aborted beginnings

the ghostly skeletons hang over the rooftops - electric scarecrows stripped of rags and straw in bad weather reaching for the signals in the sky. the wind blows the spindly things around like broken weathervanes.

i'm across the street at a cafe, eating a bagel and drinking coffee. i'm watching the rain fall through the antennaes like falling down pine trees or broken umbrellas. i'm waiting for lightning to strike the roof of a church.

in european cities - most of them - the tallest thing on the horizon are the church towers. i'm looking at this church tower on top of a red stone church in mainz. the top of the towers have these gothic crosses that look just like the scarecrow antennaes all over everything else.

scarecrows keep things away. these broken scarecrows pull things down from the sky. cable television. salvation.

i'm sipping the coffee slow because i'm about to puke and i don't want to puke. before i came to this cafe, i had woken up under the bridge between mainz and kastel. i was fully dressed. i wasn't at all hungry.

my mouth is all full of brown hair, little flecks of bone, and the aftertaste of blood.

i know exactly who i ate when i was blacked out.