Squint from Zones by Enablers

Squint: the Correspondent in Absentia

But if it still serves, and for the record,
consider its effects: the Polaroid achieves shapes first,
then gets on with the dreamy particulars:
long, small sets of breaking waves; low tide’s
pungent, shore-strewn foam;
a white stone lighthouse appearing
and appearing a little more
through the yellow windblown flaps.

Out here,
yellow matters. It is one half of brown
and you are green, and that makes brown, which rhymes
with the year a president’s voice on the radio always offers
a fondness for a makeshift tent
and squalor.

Once, after a reception fit only
for braggarts and the future’s best
and brightest, and after you pissed
on the club’s soundboard in reaction
to a questionable case of low flirtation,
you received a box in the mail, opened it,
and erupting in one ornamental word on a
hot pink flashcard:
Tact.
And one more, not ornamental, on the back:
(Repeat)

Only after sitting up
do you remember “out here”
is not desert at all,
and speaking is useless when you can just
shut up and rub her feet,
churning out silence the more skin
is absorbed into skin.

You arrived lily-white, smitten with yourself,
a muttering, pre-packaged humor subject to a keen
test of performance and guile. Fail, and it’s back
to a life of air and rail terminals (away forever, really),
and your lacunae of calendar dates
entombed in a spiritless Polaroid.

Your dispatch:
beacon against a white-hot sky
overlooking a gem-blue sea
war going on everywhere

Repeat.

You are proverbial,
one day leads into the next day—blah blah.
You are not the lone, pensive beachcomber,
just the lone beachcomber in a shattering
and reforming occupation of breezes the terrain,
come dusk,
stops accepting by fire light.
Nights grow full and the lighthouse lows,
its beam in dutiful rotation, trying to tell a war
from a stupor by the sea.

• Experimental
• guitar
• indie
• post-rock
• spoken word
• United States