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I’m here, between asphalt black and sky blue. Point Defiance Park pinecones and needles shine golden, drawn to the exfoliating ground as we are universally propelled by narrative. Towers and towns aren’t built, they’re written in erasable ink, erasable blood, becoming vague but never fully forgotten.
| K. Shawn Edgar | September 2017 |
The Trouble with Trouble•
We start in a parking lot, between two white lines.
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Car radio sounds are heard: music to talk to music to talk…
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Raw aluminum-alloy lamp posts, tall as prison towers, uniformly point toward the sky.
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Women and men with bags and babies. Big mess. Obeisant, humanoid-faced cars wait, some humming mechanical lullabies.
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Dialogue:
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(As if watching someone do voiceover for a Disney animated movie we cannot see.)
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I am at home between the loving arms, these white lines. These silent boundaries.
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The trouble with Tacoma, there’s a sleepy veil of depression billowing up and drifting back down, daily. Never quite enough to keep the crows and jays from flying, or the people from driving, but stellar association isn’t ever what it might be elsewhere.
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Second strange plane flying overhead. So low and quiet, so flat and colorless, most folks don’t even look up. Don’t smile.
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#kshawnedgar
K. Shawn Edgar | Man Flake | Cube Dweller | Bad Actor
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“In 1916, The Etude magazine was $1.50 for the year. And that’s the good news. The bad news … my time travel bracelet was stolen by the White Witch; you know, the lady from those C.S. Lewis stories. I guess I wont’ be happy anytime soon.”
—Woodheavy Brown, circa 1993
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_______
Thanks for all the Pee
•
Three Easy Poems
By
K. Shawn Edgar
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∑
…
Walking the Docks
Her full shipment moves at a jaunty, magnetic clip.
Whirlwinds subside and sea monsters submit,
to her comings and goings. She is a cargo ship
in a world of overvalued, pressboard plastic vessels
all too slender and filled with stagnant air.
And believers of the consumptive faith.
She’s an ice crusher, a frozen Arctic figure skater
moving with the purpose of Sherlock Holmes
through the denizens’ maze of street market hustles
and Curzon Cub riots.
Starfish fingers and custard covered phone cards—
all the leftovers from 1990s backpack travelers—
fall away as She spirits the wind.
How is it eight of ten visitors to the docks
see only the light sailboats and party yachts
when Her long sharp curves part the water,
become the water, the sea, the horizon?
Her clip is magnetic; draw me lingering
on the balls of my feet, so straight
and tall, tipping toward Her wake
on the water.
•
∑
…
Longing and Melancholy
Say it with frost on your teeth,
deep space is cold.
Has butane?
Madrid is coming.
Or we are coming to Madrid.
She’s always been.
And waiting.
Has oxygen.
She’ll see you through
to the end.
•
∑
…
Dead Lot
Stale, dark rainwater
pooling.
Gray cars punctuate
smooth black asphalt.
Nighttime atmospheric.
Unknown empty spaces.
Engine off; deep breath.
Eyes blinking up
starbursts from greenish
hazy lamplight.
All movement wavers,
finally stalling as lids close.
Silence.
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_______
•
Copyright © 2015 Publicrats United
&
K. Shawn Edgar
•
Dear Readers,
This page is for you. Fill it as you please.
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ºøº
(101)
12/12/2015
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•
Volume One:
•The windup man is telling his friend, shuffle feet, about the overlapping details of a dead father’s woodworking precision. The two men unload grocery carts into the trunks of cars.
“He graduated from high school in 1961, and started working the wood in his dad’s garage. Scraps leftover from building the house.” Shuffle feet responses with a hasty head nod.
Windup man spins on: “The cabinet my father left me when he died, he past at the end of June, was his—he’d always joked—like a thesis project. ‘Intricate,’ my mom called it; ‘flowers inlaid in wood like they’d bloomed there and Gothic-era peasant women tilling and planting. So real.’ My dad had artistic connections to representations of old European agriculture. Thatched roofs, I guess.”
At windup man’s first intake of air, shuffle feet half turns his lower body—Is this the gap in traffic, he wonders?—No, the moment’s gone; suddenly it has closed as closes a line drawn in wet sand. Quick and seamless.
• forward to The Fomorian
K. Shawn Edgar K. | Fomalhaut K. | Lemmy Caution K. | Goth Newt K. | Undead Streaming K.•
At the nighttime
Slot Lot
Night is rain and radio
a streetlight symphony
teasing the eyes
with vulgar exposure
Run me down
warm tire rubber becoming
new textured skin
The romance of collision
Our meat and steel
warming the frozen exteriors
of passing strangers
united now by law and loneliness
Playing in the Car Park
Sitting in the Focus, last slot of the third row,
parallel to the concrete island of puny, ornamental trees,
I soak in 360 degrees of multihued metal, yellowish lights, and movement.
As a lurker who spends time in parking lots, my vision is optimized for scoping several moving subjects at once.
Not as segments but as sauce.
Not as meat patties but as the whole living cow.
As a lurker, I will not open the red wine, I will not boil the pasta in salty water, I will not dine.
As a lurker, who harvests parking lots, I feed on impressions. I feed on the contagion of other people’s addictions (OPA).
As they shop and dine and parlay, I contemplate the end.
K. Shawn Edgar | Path Walker | Chrome Leaf | Sub-Pharmacy Poet
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÷•÷•÷
I’m not a perfect circle man. Its aesthetics fail to please. I’m not a spiral shooter, either. I prefer straight lines and ninety degree angles. There’s a certain type grid most suited to me. It’s laid out in white and asphalt grey.
I sit in my car in parking lots for long periods of time; three four five hours, just thinking and writing. You start to feel the heaviness and beauty of the place, the spaces. I’ve always known I’m contained within the autism spectrum. Even if I’m an outlier, I help to define it more than it defines me. It is my category; it is my vessel. But as a rib helps make a ship, the ship isn’t the rib alone. The rib is itself, and it’s a part of the whole.
In a parking lot, it’s similar. The white lines contain me, comfort me. Here—within units paralleled—we each have our own slots and I fit into mine. In the slot on either side of me, there could be a genius or a professional bowler. Only it doesn’t really matter what they call themselves. We all help to make up, and define, the lot at any given moment. I enjoy watching it change around me.
Most people don’t seem to stay long in their cars. That’s part of the reason I do. A larger part, though, is I don’t seem to be able to help it. I pull in, perfectly parked, and can’t get myself to hop out immediately. Ass just won’t leave seat. Crude, I know. I can feel the rising pressure of the unassigned movement required once I leave my car. Walking across the lot. It’s so free-form. To me, I imagine, it’s a lot like walking in outer space is to astronauts. Except, moving through the lot, everyone else has better, more accurate thrusters on their space suits.
I bump, or nearly bump, or feel like I might nearly bump every other person I pass. Or who passes me. Like meteors. They zip. I weave. Or, does it just feel like I’m weaving? I can’t tell. I can’t know for sure once I get out of my car. The safety belt’s between the white lines. Slotted, I can gather my false selves, my wholly contrary voices, jabbering self-conscience fantasies about other’s impressions, into my one true safe harbor ship: My mind. The actual me. Between my lines. So I sit for hours in my car in parking lots.
• K. Shawn Edgar | Writer | Humorist | Mad Assassin •
Pole Vaulting on the Sun 