A Sort of Story I Will Not Tell (But Talk)

I walked up to a tree this morning and said, “It’s complicated.” I had switched over to my other head, the one I like to pull apart, to pick apart in strands, islands, the head where my language is more my familiar than my self. My elf. Maybe I should specify it was a sycamore tree, or plane tree (as it is also known). Maybe I am occupying too much by thinking questions like this exist and want to come to you, trained doves.  Do details matter? Of course they do, but they are as unicorns here, as useless facts, as windmills in an urban hipness, as unreal as anything else, a chain of as. A sort of licorice of ecstasy to unwind like a radial tire. You only believe in nodes of a story. Do you notice this about yourself? You might want to know where a character went in the novel, which streets he took, if he progressed like a squirrel or did much better, which corners he turned and what’s the address? You don’t care about the gnat or more inviting body, the great who rule over the imagined scenes, who are not consulted in our night of art, those things which might have taken her eye in the story considered real (to her). Should I tell you, for instance, I had my knife in my jacket pocket, as is my wont, or should I lie again and say it was a favorite stone, smooth, I like to (I must) caress with my hand? Now it is both a knife and stone at once, like that cat you like to talk about. Talk all you want. A doorway is made only for this. This loquaciousness. You don’t care about the great bank of all the ideas that ever were, that ever wore, but I say I do and either do I. I walked up to the tree and spoke to it, because it seemed a presence, luminous, white thing, thick, excoriating itself, phone book ugly, tearing its own skin off, day by day, alive, secretly parturient, stupid, liable to outlive me, illiterate, beautiful, hoggish, retro, mysterious, slave to wind, player with wind, trifler with all of us. I felt an affront and an attraction. The way it is before you fall into a hookup. “Why are you even here?” I screamed at the end of the mute soliloquy with the tree and then stomped off in ugly shoes. There was no one on the street. No worries. Even I wasn’t there.