\t\t\t\t1:36 AM Wednesday, October 12, 2011<\/p>\n
I woke up at 1:30 to write away the worry, to
\nwash away the world with wine and sorry.<\/p>\n
My back is erect but limber, leaning but stern.
\nI jumbled the night with a passion of
\nsleep and an hour of remorse,
\nslipping into the oily grime of kisses,
\nkisses of sleep and kisses of creation.<\/p>\n
I wasted a day’s empathy and existentialia over a
\nphony display of death and concern. The
\npolice cars were actors and the officers extras,
\none with a furry beard of strenuous portent that
\nsmelled fake as a Panera sandwich, the other a
\nmember of the tiny mob swiping
\nhapless samples and residue from the murder scene.<\/p>\n
I was fooled and chagrinned, for it was
\nonly a scene in a television show, the
\ncameras and booms and other manufactory equipment
\nfar from my eyes, far from the body that lay
\nmurderously contorted in the vehicle.<\/p>\n
I nervously snapped pictures, afraid of
\nintruding on a criminal investigation,
\nthinking (incongruously) of Paul McCartney and a
\nterrorist in Thailand who I briefly thought had
\norchestrated the blackout of August, 2003.<\/p>\n
I get my facts and fingers mixed and mangled, the
\nphoney bluster of Hollywood sticking itself into my
\ngluttonous thirst for crisis and dismay.<\/p>\n
I called myself from a payphone to
\nreport the dismal news, the sorry report of a
\ndead and murdered body on 31st Avenue and the
\ncloud of morbid turmoil surrounding the discovery.<\/p>\n
I remembered Rainey Park, and the chicken, that
\nstrangled and dismembered sacrifice
\nslumbering in pieces at the tree,
\nlanguishing there like a grinning, sated instrument,
\nlying in state for over a week before I
\nsaw it again and reported it to the authorities.<\/p>\n
The park rangers welcomed with concern my
\nreport of the dead animal. Their truck moved in like a
\nhoary, outsized reaper, patrolling the grounds with
\ngrim optimism in search of a tiny corpse,
\nall according to my directions<\/p>\n
\t(“The third tree from the gate.
\n \tThe third tree.
\n \tThere’s a dead chicken,
\n \tor a rooster,
\n \tor something like that
\n \tat the third tree.”).<\/p>\n
The phony scene on the street still real to me I
\nimagined the car full of chickens, or roosters, and the
\ncrime scene investigators plucked
\nfeathers and entrails from the
\nunfortunate beasts who died with and may have murdered the
\ncontortioned man in the drivers seat.<\/p>\n
Forcing sense of the situation I assembled
\nsummary information of the
\ndead things I saw the day before:<\/p>\n
\tA cat, large and dead,
\n \tslumbering on its side for
\n \tall time at the corner of
\n \tHoyt Avenue North and 23rd Street. The
\n \tfutile time spent waiting for 311 to
\n \ttransfer my call to Sanitation
\n \twas spent articulating how I would
\n \texplain that those curbside deaths made for
\n \tgreat photographs, the
\n \tblood oozed to congealing point from the
\n \tterminally grinning mouth of a freshly dead animal,
\n \tits over-rated freedom smacked to a blunt halt by a
\n \tstampeding gust of metal.<\/p>\n
\tA sea of Halloween death (a
\n \tgimmick I never appreciated) with
\n \tfront yards slabbed with
\n \trubber tomb stones and
\n \tplastic carcasses.<\/p>\n
\tThe pollo vivo shack,
\n \tthe cemetery, the
\n \tlobster tank at the supermarket, the
\n \tanthills I crushed.<\/p>\n
And then, I thought, a human being,
\nturned asunder in the drivers seat of an SUV,
\nanalysts (but actors) swiping his
\nsplatter from the windows as a
\nsenile gathering of citizens gathered,
\npuzzled but busy with their lives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1925","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-text","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paumAn-v3","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1925","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1925"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1925\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1925"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1925"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1925"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}