Caveat Emptor (The Frozen Dead)

Rags tied around the rips in my clothes - leather and canvas, black and olive-drab (and always dirty) - heave a silent menace into the road. Riding freight cars is a thing of the past; the highway is too slinky and clean for me, the woods are all swamp pits - infested with trash, needles, beer cans and waterlogged couch cushions - and the neighborhoods are all built from recycled plastic milk jugs. Our estuary is dissolving into white chalk and re-bar. The black birds in black armor mark sentry posts against the White Visitation, white surf beating its cold saw-teeth...

Sand dug under my fingernails, shabby red whiskers on my jaws, feet in perpetual ache, nostrils in perpetual flare, stare fixed on the hundred-yard line... knives fixed to bootstraps ...hoarding tinder and kindling, hoarding bricks and pipes, ducking squalls under swoop of cedar boughs, rationing canned beans and apples, bolting up from sleep to stab shadows, stinking of smoke and toe-fungus, bathing in a forever of sweat.

This is this how you’d meet me: wrung out, never living in it. Who wrote on this beach trash? Who broke the sundial and left the hourglass upside-down? Will I show up trailing kelp and crab-shells, dune-grass in my beard, eating cold beans from a can, teeth orange, eyes yellow and sunken and bruised? Who’s been chopping at the straw goddesses, throwing the corpses of dogs on the fire? Who keeps carving messages in the tree-trunks, and if I stuff a note into each bottle, what’s to keep them from washing back up on these same beaches, scratching me in my sleep?

The fog is here.

The dead come at me in those radiant under-eyelid visions before sleep. The dead come at me in dancing skeleton circles, in a funnel that sucks the Earth into dead obliterating space, the frozen dead in brilliant blues and turquoise and the orange glow of campfire embers, asking me if the ocean is cold enough to swallow, the frozen dead in lavender and the mad red reds that rip the ocean sunsets, the frozen dead in hammered gold glide their frozen bone fingers across my palm, ask if it isn’t a lovely day to go drowning in whisky and wheels and metal. The skulls all drain and spiral into orbit, and there they forget the Earth.

The frozen dead are focused now into a thin twisting filament, stretched out over eons of space, vomiting frozen souls to disseminate across the empty galaxy waysides. The frozen bones smear into fine hairs, lightyears in length, wrapping the planet in silken death-twine, choking off the solar wind, de-magnetizing the poles. The frozen dead are an electric tourniquet before the celestial amputation.