The Bridge
So far the bridge has kept from falling. Some say it’s a bridge of iron and steel to cross but it’s a bridge to build the world. In all its inimical stand. Our Brupper entrained his loose clothing with nano bats that charged when he walked, harvesting from eyelids and venous return, arterial pulse and footsteps. This enabled the veritable to walk. It needed electric don’t you see. To participate, suffer, sacrifice, feel pain with those named. The Colonist's step over this bespelder'd floor was All in One. It came on as swift as a car slams as you walk or your legs flow to the pavement of themselves. There, one and all, at midnight with false papers, we are commanded to walk.
There is a double strand of layers on whose upper deck long legged thrones sit in rows whose feet hang down. Gyres of immortal turpitudes of their feet hang down and glow. Feet and head connect as an ampersand. Under their seats endless hedgerow volumes of commentary and journal in every language stretch from one end of the bridge to the other. This is the reality that the thrones as rulers are creating for their kings on the lower deck, who indulge this ferment by projecting it in the violent passion of riddles in the dreams of those below, the moon chained villages that live on the river and the ground. Suspended from the deck so they could be seen by the villages on the ground, dingle stars in radium pyres flash beside the thrones like fireflies in nightjars. These were the stars that lit the wishes always rising. They could as easily have been plum-trees that grew crooked over the rivers overhung with ripe fruit to feed the gulls that circled in and out like wheels in wheels out of the eyes.
One question of our history concerns whether, when the bridge is destroyed, any record of these versions of history remain. At least there will be no more new tomes as are now constantly being added. Are these to be preserved in some cloud? It not how will we know that any of it is true? Like the dream where
eagles nests on road signs change into geometric symbols as we look, or where on the edge of a lake in high season we go down a high road to an apartment where a woman gives us a fluffy, red, green, yellow, blue, white bird to ride on our shoulder as we walk. It is playful and likes to flip around all day.
In the end I wonder if all of us are not guilty of trying to prepare people to live in a world we do not inhabit.
Flying like butterflies in fall about the heads and necks of the Bridge travelers, swallows of different colors dart in and out. Hawks and chickens, ducks, white and red orange parrots thick as leaves in a wind. These are thoughts. We call these bridges because those who cruise the lobbies of river mouths do. We should call them divine gates, and the beautiful puffed birds, powerful, corrupt, grotesque, are everything that could be said of bobbling on one ungainly foot.
The bridges suspend from even greater reconstituted towers which fit the quantum structo, both and neither. We merely observe the algorithms, concurrent with our sympathy that runs in waves. In the case of vulgar idiots who profane this wilderness with every breath, the root for this quantum info is to sell it to the masses with that analogy of plus, minus, either, both and maybe neither. In quantum landscape either/or every hill will valley, and every valley hill, and both maybe together invent a numbering beyond 100 where you stop.
The images flow upward from down below too. The tribal folk along the river give up visions and sound. Home and Rome become Holmes. Songs in this state of mind wear chartreuse clothes with yellow scarves and dandy hats that impersonate the nightjars. The ones below impersonate the ones above on a two way up and down. The up and down are one, the down up, the up down one. Projections of poems sail from the bridge, which is not over or under either, but around and through. Water birds inhabit winged trees there where high herons dive. On the hill shoulder, pears and parables of sun light descend to a rookery where Democracy makes love in her Sunkist hair to the alabaster plain of the moon. Winds turn the mother of pearl to blue. There are no lands or sun or stars. The crowd is singing of itself—House and Mouth, but neither exist in that way except as radiant abyss. Just the opposite of pure vacancy
Once this was called empirical thought, well designed, but don’t take my word for it, see for yourself. The boots of the kings lay in contempt upon the tomes of the books like necks, whose heads have been left below in the trees. Book heads, nicely bound in leather, lay on the ground like Egyptian mummies, at nice 7 degree angles too.
In a party game two players lift their arms and others pass beneath. Holding the shoulders of the one before they hurry lest they be caught. The descending arms of the game are a good place to start, but the game ends in a tug of war. The bridge becomes a tug where neither wins. The bridge connects both worlds.
2. You may need some time to absorb that Brupper is not moving. What is there to move for? The whole earth below is noise. The noise miniaturizes to a poof. Wear the earth around your neck in an instant as everything revolves. Earth, planets, space and plane simultaneous as breath, myriads of the spiral hairs on the head of Brup and his alternative Burbreak, Brubake. He wore them every day that they were wearing him. This sounds like the moondust from the feet of Buzz, but the many Adam planets are worn quick wigs on the ball of a bead strung round the man’s neck where the universe extends. He arrives and his eyes half remember the bridge, the wave of corded strands of telepathy all told as a bridge of fire.
I prefer my Brupper had no name but then those who do will think it odd, for who will you think he is and how will you know if he has none? But how could he have a name, he is one who came the way all of us might think we have, special to ourselves without doubt, trumpets of fantasy mind, until reason kicks it out. How does anybody escape? In public character, seeming humble and empathic, to be as interested as much as I am in this one with no name, this everyman came down from the sun on ice waves and hydrogen fire of forgetful joy to the world so wrapped up in his coming one forgets the exit. Then the brain waves change. Oh you didn’t know it is coming, takes about seven decades later to get the news, lust, peace, hope, death.
So we don’t have a name for him, never did even if we have been writing about him all his life, a little obtuse in his pretendings, but with the ability to dance, no need to think him different from any other despite the scientific studies that justify his steps. He’s a dancer making onion skins to cover up the nothing new, so he has no name when all the coverings are taken away, although we insist on his dignity.
Surface ememory what I said to you, just now forgotten, and the dozens of layers below it, all down to base memory of the horrors done us by circumstance that permeates through the other layers up, never forgotten but replayed, these things I think and don’t, as a kind of decoder’s manual, believe nothing and everything according to the truth. Unacceptable premises proving and disproving the mythologies of the world. The world is false, I burn the dross, nothing is revealed.
To complement this mystic tinkling at the knee, the truth to higher and lower worlds, I won't make a stew if ---Sothli a strongere comynge above him came him, and tak a wey alle his armeris, in which he tris-tide, and dele abrood all his spuylis. I mark those lives chosen, redeemed forfeit before the beginning knew the beginning and end. Armaments of the Word and the Name, the Blood, the baptism, the Branch, the deliverance praise breath, coming armor into battle with harps and song.
Bio: AE Reiff, Alcohol Ethoxylate, is a NON-IONIC surfactant that breaks long chain ethoxylates. To bioremediate, accelerate and deregulate the oil of Sulfonated Analogues, UNSULFONATED AE transports the hydrocarbon exulate of letters in a caustic pot to break down molecules for microbes to digest. His Secret Life of Democrats appeared in the last Thrice Fiction #27. He is a native of Philadelphia.