A Fever Pitch Reached Ad Infinitum

The crackerbox, turned upside-down and sprouted wings.
Spun around unwinding itself, revealing the panoramic blur.
The room was static electrified, dry, dead and in mourning,
Licking time around the clock up through the salivating doorway.

Pampered regally, I vomited cold blood.

I dreamed the violent bruise cooled my fevered brain.
Envelopes flapped to the beat of the removed, clockwork heart.
The heat from the flesh pots, wearing a mask of pain, relieved me,
Knowing the truth, the blinds rolled up like a rolodex.

The crackerbox spun, keeled over, sputtered and died.

Arrival in Charlotte, Three Days Later

Secured in a blanket at three in the morning is no way for a man to spend his time. Watching the reruns drift pass with a regretful pacing. The hits come harder now, at this time of night, being as all things are, upside-down and belligerently drifting into the barely-lit borders of the other room.

Somewhere is the newspaper where I can forget the news at three in the morning, and forget about death for long enough to stretch out passed the four walls, wander out inside of it all slouching over time like an old disc jockey. It keeps me from finally losing it all among the scrap heaps of bulletins that act as a bizarre counterpoint to the out put in the other room, I'm in the kitchen, eating a sandwich when the phone rings the next morning.

I'm full of hope at the arrival of the ringing, but I can already fill the chilly disappointment when the deal has gone south, and I can leave the couch on the shag carpet, step outside, cross the street and pick a comfortable view for when the tide comes and washes us away, on the rain-slicked heels of my arrival in Charlotte.

Gaitlin Hall is where the low money makers sell there wares, quickly, astutely and without the caffeine come-down. Four of them now, down the hall of the convention center I find myself in. The coffee is a bitter concern, subduing the awkward family visit, having been spared the awkward explanation of the scientific world: how kids are made and wives raised by greyhounds are as rare as radiance in a mock trial.

Naked In North Carolina

My family’s farm somehow continues to produce enough uncut tobacco to provide my parents, Marvin and Patrice, with enough revenue to keep their modest three bedroom farm on the outskirts of Asheville, NC in enough repair to provide for a precocious son, myself, having being provided the schooling for such a career as was betrothed to me at such an occasion as my 45th birthday, spent on a particularly unaccustomed stretch of highway, which provided me with a plethora of opportunities for me to humiliate myself slowly, as someone would in choosing just the right moment to declare publicly, that one is homosexual.

Back In 1979, people knew a little less, but thought they knew more, at least in the moral fortitude department. Then came Reagan, and for more than fifteen minutes, Americans once again took pride in the national trouncing we not only provided gratis to the Russian Hockey team, but to the Iranian nationals to whom we were less than gracious. At the dawn of this still undeclared decade, are the times when we try to find solace in the familiarity of the open road, wandering through life's woes and cradling the familiar stretches of road that have supported my trip each year to this remote spot in North Carolina.

I come to visit each spring, casting off my pile of papers to grade. I head off down route 93, watching the slow encroachment of the poplar trees. Soon the pines reinvent themselves as poplars the closer I get towards the mountains. It always starts raining at around the same time, outside Warrenton. The leaves, bearing their heavy pools of rainfall, hang down; droopily look at me from their perched heights. In them I can almost see my reflection, blotted out by the swab of the windshield wipers and resentment measured out in tiny doses throughout the years, as I floundered through school after school, always scrawling my way back here, to this spot, outside Warrenton.

The road to Bat Cave is marked with hairpin turns and lush green stretches of bombastic elevation. The combination in the canopy of leaves and the crisp mountain air is refreshing, and my mood begins to pick up. After a hectic past few years, the moths no longer gather at my doorstep, and instead leave intricately wrapped gifts of silk-spun baskets illuminated by distant candles of the neighbor’s porch. In the evening, when the full of the moon is cast and we're making love out in the pool, the light staring up at the water, like an electric owl, beaming out the local news.

We ly there, our heads partially submerged, entangled within one another, and staring up a the pin cushioned night sky. We watch the moon flicker like a nickelodean and we float onward towards the inevitable dawn, that always catches us by surprise.

Tara is a ceramics major whom I met just last term, while teaching night classes at the local community college. It was my side gig; a job that kept my summers full of awkwardly placed words, solitary trips to the Congaree River, and overflowing pages of my latest novel. I met her in the American Lit class that I teach on Wednesday’s, in the annex of the Shaftsbury wing, a donation from a recently defrocked local politician, donated during a boom time, when his pockets were as full of money as his head was of whiskey.

Tara took to the transcendentalists with a religious like fervor. She was the only student in my class who seemed to understand the subject matter, and I rewarded her with long walks after class through the dimly lit passageways that crisscrossed the rotund eyesore that was the library of the main campus. It was on these walks that we forged our friendship, a relationship that eventually grew into something more when we’d had enough of talking and decided, rather haphazardly, to up the ante in a nearby set of bushes.

The waterlogged engine of my 64 Mustang rattles her way through the lolling hills of Bat Cave, down through Raleigh and hugs the coast as we, my Mustang and I, sail through Wilmington finally heading west.

It's only a short jaunt to Barlow, a speck of a town inhabited by only a hundred people or so, right on the central border of South Carolina. My parents have lived there for nigh on forty years. They sell much of their crop up in Winston Salem, periodically leaving their farm behind for a few days out of each month. In many ways their trips to Winston Salem act as mini vacations, as pejoratively sad as that sounds. By the looks of things, and the lack of cars in the driveway as I pull up, it looks like they are on one of those vacations.

I turn off the ignition, and bask in the silence of the afternoon. The air is still, like everything has momentarily been put on hold. I often feel that way when I come home --that all of the frantic scramblings and cover ups of my current life outside freeze in between motions-- and I'm left with the buzz of the locusts. I get so relaxed, that I drift off to sleep. When I wake up several hours later to a stiff back and notice it's already dark out, I pull out my duffel bag from the back seat, roll the top up on the Mustang, and sit out on the front porch, my thoughts coming back magnetically to my brain, bubbling up to the surface like an unused lava lamp.