Occupy Jehovah's Hurricane

In my ill born dark corner of the world I wake, and the old pests retreat from my skin.  Emma Gerber is nowhere to be seen.  I can only find vacant traces of her in the room as if she were lifted into some confine beyond the eyes of God.  If he is or sees.  For sometimes it seems that his sight is blind.  Perhaps he sees even now in the eye of the storm overhead looking down into a single hole of peace amidst hundreds of miles of tempest.  Hundreds of years of tempests.  I hear a knock on the door.  It has a rustic sound that seems distant and faraway as if the storm outside would soon sweep it away.  I step down the old stairs that breathe sighs of old wisdom in their quiet dilapidation.  I open the door, and I see a man and a woman.  They look afraid.  Not at first, but if you pause to gaze upon them you can see an old tacit fear that rips through their hearts in the prison of their minds.
"Can I help You?" I ask.  The woman twists her hands together nervously.  They look surprised my accent is somewhat of a delicacy in these parts.
"We would like to as you if you've accepted god into your life?" I laugh mirthlessly for a moment and build their perplexity.  It is an old skill I used once long ago when asking questions of a darker nature.
"The real question is has he accepted me?  From the life that I've led I'm far beyond his grace, and hope for my salvation is a useless pipe dream."  They look at me stunned.  They have finally found a man so decrepit and abandoned someone more worthy of their words than most that they talk too, and they cannot wait to walk away.  They hand me a pamphlet then scurry down the steps, and walk away.  Across the street I see a man feeling his way along the walls.  Muttering too himself old lines from old plays his feet look swollen he has no shoes, but it seems that fate has cursed him thus.  I walk to the opposite end of my home, and gaze across at the field where members of the OCCUPY movement have taken up residence.  I have watched them one tent is empty perhaps someone will occupy it soon.  I know that I will not.  I have heard word of infection on the streets.  I may be a morose man but I yet value my life.  I will stay inside once more, and hide from the absurdity abound.

When I was young I searched for desolation.  Old burnt out cars rusted and brown by long ignored desire lines.  They sparked in me a curiosity that bugged me until I grew older.  Then my curiosity was satiated to the point of sorrow.  Now it no longer matters I'm merely a passenger on a train that never stops moving even into eternity.  I stand up for a moment and look down and see her walking across the room.  Her face seems worn and haggard as if she is pursued by some nameless and irrevocable force.  She is a mirror before me, and I have been long in the cellar of solitude.  So I call out in the dark and she lifts her head.  I ask her how she is, she looks at me strangely as if wondering how so ragged a man could have such a lucid voice and countenance.  She tells me that she's alone in this quiet place.  I can feel her isolation just like mine.  I talk to her of a few basic things.  We talk about the fact that 4'33 is playing on the radio station, and how we ourselves are a part of the music.  We both laughs at such an absurd composition  Out words cross each other and seem to reach past our walls.  She walks away, but I know now that I'm not quite alone.  We have shared our voices in the dark perhaps to shed a little light.  so much lies below that we are yet strangers  But I know her name and she knows mine.  She is Emma Gerber, and I am Pestilent Mann.

When I Was a Child

I wake up once again feeling the bug’s retreat from me, and hide in the crevices away from my vision.  I try to distract myself from the invasive paranoia that has come from my pestilent life.  I stand up and walk to the window looking out from the abandoned building that was once part home part factory and now is neither.  Someone else seems to have taken up residence with me.  I should tell them about the bugs, but if they’re here already there is no hope for them, and the pestilence will pursue them from the eyes of the Aegean to the mounts of the Himalayas.  I see a single bug crawling toward my foot and I step on it.  I felt not an ounce of guilt, as I know that I have successfully improved his brethren by removing him from their number.  His stupidity does not become them.  He does a disservice to their immutable and timeless strength. 

I walk downstairs, and I see that my nightly guests have already left me.  I think of the pictures in the room and I wonder back to my own family left so far behind on the distant shores of my own country.  Where the dirge like waves run against the shore like the howling’s of an endless wake for a nameless soul leaving behind the ineffable bereft.  It almost makes me weep to remember it.  I was so happy before the blight of euphoria, and before the guilt.  Before I made the mistake. 

When I was a child:

We lived in a small house where there lived an old sulfurous odor that permeated through the air, and sought to stifle me.  My father was a German, and I spent many mornings gazing into the faraway depths of his pale eyes that concealed a distant flame.  My mother was a woman with fiery red hair and a vitality that seemed to hold the house itself together, even when the cracks dug themselves into the wall.  Our house was always under perpetual assault from cockroaches.  No matter how hard we tried to drive them away they always persisted, and I remember that the only time I ever saw my father cry was when he took a single bite of a fish he had caught in the Irish sea only a few ours before and the fish crumbled revealing a myriad of cockroaches united in their insatiable hunger.  And my mother spent ours running her hands through the distant corners of our closets looking for cockroach eggs cloistered in the warm darkness.  As a child I was all greeted with all manner of pestilence. 

I remember that one day my father took me to Dublin so that I could city, little did he know that he was to give me my first grand exhibition of death.  Near the center of Dublin with their backs against the wall three men were shot and slid down the wall leaving three red stains against the wall their eyes frozen in their final perilous moments.  I looked into my fathers eyes and saw the reflection of memory, for he too had seen such terror in the eyes of men, he had the scars and the pension for drink to prove it. 

“Daddy why did they shoot those men?” I asked.

“Because they wanted freedom.” He answered in an impersonal manner that made him yet a stranger in this land.  But I was to learn their struggle was mine, and I learned to love our misfortune as if it were a brother even as I fought against it.

I open my eyes as the light shines in from the window illuminating the old abandoned building next to Castle Apartments, and I think about the person who has also taken up residence in this spacious building.  I hope they get out before they get the bugs.  But I knew they wouldn’t escape, they were already on their way here before I ever saw them pulled by an invisible and nameless current that tugged at us all.  Outside I can see a blind man who sits next the clinic speaking of what is to come as if he has some prophetic understanding of the future.  

My Bed Bug Problem

The day started with an old and peaceful feeling somewhere in the deepest corners of my heart running away from me and hiding somewhere outside of my minds eye. I looked out my window and saw the side of the Castle Apartments Building leering at me, and for a moment it was as if a thousand voices whispered to me from across the wall imploring me to step inside their doors and join them. But I can't. I have made my peace with it and I have to stay here like a little marginalized cockroach. I certainly deserve it. I gazed into the little alarm clock that stood beside my cot. Its quiet green hum piercing the roof of my mind. And with that I stood up from my bed and wiped the spittle from the corners of my mouth as calmly as I could manage. My hands still shook a little. And if I hadn't grabbed onto the edge of my cot I'm pretty sure I would have fallen over, but I didn't. I steadied myself as the little black dots seemed to crawl across my vision and a quiet fury hammered away at my head

I walked downstairs to the first floor of the dilapidated building I now called home, the air rife with heat and stench of the slowly closing summer, and greeted my nightly guests. They quietly grumbled a familiar greeting except for this one old man who lay still entirely to still. I walked up to him and gave him a gentle prod as fear quietly crept into me. He didn't move for a moment, and I gazed at him soberly. One of the others walked over to him and gently pushed me to the side. I was too shocked to act as another man gingerly pulled off his shoes and began examining them and trying them on as if he were buying them at a store. At this point the man (who had been sleeping, perchance dreaming) woke up. The man holding his shoes looked at him for a moment transfixed by the quiet fire he carried in his eyes. Then he dropped his shoes in as neutral a manner as he could and walked away. Within a few moments they had all gone to different corners to beg. I watched their shoulders sloping away with quiet resignation.

After they were all gone I paused and let the silence once again wash over me. No one had lived here (and I mean stayed here for at least ten years). I saw their pictures in one of the rooms upstairs. They were all smiling they seemed content with their lot in life. But that must have been a long time ago. There was little sign that anyone lived here a few pots and pans some cups, and an old piano coated in layers of sawdust from when they built Castle Apartments. Back before I was here. Back before it all. I thought of my alarm clock and thought about how it was broken. It only goes one way. Well nothing to do about that nothing at all.

In that quiet room I looked up at the ceiling my eyes glazing over as I looked at the hissing eye of the phosphorescent light. It had grown in an ignoble crescendo as I stood distracted and now it gave illumination where darkness should prevail. I hung there a moment transfixed by its ignorance of time and space not knowing who and what it would outlive. Sometimes it seemed like things never born lived longer. Like steel, and fire. I sat there for most of the day and pondered the only thing worth pondering. And once again my own self-loathing grew, driven by its own engine. Until it was night again and I walked upstairs laid my head down on the pillow and felt a sharp bite. I reached down and held a little creature in my hand. I laughed for my name is Pestilent Mann. I and knew it would continue to follow me, because It always has and always will. God I could use a drink, but I don't deserve it.