Hubris

Consider the molecular,

The insanity of it,

And rest in the notion

That you are not as important

As you feel.

Go More Slowly

We may find exactly
The song we tried to write
For all these years.
I hope to hear it sung.
I hope to hear it pour out
of your mouth
and fall down drunk with it.

 

The Hearts of Savage People

I have known the hearts
Of my fair share of grave robbers,
A profession that hardly exists
In this country anymore,
And they are not such horrible people.
Many of them less savage than I.

Trains

Movement,
is a devastating reminder
of impermanence.

Photo by Cecelia Webber

This Light

From a quiet well
This early light has climbed free
And dogs run wild
Barking after the imaginary foe.
In the city bridge, bats are nesting again
for the night. This moment
Makes so much sense.

Movement and Lack

To move so slow is to be so lucky,
Such fleeting luck that we may
For a brief moment feel bathe in the sun's glance
Through gray - the cellular excitation and sudden urge
to scratch at the flaking skin of a sun burn,
An older time when we had enough food.
But then snow, desire, and wind.

New Story

I have begun a new story. I will post it as I write it. Who knows? This could be an interesting thing to watch unfold. It has been far too long since I've posted here.
Enjoy,
Michael R. Walker.
 -----------------

The boy was awakened by the gruff whisper of his father, leaning into the tent, quietly commanding the boy to rise and dress. Get up boy. We've breakfast to make and then we move. Not until the tent flap had fallen back into place and his father's steps marched away into the darkness did the boy toss the heavy wool blanket back and raise up to his elbows. The itch of the wool had finally grown on him and he enjoyed the weight of the blanket in the cold mornings. Rousing was never easy, but the ordeal of it perceived by the boy was not a concern of his father. Thusly, the boy never complained, for fear of seeming less like the man he wanted to become and the man his father seemed to expect. The boy dressed quickly, noticing the vapor of his breath and rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. When he drew back the tent flap, he could smell coffee and hickory smoke and looked into the gray to see their nigger cutting strips of belly from a wild boar that he had not seen the night before. The nigger was washing the strips in brine water and laying them down into a canvas covered in pepper before tossing them onto an iron skillet over the fire, sizzling and popping as they began to transform into food. This always pleased the boy and he grinned just as the nigger noticed him standing there. Mornin sir. Your pa an me, we caught dis he piggy last night after yous asleepin. Makin some right good bacon. That'll be alright. Where's Pa? Reckon he went yon so as to perform he necessaries. Reckon you better had too. I be he cookin when you get a finish. That'll be alright. The boy marched down through the tall grasses toward the creek and felt his belly rumble. Mornings were a perplexing mystery to him even as he had seen more than he could remember. The way in which the earth changed to come alive after sleeping - the temperature, the colors, the smells, all while he slept - was something he could not wrap his mind around, yet trying to figure it was something he enjoyed. In many ways, he wished to emulate the quietude of his father, for he figured that his father must have thought the same kinds of things and, if he was quiet enough, he too could understand the world as his father did. A certain delicacy hovered around the quietness of people and the boy had perceived it at an age younger than most. The awareness of it was settling and helped him to understand people without asking questions. Questions were overbearing and uncouth. He could hear the horses baying and the soft rustle of the creek, dulled only by the quiet whisper of cottonwoods in the faint breeze. The sun was peeking out and the color of things began to change.

Hills Like Hot Air Balloons

From the hills Looking down over
The coastal plain Hot air balloons
Chase the sun Upward,
One hell of a show
For the motorists
Who for a second
Stopped caking
On make-up
And didn't think
About Starbucks and
Simply remembered something,
Sequestered,
From youth.
Perhaps life has
Much more substance
Than a morning commute.
But a cell phone rings.
The sun wins the race.
And the gears of capitalism
Turn in marked rhythm,
Punching in the time clocks
Until the health insurance
Won't cover the costs.
Perhaps life has
Much more substance.
I long to know.

Blenders Are For Puréeing

Blenders Are For Puréeing(conceptualized and co-authored by Samuel Stavinoha)

All the people go spinning around
furiously around, and again they go around
with the heirloom tomatoes and the hatch green
chiles and the purple onion,
but most of them never realize that if 
you just press your whole body against
the clear glass that you can stay out 
of the salsa churning in the blades
down below us all, at the foot of the world. 
It's ridiculous to think that we are 
so poorly adapted as apes that we can't
even swim fast enough to get 
out of the wake most of the time
and the ones that do just cling 
in terror, watching everything raging into
salsa below them. They hold on 
screaming for god to shut the blender 
off, but the sound is too great and 
everyone's just screaming at the air. 
I heard a story once of a man who thought 
he was safe from the salsa, but he accidentally
let go when he answered his blackberry. 
I heard Christopher Columbus made it out 
with only a few stained clothes to go on
and catastrophically discover the new world. 
How evil the world must have been then,
before we stopped answering questions about the universe
with wars instead of math. Or was it art that we use?
I can never remember. This blender is so loud
it is so very hard to remember.
I also heard that owning Apple products
statistically increases your chances of
getting up the glass, but then again,
so does being Batman. 
There are days I feel like I'm a glass-climber
and days that I feel like minced garlic.
In the end, I guess it's a matter of opinion. 

Confluence

The more I think about things between us, past and present, I am beginning to see the ways in which our lives are becoming one life and the more we fight its movement, the more acute the awareness becomes; the terrifying and sometimes so overcoming realization of our now and here, and this, comes on so strongly that we forget that two rivers running along side one another most always converge. Their colors meld and their salts and soils turn into one shade of the murkiest brown. We forget that the water is perpetually rolling over itself toward the sea, where we set out to a place where the sky once was, now only separated by the slightest of color. Rolling on into darkness.
Fighting is so much harder on us, but we do it because we are scared to drown. Drowning is suffocating with water and the experts say it is more painful than burning alive, so why shouldn't we be scared? Why shouldn't we fight to get to the banks instead of being sucked down into the moving silt and mud to suffocate in a place we cannot see or understand? We are not catfish, but people. Two incredibly scared people on the verge of drowning at the hands of a merciless movement toward a sea of unknowing and endlessness. Darkness.

Today I have a very different thought about it though.

I want to drown.
I want to let go and tumble underwater at the hands of two rivers converged, feeling the momentum gather strength as they entangle waters, tearing at the land beside, cutting through the earth like the knife that carved creation out of a single block. I want to open my mouth and let the water go down into my lungs where it will fill up every inch of space, every breath of air exhaled into the muddy water. I want them to explode.
Because then I can finally sleep without worrying so much that I'd drown. I will have already done it.
And the best part, the moving part of it, is that I know I won't be alone.
You are just as much a part as the river as me and there is nothing more comforting than the thought of drowning in your water, entangled in it, the mud composed of soil from the entirety of our lives separate - now thrown together into one. Just drowned and quiet, flowing toward the sea, letting the river take us where we need to go before we get there. Really breathing in the water deep into our lungs.

I cannot wait to drown with you.
I can see our rivers converging just ahead.
The thought is so pleasing that nobody would mistake my emotion to be anything less than peacefully content. Alive with the thought of dying at an old age with you.

I love you in ways you cannot know because they are so much apart of me that I cannot tell them from one another, nor explain them for that very reason.

Drown with me.

26

The tower howls
and sings a
requiem
to the springs
it looms over-
when I see it
I crawl into myself
and realize,
at the cost of great
aversion and pain,
that death is
counting our ribs
every day.
I will miss you
Mr. Fox.
I will miss you
a great deal.

They Call The Wind Mariah

On a night
in Amarillo
if you are
quiet enough,
you will hear
the wind whistle
through the hole
where god is
supposed to go,
dust settling through
the cracks of a window;
and when you
hear it you
will whisper
to yourself
"is this really
it?"
and sisyphus will
look at you
from the chair
across the room
and say "quit
your moping,
flip the record,
and get us another
beer."

(a.) Stream Of Consciousness Exercise (b.) Possibly The Beginning of a Short Story Or (c.) Simply A Character Development

She was humming while the shower curtain threw open and she reached for the blue towel hanging on the wall mounted rack from Target, immediately wrapping it under her arms, the point of contact between wet skin and dry cotton just shy of immaculate, elbows tucked down to hold it in place. As she reached out for the pink towel, smaller, to wrap around her head she noticed that her arms were puffed out next to her breasts from the elbow tucking and this sent displeasure through her, though she knew it was petty and probably a useless thing to feel. No less, it was her useless thing to feel.

Wrapping up her hair in the same turban style her mother had taught her when she was young, a memory came and the displeasure was gone. Rowan didn't believe in an afterlife, but the thought of her mother sleeping peacefully made her feel something new. It would be six years next month and Rowan was finally a little okay with it. Displeasure replaced with nostalgia and a faint scent of daughterly gratitude. She managed to smile as she dried her shoulders, but then she thought of how much time had passed since those shoulders had been touched and this brought back the events that took place just prior at the Saxon Pub.

She was supposed to have met a guy who she'd contacted on FirstDate.com, but assumed that he had either died in his apartment from dorito strangulation, or a strange heart condition, or he just saw her face, feeling either too aggravated and nervous to deal with a next to blind date, or disgusted with the goods, the commodity which the internet had turned her into - a profile to be examined and evaluated - and walked back out the door. She imagined him hailing a cab as she drank her third vodka-tonic, skimming over how he could have made such a terrible mistake, overlooking all the possible negatives of her profile and following his dick's advice. Whatever the reason, he had not come and Rowan was, in different and terribly melancholy ways, crushed by this.

And as she lifted a leg to the edge of the tub, bending over to dry it, her stomach bunched into the faintest little pudge whereupon water trickled out of her belly button and ran down to her thigh. It felt for the briefest of moments like a man gently blowing against her skin and when she became aroused at the thought, the displeasure came back in full stride and she began crying, the tears indistinguishable from the hard tap water still running down her face from the drenched turban of hair above.
She felt just like everybody else in the world, nothing special about her. Breathing in sharply between light sobs, this was Friday night for Rowan and it was filled with ups and downs, nostalgia and the great displeasure.
Probably petty and useless things to feel, but these was hers to feel as she unfolded onto the bathroom floor, a puddle forming at her feet.
Hers alone.

1.11.11

We will spend our nights
eating vestiges of dumplings
as cold sweeps into
our window panes,
rushing through
empty spaces
between the wood
exhaling into the house
and fighting the heater
tooth and nail.
Blood for blood
and cold for hot,
we only live about
eighty years each,
spend a third of them
asleep and even more
in silence or in chaos.
Death counts
our ribs while we snore
toss and turn,
we might be better
off trying to love
each other.
Of course we won't
ever know what
that means.
But as absurd as it
seems, in those
quiet moments:
Tick Tock tick tock

goes the big 

wooden clock

and the wind 

whistles in again.

Still

I have again
confused the Shell
station sign for
a brighter and fuller
moon than the one
that actually hung
in its place above
the town that
rests quietly,
winter's slow.
It is the season
to know
that when you
have bent down
the branches all
and pulled away
the fruit, the tree
only looks like a skeleton,
it's skin fallen to
the ground,
rotting in piles
raked together,
never carried to
the garbage.
Be still I say.
We are so
lucky
and so foolish,
sometimes one
cannot be distinguished
from the other.