Nelson Gary

Heat's Kingdom

Heat's kingdom blazes street transparent,

crystalline on opals the size of golf balls.

Whiteness of rosy skin cancer itinerant rises

on headlines furrowed on brow with arrow

of time reversed in prayerful cure. The narrow

road visualized is a rod pounded into a needle

that weaves summer's short sleeves once long

to hide tracks of smack injection.  The rosy

crucifixion resurrects the dark night of heat

with the thud of ruby heart, McQueen's blob.

I could love the disease of vision again with drills

of introspection questioning toys with the fast thrills

of nudity nudged by spiritualized strangers, even if

their visions were borrowed from the hallmark hal-

lucinations

that brim over, basking in the blaze from heat's kingdom's

bleak cauldron of copper.  Authority figures in this picture

with freedom of expression, freedom of religion.  Structure

does not marry heaven and hell, the place where earth dwells.

Instead, the opals' fires burn beyond the glory of the moon

Now bleeding what I have written until it's what I'm reading.

Aleph Voice (Chapter 1)

The flowered couch had too rich a history to throw out or recycle and make part of an installation.  Its legs were rickety, and there was furniture music when fat-bottomed, Amerasian Floe Rose sat down on it, as she did now with an iced white mocha, purple straw to her lips, watching the full lips of Jewtile Frank Lee quiver into practically a pucker.  She took a sip of the sweet, Alaskan mud, then said, "Speak your mind, Frank.  Who knows?  You may end up sharing your soul."

"I can't stop thinking about it."

"Thinking about it is worse than it happening.  Worrying makes it worse.  Worrying is unpleasant.  Only the most evolved masochists like it."

"Why?" he asked, nervously rubbing the tips of his fingers by the zippered pocket of his black, leather bomber, a holdover from his days as a motorcycle club member—his early twenties.

"The greatest ecstasy is relief from suffering.  A spiritual element can make it liberating.  Biologically, the adrenalin adds to the high, combining with the endogenous morphine released by the pain, loving abuse—tough love of a kind.  A speedball.  A natural high bested only by mania."

"Have you ever known a spiritual masochist who was manic in ritual?" Frank asked.

"Yes.  Wolf Stark," answered Floe. Then, she ran her fingers through her cloud of hair, seemingly rusting as time beat out each second of history of common value into the underground with its codes embedded, entrenched.  Her heart throbbed, remembrances of Wolf, a series, all of them, indistinct, melding into one another, the truth present, the facts unsummoned, a secret history with body art at the center.

They heard a car slowly glide into the carport.  The driver would less likely be Wolf than Death itself.  Frank caught sight of a threatened bird of prey, a bald eagle, making its nest from tan twigs, maple legs, in a sycamore tree kissed by June warmth in the open window behind the couch. What spirit the white-headed, black-feathered bird had, Frank could not figure.  His bladder filled, a rush of excitement, but he did not alert Floe to what was right outside: freedom of thought preserved, freedom of expression not risked.

Frank's scalp shone under the solar light of the living room, the blades of fans spinning around, a cycle for poets not present.

Harrison Pearl, a Scottish-born Mason, wanted to crawl, not walk into the living room, but Frank was there.  Often, he crawled at first, then rolled into bed or wherever Floe wanted him to be.  His arthritis was that torturous. The hillbilly heroin had ceased to relieve him of the disease's merciless sadism.  His bones were the bars of a cage, one Wolf understood better than Death itself.  "Dr. Toranaga won't up my prescription," said Pearl.

"Don't turn to crime," Frank said.  "You get busted, and you're looking at life."

"What life?" Harrison, a reformed career criminal, asked.  With a deep sigh, he stared at the wood floor, forgettable, but for how its boards creaked.   He shot a glance at Floe; then he gazed at Frank, the proverbial picture of health, an agent undercover as a filling station owner, and confessed, "I can't get it up.  My love is ambiguously expressed, other than in kind conformity—Emily Post's disciple."

Pearl's castrated ability to enjoy life moved Frank, but not without making him, a soulful recycling yard, uncomfortable.  "You're more than a conformist to bourgeois etiquette.  Come on, Pearl, buck up!  You're one of the most mindful people I've met—definitely since I bought the 76, if not ever."

"That was only a year ago," Harrison sneered.

"I spent most of the last ten years in solitary.  It's true," Frank lied.  "But I lived the life of a butterfly before that.  A long one!  And the whole town comes through my 76."

Harrison did his best not to become hostile towards Frank.  Anger increased his physical suffering. He also did not like having to play priest to his conscience for resentful or even violent thoughts.  Harrison said to Frank: "The mindfulness mania, that probably came with your time in the pen through cognitive behavioral therapy, don't associate it with me. It's a bastardization of a legitimate practice.  I'm a Buddhist, so the mindfulness craze is sad and offensive."  Even in dustbowl America, Pearl had made a point of taking refuge in the Three Jewels.

  Floe rose from the couch, the one she could not junk, the one little larger than a loveseat, which Harrison had given her when he could no longer practice as a psychotherapist for legal reasons.  The river ran through their backyard.  Floe often bathed Pearl in that river, knowing that many times Frank had been watching from behind a bush or in a tree.  She ran her head through the storm cloud dyed gray to mirror the Bride of Frankenstein and said, "Frank, you'll have to excuse Harrison and me.  We have to prepare supper.  And there aren't enough leftovers for three.  I'm sorry."

"No problem.  I understand," Frank solemnly said, quickly becoming unhappy.  He had no exit plan. The bush of green beside the rushing river he had wanted to enter as the bush of noire with a well brimming over with the anointment of Floe Rose.  He placed his hands in his blue jeans' pockets and offered to take the two of them to Chinese food, their favorite cuisine.

After chowing down, Harrison turned in, filled with Chinatown Express, cursed a bit with each bite.  The food made his body sting, his skin feel as though it were being unpeeled to bones pounded by gavels.  The tastes of all the dishes, however, had pacified him electric, a garden of culinary pleasures savored.  The subdued electricity was that which lights an opium den on the street and within, leaves it solely illuminated by candles.  The shared meal allowed Pearl not to trust Lee, but to let the revelation of Floe Rose be shared outside the community with an oil man, two different worlds arguably.  Of course, it was not his call, not his choice.  

What was familiar to Rose and Pearl was freakish to most people.  Frank Lee was more than that fabled man of experience: he was the real thing, flesh, blood and brain.  Harrison Pearl's voice of openness had silently expressed itself by turning in to the bed of his broken dreams.  Dr. Toranaga could have numbed the disparate pieces perfectly together had she not been afraid of losing her license more than treating a client unethically and turning him into a fiend.  Pearl's Aleph voice, the silent one, the one of action, was concise.  Frank understood it almost as well as Floe did.  

Floe would not have expected anyone to know outside the body art vanguard that the breasts Frank's hands climbed were Mount Zions centered by the stars of God placed there by surgeons of the transhuman underground, double features attended by Jehovah and Satan both—nightly.  The angels and demons starred as genies in a drive-in that the spy hoped to find.  If the underground was the bottomless pit, he did not mind.  Even though Frank was an expert liar, if need be, his life was in service of the truth.

Floe rose and walked away from the couch of Eden, leaving Frank's balls risen into his gut and feeling a degree of empathy (for him).  Even though there was longing for the man now in August before the month arrived, Ms. Rose did not want to get rolled by a punk John Wayne, especially not in her own home.  She fully appreciated Frank Lee as a human being.   He was the biological part of her she grew out of or just left behind to give up on that hell-bound train of social construction offering her not much more any longer than ashes in her process of individuation.  Floe Rose was one with herself and one with the other without ever compromising the fullness of her identity. 

Walking Frank to his blue 1952 Studebaker Starlight coupe, she moaned her goodbye to him.  Intimations of a promised land to come resonated in their exchanged tones.  Frankly, it was a promised land that only needed money from the old world she had done much more time in as a model citizen than Harrison Pearl had done time in the penal system as the model prisoner.

Alone and outdoors, Floe Rose settled into informal contemplation, reflection.  Sipping jasmine tea under universal darkness hosting a congregation of timelessly glamorous stars, she sipped her jasmine tea at the top of the teak staircase.  Not her feet, just her eyes walked down the lanes that led to the river that, with its run, hushed the wildlife: the hoots of owls who didn't care and the cries of coyotes who were in no pain whatsoever.  The paper lanterns and tiki torches lit the cobblestone paths.  They had grounded her many times, hard ones, good ones, times of heartbeats broken and times of heartbeats absorbed by some supernatural source, which she was wise enough not to attempt to define, in ecstatic throbs.  On the proverbial face of it, pimples and all, it was no more a mystery why the notably younger Wolf Stark wasn't coming back than it was why she couldn't get pregnant.  It wasn't that he had fallen prey to her charms as a leopard and become a wounded gazelle, or that he had become a relatively famous action painter who did performance art at his art openings.  He wanted to be a biological father.