Post-Acid Sunday
By Brett Clay Miller
Copyright 2014 Brett Clay Miller
Contents
Impersonating Lawrence
Managing the Layers
Cooking the Books
Morning Light
Same Cow, Different Pasture
Binge, Purge and Evacuate
Tunnel Vision
How to Fold a Map
Flotsam
Undressing at the Microphone
Toeing the Line
The Inadvertent Summit
Brothers
Hiring Freeze
The Eye of the Behoarder
The Moment Before
Threading the Needle Backwards
Guilt by Association
Conundrum
The Dangers of Cross-Breeding
Post-Acid Sunday
He(lium)
Leave-Taking
“So, You Haven’t Forgotten Me.”
Metaphorically Freaking
Fan Fare
Stapler Fodder
The Unmistakable Prelude
Capitol Hill
Creatures of Habit
DIY Gone Awry
Road Trip
A Spin on Isaac's Wheel
The Day I Discovered The Cure
The Dark Side of Bric-a-Brac
The Poetry Nazi
Bringing the Boys Home
As the Streetlights Wake
Overheard in the Orchard
Sign of the Times
Machinations of Flight
August 43rd
About the Author
* * *
Impersonating Lawrence
While thoughtfully chewing a late
lunch and casting about aimlessly,
I chanced upon a color
with no name; a friendly
green with a sense of
high fashion. I took the liberty of
dubbing him “Low-Voltage Algae”, for no
other reason than to create for myself
a mental handhold. We proceeded to discuss
the merits of “Seafoam” and “Kelly”; “Moss”
and “Forest”; “Olive” and “Lime”; “Bottle” and
“Galapogas”; enthusiastically agreeing that any hue is
a thing to be fervently
embraced, but that the nameless
ambiguity of the shades between
is unsettling to the beholder
as well as the beheld.
Managing the Layers
Though I grieve the natives
and the night-sounds, perhaps
it is best that I've
retreated to the forest, where
I can inspect the grey
in my beard and fret over random
misspellings, because here a path is just
a path, not a street corner in
a neighborhood where once I lived; or
ran wild with my pack; or married;
or buried. Here, at least, the ground
cover is shallow, and if I take
on the accent of this
region, my every vowel can
burst with implication, and I
will have something to pack
when it becomes too crowded.
Cooking the Books
Simply stated, my task is
to generate snippets and systematically
coax them to life; to
somehow determine whether they collectively
represent a symbiotic community with
a viable infrastructure or only a ragtag
band of misfits having little more than
a smoldering campfire to their name. Paradoxically,
I am ignorant of the endgame until
the final player stands breathless in front
of me, dripping collapsed sentence structure from
his unkempt hair and itching to relay
the messages in his charge,
thereby passing to me the
burden of formulating from his
dispatch a feasible strategy that
Morning Light
I am awakened by the
sound of another conviction slipping
out the back door with
shoes in hand, still wearing
yesterday's opinions. I am left
to consider the newly empty space beside
me with consternation and a bit of
shame, and it occurs to me to
wonder who will be left if and
when the rain abates. It is in
this quiet moment that I am able
to fully acknowledge my preference for stringing
together more quiet moments, and
I try without success to
remember the name of the
ridiculous dance I attempted on
the night of my wedding.
Same Cow, Different Pasture
Though habitually late for the
knife, she exudes a quiet
wisdom beyond her breed. As
it was in the grasslands
when I was eleven, so
it is in the foothills today: when
I dodge the clock to sit astride
this machine and venture out, I am
inexorably drawn to her. She hasn’t a
hurried bone in her substantial frame, and
yet she claims to care little for
idle navel-gazing. Regarding me across the
barbed-wire fence, she ignores
my usual greeting and, with
a twitch of the tail
that is more afterthought than
intention, turns her head away.
Binge, Purge and Evacuate
What goes through a desperate
man’s head as he abandons
everything he owns and redeems
the only currency left to
his name: the door, and
not for the last time? How much
will fit into a one-hundred-dollar
1971 Dodge Dart? Why do art supplies
make the cut, but school yearbooks do
not? The widening trail of his castoffs
courses through the years like iodine through
a vein, cluttering the thrift store he
once frequented but now abhors.
Is it third-hand filth
that quickens his step toward
the exit or only the
stench of his own snobbery?
Tunnel Vision
My towers are crenellated for
aesthetic reasons, but the historical
context of this design is
not lost on me, so
I find myself pacing the
battlements at dusk, distractedly contemplating the likelihood
of a genuine siege. Such dogged trepidation
has a knack for constricting my perspective,
reducing the periphery to a disregarded shambles.
When this troublesome guest makes an appearance,
all others fade into the tapestries, and
the ruckus in the hall spontaneously quiets,
as if the entire structure
might hike up its skirts
and skitter away, leaving only
this room; this chair; this
heartbeat; this bead of sweat.
How to Fold a Map
My u-turns are not figurative;
my violently flashing engine light
no cleverly masked allusion. Yet,
here I am: headlights off,
slumped low in my seat,
cruising the crumbling outskirts
of another driving
metaphor. I am not shamed by my
repeated tours of this city but rather
chagrined that each time I believe it
to be my first visit. By contrast,
though admittedly ponderous to traverse and stretching
beyond the limits of my fickle vision,
the prairie habitually breeds perspective,
where it can be promptly
field-dressed, packaged, and carried
back to the highlands in
tidy bundles for future consumption.
Flotsam
We are the products of
currents greater than ourselves, wholly
subject to the ways and
whims of a fickle sea,
alternately riding the troughs of
friendly wakes or fighting submersion by rogue
waves. Though our opposition will render it
no less salty, many choose to resist
in this manner, arguably to the point
of maximal saturation, I find myself on
my back, searching the clouds for patterns.
I have begun to suspect
that the sun will rise
and set as long as
I float, whether I elect
to bask or to bake.
Undressing at the Microphone
When we remove our shirts,
it is arguable that we
are not extraordinarily disparate, only
desperate to show that we
still breathe. As each poet
passes to and from the mic, however,
it becomes apparent that we represent one
of two tribes, each of us branded
with either a pigeon on the left
chest or a hummingbird on the right
shoulder blade. As the reading progresses, expelled
stanzas muddle the air, and the hummingbirds
surreptitiously back out of the
room in a staggered exodus,
leaving the pigeons to collectively
cock their heads, regroup, and
peck for crumbs amongst themselves.
Toeing the Line
I've yet to settle on
the sport that most intrigues
me—preferring the low-key
pace of figurative scrimmages over
that of high-stakes tournaments—
but I've managed to narrow the field
to these: tetherball, in which the object
of play either lies impotent on the
ground or is unceremoniously tied to a
pole and struck repeatedly; or roller derby,
in which the player adopts a flippantly
fearsome moniker, emblazons it across her shoulders
and skates about in a
circle, artfully evading those who
would jostle her to the
side, incessantly arriving at destinations
I will never even approach.
The Inadvertent Summit
Boulders, for the most part,
can be trusted. Liberally mottled
with ancient lichen, they exude
a comforting mass beyond proper
comprehension. They are disinclined to
budge from their beds, but the hair-
raising clamor of their approach when they
are on the move is warning enough
for most. Pebbles, however, are an entirely
different breed: these little cousins are mean-
spirited, with a tendency to quietly filch
our traction and precipitate magnificent spills. I’ll
reserve my trust for a
sun-baked rock large enough
to bear the weight of
my body and the weight
of time in equal measure.
Brothers
Most deer have learned to
cautiously skirt the edges of
the human populace, making only
occasional forays into the gardens
of men to nab a
snack. Some of the more distracted bucks,
however, have a tendency to lose themselves
in the city in the course of
their reflective wanderings, trotting with eyes wide
and fur unkempt across busy intersections, making
a general nuisance of themselves as they
frantically search for the way back. As
our eyes meet through the
windshield, it occurs to me
that the only things that
distinguish me from him are
jeans and a steering wheel.
Hiring Freeze
I find that watching a
movie is akin to hiring
a world-renowned consultant and
tasking him with the execution
of my most toxic blunders.
Fully cognizant of the inevitable fallout, I
maintain a safe distance, cringing in my
reclining back-row seat. The harsh reality
of this tactic is that I have
managed to outsource only a minuscule portion
of my prolific potential for error; the
director’s creative vision does not necessarily match
my own; and I am
both behind schedule and over-
budget. At this point, my
only hope for redemption lies
with the post-credits scene.
The Eye of the Behoarder
As we carefully pick our
way between the listing towers
of baffling clutter in your
home, you alternately (and with
little transition) find and then
promptly lose crucial objects (along with your
geniality) in forgotten hidey-holes. I am
overwhelmed with a compulsion to escape the
gravitational mayhem of your lawless domain, after
which I will rush home and purge
my crawl-space of all curiosities and
collections, along with any item older than
my vehicle, if only to
prove my dysfunction milder than
your own, even if my
mixed feelings are all that
remain to me to sort.
The Moment Before
Strolling out of the library
into the late afternoon sun,
preceded by a frenzy of
little-girl-sized energy in
four-year-old packages, she
answers her friend, “Because he has a
gig. Is that the right word? I
always feel stupid when I say it.”
Across town her husband leaves work early
to buy new strings for his upcoming
performance. She doesn’t understand his music (the
context is a bit murky), and his
physical presence doesn’t necessarily translate
to emotional engagement, but they’ll
always end up at home
together, perhaps because she’s willing
to say the word “gig”.
Threading the Needle Backwards
Never have the consequences of
a violent uprising been so
beautiful. They wait patiently, reclining,
as rock will tend to
do. A ride along their
twisted spine has the uncanny power to
straighten my own, as if the odometer
is a shelf, and every mile is
a trophy. When the sun dips below
the peaks, though, and a palpable chill
permeates the air, each of us must
decide whether to enter the darkening canyon
or fight the crosswind on
the plains. Though unden
iably a
weighty decision, the more pressing
issue, I think, is the
matter and manner of propulsion.
Guilt by Association
He speaks too loudly and
with the irreverent wisdom peculiar
to random hikers chance met.
Though his tactless counsel helps
me to my feet and
escorts me upright to my destination, I
would beseech him to tread the trail
silently if ever we return to this
chapel in the forest. Instead, he carelessly
drops an apt but clumsy metaphor in
the midst of this sacred space, jesting
of the inadvisability of stopping within a
slow herd of moving cows,
and suddenly my footfalls, once
single-minded and purposeful, become
nothing better than the irksome
habits of a waffling disciple.
Conundrum
Ours is a culture in
which marijuana dispensaries sprout without
irony beside sandwich shops, yet
thirty minutes southwest there is
a dirt road whose quiet
is constructed of wind and birdsong; that
sees more activity from the quiver of
aspen leaves than from the passage of
any vehicle; where one can be confronted
with relics of his past and not
be swayed by them. This is a
wildly appropriate province for the man of
extremes, who sees middle ground
as treacherous territory, suitable only
for pushing through; who is
nevertheless relegated to a small
apartment in that very region.
The Dangers of Cross-Breeding
once a Golden with
his ball; now a Pekingese,
scrunch-faced and grumpy
Post-Acid Sunday
When we were painfully young
and equally indiscriminate, we would
cheerfully abuse ourselves until the
dawn arrived, agonizingly bright and
habitually vacillating, ushering in the