Doing Bath Salts at Occupy Wall Street

An hour after I took the bath salts the moon had grown pregnant and full during the walk from the Battery to Zuccotti Park, pox marks and needle burns etched along its jagged sides. I remember breathing in the living flesh and fire in the smoke, standing next to the small pond and adjacent fountain in the Battery, watching the water flower in strange angles even though it was already frozen in the cold November air, tracing lines and figures among the frozen lily pads and swamp grass jutting jaggedly into the frosty atmosphere of lower Manhattan. Next thing I know I’m walking through the ensemble of tents, past the small pond still frozen in the mid-winter night, the coughs and snorts of unwashed noses, the smell of body odor and marijuana and flatulence blending with the warm grass and heavy wind and the wildflowers. I used to know where every tent was, every occupant, every story, told by the moonlight, when it was visible against the city lights. The city lights, who I’ve been told mask the high moon above me, but I can see so plainly and so intrinsically falling through the needle points of the buildings and the vortices of wind stirring through them, the Word of covenant blowing across the colors and pulsing tides echoing through the world contained in my vision.

They speak in ancient rhymes, riddles bending through millions of years of history sneaking through the secret places where the most hidden souls sought refuge. They turn their eyes to me, then to the tress and to the moon who they say remains invisible but who even now falls closer and closer to me, and I would be terrified of it crushing and consuming me had I not the eons to remember it falling like this through space that is as infinite as it is close, and the stars too, and the galaxies and the plasma angels all spread out in their multitude and contained in the skyline above Manhattan.

The man and the woman stand vertically. I hear them breathe and hear their hearts beating through the wind and my own breath, the man with dreadlocks going down to his back and the woman with short hair, shaved down to her roots on the sides, and metal gleaming in specks across her face in the pale colors of the evening.

“Do you think they were going to make it?”

“Given what?”

“Given anything you’ve learned up to this point.”

The man, his breath visible in a vibrating blue, kisses the woman and she pulls back and then relents and kisses him in return. The man forces and hand down her shorts and they fall back into the trees.

“There was never any real hope. That was probably obvious to everyone.”

“I don’t want to be conspiratorial, or anything, but…”

“Dude, never start a sentence like that if you want to be taken seriously.”

“I’m just saying…”

“You’ve already said all you needed to say.”

Feet stuck out of jade and yellow pup tent below a concrete barricade along the tiled ground, through which grew microscopic plants and fungi only visible by the irradiant ooze they bled into the atmosphere. The feet rose and fell, and the plants crushed underneath them but grew back within milliseconds, new births of the spectral ooze flying like spores into a hurricane contained in the lustful city wind. The feet rose and fell and human air sputtered and gasped from the corridors of the tent, heavy breaths that inhaled and exhaled the spores and made the spores and the lights and the gravity they defied a part of the bodies themselves coupled together inside the tent. I could already see the lights streamed through the arteries beneath the pale sweaty skin clasped over the feet sticking out of the tent.

“But don’t you think it’s a bit suspicious…”

“Everything’s suspicious, man. The fact that we’re alive is suspicious. Somedays I think human existence is a practical joke oxygen played on carbon. The air’s just waiting for us to destroy ourselves so all the pointlessness can be revealed in a big punch line, and the rest of the periodic table can have a good laugh that carbon thought it could be good for something.”

I watch my own blood. It leaps across my eyes and then pools in tidal lakes. I see creatures swimming, multitudes of heads and torsos and extremities, teeth biting into flesh and genitals birthing new generations to live and die across the eons of each heartbeat. I breathe the phosphorous spores and my lungs go neon and I shine so bright I see my own shimmering silhouette cast upon the white, creviced face of the ever-approaching moon.

“See, this is your problem. I’m giving you a legitimate concern and you throw your head up into the clouds and give me some metaphysical bullshit to try and get around responding to what I’m telling you!”

“You think this isn’t practical?”

“I think you can’t handle the reality we’re dealing with so you imagine these asinine pseudo-hippie platitudes to try and strip significance from everything!”

“How is that worse than reading conspiracies into every circumstance?”

“It’s worse when the conspiracies read themselves.”

There are vast jungles born and destroyed between the cracks in the pavement. When I was younger, I would sit and watch them and burn the time I have in bonfires of moments and hours and years. But I’ve learned to pull my eyes elsewhere, watch the thermal bodies of the others in the tents and walking through the rows of trees and statues in Zuccotti, watching the bodies circulated through the veins of the iron buildings ascending above lower Manhattan. Nearby, a couple fucks and clouds of heat rise above them. Elsewhere, drum circles forms and the rhythms coupled with the intricate rhythm of heartbeats I can hear throughout the park, and the wind sings a melody over it. A woman sits with her guitar and plays the song of the wind. Her hair is red and blonde. She wears glasses and several beads around her neck. Her mouth moves, but I can’t determine the sound of her singing amid the songs that erupt across the evening, from the bodies and the plants and the buildings and echoing from the deepest caverns of the moon.

“The feds were waiting in the corridor, weren’t they?”

“Where?”

“They were all over the alley, a bunch of them were already in position in the hallway on the other side of the bank.”

“Who told you that?”

“It’s already all over the park. Everyone’s told everyone.”

“But who started the rumor?”

“No one. That’s how these things spread. They’re organic.”

“And you don’t think the story evolved with each telling?”

“You don’t think eleven ops are dead and seven more are sitting in a prison cell somewhere, probably in solitary and definitely somewhere dark and cold?”

Darkness, coldness. The eons die within my eyesight, the tidal pools in my blood, a freezing pond against the fragile fortitude of so many generations. The dark cluster around the park has coalesced into the same shape of human forms that stand on the placid ground, the ground woven from the corpses of worms and insects, freeze-dried by the absence of their burning moon, but waiting for when their lunar mistress returns and they can crawl upon the earth and my skin and again. Their mistress moon who even now rockets closer and closer to earth, so close now I can feel the first vanguard pull of her gravity. It lifts my stomach and churns the seas inside. I lean over and vomit onto the sheets of the ground. The bodies pass me and I reach out to them and they pass on unnoticing.

“Did you ever think this would be a good idea?”

“Which one?”

“Any of it, but especially once we got guns involved. Everything’s going to shit now.”

“Do you think we could have effected change through drum circles and protests alone?”

“I think returning violence for violence only doubles the amount of violence in the world.”

“And I think ignoring violence only makes you a freakshow.”

I am a freak in a show, and the other bodies watch my balancing act, the broken shards of life I balance on my limps, all of them stretched into every pore and crevice of the universe. I walk through the park. I watch them and they watch me. The young couple fucking in the tent grunts and I weave their grunts into music. The two behind me, the two male voices threading discord around the night, harkening the arrival of the moon upon our shores, and now they are next to me and their voices the voice of the world. One puts an arm around me and looks into my eyes (why do they see?) and speaks in softer, neutral tones to repeat another variation, another theme to be counterpointed off of the endless discord of word they have already spilled into the night.

“So Bucky,”

I am more fragile than those words allow.

“So Bucky, you heard anything…”

He longs for my voice, I know, but my voice is wild to hold, and she slips through the forest of my lungs. Does she slip towards prey or away from fire? I can’t find her, and I tress my fingers across the man’s lips and he receives them.

“Never change, Bucky,” he says. “That’s what I like about you.”

The wind is made of rumors, bittersweet like honeysuckle and cold in the dying sun. The rumors have invited the oncoming moon, cast a soft bed for her to sleep when she arrives at the dying earth, dug tunnels in the air for the resurrected insects and worms of the ground, the bones of the dead vomited up from the bowels of the earth. I walk upon them, and I feel the beginnings of their feet walking across my skin, raising my hair. I feel memories of their work in my lungs, the burning and the blocking that turned my air to fire and molded my spine towards their kingdom of the ground. I felt their claws enrapture and mutilate my mind. I taste the hot vomit in my mouth and remember them.

My companions have left. Their voices defied meaning and disappeared on the other side of the trees. I walked into a corner of Zuccotti in the farther back quadrant, away from the other bodies and their voices and the smells the raise in the air with their breathing and farting and fucking. The trees have clustered here, they are already older than the buildings, and grow older by every second, every heartbeat, they send their roots into the steel and suck from it the iron ore and the fires from which it was forged. They craft it into the thousand or so colors painted in soft pastels in the billions of leaves. A river runs through here and her gentle current glides across the wind and the two dance for a while, and I watch them and together they soothe the oncoming hoard of insects across my skin and viscera.

Then I’m back at the frozen pond, watching the buildings frame the stars, counting the changing patterns of their electric lights. Here, I used to think that the moon might, after all, be held off, as if these glass and steel titans might be the only among us who can hold her from the earth and calm her raging fall. But I’ve looked closer into the face of the cold, white moon, how infinite her craters are, how deep her radiant glow, and I know now that even the buildings in all their brutal glory cannot hold her off when she comes crashing through the sky and descends upon us. They cannot shield us from the burning coldness of her ever-present light.