Einstein's Tongue

Home

Vol. I Issue #1 Spring 2008

Prose Poems by A. Scott White:

"Ill@Ease"

"Freibesh Plubacity"

"On The Road Revisited"

"Meters"

About the Author

A. Scott White writes almost every day. As a young man he was a fundamentalist minister. Today he's an agnostic computer programmer. He'd love to get paid to write whatever the hell he wants to write so he could tell the corporate world to get bent. Until that day, however, he's content to continue to seethe. You can visit him online at www.aswhite.com.

Ill@Ease

Sometimes he is plagued by dire imaginings, like the thought that all the trees wish to perambulate, but that they are stuck in place, rooted in frustration, trapped. He tries to imagine that the trees are content, that they enjoy the privilege of a relaxed and contemplative existence, but he cannot make these thoughts stay. He can hear the groans of their struggle, trying in vain to uproot themselves and be free. These are the kinds of thoughts that plague him, and he doesn't know why.

It seems to him that other people always have something in their hands. He often wonders if there is something he should have in his hands, something that would make him feel more normal and acceptable. Everything he picks up, however, feels awkward and contrived; he has to put it back down again. He once asked a woman at the library what a guy like him should have in his hands, but she did not hear him clearly and he was too embarrassed to repeat the question. Most of the time he keeps his hands in his pockets, hiding their shameful emptiness. "My pockets are full, but they are full of emptiness," he once said to a policeman. The policeman told him to move along.

When he sleeps he wakes up a lot, always bewildered and lost for just a few minutes. His dreams, when he manages to have them, are kinetic and forceful. They begin quickly, seizing his mind. Tonight he walks a country hillside, a place he saw once as a kid, though he never walked there. He walks and chats with a hackberry tree in the cool evening air, flipping a large, silver coin deftly around the fingers of his right hand and tapping the ground with a the tip of a fine, silver-handled walking stick in his left. "What have you got there?" asks the hackberry. "It's a silver dollar," he answers. "It's worth almost thirteen dollars." "Hmmm," the tree replies, and they walk in silence for a while. Then he wakes. For a while he lies there unable to sleep, wondering where he is. It's a windy night. Outside he can hear the trees. The poor, poor trees.

On The Road Revisited

If Jack Kerouac drove by while you were walking down the highway he would not pick you up. He might throw a beer bottle at you, but he would not pick you up. Do you know why? Because fuck you, that's why. Jack Kerouac is not responsible for you. He's got better things to do. Besides, he's no sucker. He's seen your kind before and he's not going to risk it. If you had any sense at all you'd have a car of your own.

Being a traveler, a vagrant, a hobo, is all about logistics. You're exposed and largely defenseless. It's you against the world, so you're badly outnumbered. You've already forsaken the high ground. Stay low and take what you can. Stay alive and keep moving. Life is not like the TV show Kung Fu, and you are not Kwai Chang Caine. I know this is not what you expected. Mostly you must guard against your mind. Madness stalks you like a fire-breathing windmill. The wind of passing trains and tractor trailers will pull you under if you reach out to touch them. Talk to the god you can remember and stay warm. The nights will never end, but you'll forget them in the morning.

Freibesh Plubacity

We are a certain kind of people and you will know us when you see us. We dress in that way - you know that way - and we always walk just so. Just so. We're into all those things you might imagine, all those same things we've always been into. It's so us. It's who we are. We do not change, except in all the expected ways, and we do not deviate. Reliable in our way, like clockwork. You know our type. Us.

You know it's true. Jazz cannot stay still. It moves slow or fast, but it moves. It's not like country music. Country music stays where it is and invites us in. Jazz ain't hangin' around. You can stay if you want, but it's gettin' the hell out. You can follow, but it prefers that you just go your own way, thank you very much. There are other genres of course. There are some that jump around in the corner. There are some that run straight toward you like a charging bull. There are some that wander around and some that soar. Fuck them, however. Jazz is outta here.

All my life I've been tracing with my fingers around the edges of a controlling theme, dividing the fact from the fake. I've been convinced for a long time now that I was almost upon the pattern, that I was close to an epiphany. The shape is familiar, it is. Like the small of a woman's back or the quizzical angle of a cat's curious head. I cannot make it out, however, and I begin to despair. Shifting paradigms tell me that this is the real goal, the tracing and discerning. Arrival is not the goal. The journey. That's it. People always comfort themselves with this opinion when they know they aren't getting anywhere.

We are those kinds of people.

Meters

Richard was disappointed to find parking meters in heaven. Since arriving several months ago, he had settled into a nice place and gotten in with a group of good people, some old friends from Earth and some new friends. His after-life was going pretty well, much better than his life had gone. There was a seed of discontentment, however, that clouded the back of his mind all the time. Why parking meters? It just didn't fit for him. Even though they were never active, even though they stood in an eternal grace period, allowing you to park without paying, their existence bothered him. Eventually, after the equivalent of a few hundred years, it really started to bother him. "This universe is not as good as it might be," he would say to anyone who would listen. "There is something rotten at the core." No one else was bothered by it, but he couldn't let it go. It grew on his mind until, one day, he decided to leave. He just headed for the gate, taking nothing with him. "Where will you go?" asked Saint Peter. "Anywhere but here," Richard answered, without looking back.