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{the 800 pound gorilla he had to leave his baby with } j.a. tyler She was buried inside a hole. Behind a beaver dam entrance and vast yellow-lined parking spaces. Inside were fuchsia window panes and homemade breeze blowing curtain rags. Overstuffed chairs. Broken clocks. Dusty shelves empty with nothingness. An opener without a garage. A carpet barren and lifeless. A refrigerator camouflaged to the wall. And atop it like a poetess without hunger an 800 pound gorilla named Edith. Him. Holding a baby under his arm like a softly swinging cantaloupe in a plastic grocery sack. Corners ragged and beautiful. Mid-stream a soft brown finger print and a whisper of hair. Kissing words like midday beards on strong jaws and absolutely pulsing temples. Alive and kicking. Glorious and young. New. Nubile. Storm clouds raced overhead towards plains ringed with dirty soap bubble residue clinging to streetlights stoplights signage et cetera. Cars passing sweeping dust. Sun groaning and cloud-gobbled. The stains under her graying tank top were half moon and spongy wet. As if tripped in junior high attitude her legs lay overwhelmed and sickeningly spread on the green upholstery. Many children of her own lay sprawled on table tops, couches, chairs, and screamed broken-backed next to lamps and pictures of smiling mothers and proud fathers. Edith had said it would be a conversation. But her short white hair and pungent teeth dictated a lecture series with an audience of one. She blathered on. The room filled with echoes of echoes of echoes of echoes. All her nasally voice whining on. Whirring. Zipping. A twisting propeller blade starting the chugging engine of a Stearman in yellow grass. Moments of sneaking import struggled through the hills of chaotic language. Some compliments managing to land steppingly on the soles of his ears. Dazzling charm-bracelets of pieces formerly printed in gear-shifting magazines and un-paper-printed narcoleptic web space. It had nothing to do with fame or fortune or eye-splitting paparazzi. But he enjoyed the feel of it in these sparse openings. So she went on with her scattered words. His mind unbound on electronic sheets inside his head writing about hillsides covered in braying jungle grasses. A dark form clutching a reciprocating baby. Holding each other incessantly. Clinging. Teaching instinctual positioning as days moved into nights moved into final moments. She spoke and he wrote. Both without thought of one another. Both inside an inside. Rotting. When he began listening again: She wanted very much to cradle his new baby in her rusted crib. Suckle it on her motherless tits. Stroke its back and feel its heartbeat grow steadily outward. Feed it sustenance and nutrients from unseen springs of youth and rampant arrogance. But he didn’t know what he wanted anymore. His confusion bred confusion with sprinkled capers of paranoia and the parmesan gratings of chance and luck and love and fear. And he was growing tired of all the head writing and blathering nonsense. She wanted she wanted she wanted but what about the baby and there seemed to be nothing about it. There seemed no concern. A willingness left un-manifest. A soul trampled by astute readers with chewed cigar butts and discerning newspaper fingertips. A risk of its death. The venture of a short-lived erratic life. Lacking. Rocking. Unsteady. He thought she might smother the baby. Or fail its feedings. And he wanted nothing more than the clean air lying beyond this smog infested hornet’s nest of unresolved issues and treadingly thin excuses apologies and whatnot. But the only way out was to leave the baby plaintiff crying on the edge of a sharpened knife coffee table. And when it slid from his creator’s hands and tracked smoothly on the scratched wood his heart fractured and splintered as dim light through rocky crags and off the bellies of dead one-hundred-year-old turtles. He was free but the 800-pound gorilla had his baby. And there was nothing more he could do about it. So he went home to masturbate another being into this craning neck world of needles and white-haired Ediths waiting to chew on the glorious lobes of a new baby’s ears and sip its life-giving blood. |
