Time the illiterate

 

14 October 2022

Cat a cat a category. Dog a dogma. Pet the petard. Whole words as fragments, pieces as holes in a blanket. Dog puts nose through hole. All we see is black nose, blue blanket. Blue blanket thrashes when I finish granola bar, place green foil on the floor. It’s not the way sound generates meaning, but how meaning generates sound. Small words are best, like mosquitoes on the arm of a sentence, making it itch. Hairs stand there without standing. Hair looms: over or as machine? The fabric made therefrom might be scarf, if we wore them, or turtle neck if it were cold. Cat fur makes turtle neck soft. Shell games go on without. In listening to him read, I suddenly heard some tics, sound stitches across poem fabric. The era of flags flags. The noun verb thing continues apace. We pace to fit the vowels in their slots. Some call it meditation.

Shooter is category. Shooter is 15 years old. Shooter wandered a path by the creek; he went a-shooting. Jogger, guy going to work, his brother. Wore camo. Camus restated: the question not of suicide but of other-murder. She died not by her hand but by another’s. He awakened from a dream of wet concrete, his hands gray and stiff. If we dream of concrete, does our dream then set? Kids sign sidewalks. A kind of immortality, short-listed. Hard to bury you in a sidewalk, unless you’re DH Lawrence in a wheelbarrow. Fight over those ashes.

Ashes to ashes. Mine can’t get out the door, whether cat or mother ash. Mother is category. Mother loved dogs. Mother was dogmatic, something of a prude. But then shone her eyes (spelled e-yes!) about the plugs and sockets, male and female. What one to another does, she said. More expressive on our left sides, we favor our rights. Florida, its first lady claims, is a free state. Was its name ugly, or pristine? Piscines by the beach waste water. Waste water plants redeem it, except when it rains. All of us love the picayune. A White woman screamed the n-word at a Black woman and a White man reeled. It is just a word. No word is, on its own, just.

The real reels. Realism’s an eel, a lissome one. Snakes through cracks, code cracks. Knee and back. Crack. Crack reporter, at 23, breaks stories like raw noodles. Starchy, too. You are not your accent. You are not a spice. You are the dot that moves across the screen, marking the dmz between then and then. Now is too hard to find, not yet a hand in concrete. My face is young, but my hands are old. They are turning into mine.