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fences

steam from the deep sink brushes past my face, moistening the hair on my brow as i stare out the window at the thermometer, which cracks right in front of me, and the mercury makes a silver-flecked hole in the snow, deep. i'm reluctant to take a walk because i'm only staying here a week and don't want yet another street to be burned into my memory , another street that i will have to recall, associating tender thoughts and feelings that bleed through certain objects and make me cry on some future night in a new bed. i repeat my name over and over again into the diluted reflection on the window's steamed interior above the sink, trying to connect it with my face, waiting for ancestry i'm not aware of to chronologize itself suddenly in my mind. every yard is hidden under snow, holding memories that aren't mine, every yard is surrounded by a fence i didn't build, crossed by shadows of telephone poles that are too big and abstract for me to ever erect. a dog runs by in the backyard, barking at things i can't hear, i want to go into the bathroom to take a piss and never come out, want to be reborn immediately.

right now in my memory i'm on a rickety white-painted wooden rollercoaster with a friend who i may never speak to again, the car we're in is lifting off the track slightly and we think we might die, he stops laughing but i don't. the floorless, untraversable labyrinth of white wooden frame creaking like an arthritic skeleton around us, i drank too much wine and i'm on my stomach in the bathroom, giggling happily, drawing on the floor with stolen lipstick, i've never slept with a girl and i wonder, looking at the slick jerk-off magazines stacked in the corner of the linoleum room, what it's like. next thing i know i'm in bed with one, plunging away on a beat-up mattress with strange blurred floral patterns, looking over her shoulder into this impenetrable lacework garden, trying very hard to finish so i can relax and spend the rest of the night trying to figure out what it was like. how the hell did i convince the landlord to rent us this place that protects us with it's undecorated walls from the winter wind? but it's not winter, that hot breeze on my nakedness from behind is from the open window, not the heater, i smell vanilla on her neck, i'm about to raise myself to look into her eyes, my friend looks across the kitchen with no idea of his distance from me in time, laughing drunkenly at a joke that i planned on telling as i drove here, to his new house that has the same kind of ceilings as his old apartment, provoking a bout of deja-vu that lasts so long that i have to lie down on the couch, the party's voices fading, the couch so plush that i may be able to close my eyes and sink deeply out of sight into it and through it, falling out of air-conditioned air into another room full of different people with differently-colored drinks in their different hands. i am on a new couch listening to louis armstrong sing songs that were written almost a century ago, but his voice is closer than anyone else's as i stare into the lamps on the ceiling, the ceiling becoming a floor on which sits only a few strange glowing objects, the way the ceilings became whole new palace rooms when i was a kid standing on my head against the woodpile, in a desolate living room, smelling the exact same wood scent that i'm smelling now, drifting through the window of a hotel where the floor is covered with more shoes than there are days in a month and my girlfriend is telling me that she thinks she's pregnant. another person on this planet? i haven't understood one yet, and here comes another indecipherable human being, one that will undoubtedly confuse and terrify me by acting a little bit like myself. i am reading the dictionary, forgetting whoever it is that is talking to me under or maybe louder than the intensified, artificial rain of the shower, i wonder who is bathing and if i should go join them, see if they want to share the shower. my feet are cold, i want to feel that strange burn that you get when the hot water hits your cold feet and you close your eyes, the rest of your skin nonexistent, drifting into another vaguely familiar room and noticing objects that weren't there before. all these thin pages the bedside lamp shines through, i'll never be able to incorporate all these words into my life no matter how long i live. i like showers because they're a break from life. i hope i never wake up utterly confused in a room that i can't remember at all, unsure of the details of my history. i hope nobody ever hates me for doing something cowardly, i'd rather be hated for doing something noble.

i like these shoes better than my last pair, i'm standing in a cold river getting a blowjob from a girl who doesn't seem to think it odd that i'm standing in a river completely nude, i guess i'm not wearing shoes after all. i wish someone would bring me a freshly uncorked bottle of grape merlot wine, and maybe some rice pilaf, but i don't think that anybody will. in one of my memories my mother is yelling for me to get out of the shower before i run us out of hot water, i wonder how it's possible that we have hot water at all. i'll have to do some research. this is a bad time to think of my mother. actually, it's not, since i'm no longer being fellated, now i'm behind the wheel of a vaguely familiar car, i've never really looked at the interior of this car before, how deep red it is, how velvety and vaginal, alone in this tiny, quickly moving room that could be a bedroom for two people who never lie down. i don't pay much attention to my cars until they break down, then i can concentrate more while walking, usually i play music very loud so i don't think about the fact that i'm in an incredibly dangerous machine. i think my father died in one of these things once, ran into an eighteen-wheeler, a thing much larger than a car, and this is so long ago that it doesn't affect me at all. BOOM! or maybe CRUNCH. just like that, and he'll never have to brush his teeth or hear an annoying radio commercial again. why am i drinking beer, if i hate it? i continue to drink it anyway until i can stare into that fishtank over there and feel perfect, woozy empathy with every cold eye-twitch. i tell the unnamed kid sitting next to me that i can imagine very easily what it would be like to be a fish, he looks quizzically, then tells me he thinks he knows exactly what i mean, that i am probably an unrecognized genius of some kind. that same song is playing again, i wish somebody would shut it off so my life can slow down a bit and i won't feel so confused, not sure what year this is, whether it's one i've lived or one that's arriving, and what kind of food i am about to eat, i hope it doesn't have an odor, odors take me back even further and then i have to think about my childhood which wasn't particularly bad, just tiring and vague, surrounded almost constantly by pine trees. suddenly, after hours of absorption in my imagination, i'd look up at the huge carpet of pine needles and be terrified of my solitude, even though i prefer it to company, terrified of all this green space of too many fibers that i will never know by heart. why are all these people in my bedroom? i shut off the light and they stumble around spilling drinks on each other and snickering, spotlighted occasionally by headlights through the undraped windows, i hear sirens that aren't coming for me yet and lower myself into the steaming bathtub with a cold beer in my hand, i go limp with relaxation in the hot water, my workclothes gathering heavily around me, the beer spills down my chin, the freshly shaven skin stinging under the alcohol almost enough to wake me up, and i wish the neighbors would shut off that song that's muffled in the wall and let me enter the present.

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