matt pond PA

July 11, 2017

A real county fair prize.

Pitch-black to gray. Pre-dawn stumblings, half awake, phone scrawling to oneself. Undressed, wandering for olives and seltzer. Checking the locks, the baseball bat sentry. A sluggish search party without direction re-retires after the icebox has been plundered. A neanderthal success. But a success, nonetheless.

The first slices of early morning sun cross the bedroom floor. Skinny, golden lasers cut protracted paths over sheetless feet. Beyond the ramparts, nattering birdsong rises above the grinding low-gear shift of garbage collectors. Cans crinkle, rumple, clonk.

Dreams and dreads with a pillow under my head. If I could get beyond the petty meditations, the loops of listless thought. If I could pop the top off the container of time, if I could be the movie-me, the one that only speaks when the music swells. If = then.

Stuck since the beginning. A three-speed brain, a nearsighted set of built-in binoculars, chicken legs, Bic lighter bald spots stretch along the forearms, scarred fingers, scarred shoulders, scarred everything. A real county fair prize.

I was once a willingly commandeered kid. Whatever they fed me, I ate. Whatever they told me to do was done. Mussed up hair, lighthouse eyes, soft-bellied jellyfish skin. Fear ran the show, the show ran all night. I was prone to losing things that were in the palm of my hand.

The Point was a Harry Nilsson animated film on a tiny television in New Brunswick, a message from the other side, euphonious, radiant, revelatory. As if Oblio and Arrow hijacked a gaggle of cathode rays, opened a direct line through the cosmos, shot straight through deep space and into my dimly lit cerebrum. (If there is a way in, then there is a way out!)

A dark, cozy den by the Passamaquoddy Bay, entombed in the smell of wet wood and seaweed. I knew that there was more to life than what I knew.

It’s 9am. I know that must mean something.

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