Early For The Fall - A Piece of Flash Fiction (written at ArtWerks)

Early For The Fall by Mick Parsons

Two More From ArtWërks

1.

The streets have been full for centuries.

Even if the buildings were to disappear

tomorrow, these streets would remain

filled end to end and side to side

with memories and with ghosts

and with the specters of memories.

In the dirt between the bricks

there is a memory

locked in stone and pebble

rubble and rabble

memory that filters down

and into the water

and from the water

into the dirt

and from the dirt,

it is rubbed into the soles of our shoes

and we remember again

all the things we didn't know

that we didn't know – comes to us

in dreams and in visions

and in visitations that,

if we're paying attention

will tell us the way

we are to go.

2.

So sit down here

and tell me a story

and make it a good 'un

like the one you told me

yesterday. Tell me

about one of the places

you frequented when you were

young, and fresh the fruit was

and how the women were sweet and ripe 

and how clear and how cool

the water was and what it

felt like to really sleep,

to sleep out in the open

under the stars and what it felt like

to feel safe and to feel free

to feel something different

before all the fences and wires

and wireless was all built up

back before there were gate keepers

and invisible gates

back when you were my age

and the world was something more

beautiful than it seems today.

Random Unlabeled Photos (From Artwërks)

1.

Paint the body electric

hip hop bee bop –

O, let us sing the songs of ourselves

electric slide

run and hide

safe and sound

sunbathing beneath a blue sun

illuminated for the body

and the electric funk

born out of a need to dance

and a desire to stay

a little while longer.

2.

Let us go then, you and I

and wander silent empty streets

like drunkards, lovers, and reprobates.

Let us imagine ourselves ghosts

material immaterial

substance transubstantiated

wandering the bric-a-brac

counting the minutes of the witching hour

when even the cops have the sense

to go home and leave this place

to the rest of us that neither

need their rules nor

care to understand them.

3.

Counting down the hours til dawn

all the midnight shadows are drawn

in, tied up, and stowed away

in anticipation of an approaching day

that most people will not notice

because they're too busy

being respectable, worrying

about what shoes to wear

on Sunday morning and whether

the sermon will go long

making kick off

one more missed opportunity.

4.

The lines are drawing

themselves on my face –

deep lines around

the corners of my eyes

drawn around

the edges of my mouth.

They each tell a tale

geologic in proportion,

private in scale. The old men,

they like to remind me

I am still young. And while

I cannot argue

I cannot acquiesce

to their insistence

that it's all downhill

from here.

5.

This is the other side of night

that place Céline dreamed of

but never found; that steady peace

that comes with the meditation

of one painted line and the poetry

of coffee at 3 AM. Counting down

the hours til dawn and the cats are yowling

or maybe

just another bunch of bums

the cops will later blame 

for various and unrelated petty thefts.

The Shady Side of The Street

In the winter, the ice builds up

on the north side of the street

and snow trucks, somehow,

manage to miss it... every

single time. Shop owners

armed to the denture with

cheap plastic snow shovels,

rock salt, and hot coffee

push the snow away from the door

as best they can, scrape and chip

away at the ice underneath –

all the result of several hundred

silent prayers by school age children

trying to avoid another math test

and the sour mood of a teacher

who is too underpaid

to afford four wheel drive.

In the Spring, the flower boxes do well

because even flowers need shade,

and the rain runs off and down to Carroll Street

unabated. Sometimes the rain comes so fast

both sides of the street look like

dueling tributaries fighting for the same river,

a sad amusement park ride

for the dirt and weeds and cigarette butts

stuck in the sidewalk cracks,

for critters so small our eyes don't see them,

eventually uncovering the unmarked graves

of stray cats left out to die the previous winter.

They wash away, too: the dead cats, the dirt,

the weeds, the cigarette butts, little chunks

of the sidewalk that avoided repair

because henpecked city work crews

couldn't get to them.

(This is not an age

where neighbors help

neighbors. This is an age

of paperwork – left behind

as the digital age takes

everywhere else. More

paperwork means more

industry, more to justify

some small town middle

manager's futile existence,

something to merit

that small plaque

placed in some ignored corner

of the old city hall building.)

The sunny side boils in the summer

and event he gadflies have sense enough

to stay away and loaf

on the shady side of the street. People

walk slow, clutch their purses and wallets

These times are tough, and the only

businesses that boom are the bars

at the bottom of the hill... the only

hiding places left. The talk on the bar stools

is the same on either side:

too much rain / too little rain

the price of corn /soy

machinery repairs / foreclosures

cynical whispers about

new businesses / new faces

lax school teachers / lazy parents

the President / the cost of milk.

In the Fall we all breathe a sigh of relief

at the break in the humidity

and the prospect of not having to mow the yard.

Night air cools. Days are warm.

And even storm cloud don't bother anyone.

This is the time of year

that makes people want to move back

to the Midwest, to the place of their birth,

to see the leaves and to loaf for no particular purpose

on the cozy stoop in front of the old barber shop

on the shady side of the street –

the one the old men used for that purpose

in that Once Upon A Time

time our grandparents used to

reminisce about and that we only

pretended to listen to

before we discovered the glory found

on a simple stoop, a cool spot on the sidewalk

in a town getting in its final stretch

before another long and buried winter.