Espresso Wit

As it was drawn down past tar level into the depths of those cracked and rocky roads of past, there was feeling that the ghost had done something wrong back there and this would be its path to eternal torment and inhuman soul-sucking torture.

It was half wrong; and as this momentum pressed on, it became clear from the remains of a thousand beasts and burdens that the past is never as haunting as the present.

El fantasma seguía su curso a través de todos los siglos compactados y teje a través de kilómetros y kilómetros.

And once the ghost viewed this, it recognized that it could see far beyond itself.

Time is built into the structure of life, and with its great fall it could see it enact itself before the ghost in moments rather than millennia.

When the ghost hit upon the skeletons of those native peoples with whom it had traded gods, tobacco, and furs, the ghost said excuse me and heard what it assumed was a friendly response, but the road ushered it on without expense.

If whatever moved this ghost wanted to rattle its centuries-weathered resolve, it had to some point drudged up the emotional state leading up to the ghost's death.

A time when the land of the Great Lakes was a blooming harvest for the wealthy and distant lords who shuttled galleons of their own people to endure harsh and foreign climates.

The ghost still had yet returned from its wearying journey to speak to a chief who frequently shared his fish fixed with a spicy, delectable recipe that the ghost would in the end die for.

With this recognition the ghost's perspective broadened and dispersed far across the span of this magnetic whirligig that had propelled the bulk of its existence.

 As this spectre outpaced the thermosphere it filled the black and void of space, not neglecting to touch upon all aspects that intrigued it while it wandered past the frontier of civilization into the hinterlands.

In the winters, the ghost recalled logging its activity, accounting for each trade and trail taken.

 It mapped out some of Lake Huron and Michigan; and had taken in a great haul of furs which were to be shipped back across the Atlantic.

As the tallies rose, so to did the number of trappers and thieves that the ghost met our in the wilderness.

On course to the sun, the phantom accepted the momentum as its own motion as it willed it.

It truncated its route by wrapping its entity around itself, thus transporting this conciousness across greater leagues of space/time.

Thus the ghost could now transport its logic and receptors to greater and greater lengths.

Such as a relay, when one horse was too tired, a messenger could trade its mount for another, the ghost could launch what functioned as its eyes between points of existence near instantaneously.

Yet with this accomplishment, the ghost still took a blinks to cover the length from its home to the sun.

It was not as it had thought using its now rotted brain that the sun was like a glass orb full of liquor and fire.

It seemed to the ghost to be more like a top spinning on no single point, it churned to no specific end.

And as it examined this it too looked behind itself, viewing the expanse of this Milky Way.

The Earth is round.

The Sun is the curl at the center of this pinwheel.

The whole of existence violated all the ghost had known and was promised.

It had to quench one last thirst.

The ghost folded itself to a distant star, the one the captain had used to reference all his movements across the open ocean.

The one star that commanded the most respect across all professions, with sailors, explorers, or even priests.

When the spectre warped space/time enough to have found Polaris, it now had to shed all presumption.

Polaris, the North Star, was another sun in the black map across the sky.

It marked nothing more or less than that its God had created a thousand twirling orbs to spark life in all galaxies.

When the ghost wandered back to its own memories, fur trading and becoming familiar with the people it had met along the way, its trip to Polaris lost its cohesion.

It was as if an anchor had been dropped, and the ghost was dragged back past time and place.

Once it hit land, it was as though it hadn't just been slingshotted across a great ocean of calm formlessness.

The ghost had pulled back to the precise second it had taken its first step on the shores of the New World.

This memory loomed like a depthless anxiety in its conciousness.

When it stood there, it stared at the men unloading the ships and giving orders like cannonade on the ears of travel-weary souls.

The ghost took a step forward and stopped.

It was no longer moving empty limbs through an altered space, the ghost was now moving its own limbs and running to help.

Excited he drove forward, no longer thinking of itself as a soul escaped, and lifted the largest box he could find. When the ghost remembered his name it was a nice Dutch name, and then he sang a nice Dutch tune. The dream of his afterlife faded a little. The spectre tried to remember its death and the sun he'd visited so far away, the one which he had watched endlessly aboard ship. Its death appeared so far away now, but it was predictable, oh so predictable.

It tried to keep the memory close that the sun is but one in a near infinite set. It wasn't a delicate bulb readily blooming a seed of fire within. He had seen it with his own eyes as a phantasm traversing the universe. But there was too much to remember now, he was alive and wouldn't undergo many more ocean crossings before traversing across that lake country.

The ghost would write to his home as much as he could, to leave a tale of his passage. He was raised to read and write, but what he'd seen was far out of his bounds to reiterate. It would be as though to explain that humanity could sail across the oceans in a few weeks to a man who has only ever dwelt in caves. It wasn't as though he hadn't tried, but his vocabulary could only be stretched so far. A ship's manifest, a letter to an old friend, these were the things his mind could put on paper.

The memory of the ghost who had fled this land could now only be expressed as though wisps of straw. The clarity was all well and good when one's mind made it a point to hold on, but thoughts intrude and life moves one to think on and on. The straw comes loose, and into an ocean of black goes one's mortality.

So as the days wore on, the ghost left the shores of his homestead with the feeling as if on another expedition.

It was as if the illustrious hinterland had become not a secluded sanctuary for the dispossessed, but was a sun unto itself, twirling on an axis unaware and unafraid of the systems beyond.

That night, after the crew had unloaded the ship and made camp, he sat across from the incoming tide.

He sat there for a long time.

==

of the ice in our breath.

A change in temperature

is definitely good for a change,

but don’t get stuck at room temperature.

==

Don’t mistake warm for warmth.

If the ice stays, let it cut.

Let it sear and suck,

so when you finally feel that touch

==

When that hand passes,

you know it well,

let it wrap and grip and tighten.

Let go of your fire, 

==

let it out and spill

across the lawn.

Let a neighbor know

you want to care.

==

Collect the fuel,

hydrogen to carbon

as water to skin,

break out the oxygen.

==

We might share what we’ve lost,

burn the rest for Winter’s sake.

So let’s gather, and let’s hold

each other in this concrete forest.

==

Where we will drink beer

to forget our fear.

I miss your friends.