I Wonder at the Effectiveness of Streetlights

I wonder at the effectiveness of streetlights
Wonder at the brief illumination of darkness
At the waxing and waning of the outer limits
The line that fades, hazy to the eyes
And swift in warfare upon the senses
Able to reverse the density of the years
The angry impotence of passing time
The rugged opaqueness of past lives
The olfactory magnetism of canyon winds
And that ball and chain of personal history
Spitefully returning with the rising sun

I wonder at the cold promise of insulation
Wonder at the ineffectiveness of a woman's arms
At the broken and beaten myth of love
The woman that saunters, noxious to the mind
And with the cold consistency of a stranger
Able to dissect with tools of dissension
The ephemeral empathy of my mind
The perennial restlessness of my spirit
The consequential promise of hope
And the congested nature of my heart
That clears all too quickly with the setting sun

I wonder at the course of molten rivers
Wonder at the carving strength of least resistance
At the inevitable paths of wandering soles
The years that fade, hazy to the mind
And quick to compound upon the human frame
Able to revolt against the frailty of contentment
The directness of apparent facts
The precedent of successful cousins
The aspirations of illusory films
And the insistent images of dreams
Infectiously haunting in the transient night

Piss in the Yard - She Has Locked Herself in the Bathroom

Piss in the yard. She has locked herself in the bathroom again. Lean back and bash your face into the silver glow of her majesty. Rummage the stars for familiar constellations; find Orion and speak no words, search for Draco and succumb to ignorance. Follow the dipper handle with your eyes and leave while still she moralizes through closed doors and communicates with silent words, unspoken thoughts.

Pass an old man whose eyes pierce your thin layers. Think of your father, think of yourself and avert your gaze. Walk to the corner bar for warmth and a bathroom door minus working locks. Drink pint after pint of cheap blue ribbon beer and stumble out full of foam. Think of the bathroom prisoner and let your heart harden. Puke and spit into the yards of your neighbors. Peer in their windows, families bundled around televisions like church alters, receiving sermons in Americana. Look up into their daughter's bedroom window; see a be-speckled teenage girl before a mirror. Think of a German girl you met in your twenties before the shackles of houses and wives and business suits and oil changes every three thousand miles and avert your eyes. See your dog wandering the streets, catch and drag him home by the collar, latch the gate and piss in the yard. Search for Orion and find him on the horizon. Stare up at your windows and find them black and empty and let your heart break. Sneak inside quietly and creep into the guest room. Watch sport center and Cinemax. Satisfy animal urges with the flick of a wrist. Look out your window and see your dog staring in at you, whimpering. Whisper in drunken understanding and sleep.

Wake to a silent house. Read the note through the bag-of-assholes feeling of the morning after, fold it up and put it in your shirt pocket. Hear the phone ring and let it ring. Turn on the television and ignore it. Go outside and toss a stick to your dog. Piss in the yard out of habit and defiance, look up at the clear blue sky, see the sun, shield your eyes and say nothing.

Go inside and close the door, windows, cupboards. Turn over her picture and turn over her mother's picture and turn over her friend's picture. Look at the unexplainable cut on your hand. Go into the attic and feel the dry heat of the dusty past on your face. Shutter the window against the sun and find a picture of the German girl from your twenties. Sit, reflecting on alternate paths. Lay back on the dusty wooden floor as the sun sets and leaves the attic dark. Hear her return below opening doors, windows, cupboards. She is calling your name. Say nothing.

Meat Raffle Sunday pt1

My offices lumber above Main Street like a balcony box. Off the beaten path of the raving suburbanites, tourist and students that clog the newer, flashier parts of the city, it is a crown jewel of justice in Madison's first settlement. In infancy, the street she was the center of the earliest neighborhood, large speckled houses of the richest and most influential lined her silken unmentionables. But now her authority has waned, some of the old speckled houses still standing but for a large brick building, dilapidated, housing small studio apartments and my agencys eight offices. I am on the third floor and my windows face to the east, turning thier back on the Capitol building and County Courthouse. The floor is split down the middle by a long hallway, dark and lit with small ineffective lights that give it the appearance of a zebra-stripped snake. Eight of the nine doors on its left side are mine and the nine on the right seldom open, hiding studio apartments and seedy characters like a game of Guess Who. I do not hear the tenants often, the rooms seem to be partcially unoccupied, but I have seen a few as a man in the forest will come across a surprised rabbit and wonder how he got so close momentarily, before both man and rabbit scatter. A few doors down there's-ah Chinaman on my side behind door # 5. I see him leave early in the morning and return late at night with shopping bags covering both his hands like examiner's gloves, peering around corners with glassy, tender eyes. He pulls the doorknob of his front door closed with those grocery bag hands as I approach and all the time he seems as on the edge of firelight, lingering on the border of darkness just out of sight. When I say Hello he freezes as a deer and looks up at me trembling, as if expecting a vehemence of blows. My offices surround his dwelling and I believe he knows more about my dealings than I would like. A Panamanian lives across the hallway from my main office, #1, seven feet tall with thick lean muscles. He is quick to anger. At the end of the hallway, farthest from my doors and opposite, a thin, elderly man in tight pants that cause him to wear his balls as a fanny pack on an nineteen-eighties tourist, lurks behind his entry, only expelling himself to tap politely on my door to tell me my music is too loud or that I drink too much whiskey. He says often that it is good we can solve our differences like men, so that it is not necessary to get the landlord involved. For several months I figured him for a deaf mute, for he ignores all of my hallway Hellos and Good evenings and tips of the hat.

Office #1's door has been replaced with one showing a frosted window framed in wood and in an unadorned font my name and my business stare down the zebra hallway. I operate the only private investigators office in all of the city of Madison.

I like to think, and I suppose it is possible, that no one hears me in my offices, but I hear much that goes on in the building; the Mexican couple below me that fight and fuck with the cruelty of wild boars, the alleyway-like discussions of the hallways, keys as they jingle to the lock, phone conversations leaking through thin walls, doors swung shut with a soft whistle, strikes that land with the strength of an avalanche, whispers and secrets. Once I passed a policewoman in the stairwell taking a statement from the Mexican female downstairs, who hid a black eye and busted lip in the shadows of the zebra lights. The officer stopped me to tell me I looked like Ron Howard.

She said "are you bald underneath that felt brimmed hat?"

I told her I was a detective. I said my name is Hardley, Jack Hardley.

Inside my offices all evidence of its duel use as my primary living quarters are hidden, the bed folds into the wall in office #4, clothes are kept in desk drawers and a shaving kit is home in a file cabinet. The rooms were originally separate studio apartments and rented to me at a much lower rate on the promise that I would use them for my agency only. There are two cats, Althea and Tank, who roam the offices through small tunnels I had specially built, but I must exit and enter through each door in its turn. I told the landlord they are seizure cats and they belong to my secretary. He allows them on the premises on the premise they are taken home by the secretary each night and that I pay an extra ten dollars a month for the both of them. The landlord's name is Casey Reh, he fixes cars on the side and is a good man.

My office desk has been in the Hardley family for generations and numerous people of an inquisitive nature have spent thier lives behind it; a newsman, a headhunter, a commissioner of thistles. In the bottom left drawer is a bottle of Irish whiskey. In the top right drawer are a six-shooter and a passport with two stamps. The top middle drawer houses hundreds of stolen pens and pencils, telling the tale of my travels and a half used pad of sticky notes for them to bleed into. The top left drawer holds my camera and some spare rolls of film. The lower right is locked. Most often my hand veers to the bottom left and then, to the top right. I keep my desk in office #1, behind the frosted door that proclaims my name and my business.

I am in office #1 staring into my first cup of coffee when a knock comes and comes and comes again at my smoky door, an official and barmy sound to it. I waste no time on thought and open it, expecting to be confronted with a badge or mark or seal and two fist of burly knuckles, but standing underneath the glowing exit sign in the zebra hallway aback from my door is a woman the likes I've never seen. She is tall, thin, alien-like, dark complected, Turkish is appearance, with one of those hats the dames in Monet's paintings wear and clutching a hanker chief with her long claw-like fingers. Most of her body is covered by some sort of cloak and her boots have these unnecessary heels that helped her tower over a 6 foot 2 me.

She raises her eyebrows and says with unfittingly large, pouty lips "Hardley..., Jack Hardley?"

I usher her down to office #3, which I use as a waiting room and show her to the couch. I say please excuse the informalness but my secretary is home sick, she has the seizures. She sits opposite me facing the windows, but their light seems to die in the air before reaching her, her features hard to make out. The cats hide from her underneath the couch, never a good sign.

She says "My father is missing. Can you find him?"

I tell her that she must wait until the top of the hour to discuss the case with Mr. Hardley for billing purposes and ask her to peruse one of the magazines in the racks on the wall; I say with an akward smile, I will let you know when Mr. Hardley is ready to see you. I turn to leave, wanting to professional-up office #1 a bit, but stop at the door when she speaks. She again says "My father is missing. Can you find him?"

I rush her out of office #3 and into office #1, taking a seat behind my desk. When she takes a seat opposite me (looking confused) I introduce myself, I'm Detective Hardley, Detective Jack Hardley, Private Investigator Jack Hardley, master of disguise, eh... are you comfortable miss...?

She nods approvingly. "MacMurrough... I've seen your picture in the paper."

Ignoring this I say Miss Macmurrough, where did you last see him? She looks unsure and bows her head in thought. Her eyes are small, but too big for her head and the glitter green mascara she has encrusted them in make them appear venus flytraps that would attack any asailant moving in for a draw off her luscious lips. As she looks at me suddenly, I see the bridge of her nose is very wide and has probably been broken before, perhaps multiple times. She tells me that the last she knew he was in Chicago working as a janitor... Chicago, now that would be a real carrot to crack. Was he in Chicago when you last saw him?

She says "I don't know... I don't know where he was... I've been around him before but I'm not sure that I have seen him before."

What... what does that mean... I say but she doesn't answer and looks once more down at her boots.

I said why do you want me to find him, do you miss him... want a reconciliation, to fix an empty childhood?

"Hardly..." she says under a thick sigh.

Yes?, I say and she looks up surprisingly, then returns her gaze to her big boots saying "no, I don't want to meet him, I just want you to find him." I'm getting nowhere gradually, the worst speed in which to find yourself drifting towards nowhere and decide for a different line of questioning.

I say what do you think happened to him? She shrugs her shoulders and again avoids the question. Listen lady your gonna have to give me more to go on than Chicago, no description and no name, I say forcefully.

Ignoring this she says into the silence "do you mind if I smoke?"

I say please Ms. MacMurrogh, wait until after the questioning, smoking is only allowed in office #3 and walk over to the window looking down onto a East Main street that is strangely deserted and ghost-like. I am unsure of how to proceed; it is obvious to me that she doesn't want to offer up anymore information. Ignoring my answer she takes out a slim pack of cigarettes, thin and slender like the fingers of her hands and lights one. She looks as if she is about to break down as she takes a shamelessly deep but somehow dainty pull off the cigarette, but just can't get over the precipice of the hardened wall built tall and evident all about her. Her hankerchief is still clutched in her other hand and thus far useless. She looks up at me and down again as a poker player planning the next move and decides to play her first card, which is the pretty card. She smiles and says "call me Aoife, I haven't seen my father since birth. He was there in the Cicero motel room when my Mother had me in the bathtub. I'm still not sure what day it was, sometime in mid-to-late March. Their plans for me I'm unsure of, the dumpster probably. I was raised by my Grandparents. Then..." with an air of dramatic she looks away and finishes "he vanished and neither I nor anyone else close to me has seen him since. I can't give you an accurate description; I was only just born..."

I said you never knew him growing up in...?

She stood slightly trembling and walking away from the light of the windows where I stand, says defensively "Missouri... I couldn't speak dammit, couldn't walk." Taking off her Monet hat she shook back her greasy thin hair, "I need you to find him, but I don't want to meet him." She wouldn't take her eyes off of the floor no turn to look at me.

She has the ass of a fifty-five year old New York cabbie, practical and as ugly as the face of a monkey wrench, wide, flattened and calloused, like two old throw pillows in a dirty, west Madison coffee shop.

I said son-of-a-bitch Aoife, you're not bein straight with me, if you want me to find your father, talk you! and advance on her.

"There is no more" she says sadly, in a voice that chills me, stopping my advance. "My mother was never around either, but I know where she is... and I do not want to see her. A few older half-sisters on my Mother's side, my Grandparents who raised me, that is it. I never met my Father's parents, if the devil bastard has any. There is no one who knows anything, except my Mother herself. I'm not willing to ask her, I have come to you..." She walks over to my desk and angerly spreads her things out onto my desk, her driver's licence, an Illinois state identification card, a faded Poloroid of a squat man in cut off jean shorts and a mustache with that same broad broken nose (it really could have been anyone from the 70's, add a pair of wild sunburns and thick glasses and you could-eh told me it was my own father.)

I said what is this guy, your father's... name? Is this him?

"I don't know his name, nobody speaks of him, my Mother would know, she is in Missouri still, I think, my grandparents have never dared utter her name either, just your Mother this and your Mother..." This almost blew my guts out the top of my head and my gaze is suddenly fire, burning away all my professional courtesy.

I say how in the hell em-I suppose teh find a man with no name who could be anywhere from a thirty-year old photograph and a Cicero motel bath tub origin story?

She starts up hurriedly and walks about the office. With my sudden turn to anger she raises her voice with a venomous hatered I am surprised to see leap out of her and horridly puffs away on her cigarette in between pairs of words saying "I was... just getting... to it... Mr. Hardley... my father sent me a message nine days ago. He is... trying to find me." She is trembling all over. I walk up to her, scared and intrigued by her sudden anger and pull her towards me, kissing her abruptly and forcefully. She taste like peppermint and cigarettes. Pulling away from me she slaps me with all her perceived might softly across the face.

Call me Jack... I say suprised by my own attraction. I guess that means I find your father before he finds you.

"People would like you better if you grew a beard." She says out of the blue sky and turns to leave. Saying as she closes the door, "I will return in seven days and expect results, Mr. Hardley."

She reminds me of someone I knew long ago, but I cannot make the connection in my mind. I stare for sometime at the closed door, thinking of this and stroking my freshly shaven face. I said nothing more that day than stated here, staring into my now ice cold cup of coffee alone with millions of questions and few answers. If she said anything more, it is lost to me and does not matter. I have always been in the 'if a tree fell in the forest it makes no sound' camp.

I pour the coffee down the drain and pour a heady, tall glass of Irish whiskey and think... of all the private investigators offices, in all of Madison... why mine?

Exile on West Main Street

"Head in the fuckin' game two three!"

I'm sorry, i was thinking about Ryne Sandburg, walking along block 500 were i found a pot teh piss along the lilac laden houses, fleeting as miniature reminders of the shortness of life and the sweetness of breathe. A man passes, his skin stretched as ligaments must across too far a distance, holding in his secrets as a military state. He feels along the sidewalk with a thin stick sharpened at the point by the pocket knife that jingles along in his Cotton pocket, bouncing off his dusty balls and the shrunken legs that carry him slowly along the street. Sweat, a dusty sweat, pools on the bill of his baseball cap and falls in slow, saliva like drips. His eyes are tiny and secretive, like holes made in a paper cup with a sharpened pencil. Some glimpse of his truth comes as his eyes catch mine, momentary, but vanishes as he darts off as a frightened animal into the nearby parking lot of my building. A young woman is crossing the street towards me as I near Basset. At this distance she is alluring. She is carrying a red plastic bag of groceries in her dangling arm, swinging them along childlike. She holds a cell phone up to her right ear, wears over sized, bug-eye Hollywood sunglasses and bright blue rubber rain boots. As she nears and passes she takes no notice of my shrunken features pale and ghostly, she screams the opposite; I seem not to exist, she seems to be all that does. Nearer to my eyes she was repulsive, widespread, cookie-cut, and easily dismissed. Crossing to 400 and entering the parking lot i see the walking stick man doubled over into a dumpster near the front door of my building, riffling and preparing for the coming winter. He is taking out tin cans and greasy pizza boxes and torn letters and shit-stained blankets and packing them all into plastic shopping bags, attaching them as balloons to his nearby bicycle, to leave the shores of reality, to sail away. As i pass he scurries away again without an upward glance and visually loses himself quickly in the trees, unperceivable behind the passing barriers save the hurrying cadence of his wiry legs, his antenna-like stick and the Newton's Cradle-knock of his dusty balls. I've seen him before, his name is Gerald. I'm sure he knows more than that about me, that i prefer porters and stouts, that i can only get halfway through a tub of humus before it rots, that all my ideas are written on tiny pieces of paper, that my power bill is roughly forty dollars a month, that i change my cat litter every three days, that i still think about her sometimes when waking dreams force me to conclusion, the things i throw away, pathways to the things i don't. It's all there in my trash.

I can sense her on the wind that blows west past the capital building and finds me on my front steps. Her innocent smile and childlike grace, her wavering speech and short cropped auburn hair, her light steps and tiny feet, her hoop earrings and piercing fingers, her crooked humor her originality, her pinkie toes, her eyes, like god's, crossed, closed; all olfactory memories of anti-fruition, of rot and estrangement. I have no idea where she has gone. She could still be wandering the storefronts of Willie Street thinking about french presses and grind settings, or tramping the snow covered slopes of Colorado laughing among the early season snowfall, perhaps she is back in Michigan surrounded by those who know her best. I admit first i know nothing, but have found it is true what is spoken into microphones or whispered into empty bottles in the city of Chicago about Michigan Girls. With one last wayward look to the east, a girl walks down the sidewalk towards the Capital past South Broom, identical and widespread, becoming tiny as a plastic barbie doll and tossed away like a series of dreams.

I walk up the switchback staircase of my apartment building, as always feeling like Lee Harvey, like a Judas, vulgar like Steven J., angry like Tosh, seeing myself reflected in the stained white walls and ancient red hotel carpet, quiet, solemn and misunderstood; terrifying greatness hidden in all the glittering gold. I see it in the faces of the Forty year old woman, faces painted, caked, ageing ungracefully into the years. I see it in the cupboards of matching orange plates and pans and knives, bottles of EVOO. I see it in the magazine racks i pass on my way to the H section. I see it on every television channel and every billboard along I-90 and every teenage face. I see it in the lipstick stained identical paper coffee cups collected into trash bags i, greenstrewn, throw into the dumpster each day. I hear it in passing state street conversations of traveling suburbanites. I smell it on the canvases of passing girls with bottled smells. Confronted with this stride towards a universal carbon-copy idea of beauty and rejecting it finds me banished behind secret doors, scampering. I escape it in seedy dark rooms where music is played, in sandstone cliffs over owl canyons nigh the dark Illinois, in mountaintops silent as graveyards, to sail away. Entering my third floor abode i hang my keys and toss my sweater, tear at the sash and then washing, a sense of comfort and calm. All over America, inescapable, i've found.

I look out my apartment window, exiled, ghost-like and discarded, onto west Main street, seeing a pale reflection in the pane of indecisiveness, cold and lifeless at the heart of the beast.

-Mark Christensen, May 2009

Preamble to my novel-"Diminished is the Drizzle that broke my Calm"

The piece she took towards Deep pockets, vital, raw, but Just a little piece

preamble

In the aftermath of an unusually cruel April (even by the standards of poets and priest) and months of mulling it, sitting in the grass with a pad of paper writing haiku's like the one above, looking at broken fences in pie laden pastures, looking at the night as it came drifting down the hallway and eased into the window glass like heated breathe, looking at the empty white walls of my apartment on state street, looking at streetlamps with tear crooked eyes that created visions of kaleidoscopes, looking at the moons luster across a very angry and dirty Illinois river, looking at the telephone poles that stretch out for miles into the infinity of the countryside, looking at buildings and second floor apartment windows and dented cars and restaurant fronts as an outsider and a ghost in the town of my birth. A town of twenty-thousand thrown out into a sea of cornfields, nigh a few rivers and valleys and unusual canyons and canals built with the blood of Irish immigrants and Capone's gin stills hidden in the walls as green as clouds and most importantly many diminutive tragedies of intermingling little circles that would dance around either side of the Illinois striking across it like pampered house cats; I came to a slow and focused anger that left me powerlessly in-between. There in that little town my feet grew itchy and walls both fell down and congested as closing fingers or the meeting of lips. For long months piling into long years i was caged for lack of money and will and destination and aims and means and ends and everything save a growing craziness that could save me from this world's true desire to caponize me, the world's one true desire to bury me standing.

April was neither the beginning nor the end but isolated from all notions of beginning middle and end, towards none of these post with which we mark all other times past, present or not yet reached. On the first of the month I awoke among dirty flannel sheets and dusty Venetian shafts of light and empty beer cans and inside rusty skin full of rusty blood, with a silent tongue grimy in my mouth when the present hit me like a semi-truck. It felt like waking not from a nightmare but to one, as if my life in that moment of existence turned immediately into some sort of other worldly eighties horror movie. At first a deep panic set in, the very same felt by waking alcoholics and wild prey and species and seconds ticking by found me eventually in this life asleep and buried in the rattling wooden floor boards of my hushed apartment near the shore of the muddy Illinois river; but I should get to the point instead of trying to explain, no one ever gets it and I am above all things a rambler.

Walking out into the mid-day sun looking most Beverly-hillbillian I fled into the direction of the light, but almost immediately the day turned ugly.

-Mark Christensen, May 2009