The sound of steam is more subtle than cartoons would have us believe. Contrarily the throb of a heart in a throat is more demanding-dynamic-dramatic than the words on a page can describe. Moreover the lulls of our lives our indigo-in-betweens the grays that fill most of the days and if you’re the memoir type most of the pages that catalog the days those lulls and grays go on much longer and define what is most, but importantly not all. The memory trots up from the stores: I do not remember what was carved into the tables but I remember they were of wood. It rained briefly. I recorded inconsequential images of impossible ideals in my blank black book they came to nothing, now it is less pressing, now the pressing things are how astounding! how grave! that I’m suddenly so inside the memory of that long-ago Oregon spring the beans and steam and precipitating trees and everywhere could be seen above the cigarette smoke petals on a wet black bough, how astounding that for a little moment I was able to forget that now is so different, coldly so when I remember what I so infrequently forget.
Isn’t that interesting, it seems that remember-remember-the-fifth-of-Jack-Daniels/November is the Before-After line of demarcation. Everything fucked, everything coked, everything jacked: the past slaps like gentle lake-waves against the cinderblock supports of the dock against a present where tensed I sit listening to the snores of a tabby cat, too the imaginary rain that penetrates like the imprints of yes-things and known things and one of two things we should have had but never-did.
Naturally that is what I would seek; there must be a shortcut. Just this ONCE a shortcut through grief! I do not expect to find one. ‘Tis why I wore my hiking boots.
Hiking and haunted; graffiti speaks on the door three times and I stand with one mittened hand on the knob. Told over and over not to stray from the red lines that linger attesting to screamed moments, the bloodcurdling best we have to find in bedrooms and bathtubs. But there’s more behind a different door: every time I turn a new leaf I find sixteen more beneath it.
The raccoons forgotten, the acquainting acts, the bullet the bus the breakage. Stagnation and change have twisted like two colors together to form something like horror: a color I have never seen before. I covered my eyes (knock knock knock on the door!) and I will again too, and again, but the bravery is there, ebbs and flows like anything, like anything worth keeping.
Futile to worry whether it is worth keeping as I don’t often get to choose. Sometimes keeping isn’t an option and there’s the grim moment of feeling like folding. Easy to fold but braver to stand and let that cold water hurt me. That’s the only way to be sure I can handle this shit, anything or anything.
Any is safer than yes as anything is vague and accommodating and unpretentious; not every yes-thing is a truly yes-thing. Much of it is possibly-maybe/probably-not. I can’t control that. Wish I could, wished so hard that it almost seemed I made it real. I was haunted.
But only just for a bit, there and here, in starts and fits and stops don’t wanna / stop it. Yes-things have it in their nature to occasionally turn upside-down into no-things into nothing the way the moon is regularly a crescent hugging one side of an empty partial-circle before it’s reversed, only to be flipped again just to fuck with you.
Long ago sense stopped and the heart-throat mechanism was tripped to the sound of slight jazz, more commanding than steam. Subtlety finishes lingering and moves to leave the room and the train stops at a destination I did not decide. But I wore my hiking boots.
