Leap Year by George Sparling

At first, when you smelled month's worth of my shit I'd covered with boards over a toilet that only flushed with a bucket of water, when my clothes stank from weeks of writing poetry on bennies and ampheta- mines, my friends setting you up with me in that hacienda, you thought how could you make love with an ethereal-out-of-touch-with-his-body poet or just a common variety, pre-psychotic-breakdown-sort-of guy. And then those oysters and tequila, the bus ride into the mountains and smooth creek, the sweet moss; the psilocybin blew our brains inside out, we cerebral runaways, that loamy sex jolted us. Then, the boat basin, that shared trailer, how you teased me though it never worked its wonders; I forgot the dance. I was a brutalist, cement blotting out necessary emotions. A. Nin's erotica straight out of our traipsing bookstores, you stealing two of her books, reading how the literati chattered: I failed you then. Too sophisticated perhaps for me. No, I made certain the carnal tran- substantiation never happened.

You handed me your father's letters with his apologetics, warnings, sub-textual taboos, his Jesus the Christ---I couldn't find the rosetta code. I knew essentially his message, but I'd too many doubts and unsuccessful personal breakthroughs, not aligning with you courageous-like as I should've. My self-abnegation proved a wall of granite. Then ennui, its goddamn ruthlessness, arrived; you left for Buenos Aires, intending to translate poets and somehow make sense in spite of the essential self-inflicted and damaging words you'd have needed. The poets weren't conscripted into USA's desires, its unconnected dots across wasteland maps useful only at one's peril. Even thousands of miles away you found you still couldn't withdraw from our personal and therefore eternal untranslatables, though you had the gift of tongues. Even that burnoose bought in a zouk in North Africa hadn't allowed you to "carry across" ( Latin for "translation" ) into something all those accumulated movies demanded of us---love---how they drumbeat to death even perceptive ones. Our unspoken words leached our Boomer immune system, making us susceptible to disease.

Admit it, that is if you still lived, that night on high-packed, city-street snow, two of us walking stereophonically, our feet and words making silent John Cage music, you tearless, though I heard your trembling syllables: How the hell was I supposed to know why he kicked you out. Then the SSRI's, mere placebos, having no effect on you except made you braver. You left the meds behind; I watched you carefully, making sure you missed the pills. You favored invincible medicine, moving toward truth and its ugly beauty rather than seeing feeble hollows of your cheeks, so unlike that time back east in CBGB, closed forever now. I allowed you to slough me off and take the leap, a high and famous point on the Golden Gate, taping jumpers 24/7 ( I saw the film, "The Bridge" ), providing evidence that you had been more real than in my memory.

Unmourning, I click a webcam of you and I watch from my desk you slow-stripping, your flesh and bones on the monitor, forgetting your nothingness in the urn after they found you in the bay soaked and broken by death.

Them

It's how the traffic increases ten-fold whenever I step out of my apartment, moving down the sidewalks on otherwise quiet streets, how every pedestrian is armed with cellphone cameras, their wi-fis videoing my every move and each twitch of my eyebrows, letting thousands in the community and count- less numbers, tens of thousands more remote and far-flung, how I used to get many wrong numbers ( I've disconnected now ), voices pointedly sounding contrived, making me realize they've purposely called just to make me paranoid and interfere with my uncommitted life, how they've inserted themselves into my dreams, scriptwriting and directing them, their own cinematographers providing the gaudy visuals, how the hourly bells ring from the college campus, as well a duplicate slightly ahead of the other, as if they think bells drive the madness out from that dwelling place deep within my aluminum-covered neurons, how I hear crows cawing after sunset, as if they're on a tape loop especially created for my ears, how I go into the DVD rental store with a dozen patrons quickly entering, walking past me letting me know I no longer have privacy and don't try anything, bub, we know what your selec- tions are, we'll track you down for now you're no longer a sovereign individual, how they've made certain I know I'm under surveillance to make me conscious of my consciousness, how I saw on PBS News a segment of a woman imitating my humped back and crooked head tilt, with obvious archival footage from an empty statehouse legislature, that's how far their power extends, how online litmags know about me, how they've been notified by law enforcement agencies about my crime of crimes, transgressions worse and far beneath standard felonies we witness daily, how a guy crossed in front of me in the aisle at a movie theater, flashing his mobile and capturing my image, how an over-abundance of customers appear spontaneously in the laundromat, every machine used in a normally uncrowded business, how vehicles' headlights are highbeaming me on sunlit streets streets as I walk toward them, telling me that time indeed is out of joint, how the neighbors on either side of our common walls keep banging them, all to point out my helplessness, wanting to roust me out of my quarters, how all the websites I go to also know I'm under creepy surveillance, how even U-2's Bono, interviewed about the developing world debt, made a peculiar and singular clearing of his throat just as I do, how I made a long-distance phone call to the ACLU, asking if it's legal to spy, glassing me from his 2nd. floor apartment, the counselor saying to contact the police, and how after walking away from the telephone a doctor in his scrubs ( I phoned from a hospital waiting room, figuring that's safer than from my tapped phone ) stared while I said under my breath, "Fuck you, fuck you," and how he registered nothing, his facial expression like Buddha's, he just another undercover, how particular music on my perpetually streaming internet radio gets cars stationed outside my apartment loud, louder, sticking their muscle engines into my ears, trying to sap me of fortitude, my very me-ness, Tom Waits usually gets their engines roaring like hurricaines, how when I used analog radio, a DJ said, "He keeps bouncing around," meaning me, who, in fact, likes to walk through rooms, and how, when I write a strong line about perhaps 5,000 people running or attempt to control our society and set topics for discussion, an army of strangers pass my windows, right now, as these words get written, I predict that same fate, how the commotion outside grows whenever I flesh out characters in stories or trying to write that perfect line of poetry, how a jet plane flew below 500 feet directly over my apartment at 1 p.m., and asking a friend about that, he replied he was in the public library and hadn't noticed anything, even though the flight path went over the library, he now a snitch, who will watch the watchers, how reading William T. Vollmann's "Europe Central" agitated them every time Dmitri Shostakovich's name got scanned with my eyes, and I knew then how they "read" with me, my eyes like cameras, I understood that they had the power to hear me sub-vocally, possibly through my larynx, how they've guided me to speak with a whispered undertow, not the usual inwardness commonly associated with quiet solitude, so that I'm a distorted shadow of my previous self, how a passenger on an crowded bus kept dropping her knife at my feet...

I'm the necessary hated other.

George Sparling been published in many literary magazines including Underground Review, Word Riot, Pittsburgh Quarterly, Slow Trains, Lost Magazine, Unlikely Stories, Red Rock Review, Potomac Review, and Thieves Jargon. He graduated with a social science degree and sort of read his way into writing fiction and poetry. He is retired after squandering most of his life on things he never needed to do.

Email: George Sparling

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