guyceretti

[guyceretti]

From Balconies

Listen here for rehearsal.

Diving off cliffs into shallow waters;

Hit sedition when I grabbed for your heart.

Escarpments pulling from the sea to a pond.

Time gave nothing, it only dressed for the part.

When I fall now it’s only from balconies;

Be my love now; be my love, darling.

Go and walk now, from this kneeling tower;

See its torches throw no light from their flames.

Blight the riches centuries stored away.

Hide ambitions you surely fear to stay.

When I fall now it’s only from balconies;

be my love now; be my love, darling.

When I fall now it’s only from balconies;

be my love now; be my love, darling.

When I breathe now, it’s only from frozen lungs.

This bed stays open, quiet, sleeping for so long.

In the valley tucked beside its icy walls,

Snow is melting, gathering into a pond.

[guyceretti]

Seatbelt (Jades in the Snow)

Listen here.

We’re two stones falling towards the same sea,

Either to shatter or sink.

We’ll see; please breathe.

But is there nothing beneath to re-stitch these seams,

Not some watery queen with the atoms of eve?

We’re falling in—

Just diving in.

Be fornent to the aches that you know,

Tremors that rattle your sleep.

There’s no home; it’s so cold.

[We’re] Like jades in the snow, hiding our…

The salted air, the rocks, the shore

Only appear in the cups of our pores,

And swim away like memories

Of a lost love.

They swim away like memories

Of a lost love.

It’s a lost love.

We’re falling in—

Just diving in.

Stone grinds to sand.

We’re carried so far from the land.

In torrents we turn, like crowns of Saturn.

In the belly of the deep, far beneath that beach,

With the dancing of the reef, turning in black sweeps—

Far beneath,

Far beneath,

They sleep.

In ripples, they’re cleansed by royal sunbeams.

Dressed in foam and dreary daydreams.

The tide’s my brim.

[guyceretti]

The Heroics and Capers of Babyface, Pt. 1

Gregory Thomas disliked all of the media attention. Not because it fizzed with camera bulbs around his exploits, nor because he was forced (“by necessity,” emphasized Gregory to his banker) to wear slick, half-rimmed, exorbitantly pricey sunglasses when entering public spaces. Neither was the case. He disliked all the media attention because there was none of it.

An anonymous informant, one who coincidentally shared Mr. Thomas’ phone number, tipped off the local paparazzo of Gregory’s whereabouts. “Who?” the paparazzo replied.

In addition to being, perhaps, the most handsome and shining of mortals, Gregory had been born with a queer talent. Whenever he winked—provided, of course, he did so with dash and perspicuity—whatever he willed came into being.

Our heroic cowboy discovered this gift at an early age, when his aunts arrived from the Midwest for Christmas. Insofar as the magical runs in families, these three women had a miraculous knack of their own: namely, a dumbfounding incapacity to buy halfway decent Christmas presents.

What self-respecting boy showcases garish sweaters and coffeemakers to his friends after the holidays? the alarmingly verbose seven-year-old Gregory wondered to himself. These crones will be the death of me!

On a rosy winter’s afternoon, the three bubbling ladies came jouncing down the Thomas household’s walkway. The reception committee—Gregory and his two older sisters—were immediately seized under a barrage of tacky-lipstick kisses, over-the-top compliments, and bellowed hallelujahs.

“Hallelujah!” Aunt Kara fluttered, “Our babies are all grown up!”

“Praise the Lord,” Aunt Jovis muttered, lightly clapping her mittens.

“Hallelujah!” chorused Aunt Perrot, slinging her flabby arms and capped head backwards.

“But sisters,” Aunt Kara whispered aloud, “I think our itty-biddy nephew’s looking down and glum.”

Gregory gaped at his aunts in fear.

“Well—how about we lift, him, on, up?” Aunt Perrot exclaimed. Gregory’s face was purple with dread. The three women swung him upside down by his ankles and showered him with kisses. Looking out to an inverted world past his aunts, Gregory could see alarmed neighbors coming onto their porches.

“You looked like a fat, stupid piñata,” Abigail, the middle sister, later told Gregory. Lip-shaped bruises having already formed on his face, Gregory wasn’t surprised. That said, he was surprised that he hadn’t burst open and poured forth with candy.

After his aunts set him down, the eldest sibling, Bridgett, sauntered forward: “Did mother tell y’all?—I was chosen to be in the school play.” Gregory soundlessly limped away from the storm cloud of estrogen, certain he had somehow been broken.

“Ooh,” the triad chirped with pleasure.

“This year’s Bye Bye Birdie, and I’m going to be Kim.” Her sapphire eyes twinkled.

The middle sister made a clicking sound with her mouth before saying, “Mr. Vladimir only chose you because he’s a creep.”

“He’s not. Shut your massive face,” Bridgett fired immediately.

“Is too.”

“Peabrain.”

“Skan—”

“—Glory me!” Aunt Kara interrupted. “Such pretty faces, such ugly mouths. Why don’t we air out this dirty laundry inside. Huh, sugar pies?” Aunt Kara gathered the girls under her arms like a dignified and queenly hen, and the lot of them walked towards the house.

“Gregory, would you be so kind as to help some pretty ladies with their luggage?”

His prepubescent manhood injured, Gregory snarled, “Have sweet ole’ Bridget carry your stupid bags. She’s great with sacks.”

“Sister, this is the second millennium after all; a young lady can carry her own burden!” added Aunt Jovis.

“Right you are!” replied Aunt Kara. “Darling, the bags, please?”

Bridged looked from face to face, then shot her little brother a glance of unquenchable malice. “I would love to,” she said.

Knowing both that he had won and that his victory would be short-lived, Gregory winked at his sister. And at that very moment, with no grand pyrotechnics, no flashes of lightning, and no cries of mad scientists: Aunt Kara, Aunt Jovis, and Aunt Perrot vanished into thin air. Where they had stood and fluttered but a moment ago sat an Xbox, a Nintendo, and a Playstation.

Ten seconds passed, the children gaping in horror.

Then: “Heeeeeeeeeeeelllllllllllllllp!”

[guyceretti]

A Mousy Priest and the Broken Window

A mousy American priest one day renovated a run-down, long-abandoned, bland-looking elementary school.

“Flood planes and depressions do wonders for property costs,” he’d later explain to friends. “And I swear I’d never seen another building quite like it—so very decent, I mean.”

So, against the diocese’s wishes, this fellow went ahead and purchased the lot, throwing up a homemade sign on its front lawn: “Future home of St. Anthony Church.”

This friar was penniless, friendless, but unconcerned. While awaiting pennies and friends, he lived in the neighborhood—avoiding additional vows of poverty by teaching history at the high school.

From the first, students agreed that Mouse (as the neighborhood quickly rechristened the priest) was quite stupid but also perfectly nice.

“He’s alright, I guess,” one kid told his mom. “He gets off topic all the time and should probably be the art teacher, but he’s alright.”

Teenage and twenty-something-year-old men agreed that the priest was quite stupid but debated the meaning of his niceness.

“I dunno. Guy’s gettin’ under my skin. Too much good idn’t always a good thing,” one of them said.

“Well maybe you oughta shape up, ‘n he’d been outta here in no time,” his mom responded. “‘Bout time we had a good, ‘onest man ’round here. That’s how I reckon’.”

And that’s precisely how the priest annoyed the living hell out of his neighbors, especially the younger guys whose moms still read the King James. These sons would have found Mouse more bearable had he driven a Cadillac or touched children. Sadly, though, after months of careful observation, the men concluded that the priest wasn’t a villain—

“Nah, jus’ a dipshit,” Theo remarked. “Y’know,” he confessed to a friend, “Nowadays I’m kinda startin’ to miss that holier-than-thou crook who stole momma’s retirement savin’s.”

Though held at alms’ length by the younger townsmen, the priest eventually won the affections of older folks—especially from those who still remembered the old baptist hymns, which had been swallowed up alongside the church in the ’89 flood. New churches had sprouted up since then, of course, but their only attendants were little girls, mothers, grandmothers, and whichever men were hitched to or romancing them at the time.

“Hell nah. I haven’ benna church in ten years, jus’ about,” Mr. Franklin, a retired contractor, told the priest. “Least, not since the old lady croaked. They got no soul no more. Don’t need anybody tellin’ me how to be good no how.”

“Well what could we do to change that?” Mouse asked.

“Change what?”

“You said there’s no soul.”

“Ah, well that’s not gunna change overnight.”

“You know that’s not an obstacle.”

Mr. Franklin became quiet. He slowly chewed on his gums as he mulled on the question, a slight and solemn frown on his face.After a pause, he let out a long groan: “Tell you what… Promise me we’ll be singing ‘Swing Low,’ and I’ll build that damn church for you myself. Won’t fix nothin’, but I ain’t busy either.”

“You know I haven’t got the cash for it,” Mouse laughed.

“Then you better thank God you got me as a friend, ’cause I got friends. I’m your answered prayer, son.”

So it was the memory of singing and a modest pledge that recruited the neighborhood’s most talented glass-smiths, carpenters, and landscapers. It also helped that these folks wanted to see something else built besides a gentlemen’s club, liquor store, or crack house.

Later that afternoon, Mr. Franklin justified his commitment to Harvey, a friend of his: “Sure, sure, goddam the Catholics, but goddam the pimps too, I say.”

“Still not seein’ why you give a care,” his friend replied. “Not like pimps are goin’ anywhere, and not like youse gettin’ any wine anyhow, you ole drunk.”

“Shut your mouth, boy. I’ll whoop your ass an’  have it saddled in time for J.C. to ride it inna church come Palm Sunday.”

Amused crow’s feet wrinkled around Harvey’s eyes: “And what’s he gunna do with that tongue ah yours? Guarantee you’ll shit those brave trousers ah yours at the sight ah Him. Besides, don’t you got better things to do?”

“You know full well there’s jack shit to do in this town. Decent things, anyways.”

Whenever he wasn’t scrambling around with chores or visits with friends or the church’s construction or teaching or naps or city permits, the priest would sit in a sofa two sizes too cozy and read books seventy-times-seven sizes too big. Usually he’d just fall asleep while muttering things.

A few months after moving to town, students began visiting his little house to talk about books and music. He knew they didn’t understand his favorite books, which he said were about poverty; and they knew he didn’t understand their favorite music, which they said were about poverty. But they all loved to shoot the breeze.

“Will they ever put ‘Me Against the World’ in the Bible? Maybe then I’d read it,” one of the girls said.

“Well Isaiah’s in there, so maybe God figured there wasn’t any need for a sequel,” Mouse replied.

“Well maybe black people have something to add to the pot?”

One of the boys joked, “You’re going straight to hell, Maggie.”

“Straight to hell?” Maggie hopped to her feet and belted out with musical flare: “Lord, help me chaaaaange my ways!” Perking up to Maggie’s jubilee, the other kids chimed in for the chorus: “Show a little mercy on judgment day! It aaaaiiiin’t me, I was raised this way! I never let em play me for a busta, make it hell for a hustler!” They all collapsed in laughter, rolling around on the floor and shouting at each other.

“Guess we’re all goin’ to hell!” the boy cried.

Mouse sat in his big chair with a big, embarrassed smile.

Eventually the day came when the building was restored to perfection: stained-glass windows to shame the New Jerusalem, towering wooden beams upon which God Himself could sit, raised flower beds brimming with foul-smelling compost. For years to come, whenever they accidentally wound up in “the wrong side of town,” rich people from up north would be stunned to see the church in the middle of a ghetto.

“How hasn’t that thing been burnt to the ground?” a man wearing Ray Bans asked his wife, who was frantically scanning her map for escape routes.

“Focus honey: where in God’s name are we?”

But on the eve before the church’s first mass, the friar stood in the church’s courtyard. In solitude, right at the foot of the steeple, he saw how good everything was.

And after a year of constant letdowns—arrested fathers, pregnant little girls, denied construction permits, offhand insults—a quiet and easy joy welled back up in him.

For enough seconds, he could remember why he was there.

So this content little man grabbed a brick and wordlessly threw it through the facade’s largest, most marvelous stained-glass window.

To Mouse, the sound of it was immense. Like a waterfall of crystals, he thought.

However many minutes passed, Mouse eventually smiled and thought again, Or like the rumble of a coming stampede.

[guyceretti]

A Semi-Irritable Man

Professor Levin stared like a paranoid seagull from the podium, a white splash of hair cresting across his balding and equally white head. He took a half-hearted sip from his Starbucks, maintaining the area of sclera visible in his bug-eyed eye balls, swishing the coffee around in his mouth. For such a skinny man, his button-up shirt was large. For a man with such frightening teacher evaluations and such off-putting mannerisms, he turned out to be quite funny.

“We may as well get started,” he opened. He disinterestedly asked where we had all gone for our summer vacations.

“Cozumel,” one girl replied.

“Hot as hell. Sounds alright, though.” He paused. A friendly frown appeared on his face. “It was alright, wasn’t it?”

Laughing, the girl replied, “Yeah, it was alright.”

He shrugged and pointed to another student, “And what about you? Do anything worth mentioning?”

“I visited family,” the kid responded.

“Not worth mentioning. Anyone else?”

His lecture style—once he actually started lecturing—was commonsense, unembellished, and wonderfully American: “Now,” he said, gesturing towards a pie chart (which illustrated the relative proportions of species on earth) displayed onscreen, “That’s a hell of a lot of insects. Too many damn insects, I’d say.”

Later, while discussing factors affecting biodiversity, he wondered why species’ diversity really had anything to do with the distance of islands from mainlands.

“Does it have to do with continental drift?” a boy with a curly afro asked.

“Leave Pangea out of this,” Levin said. “What else would cause it?”

“Birds trying to find mates?” another cracked voice offered.

“We’re not talking E-Harmony here. What else?” Silence. The number of students eager to be butts of jokes dwindled. “Was it just an accident?” Silence. “M-a-g-i-c?” he asked, looking suddenly afraid and pious. Laughter, but then more silence. “Well how about a damn storm?” he said at last. “How about a damn storm swept through there and carried off the kiddos?”