Brown said: “So I awoke one morning and found myself STILL unknown… writers trying to repossess lost time… type in darkness, thousands of them, tippety-tap-tap-tap… trying to define The Nation, it is beyond them, they are alone and frightened…”
The VOICE said: “I’m losing you, Brown. You’re fading.”
Brown said: “…the lights out there, bright lights must be humanized, my words will humanize the lights…the page is a dead land…still water…so many sentences secreted hourly, The Nation is immense… writers are jostled in the street, they must create space for themselves…they colonize the page with words…”
The VOICE said: “Brown Brown Brown is fading…fading…fading…Poof!”
The VOICE said: “What heart pounds in the beer-gut of The Nation, waiting to be born? I am Vesuvius I am the core, I am The Beast crouched clawing through the womb: I thrum I resonate I’m hemorrhaging! Bathe in my syllables I devastate you.”
I said to the recorder: “Plantman ascends towering mausoleums to make concrete bloom.”
I said to the recorder: “I’m practically a Folk Hero. Like Johnny Apple Seed. Imagine those corporate hives if nothing grew. If all they saw or smelled was carpet and Formica, flashing screens…they’d go mad. Insane. Plantman keeps their plants alive. Their pothos and aboricolum; their corn plants, silver leafs, and marginata; their spathyfilum, spider plants and ficus. Due to my efforts workers hundreds of feet above the earth can sit under the shade of a potted fig tree and discuss favorite colors or whisper secrets. Who knows what banality lurks in the hearts of men? The fig tree knows…”
I said to the recorder, “Over two hundred horticultural technicians work for Topiary Techniques. Largest indoor landscaping outfit in The Nation. Clients range from small businesses to major corporations. There can be anywhere from five to five hundred plants at a site and the technician on whose route that site is situated is responsible for every damn one of them.
“Technician’s mission to keep the flora on his route alive and young. When a plant dies or becomes unsightly, the client is entitled to a replacement. The technician must fill out a form in triplicate and hand-deliver it to the Dispatcher, who must sign it and send it to the men in the nursery, who release the replacement to the Delivery men, who place the new plant on a Topiary Techniques delivery truck and ferry it to its new home. All this costs time and money ’cause the company supplies replacements gratis. Every client is entitled to unlimited replacements so long as
a) the moribund plant was originally purchased from Topiary Techniques and b) the Topiary Techniques maintenance staff — we technicians– are retained for weekly visits to the site. The client corporation is entitled to have healthy green life always on its premises and nary an old brown leaf or jaundiced stem.”
Threw on a pair of jeans, shut off the big radio; clipped the radio/recorder to my belt and up to the roof. Paced under an idiot moon. Shocked-faced moon, eyes wide, mouth wanting. Voyeur moon can’t get enough. More drama more sex crimes, murder. More violence man to man or machine to man killing, killing. Moon gets off like a libidinous prison guard. Watching us kill and be killed. Panopticon Moon knows all, sees all. Who’s sleeping who’s awake. Who’s bad or good, naughty or nice. Be dastardly exciting, be his thrills. The MAN in the Moon. THE MAN is IN the Moon. THE MAN owns the Moon, like everything else.
Not a moon pleaser, I, though not Moon-Man-Mad like many I’ve known. Piss off, Mr. Moon MAN, Mr. MAN in the Moon. How much? How much did YOU pay for the Moon? Or did you just take it, like everything else, by force?
Stacks and stacks of lighted windows teased with possibilities. Sky irrelevant; stars lacked wattage. Out in The City the core, where life is. Out there the center of the world.
City’s Sleepless awake by choice. Night their milieu. Imagine: rooms full of bodies cosmeticized by colored lights and artificial fog, secret corridors of beauty, pleasure, music. Places people gather to be better than themselves. Better than human, more than human.
“Ten million lives in The City and I’m not living any one of them,” I said to the machine.
Coming home the subway packed I feared sticking people with the nozzle of my bucket, protruding like the barrel of a gun. Old man lugged his life into the car. Frail old man. Accent indiscernible. Dolls and imitation cell phones hawked from a soggy shopping bag.
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