Hour after hour, her fingers dance on the keyboard. Rarely, she glances
around, and only hastily does she get up to hunt around for snacks, which
she consumes quickly. There are pizza-stained paper plates on the counter
and empty cereal bowls on the floor, spoons glued into the hardened milk.
When her hair slips from its ponytail, she deftly pulls it back out of the
way, and resumes typing.
On late into the night she types, and when her eyes will stay open no longer
she throws herself on the couch and sleeps in her clothing, teeth unbrushed,
mouth open, snoring. As light creeps back into the disheveled room, she
rises, guzzles some milk from the jug, and continues typing.
After many days, her fingers stall. She types a few more words, hesitates,
and stops. She looks around, rubs her eyes, stretches. She stares at the
walls and ceiling. She knits her fingers. She stands, paces the room -
notices the empty bowls, the greasy plates. Slowly, she moves through the
room, gathering debris and carrying it to the trash, the dishwasher. She
opens the blinds. She tilts her head, as though listening for an inner
voice - but seems to hear nothing.
More days unfold. The apartment is tidy, the crumbs vacuumed, the counters
wiped. From time to time she sits in front of the computer, her fingers
perched on the keys - but the fingers remain still. She slumps in her
chair, sighs, and gets up to straighten a pile of books into a neat stack.
Then one morning, as suddenly as it had departed, the muse returns. The mad
typing resumes. She smiles, lifts one hand briefly to stroke her ponytail,
types.
She clicks on her printer, and the loose papers churn out. She gathers them
into a pile, its solid heft resting comfortably on her desk. The cover
sheet, printed in size 36 font, is visible from across the room:
“Ron Bites It: Harry and Hermione’s True Love Story”
A stripe of smoldering macadam from curb to curb, the air heady and saturated with gasoline vapor. The boys jump through heat waves that shimmer as thinly as the sun at the horizon. With every leap the rubber soles of their Air Jordans or Reebok Pumps grow more gooey. Girls with long bangs and french braids squeal, breathing heated antics into atavistic splendor. Beneath the cool concrete and Kentucky Bluegrass, low under the street black as wild vanilla, pleasures warm as dusk await. The howling thickens like manioc and every pulse becomes a drumbeat, remembering an ancient rhythm composed by capricious devils hooked of nose, cruel of face, red of eye and white teeth that flash and gleam like ivory spear points. Old men, pathetic, waxen skin, sneer at wasted hydrocarbons. Old women who never see the faces in the flames, arms folded over drooping bosoms, shout for their sons to come inside. In rooms painted antiseptic shades of pink and beige, coffins for the living lined with polyester, wicker, teak, slouching towards our stereos we hold our cathode torches high and in blue light at 30 hertz we walk a path of carpets, ankle deep in high celestial shag. The devils were never in the smoke and flames, but hide in pale and cunning forms, tasteful knobs, blinking faces of distraction. There is more life in every leap outdoors, in every curling flame, in all the darkness under the sky than in the tungsten-lit tombs they call home; young people had better die indoors.
I wake–it seems I had fallen asleep
On watch at the top of the hill.
I think how as the sun has set,
I’ve lost my own shadow in the Earth’s.
The day has moved it’s face
To look upon the fires far away.
From there, the last of the news that we heard
Came as rustling of the trees in the wind.
We hoped, and held to the last of our breath,
Then sighed, and shut the panes against the rain,
Till there came a clear and calm,
And I climbed to watch the orange turn to blue.
Sometimes,
when the winds hush,
You brace yourself
For the eye to pass,
And the far wall’s rush
To send its blast,
Driving you back
To the shelter.
But oh, this is no such storm.
For lo, forming as I watch,
A light appears
At the end of the lake.
My poor heart breaks
For pure joy’s sake.
They’re coming home!
They’re coming home at last!
My signal flares,
The town responds.
The midnight blue
Erupts in orange:
Fireworks–
The fire of peace.
The townfolk rush
To drown the docks,
And meet the waves
Of the final wake
Of the mighty ship
On its final call to port,
Never, never again to debark.
We’ll no more shut our eyes against the dark.
Awake, awake, everyone down to the lake!
Awake, awake, everyone down to the lake!
When I was a little kid
Riding in the car,
Sometimes I’d look to see
No hands upon the wheel.
No parent in the seat,
Nobody to slow it down,
Strapped too tight
To reach up front
And take the wheel–
I hope we stay on the road.
On my first day of class
I opened my front door.
Southbound birds and falling leaves
Swirled beneath my feet.
Further at the foot of the cliff,
The sea devoured the rain.
The closing sky took a heavy breath,
My vision swam,
I fell with a splash to my desk.
All throughout the day
The lightning bolts were too far away,
And I couldn’t see
To find my way to shore, but I
Knew there was an end,
Though the means ran thick with ashes and dust.
I swam with the current
Till the waters rolled more pure.
And now I’m older and smart,
With my own hands on the wheel,
But I’m not far down the road before I’m
Slamming on the breaks,
Spinning the car around.
I come to a sliding stop
To face the setting sun.
It’s burning a way through the frozen haze.
The world is turning in a drunken craze.
I should be afraid,
I should dig in my heals,
I should like to get off,
But I’ve learned enought that I
Know there is an end
Though the means run thick with ashes and dust.
I’ll Swim with the current
Till the waters roll more pure.
And now I’m older and smart,
With my own hands on the wheel,
But I’m not far down the road before I
Halt.
Stop.
But the Earth turns over again,
And the filthy slush slides away
Over the edge, lost
In the night pit.
Oh let it fall,
Oh let it fall
Un-mourned.
Only save up your tears for the dawn
When He’ll loosen His grip on the thorns,
And the petals fall into drifts
At the side of the road,
A soft landing for all the lost and aimless cars.
Another new contributor, Acheté, my brother of the sterling tongue, has joined The Buttered Slice. Excellence in poetry and language are his; he wrote the piece below, titled Gravity. We’re thrilled to have his gifts at our disposal. Please read more about him at the Contributors page.
Gravity is the security tether
That lets you let go of the grass
And gaze open-handed into the abyss
Of sun, moon, stars, and empty space.
Gravity is the shifting illusion
That says, of the wandering zenith,
“There! There is up and not down!”
And masks, with unfathomable
But green-blanketed mass,
The vast co-wandering nadir.
Tell me, daughter of Eve:
How does it feel to sit on a globe
Where live tigers wander free
And rain falls through open skies?
D: Before we start, can I ask you something – M: Go ahead. D: Does it smell like bacon in here? M: I don’t smell anything. D: Someone had a bacon sandwich on this table. Now it’s gonna be on my mind the whole interview. M: I can wipe off the table – D: Please, don’t, it’s a great smell — not just bacon but like a chicken cooked in bacon in an earthen pot, left out for a week — I’m getting a little heady, sorry, I have a nose for these things, pun not intended. M: I do smell saltines – D: I got into a pack before you came over. There are probably still some crumbs in my whiskers. M: You like saltines? D: I’m fascinated by what you guys eat — I mean, it’s an exciting day when I get switched to liver flavor, you know? If Ben didn’t sneak his vegetables to me my diet would be almost entirely kibble and rawhide. M: I had a question about rawhide, actually – D: Raw. Hide. Two of my favorite words, and I get a giant chew about once a month. My mom said she used to get a small chew once a year at Christmas, and now they’re like – M: My mom says the same thing about oranges, they used to be rare. I could eat one whenever I want. D: I think I have an advantage in that I still get very excited about things that should seem very common — maybe there are dogs who find giant rawhide bones passé. That seems sad. Probably lassa apsos. There’s one down the street, but she never talks to me. M: Do you think that’s her, though, or her owner? D: She’s into it, whatever it is. Look, I’m half pure on both sides, but that makes me as good as a mutt. You go back far enough in her pedigree, there’s a brown mutt that sneaked into the sheepherder’s camp.
M: Purebreds have the health problems, too. D: Hip dysplasia, compacted teeth, cataracts, don’t get me started. I’m old fashioned. It’s not that I won’t go to the vet, don’t get me wrong, but I saw a chihuahua with a little cart for his back legs — I chewed that up pretty good. Nothing wrong with what happened to old Old Yeller, right? M: Doesn’t that perpetuate the old roles and stereotypes? D: Mind if I hump your leg? No, seriously though, the first word in PETA is PET. M: You say you’re old-fashioned, but your breed, labradoodles, has only recently become fashionable. D: Like I said, a mutt. I happen to be a very handsome mutt, one who gets a new rawhide bone every month, but the only reason I didn’t end up like every other pound-puppy is my natural talent for not making people sneeze. M: So again, this contradiction – D: Listen I’m a huge fan of the Humane Society, I think they get it just about right. I hope — really — I wish them great success. I hope I never hear about another dogfight. Michael Vick should be glad we never met. But in the end — people have priorities. How can I judge, my brain’s the size of a tangerine, hopefully not a walnut. Will you rub my belly? M: Can we get through some more questions? D: I’m so tense, I don’t like thinking about PETA. I still smell that bacon. Plus I just saw a cat out across the street. M: Alright, what, a couple minutes? D: Better make it five.
[break]
M: How was that? D: Great. Thanks for the biscuits and water, too. M: Are you more comfortable here in the den? D: Believe it or not I can still smell when someone had a nosebleed in here, but I’ve stopped sniffing that spot. That’s this room to me, though, an ancient nosebleed. I might probe the couch for Cheez-Its when we’re done. M: Can I ask — licking hands? Every dog I know… D: You may not know this, but hands are completely fascinating. Have you noticed — [extends front paw] — my front legs end the same way as my back. Wait, they do, don’t they? Yeah. Yeah, if I had hands, well, Old Yeller might have ended the other way around. No, I mean, it’s not quite like that, but — I have a mouth, to relate to the world I basically have teeth, a jaw, and a tongue. Paws are good for digging, some European dogs live in houses with door handles, but you really had us whipped when you started putting knobs on everything you use to go outside. I can’t look at a brass finish without feeling helpless. You know, maybe you have obstacles, impediments in your life that you struggle with — maybe you don’t meet the kind of girl that you’d like to, I don’t know, [ed: cheeky!] but if you have troubles they generally aren’t of the I can’t get outside by myself variety. If I see a stranger, though, or hear a sound, or smell something really amazing, I always know I’m probably not going to meet them, or smell it, or eat it. I bark, because I can and it drives you crazy, but I know I’m not going to get to it. It’s right there, literally at your fingertips, and you just watch Judge Judy and eat ice cream. For some dogs hands become a fetish, they literally start to worship them — and they probably get more rubdowns because of it. When I got past puppyhood I found it embarrassing, so I don’t lick anymore unless they’re coated with something delicious, and you think that’s gross but everyone does it to me. But yeah, I can understand why some dogs lick hands all the time. M: Have you ever met a dog you think you could always want to be with? D: … no easy answer for that. M: No dog in the neighborhood? D: If you want to get into it — dogs, wolves, don’t mate for life. Usually if dogs mate anymore, at least in my circles, it’s been arranged by their masters. I can’t, you know, I never will father puppies — sorry to be graphic but you brought it here — and humans are a lot like dogs, you know, families, packs. And a good family, you never worry about being the Alpha, I’ve never even thought about how to lead a pack. There are dogs I know who try to be Alpha, or I guess they experience a void in leadership, and they try to fill it in, but they aren’t happier than me. I’ve met them, and they’re not. You can always pick them out at the park, they’re tense and they try to dominate you. Tough for them at home, but even worse, they have to keep it up outside. I don’t try to play with them, there’s no give-and-take. M: Would you rather live with dogs, though, if you had your choice? D: I’ve answered that as well as I can, I think. I don’t worry about it. Man has war, and work, and wages and worries. Lions and bears have to hunt – M: It sets you apart, then, you have this — occupational niche? D: Yeah. M: If you’re never challenged, though…you don’t miss, wonder, for lost potential? D: These dilemmas — your question, not mine! What would my puppies look like, could I keep a pack intact, survive in the wild? Keep that up and I will need puppy Prozac! I have a deep respect for the traditional relationship – M: I guess that’s where I’m going with this, hasn’t that relationship changed? Dogs were valuable when they had work to do – D: Poodles were guard dogs, Labradors went out on the hunt, but most breeds have been coming inside at night for hundreds of years — let me finish this thought, please — valuable when they had work? How many poems, songs, stories about dogs? It’s a confused history, isn’t it? Easy to view it through the lens of economics, I guess, but feelings, respect and compassion for one another — we don’t know which came first. Maybe unique among all animals, this bond. What if a man without a fire needed warmth one night and a mother wolf brought him in? Why can we tell when you’re about to have a seizure? Something happened, not just once, but enough that now I wouldn’t be more comfortable with a wolf than you would be, or than I am with you. If you tell me I’m diminished, you don’t see my true nature. It’s more than the job I was bred for. I wouldn’t trade places with the wild dogs, they have the streets, they have hunger, they have short lives, mistrust, rabies, fear. Show me a dog who thinks that’s his “true nature” and I’ll gladly chew on his toys. And take any nice collars, too. M: Speaking of — I see your leash, wanna go for a walk? D: I see a patch of sun under the window with my name on it. Maybe next time. M: Can I pet you? D: Get me another biscuit.
