Whose Shirt Was Surely Fleece

I gave up all my charms. Now, on Friday nights, I go to the grocery store and my charms are the soupboxes, the people I see when I look around. I go with my boyfriend and buy him a little treat, something bubbly but uncaffeinated, something with tropical packaging. DO I MEAN DEATH IS MAKING US GET INTO KIDS’ STUFF? Kind of, but not really. Its aspect ratio is kiddie, but the pixels themselves have much more sheen. They let things slide off of them, like a plate, the plate on which I serve dinner to the children I’ll never think of having. Sometimes I wonder if this is the real cause. That it’s not just death’s fault? That I might actually live in the world again, go out to parties, etc? Our bubbly water could be caffeinated. Cruel trick that all cool women will have to face. All women whose faces lag and lapse over the pixelated cart BECAUSE THEY HAD SOME BRIGHT IDEA. MOMMY TOLD YOU NOT TO DO IT! Mommy showed you curdled drinks! But I was too young, a baby who was already a baby. That’s enough, I thought, and went back to sleep. I went back to sleep, since I was the child and the mind of the child at once, since I was just a touch away from snuggling bliss. Mentally. Physically (I looked down at my cart, then at my boyfriend, whose shirt was surely fleece). I told him I wanted us to consider this a date idea. I wanted him to consider that I had come up with this idea and what that meant for us. I had a sneaking suspicion that he himself was into the tropical treats idea, but I learned as a child that men aren’t into sticking with.

“Guarding”

Another evening walk with him in this frenzy-ornamented town. Another lapping lag while on the sidewalk as my blood huffs to get the baton around (too much coke, too much sugar in the break). We pass, among other things, a statue of a lion, who guards the right edge corner of the small white house’s driveway. The statue of the lion is weirdly shaped, as in it’s got its legs folded under it, as in, it’s lying down. I wonder if the lion’s posture is contingent on the kind of home it plays in front of (mine certainly is)–when I’m at LEE’S, all my back can do is lie down and breathe, since it’s not random that they have those things. This house is random, too, but not the words I sent to you while noticing that lion, or that that lion sent to us in the space between our recognizing. “Guarding’s” the word. Guarding’s got fur. As in it came to us in the space between. As in it deputizes the Land of Nod(t) (furry, sleepy children nodding out with the gesture of a paintbrush amidst granite spires, sighing, the gesture of a mouse–baby blue snuggie… baby pink…). So you were saying the lion was doing not that, v lax in front of the port-style house with its trinkets parked in the loading belt. Also, the lion was granite, and so didn’t have any fur. I wondered, or was wondering, after you pointed to the lion weirdly not-guarding his home, his friends (might as well have pointed into the air) looking for the word to describe his failure NOT what word should be filling in the gap but whether it was worth mentioning at all. Whether you were worth it, this breath. Plus, I wanted to save it for myself. I discovered it, I unearthed it in its real beauty, which was not its clicking into this particular question but its clicking more generally.

Semordnilap

Pressing the bulb in the corner of my eye, a bird got caught in a snare, a flare, skittered, then I lay back down and thought I would never get up again. Then I lay back down into the white of my bed’s turf, down through the square of it, the plane, then down again, through the sheets of clouds, the elevation changing, turbulence-sans. I would never return to work again. Would that be a change? Or would it be anti-change? Inertia? I preferred to think the latter, to feel dead momentarily, though still fuzzy. Here from my Saturday-morning casket I watched various phenomena of the eye play in front of me like seeds in the air and a giant red bar of light. Like scenes in the air. Like deconstructed tableaux. How do I do that. I recall the people who have used the term, summon/re-imagine them in my mind like ancestors traveling in a great backwards-flowing line. Xuaelbat detcurtsnoced. The act is noble of itself and light enough to sustain Semordnilap. Is that my name? I do a lap around my sea-bed backwards and upwards-facing, arms outstretched. The names of teachers, mostly, come to me, the names of all my dead teachers. They fall into my open mouth like gently dropping fruit and taste, mmmm, like cherries. Cherries mixed with cream, so less red than pink. O yeah, xuaelbat detcurtsnoced. They’re trying to teach me something. To unteach? Every time I swallow another one, the scenes I watch in front of me on the bed become more and more meshy, less opaque. But no sooner than I think the word MESH, someone whispers YOU GOT IT, then I’m dead.