$300-

I lie there in a would-be nether land of ether; save one solitary cricket and her song of longing. I press eyes closed inches away from the sofa cushion’s front. The imprinted square fades into my fastened lids’ cave and withdraws; escapes as not photograph in series- though a print in nature. It neither is a black and white smear of a scene through negative blown large like carnival poster…no image nor bonds. As eyes open they fade away and I find myself on bloody hands and knees, feeling my way blind through moss and gutter and mountains of recycled beer bottles, windows and fraternity boy tankards lain smooth as baseboards for a rotted city side street; parking lot. I rub the ends of my knobby fingers along my path as I see nothing…driving at times but slumped in the seat…seeing only the steering wheel and dashboard…but crawling I am both pressed against and hanging from that granite lined ghost walk. I don’t know anything. The last three months have brought such emotion forth that dammed rivers and beavered streams have all combined; drawn together from every finite point, every singularity such that a sea now rises around and above us from every sewer drain, storm trough and retaining wall. We are swept up in her grey like crackers crushed then swirled in a thin soup. The shape of us is lost, the individuality, the molecular integrity itself leaves protein structures to crash in upon the weight of themselves. We become the primordial slurp, the sludge fest plus lightning that caused the first amoeba, the first flagella to fishtail in the mist of the beginnings of this, our modern world.______________________________________________________________________________________________ Driving in now the clouds were the first and last to strike. Like stacked nursery pillows or cheap Norwegian lamps the hung, suspended as if just hands above the trees; held up by a zephyr. Each one is an individual and ever-changing animal. They rise riding thermals like vultures and loom imposingly on the next several moments. Perhaps they are the dusk devils; imprisoned cyclones created by the cool and light Northeast breeze that blows summer away as he kissed with the warm waters in every backyard rental pool, a million jellyfish from one. Smokestacks, tailpipes and factory farm emissions spew them forth one by one. Behind is the pthalo blue. Big smears of strata not scraped off the edge of the bubble’s skin hide all that remains from the outer world. The chips of cloud span miles of mind and moment. Low and behind them, and to the left the fireworks show takes hurried pace. Every bit of organic fire and ice in the spectrum dances in particulate before my tired eyes and my children’s swinging session. My wife takes pictures of them and this in a park somewhere as I drive in, ease the stop; slam the shut on another trip. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Has it been weeks or moments? Has it been days or another lifetime; a dream of blinking or a blink while a dream? Different bedding covers the sides of the road now where my North Carolina home meets Virginia. Weeks ago the sweet corn was gone. Now the feed corn has disappeared too. The fields are split. Some of them have been injected with the stupid American soybeans…always grown too long past tender. I watched the crop dusters circle and dive down over the power lines to spray them with whatever that shit is. It is all controlled madness; the methods of growth and the foods we feed us. Some of the fields remain as rows of smashed brown stalks while inside the tracks of the loader tires the stalks stick up in a lack of order, like Rommel’s Asparagus; 1944. Some of the yards closer to home have even seen the arrival of the suckling collard leaves, laid neat in quickly walking winter rows. Where has my summertime mind gone? Everyone and everything in this sand town have moved into another season and in my mind I am still hiding under a bed when I was four in June. I have missed something while reconnoitering the lightning quick edge of Heaven and earth. My beard is glorious and my mother has gone home; she climbed down off of the roof while hepatitis wept along with the sepsis and the embolisms, the congestive bleeding hearts and the choking of forced, humidified oxygen; the beeping of the appliances and the changing of dressings. The Fever jumped from dust mite to cat’s dander and doorknob to nose and the Dogwoods and Weeping Cherry my father planted years ago after retirement stand a silent guard on that back porch in Suffolk…safely back from enemy lines. She sits now, carefully, but I must only imagine momentarily relieved as the first Nor’easter of the season keeps the breezes coming faster than the antibiotics and intravenous nutrition. Inside my dad sits asleep in a chair with one ear open; still at the ready to escort his bride over the threshold. Sometimes Portsmouth produces a real winner. The ever nourished fields planted by my mother and father decades ago lay lush as constant reminder and tribute to that simple peace. Here between me and the ocean, between Sand Spur and gossamer, it all just rolls toward the new lazy play. Everything in frosted shadow, everything which needs takes the dead clay’s walk towards a scampering sun. This is deeper than will. Zoo tropism and a need for alcohol drive most around me down here. Portsmouth promises more heart attacks, murders, babies, kittens, hobos and heavy lead to keep me working and paid until way past Christmas. My Island home is now divided between the jet set that is preparing to flee to one winter paradise or another, and tired souls hunkering down to crunch numbers, hoping the unemployment insurance will get them through the winter; keep the rent man happy for another season in this tiny little town whose residents think for a living. This irrationality leads them to believe that somehow this narrow strip of shifting sand, blown together by hurricanes and overtop of rivers and millennia of other little towns is the center of the universe and therefore the best place to be on earth. I moved here in 1989, writing these few words upon the night of my arrival; “Nags Head, Virginian for Utopia…” I now enjoy my time in the ghettos and the historic districts of the highway town that spit me out forty three years ago a bit more than this sandbar; conquered by some restless drunkard that stole it all away here one night. I had a girlfriend and a sandwich. She had her daddy’s dealer car. They were both shiny and red and we all went to see my grandmother one Saturday morning, after the first Friday night but wearing the same clothes. Grandma said we looked like hell. We were. I miss her, and I drive by her house on the creek every day. Portsmouth, Virginia has cradled me just fine for the last few months, despite the gunshots and leg cramps. I look forward to ever tunnel ride and every trip overseas in the Econoline. Did I mention that the collards are coming? Yesterday I was picking up toys and clothes and books from my living space and I grabbed a toy lizard, only it was alive. The cat lay nearby; obviously proud of what she’d dragged in. I picked up the nervous Anole and took him outside. He was grey from the inside out and panting like a dog, his heartbeat must have been one hundred times that of the calliope. He left my hand and crept onto a thin leaf in the Snake grass. When I slipped outside this morning to take trash to the road I saw him there on the salt treated steps. He looked up at me as I paused to give him the moment and the stage. He craned his neck…his eyes chameleoned around like they do and he watched me. I talked to him but it’s a secret. He slid then hopped off of the step back onto his green living space to let me pass, watching as I threw out so much rotting food and wasted wood. Humans do that you know. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Has it been weeks or months or days? I cannot remember the last stop/start motion. I can’t recall the floods. I remember the wet and the screams, the coughing and blood, consumption and fevers. I try and forget all of that and the chills too, I just can’t sometimes. It moves me. I can hear my train these days. Everything is building and tearing down. We move through the time lapse world; watched, by a greater good or bad…it sits in a still, sepia or twilight but just enough loving light to capture the dripping and ripped hearts. As we closed in on completion of my new friend at 218 Glasgow the news of the closing of the “hobo-hop” came as no surprise. That’s all this is; birth and death, equilibrium, homeostasis, Utopia. The Kwick-EE-Mart is going to be razed so the city can put in another chunk of Expressway. The Martin Luther King Jr. Freeway is going to be turned into a side street just like Ann or Bart or Detroit Streets, and Brian, Superman and Ghetto Chuck will have to find another compassionate concrete hang. All of this passes me by as Jimi Hendrix screams throat-less over my head. I reach to turn it up again. It is the day in October now when my first grandma died. I was fourteen, and that was twenty nine years ago. She was my mom’s mom, and she died of the cancer mom just had cut out. She told me what Heaven looked like when I asked…I must’ve been eleven or twelve, suspicious and loosening up the chains of caged youth. The first death of pure love and holiness changes everything. I ran away that moment. I left it all burning as I pressed my face into my arms and leaned against the ivy-covered pine. A childhood friend sat beside me. He seemed to be the only one in the world that understood…gave me time, told me it was alright, and would be. I got my first girlfriend in the next two days and within two years she would give herself to him. I have murdered him one thousand times since then. I will track him down and kill him in front of his family again someday. His name is this. Actual quantitative and provable love and compassion only show themselves to me in those five minutes. They live between hyperventilation and humiliation. Oblivion, annihilation and exhalation, a wiping of an awkward nose on its own denim-covered shoulder: these are the true scant and squandered electric moments that verify their existence. A boy snorted as I left that field of witches and pig-men. I dropped the match down the drain onto the dried leaves and pine straw and walked away. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ That night I asked my mother a thousand questions and got one thousand and one answers whether they fit or not. The house was filled with horizontal panes of thin blue smoke as I woke within the dream. I walked to the yellow telephone hanging on the kitchen wallpaper and picked it up. It was ringing and I picked it up. “Peter…” she asked. “I love you grandma!” I cried as tears burst again and filled my mouth and glazed my cheeks. “I know you do. I love you too-“was all I was able to make out as I shrunk to the floor. I folded and melted into a moist ghost as I clung to the mold on the jam. I woke up in a sweat, clutching the pillow in my bed. She called me. That was twenty nine years ago tonight. I haven’t really been back. Funny how these days things make me wonder when I have all those answers. My mother told me everything I ever wanted to know and hers assured me of Heaven. She walks through cities of gold now; a fitting payment for serving as witness in Portsmouth for all those years. It is no fun being God’s eyes I bet. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ The lizards were back today. They came out about an hour before the sun. I watched them from my bathroom window as they put on a show. There’s always one around this time of year, but rarely do you see more than one in a particular spot. They’re territorial and for the most part solitary, except during mating season or natural disasters. It is a little past mating season. I recognize them because I always have. They are Green anoles, or as I prefer, Carolina anoles. Some people refer to them as American chameleons because of their ability to change colors…but they are more closely related to iguanas. As I started out of the bathroom this morning I noticed the one I took from the cat. He was sitting low…laying really, and looking brown, grayish brown. Little diamonds which strung the length of his spine were visible…like tiny mosaic paper art. His eyes appeared baggy and dark. He wasn’t happy. He sluggishly pulled himself towards the edge of the rail on the deck, and then raised…running like a micro dinosaur and then pouncing to grab an ant with a flick of his tongue. It was then I noticed another male. He was smaller and fat. To really know the gender of a lizard he or she must sex them, and I didn’t do that, but I can tell you, they were both males. As he inched closer to the rail where my rescue sat, now lapping up water as it dripped from the roof, I watched as my friend began to turn bright green about the belly and ring of the tail. His eyes lost the sunken, sullen hues and took on an almost humanly amount of color; though the turquoise and glittery pastel blue was nothing any human could really re-create. He began to turn quickly into that Jamaican porch green I love and the second guy leapt into the frame. I thought about making a small movie, but just stood idle instead. The little guy, looking grey himself moved to within about two feet of the rescue, then it began. He pressed himself up like a crocodile when it walks, and extended his pink dewlap; the rescue moved away and browned. For a second, the new guy stood guard on the drip site and a third entered the picture. He did nothing. After a couple of minutes my favorite moved back into position. He was a good six inches, a full grown male, and survivor of unspeakable horrors. He slinked in at first and then BAM! He pressed up like a combatant at mess. He went up and down, his larger, deeper pink skin fan flexing in the first rays of sunlight as his green came back and his adversary jumped back to the long thin rail of the planter box. He ate a few ants, each time scraping the side of his scaly mouth against the two year old deck boards as if he was wiping it off. Then he gave chase! He jumped down to the planter and chased the intruder a good ten feet in total before the other guy hit the ground and made for the Rosemary bush. I felt confident enough now to leave the bathroom, tell the story and go about the day. The last I recall he was walking back towards the window; my buddy. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ After nearly a week of gale force winds, burning rains and tidal inundation; the sun shines brightly on this sandbar. We finished 218 Glasgow a week ago tomorrow but we’re still waiting for the check and the land lord is still waiting for the rent. My wife is serving with split hands the wiles of the whimsical and my daughters’ count one, two and three. I walked out onto the driveway to take a moment’s visit with the warmth of late autumn. My hair is frazzled, thinning and stands high like a mad man’s. My beard is now resting on my breast. I have a deadline for the novel in two weeks and could really use some insurance…some time to think. I do all of this for the book. I travel, sleep, rot, wake, eat, bleed, lay, cry, worry, rejoice, think, talk and ramble on drunk sometimes about or for the damned book; the life. We’re supposed to start painting a post office in Phoebus, overseas next week. This week has been a wash. All of this goes on as I try and correlate, mix this and mash that together into a fine representation of what it is to live and die of Portsmouth, Virginia. I conjure the images of Anoles, hurricane, Yellow Fever, hope…angry seas and dead cats hanging from aluminum roofs. I am insane. I got up a minute ago to find a crust of bread, something salty and wet, and water. My mom had called twice while I was writing. I called her back. She told me that she had some extra pocket money so she had my daddy send me three hundred dollars. She said she figured with the rain I wouldn’t be working and that would make up for the lost week. Hell, a good week is five bills…and I worked Saturday and Monday so I would have a five hundred dollar week with the extra three. Mom said she figured that’s the way it would work out. She knows it will keep the daily strain of regular life away for another week. She even ended the conversation with “you just enjoy your week off…” and a little laugh. She is just like me. She understands how hard it is to put on the multiple masks every day and juggle the needs to steal away an eventual couple of hours or days of want time. She went on that if I was up there on Monday working and tried to get in touch with them that she would be at an appointment with another barber for another biopsy. I asked what it was about, knowing that the margins on the tissues removed back in June were positive for cancer; they had missed some. I didn’t say anything though, just asked what it was for. She told me it was about some swelling of the lymph nodes in the groin area they were concerned about. “It’s always something…” she added, “just enough to aggravate you. You just go on and try and make your week and I’ll talk to you. I love you.” We each hung up the phone. Just then for some reason I felt like I was flying, and at the same instant I heard a door scream shut in my slamming mind. The headache of the last two days returned and I moved onto the couch for the remainder of the afternoon. I was full of wind and rain, and I needed a good nap and time to straighten all of this shit out.