Eulogy

The Internet has set a fire beneath my bookcase. The higher reaches of my room are stormclouding with smoke. Soon I will be forced into a crouch. And then into a prone position, pressed low against the carpet weave.

I could leave the room, of course, but I won’t.

I will stay here and keep writing.

I watch as each still-living book breathes in the smell of the unfortunates, the ones already afflicted with the flames. Breathes in the smell, the charry, soot-saturated ghosts of them. Catches the disease of their burning. Covers wrinkling, fuses timing down to the explosion. The pages all consumed at once, in no particular order; the list of their contents un-consulted by the blaze.

I have saved one.

Grabbed it just before the spark leapt free and hunted out the well-stacked memories of my dreams and my learning.

It is by Ray Bradbury.

I read it as the storm clouds darken, as the fire goes white and then whiter still with the heat. I am not rushing, but already I am halfway through.

I have read it before, but do not recall the feel of it being quite this way. It shocked before, certainly, but seemed somehow far-fetched. I think perhaps I did not want to face it. Now, it has a desperate urgent honesty about it. Not science fiction, but history almost.

This has already come to pass, I say out loud, and inhale smoke.

My words barely form a status update, barely constitute a tweet.

They are so insubstantial that I repeat them, repeat them, repeat them, all the while inhaling inhaling inhaling and coughing and coughing and coughing and It has already come to pass I call out with rusty undervalued vocal cords, and tears turn black upon my cheeks. I know because I raise my fingers to them, examine, through the haze, the tips.

Ink.

Weeping ink and breathing fire. I am become, already, a brace of mythic, fantastic things. Dragons and books. I am scared to reach up to my forehead lest I find a horn, scared to look down at my legs lest I discover them fused and sequined all across with scales and remnant sheen of ocean. Seaweed wrapped around me, crackling and jumping just like popcorn in the heat.

I read, I read.

I write.

I think.

I mourn.

I think.

I feel.

I feel

funny

faint

fey

foolhardy

forgettable

forgetful

fallible

flammable

false

forgetting everything

forgotten in and of myself

and now the clouds have sunk so low that I must crouch, even as I sense my hair catch aflame the same as paper. Even as it hurts, I find a balm, a panacea in that. To be like paper. To be capable of holding thoughts, of showing them, of yellowing and weakening with age and yet still retaining most of what I know or knew. Of coming from a seedling, and then being malleable enough to return at final page’s closing to compostable matter, fed back, with dignity, into the soil, to form a bed from which other seedlings might arise and other paper thereby be acquired, and acted on, and added to, and written on and read and read and read.

And on all fours now, I struggle to maintain focus, and my ink drops down and runs and swims around on top of that already printed, and I rapid-breathe the enormous hulk, the awesome mass of shadow that the books expel once they’re done burning. They fill my lungs and crowd and jostle in my blood, and they are, undoubtedly, a part of me, and becoming moreso by the moment.  

I read.

I lay down prone, the clothes upon my back incinerating.

I read.

I sweat ink as well as weeping it, and all of it is steam as soon as it hits surface, rising to meet the weighty pall halfway.

If this is how it has to be

I say out loud

inhale

If this

I say

inhale

I read

the punctuation catching fire first and then the keener more ambitious more inventive words and then the capitals the proper nouns the names for things the names that are important were important but become within this burning just one more place or one more person amongst a host and

none of them

are golden daffodils

the first poem

i can remember

knowing

wordsworth

bradbury

cormac

shakespeare

marlowe 

hank bukowski

conrad

ernest

dylan

kundera

m ondaatje

zuzak

pratchett

frank ohara

jack

jack

kerouac

beat poets

modernists

postmodernists

realists

fantasists

readers

writers

digitized

splitscreen

distraction

distancing

denial just

a little

of the possibility

that any of it

means anything at

all

its

just words

and madeupstories

and those stories are

not the real world

and they are not

the digital world

the better

everyonetogether

world

either

and so they dont

matter and can be

spared and let

them disappear

and scatter their ashes

far out at sea

where nobody

will bother to

visit and weep

for them mourn

for them

write and read aloud

or in their precious

head a eulogy

a little prayer

though not one particular

to any faith

only a clutch a

sacred fragile

gathering of words

to ask with

desperate urgent honesty

for somehow

grass to rise

above their resting

place and

somehow

for even one

just one more

seedling to discover

the bliss of

the daylight

and grow 

Marseilles Dances

Marseilles dances in the autumn heat. It shakes its trees like tailfeathers, and boats sway with an eager kind of grace in the blue, like feet dangled over the edge of the dock. Fishblood and fast-melting chunks of ice get washed down into the small scrap of ocean pincered in between the restaurants and bars that make that downtown locale hum with its own salt-sweet perfume.

Marseilles watches him, and he watches it back.

The plastic of the camera is warm in his right-hand grip. His left hand rests on the top, jutting out over the lens, giving it shade. It needs it. The sun scorches worst and best up here, on the steps of the Notre Dame de la Garde. The gold of the virgin mother maybe fifteen feet above him looks white hot, and the glare off it fills his screen. This won’t do. He knows it, instinctively. It’s his first proper try at location-spotting, but already he feels confident in making that call from his gut.

Lower down, along those steps, at the end of the long dark line that traces their length like a pin splinting bone, is a football training ground. He sees a kid kicking a ball about on the turf, knows that he probably shouldn’t be there. Anyone else who’s looking down, cameras in hand, will know that as well. If they want to find some number to call, alert the authorities to the trespass, they can. He won’t.

Over to his left, on the outcrop at the side of the vieux port’s mouth, there is an old building, looking like a broken-down country house. Taken from Dickens and planted fresh here. He can’t place it among the scraps he recalls from the travel guide he skimmed on the plane. On dark nights, he imagines, it must look haunted. Neighbourhood kids will tell stories about it. Probably involving a dead girl, flinging herself down onto the rocks after being spurned by her love. Her love having a change of heart, but too late to save her, and then turning to madness and wicked habits in the darkened basement of the place, wreaking evil on anyone fool enough to go there now. Daft, he knows, because it all looks well-tended from this distance, and maybe even like a museum or something. His mind is stuck in that groove, though. Ascribing stories to everything. Filling in every detail of the scene. Giving it some sense of past in which he can root the tale he will eventually tell.

Marseilles has its past, of course, and a lot of people know it, and even more people have added to it over the years and not had a clue what they were doing. But sometimes real pasts don’t always translate into stories that film well, he knows, and so they need some tweaking, fine-tuning, to fit into the plot.

It would all be easier, of course, if he had a clue what that plot would be. But, impatient as he is, he came out here today with his camera thinking that it was the kind of thing that would turn up when he needed it. He just couldn’t bear to wait further before starting the hunt.