East

Vivid dreams followed me. I awoke, pulled on last night’s duds, kissed Buttercup goodbye, loaded myself on the bicycle and pedaled back across town in shame. Shame may not be the word for it now, what I was feeling was the unutterable lament of loss. I was about to lose her too even though I knew shifty nights in bars and slouchy highs would not/could not produce anything of substance. At the very least we were closer to a source there – I having become extraordinarily uncomfortable with the games that come along with suburban design. At least in the lowly mass of wood and sticky beer stench a man is more likely to bear his soul, revealing just what it is that keeps it all going – bestial acts (With Uncle Tommy Waits to thank and before he, Ginsberg, that beautiful fag). Half way home, between her place and my studio, on the lawn of her school and my place of employment I stopped to lament a dead bunny. Its head had been severed and placed like a composition about a meter to the east of the body. “Heading home with Mohamed to see Allah,” I said to its corpse. I spoke to the head and laid my fingertips on the soft rear end. Bunnies are Muslim. In the order of creatures God assigns religion with ritual we’d likely call instinct. Much of that ritual goes unnoticed but today it was clear – in the fractal moments before death an animal is given insight to its end, they always know, and bunnies will always face east.