Travel Backward To Go Forward Surazeus Seattle 17 April 1992 I worked at the same job for ten years. Time I quit and went out on the road in search of adventure. Road warrior tripping through the street corridors of Dream Town, three thousand miles lined with knots of factories, apartments, and malls from Victoria to San Diego. Trembling at the hard locked door of his basement room, the student tries to steady his hand as he aims the jagged key at the lock. You have to wait a little longer, my precious brass lock. Someday I shall place your soul in the stone heart of a woman, and you will have bright eyes. Forgive me for keeping you blind, dear heart, for I failed again to find you a body. The key slips into the lips of the brass lock, and a click shatters the walls. They all fall down. The eggman rolls backward, laughing at a joke Renard shared with a sly grin. The sun burns yellow at dry grass where sticky green goo drips off tips, like teardrops of a princess. The screaming clown strains at the bone chains, clawing the sticky pink cocoon to shreds that drips wet from twisted arms. Face pale white, powdered in white flour. Giant fingers press the dough of his gum fat, squishing him down into the slime of tofu fudge, where turtles dream, and he rolls up into an iron ball, a bullet penetrating balloon of a juicy apple full of dreamers. And he screams delicate flute voice to silence roaring of waves that crash against rocks of bouncing continents. Alone in vast desert, where cabins beaten by two hundred years of bored rain sag against twisted pine trees. Blue tank of a motorcycle glistens, dented and rusty, pearl drops of the afternoon rain still hanging from the handlebars. Bull horns peer from above the splintered door at a polished razor blade horizon. He takes a drag at the cigarette, drops it to dust, boot heels it down, slowly rises to unkink his back, tips felt hat to cool his sweating brows, spits, and shoots a clean hole in the rusty tank of his motorcycle like monkeys doing trampoline on a typewriter. Does the bike topple over with a crash, or explode into roses of laughter? I was walking on the beach with Piero and Hasim when a beautiful girl with green eyes whose red flaming fire flowing long in cool sea breeze, came up, holding a half-empty drink, and we talked about a lot of things, and she invited me back to her campfire. The guys returned to our group at the cabin, and she introduced herself as Rosa. Her eyes were so green, I felt myself sinking into soft grass. Eggs shine bright as silver mirrors. We came on a rusting oil tanker lurching up at the bleeding sky, sides gashed open by ancient granite rocks rocks that lurk under supple green waves. I wanted to go out and see the tanker, to penetrate its gloom, and sniff at the putrid black oil of its belly sucking at the bitter wounds in its thighs, and maybe to drink at the nightmares still festering in the cesspools of its breasted tanks. She got pissed. She stalks off and leaves him standing alone without any hands on the beach under a blackening sky, and the wind gets vicious. He shivers as he tiptoes across the half-hidden tits of granite rocks, far out to the iron wreck, trembling like a lonely young boy creeping into room of his mother. The skeleton lies sideways, an egg fallen nine days and nine nights from the pearl walls, lying cracked half open like a turtles egg. I remember when the cow died. It was discovered by Tanaka, the Golden Retriever my uncle gave me. She led me one afternoon to her black corpse behind the hill, a lump of dry rotten flesh half hidden in tall wet swamp grass. The horns broken off her skull seem to burst with curdled milk. When I poked her belly with a stick, greenish yellow ooze burst the bubble of pink skin and spurted all over Tanaka. She yelped and jumped in the clear pond to wash out her shining shaggy hair. Three months before that muck all came clean, and left her hair bright again, gold in morning sunlight. Waist deep, he slogs his body at thick brown slime. Alligators watch him with golden eyes. The boldest glides toward the naked man holding a spear high above his head, hair matted with mud, bones and feathers. The boldest sinks down and glides. He pauses, watching the green log floating toward him without a current. Pretending not to notice the eyes, gold as the sun on frozen mud, he pushes forward against the slime. She opens her jaws to chomp his thigh, and he rams the spear in her eyes, jabbing it deep into soft brain tissue, ripping gashes in the fluttering curtain of her dream. The alligator thrashes at thick slime, and then sinks down, like a seed shoved into dark dirt by the farmers sharp thumb as he hums. My old teacher in fourth grade loved to tell stories about the way people used to live in long-ago times. She wove her words in the air with her hands, the same way girls make intricate webs with a loop of yarn, and she made us wiggle with her eyes. But my dad told me they were lies. I am the man of the house, he shouted, as a cockroach crawled up the leg of his uniform pants. I almost lost my cool, and laughed as he lectured. I visited my high school recently. The lawns and classroom walls that once shimmered in my hungry eyes, were but bricks and blackboards and blades of grass wet in light rain.
Posted on: Sat, 22 Nov 2014 01:08:34 +0000