from Jaywalking the Is
Noah Eli Gordon

Chamber of Commerce or commencement speech lounging on the wrong subway line? Rather than a stranglehold to transcend the phone wares I'm sinking under, someone in an expensive hat calls his implicit contract the be-all-end-all motivational sublime, an ideal peach rotting in the over-saturated slide. If you promise to listen, I promise to undo the leash, de-lead the drywall. I'd say it's stylized dialogue but that'd be acting on bad faith.

I go on sensory overload outside, safer with the same room, same chair, star charts as nicks in the wall. The immobile scenery of what I'm missing out there fills me like a crow's nest, might as well carry a sign, grounding the play-by-play of someone passing on a cell phone or trying to embrace the pond by falling in. It's a construct as bad as plywood scaffolding, how the coins in my hand could muck it up halfway across the globe or keep me insular, forgetting what I said to whom, eyes plastered to the concrete as an excuse. Clouds overhead won't expand where the mind goes when I'm stuck striking the surface of a few puddles as obliquely as I do the shop windows. Rain on the sidewalk is rain on the ceiling & my suit is just right for the job.

I sloped into the American gold standard. Got all harlequin, shaved head, masked face, variegated tights, wooden sword. I was in a movie about movies, working the laugh track backwards, warming my hands by cupping the few ounces of ash left from the workhouse skirmishes, some paregoric to down the playpen syndrome. I'd rather be anesthetized than another Peter Pan statistic. Dukes up. Dogs out. Call it a clinical cynicism, the fear of white suits in a well-lit room, the fold between waking up without enough air to ease the straps off & ODing without ever leaving the left-brain, right-brain paradigm, apart from a stroll to the pawnshop, & of course, it's closed. Admittedly, I need the night to make my mask worth its weight.

Habitation tempers the dial tone I inhabit, hoarding the earpiece & priceless circuitry when you walk into yourself. The route is a fig & the archer's fingers make two good body parts for every trained hero hoping to salvage a little personal space. They want their own ink to overdo it, their own half-submerged retro-stylings. Every shirt in the shop is for sale, even the one the owner's got on. Starboard, a little sparrow choking on its diminutive song. Aft, the laughing hyenas in their best rope-trick come-on lines. I'd mention the open carcass if the smell hadn't handled that one already, if I hadn't been hanging up for at least half an hour.

Gunship grunts. Splendid assemblage & cinnamon acetaminophen. The glue holds the gutters in. The rhetoric's a loose-leaf apprentice. Cracks in the oracular self I'm splitting open, splicing states of consciousness onto what? Locomotive sound wings? A burnt rabbit in the trap & a rabid set of number laws the numb part of me knuckles up to. Tell it to the sludge, the oil slick, the slippage ousting us from Ollie-Ollie-oxen-free central. I've got a drawer full of keys that bend by themselves. Magic Realism, mute narration or just plain jack-in-the-box psychosis?

Gut rot in the gulfs, a way to ride the terror talk, risk the trenches. I'm in robes, ribbed. The last Saxon in starlight starting up a fresco for the toothcomb squad. & it's not the brandy I'm after, not the bolted door left open, a paradox under the urge to kick 'em down when every car sprays the street in your face. A bit to the back, head drooped, heart saying: that song comes every hour; those shoes match the treads I meant to follow. The tracks lead straight out of town & the bus brings it all barreling back, receipts, recipes, other groundhog days when the ground's so frozen nothing save contempt would risk a soliloquy to the few stems still leaning toward the fading light. It's cold enough in valediction alley to see your own breath shadowed along the pavement. Pulling teeth or retching from the plaster cast. There's a perfect mark under me & I'm pure bull's-eye for putting it there.

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