voice snapped

He asked her what it meant & she said that they're just the kinda lies that make up everyone's childhood. The lies you believe in order to sleep thru the night. He leaned back on the astro-turf & emptied the bottle out, drops of it stinging his lips & pushed the guitar away. But the lies told to us now aren't any different, he said. You get older & the lies only become more complicated, harder to unravel until you just collapse before them. He sat up & threw the bottle out onto the course. It landed hushed among the icy glare of the golfballs. What lies have you been told, she asked. I don't know, he said, I stopped trying to be free of them & started believing in them just so I could sing again without stumbling over the words. She lowered her head onto his stomach & ran her fingers across the seams of his jeans. But you still stumble over the words, she said, so you must still believe. She unbuckled his pants & pulled them down to his knees. I stumble, he said, 'cause sometimes I forget the words just like children forget the lullabies they're supposed to sing to make their parents happy. Do you know any lullabies, she asked as her hand slid beneath his boxers, trying to rouse with words what her fingers only fumbled before. My mother only sung one lullaby to me, he said, one where a child falls from a branch snapped by the wind & crashes to the ground, but her voice was so raspy, I just pretended to fall asleep so that she'd tip-toe outta the room. He laid still as she rested her head on his thigh & he told her that he hears the same raspiness when he sings, every day it eats away at his voice, some inborn disease, the songs grow ragged & sharp until the singing just gives out all at once & he's back where he began when he first started playing, ashamed of his voice & humming deep within his throat. He slides her pants off & toys with her clit ring as she crawls up to straddle him. After awhile of bouncing ontop of him with her jaws grinding, she lets out a scream & her head falls back. He lifted her up with his hip & shuddered violently beneath her. She let out a second scream & he lifted her higher. She yelled stop, stop, you fucking idiot, you're hurting me, don't you fucking know you're hurting me & lifted off of him, reaching for her pants. I just got this piercing last week. It's too sore. With her jaws still grinding, she cradled herself between the legs with one hand & tried to pull up her pants with the other.

Blessed Unrest

The guitar's shell like a conduit for the wind which at first timidly sifted through the strings, barely strumming them, then pulsed & howled from within, gathering force before blasting out through the strings again, rattling them against the fingerboard. The golf course is kinda nice, she said, but the view is shit. It must kinda knock them out. I mean coming out here, all those guys hitting balls the whole day, looking at this shitty skyline & the green field. Must make them kinda dizzy like they'll soon fall on their faces. All the balls just flying up one after the other, then jumping around the bright grass. She started scavenging through her bag & coat pockets & said I thought I had something to drink around here. He said I got something & opened up his case & pulled out a palm-sized bottle of Stolichnaya. She took a few sips & passed it back. They must feel kinda like little children, watching those balls falling one after the other, like children looking out windows at the snow falling, like children who can't go out in the cold & they sit at the window until night comes & they forget that they ever wanted to go out & forget the lullabies they were taught to sing & whisper beneath the sheets schlaf nun selig und süß, schau im Traums Paradies.

Three Rail Corner

Der Alte Mann sat before him slouched over the chessboard. Other old bloated men lined the torn leather booth like a pile of sacks straight back to the flashing slot machines. The lust for game leaving them all depleted, not even roused from the cushions by the girl who was spinning on her toes beside the abandoned pool table, her toothless smile under the green lamplight. She shuffled dizzily to the bar & slammed her hand down. Mensch. He could've captured the queen with his rook, but he let the chance pass & lost the match. Der Alte Mann lifted up his head & grumbled. Stray hairs of his beard clung to his collar. He didn't know if he was boasting about his victory or insulting him for his shameful play. The girl came over to him, grabbed his hand & spun him around on the slender dancefloor to the siren of an untouched slot machine. You sing me a song, cowboy, she said, rum on her breath, take me somewhere & sing me a song. He wrapped his arm around her & let her dip back. She reeled upward & he slung the case over his shoulder & spun her over to the door. Der Alte Mann chuckled & slapped his thighs. They walked & came to a chainlink fence bowed & bordering the trainyard. Is this your secret place, she asked. Not anymore, he said, lifting her up until she pulled herself over & fell without a shred of grace onto a dry patch of weeds. Across a chalk path gullied & cracked, kicking up dust that reeked of diesel. The bridge across the field posing as a horizon, its steel gleam bisecting two realms of darkness, the faint red glow of the city through a fortress of trees & the cloudswept sky. A platform overlooking a golf range: the balls beyond brightly hovering like wayward stars. A train coursed above. Her dead gaze on his hands as he weaved his way to the last verse of a song until he stumbled over the words & hummed & went silent.

the time has come soon forgotten

He didn't choose this world, this catatonic city floating across divergent waters, walled in by a forested hinterland made smooth by northern winds. It was chosen for him. He arrived under an impulse he could hardly call his own. Awoken one rainy night in the city of the risen dead, enamoured with its own ruinous legacy, transfixed by the mischievous spirit of history, reenacting its memories like some washed-up vaudevillian inextricably bound to one role & playing it until the final scene. Streets deserted beneath the charged air that follows a hush. White buildings, iron rails & stone facades. Awoken & soon pacing beneath the tracks over Schönhauser Allee, settling into an anonymous destiny, forgotten in a world that would sooner be buried in ash than forget its past. Unable to fully remember the first days here when he was drunk, wandering around the main train station, escalators bridging each level, the lights flooding across the floors. Rising & descending into damned netherworlds. There was a show set up for him in Hamburg by the tranny ex-girlfriend of a German keyboardist he met in Seattle at a Melvins concert. That night arriving at a warehouse emptied of a crowd, only a man & woman in the corner passed out together, a short kid with patches of bleached hair stacking up cases of empty beer bottles onto a grocery cart, a projection screen hanging from a wall with a home video taken during a bright afternoon of a boy beating a dog with a stick. His laughter & the dog's whimpers faintly heard through the wind flapping against the microphone. He set his guitar in the dirt & leaned against a column & listened to the wings in the rafters & saw feathers sifting across the blue screen before the rain began drumming on the roof.

Crooner's Litany

On a quiet windless path buried in Tiergarten. As if the birds had dispersed once he clanged & hollered. First pass thru the fever before emerging from the spell. Every day, it's a gettin' closer. A drunk untangled himself from the bushes, trying to slide his cock back in his pants, tilted forward to listen before stumbling thru the woods, anchoring himself to each trunk he crossed before pushing off again. Every day, it's a gettin' faster. Tossed his head but the sweat still stung. Blind & slashing at the strings. Letting each word trail away, its ending lost in anticipation for some word in return. Surely. It will come my way. Every day seems a little longer. The time spent waiting for love rushes forward or slips back & the voice which intones those words clings helplessly to its shifting pulse. He crawled through some brush & came out upon a bright clearing & laid down to grumble a prayer from childhood broken by a hush after each amen where he feverishly stabbed the strings. Choose the world to follow. This world is chosen for you. Mister, please listen to me, I will choose the world where the gates shimmer white & the grass is green. Sunday drives through the rain. Stiff bodies up front but for Father's hands sliding across the wheel. He sang until his voice grew faint & his breath burned & then he sat the guitar aside. He could hear others beyond the trees. Language as indecipherable as the birds'. Rain every Sunday, his father would say, can't remember the last dry one. Must've been before the Lexus, then Mother interrupted him as if he was jinxing all the Sundays to come. His father knew it upset her, but he would say it anyways just to get her worked up which was well worth the pain of listening to her gossip.

Chamber

I don't believe that he's unaware of it, she said. You can't exact vengeance without being aware of it. He sees the pain in my eyes, the pain he wants to give me & leave me with. Staring at him like a blankeyed doll. Naked until he's shamed into dressing me. He was convinced he could destroy me from the beginning. He only needed time, a little persistence & the rest would be downhill. Don't worry he always says. He can't tell me not to worry: it's only gonna make me worry even more. Our bodies on the bed so visible to the world, to those passing by in the street, to whoever the fuck is up there watching us wear each other down. You must hear us at night from inside your little cellar here, Stefan's captive wild child, bumbling American. Sometimes you meet someone who might remind you of yourself, he said to her, reaching outside to stub out the cigarette on the wall of the building, someone who either makes you feel so at ease with yourself, ready to abandon all the panic inside, or someone who completely repulses you, reminds you of all that you despise about yourself, a mirror image of your own inner horror. He reached over for his guitar & started to tune it down. You gotta get outta of here, she said, there's too much sickness in this apartment. She left & he watched her cross the street, a tear in her pantie hose the length of her calf, bulging purse slung over her shoulder, shielding her eyes as she stepped from beneath the trees.

Hidden Games

Did you hear him leave? I fell asleep & when I woke he was gone. My mom would say that you can't trust a man who moves around too quietly. He wants his presence to pass unnoticed because he's up to the devil's work. The morning's almost over, isn't it? She leaned against the door way, heels dangling from her thumbs. Make-up from the day before caked around the corners of her eyes. She knew the morning was done, but it was as if she couldn't accept it on her own. She needed him to acknowledge it with her. Help carry the weight of an already wasted day. I don't wanna go to the gallery, she said. Every day the director tries a different tactic to get me in bed. I don't even know what he's doing until after he saunters off. Like he's slowly wearing me down, one subtle gesture at a time until I become too weak to resist him. Both he & I know that it's a matter of time. She went into the bathroom & brushed her teeth. He boiled some water for coffee & rolled a cigarette while she rushed around the apartment gathering up all the things she had left over there in the last few weeks. She put them in a bag & stood beyond the door of the kitchen. I don't wanna play games, she said, I don't care who wins or loses, who's destroyed & who's ready to strike again after it's all over. You're making Stefan out to be more clever than he actually is, he said. As if he's taking a tally of all the women he's thrown away after he's done with them. He doesn't even know what he's doing. He met some bartender in Seattle when he was traveling around the States playing tennis tournaments. They kept in contact for the next few years, visiting each other as much as they could. But he couldn't believe she was that perfect & he got curious & started fishing around & found out she had been fucking all the guys she worked with & some of the regulars too. Of course after he discovered this, he fell in love with her even more, told her that he couldn't live without her. She said she would stop & things were good until she started fucking around again this time right under his nose & he kinda lost it & broke off contact with her. Every girl since then has been American. It may sound stupid, but I don't think he's even aware of it. They fall for him, he keeps them around awhile, then gets rid of them, trying to smother the pain left over.

Come morning, rotten morning...

After he came again, he wiped off my back with the same towel. I rolled over & was lying directly beneath the hole. There was still that same blind spot in the ceiling where any eye could easily perch & watch us sprawled out below, Stefan struggling for some kinda way to be free of me. I wish he knew it's not just about the climax: who watches a movie just for the ending? Of course, a bad ending can ruin anything. But there's no reason to start it just to see it come to an end. He told me to stop looking at the hole. No one's watching us through it, he said. Two girls live up there. Haven't you heard them walking around late at night in their heels, listening to their shitty pop, getting primed for an after-party somewhere? Hoping they don't come back tonight. Betting their souls on it. But they're German girls, he said, they'll come home tonight. They come every night & forget to take off their heels, clacking around up there, laughing about all the old timers who tried to put their tongues down their throats. They're not as bad as American girls: the one place they sleep at the least is their own. I told him to shut the fuck up & he said okay but only if you admit that you're all whores over there. The true sluts among the women of this world. I rolled on top of him & grabbed him by the balls. No one ever mentions what we do to men once we've used them up, I said. Once they're no good to us. What do you do, he asked. That same portrait smile on his lips. We destroy them & move on to a better one. But one day, he said, you'll be too old & ugly to do that & you'll be the one who's passed up for someone better. My grip got tighter as his smile disappeared, the disbelief that I would hurt him fading from his face & then I felt something cold on my back. He grabbed my arms & pinned me to the bed. Flakes of the ceiling had scattered all over us, turning to dust as we rolled around in the sheets.

Agitated Postures

He finally came all over the sheets & scampered off to the bathroom to get a towel. I rolled over & put my head in the pillow. He came back & dabbed up his cum. I had some of it on my stomach. Normally I would've wiped it off, but I didn't care this time. He asked me if I was asleep & I rolled back over & told him I had to lie on my back to fall asleep, but that I couldn't stop obsessing about the hole in the ceiling. Don't think about it, he said. He sat up from the cold sheets & put his lips to the small of my back & dragged them up & down my spine. I laughed a little & asked him if anyone could see through it. Even though the room was almost totally filled up with sunlight, it was still dark. Anyone, anything could be on the other side of it. He told me that he tried to fill it up, but that the plaster wouldn't hold & kept splattering on the floor. He got up & rolled out his vertical mirror next to the bed. He straddled my back & pulled my hair until I got up on my hands & knees & stared into the mirror. He was fumbling around my ass cheeks as if he were trying to chisel out some entryway for himself, whispering don't worry over & over again into my ear. His warm & stiff fingers. I crawled passed the mirror. You don't want to look, he asked. Now he had the reflection all to himself & he quickly found his way inside. I glanced back over my shoulder & saw his eyes dancing over the image of his body, over the sweat that shone on his chest, the muscles that clenched one after the other, his portrait smile, my ass wriggling beneath his grip.

Trick of Light

He woke up to the American girl's foot nudging him gently. She looked down at him on the floor with a timid smile & asked if she could roll a cigarette. Next time, don't ask, he said. Just roll it. Shadows of the leaves still writhing across his sheets. She sat by the window smoking. Last night, she said, I noticed something on the ceiling in Stefan's room that I haven't seen before. I asked him about it & he said the only person who could give me the full story was you. He sat up on the floor & opened the refrigerator, hoping to find some champagne left over from a few nights back, but it was empty. It's gone, she said, we finished the bottle by the river last night. I'm the wrong person to ask, he said, if I told you, it would be a skewed version with details pulled out of my ass & an ending you wouldn't believe no matter the conviction in my voice. I've lain on my back in that foul room of his almost every night the last two weeks & I never saw it before, but when I saw it last night, I couldn't ignore it, it was always present, always waiting from above. In the early morning, after we had been asleep already a few hours, he was on top of me again, his wet raspy breath in my ear, on my neck, clenching his fingers around my waist, lunging into the faint light, waiting for me to moan so that he could cum again, but I held my breath, obsessed by the hole in the ceiling as the sun began to fill up the room & the light crawled through some of its cracks. He must've felt awkward fucking me & he asked what I was thinking about, but I didn't answer. The hole seemed to pulse by some trick of the light. The whole ceiling caving inward upon it. Spilling into it like a void in space. Maybe I was still drunk or something, but I felt everything in the room was somehow drawn into the hole, unable to rise toward it, but still attuned to its unshakable presence.

Trailed by a Curse

He remembered he had left some weed in his glasses case & smoked it by the open window as he read the book without a name. Chapter 7. The son is taken into custody. His father refuses to pay the bail & sends the mother to visit him in his jail cell. The son stays in his cot in the corner as his mother cries & tells him that she knew from the moment of his birth that he would be a curse on their name. Till the day we die, she screamed. First drive us to hell, then haunt us there with your rotten memory! He had a bruised eye from fighting with the police who found him crouched half-asleep beside a shed some 10 miles outside the wired stakes of his father's land. No son of mine. As she screamed from beyond the bars, he peered into her mouth, lost in its darkness for a moment, in the silence that awaited him there in the cell, the silence he knew he must coerce & tame or be swiftly dismantled by it. A guard led her by the arm into the lighted hallway before the door was clasped shut. He started dozing off & put the book down. He spread out his blankets on the dusty floor & curled up inside them, listening to the leaves scratch together. Their shadows wresting loose from a gaunt tree. He closed his eyes & felt like he was sinking into a bed of them, not struggling against the descent, dizzied by their sharp musk, buried by what has fallen. In the middle of the night, he heard singing. A group of drunk Russians in the street. High-heels clacking off the stones. As the chorus grew fainter he heard a pair of voices against the wall beside his window, a man & woman trading breathless sentences. Her heels strayed away only a few steps. Rustling jewelry. His coarse voice urging from the sidewalk as she stumbled across the street. He lit a smoke & stood there awhile before following after her.

Faith in Resentment

He told him he had to go, needed to make some money for the ride back. The organist handed him a ten & said melodies have rarely come to me because in the end I resent music, foolishly hold it accountable for all my carelessness & strayed desires which have always led me against the wall, my hands behind my back, waiting for a reprieve. He put the money in his pocket & said thanks for it & the beer. He passed through the park & could see the scars in the trees shining in the lamplight. At the entrance of Warschauer station, he bought some sausage from a fat pimpled man in a wheelchair who rocked back & forth. He slid it in a bun & passed it over the plastic roof which housed the steaming scraps, eyes hid behind sunglasses, beats heard from the headphones around his cleft head. After washing the food down with another beer, he took out his guitar & harmonica & sung "I Fought the Law," even though he never had, the law tends to leave you alone when you've only ever been a threat to yourself. The organist felt his playing was premised on bad faith for the god he was paid to serve, the house he was hired to awaken. Has he failed to serve those bruised & strung-out highwayman, the blind bluesmen in movie lots, cast-out pastors who prophesized in song, voodoo priests & convict seers with all that he grumbled & cursed on busy paths? Twilight & what to offer but this drunk homage. But he knew he wasn't worthy to pay such homage. Too enslaved by fear whereas the others, those for whom he sang, whose songs he whimpered, would risk their soul for a bus ticket to Biloxi.

A History of Sound from the Borderless World

After a city is laid to ruins, do you think it can ever regain its identity, what makes it whole, a sense of cohesion? Is that laid to ruins also? When I wander, I notice that the streets have no pattern, they spiral outward from wherever you choose to rest, some without names, the numbers on the buildings are out of order, passed a park where a stone statue of a war martyr poses enthroned, battered in bright red paint, abandoned courtyards, gutted cemeteries, a grass plot bordered on one side by a building with a billboard on it that faintly pulses under a frail fluorescent light. People come here to get lost & stay lost until they startle awake in the morning with no desire to stay any more & they leave in the same state as they arrived, restless & unamused, gulping whiskey, suitcase slung over the shoulder. Come here to abandon their ambition, stunned beyond the periphery of a world without an axis, to fall asleep in an afternoon dark as any night only to awake & feel as if you had just recovered from a long sickness, face draped in sweat, the curtains rustling together like dry skin. I was standing in a courtyard that I had somehow wandered into. Warm rain fell gently. Tapped off the bicycles gathered against the wall, off the waste bins & the cobbled floor. A melody appeared in my mind that I held onto as it repeated itself, gradually transforming into a soprano's voice, a sustained & shrill cry, unobstructed & piercing, then the melody continued repeating until the rain stopped & the voice ceased with no trace of an echo.

Sieve of Melody

I began writing piano music when I was a student at the conservatory for a few girls in my class, the ones who captivated me with their severity & those cunning glances they passed to one another. I named each piece after their initials. I never knew if they played them or hummed them aloud in the shower or burnt them in steel baskets. You should have played them, he said. No, I was too shy, besides, getting any one of those girls alone in a room was impossible unless you were the teacher in which case you had full possession of their time. They would hardly speak to anyone else. I entered a competition my last year there with a sonata. I played it blindfolded before the committee & stood up afterwards & bowed before a portrait of Stalin on the classroom wall. I was disqualified & almost expelled. I kept writing pieces & using the paper later on to roll cigarettes. When I got married, I lost my ear for melody if I ever had one to start with. He asked him if he ever wrote a piece for his wife & he shook his head & said no & told him that he wrote a piece for his son while he was dying. A lullaby. He played it at his bedside on a toy piano. Sometimes when I'm walking in the afternoon, I'll hear a melody trembling as it tries to take shape, but nothing ever coheres because the space I wander through transforms with every step & the music cannot hold. Nothing coheres in this city. No center on which to stand. Only boundaries within which to wander. Unheimlich. That's what they call it. The sensation of realizing that your origin has no beginning & that your memory has no end. Music needs some center of gravity from which it first strays & eventually orbits. When the ruins of a city slowly disappear, the inspiration therein follows. The organist asked him if he wrote songs & he said he never wrote anything down, all the songs piled together in his head, the ones he'd heard & the ones he'd imagined, the lyrics intermingled, each refrain fueled by irredeemable desire.

Weight of Return

He bought another round with the money he had earned & the money he had stolen. The organist told him he didn't practice anymore but wandered around the city, trying to replace the conversations he had in his life with the ones he had imagined, wondering if he should someday return to Estonia, pretend like it's home again, return to that fallen tree near the border where he sat & stared at the tangled snow trails of hunters long passed through that rose up from the valley, return to faith to ease the final phase of entropy. He asked him if he wanted to return to the States & he said he never thought about it, never had the desire to return to anything. We unknowingly tread circles again & again. The days repeat themselves of their own accord. Why would anyone choose to return? But the repetition of life, the organist replied, is an illusion. When I returned home after circling through Russia for years, the world I had abandoned was completely altered, the only pieces that remained were the ones which terrified me & I knew it was never my home in the first place. It wasn't a circle that I had tread, but another path I had to untangle. If nowhere you return to is the same as it was before you left it, then maybe the nothingness after death is different than the nothingness before birth.

Endless Joke

Both of us, he said, play before an oblivious audience. Yours are too consumed with their next station, in Eile, rushing onward to where their pleasure & pain await them. Mine are the near-dead, papyrus-skinned, deaf, compulsively wetting the roofs of their mouths, waiting for the Word, embittered over the failed promises of their pension plans. We play for ourselves. With ourselves. But if an audience is oblivious, truly oblivious, he replied, then they're not an audience. Just people happening by & no one can expect any more or less from them. Are you only playing for yourself? In a church, aren't you playing for someone else? Someone who you know is listening? Mortals may be oblivious, but you've captivated the infinite. I don't play for anyone but myself, the organist said, if I did, then the music would have no direction. No force. Plagued by distractions. Certainly not for God. If I wanted to play for an idol, I would do it for one worth believing in: money, sex, posterity. The moment you humbly present something beautiful, something you've pieced together out of pure humiliation before the infinite, it dismantles it with unworldly tact, then spits it back in your face. Maybe then you should present it with pride. The organist told him he had nothing to be proud of & that he wanted to keep it that way. He lives out of a suitcase. Has a wife that posts pictures of their dead son on the walls of her room, pointing to them, laughing silently to herself. Once she wrote with lipstick when will the joke be up? on her bathroom mirror. When the asylum worker tried to wipe if off, she bit him in the arm. He told him he played at a Russian Orthodox church in the West that reeked of death. They lit hundreds of candles to hide the stench. Incense & petal water. Nothing. Only when the doors finally close after the last congregant, will the church smell once again of an empty tomb.

Far Cry & Fugue

When he opened his eyes, a squat man with a beard & pale green eyes was standing in front of him. The people passing can't hear you, he said. All the cars. The horns. The trains coming in & out. If they could hear you, I'm sure they would listen. Maybe give you a little more money. You were playing the blues, weren't you? The world is too loud for the blues. The passion's lost in the noise. I don't care if they can hear me, he said, as long as I have enough to buy a few beers after I'm done. Maybe they will hear the words later when they step into a quieter place. He set the guitar in its case & snapped it shut. Please save your money, the man said. Let me buy you a beer. They drank at a table outside a bar. The man pointed to the park across the street. On those trees, he said, you can see fingernails etched in the wood. Communists. Jews. Russians. Germans. Anarchists. Each has left the same grip of death. It seems each corner of this city is haunted by murderers & the murdered. How can you have music on the same corner where a boy had his throat slit, where an old lady was raped with a Kalashnikov? You know you're the first musician I've seen playing on these streets since the last time I was here. The people here are too weary to let their daily rituals get shaken up. They only hear their own second-guessing. He told him that he disagrees. Death lures musicians from their hovels. The soul of Orpheus' lyre. Requiems. The cloaked violinist one step behind the pallbearers trudging up to the pit. He asked him if he was a musician & the man told him that he's a traveling church organist. I started playing all over Russia & Eastern Europe, he said, once the Soviets let me leave Estonia. I haven't gone back too much since my son died & my wife stopped speaking & got put in the asylum. She knew he was going to die & she was always the consoling one. But when he died, she said that her love died too & wouldn't speak to anyone. I saw her last winter. She was watching game shows in her robe & her toenails hadn't been cut in years.

Abandon All Vision...

When he crossed into the East, the pain had gone away. Strings first plucked with numb fingers, trying to crawl through the music. Elated, the apostle of idiocy, leaning against the wall of the station, tapping his foot where feet passed, the cross-hatched streaks & prints & pummeled cigarettes. Street raised, naked in the sharp air skimming off the trainyard. Eyes closed, he pealed out Not Fade Away & slapped his hand on the guitar. What was the chorus again? Love is love or love is real? He always forgot the chorus. But if love is love, then doesn't that mean love is real? He clapped his hands over his head & stomped in the dirt, making true his promise to sift away with all the others, those loved & those rustled against in narrow aisles. Some coins rang in the case & strangers danced. He didn't need to open his eyes. The world being all that is heard. He crouched down on one knee, began humming while trying to fashion from memory the melody the Turkish kid had woven but it soon spiraled beyond his fingers so he stuck to the scales he knew, singing you gotta walk that lonesome valley all by yourself & no one here can walk it for you. His sweaty hands slid down the neck & he lost grip of the trembling, taken away from the pulse of her body.

Sifting Paths

He found enough money tucked between the desk & the wall to buy a few beers. The roommate would never miss it. He slid it into his pocket, grabbed his guitar case, left the bike chained outside & began walking. He crawled under a fence through high weeds into an old trainyard. An abandoned iron bridge split the sky apart. Furniture & firepits scattered near the base of it. On the horizon a gaunt tower with an antenna that flashed at the top. Cargo containers lined in two rows to the end of the field. Shadows weaving among them across the grass. He heard someone pacing on the other side & knew he would have to choose to either run or pay his greetings & continue on. The footsteps stopped. The other had heard him. He remained where he was & met the paunch guard's eyes with a hapless grin. Bowed & walked on. He heard no steps behind him & hopped over a brick wall, zipped up his jacket & then trotted along to the station with his case held in the air . He got on the train & stood near the doors, still breathing heavily. Baby, sleep beneath the tracks with me 'cause the Lord knows we ain't going anywhere. Feeling tomorrow like I'm feeling today. The river rolling beneath a terse coat of light. He set his head against the bar, tapping his foot. By the time he realized the ticket checkers had slipped in the car, it was too late to get off. The next stop was about a full minute away. He stayed there, eyes closed. They made their rounds quickly, everyone showing their tickets. One of them asked the kid sitting next to him & he opened his eyes. The kid fumbled around in his pockets, muttering under his breath. He didn't speak German too well & seemed to be stalling the checker. The next station was approaching & he leaned against the door, his finger on the button. The train stopped & he jumped off & scurried to the last car, riding all the way down to Warschauerstraße. Drink to the pounding heart, furious pulse. Lifted by grace before being dropped again.

Torn Voice

He was riding around on his bicycle, trying to find a pay phone to answer about a possible gig next week. Coasting from one busted booth to one unlit corner of piercing glances till finally finding a dial tone, then remembering that he had no money. First things last. Day once again depleted of direction. A host of hours among which he was too fearful & fickle to command. A pang in his stomach but he didn't budge & got back on, riding down the bike path along the sidewalk. The sun breaking through again. A guy walking his bike on the path. On his shoulder, people strolling by. He had to skim through, almost hitting the guy & asked what the hell the problem was. The guy answered in English, telling him to suck it. He slid his bike around, let it fall gently to the ground & walked back over to the guy & asked him what he'd said. The guy kept repeating nothing, nothing, keep on going. What'd you say, mother fucker, he asked again. The guy’s bike stood between them. He leaned over, asked louder. I said nothing. Keep going. The guy calmly walked on. He stood on the sidewalk. The wheel of his own bike still spinning. Breathless, bargaining with the pain inside. You haven't done that since you were kid, wrestling the Patchett brothers in their backyard, scratched like girls until fists started to fall. Words would never set you off. Failed to see their magic when spoken by fools & violence is the ruin of many a night. Proud of nothing yet beholden to pride. Frail voice of youth. People who had gathered moved on. He got back on the bike & went home & plundered his roommate's room for loose change.

Fearless Symmetry

Fiction too often betrays the reality of time & being. Or perhaps we allow it to, we initiate this betrayal by our need for symmetrical, operatic narratives, destinies strung on a bow. Are they attempts to deny the nature of existence? How can satisfaction be gained from disregarding the chaos of life, the halting progression of time, cyclical patterns, moments of amnesia & blinding clarity? Narrative is not mechanical or even logical. If it creates suspense or metes out resolutions, it does so spontaneously, on numerous occasions & sometimes the resolutions turn out to be cataclysmic & sometimes the suspense is a cold hand in a movie theater. Narrative clenches, expires, bursts & hiccups infinitely. Fiction should embody that infinity, that impossibility. That's where the engagement, the seduction of the drama lies. The organic imprint of eternity. Each work of fiction self-generates its own narrative logic: ideally, a logic which devours itself whole. Fiction that establishes its own rational scheme & then asystematically disassembles it in a dance or trance-like fashion. Discovers then dismisses the laws of its universe, opting instead for a form of intoxicated gnosticism. The writer chooses to have no faith in the logic of his work. He cannot depend on its structure. He renounces reason as language unspools before him. Like a hermit who long ago lost faith in god but who remains cave-bound, blissfully entangled in his own visions.

A Card In Hand Keeps the Devil Away

A bar on a street with a name that changes according to who you ask. Quiet as an embarrassed child. The steel moon smelted: a molten drop. He lost a game of chess to Der Alte Mann who bought him a beer anyways. Forever consoling. Since neither knew the other's language, they sat & drank. Across the bar a girl with purple hair & a dog collar slapped a man. Pool balls breaking. He started carving small letters into the leg of the table with his pocket knife. Drizzle outside. Der Alte Mann slumped in the booth with palm on belly, rising & falling. Hairs in his heaving gray beard stained yellow. fear spits the soul out. He walked home & realized he had no money. All that was left in his wallet was a three of hearts. Peasant card. Worth its name when the hand is strong. But starved & cowling in isolation. Had enough food to last until Friday. Ride the trains when he needed to by sliding in, watchful of men with grim faces, cheeks always the same beet red, who would try to weasel a ticket out of him by claiming he's a criminal. How do you talk yourself out of it, bumbler of words? Half-drunk, his scratched glasses hazed in the dust & sweat. Enough excuses & a look of earnest dread & you can slip through anyone's fingers.

Transmigration

The stranger crosses into the city, wanders thru streets whose names he can hear reverberating off his bones, sinking down, rubbing against the words that have nourished him like a cruel father with a bent spoon & a book spread over his lap, luminous with markings that spill across the page like sand. A thousand steps & the river’s murmur fades, the streets narrow, each face in the passing windows darkens beneath huddled shoulders as the smell of beef & dumplings
seeps from gratings. When he crosses into a city that will never lower its unwelcoming guise, he approaches the unthinkable—that instant when the life he can hardly recall blurs & becomes overtaken by the life of one who was born there. The prisoner of a language that will never be shaken from the tongue far from a river whose light will never cease to sear the eye.

Lessons on Falling for the Risen

After she left, he read the rest of the chapter. It ended with a young man, the son of the book's patriarch, burning down a silo in the middle of a field. Even though he was finally able to remember the cast of characters & could disentangle the conflicting destinies that arced through the a span of what must've been centuries, he still had no idea what was going on. Whether the language had any command over the beings that killed, fucked & betrayed in that world crudely rendered. Those sprawling sentences he would have to stop in the middle of just to exhale only to forget where he was, what had taken place, who had been redeemed & who cast away & begin once more. He read the same few pages, saw the same silo burning several times on the parched hill before coming to some closure that could set him wandering. His chest weightless in the dwindling light, a few spectral hours, as he rolled near the river with beer in hand & played his guitar on the cold grass. Some Turkish kids ran over & he let them play it. One kid played & the rest laughed & whistled. He handed it over to another, a scrawny kid with a mouthful of twisted teeth, whose fingers danced like spiders over the strings. He sang what sounded like a lullaby for the damned & unraveled melodies unheard of as the rest fell into a trance. After the kid finished, he handed the guitar back & thanked him with a solemn smile.

Or Wonder By a Few

He went back & didn't know what to do with himself. Eleven in the morning & he had nowhere to be nor could he think of a time in the foreseeable future where such would be the case. He was having a show on Friday night in an abandoned factory where he was getting 5% of the door but thought he could convince them to raise it to 7%. All he had to do was tell them he had a band & back-up singers & then get some drunk kid from the audience to beat a set of drums & harmonize on the last chorus, buy the kid a drink afterwards & pocket the rest. He did it before. Back when he had more shows & didn't drink so much, back when he would wake in the morning & be amazed each time by how much money was in his pockets & thought about drinking just to celebrate the discovery. So he sat on the kitchen floor, rolled a cigarette & continued where he left off the night before in the book with no cover & no name. He was on chapter 6 which began, It was when I saw her hands, sickly & peeling, that I believed her story to be true. He heard the door buzzer & thought it was some delivery person & buzzed them in. Then a knock & he opened it & the girl had returned & said she forgot something & then complained that she was always late & that perhaps that meant that she secretly wanted to be fired. He answered as she was in the bedroom rummaging through things that she should hold on to whatever job she has in this city & that people always bitch about their jobs & want to quit them until they don't have one & then always bitch about that. She came in the kitchen & said she was going to be late anyways & asked if he could roll a cigarette for the road. He grabbed his papers & pulled out a green colored one. Shit, she said, you're outta papers. He told her it meant that there were still a few papers left. That's how you know that they're good papers.

Scattered Cues

The roommate left early the next morning: he was giving tennis lessons to elderly women at some pre-fascist recreation club in the Tiergarten. The girl came in the kitchen with her hair knotted & eyeliner caked in the corners of her eyes. She asked him if he wanted to get some coffee & they walked to a cafe down the street & she told him that his friend was a child who is trying to attain manhood by manipulating the women in his life, convincing himself that they dance to his cues & will always comfort his distress. She said that she was letting him do the same to her but that she was aware of it & could easily distance herself from the abuse & witness his delusional games with a detached fascination. She talked for another hour as he listened & right before she left to go to work, the wind blew off the squares of napkin paper she had torn & piled at the edge of the table.

Some May Call It Void

He was sleeping in a kitchen in the West during that tail-end-time of the summer when the leaves begin to rot, renting it from a friend who was sleeping in the bedroom of the apartment. At night he sat on a broken bench near the window in his underwear, distracted from the book in his hand by the contorted images that unwound in his head of some old house on a hill, steam rising off a river, splashes of otherwise silent toads. He reached this hallucinatory state every night before sleeping, finally lying on the floor when he couldn't open his eyes any more. As long as he could sleep immediately & not listen to the purr of the refrigerator beside his head, the sound of the roommate's grunts as he fucked the girl he was seeing at that time. He also couldn't bear the pain in his stomach from eating only bread & butter until the pieces clogged up his intestines so that he was walking around with two weeks worth of bread in his stomach, enough to feed a glutinous church congregation. During the day he would wander around streets half-drunk with plenty of excuses to talk up older women who basked in the waning light of sidewalk cafes. Ask them if they thought the world was getting more chaotic or if we were only getting worse at enjoying chaos. Drink up what other people left in their glasses at the bar. Stare at the swans that skated under the bridge. Waiting for them to open their eyes & dip their heads. Coming back home so many nights through the cemetery, sometimes hearing the rain still fall through the trees onto the headstones. One night he returned to find the American girl & his roommate leaning out the window in the kitchen, spilling some champagne on the ledge, some on the mattress & sheets on the floor. They passed the bottle to him & he took a few sips & with his guitar he began singing "Mean Old World" by T-Bone Walker as the girl dangled her naked leg out the window & the roommate swayed his head.

Fragile Defense

Do you realize that I'm a fragile man? I'm not a warrior like some or a hero like few because I would never know which idea I'm fighting for.

Self-axis

Self-consciousness, self-awareness, whatever you wanna call it, is advocated & even championed as a path towards being a more fulfilled individual, someone who seeks out those experiences in life that count among the most enriching & rewarding, someone who "knows what they want" & pursues it with fervent dedication. Such awareness is often synonymous with authenticity, another rung on the ladder of individual expression & understanding. It also affords one a better grip on the ethical repercussions of their actions, how they can achieve a better relationship not only towards themselves but also towards others, thus becoming a more responsible citizen or lover, mother or daughter. Self-consciousness or self-awareness also inhibits the individual. When one is more aware of what one does, one often is given over to doubting oneself, questioning motives & actions & thereby resisting spontaneous expression, intuitive responses & creative choices. Artists who question their choices too often tend to drain their creations of life force, immediacy & effectiveness & yet an artist who fails to question their choices can create sloppy remnants of ego-maniacal episodes. I am by no means claiming that a balance between the two is the type of harmony that each individual should strive after. I am the last person to have faith in a balance between any two seemingly opposed elements. I often like my world-views crooked & ungainly, my concepts asymmetrical & my art discordant.

As if he didn't hear...

The rain was too much of a coward to fall steadily, to bear down on the city, ravish it with its rhythms. Only bouts of grayness spreading over the buildings, through the lindens & across the eaves. Cars like whispers in the mist. He walked around trying to pretend as if he didn't hear the tension in the voices that emerged from the blindness all around him, the wrath that reared up from each vagrant call, each motherly admonition, the unfathomable pleas to a sky so long blanketed in its own petty tears that no pitch could rouse the light to release itself over the bodies that groped down the street as if it were a tunnel unto the gate of dawn.

Mumblings

I wake up. Open up the window to the courtyard. Standing there with the cold on my skin.
She mumbles something from the bed, wrapped up in the sheets, still asleep. The light does
not fall through the clouds. The cold only seeps deeper. She says my name, then speaks of a
city whose name I've never heard before. Pigeons scatter across the sky. I stand there until
the cold burns then turn away from the window & crawl back in bed, ready again to taste her
poison.

The "poem" about the "Poet"

I once wrote a poem for a "poetry workshop" called "The Poet." I was inspired to write it out of sheer frustration, vitriol & childish pleasure after being subjected to the masturbatory monologues of the "resident poet," the "facilitator of the workshop" during the first "session." The poem that I wrote was composed of a series of blunt statements: "The Poet licks Mayakovsky's asshole," "The Poet is a bum disguised as a lecher," etc. The other "participants" in the workshop, those gathered around the rickety table in a moldy chamber of untouched poetry books, didn't quite know how to a muster a response, drained as they were of all inspiration after having listened to an hour of poems & their subsequent "critiques," or "readings." They made their rounds of inane comments, stamped their feet, their fists, expressed total confusion, utter indifference. A few friends had joined me for this workshop & were trying to hide their laughter with their hands. I sat there dead still, a poker-faced charlatan. The "resident poet" offered up his "critique" then excused himself, scampering off to the toilet. A girl at the end of the table with permed bangs that jostled over her eyes said, "I just don't understand what you're trying to do. Do you? Maybe you could help me, help us understand." Maybe I could've, now thinking back on it, but then I wouldn't be able to see my friends trying to hide their laughter in a ship of fools.

Frail Refutation

I would leave, but I don't know a better place to live in this world, at this hour, during these wretched days. I've never left a place without first having a vision of where to go. I couldn't even consider another life without the hazy hope of a better place to dwell & wander around in circles. I have no other city on the hill. No other language I'd like to hear & recoil from not in horror of the language itself, but in the self-realization that I have no will to let it speak through my soul, to be possessed by it, housed within it. No, I've been suckling too long on the mother tongue: my mouth is petrified according to its sometimes dour tonalities, its wave-like pulsations & phrasal fluidity. Where would I go? Where would I begin again? Armed only with the knowledge that I can abandon any place without reason or that I can forget as easily as I can walk away & that both come second-nature to me? I would leave, but I don't know where else I would suffer so gracefully, where else I could learn the art of careless living, where patterns fail to apply, where lightness of being is passed around on a mirror, where I could spend months anticipating the next transformation & realize that I just underwent a dozen of them.

Radical Performance

If a man is being willingly dragged down the road by another man, is that a performance? If everyone passing by deems it a "performance," then it's OK to walk on, laugh, smirk, or admire such radical histrionics. If it's a performance, then it automatically has no tangible effect, or is thought to have no tangible effect. But a snapped spine or bloody hand is an effect of a series of actions & yet it's deemed a "performance" just as a play would be, or a musical act. Of course, pedestrians might yell, raise a fit, tell the "performers" to "take it somewhere else" like to a pre-ordained performance space, a place where rituals are enacted beneath the security of concrete ceilings, barricaded by rows of cushioned seats & surrounded by a wall of benumbed gazes. An element of drama is distilled from a theatrical performance. The audience has agreed to participate in the event & therefore the chances of total surprise are minimized. They expect drama & are not as affected when it occurs. Whereas when performances are enacted in streets or in other frequently stultifying environments, then surprise is maximized, pedestrians automatically become audience members & are hurled into a thicket of emotional responses that've they neither prepared for nor have much control over. Drama is reinstated. The most effective performances are those that redefine the very nature of performance, that turn citizens immediately into audience members, that truly dramatize their daily lives where the rituals of urban motion crash into the rituals of a spontaneous performance.

Notes to a Testament (Part III)

I’ve made my admonishments against fear & I don’t regret being admonished every time in return. Just for the pure abuse of it. To be rattled, knocked around before the lifeless gazes of my compatriots & enemies, or no audience at all if my demise is enacted upon such blissful grounds. Wagging my finger at the thorn in my side. This is not the way to go, friends, but it’s undeniably preferable to being humiliated by a sleeping beast than by one you’ve roused with the sheer will of your words. I know I’ve lured fear before into the only space where my body stays tethered to the floor, where my breath’s unleashed at syncopated intervals. Full heave, cough, tremble & expulsion. Am I fighting against a force which should only be met with renunciation? Before you personify your own inner devices of immolation, remember that the steadiness of your sanity hangs in the balance.

Notes to a Testament (Part II)

If I accept the impossibility of happiness, will I feel more liberated than ever before? What kind of liberation is worth a renunciation of possible happiness? A liberation which soothes my restlessness into a doleful sleep, calms these erratic fingers, this scowl & burning heart? Liberated & catatonic, like the revelers who drape the street with their laughter. Freed from any potential for surprise, cataclysmic awakenings, sudden eruptions of lust & delight. But free. Yes. Never to expect a moment's beauty. I'd rather have faith in the possibility of happiness, believe that I've felt it before & may feel it again even though my skin recoils at the very mention of the word. Believe it & accept the nightmarish spell of routine, these selves constantly hurled to the floor or lifted up into the light with a view to scrutinize & condemn them for what they fail to represent or uphold. Having faith in happiness without ever expecting its sometimes graceless embrace, its drunken kisses. Suffering for the possibility that one night I may be surprised.

Notes to a Testament

I told them I would dance on graves only if the weather was right & if the rain was light enough & slid down my arms like honey. This is a not pastime for the frivolous, those "ill at ease" with the sound of such steps, the travesty of such rhythms as the auburns slacken on the hillside. Empty tombs upon which I dance which reverberate to the side-step, the Newport skip, the shreds of a mazurka remembered from childhood days when the family maid rolled through a few numbers on the Wurlitzer in the living room as the lace curtains billowed & Mother was in bed, nursing the fever that accompanied her soul like a shadow in each of its debilitated permutations. Hollow as the music of this earth. When the dirt beneath your shoes clouds in the headlights fanning out over the nameless graves, the lanky grass, the path that leads to the gated white house. Sing
the music of this earth, nervous son, as the rain beautiful beyond any memory bounces off the stones.

At play, the night

I think I can remember the rules of the game. I just don't remember how those rules are carried out. Who declares the winner? Whether I should sacrifice myself rather than accept defeat? What the symbols mean on the board? How this porcelain sword is supposed to move across the black & green squares? I can pretend like I remember. Answer to no one. Continue with my cracked shield until sacrifice is the most advantageous option & no victor, now matter how felicitous his spirit, shall witness my dissolution.

The rules are never remembered. They become elements of a fantasy no one dares call into question.

Strong Odds

Colleagues gather to play poker each Thursday night in the basement of a bar. Their haggard, expressionless faces hunched over in the smoke. But even a novice observer can sense the anxiety welling up in their eyes. The sudden scratching of the shoulder. Fingers rolling on the table's edge. After all, each man but one will lose almost the entirety of his week's earnings. Each man but one will stumble home, imagining scenarios of revenge and redemption. Every week, the same man takes home their wages. 7 years of playing and not one game has slipped through his fingers. He sits at the table with a wide grin during the entire game. The same grin no matter the status of his hand or the confidence projected by the others. He never folds. And even when he's lost all but a few dollars, his smile remains, and he stays in until the game is his again. The others have grown to accept the inevitability of losing, and yet they begin each game with the same crude jokes, the same excited gestures as if the outcome is and will always remain undecided.

Two Hallucinations

With the sickness, the hallucinations returned. Blackbirds swooped soundlessly onto the naked branches of a tree, held crooked postures against the singed clouds, the spools of twilight reeling. Opened their beaks, bearing worms, twigs, other mouths. I could be heard speaking to myself. Called out the names of the sacrosanct and the damned. Listed, as always, the benefits that conspire against the willing soul. As the fever swelled, the birds disappeared & bats collected beneath the branches, swinging from invisible claws, red pools glistening beneath their lids which momentarily opened. Light shuddered across the horizon, but they didn't budge, nor would they until this sickness passed.

redemption is another drug

Snow buried what remained of last night's fireworks. Then melted, coursed down the streets in muddy ripples. It's been longer than you can remember since you had a night that you couldn't remember. Why you wake up missing your jacket and smelling of vomit in an apartment overlooking a rutted field, rows of abandoned buildings. What the unseen sun hasn't thawed. On the street of Invalids. In a city rearing up for apocalypse.