Waffles and guns

“Thanks”, I attempted to say, “But I don’t make sense.”

You disconnect and reconnect. How to count detachments when there are no attachments? Five-six-seventeen-six thousand-and-twenty-one - I throw my voice out to anchor myself to my own text, I stumble on keyboards scattered on the floor, this is real, did you ever doubt I was real, there being reality between the lines? Sometimes a scene plays out with all the wrong faces - sometimes, perhaps, it’s all right, it’s okay, just in the wrong places. Sometimes I don’t know what was dream and what was not. Sometimes I forget what words I wanted you to have and which ones you really got. Sometimes, most times, I assume you heard me, yelling at you from across the decade, hours of lecturing sidewalks, and I just wait for you to extract your apologies from the pavement. Can you measure the amount of mercury in my nose? Can you tell how much glue is left underneath your feet?

Thanks, I attempted to say, but-

I carry a notebook now, did I tell you? In which to keep track of all the shiniest stars. In which I write not questions nor answers, no memories or dreams, just sentences to confirm step one and what ought to be step two. It was intended as an anchor. Words, you know, I would believe in the staying power or words, of ballpoint pens, caught-in-fist inkstains. Give a thing a name and it is no longer just a thing. Stars are there for hitching wagons to. Give it words, and it starts to look like a promise. Promises, heavy with integrity, are, ought to be, should very well be, anchors.

What kind of ship needs 54 pages worth of anchors?
Can you find a single apple, or a wagon to keep it in?

“Thanks”, I typed, politely, “but I’m all out of glue.”

The heat sinks into cobblestones and stretches of pavement, clouds over, dusts down, blends with the rotting vegetables changing hands in the street, clouded over, dusted down by the sea.

They call it the city of poets now, on envelope fronts and newspaper stamps. Poets fled this town, I was taught. Poets were imprisoned, their abilities questioned, forgotten about, hushed down. This I was taught, I know, and I watch the large vehicles float by, the faces of these poets smeared out in large print, their names calligraphed and golden.

Sometimes he would come, when she was still much younger than he was, to read to them. He knew about stories. He carried books. This I was told. Sometimes he would try to teach them the words. He chose the words which never had reason to flee, ones never clouded over, dusted down.

“I was creative too.” Shifting feet, dry paintbrushes on canvas landscapes. “Until I laid off the cocaine, y’know.” I know about stories. These I am told.

One lighter patiently changing hands, collecting brief touches, carrying conversations. Future is seeping in, under the clouds, under the dust. We exchange words, these alternate futures and I. The one adjusts her face in a mirror, the second alters her intonation at a telephone. I, the third, the fourth, the fifteenth, find myself speaking their language - considering, at length, whether to be ashamed of this practise, of borrowing a tongue I rid myself of as soon as I knew how to. There is safety in abandoned houses. There is pride in the unchanging. This I was taught.

“How did Noah build all the cages”, the one says, “to keep all the animals in?”