Trains, Trinidad, Try Not to Try

Though I tip-toed, tender into Trinidad, my books of atheism sprinkling the beach with denouncements of a deity, I mocked the majesty of el mar, sunk the Lost Coast black glass and swept the sand swoosh willy-nilly 'neath my sunburned toes.

And the seal pup baked in the sand, deaf to the barks of its worried mothers up the coast, who yelped in absolvent what-to-do? screeches for the shortcuts of solving the tides, of timing the rise of the foamy shore and the receding, cursed by the moods of a moon they barely know exists, as their pups grill steamy on the beach for the odorous whimsy of Newfoundlands, the bloodlust of giant sea eagles and the endless curiosity of passing children caked in sunscreen, clutching cameras, snapping photos.

Every new visitor sought your viscera, knowing the now-routine beaching of your kind, and the marine laboratory up the dune would soon cordon off your corpse with yellow tape, with orange-capped cones, with cuidado signs to study you and know why you were resigned to some cosmic abandonment.

And I thought you a shiny, sea-salty rock upon first glance, glistened by the mists of mortified el mar, deigned to act as perch for dumpy tourists' haunches and upon whose mounds would be carved the initials of fairweather lovers and the finite dates of a delusional destiny.

But the stink of your death had not yet plumed. We all guffawed.

You were hours earlier barking in the surf, looking for pups of your own, or arfing for the partner to bequeath them unto you.

Were those sunset woofs of worried mothers I heard up the coast all for you? Or is the whole world now sentenced to bark at the midnight mischief of the moon, flecked and filleted by no more caustic moans but for the collective malice of an absentee maker?

When fogs roll in, our dear, slick, dead, desecrated, sloppy brother, again, to sleepy Trinidad, you float away and feed forever in my fables of the ruse. I wake to hear you barking again.

Independence PDX

I tried to write a story once about the end of the world, of the disintegration of every breathing atom, of the unambiguous forever-spiral to the after. With every keystroke, and with every impression of the pencil on the page (half written, half typed to convey the essence of futility – failure – being the forging of the present on the past), I hoped it would happen.

I wrote, “And the sleeping mountains shaved their arboreous skins and melted their trails with awakened molten death, slow-cooked the swing sets, deep-fried the daffodils, skewered sleeping squirrels and dusted the sky with their cry,” and looked outside to the doomy precipice of Tabor and wished to see a swirling smoke give way to a landslide of magma on my room, like a thirsty baby wishing for the salvation of the slick nipple.

I typed, “All my blueberries turned to balls of heroin and I ate them to suffer the end of the world in a stupor, and the oranges turned to maces and punctured the throats of the greedy, and the moon cried tears of missiles and sent them to Jerusalem to settle the score of the war of illusions, and Mars bled red and cloaked Manhattan with an ocean of crimson and the sun winked a final coo to blot out the apples of our eyes,” and looked for fruit in my kitchen to see if it were true, and looked at my pupils in the mirror to see if their glow endured, and grumbled at their dilation.

I wrote, “The ground opened up fissures in the roadway, swallowing cars and licking the loamy Earth with whipping roots, like tentacles, snatching the scooters and bikes and eating the life of this world, re-devouring in fast forward the undeserved farmers of its dignity, of its ever-loving core,” and saw on the road a tar-scarred crack by the crosswalk and urged it to expand, to ingest the rumbling station wagon whose muffler burped along the street, coughing black through its tailpipe.

I typed, “Everyone was crying and screaming and drooling and dying, looking around for something to help, praying in the woods, looting for a last fix, setting things on fire, fucking, running, bleeding, eating, clogging the freeway to find the safe place not knowing they’d helped institute the demise of all safe places, petting their dogs, denying, raging, fearing, accepting, sleeping, finally, to death,” and lurked a family trotting in tandem down Division, linking arms by small lengths of twine, skipping, smiling, and I secretly wished their smiles were mine.

I orated, in secret inner-dialogue, “What good be the march of a man who so violates his womb the world? Who deserves the roundness of this orb upon which he both pines and pisses, to glaze his excrement to the lips of rivers, to spackle his spit on roses in the wild, to pave the deserts and build villages no one will live in? And when, oh, when will the Earth’s ruptures implore the furious ocean to spank our false cathedrals, topple every credit score, wash away our starlets’ makeup, make slanderous and vain every billboard on the freeway, and flood that freeway with starfish and dolphins gooped in oil, flopping and asphyxiated by the Brits? The Brits from whom a minority of us here descend in starving, panicked America, and from whom we now receive the ultimate fuck you. The payback for thinking we might be weaned from their loving breast, for dreaming in our infantilism of outlasting centuries of monarchies and the wisdoms culled from centuries of failure. Here, now, we endure the penultimate folly, finally recognizing the familiar reflections in the flashes of the pan.

America, whose beaches’ sands grow tired of our bitter spills, whose fingers point the blame in every direction except back at itself, whose sons and daughters have smelled death and known rebellion just by being born and who contrive to live the lie bequeathed them, whose opportunistic bents ingrained from birth prove both boring and lethal…

…to everything but us…

I opened the newspaper and saw pelicans trapped in a stinking oily hell, and guffawed at video streams of gushing black clouds erupting from the broken drills, and imagined the slow death of the Earth as being perhaps better than the quick. When we look in the mirror, we see our ineffable faults and keep them secret, and deign ourselves to dream that we can overcome. And lie to ourselves in every way, everywhere, always. And we kill all that is not us, in whispered sentimentality, by forgetting to give warning that we know not what we do.

I tried to write a story about the end of the world, and realized it’s already here.