In The Voiceless Howl

Surrounded by short walls that give me a small privacy I sit and smoke and watch the wind moving past me like a tidal flood. I feel the roots of these trees squirming in the earth beneath me. The wind is a thick wave carrying leaves and branches and plastic bags from afar. It carries distant music and drumbeats and sings its own song in branches of trees and bushes. A cloud moves and lets the sun shine right here and a small shadow darts across.

I'm contemplating fresh memories in my mind of a music lesson never received. My fingers were shaped on a guitar in just such a way and a rhythm had started in my feet. There is nothing like being lost in a music that you are making. And the wind is jealous. It shakes the trees harder - making them sway - and it carries other musics from further distances. I take all that in and add it to my own song.

My song is both joyous and sad. It is about leaving and being together. It is about kisses so soft and eyelash gentle tickles. It is the rhythm of bare feet sinking into mud This song borrows its melody from the words I hear you saying. I have for my orchestra beer cans and bottles, high-tension wires strung across the streets, birds flying backwards in a storm, and awkward glances made by strangers as they pass.

As always, the song fades and I hear a brutal silence. The sound of the earth drying and cracking, desperate wings flapping from shade to shade in search of water. The engine of automatic insects slows to a crawl and a black beetle gives up its life in the dust. In the voiceless howl of this absolute silence I hear a murmuring of life on its way back. Rising from its afternoon slumber, pushing through crowds of walking dead, eyes ever forward, life returns to me again.

This is a dream I have between blinks of my eyes. Flash fiction. A poetry of the moment. Life returning to me and then pulling away just before I can touch it. That seems to be the plan - your lips almost touch mine and then they don't. And yet I remember such a passionate embrace. It never happened - and it was - and it is - and it's right now - and there never was such a thing - and now the wind is silent. Perhaps it has found another soul to torment.

I take my shoes off and then I put them on again. The wind has left my hair a ruin and I look through dark brown streaks across my eyes. My heart is racing and nothing is happening. There is a psychic wind now blowing a storm of thoughts through my mind. I watch them swirl and eddie and settle and explode. One though decides to make sense for a while and then changes its mind. I feel a shift and then I am right back here. There is a backlog of people sending me messages expecting me to think certain things, to be in certain places, to be a certain person. I have nothing to say.

A guitar nudges me aside. It takes my notebook and pen from me and has its own ideas about what we're trying to say. The pen vibrates like a string as I watch and gold flows onto the page. I can't believe this is happening. Everything I've ever wanted to say is right there in beautiful sparkling print. I reach for the page and it dissolves into a blue smoke that goes into my eyes and up my nose and now I am high. So fucking high. I am a guitar. I am not a guitar. I am a one-letter word. I am a single note released into the air of a dark hall hours after the concert has ended.

There is nothing left here. The place where I came to sit in privacy and peace. There is an empty chair, a dead cigarette, dried drops of beer - roots of trees still squirm in the earth deep and a small platoon of ants are carrying a black beetle from the dust.

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Fanatic Gardens is a mathematical equation that shows the difference between how fast you count the seconds when you are holding your breath to how fast you count time regular. It's a syncopation of heartbeats that are not counted as part of your normal pulse.

Fanatic Gardens are the words we're really throwing back and forth to each other when we think we're talking. It's the way your left eyebrow quivered when you said the word "tomorrow" and the way that my mustache relaxed when I mentioned Hope. It's the backseat monologues we carry behind our eyes.

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And I was hoping it wouldn't come to this, but I think I'm going to have to use my Jail Free card now. The mud has gone past my toes now - past my ankles. It's a soft mud and I like it, but now it's trying to take my knees. I'm going to have to press forward. Times I've told myself that if the situation was beautiful enough I'd be willing to make the sacrifices but now even my sacrifices are turned against me. The tongue of love and life is seeking out my tongue and the heat is on and I can feel the edges of teeth. Bitter and terrified teeth that can barely taste - only wanting a strong grip from which to tear and destroy in blind, mad grief. I try to return a loving kiss and it almost works but then that pain returns. Teeth bite and accuse and refuse to believe. Tongue is coated in the acid of old bad aftertastes. Lips are eager and hungry. Hands pull and twist and hold and feel. Eyes are right there and they are real.

Gentle and monstrous and afraid and hopeful - the who we really are takes hands and arms around moves feet in front of feet towards where we're really going.