A Hand

Alright, who wants to be me? Seriously. I have too much going on over here and I am lagging on commitments, namely The Five.

So, we'll do it this way, all you guys have a grasp of the english language and/or how to mock me, so here's your chance. If you're interested, comment or email and let me know by tomorrow afternoon. It's not that hard, The Five is one of the easiest projects ever(!), so if you feel like not being a bitch, give it a shot. There is a catch.

I already have half of my contribution done, so anything you add will be added to my half completed post. I will not tell anyone which half is mine and which half is yours. So, you must sound better at being me than me.

Good luck.

Barely Worth Noting

An unotable source of some consternation has seen fit to make a big deal recently of one of my links.

I try not to take the jibe too seriously, considering the marginal nature of her webspace. Still, I wish she had linked when I had something better than a drunken and otherwise affected tribute to Thoreau and Douglas Adams up. She has truly proven to be a pain in the ass.

Seriously, scroll past it. See? I can write. I write better than anyone I know. And yet I get linked the day I Marley myself out and have a little too much fun.

No Comma

Perhaps possibly even odds are that drinking almost, but not quite, exactly nothing like half way not stoned is not a good idea. With some expedited instruction and reservation of indirect nature I can redirect habits leading to the ramble of perhaps a little too few commas and perhaps even remotely probably too much wine running the digits that reside on idle hands.

Without heart and soiled sullen soul and still without commas and residing silence in phrases set forth upon run ons to all hell and back through pearly gates of unchecked meta-discourse running through and in and over the sea of somewhat circuitous prose still not involving commas if it can at all be helped can I still dissuade the casual reader from putting up with this meandering washing and swashing breaking wave of semi lucid dream running type?

Perhaps. Perhaps not. Brevity is the key. Brevity.

Simple declarations tell truth. Of what purpose are questions. To find truth in declaration. They exist for that purpose. No other. They do not flow. They do not run. They stand. They are. They will.

If I were to buy cabin making materials and live on a pond, thoroughly ensconced in old world, formal, all together unintelligibly intelligent, though running at time at length not acceptable, short of the occasional blurb of pondside ecological matter, I would buy those materials, all of them practical and of quality suitable but not over providing, from a poor Irish family, and there is rarely another type, who would provide me fuel, precious and reassuring, of my own stereotypes.

Comma splices are prevalent and always lurking, waiting for your inspiration, your thought. They rest on the tip of your pinky, tempting and illegal. Like that early 18th summer of mine, i was still young. When I found that girl attractive, fifteen.

Should this wine run itself out? I think not.

This Girl

She defies explanation and diction. She makes grammar a hobble and prose a noose tightening. I cannot explain her but to explain all others. And all others are pathetically explainable.

There are only five types of women on this planet.

You have your earth women. They are immobile and immutable. Their movements are so slow as to be invisible and their hearts are molten iron. To the earth, your time is a joke. They laugh at your goals as you die and they lock you in their icy chest for the other life they keep on and in them to find and consume. They never respond save to vent and explode when they can no longer contain their heat. They give you shelter if you are willing to dig it out of them and they give you food if you are willing to plant and cultivate it in their uncaring skin. They are beautiful. They display the history of eons before you when they split and rumble and heave. They remind you that you are not the first and that you will not be the last. When you freeze on their steppes they forget you to the life they host. They do not let you escape. They hold you to them in their hard body by dark forces of gravity. They let you see the stars, but shackle you with their disconsolate gravity drawing you down to them. I have known earth women. When they leave, they leave nothing. They are all consumed by the sun eventually.

Then you have air women. They ride in on their own wings and move into you. They set up their souls against the heat and cold and surface. They enter your body through processes of living and power you and your cells, though their argon hearts beat for no one and have been consumed for eons before you. They live inside you and around you, but never allow you to become them or they to become you. They roll up into the heavens and return unchanged. They are always there, though you can't see them. When they move, they cool or heat or destroy, but stay out of sight. You never see them come and never see them go. Their size is huge. They are spread through everywhere but they move at will. When they move into you, they move you. They push you through them and into them, but never let you get away. They love you with tender breezes and they hate you with forceful gusts. The most you can hope of them is that they do not leave. They will not be yours. You can not own the air. It is not bordered or collected, not totally. I have known air women. When they leave, they leave you gasping and choking on your own hemorrhaging throat.

There are fire women. They are never ignored. They are lovely and lithe and always showing themselves to you. They show themselves to everyone. In a dark room, one small fire draws the eyes of all others. You can not control them. You can only keep them fed and consuming and they are always consumed. When you no longer can feed her, you have to either give her away or watch her starve and die. They are never free of themselves. They can only eat and breathe. They take the mass of your copper dreams and the hardness of your tin future and catalyze you into a mighty weapon. They draw you into them when the air and the earth have grown cold. They burn you when you try to hold them. They are not to be controlled, they are to be cajoled and influenced. When they leave your influence, they must die or they will take from you your home and family and life. They are untouchable by nature and sickly by right. I have known fire women. When they leave, they leave only evidence that you once fed them.

Water women are alive. They move in and out through the low spots of your earth gouging them gently ever lower. They scour the gouges and scrapes in your surface covering and cooling and deepening them. They lick across your scorched deserts and make you tremble with their dam breaking flow. They eat you away and you love it. They transport all weathered parts of you farther away. They find where you are dessicated and light off the silver fuses of life waiting. When you need them, you need only them. All others are forsaken. They will allow you in their shallows to cool and soothe. When you plunge to their depths, they grow in pressure until they enter your lungs and your ears and your mind. They destroy you by nature of their depth. You drown trying to sip and sip away while you are sucked out of salt. They are there for you and they are unlikely to happen just anywhere. They live in the clouds and shade you until they become too heavy to move and then they fall. I have known water women. They never really leave you, they just disappear to return and return again.

Metal women exist. They live in and out of the rocks finding their way to the surface riding hydrothermal chargers up into the soil. They explode up into the mountains to wait on you. You have to seek them and dig for them and carry them away on your back. They are heavy and compact. They expect much and reward much. They will serve you after you sweat over a forge and hammer and slave yourself into slick sweat. They reward you with small trinkets or plows or swords. Their hearts and skin are cold. When you fight through the chill with fires stoked and accelerated by your constant slaving, you might be able to get some cooperation. Not everyone can smith metal. They take effort and perseverance and the reward is slight. After they reward you, you must polish and hone and oil forever or they will return to the earth and air. I have known metal women, when they leave, they are melded in another's forge to be another for them.

Those are the five types of women, save one.

This girl is the ether and the universe. Earths move through her rosewood hair and she breaths in water through her alabaster skin. She lives and lives again in the fire and the fire is in her and becomes her rutilated argentite eyes. When the sun shines on her, she is the light and the heat. When the sea calls to me, this girl answers with fingers running rivers over the deserts of my self. Her fine hands are stained black with bronze and silver from her crafting of music and beauty.

I have slept on the Earth, cold and shivering waiting for day. I have slept on the ocean, floating in a box of death and fuel. I have slept above fires propelling a city of men to another continent to destroy and rained down our own fires upon it. I have slept in the air, the sun and moon guiding and comforting the drab metal machines rocketing me from one life to another. When I sleep with her, time is no longer. My future and my past, both spotty and of some disrepute, fall away and the earth spins to the ground and fires inside me quell down under waters she brings and air she breaths onto me. When I lay and watch her sleep I am rested. When I sleep with her watching, dreams go away. Possibilities explode and contract and dance the universe into its unfolding.

Fiction Friday

More of the same.

“This is Jim Stiles. He'll get you started on some work,” the woman stood at the door to the small closet turned into an office, her official hands taken in a shallow wringing motion, she stared at John Pine.

Thank you, ma'am. I really appreciate your help. In everything.

His words drove through her tired eyes and tired hands pulling her and lulling her. She stood in the doorway with unofficial thoughts and unreasonable hopes. “Okay, John. I...”

Words hung in the dust swirling hair in the dust halo of government fluorescent light.

“I'll be leaving you two. Bye.”

An old pair of eyes watched the woman from the desk. Were he a younger and wholer man, he would have unofficial thoughts about Judith, the woman in charge of processing the wayward into new lives here in the den of public assistance. He saw her flush and her loitering. His eyes, older than his smile knew what was happening. Humanity had come calling Ms. Judith. She waved a small frantic wave and turned away from her charge. The door closed behind her.

The sheaf of papers on the table found its way into his hands. He looked down through the bottom lens of his bifocals, searching for pertinence on the tall man in his office. “Have a seat, Mr. Pine.”

John, sir.

“John. Good. Says here you know how to do plenty. Farm kid?”

Yes, sir.

“Jim. Farm kids always know how to do everything but act right. Anyway, I see you done your time in the service. Army myself. Couple'a tours in Vietnam.”

He gestured at his arm. The western cut shirt was twisted and tucked in where his right forearm once was, now a shiny steel hook protruded. “They call 'em IEDs anymore. Back then we just called 'em 'FUCK!'”

John laughed a quiet, self conscious laugh.

“Got half my right leg too, VA gave some bullshit stump stick to walk on. A while back, the office took up a kitty to get me a new one for my twentieth anniversary here at The Center. You gotta laugh about it. Otherwise I'd of went nuts. Besides, it's an excuse not to get a real job. Says here you know some carpentry?”

When I was younger I done a lot of it.

“Them days are gone. You gotta have a social security card and a background check just to flip burgers anymore. Speaking of which, we do need to run a check on you, before you work for any of our guys, policy. Anything I should know about?” gray eyebrows arched.

No. I had a clearance.

“Alright, it'll take a little bit for it to come back if you had a clearance. Where they put you up?”

Coyote Canyon.

“Jesus, I'm sorry. Let me do something real quick...”

His one hand put down the papers and picked up a phone receiver. After tucking it in to his shoulder above the absent arm, he dialed. Silence fell on the room.

“Yeah, Taco John, how the hell are ya? Good. Good. You still here? Come up and see me for a minute.”

The phone rested back in the cradle. Papers were recovered.

“Any problems seeing or telling time there, John Pine?”

No, sir.

The door opened heavy. A short and round man entered with skin the color of the Earth. His T-shirt, covered in saw dust, advertised a local breast cancer benefit 5k from 1998.

“Taco John, this is Mr. Pine. Says he can see good and can tell time.”

Taco John scratched under his ample overhanging belly. “Can you run a tape measure, there Mr. Pine?”

Sure enough.

“I need someone to cut some rabbits and glue for me while I do all the technical stuff in my shop like sleep in my chair and drink Coronas.”

The R's rolled shallow. John Pine nodded.

Stackable dado or router?

“Both. Be by my place tomorrow by seven. This gimp over here'll tell you how to get there.”

“I'll let him know to follow the smell of beans. You know how to starve a Mexican, Sargent Pine?”

John sat uncomfortably. No.

“Hide his food stamps under his work boots.”

Taco John laughed. “Motherfucker. That's a good one, Cap'n Hook. I need to get down to that new burger place on Morrison and take some measurements. I'll see ya tomorrow, John.”

Yes sir.

Jim speaks, “Yeah, me and Taco John, his name is really Juan, go way back. He's piror Air Force. Well, grab up your stuff, we got a bus pass and a bag of goodies we can give you to get started out right. Mostly crap, but it has some hygiene stuff, too. I know how you Jar-rines like to smell perty. Looks like your background check come through alright,” a conspiratorial smile crept onto his face and a stamp pressed onto the sheaf.

Jim Stiles deftly replaces a paper clip on the sheaf of papers that is John Pine inside the block building. The bag at John's feet hefts off of the cold and dirty tile floor. He stands up and follows Jim Stiles, lopsided and limping out of the room.

Fucking Full Metal Warrior Monkey

Yes, a fucking full-metal warrior monkey.

I have heard all the regular zodiac bullshit in my life. I am convinced you can not date a woman without getting a whole heaping load of horse shit about what your birthday means. Usually whatever they got out of some gas station rolled up horoscope. What the stars have to do with my movements through life makes no goddamn sense. There's more than one latitude on this planet, thus trying to determine what the hell you are based on what stars are where is illogical at best.

So I put up with it. Women put out. I like that.

Besides, my sign being some OCD cleaning lady virgin makes no damn sense if you have known me for five minutes.

Then I looked up my Chinese sign on a whim. That crap you see on restaurant placemats? Bullshit. If you look deeper, the zodiac gets deep as hell. First off, there are three animals, not one, and they are all complicated by the five classical elements of Asian persuasion.

You got your regular old egg foo yung animal, that's the one based on your year. That is what you project to others. Meaning: it is not who you are, but what you seem to be. So, the least important is what ends up on your year sign. also, if your birthday is before March, you probably have your sign wrong. Dumbass. My sign there is metal monkey. More on that later.

The inner animal is determined by your birth month. A corrected agricultural calendar, but a very accurate one as far as classical calendars go. This is who you are, basically. This is your behavioral motivation. When you get pissed off at the guy who cuts in on you in line and you want to strangle him, if that is your reaction, that is your inner animal. My inner animal is a yang-metal monkey. Metal has a dichotomous relationship with pretty and war. I am not the pretty. I am not the cute little ring, I am the forged blade and the graphite bronze shield. I am the death monkey.

Now, this complicates matters for most. Their inner animal is not their outer animal. They are not what they seem. Now, it is statistically unlikely (something like 5X5X12X12:1) that a person would be the same element-animal. And I am.

There is a deeper level to the zodiac. It is the secret animal. Secret animals are what you were born to be. They are the part of you that actually strangles the motherfucker who cut in that line. The secret animal goes off the suns position at the hour of your birth. Not real complicated if you have a handy farmer's almanac. I was born in the hour of the monkey. Meaning, take that first probability, which comes out to 3600:1 and multiply it by twelve. You get 43,200:1. I am one special motherfucker destined for conquering.

It also means something yours probably doesn't. I am exactly what I seem to be. I am not complicated. I am a driven martial attitude connected to motivated killer balls the size of several mid-size SUV's. I feel like Wild Turkey.

Gone

I'm in Denver this week.

So don't expect much.

She rests easy

She rests easy on the mind, but heavy. Her movements are never hurried. Her mind never screaming steam fitting ready to blow like mine. She does not drink whiskey.

I met her with a beard and a bottle of bourbon. She did not know how to two step. I did not know how to talk to someone so amazingly astoundingly beautiful with eyes like polished garnet, eyes like lost positrons forever falling past untold event horizons.

I told her something about wine, blood, and red rocks.

Stupid country songs about girls make sense in the pale noen halo and under the cascading swirling silver angels shining from silver globes on the ceiling.

Her mahogany hair matted down and shone with her sweat. The copper glistening skin of those around purples and reds in the club lighting. Her white skin for me. Her salt neck for me. Her small mouth for me and mine.

We left and drove and drove interminably driving the drunks home. We were sober from drink, drunk with air, dry and glowing and desert. Giggling laughing and noise behind us, we sit in shared silence. Anticipation. Something else.

She walks into the room, showered. Unashamed of wearing little. She makes it hard to breathe. My my square jawed steely eyed nerve, all that I am and all that I have, leaves me in her and is lost to her. Truth.

True things are whispered. And gasped. And lost forever. In greater bounding. Truths. Life is appetites. Mine are great. I want much and better. Morning.

That morning, officially the last remaining hope of us being a one night stand. We stood on a cliff and held hands. Her fingers through mine. I explained true things. Rocks pushing and bulging. The appetites of time. Lost to her. I said something ridiculous about fate.

I don't believe in fate. I don't. I said it.

She stood on the cliff and held my hand, in the dwindling coliseum, the crumbling cathedral to the red sand desert dunes hundreds of feet high towering into the graveyards and testimonies of brackish river sands and conglomerated river gravel calcite beauty.

We knew sand and cedar and sage. And each other. In the riparian moonlight along the cottonwoods and tailwater stream.

Heartaches and Grease

I start every day with at least four eggs and three pieces of bacon covered in roasted chili peppers. When I'm feeling the need for more mass, I fry up pan biscuits and use the rendered fat of the bacon to make gravy. In my defense I use whole wheat. On occasion, I have a beer or a little whiskey with breakfast. Just enough to open up those chilis.

I am aware this is not healthy. That being said, my family with it's tradition of longevity, barring production of ever more creepy charcoal self portraits in a mirror and then giving you brain a buckshot ride at a young age, is based on various rendered animal fats swimming in flour and whole fat milk. Gravy for those of you uninitiated. As well as over easy eggs, breaded and fried animals adorable enough to find their way into bitch-ass zoological parks on the Coasts. Whiskey gets an honorable mention. As does homemade fruit wine.

I look out of the window of a life that seems to have found its way good and gone anymore. The Jcrew crowd is closing in. I have gravel and grit where others have polish. Listening to me read poetry is like using an adz for trim work. Hearing me use pretty words is like watching a surgeon with a cleaver. Like RDX, aluminum oxide, and polymerizer trying to usher in peace and democracy.

As soon as my short arms could reach the trigger around the butt of a gun, I was taught to shoot. I've been hunting longer than I've been reading, and that is impressive as my mom taught me how to read in the sleeper of a semi hauling flammables through the scorched silver highways lost in miles of red desert around the age of three. When I was possibly four, I was hunting out on the rim of the Escalante with my father and a few other of the Brethren. My brothers and I had the job of walking unarmed through the bottom of a draw, the wardens were out and were weren't of legal hunting age. We were to flush the game while my father and one of the Brethren walked above us on the ledge ready to shoot down into the draw should food present itself. By far, I was the youngest and smallest there. Bear and mountain lion were pretty heavy down there back then. I asked, as tough as I could muster, what I should do about the cougars if they decided I was food presenting itself to them. My father, with some great ceremony, pulled from its holster a bone handled hatchet. He put it in my hand, which was barely able to grasp the thick handle. He put his diesel smelling hand on my head and told me with preacher's conviction in his eyes, “If you don't fight back, you ain't my son.”

We got a couple does and a buck.

In the fading orange sun of Colorado dusk in wildfire season, he would drill us. We had to know how to fight, how to speak, how to introduce ourselves, and how to treat ladies. We also had to know how to field a grounder, how to grab the ball by the laces and send it flying, how to leg tackle, how to chop block, and how to suck it up when we got beat up. If we cried or limped out
when us boys were engaged in the fray of brother wrestling matches, he would jerk us up to stand up straight and threaten us with something to cry about. He would remind us of our one immutable family law: If you ain't bleeding, you can't cry.

I wish he had taught us more important skills. Like how to chisel a customer. How to lie. How to bring your conscience under control when principle gets in the way of comfortable living. How to leave a woman and leave her casual. I have none of those important life skills.

On the other hand, I'm doing alright. For a kid who got his first pocket knife when he was still in onesies.

Still Lame

Out here, with the night creeping in on the edges of a dusk reality, life breathes slow. The insects scream and chirp. The frogs holler out for company of a fellow lukewarm companion. I missed it terribly when I was gone.

That first night back, I laid down in a borrowed bed and buried my dreams in the fabric of life. I had nothing to tell anyone before I went under the spell of night. I had nowhere to be. In my own way, I had no friends. In my own way, I had no life. The patterns of life lived wore into my tired soul. I knew I needed them, those tracks in my skin and in my head. The tracks that hinted at my soul's torn and tired flagging in a long night of dying to self. There was no self left after five years of love and killing. My eyes would close, but the racket of all the screaming life kept me awake.

Thirty five tons of machine had been landing above me, barely thirty feet of steel and working men was all between me and that noise. I slept as I never have under all that noise in a two foot box. In my other stations I had lived in poor ghettos where the sounds of life took on the screaming noises of people. Parties and cars and loud thudding sorts of music. I had slept there in that noise fine. I could sleep through that.

I laid here that first night home. On my queen sized bed that seemed so obscenely large after the life I had lived before, that friends were still living. That I still lived in steel and nitrate dreams. I could not sleep.

Noises would startle me awake with their random sounds of life. I would wake and jolt up, searching for threats. My heart would rocket off into tachycardic who knows what. My breathing would slowly return to me. The little white country room in a little white country house would return to me. So would She.

As a ghost. As a ghoul. She was supposed to be home with me someday. Not living in a hotel working, as they say. She was not supposed to be left behind.

My eyes closed and I listened to the symphony of chaos. I couldn't sleep.