Samuel Need 400 Anita Street, Durham NC, 27701 samueljneed@gmail.

com

Bum lurking the darkness with sixteen wrinkles in his forehead. Shoe muddied with a muck of unidentifiable composition. He frowns as the buildings spill slowly to the great lake. He cannot, wait.

The Impracticals
1.

I found him on the outside of the party. On the stairwell out back, the rickety tick steel one that leads up to the roof that looks over Manhattan. The one where the smoking of the cigarette is like a sort of backlit painting and such shit and you have thoughts with your chin pointed up at the birds in the sky above the cloud of smoke. The wearing of sweatshirts for slim bodies, toboggan hats from Peru with the earflaps

and Mohawk of pink wool. The holding of the edges of the girls arms by the arms of the slightly larger individual. The updrafts of warm, sweaty air from the subway grates below. Moon gaze, time stop. And somewhere in between those moments, we begin to think that if we have the right sort of thoughts in these sorts of places that itll fix all that other shit and the bad behavior and black depressing thoughts that emerge while you are tired and fixing up some cereal and just being negative. The porch, the patio, the roof: its one of those places that has been scouted and screwed to death by artists on the canvases and cassettes of a million studios, but for good reason. Its one of those impractical places, where the people come to unleash an essence, clumped and smelly and cloying but still real and thus just as valid as anything else.

Finally he saw me in the corner with the bottle of green liquid. He asked me who I was and I beckoned him to follow.

<>

I found him in a room on the first floor of the house. In an office crammed like a fat foot in a tennis shoe, filled with pictures of Greek deities, Ansell Adams prints, astrological charts, Rothko scans from internet files, poems on the old sort of computer paper that unfolded onto

itself like a really long piece of skin. On every wall hangs a collage of work and the stuff he looks at for inspiration for work. A lone window affords a rectangular view of the skeleton trees outside. Western Massachusetts in February, a natural graveyard under pencil lead skies. An empty swing-set for a child who lives with a mother in a different home. Gray smudge birds with coats that do not hold light like nickels hold light. All of the elements stirring wounded and incapable of running far enough away; cold front on the way. The poet looks at the landscape with the tenderness of a monk and the obsession of a cop. He is trying to wrap his fingers around the cogs and bolts that advance the action into the next day. Hell grasp maybe one syllable in the course of an intensely brow-creased sweaty work hour. Over a day, maybe a sentence, but itll be a permanent thing. Hell never take the editors scalpel to it. As he throttles the laptop screen and stares with watery eyes at a rabbit in the grassless mud field outside, he is wondering why he of all people is being allowed to see another winter. Wonders if the medication will hold out long enough for another spring. Wonders when society will collapse and return to the animal kingdom. How hell be killed in the event that happens, he having the no woodsman skills and the slender body with the Converse sneakers. The poet hasnt been around people for months except to pick up

eggs at the general store at the bottom of the mountain, but even that is rare, because everyone in the supermarket checkout line makes him so sad, because he can look into their hearts and see the little rises and falls and magician stagecraft that they use to decorate their lives, their excitement over new network television series this Fall! He cant stop looking at the damage of it all, and he tried out the wandering thing but it didnt solve the problem and he still needed money for coffee and health insurance and baklava. The only living things he spends any time with anymore are his three elderly cats. As he watches them amble lazily through Monday afternoons that pierce the core of his heart, occupied primarily with the chasing of sunbeams, he becomes convinced that they know the truth of it all. Somewhere deep down, the poet still believes the right stanza at the right time can save a persons life, and on good days, he thinks these words still swirl like clouds underneath his skin. But twisting and sneering above all that is the mans knowledge of the smothering Buddhist void, the cancelling of character and personal spark, a noise issuing at the shrieking decibel of silence that exists in a Geishas rock pool. It is the final white blanket waiting to be tossed over the stage, and it is bigger than the stage.

He looked at me when I come in through the pantry door. How did you get in here?

No, I said. That is not the important question to ask. I see. He put up no fight. There was something undeniably Protestant in his resignation. I thought again about how this was indeed New England.

<>

I found him out by the beach with a few ladies touching his shoulder. No shirt, middle of the day, Sao Paulo, Brazil. Sand smelling like coconut milk and sex. Bronze child with the un-clothed chest at the center of the picture. Fifteen, sixteen. Skin like stone in a river in the sun. Seated on his slender and tough butt with his knees pulled up to his chest. No scars anywhere in spite of his living situation, which is a lot like the more violent video games. A joint made out of trashcan rice paper is winding its way around the circle. In goes the fire, out goes the heart and the knowledge and the restless kicking little macho. There is the shoving of the farthest edges of toes into the warm pillowcases of sand. Sitting with him is an older woman with light skin and her friend who

is younger and black like a nugget of coal. The older woman is grown, with exquisite bone structure and sexual experience. She has slept with the young beautiful boy on the sand. Has gripped the edges of his unscarred ribcage, whispering to him in ecstasy as he has gone on longer than others, younger and firmer, all while the chattering of the chickens on the roof above echo like the church bells of the slum. And outside, there are people getting their hair cut in chipped, wooden doorways, in the same place where they smoke dope, in the same place where they kiss, in the same place where they play the mandolin and that man has no hands and why does he have no hands and why does he have no feet and how does he play at all he is just striking and striking empty nubs at this organ of noise. He plays urgently because he either speaks with the devil or with god and neither likes to wait. And the child was born on a bloody floor to a poor mother and a grandmother stirring pheasant bones for stock, and he grows and is strong and lush and golden flavored in almost a mockery to the impurity that clamors at his eardrums on the daily. The noise from the starving dogs mixes with the noise from the hustlers and the noise cooed into his ear by the mother-aged lady he sleeps with for the sake of it on nights that dont ever get cold enough he to feel like nights. In the mornings, he pushes out

of the beaded front door and runs through the streets and down past where the white people and the generals live in big mansion houses hanging like halos above the highway. He runs the alleyways, past illegal street carts selling kabobs, past the slop in the gutters that smells oddly citrus, through a tangle of flabby church going arms, and finally out onto the beach and to the ocean and he cries with peace because he is tiny in comparison and that is really good news.

I greeted him and he came right away. Said he was bored and hoped alongside me like an antelope. I tried to offer my credentials but he waved me off impatiently. Whatever chico. Ill go with you for a time.

<>

I found her on the farm, tending to those that grow. Cradling the shoot of a turnip like it was the most important sacred candle in the oldest sort of Slavic baroque cathedral. Young girl, overalls, hasnt taken a shower in like a week or who really knows; nappy-headed dreadlocks not for style but just how hair winds up onto itself if left to its own devices for too long. Hairy legs because fuck the man Ill cut the hair I want to cut, and isnt it important that people have fur, and isnt it important that people

have fur, and in spite of the model glamour bullshit and the avian models on TV with the unblemished faces, that every last soul on earth is connected to a body that can digest flesh and produce shit and generate hair that literally bursts at the fibers of the flesh of your face. How we have forgotten the processes, she says often, how we have forgotten the processes. The celebration of the natural, the rapid, casual, and rapturous intake of the sort of at first off putting musk scent of really human skin and really human odor. Gardener has a carbon footprint of zero and she hasnt forgotten where the water comes from or where the shit goes. And she composts egg shells and orange peels and anticipates the microscopic mushrooms that say hello and poke through and return the waste to mush and the dust to dust. She kisses baby donkeys and even loves and names sheep individually even though who are we kidding sheep are basically like rocks in terms of their intelligence. But it was never about what animal was giving the most, it was about the fact that this animal, fucking, is. It is carbon and fur and fear and hunger, it is shape marshaled and organized into form, and whatever fits that requirement, you just have to love it with all of the engines in your chest because there is no reason for it just like there is no reason for you. And the gardener with this dirt on her face is smudged like a playtime child in the woods and she has come full circle

and cut away all of the abstractions of like vehicle and dinner party that hang off the modern person like cobwebs. And she puts the food in her mouth that she brings up from the earth and she puts the flesh in her mouth of the animals that she has slain and named and kissed and she is really just being a mother all the time and that my friends is an empirical fact. Attuned to the larger musical movement, she is just so ready to go with thermodynamics and to recycle her carbon into the earth and to relinquish her body to the eager fecund mouths of chanterelles and to just simply return and give away and lay down the physical and be good finally and at rest and at last.

And the rest of you who still shop for fresh mozzarella with a clean conscience, in halogen lit rows of sad supermarket towns, cloak and dagger liberal, shes got the most erect and unforgiving finger to point in your face.

She points a trowel in my direction and steps in front of the flowerbed. Who are you? I mean no harm. Just be quiet, she says.

Only by displays of intense stillness can I gain her respect. It seems that which is human has so grievously disappointed this woman that she can only abide plants these days. It takes an afternoon of me standing by the gate, hands patiently clasped, imitating the patience of an oak tree, before she will consent to hear me out. Once we speak, however, she moves quicker than the others.

<>

I found him on the steps to his own apartment building. Summer in the Bronx. Block party. Mamies in jeans that bulge with large rear ends tote ice cream cones in their right hands. Solo is his name and he is sitting on the stoop just trying to look calm and chilled out even though the heat is intense and even his butt is sweating inside of jeans that he too is wearing. But he has to wear them because he has sort of formless legs without muscles and he cant let people see that his legs are that formless because brothers will step to you for that sort of slovenly shit. And he is watching the girls with their candy cane lipstick and their ice cream cones and the dripping plop of that cream onto the steaming pavement and Solo is thinking about another sort of dripping and it seems as though sex is literally pulsing in the eardrums of everybody present. And now the church ladies roll up on the block with their enormous body mass and sun

dresses, and they are trying to like be a non-sexual presence and nobody is stepping to them, but even they too must know the score, is what Solo is thinking. Little Earl is sitting on a stoop across the way with a black boom box and even that is sort of sweating with water droplets on the speakers, which sparkle like the twin eyeballs of a great weird bee. The base ushering out of the box is a straight sort of one-two, one-two that makes Solo think of being high and hearing the base like its a deep, secret cave in his own heart, and in this cave the beating is reverberating with geological repercussions, from stalactites down to ice cubes, and its the most primal of one-two, one-two, one-two. And he thinks if he can only stay on this beat than fuck everything else and fuck the street that he is destined for and fuck the school system that cant even give him a pencil and fuck the dopeheads who try to swerve the count at the last second when Solo is just trying to shine and go out like a firecracker in a spot where so many other things are going out like little bugs lit on fire from a distant like Molotov like cocktail. And when mamie looks his way, from out under the utterly crisp brim of his red Yankees hat, so fresh and so clean, Solos eyes return the gaze in the way a wolf would look at some prey in the afternoon tundra. Little slits, pupil barely peeking out, like he is the sleepiest motherfucker

on the stoop. But he isnt and thats the game. He is predatory, perturbed by nothing, cooler than an icebox coolest droopy eye cant shake me pusher on the block, like a glacier even in this summer, crazy, pavement shimmering heat.

He asked me the fuck I wanted when I showed up. Moved his eyes around in a complete circle, checking and assessing every direction for people and meaningful context, before he met my gaze. Asked me did I want a bit and flicked something off the top of his lip. No. Then step the fuck off honky. I whispered something to him about his mother that I shouldnt be able to know. He studied me coolly for almost a minute before responding. The naked feeling this gives me is not one that humans can usually generate in our kind. Finally, at a volume barely over a whisper, with his eyes back in a disinterested gaze towards the happenings of the block, Solo speaks. Meet me out back in five.

<>

I found him in eating breakfast on route 66. Pancake breakfast, cracks of sand in the fissures of his ruined maw. Pebbled and porous skin. Paper Mache cheek flap of meat. Thousand yard stare that brooks no criticism. Cigarettes because of the free will of it all. Drinker and doer of the thing just because somebody else tried to say no. No Name Joe is the hopper of trains, the eater of salami and cheese sandwiches on the Oregon coast, the runner of mountains, the protector of the individual freedom. He is saying to the rest of us, jump, jump out the window when the wife isnt looking, because some animals shall not be tamed. Watching everybody with the eyes of a devil and the heart of an angel all bound up somehow in one person underneath Denim cloth. Joe is listening to Johnny Cash; trying to perform Genesis books like one to twelve on the red blasted floor of the Mojave Desert. Exposed his soul in Tennessee at such a young age that he couldnt ever stop moving after that. In the midnight hours, he gets the kind of nervous addict twitch in his lungs that keeps him from settling. No rest in a chair. Feeling endless little bug feet scratching the sides of his throat when he sits in living rooms at the late hours of the night. Hollow eyed, hes the sort of man who doles out that like really good wisdom about life and love and the spurning of women and the reminiscing of all things, all while the most god-awful shoveling of

pancakes and food into the interior of a mouth which has been used for this task so often it is basically like a rusted old furnace door. And he is like the mans man with the right hook at the dive bar if the situation calls for it, and he is like not the best father figure for obvious reasons, and like I suppose I said before he is already half dead and staring into the infinite with one of his eyeballs all the time and tha ts fascinating to me and my kind because most folks dont want to look at death until their up to their kneecaps in mud. So excuse him if hes got too much on his mind to stop. W hen he goes there wont be a ceremony. No, itll be like a gum wrapper on a highway that has been run over by so many tires of so many vehicles that it is hardly distinguishable from the pavement, slowly by degrees becoming the black earth.

He was the only one out of the group who expected me. Saw me at the door as I was coming in and doffing my hat. Hooo! Hello Sally boy. Come on in and have a cup of coffee. I smiled and said no. He leaned back and heaved a deep, hearty breath. I suppose its getting to be time now. That it is, I replied.

It was time. The six had been collected. The first step completed. What lay ahead of us I myself did not fully grasp. Our task was to sustain, but like all things, it would become more than that. My name is Gabriel, oldest of my kind, and I have watched these hills a long time. These six are my wards, my warriors, my hopes, and if they do not succeed, I will be the first among many to pass into shadow.