THUGWISE CAT

The Saga of FACES and VASES
By Tracy Thomas
There’s voices in the mandolin, some sort of chatter down in the f-holes.
Now there’s a campfire and horrible mundane songs that matter to everyone
but the soup stones, the antiphonies, the pariahs outside the firelight, those
reprobates shivering in the woods with pink toadstools. Their bones have left
them. Their bones are off to see the world. Their bones are drunk in Buenos
Aires. They’re hiding in the jimson weed, crazy in the scent of moonflowers.
Their bones are playing dominoes under the ponderosas. They’re sleeping on
one leg with flamingos. The voices are telling a story they’ve chopped into
pieces. They’re rasping at the grue. There’s a trunk with my father’s broken
mandolin. I’m having a garage sale but it’s tricky getting rid of darkness. I
got this dinner triangle of bones. I got the pulcher eye. I got Latinate
adjectives, nonsensical objectives. I learned a dance in the lich gate. I’ll
bring your turtle back to life, your wishing star heartbreak turtle in the hurdy
gurdy of your head. The voices chopped the story into pieces now they’re
black dove treble clef. Now they’re Ascension Day rain. They’re the sobs of
smoldering wound. There’s voices hacked in pieces. They’re playing
mandolin.
It’s all about stories, if you can keep them from going into pieces;
keep them from seducing the neighbor’s daughter in the tree house. Then the
stories are looking for some sort of revenge for their mutilation. They want
the quemada, the conflagrande, the auto-da-fe freeway. Maybe eat some
folks, got them turning on a spit or they’ve got their heads together inventing
something like a song, a chant, a groan, whatever to give voice to the
nonsense or they’re getting on your nerves stirring up the goat herd, waking
you from your pastoral idyll, send you sprawling from your dithyramb, no
shoes, head on fire, burning fennel stalks waving at whoever’ll listen. I’m
sick with that voice. Now I’m butchering some stories, hacking them into
dusk persimmon calligraphy, flowered owls of smoke, fax machine abraxas.
See how deep they’ll sink. Maybe they’ll send signs back from the depths.
I’m going to slaughter some stories, stare into their entrails hanging from my
hands for a message. Maybe hang them from the rearview mirror like lucky
dice. The stories can be messy if they’re no more than bits of yourself, just
bits of you chopped into the language of the birds, bits of you hacked into
voces mysticae. Then you realize what you really have is potsherds and
nettles.
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