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