Category: Alias Harlequin

Alias and the Ants

On By NW FilbertIn Alias Harlequin, death, depression, fiction, life, loneliness, longing, Writing2 Comments

trailofants

Alias observes the ants in his bathroom.  Each Spring.  Spring or Fall, no matter his warfare – treating / trimming / grooming the perimeter of ‘his’ home – no difference (or differance) – Spring and Fall, a trail, a train, a miniscule “army” (whether ‘Army Ants’ or no, he could not say) of tiny insects crossing his counter from sink rim to (nonexistent) god-knows-where and back again, doing god-and-perhaps-scientist knows what…traversing, infesting, conquering, appearing, occurring…

…Alias is unattended…

Observing ‘his’ (not-his) ants.  A collective of interminable insects roving to and fro between a Lilliputian crack along the paint of his lavatory wall (an outside boundary of ‘his’ ‘home’), the cylindrical rim involving ‘his’ ‘vanity’ (does he still possess any of that?) sink, his children’s toothbrushes (the “family” so wishes the infestation undone) and wherever they might journey over the surface’s edge, the drainage holes, the drawers…

Ants.

Alias composes both paste and powder of Boric acid and particled sugar.  A supposed deadly mix for puny pests.  Like “life” for him.  Murderous moments of sweetness colluded with deathly compounds: vodka, cigarettes, illicit sex; bacon, buttery-fried flour, altitude…

Responsibility (instinct) and desire (impulse).

Alias is alone.  Most definitely that.  Solo and (interpretively) forsaken.

His ‘kids’ are grown.  His loves (clearly) outworn.  His ‘friendships’ recursive, reductive, assumptive, routine.  But the weed-trees, the weather and wear, the spiders, the crickets, termites, and dust…and ants, carry on in a differently (and differantly) incessant way.

Indefatigable.  Undefeatable.  (Like death.)

That within succulent sweetness, luscious limnings of love, lie poisons and trace, exposures – never a joy without risk, no ecstasy lacking its peril, no thriving without its decease.  Positives all laced with negatives, happiness balanced in depress.

Alias gazes.  He stares.  Isolated, trimming at an untrimmed beard over a sink he did not install, looking (and failing to see at all) into a mirror replicating demise…above a trail of ants he’s fed sugary poison for weeks, which appear to be active and thriving, in differance to his own ‘self’ – choking and chortling on pleasures that keep resulting in pains, experiments emerging as monstrous, efforts destroying their ends.

He sighs, does Alias.  However he seeks a team and a trail it leads him to toxin, bane eroding his chance.  Considers Laramie, Lucy (his wife), and each child.  Ruminates purpose or promise or hope.  Wonders how relief repulses its reasons.  Why remedy acts against cure.  How ants insist on their patterns.  Why exultation evinces in ruin.

 

 

Alas, Alias

On By NW FilbertIn absence, Aging, Alias Harlequin, depression, fiction, grief, Language, loneliness, memory, Perception, Writing8 Comments

kitty-litter

“Cat litter,” the last thing said, and something about that abandoned bicycle, a child’s bike, deep red, repainted, left askew on their lawn for days.

Those were the last things.  The last things she said.  And so he’d begun to move about much more carefully.  Timidly some might say, an amalgam of caution and care.  Ever tender, aware that things break, or tear, spill, or fall apart.  End.

But then Laramie, his sister, mother, the kids – some entities seem to persist, so few and so stubborn, inexplicably, threatening almost, as if an accumulating disaster, an heavier withdrawal.  He doesn’t know what to make of it.

Abandonment crushes all scales and statistics – but pebbles and dust, foundations and roots still remain.  Persistent.  Resilient.  Irrational.

Like a sloth he repaired to his desk, as delicate and slow.  He took up a pen with his head in his hand.  He was lonely, alone but for quiet, sweet silence, and branches and birdsong and wind, autos and dogs.  Not quite quiet.  Not quite alone.  But abandoned, far as he could surmise.

He wrote.  Rather drew.  Looping lines that were shaky on paper.  Tried to make his operation more smooth.  It failed.  He shakes now, does Alias, from drinking and smoking, aging and grief.  From perspective.  His perspective.

A rattling undone, an erosion.  He sighs.

A bike, and “cat litter,” then gone.  Others had left for much more and much less.  Litanies of reasons of wrongs are so easy with humans involved, never mind the ‘weight of the good.’  Can’t compete.  Won’t compute. There are mistakes, and effort involved – both are failures, no matter the theories or talk, no matter their universality.  He was wrong and a failure, which equals abandon no matter the words they produced.

Alas, Alias.  A depression.  An outlook that colors the field, but it’s charcoal.  No matter the ‘whom’ it will bleed, run them dry, and disfigure.  No one’s withstood it for long, for all of his kindness and passion (devised to distract from the swallowing dark, or the primer – his base coat is death).  He’s alone.

Not a Laramie, mother, or kin.  Without doubt there’s no lover, no friend.  Just a man and his books and incessant grey thoughts, and a pen.

He begins, looping lines…forming “Cat litter,” the last thing she said…

Bike

Without Criteria: Laramie

On By NW FilbertIn Alias Harlequin, Art, creative writing, death, desire, fiction, identity, Travel, WritingLeave a comment

Picasso - don quixote

Laramie shoots and kills.  Laramie loves and captures.  Catches and release.

Riding along the ridge, singing, swearing, singing.  This journey’s a long time coming.

The need to get away.  For autonomy.  To be self-called.  To begin after all of this and that.  Recall and resound.  Taking stock.

He’s always been this way – a little undomesticated.  A touch of untamed wild.  Never finding a place.  Never quite belonging.

Boundaries forged by relation and response (-ability) all forwarding to limits, cages, toward constraints or restraint he can not abide.  Each vocation or program, discipline or field, replete with vocabularies and methods, praxis and behaviors misfitting to degrees he finds it hard to accept.  A ‘lone wolf,’ ‘self-made man,’ a patent failure or ‘with no name.’  Renegade?

He rides.  The shuffling flanks feel heavy under him, providing awareness of his own weight.  Considers Alias, and thinks how both do not belong.  How adamant and vehement he himself cries freedom, how Alias skinnies and wriggles past the gates.

How neither could ever be said to have ‘succeeded.’  How both (in his mind) would never have failed.  How neither and both are alike.  Neither and both are so different.  Neither and both alive.

Rides on.  Too old for all this but he’ll camp out tonight.  To prove to himself that he’s old both and wild.  Yet.  That he aches to be tamed and untame.  Yearns to belong, independently.  The want for a self that is selfless.  The urge for a course without banks.

Laramie wants to be world, alive.  Wants to be fertile and virile, viral, untrained.  Wants claimed and confessed-for, wants derided and praised.

“We’re the renegade scholars,” sometimes he would say, “learning the lingo and undoing like acid its heart.”  “We master and tell of its weakness, expert novitiates in all.”  “We unwind and unravel.  Travel and root.  We are rhizome,” he says, “drawn out from anywhere.  We absorb and vituperate, ingest and expel.”

He rides, and he rides, in love with the muscling flanks.  The wind tearing through hair and beard, blistering cheeks, stinging his eyes.  There are tears.  Laramie swallows.  The sorrow and joy are one.  Life and its death copulating…heaving and sweating, oily and dry to the bone.  He is brittle.

Laramie is needing to stop, and he feels it.  His body is singing – pain tells.  Time is ripe.  There’s an end.  It is coming.  Unrolling his pack…here it goes…

Alias Impassive

On By NW FilbertIn absence, Alias Harlequin, depression, Experience, fragments, loneliness, longing, Loss, Melancholy, Uncertainty, Writing8 Comments

10380970_1451619841776520_7727485160186058295_n

Alias awakens to disquiet.  Comprehension out of joint.  The motions, the motions, but nothing complies.  He does not feel so he touches the knee of his son.  Yes, he seems to be there.  Words with their sayings and tellings aren’t meaning.  Perhaps he hears.  Feels he doesn’t have pants on, but perceivably they’re there.  Goes to bathroom, masturbates, conjuring images of his love.  Disconnect.  He is not sure that he is here.  Or where it is he is.

Not the trees, not the road, not his car.  Many things are missing.  Not his thoughts.  Not pets, not postal service, not sky.  He’s come unfastened.

The motions, the motions, he makes coffee.  The motions, the motions, he showers.  But did he use shampoo?  Deodorize his pits?  Remember the drop of cream?  Are those his feet?  Walking into work they all take notice.  Is he bleeding?  Checks his hair, his face, his clothing.  Is he stinking unawares?  Deactivated and decoupled, unable to correlate.  He’s in his chair.

He’ll go for water.  He’ll check again.  He’ll look through letters, notes, to-dos, he’ll use his fingers.  He seems inoperable, confused.  They’re noticing.  He hasn’t spoken.  He puts on music.  Sits again.  He looks at language, hears some sounds.  He’s not authorial, nothing gives direction, nothing issues commands.    Disjointed and isolate.

He tries to sleep.  The dreams don’t follow, the eyes don’t rest.  He is confused.  He is detached.  He looks at pictures, attempts a memory.  Everything is near and quite intangible.  Everything is distant.  He cannot cry.  He cannot feel it.  He isn’t thinking anymore.  Something is unhinged.

The motions slow, the motions blur.  Not conscientious.  No recognize.  It seems there are duties.  It seems related.  It seems forgotten or never begun.  He’s too much there and not enough.  Unavoidable and out of sorts.  He cannot hide and there are others.  He tries the motions, and the motions, and they’re still without sound.  He can’t compute.  Head in his hands on his desk.  His eyes are burning.  He can’t find pain, locate discomfort.  No ability to take account.

He pushes objects.  Cuts his palm.  He walks again.  The motions, the motions.  There is no wind.  The sun pervasive.  He sees some plants.  They are not there.  They have not grown.  He is alone and everything knows this.  Dissociated.  He’ll try again.  What will he try?  He’ll try the motions, he’ll try the motions.

Alias motions with his hand.  It comes undone, it does not signal, there is no shadow.  Too much shadow.  He looks around.  There are the others.  They seem to wince, to look too much, to look away.  There is no commerce.  There is no passage.  He sits again.  He hears a sound.  He thinks the hearing.  He tries his luck.  There is no luck.  He wants to realize.  Anything.  Something.  Perhaps.  Maybe.  Motions, motions, motions.  He is not moving.  Things are vacant.

Alias impassive.  He tries to speak.  No one to speak with.  He works at thoughts.  All misremembered.  He’ll try again, he’ll try the motions, keep at the motions, the motions.  All the motions he will try.  He has no purpose.  The motions fail.  Vacuous and without intention.  Was only trying, was just to see.  He cannot see it.  The motions fail.  He moves again.  Things are dissolving.  Disestablished.  Without relation.

He calls the dog, he has no voice.  There’s no response.  He is within a vast alone.  He is not happy.  He is not sad.  He’s unaffected.  He tries the motions.  He tries again.  After all he will stop trying.  Sometime later he’ll give up, but now he tries.  He tries the motions.  He tries again.  He is disquiet, and without end…