Girls with green hair are running helter skelter through the landscape of my ambition, over the cragging peaks of the mountains of my dreams–cold, steep places filled with skittering rocks and watched over by the same solemn condor, turning slow circles over each peak in turn. Girls with their every inch tattooed come crashing over summits, rushing through canyons, their biceps bulging with flowers of inimitable strength, their eyes and noses strong.
Chased by the hounds of Artemis, deer-horned dogs, they sleep with swollen eyes at the graves of Orpheus and they alone know he is an ancient Afghan man from the time before gods. They alone can see his bird’s beak nose and bird’s wing eyes. They alone know he was buried unsung in an unnamed French cemetery. They alone know it is–it will always be–nineteen seventy-one. They drank the Kool Aid.
Their nails have been worn roughshod from scratching at their rusting iron eyelids, eyes like caves frozen in horror at the destruction and the degradation. They think they caused it, poor dears, running as they do in stilettos made of melted-down tanks and still-sparking nuclear weapons. No one knows why their hair is green, if they are so jaded or if they had it tattooed in days not long since of surly-faced idealism, of hulking kindness. They cannot speak. Every night they trek to the ends of the earth, to an unnamed graveyard, and sleep nose deep in the soft, tilled earth beneath a towering ash tree where a giant vulture roosts, eyes shining and brimming and wide. Every night their blank eyes and grasping ears and malnourished souls see dream after spinning, bewildering dream, hear songs which play only on unmanned harps made from the heart strings of poets and dead gods. Every morning they breathe bright and fresh, every morning fill their rusting skulls with clods of earth. They do not know you cannot overdose on nature.
In five years, perhaps, after untold tries, they will give up on suicide and be led to the kitchen–where all the knives are–and because dirt is not convictable, they will not be charged with malicious intent when they carry these same knives with them to Judgment Day, but they will be charged with conspiracy to blaspheme when they stab the Holy Ghost in his spineless, whining, immortal, pacifist heart. Jesus will sterilize the gaping-empty hole with a bottle of Kentucky’s finest moonshine while the devil lights another morning star (half crack, half morning glory, half factory-synthesized tobacco). “Industrial revolution complete,” he reports to the boss in the upstairs corner office while green-haired girls lead one thousand mules from cotton-candy clouds to molten shores.
The beach is crowded today. The whole world has come to party, barbecuing puppies over the smoldering remains of reality. Talk show hosts wade in the strawberry-red sea, pulling antiwhales back from the waves wih apologies for everything that got them the job in the first place. “Siva is dead,” they cry, “and the god damned queer deserved it.” Infants hold a sign in their clasping fingers, a sign of a night-blue god dancing an Irish jig on the balls of the cowboy of ignorance–eight millennia in hell, it says, and only four more days until the beginning of eternity.
On the last day ever, the bastard child of Kali and Gaia, whose birth killed both zir mothers mothers a full seven seconds ago, comes: a whirling dervish with long green hair and one white wing, quadriceps like a butterfly, comes stomping from ocean to ocean, shy one lifetime and hard-lipped the next. Zie rides a flaming Razor scooter to the earth beneath the ash tree, furrows the loam with zir uncouth finger- and toenails, flings seeds with the fury of a child caught in tantrum. As dandelions flower and puff among the Three Sisters’ roots, zie throws zir head back and, throat bursting like a roadkilled rabbit, howl-sings to call back the green-haired girls. They cry aloud in sightless, mute wonder and with the first words of their unheard song, Kali, reborn, claws one long arm up through the deep dark soft dirt. She shakes clods free from her thickly knotted hair; each clod falls, breaking into a cloud of sunshine. Sunflowers unfurl as trees shoot long, secret roots.
The Razor scooter, left forgotten at the edge of the clearing around the ash tree, lights the sky to a wild flame. The atmosphere burns with a vengeance, silhouetting a low-flying, slow-circling bird, as the world explodes into life.
In struggle,
Bargain Puppy
