Playing chess in your mind

The auditorium is tense he has been taking too long at the mic. Crowd favorite but not mine. I like someone who needs it more, this being a competition it’s important to have unique opinions. The microphone cord makes a tripping hazard on the ground luckily the school pep band has packed up, all the staff with the conscience to mill near the West basketball hoop are embarrased by their slavitude to the bell and their corresponding lack of twenty minutes of end-of-day curriculum, the gym doors are guarded but we I like this game. Watching is a part of playing. If they keep us in we play. People are whispering unfavorable things to each other, makes for intimidating non-silence, the favorite is biting his lip, everyone wishes he’d just get it over with, otherwise heckling perhaps.

Finally he leans it in: after an almost unbearable thirty second delay in game play: bishop to F6. His opponent laughs: in a hurt way, like you laugh when the dentist gives you the news: both of them look like such boys then, unaware they could hurt or touch each other: the favorite has snuck the knight out from under him.

Amused decades pass like this, minutes, constrained time can only expand inwardly, infinitely, we are not allowed to leave the audiotorium early. We give advice to the favorite, I give advice to my favorite, we laugh with or sometimes at. I am grateful for the mind-games. We played along. We forget who won, we were always losing time.

Anyway! Now: the wind in a bad way, legions of reaction grass marooned in their own smell, in their own breakable arms, with faces too small, if only! To be carried lighter along the impossible lime… the people who are mine forever have left, pockets of people tucked in behind me, tucked in town, the wind flapping their excess doors, I don’t know where they hide, my people, every mouse must move his home… every squirrel I pass eating his misgivings, here I come, my misgivings are too big to eat, August is roiling, even in the belly in the forest in the ship even thrusting myself forward to be looking through space and time unavoidable that I hear the clouds come down cursive illegible cows driven by hooks the size of mountains that sculpt the sea and, forgetting that, give lifts to the peaceful the the old albatross… the desire for archipelagos nearly ruptures us but on we go… the cloud shade sitting on us now we can smell better in the shade makes the mud bluer yet feel the smell of wet frog skin the burst pod through roots the fertile the fertile worm waits for death What are we all waiting for? Some signal? Some lesson that can never be escaped? Only once in a moon’s time am I exactly where I want to be… but I value the moon all month long…

Dun dull soft of feet in sand, river moves on without comment, the wheel turns and I seize the sensation handed to me, holding it, opportunity to emote, the moment swells and falls on my scalp as a glob the size of an auditorium, between my roots icicles of dread So is this my life without my people? So immediate, so periled? Running water then sand takes the beating I lay down with the sand in my mind Did you know you can play chess in your mind?

The broad recieving silence I throw in my breath among the high disc chatter of locusts What are we waiting for? Would rather die for something than of something. Would like to be inside a talk we had starting from a central intimacy like the trunk of the oak tree that frames town and branches going everywhere the town cradled in the branches of the talk we had look at it but hush, the wind’s in a bad way pacing the ears with rumours the eyes move the deer Is life to be lived for a few moments? When everything conspires to feel? Like you could bear anything else. Too gone to cope. Going back, downhill, someone has to get me home, there might yet be people. Only way to get down the hill at equal speed is to take bigger strides, condense more time we get faster at this as we get older.