1:36 AM Wednesday, October 12, 2011
I woke up at 1:30 to write away the worry, to
wash away the world with wine and sorry.
My back is erect but limber, leaning but stern.
I jumbled the night with a passion of
sleep and an hour of remorse,
slipping into the oily grime of kisses,
kisses of sleep and kisses of creation.
I wasted a day’s empathy and existentialia over a
phony display of death and concern. The
police cars were actors and the officers extras,
one with a furry beard of strenuous portent that
smelled fake as a Panera sandwich, the other a
member of the tiny mob swiping
hapless samples and residue from the murder scene.
I was fooled and chagrinned, for it was
only a scene in a television show, the
cameras and booms and other manufactory equipment
far from my eyes, far from the body that lay
murderously contorted in the vehicle.
I nervously snapped pictures, afraid of
intruding on a criminal investigation,
thinking (incongruously) of Paul McCartney and a
terrorist in Thailand who I briefly thought had
orchestrated the blackout of August, 2003.
I get my facts and fingers mixed and mangled, the
phoney bluster of Hollywood sticking itself into my
gluttonous thirst for crisis and dismay.
I called myself from a payphone to
report the dismal news, the sorry report of a
dead and murdered body on 31st Avenue and the
cloud of morbid turmoil surrounding the discovery.
I remembered Rainey Park, and the chicken, that
strangled and dismembered sacrifice
slumbering in pieces at the tree,
languishing there like a grinning, sated instrument,
lying in state for over a week before I
saw it again and reported it to the authorities.
The park rangers welcomed with concern my
report of the dead animal. Their truck moved in like a
hoary, outsized reaper, patrolling the grounds with
grim optimism in search of a tiny corpse,
all according to my directions
(“The third tree from the gate.
The third tree.
There’s a dead chicken,
or a rooster,
or something like that
at the third tree.”).
The phony scene on the street still real to me I
imagined the car full of chickens, or roosters, and the
crime scene investigators plucked
feathers and entrails from the
unfortunate beasts who died with and may have murdered the
contortioned man in the drivers seat.
Forcing sense of the situation I assembled
summary information of the
dead things I saw the day before:
A cat, large and dead,
slumbering on its side for
all time at the corner of
Hoyt Avenue North and 23rd Street. The
futile time spent waiting for 311 to
transfer my call to Sanitation
was spent articulating how I would
explain that those curbside deaths made for
great photographs, the
blood oozed to congealing point from the
terminally grinning mouth of a freshly dead animal,
its over-rated freedom smacked to a blunt halt by a
stampeding gust of metal.
A sea of Halloween death (a
gimmick I never appreciated) with
front yards slabbed with
rubber tomb stones and
plastic carcasses.
The pollo vivo shack,
the cemetery, the
lobster tank at the supermarket, the
anthills I crushed.
And then, I thought, a human being,
turned asunder in the drivers seat of an SUV,
analysts (but actors) swiping his
splatter from the windows as a
senile gathering of citizens gathered,
puzzled but busy with their lives.
