I had went to visit some friends some acquaintances these people i used to know I was a ghost in my hometown, where no one used my given name. they brought me in through a screen door and sat me down in the kitchen. their voices were like underwater sounds they told me to be still while he said hello. I looked down a flight of basement stairs where bathed in a blue light like Chopin’s no. 19 in E minor sat a tiger burning bright. up the stairs it bounded forth in muted strides to the floor it pinned me under protest in cemetery stillness it said hello. the kitchen was an autoclave I never asked for help.
my hometown calls to me in my sleep like an indian death wail on a buffalo robe so my eyes sink back into the firmament. bathing in the predawn light my bones are an old horse I ride, I score one for the body then I get onto a plane then I score one for the body and I get onto a plane then i score one for the body as it lays dying without complaint. kneeling before the Holy Cross by the roadside I take note of really just how much room there is on the bed beside me strange bedfellows are I and the space I’ve been given. there is a queen sized outer darkness within my twin sized gestures of self control. the dusk is day now and the moon is the sun and my hometown calls to me like Jericho’s Trumpet sounding from inside the Pale.
in my hometown I am a pilgrim I saunter towards the seaboard where the docks hold greek columns that soar into the air like the elephant’s legs in Salvador Dali’s “The Temptation of St. Anthony”. nostalgia burns my throat like acids and bases and the columns lead up to nowhere and this place isn’t how i remember it beyond the Pale. limping with thin soles dragging a dull hypothalamus like a dead mule chained to my ankle we would sit and watch our forefathers stare at the static on the TV from their arm chairs in the dark. we would offer them coffee and ask how their day was and they would tell us that sometimes they feel like a lone alley cat. It’s like my buddy's roommate when I would go to visit; always alone inside his room. sometimes I would see him around town and say hello and notice his face and see that he was still alone inside his room.
well, I have skin in the game and I have a reputation and i’m attached to my non-attachment. sometimes a subtle brand of disgust creeps in to replace my avarice and sometimes I starve to death holding a long handled spoon seated at Caligula’s table. sometimes i can’t tell their maidenhood from their madness so i hoard one for the body. sometimes i remember the way bees will talk to each other by dancing and how old men will tell you they’re afraid to die. Sometimes I hand a *** a 20 and weep as I watch him fold it into an origami crane.
while I was in town I looked up my former landlord I held a fondness for the times when they didn’t use my given name. I wanted to see my old room and I had kept a raven back then and he assured me it was still around. the room was now and attic and was much bigger than I had held it in my memory, vast almost. I ask the dust as it was thick upon the floor boards and something felt abandoned in the air. the roof was in disrepair and one whole side was nearly completely gone. tranquil ribbons of cirrus clouds stood in the sky through the roof like a child’s drawing. “Is it like you remember?”, he asked. “Way over in the corner there was a couch my brother would sometimes sit in” I replied. I asked after my raven and he pointed to the part of the roof that still was. from the shadows came a bird song like an irish low whistle from above the Pale. “That doesn’t sound like him”, I said (more to myself than to my host), “that’s an owl or something.”