Wooden Head

East shore of the lake, everyone has colored stripes, laterally mostly unless they lie upon their sides and I am standing. Seagulls bank on wind resistance, hanging at precisely one hundred feet. Do they focus on a point on the ground? Try to hold it? Am I their point of reference as I stand? Or is it that huge sweaty whale of a woman, a much better visual anchor, brown and on her back just a few feet away? Her breasts heave like massive, greasy bread boxes. Slick, sullen waves of flesh, keeping time with the tides of some distant ocean or moon.

I rise like a feather of burnt skin on the green breeze and glide inexorably into the water. It is cold -- cold and clear as a book with glass pages, turning slowly as I enter, waiting for me to spread, the ink that tells the story. Only the gulls have the angle necessary to read it.

I walk towards some secret hub. When the depth is at my throat my feet leave the bottom, my body hangs spindly like broken jellyfish appendages, beneath a huge floating head. I work my legs and motor through the lake, as truth exposes itself to a jury of seagulls floating above in judgment of my many transgressions. My skull is a hairy drifting thing. The point of reference bobs and dips, redefining purity by baring the ultimate impurity of my every thought and deed.

From a vantage point of one hundred feet it has to be impossible to miss.

1989 rev. 2010