, that you can make things fall better into a place. If the goat's fish tail is broken it will become a part of the floor... no der.
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I like it when people ask me where I am, because I'm never anywhere, and this is comforting. I aspire not to any one known. I make love to my hands once a week, and that's anywhere I can get my hands on... heh.
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