12gauge.com 2002

Forbidden Place

Meteors are hitting earth, creating large steaming cradles of rock and bone. In my world the body of a missing California girl is found. I killed a fly with my hands and felt the soft buzzing against my skin before the drop to earth. He said beware the ides of March. He punched me when I was needing nourishment. It is all about risk, as all great things come from self-exposure. The heliograph is in the shape of a stone, with fuzzy edges on frayed paper. Show me your mess. Show me your desperation to be heard. String the wires across the alley. Play telephone and hear the mysticism that comes out the other end. Dig a hole. Call it your “forbidden place.” Intersect at an obvious point. Hide the trajectory from those who are curious. Get a tattoo that shows the sum of everything that you have learned. Put a notch on your belt for me. Find the Rorschach that is the structure of your bones, the hip flares to a sharp point, crevasses in protein and chalk, all useful to the human race. Dissapear into your day of heaven. Show me something real or imagined. Peel your eyelids back and look at my mess. Hide my mess in a deep hole, that cannot be traced or touched with a metal detector. Relish the day after pill. Spit out the pill for the day before. Save the pill that is for right now. Feed the pills to the watery green seacreatures that are becoming extinct. Hide from the dust storm. Look into the crater that the meteor left. Lick any shards of the meteor you might find for alien salt. Lift your hands in the sky and pray for alien knowledge as to the pattern of the universe. Travel back in time and push the California girl with the missing body out of the way of harm. Open your mouth and swallow the meteor. Pet the fly with a small feather. Do not dig the hole, but gather dirt into a lovely mound. Give mouth to mouth to the seacreatures dying of desperation and anxiety. Breathe oxygen into them and let them walk on land. Show them your forbidden place.

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