Willow Mammoth

Static Terminal: Feeling wirey? Scriptures of the sleepless, Pt III

Near the lakeshore, where in the day
Joggers run back and down along the trail.
For the last seven years and maybe longer than this memory mind there has been a chain squeak on the lovers-chair that swings back and forth facing the North. Cranebirds fly towards the shadows and geese, who catch V’s in the water, make more of a public appearance than the cranes ever do. They share water spaces with the ducks .
Joggers eventually get that workout fulfillment they set out for, unband, and leave.
The winds still push those old wooden swing seats; a sound that matches a permanency or pattern as common as the duck honks that sound like a slight wino’s uninterrupted laughter.

There’s a taste of cinnamon stick, here
Try and bite on the end and get a spice morsel chunking down your throatway
The ducks go mute in an alarm-pause
A sound of  an annoyance-choke goes 20 seconds or more until breath is catched again
A decision is confirmed that it’s been too many cinnamon sticks that night
Turning over onto a side, near the lip of the lake… any park visitor had already left 3 hours ago when it closed. The ducks start up with their communion again, talking about that person who almost choked on a damn cinnamon stick.

The willows are so mighty and tall with hairs that look combed and smoothed down. The shape of 2,3,4 of them side by side creates an outline against the starnight. They look like wooly mammoths marching along the shores, with trunks swaying heavily. A size so gargantuan that in any night I could wind up as gum on a mammoth foot and one wouldn’t even think twice or notice.
Luckily they’re only surreal, for now. I wonder that about the stars, about myself,
About the cold amount of breath that exhales and the wet grass stain on my left knee.. How legitimate these things are… What kind of tales of life I could stuff into a bottle.
Is that done, anymore, filling bottles with souvenirs for recipients, who find a floating glass and open a  message from time? Or are they for collecting in large black trash bins, left by wino’s who laugh like ducks or non-meticulous highway-driver pitchers. Did I mean the bottle or message from time

As an unidentified lemuring biped, sometimes it seems more worthy of sense to slither, or float, or hover.
But every time I’d ever tried to slither I had walloped my hip upon a root or got caught up on a briarberry. And every time I tried to float there’d be nose gulps snoozed of seawater. Every flight shortened me a little each time as the jumps were so high that most impacts crunched me in a jolt of body shortening--so I’d have to tie my feet to a tree and hold 200 pound turtles to stretch my self back out again.

This is my test--- my examination.. Test out this body mechanism, examine what senses can do and try not and be too volatile or unforgiving of the sense perceptions around me. Breathe out again, staring north-out.. Underneath the mammoth willows with their furs moving by night wind.. Watching breath disappear into old airs.

Way back stream, 20 hours or so of inlets that lead to this very here--- So far back there there’s a penchant of my past.. And I must have floated all the way down from there to where I lay now, almost a part of the ground. And I could have been smaller then--- like how a mammoth willow could look down to something like me and see how small--- only more, way more..
Because maybe I was a seed, that floated from the very beginning. But now what am I again?
It floated and grew along the entirety, and somehow ’made it.’
I’m sure about a lot of things… Like never being able to keep an assurance entirely still or certain
And finding an edgy rocking back and forth between practice and virtue.
Falling in love much too easily convinced as the queries of ’don’t trust strangers’ tells me my answers are misfire. Then again, watching from some sidelines never exactly sure about things like spirals and if I’m a part of this game or just a lousy, disqualified human being.   Or beautiful, or none.

The airs move the swingseat and nobody ever wd40s  the chain that holds it above and swinging. I sat there alone before, in the day before the sun went down. I sat there in the night, with others-- holding hands a lot and probably casually cussing a lot-- a longer time ago. 15 hours further up that stream, that leads towards where I  now ay onto my side.. 15 hours further I would jump and slip with friends in the creek,
Hand-cupping minnows in streams and letting them go.. Or building mazes for them-- labyrinths and castles for fish that would grow to be trout that their mothers would be proud to ever have had as part of her egg sack. Only when they didn’t face the dried up summers where the creeks would turn to a crusty bed of coarseness. The stream could have been like that when I was growing along the current path as a seed along the way but instead it was flowing and nothing from the side banks had snagged me and no predators had lifted their jaws for me to pass as leftovers.

I stare outward, each half hour-- the silhouettes of the hills circling the lake grow more noticeably darker, trying to match the skies. In the park--- near the fences to hop and bridges to cross. A multitude of selfs travel along memory and face the now as a series of pasts and futures. But no agreement has been served to erase or reverse any of these people. Some of them come from 42 years ago and match an astonishing glare while the each of you cross the street at a hurried second. Others are momentums of bashing a finger into a car door at an opposed second of misdirection, not focusing attention.  Whoever invented the wheel- yeah, that was pretty good, but there’s no ever living down how miraculous the dawn of the circle seems to be.

Curfews never happen, the wrist watch, no matter how many times I crack it against a stone, never seems to start ticking. Shoes are gone, these jeans start to crumble each and every seam, disbanding and disintegrating into dirt into powder and gone-- even the cinnamon stick, disappearing, winding up naked-- nothing to cover, nothing to really hide from… A piece of the land.. Skin tarnished, no, dirty… no, blessed by the dirts, the make up of the land. A cold dew felt more personable now, against the back of the skin and breath coming out now thicker and streaming… into the hills and riding away, like something alive.
If I could, just--- concentrate, and watch the willows take their feet out from the ground, and march as mammoths and swing their trunks---roar their heads.
Every old thought that was square, when it came to head… it punctured, it laughed and evoked a tearing. It was a past that would not live down.. So sharp and indignant to admitting that it is as has been done, and time measured on focusing, or worrying about etched moments penetrates nothing through acts of time. The circle came-- to revolve
Circle, around and around  unlike that clock that  ceased to do so.
The crane bird comes to me as material becomes less and less.. Skin still held up, bones to operate.
The willow mammoth lifts one foot, as a trees comes from the flat. No sound, a gentle motion. Obviously gigantic but so mellow as it parts from the soil. Another foot… all four are eventually freed. Archaic creature, steadily along the shores, with the back of a willow and ever mighty.
The crane bird stares into my eyes, inches away. I stare back. Content.. Nothing to cover, nothing to take away. We’ll dine on the night. My friend--starts the conversation and I’m so ready to listen.