I want Sunday to arrive without a plan. I want a friend to come over in the afternoon, unannounced, and in mini-celebration of this I want to open a bag of lime-flavored chips and pour a bowl of medium-hot salsa, and I want the entire family and the friend to gather around it, like a little bonfire for hands and mouths. I want the conversation to focus on strange, funny, random things that have happened to us. When the friend leaves, I want to wander out to the front yard. I want our neighbors – the older couple that likes us because we're younger than them – to walk by with their big Lab. I'll pick up the dog and hear the laughter from the older couple because the dog feels funny about being cradled. We'll chat in the yard, dusk seeping over the trees. I'll glance at you, and we'll know: We love this couple. We need to think of something we can leave on their doorstep on Christmas Eve. We need to do favors for them when they start to get too old and weak. It seemed inappropriate to tell her parents that she had, in fact, not avoided the library but had been there to study on a number of occasions in recent weeks. It also seemed inappropriate to tell them that she took off her shoes and left them at her desk when she retrieved study material, or that she smiled at boys who were apparently looking for books on the shelves near her study desk. Or that, after she realized how open, well lit and uninviting the first four floors of the library were for anyone trying to do something perverted and criminal, she had switched to studying on the darker, more cramped and private floors of Woodruff Stacks. Or that she was alone when she did this. She had no logical purpose, other than it thrilled her for reasons she was only beginning to understand. The song is over, obviously. Everyone's watching, stunned, quiet, muddled in the disgusting sound of a dying guitar. My bass player hurls his electric bass somewhere. My drummer begins kicking his drum set to pieces. I dry-hump what's left of my guitar, while working the wha-wha peddle with a free hand. Then, I get up, and we, The Inkompetent Fools for Kurt Cobain, walk off the stage, never to be seen in those parts again. "Every candidate has secret intentions," Erica said. "Most of the time, theirs are worse and more selfish than wanting to take over and help a dying planet. Most of the time, the candidates simply want power. And in the process they are willing to sell out and do little things that inevitably lead to the death of the planet -- letting some company drill for oil, letting some gun go off in a child's hand, refusing to treat sick and contagious people because of what amounts to paperwork. These things negatively effect the Planet Karma and make things a little worse, a little closer to darkness." I had never before given a second of my time to someone who used terms like "Planet Karma." But Erica was different. The times were different, suddenly shifted and altogether promising and spacey. Arriving at the bookstore, George still had red lipstick smeared across his mouth. The thin hair on his head was messy from the ardent encounter at the bar. He felt famous, with a young woman on his arm and revolution at hand. The matches were in the right-front pocket of his khakis. Remember when you wrote TruLuv4Ever on my notebook? Remember when I gave you that note that was stream-of-conscious musings about jelly donuts and the smell of scotch tape on CHristmAsmoRningsofLimpidyOuThandhowiThoughtyoumightbEfIlledwithSweetjellyandwrappedwithtapewithbellSalsohangingPrettilyfrOmyourhairaNdinThAtnoteialsomaNagEdtOcapitalizeinslightlyUnorthodoxfaShion the letters that spelled CHARLOTTE IS SPONTANEOUS? In the morning meeting, my boss -- 40, with sane hair -- is rambling on about something or other. I’m drawing pictures of cavemen and cavewomen on my pad of paper. My hair is talking about moving to Alaska. “I hear it’s nice there,” my hair says. “It’s wild and free.” “Hair,” I say privately, teasing, “you are so crazy. Get a grip. You can’t move to Alaska.” “No,” my hair says, “I can move to Alaska. You’re the one that’s holding me up. You’re so not crazy.” “Wait a minute,” I say privately. “I’m the one that messed you up in the first place.” “So,” my hair says. “Move with me to Alaska.” You're slumping, with your haggard left arm draped over the orange water cooler, which gets a visit now and then from a sweaty, smelly, bulky, doltish hitter. Your legs are crossed like a debutante's, and you're wearing running shoes with your red stirrups wrinkled low around your ankles. You have a small chew in your mouth, though you don't normally chew, and some of the brown from one of your spits -- a misfire that failed to hit the ant that was crawling across the dirty cement floor -- has stained a part of your home-white pants next to where you might normally see the bulge from your cup. But you're not wearing your cup tonight, just like you're not wearing spikes, just like you have no idea what inning it is, because you pitched yesterday and you threw a complete game and struck out 11 while giving up just one hit and more or less totally dominating the navy blue team from up north, their northern skin red tonight from yesterday's sunburn or maybe from the heat of your pitches. It was a frantic race. Coming around the final turn, with Easy Goer in the lead, his mane flapping like copper wings, Sunday Silence’s dark countenance appeared on the outside. A two-horse duel. For the entire stretch run, with the other horses struggling to keep up, Sunday Silence and Easy Goer ran side by side along the rail. Easy Goer led, by a nostril, for much of it, but with a hundred yards left Sunday Silence, ears pinned, eye-to-eye with his rival, with Valenzuela’s pale yellow silks rattling like a flag in a storm, refused to give. With two steps to the finish, he pulled his nose in front. It was the closest Preakness finish in history. She had performed a solo act on one of those webcam sites. Twice. Okay, three times. It was a big turn-on, truthfully. She had, however, underestimated how many people would see and share the videos. This had unfolded after graduation. Sure, she had a marketing degree with a minor in social media studies, and the videos could, in some ways, serve as proof of her talents in these subjects. But she now had no desire to work for companies that would perform a background check on her. She also realized – with and without irony – that maybe she didn’t have an interest in marketing. Maybe she wasn’t meant for Adeline’s either. But she got the feeling the people here weren’t ones to troll the Internet for employee sex-cam histories, or even care if one did such a thing. They simply accepted her. She liked food. Cherie wanted her to start waiting tables, and Krissy wanted to learn to cook. An argument with her parents clouded the horizon. The boy climbed out of the pool, his plaid boxers peeking out from soaked, baggy shorts. He dripped all over the place, as he retrieved his shirt and flip-flops, full of pride—until he saw us sneering at him. His father turned away from the scene, perhaps so he wouldn’t throttle his heir. His sisters tried not to giggle. Security arrived, and when the boy attempted to hand his dry shirt to his mother, she held up her hands to him, the universal sign of all mothers everywhere: I hereby disown you. He was escorted off the premises. What sandwich would taste good in this blazing sun, or in the blackness of an afternoon thunderstorm? What dish would one serve to downtown bankers and lawyers that would also mingle with chicken and yellow rice, garbanzo bean soup, plantains, or papa rellenas? What goes well with both Gulf saltwater and Central Florida swampland, spring’s sweet orange blossoms, and Ybor’s cigar-smoke bouquet? Manual labor isn’t bad for the imaginative mind. There’s something mesmerizing about standing in the same place for hours, sweating, watching hot water run off steel and earth. It’s the fodder for daydreams, and — contrary to my dad’s efforts to persuade me to enjoy school — I was cultivating a fantasy about me as Blue-Collar Guy. I was reinventing myself into a life away from classes that make you type to classical music. Forget professional baseball, or whatever else it was that I thought I might get out of college. To me, steam-cleaning wasn’t a bad life. It was simple and relaxing. As Jorg the Robot aimed his sensor-meter over the dusty terrain of the planet once called “Earth,” Commander Kirkland surveyed the horizon of the planet’s blighted landscape. He was a man who knew the horizon all too well. His life had been an endless series of horizons, except when he was in space, because the horizon of space is nonexistent. Thank you for sending what you call a “poem” etched into a stone tablet. While we can’t read or write, and while we have no idea what a “poem” is, we want to assure you that the time you spent on it is valid. In the meantime, please feel free to submit sharp objects, which are selling. Also, fire. (If you haven’t heard of fire, we suggest you do a little research. It’s hot!) You might be wondering how we are writing to you, as we cannot read or write. Actually, we are just scribbling on a stone tablet, making grunting noises as though we are doing something productive. Our boss likes to see us being busy until the next Big Idea hits. One day, someone will excavate this scribbling and interpret it to mean something, we are certain. We are very important cavemen.
MARCH, 7:30PM
The fire of sunset
Kindles the sweet orange
Blossoms in the gloaming groves
Somewhere over the ballpark’s oaks
You can smell them sweeten the air as
You breathe in out like a
Horse spit
The shouts from the stands the dugouts
Your body quivering with electric
Rage and rising sap
The left arm hot its fingers
Caressing the scuffed rawhide
Like a pale Easter egg
In the sour leather glove the
Mound a crowning the red-
Jerseyed college team staring
Swinging cursing your kingdom
Blood red with madness jealousy
For they have no idea how
This will end and when the umpire points
You step back into the March
Air in the middle of this flat Jurassic state
Kick right leg high and it is as though
Nothing effortless anti-physics
Left arm your heart the center
Of your being sending them a
Hot hissing pellet a
Communique that you are
Love and lust and nothing will
Keep you
From her.
The Game is a story with an
End and you the author the
One thing you can control
Not the hitting and scratching
Not the blood and bruises and poor excuses and
Parents forbidding their precious
Community-college
Sophomores from seeing each other
Only your desire for her
When game over by your hand you meet at
Your secret place a
Zero untime
On an airfield in the dark grass
With the slow planes
Rattling over the
Dew-wet orange blossoms
Soaking the air her
Smooth open
Pale skin wrapping around yours a
Glove of salt spit cum
Until then three innings five innings seven
A fever dream of her dearest parts her
Smell that look on her face when
You are inside fitting like hand in glove and
She succumbs and
Becomes herself the one that
Only you know and
You think so that’s what she really looks like
The game is not what they the
Red think it is.
Not the end-all to
Prove the dominant team here.
That will be established against their will.
It’s merely a doorway through a
Ritual of body-blossom cursing
Water clay on sock ankle spin and heat
To the secret place after
Where and when no one asks
Who you are or
Counts your every pitch your
Twenty-one strikeouts your speed
On the ray your height and weight
Just a place that you have closed off
Except to her and she knows as well
How temporary as swift as the blossoms
Living and dying in the mad air that
Will soon turn again and like that the
Game the season this time will be gone.
—