STARTLEMENT
(Near The Niagara Escarpment)
You don’t need a beach
for beach glass, you can source it by a river. The truth is,
beach glass finds you.
An actual ball
isn’t essential to drop the ball.
How badly we long to believe we are more.
More than our tallied trespasses.
Below rolling grass
voices clamour, their stories
heave higher with each passing frost.
Listen, for once.
Listen, for a change.
You’re thinking I’m talking
around something. Skirting. You’re right.
This world is too direct.
**
#SoLongHelmetHardhatBatteringRamWorld
#BetterToSallyForthSomewhereNewSoftHeaded
**
Swap out this blunt world for another, not
as tricky as you suppose. Simple as boarding
a bus; the air out there on the moving highway
pulses with August heat. The highway isn’t
moving, you are (what genre of trip are
you on? Everyone’s stoned now, so what?) –
like any bus-rider you gaze, dazed, out the window;
flags bash about, all brash & Bed Bath &
Beyond, stuffed with duvets pirated
from the backs of birds. Signs command soil where
some bloody battle surely once played out
(vague images – muskets, crimson coats, just one more
scenario of borders & cocks – crudest words
you ever wrote (!) having inhabited the blunt
world too long. Time to release from its lariat, this
sojourn less random than it seemed). A way elsewhere.
**
#ThisBusHaulsAss
**
The region vibes hard, gut-pulls deep,
almost as if Mesmer himself, with his
magnetic character, occupies the seat
beside you. Mall – mall – meta. Boxes point
only to themselves. An unremitting
sterility stacked against excess, green
onslaught, vines on steroids, a kind
of Brobdingnag. Triffid land.
You like it. & haven’t even arrived.
**
Arrival. City named for a lady.
Pretty clear the transit station is
a prop. Shell. Portal. Hub of froth
set to dissolve the instant you
step onto the street. Empty, mostly,
an inert, sweltry-rabbit-hole aura.
Desultory taxi driver, parked.
Worker steering an unwieldy wheeled crate.
Pretty clear something’s amiss
with the government here, too (but
you don’t delve – rivet to surface).
Someone skulks past. The number twelve
feels relevant. Any clocks
would melt over a cliff in this
hottest, strangest place you’ve ever landed.
The earth’s fierce, green throb. Peach season.
It’s like all the heat in the entire country
is archived here.
The perfect, wobbly place you sought.
**
#UnbluntedSmellOfGrapeVines
#TimeWaversHereLikeOldGlass
#HotterThanHubs
**
You turn. Just as you expected, the bus station
vaporized. You’re in a dim room, drapes drawn.
An old electric fan churns to little effect.
People seated in a circle, ladies, mostly,
in nineteen-thirties clothes. An attitude of
prayer (though this is not like any church
you’ve ever entered, just some spartan parlor).
You don’t need a church for prayer.
A man’s stentorian drone, clergy-esque.
clearly meant to ring impressive in a from-
the-horse’s-mouth-sort-of way. But the drone
doesn’t dazzle or gobsmack or awe; instead
evokes the irksome growls of a dying furnace.
The room is warm, like being inside a giant skirt.
And though you’ve just blown in, it’s pretty
clear the ladies rule; that vicar-ish ambient bass
doesn’t fool anyone, not even you,
hovering near the drapes, mouse-quiet. No one
sees you though one lady remarks on an oval green glow
over by the window. Maybe that’s you – turned beach glass,
sloshed ashore in the wake of some bygone shipwreck
or better still – your highest ambition, a ghost, soft-headed.
**
#PrettySureYouStillHaveEars
#You’reAllEars