Free War Is Language : 101 Short Works (9781937316044) by Nath Jones Page A

going water meter owners on the bicycle path and also by
this oncoming trafficked Lake Shore Drive—and oh God, the ache
fall. Because we will damn well get it. Oh God the lightning crack
in half and wood from which life barely knows the swirling flood in
a sewer gutter splayed everywhere, and weight-bearing bent drowning
branches in the grass.

 

    45 — Identity/Id
entity
    Under bedrock, the world moves molten. It seems
not at all possible when confronted by that crust of seeming
solidity. But denial is dangerous. You and I both know that rock
subverts great flows of magma. And below your exterior, your
countenance, your pleasant tolerance, the self melts where
mountains have yet to be made. You want a steam vent? I’ve got just
the nothing causing that kind of defeated hunt for entrance. We
both know there’s a way in. Because we see every kind of shattered
earth: snowy streetlight near cracked asphalt in a parking lot, but
also bedrock asunder, and exploding meadows. This is your version
of loving, eh? Okay. But I have diligently done all that, picking
over soft filth, pretending. Another damned mess made just to be
cleaned up. Shhhh! I know. We don’t have to talk about it. It will
go away. I’ll sift glitter and dust across that place where a steam
vent can’t exist because I must obstruct my loving, knowing
entrance to you. Just hush. Let the glitter come down through
nothing, falling dutifully bright, and likewise weightless, flat.
Don’t say anything. Not another word. Let this silence of my shaken
may-as-well-go-on morning be like powdered sugar on a bundt cake.
Uniform, perfect ash drifts down just the way nothing’s swept away
from the dusted dark, which remains as its own reality. We may be
able to prove and disprove ourselves sinister and sane continually.
Just shut up about it. Get some slivered almonds on the way home,
will you? And to these beginnings be, blessed white fires of
belonging, undone and rapt, and so Pinatubo, so what? Rim unclosed
and somehow surging, so much molten earth forced into our night
sky—how can it be? It is. Not a cake. Not a steam vent. Not any
kind of horrid, unprecedented eruption. Not anymore. It is nothing
in the morning. Only. Undone and cooling wrapped valley spurs,
through obsidian eyes, and so leave these unquestioned, these
blessed white fires of belonging: me, yours, your only own
pyroclastic flow.

60 — Pussy/Deterrent
Threat
    Dear Fake Advice
Columnist,
    I’m a guy and I’m sort of a pussy.
Sometimes I sit around with all my friends and talk about what a
bunch of pussies we are. Check this shit out. A girlfriend of one
of my buddies was on a train. Right in front of her this old man
was severely beaten and mugged. It was crazy. She had to sit there
and witness it. Just watch someone get brutalized and robbed. She
was really shaken. We tried to make her feel better, help her
relax. Just kept talking about how much we would have showed that
guy a thing or two. But you know what? Honestly? I’m glad I wasn't
there. I probably would have had to do something.
    Dear Pussy/Deterrent
Threat,
    It might not have happened if you were
there.

49 —
Security/Insecurity
    I had a dominant dependence on several men in a
row. What? No. That can’t be right. (Nobody looks good in a thong.)
Wait, watch, wild, wonder, world over, skill, better, improve,
perform, control, get, do. This is my insecurity: that it is me,
that it is not. For forty-two minutes and twenty-eight seconds a
man in jeans with his shirt off gets a mechanical lap dance. So
hurried; then a woman lies down on a sandy path between green aloe
bushes. She’s secluded, ready, wanting. But never secure. There’s
nothing to tie her to: no mooring, no cleat, no tree, no bike rack,
no fence post, no tow bar. What will hold her weight if a storm
comes? She is free in the confidence-shifting sands and wears that
brick red nothing. Get mesmerized. Go to Milan with a fresh
manicure and pedicure. Do it May 30, 2011;