swallows (nocturnal salt)

a preemptive farewell to a city from a local still living there far in advance of an as-of-yet uncertain departure, via some melancholic sentimental rambling as usual, aka (and I clearly should have led with this): An Indirect Austonian Au Revoir

Bats are hairy nocturnal swallows. Mammalian fighter pilots suicidally plunging in semilit summer, simmering with sonic, they of webbed fingers so frail they look haunted they gorge and bank and shiver vivacious and untouchable in shimmering ripples of echolocation; like X-Wing Fighters, Dad! Look, Dad! Sorry if you’re managing to read this now Dad (who I will never legitimately refer to as Pops despite a vague inchoate longing to do so of the same urgency as calling a teacher Mom or my therapist Doc though she technically possesses no PHDs to speak of just those thrustingly empathetic eyes and… not motherly hair but… shoulder length or a bit more and graying tamely or sweetly or softly in that slightly older way you know like volunteer librarians in their sixties checking out my stack for me all of them heapingly yarned and sweater-bearing and deeply kind with intelligence woven through in surging feedback loops: wit, percolating up and popping gaseous but goodly, smelling of sucrose and Febreeze and not nearly as much sulfur as before).

Sorry, Dad, I must’ve been an exquisite nuisance, needing always to know right away who was Vader and ew why was he all wrinkly like that and shhhhh Cade shhh, never exactly grew out of it did I but you read all that what I said and read and I mean I know I’m sorry but you’ve merely brushed by on your way home to shower if so needed you’ve merely adopted this Dear Reader I was born into it me I’m stuck here with this and I think I have to do this every day now, writing, vomiting at you in various narcissistic hues of self-interrogation consumed and copywrited and copied-down thoughts of other more talented wordmakers placed and clung to as some safety deposit for memory he didn’t trust I didn’t trust like the nascent ice like tucking his valuables into offsite storage like death or early onset alzheimers or schizophrenia were on their way right this minute (and highly hereditary, if you take the statistics at their word and still subscribe to facts of any conceit: like ticking genetic time bombs, frequently triggered in the early twenties sort of out of nowhere hmm and so often it’s the melancholic thoughtful types like Unc gurgling with the early signs of his impending schizic break on its way as sure as Swiss Railways, once the exorcism Grandma insisted on didn’t take hold for long—though the damndest thing, it worked like a charm at first for a moment for a sketchily miserable and seemingly uplifted high-schooler, Will Massey). 

Black mammalian swallows above 6th Street. Austin, summer, sadistic. Festering discontent stained into the sidewalk and stinking that evening, like your city but with queso and bigger boots and more lime salted into the heat. Dormant soccer fields, massive floodlights beaming overhead costs into the ionized night, gorging the already-frothy stratos heavy by that point in the evening and soaked through like all summer long at tennis camp, no shade, disappointed if I didn’t darken the greys of my outfit down a shade by day’s end and how the fuck did I do that all day long always churning and building character and freely sweating sheets of pastily reapplied sunblock like lizardskin and phoenix feathers, like constant regeneration between asphalt angles, all of them right. 

Feel them: night and tar and burnt buildings still hot. Austin belching the day back into the cloudcover, ballooning insectoid fogs and careening vampiric shadows. Driving, I was always driving, especially when I was first licensed and unleashed and hopping soberly from suburb to suburb like trick-or-treating for slobbering labradors and squat ROMNEY-RYAN yardsigns spelling financially stable middle-upper-class fascism in block letters, nothing really changing all that much, right, so long as this Human Condition is stable and inescapable like NIMBY and MLK’s tyranny of massive moderate apathy, I wonder if he and Joe ever overlapped.

And the darkness drops again, and the shadows of the indignant city swallows reel madly overhead.