Steve Tills

from Life Sentences


Playground unattended on rainy fall afternoon initiating media
marketed associations of TV-reel predators in richest country but which
it will not root out while National Securities monies go to cronies
pretending to search, destroy Bin Laden. Man all day long amending
resumes in his head always meaning to send them out some day
and change jobs with the new skills he can't list on one page ever again.
The sound of the ducks' quack quack in the little pond at the hospital
next to the contagious factory next to the office of the man with a ponytail
who practices psychiatry and writes out 150 piece script for Valium
for the boy who sells him his lime green Florida jeep. Cat tails forest
nine feet high growing unexplored more and more each year, man seeing
bump high side of village park as hump of brown-green sod diagnosed
with cancer by automatized metaphors. Woman needing to tell husband
to stop sniffling as man wanting to tell wife to stop sniveling needing
to not do so. Three extra-large crows' nests in 80 foot tall tree which has dropped
its leaves possibly home to some of town's biggest birds, practically homeless
man gathering things needed from park trash cans saying something to car-home
girlfriend on break from day's scavenging. Eleven page swath of person's
peanut shells aging quickly on side of rode on wet fall day actually discard
words person plugging in so that they won't go away. Maladjusted seasons
last years of male civilization, content man driving by in white Honda Civic
telling himself on way back from writes done on lunch break at 1:something.
Full grown woman beating herself up flogging man who loves her, hating
to see her hard on herself for such soft hidden pathos. The person who abused
her subordinate until she could no longer afford to be intimate deciding
that sincerity didn't secure the job she got for her daughter that she made
sure everybody heard her describe as a supervisor's position. Man walking
into words actually images of words reeling after recalling movie Crash
thought depicting world of real characters played by real people colliding
with others like enormous syllables jammed into increasingly shrinking syntaxes.
Woman interpreting dark orange dream as light pink premonition
listens to son coming in at 6:30 in the morning rehashing medium gray dreams
as if they had been black and white ones. Post flanking left side of queen size
bed thought to resemble chess piece pawn on sixty-four squares for 64
different sexual positions or objects pretending to contend with each other
though the spaces themselves dictating neither direction nor intention.
A man believing Thanks-giving by family and friends at Christmas to count
their blessings being together outweighs presents-exchange watching Indian
or Mexican American mentor at McDonald's parking lot advising 45 year old
protégé or son in way that foregrounds mentor’s advising role and authority,
not his advice. The request "May I have one of these" becoming "I don't mind
if I take the whole plate" standing out in the mind of grown man observing
youths he considers uncouth and unrealistic.


***
***