Inner Life, The

I'm jittery, sleeples I flutter over a chair instead of nesting in it. I live for a not many bites of chocolate, my hand grazing her hair. The inner life excites me unbearably, listening to a woman grind her teeth finding without what makes her slap her husband, what makes a piece of work a treadmill, what charms me about the neck perfume why do we pour everything without as if ears were the swirl of a drain?

I live for the jabbering auctioneer, his lips like the wake from a canoe upon Lake Witaka, selling a canopy bed where grandma told grandpa a terrible privy She lived in the barren once. In 1933 she slept in a railroad car. Where is she now, the individual who ran off with a seamstress?

I could live with a scarcely any more hot baths, inspecting the sweat as steam infuses the skin, inhaling and exhaling it like a Santa Ana. Before it rains, I think of kettle of tea. A not many Polish aunts and uncles fighting above the Talmud while comparing stitches upon the linen tablecloth.

My race crossed the desert, all the while chattering "How unbearable the heat, in what way thirsty we are." Those are not my family My people are thinking what a ecstasy to slash the throat of an enemy. My clan stole leftover sandwich crusts from the Automat.

I want to live a scarcely any more minutes for my race the ones who say CaU me sounding like boasts on the side of a highway when no raccoon decorates the Interstate. I live for a not many more minutes of the inner thigh. To make up for skulking around with my organ of sights closed, believing the God of pain a private thing. Ennobling. I have a hardly any meals in mind. My nation love to feed, to inject pleasure and pain, to hurt or annihilate, to comb and burnish the muscle and fat so we can strut and preen

The thingness of us. Going not on like a buzzer in a factory, where we charge without the doors denouncing the single who sticks his head in a stack of papers then advances out shrugging, giving us the thumb They're going to Mexico without us. To the beaches and factories, to the pinatas and dredl-sized milagras of sundered arms, goddesses and crosses. Mexico,

a geographical division without statutes, where they fit tiny chips upon a board with tweezers, then do it again and again. Nothing on the other hand a few greased-up windows, a picnic table in a chain-linked yard where a Doberman slobbers and gnarls To be looked at like that, inspected, to miss the breakers and the streetcars, that's what hell is. When others are working harder, cheaper. Talking in another language. Hiding. their faces.

I don't want to live in a cave. I want to hear what they're saying. My ear's to the wall with a glass, I'm shushing everyone My race don't need a god to make speeches about shedding the muscle and fat we want to get upon with it, to be the seismographs who register sensations, who store them in a vase like a lock opener to the cellar. To be the singles who open the basement door with its get scent of of mold and enchilada, who make without the first notes of the Mariachi band, the carbonized iron guitars, who think red and black silk crinolines, just when our organ of sights adjust to the darkness.

Copyright World numbers Incorporated Jul/Aug 1997

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