restlessapprentice

[restlessapprentice]

[restlessapprentice]

Oncoming Pain

Aching refined By finite design

Broken the soul on the wheeling divine Water to brine Pickled in time Arresting the best Is jarring to spines

I divest

The withering tide The day rests

All life defends a peace of the night Sleep

Glory to rousing bells Silver slumber slayers Conspire Florentine spires Awaken The great cathedral

Summer kiss Winter never tells We fall Stream springs forth, never the same Ring the morning bells

Edit

To the end 

Old railway light puts up a fight

Lick shine the tunnels 

tongue probe of light 

Thundering might 

Rattle the rails on the trail through the night

Light licking lampposts enumerate illuminations

Shoddy incantations, graffitied representations

Shadows chased from furrows and all for naught want not 

To the back end before he isled up idle

The summer of bedtime bedraggled and bedridden all an aside to ride out the tide

Foamspill designed 

And the waking world washes up

In salt swelling lines 

Of off shores stuck between two places in time

The back seat defined

God news to all who linger 

Stick your hand’s probing finger

Down dark pupils of gopher holes

Feeling for gold

Hoping its honey not bees that you hold

Repressed without finesse, processed, pity with time the willful stay blind 

Ten years behind

Form in the farmwave brings cold clouds to ride

Rippling the fence, an earthquake regrets 

The fire and water and wind it begets 

Gray glaring skies between great big brown eyes 

The bridge between hemispheres cut 

Now no highway 

No simultaneous pairing 

Recuse cut the fuse and no feedback loops

You can have the stream or the consciousness but you have to choose. 

I’ll go for the booze. 

Train your brain, the lights in the tunnel, oncoming rain needs no refrain. 

Well, lightning cries to bedtime 

sally forth and all who wait misbehave

There’s little trust in faith

The whipping cloaks of fate blown by ticking clocks of late 

Daggers to drive into hearts torn alive 

Blood bursting forth changing its course 

Well man maybe that’s simply par for the course

A means to a time, a rattling pride, a musical note tuned to stay alive

Nothing works when wandering 

Is only half true for a very select few

Someone like you

Lost in a hive of jellyfish mind

Left behind two different consciousnesses from the left to the right 

Dichromatic in time

Spin to thin out the herd of the kind

Music to chime in, poker to buy in, belly fills up bet the pot that pot that you lie in 

Light canceling out

Shimmering doubt

Interference patterns are what the world’s all about 

And a prize for the show 

Food that you know

Bellyfull recourse is vomit to most

And sober as that sizzling fat spits the cream to the ceiling 

A syrupy splat

In your eye

Sticking to perfect 

Sickness 

Never lost the best weakness 

A paltry side dish 

Something delish 

Spices and herbs and gardenfood bliss 

Pepper blind favor kills all the flavor 

Time tasting blandly is more than familiar 

Pallet dry future and rough on the tongue 

All those who wait for the war to be won

Live to placate 

But never empty the plate 

Map the road where to go nothing and everything’s the key

In the idling motor car engine

The buckling shocks 

Awe stuck doors without locks

Mirrors in the meantime look backward 

Step out for a minute

Lose the shoes 

Toes dig into earth like old worms with the blues

The great microscopic tree eaters 

Floor dwellers 

Sperm cellars

Rank tellers

Damp dirt in all who lie

In decomposition reclaiming the mudworld floor

In cahoots with the roots

Hilarious decay

Saw dust to dust in the mouths of the smallest of us 

Nature’s course on death and rebirth and other unpleasant circles 

Tree theme

Full steam. 

Light in the tunnel 

Ride the tide or be lifted 

With all other boats 

In ordinary moats 

Is never as interesting as shipwrecks remote 

As in for the television 

Tuned to the wrong channel 

The seaworthy mammal

Body spit foam and milk from the mother 

Salt milk silver sea

 Hole blown and alone

A forest to roam 

To play all the day is a west worldly moan 

And there’s your zen koan. 

Which means love the unknown. 

Makes the light in the ocean of darkness your home. 

Two petty kaons Three Petty loans Two cheap expressions oppose jetty coats 

Bitter in bayside

Par for the course 

The cable is cut on the cart of the horse 

Bitter is better than sugared remorse

Lemonade limes the bastard opines 

The master was faster than severing ties

Killed for his spine 

A pin in the crime

Shopkeepers grim reepers slip maps of their lines 

Smiles so wide 

The pickles in brine turn barrels to wine.

Vinegar eyes

The once upon a time 

You can waltz away from your problems but you foxtrot in time

The life of the lifted foot, swigning hips to the beat, arms reach the stars if they  stretch for carefree  

Leave it in bars 

The best picture tincture of scuttlebutt scrap jaw.

There are never old toils to see new ways 

Screw jack the pooch and he’ll cut you lose. 

Bite the leash take the teeth.

Grime of the bigfoot stall petty coat drawl bringer of binges and paint splattered walls

God images feed the fish 

The sparkling pond 

Fishing grown fond 

Information pulled wet from the depths with a net

It’s all about the teaching to fish right?

And all the slobber coats and the pilfering dopes gather too many clinking crinkles in their lines, never knowing where the crickets reside, so biteless go hungry, stomach in thoughts, empty in knots. 

At the bottom of his pockets two empty eye sockets 

And how you gonna fish with no peepers like that?

Fails are the scales on a writhing rainbow trout 

Hook in the mouth 

No forever and gone with needy eyes drawn finished for nothing and assigned some truth well what you going to do? Throw it back? 

Mowgli and Bagheera 

Death creeping nearer. 

Pistol pocket apricot 

Pistol pocket pepper jack princess timely for sure 

She makes her debut scowering the line scowling in time 

The drools of the fools drip down diamond hearings

Debutants twirl ribbons unfurl champagne corks pop across the lightning struck world 

Visions commissions and fission omissions there’s awkward science standing there 

The word play playground is full of bland mines 

Mind time 

All the rest dressed their best made the front of the line

Certainly fine

Clock stuck in gears with nothing but jeers bewildered to the back of the bar hands over ears willowing tears running like rainbows across the sky of her years 

Wrinkle appears

Collapsing contracting the faith of her peers.

All in the eyes of a new generation perfect contemplation a life fully lived ends in degradation 

Tragedy mined is the source of all time 

Fueled by the salt at the end of the line 

Bitter dark tumbles through damp dripping tunnels

Those ever winding railways in a rattling car

It’ll be ok it’ll be ok. 

Buried in the back seat by daylight where art thou through the wind in the window?

Who’s left behind?

Make it rain naked raincoats

The belly of the beast belays with no makeup 

There’s a person to take up delusions of fake diamonds

 The perfect carbon footprint

Nigh tide follows on the ride home from take off 

Well spring forth a force from the source. 

Winter falls from summer

All my strength to steal your pain

The pretty refrain

The flower is wilted and that strikes a vein 

Tragedy well played

And heaven awaits 

Her spirit forever 

My grandma is dying 

Doesn’t mean I can start lying

The truth is no shield when feeling like crying. 

Bitter residing

In the heart of all sweet light buzzing bitter bees betray their sweet honey pulled from flowers it only takes hours

A pestle of pollen to fresh sugar powder 

You’ll never leave me I’ll never leave you I love you I love you I love you it hurts. 

Fuck using words 

Their power don’t matter when matter disperses. 

Time robs our purses 

Ignores all our curses 

Death is deaf to our dumb universes 

Never reverses 

Music of the spheres moves in the wisdom of verses 

Cemented as scripture and true as black hole behavior

Or sickness

The physics of being.

Finite.

I want you to hear me I want you near me 

To feel 

That love is the light that makes the world real

The guardrails put up are hardly like steal 

Melting

Nothing to heal.

Finished the reel

Only a picture of Mary who suffers with zeal.

The light appears rushed. 

Brace myself

We are together. 

Letter cry 

Let her fly

God’s standing by

I love you. 

[restlessapprentice]

The Village Boy

There is a village. In this village lives a boy who came of age in the shadows of trees, upon the backs of frigid forest rocks, in gentle recline.

Outstretched, he considers his corncob pipe. He blows his smoke in rings toward the sky and he marvels at the clouds and the shapes that come to him.

I have a thought, he says to himself. And his plume of parading rings puffed dissolves, one by one. Thus, the thought is itself gone plumeward and away and returned to the stars from whence it came. A breeze passes across the field of green and the boy's eyes close beneath a tree. O'er his face, a sleepy smile curls Cheshire and the leaves sing a song of napping at noon.

I am thoughtless, he says to himself. And the rocks are cool beneath him and the sun is in the trees and the light shimmers across the shadows of his face.

[restlessapprentice]

Gramps

On the porch, they'd sit in silence, just rocking. And the smoke from the old man’s pipe was sweet and the boy liked the smell of it as he watched the sun retire behind the fields, patient, in humble surrender to that enchanting hour when all of the nighttime things emerge from daytime shelters to sing. 

The wind was worn and quiet as the woven blanket upon the porch chair, which made the old wooden thing, “just about as comfortable as any feather pillow in heaven,” as spoken by his grandmother, who had sewn it years ago, when she still could sew up a terrible storm.

And the boy would crinkle his nose as he watched his grandfather puff at the dark hand-carved pipe in violet silence, ever rocking the crescent legs of his favorite chair. The boy wondered what a man of that age was made of, where all those lines in the face come from and what puts them there. The man would speak of memories but the boy could not draw forth the image of the young man to fit the worn soldier's uniform or see the silk-skinned face of the young man at the soda fountain, listening to that music from so long ago like it was a brand new thing. A jukebox? It was to the boy, a sepia-toned mystery. Now he could only study the etchings in the mahogany of the pipe and smell the sweet smoke that carried across the ghostly sky while blue fog blanketed the fields in something like sleep. The candlelight cast shadows across the floorboards and the silence of a finished dusk settled and the boy was suddenly aware of his own beating heart.

The water was so damn cold in that river, his grandfather said in a gruff timbre that resonated above all those calming nighttime sounds of insects and rustlings like a hushing finger pressed to the lips of the night, and the boy's gaze left the horizon to see the twin cascades of pipe smoke descend from his grandfather’s hoary nostrils before curling upwards against the man's jagged cheekbones in what seemed to the boy, a gentle caress. He watched the old man's long weathered fingers find the edges of the rocker's arms and he followed the veined ropes on the back of his hand until they disappeared beneath the folds of his cotton shirt. There was a deep address of breath. 

Yes, that was quite a long time ago, but I can still feel the chill of that water in my bones. Water so cold, he said, it would freeze the breath in your lungs and pull your chest as tight as an Indian drum. 

What were you doing in the river, Papi? 

You see, in the summer of 1939 people were talking only of Nazis, but I was just a boy in the summertime then, nine-years-old and for a small boy there was no war in the wilderness so that's where I went, me and the boys from the school yard. You see, we played pirates by the river. We made rafts and fashioned eye-patches with our mothers' sewing kits and used our pocketknives to whittle rattling sabers and muskets from birch branches. The river was ours and we knew its flow like we knew each other and you see, there was a friendship there, something lasting and winding and deep and of course, cold.

He paused to put the pipe to his lips, the slow drawing of his breath to stoke the small fire in its glowing chamber.

No matter how many times I jumped in that river and no matter how long I tried to stand it, that damned water always got the best of me. Even on the warmest days of the summer, that water remained as deadly cold as a jack-pine on the mountain. It ran down from the mountains you know, from way up north when the seasons changed, and you see, even when all that melt stopped being snow it ain’t never stopped being cold. 

Then there was the day they told Jimmy his daddy was never coming home. They sent his Ma a flag in a box with some letters. And that day we went into the woods with our swords and our wooden muskets and we didn't come out for what seemed like God's eternity. And we stayed on our pirate ship by the river and Jimmy was the captain and I called from the crow's nest and we searched for treasure and all Jimmy wanted to do was jump into that river. That day they told him his daddy was never coming home he jumped in and I jumped in after to fetch him because his lips turned blue and his teeth clattered like a busted music box and all he wanted was to stay in that icy water. I remember he tried to punch me for that. And on the riverbank I gave him my coat and we talked about how we were going to be soldiers one day. 

[restlessapprentice]

An Indian Gift (Is an Offensive Term)

Take the gift that keeps on giving

Take the blighted fated run

Spin the run of just believing

Feel the rise from setting sun,

Fell the bridge that never lifted

Pitch the tents to stem the hail

Beseech to those who need beseeching

Tell the tales to those who tell

Whales if never mentioned breathing

Beneath the Ocean’s standing swells

Entrenched and bowed if nearly seated

Hardly mentioned summer smells

Think those rains untold believing 

A nest revealed in shallow mist

By thee to seek thy truth if fated

From tether line their laughter missed

Shoot the angels! Poach their wings!

Bury their guns in clouded caves

If never a boy whose soul was cheated

His princess lost among the waves 

Bog thine floors with social attire.

If naught the bell which heaven soothes

Wring his neck with strands of wire

If naught the bell which heathens croon. 

[restlessapprentice]

Punks with High IQs

You've got to watch out for punks with high IQs, she said. They come down the hallways, chains rattling, brass-ring knuckles along the walls, scraping, with disaffected smirks and no-rush kind of limps. You see them but you don’t know them and their eyeballs appear as if behind glass, like the winter sun, all that rage and explosion occurring behind some protective, February atmosphere and a disposition of an idling motorbike. 

When they come it’s like nobody’s right, she said.  You see everything in your life torn apart, ravaged and left falling to pieces, gently toward the ground, like the bursting feathers of a shot-gunned game bird. It’s the punks with high IQ’s, she said, that can dismantle it all no matter how well put together, and the stupefied looks on the faces of the dismantled are the gratifying engines which drive those amused and distant smirks.  

What really gets me, she said, what really and finally gets me like, burrows deep into my mind’s craw, is that they are perfectly capable of putting it all back together, hell, expertly capable. But they don’t. They stand over the fallen pieces like some demon child over toppled towers of sandbox blocks or the scattered remains of the classroom jigsaw and again, with a knowing smirk that betrays nothing of emotion but everything of like, understanding.  

Are they responsible? Who’s to say? I guess that’s why they’re punks, she said. They leave it up to their own discretion and there’s not a soul that leaves it for them. You can call it some toxic take on morality I guess, but I think it’s just you know, punk. Does that make sense? You have to admire those at the helm of their own decisions, especially when those pirate ships of decision plunder and pillage through the comfort of others in a manner that is so skillful and calculated that it makes even the most privy to intelligence and devout of order scratch at their hairless and spiritless liver-spotted noggins, the initial confoundedness before the coming of a begrudging but inevitable nod like, hey, you’ve got to hand it to them. 

[restlessapprentice]

A Shed

A toolshed all draped in whatever like rotten wood and circumstance closed off those black windows long ago and can't see inside it not one bit. And he wiped the dust off and cupped his hands over his eyes and pressed them against the glass window.

You think there's anything worth saving in there?

I don't know,she said. There's got to be, but I cant tell for sure you know, it's all shadows. 

There's gotta be treasure deep down in there. Think about how old this place is. Maybe there's bones and veils and old dresses and photographs turned yellow with burnt corners. You know those creepy old kind from when a photograph was a big deal? 

Yea, she said. I know.

Maybe some old jewelry that's worth millions like some old family diamond or heirloom you know that came over on some immigrant ship from escaping aristocrats.

You never know though, it might all be junk.

One thing you can be sure of is the spiders, he said. You can bet your cap and gown on that. They're probably hiding in the corners with giant bulging egg sacks just waiting for one of us to open the door. Then on cue they'll let them explode and we'll get covered in baby black widows sewn up in little webbed cocoons and then they'll find our dried up bodies like raisins you know, because they'll suck out all our juices, like liquify our insides and slurp them up and ---

Alright that's enough, she said. That's completely disgusting. She backed away. You know what? The treasure can stay in there then. I'm not messing with an army of black widow babies.

[restlessapprentice]

The L Train

And Harper turned to him and said, You know the subway to Brooklyn in your sleep. Even those that ain’t never took it before can know it at first glance. And show ‘em a picture of those waiting on the platform for the L Train and they know for sure well those Mohawked blue-haired humans with pop art tattoos and chains all a’dangling are going to Brooklyn of course. And don't you know they are slobbering at the gums and clawing at the sides of that metal caterpillar to get out of stuffy old Manhattan into sweet freewheeling graffiti-splattered home where you can pay for a PBR by throwing your nose ring down on the bar and say I’ll trade ya.

There’s the desperate calling of art on those trains, Harper said, and the search for purpose speeds through those dark tunnels like the calling through the tunnels of the soul and it’s dark and desperate and it stops and it squeaks and it rattles and all those lonely artists sitting and thinking and wondering when their time is going to come. The muses call and under sea and through the rock, you must go onward to Brooklyn where the muses reside in lofts and old warehouses and inspiration comes from finally seeing the sky, not all those high rises and at least you can sleep well feeling like hey, at least I’m not over there where all that god-forsaken selling is going on. There’s just too much business over there to breath right and all and everything is a transaction. You’re selling or you’re buying. Walking the streets of New York is no microcosmically different than sitting on the floor of the old NYC Stock Exchange. You got all these clamoring, froth-mouthed Brooks brothers shoving their dollars into air frantically climbing over each other like little girls at a Bieber concert crying to buy, sell before that other guy. Buy and buy and sell and sell and here’s the money, take the money, here’s the dough, take the dough and from the outside you can only look through the glass and say Jesus, can’t you see you’re acting like a bunch of goddamned animals? And the indignant prep school grads shake their heads and say, no no this the way it has to be. This is the right way and we’re all doing it the right way and we're certain. We're certain all that feels as good as stepping out onto that fresh cut grass you know, like in high school before the big game. Is everything the big game to you? Well isn’t life just a big game? It may be but I don’t like this version you know? Well this is Manhattan and if you feel strongly about that why don’t you just go to Brooklyn or better yet just get out man because we’ve all agreed and don’t you know where we get to eat our suppers? In the finest. Don’t you know where we get to buy our clothing? In the finest. Don’t you know the women who claw and yearn for us and worship our success and dollar slinging achievement? The most beautiful, that's right, the aesthetic finest.

And Harper said, What’s a girl supposed to do? These aging mid-twenties girls, well it’s all catching up with them. The biological jig is almost up and they’re all snapping their heads back and forth and descrambling their brains to consider what truly is the attractive thing to them and maybe it’s not what person but what kind of lifestyle is attractive and to be truthful and honest with themselves they all know the score, they all know they need a comfortable nest to make their homes, their stationary controlled and secure places from which they can nestle and download their motherly home-dwelling instincts. And whose going to provide that to them? Well surely not some punk on the way to Brooklyn. The time for idealism is running out on the mid-twenties beauty. The high school musician, well where is he now? We don’t have any more time for romance only for comfort and why shouldn’t those comforts be fine, he provides them and he shares my values so I don’t feel so hollow for thinking this way. And hey by the way I’m only following my instincts. You can’t redirect nature like some valley stream to the turbines. I didn’t make the blueprints. You know that just as well.

And from the tunnel, the oncoming train. 

[restlessapprentice]

West Village Winter

A wild windblown afternoon in November and it was supposed to be too early for snow, but the warmth was long gone with the night winds of October and all those fall leaves turning autumn brown before they died and done fell down. It’s the beginning of Gray New York as winter circles like a purring kitty before collapsing to fireside slumber.

They walked down the street that afternoon in their heavy coats and they talked of mittens without fingers so you know, you could still use the phones.

And he said, we don’t need anyone slipping on the ice with their head down crossing the street, libel to get hit by the city bus or some damned silly thing like that.

Harper, the people are going to be on their phones no matter what they do, so you might as well give the people what they want

And he said, why don’t you think about all the times you wanted something you probably shouldn’t have had and think real hard about it you know like, scratch your head.

And she said, well yea I suppose, but that’s a hell of generalization.

They stopped at the intersection of W 4th and Perry and the buildings look so beautiful and brown and ancient here like some snow globe version of New York that used to be and still might be if you just stop walking for a minute. She stumbled on a crack in the sidewalk and he said, what an awful thing to do to your mother and she said, I guess my fingers would get cold anyway.

Some hot coffee maybe? All this talk about frozen fingers makes me want to wrap them around something warm and steaming, something to keep the bones soft and the old insides from icing over.

I think that is the perfect idea, she said, and I see just the perfect most wonderful cozy café over there. Lets go.

And they walked briskly like children in the sharp wind that blew at their faces and he said, if it ain’t snowing now, it’s sure to be snowing soon. What ever happened to the fall? They just strip us of our summer and then of our leaves and then they expect to us to seek shelter.

Well, if shelter means pretty cafes, than I’ll be holed up nice and tight and we’ll sleep the winter away in each other’s arms like brown bears and we’ll stow all our cakes and coffees and piping hot stews in our toasty caves and we’ll watch the tube from beneath the snuggling folds of our favorite blanket as the snowflakes fall and silently tuck the Village in quiet white comfort.

That sounds like a dream.

And he opened the wire frame door for her and she had a runny nose and pink cheeks all cold-bit and sniffled as she thanked him and the bell rung as they walked in. 

What a warm welcoming sound of the coffee being poured and the gentle coffee shop conversations about unfinished books and something delicate and fresh like a pastry, maybe a nice croissant, all those croissant conversations and out the window they’d left the gray outside world and the cold wind wouldn’t find them in here and there was the buzzing of the radiator that warmed the air like evergreen and a fireplace. Those pine needles on the ground and the crackling fire, is what it all felt like, some pretty pictures on the walls from anonymous neighborhood painters, there was one of a sail boat on the Hudson. They removed their caps.

I never knew someone could spend so much time looking at Jersey City, he joked.

She raised her eyebrows at him playfully. Well you know the lights of Jersey City from the West Side Highway comprise one of my most favorite and cherished nighttime snapshots that I hold dear in my memory. Like when I leave the city and I can see in my dream mind all of the little photographs of my home, I hold that one the most dear, like it’s got weathered edges and it’s crinkled from folding it up and taking it out to look at at some moment’s notice. Do you know what I mean?

Of course I do, and I’d have to agree with you that the orange-pink sky before dark that backdrops those quiet Jersey City scrapers with their lights all lit up and glowing yellow and reflecting off that dark metal water sure looks beautiful and serene from the other side of the river and you know what it looks like? It looks like a city without sound, silent always like some shadow-child of Manhattan in some mirror universe.

That’s a very active imagination you have there, she said. You must be proud of yourself.

Well, you know sometimes I just wonder...

[restlessapprentice]

The Grand Parade

Well here it comes blowing in from over the hills, waves through the grass, leaves a rustling in the trees and on the horizon it marches in linear silhouette, the big parade. Batons twirling, symbols crashing, elephants with golden bejeweled tusks stomping in the dusty orange afternoon. The fat man on the tuba sweats big and blows with all his gut-bellied might and the trombones stand in line behind pulling and twisting, careful left and right. And the girls are dancing in swirling colors, no shoes, playful bliss, twirling and curtsying polite at elder onlookers who smile and swell with pride and I was quite a looker myself back in the day and my do they grow up so fast and following close behind is the mob, flying popcorn, confetti showers, the teary-eyed mothers tending babies, the playing children throwing rice, and a little pickpocket boxed in the ears whiles his pennies hit the dirt. The men smoking big cigars with jolly smiles and there’s beer in their mugs and swinging comet tails of foam a spillin’ to the music of the grand parade that marches through the hills. Can you hear it?

[restlessapprentice]

iPad Kid

Here’s a story about an ipad kid: See this poor guy comes from the middle, I mean like the middle of nowhere in China, I’m talking deep beyond the rice paddies. So this kid comes to the big city, all by himself. He’s got his mother and his father on the farm and all his little brothers and maybe the one sister they didn’t throw into the river, and he’s got like half a penny in his pocket and some rags. He kicks up dust as he walks you know? The kind of life where you’re used to hearing chickens squacking all day long and you ain't never, I mean you ain't never seen a McDonald’s. Forget about it. So he takes some broken down rickety old bus from before WWII outside his little dust bucket thatched-roof village, for like, opportunity. He’s gonna send all his pennies back home so his little brother can get a proper education. He knows it's too late for him. So on this bus, they’re packed in like sardines, all of ‘em. As the bus stops from one dust bucket to the next, over and along some not-so-paved road, you know, maybe some pebbles and this poor kid is sitting squashed up against some other kid who's just as dirty and ragged as him, and they don’t have to say nothing, not one word to know they have the exact. Same. Story. And no one’s too excited about it. Maybe some are. Some think they’re going to work at Disney Land. Big opportunity. Others have cousins, big brothers, uncles, and they know the score and they know it’s no god damn fairy land.

[restlessapprentice]

A Word, A Breath, A Talk, A Text

A word a breath, a talk, a text. Two pieces for the mind and one who cried. Never mentioned, but fair and sturdy. She left him like an old cabbage in the garden, soiled and brown. About town. Never before and then once again. Forgotten. Like cabbage. And they say on the way to the graveyard everyone and everything makes sense and as you lie down in the cardboard cutout that beds you in dirt for the rest of eternal life there’s peace and nothing and sweet joy. But what is there in playfulness that’s never been seen? Like a dream. So. We’ll see.

A matter of fact. A matter of folly. Two stones thrown and you’re sorry. Simple to remember. Simple to forget. The one worth leaving was the one you’ll regret. Never intentions, but specials aside. We never bought something that soiled the mind. A piece for the future. A peace for the past. And the children went running when joining the cast. We hopefully mentioned and hopefully sighed. The laughter was crasser than thorns in the side. A word before breakfast. A word before lunch. A word’s just a sore in the stomach you punched.

[restlessapprentice]

A Fighter

Well that’s a fact, but a roundabout way to say things, and you know if you wanted to hide behind the counter and shoot over the top and hide like a coward, you might as well just have said so. It’s a waste of time really and all that warring going on. Who knew you were so yellow? Let’s get down and give me 20. How about that? Twenty of the best, he yelled at him in loud vicious saliva strung bursts. The boy's face was kept straight, as straight as an arrow and if emotion existed somewhere in him, it was far below the surface of his visage, which remained placid as a Carolina pond. Only sign of life on him was that he couldn’t help but blink a little when the sergeant’s spittle flung into his face and more specifically directly into his eyeballs. There ain’t no human around what that could hold back such a instinctual reflex and it’s engrained in our physical response systems that we ought not to get the spit of another man in our eye and that’s why, ma always said, god gave us eyelids, that and for drifting off into peaceful slumber, and for kissin’.

Gotta keep 'em closed when you kiss a pretty girl, John.

And somehow he heard this over the assaulting sergeant who rained his fiery wash down upon him, cursing and screaming and belittling, but he was drifting down into his memories now and his face remained straight and his eyes were cast ahead, but he saw nothing and he heard less as lambasting onslaught faded like a passing car on the interstate and he remembered how yellow with sun that day was and he remembered that grass beneath him as he lay supine itched his bare back something terrible.

He had given her the only blanket and the damn thing was too small for the both of ‘em. He remembered that it bothered him not one bit that his back itched something terrible because next to him bathed in the golden day’s sunlight she lay similarly supine and glowing in her sister's old sundress, that one with the blue flowers. The one she had left behind when she took off for the city. You take this one Charlene, she told her baby sister, I got no use for it now. I got to be sophisticated like the rest of them city folk, you know and I can’t be seen in this old thing.

She sure was beautiful in the sun. He liked that she had to squint and bring her hand up over her eyes like a sailor searching for land ho. She turned to him and he didn’t want to go. You sure they ain’t no ants here John?f Yea Charlene, I’m sure they aint no ants and besides, if they was ants here I wouldn’t pay them no mind at all. He reached over and twirled a strand of her yellow sun hair in his fingers and pulled the long strand to his lips and gave it a kiss and she giggled like a perfect yellow sun flower.

[restlessapprentice]

Onto the wind and over the water

She never felt lost, with the sky as her father

The shell holds the memories

The time makes them pearls.

And the stars are the sisters

Of the sky's little girls

[restlessapprentice]

the words buzzed around her like flies...

[restlessapprentice]

Palm Desert

And he arrived at the adobe house in the desert and all his friends were around and he felt merry and alive and lithe and his limbs tingled with the desire of escape from a small place and there was wonderful electricity all around and the sweet promise of the moment gave birth to the savory promise of a great brilliant adventure. And the sun was high up on its blue blanket, the golden, blistering eye to watch them all and give them motherly generous heat energy with which to expound in the fields among the gathered masses -- to rock and sway and roll to all that music. All those colorful children escaping to the desert like deserters to the Siren's call and you know that old Dionysus, if he’s truly eternal without his priests to kneel before his alters, sent the wine spewing from his goblet as he sprung from his throne, the golden thing, and looked down in wide-eyed, hair-flung excitement over the herd, his white robes the billowing clouds of Olympus, and by Zeus these American boys and girls don’t know how to do much but let it all go.

[restlessapprentice]

The man on the moon is a boy scout earning his isolation badge