A Reticent Martyr 

The drivers of vehicles hurried their horses furiously on their way. They were made more cruel by the exposure of their positions, aloft on high seats. 

---The Men in the Storm, Stephen Crane 

I strike execute. 

Lurid commands roll by like a liturgy. Amber syllables. Letters resinous in the halflight. A dark, electronic awareness leaks from the square screen. Through a stark window, as cold as it is black, an unviewable moon offers its siftings. Those silvers and my own darker light mingle in an uncertain space. Sheer abstractions shuttle by. I am viewing the dump in cuneiform. 

Time slides by. Ensconced in a dollhouse, the packed screen speeds to its executable end, writing something on my face with its illuminated shapes. A pewter taste of expectation develops on my tongue. My skin is ready to flinch at revelations. My heart drops away among clouds. My bones buzz. An instant elation floods into my head. I am about to shuck my body off like a husk, swimming in realms of light. 

Strapped in my high chair, the keyboard smiles at me, full of teeth. Its high-impact plastic skull has been shoved to the edge of my oak worktable. Smoky woodgrains knot at its far corner, dragging me into a filterless haze. Distinguishable greys lift, pull me forward, and begin to blurr. I slow to a swampy thoughtlessness, adjusting to the blankness. My feet sink. Not expecting the two-foot drop, I stumble and end up on my hands and knees, feeling the wet grass. 

"Hey, Billy! Shoot already!" 

Clots of trees condense from the mist; I had landed back in third grade under shady vegetation. The slow weight of the shooter marble lolled under my thumbnail, unwinding its slender ribbons. I inhaled the pounded dust of our semi-sacred semi-circle and fell a thousand miles onto my shrunken left palm, trying to edge fractionally closer to the tourney's center. The sun grows from my neck like a tumor, lashing its white hydrogens, and I twitch my little globe forward on its sundering path. Straight into a timid crowd of chipped agates. A bone dislodges, that sound, and a tittering pack of marbles goes scattering into the nearer grasses. 

Brave silence. Everybody was playing for keepsies. All the bright particles had scattered past the thin arena Tim's thumb had traced in the dirt. A million exit lines and one heavy blue eye still spinning at the gravitational center Tim's elliptical orbit described swore witness to some great activity. Our silvery childhood cloud chamber was emptied of its experiment. 

Nobody expected me to take all of the marbles, stuffing my triumphant sack until it was as hard as a baseball, held together only by its red stitches. But they wouldn't say anything. They stared around. At a shadowy tree, at the ground. David tied his left sneaker tight. I scooped up my killer eye and ran ahead. 

The Genghis of my mind has been encoded. Satellites mirror me worldwide. I crept into the London stock exchange one night and crushed a petrol bull market. A deep cape of redder intentions covers my covert hand now, shaking the rude trees civilizations erect. They can't counteract a knowledgeable chaos. The shove that hovers. Their famed balancing act is about to finish. They've approached a doable denouement before, but the last thrust of their imaginations faltered, and they fell like a shot man back into their habits. A dense discontinuity urges the demiurge to never again gather together what has been scattered. Let the marbles lie., 

Banished to the university backlot, under a tangerine weather, here in my toothshaped womb, the amber monitor is bedizened with a wry genius that I only half-invent, scarce made up myself, halffinished, lumped on this silver/pewter platter of ambitions I am honing into a knife to make good my escape. Commands skitter from my fingers. The flow and ebb of power numerals flutter by my squared eye, humming on its plastic stand, deciphering the underlit code words of a warped desire. An atomic erection, aching after death. Crying "death, death...." Lost in a wood, humbled by thick briars, soft thoughts torn off by the tough terrain, the cramped landscape that bites. Whispering, in a half-run, full of pants and breathless rests, finding it difficult to run with the stinger erection, "death, death...." A caped figure floats into shadows. There, by the fallen log, above a malignant hump of mountain laurel, and behind an invisible force field, smelling faintly of burnt ozone, that I have never-- oh never, in all my wronged, wrestling life, never!-- been able to penetrate. 

Ah ha! Black mountain silo #RZK1718-B slips open her concrete portal for me. Seven and one half tons of dust slide sideways at my filthed will's prompt. And, yes! In the undulant Urals, a hole yawns wide. Everything is as planned. Although I have had to improvise all night, punctuating various feints and deceptions, it has all been planned for a long, long time. Since that gold pin in my thin diaper sprang apart and in a tossed infant sleep reached my spleen. Perhaps. Out of my mother's anesthetized womb I came with a red welcome! A grin stitched on her belly stretched to my wicked size. A spewing Caesarian, rolled in the mother-blood. The God-doctor muttered obscurities. My feral half screamed. Deep dreams of death-conquest even then, chewing the old milk from her tit. A strawberry fist marks my burning scalp, revealed as I go bald. A turbulent vein throbs in my ear, a splintered bone in its throat. Delicate as a spider, my sister walked away from the yawing crib, leaving me swaled in my awful agonies and a pink wool blanket. I bawled abandonment. 

I flailed away from home, like a squid, when I was fourteen, and applied to Cornell for my doctorate. 

Somebody, walking carefully through the rooms, turned out the lights sa long time ago. I withered in the darkness. I punch an emaciated sequence on the cold keyboard. Another hole opens up.  

My foreshortened forearm rises to a new manipulation. I am become death's salesman. My patent leather shoes squeak on the edge of the seat, which falls away past the outstretched ends of my legs. My silk boxers are hand stitched. The ultralight keyboard, pulled by its twirled cord to my squat body, presses on my lap heavily. Even though it is only an alphabet and a few digits, it is the proportional size of a piano keyboard, making me stretch for the distant, upper right hand corner zero. 

I am 2' 4" tall and am about to destroy this world of giants.