Old shopping carts stuffed with broken bikes and bricks, zip-tied shut and riveted together. Unused iron weights, got on the cheap digging through unattended Goodwill donation bins in the predawn hours, netted together and attached to a Tow Truck chain.
Contingent myths of successful rebellion fighting the law, pretending to win, in revelries at 4 AM. The wavy gravy and biscuit spot where we bestow accolades about multiplayer bumper car adventures, all stolen and totaled, even before the police chase, all along the 405.
A massive tree stump roots a tangle nearly puncturing the vessel in our hauling of it. So heavy we could barely heave the dead trees's remnant. Taking four full-grown men, an anxious and barking K9, and a rail-thin malcontent woman to worry it into position.
The streets that accommodate a pirate's life with block-chain enabling. Everything that's laid to waste at the bottom of a dirty river. The visceral reality bound and chained to the enormity of the unseen, unspoken, though solemn, often formerly friendly, roster of victims.
Multiple baggies in various states of chock-a-block, a liquor store of bottles incuriously empty, and intractable piles of misplaced motel keys. A stolen car, at least once for real, and still down there somewhere to be sure, and boatloads of lost and hard to forget time.
Defunct out board motors that have long ceased to put-put, scavenged or stolen from old dinghies, for the environment’s sake, emptied of their fuels and solvents, of course. Also tied with nylon cord to avoid line corruption weighted just so in the muck and miry currents.
A hapless throb of hurt people, hurting people on consignment. Portland's lay-away sales pitch of epigenetic oppression. The City's amalgamated struggle and suffering imploded to the point of truly cold-fusion. A Dark sparkling power, requiring God's hand to break.
And the dead, countless, even from before the city itself was born. This weird city and the Shanghai climate that spawned it. The Naga's need. The lust of a rivers bed for bodies and the souls of the lost, the lonely, the cast aside, or the heave-ho'd. Overlooked but for the anchor and chain. | JM