David Hoefer

RIOT TROUSERS

I'm ploughing upwind from my apartment to the separatist bar. In my element,
    stapled to a telephone pole, are two posters: one depicting a hirsute and
    unkempt man, outlined by fire, who offers a book to passersby; the other,
    a business-suited man with a peach-colored pocket square offering the same
    passersby a different book, this one in flames.

The sky overhead is an alcove hard-wired with desolation. God the old man,
    god the electromagnetic pudding has lost figurative energy.

It will take something human to staunch the exile of objects, to relate remnants
    in a fullness of blood. As it is, my senses are satellite dishes gone bad.
    People establish themselves with the soft clang of waves breaking against
    pilings. A single shopper nearly persuades me: a smile for falling into,
    a series of events housed in one commanding flesh.

I could case the zoo instead but why? one knows the result: chuffing, dirty-
    necked swans in the guano of sunlight. Some children resting in a group,
    under the big eyes of their teacher, like a box of new pencils, some altered
    by teeth marks.

So a seething ring, I arrive at the bar. Above pool tables, a sign announces,
    Beer is my co-pilot. Here the sandwiches and the girls share names like
    Patty Melt; here the girls, forested in black, display the wing nuts of
    their construction, severally endowing their takeoffs.

What a bivouac of occupied and unfolding beauty! Nursing a drink, I participate
    at a distance. Innocence is overrated, Hedy concludes, helmeted in shine,
    dismissing her date's second-nature coquettishness. Lizbeth, aviatrix of
    the stars, mops the brow of a rough, gorgeous blonde with violin-soaked rags.
    Soon, I have wild life enough to push the limits of a postcard to friends
    dwelling nearby, on Doldrums Place.

Abruptly, the lights fail but I forget to ask if anyone can explain what has
    happened. A used-to-it voice says, Lick the walls to find the sockets.
    Electricity responds with a countersign of daggers. Fate -- he of the low
    entrance and exit costs -- revs his ballad in the attenuated air of 78 r.p.m.

The latter spurs me to the door. My self, hocked, is repossessed by exaggerated
    subjects of the sidewalk-real world. The sky home remains shrunken, like
    a head. In my apartment, retired from gesture, I call off my riot trousers,
    one aggression at a time.


      [Previously published in Talisman 11 and "New, Improved Wilderness"
       by David Hoefer (Vatic Hum Press)]