Been
wearing overalls mostly lately, because all my clothes were ill-fitting, not
just shape-wise but just didn’t feel right, like I’d changed my aura shape and
was forcing myself into some shit from previous versions. I also been writing
poems on empty bottles I find in the woods and along the river, and I swear
overalls is helping me find bottles easier, even though it’s full-blown spring
now. I was actually thinking about how spring and fall are the tides of nature,
where the green rolls and rolls back out, and the best time to gather up the
quartz rocks and empty bottles that got pushed up to the surface is after low
tide of winter, once it’s warmed back up, before high tide of greens rolls in
deep. Everything is starting to get grown over for the summer season around
here, even the old TV that got dumped off by the river last fall, then shot up
and fill with beer cans, is almost unseen now because of the green that’s done
taken it back over for the time being. Anyways, this makes it harder to find
bottle dumps this time of year, because there’s green everywhere, full of lyme
ticks and scratching ass things and you get all tangled up in green. But I look
for humps in the land just off the gravel roads or foot paths, hopefully a
glimmering glisten of glass, which sometimes is a single busted bottle,
sometimes is a whole slew of awesome shit from decades back, and sometimes ain’t
shit but a plastic Coke bottle. I go on pretty long walks, away from my car, either
at home or parked somewhere, so if it’s along a back road, I’ve taken to
stacking all the good bottles up just off the road, over the ditch, where
nobody will see, and putting a single beer can at the edge of the road, set
upright, so I know where to stop when I come back through. When I first started
hearing the bottles call me, and found a nice one, I had set it up beside the
road, sitting up, and this motherfucker who lives down below me came running
through on his riding mower and snatched it. Not sure why, it was really weird
as fuck to be honest, and in fact he came down the road ‘til he saw me, then
looped back around and went back to his place. I’ve always wanted to go down
there and be like, “Yo, why’d you take that bottle?” but now it’s been so long,
it’d be awkward. He’d remember, because you don’t take a bottle set up on the
side of the road then go looking for who set it there without remembering. And
I’d remember. But it’s been so long and nobody said nothing, it’s like that TV
busted up down there, except time that’s passed is all the green that grew up
all over it by now. Then again, shit like that piles up when you’re dealing
with folks, and becomes the buried detritus of your long-term dealing with each
other, so that one day, should it ever come to some sort of head, we can dig
all that shit out, yelling, “WHY THE FUCK YOU TAKE THAT BOTTLE THAT ONE TIME,
BEFORE YOU KNEW ME?” and he’s yelling about some shit I did that I didn’t think
nothing of, like cutting through his property by the river to get to under the
bridge, but didn’t even know it was his property or some shit.
That’s
country life, and southern gothic futurism, which is the same as the past, just
with a whole lot more bottles that got marked up with paint pens and spray
paint. Somehow I’ve been wearing this one pair of overalls four days straight
and still ain’t got spray paint on it, not even wiping my fingers on it without
thinking. When I was a housepainter, I used to use my thighs as rags, so
fingers full of caulk eventually created these silicone thigh pad plates on all
my pants where they could almost stand up on their own from the knees up. But
the overalls are helping me be better at finding the bottles that are hiding
out there, forgotten, and then I leave them in the yard to clean up, set on
rebar, paint, and they hang out there until they’re yelling a poem at me real
loud. That’s when I write it on there. Hopefully, by the end of the summer, I’ll
have a couple million, and I can set them up in the yard like they’re for sale,
but get mad at anybody who tries to buy one, because people who buy things on a
whim tend to be annoying and full of shit, so mostly I’ll just get a reputation
as that guy in the overalls who wrote all them poems on bottles he found but
just yells at you if you stop and hang out too long. And don’t even get him
started on the dude who lives in the trailer down below him who took one of his
bottles off the side of the road that one time.
No comments:
Post a Comment