(halfway house)

XX.

         Any Where is a real halfway house. It's a halfway house for surrealism, more than it is for surrealists, although everything's welcome. I'm only halfway sure if the door is always wide open; some days it seems halfway closed, although you never can tell for sure. Like the pieces in a dream, in the dream, have you ever-sometimes truly been uncertain, of the identity, of an Anybody? Of anything, of some one? In a dream. If everything is like blood, the door at Any Where is the living heart of an animal: In Out In Out In. Out In Out. In Out In Out. If sentences could never start and never end, the sentence I would write here would contain both words, only two words, maybe a million different two words. The door at Any Where is a threshold, is time, of time. The Experience.

         I did not go through one side to get to the other. The living heart of an animal is always beating: never the same beat, never the same blood, always the same, always beating. For all of being living, the heart is the same never the same. The animal is the animal always different, because a moment makes a difference, different moment. I have done things, I was somebody, lots and lots of somebodies, one for every moment who I was, was who I was. And now it's still the same, still different, even now, even now. Even you. Even words, even ever. Even never. It's all real, it's all separate all together all the way all all just one. Just many. More than one. I travel all around, I'm always going to new places, it never changes, even when "never changes" changes, because what never changes is "always changes." Halfway is the only suitable compromise here. Any Where is a halfway stop on the Real Express route, the Expressive Rail trail, the Train Of Thought express, and even the Halfway Railway way.

         It's not really a place that you find, but you can lose it when you travel. I travel all around, and I don't; I spend my life on one train or another, Halfway, and halfway true things seem to be the truest. Halfway thinking feels confusing, halfway feeling feels halfway. Who knows, who knows: halfway is for living. Living is for who knows, and so is death. And so is halfway. All for the other, never to get to the other side. For not for. Half-way-door.

         I am a string, stretched taught between-in No two Points, between-in one strange loop, and plucked; life the measure of vibrations if time the measure of change. Movement, movement. The parts composing me came together, moved me, as though I were plucked, and I resonated with other strings that came near me. Maybe with the collective hum of all strings, each string so quiet, collectively too huge to not be a part of. Now, now, the string moves back and forth between black and white, and every time I get to black it could be white, the frequency so high, the amplitude decreased, no time to orient. Black or white, neither/either. I’m not in either, I’m in both. I’m in both/and/either/or. I’m not moving between black and white, I am movement and between-in. Confusion is gray, but so is clarity; when you hit the middle, it is only living, and there are no words, no words for black or white or gray, except direct experience of Anything, contained in single words and not, not for others, not for always. Fools look at fingers that point to the sky. But there are no single points for everything, for direct experiences, except itselves that can’t be somethings, that can only be living, and dying. Not eithers, Everything boths. The fool who looks at the finger and does not think and sees everything doesn’t need to look at the sky. The sky is in the finger, the finger in the sky, the point doesn’t exist. Only halfway.

(transplants)

XVII.

         I was afraid, so afraid and I asked myself what I was protecting; my stomach growled.

         Emptiness.

         I am protecting emptiness, and that is not one thing or the other. It is with fulness, both/and.

         It's a new challenge all the time. Last night they wouldn't let me eat the food---all I wanted was the buttered noodles. I can tell with my nose when we're having buttered noodles, because they always serve it in huge round meatstuff-bowls; the white and blue quarter-inch thick plastic entrée bowls, reserved for acidic smelling meatstuff, or buttered noodles.

         It starts like this: I have a friend made in Asia, made of stars; she is built out of well hewed shorewood, with memories of cultural week and toy brick possibilities, a plastic seaside resort with tall single-pane windows, first impression sandals, sandals I had once owned and then judged, subconscious contests in the rec-room, kept constantly at 61 degrees. We have collected and shared and corroborated insight since I first saw her in those sandals. Tonight, today, now I ask her if she wants to go to the pet store, to the fish store next to Lee's Oriental. It is a one-room store, and there are no lights on the ceilings or walls, there is only the aquamarine light from the aquariums. We walk past the dark green goldfish tub, to the back of the store, but I do not check to see if she is following me, and when I pass through the Employees Only I am suddenly alone, in a mass of kids my age, in the cafeteria, of a cram school. In front of me, kids are climbing over each other, fighting to get the food, which is spread over the spoon-scratched metal surface of a huge cafeteria counter. Like a farm trough, but the food is on a surface, not in a trough, because humans eat from plates. Altogether it looks like a wave, of lavender-colored long-sleeves and dark green turtlenecks, orange and khaki shorts, bowl cuts and braids; a solid wave, frozen but writhing in a great struggle against the counter, not breaking as waves should when they hit the shore.

         I go straightaway to where the seating is, I find the round orange cafeteria table where Junior Great Books used to meet. The girls sitting there are all my friends, but never my best, never stick. They are all Asian, and we are all in the same school. We are like driftwood that has drifted to the same shore. She has a knot there, I have a notch here; we slide around on the tide of the same shore, then the tide carries us out, one at a time. We are like handmade driftwood, hewed with differences between-in us that are personal, are the qualities that make any one person different from every other, that make friends or don't. These friends are ultra-smart and academic; they laugh at numbers and nonsense, I laugh at nonsense and laughing. They all have trays in front of them, with plates, with tiny bits of carrot or fruit salad or no plate at all; they jestfully deride each other for not eating enough; it ends with criticism from the girl with no tray at all. There is not much laughing, because it isn't nonsense; because while it doesn't make sense, it is too real.

         I want to get some noodles. I don't need the salad or the carrots or the fruit, I focus on acquiring the buttered noodles and nothing else. When I head back to the flat trough, there are not so many kids, just a few, come and go. I see a quarter-inch white plastic bowl on the metal countertop. I run to it. I grab a handful of buttered noodles. I can feel the shreds of Parmesan between my oiled fingers. Just a handful is enough; I turn to run, to getaway with my noodles, to make it to Safety, but in front of me is the Foulmart. My arch nemesis from childhood. Shorter than me, and thinner, with thinner edges, thinner lines to cross, crosswired, trip wires that set off severity. The veins on his hairy arms, on the back of his wrists, over his bony hands are permanently bulging; I heard in high school that he got into steroids and I know that he's still competitive.

         He knocks the noodles from my hand. He apologizes. I don't mind. He glares at me. My heart pounds, my eyebrows rise, my mouth opens, my hands open, they travel protectively to my Front; I have wrestled this kid before and lost. I have won out other boys, I have beat the odds and not been whitewashed. The Foulmart himself gave me the nickname The Crash Dummy, because he can shoot a soccer ball at me again and again, and I won't cry. But it's been long established that the Foulmart will beat me in a race. He will push my face into the snow. He will not stop if I have an asthma attack.

         He stuffs a snack-sized plastic baggy of weed into my hand and looks around, and leaves. I must hide it for him, so I stick it in the Back-most zippered pocket of my navy blue canvas backpack. I must get it out of here, I must take it to Safety, and on my way out of the school, on the shrubby gravel path, by the fences I meet a familiar looking Latina. She wants to skip class. I take her with me, we duck into a hedge of hemlock because a teacher is coming round the path. When the way is clear, I take her hand and lead her down around the hedge, around the bend, and into a village of shorewood and hills.

         We go round the land-wreck house, where the doors are always locked, where the drinking fountains never work. Where the pale brown paint is always peeling. We go partway up a broad paved street before I stop. The distance is sufficient, it's sufficiently close to the Foulmart's house. I take this moment to glance at the snack-sized plastic baggy; its contents look like biscuits. Croutons, pesto-flavored. My friend takes the backpack, she is All Set for skipping class. I go back to school, to the paper-bag brown stairwell, to meet the Foulmart, and I tell him I left the backpack near his house. This news is sufficient for him. But I never put the baggy back in the backpack after I took it out to look at it---it's still on me, in a pocket, somewhere. A teacher is coming! The Foulmart races up the steps; I spring behind the stairs, under the last leg of the first flight, facing tall single-pane windows, dirty with rain drop stains like calcium build-up and flecks of mud. When the way is clear I look up, right where I can see every hand on every railing on every flight, where someone on the top flight could drop a penny or a notebook and knock me out.

         The Foulmart's friends are coming down the stairs to rob me of the Foulmart's weed; they are not really his friends. I see the Foulmart's hand, on a railing seven-flights-up; I change perspective, so that seven-flights-up is now seven-flights-down, so that gravity can aid me in climbing the space between the railings, the middle of the stairwell, past the Foulmart's friends and to the Foulmart himself, to give him the baggy. The climbing is rough, it takes guts; a railing snags my fishnets, rips a hole on the inside of my knee. The Foulmart acknowledges that I am no girl, and I see he's  not really a foulmart. We are reconciled, finally.

         Now I am arriving for work at ABC, the sandwich place. The building blocks for sandwiches? Or Already Been Chewed? A customer in a molly brown fur coat on her way out the door tells me not to cling to childhood. That I should be aware of my North Node. The brass bells near the top of the door jingle as it closes. I don a dark green apron, I check-in, I nod to the cashier, I decide to go on lunch-break straightaway. I seize two slices of sauerkraut rye from underneath the glass display, ignoring hungry customers. I can't reach the provolone though, or the spinach. The door bells jingle; I pause, look up to see who's come in, and understand that my long-fingered classmate has been hired to work here. I understand that she will do much better than me and I will probably be fired. Success is built into her bony hands.

         I go out the back door with my two slices of rye, I sit on a cherrywood chair that has been rained on. The air is greyish blue, is clear and cloudy and thick, and through it I see the Back, I see the brick walls and dumpsters and Employees Only that make it suitable only for employees on break. The air is so heavy that I don't even remember that Lee's Oriental is just next door. The Harlequin kid comes out with provolone slices and spinach leaves, the B and C, the missing building blocks of my lunch-break sandwich. I look at him, he lights a smoke that sinks because the air is too heavy with cloudy blue clear. I feel like a crate-shaped burden, a burden that doesn't fit on shoulders, on the Harlequin's shoulders; I have moved into his workplace, and I don't fit there. I should get fired.

         I go somewhere else, to whatever age it was when age wasn't established, to before I learned to keep track of the days of the week. To a waterslide, slow and lazy; Safe. To a waterslide of grey-blue ice-floes, like a white and blue plastic river. I float along, alone, on a submerged inner-tube, and I slap the surface of the water with the palms of my hands because I recognize the cookie-cutter shapes on the shore. Two-dimensional trees---there are only two types, two shapes: coniferous and deciduous. I float along, alone, but then the ice-floes break and the current gets stronger and I lose the inner-tube. I must get out of the sliding grey river or I will drown, a white and blue death. So I plant both hands on the side of the slide, the bank, and hoist my upper half up til my belly rests firmly on the ground, like a sea lion; from here I can afford to climb out less gracefully.

         On land I join my friend, we walk up a hill that defies the city, the grassy knoll down which the grey-blue river slides. The ice has melted. She stays put while I run laughing into the river, hurl myself into the flow of the waterslide, which is fast and forceful like the spasms of laughter in my throat and abdomen. A wave crashes into the white plastic side and I see a rattan tea tray emerge at the break like a fish out of water, and it disappears in the great foaming grey undulations, just as I am swept around the bend, just as I slow down to a drift, just as I am floating around the bend of a strange waterslide; just as I have reached the top again.

         I do not take a second trip. I climb out before the current picks up again. Pieces of picked grass and dirt cling to my wet skin, and around me is a designated camping area, a public shelter, its brown paint peeling and bubbling where the moisture leaks in. Campers have shown up; one prepares for fishing, another talks to a third, a girl with rainbow dreads and blond eyebrows, on the bridge that runs over the river I climbed out of. I watch her try to light a poorly packed clove-cigarette; the shredded tobacco hangs out as the paper splits open; her navy blue plastic lighter won't light.

         I move again, move back to the violet construct, on the lucky hill, in a foreign world that's all my own. I am outside of school, inside of love, reuniting with a toe-stubbed lover. I move to plant a tree with yellow leaves across the street from the school; it is the color that is missing. The rest of the rainbow is there, in order, in trees that grow up against the back of palatably painted bungalow homes. My tree is not in front of a home. My tree is not even a tree, it's a ground vine or a shrub, a ground plant, and not baby. The plastic marker states that I am not to plant it near the breast of the tree of the same kind of plant. So it is somewhat lonesome, but yellow is the color.

         Ryuta is standing in his soccer cleats on the paved pathway in front of an orange bungalow. He sees me planting the yellow, and knows that I am back; I see the surprise and yearning in his eyes. But he is in the company of two school officials, so we do not run to embrace and kiss. Instead we wait, I finish planting, finish scooping black topsoil over the roots. I forget to water it, though; I forget that all transplants should be watered immediately.

(alley)

XIV.

         Just around the nighttime bend there is an alley between two generic, modern, colorless brick buildings. The alley is dark, and clean; the perfect blacktop pavement is wet and shoddily refracts sourceless white light.

         On the street before the backstreet before the alley, I can hear tires nebulize puddles, I can see small rain that swirls around on currents of air, floats like dust, slow like humid smoke; I can see it as it rides across the shaft of one whitish yellow headlight. It's too heavy for mist, too light for rain, too wet for air and too much to breathe. Too warm in my lungs, too clammy on my cheeks and hands and shins. It must look like that all around, the way it feels, but it's invisible without the tirelessly straight white conical beam or the bright, and surely hot, white bulbs embedded on the bellyside of the marquee. Those tiny bright bulbs are bright, but they do not emanate, oddly; they have little glare but leave tiny burning afterimages in my eyes.

         The car with one headlight picks up a lady; I cannot look at the car, I do not look at the lady. My feet sport black ballet flats, the inside walls of which lean far over the insoles, shaped by six thousand pounds of size eight flat-footed wear. They are wet. Clearly I have been trouncing through street puddles; there are a few muddy bits, wet debris clinging to the yellowish white flesh of my feet, from halfway up the shin and down.

         The nobody driver puts the car in drive and glides forward, past me, to my backward and away forever. I am walking on perfect gray sidewalk, perfect square-looking rectangles one after another, doormatting formal romance and expensive sophistication and whitish lights. The curb is flawless, without a chip, without the evidence of the ice pick of the forgotten angry corner of the city's busy mind. There are two small holes in the back of my black legging, half way down my right hamstring. One tiny hole a thread away from its older brother, above the hem, where the weight of the city's lungs leaks in, licks my clammy skin. The center of a mysteriously radial wet spot on the fabric, where water makes a black blacker than black.

         I round the bend, walk up a slanting backstreet. I'm with a group of people, the Harlequin kid included every other time I look. We're walking to somebody's apartment, and the dark is perfect for a camera---it's clearly night but every part of every one, every detail is illuminated for the camera. Like in movies, when a nighttime scene on a street always shows the pavement to be wet, even if it had not rained. It registers better that way.

         There is a piece of plain, thick-crusted cheese pizza in my hand and I am doubled. I stop. I'm no longer holding the oil-stained pizza box. Was I ever holding one? The group continues to walk. There's no longer a bite of pizza in my mouth. Did I swallow it? Was I ever chewing?

         The slice of pizza is still in my hand. The kids are still walking, they're still walking to someone's apartment but they're still in a group surrounding me. As if they're walking impossibly slowly, but I can't tell. I look to the right, I'm facing the right so now it is my forward, and I am standing there, the kids still frozen behind me, the pizza still in my hand. In front of me is an alley, dark and clean. It's perfect, it's striking; there's no place for the mice to hide or the cats to sleep or the trash to live or the smelly dark spots to spawn and prosper. It's devoid of anything, except remarkable blacktop pavement and a mist of shoddy whitish light. And it's encased on three sides: two colorless brick buildings forming the alley, and one clean, glass wall for me to look through. It reminds me of the penguin pen at the zoo, how most of it is fence for one to observe from, but there's one eight or ten foot span of glass so you can see them underwater, too.

         This glass wall is admirable. Even the three thumb-sized fingerprints spread upon it. It leaves one struck with a quarter inch impression. I cannot figure it, I cannot figure if this slick spotless alley through the glass is more mysterious than a filthy alley with no details, where no light reflects and so much is hidden and generally one wouldn't want to see.

         And just like that I am walking again, the wondering ceased and my attention traveling elsewhere. The pizza is no longer in my hand.

         I have turned to the Harlequin kid. He is mute, but we discuss finding sharpies. We speculate about when to get them, and how we will pay for them, and I can tell that the Kid is thinking that he'll keep them, that even though we are talking about obtaining them together, he's really just enlisting my help for something that maybe he'll let me use before he parts ways and goes home. He doesn't live with me any more, but all the more reason he'd leap at the chance to get some markers if I pleaded for my parents to sponsor me, me whom he would in turn plead with to sponsor him. More vexingly, when I point this out, he gestures abstractly, such that I experience him to mean that I "can never think to remember that I wouldn't understand." It always works, see.

         The discussion ends abruptly and we retreat to our proper minds. I muse on the idea of pleading with my parents to sponsor a new pillow. I peel the 100-thread count lavender pillowcase off of the pillow in question. I want to show my mother the mold growing there, but I know she'll just see it as a stain of drool. We are tight on money and a new pillow would be superfluous.

         I have arrived at the apartment gathering. I sit down next to two others on the left side of a denim couch such that I am center-most with the kid sitting down next to two others on the right side of a couch to my left. We are in front of a large square late 90's TV. The long lost terrifying Lolita friend of mine capers across the oatmeal-colored carpet with a bowl of blue corn chips. She introduces a friend of hers whose terrifying face I cannot look at and cannot look away from. She's a young Asian woman with non-shelled purple snails for eyes, she's a monster that would eat you, she's a ghost that would ravish you. And I'm oddly okay with her. She's DJ-ing tonight, and after shaking her hand, I hop over the turntable, scratching the vinyl at a gradual angle obtuse to the grooves as I go. I run over to the stairs, looking back at the snail-eyed girl. With one last gaze cast like a net over the room, over the ocean, over to the monster, I cast away, leave to go upstairs. I bend over on the stairs and plant my hands two steps above my feet. I ascend on all fours. But by the time I’ve gotten three quarters of the way to the top, I’ve lost my mission, I’ve forgotten my purpose. So I swing one leg over the banister and slide down till my butt hits the post, and then I clamber off to the floor. I traverse the worn wooden floor to the mail bin where I discover a tampon for the first time again and naïvely conjecture its possibilities. Icy wet spots percolate through my socks; the grown-ups track snow in from outside and forget to take their boots off until after they've reached the kitchen.

(closet)

XI.

         I steward the home for questions. I live in a space I call my room, but really it isn't mine. It belongs to No One. But I call it my room just the same.

         The closet in my room is the place for death. As we sit in the closet, which is also a basement, and a costume shop, and a jungle in Australia, I tell Laura how I used to be scared of it, how I associated it with the murderous clown of my childhood---the one who left the oversized cake-carving knife in the fish tank, who stabbed family friends and spattered their ketchup across tabletops. I tell her how the cat died in here, and as I do so I dare to glance at the litter-box residing some distance away; it's full of grayish kitty litter but devoid of kitty. She politely points out the circles of oxidized blood on the walls, coughed up by a boy who perpetually forgot to cover his mouth. I guess it's understandable: forgetting real world faux pas like that during the process of dying.

We are sitting on piled up laundry baskets and light blue plastic bins, we are slouching because writers always slouch in decidedly relaxed spaces. There are campers wandering in and out, in and out, new campers and old campers. New new ones, new old ones searching for costumes. Suddenly I want to give her the nine-tenths-of-the-way empty book that I bound, the book with the plastic clock glued to the cover. But it's in a plastic laundry bin past the clothes rack, and I know for a fact that there's a boy hanging up on the clothes rack. A few minutes before Laura came down to the basement, that very same boy with the beautiful chestnut skin was guiding me through the Australian jungle with his brother. We were crossing a river, and his brother had to split up with us Just In Case. There were dangerous sneaks hiding in the brush with blow darts, and the boy and his brother communicated through a series of abstract gestures to avoid being heard. As we crossed, his open hand kept circling in front of his face, palm to face="talk them through.” He continued to signal to his unseen brother as we dashed safely into an outgrove of clothes rack, when a huge blow dart flew into his chest. He looked down at it as though he'd been expecting it, as though it made sense that it was there, and as he fell back dying, his open hand circled his face once more before he tumbled into the folds of my navy haori. He died with his arms stuck through each sleeve. He became the boy in the haori who dangles from a hanger on the rack, the Boy Hanging Up, and the clothes pushed around him so he was lost to everyone but me, so he was waiting to be found by Anyone browsing for clothes.

I realize that the clockbook is falling apart after I shove it into Laura's hands. It's her birthday and we're sitting in the threshold between the gala and the promenade. The gala is happening outside the closet door behind me to the left, and the promenade is up the basement stairs behind Laura to the right. It's Summer Camp on a Field Trip to Australia, and outside the closet door and up the basement stairs the campers and counselors are celebrating safety with the most decadent gluten-free casein-free peanut-free cupcakes. Laura informs me that she has a gift for me, and I fluster because it's her birthday, and I don't have anything to give her. She holds up an avocado pit between her thumb and index finger. It's bright and strange and gleaming darkly like a gem. It's blackish green and dark brown and glassy bright in the center, and it's caked with overripe avocado flesh. One look and I know it'll grow into a tree. I make a discovery as Laura is summoned to the promenade for some staff-related purpose; there is a plastic baggy full of slides on top of the stack of bins at the foot of the stairs. I hold each glassy slide up to the ceiling light, between my thumb and index finger, and I see brightly colored pictures of the avocado seed, of its growth into a tree.

I look at the stairs where Laura's gone. The traffic of campers in the closet is increasing, so I move to one side and wait for an opportunity to exit via the closet door. I seize the moment at the first opportunity one arrives. Past the door, Camp is simultaneously dressing up for and throwing a soirée à la 1940's. The girls from my dorm scurry about beneath strings of ecru lanterns, tossing mules and classy dresses as they go. The space is semi-outdoors; where the walls would be, the black air gushes in with offshoots of the night, over long, wide benches. I sit down on a tuffet of empire waists and slide my feet into a pair of sandals with wedge heels. My feet are scratchy and calloused; they don't slide in well because the skin catches on the suede. The straps are the inflexible leather of an unbroken-in birkenstock. I have to stand up and kick the toe of each heel against the ground for it to fit, and it comes to my attention that the heels are two full inches of cork. "Elegant birkenstocks, aren't they," I notify a nearby dorm-mate. She's hurried-looking with at least three armfuls of shoes. They're escaping her arms rapidly, and when she looks up at me I look down at the silk skirt I'm trampling. I'm slipping in it, my sandaled feet are twisting into it, so I plunk back down into the nest of dresses. The nearby dorm-mate releases the shoes in a waterfall somewhere in my periphery. Then she is at my feet, urging my sandaled feet into a pair of light blue vinyl sneakers, and I try but it Just Doesn't Float. Then I am hit with another realization: this is the third if not fourth time tonight that I've put these sandals on. I keep putting them on, but I don't have the slightest memory of taking them off. They just keep leaving as soon as I forget them; I don't notice until after I put them on again.

I think about the brother of the Boy Hanging Up in my closet. Maybe he's a lost boy now, too. The Boy Hanging Up was a lost boy all along. He died without a question. He was ready for death, he was so free of right and wrong that he was already living death when it came, that living death is just as natural as living life. That's why it's fine that my bed is next to the closet. Death every bit as natural as life: I'm close to it, and all my life I've been Very Far Away from it, running from it like I run from centipedes. If it was near me, I couldn't be okay until I got away from it. Now, so close to the closet the truth is that I own nothing, nothing to keep nothing to lose. So close to the closet, I only am because there is only living, and that includes living death when it is near because I don't own or keep or hold a life such that I can lose it. Living so close to the closet is a freedom, ultimate, and in the freedom there's a trust so great that problems aren't problems and everything makes sense as you live it, a trust so great that it’s free, ultimate, and in your freedom you are living. Living is a strange loop, living is a snail shell.

         Laura has the clockbook whose spine is cracked inwards so that the pages stick out at uneven lengths between the covers. The cloth strip mounted on the binding is lost, the Duck tape I used to bind it is exposed, the washi's deteriorating so the binder's board is poking out at the corners. I suppose it's been in that closet for one point two million years. Laura has it, but I desperately want to show her that it's only nine-tenths-of-the-way empty. My sister is outside the soirée on the prim lawn around the promenade. She's with my mom, showing my mom how to use mom’s new twenty-inch laptop to view a picture Laura sent for her birthday. She sent me a picture too, and for a moment it's everyone's birthday. My mom can't get the picture. My sister and I look into the laptop. We get it to work, when it loads it's a picture of my brother and his wife. It's a movie, and when my sister wants to know who Laura is we are through all twenty inches of the portal, in tall brush, looking up at Laura.

         Her back is turned, and she is dancing away from us. The encounter ends, my sister and I agree that so far, the only lasting impression is that Laura Has a Long Denim Skirt, with denim frill at the very bottom, the kind one can accidentally trot on at any time. But Laura sweeps skillfully away, sweeps away to where my brother and his wife are standing; she pretends to snip them apart with twenty-inch ceremonial scissors. The scissors of movies that a mayor or benefactor uses to slice a giant ribbon, to free-open a brand new facility to the public. She's pretending, and my brother's wife is pretending too, and when I sprint towards them they trot away chatting, all the while Laura's back is still turned, so my sister doesn't get to see who she is. Only her long denim skirt. But I want to get to Laura and the clockbook and the avocado pit, which she must still have. So I run after them, across the soirée lawn, but I'm holding the twenty-inch ceremonial scissors so I slow down. Then I know I'm being chased down, because it's hazardous to run with scissors and it’s Camp. I look over my left shoulder expecting to see the angry directors, or harried counselor, but my pursuer is my neighbor. Blair, Blair, Jogging in His Underwear. He is very old, but very fast, and he's after me because I'm Reeking Havoc and I'm a general concern to the public. I have to turn my eyes back to the lawn ahead of me, and the scissors, but I don't fail to notice that we just passed a fountain with a pool that looked like a reflecting pool. It looked like my closet was at the end of it. It looked like Orion’s belt is at the end of it. I don’t get a second look as I need to focus on my feet, I need to sprint because Blair's gaining on me. After a couple seconds sprinting, though, we both agree that it's best not to get reckless when carrying such large scissors, and he slows down so that I can slow down, so that we are jogging. But he's still a fast jogger, so I sprint again, and we shift between slowing and speeding until we approach the hill that I've decided not to climb.

I give Blair the scissors while we're still running, he's still running. I cast my eyes back at the promenade and there are people scattered along it, chatting and mingling in gowns and tailored suits, holding beaded masks and crystal cocktails and sandalwood folding fans. The masks have light blue pearls glued to them, the fans are sweetly scented like my grandmother's hand-me-downs, like the prayer mala that lives on the mouflon whose feet touch the floor of my room.

         I touch the room. I'm awake and I'm sleeping next to the closet. My feet find the floor, I think the smell of the mala, find half the smell in my head. I lose it, I lose nothing and the gain of living, and I lapse driftless into neither-either-loss-nor-gain. I drift out of that, into a memory; I linger in its feeling alone, I’m feeling what I’ve Found and I am fixed, unintently. Lapsing like that for an eternity. For a moment, before I get lost there. Lost in the memory of my hand with a pencil, with the pressure of life; my hand shading a map of Australia for life, with graphite. With knowledge like a well gushing up from its insidemost pressure, pressure from the center of Inside, the pressure of saving a life. The life of a lost boy who dies. The pressure of keeping his birth at bay and his death from living. Of running from the question and running from the answer, of running from the opportunity a moment arises.

(expedition)

X.

         We are on an expedition. Maybe Mom, maybe Dad, maybe a guide. Snowy pass high up in the mountains, starry starry sky I can't look away. Can't look at the aurora, don't look at what the others see: must look at the stars. Find Orion, it doesn't matter I don't. There is a guide who sits in a white plastic chair, always sits there, out in the snow off the path, facing the path. John Muir, perhaps. I don't remember what he says; my two Anybodies are listening for me. The two who are my companions, the two of the group that survive with me. If they are Anybodies, I'm an Anybody too; I'm me, I'm a girl I'm a boy I'm neither. I'm a character in a movie, I'm a child. I'm a Lost Boy, The Lost Boy, but I'll never know it. I'm living androgyny, I'm living a roleless role, I'm free and I'm dreaming and I'm living.

         Our group has made it across the dark snowy pass and back before, at the start of the dream. We are going Back, Enya is singing and off the path towards the guide's fixed chair there's a leafless twiggy tree, growing out of the snow, not quite tall as myself, young and colorless because it's dark. It's sleeping 'cause it's winter, it's night time. Enya is sounding, water shows the hidden truth, and under the tree is a dark violet iris, violet amaryllis, violet violet, so deep and dark that it's the color of the sky, the deep space of the backdrop to the stars. I'm looking at the flower; it's not growing out of the snow, not growing but eternal just the way it is, there like a spirit not touching the ground, a stem with no roots. I'm looking at it as though I were sitting in the chair off the path, a few feet from the tree; as though I'd gotten up out of the chair and squatted down by the violet, in the snow, with the snowy pass and the Anybodies still on the path. The Anybodies still waiting, watching the aurora, in the background of my vision of the violet. I don't know if we're going Back to where we came from or Forward, to an equally unknown. I don't know which way we are going, where we are going.

         We dabbled in the land of the Rock and the Bank and the Waterfall before, not enough to remember at the start of the dream. So our group returns, we're on the mountain pass again, still. Now it is dark and snowy and Muir's chair is empty; it is quieter and harsher and darker than the last time. There is no violet. My eyes are spinning the sky, crossing and uncrossing and blurring and whirling fast, searching. All the stars that I find are Anystars, not Orion for sure. So many stars, not Orion for sure. We lose members of our group somehow, somehow it's just me and the two Anybodies, we make it down the steep, steep mountain, the steep slope next to the jagged cliff like a castle to the bank below. There are rocks that look like huge castle bricks embedded in the cliff; it almost looks like a castle tower. We make it to the bank, the Wild bank of the wide wild river, the river that has just two banks to beach on, each on one side of the Giant gray rock, which juts into the river like a thorn in its side. Like the thickest, heaviest splinter; splinter of gravity splinters the flow, splints the wide wild river. The bank, Wild bank, at the foot of the mountain is on the downstream side of the Giant gray rock. It's Wild beacause it's hard to get to, it's dangerous to get to from the dangerous river, but the bank itself is calm in the shade of the Giant gray rock. It's surprisingly still, it's the pocket of pool at the toes of the mountain. The water there isn't salty like tears because the freshwater snow drips down the mountain's legs and into the pool in the steadiest, slightest stream. The Giant gray rock is granite, it’s bluish gray with flecks of salt and pepper; it's eroding where the river bites and slaps and weeps at it, just above the water level almost to the middle of the river. The wide wild river might be salty 'cause it waterfalls to the sea.

         We make it to the bank on the Upstream side of the Giant gray rock; we have to live there for years, for forgetful time; we guess three or four or maybe five years. We live there for years because it's too dangerous to try and hike up to the mountain pass where we lost so many people. We have rusty-spotted aluminum three-seater canoes, two or three; we only use two. We have orangish-red helmets with strips of navy blue and neon orange life jackets with black buckles and yellow straps like highlighter fluid. Because the water is dangerous; just a ways down past the Wild bank is a waterfall too huge too unknown no return. The plastic weave of the lifejacket cloth and the chinstraps on the helmets is perpetually wet, feels like a leash after a dog walk in the rain, a harness after a frolic in the downpour. Maybe we started out stranded with a few more people but we lost them and their canoes to the Waterfall, or to the dangers of the wild, the power of the wild, the forces we trust. Maybe we didn't lose them, maybe they left us. The forest is dense and lush and wild with tall coniferous trees. The water is wide and deep and Cyrano clear: the greenish cerulean clear of the fountain at Mirpe Square, the clearish color of things we touch and we leave, the salty cyan of friends we know and we touch and we friend for a short time and leave. It's gushing and constant and a body of the force, the body of the force. There are sand colored stones that form the bed of the river, they're smooth and round and born with gray rings.

         We always wear our life vests and helmets when we canoe because we don't want to lose each other. But now something is calling me to the Wild bank: I'm meeting Mollie there, I know she'll be there so I get in the canoe with just a clean, raggedy white towel, the kind we used to dry the dogs with after we gave them a bath. I paddle left, paddle right around the Giant gray rock to the wild bank, I'm in the canoe without my life vest. I'm a boy without a shirt. I'm a child without shoes. The raggedy white towel is draped over one of my knees, partly in my lap. Riverbrown riverwater is sloshing around the rust-spotted bottom, floor to my feet. The Anybodies hop in the other canoe. Now just one Anybody, a handsome actor-like Anybody, Sam-like, is in the other canoe and asking me what I'm thinking, what I'm doing, free like I'm going to die without my life vest, without my helmet. The other Anybody might be another handsome actor-like Anybody, the younger brother of the other Anybody; he is now on top of the Giant gray rock looking out for us. We bank, the handsome actor-like Anybody who followed me in the canoe might be like my oldest brother, but he's Anybody, no questions. I beach on the bank, I don't need to think about the canoe, I don't think about anything but I'm meeting a wolf, I'm meeting her here and I climb up the steep slope towards the Mountain pass we never went Back by.

         As I get to the top of the slope to the mouth of the Pass, I meet her, just like I knew she'd be here. She's here and she's magnificent, Anyage, she's young and old and wise like spirit, has the energy that's locked away in questions that are lived. She's absolutely beautiful and we run to each other and embrace each other and we cuddle and we're together. We climb up the rocky Castle Brick steps to the Castle Brick Cliff. Mollie leaps up on the Castle Brick ledge and lies there comfortably; my arms wrap around her and my hands pet her silky fur and scratch the dark brown soft behind her ears. I flop her ears, we are together, there near the edge of the cliff. We're so close that I don't bring myself to look straight down over the edge, at whatever's straight below, I don't want to fall. But Mollie can see it and she's not bothered, so I can look over the edge, just not straight down yet. Together we're gazing out at the wild world with the most incredible view. It's freedom, the freedom of a wolf, and Mollie is free, is a wolf. I know she has a pack to be an important part of, a wise member as an equal to everyone, everyone is equal in the pack on the path. A pack to go Back to, to be free with, and this is what she sees. I see the lush wild forest, the ledge of the waterfall cut off by coniferous trees, the Giant gray rock and the wide wild river, the Wild bank and the path up the steep slope. The bank that we live on, the Upstream bank, is too far away, cutoff by the Giant gray rock, so I don't see it. I don't see what is straight down, I'm not comfortable as Mollie who is lying on the ledge, but together we see the fifty plus wolves running by the river, my pack or hers, running out of the forest to hunt, to run to nothing to live, to free.

         I have to say goodbye to Mollie. She has to go. I hug her, Anybody is there to encourage and help me down the steep rocky castle brick steps, but in the end I do it myself, and Mollie comes with me. There's a bit of time before we part, and there's a spot of level ground at the top of the grassy slope where we won't roll away. Growing on the level ground is a light brown, leafless twiggy tree a bit taller than myself. We lie on the ground and roll around and cuddle and play open-mouthed like we did when we were children. We flop and roll around and live together with abandon, freely and with each other every second, no time. I have an iPod, the only second I take is the time to pressplay an Enya song, whatever song I click I let it happen, listen to the rain. In my vision is the violet iris, the violet amaryllis, the violet violet 'neath the tree like Mollie and me and it's light and purple like a flower in the sunlight. I'm with Mollie now. I love her, don't keep her; we live together like that, my arms wrapped around her, my hands stroking her fur, face buried in her fur. Every touch the most meaningful touch in the world, the kind of touch that happens because you are loving someone, you aren't thinking about it but you're living it, there is no better moment or longer moment or moment you could wish for but this, and that is the best.

         We live that until we have to go, and I'm not sad and she's not sad because we are still living, we're free and close and closer than ever to the edge, and she's comfortable and I am too, and it's as natural as life as living and breathing and the force we trust, so she stands by the tree and watches me leave with Anybody. We are parting ways, going Back Forwards to our packs, she to her wolf pack and me to mine. And I can still feel her fur, her beautiful white and black and brown and sand colored fur, the warm fur that grows from the nape of her neck. The soft feel of that fur in my fingers, the loving feel of it on my lips. The back of her head, by her ears where I bury my face, silky smooth, dark brown, warm. Where my tears collect, when I cry, when I'm a child, when she's my best friend and we're living each other and we're right there with each other for each other. When the rain is the most beautiful thing in the world, when Mollie is the most beautiful in the world, when I was living believing all this on a rainy day, together with Mollie behind the light blue-cushioned rocking chair in the room with the Cyrano walls. I can still feel her, when I am a dog and a child, when I am close to nothing and life, everything and death. When living is dreaming awake and free.

(pieces)

VII.

Pluck the white-coated metal, black lipped lamps from the 

white plastic tracking.

Ink them on stamp pads.

When will they turn the water back on in the parks?

                  Better fill up a water bottle just in case it's not yet—

                                    I have a place on my bicycle to stick it.

Unusable metal tokens, polished with vinegar

Rock-polishing machine                 Coin sorting bank

(Neither take tokens.)

Plastic peg pieces punched out with brand-new game pieces:

                                                         separated,

                                                      lost,

                                                            found,

                                                          considered and

                                               discarded.

Stiff, far-twisted plastic-coated twist-ties, un-twisted,

                                    released from the ankle of the brand-new toy

                  and the punched hole in the brand-new box.

Plastic wrapper, wrapping box,

passes being brand-new—

moments, minutes, a day after broken?

Bro¦ken op‿en,

                    ap/art,

                    to↯rn, still passive;

                                                         what be it now?

                                                         what be-ed it before,

when my fingernail  could not slice it?

when I could not incise it,

             even at the corners of the box where the wrapping wrinkles up.

When my tooth could not tear it,

                  only pu l  l   ,  s  t r et ch   the wrinkled corner and

leave saliva beading up on the clear.

                  Even at the edges where the box folds in;

where the corner of my nail could not slit it,

only run along the indent, against nothing, aggressively,

only    s   t re tch  i ng and wrinkling the plastic.

   what be it then?

Before a pen is found to do the job,

                                    go where the fingernail failed.

                                    A scissors to finish what the tooth started.

What will all the stamp pads be when they've dried up?

separated,                  

       considered,

lost,         

discarded,         

《found?》  

I'll have circles the diameter of light bulbs

if I can find stamp pads the diameter of white track lamps.

Outside, inside, through the window,

through the nine-tenths-of-the-way closed curtain,

through the white plastic corner of fence,

behind an unfocused sum of tree fingers,

tree digits,

ticks a shape as bold and dimensional as a water-logged ink doodle. Ticking tail, monkey’s math, sleepy rhythm, in and out.

It's a monkey,

a faceless baboon or an unknown sort,

a crossbreed,

a generic likeness of—

but not a gibbon. Not a creature's shadow. Not altogether there.

On the edge of the dream,

a banana = slip, and as I slip into dream the ink monkey

appears like an inbreath and bobs away like an outbreath, disappearing to the park.

I left my bicycle by the fence, for the years and years of a heartbeat, with no tangible evidence of the was that passes since we were,

since the way it was and the way we were,

since and passing.

Like grabbing sunlight

as it cycles through the nine-tenths-of-the-way closed curtain.

Like banana meanings, like a rhythmic tick:

monkey’s math for water-logged ink at the start of a dream.

Like vinegar-polished metal tokens,

which cannot be sorted by mechanical banks.

Brand-new passes wrinkles, time and time of a heartbeat.

My white-coated metal, black lipped stamps pass too,

on the white plastic tracking,

like plastic wrapping,

plastic pegs,

and far-twisted twist-ties.

On the edge of the dream, there is no place to stick it.

(forty winks)

VI.

         Reclining on my bed I look into the Karate mirror that runs parallel to me on the opposite wall and see that all is in order in my room. No Peter-Pan-shooed thief is dismantling the storm windows, no disturbing skeletal cat is crouching against the ceiling in the corner to my right, no mouths are shutting in any of the pictures posted up behind the lamp. None of the canvas-skinned subjects have left their painty backdrops to sneak into my sheets, no brother of mine is on the roof outside the window with a bagel for my breakfast. Forty-winks and I'll be on my way---Wink number one: Was that a three foot hairy-legged centipede resting on the wall above my head? I blink. There are tears worn into my lykafur coat, ripped from my blinky eyelids after naps in crowds of beer and sharp grass, ripped and sewn in with a needle of grass at the world's weakest seams.

         My door pops open in a demonstration of manhood, proof that no one's helping hand is needed to turn the knob. Blink blink---I lost count already, unless that makes five. I poke the latest self-infliction in my mouth with my tongue. It tastes tender and savory, and painful. A finger travels to the space between my legs. Then, a moment of self-consciousness and salty guilt precedes and endures a vision of Anyone everyone regarding me, Everyone offended and feeling forced to live their disgust at me. So I do exactly as I don't-know-what-to do:

         I stretch myself on the torture rack between thinking one way and another and listen as my muscle tears under grueling strokes of "yeah buts." I listen to sinewy rips that sound like wet pulpy construction paper pulling apart, canvas on a hot air balloon bursting open, rupturing in the middle of the canvas, far from the seams. I hear the wet, fleshy tearing under my skin until I get to the end, reclining on my bed. Reclining on my bed is the dream, and I recline into its comfort. The dream reposes there, as fantasy, as gettaways, as entertainment, consolation, inspiration. Occasionally just as sleep. Cozy sleep boiling over with emptiness, so empty you have to put a lid over it. But right now I'm still blinking. I must not have reached forty yet.

         I listen to the song that's noising my room; the noise is all about a lady In London So Fair, and I like the story I'm imagining. Soon I snap out of it and realize that my sister is driving me somewhere. It's a car ride from hell; there's highway as far as the eye can see and Everyone knows: it's pass, kill, tailgate and be killed. I see cars full of children go down from crooked tricks and despicable stunts, and I keep my eyes on the red sky until my sister drops me off at a small theater with peeling frescos. I'm told by the cooperators that I've been Commissioned to Rectify their building Through Art. My fingernails scratch at the fresco, scratch away the crumbling plaster, peel and scratch 'til I feel the cement structure behind it, the architecture of the 1970's, heavy at the bottom. There's not a lot of light but there are red-orange rugs, and the trapezoidal walls and dead vines on the cracked cement suggest the building used to be an underpass. If I walk up the stairs I can take the slide to the central Prada store in the city. I take the slide. It's not a store, just a building. It's chic on the outside, black and white and skyscrapery. On the Inside prada is lost; it's black like an arcade and there are kids there, kids my age and older. Some are sitting in a jeep, others in a blue and red Porsche, wearing pricey sunglasses, taking photos of themselves and rocking back and forth because the cars shake like their miniature versions—the mini cars, planted in front of grocery stores, that little kids ride on for a quarter.

         A familiar-looking kid my age takes off his pricey sunglasses to assess a photo of himself. As he adjusts his stylish scarf he spots me and beckons me over. I look around. On the right towards the back of the room the black wall is missing. There are three long steps where the wall would be and three walls surrounding the long steps, it's dark inside because it's an arcade for kids much younger. By the time I look back at the familiar-looking kid he's engrossed in his project again. I go and join the kids much younger; we play life-size Hungry Hippos. But the game costs $6.50 and the supervising carnivalman shakes his finger at me, wordlessly accuses me of sneaking and kicks me out, so I wander past the Photobooth-in-a-Jeep and Porsche Rock 'n Ride and outside of the building where scores of kids my age and older are loitering and trading and chatting and grinding the toes of their shoes on the cement to put out finished cigarettes. Some are sitting in butts that are old and stained by the street and the dirt on the ground is probably ash. The grass that sprouts through the cracked cement is coarse and sharp and tougher than plastic; it's fibrous and dry and bends though it's stiff and it'll papercut your finger if you grab it from a sneaky angle. It's impossible to uproot, even if you tear up the fibrous blades; the scores of feet my age and older trample the dirt and pack the ash so tight that they form cement and that's how the streets are made.

         I make my way to a harlequin kid who is chatting it up with Anyone near the side of the Prada store, on the sharp grassy lawn of the park where loitering is abundant. I borrow an ice cream bucket full of cash when he isn't caring. I just need to use it to pay off a game of tug-o-war for the kids much younger. But the bucket is from crack deals and suddenly there are shouts announcing that "it's the po," "the pigs are here," "the fuckin' boys―the fuckin' po-lice" have hit the scene, and it's a dry, sunny day for the scores of kids my age and older to scatter like mad in every direction. Some continue to sit on the sharp grassy lawn and picnic on tattered, ashy tablecloths; they stay where they are because they know they can't get arrested if they're clean, or because the police have black batons to bring down the runners. Others run because they won't get away with staying, and the heavy policewoman near us is distracted by the runners just long enough for the Harlequin Kid to slap my shoulder and tell me to run. We take off. It's inevitable that she'll come after me and as I follow the Harlequin Kid, who doesn't take back the ice cream bucket, I look back and see her brown face, heavy at the bottom, chasing me. We sprint across the park and there are so many kids that she loses us, and I look at the Harlequin Kid and his eyes are so red and so tired that he stops to lie down under a tree for 'night's sleep. He hands me a pamphlet before he knocks out and I read about a kid my age or older who died with blood in his red eyes and coke dusted on his shirt and hairy arms. There is a picture.

         I wonder how the Kid got this pamphlet in my dream and what is he trying to tell me by giving me this. I wonder is he showing me that the world of law-abiders, the parents, the publishers of the pamphlet are ludicrous, Or Is he warning me, Or Is he laughing. His language is ununderstandable, and with no answer it is pointless to keep the speculations, so I delete them and the situation is feelingless. I delete right and wrong before I leave him to sleep under his tree, before I leave the tree and the pamphlet and the park and the world of highway as far as the eye can see. In forty winks I'm on my way, I wake up and remember I was sleeping.