Weekend in Massachusetts

Roll on down the hill, feel the wind and the rush of temptation,

Draw me a portrait, of its slope and its turbulence eroding your face, 

blades of grass, blurring metaphors. Later you crawl into bed with

yourself and one too many pillows. The cup on the table whispers "myth"

And you're back on the crest of the hill, near the bakery and

your old house, where they called you a hero. Smell where the sand

sleeps, where the granite steps fade away into a beach, from your old house up around

the corner, a place my uncle watched through his telescope, and I with him, the sound

salient and slowing near the deep end of the neck. They all have good

jokes out there, they wrote them in advance 

They know people with names like Pettigrew and Constance,

and names like Willy are accepted until your thirty. The ice cream

stand is the social center of the town, where I'm from the scene

is grocery stores and cigarettes and looking for answers to questions

we never securely tied down, at the top of the hill before we rushed down

for good. I crawl into bed in my uncles attic, and like clockwork I see the mound

out near the baseball diamond. Out there, they love the patron saint of hopeless causes,

myths and ground balls drooping between your ankles. I define my life when it pauses,

and there is time.

There is time to not look at my watch

There is time to sit on porches and talk about my father.

There is time to walk down the spit to the club and dive in head first, little legs underwater.

There is time to coast, and say goodbye to what wasn't mine

There is time to ponder

There is time to dip my feet in near the edge of the dock and wonder.

Then I'm on the south side of town again, and I look at my watch until I can't look any longer.

My legs cramp up, so I go into the back of the trailway, and the mixture of piss and shit rattles,

I come back to work, and the gravel seems different now, it seems like it missed me, this battle

wasn't a battle. It was the way things are.

I look at my watch.

The band had rotten and broken off.

I threw it somewhere in the bottom of my pocket.

I roll on down the hill with you, you know, our wagons fuse is nearly done my rocket

is your rocket.

Cinder

When I drive down Kaiser,

and the sun beats me with it's tiny fractured waves,

I squint.

Stretched and sovereign, on the shoulder, limbs extend pas the normal frame. There is smoke fuming out of the Volvo, which I don't drive or ever did.  Everything is green out here, that sharp florescent green, like algae in a dirty fish bowl, and I don't fit in.

I can't

No, I don't apprehend my apprehensions.

I play dead, nod and stay quiet.

On the inside, I remind myself and count things, and stay very quiet. Like a nationless soldier on a battlefield,

squinting.

The sun is a sweaty ball of blindness, above an empirical sky. These messy feelings, pushed through a sieve of math and order. The sun was like a big hug, but after the atmosphere and the ozone layer, it has become these rays of sun, this energy which for some reason bothers me.

I sit down, and I realize I can't see straight because I couldn't see straight. One can't replace another, like a flamingo and a ballerina, two different forms of elegance, so I sit down on the hood of the car, while my driver is arguing with some person on his phone, yakking about a faulty part. I close my eyes and breathe, and hear a bird chirp, succeeded by a flock, and the sudden vacuum of engines and wheels approach in front of me.

An effecting helicopter of four windows, two all the way, two as children would, and they are young and tan honest lovers, with foreign hairdos and exotic postures. They seem strange and somewhat reassuring. But then I realize they just live on campus and have too much time on their hands. They are wearing sunglasses.

Maybe,

If I wore sunglasses, I could relax.

Maybe,

If I had more money, I would have better friends, or at least more of them. They would have a much higher chance of being better. Whatever that means.

My friends now are either distant or in the process of becoming distant, emotionally incomprehensible, or more commonly, simply missing. Nobody has heard from some people.

 I don't know. I could just clone my old friends, I can imagine them emerging from cellars with mist and carbon and all sorts of sciency things like Urkel turning into Stefan. But that would be hopeless, a failure, an abysmal mess. I mostly miss having somewhere to go when I had to be able to say I had somewhere to go, so it didn't look like I had didn't have anywhere to go, and now none of that exists. Nobody cares. And that is much worse, or much better, depending on my situation.

But money doesn't buy happiness. Money buys friends and exotic unnecessary material things, which brings material happiness. Which dies as assuredly as friends do.

But I am sitting,

on my hood,

staring at a picture,

I should've taken.

The car is busted, the smoke is this resultant without ash, without a profit. And I just wish I could wear some sunglasses.

Things would be different,

I am not meant to be a poet.

Maybe a domesticated animal, waiting for praise and belly rubs, with fingers outstretched and popping, my voice whistling with the birds and the falling leaves of a rain forest. 

At least, one with a suntan, and an expensive pair of sunglasses.

Signals

This morning, I turned up Harrison from the pseudo-round-a-bout and didn't signal when I shifted over to the left lane. There were no other cars around, and I thought, "What does it matter?" The thing is, is that I always signal my turns, even if nobody is around, a force of habit I guess. The turn to go up Harrison hill is usually a pretty senseless one to signal at: there are two lanes, and before ten or after six there is hardly ever anyone out there, yet whenever I changed lanes entering the hill, even late at night, I always signaled. Why was today different?

I began to ponder this as I sat waiting for my food at Egan's. I remembered conversations with my father, asking him why he didn't signal, pointing around to the absence of company and declaring, "If a tree falls in the woods does anybody hear it?" I felt told, that he knew something maniacally human that I had not picked up on. But then again, he wouldn't ever signal even in traffic, and is widely known as one of the most inattentive drivers in our community. Maybe I didn't miss anything, and maybe it was more than a force of habit.

I tend to lift tedious things into a spiritual meaning. I feel whenever I pull the signal down or flip it up, I am declaring my existence, at least as a driver. I thought back to my initial question during my internal monologue. "What does it matter?" If I do not signal, I am leaving it as a tedious action of my upper-lower-middle class quasi suburban existence. But if I announce my next move, if I signal what I am doing, it becomes realer then it was if I didn't.

Then I remember that I signal when nobody else is around. I think of the tree falling in the woods and nobody is around to hear it. The tree makes a noise, creating the opportunity for the ear to hear it. I signal my turn, creating the opportunity for someone to recognize it. The tree has no control over if it makes the sound, I have control over whether or not someone can recognize my forthcoming action. And this crucial difference has a strong implication. The conscious choice I make implies that I feel there is someone else to recognize it. Even if there is nobody visible on the road, a higher power would be watching over me, that I have subconsciously acknowledged by pulling the lever. If there is no human eye to witness the right deed, then I have created an eye to see it.

My force of habit, my routine, may actually be an unintentional offering, a prayer if you will, to society. And in the absence of a visible society, I have created one to replace it.

So maybe it does matter.