And The Birds Sang Beautifully
REMINGTON GRAVES
“Look at me. Don’t look away…there…see this…in my eyes…do you recognize it?”
”I don’t—please just let me go, I don’t know you. I don’t know why you’re doing this. Will you please just let me go, please? I swear to you on everything I hold sacred, I won’t tell anyone. I promise!” She blubbered through mucus and trailing tears. Her red hair clung to her sweaty face and to the corner of her quivering soft-pink lips.
”You have seen me in the waves of a wandering Wednesday evening, in between the swaying leaves while birds sung a sullen song, as rays from the sun caressed your scarlet crown as you walked gracefully on by. The tree’s limbs bent painfully to touch you, and you unknowingly threw off the obeisance with a shrug.”
”Will you please explain to me what I did to you,” she whispered as her head hung heavy, “and I promise I can…I can…fix it.” Her arms pulled up with dirty rope, her white freckled fingers crossed each other in a thorny nest. The pastel-yellow summer dress her grandmother had given her was now torn and soiled and draped about her like a giant autumn leaf.
“I want you to do exactly what you’re doing now. It pleases me to watch you surrender as your bare, pale feet cannot sustain you any longer,” he said focusing his gaze on her slender ankles and seeing his mother’s face on a small birthmark ,he smiled warmly.
”I don’t understand why I am here. What is this place?”
”An abondoned warehouse on the outskirts of the city. Nobody travels out this far. Not a single person can hear you howl in that dress…no one cares about your better angles…or see your stylish eyebrows…,” he uttered in a thick, soft baritone as he slipped one hand into a latex glove and then the other, “and I can proudly tell you, this moment will not be photographed.”
A horse neighed on in the distance as its hooves delved in the dusty nightmare…and the wind whined and cut through the crops…cicadas suddenly symphonied…an owl hooted then painfully screeched…in the midst of the swelling cacophonous pandemonium, she finally constructed a world within that musical composition where a spinning sun caressed her hair…where hulking trees waved their arms and reached to cover her…where Wednesday lasted forever, and the birds sang beautifully.
She had to.
∞
Again And Again
REMINGTON GRAVES
Rising
Monks that chanted clung to bells that firmly standeth
With such clamor, forced with swinging, and a ringing no longer cometh dreams of angels singing
So the hissing sickle to the wheat and the servants that did plead
A harvest that was promised now a hallmark mephitic an alarmed
Signifying the delusion of mass conformity’s inclusion
And with a pair of eyes upon that old unquestioned effigy, I sat at the corner of cathedrals planted and blurring into perigee
Falling
Beneath the beaten path of stamped hooves above the dirt and grass, your days are like years and my years your days—the drying mud the roof of graves
To delay the drapery of the mantle, the maiden in her crimson garb did handle such trembling hands as sunbeams kissed her broken fingers
Inside the fortress where thine Superman lay dead, in a tomb, a cold deep abyss never ending with its rearing head
Beheld the dawn galloped through the foggy wall, and so the voices that once kept you and rendered you at all, supposed a treatise begging for you once for all
Pulling Up
The son would not die, despite the three day bite of the cold breath of winter, and the father had sent three kings to ensure the success of life but with a sigh
And so I set out and descended aback the beast—my downward spiral, holding firmly eyes wide open, clenching teeth as blood did pour
At the bottom I beheld him and I leaped for knew I must
I did trust my desperation as I heard my body aching with a dying and a crying never more
My hands clamped about his neck and gasped and grunted with much begging he did plead and although there were no thirty pounds of silver, I would do it again and again
For Free
∞
For A Few Collars More
REMINGTON GRAVES
Sixty-seven fucking years old and still sulking severely at the surreality of life. I lost the woman I loved on a beach near a crude cliff dive called Careone’s in South Padre Island. My mother’s wedding band was in my trousers twirling between the fingers of my right hand as I walked towards the waves where she bathed silently staring at the setting sun. I had become nervous, I remember clearly, as the sound of laughing children dwindled in the distance, but pressed on through cool waters. And right before I uttered a word to get her attention, who knows what that first word was going to be, I heard an explosion followed by a sharp ringing in my ear, and then…nothing.
A violent slap woke me to consciousness as I coughed up sand and water and tried making sense of the dancing stars in the sky. Incoherent and muffled mumbling and then murmurs from afar, permeated the promenade next to the ocean. Wailing and wild-eyed bloodstained tourists ran to and fro, some carrying small lifeless bodies. Others crawled or curled themselves into fetal position trembling and trying to assess the situation.
I was a babe in the woods then; a young man of twenty years old and unaware of the atrocities that awaited me—the challenges, the painful separation of that life and the one that awaited.
I get off at the next stop. My mark ( or “collar” is what we old guys call them in the business) appears asleep eleven rows ahead of me—but I assure you, he is not. I look out at the window and I am thankful to still feel the small semblance of humanity I do at times: the monolith enthroned in the midst of a million pine trees sits quietly, majestically, without concern for me and the lives of anybody else on this train. My countenance, now much older, white stubble, crow’s feet…overlaps the scenery and I notice the cigarette burn on the gray argyle scarf I’m wearing—the scarf she gave me the night after our first date right outside her university. The thin,cold glass separates us, the world that calls me home, to feed it with my bones. But I do not want to go the grave just yet, not just yet.
“Next stop, seven minutes!,” cried the voice over the intercom. “Seven minutes.”
As I took one last glance at the monstrous mountain through my window, I put my sunglasses on and pressed my left hand against the window pane. “Soon, you’ll see me. Soon…”
”…Just let me bring a few more with me.”
∞
Notable Quotes
MARILYN MANSON
“The most valuable thing [Anton LaVey] did that day was to help me understand and come to terms with the deadness, hardness and apathy I was feeling about myself and the world around me, explaining that it was all necessary, a middle step in an evolution from an innocent child to an intelligent, powerful being capable of making a mark on the world.”
Tracing Lords
REMINGTON GRAVES
“Ever wondered what the hell the sulfur symbol is doing on the Oreo cookie? I hadn’t noticed it until about a week ago when I sat down from a long day at school to unwind with my usual episode of Alf. I can’t get enough of that show. My cousin lives in Hollywood and rubs elbows with all these bigwig types and he tells me that the writer of the show is on heroin and that he only writes episodes to support his habit. I mean, can you believe it? Heroin? Is that sexy? I don’t know, I guess some of the guys in them heavy metal bands do look like they smoke heroin, or eat it, or whatever it is you do with it. It be bitchin’ to try it someday, I guess. When mother goes to work, I get in her closet and look through her stuff. Just a bunch of crap, really. Her name tags from all the jobs she’s worked are all in this treasure box. “Mrs. Kuzma” they all say. But she gots these leather pants that look badass on me. Well, most of her threads look better on me than they do on her, and it kills her too. Man, as soon as I’m eighteen I’m hitting the road, if I can wait that long, and heading to California and you bet your bottom dollar I’ll be doing it in those damn trousers. ‘Bottom dollar’, is something my Grandma says from time to time. She’s the only one that ever listens to me, you know? I get along with her the most. I would always draw her pictures and she kept them all. ‘You can really draw, kiddo’, she would say…truth is, I can only trace. I can trace the shit out of anything, seriously. Grams doesn’t laugh at me when I tell her I want to be a famous singer one day, or maybe be on one of those crazy rock videos swinging my hair around wrapped around the arm of the singer or at least the guitar player—people love my blonde hair. Hell, I might even get a gig doing stunts for the action movies—I hear not a lot of girls got the balls for that kind of stuff. Shoot, I’ve always been a tomboy, just ask my cousin Brian—well, you can’t, he’s dead, but I would keep up with him and all his buddies back when he was around. Sometimes I really miss that asshole. I shouldn’t call him that, but he liked it, no, really. He would smile when I’d say, “Hey, little asshole, that’s my pop tart,” or something like that, you know? Anyway, gotta go, Alf’s coming on soon. See you tomorrow, Ahmed,” She said grabbing her skateboard and dashing out of the store with her usual bag of Cheetos and a Cherry Coke.
”Yes, see you tomorrow, Nora. And tell your mother her tab needs paying again, it is getting high, too high again,” replied the store clerk moving his head from side to side making sure she skated across the street unharmed. Closing his eyes and drawing his face slowly towards the fan with its missing blade, he began to hum a television show theme song, unknowingly, while sweat trickled down his spine underneath his new Hawaiian shirt. “That girl is gonna be trouble.”
∞