MattMain

Jackson, Wyoming.

Bawdy neons strike at your most  immediate sense: sight. Here we are. Absolute. Full of the daily terrors that keep us from remaining stationary too long. With flags dead at the tops of their poles, I troll the town in search of. Every color combines to dye the sky; night descends completely, a trick we are loathe to clap for since beginningless time . All is swallowed slick and marvelous by God, his open chest heaving out nothing but inky, flotsam blacks. Light chances to reflect off all glass windows — those invented funhouse mirrors of this adult life. The brightness mails out hollow, elliptical notes of the empty. I stand gawking at everything but myself, holy compliance for ignorance a requisite for sight. Sun, rockets, and saints rain invisible down the throats of my eyes. My god! I can see glory! Sunday evening and, minus my dancing iris’s, this place appears a stale tomb. I’ve only these gaseous signs for company, aging pillars of the west that they are. There is nothing but waiting catastrophe this high in the Rockies. In the meantime, I’ll take this burning refuge as ridiculous hope.

A blank page, among other things, poses the question of what do you have to say? Well, what do you have to say? What laudable piece of magic do you have to give your audience? May they, and it, be worthwhile. There are too many claimed creators and not enough creation. Too many watchers, paralyzed with perceived normalcy, weighted with the inability to fucking hear. But that’s neither here nor there. What? I run round the altar of the gods seeking shelter, supplication, sympathy. They give me the tools that I was born to possess: thought, diligent action, a smile, arms that can carry the heaviest of loads.


A storm spends the day creeping across this valley. Mountains come and go like wit in a conversation. Lines of electricity, balanced on wooden poles that jut into the sky, run themselves into the dreams of your future. I walk into the evening. Snow dusts a world of sage, asphalt, and language. Clouds move off the hills with a wink — smoke sucked out of room from beneath a door. The air is dark and wet, feeling in your lungs like a thousand mornings of bitter coffee that do nothing to brighten the stain of gray out the window.  I rejoice because blessing is knowing that this is the 5^th day of May and soon enough we will see the sun. It will make us forget hot teas and blasted hours spent thinking cold thought(s). We cannot lose.


There are stars out my window so bright and precious that they rival the days best conversations, melting the weakest that they main drain like rainwater to the seas. The moon is glimpsed these last three nights not when you lay your head down to sleep, but when you lift it in that precious midnight that has no beginning, no end. Sometimes it is yellow and framed by clouds the color of dirty English teeth. Often though, it is without texture or reference, a single lit voice of reason for infinite personal possession of those with something to say.

Wyoming – and you’d be forgiven for thinking that mountains, mountains should be the subject of all things photographed – has placed me squarely between its uplifted, crunching jaws. Survival means strength, jumping from between the crashing machinery not at the last moment, but when I tire of growing ever more capable of: survival, love, patience, bearing witness. Sentience. Seeing. Hearing the air speak in sentences that instruct me to look.


Water drips from eaves — snow having been it’s previous, and oft maligned, evolution. Spring has not quite yet come to 6200ft, and all of us curious lovers of seasons await this one both for its allowed remembrances of the past and its uncanny ability to create anew. Flurries flair from a sky that is sun bright if ill-defined. Radios cackle distant – those simple waves sent from the pale blue hearts of abstract, but climbable peaks? A truck that looks the way it smells – old – carries me down roads that have been swept eternally clear by invisible scourings of wind from Idaho and Montana; mistress breezes that turn the corners of my perfect lips up into something of snared smile.


For the time being, this place is a wondrous, distilled home. Perspective both winnows and explodes. This language wanders marvelous, with strides that cross state lines. Brushing my teeth means watching the golden valley below shade black with the shadows of passing clouds. Walking means robins courting like two clapped hands. Ravens spiral out of the shapeless sun. Moose drain creeks. Birds of prey swarm like thoughts of god. The sky is a rolling thunder of all things gray, white, and blue. I’m a boy with the imagination blender set to puree. Give me it all! [Please].

Smith Rock State Park, Oregon.

Highway 126 – Cougar Lake, Oregon.

Some of us hay wired, our connections poisoned often and early,

corroded by the sense that time is going to steal from us once and for all.

We cannot bathe often enough to cleanse

ourselves of who we are.


The bloodless saints we bow to in the wake of

a bad moment about to turn pure give us the emotional immediacy of belief.

Everything glass to the touch.

Which of us is afraid?

God is knocking at the door to ask for a sit down cup of coffee

and all you have is decaf. All he wants is a chance to set the record straight.


Hope has left the building and flown

up to pierce the beating heart of a white hot afternoon.


I stare down a carnivore so powerfully able, tumbling end over end.

Blown into bits that fall forgotten amongst the small, underfoot rocks

that serve, in this instance, as earth’s outermost crust, I am.

There is nothing to offer the sky except an iced and awed humility;

purity a suite it has in spades [sic].


Too many with sight do not see the blindness that rages across

the geography of their face. Attempting, while they still can,

to tell time to go fuck itself, we will not be mastered.


At dusk, the mountains are bluer than you’ll ever be so why bother?

We invoke the single western deity we were born next to —

bassinets knocking together like small harbored boats

in the wake of The Great Dawn,

asking for a little help up and out of the well.


The days lodge like read then forgotten  (or is it forgotten then read)

complaints on the men’s room wall.

Looking for an instant to believe for a lifetime,

we dance ‘round the room like wailing sirens hoping to be heard,

hoping to somehow find a listening set of ears.

Alaska as variously defined:

Notes on a bookstore:




The bookstore is a crowded, sordid affair. Everyone/thing looks uninterested and uninteresting. Cell phones carry conversations that one hopes are left at the door (or, left in another, lesser dimension). There is a café – really an a queer, hyper-electronically atavistic study pen – and a lofty (sic) hum moves about in the six feet above all those focused on screens that burn bright opposite the white, floating apples. They are in The Garden and each computer user appears to have taken a bite of the Forbidden [Corporate] Fruit.

Like too many of the café patrons, the books appear groomed, glossy, and forever reprinted; so clean and focused on their respective subject(s), you don’t dare pick one up for fear that merciless instruction has replaced stoic dreaming. I get no sense of wonder when I draw a copy towards me. Spines are newborn. The corners sharp enough to draw blood that would drip across covers so bright and impossibly full of fortune that the language within seems auxiliary, a byproduct, a side effect. I search in vain for Carver and am overrun by Cussler; copy after copy of which is wrapped in foil proclaiming slight variation on the theme (which best I can tell is completely awesome stuff. Seriously). Walking through the cordoned grid of each titled section, I see the categories we’ve arrived at: romance and computer programming, mystery and religion, Kathy Griffin and world history, rock/roll and horse calendars — all the stuff of good fiction presented in this reality.

A legion of men and women swarm the aisles to proceed with some sort of inventory that invokes them to all kinds of motion and noise, a type that is unplanned, momentarily considered, eternally understood. Each holds a small computer that resembles a re-invention of the calculator – the only visible buttons, labeled 0-9, are arranged in a grid like those on a cash register or old computer keyboard – and all tap incessantly and carefully at the keypad like archeologists exposing a dig with their really tiny hammers. Many don’t know exactly what is expected so there is a general air of bluster and amusement – an elementary feeling regarding those days of ‘substitute teacher’. I can hear (and see) one older woman, who, because of her age or her apparent confidence or her [rimless, stainless [steel] glasses, or possibly a combination of all three, repeat to a half dozen others, not collectively but individually, how to turn their handheld counting devices “ON.” They then begin to swarm saurian over the shelves, breaking that modest sense of focus Person X – completely average shopper – might reasonably hope to find in a corporate, cubist, book-selling box such as this one. All swarmers appear somewhat nattily dressed in generic, forgotten-logo-over-the-left-chest-emblazoned-maroon polo t-shirts and khakis that run the styling gamut from tapered leg/pleated, pleated/straight leg, straight leg/cuffed, cuffed/pleated, pleated/straight leg etc., etc., including slight color variations due to washing, time in service, brand, fabric type used by said brand; also some inner, lower leg seams are slightly frayed – those sitting bunched and crown-like above the crest of the shoe and that rub the opposite pant leg when the wearer is walking and/or running, although why one would be running in khakis, except in some sort of emergency or in an intoxicated state, possibly the very state that caused the emergency proper, is a question I’ll leave altogether unanswered, for now – from use, as are certain pant bottom cuffs that have been drug across numerous carpeted floors as the wearer schleps them room to room, having not had the foresight, possibly the means, to take them off while not at work to preserve their appearance of being relatively new, neat and kept, paying them no more mind than if they were a discreet woodland tic or foster child, OK, maybe not your foster child, but a foster child. Ostensibly these maroon and khaki workers have never been in a bookstore, their body languages and bawdy dialog more akin to electronic retail or wait staff, although possibly, since we’ve taken to creating general atmospheres of, arguably, disrespectful bigness regarding choice in store and product, and extreme impersonality also regarding store and product, they are simply mimicking the faux-mercurial, completely indestructible, predictable, experience of consumption today, that rounded emotion of ‘I guess so’ that crops up when, and if, we chance to consider ourselves in relation to our market actions and their significance, and how though we may believe choice as a consumer is dead, choices made as a consumer affect larger markets which in turn affect still larger markets etc. etc.

There is an angst and bustle that begins to ever-so-slightly rise towards climax – think the second of the fives parts of a story: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, denouement. There is a sense of general helplessness and good humor among shoppers — something like ‘Oh well, what you can do with people you’ve selectively hired to perform an immediate and specific function regarding the well being of our store and, ostensibly, our customers.’

Anchorage, Alaska.

From my favorite recent time gone by:

a.) Chicago, Illinois.
b.) Coney Island – Brooklyn, New York.
c.) Manhattan, New York.
d. & e.) Hoboken, New Jersey.
f.) Manhattan, New York.
g. & h. & i.) Boston, Massachusetts.