Red on Gray

There was dry blood splattered all over the ground in front of the bus stop this morning. A large red stain had soaked into the flat slab of concrete. It seemed to float there, a cold map of some unchartered island waiting in hostile waters. The air felt burnt with an unnamed violence. The smell of bad electricity lingered. There was a second patch of spilt red a foot in front of the first. Wider. An unidentified black chunk sat in the middle of it, dehydrated, frozen. It stuck to your iris if you looked too long. The commuters had formed a semi circle around the stop, church quiet awe, not a one of us wanted to be near it, none of us wanted to risk having that energy get too close. The sole exception was a hispanic kid, early teens, sitting on the stops bench, iPoded up and playing a loud video game on his cell phone. Oblivious; he smiles victoriously at his artifical opponet and the gravity of the scene is made absurd by the little beeping noises going off around him. To my right sit a group of grade schoolers waiting on their bus. Must be summer school or some kind of daycare thing. The mothers keep their children tightly tethered to their presence. Normally they'd run up and down the apartment complex stairs, the boundary would be open as long as none of them strayed towards the road. Today they are under the lock & key of maternal instincts. They shuffle restless, confused. The rest of us, the commuters, do our best not to address this potentail crime scene, or at least, not to do so in a way that would betray our morbid curiousity. We force our attention on the wide stretch of Pleasantdale Rd, trying to will the #124 towards us. I refuse to believe in it. I refuse to believe that this is anything more than a spill of punch, that blood is an entirely different color. The color I've seen on TV or on the needle jab drops on the tip of a pricked finger. Deeper. Realer. I look down. Unpremeditated. Automatically. There is a white shirt with a blood stain on it. Next to it a red baseball cap. Evidence. 'No one should have to bleed like that' An old woman next to me says, clutching her six beige plastic shopping backs to her. I feel queasy. I feel ashamed, nervous & horrorified all at the same time. I don't know why. Suddenly the hard man stance is abandoned. When the bus finally shows, I push my way through to get on board first. I sit huddled in the back. I look out the window, finding the shift in perspective doesn't reduce the impact on me. It was the shirt that got me. I know I must sound like a pussy, but I just can't shake this image out of my head yet. I need the word exorcism, I need to trap the memory in these clumsy sentences, each moment is assigned its own individual demon, and I bind this one down here on the electronic page of my journal.

Parallax & Paralysis

Parallax: Noun:The apparent displacement or the difference in apparent direction of an object as seen from two different points not on a straight line with the object; especially : the angular difference in direction of a celestial body as measured from two points on the earth's orbit.

Now I remember the truth about ghosts. That you will not find them consigned to lurking in the corners of your closet or waiting in patient ambush under your bed and behind your shoes. These are childrens ghosts, manifestations of a growing anxiety. The body changes, the mind digs itself deeper in memory. The course is set forward and on some level of instinct, you know, you just know that this is the only promise that will be kept, the slow launch of Now into a Then that is both alien & dull at that same time. These ghosts are an inevitable shadow theater, cast by the waning light of the youthful imagination. They are made out of the last day of Summer vacation, the first morning after Christmas and the lonely moments walking home from school. The real ghosts are in the details. They know very well the rules of the game. You are only invisible when you can't see them. You know this rule, hiding under sheets soaked with piss, too scared to get up, to ashamed to admit it. The real ghosts wait you out. They kidnap your reflection and take it's place in the reflection of the window. The shock of the strangers face, replaced quickly by the horror that this obscene character is supposed to be you. So they wait for the veil of fingers to open across the eyes, they wait for the one peek that will allow them to rush in through the tunnel of sight, burrowing into brain, nurishing and nursing the screaming things that hatch out of nightmares. Waiting in the scattered matches on the table. In the unused coffee mug that knows your name. Along the fold of the blanket on an unmade bed, a fingerprint on a glass you haven't touched, the smell of a familiar perfume in the middle of the night. A white shirt with a red stain.
( Read more... )

Last night

Last night was fun. Seems so long ago now, a month has been carried in a few hours passing it seems. Went over to the Scholars place. The cave of his room has been converted into a minature city built out of books & CDs. He fired up the computer and we reopened the document vault of the abandoned script. I took a seat and took a few practice shots on his Apple. I always feel like a pilot when I get behind a 'foriegn' keyboard. The controls are the same, but there are little nuances that most be taken into consideration. You have to let the fingers take off slow. If you jump write into escape velocity you'll end up with a paragraph of pure gibberish. Translation turbulence. I take it slow. Cautious steps across the frozen bed of a lake. His pages are set up different. Black words on white give him a headache. He's set his a blue background with glowing orange text. The colors assigned to Hermes in 777. A subconscious invocation of the scribe God of the first democracy. The screen sits to the right, not in front of me. I have to go by faith. The hands become invisible. I sat there doing little else. The weight of it dawned on me. Mental wheels spinning in the mud of trepidation. Then a word. 'Scene'. Then another. And another, I 'Unleashed the word hoard' and five pages spilt out of my hands somehow. The two of us go over it. Minature court room arguements. If it pleases the court your honor, the dialouge was a little clunky there. I object, the subject is under duress and hence is not speaking naturally. Over ruled, but watch your typos councilor. When it hit midnight we stopped. I could feel my imagination purring like an engine. Reving up and ready for cruise control. Cigarettes under the rain. Can't smoke inside. Strategys and traps of circumstance, away from the page we conspire against our character. This was exactly what I needed. Collaboration. Arguement. The excitement of the commerce of ideas. I felt the warm shadow of purpose come over me. This morning did take me off guard. The immediacy of the blood everywhere. The kid sitting there and the tension being tapped out in morse code along my 6th sense. I was derailed. But work is over for now. L____'s not coming over tonight. Soon the house will fill up with roomies and their significant others. The Lynn Ray Youth Hostel will open up its doors and the crowd will wash the reflection out of me. So i'm going to take this rare accident of solitude and soak in it for awhile. Solitude works my muscles the same way a hot bath does. Well anyway, last post for the weekend. Food. Sleep. Now.