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OK, here's mine, done to "Point" by Cornelius.
POINT
1. Bug (Electric Last Minute) / 2. Point of View Point
He opened his eyes in the silent white of his bedroom as the clock radio beeped its first, and he smacked it immediately, pushing it over into the radio, spinning the dials from static to news hum and music and back into static. White. The cat was asleep at his feet, until he sat up suddenly, scattering its paws to the wind. He ubbed his eyes like he had learned to do while watching other men wake up from sleep in the movies.
And his agenda was? Looking up at the ceiling he wished it wasn’t there. To live in the sky, to live as a creature adapted to the sky, like a bird who had no feet and could never land on the ground. To be free by genetic imperative.
He was living in the skyzone still as he brushed his teeth. Couldn’t break free of it. Couldn’t. The cat stalked by the door, looking for some lower-borne form of life that was never there for him to find. He would never let the cat leave the house...
3. Smoke
In the back seat of the car at 80 miles per hour in broad hazy daylight in the Valley, our lips locked together and our hands roaming. She’s like air, weightless, hollowboned. We turn sharp to avoid a sudden merge and we get pressed against the left side of the car. The seats are densely soft though and so are we, clean Americans, so sanitized and well-dressed that it’s like we’re cartoons. The road flickers by high-speed, and we speed through a tunnel. The sodium lamps zip by one at a time, turning the inside of the car into a yellow strobe and now we are cartoons, but I’ve got my eyes closed and my lips locked.
We get to the other end of the tunnel and her hair’s getting caught in my mouth. In the front seat Stel and Dominic are chuckling softly at us and Dominic slides in a tape of sky-noise. We slow as we approach an oncoming traffic jam...
4. Drop
Again, it’s like it was when we still lived in the forest. One house, one garden, infinite trees, no neighbors. Things were evil back then. Sitting under the thatch roof watching single drops of water fall from the beams, hitting wood and skin.
It was in the forest, though, that I was able to find the other animals. And it was in the forest that I learned how to kill and how, above all, to be real. Before then it was like I was just a discoporeal thing from the green. My parents birthed me but then I had to birth myself. I stuck the point of the knife into the elk’s throat and I followed it down into the river and held it there. It was young. It didn’t know what was happening to it and I barely knew what was happening, I almost drowned alongside it, coughing and sputtering when I finally remembered to come up for air. I could have drowned myself alongside it. I had to follow it into death as far as I could go and still turn back. I had to make that decision to turn back.
It was in the forest that I killed and it was in the house that I served. And then when we left the forest there was neither. Except for the water.
5. Another View Point
Here comes a plane.
They were standing on the tarmac watching it zip by, flagging at it with their sweaters and beer bottles. It was all a great day out.
I was sitting on the periphery, staring sullenly at the ground. I couldn’t believe this was entertainment, but it was what my relatives liked to do. Stand around at the fences of airports and watch planes go by. Once, when I was a lot longer, we were waiting for a taxi cab on the street in front of an airport we had just landed in. I must have been four. I had my head on the pavement, looking straight up into the sky, and I remember thinking, this isn’t so bad. I don’t know why they tell you that the ground hurts to lay on. And then I noticed things moving in a halo around my head... swarming pinpricks. I didn’t tell anyone. A week later the school nurse stuck her gloved hands into my scalp and yelled “LIIIICE!” Her fingers swarmed...
A jet blasts by us. I’ve got my hands over my ears the whole time but they’re just waving and cheering.
6. Tone Twilight Zone
Out at the rim of the lake at three in the morning, you can’t remember how old you are, or where you’re supposed to be. You can’t remember if you’re lost or not.
You do remember what crickets sound like, and you know that that’s what you’re hearing. Up above the moon glows with an ice ring around it that would have to be a billion lightyears across if it was in space instead of just in the atmosphere. Your feet go one after the other, you’re staring at the blood encrusted around your socks and the edges of your sneakers. It’s a very peaceful night. Ice circles are caused by a refractory optical illusion as the full moon-light dances off of ice crystals in the upper atmosphere, a very rare condition indeed. Where are you?
There are trees all around, and it’s early enough in the morning that you hear birds.
7. Bird Watching at Inner Forest
The birds sing. It’s five in the afternoon and I’m still in bed.
There are e-mails to write, course material to read, food to eat, and inner vision to be, hopefully, tapped. I wish there was a country where these things were the only things left to do. I became an outsider so that I wouldn’t become an outsider. When the culture screams from the rooftops that you have to be strange, have to have a chip on your shoulder, have to come from pain and be going to pain in order to be taken seriously, than goddamnit you do those things in order to be taken seriously.
I wish all I had to do was be myself. That all I had to do was pull mysterious fish out from deep inside myself, and turn them into money and inspiration for all. But people do not cooperate.
8. I Hate Hate
FUCK! Our heads go blur, our heads go up down and around and blood rushes and the sound, the sound is pounding! Our time runs together! Our lives run as twenty! It all runs! Our futures become as one! Our refusals!
9. Brazil
He sits at the storm center of the world and tries to get everything aligned up into the right place, so that he doesn’t get stuck forever in the wrong place. That he doesn’t become useless. That he doesn’t become cut off from everything. That he doesn’t become a joke.
And laughter is the only way to align yourself, the only way to loosen the quicksand. And they’re all laughing at old1940s movies where the choirgirls are easy not to care about because they’re all dead already. Because they’re agglutinations of grays on a flat screen, not people. Because they played a role and died, and what is left is the role, not the life. The plaster cast of a faked instant.
And he’s staring.
10. Fly
Dot dot dot. Dot. Dot. Can’t stop coughing. Can’t stop staring at the television.
He’s not really on the mark today. He should be watching the planes, but he’s at the top of the air-control tower humming to himself, watching the miniature TV screen he’s brought up there with him and listening to the raw sound of the jets. They fired him a week ago and he’s really not supposed to be up there, but after spending forty years as airport maintenance, where else do you go?
Beneath him he can feel the air traffic controllers bustling around, unaware of his presence. He came up here to watch the planes like he used to, but he’s staring at the tiny television image of Los Angeles, so many miles away but he can see it as it is, right now, this instant, and how can the world be anything but magic? He could take a dive right now.
He stops to think. He lets the miniature television take the dive for him–ah wait, no, now they’ll see it. They’ll be coming up to get him. Well, there goes a plane. At least he saw one today. It zums right over his upturned face, not fifty feet away. He watches the landing gear in their final descent, watches the blinking lights on the underside, listens to the raw deafening blast like it’s the last thing he’ll ever hear, because it is.
For love, for love, for love. Up into the air.
11. Nowhere
The beeping in the clouds calls his attention. He’s dreaming about flying and something’s hiding inside one of the clouds and it’s beeping. He swoops down low to investigate, brushes the fluff away with one wing.
There’s an old phonograph in there, and now it’s not beeping, now it’s playing old lounge records from the fifties that were recorded long before he was born, that he only knows secondhand, from manufactured nostalgia that he can’t help but feeling even though he has nothing to be nostalgic for. The needle gives off a warm organic crackle that would have made him feel comfortable, at home, loved, if he had been thirty years younger.
His flight path takes him up farther, near the sun, and the soundtrack booms from the phonograph as he soars, exalted him in the sunlight, all joy. He’s going up and up as the groove runs on. Ah, glory, ah, glory, glory of the warm past where our parents were children, the only glory set aside for us as the needle skips, the wax melts, the dreamer awakens.
THE ALARM. |
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