The Fire near Wood Street

Written on 09-18-08

Edited on 10-26-08

Two white plastic speakers uttered in flat
muffles a harrowingly metrosexual
Kanye chorus about flashes and lights,
a tune booming natural upon Jeff’s arrival.

Sitting the circle in the living room,
this haunted house’s groaning end deep
above us, we felt like we were little bards
brought in on tidal wrecks from Baltic seas.

We had arrived with the purpose of
transforming stories in our minds,
morphing tales into something elses,
new dimensions, syntheses and paralysis.
And it always seemed time to speak.

Inevitably the others peered at me. I had
not been following, my mind locked on the
situation, my voice muttering, aflame with
wine, ecstatic, hyperized, insecure at once.
What to do but play the fool’s vocal harp?

Like a shaggy pest in disguise, my small hulk
burying stature in the risk of social equality,
I announced a distinctly bland red death call:
“There was a huge fire earlier. Down the street.
Did you see it?” Their eyes turned to the street.

(Oh they hadn’t a clue about the fire. And so,
in the same thread as last time, my mouth boomed
the cop-lights scattered outside, preached the
dramatic stops and starts four blocks away, four
hours earlier. It was a bright and dull and faded
yarn, tattered oral weavework and mystery)

They looking on wide-eyed, mind’s eyes on the lasting
images, an emotionally imaginary crock-pot, American
sensations swirling around inside, flames licking the rims.

(The truth of the matter: the flames licked up a
building only two streets away from our house)

The orange beacon of smoke had been curling
through the black Bristolean sky like a myopic
funnel-cloud as people gathered, a procession sans
any musical dirge, replaced by all types of leeching
buffoonery, myself included, standing around like
dogs, a fealty sworn to a ghostly embrace with death.

“Where were you when it started?” they asked.
Parking, a road or parked cars and us penetrating
that row, relieved that Wood Street wasn’t on fire.
My eyes sunk as we joined the crowd of the meek,
the helpless, the curious, sorrowful, worried, girls

who showed up screaming, looking for their fathers,
looking for their fathers’ buildings, screaming more,
“that’s my house that’s my house” in strange, scary
tears and cacophony, I sitting stunned, Karen at my
side, though we were too shocked for tears and remorse.

(There was no death. Tones and tunes
really do play tricks sometimes)