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When The Night Comes
When the night comes, I wish for him. I wish he would rescue me from all the pain I walk around with
in the daytime. I want to be chopping wood and carving meat and pushing biscuits into fuel for our souls. I want to be settled into an assuredness.
I want to be transported into a place of vital need and health.
I think of all the homes I visited in that small town. Dark walls paneled in
grainy wood and orange, black and army-green afghans slung on the back of thrift-store-sofas. Always, shaggy carpets and stained linoleum. Crusty kitchen counter tops with glittery, earth toned,
60’s-modern surfaces. Fires were always burning, in iron stoves, to take the chill off the late evening air. The smell of dinner wafted through and took over the sense of
isolation-in-the-woods, outside the windows.
It was as if asserting through structure, smell and iron machinery - human dominance could be placed on the life surrounding, on the darkness of the earth in which these people found themselves placed.
Usually, the smell of cow manure would hang in the wafting breeze, regardless of the place
the sun had stopped in the sky. Some of these places were happy to have these associations made.
Small town, rural life, escapes of identity, the absolute assuredness of the place in which they shared. This smell sat in the air because it was shot all around by giant sprinklers, over vast pastures, in an effort to grow rich grass, to feed the milk cows, for money.
When the night comes, in Los Angeles, I think of him. I take sips of dark, cold beer.
I smell him in the bottle, in the hot breeze, in the smell of sex wafting in my windows. I wish for him in the daytime. I want to have his opinion and reflection and understanding of the amazing states of humanity I witness on the streets. His presence in my needs give me courage.
I think of all the dark alleys I’ve passed with crushed cans and broken bottles clogging
curbside corners. Giant green trash receptacles, chained to keep the hungry out, gang tags decorating their surfaces.
The smell that comes is sickly-sweet, like rotting flesh and danger. Often there is a man or a woman there, huddled in sour blankets and dirty sheets. Always their fingers are black and caked with blood and sores rip across their bodies. These people have found themselves placed in the streets and never know how to escape them. It’s as if people allow people to eat each other on LA’s streets – in order to assert human dominance on the life that surrounds them.
Usually, the sun beats down on Angelino heads and cooks the brains inside them. Some
of these people are glad to have the constant heat and use it to their advantage.
Women sit with no tops on to bronze expensive breasts, while men strut through fancy luncheon dates with absolute assuredness. The golden light fills the sky because this part of the earth is closer to the equator, the combination of heat and flesh, sun and sand, sweeping cloudless blue, works for some, in the quest to make money.
When the twilight comes, I numb myself and try to imagine a midnight of darkness. I
wish the sky would heal the strain of settling into disconnected assuredness.
I ache for him and firelight, with grilled meat and fresh picked vegetables. I numb myself in the daytime and understand that the knowledge of him transcends all the sadness.
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