Sequined dragon iht the glass and hollow tail hollowed be thy name in 198454 th herrick twins were observing a flowering cactus plant when their mother called from the kitchen of smoked red brick. The signs are just coming in from the paper. The letters from the editor have arrive boys. I don’t want do read it, derrick said though when he looked at his brother and shrugged his shoulders the other brother the herrick twin could only guess that what his brother was really fearing was a sense of fear itself. Maybe he idn’tt want to find out that the letters were negative or maybe he didn’t want to find out that he had fialed. But really, what he didn’t want to find that that over and over and over and overt agina he had been used to being let down. In in the summer of 19645 theherrick twins were the first to receive thre letters of reommendation when his nrother was dialnosed with nd stage renal disease. This was not an uncommon trait or diwsease nut was was common were the letters going out to the families indicating that the time with the sons as limited. Or thrather that the time with the daughters awas s;imited how couldn anything bine more dissapointming thtthan a letter sayint you’ve been chosen bfor the greatest team college you wanted. You can have the beaufiful glass castle with the red shades and shutters of light brown majogany. The leather coered antigue Joshua tree that sits in the Italian made vase circa 190082 its
Is sooo old, he thought. We atre gtting so terribly terribly old. No were not. You are not at least.
I knownbut now you know thatwhat I’m seeing? You know what I’m beginning to see? I’m beginning to see a generationthat is so aware of its cold nature – the science of the life0- that the nature itself has been rep;aced with a cold new world of stmechanics roboti features, claws that pull human organs from their positions isn the human torso, and exchange these organs with the ones that don’t work. But one of the things the newer generation is discoving is that this comes at a cost. The cost is the humanesss. The cost is the renon-scienfiti commands, the hands that work inside the skin. There used to be a sense that when a physician laydelle his hands inside the cribs aof a dying man that the man had everything to lose and also everything to gain. But the old man didn’t expect anything. Now there are people who expect everything of science and move tin that direction accordingly. They want their gadget, their hgismost a pletnly. They want robotic arms that crain in the direction of the brain and pull from the lobe soft pieces of tissue .ike look like sausage meat. On a cabootdle. But what the machines really spit aout is a piece of humanity.. the I am” am fragile” capability that only the hans of a man or woman can ictagte over through the course of touch. The hard steal metal plates are awfully clean. They are gird and cold. They are they are a kind of sterility that can only be achieved in an artificial enfvironment. Envirtonment. The people of the kind of place tht is happening right now is both exciting and very sad. The reality is I don’t know…. That is the reality I live in a transition between the cold plates of steel that dig into the very human bodies lying on the ooperating table – that and the computr itslef00 making way for the extension of a life that is not more human—but artificially extended.
I don’t know if I can tolerate that kid of behanvior, said marggie.
I can’t imagine a place where the ducks that used to be simmin gin the tub are now popping their wide eyed glares throught the app of an iphone.
What kind of bath is this? What kind of cruel bath drowns the rubber duckie in his wide eyed crystalilized glare throught the looking glass at jesus face. There are no more .. .well maybe some—certainties. But not good certainties. Just frightening certainities that we have to at in the rain, like small rain drops that fall on our senses and dull the roots of ts elliots lengthy lenthy lenthy prose prose prose.
What I don’t wnt yo to feel is alone.
But that’s what the machines feel.
No they don’t
They don’t feel
Tey feel alone
They compartamentalize data over and over and over again
The repitition of number and letters becomes a kind of poem inside the wires that nobody really understands fully. What has happened today?
The letters are not sent out anymore. They are distributed by a click of a touch. The fingers touch the mechanical engine ant then the information si isent out to hundreds if not thousands of people. I am not complainting, george,
What a mouse was this?
You hid in the corner to find a cradle of haystacks.
What dirty floors that used to parade around the fourth of july on a Sunday afternoon. The sun was high hgigh high. The craters in the trench were smelling of dirt and pie and a la mode. There that can’t be undone. But how can it? Now the trenches are gas. The gas kills. And the gas will put to sleep the aching bones of the failing bodies. There is something that looks like love, approaches some kind of love, but never really has the weight of love. Love is the weight of iron. Heavy and durble and it doesn’t break down under pressure. That’s the old love. The new love is in a machine carrying information. I love you, the machine says. And maybe the machine means to say it, but there is no substance to the letters or numbers or l or o or v or e. There is just the data that says something that means something that we know theoretically but can’t really carry the way the pilgrims carried their children across the dirt. Tehre is a teathered ball that swings around the poll.I hit the balls over again, swinging even when I miss, I miss you. I said. Come back to me. Come back to me. There, the ball of the teathered pole swings round and round the other peson is not aware how madly mad the ball needs, it needs to tighten to grasp the pole hard enough so that the rod quakes, it shakes, and quickers underneath the pressure of the tanted ball. The yellow ball. The sketched and tainted tied to a rod ball. Balls and chain. Swing the balls around the chainp--- champ. Part champ part rod, part chain, and part winner of the game. You never lost to me. I always won. But that’s not true it just seems like a cliché again along the borderline of another stupid cliché. The never never land where all the blue sparkling eyes get tossed into a crater of mud where they will loosely fall apart like the little white freckles of tost that crawl into the gras when one blows the lily fronds. Front yards are full of these miniscule umbrellas made of sparklers of th night that seem like stars. Stars in the day walking through the sky… flying an umbrella of protection. My wishes are that there be stillness, a kind of peace that can only come from wishes. Maybe not. The battle is a long one. The soldiers sing dirty songs with their flutes in their hands, their eyes gaged with intensity of mind. “My eyes” My eyes. They cannon see
You you you are blind, and what does the blind do? He of course leades the blind? Yes yes.
So there you go, doctor. Take your hands an dmaneuver them into the cradle of laproscopy. The cradle of forgiveness, the hands that heal are no longer human hands. They re the hands of the rocket. Pynchon, you were right all along. The rockets, especially the v-2 no longer the kind little penis rocket that had the power to propel life. The rockets we have now destroy the very life that the flesh rocket once provoked. Oh, how the little girl walking through the field of daiseies wishes she could lie there and just smell the smell of oldness. There is only the not smell of sterility. And that is deathly hollows. It is an empty smell like a fridge that has been emptied of contents and is only left with the iodine powde0—the white that makes that rotten cucumbers and boiling faling twisting tomotes browned and Brazilian old cheese from the inner ear it stinks so bad. Clean it up though. Let it wash away with the salt of the earth. The salt of the cheak that lay in the sand next to a friend in the sun of shore. Tides were late. The moon was low. But we didn’t want to go. We didn’t want to take the hike back up the cliffs where the toadstools had fragrence, where the cars wer parked reary to ride back back ucsd, past the institution of knowledge.e We had some kind of knowledge ehtne, you and me. We had the sun. It was all we needed, and maybe some sandwhiches or crabs from the bayliner that came in after 10;00 . We were not the early birds that the men out on the fishy ships were. We came in late when the red was bleeding into the sky, maybe on some days we saw the moon low even when the time on our phones read 4:00 / date / time/ ssituation/ comedy/ tradegy. It told us everything. It told us of the beer that was not to be tasted but yes you can drink it from a phone little one. How darling. Look at the little tike, sucking on the corner of the phone. It looks so alarmin!So young and so mature to taste the golden ale in the summer. We had our knowledge you and me. In the meanwhiles…. There were suckling babes at kettle branches stung like fuckering that distilled the brine. Brine branches that wipe the skin against the sour lemon raggedy lime juice. How the aloe healed the pinkish salt skin. I brush your salt skin. It feels sandy and glassy,; it smells like the waves. Seeweed wrapped around our shoulders dancing dancing dancing. And a smile beems from here to kingdom come the sun will glow in the evening and I take a picture. The camera snaps, it works so well to take a snapshat of our lives that we are wantinto capture. We capture us. We capture the sea, the weeds, the smoke, the chambers …. The songs the way we sang outr songs. They echoed through catholic halls that meant no harm but fishy went wayword, when catch a till, too many and there are nothing left to fish. They went somewhere theyclimbed the rocks at sunset. I watched as the boys disappeared int the upper ledge, and I imagined how they would look over the bliffs our ways. Back the ways we came and think, that was a good ride. That was a good time.But it keeps going! It does! Don’t forget that, ever little tike that dances with the weeds on her shoulders. When the legs are burning from the hike, lift up the shorts, pull the red bandana over the scalp that the Indian sun wants to tear apart. There is so much knowledge to be had behind the wires, behind the heart, and it hurts to know that it has all been lost and not lost simulataneously. But what of it? What of the stinking rags? Ad the aloe succulants that drink my water bushes? I will feed them all they need, says the sand and the sea and the beach and the water liiies. I will give you all that you could ever dream…
The lotus eaters sigh.
There was a cship that had washed up on silly seaward. There were ships along the coest but only one had the courage to dock and shock the rest of us. Loosely this is based on te ever steamy rock-talk that we had during the song” never let me go”. I was saying, yes you were saying. There was one boy who looked out over the sand from the ship he waved, the smile and laugh were like the puddles mixed with soap. Ashes and Bubble pops … otter pops that burn the upper nose.
Oh my Heavens to Betsy! My nose is Burning!!! It is the devils powder up there!!Dobnt let the sting get to you, the hotty totty ice mack can let you down. But never does it last.
OH, is that right old chap?
Oh young one, I am that one. But it doesn’t feel it. The age of the day travels like the speed of the camera lens on hyperwarp—the magnification, hyperventilation—of time.
But what of the docks? There were docks that never meant much, and somethat meant a peach pit. There were docks that held the rock-lives handed into spring-such painted with smiley faces. There were rocks that were painted with the lines. Pray. Tongight, pray. But did you ever pray to a rock ?
Sirus looks at a broken nail, and pulls at a piece of skin. “I wanted to believe in more than just a piece of earth.”
You will. I think you will. Right now it may just look like the cliffs are made of rocks, and the boys are climbing the stairway to a trailend where snakes bite and bit and the corals never sweep again. But boys will be boys, yes they will.
Now, now, I think looking up at that cliff, where I smell sweat and canopies of ginger juice on wet cotton collars sleeves. That is the time that we loved. The Nudes wrapped in nothing the but the blanket of July heat, and eucalyptus oil too. Banana boat, haninging in the cotton pouch for those who didn’t feel the necessary pride to parade the showings. The real estate homes sloaped over the edge of the bay. It looked as if the ramblings of an older author had left these homes for someone to pick up. To clean up the mess. To put the prose back together again. What happened years ago? What happened when I looked at the eyes of the text and the eyes didn’t look back ? they just wandered somewhere off into the next thought? A broken house hangs from the ledge of Tibbett coast.
You were there, you remember. Why don’t you just tell me? Stop with the fragments. Someone needs to rise, pinch the threading and knead the letters into a tapestry of words that actually mean something. The weight of the words can’t be found in a feather of fragmented thoughts. The thoughts are the flying umbrellas that we blow in the spring. The thoughts are the afternoon starbursts promising wishes to come. Say it aint so ash face.
Poppy licker.
Como Chingas. Growing from the weeds, in between the chopped fragments of grass, I will pull at my wishes, blow a stream of air through the thoughts, and there—wherever the wind takes the glowing dandy grains---there my dreams will grow.
In 1954 the herrick twins discovered that Lenny had a faulty organ. The keys, also called the nephrons, didn’t sing quite on key. Off kilter a kilt, to save a kite. A rocket will burn through the kite, and the boy hold the plastic yo yo looking dradel will be left with a limp noodle of a rope/string. I loathe that rocket right now. But the rainbow is appealing…. We’ll seee.
In 1954, in the bleached groins of the physician’s exam room, Mr. Hector heard an intonation he would rather not have heard. The intonation sounded like the respone a child gives when his mother has found the pieces of broken lamp glass lying on the floor. It seemed to say, what’s done is done, and…. It may not be the way you want it to be, but you’re going to have to turn lima beans into lime cud. Brave and cocky soldier. Get rick of the cock and just be a little brave with lower case limpers for once. Twist my arm and jingle a satchel of Chinese ringing ranging dangling cuttle spheres. You know, the ones that make the ding dong chimes—sounds that seem to be coming from the space beyond the fingers five. One pinger and then the other, 1,2 3, four, five like the segments of the caterpeller, rotation and turn, pull and release. The spheres are moved.
Don’t let the salty sea choke you. I will watch—because right now I can’t swim—you will float. Treading water sideways inways underways. Take the million little pieces james, the pile—no the scattering—of cupcake rainbow spreckles. Eat em. Let em dissolve between the bottom tongue and tooth. Tooth and tongue. Watch it become something else. Transform. Transformation.
Simon calls from a rest-point where he rests his heavy buttocks on a nut branch.
You wanna go ahead? “ gesturing upwards, simultaneously wiping the sweat with a fruit of the loom cotton-sleeve.
You go ahead. I’m going to take a bag of trailmix out of my kit and cabbottdle and eat it with a spork.
Yeah?
More fun that way. And I hate raisins. No really, I dislike dried up grapes a lot.
Oh oh oh why let the blues sag the boobies down. Don’t got no braw, but gots my dignity… Gots my kidney beans. I make em into a stew—clever, huh? Chile with Coriander and mellow cumin. Organic, of course. 100%. Mmmmmmm with a seed-filled slice of watermelon on the side. Oh dear. I may not be able to publish this. Not PC. I love my friends, though, everyone of you. Even if you’re only in my head.
There there,” grandma sheivgard reached over to pull the pistachio cradle from the meat of the nut. “I gots it hunny.”
Oh dear, you know you’ve hit rock bottom when gradma has to split the nut. She’s got the wild fever, so she can take a couple wrinkly little fingers, use a little prune-lip action (the way a baby might suck on a pink nipple) and remove the shell from the good stuff.
“Don’t you just wish…” the coriander reminds me of dandelion, and that glowing afternoon starburst drifting off to bloom. “Don’t you just want a machine to do all the work?”
The boy in the overalls, osh-gosh-b-gosh— pushes a heroe’s plastic little tike toy mower across the lawn. The birds above the poolouse continue to yawn. Or rather, test their range. A beak is sheik. But inside the main house a physician prepares a slide of organic matter that will change everything.
“Don’t shay I didn’t warna, einshtein.”
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