AN EDUCATION FOR FIELD MICE by C.A. Childers ====================== Copyright 2004, C.A. Childers. Some rights reserved. cachilders@apeinfinitum.net apeinfinitum.net/pub.html First Edition This work is governed by the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. To view a copy of this license, visit creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/ Or send a letter to Creative Commons 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA Under the above license, you are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform this work. In addition, you are free to produce derivative works from it. To the point, such behavior is encouraged. There are, however, a few rules which must be observed. First, you must give the original author credit. Second, you may not use this work for commercial purposes. Third, if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one. So, there you have it. I guess the real question revolves around what you might do with it, now that it's yours. ====================== ============ Introduction ============ In 1984, my mother took me along with her to see the colorized re-release of Metropolis, the one with music from the likes of Freddie Mercury and Adam Ant. I fell asleep long before the construction of the robot and woke up some time following the riots. It's been twenty years since that screening. I've seen the film on several occasions since then. I've also slept from time to time. The following is a book of poetry. -C.A. Childers, July 2004 ============ blunt trauma ============ when the bone is shattered the fragments disperse == if == if i were a prime number i'd like to be 5 more than 3 or 11 as it stands i'd like to live for eight million years even though i'm sure i'd be worrying about death after seven imagine that a million years of this as opposed to forty if i were a prime number i'd like to be 17 my first car would be a chevy malibu and i'd paint a pitchfork down its side and i'd be a brand new locust for a brand new world if i could be a contract i'd be bulletproof =========== diving bell =========== held beneath endless gallons of salt and wet the diver stretched long by heavy perspective ponders the mechanism fresh air supplied by sunken barrels the wooden lung exhales at this depth his feet submerged in the spiny water his skin can be made to stretch across the whole of the earth japanese whaling ships become like mosquitoes infinitesimal nothings against a backdrop of him an equal nothing only ever the sum of his parts at this depth forgetting the gold is impossible and forgetting herÑ simple her with watery eyes terrible her with bedrocking poison dangerous them fallen to pieces and buried at the tip of each compass point Ñhas already begun =========== free market =========== these days beneath the blanket of personal freedom farmers are made to slice open their melons in proof that they contain no explosives and soon the same will be true of everything ================== experiment no. one ================== travis brought a shoebox meg dragged along an old shovel and myself i carried a neon highlighter and my copy of "the technological society" with the shovel, we dug a hole seven feet deep and two wide the book and the marker fit easily inside the box they seemed so small in there meg dumped in a scoop of swarming ants from a nearby mound the wind blew we sealed the cardboard capsule and dropped it down our fresh tunnel "i hope they read the book" travis said "but I doubt theyÕll have any use for the highlighter" meg began to fill the hole ==== 7:44 ==== i think i'll take out the garbage now a fine follow-up to the hour spent masturbating beer bottles in box bags by door =============== compelling lead =============== they televised the torso's closing remarks severed here i remain true to nothing more than my state clearly stated the cameras closed in on the evidence ===== opium ===== high walls from inchwater and the scraping makes for all sorts of sibylistic foretellings marlowe richard stewart marlowe and revised to a point of literal recommunication stewart marlowe richardson is the high king of walzowth which lies due south of providence found laying longwise richard can be seen drinking smoke from a highdrift tube the substance imported from across various oceans of civil intercourse has had a degenerative effect on the likelihood that things might get better but stewart is persistent and nothing if not regal so he wears his burden well and shrinks to the future that confronts him disappearing in the distance under the weight of the sky no different than anything else ============ by the water ============ driftwood often beaches on the shoreline near my home. were you to come by on a sunrise walk, you might see me out there, chucking it back at the sea. ===================== django saw everything ===================== django saw this coming the wash of strip malls rolling out to the ocean shore bucking arrogantly against the approaching wave he saw it from where he sat beneath the hand of some mislaid god he told us everything from there wrote it in fingered string but our ears were too slow to catch his meaning our sense of motion too imperfect to note the changes in key and as much as he might have liked to see the look on our face pale and full of knowing he couldn't stick around forever and even if he could've we can't think his hands would've stayed so keen so sure of the words they'd spelled and though the reading's slow especially with these broke and busted ears we can just make out the truth of it when days is done he said they's done ===== whale ===== the carcass, here beached has never judged its admirers it has never thanked its exalters or cursed its decriers it has only served as the calendar that it is counting the days in falling meat ============================ my first hydraulic tree lift ============================ i found my first hydraulic tree lift when i was twelve and i took it to the top of the years highly pressurized but slow moving it gave my ascent the shape of generations though a more legitimate system of measurement might have involved metric distances rise to broken adulthood not until that first ride could i make out the scope of the expansive wood and the jacks i saw them too working their screws through the ancient bark ========== compromise ========== climbed inside your wall tonight found new ways to hold nails ===== hands ===== the sitar had been broken in a most efficient fashion so cleanly was it smashed that upon violent impact no sound had been heard only now as it lay before the masterÕs feet did it resemble an instrument of music the thing it had been when first his hands had taught it to sing he wondered at what it had become at why he had ceased to know it for what it was until now ========= myopiates ========= wash this rusted fist heavenly swung upon your jaw beneath your milkblood flow make me waterbanded upon your neck and down your chest and heavy below you with the moist of now and yes above all the birds recognize our simplicity lines drawn in endlessly complex directions remain simply lines flatly tethered to their paper gods invisible when turned to true sideways yet professing always love and need with gropes and whispers to seal the deals ==================== evidence of sparrows ==================== travis got there first then me then meg a sign painted clumsily on an abandoned fence offered some direction meg read the splashed red words aloud "throwing girders to god" the indentation was in the shape of a man fallen maybe from the building that stood unfinished in the lot but there was no body and in all of our bicycling by the site we'd never seen workers we'd never seen work always just the building for years standing in the same incomplete state and now this the faint trace of red in the gravel brought home the grave truth travis said his grandmother's words to console us "angels are stones, always falling to earth" i said i didn't understand but really i did we were too late for this one angels were dropping like stones from the sky and it was up to us to catch them ==== them ==== they control the outcome with kray architecture tuning futures by the dozen the topography of time they say is bumpy and irregular ===================================== said the captain to his one true love ===================================== rest and the water will roll without you rest and the water will roll without you rest and the water will roll without you and the boats fragile as they seem are anchored to stones never dreamed by eyes like ours and the birds whose strings hang from vaults unknown make no attempts to change our course if you listen to this wave you will know that i made it for you to break for no ears but yours rest and the water will roll without you and when i am dead now as much as then you will hear no difference in that sound the lap of the sea against the wood it will persist in spite of me and because, as well ========== prospectus ========== iÕd like to buy something if only there was something i wanted and some money with which to buy it ========== my lighter ========== my lighter has a fixed height and weight its mechanism is simple and rigid the fuel is easily obtained yet somehow it's all made of air just like everything it touches even the air is made of finer air gossamer and infinitely reducible my lighter is an idea structured by external forces and planted in my skull which is also an idea =========== ultraviolet =========== black and white layered under with purples and outer spectra as observed through the eyes of bees whose dogma has arranged itself around the shape of things and the shape of things to come prescience is the watchword of the beehive mind jungle rumbling and bobbing and weaving against punches not yet thrown by sunny sunday's housebirdmen mowing endlessly within the finite present wrapped so tightly in time the mowmen see no evidence of a bee's sideways motion through a substrate no more linear than a straight line drawn on a spinning potters' wheel shape is made in the seeing of such and so the world is shaped by buzzing disconnectors little gods with precarious stings all lined up seeking purpose in endless chains of flower petalstops each step clearly visible from the outset of the journey and no less important when an end is in sight ======= encanto ======= i counted my way to your house by twos and by tens things were easier on our street you never call ========== the needle ========== they arranged the surviving portions of kennedy's exploded skull by size and consistency they separated out the meats and tissues boiled the bone clean and with the aid of logic engines extrapolated possible recombinations of the matter after a number of false starts they settled of the most complex model a traditionally proportioned obelisk three inches in height the kennedy needle referenced as kay-en in several classified documents remains to this day second only to the cup of christ in mythic value ================================= too-tall and the infinite nothing ================================= drawn straight a line has little more purpose than a wall and all things line up nicely when hedge walls are manicured with care only the shortest of men know the truth of too-tall and the wispy wilter of how too-tall enraged by the clay and the mud built a new truth a new too-tall it's a secret they know well enough to keep though they've been known to let such things slip given proper encouragement (liquid encouragement) in fact in bars there's seldom a man who's not heard the tale of how too-tall obsessed with freehand perfection drew himself up in a perfect square and became lost in the page lost until his page was discovered by a lonesome hedgesmith (let down by his trembling hands) who found he could read too-tall like a book and found in him directions for hedging himself and so the artist worked day and night by too-tall's design no sooner would he lose himself in his falling edges than he would discover some new part which had to go so on he went until there was nothing left nothing more than empty perfection no aging artist to shake and weep no too-tall no nothing and that my friends was just how they liked it =========== broken weld =========== lost the entire gas pedal assembly stranding me here alongside the 103 mailbox and i don't believe i'm the first to whom this has happened, either the evidence suggests otherwise the prospector's bones frozen finger pointed ominously upward at a passing jet that cave painting depicting a scene quite similar to my own all i know is this the sky will not fall though now seems an ideal moment for such a turn = f = man oh man baby i could just shut your face up in a box of shut your goddamn mouth and when i walk the ground forgets its lay and i could reach down and shut your everflapping trap and the sweetness is imagined because i want me gone from your dead eyes and i want me gone and forever that way ====== listen ====== the fairgrounds are alive again just past those trees and if the wind behaves you'll hear them ringing the sound comes in through your bones it's too slow for the ears, you see but those ribs of yours, they hear things things that would make you cry ===== relic ===== god is a machine a '63 peterbilt he's rusted now grown over and under by weeds and wildflowers which are also him ============== the guardhouse ============== he is a clown for you, one with big words and hollow hands. hear him shout. "the guardhouse is empty. you are my audience. where has the guard gone? where is he, children?" he is a clown for you. see his eyes grow wide as he cups his hands to his ears. hear the children yell. BEHIND YOU! "the guard is behind me?" he is a clown for you. see his mouth become a soft question mark. YES! he is a clown for you. see him turn slowly around. hear the children yell. HE'S GOT AN AXE! he is a clown for you. see him take it in the skull. o! the blood. what of all this blood? hear the children scream. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! hear, now, the axe-man speak. "the guardhouse is empty." hear the applause. see the curtain fall. ======= the set ======= theyÕve revised the set of the terrible play as though that could possibly make it better ========== gramophone ========== at seventy-eight revolutions per minute the grind is soft and full of milk the sound is an inland beachfront and the music distant and delicate beneath those waves speaks of the city we've forgotten and of the lamppost at its heart and of the shape below that revealed in halftones by the yellow light ====== coffee ====== in a large container mix one brick domestic coffee (dark roast) with one can columbian espresso close container shake thoroughly into the press four scoops mixed grounds boil water fill press with water cover but do not press allow grounds to steep (five minutes) press pour ================= mission statement ================= i think iÕll make up a word and wink when i say it so folks'll know i'm talkin bout sex =========== charlemagne =========== charlemagne opened a bookstore in downtown portland he'd had enough of empires and horsecraft and wanted nothing more than to slow the tide of encroaching entropy used books he'd call from the corner of green and third four for a fiver and though people seldom stopped he never lost his smile or the childlike innocence that glinted in his eyes he once confessed to a former general now a close friend that he'd hoped to never sell a single book he'd said that after all of those years of public success private failure was the only thing left that made any sense ================ at last my cloud ================ at last my cloud tall and precise drawn in squares and circles perfectly joined at last my cloud come to spill its rain wash me away and clean clean and gone my cloud knows the gone in sunlight wrote the gone in mighty wind washed all of this away my cloud strong and unforgiving high above this earth high above space where there is no high can be no high ============ jesus and me ============ i joined up with jesus and we hung together from the tallest tree nothing worse than that last hour before clocking out longest hour measured in years but he had a mind for trivia and a smile for building cabinets ======================================================== passing grain silos along highway twenty, near macedonia ======================================================== the had when observed quietly from the loss seems more crystal than any had as viewed from within and the have seen with ambition from the want is worth counting days for in spite of the costs ========== small talk ========== virginia opened the door and took a deep breath why not with all of those open ended statements she'd lost track of which were innuendo and which represented their intended meanings "would you like a drink" "that's not all i'd like" "don't be silly" "i'm gonna fuck you silly" "oh my" with a face that red the warning was implied the exit was firmly printed and the sky was locked securely beyond the wood and glass ====== my eye ====== my eye is a razor dull disposable rusting a dumb tool in the hand of an idiot =========== be here now =========== there is a time an april night a breeze soft as god rolls in from the bay a house on a distant hill where no light blinks a call a dark that knows no lamps or stars when smoking is worse than wrong and nothing short of necessary ==== arms ==== i lose my arms at the thought of you and it has never been an easy thing i think for anyone to learn to write with their feet =========== from a tree =========== birds broke away from branches and it was raining and it was like an explosion all these birds five hundred tiny wings in loose swarm and it was raining and they split off into two clouds each one complimenting the other and they were a smoke signal flapping with one nimble wing and gliding with the other and there was god not the one that lives in words but the one that gives words a reason to live and it was raining =============== three's company =============== furley acknowledged the problem with quiet resignation jack was to be straight made straight by his golden swingered hand jack lit to the idea date women kiss women fuck women finger them beneath the tables of greasy-spooned diners sure thing furley grinned this is your shot but the complication occurred in jack's misinterpretation of his landlord's intentions this seemed the escape he was seeking from artificial homosexuality image maintenance and while furley agreed that a cure was in hand he had no intention of allowing a reformed jack to remain in his dubious living situation in other words this was square one and so the snowball rolled jack found love in the dishwasher aisle of a local hardware store furley hid in the bushes and masturbated to the sight of jack's oiled body making devil thrusts at woman parts janet overdosed on barbiturates never aware until she heard those moans of her love for the clownish prat-faller but like all greek tragedies the answer was painfully clear yet evaded our players until the end the simple treachery the poisoned goblet the discounted prices at jack's bistro which only ever served the most hackneyed of dishes all things turned in an instant upon the fulcrum of that two bedroom/one bath apartment and when the dust had cleared nothing could ever be the same but the waves of the nearby beach lulled us to simpler times pouring through electric resonance slaves in stereo where available ============= salmon steaks ============= they sampled the cuts for weight and shape making appreciative sounds at the ones they liked and sour faces at those which failed to make the grade always showy always hoping their reactions would be forever painted behind the eyelids of the attentive vendors remember me spoke their subtle sighs this is my contribution ========== the finger ========== what is the significance of the finger found washed up on every blistered shore tired eyes wonder as they trace the path to which it points tired dreamers reckon the distance from severed and bloated appendage to point of ultimate desire it's between five meters and a billion miles the haze harms the final solution the haze bubbling outward from searching hands and oversexed eyeglasses if the question the one presented by that washed up and lonely son of five could be focused upon the answer would be clear clear as grain alcohol and matches clear as the fire it would take to wash it all away ===== human ===== hemingway sharpened pencils not to think but to not think and before picasso was picasso he was pablo =========== shipwrecked =========== the pirate meg said had been blown from his course by a mighty wind his ship and its weary crew had been broken apart by vicious waves and in the thick of it heÕd doubted any chance for survival but his will was strong and with the break of the morning sun heÕd thanked his ancestors for their unflinching blood she said he was sleeping when she found him there passed out in the alley behind the safeway bits of his derelict vessel beached in with the empty cardboard boxes and discarded motorcycle parts but he was wide awake when i arrived teaching meg and travis the art of cooking oslo beans on the smoldering concrete i had a feeling heÕd turn on us when he had the chance pirates' code, and all but the summer had just begun and i hated to spoil the moment so i kept it to myself and squinted my eye and shaped my hand into a hook ======== out west ======== there was a cowboy in my town strange, cow-folk horsebound superhumans augmented by equine muscle ================= brave new locusts ================= we opened our doors to brave new locusts and they left their husks to cling to our hands brave new hands better now with locust strength rain was never so absent as in our brave new time fierce in its lack of motion more quiet than sleeping locusts ======== keepsake ======== here take this drawing sketch etching sculpture polaroid of two cats on a tricycle it used to be three cats not wheels one of them must have fallen off along the way got lost but i'll keep the search alive and you can hang onto this to remember me by ============ in the dream ============ in the dream was a man. at various intervals he was observed to hold the following items: - frying pan - silver whistle - water bowl and velcro watch - watchmaker's toolkit - jeweler's loupe - dog's tail - collections of disembodied book spines - the word "again" in wooden letters detached from the dream, the man observed was my father. ========= the story ========= we told it first with words composed only of vowels with verbs composed of leaves suspended, branchless on zephyr trees spinning but only to reveal every side of a thing so meticulously arranged that no hand could ever have known its design and with time we found hard sounds to define the soft and the story so brutal and rich became that of the telling and when we told it (built now on a frame so rigid that symbols were sought elsewhere) it seemed so right that we believed every word in spite of its flimsy motivation and empty characters ====== houses ====== houses seem uncomfortably small without their skins slim lattice-works of wooden bone requiring less than twenty paces to cross for the slightest of migrant workers so walls must be the trick if not we could outthink these cages and make tracks to the border crossing ================ the jogging tree ================ the jogging tree came early this year but no-one seemed too sad they handed over their shoes just like they'd promised and doubled their socks until payday ====== furrow ====== after the fall knights would wander their former lands as beggars and cry and when the enormity of night had grown full and thick to their wives they'd whisper i could kiss you but what then =============== the eight hours =============== i wonder where i left myself someplace i think between the fourth grade and my doctor's office it would be tough to finger the precise moment at which i ceased charting my development so here i am romanticizing the exploits of people i've never known but then why not i've never known myself, either and i wrote this which is a lie anyway why not bond with the dead and gone fawn on over the hewn and sawn which brings me to neal who stood there watching his shadow mark the passing hours across the backs of hunching grassblades he smelled the air saw the swelling gut of the approaching wave and his voice was the clang of every slamming screen-door "saddle up, boys, the tide is high" in a cloud of thick exhaust and sweet-sweet cigarette smoke they were gone leaving me where, exactly fogging up the glass just beyond the scene that would be my guess tracing the words remember me in a hollow act of rebellion against forces that just don't care =========================================== midnight in the desert is unimaginably vast =========================================== midnight in the desert is unimaginably vast even when faced with knowledge faced with a presence in the endless expanse one can hardly render a thought with enough speed to escape the sand and there in the darkness black and absolute for even the moon has ceded to the infinite stretch of nothing the eye can catch a thousand shapes and all of them have meaning from the softest of skin found low in the seam to buildings tall and dangerously intent marching through the wastes with perfectly measured gaits crushing oases with their parking deck heels seeking some new city to call home and the dreamer who in the desert is wide awake can grow lost in such spans find himself behind a supple mahogany desk thirsty hand frozen around a perfectly machined cross brand pen dreaming of the desert at midnight and of the moonless dreams, there born ========= in a word ========= transcend go beyond the cold and only watchful interpretations of a world through selfish eyes nervous reactions to subtle conversation squirming at the sight of direct interaction transcend stand before the masses and declare this is a reunion of the i and the else high atop this mountain where peachtree meets tenth this is a heavy hearted sigh at how far we've come transcend and close dead eyes forever and again quiet vibration becomes the new sight awareness of intent far beyond deed transcend and welcome ignorance as the only voice with resonance above the noise of now and need watch firmest walls quake at the fury of a word transcend the water that flows here for your boat built from your father's bone and breath cannot sense the tide ================ About the Author ================ Casey Allen Childers was built in the late seventies from refurbished engine parts and a stack of old magazines. His mother had a record collection and a maroon Camaro. Over time, he aged. ======================