OwlOutlier

The Corrections

Maybe it is putting you at risk to tell you about that time our friend Stephen disappeared. We had a quite pleasant lunch with him, all seven of our jolly tribe, on the deck of a seafood restaurant called “The Fish Show.” It was a sunny Friday afternoon in July. Stephen vanished that same weekend. His parents, his fiancee, and everyone else began making urgent calls back and forth. He was just gone. The police were contacted and by that Monday he was officially a “missing person.” Stephen’s goofy, loveable face was all over the television news that week. His MISSING posters were up in the front windows of businesses and on telephone poles all over the city. Two weeks passed in this agony. When he started texting his friends and family again, we all felt our tightened muscles and clenched jaws let go. We let out whoops of sheer joy. But he acted as if nothing had ever happened. Stephen insisted he had never been missing. Thirty-three is too old to play a prank like that on everyone. So we were all sure he had suffered some sort of break with reality, possibly had experienced a head trauma, or that this signaled the sudden emergence of mental illness. He showed us his phone, which was filled with texts from all of us during the period he had been missing. The strangest thing is we had indeed been sending him texts voicing our great concern and worries about him. But these were different, chatty texts by “us” “to him. None of them were asking, “Where the hell are you?!?” They were talking about casual events about which we had no recollection. They seemed to cross-reference with each other well. These versions of us were clearly having perfectly normal lives with no missing Stephen. Plans were being made, anecdotes were being shared, jokes and emojis had been flying fast the entire time we had been worried sick that Stephen would be found floating in the river or moldering deep in some woods. The weird thing is that the messages sounded exactly like each one of us had written each text. But we hadn’t. We became convinced it simply had to be a hoax Stephen was perpetrating and a very unfunny one. We thought maybe a new prank television show or internet series was behind this. If so, they had wasted the resources of several agencies, pissed off the police and made us all cry pointless tears. That’s what we said to him. “Stop it, Stephen! Just stop playing!” He was stunned by all the evidence we showed him of the fifteen days he had been missing, his apartment empty, his pets unfed. He showed us a video he had made of himself playing with his black cat, Urania, which was dated right in the middle of the time had had been missing. It certainly looked like his cat, but how could we be sure? And metadata can surely be faked, we told each other. Then certain agencies in the government became very interested in Stephen. And he disappeared again. This time we were told he was just being “assessed.” Nobody was allowed to contact him, not even his parents. The story disappeared from the news. It was reported (falsely) in the news media that Stephen had been found after having a “medical episode” and that he was ‘safe” and “reunited with his loved ones.” Now, several weeks since Stephen’s second disappearance, we have begun to notice that we are all being surveilled, followed wherever we go. We have been trying to meet in private to discuss what to do. Rowan said he is leaving the country, but somehow I doubt he will make it. I don’t think any of us will make it.

An Obituary

I aimed at the rabbit and missed.
My blood brothers laughed at me.
My arrow fell to the left of those lovely flanks
that were every river I ever wanted.
Because I wanted my arrow to miss you.
The rabbit, she kicked diamonds into the air
and was gone. I saw my entire life with women.
Lovely, doomed. “Run!” I prayed into her body.
“Ha! I am a boy!” snorted the rabbit
in my dreams that night, her hidden fur
grazing me as she agreed to become human,
to marry me in my weird moon cycles,
so I could die, young and happy,
on my beloved exile’s motorcycle that was Jim’s,
nobody you know, just a few years after.
My body found on a highway you still use
the nights you visit that cursed drunk
because he looks just a little like me.

Homeless

The morning glories,
gone rogue,

travel grass-fringe
pf alleys, of battered cars,

many gone still
as money in their houses.

Years of a.m. walks,
my quiet greets

theirs. The deer
and their children

will die, and then me.
But the purple

twining flower
will still unfurl

stars, a thirsty
twisting like lust

in a slow motion
of years. But what

are years to you,
weird god?

Cup

I woke early to earliness.
The stars are in their upside-down cup.
Do you think to find a cup yourself?
Cup your ears to hear what’s close to the house,
milling the darkness into its own darkness.
Cup your body foetal, to an image of birth. Of death.
All the cups of the house cup darkness now,
not even holding their breath.

The cup looks nearly immortal,
whether it breaks or not. I mean the idea.
The physical idea of what is happening
when a cup hosts air or a liquid or anything.
First, it was just a stone by the river, a depression
in the center. Something almost human
staring at this, drawn to it. Then scooping
water with its hand…no, it’s almost a paw.
The miracle of that space in the stone,
that strange kindness of holding, keeping
what we need. But wide open to the sky,
losing what is there. Giving it away every day,
to wind or sun or long animal tongue.

And the smart animal returns later, maybe
the next morning or afternoon, and feels a twinge
when the cup is empty. The dream of filling
something becomes everything….

Apologize

I apologize for leaving earth
to their feelings
for being vaporous
in the way of love or reason
that took us onto cliffs
joy of panoramic regret
or vision bread
we stood inside photos then
people stood in paper
you could touch rasp
here drink this coffee imp
I need to say
I am becoming paper
again the leaves
against my windows
people bodies I know
I drown
I hope to drown
between worlds
our parents double-sealed

Department Of

You are alive but very-slow-moving.
Dead things are passing you at astonishing speed, incredible forces.

This is a peculiar equation we drive. Nobody says.

Doppler screams away into the red distances of those unjustly taken,
come around in-your-face cop blue.

The cops pretend to chase those speeding dead things.

You pull over to check your makeup.

You are still made of insect jitter.

You are still made of mercy stutter.

Fairy Tale (an Epistle)

I am less a person than a calling to a person. The origin of that calling is a mystery to me. It appears, brooming consciousness from something that was starrier and brighter, that lived basilisk eyes all night. It’s like the daisies just past the truck stop drifting downtown. I have begun to buy it things. My body when asleep. So far, none of the gifts has been accepted by this paralytic dreamboat. But soon. Soon…
The man who stapled a crow to his body does not bother me. The man who stapled a crow to his body no longer bothers me. It is strange to me that he fills stadiums with people by doing just that, stapling a crow to his body. The crowds gather by the thousands to watch it peck him torturously. They talk about the stapler in reverential whispers. When he leaves, he tells them he loves them and is woozy. He wanders off, losing blood, smiling.
Salt. I send you salt for our anniversary! You don’t realize we are even married. But this salt arrives at your front door in a box, in elaborate mythology. You go to the front door of your house and find the box. When you open it and find salt has been worked into a museum-quality piece of statuary, you run to show your wife, and she immediately bursts into flames. She bursts into flames under the baleful eyes of social media.
We agree to meet in the pages of a children’s book. The book was authored in the 1940s, so our human safety and dangers are all garbled. A cartoon animal shelters us in the city and feeds us. We learns she is part of the Cartoon Resistance and she wants us to join, to become blood siblings in her secret kitchen. We do it sheepishly, cut ourselves and bleed into each other’s bodies, feeling like eight-year-olds. Someone mentions the surgeon general, someone the Pope and someone Wallace Stevens. Later, we both comment how sickly she looked. How sick her blood must be.
You die and go into a cistern. Everybody knows where the cistern is but me. You repeatedly send me messages scolding me for not visiting you. But you never tell me your “death address”. I see after a while that you are starting to enjoy this. Like so many dead game-players, you are using death as gift wrap for poison gifts. You are deathwashing everything you have ever said. You can barely keep from laughing anytime you say anything anymore. It is like a disease. You run into the ocean to hide your laughter, drowning all over again.
The Golden Fleece was only rented. The creature from which it had been skinned to make it came back for it with an army of lawyers. The dragons fought on a battlefield, on what was thought to be the side of justice, to retain the fleece, but later we learned: it was all just corporate interests. We had jumped rope for the bastards for years. The dragons themselves were told to retain lawyers, but they dashed themselves on rocks below the cliffs. They saved a little face.
I crawl into a hole. This suddenly feels like an elegant, 21st century solution. I am afraid to share this with anyone. It will just get all twisted.
I is a mother. I is a bother. I is a dither. I is blather. I is bluster. I is a rooster each morning. I is I because my little eye knows me. I is a real pain in the pronoun. I is a conifer. I is a wicket. I is a sorry lube for what you are about to say. Do it dry.
Tasting the eyes of stones. All night last night, all long night, all long last night. We were. Kissing the borscht of dragon blood. I felt the need to follow up with after you had died. Only then would the real breakthrough be possible. You would show me I’m a tympanum. I would make you vibrate like The Sun. The new technology tastes blood.
I can’t follow you home, follow you home. I can’t follow the shadow into the sleeve, the sleeve into the hole. Nothing beads the windowsill as you promised would occur. I open the window all night long. Off and on. The binaries of being rain and dry, sorrowful and here. The river barks several times under its ancient long moonlight of gossip. We go and look down into darkness to see the first time our words, overlaid, were like the souls of birds dying in the same instant. The same apocalypse become kindergarten.
This was and is the fairy tale. You erase it to get to all the white candy of the empty page. I am beside you brushing the tarry snow of our taffy conversations away. Eventually, we must reach bone. The explanation of number is more number. The fairy tale begins to hum to sell itself. It has nobody but itself and the chandelier left after the grand hotel disappears. Still floating there. The welcome is not welcome so becomes powerful.
Pocketfuls of things for you. It’s all that is left. Insects, gluten art, toroidal glitter space that occur in cinema as it drowns. I drown before you in the color red, never red, once red, almost red, red that follows you home then turns the corner, seeking a circle like you that is not you. Never your sweet mind. Your first phone number you never told me. I am trying to call that place where you were and are not tonight, all night.

some wildflowers (still life)

today I have the laziness that grows out of fear
dominating me like an alien being that slipped inside my body
in some sexy cinematic way. a parasite cop seduction like “Hello.”

can’t you see the way I handle stolen sunflowers in bed
and stay too long in the Underworld of the refrigerator?
I start to live between two languages, and both hunt me

and want to kill me for not living forever in their cult cells
like a plant on a windowsill in the city of eternally forgotten phone numbers.
I enter and feel a reverence. I, a fox, explode into a cloud of pronouns

Something in Some Mood

Let us celebrate tonight the strange ways shadows have
of courting the earthly objects that cast them.
They hang around their very necks like desperation
or jealousy, or wishfulness, or sad thirstiness in homeliness.
I can’t bear to criticize them, since they don’t really exist.
Yet I want to watch them all day and silently judge them,
what fools they are making of themselves.
I want to go over and say something to them, right where they live.
Look at the shadow of that sycamore tree lying there
on our hot summer street, dodging the bullets of sunlight.
I watch and think, “I’d rather be dead than be that way.”

Fancy Seeing You Here

Today we met on the street and smiled
We did not acknowledge the Sun
shining down and making us both possible

We both talked about Pete and this newspaper
and “Who is this please standing before me?”
“Will I be executed shortly?” each wondered,

it had been a few years since swerving together
in the soft wars of the twenties, thirties, Viking
discussions in kitchens. We lit up for a few minutes,

then were washed down the conduit into our present ghost armies.