Something is unraveling. I hear metal being cut or shaved. Sparks. Screw-heads sit stripped like busted locks. Every clock is a countdown to death. I feel the rocks shrinking my breath. In a dream I flew through a blue corridor, past doorways and through people bursting into thick lightdust. Thick like pollen, like ragweed, like the sucrose of springtime - like the cavities of summer. The roots of oaks ride canals as boats, in Panama or in Venice.

Somewhere in America thunderheads are poised like flexed biceps, squeezing sweat onto assembly-line houses. The lightening bulges like veins over the graveyards of once-mythic landscapes.

Will there be a grand finale? A climax, a burst, an apex? Will it fizzle-out or just droop? I’m not running around with rattlesnakes, corals, and copperheads raised above my head in fistfuls. Something is unraveling. The signs are like droppings. The dreams are like droppings. Sick. A key with no lock, a foot with no sock, a barn with no cock, a boat with no dock, a ring with no rock. A shock.

On the way there, a man on the subway is reading a trashy sex novel. He is hunched over. The agonizing, thorn-crowned, solid gold head of Jesus hangs between his legs from a chain around his neck. The train is bumping and convulsing, and Jesus swings to and fro, quietly smacking into the man’s crotch like a morbidly sexed pendulum. All I can think is that Jesus is giving head to this man. The tortured floating head of this deity-pop-star is slapping a penis every two seconds. (He’s got the priests beat, and he doesn’t even have hands.)

On the way back, a man is shooting blanks - some unintelligible diatribe. His eyes move like houseflies, impulsive and fickle. He finally bursts into tears, and I feel terrible for not understanding. We are forced to observe one another, he and I, on the train. He looks around, as puzzled by the rest of the passengers as some of us are by him.

Today I walked into a tree. Just like in a cartoon. I swear, it was sad. I was looking behind me, and the second I turned around, there it was. "Hi!" it said. "Oof!" I replied. The man getting into his car in Union Square gave a look of disbelief and either annoyance or pity. Not sure, because I was quickly getting my cell phone out. I spoke into the reciever: " I just walked into a tree." No one was on the other end. I hadn't even dialed. But I was despearte to do anything but walk by the disbeliever with no defense or distraction. He must have known I wasn't speaking to anyone. I would have realized it myself. I was too distracted from being body-slammed by a tree to do the logic. I wonder if he decided I was already nuts, or I had gotten clubbed hard enough to knock a few screws loose?

My night was better than a novel. I left Times Square at one in the morning, a few hours early to cushion my transition to the day-shift.  I carried two heavy bags full of soda cans and bottles out ino the street. The office building that I work in does not recycle. I have made the decision to do it for them (at least on the eighteenth floor). I thought to myslef "It's early, why not take the subway rather than a cab?". And so I proceeded into the gritty intenstines of Manhattan with my fingers already starting to go numb from the weight of my bags of reducable, reusable, recyclables. There is a certain prowess granted to he or she that carries bags of bottles. While it punished my digits, it also freed me to act as if I were outside the scope of etiquette. I could spit, curse, make eye contact for more than a second, sing to myself (out-loud), and just generally be obnoxious. I've always wondered at what point somone becomes a bum or bag-lady. They don't awake one morning and  gather their things up in bags and start wandering. Where is the transition? Have I taken the first step? Have I leaped into it and discovered the liberating effects? The bags were from the Gap - the ones with strigs like nooses on my fingers.

People make assumptions about those carrying cans and bottles in used Gap bags. People were afraid. They avoided me. They moved seats when I sat near them on the train. They whispered and oogled and pointed. "That boy isn't dressed like he should be carrying bottles", I imagine they said to eachother. But on second thought, I was, wasn't I? My fingerless gloves were fraying at the edges, my jeans had several large holes with long-johns underneath. My hair was a crime scene. On second thought, they were saying "look at that boy," period.

Still high on my new freedom, I realized the train I needed to transfer to was not running.I left the subway to find the bus. I was followed by a police vehicle for about 10 minutes. Finally, they decided to ask me what was in my bags. They did not believe I was recycling at two in the morning, so they searched my bags and let me go "haha...recycle", as one of the officers put it.

Three hours later, after getting on the wrong bus once, and the wrong train twice, I arrived home and deposited my "haha recycle" into the appropriate bin. 

 

Wood                          © Joshua Katcher                     clay and oxides.

                    Hips                                © Joshua Katcher                               digital photo

Sap sinks down to sleep in roots - animals hide in nests or burrows, the wind moves across the ground like the notes of some frigid lullaby that hush everything into coma. Nothing is growing here. I wonder how i might survive the winter as any other animal (having gathered and stored food enough for months). The truth is I'd probably die. I don't know how to grow my own food, and I don't know what is edible that grows here.

I didn't grow up on a farm. I've never milked a cow or slaughtered a chicken, but here they are in clean plastic casings with no evidence that they cried out as they're throats were slit. (My father took me fishing once The hook went through the eye of the fish and I couldn't stop crying.)

People who don't mow their lawn get death threats.

There is a tribe beneath my skin, painted with the rich soils of South America, and hardened by the white deserts of Africa. They drum my chest and emerge from dense capillary jungles. Raging red rivers call for my warm flesh forests to go back ten thousand years and start over. Hunters pull at my tendons like bows, release arrow-sharp reactions, then vanish. Gatherers collect my senses like roots and mangos, to live.

I find the land replenished and every clock crumbles and blows away.