Fukushima #4

by John Pursch

My memory has been dismembered. There is no longer a flailing of farces, a chattering of teeth, a fueled imbroglio of wanton emblems. The icons of six o’clock news have receded into the countryside, along with full count pitchers of rice paddies, photos of a lost gazelle, and placemats to be framed in a wild and wizened lineup of causal circumspection. All that remains of the Panic of ’87 is the dusty rag once owned by four presidents, now hopelessly on display next to a dozen pallets of whisk brushes. 

Referential integrity ceased to obtain after the fall of Fukushima #4, swirling into paused idiosyncratic dubiety; all without a titter, a meaningful sigh, a cataract of phosphorescent malingering outside donut shops near you. Pentagonal starboard snowfall continues unabated, filling the gunwales with iced chaff and old newsprint, pickled in fine dusk. Onsets of opinionated release appear, vacillate, and slink into cold closets, yearning for herniated police. The only constant is the scudding glow of slo-mo cloud, sputtering from blowgun eruption stilts just over the horizontal listing sea. 

Modular hickory smoke still rises from the motu, revealing burnt catamarans, echoing nocturnal cries of hypnotic pheasant herders, huddled deep in solitary traceries of doubt. It is as though time has finally lost all meaning, though this would be far too simplistic a statement to hold any stale water. We know very little, but what remains of our canned convictions is killing us. So we keep on spraying the clock with aerosol belief revolvers, bent on sad regret, achieving duplicitous remembrance of module flint bicuspid erasure, molded in stone and concrete. 

Now I see through the purple plastic of empty cartridge, to newly blushing fossils of teenage expectations, groping each utterance for purchased redemption in quick sure steps, solid handiwork, and fluid beats of heartfelt joy. Doubled over in pleasure, ecstatic electric ejecta becalm the humming racetrack with greying houses, busted planets separating sunrise infidels and nervy dolls in greenish gauze. 

I realize of course that if I inject this last remaining green capsule, there is no turning back from hell-bent empties of pop-top fibrillation and spinning mornings of downtown soup canary coffee mugs on old abandoned carousels of horse guffaws and slackened linearity’s pejorative oomph. But all is foregone, especially the frozen shake of impending inky stairwell echo, fall of metal gunship blaze in cooling sheath of anchored nostalgic grief, pushing overt cattle, glimpsed in charismatic truncheon swaths of neural muon baths.