castleford

i have moved to the city of new york three years ago from Castleford, Idaho. a small, rural, empty town of three hundred people, persistent dissatisfaction and negative aspirations. we are evenly gendered; with a modest household income of thirty five thousand and forty seven dollars. there are seven churches of three denominations, a deserted synagogue and a decrepit rectory, which was once the home of Father Cecil who molested a fourteen year old boy in a nearby sanctuary the summer of 2002 and went to jail in Arbon Valley. no one has seen or heard anything about him since then, and it is better that way since he was a brutish individual with an overdose of self-ego who would beat people up whenever he got a chance.

we have our own high school at the edge of town, with a serious teen-pregnancy scare and installment of poor scholarship that pushes our students into aimlessness rather than motivating them to pursue higher education. the football boys want to farm, the swimmers want to be cashiers at the Walmart in Buhl, and the non-affiliates of the athletic bandwagon are left to decide for themselves how they want to spend the rest of their lives; in the shadows of a quicksand-esque familiarity or to knuckle through a hyper-polymeric bubble of unclear establishment on the brink of a new life. art billington, local hero and charity lord, encouraged me to choose the latter ever since my parents disappeared with the drug dealers from Clark Fork to indulge in the trade, and lead better, care-free lives, when i was fifteen. it didn't matter much to me, since i was never close to them. no emotions were ever displayed, and no difficulties were ever talked about. but i missed their presence, and my mother's huckleberry pancakes, Russet fries, and pheasant casseroles that she made every other Saturday.

the motto during my upbringing, after my mother lived through seven miscarriages and a stillborn, was to make of me an independent man; without any community strings, religious beliefs and political hunches. it was always feared that i would run away with a conniving blonde from Hayden Lake, especially the one i had been eying on at Tcby for almost a year, or a jock from Kooskia to either San Francisco or Portland and never go back to Castleford and so my parents needed supreme disclosure of my whereabouts at any given moment in time. what happened as a result of their constant hyper-vigilance was that i missed out on how to read social cues. i had very few social interactions to begin with anyway. my parents had no friends, which did not help. i was the 'colored boy' with potato skin who no one cared to talk to other than during lunch at the north corner of the school cafeteria, a non-resident asylum seeker who was a drain on the Nation's economy and stealing opportunities from the real Americans, and most importantly, that i was extremely obese and therefore must automatically have been lazy, selfish and greedy.

art billington, an ex-Wall Street analyst, forty-five and plump, has been my constant source of encouragement in the withering, ruffling town of Castleford. he spotted me by a convenience store restroom, in the fall of 2004, with my copy of Animal Farm and articulated a friendly chatter. his son had run away to Bellevue, Washington, to become a yoga instructor after a plummeted failure in the fashion industry and his wife had died of Lou Gehrig's the year before. he was looking for a 'replacement son' to coach, with the eventual hope of becoming the father of an astrophysicist or a computational geo-chemist. we bonded easily, since then; discussing philosophy, Proust, geometry, circuits and aeronautics in the evenings on his porch with the clouds unfolding over whistling ocher skies, scuttling in zigzags over the faint pencil sketch of a quivering horizon. he bribed me with fourteen dollars every time i earned an A+ on a test, egging me on to self-educate, self-discipline and to self-motivate in pursuit of scholarship; incentivizing a concerted leap on to the linoleum patch of an angry city, far away from the threads of collapsible rhododendrons by the Schoth's, the tensile zizzing of the Wells' divorce, small talk at the Howard's, and the general consumptive milieu of a non-ambitious stagnation oiling the mechanics of a dead society, pooling and freezing the recoil of minds, the ladder of dreams, and the consonance of desires.

on a tuesday night in September 2010, art takes me to the Starbucks on Filer Avenue in Twin Falls, 24 miles east of Castleford. he orders a Grande dark roast for himself and a Tall mild roast for me, pays it off with a hazy blue-and-white Visa debit card, holds the drinks by the coffee sleeves, sneers at the barista's 'Fair Trade Coffee' button, and proceeds to the milk stand by the door entrance. he pours a little skim milk and empties out half a packet of Raw Sugar on his own drink, and adds some Half and Half to mine, and stirs both drinks simultaneously, anti-synchronously in sporadic jerks and jitters and walks over to our Harvest Cherry colored table in the south corner. he looks very confused, distant and disturbed today and is muttering something under his breath. five minutes later he looks at me and says, Daniel, if someone doesn't appreciate you and love you for who you are, then fuck them. you've got one shot at being yourself, play it out brother. do you understand, Daniel? This is no joke. i want you to be yourself and become powerful and invincible and successful in a way that no one can touch you or bully you or piss on you like they do here. go to new york city and live with theresa and create a new life. theresa will help. i'll call her and let her know you're going. theresa is art's half-sister of Polynesian descent, a double-divorcee and an attorney.

it was his dead wife's sixty third birthday that tuesday night, i later found out, as we drove back into a familiar darkness of everyday life in Castleford, with a symphony of aphids, crickets and pallid-winged grasshoppers ululating in the woods, a mouthful of winds gurgling over the valley, a feminine racket of distant sirens, a collage of stars in the cavity of the night sky, the giggling of water streams, and a temporal shroud of a solitary longing, curried and peeled at the perimeter of my hallucinating township; out in the ream of a divergent reality, beating and baring the venomous fangs of a communal dispossession, a disintegrating rhetoric of progress in the reflection of a broken immunity.

i live, now, in a two-bedroom apartment on Central Park West and 85th Street. The east window of my bedroom overlooks Central Park; i can clearly see a ridgy, shallow reservoir with a fountain spouting water, ten feet high, at seven second intervals, the sunshine dazzling against the metal rims of bikes, shadows of geese, Hollyhocks, Roses of Sharon and Squills undulating in whispers of the somnolent breeze, and a few strollers hopping on the west side pebble patches. i will talk more of my city life at a later day, at a more opportune time, but i want to lean out to you and say, loudly and clearly, that powerful people are not invincible and people, in the rat race, along the spokes of a professional hub-bub, do not love you for who you are. the pinnacle of a razzle-dazzle, feisty and rambunctious cityscape begins in the evolution of a second self, in the molting of a real identity and in the donning of a neo-pathology, a purpura of multiple selves constantly bemoaning a struggle to survive, an unnatural existence and the definition of truth lies so far away that you sit and wonder, often, where am i?  

marjorie smith

the day before marjorie smith died, her son had come to my Midtown apartment to talk about the nature of our flagging business. a pearly white face, long slender stature, tinted blue eyes and disheveled, dark brown hair, jonathan was my enemy in middle school, a rival in high school, a competitor in college and now, a business ally. it is incredibly funny to me how time and circumstance mold the nature of my untrue relationships; catered to, tailor-made, and characteristically assimilated to make a situation functional.

we own a sex shop at the corner of 19th Street, in the west side of Chelsea. it is called Lollie's Erotica and caters primarily to homosexual men. a 25 feet by 30 feet space with high ceilings in a pre-war enclave, the lack of hot water, anonymity and soap have been pressing issues for the past 14 months. there are always a few female customers, an estimated 7.5 per week, who come to our store; disappointed, dejected and frustrated with the dysfunctional nature of their sex lives. they introduce themselves as straight, jacketed and married or in a relationship. i do not have much in me to offer. and neither does jonathan. so they wait in the dingy, dark back room and spend fourteen dollars watching peep shows, leather sex, and live bondage and wait for hours, while texting, for a hetero- or a homo-sexual man to make them moan. in a public booth. so they can go back home, satisfied for the next few days. 

it usually does not work to their advantage, despite my praying for their sexual satisfaction and my aggressive business. lust is a serious, serious craving, i realize, and i sympathize with the addictive gratification of the 43 year old mother of three who comes in every Wednesday and leaves my shop with a wink and a suppressed half-smile. i feel disquieted, sometimes; marginally shady, embarrassed and out-of-place to give advice to a sex-hungry widow. but this is my business, and i am stern. i have learned to align my emotions, over the years, and treat every activity of the world around me as normal, plausible and acceptable. i never believed in conventions growing up, and that definitely worked to my benefit at the thought of dissolving my sense of morality. everything is moral is my motto, as long as no one is hurt. i realize that there are several obvious loopholes in this line of illogical thinking, but I'd suggest that you went with the flow. It makes life easier; for your sake and mine. it makes living more bearable, more fashionable and less concerning. 

the most difficult part of this years' autumn fallibility, perhaps, is that marjorie smith bled to death while listening to Harry Belafonte, wearing a pepper tweed dress, a charcoal Fedora and turquoise Yurman bangles. i read about it on the web link of the Chicago Tribune on a windy Saturday afternoon, uneasy from a massive hangover. an aluminum fist mold had been planted in her vagina. a foot-long dildo with incredible girth stitched to her anus and a leather dog muzzle strapped across her face. the muzzle pegs were painted bright orange, apparently, to signify her support for the No Kid Hungry campaign. and her breast tattoo was a figure-of-8. and her rainbow colored pigtail was completely undone, combed and gelled into the shape of a broken conical flask. a note, nailed to the north west post of her cherry wood bed frame at her private home in Glenview, IL., read i am a human ashtray. jonathan had never mentioned to me that his mother had developed smoking fetishism while in the military, serving abroad, which manifested in her consuming a clump of ash every night. the sensation of a sizzling esophagus, curling and charring in a span of hours, burrowing through the solidarity of defenseless epithelia and the numbness thereafter, was the advent of her asinine addiction. how this ever happened, and why, i do not know and possibly never will. 

i had seen marjorie at my store, twice, coordinated with times when jonathan was away, the year before her unusual death. she came up to me once and said in a frilly, shrill intonation; you know, thomas, sex is easy, but being held is hard. i smiled, without purpose, to keep her going. i meant business. and when you reach my age, and you've had a lot of sex, you feel lonely and used and unsettled to a point where you give in to whatever comes your way. but you're young at 46 and i am sure you could find love somewhere, i told her, almost impulsively. that is no consolation, i realize. when everyone around you says that you will be fine, that you will find love, a lover and 'settle down', the bar has been raised. they formulate a happiness for you, they are confident without any basis. that is what you are supposed to say to make someone happy, to be generous, to sound kind. what if, then, there is an unfair juxtaposition of desire, pressure and outcome from the 'well-wishers'? what if you couldn't live up to their narratives of optimism? what if you never knew the kind of love you wanted? what if your ideal life was a little different, a little violent? how would you explain? how would you find your niche in the world of ideologies to satisfy a crowd, to explain to yourself the origins of your immutable desires? 

she sighed and walked away that restless evening. i saw her unhappiness slip through my eyes, burrow her heart and nuzzle with her mind. and i didn't say anything, do anything or hear anything. it was just another business. 

the diary of a dead button

chapter ix

it has been four days since i lost my thighs. and everyone has been noticing; everywhere i go. strung against a zebra flannel, a bronze talisman, and a camouflage handkerchief, i am half-bodied, inelegant and exposed. at my age of two years and three months, it is not in the Lancaster social conventions to support anyone as hedonic and Bohemian as me. as a result of which, i have developed tremendous insecurities. 

i will not lie and hide the fact that i am insecure about my race, the color and texture of my skin, early-onset pockmarks and my unequaled roundness. i am of an orange-brown, a burnt face, with severe psoriasis and xerotic eczema. to cope under these bitter circumstances, sheila gave me an alter-ego, a beautified intelligence, a twinge of the rational and the virtue of perception. a voice with which i can croon to the sparrows, straddling the lips of burnt azaleas. a voice with which i can speak to my self, unaided and spiffy, and create a shell of make-believe preponderance, to machinate and orchestrate an esoteric living, to beg the humane for civil justice, to prove the inertia of my deceitful alienation --all in a pleat of my menstrual adulthood, in a search for establishment. the scope of my wandering is beyond any containment; beyond any boundary of society, litigation and morality. in this search for establishment, i am in my own power to experiment with sexuality, to appreciate nature and deconstruct my social class. but i am an outcast, a polygamist and a social scientist. a morphometric schizophrenic, with a serious condition that Dr Rigo doesn't know about. my adult baby syndrome.

as a button, i am born with very specific and defined roles. primarily, perhaps, to hold together the shame and dignity of your absolute forbearing. peeking my arms through a lip of cotton, gliding past a corrugation of your fabric, rough on the edges and smooth on the surface, and blossoming, finally, into a full embrace of the pearly atmosphere, a bouquet of clouds and warm, autumn buttermilk. secondarily, i am a barrier to the phenomenon of nudity. or in the use of careful concealment. allium and liatris, for example, use my tongue for lesbian debauchery in a peculiar garage on Cornelia Street -sweating through their nipples, dictating ideologies of radical feminism, and creating of me a spectacular Libertarian. they wear garlands of syphilis, beads of cherries and olive make-up. read Rousseau and Wallace while listening to the Velvet Underground and confess to the occasional identity of confused Beatniks. their seminal philosophies revolve around the performance of concealment -to button up, in a wiry, speculative sense of glamorous magnificence. polished and refined from a wild exterior; but what a harrowing, tumultuous mesh of discordance occupying inside -it makes me tear up. this is the story of today's reality. or maybe my devolving reality. counterpoised and targeted to paint away, to brush away, to melt away the black and white with a whistle and a smile. it is the fad of spectra -everything is purposeful, edgy and charismatic. 

he broke me when i was, only, an amateur wallflower. in a matter of microseconds, behind an accident, on the fortieth page of the Torah. gregory arthur gould. a twenty four year old half-Italian half-Greek climatologist from Wellesley, MA. undetectable, HIV positive. this happened at a clinic on 54th Street. with the delivery of the news there was first a disbelief, followed by an outrage followed by a soul tearing, glass smashing disarray of negativity, anger, dismissal and denial. shortly after, he took me by his hand and broke me into seven pieces. burnt a few of my fingers, trashed a few more, and spared me. i know the pain of severe disability, though i cannot communicate, i cannot speak or write or dance to gould, to explain the fable of brooke atkinson, McNally Jackson or the life un-lived. but my broken state, my fierce bipolarity, my tri-partite insecurities are elements of my existence i am coping with today. perhaps, tomorrow will be worse.  

november shuttle bus

i am reading Canada in a shuttle bus that is patchily air-conditioned, dimly lit and stacked with a unique amalgam of queers, auditors and drowsy people. we are moving at a constant speed of sixty three miles per hour. my head keeps swaying, my shoulders tilting, my legs split in a maneuvering discomfort. i release a cough and look to my right, incline my shoulder and let my shared seat-partner drool and dribble a speck of saliva onto the fabric of my shirt. salmon-stripe, wrinkle-free, tidily hemmed and fading. she is black. speaks Ebonics. a business lady in her thirties. her hair is neatly braided, with streaks of burnt brown, almost chocolate colored, although it appears a peculiar blue in the green lights along the bus ceiling. moments before the drop of saliva lands on my shirt, without a thud, without a ripple, it glistens with a jarring twinkle, rough at the edges with fourteen bubbles. i follow the trajectory of this pearl drop from her lips to my sleeve, carelessly instantaneous, traction-less and unmoved by my breathing. her upper lips are chapped around a plump, waxy tubercle. one millimeter, crater-like dents lining the vermilion zone, extending to the node; coursing its way to the tip of the philtrum. the drop appears from the extreme nodal crease on her lips, gains momentum and falls, gravitationally. within a matter of seven milliseconds, the drop has diffused into the lattice of atoms -- my pasture of fabric, on the edge of my body, in mini-trails and fetal paths, reeling in anoxia, scurrying along in tentacles, riddling and flushing a puddle of fleas, ticking and jogging in bristles of dust, a dying matador, a suffusion in tertiary voids, mellowing and stripping in the tragedy of disappearance. this is the life of a saliva bead as framed in the pocket of a dictionary; a liberated gestation of nanoseconds, to the shared demise of tragedy. a peculiarly universal phenomenon, traditionally unobserved. aimed to entertain on the lip of the black lady, my shared seat-passenger, resting before business. her name is nyomara. it hardly matters.

i fell asleep shortly after. and woke up, twenty seven minutes later, to the sound of a crying infant -bordering seventy decibels, shrill and constant. i get very irritated sometimes when i hear infants cry. it's excruciatingly loud, desperate, and so piercing. i want to jab a pacifier into the mouth and say, can you shut the fuck up, please? but i realize, in the polite society where i live, this will be considered rude, selfish, aggressive and unthoughtful -borderline maniacal. it is a pity that given the constraints of our code of civilization i am not allowed to feel, sometimes, the way i truly feel, especially about a little child. or i am allowed to feel, but shunned from expressing it. the immediacy of concern and my upbringing, best left unquestioned, glides past moments where i bite my inner cheek to maintain the codified propriety. sickening and staged, most of the time.  but i am helpless, and lonely in this domain. if i have a child of my own to deal with and raise, perhaps, my feelings towards a screaming infant may change. till then, however, i will maintain that this development of evolution, this crying to be heard, this congruency of defenselessness, this modality of expressionism of a voiceless, wordless, living meta-summation of chromosomal hiatuses, is no different from that of a barking dog -similarly defenceless, speechless, unable to communicate in a constructed vernacular you and i rehearse. possibly a scandalous analog -the rational and the irrational beings of the one tree of life. but is your baby, truly and decisively rational? answer me sylvia. 

i have the vision of a miniature me, nano-sized, possibly tubular, sitting down, hunch-backed, at the neck of my aorta. the ascending branch, behind the sinus, perpendicular to the orifices of the coronary arteries. en route a micro-systemic shuttle of immunity, complexity and the belligerence of hormones, unearthing a cross-talk, bendable to nature, glorified and typified by the philosophy of adaptation. googly-eyed and insincere, dictating to a self-duo, trafficking and policing the physiology, the morphology, the blueprint of the body worlds. living in an umbrella, talking to my self in a series of echoes, ribbing and rippling the frustrations of a physical circuit, walking in circles, breathing in loops, fashioning and dressing in the renewal of the constitution; this is my internal turnover, this is the photograph of the internal me, unedited and untouched. the relevance of capturing the ballad of my blood cells is something that makes sense to me. it helps me know my other self. my clockwork self, with a mind of its own. playing hide-and-seek with viruses, my nano-me in a nano-world gives shelter to my soul. gives comfort and reassurance to my vitriolic mind, burnt out and charred in the ferocity of my life, in the dielectric of my world; our worlds, perhaps, the shared distribution of economics and pottery. my nano-me in a nano-world, in nano-tongues and nano-views, searching a transition to a hidden life, a floating city, and the meta-soul of screams. 

boston part c

you are looking at me, wide-eyed, from the other side of the glass window, with a half-smile, a crinkled forehead and a curiously bent nose. you are wearing a blue flannel shirt, brown leather shoes, a Red Sox vinyl jacket, and carrying a white plastic bag. looks like a carton of milk and a box of Cheerios, but I could be mistaken. you appear like a shadow, perhaps. a silhouette against the flash of bright yellow lights in the township of Arlington where I am. right now. drinking a decaffeinated beverage, tapping away on my mobile phone and listening to Rob Dougan's instrumental compositions. i have had a fulfilling day; exciting, reflective and responsive. extensive walking, singing aloud and dodging two drunk boys throwing bottles at each other on Varnum Street. you are possibly waving at me right now, trying to speak with your eyes. but i am semi-alert, looking through your body, remembering the weight of my Boston pedagogy. mired in a nostalgia; i cannot explain. the kind where you felt electrified, revolutionized and transformed in the folds of your naivete, and grew, and matured, and ripened in a city that you loved, in a city where you built your dreams, in a city where you saw yourself.

i am in a red city shirt; i've worn it all day in the midst of a baseball parade, a feminist intellectuals convention, a hospital and a library. a disgruntled father cut across a coffee line earlier this afternoon, to buy some for a dying daughter. i flinched, violently. she is microcephalic, tender and perishing. i spent minutes imagining what she looks like; tying a father's face into a feminizing, fetishizing morph. but i didn't have an answer. into the demise of a clouded imagination. onward and into a canopy of fairy tales. a dead daughter, blood gushing, trembling in a dialogue of evolutionary ingenuity. the last impression of a breathing, human epitope of violent laughter. i shook my arms; as if hyper-contracted in a freeze-nitrosylation and sprinted to the Quad. eating on the way a fistful of sunshine, a century of mildew and shavings of marble. relentlessly intrigued, racially burnt, discussed dissected and experimented on.

i was humming a Beatles tune, rolling my eyes, clicking my finger tips on Massachusetts Avenue when norah yelled from across the street. an ex-neighbor, virgin and decidedly scholarly. orphaned in teenage, miserable in her 20s, she became a hermit in training, reclusive and suspicious, with an airy voice, granular and monotonic. the deep-rooted sexual primacy, buried in a chimerical cage, made her wildly numb; an inner tempestuousness breaking the perimeter of promise. back to my world, across the street, spinning tales, lies and drugs. norah, what's up? i asked, curiously. i got bit by a dog the other night, bad baaad Booty, she said arduously, i may have rabies from the smuggled pup. her phone rang. the sound, a piercing cadence, pressing through an orange leather purse. oh yes mom, he drugged the nanny last night and... i walked away, unknown to me the life of the nanny. and my ex-neighbor.

into the face of Virgil and tourists, a garden of bricks, a monument of words and studios, i sat by Straus D, clicking photographs on my memory and listening to the chuckle of an Ivy gay, a Jamaican and a transistor; memorizing history, confusion and Vonnegut. my bitterness about philosophy, beginning on these very footsteps when Russell kissed a frog and said to me, the fundamental crisis that man faces is loving everyone but himself. in truth, in comparison, in the variegation of mnemonic, we argued at the brew house on Dunster Street. appropriating the meaning of 'loving yourself', the outcomes, the placebos, the canonizing and gentrifying, the undulating Harvardian raking in contempt, shriveled in remorse for a resonating hypocrisy; calling yourself a raven, a cormorant and a field star, curling in ulcer and uremia of your brain. i need you to learn to love yourself, first, Russell, and then plead the cases of Curie, Amis and Plath. to compare, to verbalize in the spirituality of Salinger, pompous in your white washed neighborhood. what money and your entitlement did to you was loathe yourself at the cost of appreciating contemporaries, wary of an alternate reality, in a pit of poverty, in the third world of mine. you pointed it out wholeheartedly, preachy, on our second night at Harvard. i have never forgotten, never will. as you continue on your mission of entitlement, privilege and philanthropy, hating yourself, doing good for the exterior of your smile, it is my hope that you will un-click a pittance, a grueling punishment and let yourself rise. in the philology of self, the biology of winds and consequence of minds.

my momentary fascination

i had a momentary fascination with electronic drumbeats, lyme disease and roots of words, today. especially, aleatory and solecism. corresponding meanings are random and ungrammatical. i am a fan of the concept of randomness. for some tremendously odd reason, the imagery of chaos is an orchestrated, romanticized thought chromatic in the deepest venule of my existence. i have been thinking about randomness, a lot, today. unaware of three spilled coffee drops on my pink checkered shirt, a trickle on my threadbare denim, a design on my Keds. shuffling between that and my non-affiliated embodiment of a pro-spiritual, anti-constructivist.

this probably stems from my being a rebel child. a violent, unkind boy at the age of 6, stabbing my sister with a sharpened pencil, disturbed, bemused and unbridled. persistent in the juxtaposition of carelessness, queerness and motivation, the defense mechanism of violence; i have perennially outgrown a soliloquy of emancipatory motives. i have vouched for sexual emancipation, erotic symbolism and polygamy, since i was twelve. rooted in an anti-classicist, shedding reason on the tendency of mammalian carnality, i have advocated for an unconventional incredulity, barking to the passers-by. marilyn escaped the season of sex.

reminiscing the face of krenaline, my bold and valiant lover. asleep behind a shadow. celebrating a time of fair togetherness. with cocoa, fruit and neuroses. with a bucket of my strange psychedelics, hallucinated upon by the whims of colic, reaching out to you. with a tear of dissonance, a breach of distance, parody of those electronic drums. i miss you krenaline. come back to me.