TONY

MANCUS

When I start it’s about what I have to get done, what worry sits on my chest like a rock weight, My new t-shirt has a light bulb shrugging with the words, Maybe worrying about it will help. It’s not posed as a question but feels like it is. There are no markings. Forget how to manipulate your hands in the sand pits. I’m not a mystery as much as I am not a mystery The foreign balloon was shot down somewhere over the Carolinas. Zach said that if it had gotten over Philly it would have been shot by a contraption from someone’s south Philly yard and there would be a drinking day to commemorate. I wonder not enough about the habits of others but concern myself with my own failure to maintain or establish them. Everything a kind of measure. Time and the continuity that it lacks now after the span of years between when our kids were unable to walk, and we held them together in the Glider Diner. Now they’re chasing each other around the H2 Suites in Dickson. A view of the parking lot below us and the mountains dimly across the flickering valley. Errol and Addie and Junie are one floor below us now. Seb sleeps in his tent and Shan deals with the hacking we’ve inherited for the past several weeks. Bugs in our burrow. In our brows. The beat lost among a crowd of staring flowers. I haven’t shared the short review of All the Ordinariness yet because I’m pretty sure that everyone I know thinks me a fool. There’s likely no truth to this perception and yet it sits with me in most of the hours I think about what I can and can’t do. A perch for a train. The bird in its howl. These tracks a Saturn-like ring and what gods eat their children without considering the rest of the lines they’d inherit. A series of steel girders holding the old wooden rollercoaster to the track so now it can invert. We hear the ghosts of our childhood screams come back from the grain of the wood. When PJ and I were ten or less we stayed at the Hershey Lodge while his father had a conference and went to the park. Now his dad is having part of his colon removed in a month. The rides our memories form for us. Of us.

There’s space for surprise if you stare blankly at something enough. It doesn’t really matter what thing specifically. Whatever you’re looking at becomes unfamiliar. Out the window of the airplane—the words reinvent the wheel make me wonder how many wheels are out there. This thin one and that one like a block with rounded edges. O-eyed to reinvent it over and over and pass us through its middle. I don’t know if figs and dates are cousins but maybe they should share a family tree. The rock patterns don’t make me think home is anywhere, really. At the end of it is an endlessness, the boy in the video arcade in Levis’s poem says. So teenagery, and yet. There was another thing I wanted to fold, but I forget so much these days. How to crease. Drop. Flag on a windless day. Some middle twenty years ago now I was closer to the front of a plane out to Tucson—I can’t place the year but think it was when Steve lived there on Campbell. I read a Burroughs book—My Education—which I can’t place now somewhere in the tall bookshelves gathering dust. Mostly dreams, I think, and small memories peopled not with Algiers or anything that would suggest the mugwomps—I think it was something he wrote well past the very long middle of his addled life. What fits neatly in the grids below us inked white by snow. No. Lined up by rows and rows of field and road. Seb looks up from his screen and says I’m really hungry, so. Look at the land until it becomes a sound. A solid state. The folks surrounding us unmasked in their quiet forms. The land shot through with the lightning strike of waterways. In another season there would be a color to associate there. Then the clouds like white hills, no elephants to be found. I almost fell asleep but my feelings kept me from it, or something in the show I was shoulder watching with subtitles. I want to ask you questions as if there’s a you there. One and only. What patches of pine make up your reminiscence. Some hint of a past in the highway exit signs and off-ramps. The new Killers song wanting to be Springsteen, when it brings up the opioid issue and I think of Jeff whose last name escapes me. Left-handed and dead in the 90s before the full bore dive into despair that seems to be bearing out everywhere now. Almost everywhere. At pool parties and empty houses with windows like closed eyes. I could see the cloth and how it never comes to an end from the curtain rods, just swims through the whole structure and grows dust in its weave as it slips out the back door. I think the pattern says exit. I don’t have a direct question for Elle and the cards next week. The veggies are on their way to freezing. In the show I’m shoulder watching the young mom and her late-teenage daughter keep having moments where they check in on each other. One asks Are you OK? Neither of them are named Annie. It’s challenging to think about thoughts when you’re thinking. But I wonder why Steve never was adopted. He kept his name distinct from the house and maybe that too was a sign. The dent in the sheet rock from his thrown fist one, too. We apply for our lives. And I can’t hear what comes next with the chatter about credit cards scripted to get us to mile our round miles and mile our wheel-round wheels. Instead of an endlessness, I think I’d see a play bar where we could scrub forward and back, forward and back at our leisure forever, if I was that boy. Seb asked what trouble was on Peña Blvd as we approached the airport. Shannon said when things go wrong and there are consequences. Or that was her response to getting in trouble. She juggles several things while we are in the air. We dance around meaning when what we know is set as a foundation. Or what we know is already well-defined and etched out by what we don’t. I said problems. He didn’t ask what they were, though. But what are they, really. The roots of requirement. I forget what it’s like to live inside books. But the stories we tell are full of trouble. The stories we tell ourselves trouble me, are troublesome. We can’t grow old without getting into some serious trouble. The pressure in my ears a’building. Some number of minutes from the ground. Water will be one big groan of trouble. They speculate—infamous, unnamed they in all their habits and long underwear—that AI will outstrip human intelligence in a timeframe that makes me uncomfortable. I want to buy everything I can and then lose it like language. Like age and luggage. A scrub as far forward as it will go just takes us to the credits. Anything could be a sign.

He’s a mighty good leader, he’s a mighty good leader, he’s a mighty good leader…all the way. Ringing in my head like the children’s cartoon songs that echo daily round. The turbulence from one sky ride makes my hands understeady, unsteadier. The wobble in each line more akin to a felt tremor, rather than a rounded earth and so many of my thoughts end with me looking for where they went and what fed them. It’s a cursed thing, the brain. Told to be master of its domain but when the surveilled particles wreak their messes I think a dog-like thought and then what happens. The unsold rest of my body. Turn outward. I think I know not knowing well now. And Seb says, Dad, Dad—I see my father’s turn toward me in how I turn. Something about patience and lack or mistrust of what will come next. There are equations and the screen-printed words of strangers on our chests. I think the people I know will eventually feel older than they’ve felt. All the way from up to heaven, he led my brother, he led my brother. High and tight in the strings and clotheslines. A shirt forms belief. A memory corded yard. In a meeting on Teams today, Keenan held up a glass full of green liquid and called it a “cucumber sadness.” The booze gone for the first month and a strawberry on the rim of the glass. The pilot intrudes, or maybe it’s a flight attendant. I’m uncertain what they attend to—wait staff in the sky—Treat me like the way. He said the drink tastes like cut grass, and I said there’s a place for that, and someone else said, yes, the yard and we eventually shut our faces off the screen. He led my mother, all the way. Still I can’t avoid the one-sided conversations, over and over I owe you nothing, but there Steve stands with a wiffle ball bat and the plates out for bases. Smell of grass in our mouths and it’s hard to take someone out of your memory. Easier in pictures, or to not look. Eventually I’ll have a lot less frequent intrusive monologues, I guess. It’s hard to know not knowing so well. All the way from up to heaven. He’s a mighty good. And we continued to swat at the sun like our lives were only that day long.