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Wire to Wire | James Kent

Do not do as I did, one recent semi-tropical evening, high above the placid, flaccid, steamy dead-end shores of Lauderdale-By-The-Sea, and ask your assembled in-laws, gathered there from distant compass points to mourn the death of their father, if they have ever been seduced by the lure of the Abyss. If, gentle reader, you share the same fascination, I should warn you that your declaration will only provoke blank stares. Even if your assembled in-laws have been drinking beer or smoking a bowl, and even if they themselves have traveled around the sun sixty times or more, do not assume they will reinforce your firmly held conviction that yes, the idea of leaping off a balcony, or a cliff, or a rooftop, might at times seem irresistible.

James Cameron was so fascinated by the Abyss, he made a movie about it. He called it The Abyss, because that’s the kind of writer he is, and it was a really, really great movie. Until he ruined the end with this weird liquid alien thingy which is why it only gets a 7.9 rating on IMDB. It gets like 3.5 stars on Netflix, but I don’t like the Netflix 5 star system, I prefer a one-to-ten ranking, and besides, Netflix encourages any yahoo who thinks they are a Movie Critic to weigh in. Yahoo, by the way, uses neither method of ranking movies. I still love the movie though, and not just because James Cameron made The Terminator (a solid 10, in my book), Terminator Two (8.6), True Lies (7.2), Aliens (8.5), The Titanic (7.6, but 7 if it were up to me because his dialogue has the subtlety of a bag of wet cement.) Speaking of wet cement, if I had a bag right now I would toss it out the window at that yahoo neighbor who keeps yelling “Fishy-fishy” to his kids and distracting the hell out of me. I think it is well past his children’s bedtime. All they are going to do is grow up spoiled thinking they can play fishy-fishy all day and night and not think about ruining other people’s work and then they will need a new wing on their high school and I will be asked to pay for an umpteenth tax override, and in case you want to know umpteenth really is a number, it translates to a giggledty-fucking billion.

All of which brings me back to the subject of leaping off a balcony. Oh – wait there was one more thing about the Titanic. That boat was fucking awesome. So – ven do I first remember zis feeling, doctor? I was maybe in 10th or 11th grade, and I was scouting locations for a Star Wars movie. My own. My Very Own Star Wars Sequel, filmed on a super 8 sound camera. Those of you raised on fishy-fishy might not know what film is, because there is no such thing anymore. It is Gone With The Wind, like Mint Juleps and and Ma Barker and Bob Barker and Triple Crown Winners. True Story – I know Gary Stevens! He is a three time Kentucky Derby Winner who let me borrow a bunch of crap from his house to use in the set I was putting together for the character he played in the short-lived HBO series Luck, which is available on Amazon as a box set and is a 7.6 but should be at least an 8 (I don’t get any residuals, not one red cent, but if you buy it and review it, be sure to mention how the set decorator was really shafted at the Emmys last year.) Anyway, if you grew up like me, not playing any team sports, I would really encourage you to befriend a jockey, because they are really tiny, like Leprechauns. Some of them are even Irish, although most of them are Spanish. Disclaimer here – I don’t want any lawsuits because some idiot might misunderstand me and pounce on an Irish jockey thinking he has a pot of gold. That could happen – but the odds are so long I would discourage it. But they are all small, so you don’t have to feel intimidated. You can be hanging out with them thinking, don’t worry, little man. If someone tries to steal your riding crop I’ll give them a what-for.

Gary Stevens was retired from horse racing for seven years and then he came out of retirement at 50 to ride again. He came second in the Derby and a few weeks later he won the Preakness on a colt named Oxbow. And on that afternoon of the Preakness, I was this close to actually betting money on him to win. I had a feeling. I actually texted him and wished him good luck. Because I just know he was sitting there on his horse checking his cell phone every 20 seconds. Not only did he win but he won wire to wire. He led from the start and held off all challengers all the way around that long track. It was heart-stopping, it was breath-taking, and when it was done I texted him congratulations. And you know what? He texted back, the next day! He texted “Thanks.” Just that. Wow. Right to the point. These guys just get to heart of the matter, you know? They have incredible focus, just like I used to have. Right now someone is strumming a guitar. For crying out loud. I am trying to write here! HELLO? Fuck your override, you’re all going down, every last rainbow flag flying grease car driving coop shopping solar powered last one of you.

The Abyss. Oh – by the way – James Cameron made so much money off the Titanic and Avatar he built this submarine that costs a giggledty-million dollars and dropped seven miles into the Mariana Trench, just to sit there looking at his own magnificent reflection for an hour. The ultimate nyah-nyah. James Cameron goes deep. Richard Branson goes high. Branson is so rich he built his own spaceship to fly into the edges of the Earth’s atmosphere. The edges call us. The void calls to us. The deep, the darkness, the unknowable. When I was scouting for My Very Own Star Wars Movie, I stood on the edge of an eighty foot tall cliff, overlooking an ancient rock quarry, and I had this strange feeling of levitation, of transporting out of my body, and floating over the space. I felt compelled to take a step. I didn’t, but I wanted to, and I seriously thought I would not fall to my death, but instead would float on, out into — what? Who knows? All these years later, that feeling is still there. The more mortal I feel, the older I get, that feeling never goes away. That desire to merge into the void, to become part of something greater. I guess I am headed there anyway. I won’t have to take that leap into the infinite, the infinite will leap into me. And then I will know. Or maybe I won’t.

She Made the Sale | Marc Berman

A fanatic at the door
selling environmental salvation
begs for money at dinnertime.

Not now, I say.  Come back later.
But my wife appears,
morphs into a polite 80 year old widow
and nodding, let’s the fanatic talk
though spaghetti is on the table.
So, I eat alone

in full view
watching the 25 bucks
exchange hands,
the fanatic’s smirking face
peering over my wife’s shoulder
as I twirl my spaghetti in anger.

The Nightingale | Susan Cocalis, now available from Gallery of Readers Press

A non-conformist nightingale
longed to be a great white whale
He once had heard of Moby Dick,
whose skin was white and very thick,
whose blubber never turned to flab,
in his pursuit of Old Ahab.
So for this bird in South Tyrol
the ocean’s depths became his goal.
Night after night, this bird lamented
his sad plight, how he resented
that he, an inner creature of the sea,
spent all his days stuck in a tree,
that he, a whale, had been interred
in the body of a … bird.
It was a source of constant shame
that he inhabited this frame.
He felt entrapped, as in a tomb,
forever plugged his splendid spume.
Of course, it’s true that he could fly
but Tyrol was mountainous and dry.
And, yes, he had the gift of song,
but it felt so wrong, all wrong.
He’d never cared for Keat’s Ode,
in Melville’s prose his juices flowed.
So many were the days he’d wish
for a mighty tale to swish.
Then, one day, he dared to hope
there was something to help cope:
he’d heard of sex-change operations,
which led to joyous celebrations,
where men shed their virile apparatus
to adopt a female’s status;
where women freed their inner male:
could he not free his inner whale?
But though he searched the whole world through,
no surgeon could this procedure do.
Thus he returned to his home tree.
This whale-thing wasn’t meant to be.
With time, his dreams began to pale
and he was again a nightingale.

Ladder to the Roof | Brett Averitt, now available from Gallery of Readers Press

We inherited a roof garden, as well as
The ladder Hermes left behind after
He’d invented escape, trapped only by memory
Of his invention of cunning and theft.
After a fancy education had worked
Its magic, he moved to California.

The plants he planted bloomed all day
And night through the long days of summer.
By October the silver light (which does look like
Spilt milk in the sky) meant
That we’d eaten the passion fruit and spit
The seeds and finally remembered real hunger,
Ours and yours and yours.

The roof lines of our neighbors’ houses
Show through bare trees now:
The saddle, the hip or gambrel.
From any roof the ordinary feels
Strange, the strange ordinary, snapped back
From a thought you may never
Have had or remembered otherwise,
Had the roof garden and the ladder
Not given us this view.

• Stephanie Gibbs, Betweens