This signifies the transference of autumn.
Money continually changes hands.
I have no words for you, Mr. Attorney General.
My words have shriveled up with disuse.
Or they have drowned themselves in the unholy reservoir.
Again, I pretended to be a dying soldier.
My gall bladder was on the fritz.
I was trying out for the part of Dying Soldier #4.
I wanted to awaken to the soft kiss of a night nurse.
I held obsolete beliefs about gravity.
My mission was to walk off a cliff and into the air.
I wanted to create something worthy of photography.
Please don’t be alarmed if I swim naked in the reservoir.
Let me pass my holidays at will.
Let me find peace encased in a concrete sarcophagus.
Inordination.
Aeons ago I had a different face and then I lost it. There were two noses
and neither worked. In my supposedly
tangerine-scented garden, I witnessed
an armistice between my aging stepparents
and the neighborhood deer. An understanding
was breached. In the morning, the sky
gleamed like chrome. I could see leagues
into the distance—the curvature of the earth
gave me vertigo. One of the deer astrally projected
into the den and got its fuzzy head
lodged in the chimney brick. I couldn’t believe it!
Before I could say anything,
my soul was dragged up into heaven, where
I became fast friends with Davy Crockett,
where we built dioramas of the Alamo well into eternity.
In a Silent Way.
I opened a window into the heart of the storm. Hailstones the size of cannonballs
crashed through the atmosphere. The use-value
of my coffee was on the decline, ancient protection spells
wearing threadbare. I felt spied-upon
by satellites. When the traveling minister
materialized at my door, I heard choirs of angels
intoning softly in the storm clouds. The minister
looked like Jesus in the glow of a stoplight.
I was prepared to confess to anything—
presidential assassinations, high treason
on a tropical weekend. Now my heart
felt a million pounds lighter. My mother
whispered my name in an indirect, silent way.
The minister’s work was done. He could finally
return to his glassy mountaintop of sorrow
and watch ghost runners fly uninhibited
across the empty plains. For his next trick,
he was going to erupt into a flock
of dizzy sparrows, but neither of us knew that yet.
Sebastian Hunter is a writer and musician from Seattle. He makes maps for a living and reads books in his spare time. He is published or forthcoming in Bombfire Lit, Boats Against the Current, and Roi Fainéant.
