The Future Isn't Thirsty

Yet another piece related to my degree project. Hexagrams: #39 Obstruction ---> #33 Retreat

The Future Isn't Thirsty

This season, there is an over-abundunce of cacti in the foyer. Spiny and plastic, anchored beneath wood chips, they invoke a breed of nostalgia that is not compost-able. Rather, they are indestructible creatures from a B movie, able to haunt the most unexpected corners of the mundane; any moment one could lumber off the set and devour our morals. Given this threat, the guests are vulnerable; I have been hired to protect them.

To accurately play this role, they have outfitted me in the garb of Wyatt Erp, and I am drowning in my own sweat. Fifteen feet above the entrance, a giant banner reads "THE FUTURE ISN'T THIRSTY." Rolled vinyl emits a whooshing yelp as the custodial staff lowers a projection screen along the eastward wall. At stage left, key members of the press (those hired for the occasion,) flash posed pictures of W.P.C. (Water Purification Committee,) members addressing the historic importance of the event. Heard in its polyphonic grandeur, the room's chatter suggests a jungle-like diversity of sounds, or perhaps the condensed echo of rush-hour traffic were it rising to ground-level from beneath the Amazon, (the likes of which now festers with mutant-life.)

I pace deliberately around each rectangular garden, a sentinel lost to daydreams. Each garden is adorned with a mechanical fountain spring; their combined gurgle is enough to tease urine through a kidney stone. The event is meant to preserve the utopian tone of the last presidency, when it was assumed that we'd be able to save Africa.

Occasionally, my boredom becomes painful; it is then that I call upon my favorite trick. I perform a time-lapse of the moment, condensing the lobby's occupants with its furnishings, until all loses its trace of animation. Though the water's trickle continues to tickle my ear, each motor ceases to turn. The face of every guest remains awkwardly posed, exuding its own calculating glow. Guest's hands grasp outward at traces of frozen conversation, some clutching the dregs of a glass of champagne. These uptowners would be shriveled bodies were they lost in the desert. There, hands would reduce to bone, and with them, each plea in want of an oasis. For me, the oasis is real; the dream is not dead; the dream is something rooted in my marrow, the spongy profane core of my body's structure. The mystic in me screams: "The antidote for thirst still lingers in the air once every cell has putrefied, but the dream is nameless!" I realize that if I had to, I could wander through myself like this for days without end. With this, my desert-scape disappears, and the guests return to piddling about.

I wonder who built this theater. That honor must be held by the Bureau of Water Purification. I'm sure its solvent; the state subsidizes environmental projects, and these days, they're the only organization with enough money to do so.

I wonder if I really am cute in blue fatigues? Well, this CEO certainly thinks so. He's been ogling me for the past twenty minutes, his wife aghast at his lack of concern for her own fixation on the upcoming Purification Party gubernatorial candidate, a man who's tie sports its own second-rate globs of technicolor distraction. And these pricks think they're gonna save the world. I could really use a drink.

A Sense of Drifting and of Meeting

This piece emerged as the third experiment after having "built" the following hexagrams from The I Ching: #55 Development (Gradual Progress) and #44 Coming to Meet. My intention here was to provide a first person account of a fractured identity. I can't help but draw my own comparisons between Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman, Kafka's Josephine the Singer and Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers; hence my bizarre dedication. Hope you enjoy :)

A Sense of Drifting and of Meeting

or an homage to Our Lady Josephine of the Flowers

A sense of drifting and of meeting. Is there something betwixt a lament and a song? I hear her calling, she who once gave shape to the operatic vowels, to the places without faces, without texture, without land. And what is between? Why can I not hear her tonal heights clearly as she soars far above the trees?

I wonder if she even remembers my face. Yet, it was just last night that I saw her out for a stroll through the park, chewing away at those florescent pink stubs of keratin - each finger bleeding as she bit. I'm not sure if she's starving herself or just nervous, but she's always at it, and her hair seems much thinner than it used to. Locks of straw. A tattered trench coat. Her aura aglow with an unkempt fragility.

And oh, how she loved nature! My skittish soprano was always complicit in a mighty chorus! She used to engage geese in the park and as she sang her lilt would synchronize with their aerial hi-jinx. Having mastered the birds she soon moved on to creating whirlpools in the pond. She progressed so quickly that she eventually learned to control the bringing of light, the darkening of the earth, and the great rushes of autumnal wind that wobble the empty rowboats. Every Sunday, she would again command the geese, though on this day she would revert to The Marriage of Figaro; this would promote a most erratic flight, scattering feathers every which way. Even the pigeons knew her voice conducted the meeting of ornithology and opera, and I have heard that if she could sing now, it might prompt the definitive merger of science and art.

Though never at rest, she would often sit with me over a latte and we would take turns sculpting and subsequently tonguing frothy beards from each other's face. We lived together for years, nursing wounded or aged creatures from the park back to good health, providing euthanasia when necessary. That's what I've been helping with lately at the SPCA. One day we brought a feral dog to the vet, who suggested that we keep her; she was a mangy, sweet little yapper. See, my singer and I used to sing together, but my voice is too rough since I had the operation. But she still sings day and night; she often keeps me awake. We were very close once. Sometimes I wake up thinking I'm still wrapped up in her dirty afghan, reeking of wet dog.

My therapist said I'll never really forget her; I'll just have to learn to love her like a sister. See sometimes the only way for me to see her is by going to the park and staring in the water so that I can dream a little about how I used to paint my nails and sing and walk my Chihuahua around the pond.

And when the wind picks up, I know it's her vibrato that causes this image to disintegrate, as the surface tension is disrupted by explosions of new rain on old water, and my newly bearded face struggles for congruence. And now the thunder scares the geese. And now the hotdog guy turns off his radio and Mozart's magic floats away.

t(w)o rise through metal

t(w)o rise through metal

Such a rascal! Come sit.

Careful now;

Mommy's breasts sore

One more story but

firsta

simple

lesson bout school

Sweetie,

friends ill never

speakforyou

baby,

one can never be two

(

)

butjustone

saccharine

lolly

may get baby

through

folly

Recollection relies on the sore spots

Channels their magnetism

Assembles crude tapestries of metal into protean orbs of reflection

No common center - starry - fractured

Somehow centripetal

Wait with alacrity. Form grows thin,

form grows thinner. Flesh arms

striated, aping red ridges

of clay and boulder

Wait here; whittle the memory,

whittle away your own thumb

He'd rather you mount from behind. A mountain

spring bisects conifer from deciduous

Leaves sweep away down-stream

What rises from flesh

has stench, yet is supple

as symbol when altered

through pain

Pesky Pronouns

Though I would have much preferred to not use any pronouns in this piece, I'm still pleased with its appearance and sound. There's always next time...

flowing over his lips, choices dance, flames

extend the rose-tinted orbit of each nipple

with a kiss, faith is wet, she

a vibratory chorus

unlocking new voices of revery

to hold what is lost

beneath breath

and release

what is scalding with water

like a faithful wish

lost underneath

a convex lid

each is held to a breast

bone circling