#via writes things

[highabovetheland]

I lie next to you in the back of the truck on the way home, jostling like used cargo that had enough—the point you can hear the cracks in the crates. We wore our matching dresses but that wasn’t enough. I wanted to breathe into and with you to the long lamented sounds of the old ghost trains in the distance, the ones that passed by for years with the graffiti on them, the same timeworn, abused train cars.

How old are you before you notice what people have written on you?

When we stopped by the roadside with your boyfriend your hands moved in waves, strange fits of grace. Your mind eases into mine. You take one flower and then another, so that we match then too. At that point I knew enough about flowers to know we wore death in our hair that night and you gave me the oddest smile because you knew death and it didn’t matter. You ate lunch with him and took inventory at the library every Tuesday mornings;

“You can’t come in here this early,” you’d say, and always leave me behind.

[highabovetheland]

I.

She sat down not as far from him and definitely not with ears as long trailing behind him like the stray bits of string that dangled from his robes. He stared at her so intensely he trembled in his seat. This was not the man they told him about, he seemed so frightened and out of place. "What did you do in the steppes?" she asked him, her voice a gentle cold fuzzy sweet peach. He merely sat there across from her in the same position, one leg spread out under the table while the other was tucked against his body and he hugged it close as if it were in pain. His nose twitched and his mouth opened but for a few minutes the only sound that came out of him was a strange click, click coming from his throat. "I only sit here and do the sun stuff," she continued to say. "I don't know what you saw up there. But that's not why you sit here before me, is it." "I'm tired," he only managed to say, slumping over.

II. [ten minutes later]

"I'm sure that's it." Her tone was strangely defiant. She had ready finished her tea five minutes before their conversation really started moving but she still held her cup up to her lips at irregular intervals. "I'm tired." "How long has it been?" "I don't know." He sat up straight again. "It's not my business there but I want it to be. I feel like it has to be." "Well, who else will do the sun rituals, Klaus?" She smirked at the question. "I think I killed a bodyguard." "You think?" She feigned surprise. "There was a lot of yelling, and--suddenly he was just at me, like, rabid. I only saw some blur in a white coat behind him. She caused a lot of the noise." He rubbed the end of one of his stringy ears. "I'm tired," he said again. But he still sat perfectly upright, eyes open wide like bright new marbles.

[highabovetheland]

6-8-2015

and she said, "have you heard the story of the red man who scaled scoured and soared until nothing was left but dew?" she said, "he might have been green once, but his blue it melted away with the sea." I have seen him I said. but I am naught but blue there is no catching me in the sea

[highabovetheland]

“He is a Spoken,” the Heard remarked, “but you, I will have to keep an Unspoken. Only the Unspoken can hear the Unheard, and you are not ready for this task, and this is why I give you this burden to bear.”

[highabovetheland]

There’s an unholy heaven now;

Guide the angels back to their gardens.

Map key: You are Here. --> Where You’ll find Me

[highabovetheland]

11-19-2015

I’m eating ice crystals on the floor. You’ve always been here. You took the bird’s nest to the veterinarian that morning, you were so worried, the tiny embryo’s beak bore a bad omen in a tiny crevice by its eye And the roses all turned softly in the dawn under the lines of light. I did not check the garden for two or three days I Did not know. Ah, the king, he was gone for four years; and Ah, the queen, she had never existed, That was the news that you had for the day to share. And the tiny crevice Between your eyes was worn and housed a live, living Doubt. Doubts were rare finds these days, you never saw them fluttering about the bleeding hearts and the magnolias like they used to. And Qualms, either; those often found underneath leaves, yet no more. Fancy that, you said as you turned to what was left of them; Fancy that.

[highabovetheland]

[untitled exercise i wrote about a customer at mcdonald’s]

You stand there with your mouth wide-open, like you expect good fortune to fall right into it. Your glazed-over eyes, your smirky demeanor, the way you sway forth-and-back with your hands behind you, fingers locked, and you laugh up at the menu above you; your life is so spent Yet filled with choices, that you feel entitled to the common things. You slip a wink, a remark or two to the girls, your cleverness knows no bounds at all, does it not? And you slide away in your ragged jacket, slip like jelly back into the corner with the spiders.

[highabovetheland]

a clock watched, moves never

I hold a secret in my shoulders that you’ll have to find, closer edging,

the rattle of snakeskin against snakeskin, the curdling of leftover empathy in the fridge,

surrounded by my sepals unfurling, and the sodden two windows that lie row by row,

have you found it?

I dust off the bones of the fridge and I reveal that old, stale emotion. It has no expiration date but the juxtaposition of truth against truth has stained it. It corrupts my fingers as I touch it and they begin to melt. “Unsafe for consumption,” but I consume it anyway.

If you kick enough against that old washboard, (with time, with talent, with time, with talent) the seams shatter against the place, and the  thin shards reflect your sins all over you, that mosaic of lies.