Why I Ate The Messenger Boy

What feels like cold piss running down my leg is loose change, quarters dimes nickels pennies, a stream of it, from a hole in my jeans’ pocket. Nice perfumy smell of fresh laundry in the bedroom. Cat curled up on a blanket. I get out the massage gun R gave me for Christmas and press the fork-shaped attachment against my heel where it pulses rapidly back and forth. It gives me immediate relief from the pain of Achilles tendinopathy. It’s such a heavy thing. The weight of it promotes confidence. It means business. Anything that heavy must be profoundly deliberate in its action. The pain dissipates, but minutes later returns. Hope persists that it will remedy my heel permanently. Or as permanently as mortality and old age allow. I iron a patch on my pants pocket. Help myself to a piece of chocolate. Not so many crows today. Wonder where they went. It was sunny, no wind. Can’t figure those creatures out. Always an enigma. Guy in the Safeway parking light in front of me sitting in a parked car with his sidelights on. I was trying to read René Char while waiting for R to return with a German chocolate cake. My eyes kept going to the sidelights. They were irritating. I kept expecting the car to back out and leave but he never did. He was a Safeway employee taking his break in the car. They seemed permanently implanted in my vision after we left, two thin white lines, one on each side of the headlight, at a slight slant. The spider I watched walk back and forth on the ceiling last night while lying in bed was still there this evening. I got a ladder and cupped him in my hand and took him outside and set him down on the porch where he walked away. It was cold and raining but he’ll do better outside. There’s nothing to eat in our bedroom. And I worried that he’d lower himself into my mouth when I was sleeping. Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek opines that while people still meet privately and go to parties, there’s always this desperate undertone of “let’s enjoy it as long as we can.” I went down to get the emptied compost bin and bring it up to join the other trash bins. It was cold and wet. Water is always so jewel-like, especially in the winter. It glitters more brightly than it does in daylight, as if the air were charged with solstitial magic. Somebody already brought the bin up. I went back inside and opened the Whitman sampler. I had a choice between a pecan and English walnut cluster or a messenger boy. R likes nuts, so I went for the messenger boy, a tiny ingot of solid milk chocolate. I think about the friends I lost in 2020: Lee Chapman, Amber Curtis, Noel Franklin, Michael McClure, Judith Roche, Lewis Warsh. If we find our reality in relation to other beings, I’m going to have to start looking into the void. And remind myself how good it felt when the propofol entered my bloodstream at my last colonoscopy and I melted away into oblivion. I could’ve stayed that way forever and not known the difference but that a man in blue scrubs with an inquisitive face who looked peculiarly familiar talked to me when I regained consciousness checking for signs of full cognitive recovery and no, we’d never met before.