Communique

This is a prose-poem-essay dealie that I contributed to the zine WYRD DAZE recently...

I have seen the march of powerlines across the landscape. Neat symmetrical arrangements of shimmering steel and wire that carry lightning between two axes, two balanced ends of a ruined and withered spectrum. These are the capillaries, the bloodstreams, the veins strung taut in ribbons. City to city and house to house, stirring each convenience to vivid life and light. We've watched it all on television. 

I've seen the deepest and secretest of gray-washed winter woods laid naked and ravaged by the earth-moving blade, the rusted rumble of gears and the lingering trace of filthy oil at the edge of a future building site. Where autumn once held her orange dominion, now miles of spidery commuter suburbs with tarped-over aboveground pools and red-cedar swingsets in the yards, sacks of poisons lurking in the eaves of the garage. Each cul-de-sac a dead void where mystery had laid down sighing. I've seen the uniformity like corpses arranged in a pagan circle.

I've seen the edge of great and spreading centers of commerce, where the blinking polestar signals of radio towers jostle amidst fields of white oil tanks and grim and sterile office parks, where toxins spill from the strangled rivers into the sumac and half-submerged shopping carts of a hesitant reservoir. I've seen the boundless pouring freeways, their many-shadowed overpasses scarred with the dim graffiti of teenage malice, glaring halogens and passing whims within easy steering. I've seen the interchanges and toll plazas, the false shrubs and noisewalls, the gaping tombstone hollows of ghost-boxes and rippling vacant-grinned airdancers. I've glimpsed the flickering headlights through the hazy amputated median forests on northbound lanes at midnight. I've seen the dreary beige fields of your outlands, North Carolina. I've seen where the layers of your progress give way collapsing.

I've seen the plumes of smoke from countless streaming Superfund chimneys. I've grown within reach of your abandoned mills of brick and soot and shattered, pebbled glass. I've seen your vinyl furniture set ablaze in a meadow beside a corrugated warehouse. I've seen your hangings, your phantoms, your sense of loss and your obsessive skeleton key past. I've seen the blood and chalk of your senseless sidewalk shootings, I've seen the drugs you can't purge from your system for the minimum wage food court job interview. These halogens aren't flattering to your skin. You could see a doctor if only you had the insurance.

I've seen these soldiers bored on their toted bedrolls. I've seen these police trailing you home if your skin is a shade too brown, Alamance County. Your harrowed realm is a witch's spellcraft, a ghost at the banquet, a lingering omen, a portentous sense of dread, unspeakable nightmares half-glimpsed moving in the darkness of an unknown alley or a haunted mountaintop wood. I've seen Other Burlington, and I've seen the distant lights of her awakening. I've seen the squadrons of black southern birds racing the moon and its tangles of drifting cloudbank. You're a seance, Old North. You raise the dead wholesale and sell them off cut-rate for a mall that'll rot derelict in fifteen years if business is booming. I've seen your taxidermy. I've seen your desperate, hallowed malingering, pulse fading, pressed in glass and trapped in amber. Your history is our own. The diaries you keep are stained with trails of errant ink, an NC carved in a wax seal, moldering. Your name is light pollution. Your name is a mirror. Your name is Gomorrah. Your name is consuming without regret to fill oblivion. Your name is lurid logos and leering billboards, beckoning from the highway to the death-sprawl that lurks just beyond a discreet tree-line. Your essential entirety is outskirts and borderlands, Tar Heel. You're an abandoned car filled with dread rumors on the side of a forgotten exit, aswarm with wasps. You forget how I've seen your boarded up windows on tenements and your forgotten asylums, your overcrowded hospitals and old folks' homes. You can't keep a history like that from one of your own, friend. I've seen how your trailer parks and driving ranges wither to ash in the falling twilight.

I've waited for Shearon Harris to go red and fill the sky with pouring radioactive rain. I've seen your cars piled in flames on cloverleafs etched against the chemical sunset. I've seen your terrified jet passengers bracing for the final descent into doom. I've seen your saw-blade and your axe chip efficiently, coldly away at the marrow of our green hills and plains. I've seen your hulking ships swaying in your salted tides. You are a nondescript parking lot down an access road. You're the empty pursuit of material perfection, a sanding away of edges and of character, a gated development with high walls and identical center-hall floorplans and anonymous magnet schools arranged within easy walking distance of shopping. I've seen it all since childhood: a veil lifted, a decay and a fever and a longing and an ache. I've seen the answers to your questions. I've seen the tarnish setting in. 

And still, beneath the curled veneer, I've seen the fox, the bear, the deer, the red wolf. Still I've seen the cool and bubbling rock-hewn streams, the black and endless wetland channels. Still I've seen the swarms of pine woods navigating the valleys. We've been there with our broken technology all along. We've been there with our warbling, dying VCR, our stained and eerie Polaroids, our scratched and blurring Super 8. We've been there with our cassettes set always to 'record'.

This is your salvation. This is your invitation to the ball. Your denouement is here, North Carolina. There's no more escaping or warding it away, no turning back. Approach this final abyss within. Critical mass has been breached and surpassed. The end is already set in motion and cannot be reversed. Brace for a coming storm.

Soon, we will begin disappearing like an old-time rapture. Every mailman, every gun-happy small-town sheriff, every crooked elected official, every perpetual and lethal widow adding arsenic to the glass, every drink-addled fraternity pledge stumbling through the gutters of Chapel Hill, every sunburned crabber, every soccer mom at Briar Creek in her SUV with stick figure family enumerated proudly on her back windshield, every buzz-cut Fayetteville recruit, every Durham gang-banger, every genteel old tobacco executive in their fading antebellum mansions, every bearded vegan barista in Asheville, every Seagrove potter, every family, every man, every woman, every child. We are vanishing from the very yards where we grill on the Fourth of July in preparation for fireworks. We are vanishing from behind our rubber Halloween masks in the thick of the spirit hour. We are vanishing from Christmas dinner, from lounging in front of Thanksgiving football. We are vanishing from winter, spring, summer, fall. This is the song of our departure.

And when we lift to the ceiling of your very burnished skies, we leave not the thinnest legacy behind, no pure illumination, no cast of light to impart that we were once a people, a community, a state, a home, save perhaps for one solemn and dying voice trailing like a streamer on the faintest hint of wind, bristling through the empty streets and down the silent travel lanes below rows of dead and leaning streetlights, from ocean floor to red clay ridge, between the broken skylines. A voice that insists, plaintively and pointedly, that I have seen the end of all I've ever loved and known, and I have seen the march of powerlines across the landscape. 

Heart and hope, love and entropy. Yearning and magnetic pull. Anchors and orbits. Dawn and the new bourgeoning. Names that now can never be unspoken.

Tear every city asunder. Sow new oats over the hallowed ground of this ruin. Break apart the elevated freeways with your hands and crush every skyscraper into powdered glass. Stomp every mall flat into the earth it trampled to be born. Unearth the bones from every graveyard. Erase every sidestreet and every stadium and every cinema, every drive-thru and every satellite station and every rock-flung shore, and brush over every trail with withered leaves until it's all a white expanse on the map, unremarked upon, unremembered, gone. Snap every smokestack and spire and roofline in two. And when everything's gone, begin to build again.

We Dream In Our Waking Moments, And Walk In Our Sleep

Lately I've been re-reading 'The Scarlet Letter', that hated bane of so many teenaged American existences, for the first time in about a decade. As always, Hawthorne's work manages to both haunt and intrigue in equal measure. Imminently drier than my favorite works of old Nathaniel, 'The Scarlet Letter' still incandescently smolders with the delirium of its prose, a heady brew of paranoia, shameful secrets, and fear.

It's the terror that most lingers in my continuing fascination with the early settlers of Massachusetts. One can imagine how foreboding such a land must have seemed to them, those severe British cultists in their pitch-black clothes and dour expressions. The America of the age was an endless carpet of dark, unknowable forests and steeply climbing hillsides. As man is known to do, the Puritans set at once to creating their own demons when confronted with the void. Man must explain, to put into a frame of reference, what cannot be understood. There, balanced on an edge of this new, depthless oblivion, setting foot into a world utterly unknown, they populated those woods with demons and witches. It was either a precarious attempt to better understand their mysteries, or a realization that the truth of all that unknown land was much darker, indeed. They were so far from home, and behind their backs teemed a multitude of open-ended questions.

In such tense, unusual situations, men tend to turn on each other. Suspicion, conspiracy, and hidden lives are cast like shadows behind the chalk-white facade of every early settler. In 'The Scarlet Letter', every finger that points in Hester Prynne's direction is stained with the blood of its own sin. Only Hester's quarantine allows her to see this clearly, as one accursed, excluded. Freed from the bindings of a severely unhealthy repression, she sees behind the veil. America is a loss of innocence, a confrontation with the animal nature of our environs. The Puritans' growing pains were a part of becoming the first Americans. Their behaviors and reactions would shape what that word would later mean. We've all seen how such legacies resonate through the decades towards today.

I grew up shaded by dark and eerie hills in the western half of Massachusetts, but it's somehow still North Carolina that is conjured by re-reading these florid colonial works. Our state's first settlers disappeared without any trace, and it's as if they're still lingering here between the hazy pines, hovering aloft in the tall grasses of the fields. Hundreds of vanished families like ghosts drifting about in whispers, shadowing every step. This state is shrouded in its past in a way so unique, so peculiar, that I haven't yet seen its double elsewhere. For every Costco, every new lakeside McMansion development, every strip of blank-faced office buildings or desolate fast-food parking lots, you're still just moments away from a bottomless frontier. Just last week, ten minutes from home, Denny and I camped alone at Shallow Ford entirely surrounded by the abyss. Hundreds of years and nothing has changed. America is still a mystery, a void beyond a void, a thin fabric behind a carefully-constructed surface. America is still just a murky sea of trees and hills, masking spirits and devils and wretches casting spells much as it did in the early days. We've managed to put a mask on it, but we're all still huddled close against the campfire light, jumping nervously at every rustling noise deep within the forest.