The world was gray. Trees didn’t grow, and buildings were a memory. Things had been this way for so long that we had forgotten that it had ever been otherwise.

And then I met the Giant. I didn’t know if it was a he or she. Maybe it was both; maybe neither. But She knew that there had been a time when things hadn’t been so desolate, so killed. When plants flourished, when animals roamed, when people made beautiful things and struggled towards the good. Not a paradise, not a land of milk and honey, just a time when there was motion, light and energy. Meeting the Giant changed everything.

The Giant taught us about the shards. These were small white fragments that weren’t hard to find — they were embedded in grass tufts, tucked away in tree boles, perched up on concrete sills, in the bottom of discarded tin cans, or just lying in plain sight on the buckled and broken sidewalks. They looked like little pills. Of those people still left walking around, most didn’t notice the shards — but those of us who had met with the Giant had been given the ability to see them. The shards were precious, they were like little babies to us, because when you reclaimed a shard, you helped the world re-grow. You helped bring it back to life.

So you’d go about, and discover these beautiful shining white shards, these tender half-moons. And, every so often, you’d look up and see others doing the same. And you’d exchange looks, and maybe become friends, bonding over the realization that both of you were working toward a common goal.
 (Read More . . .)

After work every day he would walk 3 blocks through the city to his apartment. Once inside the first thing he would do is fix himself a fried-egg sandwich. Toasted bread.

But before that, he would have adventures. One of the things that would happen is he would walk in a furiously erratic pattern on the way home. Every shop window or alley or facade or trash-can or poodle or wino commanding first his attention and then his entire body. Magnet, amok. Part of him could help it, part of him couldn’t.

The part he could help was the starting of it all. Because it was up to him if he wanted to start walking that way.

But once it began — well, he couldn’t quite do much about it at that point. And it felt nice anyhow. You felt closer to things.

Often bicycles would strike him because of his habit, unable to veer away in time from his careenings. Sometimes panting joggers shouldering into him and past, muttering, cursing.

He called this adventure C32 to distinguish it from others.

Music, a toppling, clamoring mess … I’ll go to the store to buy an iced tea or something and suddenly — like that — a melody, a little infant Athena-ed into my head, and I almost turn around to go home and sing it into my tape recorder before I lose it, but I’m lazy, and overconfident, so I walk on, down peaceful quiet streets, hurrying before the melody unfolds into a shape I won’t be able to remember, and all of a sudden, crash, noise blaring around me, the world conspiring to distract me from my little useless ditty, like someone saying ‘6, 4,14,2,4′ when you’re trying to count to ten, cars honking, old women grousing, little kids bleating and stamping, dogs yapping, manholes clanking, landscapers buzzsawing and mulching refuse, thunder cracking from the sky, hogs being loosened into the street in a great stinking honking outrage, volcanoes erupting at my feet and tossing me like a fucking penny up into the air, geese hollering and biting my crotch, airplanes crashing all around me in hillocks of shrapnel and mutilation, Polynesian orchestras marching into each other with all sorts of tuba trombone and piccolo dissonances, and me crawling through it all, trying not to be distracted, cupping my song in my head like a smoker palming a lighter’s flame away from the wind, looking like an idiot mouthing my pathetic little motif to myself, and then — Thank god — I’m there!… temporary reprieve! — I reach the safety of the Rite Aid! The air conditioned quiet safety of its aisles… until suddenly Beyonce comes sallying out of the loudspeakers, scrambling my brain, giving me epilepsy — I froth at the mouth, I scratch my scalp to ribbons, I pass out — it’s madness — I’ve taken to walking around in earplugs — maybe I’ll stop going out period –

I woke up with more on my left forearm. I sat up in bed, fingering the stems sprouting from my skin. A few had blossomed overnight: small blue flowers, pale fragile petals. I plucked one of them, felt no pain, pulled out the rest, still felt nothing. The hole left behind was not bloody. It was little more than a pore, and before my eyes it shrank.

-How many more, she asked, her eyes closed.

-About four or five, I said, plucking another.

-I see more on your back, near your spine, she said. Buds.

I felt around, brushing them with the back of my hand.

-What are you going to do? she asked.

-I don’t know. Keep letting them grow. Maybe let myself be covered.

I thought about it. I could let myself live for them. Love the soil I’m becoming. Enrich it with the right foods. Nitrogen, phosphorous. How could I modify my diet? I thought about books, web sites, ways to educate myself. I wanted suddenly to do right by them. For weeks now I’d been destroying them methodically every morning, collecting the refuse in small plastic bags. For what? To send off to labs? To collect as evidence if they ever stop growing? I don’t know. It just seemed like the right thing to do, to preserve them.
 (Read More . . .)

Orchids she sent me, on my desk at work.
& I love coming in to find my space –
gray like old lustreless paperclips,
flat with stale office air –
dendrited,
coral-branched,
erupted into by those flowers,
like a silence sudden-colored
with a spray of piano arpeggios.

In Wyoming, on a hill.

Melissa was with me — we had all moved there, the family and me. I was scared but exhilarated. There were miles of green snowy hills and flatlands. The country was open, there were no houses or structures. I looked around at everything and it was new and scary but it made me feel good. We looked out from that window for a long time.Now I am under heavy blankets. I’m in some kind of garage, there’s people I don’t know, I don’t know why I’m there, I’m looking around in shelves and boxes for something, I know if I get caught trespassing I’m in trouble.

There’s an old woman snooping around, I know I have to pretend I’m her old husband so I won’t get caught. So I make a lot of sleeping old man noises so she won’t get alarmed & pull off my covers. And I also puff out my body so I look big & fat (with oldman bloat) under the covers. She goes away. I’m hot and stuffy under the big heavy blanket.

Then someone else from the house comes around, a woman about 40, mean & grumbling, and in no time she pulls off my covers, sees me, starts to really yell, lashing into me. Everything she says is so loud, so cutting, she makes me feel like shit. I get up and run, hop on my bike like when I was a boy, and I race off up the hill at full speed and then like a skateboarder hitting the edge of the ramp I zoom up and over thinking I’m going to land smoothly on the other slope of the hill, but no, it just drops off sheer, straight down to infinity. I’m so scared, ready to just die. But I don’t: I let go of the bike and fall straight down like a ball tossed up in the air and hook my arm over the hill-ramp-edge and save myself from falling.

I pull myself over. Now I have skis and I ski down and away all over the mountains and hills, and the landscape is now shiny dark purple berry-clusters and glowing fluorescent grasses, alien and beautiful.

Moving, swooping, never stopping.

The man stood in the doorway, looking in. It was a large room, brightly lit. A grandfather clock, a persian rug. Gleaming hardwood flooring. The murmur and buzz of conversation, though no one was around. The odor of rotten fruit lacing the air.

He extended his arms, touching the sides of the doorway, and squeezed his fingers. The brick and mortar gave way like fabric in his hands. He held chunks of the doorway bunched in either fist, and he walked forward, dragging the room behind him like shot game. He felt its tractable mass, half-floating behind him like a load hauled underwater. His face flushed, his arms tingled.
 (Read More . . .)

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan - “Kise Da Yaar Na Wichre”

This voice sets your bones back into place.

This voice is a torrent heedless of seawall and sandbag, hungry beyond the coasts it engulfs.

This voice is the joyous smoking escape of geysers.

This voice is an orange cougar scaling a black tree and scattering the hundred larks that nest there into white cloudrivaling skysprays.

This voice is the fiery-wheeled outrage of prophets.

This voice carves & harrows the air in which it’s sounded & deposits in the hollows ash, seeds & dewy rich soil.

This voice is reverse lightning, infinite climbing fractal-branching, restless carving through the night from earth to sky.