The following is a prose piece that is part of a collection that is dealing with my North East Experiences. The book is comprised of journalistic entries, poems, travelogs and probable nonsensical tangents. The book may or may not be called Pennsylvania Blues/Mason Dixon /Mason Dixie Line Blues. the intent and form are lost in the spring sources. The book meets somewhere between journalistic documentations melding into true imaginings/non truth imaginings. Field on the Western Fringe explores the mystical currents flowing beneath a day outing at Cobb Creek Park, which is existent at the fringes of Western Philadelphia. I believe where the creek crosses Baltimore Avenue forms one of Philly's city limits. I could be wrong. This prose started simple and got almost long winded. This is a mini environs travelogue as well as spiritual dialogue of the events impressions that day. Occasionally satirical and expressionistic, the piece is a story without a story and an allegory that is in pursuit of mutilated humanity. Language often stacks too much upon each other and gets lost in metaphysical hoodoo that trespasses beyond black and white magic till perched on the edge of supernaturalist buffonery. I spent this day grotesquely documented here with my good friend/sister Hunter Savoy and of course Jenny. All events are true. I do not understand why the dog skeleton punished me though. Possibly I do though.
Recent drawing inspired by the Birch Tree Below
Field at the Western Fringe (For Hunter Savoy Fortuna)
Drifting through the germinating foliage of Cobb Park, western fringe of Philadelphia. Two women and one man. We enter the canopy of trees- which forms a skeletal vault between us and the blue chalk blue sky. We cross the creek by taking off our shoes. The deepest part of our crossing only goes a little bit above the ankles. My wife almost cuts her self on sunken garbage.
The creek flows and babbles a clarity of translucent darkness.
We walk upon the field that has sent spirits to suture the amnesia drunkenness of dreaming. The physicality of the pastoral isolated engulfs us. Look! Here, the large encompassing field with the stark birch tree that haunts my imagination. Sunbeams crash down unfettered with their luminous physics and life giving catastrophic.
Drifting into adrift silences. Three souls who cast three ghost shadows. Drifty eyed, we wander till we drift into the dissipation of individual solitudes. My sister plucks yellow flowers. She then climbs a broken rotted tree at the edge of the wood. The tree falls. The fall is silence. My wife haunts the birch tree and finds an unknown animal bone nearby. I look for an entrance through the vine fortified forest then troll about where the trash has been honed into the pastoral landscape scrape.
I cross the 1920s or 1930s stone bridge upon the freeway. I cross the creek alone upon stone, above. Vehicles are flying by on death dealing car dealership wheels. I walk against traffic. I walk against the body that is walking shape shifting into an elderly infirm gentleman lacking the gentle. I veer immediately left on a path that follows a ridge above the creek. You can smell the sewer that is dumping into the creek. I soon discover the place where 4 months ago I found a weathered frigid dog skull. Scanning eyes scan for scavenging. I find other bones of the road kill dog. The winter has bleached them well.
Reality feels odd and clumsy. I have left the girls back in the field. The scenario feels like I have left the girls back in some ideal Eden nestled within the isolation of pure obscurities amongst this dirty old city. Pastoral beauty in Philadelphia existent--a sodden fancy much rooted in the toxicity metropolitan soils. I have enacted a breaking and entry into a sodden comedy dominated by a leering Rodney Dangerfield impersonator at a militant middle aged birthday party. No pastoral amongst those bloated baby boomers sagging into bovine decline nursing home fanaticisms. Speculation concurs I have left the pastoral with no good god damn reason. I have traveled outside the bounds of dark and white magic into the realms of buffoonery. Mysticism has gone astray into the shallow equivalences of pornography.
I am a dirty fool rummaging and collecting scattered dried out bones that once assembled a canine. I sure got Road kill Blues. I get hog washed into a religious dialogue with the blues of road kill. The blues here of this mongrel dog is blue neon radiation. My troubled animal instincts cloistered in the cloudy sopping morose opaque of spiritual radiation poisoning. The phantom ghost of the dog recognizes me as the thief that stole his bodily skull, back when nature was solemn beneath a January snow. The ghost puts a sizzling curse upon. I got rabies of the soul. Confusions and vertigos contort. When I return to the pastoral field, nausea seizes into visceral obdurate epilepsy. I wretch disturbing the meditations of my wife. I am vomiting the eggs consumed for break feast back upon the earth. What leaves always returns, even with reluctance.
Yes, what leaves always returns, even if struck with reluctance. What leaves will return into the violence of silences.
Otherness. Oblique otherness. The echoes of each ghost seemingly go unknown and are gone. Despite, the victory of salient silences existing amongst the biological blues, the temporal experience of existent subjective experiences expounds with the flash and flashiness of hopeful temporary. Due course makes due course.
The ghosts, which have departed into their own individual drift return to be the casting silhouettes of the wandering souls upon this blessed pastoral. The souls pronounce the promise of misinterpretation and return with lust to the seething seeking flesh. Yes! Eventually, the eventualities of family communal familiar slowly surge when the collective blood lulls with mysterious tides. Coagulation and the spontaneous combustion back into human flesh. Magnetizations summon the severance of solitude back into bundling kinetic actions. The eventualities of convergence convene with accordance. Each of us --are once and always fossilized echoes upon diverged peripheries that blood pouring etch flowing back into each other. We return backwardly into flesh manifest--accidental cowardice.
Evidence of mysteries find us on the return path. We pass the rotting carcass of a white dog strayed into death. The white fur is like out of place textile carpet. Speculation notates details. We observe the uselessness of violence upon a corpse in the copse. Drooling euphoric astonishment corrosively copulating with unfettered childhood, must have inspired a couple a couple of kids to jettison a brick at the putrid corpse. They don’t know the living can’t punish the dead. Everyone gets a plethora of chances to become King fool amongst the mutilated orgy commencing through living life. However, a solid sordid lesson will be learnt and what gets learnt is simply stark in the absolute reaches. The dead will often punish the living---Harshness-Relentless--Remote.
Warily, we return toward grotesque pornographic montage called Filthidelphia. Two young woman and one dull man.
The flowers my sister has gathered are offered in a ceremony later in the evening to my other sister. I have forgotten anything.
by Matthew Pony Payroll Bones Proctor
Two more recent drawings capturing the aftermath energy of that day.
