Morrison's New Language?

I return to the screen to scream, to the keyboard to scrawl my name in chalk, praying the rain doesn’t come too soon to erase it. I listen to Jim Morrison’s “An American Prayer”, words flowing in and out, streaming like video on the net, images in sudden fits and starts, pixelized and unclear. I need to offer a sacrifice to get a faster connection. How would Morrison have liked the Net? He’d have loved it, a new media in which to rule, to mold into a shape of his will. I wonder at times if he has somehow transformed his soul into code, streams through the network of wires, across the phone lines of the country, dipping into this chip and that circuit, carrying stock quotes to business men and news of births to grandparents and postings of dream interpretations to newsgroups. He has become the primal electronic scream of modems crying out to each other from livingrooms and dens across America. Is this the new language he envisioned, this cybernetic screech? Can music be made of this? Can poetry? Like the priest on the pulpit, Morrison intones:
“…Soft driven, slow and mad

Like some new language,

Reaching your hand with the cold,
sudden fury of a divine messenger.”

Pronoun

I belong to one of the major form classes in any of a great many languages. I am a substitute for a noun or noun equivalent, take noun constructions, and am declined. I refer to persons or things named, asked for, or understood in context. I have little or no fixed meaning except one of relation or limitation. I take many forms: emphatic, identifying, intensive, personal, reciprocal, refexive, and relative.

I am, in fact, not a noun, but its substitute.

Fishing for Mermaids

Blue
photo by John Carleton.

A strong distaste in his nostrils and back of his throat, like something rotting. A sinus infection, perhaps, or a general distaste of the smell of things. He wandered around the rooms of his lake home. On the dock he could see his little girl fishing, her legs dangling over the side, the bobber floating on the still water. She would fish from sunrise to noon with a patience that escaped him. What you fishing for, he’d ask, and she would respond “For mermaids, Daddy. Now go away, you’re scaring them.” Odd girl from the loins of an odd mother.

He went to the living room, pulled a Kleenex out of the box and tried blowing his nose again. Noting came out. He felt dried up and like his nasal passages was a closed up house with milk rotting on the kitchen counter.

He grabbed his car keys of the table and headed out.

He drove fifteen minutes to Mainstreet and pulled up outside the 8th Street Grill. It wasn’t on 8th street any more; it had moved from 8th to Main about six years back, but the owner didn’t want to pay for new printing on the paper napkins. Inside, the noise of families and friends talking, the clink of dishes, the cash register printing out checks, the hiss of food from the kitchen. He grabbed a seat at the counter. The waitress, Doreen, had high arching eyebrows like the McDonalds golden arches. Can those be real, he wondered? They didn’t look drawn on. She took a pad of paper and held it, ready for his order. What did he want? What did he really want? He didn’t know but he couldn’t make her stand there forever so he asked for a blueberry muffin and a cup of coffee.

He’d forgotten about his daughter; she was still on the dock, and unsupervised. So what if she wore a Snoopy life vest, that wouldn’t save her from a kidnapper or a bear. He almost got out of his seat to drive back, but then realized it wouldn’t matter if he drove back. She wouldn’t be there anymore. She’d have been taken in by the mermaids of the lake by now, and she would be submerged in the deep pools while the mermaids decorated her with clam shells and long draping garlands of seaweed.

“So where’s the wife today?” the cook asked from over the counter, smirking to the dishwasher clearing trays.

Probably fucking that shoe salesman out at the mall. “I don’t know Sam, do I look like I gotta track her comings and goings all day?”

“Just a question,” Sam replied, wiping his hands on his apron and snatching another order from the carrosel. He ducked back into the kitchen and Doreen slid a cup of coffee on a saucer front of him. “You hafta pick out your own muffin at the counter.”

“What the hell for?”

“Because that’s the policy, and I am not one to go against policy; now it’s just a few feet away. You can handle that, now can’t you Clark?”

For fuck sake, why does everybody have to tell me what to do? But he walked over and spent considerable time examining the muffins to find just the right one. By the time he made it back to his seat, his coffee was cold. Have to put more sugar in it now. He shoveled sugar into his coffee, then dropped the spoon with a clatter onto the saucer. He took a grim satisfaction of how Doreen jumped at the sound.

He could have his own affair, he figured. Maybe that elementary school teacher of his daughter’s, or maybe the girl that worked the counter down at the feed mill. She was probably too young for him, but leaving his wife for someone far younger than her would be all the better.

What the hell do I care if she’s screwing around with someone, he wondered? It’s only because of what people might think, is all. When you get right down to, does it matter to me if she’s found someone else? If she was to keep seeing that guy and nobody would find out, I don’t think I’d give a rip. But I want something too. If she gets to have someone on the side, some taste of satisfaction, then I deserve that too, don’t I? It just doesn’t have to be an affair. The last thing I need right now is another woman, so what’s it going to be?

Yeah, what’s it going to be, he asked himself, taking a sip of cold coffee that was bitter and sweet and at the same time, then a bite of one perfect blueberry muffin. Have to tell Sam he really knows how to bake them. Maybe later, he decided, still sore about the insinuation about his wife.

A boat? Yeah, a boat. He’d wanted one ever since they bought the lake home but his wife had always said no. He could escape out on the water from sunrise to noon. What you fishing for, Clark? Mermaids. Quiet down now. You’re scaring them away.

Write Good

She wrote me a letter
photo by thermophle.

No, not like that. Harder, with more substance. Make me taste it and feel it. Good grammar doesn’t matter; you always do what your grammarian tells you? Don’t talk about concepts like love and hate, talk about the friction between our bodies. Don’t tell me about old lovers, tell me about now, this very moment, the most important moment. Stay away from adjectives. I am a noun. Use only nouns.

Bright Shiny Objects

A Picture Share!
photo by margarita azucar.

I knew I’d only be seeing her for a couple of days, then she would be whisked back to the west coast, and then even further away across the ocean, so I knew this was mainly a fun weekend, a handful of hours when the woman I knew from the internet would be incarnated in the flesh. Getting too attached, and then hurt from going our separate ways, isn’t really a possibility for me. I have chronic anesthesia, I am desensitized from any prolonged sense of feeling. Especially once someone is no longer in my proximity, I tend to forget and get distracted by the shiny objects around me. I am essentially a simple creature.

I was surprised at myself when driving back from Milwaukee yesterday to still be thinking about her. The way she laughs and her easy smile, her unfailing confidence with a map even as we get more and more lost deep in the urban woods of Milwaukee, the way we picked out the same glass of wine with dinner. The bow shape of her upper lip when she pouts, or is she thinking? What is she thinking, with that Mensa mind of hers, or it is the writer, wondering how best to use me? Is it the Christian that wants to save me, or the dominatrix that wants to consume me? But what bows her upper lip doesn’t concern me, if I really want the anesthesia to wear off. When we wrote poems at the dinner table on scraps of paper, all of the words I contributed were suspiciously externalized. All nouns. All about the bright shiny objects around me.

Bed and Breakfast

He sits alone in his room at a B&B, one of those restored Victorian homes in a rundown Milwaukee neighborhood, wondering what she’s going to be like. He’d read her blog for months, seen dozens of pictures her, her daughter, her friends. But what’s it really going to be like to see her for the first time the next morning, hug her like seeing an old friend he’d never met.

Outside the window, the base beat of music plays from the rundown apartment across the driveway. He turns up the air conditioner so the drone will drown out the noises from outside. Her turns up the Spanish music playing on the clock radio, a very small sound from across the room. He types in her web address, opens her blog, reads over all of her old entries like tracing the different patterns of moles across her body or the lines of her palm, trying to memorize her.

And what has happened to his Pharmacist? Their relationship had been downgraded to “friends”, and he wondered if you can really be friends after having dated, even if it worked out for Seinfeld and Elaine. He wondered if friends can still make out from time to time. He wondered if she was reading his thoughts across a computer screen in another city three hundred miles away, and if she was hurt knowing with what anticipation he waited for morning.

Let the Rain In

Squeezed Lemon
photo by yanivba.

I let the rain come in, just for the hell of it. Lightning, thunder, rain trashed the room like a rockstar, and now all of my magazines on the coffee table are warped with water. I sit back in a damp recliner and feel pleased. Bring it all in. I don’t want to be shut up in here anymore but I can’t bring myself to pass the threshold of the door, so instead let’s let the world in. Wasn’t that once the tagline for the worldwide web? It applies to thunderstorms too.

I read different blogs and admire how some people feel so deeply that the torment is squeezed from them like a lemon. I’ve dried out. Maybe it was because I shut myself up in here for so long I can’t remember quite what it’s like to care for someone again. I don’t remember what it feels like, that torn up run-and-hide kind of passion and love that makes you miserable. So instead I sit contentedly in my apartment, trying to let the storms in.