baby, let's beat it for the big city

It is a human right to be a coward.
Johan Jönen

You build your own claustrophobia, fingers unfolding from a fist to graze the walls. Measure the perimeter of the room in paces, stay a vigil in the window, candle eyes burn doubled fever. The moisture in the air builds on the glass. Outside, men run to their homes, long strides under hunched shoulders, under disintegrating newspapers. Cars whip by, as fast as the potholes will allow. The same bicycles chained to the porch, perfunctory lawn kept alive only by a forgiving climate, habitual survival pitted by thick leaved weeds. Cruel front door that slams shut when I enter after catching the trip third step, that catches us all, just enough for the toe to scrape out a plea against everyday grace: it's for those who have nothing better to do.

Being our own gods, pulling on boots or the shoes with the fewest holes, and making a reason to exit the rooms we eat and sleep in. To bury our dead, for the sake of honor, for the sake of... If we do not create this, then who will come? What will hold us together? We invent things to believe in: listing aloud the names of flowers, putting themed art in special rooms around the city, reciting the lines of plays written by stronger men. Driving each other away so that we have a place to run home. Someone to ask: why would you want that?

Kids and crushing towards the end of childhood, almost without reason, like cattle... we heard that the doors opened up ahead. You put on new LPs with old fashioned aesthetics while I fold paper airplanes on the floor. Flly them one by one out the window, mark and measure distances with chalk and yardsticks, and sweep the hair off my neck to simulate flight. Sundays, we sit on the roof and scream mayakovsky into the night.

I didnt answer when you asked: What do you WANT? Well. To be the kind of girl that sits in the rain until she's soaked through, that jumps off the balcony when it's time, that takes the mass of drowning curls in a long fingered hand and cuts them away, like the stems of flowers before a vase, scattering them. The kind that reaches down deep, pulls up the dark gets, and then plants them, and waits patiently for them to grow.

The newspaper is now digital, I drag it across the screen with my finger. There is no ink to smear across my hands and cheeks, no crinkling, this would insulate nothing were I to wad it, there is no wadding this media! Politicians have forgotten grace, they scuffle in the mire; those who would deprive others and those who would spear their hearts on fish hooks and fly sticky idealism like a kite-- a new red shirt to incite the masses. The masses have their noses to the dirt, to the screen. They have their fingers stuck to the third knuckle in petroleum jelly, they listlessly struggle to unstick; flies of flypaper, bees drowned in a half drunk bottle of pop.

'I'm originally from Los Angeles,' she says, her voice the piercing sonic distraction that fractures any peace in the otherwise pleasant cafe run by artistic types from exotic backgrounds. Tripe tacos on Sunday, for the gusty gourmands. She's working on a gypsy version of Shakespeare's Twelvth Night, she explains. She's lost a third of her funding, which lets her be creative. 'I want to do it in a bar,' she blasts, 'I want to collapse the time into one night. I'm also working on a screenplay.' From where I sit I imagine the lank blond tresses of the Canadian across from her blowing back, I imagine he winces as her voice hacks towards him like a hatchet. A fly trots across the cool wooden floor, which is grayed from time and improper care. The Canadian plays in a fourteen member Balkan band, he wears a paisley vest. 'We usually take a grand a night,' he says. 'How much direction do you want,' she asks, and it doesn't sound like a question. 'Shakespeare composed nine songs for the play.' Are they even listening to each other? I pay the man behind the counter in change and empty the rest of my coins into the dish of tips, laying down a clean, glittering noise of metal on metal on metal on metal.