Midnite on Mars
That We
are Legal
I am living with my crime. It is the window and the desert and the empty space between where I am now and where everyone else used to be. And I am imagined. I am assembled. I am quiet and alone and the bones under my skin seem to vibrate with the fear that invites me politely to fall off into the eager and endless thoughts of my own invalidity. I have been awake for days but I know I've slept well but my dreams are swollen in the heat of things. They skitter across the empty pages of the loosely held idea that we are allowed. That we are legal. That we are not alone.
Two Numbers
The hum and the flicker of the Warehouse lights remind us that we are never free. Life has a price tag. It might be glued to the sole or hanging from the neck, but they are numbers that we need to answer. There are numbers that wrap around us as binaries or as fake last names. And we hum inside the machine until the director tells us to be real. When are we real? When do we have air and life and thoughts and dreams and urges? When do we undress? When are we seen and then not seen and seen and then not seen as the day becomes night and the day becomes night until we are 1 or 1 or 0 or 1 or onezerooneonezerooneonezeroone?
I am no closer to you than I am to the center of the sun, and both are so hot that I don't dare to turn or touch or think. You cannot have me. I am emulsified. I am a chemical equation. I am an application. I am not even a hum or a flicker. I am alone beside you. I am you. You. youyouyouyou.
The Death
of You
We are random. We are the things that grow on your body as you age. The things you don't care to understand until you know that you don't understand them, and you want to understand them so you travel. You visit the experts. You see the people who might know what these things are. These things that grow this way or that. These things are different colors from the colors they started out as. The things that weren't there when everything started, but now they're there and you wonder if they'll be there in the end. Maybe they will be the end. Maybe they are the end. Maybe they are the death of you. Maybe they are you. Maybe you are death. Maybe they are the homes and the buildings and the shelters that hide the cancer. That hide the disease. And you don't notice them growing. One by one. Builders come. Walls go up. Paint is applied. And then there is another. And another. And each one is a business. Or one of them is a home. Or one of them is an office for a government agency. But they are sitting on your back or your shoulder or your elbow. They are little invaders. And yet they are yours. They come from you. They grow from your skin, from your bones, from your body. And slowly they begin to cover the surface of your earth. Of your planet. Until what was once so clean and young and healthy is now overcrowded and overpopulated with valuable real estate that will one day likely mean your doom.
Clearing
the Lot
I celebrate clean living. The clean smooth surface of a parking lot that's barely used. All the lines painted so carefully for absolutely no reason. And I am here, and I am not a car. But I am parked on another planet. And I am too big. And I am not shopped. And I have not been sold. And yet I feel like maybe I have been. Because maybe I am just a commodity. Because somewhere out there he is making me. He is inventing me. He is producing me the way one produces anything that is considered a masterpiece. And yet I don't know if I'm a masterpiece. There aren't enough mirrors. There aren't enough men to compliment me at bars or in the cereal aisle where I have more choices than I have genomes. And while I might roll my eyes towards this moon or that, I do indeed enjoy the compliments. I do indeed enjoy the thought that maybe one might find a label on my heel or a price tag hanging from my neck and decide to string me up. To hang me. To place me on a tree in December or January or February. Maybe they'll forget to take me down. Maybe they'll forget that I'm even here. And I will orbit and orbit and orbit again even if it's slower than your planet circles our sun. And I will find a way to be so far away from all the cars that park and squeal and leak and stain the perfect parking lot for the very first time in forever.
Beautiful
Sunday
I have found myself once again trapped in the brilliance and the beauty of a beautiful Sunday afternoon, leaning into the spring day, staring at the shoe store. I am shopping. Here we are so safely stowed on an island in outer space that spins and spins. A planet so envious of Earth's proximity to the center. We are circled by fear and panic. It is not unusual that we would be here, this craggy chariot, this home of war. And yet I am not even dangerous enough to make this symbol of discipline and authority raise even one eyebrow. Isn’t there danger lurking inside of me? Can I be a moon? Which one would I be? Could I thrust my head into the plate glass window of the store, only to cut my neck on the lightning bolt jagged glass, to lose my life and spill my blood on the patent leather dress shoes made by some Italian would-be designer? Because these are not the originals. These are all knockoffs. And so am I. So is this look on my face. I am a dusty imitation of something that's alive. Something I have not been in a very long time. I see the clerk inside the store with his head propped on his arm as he sits and reads the newspaper. The funny papers. The comics. We have comics in our newspaper still. Because we circle the sun so much slower than you do. It doesn't matter how many moons you give us. We’ll never beat you. Never. Not once.
The Memory of
Youth
I am the memory of youth. I am the time when once we were young and healthy and strong and new. When the grass was cut low. When the sun was always welcome. I am the tree that is full near the home that is freshly painted. I am the refrigerator that is stuffed and ready to fill the air with the comforts of fresh cooking and fresh baking and fresh scrubbing afterwards. I am the bubbles that linger in the lemon fresh air. I am the tub that's never been used. I am the clean that is even cleaner than the brand new baby born up the road at the hospital where in the corners of the rooms there is always an compound of dust. I am the past. I am crumbled. I am sitting here on this lonely trail between one place and another. And now the light flickers and dies each time I open the door. And everything inside is suspect. You can travel a million miles through space and time and still the scrapings of age flake from the skin of our existence and leave evidence everywhere that we have been here and we have grown old. Even the springs in the bed moan. They groan like a choir that sings with us every morning when we wake up. If we wake up. And unfortunately we wake up, and we look out and we see the corners are caked with dust. No matter where we are. We cannot sterilize ourselves as we age. We get filthy with the years. Each of our moons laughs at us because it has known its own deterioration. It has known collision. It knows the one secret of the universe that we all began with a blinding death and life is just constant return to it.
Tumors
I am my mother. When did I become my mother? When should I become the widow to my father? When did the colors in my life grow so bored with me that they couldn't even look at me? When did the outside world and the inside world become identical? Become invisible? When did things that used to grow inside of me stop growing? I am my mother. She is dying yet she is alive in me. When my voice leaves my mouth I hear my mother's voice. I hear the empty shell of her voice. Because her voice stopped having substance. It stopped having a core. There was nothing in her voice anymore after time until she did not have a voice. Until the only voice she had was in my head. And then that voice leaks out of me. And I am my mother. My partner grows tired of me the way my father grew tired of my mother. He developed certain tumors that grew inside of him. And they stuffed the organs that used to love my mother. And they blocked every vessel in him that once could hear my mother when she spoke with a full voice. When her voice was filled with love and laughter and the dreams of earth. And here I am. I am my mother. And my mother is me.
The Soft
Center
They pass by and they never stare unless they stare. And when they stare they pour desire into the air. And the air is thick with it. It has a stench. It smells like risk. It smells like the loneliest heart that beats so quickly and so quietly in the chest that they covet. And they are not thinking of her heart. They are not thinking of anything in particular but their wants. They are thinking of all the skin that shows. They are thinking of the parts that they can't see. They are men on any planet. It doesn't matter how far you take them. And she has put herself in a cage. She has put that part of herself that once thought that being happy was a thing that could happen in her life. And she has built up everything around it. She plays with gender. She plays with pronouns. She plays with the way she gives love to anyone and everyone. Every single thing that can protect her she plays within till that very little part of her is fully preserved. Because the damage she will endure is too much for that soft center of hers. Because they are walking around her, mindlessly thinking out loud. And they are unfiltered. They could rip their tongues out. They don't need them to say the things that they need to say. They could replace their mouths with each one of their fingers and the muscles in their arms and the whistles in their whispers that dangle and warble between their legs. Bitte beschütze mich vor der Welt. Ich bin so müde.
Welcome
Home!
He promised to skim the scum of his city and take the valuable parts to another place. A place he found buried in the post-binary. A place he found in the application of the artificial. The artificial hearts. The artificial limbs. The smiles that he made from nothing but his imagination. And the smiles that have lived everywhere and anywhere and belong to everyone and no one. Because they are not the smiles of anyone in particular and yet they are. They are the real smiles of the real people. But who are these people? And why do they smile? He would say they smile because he makes them. He would say they are filled with angst because that's what he feels, too. And they are welcome here. For he has made a home for them, and they are at home here. This is the new here. This is the new art. This is the new world that he creates. And there are so many gods now. And they all have the power to create. And the moons pull the chariot. And the war comes from the smiles that are anonymous and real. And they are angry. And they wave paper. And they shout "You have stolen our smiles. You have stolen our frowns. You have stolen us." Was the dust stolen to make Adam? Was his rib stolen to make Eve? What do we steal from the Earth to make the pigment that makes the colors that makes the paintings that makes the eyes wander and weep and turns the smiles into trembling replicas of the truth? Can you steal the truth? Who owns it? Who trains it? Who makes it? And can it be true if someone wraps a collar around its neck or shrouds it in paper? Who can judge the owners of the truth? Did God make it? Or did he take it from the earth, too?
How Can You?
Am I awake? Am I here? How far have I traveled? Why am I outside? What is the difference? If your home is foreign, how is being outside different from being inside? If the air you breathe is not the air you have breathed and the bed you sleep on is not the bed you have slept on, how can you know if you are inside or outside? How can you know when you are awake or asleep? If you walk through the world and you do not feel it's real, how can you tell whether or not you are dreaming?
Cocoon
Why are we quarantined? Why have we been forced to live this way? What have they brought with them, these strangers? These carriers? These incubators? Is the air now contagious for us? Do we dare to walk near the places where they walk? Near the places where they have walked? I do not know. All I know is that my lungs fill and empty as they have my whole life with this dusty air that I never used to notice until it became toxic. And where does the toxic go? What does it do? How does it travel through me? Does it fill me like I'm a puppet? Will I have to burn this dress? My home was once warm and now it is a tomb. A coffin. A cocoon. And will my death be my chrysalis? Will I exit this isolation with golden sunburst wings?
Turned
Down
We have cut and pasted the golden elements of night. We are illuminated. We offer to meet your needs and bend to them with smiles. Because who smiles who doesn't have to? Where are the smiles on those of us who wander the parking lots or sit in the front seat of the running cars or curl up in the bed in the corner of our trailer homes? Our homes with wheels and the wings. With rocket engines that take us so far away. We need to escape. This home of ours has become uninhabitable, and we need to find another. And so we leave behind our smiles and pack ourselves into the ships and take the long journey to another place. To another morbid home. A place where we can be as unhappy there as we are here. And when we are there, we will unpack china and the children's toys and the dresses and the sandals and the diary that we used to keep. But now our diary is used for scrap paper into which we spit our gum. We chewed the gum on the ship to keep her heads clear, but all it did was break our jaws. And now we can't speak. We are dumb. We just stare into the camera with the blank look of people who have been invented by a madman with the growing technology of the unseen.