from, under the blue banner of heaven
josh davis
At night, I sit on a little bed in a not so little room in an anything but little house, cupping a small, white pill to my lips. I swallow.
I want everything to stop spinning. I want everything to stop spinning. I want everything too, everything is spinning. Everything is spinning. I want everything.
I write a letter to no one and nothing and everything:
dear america: i want to get laid. look at what a nice guy i am. i look at walls and remember things. i will write about our exploits later, and i will leave out all the shit about being drunk and the last people in the bar. i just enjoy a nice warm body. a nice, young, well shaped, female body. look how deep i am. i have pretty blue eyes and dark hair. i'm so pretty. and deep. so fucking deep.
the smoke curls into a pair of dim circles and lingers in front of me. i stare through it. i have another. i listen to everything burning.
the tiles clap and everything smells like it came in a bag from the sharper image. but every atom in my body is volcanic. and i can't move. i am shivering apart and standing perfectly still. what's happening to the fucking world? i'm picking up signals from ghosts. they want grief and destruction in no particular order.
patter. patter. patter. click whir wire.
foremost, we must discard the davenport immediately and jettison the ashtrays. upstreet, left, hang one for the team and lean in for old time and the river run run run hey hey sssrrrrrrrrrr...n o p a u s e...straight into the well timmy, and tell the fire to keep it coming. by morning, no'ne'll notice all the flowerbeds are empty and we're all still upkeep atop the clothesline spinning our faces in fragile mirrors, brown, a little green, a mood ring, closed, open, closed, flytrap. full of ink when not looking.
i'm singing to this streetlight, and there's nothing you can do about it. a thousand things tell me to sing. i look across the lawn and forget what i see almost immediately. i look up and image what never existed.
i turn around when the rain tells me too. my shoulders are all wet. i watch the phone, half in the ground, a sad flower, become swallowed. tongueless. and i understand tonguelessness.
‘man, this is no mere abject corollary–‘
people say things like these and like to wear ties
on the back stove, waiting
collar yer owen bed tooth sleep tonight
or short the orderly a nice sign
ashpants for ashplants, we all fawn down.
were there a bed for the scraping, i would take her and straw out her very marrow this very minute. menthol, or not, i know how to swim on blacksheets. breathing. always breathing. and always pausing and telling us not to pause. never pause. rage. urge. circle. spell the alphabet on all her pink parts. prepare for boarding. you be the captain. starboard!
in a clean and distinct drawl, and walked out into the street to admire something he meant to half forget to call tomorrow at six. or seven. yes, seven is late enough. seven will sound ordinary. everyone likes ordinary. ordinary sevens.
passing through it all, i feel somewhat cheated. where're all the bodies? this gaunt won't let that one go, and yet, we're all still wearing shoes and talking about the clash even though strummer's dead. i'd like to find that ironic. do i? would he?
passing through the passing throughs, we're all intermittent, i s'pose.
everything. i wish everything would pick up and pass current and there'd always some nice electricity to ignore. some mock reaction. some religious foreplay. sneak up and tickle a priest's asshole and see if he yells ‘god’.
the pills i took are working. don't tell anyone, we're almost there. over by the driveway, there's something on wheels, and around the corner is another series of things we've just simply got to destroy. meet me in the tree house in a half hour, i've got to find a better hat.
the world wishes it could curl up into this--this size, this heat. this slow drift about the near-electric humming of skin. ten soldiers trace delicate the destruction, the tenderized blue marks, the ailing joints, the pools on their backs and chests. the fingerprints left behind all the stories. ten trace the last bruised clutches of that last moment that must've been like heaven without cable, which is to say, heaven.
Through cans, eyes, things that don’t matter, things that want to matter, mere matter, near matters, all fool crisis and all flakes of skin and hope abandoned, I am rendered, as all of you, eventually, feeling little more than slight and abandoned flakes of time itself.
No matter draw matter between this or that or a breath or a can of spray paint, or an erudite eradication of something desperately human, or the wrong eyeliner, or wine with fish?
I have...figured it out, cleverness proceeds essence. Existence be damned. Paper, rock, scissors, dirty bomb.
All matter of pretending its mattering is the great desert mirage we’ve all read, heard, polished, and soiled about. This suit and that haircut and that lapel pin and that degree and that barwit and those shoes, that steadiness, this all eliminates the humanity I foolishly imagined, or penned, or spray painted. I forgot. I forgot about boats and rides, tides, flashes, and ephem, and was too wrapped up in mere reporting.
I regret to inform you that I will be leaving my position, as it were.
Yours most truly,
