Primitive Mentor

Briar

42 brar After the final battle of the gods, the rain tasted like iron forever. And after forever, the worst was over until another worst volunteered. Not to say green tips didn’t thrust from mordent roots or nests percolate with starlings. Even the cockroach sports vertiginous wings. Pilgrim, what the fuck . . . ? No one knows if the chunk of ice in the center of the chest was part of a planet of ice before we began so full of impurities, it could be flint, it could be a soul, each of us chipped off. Three or four lifetimes later, I hope I’m not the same drunkard although the enemies are the same, galloping against each other over the boneyards of horses, blowing the pump houses, torching the bell towers. Three children beating an already injured snake make a civilization. Agony is an art like any other and deserves to be forgotten. Imagination is the vacation of meaning, thinks the snake, the earth’s other minions come to dispose of the remains, spine to summer hearth, spine to winter castle. 43 Then the businessmen arrive messaging the invisible so some of us flee with our white wine. You don’t want to be around me now. What isn’t born twisted? Even the lily leaf, the hummingbird. There was a man who couldn’t straighten and he fell from nowhere. Ask him and he’ll say he was elected into the new order, new orchard where fruit can’t rot or ripen. For a sum, a mechanism produces your future. Can the mind function without its scorpion? Scorpion warmed in a corner, allowed its repose. The ocean rubs its belly, come sleep with me, the surface hugely scratched, jagged like illustrations of electricity, thinks the woman on the porch who in three days must move her mother into a bottle of antiseptic because she’s leaving the oven on. Obscene abbreviations. When the man comes out, clinking his ice, she has already turned into six or seven other people, each with a necklace of tiny skulls, a strange power, a debt. The snake was already dead by anyone’s account. It was a small thing getting smaller. It was the animal you were before the animal you’ve become. A boy has found a bullet by the swing-set. Something’s written on it. 44 ...