The Noble Gases by Marc Lengfield

The Noble Gases

Then came an exit of sleep-infested days and the nights preceding once of a neon jejunity, exactly neon, noble and new with representations of living forward in the signed vibrancy that blinks Open All Night and Vacancy, colored gas of the future planet where your parents voyaged, your mother in heels, streamlined green and stepping out with your inert father. They were the last and you didn’t follow but wonder to mountain with another on the outskirts of cities. In the whirring gauze of the orbital curvature desolate birds flocked home through your multi-eye. Then it was onto calm breathing in the restoration of the commonplace: family pet, stranger walking by, the success of an automobile. Except the quotidian archetype was a bit of cloud adrift fields of full-bodied Saturdays, pockets possessed of miniature eternities that bloomed and buzzed through anyone’s guess, and the valence that dovetailed in an ache taut as the arrow of time. Once you even thought you heard something like a voice of cosmic alignment calling out…Hey You Kid. .

-- discarded to return: something else.

​Blackened gum spots to litter walkways. A cripple scratches in your conscience like a small voice of God. You smoke through patches and remember dawns of yesteryear’s absence. Men and women recall the security of factories, equate to happiness and plummet as they wait in line to wage war on time share owners with weapons of mass promise. In the text from somewhere high in a loft a piano is tuned. A drizzle of notes follows and so do you to the next limited hangout ordering sound bites: one method for refuting the summons from the Ways and Means Committee. This is how you listen for the humming engine of done. Pause and ask is this enough? It’s impossible in this world to trade neon for argon and so there you are like a swizzle stick in a drink going tink tink  against a swirling exterior. Outside – a collective of doppelgangers lies down in the street reminiscing over their long ago Faye Dunaways. Later they’ll knit a scarf of pronouns wear a house like a suit of mutual kindness. Scant sanctuary in the fog of this wrecked century we are living in an age that calls darkness light.*

-- revenant of a runaway: you become another. 

Autumn flickers its tongue and pillars by the lake shore where live oaks shade through afternoon séances of lost images. The children of the present day giggle their bread crumbs into the ducks’ hissing group therapy. Anoles skitter palmetto. Farther back, swagger merchants go honey badgering, slinging mesmerize at potentials. I take the whole of it in and conjure my shun with a prayer that tastes in my mouth like a hand of broken fingers decaying through half-lives of xenon. Then comes the orange and the orange blossoms until it all falls like salt on physical silver. The miniature Camus in my homunculus is telling me: briefly it is night, falsely layered and gone liquid dreamy in the infomercial. When my indigenous selves feel the fluffy existential angst of so many missed cello lessons I can’t help but cry out. O Sister of Despair- is that really me on the ground peering up your skirt? I need to feel better so I eat a martyr and touch the calming breeze in the eucalypts. The thump in the atria announces the narrative’s shifting tense and I float through like a balloon untethered to gain another sky. 

-- this round robin life: this sea of us.

It’s the strain in the voice I listen for. Because half the necessary and half the unneeded and so even a skinny trips me up. The pause vanished, swallowed up by the uninhabited crowd, got carried away was carried away across the long ellipsis. So I crawled through my animal and came back out emergent to a sainthood of rush hour traffic. The Gospel of Colossus tells a time of Jesus baptizing his gigantic rooster in the River Jordan, the afterwards of riding the sacred beast into Jerusalem to beat the bankers’ asses, the people following, inheriting all of the necessary, discarding wholly the unneeded; this beautiful story, the  heresies we love. Frayed threads of the debate unravel, give way to an unbounded. The abracadabra waves its hands over the swirling meme-flux, manufacturing the electorate’s Tao. Yin stands at the bully pulpit sniffing krypton labeled Sweet Drone Attack of Peace while Yang soaks through television screens spewing the helium miasma we call Gorgeous Asshole of Capitalism.  In the streets of us this sea of us stripping away…mottled scales of our Stockholm syndromes.

--things fall apart: the center cannot hold*

She could for flight – her aviatrix in a Matisse sky. Occult sun curtained in cloudy silk, the hot pinks and washed out blues bleeding through and the longer blues dripping their glycol scent onto grey. She could for sleep – descendent nude spilling ochre angles and the angels of white spaces roosting obliquely on the crumbling stone. This world was made to flicker she said: the crow in the periphery, the tinge of lavender, the daughters of radon. In random night her spirit appears as agent provocateur in the center of a harem of Frida Kahlos. If all her roses are wild, if sometimes she tells the story of horses and turpentine pines, of the brush of history and the rain that falls upwards into a net of stars - where loss is a statement of winter punctuated in undying ingle. If coming to in a flash of desert neon, where the  driving levels out, cross-country and simple, and Garcia lives on the radio singing See here how everything lead up to this day…*

-- arriving on the horizon: against granite

Hummingbird became the locus of tender perceptions. Wax depths of magnolia leaves and hibiscus shaped communal refuge. The ending it took to restore the sea to the sky. Father’s measuring stick being too short to record the length of the late romances. So now the door just hangs from its broken hinge, creaking or banging in the wind that emanates its cold blue distance. Thump thump  in the atria. I keep trying to imagine how it feels to forage in a forest like an animal undreamt of. The days go by. Try to feel my fingers in the cool warmth of northern waters, a realm of August before time rolled away. I need simple words for saying give me simple words for saying simple things. I need simple pleasures like counting women in church to keep me from wandering through Italy homesick for penguins, to keep the blue spiders from eating the soles of my feet.* A xenon script for the hypoxia. When the stranger train leaves the station you better believe I’ll be in my right mind better believe all my cello lessons will be paid for. 

-- in the noble air : once we were

The boom in the boomtowns, luxury liner living with the Eurodaddys and the dandies that once lined up at the argon merchant’s stall buying up copies of L’Con d’Irene. Grief – being the last partygoer to drink up all the dead soldiers. A ghost lifts you through the body of text to emerge into the sameness of stars. On rent day you retrieve a vision of lighthouse monarchs, isotopic prophesies of the periodic table. An elegance of yesterday on the radio or the first waves of color, schoolbook photographs of the Wright brothers, their flight patterns arcing through the last century, longitudinally, enjoined to your own generational mayfly, there seems to be an applause, a pageantry of swirling dust, the barking choir of neighborhood dogs. Evidently the cool kids are reading Bakunin again. Frayed threads of the debate unravel, give way to an unbounded. Scratch scratch in the conscience, then…the exit of sleep-infested days, one prime number and all the night’s neon.   



NOTES

​* “…we are living in an age that calls darkness light” – Stolen from the Arcade Fire song “My Body Is A Cage”

* --things fall apart: the center cannot hold – from Yeats “The Second Coming”

* See here how everything lead up to this day…from the Grateful Dead song “Black Peter”; words by Robert Hunter. 

* “…wandering through Italy homesick for penguins…” from the James Wright poem “Against Surrealism”



​About the author: Marc Lengfield lives in Florida where he teaches mathematics at a local university. His previous publications include a short story titled 'Diary of Blind Love' dedicated to the post punk, sex positive literary pioneer Kathy Acker, which first appeared in Dogzplot some years ago.