Now I Lay Me Looking Up

Go outside. Look straight up. As you do, experience the tightness in the throaty part of your neck. Your hand becomes an awning above the brow supervising your orbital eyes. Temper the sun. Listen. Dave Matthews sings "Sister" from some distant dashboard. You're alive and in attendance for the first and last of this the only act. Take note of this and remember me, my skin, I will not pass this way again.

Now I lay me looking up. Entertaining the clouds watching over me. Entertaining me. With gyrations. Ghostly sex. Their spidery vanguards merge together and divorce, and reconcile, forming communes the envy Paris of 1871, or tall monarchies extending into dark blue, or solitary drifts that plow uninvited into dark, democratic, and gathering storms. Dimensions. Physics. Hydrology. Meteorology. These are the beautiful math of clouds I absorb. And the realization enters my eye that God is finally useless to me. I give thanks to the math of clouds. Lighter than what? I do not pretend to even lightly know. Surrounding blue. An integer within a math of clouds was once a drop of wine in the cup by the couch where Marx once farted in his London flat between economics and epiphanies. Now, floating over as I entertain their armies by doing nothing. Perhaps I am floating beneath my wispy audience way above. Knowing. Zero is not a number you can count on. It is to be watched. Carefully. Divided by itself is what?

My hands are getting old. Puffy. Wrinkled. Freckled. Vein ranges. Surface of the planet, Hand. Asteroids, impact craters, Scars circa 1967, 1969, 1978 and 1982. Fist. Fights. Bactine. Bandaids, Blisters, Digital Superfolds, Footballs, Pencil lead, Frog Knuckles, Stitches, Knuckleheads. Scotch Irish red. Red whiskey, post Industrial and Digital.

I have yellow in my teeth. Some I've never seen. My tongue knows they're there. I want silver ones. I am not afraid. I don't care.

I am changing. In the end it's all about nature. Worry, if you must, about the bark. Or how to go mad gracefully. Aging and maddening. Maddening. It's maddening indeed. The story that won't get written begins with, "As it lay bare in a speckled column of light . . ." and ends with "not guilty by reason of justification." When I was a man in the making I wanted to still the conjoined boy that competed with me. The boy's now of even greater interest to me. I'd like to shoot a BB toward him in order to elicit his reaction. What would he say? I hope he'd fight. Ideally, take it forcefully from my hands and beat me half to death with it. Utter profanities. Better yet, do it all on mute. The boys of my youth: Steve, Jimmy, Allen, Blair, Pat, Troy, Johnny, Richard, Lance, Mark and Bill. These are the agencies of the boy.

The wind blows the sky around. The immobile flora takes what comes; it sits there and simply takes it. In the beginning the god that never was said "still be the flora" and so it was. The story begins, "As it lay bare in a column of speckled light, head raised and resting at the crest of a fallen log that was once a towering Hemlock shadowing needle litter. . .".

I still see the light. That space of wind crackling another Autumn in the anteroom of seasonal mathematics. It is cold blooded. It is quiet. It is guilty of nothing. But it is not fair. It never was.  So it seems.