Strawberry Jam | Alexander T. Damle

Up on the Mesa, tucked in away between the sagebrush and saguaro, lay the bones of a man long dead. And yet the town lain below bears his name, a spectre haunting ever the future. Does he know, somehow, that his name lasts out as such, carried forth forever on time turtle’s back (down, down, all the way down)?

Naught but gods and men can live forever. Gods and men and certain much prized house pets, stuffed and mounted above mantlepiece, name given, decades down, to firstborn children, origins shrouded, but still the dog remains.

Kill your father’s gods, fuck your mother’s whores, live forever, oh dear sweet Cain, forever under the banner of heaven, watchful skies, judgment set eternal of selfsame.

And Cain, what of your sweeter brother, Abel? Where does he hide? From what came you, man’s first murderer? What dark reservoir of your father’s love? Did your brother scream out for your mercy, as you bashed in his brains? Or did he simply succumb to immortal truth?

There are spots ever upon the sun, gaseous pale lumps. Bastard sons of wicked edge, snail crawls along, ever so gentle, uncut.

Apocalyptic images of love, dance ever across the brain.

Flaccid dreams a’tremble now, quiver like wet lips, suck though they may. Up now sweet child! For It! Gets! Better! (Damned, damnable, all to hell).

The earth is a great machine, each its trembling yammerings a twist of gears leviathanic.

And we’re but products of our own ambitions, yammering kind of incoherent, as if some meaning may yet spring from fountains ever trapped in youth and lustre (lost), birthing tythes, what it takes to be human, we’re all but little pieces (geometric) of a complete whole, a race as an individual.

Turn now to chapter ten, paragraph five, sentence three: “All contained within is fiction, any similarity to individuals, living or dead, is simply the vast preponderance of the universe’s impenetrable desire for eternal coincidence”.

One day the birds will fall from the sky, and the last men and women will lay down to die, and winter skies will be beset by ash, and yet still all I will be able to think of is your pretty lips on that cold December night when you kissed me on the cheek.

Death is but a promised Springtime.

She sat eating strawberry jam out of the jar as a record player skipped over a scratched copy of the score to Tarkovsky’s Solaris in the background.

He saw his face in the mirror and he didn’t recognize it.

Time flows like a melting glacier.

A melting glacier flows like a dissolving clock.

Scrawling beautiful font, cursive curly qs, the F with which her name began written in a way indicating much thought and practice, but all fading out at note’s end. She knew she’d never again see his ethereal, ephemeral scrawl. She remembered his face.

Across lips spattered and smeared, bright summer’s day, crickets chirping, scent of newly cut grass.

Miasmatic breathe in deep, cloaks you chokes you.

Deep in the wood’s primordial darkness from the ground the mushroom sprouts, and though to his eyes it is small, beneath the earth it is connected to a creature older and vaster than humanity’s greatest cities. It is the earth’s largest organism, and yet the man does not even bare it a glance down. Snowstorm is coming. Got to get inside before the clouds break.

Stormhead full steam ahead.

Their hands brush each other briefly in the normal loping step of bipedal walk, and they recoil at the tingling touch, but each of them feels a slight warmth in their heart, a general thawing, at the contact, however brief.

A lethal overdose of fluoxetine is extremely difficult to achieve. A lethal overdose of an antihistamine based sleeping aide is nigh-impossible.

Play it again, Johnny Guitar.

Forever more, sinking slow, dreaming of a summer day when you were small, the beast uncoils itself from your body.

The Great Red Dragon - reach for the sky.

And yet time and memory persist, even as, with each passing day, the woman grows more and more convinced that the two are simply poltergeists of her younger self, demanding she walk a different path.

And yet paths never change, even when they fork and curve in on themselves and begin again.

I wish I remembered how to cry.

You remember a song from your adolescence like the face of a vanished lover, lay in bed next to you. And yet somehow you cannot recall its name.

The woman shelters in the cave from the storm outside. She wraps her arms tight around itself for warmth.

The train clicks down the tracks, and the young man watches it through the window of his run-down home. He thinks of running outside, clambering on, and just seeing where it takes him. But he doesn’t.

A faint whisper of steam crawls upwards from the coffee cup

Must we live forever?

Exploring the basement of an old house tucked back in a woods deep in the heart of Louisiana, I found a trap door in the floor. I opened it, and found a root cellar, so I went inside. I wandered through the cellar a bit, and found another trapdoor. When I opened this one, all that I saw was a yawning chasm, deep and infinite. So I went inside.