LatinosUSA

The conversation quickly escalates beyond their own small walled world.  From down the hall, voices from an open office make their disembodied way to my desk.  I take notes.  The poem didn’t bother to knock, in fact, it walked  through the closed door.  I fold the page into a boat to float in the water fountain.  I hear Ahab is looking for a crew of poets.

Two guys try to one up each other.  Needles larger than life, human targets too numerous to mention.  They even take aim with a legendary over-sized needle pulled from a rock in the middle of a lake.  They’re off:  one man with a gunshot wound to the back of his leg is admired for two hundred operations over a lifetime, ministering to a sixteen-year-old’s hunting accident.  No mention of  calibers.  He was prone to violence, a brawler.  Perhaps pain is the most direct way to transcend the body, or is it the opposite, pain takes you deeper into life and an understanding of the frail transitory nature of existence, and whatever gods we escape into.  Brawling just another way to deny one’s existence and embellish it, if you survive.  Hard not to visualize mountain sheep, rams raising up on hind legs to accelerate their impending collision, concussive with the curved horns of their opponents.  Of course, rams are working their sexual necessity, and maybe there’s a splinter of that in brawlers, but my guess is unresolved anger, multifaceted, kaleidoscopic.   So now must I take possession of my own anger even though I was witness to it from outside my body.  I could care less about where the bicycle foot pump was stored.  I’d used it twice to pump up the driver’s side rear tire that went completely flat and later learned it had become home to a 16 penny nail.  After the repair, I brought the pump into the house to prevent one more thing from accumulating in the car, which was very close to becoming a mobile library with dozens of books reshuffling themselves with each stop.  I made the mistake of asking where to place it and was told it belonged in a drawer.  I knew that it was positioned as a bookend.  I watched myself place it on the shelf where I had first found it and then slammed the door, though it was half-inadvertent, though I could have half-stopped it and didn’t, half-enjoying the concussive boom of door and jamb, two rams locking horns with a latch.  The peak of my multifaceted, kaleidoscopic, unresolved anger floats through the room.  Stunning how little we see of the mountains.