Brain Wave Poem

I have a hard time reading poems,
even though I find it easy to write them.
What is the point of reading
about how a flower looks?
Its colors
its shapes
how the light hits its contours
at just the right time of day
in a golden and green landscape
with rolling hills stretching your vision out
for miles and miles.

Does it matter that the sky
is a vast gradient of blue?
The deepest blue at the top
and the faintest blue
sewn along the horizon.
The sky has been misted carelessly
with a squirt bottle full of white clouds.

And what if there is another person there
in that poem I might be reading?
A pretty girl with a breathtaking smile
tilted at just the right angle
looking back at the viewfinder.
She has curly golden hair.
The light
the sunlight
it casts shadow and tone
on her hair and her face and her figure
and her clothes rippling in the breeze
at, oh, let's say, three o'clock.
What if it is warm enough for her to reveal
the beautiful fleshy contours of her skin,
wrapped in an tan elastic bathing suit,
nearly seamless and camouflaged?

What would I get out of reading a poem such as this?
Nothing happens in the poem and it simply makes for a better picture.

A man in a corduroy sports jacket
with a photograph of his sweetheart
enclosed in his wallet; sleeved in his back pocket,
holds up a print of a painting.
The painting is by Andrew Wyeth.
He says it is like reading a Frank O'Hara poem.
He then holds up a photograph of a sardine
Laid out fleshy and oil soaked on a white counter.
He asks how they are similar.
He asks how they are different.

The only people using iambs these days
usually own very expensive acoustic guitars.
I say this in all jealousy of there acoustic guitars.
Meter is about music,
and music, in my opinion,
is easier to accomplish
when there is a guitar in hand.
This is a different class
with the same man
in a corduroy sports jacket.

Honestly though, would the poet know
the name of the flower they are describing?
Is it a Chrysanthemum?
Is it one of the one thousand varieties of Salvia,
such as sage or that purple one we see
sprouting naturally nearly everywhere?
Maybe it is a bulb variety,
such as a tulip or a daffodil.
Would the poem include its scientific name?
It's Latin name?

And what about the girl?
The girl in those vision stretching landscapes.
The poem doesn't know,
neither does the painting
or the photograph I am referring to.
The reader,
be it you or I or anyone else,
must decide this for themselves.
This poem makes us formulate that connection.
It is a chance brain synapse among trillions,
and sometimes I find it hard to read.
But sometimes I do not.

Poetry is an art of self
when you give it no rules.
Yet somehow
somewhere
it manages to find guidelines, sometimes.

Otherwise
it rightfully sinks.

Aaron C. Molden
  

Spring Break, Part two: The Miracle

Part Two

Zeke's Statement:
    We had to climb through a lot of shit. When the car arrived at the gravel parking lot I realized how long we would end up walking and it was going to be a long time.
    There was a tunnel that we climbed through, underneath the railroad tracks we had been walking on; there was water going through the tunnel. My foot fell into a half of a foot water that had industrial waste and shit in it. Like real shit, animal shit, maybe human shit. It was disgusting. 
     Jed was being a dick, but Sarah helped me out of the puddle. When we got out of the tunnel I saw that we had to climb back up again on a steep hill covered and concrete. I was already sweating because we had to inch our way through the tunnel with our arms and legs pressed into the curved sides of the wall
(The priest interjects.) How was Jed being, as you say, a dick?
    Well, he kept telling me to man up. I had never crawled through a tunnel before. I've never even been in a real cave. There was no place to stand except in the gross water. I'm not use to climbing against walls and I said so. When I said that, Jed called me a pussy. That's when my foot slipped into the puddle.
(The priest interjects.) Can you tell me where this tunnel is?
    Yeah, it's right near the construction site where they found us.

Priest's notes:
    After I made it through the rain tunnel, I began climbing back up the hill on the other side of the tracks. It was covered in garbage embedded in carelessly poured concrete. Broken glass bottles of clear and green and brown were littered about. Aluminum lawn chairs with weaved plastic or white and synthetic colors made in factories were shredded at the ells where the were wrapped. A couch upholstered crimson red in sheets of gleaming waterproof plastic, stood upright, sideways, turned erect by gravity in the latter day flow of concrete which eventually set and posted the piece of furniture perpendicular to the earth and sky.
    I have never seen something so unusual, yet so mundane and with out purpose, except for possibly and Oldenberg sculpture.
    There were also discarded lumber scraps that numbered too high to count. It was as if for a brief moment this was the place to go in order to bury your waste into a concrete hill. There were still trees of sycamore, evergreen, and cottonwood, but the bases or their trunks were completely encased in the craggy pebble spotted gray and dried sludge. This is where the four teenagers ascended to find and acre of wood in front of them. Past that is where they finally reached the construction site.   

    "I was in two places at the same time, once." The man said. "This body" he pointed to his chest, "and this brain" then to his left temple, "at the exact same time.' 
    "My buddy, Max, doesn't believe me. He always argues with me when I bring it up. He always says that it is totally impossible for anybody to be in two places, physically, at the same time. But it happened and I'll never say that it didn't. Hell, a couple of days ago, we got so heated about it that we started throwing punches. That's how I got this shiner." He pointed to his right eye, which had a faded mauve circle around it that transitioned into a jaundice yellow aura on his face.
    "I know it sounds insane, but it happened. I was alone in both places, except for these kids who were off in the distance, but I'm fairly positive they didn't see me, so you're just going to have to trust me." The man took a pack cigarettes out of his pocket. "Do you mind if I smoke?" He asked.
     "Can it possibly wait just a little bit longer?" 
     "What do you mean by it? Is it me? Is that what you are saying?"
     "I want to hear what you have to say, but if you could not smoke I would really appreciate that."
     "You don't want me to smoke -I get that- but am I allowed to smoke?" He asked, leaning into the wooden desk he was facing. 
     "Technically, yes."
     He put the cigarette into his mouth and lit it with a gold plated Zippo with a buffalo etched into the broad end of its reflective surface. 
     "I guess those are better than Father Daniels cigars." The priest said quietly, reaching into the leather satchel next to him on the wood floor. He gracefully brought out a small black tape recorder. 
    "What is that for?" The man asked suspiciously. 
    "I want to hear you out. The church would like to hear what you have to say about your supposed miracle."
    "I never said it was a miracle. It was certainly out of the ordinary, but I never once said it was a miracle." The man muttered quietly, then took a drag of his cigarette and shrank into the back of his chair. 
    The priest stared at the man patiently for a moment. The man would not make eye contact with him. "Okay." The priest said. "The church has filed this as a possible miracle. That is why we are here, together. I want to hear what you have to say and the worst thing that could possibly happen is nothing at all." The young priest was dressed in the starched black and white suit of a man of God. His hair was dark brown and perfectly pomaded; set in its glacial place. He leaned forward, cross legged, towards the man slouching in front of him.
    The man took another drag of his cigarette and looked at what the priest was wearing.
    "Would you like something to drink?" The priest asked. "We have a kitchen just pass the rectory, downstairs."
    "You guys have a water tank down there, like a Culligan?" The man inanely asked.
    "Heavens no. We just drink from the faucet." The priest smirked. "We have a lot of drinks, though. Perhaps some juice or tea."
    The man put his cigarette out in the small, but ornate copper ashtray in the back right corner of the desk. "I feel strange asking this, but do you have something a little bit stronger?"
    The priest's face went flat. "It is the middle of the day." He stated and was met with a moment of silence. "I'll put on some coffee."
    "Okay." The man said quietly, failing to hide the sound of disappointment in his voice. 
    There was a bottle of scotch on the top left shelf of the kitchen. It was Sunday, and everyone else in the church was in service. The lodgings were all but empty.
    "Thank you." The man stated with reserved appreciation.

    The priest, who rarely drinks -unlike Father Daniels, who is just as comfortable sitting on a bar stool as he is standing in front of a pulpit- found himself grabbing two glass tumblers from the kitchen cabinet. He was not a man that could not appreciate a good scotch. He poured the two drinks neat, in hopes that the sweet sting of the liquid would vie on the side of moderation. 
    The man took a sip of the drink, and let the intoxicating feeling settle over his body. And then he began to speak. "I always forget that the weather never ends. I have it instilled in my mind that with everything in life, there is -no matter how tragic or sublime- a beginning, middle, and end to everything. But that is not true of the weather. It adapts and changes. It fluctuates and flows. You can broadly define its cycles, but those cycles shift as well, like a brain wave not operating on the same visceral level my mind, or anyone's mind is synced up to, because of our memories or predictions. It was cold and windy on that March day and everything around me that entire day was gray, green, and black." He took another drink. 
    "I'm listening." The priest said as he looked down at the notebook he was writing in. With his free hand he reached for his scotch -which he could see peripherally to his left on the desk- and took a sip as well.
    "I was walking through the alley between the Jacques building and the building next to it, where there is a frozen yogurt joint. It use to be a place that sold Purdue apparel. That alley use to be a perpetual shit hole -pardon my French- but the city put in a new drainage system and paved the alley. It doesn't collect any water when it rains anymore, but there are still people that it treat like their personal dumpster. They even hired some artist, or fartist, to paint the walls. It's all colorful and geometric." The man said.
    "Like the Quran?" The priest inexplicably interjected while continuing his near feverish note taking.
    The man looked up, confused by the question. "What?"
    "Is the mural Islamic in nature." Unaware that his question was divergent of anything the man was thinking or talking about. 
    "What the fuck are you talking about?" The man said with enough disgust in his tone to break the priests note-taking concentration. 
     Looking up, he saw the man's faced furrowed with annoyance and confusion. The man finished the last of his whiskey. The priest looked down, in order to reprocess exactly what he had been just been writing.

The young priest's notes:
    The Quran does not allow images of humans, most importantly, the prophet Mohammed. I have not read the Quran, but I have seen illuminated script and design of their art.
    I have also seen a cartoon that presents the Prophet Mohammed with a turban that is also a nuclear bomb.
Syriana. Bombs. Gas. God. Movies.

    Two things occurred to the priest, after rereading these notes: that both glasses of scotch were empty and that he had not really been listening to what the man in front of him was saying. He looked up at the man, trying to re-adjust to what the man was talking about, but -being a light drinker- the scotch had made him light headed and unfocused. He was well aware of the curtness in his voice, and it made him cringe thinking about it the next day, when he said to the man "Why are you talking about the weather?" And then he realized, suddenly why the man was talking about the weather.
    "Why the fuck are you talking about Muslims?" The man countered.
    The young priest had heard this man's story echoed through the voices of his congregation and neighborhood. He broadly and abstractly knew what happened and why there are those who believe, truly believe, it was a miracle. He remembered what the man had said to him earlier. "I never said it was a miracle." The priest realized that even though their are many who believe what happened to this man was a miracle, the man himself truly did not believe it was a miracle. The man viewed what happened to him and what he saw as an accident. An unfortunate accident. And it was an accident because of a gust of wind. Weather. That is why he is talking about the weather.
    "Priest." The man finally said. "You're all red."
    "We... We should end the session for the day." The young priest muttered. 
    "I'm not coming back to this place again." The man said. "No offense, but it kind of gives me the creeps." 
    The young priest took a deep breath and began to feel level-headed again after a short wave of intoxication. It was, after all, only one drink. "Okay. Where would you like to meet?"
    "I don't know. Why don't you meet me downtown after I get off work tomorrow. We'll go to Hunter's."
    "This is a pub."
    "Yeah priest. It's where the rest of us congregate."
    The Priest thought for a moment, and decided to overcome his initial thoughts of possible debauchery. Father Daniels was a regular patron of many drinking establishments in the downtown area and his reputation as a respected man of the cloth was no worse for wear. He decided he would meet this man downtown after he got of work, believing this kind of social atmosphere would leave the man feeling less defensive and cagey. The priest would simply not wear his collar at that time. 
    "What do you say there, Priesty boy?" The man said playfully. The change in the air of the man took the young priest by surprise. 
    "I suppose." He finally answered.

   Upon entering the subterranean bar on the corner of Third and Ferry Street, Zeke consumed three Pabst Blue Ribbon tallboys and spoke to three patron's of Hunter's Down Under that night before he said anything passed "hi" to the young priest -whose name he still could not remember- he had walked in with. He also took a shot with one of his co workers, who was sitting at the bar counter. The co worker offered to buy both Zeke and the priest a shooter of something called Slow and Low. Father Clayton was the young priests name and he resisted the idea of taking the shot at first; he had not taken a shot of anything since college. He quickly and quietly conceded to taking the drink when Zeke mentioned to his co worker, Mike, that he was a man of the cloth. Mike mentioned that he was good friends with Father Daniels and if he offered Father Daniels a shot the Father would happily oblige him.
     "Lighten up, Padre, you have friends here." Mike said as he handed Father Clayton the shot with a resigned and satisfied look on his face; happy he had persuaded the Priest that there was no other option besides drinking the liquor he had bought him.
     "Slow and Low is a prohibition term. During prohibition they didn't have standards and practices on how someone makes alcohol. So speakeasies would take their rot-gut batches of whiskey and sell it for cheap. When they served it, they would stir it first with a stick of rock candy." Zeke said after all three of them had saluted their two ounce glasses and swallowed its contents.
    "It tastes kind of like cough syrup." Father Clayton said, staring at the Indianapolis Pacers game being broadcast on the old television behind the bar. He could feel the drinks intoxicating numb travel down his throat and spread into his chest.
    "A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, right priest." Zeke said with his arm on Mike's chair.
    "Can we get a table?" Father Clayton asked, clearly annoyed.
    "Yeah alright." Zeke answered. "Have a good one, Mikey. I'll see you tomorrow."

    "Will you talk to me about the miracle?" The Father leaned back in his chair with a frustrated look on his face. He had set his black tape recorder out on the worn wood table.
    "You know, I don't know if I should." Zeke answered. "I mean, my life doesn't have anything to do with the church. It kind of freaked me out yesterday when I saw you in that get up. The formality of it, I mean, it just isn't my style."
    "Think of me as a journalist. I know I have that uniform, but I'm just like you. Wearing that uniform solves one particular thing in my life that I no longer have to worry about." He pressed stop on his tape recorder. "My mother and the women of my congregation always act strangely when I am wearing it."
    "You just defined why I am not a religious guy."
    Father Clayton smiled. "Let's stick to the subject at hand, and forgive me, but I am required by the church to define it as a miracle."
    "To tell you the truth, the main thing I remember about that alleyway, was that there was a pile of spent red nitrous oxide cartridges on the pavement."
    Father Clayton stared at him while writing quietly in his notebook with a calm smile on his face.

Priest's Note:
Possible drug user.
Regular drug user.
Nitrous Oxide?
What does that do to a person?
Where is it located and dispensed in larger quantities?
Who is the demographic this drug is catered to?
When are they doing it?
Why are they doing it?

   "They weren't mine, but I've seen them before." Zeke stated bluntly. "It mostly makes people act like idiots, so I would mind if you didn't paint me in that light."
    The Father abruptly stopped writing his notes. His face went blank. "Well." He said with empathy. "Please tell me your story. Why were you talking about the weather, yesterday?"
    "I... I..." Zeke took a drink of his beer. "It's a habit. I'm from here. The Midwest that is."
    "I'm from here as well." Father Clayton said with changing to tone and inflection in his voice. "Tell me what happened."
    The man leaned forward, suddenly agitated, and waved his hand pathetically in the air. "What do you want me to tell you? A kid fell in a hole and got hurt."
    "How did he get hurt?"
    "I don't know, priest. God ate a bad burrito and a gust of wind knocked a goofball off his ledge." Zeke said in sarcastic defeat.
    "Bobby is his name." The Priest added. "Bobby Fischer."
    "I thought that was that chess guy."
    "He isn't the only person with that name sake." The priest was clenching his notebook when he wrote these words within its pages: Praise be to God.
    The chair creaked as the man sighed and leaned forward. "Jesus, man. What do you want to know? You seem to know more about than I do. You're the one calling it a miracle."
    "Describe what you saw passed the alleyway. How did you know where those kids were? If your claim is true; that instead of there being what is normally just more alleyway passed the two buildings you were standing between, there, in fact -in that one moment- was actually a different place. There was a place miles away from where you saw it at. How did you know where that place was?"
    "Well that last question I can answer pretty easily. Those kids were at a construction site that I worked at several years back. That was the second place I was in. It was suppose to be some high end, private suburb, but the company ran out of money well before it was finished. They just abandoned it." The man drained his beer and grunted mildly.
    "How did you know for sure it was that particular construction site?" The priest asked.
    "Hey man, I know my own work." Zeke answered.
    "Alright. Now we're getting somewhere."


Aaron C. Molden
    
                
          

Spring Break, Part One: Big Dumb Bobby

Part One

    

    The sun was setting over First street when Bobby made a decision in his head. He was walking with Sarah and me down the street on a breezy and almost warm evening during the spring break of our freshman year in high school. Not one of us were going anywhere for spring break, nor had we really grasped that we should probably do something out of the ordinary during these days of idleness. We were walking down the sidewalk without a plan for what we would do in an hour much less the next day or the day after that.

    "That's a hairy rug." Bobby pointed out, inanely, a doorway rug hanging half way off of the curb of a Baptist church. 

    "Move your hairy muff!" I yelled without thinking and kicked the rug the rest of the way off of the step. I looked over at Sarah with a smile.

    Her face was wrinkled. She tried to grimace at me, but she could not hide that she was slightly amused by my outburst. "You're so weird." She laughed with a faint breath.

    Something must have sparked in Bobby's mind a moment after that. He must have suddenly realized that these moments we were encountering, of idle freedom from our pedagogical training and parental concern, were finite. Spring break is only a week long. "What are we going to do this week?" he asked because he did not know the answer yet. 

    "I'm trying to impress Sarah." Would be what I would have told him if Sarah was not there. Both Bobby and I grew up with Sarah. We lived on the parallel and perpendicular and serpentine streets near each other. We found each other to be friends by proximity before we knew what was to really find someone. "Who cares!" Is what I actually yelled with a sustained cadence. I paused for a moment in a solid and crouched stance, one arm against my thigh. My hand was fanned out against the cheek of my face to echo what I had yelled against the sides of houses and the hills beyond and the sky above us in all its colors and hues, subdued or profound depending on where one is. There is always a right place to finally respect the need for a silent moment. 

     The sun wasn't setting anymore. It was, as it is now, sunset.

     "It's spring break. We have to go back to school on Monday. We should do something cool." Bobby said with slight frustration, walking ahead without looking back at us. 

     Sarah was walking ahead of me, after I had stopped both of them with my statuesque outburst. I touched her shoulder when I caught up with her. She brushed it away. "What do you think we should do?" She asked Bobby, who was stumbling ahead of us down the concrete side walk slabs laid on a street that outdated our births. With every step or wheel that passed over that broken and forgotten street the cement eroded back to consciousness the train tracks they had long ago covered, so close to the flowing pollution of the river. This water was our home. 

    There was only the sound of our footsteps and breathing in the waning light.

    Sarah had begun to fill in as a woman by this time. Her breast had begun to swell slightly under her Sid and Nancy t shirt. I didn't know anything about Sid and Nancy at the time, but I still found the t shirt cool and I thought it made her more sexy. A young bosom clothed with a reprint t shirt of the movie poster for "Sid and Nancy." A drama about dumb adolescent punks in London based on real human beings. That Sex Pistols bass player who fell in love with a crazy loud mouthed groupie, then eventually -probably- killed her, and soon after overdosed on heroin in the seventies. 

    "I really like your Sid and Nancy shirt." I said after the three of us had walked in silence for a few minutes, inevitably heading home for dinner, since our parents were home; maybe even waiting for us. 

    "Thanks." She said as if it were an impulse to accept any compliment she received with a practiced sound byte. I looked at the ground as we continued walking quietly.   

     The silence had given Bobby time to ruminate the quandary he purposed vocally and was continuing to consider mentally. An answer, a solution to a question that he was taking much more serious than I was at the time. "I know what we should do tomorrow." He finally said. All three of us stopped and Bobby turned around to face us with a smile. 

     "Well what is it?" Sarah said with an unexpected shortness, an almost rudeness in her tone. Her left arm was draped across the front of her torso and her right arm was pushed forward, slightly, elbow bent in a nearly ninety degree angle. 

    The annoyance in her voice startled Bobby, because his face went blank. His thoughts so shortly ago organized and tidy seem to have crumbled. His young unfocused mind was trying to grasp the right subject of thought as random thoughts and subject caromed between his ears. Preston Blair. Non-Euclidean Geometry. Bare legs. American History. Mountains and rivers. Staged plays. Portrait. Dancing. Stages. Dinner. It's dinner time, I guess. Another minute of quiet. Walking. Say something. You need to say something.

    "We could go to the abandon construction site on the South side of town." He said. 

    "What are you talking about?" I said, mimicking Sarah's annoyance, feeling an irrational urge to gang up on Bobby with her. 

    "Over passed the river, passed the Wea Valley. 231 intersects with 25 heading towards Shadeland. There is a foot path that leads toward the train tracks. Out there, in the middle of nowhere, some commercial builders decided there was a space of land that would be perfect for wealthy home owners who wanted nature and privacy." Bobby finally said with surprising lucidity.

    "Shit." Sarah said. "I've never heard of that." The frustration in her voice had melted away. She sounded legitimately interested.

    "Alright. What's your point?" I said holding on to my bullying tone. He was desperately trying to sell to us, Sarah and I, the rigid world of modernity seized again by the nature of a world larger than ourselves. "What are we going to do there?" I asked. I inexplicably grasped Sarah's hand and, surprisingly, she returned my grip and held my hand as we waited for Bobby's answer.

    "I don't know. Just, like, explore." Bobby answered. "What else do you have planned?" 

     Sarah looked over at me. "Yeah, it will be fun."

    "Awesome!" Bobby said happily. "You guys meet at my house at nine tomorrow."

    Sarah let go of my hand and said "Alright." She started walking away from Bobby and I towards her house. "I'll see you guys tomorrow morning"

    "Yeah." Bobby said.

    I stared at her silently for a moment as she walked away and then finally echoed Bobby. "Yeah."

    It was windy and much colder than the day before. I walked over to Bobby's house. Sarah had not arrived yet, so I circled around the block, trying not to look as though I was eager to be in only Bobby's company. I had worn my black hooded sweatshirt and flipped the hood over my head, shielding my ears from the erratic gusts that pushed against me at every corner. Staring at my feet as I walked, I suddenly heard a familiar voice almost yell my name.
    "Jed!"
    I looked up and realized I had nearly run into Sarah and Zeke. "Oh." I said stopping my gait abruptly, nearly tripping over my own feet.
    "Zeke asked if he could come along." She told me.
    Zeke and Sarah were locker neighbors in high school. He was a nervous little kid and slightly effeminate. Sarah and he talked to each other all the time and Zeke liked her very much -too much in my opinion- but she made it clear with her actions if not her words that they were and perpetually would be only friends.
    "Hey." I greeted them with a monosyllable. I stared at both of them for a moment, then stepped in for a hug with Sarah. I watched Zeke's face for his reaction. He turned away with subtlety and pursed his lips as we embraced.
    "Good to see you too." Sarah quietly laughed.
    "So where are we going?" Zeke asked, sounding mildly annoyed.
    "You didn't tell him?" I addressed Sarah, wanting to ask why he came at all if he didn't know where we were going. Without waiting for an answer I said. "To an abandon construction site outside of town. We're going to have an adventure."
    "Oh. Is that why you wanted to borrow my mom's car?" Zeke turned, squinting suspiciously towards Sarah.
    "His mom carpools to work so her car was available. I'm a pretty good driver and if we follow the speed limit we shouldn't have any trouble getting pulled over."
    All of us were under sixteen.
   "I figured it would be quicker to get there, or at least get closer to the site, then if we rode our bikes or walked." She was wearing a mischievous blushing smile.
    I tried to mirror that grin while looking into her eyes. "Alright."
    Bobby walked out of his house wearing a blue Jansport backpack inflated to its maximum girth. Standing in the driveway, we all turned to face him. "Hey guys. Hey Zeke, you joining us?"
   Zeke turned to Sarah without answering Bobby. "How far away is this?"
   "Not far." Bobby answered, walking towards us."Where are you guy's hiking bags?"
   "Hiking bags?" I asked Bobby, but really myself.
   "Bobby, guess what." Sarah said, her smile still beaming. "Zeke let us borrow his mom's car."
   "None of us have a license." Bobby said, still walking towards us with a smile. A gust of wind pushed him to one side and he skipped a small step, catching his balance.
   "I'm a really good driver, so it won't be a problem." She started walking towards him. "I figured the less time it took to get there, the more time we would have to explore."
   I started to trail behind her towards Bobby." Yeah, we definitely want to have as much time to explore as possible." Had I intended for that to mean specifically Sarah and I, sneaking off alone, exploring each other as well as our surroundings? Maybe. Somewhere in my young mind, probably.
   "It's pretty cold out today." Zeke announced and began walking towards the rest of us. "All I have on is this long sleeve shirt."
   Bobby stopped walking and pulled his backpack off of his shoulders. "Oh, don't worry. I packed an extra sweatshirt." He unzipped the top of his bag and pulled out a navy blue sweatshirt crumpled at the top of the bag. "It's my dad's old Bears sweatshirt. He's a Colts fan now, so it doesn't matter if it gets dirty." He handed the thread bare garment to Zeke. "I also brought snacks and water. Trail mix. It's got plenty of M and Ms in it."
   Zeke draped the sweatshirt over his head. The sleeve hung far below his fingertips. The ironed on orange and white Chicago Bears logo was peeling away from the fabric and fluttering in the early spring wind. "Thanks, I guess." He said, unable to hide the unease in his voice.
   Sarah pulled the key chain from the pocket of her tight and worn black denim jeans. "Alright, you guys ready?" She pushed the unlock button. The tan Ford Taurus beeped and blinked its headlights behind us. "How do we get there, Bobby?"

    When we parked the car in the gravel parking lot next to the train tracks, I had my arm around Sarah and her body was pressed against mine in the backseat of the Taurus. Zeke was in the front seat and Bobby was driving.
    "We're here." Bobby announced. He decided to drive in order to not have to explain the partially intricate directions in getting to this particlar parking lot. I was more than happy with the decision. He unlocked the doors from the front seat.
    We walked along the railroad track for a half of a mile or so. The woods along the train tracks were lined with prickled and bare trees.; leafless in the early spring. Areas hidden from the sun were spotted with the remaining grainy gray patches of snow from the passed winter. Bobby told us to be on the look out for a small evergreen tree to the right of the track; if we found the tree we would also find a stone tunnel dwelling forty or so feet below the tracks. It was an old drainage tunnel that allowed the flow of rain runoff to pour down towards the river passed the trees in the valley next to us. "It's big enough to walk through." Bobby said with excitement in his voice.
    Zeke was trailing the three of us on the track, staring at the ground and occasionally picking up an oddly colored rock or blunt brown shards of corroded iron, worn from over exposure to the schizophrenic nature of Midwestern meteorology. I, too, occasionally stopped to ponder those jagged asymmetrical anomalies. All of them looked rare and unfamiliar. I picked up the biggest one I could find, heavy for its size, sandy and gritty in my grasp. It was vaguely shaped like a hammer or even a rudimentary ax. Carrying my hefty chunk of rusty metal, I strolled back and forth between Sarah and Zeke. "This is pretty cool." I mischievously smiled, bounding light in foot from one wooded rectangle to the next and back again.
    "This is kind of like the movie Stand By Me." Bobby said, walking ahead of us.
    "Do you guys want to see a dead body?" Sarah said looking up at the back of Bobby's head and backpack with a blank face.
     Bobby and I giggled for a moment before we heard Zeke unexpectedly yell "Green!" He pointed to the small fir sapling to the right of him on the side of the tracks.          

     What?" I asked looking up from the primal iron weapon I was carrying. I saw Bobby quicken his pace toward the small green wisp of foreground ahead of me. Then I focused on Sarah's face and figure. Everything else was blurry: the tracks, the trees, the earth, the very little sky in my vision, Bobby, that very little green smudge to my right. The only thing in focus was her bright smiling face and her nearly Venus figure in her fleecy blue form-fitting sweater and skin tight dark gray leggings she had bought at the mall. She giggled at me. "Bobby found the tunnel."
    I slammed the bulk of metal in my hand against tracks with all my might. "Let's do this!" I yelled in glee. The sound of the rusty metal hitting the tracks rang out through the valley.
    "It's just down there." Bobby pointed down passed the hill of loose gravel before us.
    All four of us stared downward silently for a moment.
    "Um... How do we get down there?" Zeke asked without much surety in his tone.
    I jumped forward, landing sideways in the small rocks; two waves of pebbles rippled down towards the bottom of the hill; a duo of small avalanches. "It's easy." I yelled. With each step I took, a new wave of stones poured down the hill. The gravitational momentum brought me to the bottom of the hill in seconds. "See?" I said looking up at the rest of them.
    When Sarah, Bobby, and Zeke finally made it down, next to the tunnel entrance -each in their own cautious and discerning way- all of us stood staring into the depths of the stone opening; pondering our next course of action.
    "What do you guys think?" Bobby asked mildly.
    "I can see through to the other side." I noted without engaging the question.
    "I think we can make it. It can't be that far." Sarah with a confident tone.
    "Wait, why are we going through a drainage pipe?" Zeke finally asked in frustration.
    The facade of the tunnel looked like something out of Arthurian legend. It was stone and the web of knotty brown vines surrounding it looked ancient, not of this time and place. A steady flow of murky gray water poured out of it; over the cement ledge onto the wooded forest floor it's threshold faced.
    "For adventure Zeke." I chimed in.
    "Couldn't we have just climbed down the other side when we were up there?" Zeke asked.
    "Well...yeah." Bobby answered, for the first time a little baffled by the way Zeke was acting. "But when was the last time you walked through a tunnel?"
    "Yeah Zeke, this'll be fun." Sarah finally added.
    "We don't even know what's in there." Zeke exclaimed with a hint of panic in his voice.
    "I know. That's the fun of it. It's an adventure." Bobby said. "And we'll help each other through."
    Fat chance I'm helping  Zeke through this tunnel was the first thought in my head. I looked over at Sarah and she was smiling at Zeke, but she had furrowed her brow in thinly masked annoyance. I knew she was wondering how she could persuade Zeke to do what he clearly did not want to do. She wasn't going to leave him here. "Come on Zeke, we can do this." I said, mustering the most sincere tone I could manage.

    Bobby didn't bring a flashlight, but Sarah had a smartphone with a flashlight on it. We passed it back and forth, inching our way through the tunnel with feet, forearms and hands pressed to the curved walls. The flow of the water over the years left the ground of the drainage tunnel staggered with dark potholes and pools of varying and occasionally menacing depths.
    "Guys this one looks pretty deep." Bobby said pointing the light of Sarah's phone down into the black water basin beneath him. "So be careful."
    Zeke's left foot slipped off of the ledge while he hovered over the pool. He was bringing up the rear and Sarah had turned around and illuminated his path with her phone. The splash hit both her and her phone.
    "Shit!" Zeke yelled.
    "What happened?" I asked, just ahead of Sarah in the enclosed space.
    "My fucking foot slipped into the water!" Zeke yelled. His voice echoed against the walls in a deafening screech. "I knew this was a bad idea."
    Sarah handed her water streaked phone to me. "Don't worry." She said to Zeke. "Give me your hand." She pulled him up again and he managed to find his footing.
    "How much longer is this fucking thing?" He asked vehemently. "You said it couldn't be that long." He said this, I believe, to all three of us in front of him.
    "It's not that much farther." Bobby announced in a loud, even, and entirely audible tone. He was at the head of the line. He was right.
    We reached the end of the tunnel to find a metal ledge damming up the slow surge of dirt and organic material. It looked like a large entrance to a crawl space that had been neglected for decades. The dirty water trickled over the rusty arc ledge and flowed down the dark stone tunnel we had just emerged from. We stood huddled in the small hole for a moment, looking out at our new surroundings, on the other side of the track, this time from the valley up.
    "We can climb out of this. No Problem." Bobby said inspecting the ledge. He stretched his leg up and planted his foot into the mud beyond the threshold a couple inches above his waist. he began to hoist himself up with his arms grasping the thin metal wall.
    "Help him." Sarah whispered into my ear. I felt the heat and moisture of her breath and for a moment I had goosebumps.
    I pushed his other foot up toward the earthen tier he hoped to reach.
    "Thanks Jed." Bobby said and held out his hand to help me up.
    "I got this." I said, waving his hand away as I pulled myself up to ground level with my hands and arms pushing on the ledge. My right arm fluttered for a moment, as though it might give. I swung my right foot onto the edge and pulled myself the rest of the way up.
    Sarah giggled when she saw my arm almost give.
    Zeke made a spitting sound by flapping his lips with his breath.
    "Fuck you" I muttered under my breath. "How's that wet shoe?" I stood up and brushed the mud and leaves off of my damp Levi's and looked around from the slightly higher elevation: a wooded valley next to train tracks, brown leaves matting the ground, bare trees, a sky of a scattered gradient of every grey imaginable, a faint blue hue.
    "Sarah, take my hand." Bobby said, looking down at her still in the ditch of the drainage pipe. He grabbed hold of her hand and pulled her up to our level. "Zeke, do you want help?"
    "I got this." He aped me sarcastically. His foot slipped again, but Bobby caught hold of his hand and pulled up.
    "No problem." Bobby said, but Zeke lost his balance once out of the ditch and fell forward into Bobby who slipped backwards into the mud.
    "See?" Sarah said. "We made it through."   

Aaron C. Molden   

              

Dancing in Free Verse

I.
    Dancing was bliss that night. Any thoughts of menace or melancholy had left my mind. I didn't believe anything could go wrong with anything at all in my life. My job. My family. My friends. My dues. My love. My hate. This city. This state, Indiana. This country, The United States of America. This continent, North America: Canada, Mexico. Other Continents in the western hemisphere: South America.
    Spotlight on Asia. Pan over and out to Russia: Sochi Olympics, 2014. Cut to the the Mediterranean Sea and it's surrounding meta-terrain. Pan down to include North Africa. Cut to a picture of an African. A beautiful African, ebony in the sunlight, bare skin  glowing and nearly blue in hue. They are wearing anything that they want, anything they need, anything they can find, and they are dancing.
    Cut to the Middle East: What was once broadly known to western culture as Arabia is now cut into a fractured series of -stans. A stylized car crash set in Dubai. A stylized car crash set in Tokyo. A stylized car crash in London. A stylized car crash set in Mexico City. A stylized car crash set in Sochi. A stylized car crash set in Machu Picchu, despite its absurdity. A stylized car crash in Paris. A stylized car crash in Los Angeles. A stylized car crash in New York. A stylized car crash in Chicago. A stylized car crash in Indianapolis. A real car crash caught as it was by anyone who happened to be there.
    Things end badly even if I am found unaware. When they do go bad, suddenly, I do whatever I can to become aware.
Sometimes it is slow.
Sometimes it is fast.
It depends on the situation.
    When I was dancing, I wasn't worried about anything going wrong because I was dancing with the one I wanted to be dancing with and she was happy to be dancing with me, if only for a moment.
    And then things happened between people who had been drinking throughout the night. With parties, impromptu or planned, not everyone can be in bliss among a group of people. And not many are completely satisfied when their voice cannot be heard within the congregation. Unless they simply give up on trying to get  in step and decide to go out of step, with pride or false hyperbole.
Wade against the current, friends.

II.
She mentioned that her stomach hurt.
He was silent, but dancing.
She went to the bathroom.
He paced back and forth
back and forth, thinking.
Then he thought about drinking a beer.
She had started her period.
She was happy because everything
was working in a cycle once again.
He was too.

This winter has caused a lot
of entropy within the human spirit,
but it will not last,
no matter how endless it seems.

III.
Dancing with her was bliss.
Staring into her eyes,
spinning her around
when the music was insistent
on spinning her.
Dancing with her
hand in hand
leg to leg
body to body
cheek to cheek.
Wrapping my arms around her
and pulling her close to me
swaying slowly,
symbiotically,
Her body pressed to mine,
so warm and soft against me.
Physical happiness found for a moment
in an otherwise stern and Protestant mind.


IV.
No matter how awful things can be,
for a moment, nothing could possibly go wrong.
Then something goes wrong and we have to start over on the same thing
or move onto something else in order to relearn how to be vital again.
To be visceral again.
To be vivid.
To be lucid.

 V.
    To make sense to somebody and not just to something. There are somethings and somebodies that I refuse to throw away.
    There are memories that I cannot throw away, even if I wanted to throw them away. I believe I will take them to the grave with me, even if I have shared them in some way. Sometimes they remind me of music and movies and books that I have read, though they may be less romantic than they appear. They are romantic to me.
    I have been writing and drawing almost constantly in my free time this winter.
    I walk places, through the absurd ice ruins of the hardest winter I can remember in Lafayette and I do it voluntarily. Sometimes I walk the terrain for the sheer joy and catharsis of navigating this increasingly familiar landscape, without any destination at all.
    When I feel completely focused on making my body feel completely vital, I go to the gym and cross train: stretching, cardiovascular exercise, and even a little muscle development, when I see a spark of vanity in my thoughts and perceptions and performances. Most of the time I leave this vanity to others because I like to believe that I am not a vain person, and yet here I am writing this instead of paying attention to something else.
    Something like sports or music or movies or books or taking a girl out to a claustrophobic and unpleasant eating environment. It is Valentines Day in western culture, commercially and (supposedly) religiously. Today, every restaurant with cloth napkins and white tablecloths, with Gothic or Romanesque or Art Nouveau or Modern or even Gaudy architectural features (to name a few) is packed in like sardines with duos of people, pretending to have a good time.
    She is working tonight. Thank goodness.
    One of my favorite jokes to say is suggesting McDonald's for a Valentine's Day meal option and I don't even find it very funny. At least not when I write it.
    I have to move around more and more, everyday. I cannot sit for too long. Unless I need to sit, you know, just really need to rest.

VI.
    He went to bed and she continued dancing, because she still wanted to dance. She tried to find someone to dance with and that turned out to be a problem with some others who were there.
    I was dancing with the one I wanted to be dancing with, blissfully unaware.
    All of this unraveled without a single clear word, but the memory is there to stay. The love you have found, but cannot keep. The most difficult thing you can possibly imagine. Harder than dealing with consciousness or reality or who you really are and who they really are, whoever it may be, and, Goddamn, it maybe someone you did not expect.
    Attempted suicide scene, Royal Tennebaums. Suicide scene, Stroszek. Suicide Attempted and recorded, Dress Rehearsal Rag by Leonard Cohen. Sylia Plath, suicide. Suspected suicide, Nick Drake. Suspected suicide, Jeff Buckley, Mud Island. Music and suicide, Kurt Cobain, Pacific Northwest. Music and Love and Death, mostly from drug overdoses. David Foster Wallace, Suicide. Kurt Vonnegut, attempted suicide.
    Jokes about things that are not funny, and indulging in the fact that they are not funny, sometimes, when you are somehow detached. Reattach and live in whatever way you can, when you are strong enough in the face of love and death.

VII.
    I began to sweat, as we bounced around on the carpet floor, listening to the fourth upbeat Beatles song about loving a girl in row and it felt fantastic. My blood was pumping and my heart rate increasing. I was spinning her around and considering picking her up and gracefully tossing her around like the skilled swing dancer I know I am not, but imagine myself to be, if the mood strikes. I looked at her face; a face I had been looking at all evening. Her flush cheeks and piercingly attentive blue eyes were staring back at me with joy. I smiled, mouth agape, back at her. We jostled around more vigorously, hand in hand, as a young Paul McCartney sang in the most strained and bluesy voice he could manage at the time of the recording of the song we were dancing to...
   "I'll never dance with another, since I saw her standing there."
   This isn't a moment I wish to forget, so I am not taking any chances.
   Enjoy the dance.

Aaron C. Molden    
   

Seems So Long Ago, Nancy

    I was not prepared to be with her when I tossed myself at her willingness to have me. She needed someone and I thought that someone was me. For a brief moment, she believed I was right. We were both wrong.
    The first month we were together, we were drunk every night, cooped up in our tenement apartment near the railroad tracks. We had both moved out of our parents' house before we knew how to take care of ourselves, much less each other. We would praise each other and argue endlessly, until there was nothing left to do, but embrace and kiss in the name of our imperfection. We sang along to songs we knew well, together. We taunted and foolishly played with each other and it felt great. We made love and when there was no love to be found between us, we would simply fuck each other to feel better.
    There were certain songs she insisted on hearing when she had had too much to drink for anyone's good. She would sit, head slouched near the speaker, listening to a Leonard Cohen song. Seems So Long Ago, Nancy. The lyrics still give me a chill when I hear them.

    She had nightmares sometimes when we slept together. She said she dreamed she was trapped, bound in a place or situation she did not want to be in, but she refused to go into anymore detail. I told her they were only nightmares and that always made her angry.
    We began seeing friends again, stepping out of our two person cocoon. We continued drinking. Her actions were reckless sometimes. My actions were too, sometimes. When we went to parties, she would flirt with other men, other women's girlfriends. I saw it, but thought little of it. I too was talking, sometimes flirtatiously, to other women, other men's girlfriends, enjoying the company of someone other than each other, knowing we would end up together at the end of the night.
    Until, eventually, we did not end up together.
    In cowardice, I watched her ride away in another man's car from a party. I called her phone eleven times that night and was always met with her absurd voice-mail. It began as a lion's growl before you heard her voice. She appreciated the nonsense of electrical connection. She never called me back that night.
    In the morning, she called me and asked why I had called so many times.
    "What happened last night?" I asked
    "What do you mean?"
    "You left without me. With someone else."
    "Yeah, I had to crash."
    "Who did you go home with?"
    "A friend. He was going home, so I went with him."
    She refused to tell me what happened that night, no matter how much I would push her to tell me. She would walk away from me whenever I asked about it and turned on that Goddamned Leonard Cohen song from the album Songs from a Room. Everything about it's sleeve and cover I know and recognize. All it took was her sinking her head into the speaker when the needle hit the groove. That was enough. It was enough for me to drop it. It was enough for me to forgive her. And she knew it was enough and she continued to take advantage of it for as long as she and I could take it.
    I became aware of it, but I was too late.

Seems So Long, Nancy
By Leonard Cohen

It seems so long ago,
Nancy was alone
looking at the late late show
through a semi-precious stone.
In the house of honesty
her father was on trial,
in the house of mystery
there was no one at all,
there was no one at all.

It seems so long ago,
none of us were strong;
Nancy wore green stockings
and she slept with everyone.
She never said she's wait for us
although she was alone,
I think she fell in love for us
in nineteen sixty-one,
in nineteen sixty-one.

It seems so long ago,
Nancy was alone,
a forty-five beside her head,
an open telephone.
We told her she was beautiful,
we told her she was free,
but none of us would meet her in
the house of mystery,
the house of mystery.

And now you look around you,
see her everywhere,
many use her body,
many comb her hair.
In the hollow of the night
when you are cold and numb
you hear her talking freely then,
she's happy that you've come,
she's happy that you've come.

    We both worked long hours at our jobs when we were weren't figuring out ourselves and each other. Service jobs. Construction jobs. Odd jobs. Any jobs we could find, and that did not help, but sometimes we found solace in complaining about our jobs to each other.
No time for the things you love.
No time for those you are stuck with.
Choosing no time for something to find time for something new.
Ignoring obvious flaws in your existence.
Walking away without saying goodbye,
when someone believes they deserve a goodbye.

    In a night of sorrow, she drunkenly decided to swallow as many pills as she could find in the medicine cabinet. She made this decision after drinking as much hard liquor as she could manage. I was in the bedroom, sleeping.
    I woke up to the sound of a crash. Rubbing my eyes, I walked towards the bathroom, through the stark grey hallway. Through the ajar door frame bare light emitted unto the floor. I looked in and found her laying naked on the bathroom tile with foam bubbling out of her mouth. Her phone was in her hand and someone was on the line.
    "Hello?" I said cautiously into the phone.
    "Jed?" A voice asked back; It was her mother's voice.
    "Yes." I said quietly, checking her pulse at her neck.
    "Is she okay?" She asked, worried.
    "I don't know, but I will take care of her." I said impulsively, then looked down at what I was wearing; boxer briefs.
    She regained consciousness for a moment and mumbled that he did not love her. She was not talking about me. Then she said now he is gone. She coughed up more white foam, then rested her head back onto the floor, drifting back out of consciousness. The foam slowly started draining back into her mouth. I cradled the back of her head with my arm and lifted her towards me. Her eyes fluttered. I looked up at the light fixture and winced. Then I raised my arm above her head with a flat stiff palm. I slapped her across the face.
    "Wake up!" I yelled.
    Her legs and arms curled up to her torso, dragging against the polished black and white bathroom floor. The lights flickered for a moment in that cold and drafty apartment. I slapped her again.
    "You have to wake up!"
     She wrapped her warm body around my legs, semi-conscious again. She pressed her sweating pelvis against me. I pulled her closed to me. "You have to wake up." I said again, quieter.
    "I know." She muffled. She rest her head in my lap. "He's gone" She said again, then coughed up phlegm and foam. "I'm sorry." She whispered.
    I clenched her skin with my finger tips. "You need to throw up."
    Her entire body shuddered. "I can't."
    I scanned the room in its buzzing white light.The light was the only sound I heard. "Stick your hand down your throat." I said.
    "I can't."
    "I'm going to call an Ambulance."
    "No." She coughed. "Stick your hand down my throat." She gurgled, struggling to breath, then hacked up small bits of yellow phlegm. I stared at her illuminated face in the harsh overhead light, blank and spotted with pasty saliva. With unexpected lucidity she gazed into my eyes. "Jed, stick your fingers down my throat."
     And that is what I did. I tapered my fingers and forced them down her esophagus, as far as they would go, mining for the internal poison that needed to erupt. She gagged and her eyes bulged. I paused for a moment. "Are you okay?"
    "Mmph." she muffled with tears welling at the corners of her eyes. "Am fine."
    I cradled her head with my other arm.
    "Do it." she muffled, struggling to breath.
     I pushed my fingers deeper into her throat. She hacked up more phlegm, blood, foamy chunks of white pills, bile, and saliva on my hand and wrist. I slid my hand out of her mouth and pushed her head towards the toilet basin. She retched loud and violently for what seemed like an eternity. Staggered and strained gagging noises echoed against the porcelain. Things were coming out. Things were being evacuated. Things were being expressed. It was horrible.
    Finally, she stopped. She exhaled with a moan, then fell back slowly to the ground. Her eyes were closed as she took deep even breath.
    "What is going on on?" I asked stunned, but coming again to my senses.
    She was silent, except for her breathing, for a very long time. "Can you get me a towel?" She asked quietly.
    Without answering, I walked to our room and found a clean towel and a large thread bar t shirt. I sat back down next to her and raised the towel to her face. "I grabbed this shirt for you."
    She wiped the phlegm and saliva off her skin. I handed her the shirt and she clinically let it fall over her head and shoulder and hips.
    "Are you going to be okay?" I asked.
    Her closed eyes were puffy red and wet. "Can we not talk, please? Can we go to sleep?" In an dizzy and exasperated tone.
    "I hung up on your mom."
    She sighed.
    "You should probably call her back."
    She sighed again.
    "Let me take you to bed." I helped her to her feet and walked her down the hallway. Her legs buckled near the doorway to the bedroom. I picked her up and cradled her in my arms.
    "No." She whispered.
     I walked through the doorway and laid her in the bed. "Go to sleep."
    "Are you going to bed?" She asked.
    "Not yet." I answered. "Go to sleep."
    I sat in a chair watching her sleep for a very long time. She would not die that night. It would not happen. I wouldn't let it happen.
    The first dim light of the eastern sun began to glow through the window. I walked over to the window and watched it rise over the skyline. Warm and welcome orange and red light cast faint shadows upon the streets and building of the city. The first train rumbled deep and solemn down the street. I knelt down beside her sleeping in bed. I placed the back of my hand against her cheek. "I have to go to work."
    She sighed.
    I went to work.
    That was not the end of it, but it was the beginning of the end.

Aaron C. Molden

Shooting: A Collage

Infection.
We pretend to not know it
until it is inevitable.
It festers and bleeds and saps
blood mushrooms
in the full moon.
Pretending.
Abstract realization.
Bucolic escape and vulgarity lists.
Natural things that can be expressed.
Waterfalls
waterfalls
waterfalls.
Seventy percent of all of us
will eventually fall.
The other twenty will dealt with how we wish.
Most people bury it

I have the ability to notice things.
It benefits me only, as far as I can tell,
but sometimes it keeps me alive.
Symmetry, asymmetry, color, light, line
tone, gradient, repetition, pattern
criticism and theory.
Visions.

Music.
Music. Music. Music.
A great word packaging an unfinished well of expression.
Music is pepper.
Music is ink.
Music is un-corrupted diamonds in the human mind,
when it is at its best.
Rare and often eventually compromised.
My Favorite Things by The John Coltrane Quartet. John Coltrane and Elvin Jones emphasize the beat with a sustained note and cymbal ride when the listener is singing along, in their head or out loud, the word "things" in the titular moment of the chorus of My Favorite Things. I feel that moment everytime I hear it.

Reality:
Another school shooting.
It is cold now, but will once again be warm.
Awful things happen on a daily basis.
Globalization and advertising
make it simple, almost self evident
to forget about tragedy almost immediately.
Warfare footage. Climate change.
Technological mediocrity.
Forced blandness.
An isolated tumor
of fear and consumption.

Second life.

Talented dancers, talented composers, talented musicians.
Wonderful and beautiful bands and orators.
Characters
with great facial expressions
with flexible dance moves
with tone
with color
with contrast
with words which cannot simply be read.
Another school shooting and it was here
at Purdue University.
Once again, I am glad to not be Mitch Daniels,
but this is not about him.
It scares me that I can only express this in abstract fragments.

return to haiku
return to haiku, you fool
she is beautiful

Another school shooting
and it was here at Purdue

School shooting: Purdue University
Little Known of the Casualties

Shots Fired Near the Engineering Mall

"I heard there were three gunman."

CNN reports of a school shooting in the Midwest before local news source has arrived on the scene. An old woman at a bar looks up at the television screen with a cigarette in her hand and mentions that the local news did not get there before the national news with slight tone of disgust in her voice.

Tweets. A bird chirp of information that says warning and not very much more. One hundred and forty characters, some of it hypertext, which many must not understand. I, myself, have a hard time caring about using it, even though it is right there at fingertips everytime I type this thing up.

-Three shooters what?-
-Six have been shot. Are you kidding me?-
-Three confirmed dead? No way, dude.-
-Four dead in Ohio was about the US government opening fire on students. This isn't the government. Neal Young rules, though.-

    For awhile, I didn't know what to believe and I was perfectly safe from any harm; A very strange sensation. I was paying attention to the information fed to me because people I know and love could be endanger. My mom works at Purdue and two friends were attending classes near the building where this isolated tragedy occurred. Also a girl I am in love with was working in the area. Almost everyone I see and know on a regular basis live and work within a short radius of this well documented city and university in the state of Indiana. This was surreal to me, but my reality is completely surreal to a life of regular and random violence. This was and is methodical violence. This is intentional violence. This is theatrical violence with the exception that it is real violence.
Shooting at Purdue.
One dead.
Shooter in custody.
Photographer from the Exponent newspaper mistakenly taken into custody.
The victim was a teachers assistant.
A resident assistant named Jay Severson was shot and killed at Purdue in 1996. The shooter killed himself before the police could take him into custody.
They took the shooter into custody this time around and he will have to explain himself. If he cannot it becomes his problem and what a problem it is. The human condition. The unchecked and unexplained violence of what the human mind can manifest.
Edit: He killed himself while awaiting trial.

    Elated by the fact that no one I know was hurt in the wave of paranoid panic, I walked to the University book store with the intention of buying some new pens. Pens are one of the few things I am stubborn and particular about. Plus, I needed to take a walk after my totally natural, but still utterly irrational panic attack.
    After I purchased my three pens with gradually increasing widths of tips, I walked out of the book store just in time to hear the words "I'm alive!" being yelled across the street. "I'm alive!" the young man yelled again, raising his arms in the air as he spun around on the icy corner of Pierce and State street. He had heather grey Purdue sweat pants and a sweatshirt bunched around his knees and elbows and cropped hair that was slowly grown out; jar head hair. Bright white sneakers in such deep snow. "I'm alive!" he yelled again as he and his friends left Harry's Chocolate Shop with backpacks on their shoulders. They crossed caddy-corner through the intersection. "I'm alive!" he yelled again with a smug smirk on his face. "I'm alive!" once more.
    "Well someone is not, if you haven't heard." I yelled back at him, irritated.
    He looked over at me with angry gaze. "Alright, cool it, man." His friend said and they continued walking in the opposite direction as me.
   The departed's name is Andrew Boldt, and I didn't know anything about him.
   This is a tragedy.

Aaron C. Molden

A Day: Epilogue

Overnight

    Jed opened his eyes and found himself on a kitchen floor with a thin sheet over him. He was pressed against the back side of a warm body: cloth to cloth in places, skin to skin in others. It was Steph he was pressed against and she had his arm under hers and was grasping his hands. He sighed with a smile and rested his face in the nape of her neck.
     "Are you awake?" Steph asked.
     He kissed her neck. She let go of his hand and placed hers against his cheek: hand to head and head to neck. "Yes" he said.
    She brought her hand back to the embrace of their hands at her bare navel. She removed his arm from her body with the hand that touched his smiling face and threw the sheet over them, away from her head. She exhaled. "I'm going outside."
    He stayed for the moment draped in the sheet tossed upon him after she stood up. He watched her brush her hands across table clothes and counter tops, feeling for something useful to her.
    Alone in this reality.
    She found a pack of cigarettes and took one from the pack. She walked over to the refrigerator and took a bottle of vodka out of the freezer. She poured it into a shot glass and stared at it for a moment. Then she drank it in one gulp and stepped outside to the back yard to smoke the cigarette.

   Outside, she adjusted the clothes she was wearing, looking down at her body with smoke drifting upwards from her cigarette, pouring into her eyes. Jed stood behind her in the door of the house.
   "Hey" He said.
   She turned around to see him as she pulled her tight yellow t shirt down to the low waistline of her jeans. She was startled, but barely showed it in a small body twitch. "Hey" she said. blinking the smoke out of her eyes. "What's up?"
   "Nothing."
   They stared at each other for a moment.
   "What are you looking at?" She asked.
   "You." he said, pausing before he nodded his head.
   She took a drag of her cigarette as she turned away from him.
   "Whose house is this?" He asked.
    "My mom and step-dad's. She answered while staring at the cigarette in her hand. Her arm was slumped down and bent at the elbow in a ninety degree angle. Her other arm and hand rested upon her hip. She turned around. Chiaroscuro. That beautiful curve our skeleton supports and braces at the human bodies's infrastructure. "Is there something you need?"
    He stared at her. His smile fell blank. "No. It's just that your awake."
    She took another drag and checked for her phone in her left pocket.
    "And so I'm awake now, too."
    "Okay." Car keys.
    "Would you like something to drink?" He asked.
    "I'm fine." Wallet, but she wasn't sure where her purse was.
    "Do you want to talk?" He asked.
    "About what?" She had been taking inventory of her things, but she was at her house. She didn't know why she was doing it.
   "I don't know. Last night?"
   "I don't remember most of last night." It was he who would eventually be leaving, not her.
   "Really?" He said.
   "Yeah." This was her home, or as close to a home as she had. He would be leaving, and hopefully sooner than later.
    "Do you want to get some breakfast?" He asked.
    "Look." She said. "I'd like to be alone right now."
    He stared at her, confused, and then he said "Okay." And then he went inside and sat with his legs crossed on the carpet floor staring silently out the window for about five minutes. A long five minutes. Then he got up and left out of the front door. Quietly, he intentionally left quietly and she could finally go back inside the house.
    In that five minutes inside the house, when she had been smoking her cigarette, Jed received a text from the man -are you coming back to work today?
    Jed text back -yes.
    -what about Zeke?
    - no.

    The night before, Jed walked to the address Steph had sent him. The two of them spent the night there drinking and listening to music.They were quiet around each other at first, taking sips of their mixed drinks, sitting with legs crossed on the decorative rug in front the record player. They faced away from each other while listening.
     "Do you want to take a shot?" Steph asked.
     Jed looked over at her and said "yes."
     "Okay, let's go to the kitchen."
     They went into the kitchen and took a shot of vodka, chasing it with vanilla coke. For a moment, they leaned against the kitchen counter smiling, listening to the music from the other room. Jed looked over at her nodding his head. She looked over at him. They made eye contact. She smirked and looked away.
    "Do you want to do another?"
    "Yeah."
    They took another shot and leaned silently on the counters. They started listening to the music from the other room again.
    "Let's go back to our other drinks." She said.
    "Okay."
    They went back to the record player and sat down by their drinks, leaning back with their hands on the rug.
    "What if there was a fireplace next to us, against that wall?"
    "What?" He asked not understanding the context of the question.
    She pointed with her thumb at the wall next to them. "What if that wall had a fireplace installed in it and there was a fire going in it right now?"
    "It would be too hot." Jed said sincerely. It was the most sincere words he had uttered all day.
    "I don't think you understand what I am saying." She said. "What would it look like?"
    "The fireplace?" He asked.
    "No. The whole room: the rug, the record player, the wood floor, us, our drinks, but also a fireplace against that wall." She pointed to the wall without a fireplace again.
    "With a fire burning in it?" Jed stared at her wide-eyed and confused. "I think it would look uncomfortably hot." He said.
     She sighed and took a sip of her drink.
     He scanned the room as he took a sip of his.

Both of them stared at the ground for a while.
Nothing to say
nothing to do.
Both of them inside their mind for a while.
Nothing to me
nothing to you.

    The music was still playing on the record player.
    "Something my mom would hang on a wall."
    "What?" She asked.
    "It would look like something my mom would hang on her wall." He said. "If it were a picture. Like a photograph."
    "Yeah." She said quietly.
    He took another sip of his drink. "Do you want to take another shot?"
    "Yes."
    They went into the kitchen and took another shot. Then she asked him if he was hungry. They ate a last meal of organic granny smith apples, gruyere cheese, and water crackers. "This is pretty fancy looking cheese" He mentioned.
    "My mom takes food kind of seriously." She responded.
     After they finished eating they lounged on the rug with their plates and drinks next to them.
    She laughed. She belched. She laughed again. "I'm sorry."
    "What?"
    "Let's do another shot." She said.
    "Okay."
    "I'm sorry!" she yelled unexpectedly.
    There was a moment of silence between them.
    "Okay." He said.
    They went into the kitchen and took another shot.
    She looked at her phone a lot. He looked over at her looking at her phone. He looked at his phone occasionally, mostly when she was looking at her phone. When the record ended, it was quiet for a moment. He went over to the record player and changed the record so that there was music playing once more.
   "Do you want to take another shot?"
   "Do you think we should?"
   Cued laughter. Cued gasp.
   "Why not?"
   They went once more into the kitchen and took one more shot of vodka. Then they sat back down on the rug and finally talked. They talked in a way that only isolated and solipsistic minds can talk when they find another extended adolescent mind in the mire of reality. They felt smart, if only momentarily, in each others company. They spoke to each of their dreams. Dreams that would go unfulfilled or would somehow be fabricated. They talked about their frustrations with life, friends, family, and acquaintances, so disconnected with the rest of the known world. They spoke confidently, selfishly, comfortable in the selfishness of their company. "They'll be sorry when I'm dead." "She is the worse person I have ever had to be around" "Everybody thinks he's the greatest thing ever, but he's really just a fucking asshole." "They'll never understand what is really wrong." "That's the problem with this world, isn't it?" "You're so right, I'm so glad someone really gets it, gets me." And with every shameful display of vocalized singularity there was a response of support, of understanding.
   They walked back into the kitchen, still talking, reeling off of the flow of shared frustration. Jed poured two more shots of vodka and handed Steph the vanilla coke. They took the shot. The talking had ceased for a moment. And then Steph began to cry.
   "What's wrong?" Jed asked.
   "A lot of things." She said quietly.
   She leaned into him. He adjusted his arms so that they were wrapped around her. She pressed her face against his chest. "Do you want to talk about it?"
   A muffled "no." She looked up at his face with wet eyes. She wiped them with her hand. He looked down at her face. He kissed her on the lips. She jerked her head back, but quickly eased back in and kissed his lips. "Can I trust you?" She asked.
    "Yes." He answered. "Do you think you can trust me?"
    "I think so."
    "Do you want to lie down?"
    "Yes."
    They laid down together on the kitchen floor, covering themselves with an extra sheet from the linen closet. Jed began kissing her neck and face, and she would occasionally turn her head to kiss him back, but she was mostly just still. "Let's go to sleep." She whispered.
    "Okay." Jed kissed her neck once more and squeezed her body closer to his. She took his hands in hers and very soon they were both in a deep drunken slumber.
    When she awoke in the morning, she already knew it was not going to end well.