Shaping Point




Singing solitary
Nowhere
As another

    Moving through twilight, the guiding conduits of freeway bulge with resistance.  Presence.  And the late summer sky, big and open; he breathed it with a naivety that evoked primal impressions of conflict in the detached self.  In skies vast, but immediate.  In roads ahead, strewn about into miles of asphalt that penetrate tender lands running into the coming dark; that move and sway like the ancient winds in far away grassy hills and plains.  Every man and machine moving in circles and cadence to this night of day.  The tired journey around.  Seen everywhere and all over the faces in side mirrors; singing invisible songs, talking to phones; looking at him.  Driving home on this Friday evening.  Withdrawal.  Feeling that the day and week are done; they had navigated another monotonous trial of will.  Of false pride, strife, value.  Keen and distant, and the clash of senses; thoughts scattered, bodies beaten.  Together in One.  
    His shape was rough and torn, hands cracked, muscles constricted, the proof under fingernails.  It had been a hard day and he was looking forward to being fucked up.  Losing himself in drink just as work had lost him in the day. Further, into.  Thoughts rambling in echoes of happenstance that blur his mind’s eye to traces and crumbs of experience.  Music, cigarettes, bumper stickers, women through tinted windows.  Encroaching light poles and the impending darkness turning on, and on.

Held in the middle
A protection like warm skin
    
    He woke and saw the spider.  Still and absolute.  In the faint red glow of the alarm clock display, 3:42 AM.  Only his eyes moved.  He wanted to get up; to get up and crush it in his hand.  He wanted to feel the body popping in a tissue, smashing its insides and smearing the rest on the blank wall by his bed.  He was afraid and unmoving.  Wondering where the spider had been.  In the bed?  On his bare skin, intruding on peace as a ripple in water?  The moment of fear was paralyzing, exhilarating; his intuition spoke in stiff jabs that left breathless difference.

Rhythms maintaining order
Awake in dreams
Everywhere and within
    
    Sweeping.  Nails, bits of wire, cardboard, plastic wrappers from half devoured vending machine items, dirt, pieces of wood, tobacco spit, metal shavings, mostly it was drywall plaster - the white mud that gets everywhere in the last stages of construction.  Intoxicating; the little cloud of dust and dirt that consumed him while he swept.  The smells of everything kicked up in the air, breathing their way into him.  He felt overtaken by it; the dirty air, the garbage, penetrating him and his dust mask, his clothes and skin.  It was in him and he’d cough it up later that night, he’d see it in mucus on tissues.  
      It was the labor of the individual.  The young man.  Falling into place from high nowhere, from ambition and meaning, to sweeping and wanting to go home.  So pure and undiluted the feeling.  To be away.  To hate this place.   Belonging to someone else, it was part of their institution and he knew he was a part of it.  The integration.  But, he was apart from it as well, everything he thought and said seemed to go against his being in places like this. The counterproductive friction that he produced for himself and others, like an unruly squall in the open ocean, disruptive but expected of the expanse.  Yet a bludgeon hung over him that kept him in check.  It was the money, like a whore, that controlled him and every decision he made.  It was him and all of these guys that moved and swayed through work and weekend.  Ennui in gentle waters.  The balancing act of the American dream.  This bludgeon; a reflection of all the weekends and needs standing on shoulders over his head, arms cocked and ready to swing.  Pressure.  Swollen and infected, his spirit was being laughed at.  By someone, sometimes him, but definitely by those that he felt were above him in so many ways.  The overachievers, prodigies, young artists, the talented.  He would languish in the cool dim of so many others throughout his day.  From bitter ambivalence that pecked and tugged, to violent anger that stormed through, destroying things and feelings.  Mostly it was the Sadness; the ever present numb that filtered all experience, that blockaded his sensory vision like a dark blind spot to the extent that only the outer edges of the periphery were visible.  Exhausted, weary, like walking in clothes soaked in heavy oil, it was the weight of tiredness that held down every motivation, dulling his fight.  He sought sleep all the time.  The comfort of unconsciousness.

After light and the room that holds  
    
    The spider was gone.  4:57 AM.  He reached over the alarm clock, pulled it away from the wall, the lamp, the same; nothing.  He stood up in the dark, in his small square room and waited for the vertigo to wear away.   Standing, looking around, dizzy with sleep, his vision was hazed in gray static.  Like the momentary after burn of a television that’s just been turned off, it was a demarcation point with end and beginning on either side.  He starred into the dark of the room not looking at anything, but making out the emptiness of shapes, things around him, with him.  In this half-wake delirium he was so happy, so at ease knowing that it would be over any second.  He knew about life.  He knew it was the spaces like this, where nothing is anything and nowhere is here.  These miniscule chokes in existence that blurred all the other.  His ears rang and his eyes blinked, he outstretched his arms to feel in the dark, to think of a first step, to think of the light.  
And the end.  
It was over because he realized it was over.  The 3 steps to the light switch.  The carpet and stuffy bedroom air.  He felt the wall, his hands moved up and down, in circles, he looked into the blindness feeling for the switch.  Finding it,  he paused and saw a fresh snow covered prairie on a cloudless day, he squinted at oncoming traffic.  The light was on.  Everything harsh and whitewashed.  Blinking, looking around the quiet, he found an empty room that he already knew.  On the window pane, his partial reflection looking back against the bare wall and opaque night.  
    He looked under the sheets.  Thinking about the bite; if it was venomous.  He looked on the floor amiss the array of books, soiled laundry, work boots.  The window sill, the drapes.  Nothing.  He thought of the poison and its effects, he thought of pain.  The closet; could the spider be in his clothes?  Under the bed?  He crawled around the room relentlessly searching for any sign.  A web, dead flies.  Nothing.  Scared and anxious; the reflection fading with the coming morning.  He wondered if the spider could be far from home, the nocturnal searching of prey could have drawn it far from its web.  The fear spread to purpose; to the pursuit of an end point.  Through the window the eastern horizon started to glow.

Something in a distance
Suspended in duality
A different kind of beauty
    
    Orange, pink, blue.  The deep light and long shadows.  A portrait that hangs behind buildings, mountains; juxtaposed against.  It is.  Dynamic and teeming with allure, the sky as the mind of an artist or a child that forms the ever-present background of everyone.  And him in his car.  In the solitude of a small space.  Isolation in the evening traffic with everyone but without anyone.  He felt better now, alone in the river of cars swimming against the current, it was laughable.  A buoyancy.  Looking in the rearview, the slow moving light behind the mountains to the west brought him a solace that was normally faint to his eyes.  Today was different.  Today was distraction.  Today was different.
    To be away.  He thought.  In the traffic, in his dazed state of automatic functions, he thought of being away, of being fucked up, of sleeping in daylight hours; he thought of the difference.  Saturday and what it held.  The smell of people.  Barbeques, children, barking dogs, booming cars.  The flatlands of his neighborhood; the browned greenery that is either dead or dusted with dirt, dilapidated houses that used to be, the trash and dirt blowing in wind, scavenging rodents and birds, the tribal-like graffiti on fences and concrete, flowers of all color in plastic pots, American flags, little satellite dishes facing east.  He rolled his window down and felt the summer.  The cooled evening of the freeway.  It was the exhaust and breeze that appealed to this romantic self.  This is the way of stories with no endings that perpetuate for generations.  This is the music of culture; of entertainment and pleasure.  It seeks the weekend through routine discipline, starry nights and worn out steel-toed boots.  It’s what is.  With heaven smiling down.  Everything is so easy and beautiful.

Like waking
Something different from the view inside
    
    In the large open of the future building, other workers would walk by and say things that he couldn’t understand.  If he happened to make eye contact with one, he would nod or say, “yeah” or “uh-huh,” not caring about the returned looks of puzzlement.  Through the contractor provided earplugs, human speech was made into grunts and mutterings.  And he liked this.  With earplugs, he heard his every breath, swallow, cough with utter clarity while the rest of his surroundings became a solid humming drone.  It was as if he was inside himself, in his own body, like a solitary piloted vessel in vast or confined territory.  The simple foam filters gave him his own room in which to exist; to think of the future and what it held for him.  His dreams and ambitions, so close to his real place and purpose.  He thought of his glories, the triumph over his surroundings, he thought of the recognition.  The relentless hard work.  A long life of success with admirers giving their praise to his achievements.  He would command respect in all of his endeavors, he would give to charities, crowds would follow, he would be acclaimed with awards and honors.  And the end, like deafness, like solitude, westerly in slow dissension.  He would laugh and enjoy life, enthusiasm would flow with unwavering vigor, he would produce radical change, his vision would be talked about as, “laser-like precision.”  And all the time he would cry like a king.  Alone in this room, he would be far away from this and now.  Earplugs wouldn’t be needed, the future would be different, the reciprocal of now.  And death suddenly.  At the top.  A beating, an assassination, a violent murder.  He imagined his blood in the media, all over the web, the front pages, TV.  His transcendence.  The story exported to the world, to history – a legacy.  The innocence of his torn body.  The looks of bad smells and shock.  Sacrificial.  The rhythms of rain showers and slow motion.  The sorrow, the remembrance.  Glacial anger channeled into movies, books, tribute events.  Hearing the eulogy at the funeral praising him with goodness and reverence that induced mass mourning and sadness at the event of his passing.  There would be suicides and copycat murders.  Posthumous offerings.  Pageantry.  He would become eternal.  Hero, artist, champion.  Things.  “Uh-huh.”  So far away.  Far away from here and anywhere he’s ever been.  Delusional and so close to him that it is him.  The illusion so actual and true that it exceeded the prophetical and arrived at the real.  The faith he had in himself was so pure that not even reality could find its way back into his sentience.  He was of difference.  This man standing in here, this large open room, this man sweeping.  This man smiling on images, this immense place in front of everyone’s thoughts, this man of adoration.  This product of power, seeking out the more and the against, in the hard landscapes of diversion inside everyone.  An undercurrent.  Like a wind that blows over the prairie, constant and broad in tidal motions that will become formal; relaxed to sensation.  That dryness whistling though, carrying echoes of sound – reverberations of the original everywhere reaching places known, ordinary, accepted.  So commonplace that the sounds carried are distant and altered, bearing a likeness to themselves, but not of birth, not of origination. Nor of himself.  He is the image that blows in the dry winds of his own dull places.  He moves to his self of prestige and eidolon-like status, experiencing all through the dream and enduring all through nocturnal dreams of what is normally called, the real.

End and beginning on either side
    
    He watched the play of colors on the window.  For a good few minutes he saw purples and pinks turn to oranges and yellows.  Birds and quiet.  The spider was nowhere, he wanted sleep.  It was the day, and other than this beginning, he had no interest in it.  Realizing the cold on his skin, he walked over to the curtains, pulled them shut and climbed into the bed.  He thought of the dark and how he wanted to be free of fear and anxiety, he wanted to be the room that held him, and wanted to be nothing.  Inanimate shapes around him, light after burnings imprinted into the eyes when he closed them shut, still glowing long after in luminescent trails that burned hotter and more poignant than the initial carefree glance.  He loved these vivid reproductions of light – they were real, as real as the objects they personified, only enhanced.  This is what he wanted.  This, and then sleep unnoticeably creeping, taking him over.  No dreaming, only a calm sleep.  Over and over.

Today was distraction
Everything so easy and beautiful
    
    Closer to home and the coming night, the first stars were appearing near the zenith. Stark, portentous; the bellies of clouds reflecting the glow of city, in pink, hazed fortunes, toil and pace.  A different kind of beauty.  But he knew all this.  In his elevated mood he hadn’t noticed it was taking longer than usual to get home until he saw, in the oncoming lanes, that there was an accident ahead.  The characteristic twinkling blue and red light and diverted, distracted traffic.  Coming upon the scene, he saw a car completely smashed in on the driver’s side.  From what he could tell there seemed to be no other vehicles involved, hence the question as to how this happened; he saw no answer.  He looked away giving his attention back to the road, but the flow of cars was at a near stand-still while police converged 4 lanes into 2, and drivers captivated, turning heads, rotating gazes between disturbance and road.  Just as the rest do, he watched in alternating single second frames of information and curiosity.  Moving up closer he watched a boy cry into the shirt of a man that looked to be his father.  Resemblance was obvious.  Solid and stoic, the man was looking at nothing; a tight grip, a stare that had no focal point, as if the moment was attacking all senses, diffusing emotion into detachment.  A television news crew was hurriedly setting their equipment up as a paramedic crew tended to a body inside an ambulance that was about to speed away.  Thinking this body was a brother and a son, he looked again at the man and boy sitting on the concrete barrier that divided the east and westerly lanes of highway.  He felt a fleeting sympathy for them, in the center of a spectacle of light and onlookers.  It was an episode that had already happened. Witnessed everyday in front of billions of eyes, and tiredly played out without limit.  The shock; only to those involved.  For most of the onlookers the scene would be replaced or forgotten in a few days.  He drove on.
    Gaining speed, he fell into a kind of solemn cool.  Staring through the windshield, a dream of light washed into streams of frozen motion.  Oncoming headlights and the street light above as blurred into solitary streaks against the late evening commotion. Bemused symmetry.  The confluence dissolving  into a calm center.  Moving in the direction of a place.  Past the disturbance he continued eastward into skies and territory darker in scope and view.  The night black, the landscape fading of iridescence into scant points of light.  His exit in the seeable distance ahead, he thought of the body.  The mangled car that once carried him, the paramedics closing the doors of the ambulance as others watched in finality.  Who was this man and where had he been going?  Dead and finished; to everyone that knew of him, to his father and brother, even to the one who barely understood.  
    Mind drifted into vignettes of the past, of childhood and place.  He saw himself as a boy, not far from this site, in blown winter snow, wandering hills and fields.  Running, playing, enduring cold and mind.  He was away from the house and the endless patterns of boredom.  Straying in arbitrary directions for hours, an obscure purpose, an absence to be.  Solitary.  Nature and an imagination giving him companionship in compromising ways that people can do.  The personalities of compassion, elusiveness, a purpose of something other decentralized.  Asleep in his thoughts; sown in dramatic plays of coherence.  Of something in a distance; moving, fighting.  In blasts of wind and snow, the view of white in all directions penetrating everything absolutely.  It was alive and suspended in the monotone of the storm, floating in centers of sound and scene.  Struggling against the blizzard, collapsing and rising with gusts.  Like a star flickering in tides of atmosphere, irregular in site, it fought with and against.  Hard to breathe.  He thought it was going to die out here.  It moved farther from him and he thought to run after, but he couldn’t.  His struggle was exactly the same, he was enduring everything that this figure ahead in his direct view was going through.  His fear was the storm around him, it was in him fighting.  Remembering the cold shivering, sweating; he looked back to see his footprints, but there was no trace.  He saw no trees, hills or sky; the whiteout wrapped him up as if under murky water.  The landscape was turning to gray as it got darker out.  It was gone; in the distance.  At a loss, he failed to not wonder about it, then and now.       
    And then the spring and summer too.  The same steps but in wind streaked meadows and sunshine that would burn his skin red.  He remembered packing food and water, and then supplies like a blanket, flashlight, extra socks; each journey gaining knowledge for the next.  Farther ahead, always pushing.  He would sleep with the chill of the late summer night under an old bridge, braving the poisonous things he knew were there but couldn’t see, the fear and his wild thoughts compounding everything.  Preparing himself, he thought, for adulthood and independence, for the unmapped terrain of future experience.  The freedom of being alone.  And later from his distance, the city would turn on at the close of days; he remembered the night sky would look otherworldly in its variance from where he was.  Continuous wandering for long stretches of time and place out of an innate desire that constantly propelled him through childhood and adolescence.  The sinuous maps of thought, the forced endurance, winning an awareness of means and reason for being where he was for the small cost of physical exhaustion and alienation.  And now through the telescopic vantage point of age, the wanderings defined himself early as different in the capacity to accept his immediate reality as it was, opposed to how everything should be.  Despite awareness, that dusty memories crack and break down over time becoming dreams, fiction; endlessly recycled back into questions of trust.  The wistful reminiscence; the authentic.  The dualities in everything.

Refracting that wasn’t there

    He sat by himself on an empty five-gallon bucket next to a future bay door.  Friday’s lunch time and he had nothing to eat.  It was more of a reprieve from the monotony of sweeping and hauling trash to the dumpster all morning, but not from the place or people within it.  He smiled to himself as he watched a group of guys across the way sitting on their buckets, talking their slang, eating, and making gestures – the not-so-mysterious dialog of modern social grooming.  He wondered of these traditions, of the culture that made these men.  The forces that sculpt the ethos in groups of people.  Outside the day was already hot.  He saw the city through a heat mirage refracting and blurring the skyline into water that wasn’t there.  It was sensational.  The view of these modern castles built by the men in his company; and by him.  Monuments to power,  and the systems that mobilize massive teamwork, cooperation of all; the coercion and pride that is equal in magnificence.  He was thinking of the significance when he sneezed into the lap of where lunch would normally be.  He spat a few times on the concrete and smeared it with the bottom of his boot.  A mix of recycled dirt and slime on a darkened floor, it was ugly to him.

Still and absolute
Only eyes moved        

    Walking into the building, he passed through the revolving doors, through the lobby and up to the entrance of the restaurant.  Red velvet and brown satin interweaved into braids forming a tunneling archway that he thought was laughable in its pretentious kitsch.  He smiled at the hostess; she did not look or greet him as he walked past.  Braids turned looser to woven sheets and the tunnel grew dim and small as he walked its length.  Claustrophobic and almost colorless now, he walked forward hunching over, feeling the fleshy fabric touch him like a breeze; like warm skin.  Spreading through the off-centered curtains, he thought that he must’ve walked through 50 or so, until he unknowingly came to the last one, hurriedly peeling them back.  Then, standing in an immense expanse of open space, he should’ve been out of breath, but he was calm.  He stood, awed by the vast area that was this single room.  Across from him, about 100 yards, a circular bar with numerous patrons and bartenders.  The light was dim, yet hard.  It was a room of distinct shadows cutting through the air; no gray.  Looking up, his eyes followed the blank, windowless walls of this hollowed out high-rise to a brilliant point of light, akin to looking at the sun trapped in a box with all 4 corners disappearing into its light.  This powerful energy source shining down hundreds of feet onto him and the floor.  Remembering his hunger and why he came here, he moved toward a booth that had a tall cylindrical wall enclosing it and a single opening barely enough for a grown man to get through – like individual pods randomly dispersed on the pale restaurant floor.  The place was full of all kinds; a dull, blending chatter pervaded and echoed throughout, reminding him of an orchestra tuning before a concert.  Dissonance.  He slid his body into an empty table and waited for service.
    Thirst and hunger were consuming him.  The empty feeling in his stomach held his body suspended just as the clean, acidic smell of ammonia clung to the air of the room.  Frustrated, he stood up, scanned the room and waved at the closest waiter.  Nothing.  He stepped out and walked to the bar.  When asking for help, people looked at him, but did nothing – as if they heard him but had no reaction.  Blank stares in the hollow building; he resolved to leave.  Looking for a fire exit but, not surprisingly found nothing. He looked back and saw his father.  A flash of confusion, relief,  excitement, recognition.  Alone at the bar watching television, he called out, “dad!”  Pushing through the sudden mass of people, “dad!”  Louder, smaller, crowded.  Everywhere people talked, smiled, laughed.  Shouting into ears; wry expressions hanging on words.  “Dad!”  Faces and noise.  Skin and scent rubbed through, all over, plowing deeper into the chaos.  Nowhere.  His father couldn’t hear him; he stared further into.  And he stopped.  An aged statue, or a lost child in the hapless currents of this expanse.  He saw nothing.  Waited.  Nothing saw him.  The walls, the blinding light above, the decision.  Turning, he ran toward the entrance, the curtains of sheets and braids, boring through people like they were nothing.  Angry; no one noticed.
    Violently, he pulled back and apart.  The sheets had become sticky, weightless, and he tore through easily. Closer into; a growing apprehensiveness came.  Like swimming underwater, he couldn’t see or feel; save for waves of anxiety rippling through nerves as he ran slower. He was tired and wary, feeling the stringed tension pulling, holding him in an almost polite way.  Vibrating with the dissonance, the complete disharmony of everything now.  In the undercurrent of helplessness, he stepped back but pulled everything in the dark place with.  The sheets of strings were all over him, invisible now, and a seemingly greater hold; pulling him back, moving him forward, exaggerating his movements but not letting him go.  A hostage in an invisible place.  He released his grip.    
    Closing his eyes, he desperately wanted to see those after burns of light from a few hours ago.  A protection.  Like the art that compelled him, these impressions were a manifestation of substance outside itself that functioned as time stamps, moments frozen in existence like architecture in light.  The evocative excitement and comfort, yet the dark of the room existed in him.  With his eyes shut he saw nothing of any thing or object, and now he was genuinely frightened.  Now he felt a crippling fear that would not let go.  He thought that he could die in this place, never seeing outside this again.  And then he realized his being, his substance of thought – his tormentor.  This empty room that held him in the middle of dreams.
    And he saw the white of daytime underneath his eyelids and knew it was over.  An intense headache and a warmth on his skin from the sun, he opened his eyes and knew that he was late for work.  Flung the sheets and jumped out of bed, ran to the bathroom and stuck his head in the shower.  The cold water shocking him in a kind of self inflicted punishment for oversleeping.  He was fatigued and hungry, and there wasn’t enough time to pack his lunch.  “Just have to suffer through it today.”  The worst kind of work on the site would go to him in exchange for being late and he knew this.  Concrete pour, trash detail.  In the car racing down the freeway; loud echoes of the dream and more than the recommended dose of painkillers.  “At least it’s Friday.”

A solitary piloted vessel
Far away from here and anywhere

    “Looks like we got a company man here,” some asshole said as he tapped his wrist and kept walking.  No one around – it was just past the end of the overtime shift.  Like waking, he took out the earplugs, slid his dust mask off and threw them in the trash heap he’d been building all day.  Leaned the broom on the wall and headed for the time clock.  
    He found the door of the contractor’s trailer locked.  Inside was the time clock he needed to punch out with.  He looked around for anyone that might have a key but found the site barren – as would be expected on a Friday evening.  Walking toward his car, the intensity of the sun, the heat; he took the hardhat off and ran his fingers through sweaty hair, glanced back at the site a last time and saw the skeleton of the building he had spent his day in.  It was starting to look like something.  Something very different than what he had thought; distinctly different from the view inside.  The same inside that had no record of him being there.  Since he couldn’t punch out, it was as if he was still in there; or punched in and left, never coming back.  Totally ridiculous; it would be hard to explain.  Remembering the morning stupor, he almost wondered if he was in the wrong place.  “The days are getting longer.”  A sigh and a grin.  Walking to the car, going home.

Presence
Everywhere and all over
Together in one

    He pulled off the freeway at a rural county road exit.  Day dreams consumed him to the point of hallucination delivering him miles past his exit, to be here in a mirage of naivety and repose; night and the shapes of emptiness.  He drove farther into the country, parking at a dirt intersection; no reasons.  Out of place.  He waited for the dust to settle, then stepped away from the confines of the car and felt the same unsteadiness as he had in the bedroom during the day’s dark morning hours.  Looking skyward, stretching from the cramped quarters, he felt something more than lightheadedness – an instinct intuitively broadcasting, pushing.  An impression that he had been orbiting about himself.  Locked in a revolving continuum all this time, many times over, to arrive at this place.  He breathed hard, shallow, and reached for the vehicle, for anything to hold.  Shoes slipping in the dirt, he gripped the open side door swinging with it, his equilibrium giving away, gravity pulling down.  Wondering, then knowing what had happened.  The undertow of reminiscence, of fantasy, washing clean the present until a self imitation left him abandoned here.  Beyond forgotten territory with no direction to the natural; the original.  Here as another.  One that did not inhabit the dreams of his future, that did not inhabit anything he saw.  
    He already knew this.  Without any struggle, sitting in the dirt, leaning against the car as someone else.  In sight, in body; everywhere in an enormous purgatory of years encircling him, waiting for everything to begin.  Priming and adapting all along without the acceptance of suffering; the endless pursuit that had made him tragic.  In the shell of comfort around, he saw earnestness fail to infiltrate existence, leaving him unscathed in fictions that had become a projection of an unknowable place.  He knew all of this.  Yet he still watched from behind a periphery of mirrors that judged every action and inaction, every choice he made.  And it had become exhausting, to the extent that this brief impacting knowledge would erode like an ancient crater weathered over in stasis.  The fainting of a stranger into unconsciousness.
    And there he sat.  Weary, tired.  He coughed and then spat onto the dirt next to his boot, seeing the dust of the day in spit, lit by the interior door light.  Smothered it out of habit, embarrassment.  He pulled himself up, took the key from the ignition and closed the door.  Feeling the barren effects of his spell, he started down the road.  If for nothing else, it was nice to hear the dirt underneath his boots, walking in the absolute dark of the late summer night.  A rural sky immense in grandeur, an infinite view from his eyes.  Constant yet dynamic.  His head arched back to see as he walked down the unknown road.  Outside of things.
    Ahead, a grouping of trees on each side of the road, probably surrounding a small creek and culvert.  Completely still, no wind.  No time.  The extreme silence disturbed him, frightened his view.  He stopped, looked up at the stars again; like home.  And then something in the trees.  No breath.  Like crying – a young person.  He couldn’t tell what side of the road the sound was coming from, just that it was in the trees.  Emanating, suspended in nowhere.  He was petrified but willed himself over to one side.  Listening.  And then it stopped like quiet and nothing.  He looked back toward the car, for comfort, confirming it was there in the distance.  He waited, completely still, calm.  It slowly faded back, crying and moaning, but farther away, softer.  He felt his skin radiate.  The sound was moving within the trees, circular, slow, with no other noise to offset, like leaves under shoes, like flying.  Weeping.  He had to help, needed to see.  Stepping toward and walking into the brush, the trees were tall and thick with dark against sky.  He reached out to feel for branches, to see with his hands.  Tripping over and into exposed roots, moist sand, probing farther, his heart knocking hard inside.  It was still faint, well into and under the canopy of woods.  The wail, pursuing him to the dried creek bed as he chased it.  He stopped and stood looking around.  In the quick of the moment, he thought someone might be playing, tormenting him.  Laughing somewhere, watching and waiting for his next act.  “I’m not falling for this shit!”  Trying to believe that he wasn’t afraid.  The imaginary audience made him to be a clown and he had to retaliate.  “Why don’t you come out and show your chicken-shit, redneck faces?”  Panicked yelling in full armor. “C’mon!”  Nothing; words in the air.  “C’mon!!”  He waited; hardly moving, breathing.  “Go back to the barn and fuck yourself some more!”  And mumbled, “I’m leaving.”  His display just disappeared into the night.  The sound hadn’t stopped and he imagined a few sons of farmers laughing next to a kind of portable audio device.  He found a baseball sized rock and threw it.  And another.  None of anything made sense to him.  The crying was still moving in circles and waves.  Whirling around him, ephemeral.  Another rock and his frustrated growl turned to a loud yell.  There was no one here but him – he knew this now.  And the fading lone weeping.  He knew a fool by himself, his breathing shallow and defeated, seeing through broken sense.  He sat in the soft sand and cupped his face with dry, cracked hands then moving them up, pushing back hair, seeing arms scratched and bloodied from thicket. The trees around him rustled with a fresh breeze; sounds of ocean tides in the leaves.  Cool, moist air entered him, touching the inside of a home in disrepair.  The visiting end fragmented, singing solitary; from nowhere to here.  He was crying.  
    There was something.  Behind the mass of trees, a light, gentle but austere.  Immediately he stood up, wiped his face and squinted to see through the opaque flutter of leaves.  It shone elongated like the space underneath a closed door.  Something hidden, vague.  He was curious but not afraid of this presence sharing a place with him, and he marveled at this.  Like the light in the room of his dream, echoing back, it was an instantaneous empathy with something, anything, that he had not met in years.  It was a visceral feeling that he felt but could not understand.  It was the threat of fostering a relationship, a beginning at the expense of failure looming in the dark.  And so a new calm permeated everything and the light grew with all of this.  Soft winds moving through wood and brush, through his damp clothes, smelling of night and sweat.  He began making his way out of the wooded area, pushing past limbs and branches, hearing twigs and dried leaves break underneath his weight.
    From the lower grade, he pushed himself up to the plateau of the dirt road.  Brushed himself off and looked back at the moon rising in the east.  It was almost full, and beautifully darkened by dense layers of atmosphere near the horizon.  He turned and walked toward the car.  The dirt and gravel road, pale like the desert world behind him.  Reflecting, diffusing the light he had known before.
      
In gentle waters
A dark blind spot

    His car was the only one in the parking lot.  The day was still hot and the sun had started to touch the mountains, changing everything in colors.  He poked a key into the lock, opened the door and eased himself down.  Simultaneously savoring the feeling of the seat and being annoyed by the heat of the car.  He started it and felt the blast of air vents and loud music, taking him back to the morning rush to work.  Switching off the radio and rolling the windows down, he put it in gear and pushed the accelerator out of the building site and onto the road.
    Driving the roads of city, the systems of rhythm maintaining a pulse and order.  Alive in everyone.  Symmetrical circuits through bodies of community that stretch and overlap one another, blending divergent currents into a contentious confluence.  And he, everywhere and within.  The aloof witness, the busy talker, the absorbed listener.  Going home under the wake of a setting sun.  In patterns beginning and ending.  In simple progressions of time.  Awake in dreams, existing all around and inside their sights.  Reflecting back, reciprocating experience as memory, as real.  Worn out and disconnected, he slowly drove with the line of cars that were entering the freeway.  Moving slow like colors bleeding together in the sky, his car diffused into streams of traffic.  The shapes of one; cast out, spread into the coming night.





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