Stairs

I feel compelled to tell this story.

I was in a lecture hall during my first year of college. It was "Classical Mythology" but that is not important.

There was a blind student in the class. One day after class, while the stragglers were at the bottom of the staircase, that blind student got up to leave. in doing this, he fell down the stairs.

He was angry with his seeing eye dog and he refused the help anyone tried to provide him. The professor rushed up the staircase and said something to the effect of, "we are here to help you."

The blind student yelped angrily, which is understandable.

If then you were to murmur

You stain your bedclothes and
several duvets with tea leaves and animal
milk when you wake in the
night and the clock has turned off.
Then you stumble around in the dark
of your chamber and you clutch and knock
over any number of valuable objects suck as
Faberge eggs.

If then you were to murmur
unintelligible words, I would not
hear you and I would not
care to hear you mumble.
I would stop to watch you only flash
boil. To evaporate instantly from
the folds of my medulla, from
the tunnels in my bones, from
the valves in my arteries, form
the folds of my dermis, from
my scalp, from my hands, from
the knuckles I crack.

You knock over an oil lamb
and cut your hands on broken glass.
Suck the wound till it
hurts no more.

Dear Satskatchewan,

I am sick of your ephemera.

Given especially that you exist as a province in Canada at this moment in time, I am rather taken by the notion of your obsolescence, of your youthful and unabashed desire to be territory, to be a pioneer breeding ground. To be wilderness, unexplored, suburban.

Get out of Iraq, get out of Iraq.

I wonder what you are doing when you sit alone in the hallway and listen to music on your record player. Jot in your own goddamned notebook.

Go away, go away.

Come away from the hall and put down the radiation headset for just a moment. A millisecond. Come look at the event horizon and let's bask in a forest somewhere.

Look at me. Look at me.

Death drives a seafoam green station wagon and thinks about life.

I am so bored with driving a car in a single direction.

There is always a car and there is always a highway.
Absolutes are disruptive and drudgery at its most heightened state of awareness. Still, I drive because I don’t know how to stop.

I roll down the windows and let your steam roll out the window lazily and gradually. You are clouds when you turn into steam, you are clouds of the dead.

But literally, you are dead and you are a cloud.

I’m not lost, I’m just constant. I go like a runner or a jet stream. A jest.
Nobody pours over me like books or waterfalls. Nobody looks in the reflections of reflective surfaces to try to find me. I go, I go, like bones in the garden.

Death is an item like perfume. It sits on your skin and it wafts away in layers,
notes of scent. Its residue will always be there but its presence will be undetected by the nose, the organ that is made for sensing its presence.

Death is a pretense.
Death is not a pretense.

Come sit in my car and I’ll drive you around in my automobile until you flash boil, until you waft out
like a scentless fog. I will have forgotten who you are by the time you have left the window open.
Bring yourself to me and we will forget your problems together. Wander out onto
the highway
and we will crash softly into one another like two storm fronts or onions.

Jesus and John Wayne will twang away on a ukulele and sing folk tunes and hymns in turns.

Goodbye goodbye. Go under the earth.
Goodbye goodbye. Go out the window like a house fire.