Planet of the Blind

I was imagining what it would be like to have entirely new teeth because I received an e-mail from the local dental school announcing free dentistry if you’re willing to let dental students work on you. I have crooked teeth because when I was 11 or 12 years old I pitched a fit and refused to return to the orthodontist who was essentially preparing me for braces. I suffered from excruciating headaches owing to my blindness and nervous tension and my mother, sensing that I was already feeling overwhelmed by life decided that I should have my wish and live with crooked teeth.

So I was pondering what it would be like to have a Hollywood, big league American smile and then I started to think about all the other middle aged miseries: the tennis elbow; the gravitational effects of aging flesh; flat feet; creeping double chin; hammer toes; cholesterol; evident hearing loss; political cynicism; nostalgia for nickel candy—I was suddenly awash in the physical and psychological spindrift of middle age and there wasn’t any Diet Coke in the refrigerator.

I was right to choose crooked teeth. I will not invest a dime in the Normalcy Industrial Complex.

Man, am I glad I got that out of the way.

It’s good to be restored to a semblance of sanity. I think that instead of getting my teeth fixed I will go inside a stone like the poet Charles Simic. I will admire the Brailled star charts on the stone’s inner walls.

S.K.

He’s running for president of the afterlife

& so the dead press corps follows him. ,

Someone asks: "If elected, what will you do about Karma?"

He says that he understands Karma has always been a problem

& the goal of course is to put everybody on the same playing field, etc.,

But the government of the dead shouldn’t get involved with these entitlements,

It’s more a market based matter, skinny souls squeezing through the portals

Of rebirth, like floating lilies pushed by wind. Etc.

"But aren’t you worried, sir," asks a particuarly dead reporter,

That perceived inaction on Karma

Will negatively impact dead Viking land values?"

S.K.

Before I was a sentient being I was the sentient rain. I won’t kid you: the intelligence of water falling is the pearl of consciousness and there’s no proper wording for this. You can go ahead and talk to yourself: whisper "Hermes Trismegistus" under your breath, throw Latin around—"spiritus mundi" or "illud tempus" (your lips moving as you push the grocery cart past a display of household cleansers). You can be assured that the man behind you with the cart filled with charcoal and lighter fluid is not aware of your misfit mysticism in aisle five at Sam’s Club.

I was the sentient rain and then the sentient stone and today I will carry home the ashes of our beloved black Labrador Roscoe and I will place them beside the ashes of my guide dog Corky and the ashes of my wife Connie’s beloved dog Tasha and I will share, privately, lips moving, some shy, unadulterated heart to heart doggy gibberish with my friends who are falling forever through the pearl of consciousness impelled by the forces of love.

The spindrift syllables of rain are in the ashes and flesh. Try to get out of that. The unconscious and the carbon molecule are all the same. Try to get out of that? It can’t be done.

S.K.