shark

felix and andrew caught a small nerf shark last night when they were drunk on beer, and this morning everyone is trying to decide whether or not to tell jess. “we had our lines out last night and pulled in this big shark 2 medters long” felix is on his tiptoes as he retells the story for the 4th time, as we all wake up in the morning scrounging for coffee on the birch tabletop. andrew jumps in “we saw this big black back and then went down into the canoe to cut it free” our boat has got 4 kuna canoes tied to it, because the kunas come by in the day and stay. i never thought much about kids until i saw these kuna children smile and hide. theres one that wears a pink shirt with the words “punk”written accross her stomach. I want that one, as a daughter, as a sun yellow center, as a friend, to watch and sit next to. jess is a hot red haired sieren on the boat. shes 22 years old from england, that walks around beaming smiles but terrified of the water.” dont tell jess shell never swim again” we all agree, and then go to the computer to look at the pictures of the small shark circle the boat from the night before.

tasters choice

I spend seven fifty for a shave and I get cut, twenty five cents for a cup of coffee, five bucks for one room with a fan, and seventy for another with egyptian sheets, fifty bucks for a fuck, and two for a movie with spanish subtitles. three dollars for espresso and white chocolate sorbet , and a quarter for a chicken soup with yucca. Im living in two cities in one, an air conditioned flat with room service and a sweaty colonial three story with broken beams settled on a slant. I dont get dry, I just keep dripping from the shower to the soaked sheets, to the night, panama, the ocean, one man ontop of another
two rooms inside one house. The iglesias and the black majic bottled in the market.
“No way baby” it aint gonna fly. thats what I tell her as she walks down the street with milk for the family, two blocks of nothing but churches dressed in white plaster and sasheed pelvic downstrokes condeming one street to buckle and one to die. baby aunt jemimas with big cohibas jammed into thier ceramic mouths for sacrifice sit caddy corner to a white and black plastic newlyweds under glass. I walk through the streets above the market, the old lady grabs my pillon, the crane bangs another finger, and the ocean laps against the concrete and black glass towers at the footboard.” you want to be married” she asks me, all seventy five years of her body bruise my back as I turn towards the door, the matrimonial trinket stuffed in a plastic bag in my fist.
the poker keeps on coming, it doesnt make me sad anymore, or make me happy, I dont go up and I dont go down, Ive settled into the middle, Ive settled into never giving it up, and whatever consequences that might have,you gotta go all in with the nut flush, and whatever happens after that has got nothing to do with you. panama, bogota, barcelona, women and cards and that painful beauty that beats back not painting, not writting not being better
Im sitting on the edge of the bed, in a colonial corner with walls that miss the ceiling by four feet, theres a scavened cord that probably used to dangle a bulb above the bed, a monks king, with cream sateen worn soft like a fast table, frankie loved maria there in blue ballpoint on the pillow, against the wall with the red chair moulding splitting this bastion in two. theres a vertical two foot flourescent sconce staggered against a broken mirror by the door, and two beatiful shuttered french curtains facing the street . Im shot up, gristle smaking my gums, all choked up on a run, in a city that feels like home.
I walk into the glass and mirrored stainless lobby of the venetto, the dark panamanian woman behind the marble desk, was on her back for me the night before, sucking in the united states, and giving me the players discount on the room. the lobby is full of low grade hookers in acid wash skin tights and sequined belts that bounce reflections from the mirrored ceiling to the chromed pillars, and the buffet ladels behind the texas game. Im freerolling between via espana and the old panamanian port where a back door leads to a disco at noon, where the leveled pier, and the catch boats string a flax net under a long black bar, with dirty skirted girls like green and blue chairs on a ferris wheel. thirty two blinking children spreading themselves over the fishmarket. white teeth on sticks, rocking backwards on a nooseline towards my face. oxygen escapes into my lungs, the door like a snuffed trachia birthing the gasious compound, from one whores lips to another.
I finally booked a sailboat for columbia, it leaves in two weeks. A century old steel schooner that’ll drag the san blast and send me deep into the bow. eight days on a boat will give me a taste if thats a life for me, eight days away from land, like a car crash that never ends, a stone wall that doesnt swallow, zero to sixty with no chaser. spinning spinning spinning, into blind headlights, into icy banks into dixies arms, another near death embrace, the outstretched assasin smilling back, one swell one break, one broken tooth at a time

Ludwig

The capatain crushes pepsi cans in one hand as his other hand makes an open fisted glide over the birch table top, inspecting for crumbs from last nights bowl of popcorn, a spilled beer or rum rings. satisfied the table is clean, he clears his throat and looks out through the oval door, off the side of the ship caught in the oceans stare. Not like the drunk german from the night before farting and tickling kuna women off the coast of panama. Hes natural now like a gull riding a hot upswell lost on a mission. I see him like I see myself in my head, a man with a purpose.
“this boat is iron” he says to me yesterday, he’s correcting me cause I called it steel. Im thinking about a useful piece of plate, not an expensive table, where your getting graded on the needle top half moons layered like a roll off peas against a prouve chair leg. Im thinking about 220 tons of something that saves lives and stands on its own without its fathers words to protect it. “its before steel, its iron, if you slice it you see lines like the life of a tree”. The galley is black because the sun, just awake herself has not found its way from the horizon down the long flat field of water to this ship. Dark photographs like framed negatives of three masted schooners from the fifties. The boat on the wharfs of germany, hauling lines and trawling for cash in the north sea. theres a birch table with coffee on it, a warm vestige of land. a raft when this whole world goes, and you with it, bobbing in the surf like a bloody piece of bait. Im blinded for a second as the sun focuses through the open eye of a turnbuckle, laying light accross the walls like a lazer cutting a hole in ice. Ive been talking to ludwig, telling him Im a welder, trying to trade work for a free ride down to new zealand from the gallopogos in february.
“dont ships strap zink billets to the hull for a anti rust coating?” I learned that some where, when buying zink sheets in new jersey for a bar I built ten years ago. ludwig could care less. “zinc anodes” he coorects me.
“like a battery ?” I ask. Isnt there something I can do to make a dent in this morning. why is it always so dam hard to talk plain. Ive been on the boat two days so far, where sailing through the carribean san blast islands indigenous kuna indian outposts, on the way down to columbia. Im a passenger sharing the boat with a four person german crew that shuttles travellers between colon and cartagena. steve, andrew the two michaels, felix, jess, christian, esther, zasha, gabby, ete, and a new columbian girl we picked up who was stranded on one of the 1/2 acre islands named lady, and eight others whos names have escaped me. starfishes under the azul carribean water like crushed red bottlecaps on another foreign constellation.
“its like a battery” ludwig says “because of the salt water the propeller spinning creates electricity”. I get excited “an arc?” I ask. I know about arcs from welding. I hope it is the arc, the only energy I can control, a mans word, some communal surge, the blue light, the cracking carbon, lapping nickel sized moons on a stainless trunk, argon shrouding gas making an oxygen depleting world of two elements getting basic. but ludwig dismissevely makes that european snitch noise and shakes his head. “no arc, just stray current seaking the weaker metal. its the battery effect” I try hard not to make him my dad, and to understand something new. Its got something to do with metals carrying an electrical current through salt water. salts a conductor and the current can stray, looking for ground. looking for something weak that cannot protect itself. like the hull or the steel keel, or the propeller shroud. the anode is the decoy, it is the weakest metal that attracts the current, its the expendable. He’s looking out the oval door onto the flat back, the lazer light cutting into me now, like a doctors knife, and everything is silent. the ship bobs and everything that cannot be proved burns in the sun. all this time I hoped I was a man like him, like this ship. the silver sliver of sky and land that duel at the end of the world, I pretended I was the hull something heavy defying the ocean, all these eternal tasks mine. when I used to weld I imagined I was the arc, the radiant blue light, damning metals intio union, a gated quarter breed banging out a dogs song. I lied to myself on my pillow, and said I was the keel, pressing the wave down, chartered under the bright red dials of north and south. But no, the truth is I am the anode, the weakest of all things, begging a maverick pulse, thats me dissolving into a brine of alkaline swell. thats me the expendable, attracting all the energy of the world, the loose electrons that want my heart. I am the bait metalurgic, I am nothing but frozen alloy, a weak infantry man, dieing slowly as the beautiful things of this world eat me alive.