THANKING the ANKLE (Cont.)

Knowledge may have its purposes
but guessing is more fun than knowing.
Auden


Along Innerstate 42, a number of casualties exit their paths, for the express reminders they need, in casts bedecked with secret messages penned by friends and admirers, or perhaps a hospital stay. Spring flowers’ slippery rain spattered pavement slides care through stop signs, into bone-breaking sentiments, the symbols of which preceded the race to the crash, some wake into, or evaporate bloodlessly from, as others spill to the mottled woods. Being from is existing away, walking the frameworks cars pass, filled with expectations, a wind and rustle of leaves, flowing sidewards into your feet ... ah, of all things, we freeze, time trails and drags us ... onwards? Or benignly? Max was folding bar napkins intricately, as origami, scribing patterns to the shifting matrix of lines, expressing his subconscious, in an intriguing translucent medium of double-sided conjoinment, as they approached, I could tell, lessons sought edifice through mutual events. Our eyes met, with obvious pleasure. Brian! Mike! I point as nonchalantly as possible, at his aviator’s skullcap. On or off when you hit? Off, he said by mid-sentence to can’t think about it now; still fresh in it, you know? The Sopwith Camel swooped across the fractals spread like doilies next to me, as they settled into their foamy brews, and let the outside world slide off. Slowly, it dawned on me this was told to us, in a hazy yesterday, when at the café Brain then worked at, Mike bullnosed his brilliant red striking Guzi against our curb. It’s exhaust note was so sexy, I bolted from my talk, to stand next to it. Holy shit man, this thing is illegal. What possessed you to do it? As a joke of course, if you have the dough, better uses are few and far between. I folded a napkin and began to draw, marveling at the infinity it contained.


Shrill sounds of brakes, missing the stop sign Shrill sounds of brakes, missing the stop sign. I swear, the thought concentrated the reality outside; this accident was fated to happen; I saw it that night ... and Brian swilled his truth serum, which obliterated as it opened his mind. I saw that he knows more than he can contain; his commiseration is a tacit tightrope stretched taut, fundamentally braking for stop lights others miss, in dire nicks of time. I unfold, and re-fold the puzzle piece, remembering somebody having given me one, on a strip of line, I tied to my belt. How odd. He’s pulling it out from under his hat, cut from a giant canvas and colored in turn ... here, he motioned. For you. This was empowering, and ominous, the napkin was becoming what I sought to free my concentration from. Laconically, Mike begins his story, relating the catheter, and the blood. The opium pump piqued attention, the before became the hereafter and Brian orders a round. He looks at me like, should I tell him? I don’t want to know myself. Alcohol : for greatness of forfeiting and remembering. He knows I know he has the ability to convey something to a friend he himself needs to acknowledge; tequila shot are intimately shutting down and opening up in a single well-timed package. Items for note : Mike could be our fate. I’d just fallen down an embankment walking a trail at night, lost my attention for only a second ... like the driver ... and the stop sign ... and the way typhoons swirl ... not to mention the way ... he looked over, and missed the sign impact drove him through.


The pattern’s complexity was stupefying; all parts suffered in solidarity and solitude; Max’s caricatures swam across conversations, altering and altered by what we spoke. I paged through my manual, painstakingly simplified to arrest you into possibility, instead of stop you dead, at the first page of the actual article, at nine hundred pages long. That must be an expensive program, a barfly comments. How so? The manual is so thin. I thought about that. Like Abraham Lincoln’s speech-making rule of thumb. You need to give me three weeks for a two minute speech, but a two hour one, I’ll undertake spontaneously, don’t quote me on that, the general idea, you know ... less is more. More is less. Closing time secretly approached; the savvy bartender exerted her powers to slow it, magic sought to manifest throughly that night, unbeholden to limits which corral us. The simple complexity began to increase; each statement slowed its following connection to me, embracing more than a normally overloaded consciousness can hold. I found myself emptied and full; the universe of cause and effect bloomed around us; each subtle gesture weighed with beauty, wound its tendrils though me, into us ... the graphics embalmed to the clothing we wore, furthered threads of mystique exploding to tales quivering with anticipation to get told. Like the moments before supernatural occurrences, the seduction becomes the exploitation once we’re transfixed with the explanation.


This is utterly fascinating, I whisper to not one soul in sight. Not assembly-requited! The lack of answer exploded into facets of answers apportioned to each person’s account ... Brian has to tell Mike what he sees, to see it further. I need to watch my need to express what Mike can’t hear from me fully, to understand. The epicenter buzzed with concise expectations I deployed, to arrest further ways to perceive each situation. The shield of wanting to know defeats its own process; a certain perfection exists in the fractured bits and pieces, before they’re assembled into opinion, for they interact in inexplicable ways, the individual needs to parse, to feel its truth. The bartender inevitably shuttles us to the door, where the contagious assembly of facts continues. Brian reaches into his pocket to fuss with something, as Mike’s shirt fairly screams some answer I resist accosting, realizing it isn’t mine to do so. What’s that I ask him. Earplugs, she says, having to check what they were, his consciousness caught off-guard. Even better than alcohol, I retort. Which he gets, but doesn’t think through to what Mike needs, as related to what we manage to hear. I shake my head, astounded at the complexity of this. The massive shot of tequila had lodged in my brain, hampering normal reactions of conclusions. The wide night sky held interminable clues, I didn’t need to assemble. In seeing them, they continue to propagate, and exit and enter the stage.


I thought about that for quite some time, while the bed slowly rotated around. Judgment or conclusions occlude perception, which is now looking to validate specifics, rather than remain open-ended. The contrived becomes itself, for mirrors facet moments of what lies before them. Conclusions of brilliant red motorcycles impacted by bodies are seldom asked; matter is devoid of ‘knowledge’, or so we think. Then I think of Degala, who I learned was extinguished today. Blew a stop sign, died instantly hit from the side ... foretold her death, but thought she had longer. Told her daughter if I die ... and the next day ... whammo. That’s weird. But not so. It’s connected.