I feel uncomfortable
Read Walt Whitman
Patriot, maybe
I don’t know
Strands of grass
Trees of leaves
Fell asleep
‘I am going to kill you’
Hold on
Run up stair case
Trip over dead body
‘I am going to kill you now’
I feel tired
I can see myself
Wake up
Read Edgar Alan Poe
‘Deep in earth my love is lying’
Deep in earth are dinosaur fossils
‘And I must weep alone’
And dinosaurs are extinct
I’ve gone to see the Radio Telescope
in Wild and Wonderful West Virginia.
I want to eat dinner in Beckley until
like a B-movie cliche I’ve made a wrong turn
and find myself in Beaver Falls
under an Arthur Rackham sky.
The frogs are awake.
At first I think their chorus is from an iTunes sample.
So loud and clear and in my face from
a trucker’s Supersized sound system.
How many frogs does it take
to make that kind of rumpus?
Carl Sagan springs to mind.
His “billions and billions.”
A woman in pink yells at six scruffy kids.
All busy scarfing down enormous
ice cream cones. They ignore her.
Are these pear-shaped
gargantuan humans from
the same carnival gene pool?
I walk past them into the Spoke ‘n’ Spur.
Everybody is watching March Madness
West Virginia on a roll.
Confederate Dandy and Pirate Dude say
every day is Halloween
in Beaver Falls.
Advise me to order the T-bone.
My steak arrives seductive
and standing on a plate
like Venus on the half-shell.
Confederate Dandy and Pirate Dude
Give me a high-five.
My steak smiles, hops off the plate,
wrestles me to the ground.
I don’t eat it.
I make love to it.
Or else my steak makes love to me.
“Sheesh, get a room,” Pirate Dude says.
Confederate Dandy turns away in disgust.
“April Fool,” my steak says.
And climbs back onto the plate.
No more face or frou frou.
I cut into the steak revealing
a slash of red. The steak winks at me.
No way I can continue this.
I pay my bill and split.
Confederate Dandy and Pirate Dude
give me awkward Bro hugs.
I missed the frogs while I was inside.
All that joyous lovemaking.
Their chorus filling the night.
A bald leprechaun passes me
on rickety wooden stairs.
A pink tube stuffed with lights
wrapped through every rail rung.
The woman in pink and her six kids
cross my path once more
like a black cat I can’t avoid.
Sucking on Slurpees now.
I think of frogs. Spawning.
I think of Carl Sagan and the radio telescope.
Maybe there are really only a few enormous
Martian frogs out there in Beaver Creek?
And then I know what to do.
I push the woman in pink
and her six scruffy kids
and their Slurpees
into the creek.
The frogs will feast.
Eat their flesh.
Suck their marrow.
Stephen is lying in a large puddle.
He is thinking about you being naked.
Sometimes you are naked in your room, or in your bathroom.
He likes the idea of you being naked.
Stephen never gets to see you naked.
Stephen feels jealous of you because you get to see yourself naked all the time.
You are probably beautiful and vulnerable when you’re naked.
He wants to find every bone in your body.
All two hundred and six of them.
He wants to feel them through your naked skin with his fingertips.
He wants to name them as he finds them.
“Clavicle, Manubrium, Sternum”
Outside, Stephen can feel the harsh winter air against his skin.
Stephen is not naked.
Stephen is wearing clothes.
Stephen is lying in a large puddle.
Stephen grabs a little bit of mud with his hands.
Stephen touches his glasses and gets mud on the lens.
His vision is obscured.
He feels like a grain of sand, on a beach, that isn’t a real grain of sand, but is actually a very tiny piece of a clamshell from a clam that died 10 years ago.
Zenobia Jackson told Officer Murphy that her husband, Rufus, was 73
years old and “a wonderful man when he was awake” but for the past
year he had been jerking “something terrible” during his sleep and
had kept waking her up. He’d swing his arms, she said, like those
martial arts men he liked to watch so much on television. When the
bouts were over, he’d give her a big kiss on the forehead and go to bed.
“Oh, he was just a doll,” she said, “when he was awake.”
In the last month, however, Rufus had fallen out of bed three times
“fighting” in his dreams. In the morning he’d tell her he’d been
dreaming that he was in a fight at work or back in high school many
years ago. Sometimes he dreamt he was shooting at burglars breaking
into their house in the old neighborhood. That’s why they had to move
to a different neighborhood and why he bought a gun, a little pistol
he kept under his pillow just in case he heard someone in the house.
You can’t be too careful these days, he told her. He even taught her
how to shoot the gun one night when no one else was on the tennis
courts in Sherman Park. He said she was real good. Not many women, he
said, can aim straight.
But last night, she said, he was dreaming again and swung his arms at
least ten times, like he was chopping sugar cane back in Louisiana
before they moved North. He caught her with an elbow to the eye and
then another to the nose just as she was ducking. That’s why she
looks the way she does, she told Officer Murphy.
Long ago, she had stopped trying to wake him when he was thrashing
about. It was because of the pistol under his pillow. He had reached
for it one time right after she had shaken him. She had screamed and
that woke him up and he wasn’t too happy about it. He said he
couldn’t get back to sleep the rest of the night. And he wasn’t lying
because she was awake all night, too, listening to him grumble and
curse.
Just a week ago, she had taken him to a sleep clinic where he had
stayed overnight. The doctor said he suffered from sleep apnea but
she had never heard of anyone with sleep apnea thrashing and kicking
about like her Rufus. She had a lady friend in the choir at church
whose husband had sleep apnea but all he did was “snore too loud,”
her friend said, no thrashing about.
“So that’s how it happened,” Zenobia told Officer Murphy, who was
busy taking notes. Rufus had reached under the pillow for the pistol
and she had to stop him.
“Two in the head,” she said, “and he be dead.”
The lady offered me a free sample of yeast extract on bread.
“It is cheaper than marmite and just as good.” She reassured me.
As I eat my yeast extract I mentioned that she looked cold.
“I am freezing.”
“Do you want me to warm you up Sheila?”
“I forget that people can read my name. Is it a service you are offering?”
“I like to warm ladies up, especially, during the night, when they get cold. I could leave you my number and you could call me up – day or night, whenever you needed me. I am on call 24hrs a day just like a doctor.”
She looked at me for a while
without saying anything.
I finished my yeast extract.
“Thanks for the yeast extract, I don’t like to offer twice, so I best get going and thanks again.”
I didn’t look at Sheila as I walked off and I don’t feel she looked at me either.