(Always a Stranger is the first of five we will be running by Fabrice Poussin this week. Dale is by far a better judge of poetry than I am, but I think just about anyone will see the quality in this poet’s writings–Leila)
I feel the crushing weight of all those lives
foreign to me, and I know they do not understand
the pain mine, factor that seems to define my existence.
I think of those who may have loved me once, who perhaps
care for me a little today, but they move on without looking back
they have their own lives to live, and I stay frozen as a statue.
I cannot fathom the immensity of this punishment,
a continued torture that ravages my body and soul
for decades, I have been condemned to aloneness.
To realize that I cannot be another adds to the yoke
as I am so thoroughly trapped in a life I am beginning to abhor
“The prettiest girl / in all the world / is in a little Spanish town / but I left her / for a Bonnie lass / and I told her / I’d see her around / but that Bonnie lass / and her heart of glass / could not hold a candle / to bumming around…”
– Tom Waits
…His eyes popped open and his brain popped awake and he realized she wasn’t in the bed beside him which was the reason his eyes had popped open. He knew what time it was even though he didn’t know how he knew that but when he looked at the digital clock on her bedside table he saw he was correct: 4:37 AM. And we went to bed past 1:30 AM. His impulse now was to gather his things together as quickly as possible and leave as fast as possible, out the window if necessary.
But he hauled himself out of bed and walked around the corner into the small kitchen of her studio apartment where he knew she was. He looked out the window at the brown rooftops of Chicago where they spread outward to the blue lake stretching away into the distance in the growing light and then he noticed that she had Sherwood Anderson’s short story collection Winesburg, Ohio beside her on the table. She’d already told him more than once the book was disturbing to her and now here she was reading it again.
When he asked her what was wrong, she said, “I can’t stop thinking about those things you told me.”
He knew what things she meant, but he also knew the things he’d said had now been completely twisted around in her mind so that they no longer bore any resemblance to the things he’d actually told her.
The tension in the room was now so high he felt like the ice he was walking on might break through at any second and he was just trying to keep his balance as best he could so the ice wouldn’t break.
As he walked back into the other room she followed him and asked him what he thought about it all.
He was five feet eleven inches tall and weighed one hundred and ninety pounds, most of it muscle. In the worst of circumstances, Mike Tyson himself would not have scared him at all (think about David and Goliath) and he knew his own hands were lethal weapons if he wasn’t careful, which was one reason he was always watching himself.
She was five feet two inches tall and weighed a hundred and ten pounds. But she had a right hook on her that could take down a heavyweight prize fighter when aimed right, and especially when it was a sucker punch like the one she reached up and gave him right now.
He realized she’d hit him in the ear when the lights popped on again with his ear ringing like a dinner bell and he found himself staring down at her who then reached up again and grabbed him by the long brown hair on both sides of his head.
She then yanked back with all her might and sent both of them flying across the small room toward the couch, her flying beneath him while yanking his hair and him flying above her trying to not fall down on top of her but somehow they made it to the couch via flying through the air, she fell into the cushions and pulled him down on top of her by the hair like she wanted him to kiss her, which she did. Instead, she spit in his face, but not full on, only more like a gesture.
And in that moment her face was as beautiful, fresh, youthful (they were both forty-six but right now she looked sixteen) and lively as he’d ever seen it before (except one time) and even though her eyes were also truly murderous right now and he knew that she would really have killed him in that instant if she’d somehow been able to. He sometimes wondered whether she’d ever actually murdered anyone back in the dark depths of her mysterious past and he was never absolutely sure that the answer was no. It would be like her to do it and to get away with it, too.
He wanted to throttle her, that is, choke her to death – but only for an instant.
Before he knew what hit him he had his clothes on and he was down in the street heading on two feet for his automobile at high speed with the key in his hand like the pacifist he was. She was hanging out the window shouting at him, “And don’t come back this time either you son of a bitch!”
When he turned around and looked at her hanging half-way out of the window with her beautiful long red hair dangling down like a grown-up Rapunzel confined to her tower, she looked at him, their eyes met, she relented, and then she smiled at him sadly, then waved goodbye at him sadly before she turned away inside (heartbreakingly) and closed the window.
The destroyer is coming. He wants to undo everything. It doesn’t have to be like that. A world where everyone is against you.
The dog is barking. It means trouble. He’s out in the yard causing problems, but you love it. The air conditioner kicks on. It’s loud and churns cold air, but costs money.
A creak under foot to the door. You look at the black house that looms on the hill. All the cool air is behind you then suddenly it’s in front of you too. Tombstones stagger down the hill—getting so big you can read one. It proclaims, from across the street, leering over a wrought-iron fence, like an unwelcome eye, “FOREVER MORE.”
Black shadows abide like open wells. One wrong step and you’re forever falling.
All the little American flags in the graveyard drop to their staff. Like they are “at ease” for the coming of night. The dead are still known by their rank in this world.
The dog is inside the living room. He is staring into the kitchen like someone is standing there. He won’t take his eyes off this apparition like they are holding the instructions on how to raise the dead.
This worries you—you worry a lot. You know God hates a coward. “What are you looking at?”
The dog’s toenails click around in the dark. The fan on the air conditioner is coming in for a landing. A bar of dying light is on your dirty fingernails perched on the keyboard. You never learned to type, but the words spew like a rabid dog’s drool. You send scorching letters then regret it.
An ear worm goes through your head again. A song fragment, like a subliminal message, has played for three days straight and it won’t stop. You fall into its guitar thrum and openly sing the song in your mind. You know this is not the cure.
Samsung, in white, floats up and bounces from edge to edge on the black TV screen, like Pong. The dog is bouncing around the room from corner to corner, just like this word, but you love it.
“Oh, my God, lay down you freak of nature!” Then a low streak runs through you, all of your wrongs—that you can remember—some you will never forget. One is earmarked to be your final thought, all cascade down from the black cloud of the past, “I’m sorry, Pooch.”
There is a heaviness in the air. The smell of rain and it hits, without God’s knowledge, and pounds on the roof and pounds on the metal air conditioner. Rain helps, but the rain is being channeled away from the land. The marshes, which re-energize the groundwater, are filled in. The destroyer likes this. He desires famine quenched by leagues of sea water.
A thickness in the throat. The words are getting hard to swallow. People of your generation, “Gen X” are dying at a rapid rate. They were the uproar for a minute, which now seems like a second. Where are they now? Buried in the Earth’s axis? Each previous generation must in its hypocrisy hold up the Earth. “The Lost Generation” knows this well.
You watch a lot of TV and feel like a power somewhere enjoys this. A power that reeducates your mind to seek laziness and comfort. A way and will that becomes the spoke and wheel of your life.
After a while you believe your ways are hurting you and doing no good. There is constant pain. The steady flow of apathy won’t quite erode, but there is no quicksilver of action. No heroics…
You’ve done something wrong when you were drunk. People are yelling your name out on the street. One or two want your blood. They’d like to shut your coffin lid. God hates a coward.
The dog is barking, senses trouble and does something. You want to stop writing these words. They are bothersome, maybe even loathsome to a reader, a fellow sojourner of the dwindled spirit. The vainglory of youth has vanished—you were scared then too.
What to do? Where to go? Then you remember another friend has died. Wait for the clamor to subside.
Take it slow to the mortuary. No need to hurry. Sit under the tree and read Emily Dickinson, ride in her “carriage of immortality.”
On the way, on the street, a fracas, becomes violence between two red oligarchs of rage. A fracture—one’s hurt. The other is slap-happy. A defunct phone booth bears witness, but wordless for a long time now. The lines of communication are down.
Cars are lined up, and the black hearse backs out of its embalmed shell. You are late for the departed but you are lock-step now.
Your friend in the hearse, in the new lines of a bronze casket, breathes one last breath of death.
Nothing left but…
Doornails, church bells and a brief farewell.
THE END
Chrisopher J Ananias (with our appreciation for Django)
Taking pictures, being a photographer, whichever comes first? Peddling a ten-speed through the limbering trees.
Experimenting with light—always light—can’t do much in the dark. Besides: wink, hide, have nightmares, make mistakes, reproduce, and tend my ghost.
For me, the artistic eye sees what it sees. Assuming I have one, right? A brown eye that combs through the trash for artifacts. Hoping to see Van Gogh’s spirit glimmering schizophrenically off the jags of a beer bottle.
I’m ready… I’m harmless now. My ten-speed and me. Camera aimed. I got something good—a spiderweb.
I hike my bike by the cemetery’s gate. “Look at this Grandma.” I say over a tombstone, but say it anyway and show her—been a minute. SEE. She always had a dark-side.
I wander around and get interested in wind vanes and lightning rods.
Funny, it took the prospect of God’s unleashing the Flood to instill a spirit of co-operation among the animals of this earth. Noah was quite persuasive, really. In all, there was only one creature immune to his warnings of the catastrophe to come and that was the dear old ichthyosaurus. He greeted Noah’s weather forecast with a breezy “Nope, don’t believe a word of it.” The other animals exchanged a knowing look amongst themselves. “That ichthyosaurus,” they said, “deaf to reason, stubborn as they come, always was.” The ichthyosaurus nodded in agreement, but added that, seeing as he was the oldest creature of the lot, he knew a thing or two about probabilities. And to his credit, he conceded that such a deluge as predicted by batty old Noah was indeed possible – in fact, even quite likely, given the almighty mess made of things down here. “The point is,” said the ichthyosaurus, “I wouldn’t book passage aboard that Ark if Flood were guaranteed!”
And I must say, all considered, such a sentiment strikes in me a sympathetic note – to the extent that, were a similar predicament to loom, and the first drops fall, and there still be room on the Ark, my response would be to sit down and contemplate the fact that very shortly, where earthly matters are concerned, I shall be well fucking shut of it!
Saragun Springs 