night visions (sorry this is forever)

My stories never end. They ramble on, tangles of loose threads, half-faded transitions to subplots that lie under a main plotline that does not exist.

More than anything else I want to write stories about goldfish. There is something entirely beautiful and neverending in the worst pet you'll ever have, the most boring, bred in massive quantities and sold for quarters in dingy pet shops worldwide. Given away at carnivals, if you're lucky. A prize, not instead-of-a-dog. I wonder what they think. Their short-term memory span, says science, is three seconds. They live in homes with invisible walls that turn everything humans say into incomprehensible murmuring. Mmmmwmmwwm. Mwmmm mnwwnmmm.

You know you've got to treat it well. You can't just let things go to waste. You've got to find some purpose for them, a direction. Otherwise they lie still and grow stale and stagnant and stupid. Drugs. What about them.

Clean your room, you'll feel better. Make up code words with your friends and wink at them, especially if they're pretty. Who knows, maybe one of them will help you forget. Is that our purpose? To forget? Forgive and forget, or do neither. Your call. 9 p.m. on the telephone, parents at dinner. Your hands are notebooks until you wash them. If you wash them. Goblins.

I wonder if goldfish hear music. If the water sings them to sleep and to rise, sings them happy and sad and forgetting in three seconds, sings them they are special, they are mass-produced because they are so very precious, the universe would die without them. I wonder if the water sings them look at that shiny coin traded just for you. Look at your home but don't touch. You'll get it all wet. Oh, no.

When I put in my headphones I am a goldfish. Everyone can talk all they want, I'm not there. I'm twenty-five cents of pure gold scale and a tiny heart going bump bump bump all day giving blood to my tiny invisible fins. Look at my eyes. These are eyes. Day and night my heart goes. Do your shiny cars go that long? Do your shiny quarters? I am the moon! Watch me, look at my eyes. Blup. Blup.

Bring her around, talk to her some, watch her eyes, look at her eyes. Window to the soul, if you're a window shopper. If that's your thing. It happens to be my thing.

Bring her around. It's just a transition, just a half-faded movie frame. Pass the popcorn. Here's where the hero discovers heartbreak, or goldfish. I can't remember. It's the same old Hollywood formula, I can't remember. There's a car chase later.

Did you know I'm writing a novel? It starts like this: "My stories never end." I think it'll be a hit. I think it'll be America. I think it'll describe the human condition. Yes, hello Doctor I have the human condition. We have just the thing for that. Did you know I'm writing a screenplay?

Hey, it's easy. You don't have to have heartbreak, you don't have to regret. We are all writing our own stories. We are the authors here. We hold the mighty pen, the mighty keyboard, the mighty voice transcription program. I am writing a novel by talking out loud and hoping there's a biographer present. I am writing three novels. They are about the same things and have the same storyline, but I'm hoping to achieve something here. Watch it, buddy.

Just take it easy. Relax, have a couch, have a drink, have a crystal. Nobody's listening. You can tell me, buddy. You can tell me, I'm your biographer. Let's just have a smoke about it. Your brain's not important; turn it off. Just talk. Tell me everything, beginning with the part where you're a kid. Begin at the beginning, I always say in a soothing tone. Open up tell me everything let's just talk okay alright let's talk until you're satisfied then we can wake up and not do anything it would hurt to try and would take up your valuable time after all you're important.

Far far away goldfish. The one thing many writers discover about writing is that if you try to control your characters you end up with bad writing. It's almost as if the characters are real people. And yet the characters aren't in control of the story either. Who then? Goldfish have a remarkable amount of visual acuity, and can distinguish between different human beings. Some blind goldfish can identify specific humans by their voices. The actual memory span of a goldfish, contrary to the popular myth that it is only three seconds, is up to three months. Goldfish are very pretty and are good for stories.

I never want to stop writing. While writing Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard would sometimes lock herself in her room and write for fifteen hours of the day. There is sweat and blood in writing done well. I want that sweat, and I want that blood with all my blood.

The empty fields sing empty songs in the winter. The villagers tell tales of the corn and the wheat, of the cicadas and the Japanese beetles. The scarecrow croaks stories to Brother Crow, who is skeptical. His eye glitters. He takes to the wind and watches the emptiness of the earth. Lie fallow. Brother Crow lives in a copse. Brother Crow lives on sweat and blood. His is the claw, his is the cloak.

The scarecrow is haunted by ghosts. Ghosts of sweat and blood and love and tears and snowboots and hands shaking. The scarecrow's head is a goldfish bowl. He sings to the world: take it all away take it away take this take it all away.

Good luck in the dark, good luck good luck, find a golden penny, call it your own. North American Twentieth Century Ghost Story. Write your own. Let your own write itself. Happy endings never solved a thing. Happy endings never solved a mystery. Let the canaries perch on your head and never shake them away. Maybe they'll sing to you once in awhile. Maybe they'll sing some more after that.

now you see me...

there's a coin in your pocket that dances alone
ascending the staircase to fair Babel's throne
among the thistles and briar they've grown
to keep out the God Overthrown

there's a coin in your hand with the man in the moon
hunting the Whale with a lecture harpoon
while the Wolf licks his teeth and his eyes like balloons
the sun has gone down too soon

heads or tails till you lose your voice
heads or tails, there is no third choice

there's a coin in the air with bloodthirsty grin
waiting for Boy No. 12 to begin
a third-rate investor sheds his second skin
allows his facade to wear thin

there's a coin on the floor that whispers a tale
of a neverending Sleeper, her dreams to impale
upon the grey matchsticks of yesterday's mail
her windows all turning to shale

heads or tails till you murder your brother
heads or tails, it's one or the other

heads or tails, the stairs to descend
heads or tails, you win again.

we could have been beautiful nightbirds
biting deep into clouds.
we could have been a thousand lit torches
to celebrate The End.
we could have been porcupine quills,
a fragile forest, minor chords,
the shed out back, moon on the water,
every moment of clarity distilled
and bottled, rock rising from sand
dunes in the grim afternoon light,
a red door and a blue door,
silence after words, candles in hand,
breathing leaves and rain, shoe
polish under our eyes and the happy
ground beneath our feet.
we could have been children again.

in my dream you are where i remember you
and you are smiling and i wake up and the
morning is angry.

Advice

don't tell anyone.
not even yourself.
keep it locked up
like all that matters.
look away, always
always look away.

don't let it get to you
so much. think about
something else.
then, when it happens,
when time runs out,
you can slip away easily.

you can walk into a new life
like a cold empty room
and never notice that
she's not there.

reunion

I am thirsty. The trees wave against the wind
in protest. We wait by the river for the unknown.
If we sit in silence long enough, dropping twigs into
the moving thought of water, the final mystery of the
universe will unfold and calculate into us, invading our blood
like the green ghost of absinthe down your ear. Our skin
is pressed flat against the sun like a brother's hand
on a daughter's shoulder. We wait by the river
for sleep to take us into the quiet forest.

She does not come!
She will not come.
Not for us.

You catch a flickering secret and put it in my hand,
the gold-filament wings and blue-glass eyes.
I hold its weight in my palm, brush a finger against
the burnished red exoskeleton, and let it go.
It could not last away from the river.
The leaves crackle and I imagine a fire.

suburban bonfire blues

Milk-sweet regrets melting from your lips and
pooling quiet on the hardwood floor
form a window or a mirror, dark and honest,
a blemish we choose not to notice.
Your mind moves slow and burning
like a summer afternoon
with the easy harmony of windchimes
and the disquiet of a solitary cloud
on the horizon. You are written plainly
on a piece of paper and posted
for all to see. We look away.
We are on an island or in a tower
and far away from everything.
Your words are a flock of finches
and we watch cracks in the sidewalk.

Fingers climb the walls searching for corners
and brushing lightly over the titles of books.
Trees shoot up, growing roots around
your jaw or throat, your eyes
are a pond. We skip rocks.

When all of us gather, there is
talking and laughing and nobody
wants to leave. Sometime after dark,
you sit down and begin to play music.
It's all I can hear.
A tiny wooden boat with a red sail
floating over still grey waters.

overkill

The music punches into you like a blunt axe
swinging through the bite of winter. You buckle,
grasping quiet to find your flesh. [Am I here? Am I a ghost?]
Bodies floating and drifting in the dead blue chemical sea.
You want to go back to before you were born,
when there was nothing, no breathing, no fairy tales.
You can't go back. Nothing is a relative term.

The grass crawls in between your fingers. Stronger
and slower than your test-tube skin. Unwind
like rope down a well, dark forever. What time is it?
You know the answer, but it is not an answer.
It melts in candlelight, but is as solid as hunger.
If you can fall asleep, you can disappear into whatever
is holding you up, be it earth or blood or death.
What time is it? You swallow once,
and your eyes shift like a code.

Can you swallow them? The eyes?
The eyes, the eyes in a jar, swirling and
tumbling against something invisible,
can you swallow them? They slide
gently, you feel them, quivering bent orbs
and then dissolving dark blue, searching out the
corners and hiding-places of your body, until
your skin is bleeding cold cerulean eyeball music,
and you can do nothing but cough.

It is strange and wrong, coughing, like smashing
yourself on a plank of dark shining wood. Dirty
clouds hanging limp on your forehead, the blue
of your eyes is dull. It no longer pierces,
is no longer a weapon. You are not useful,
but at least you cannot be used.
At least you can lie down.