7163. BELOW THE WATER LINE, pt. 5

BELOW THE WATER LINE

(pt. 5)

You know, when growing up, you hear things that never

quite make sense; even though you hear them  -  as a kid

the logic you operate with isn't quite yet up to snuff to

compete with the ways of adults. I guess it's a smidge of

suspicion, mixed with experience  -  like when someone 

would say 'keep your friends close, but your enemies closer',

or however that went exactly. I'd hear that, someone would say

it, and it would be enough for me, just sittin' there with the

fireflies and crickets all bouncing around the backyard hedges

to think on it for hours. I couldn't figure out for the life of me  -  

in all that new-cut grass and trees, what people ever were

meaning to say. And if they really did know, why they just

didn't say it. That was in my first life, the first Avenel; then I

got hit by that train over down on Rahway Ave and didn't wake up 

for months after everybody thought I was dead, the boy-in-the-coma

lost and forever. It never worked. It took me the longest of adventures,

and I recall it all well, but I slowly  -  ever so slowly  -  crept back out

of that black-sourced spirit place I'd been and I slowly comported 

myself back to inhabit a body that just months before was all cracked

and jumbled and given up for gone, but I did get on back  -  I made it

through. If I was a car, like in the old days, I'd have a hundred-plus

travel stickers all over the back windows. Yeah, like people used to

do with their cars and station wagons and all  -  take their family to

Yosemite or Pike's Peak or New Hampshire or Pennsylvania or even

just the beach. There'd be some sort of sticker-decal with a colorful

picture of whatever it had been  -  Old Faithful or The Alamo  -  some

color decal to prove and show where you'd been, that could have been 
me coming out of the death world, the Spirit-place I'd traveled. So,
 that was my second life, in Avenel too  -  but not ever again the same. 
Just like when we moved to Inman Ave., the backyards weren't yet 
finished and I'd play alone, crawling all over those mounds of dirt 
and cut and fallen tree-trunks and broken up skunk-piles of bush 
and weed  -  it was an unholy mess. That was just like me  -  the  
second me, a whole entire uncleared jumble-patch of things to

come, new and broken ideas, everything all cluttered up.
School never mattered to me - and heck it was right down the
street  -  but they never taught anything of what I already knew.
My yard, somehow got leveled and cleaned up and cleared, 
and I don't really recall how or when that happened  - I guess 
maybe early on the crews came when I was in Kindergarten or 
First Grade, but it all got cleared  and made nice. The mysteries of 
the alkaline, I called it to myself later on. All the harsh acidic stuff, 
as usual, had been carted away  -  just like they did in school, I
always thought  -  taking from you all the excitement and dreams
and adventures or pure, clear childhood thinking, and trying
instead to turn you into the flat-formed no-good 'individual' you 
have to be to 'succeed', or what they called success anyway. 
Never made sense to me and there's nothing individual about it.
Just more lying going on. It seemed too me  - they removed all 
the bitters and, like the  yard, all you were left with were the
alkaline flats, the easy nothings, the harmless eddies and flows of 
old and tired water. Just like all that, all reflective of the paltry life

they then try to pin you into. I just always wanted to scream, and I

often did, 'It don't fit! It don't fit! Now go, leave me alone!' Fat 
chance of that  -  there was always some busy-body superior 
trying to weasel me back into (their) place. Like my yard, the flat 
and settled place of a million other squats and walks and footprints. 
Rubbish. It was as if they really thought they 'owned' me. And I
really think they believed that too. I used to be able to look up,
from the top of my driveway, northeast-looking, I guess it

was, and see the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper at night. I'd 
stare and dream, and wonder where I'd been, what was up, and 
whatever was the shape of the shape that was 
about to be descending on me.