The Dissolution

The distance between two people, measured in geographies and histories of battle.  Old treatise locked into the confusion of argument, the sane babbling in just as much nonsense to the insanity of understanding.

Locked in a rose, federal papers with coffee stains, old files and the 1970's image of a cop at a used city desk as the old "landline" rings with annoying bells.  

Something sordid about that old college girlfriend.  Dirty bruised knee, clean clothes, face with that unclear complexion indicative of drug and alcohol usage.  Was it even necessary?  Those days and nights on blue mattresses as the sun would enter with that beat up alarm clock playing the Shins in those drunk dream days, nights passing over and under us, stars and atmospheric disturbances, disturbing talk at quiet parties in those days.  Siamese cats, sickness, open windows, dead birds, and a drunk guitar player.  The television only added to that confusion.

There were fields of tall grass that itched in the summer heat.  We had a keg outside in a dirt pit filled with ice, someone earlier had thrown wine in my face.  These memories are better kept to myself.

June

Through the converted bedroom window, I could see. 
It began as an insult.
There were bicycles being taken from up the block, "men" with big haunches and tanned leather faces began walking them down the slope for the purpose of theft.  Like you could sell your father a bicycle in this market.

Hot weather, stricken with radioactivity.  Descended through blankets of black purple smoke earlier that smothered every diseased living thing down the hill, sort of like wandering through some type of space age mustard gas, coughing, breathing it in, making it communicate.  It looked like space, dense and set against white noise coming down from the atmosphere. 

Later in LA two dock workers discussed stabbing me.  I sat at the restaurant table, eating a hamburger with ortega chiles, and I wondered really.  Were they just nuts there over at the other table, having been listening to all this murder while bring up their children?  Or were they horrible, out to protect gang rights and territories, counterfeit forms of imagined ownership raped over in sickened minds unattuned to the impoverished environment, knowing only a lifetime of drugs, sex, and violence (as it turns out maybe the former two are just forms of violence).  I paid while two other screaming lunatics walked out.  Then I wandered, looking at the old fisherman and sailor's plaques on the dirty and dilapidated waterfront in front of a pink Maritime museum.  These people had been honored, but that night I got hurricane drunk and forgot if they had been fisherman, sailors, or dock workers.  I guess I don't know now, except that those people were forgotten and unknown, unnamed but for on some disgusting decaying plaque set in black tiles on a concave walkway where the streets were closed by traffic laws.  Why even set names like that? 

Later on the freeway ride home (I had an appointment) I felt a series of seizures while trying to sleep despite having done nothing but drink coffee and feel in an offhand sort of manner that I was quite tired of driving in clean automobiles as the filthy air recycled in some grotesque manner through the vents in the dashboard, sucked in with everything under the hood.  It was like driving through a chemical factory, smells, scents, highs, lows, feelings you couldn't trust and feelings that you loved.  What was unnerving were the other drivers in their lonesome crowded cars, hiking out of their houses towards work or off to vacation. 

Getting back home, the signs said that outdoor watering would not be permitted.  I thought of the garden, sighing in the heat and exhaust and smell of gas (even though this was in the woods).  When I got to the garage I felt like garbage, couldn't smell, and wanted to see if there was anything left at all in this world but machines.