Longview

8am - I ran the sink, deafening whitewater rush in the stillness of the day. The air was orange, my house, the environment, bathed in the stale light of the world ancient and still, an old man retired to settle down in the dry heat of his own ruins, a parthenon of his bones making up the mesas and plateaus that stretched on for miles and miles beyond. I cracked the window, the rocklawn slowly heating up back into the triple digits as the sun showed itself in revenge for the long cold night of plummeting cold.

The television was too loud, too bright, like everything else here. This was no place for humans, our sensitive eyes and ears not accustomed to the extremes of sound, vision, and pain that the desert had to itself. When the old man died, he let his bones fall to be his mausoleum, to be a temple for no man to live. It was thus to his standards, the standards of an era long past, the standards of the world beyond the veil, death and antiquity, that forced us to knee. There’s rumors of the scant few who could acclimate to it. A man with pale skin, black suit, they trek out from Groom Lake, descend on orbs of light, they never sweat, they ignore the sun, they seem to turn invisible in the moon. Creatures come from caves, swelled with northern gigantism, finding some rich tundra deep below the Earth. The last time someone visited me, it was Pelley, gagged from speaking on what really made financial sense, now left to ramble to those chaste and receptive ears as mine.

I rolled and smoked a joint, I got off on the television’s pay-per-view premium 18+ channels, I ran to the store contemplating crisp dollar bills folded and unfolded grease rubbing off and mixing, a film of filth and adulteration on the once pure value, now crumpled rounded almost to a ball, the clean geometry turned to the curves and bulbs of fungal waste. I drank a beer with the money. I got off again.

The radio only picks up static, a relic on its own. I don’t own Sirius XM, but the knob is broken, allowing me to go off the standard looping ad-jingles and into the unknown reaches of nothingness, not giving the response-back to pick up the right waves, not decoding what it can, instead a steady stream of noise, high and low buzzes and hashes. I sat in the car, under the hottest sun, AC, all windows up, with the notebook to record.

Numbers become words in the book labeled for divination, each passage index out for paranoid referencing, the black cardboard, thin pages unique to its type, an oracle spread across the land, sown into the ground, multiple in every little home, the only thing we shared - our collective desire for poetry, line by line, truncated in random lists of new contexts created by arrangement and re-arrangement of a collection from so many sources it was from nowhere, gone through so many translations, it had no author and still a coherent style. Something I read in it could tell me what I had to do - I had to have faith in that, if nothing else.