MOCKING YOU
I love faces. I love seeing them close and making sure that they’re examined well enough to be noted, and details are jotted down and/or photographed and archived for later use, reuse, and perhaps photocopied when the court requires their company as exhibits A, B, and sometimes C. So near, warm, and new.
So red are the clothes and pocketed are the pants; so thin and stretched are they, who follow up necks and down ankles and into freckled noses and slight accents from somewhere not cheapened by the states of their origin, but never having belonged to them. The walk and eyes, searching and dim and bright and waiting and naive, and young with glasses; and faces that smell of after-shave and Tommy and Polo, and too much, so much that it masks them entire. Becomes their extended hands without heavy stock paper with contact info embroidered upon them. So terribly mocking to the Japanese are their practices.
So red are the clothes and pocketed are the pants; so thin and stretched are they, who follow up necks and down ankles and into freckled noses and slight accents from somewhere not cheapened by the states of their origin, but never having belonged to them. The walk and eyes, searching and dim and bright and waiting and naive, and young with glasses; and faces that smell of after-shave and Tommy and Polo, and too much, so much that it masks them entire. Becomes their extended hands without heavy stock paper with contact info embroidered upon them. So terribly mocking to the Japanese are their practices.
Tried and true. And what, actually, is honest? I was sitting there watching. Eying everyone. Making sure they could or couldn't see me and if they did, I didn't smile; Cause I'm afflicted with a shallow and false identification complex which inhibits my actions to fear and recoil responses. I would love to smile. To dash and bear my teeth and be nothing if not quietly intriguing to those who I wish to be. I look away and hope they see.
Standing there, making sure their heads face the shelf of everything books of poetry. Jesus, poetry. So close. Having to move for them. Them looking superficially, and you, with book in hand, open and smiling at the wry Alexie prose that rings so true you laugh. As they tap their flat stomachs again and again, mocking you now. Your people and the land born songs. Touching themselves as they stand close, and you know them. Don't move and laugh, cause it's so damn true.
Forfeited again. And again. Once shall I be forth with action that I may surprise my light and air and be right with the fleeting events upon me. I may and I might be so consumed with the will of so many unlike who I picture myself to be, truly, under it all, and after all is said to those who are writing it down ever so quickly and losing every good and coy detail, leaving what will be told to my own feeble, and prone to advanced garbled yet so mythic, memory. So envious can I be of all they seem to carry, exude, and dance around my mindful eye with. With.
Red-eye flash photos and cabin shots with girls tucked inside crooks of arms and others on the sides, devilishly slivered are their mouths. Menacing and rageful make their ways known. So thin. So tall. So great, they know nothing, really, at all. Kissing and more. Hands up, open and steady. All for fun. All for the little, and selfish moment. Lasts like now. Gone. But bright and fully aware, and much small deaths to abide. That I feel bitter for knowing more but always in back alleyed ways; less and few and small and negative and truthfully tiresome nothing. They know, Mrs. Weaver, and they make it happen.
i had an inkling when they came. when they walked in outta the wet drizzle and nose red sickly pea striped t-shirt that they said they bought at $---village for nothing more than a handful of pennies. And dry ones at that. These high school boys, four or five of them walked in, walked right past me; the one last in and behind the others, eyed me hard, very big eyes, and soft was his demeanor. They rushed to find records or fourty5s and anything old. Anything stupid. or silly that'd sound good on rotting needles in the basement where they could find time to cuddle and mosey on up close to their ladies. And fuck them, or get hand jobs and come on the cement floors. Then go up and eat dinner with the rest of the family, one by one, leaving and smiling their good-byes and covering the cloth mole hill so visible in their khakis or beach shorts, or any variation on the trend. Thick and pocketed. Red shirts and bead necklaces, like surfers long time ago.
I don't know his name. I think it was Eric. That sounded fitting and I think it'll stick. He lived there. It was his house and the others were friends he had acquired through bullshit ancillary school activities (the very ones he disliked in the first place but found himself good at, or marginal anyway). Skinny and not tall. Hair like a mop and dark and always dry. Very cute. Though not as unknowably "cute" as Jake. The boy with the blood red ski cap and the most coveted, and paid-for features; The Abercrombie kid with the face and the body, and quite honestly, nothing else.
Eric hated them all. Hated what he became to his family for knowing them, and being within their circle--Silly and temporary, and so very commonly white. It made him hard though. Made him linger in the spaces where they had been. Where they had let themselves go, and be real. Where the girls had been reservoirs for them. Where the fleeting "love" had taken place. Eric stood still there, reminding himself of the images gone and holding his warm skin, working himself into himself, then back through again. Dashing his tongue slightly, briskly, over lip and teeth. Air sucking in. That building. That tingle, and overpowering, quite literal, burst. He would feel them as they had been there too. Just then, with him. Not the slight after impressions upon the air and the room. That wet and tart, yeast smell. Like bread cooking or just being made, or chlorine. Differing with each boy. Each skin tone, and strangely height as well.
He read Dashiell Hammett and the adventures of Nancy Drew's man, John Hardy. He hated reading. Read magazines and video covers and the liner notes in CDs; Read website reviews and stories about fucking and love and getting stabbed in the thorax by a whistle blowing conspirator. He loved reading about nothing things. Not real ideas, and smaller bugs that eat the bigger ones. He always wanted to fuck Jake the way the word sounds inside your ear when it's whispered. Soft yet inherently vile. First time he saw him in the hall. Walking past him, past everything, into his own head.