Skip Fox

Cypher

A waking spell.  From the Arabic.  Baited zero.  We were headed toward town.  I'd let the kid drive since he wanted to.  Frankly, I was a bit relieved; it had not yet become pathological, but the expenditure of emotion resultant from such daily extensions of self as driving and physical hygiene, not to mention waking, had begun to irritate me due, in part, to the seriousness which I was expected to afford them, both privately and publicly.  At the time, indeed, I  had barely begun to recognize the dangers of the sharpened mesh–knots with barbs hooks and razors–cast out by such a system of considerations, whole constellations floating blue down a river in pain, of which we are a part, if not the ocean.  It changes everything.  He looked a bit up, through the windshield, and offered as to how he thought the tornado warnings must have passed, but I had a good eye for clouds and more time to look, so I tried to describe what I saw: several delicate, slowly rotating cylinders stretching from cloud bank to cloud bank, immensities, yet all but swallowed in bright domains of sky, colonnades, operas of overarching cumuli, vast spectacle with cables held mid-sentence in bright theatres of mind, canyons, horizontal suspension of melodies across deep protestations, one like the disquisition of a creature so lonely or horny it must, as fate designs, end in something (arrive!), but disappears into a wisp; one a song of hope and despair everyone has forgotten for centuries finally emerges at last by its own device, silent urge catching the sun, then into dim distance; one a column that swept across a nearby quadrant and headed down, to our left, and as I looked through the windshield, driver's side, now an open view as we passed some shops I think, or trees, you could see it grinding away at the top of the largest building in town, upper three stories disappearing in debris, raw energy, and the confusions of sight.  It hovered, its motion down, yet also toward us, so it appeared.  I hollered for the kid to turn round, and fast, but he wasn't as quick as I would have been (how can I know this? At least he couldn't do three things at once,  as I can, . . . in dream).  The column was slashing, shattering brick, maniacally spewing it out in carved arcs like summer is here!, a buzzsaw, sudden acceleration of the diorama, pieces of puzzle spit out in blind colors and blood, crazed chirps, unholy barks, oddly human.  This is where our story begins.

            We were getting nowhere fast.  Hydroplaning as he stiff-legged brake and clutch, his face a comic frame, hook in sight-stream or fugue like memory, click off the old bat, an infield pop.  That is, a camera can't catch it as well as the eye can't.  Silence is certain in such sight.  But what is the eye of that which cannot be seen, mind in storm of cranial vault, and so forth, what is seeing or saying.  Voices never emerge from this forest, yet if you listen long enough, or close, entire syllabaries flow forth (or is it the mind floats toward them–we breathe and drift with any hope, a child's boat over a pond). But the sound he made was more complex since it contained nothing but itself, a shrine on silence's edge or like a river carves the future from a past, indefinite, through the precise, for once.  At any rate we came to a halt, and since there was no time, the chaos nearly on us, we jumped from our truck to crawl beneath another, at least our heads went under, desirous only to pass the fury of that mind, otherwise known as our lives which were never conceived so much as inhabited or, as now, endured.  Nest on wide river just before flood.

            It's usually more difficult in a dream of the actual.  Questions, like the formation of clouds, conceived without the consideration of answer approaching the site of our constructions, our recognition so resembled them, similar as their appearance they issued forth. Or they became that which repels itself to our way of thinking, resistant to all efforts of creation, even our most eloquent, most delicate.  The discussion of their recognitions is as problematic as the discussion of equivalence within the nature of that which does not exist-in-itself.  Yet an answer nearly always seemed at hand.  I would have helped had I known. It's important not to get lost, I don't deny it, but that man you are with will be playing with himself on his deathbed.  Who exists without the possibility of loss forgets which issuance is the source. We breathed the elements, foreheads to asphalt, hard flesh against the last thing to think of before . . . what?  The dream sounded a chamber deeper in the labyrinthian instrument, reticulations of caverns and caves, the riddle of sex, rubble, bear gallery, torch rubbings, vocabulary of skulls.  The tornado held my gaze as surely as the recurrent plane crashes had, where I was almost always running, to help.  Or to be there.  Once I came upon a field of surgery-in-progress (too late!) where sun's light off mirrors flashed with the stony rush of blood, pried the eyes of my skull.  Actually quite peaceful.  Even now, it loosens, lifts, winds out, an arm, all tails and feathers, into the sky before us. The past is for the passing.1  An erasure of taxemes.  We rose and tried to reconstruct that rotary of knives by studying debris, teethmarks in the remains like those of an insane child the size of a building, in houses, cars, and people, the eye in search of limit, purchase, into the barely existent, to recognize the force that binds and unbinds the apparent, replaying it over and again in our minds, each time different.  Different shouts, negations.  There's no denying the existence of zero.  He who can imagine such a question, its sides plumped, flushed with nothing else, taking everything in, absent itself, eels in his blood, can conceive an answer.  One perhaps minimally sufficient for a moment whose time has long since gone.

            Still standing by night amid the rubble, shaking long since past, screams replaced by a general sob in the tender psyche of the town–which was beginning to think of itself, at least until the beginning this day, as a small city–a bass vibration in the bowels.  The weak eye wanders, what is the question, to think of, all this distance, nowhere to go. Rotting to the open core.

standing on the shore of dream

as the scene changes or I

wake up

I must have slept with the patch on again (script by Kafka based on Dostoyevsky novel, directed by von Trier, casting by Marx Bros., costumes by Loy = hours of upper-nimble-class metaphysical yammering, unintelligible, leavened with boomerang scythes, sinking sliders [burning shit balls], spillings of the nutsac, a felony of knives, etc.), waking tired, nowhere to go, again, no where from which to have come, scratching at the borders.  (Counter-indication: Vivid dreams. You bet!)  But this morning, as I rise again, as the sun over the sad case of the human, I can almost hear it beneath the clouds.  I have to concentrate.  I need help.  Lean, as one leans to a voice.  What?  What's that?  And again?  Now forget the question.

Skip Fox says he's recently or soon in Amboit, Poetic Inhalation, Tarpaulin Sky, Big Bridge, Hamilton Stone Review, Black Box, House Organ, Word for/Word, moria, Fuck, and Dirty Swamp. Previously in Talisman, Hambone, lower limit speech, Exquisite Corpse, sendecki.com, etc. Four chapbooks. (Bloody Twin, Oasis, Auguste), one book (Potes & Poets), and one in press (Ahadada). In a couple anthologies including Another South: Experimental Writing in the South (U of Alabama P).