Hope in One Hand
Birds coo early morning madness in cool shadows. Lights from the city burn orange and green across the long promontory on which the antique fort sits. Small planes whir in the distance from one island to the next since rafts are too often lost. Evacuation echoes through dreams of red carnage projected through the thin red jellies that separate my gaze from the world. Cots creak as bodies sag in slumber. I am not alone. Others will wait out the storms on this island. They are too tired to continue running. Or perhaps unlike me, they won’t leave their home. And perhaps this is the end. Shreds of an empire uneasily remain. Its collapse signals release.
Beneath my window, water breaks against the old city walls. The frolic of waters wears down the defenses. Rotting seaweed covers the smells of two stinking primates sleeping next to me. A whole grotesquery levels itself under the clear water as dawn breaths a boisterous blush. The depth moves from clear to opaque murk. Looking into better realms, light penetrates only a few feet before failing to cut opacity. Swarms of small silver fish nibble the top tongues of seaweed that pierce the murk into the clear. Only occasionally does a rolling wave break against fallen battlements. Whirling around the fallen stones, sand and detritus devastate clarity.
Outside the barracks, twaddling, mousey birds strut and wobble on broken cobblestones. Their trunks grip small stones as they look for crumbs between the cracks. I spread a dust of plantain chips leftover from yesterday’s meal. They sputter and chirp. One trumpets, raising its prehensile proboscis. It beats its wings. The others rush to it. They slap each other, trying to loosen a large morsel of plantain from the successful bull. Beyond the malleability of their semi-prehensile beaks, their plumpness promises food for later days. This is an academic thought in case my gut ever empties enough to be refilled. After four days on the island, my bowels are clogged with plantain and meat. The body sweats but does not release.
In the distance, a sleek black cat reclines in the parapets. It glares a laughable menace at a cruise ship still filling with refugees. It clings to the shadows, flicking its forked tongue.
As I walk to the latrine, a young man from my barracks, stumbles towards me with a puppy-like gait. He knocks into my shoulder. I grab his waist to steady myself. His taut belly burns my hand. He pulls away and continues his ascent. At the bottom of the stairs, a trough in the alcove waits for my futility. My feet adhere to the damp floor. Sea water surges up the privy’s communal waste channel. Turds knock against each other as I profitlessly squat.
Water creeps.
Storms come.
The island is sinking. Eventually, everyone will surrender to futility.
I leave the toilet and trek from the fort.
White hot morning scalds. The sun grates against the back of my neck as a pool of sweat the mats down my feathery armpit hair. My palms burn and swell. Red blisters stream over my body. My scars rage remembering lost traumas.
Just past the gate, a car stops. The young man with large boyish features leans from the passenger side. He is shirtless. Small nipples; pink bumps. He asks if I would like to join him and his friend on the beach.
The driver in a blue cap with a red brim does not turn to look at me. A glass stud sparkles in his ear. Rivulets pour down his broad, sun-burnished features. Sweat soaks his black T-shirt.
The boy tells me to get in.
The streets are not at angles for cars. Too tight, each intersection causes us to grind against the sides of passing taxis. The driver parks behind a salmon colored hotel. White boundaries demark balconies in the empty cement shell. Attached to the hotel, a bar with a ceiling that folds to walls. It encroaches on the beach. Once we are out of the car, those in flight bump into us as they move in search of available taxis and we move closer to the beach.
At the beach, an orange tractor pulls a lime green turf rake over the sand. It captures empty bottles. Black birds strut in its wake pulling morsels from the freshly combed sand. A bee lands on my bare thighs. It buries its face in hair. I knock the bug into a footprint. It clings desperately to cascading grains of sand.
I walk into the bar as my bunkmates hit the sand. The fat bartender hikes up his floral swim trunks and tugs his tank top down revealing the spider web tattoo on his chest. He holds the cigarette with a single index finger. Angry puff after angry puff, he diminishes the distance between himself and the burning cherry. I order a snifter of aged rum. Sipping, my drink my bowels loosen. I rush to the abandoned hotel lobby and pull my pants down. Cold tile feels soothing on my bare soles. A single, long turd extrudes from my body. As it falls, the edge grazes my perineum.
I can see from this shadow my two bunkmates walking on the shore. They have stripped to black Speedos. The younger one pulls at the crotch of his bathing suit letting the material pull against his small, muscular ass. He jumps in the water and pulls at the crotch again letting the water rush around his jock. He prances away from the larger waves before rubbing his hand over his friend’s crotch. The driver grabs the boy’s hips. They embrace passionlessly in the waves until water knocks them over.
A dark bird grazes the surface of the water, swinging its proboscis back and forth. Water splashes in never ending arcs.
I leave my mess, return to my drink, and hope for my own small oblivion before oblivion.
Transubstantia
At the end—our end—the desperate we flee across the borders of our world, each to our own cloister. The darkened terminal echoes with my footfall and the buzzing of insects as I move toward transport and the last chance for encounter. The fetid air gives me cottonmouth; a fly crawls across my ear as I board.
At the front of the transport, young and beefy canton guards wear mountain green camo with weapons strapped to their backs. They sleep angel-sleep as we clumsily proceed between the point of this and that. Between the heaves of the passing storms, old hungers divide us. We return our dividend of will and bend from truth since truth melts upon this last collective gaze while the lie might resist the gaze a moment longer.
Still tied to the world, my desires slow; a little gut is now attractive, a health of more in the surge of less.
Exhausted, these men who gather firm their breaths for the last onset cannot bear my glances. Their backs soon guard against me. My fly buzzes a guard with an enormous Adam’s apple. He swats it; his sunglasses fall from the top of his head. His dark hair falls over his white face.
Now admiring a couple to the side; community resists total fraying. A black headscarf trimmed in red thread frames the woman’s small heart-shaped face. The husband’s black beard does not hide his lean boyishness. We smile but discover not a lack of common language, but lack of common meanings. The end for them is new; their dark eyes reflect the glow of the irradiated night. They will dwindle in peace.
The bus stops and a petite boy (faux tan mars his loveliness) walks down the aisle flipping the tail of his designer T-shirt over his pert ass. His blond hair lies in carefully careless spikes. I trail him with my eyes until he disappears beyond the transport’s first articulated joint. The couple has left by the time my gaze returns.
Fifteen minutes after they dismounted in what was once a suburb, a gentleman cries, “They left a baby.” Next to his heavy and worn face, he holds the elfin toddler. A light green polar fleece hoodie and pink scarf frame her face. The driver stops, and the man leads the girl into the waste. He waves this last transport off as he carries her to the crumbling suburb and her parents.
The petit boy returns with his rucksack. The guard with the enormous Adam’s apple wakes long enough to slap the boy’s ass with a pistol. They laugh and crawl into the couple’s space. They fall asleep spooning. The boy cocks his head onto the guard’s shoulder. The skin on the slender neck’s inside arc delicately folds. His worn flip-flops slip from his foot, revealing the yellow callous on the ball, a perfect imperfection.
The fly interposes itself between my line of sight and the boys. This couple like the other must pass.
The other couple’s smiles and hope were rooted in abandonment. Their edenic life was to be built on a mutual solitude, now destined to be ruined. The best failure betrays itself offering us a last moment before we are canceled.
Hope is not alone among our vices, but it alone must be eradicated since each poison is true only as it works. I start to lose my words as we climb through the mountains, hoping for a place removed from self, nestled in antique idiocy, hoping when the light fails we will have long not been able to see.
Alien Buddha Press 