George Sparling
Spitting Quasars
I walk down to Arcata’s plaza, and I see on the sidewalk a fragile, one-legged man
passed out, most pedestrians moving past him, but they cast long gazes at his splayed
form. He’s not moving; his ships in the harbor are unmoored, drifting like words floating
through a glimmering paradise where white wolves dream of oceans, of herons dipping
their wings flying above him. His hand grips the neck of a pint bottle through a brown
paper bag as if the Statue of Liberty squeezed a hollow torch full of Jack Daniels. I
wonder where his crutch is. He’s dead drunk to the pixel-silicon world, its google.com
queerness he’ll never surmount.
I love his cap; it reminds me of Jack London’s with its brim covering this guy’s face,
pulled low over a dirt-streaked puss. It’s as if he wishes to conceal a besieged identity,
convinced that he’d committed terrible crimes during a raging night of delirium. I stand
near him, conjuring how he’d look in Pelican Bay Prison, as if he’d really pulled off a
major felony sometime in his past. I recall Pascal’s vision of life as a prison, inmates
watching the guards with bloody knives slowly dragging out prisoners one by one from
cells, and then cutting their throats, captives bleeding to death. Is gullet-gashing or the act
of ogling gore-rituals the real punishment?
A frayed, stained coat carelessly thrown open reveals his anachronistic life; it’s a sixties’
sport jacket, the thing must’ve hung scaffold-like on a rusty, Salvation Army hanger for
years. But, I don’t believe, as do misanthropes, from skinheads to well-educated physicians, that some living human beings should die because they’re “useless eaters” needing
to be ground up, then used for mulch to grow daffodils on huge commercial farms. A
single, redolent, plangent flashback in this man’s mind, no matter sober or drunk, of
smelling the cliché of a hot, fresh-baked apple pie his mother had made is more than
enough emotional truth to let him live, and go on living until his auto-immune system
depletes entirely.
If I could and didn’t think I’d be arrested, I’d search his pockets, perhaps finding them
filled with lint, a three-year-old bus schedule, a ratty handkerchief, a sticky Reese’s
wrapper, a Boy Scout pocket knife, a tattered church program from last Sunday’s service
he attended to get a free meal afterwards. All the stars in the Milky Way Galaxy might
congest the fabric, its red-eyed-blink-blink nostalgia heaven-sucked. The man’s dark
energy made cosmic because of his openhearted, though passive intimacies shared with
me in hypothetical dreamtime after I’ve pulled out all his pockets’ paraphernalia onto the
inevitable concrete surrounding him like 200,000,000,000 stars.
If passers-by knew how his life has blurred like speeding Quentin Tarantino movies, like
vanished, cupola-topped, wooden cabooses he remembers as a boy; how train crews gave
him thin, delicious hotcakes when he came hungry to their “crummy” -- but all his past
lies now like ulcers in the craw of his stomach. Bitter Valhalla the time he spent drinking
liquor last night, its visceral panacea laying waste like wild red riders whose one faith
must be war always against his stalled life. He’s been ghosted out of strip malls, out of
TV commercials, shunted into time-shocked paltriness: USA’s unconstitutional free
enterprise’s lofty, towering money tree doesn’t blow wind-fallen, tiny green leaves into
his hands, for the only truth in Bill of Rights is America’s intolerance with failure, our
citizens afraid of it even more than death itself. I envision him a deeper poet than Dante;
I’m certain he’s dreamed up some Big Poems, like chartered trips to Alpha Centauri at
exalted, smashed, utopian, high noon.
I hear tanks crush robins’ eggs; he’ll be next, hard-boiled and noirish, realer than the
best-selling Oryx and Crake fiction as he screams beneath the treads. He makes my
calcium-bone-lit-alleys narcotic-strange, yet still he doesn’t tremble, not even slight
tremors, is silent, liquor stupefied. In bed, before I go off to sleep, the day scrolls through
my hippocampus. The drunken, unconscious man won’t let go. His scraggily existence
imbues me with hope, in spite of the pathos, the decay. I must not succumb to crumpled
ruination -- we’re all connected. I could’ve licked DNA from his lips. Who knows the fate
of our bones or how many times we’ll be buried. Drifting off, between the last moment of
wakefulness and that faraway sleep of reason when anything might happen, I mind-talk to
him that if I could, I’d spit quasars, the hottest objects in the universe, into the world to
incinerate fear, sear away paranoia, scorch away doom.
©2003 by George Sparling
