The triage was in his AA battery. Battery charges. Charges the Davidson. Son of David the alcoholic, and David's Liquor Store, lit up and gone. Left for the Middle East on promises of treaties made, because children were lying with their tongues out on some cold, blue hospital floors. Glowing suspiciously non-descript and violent. He stopped at Walgreens and charged some Duracell's to the plastic greendot. Greenlight, roar of the Semi at the intersection with the Heineken glass bottle-green and for David. David the director and damn good, damn good. Hmm yes. The accolades paid for more. So he sat down and shifted the weight to the high-part of his buttocks and roared with laughter, jacking off the remote. Thin plastic chips and clicks removing the back to hurt himself some more.

Channel All: The wrong channel; all wrong-channel the next. The next David, channel wrong too. Eat it up. Eat it, how fresh. Son of David in the A.M. at the A.A. Store. Exhaust chin upset squeezing remote control. "Coca. Cola third world country and press them for some goddamned Nesquick. I'm out, and I want some more. Bill it in Adam's name."

Damn easy to please. Please, soda pop won't give David's son the keys tonight. David use your remote control to show me what you've done. I don't believe the Sun anymore. Can you show me his mother?

***

I know, David. I know about it. There is a place where our Directors live, and they harness and sheppard the trees-placing them in rows-to fool the masses into believing that they are outside when they aren't. When the lights are off, they do their work like the roaches, eating in the kitchen and growing strong, like Hughes said.

In one of your films my wife was hung for clairvoyancing too much about our garage door shrinkage problem and the eminence of Second Earth. I want you to know that it was cold this morning, and I sat with Sunny-D beside my second-story radiator with the film rolling in the foreground. I stewed. Helping to knead a memory of her into the green wallpaper was my own brown skin drawn tight from having sunken into moist overgrowth visiting her catacomb. As I was pouting, the mail flap to my placenta caught a breeze and let a draft in. Her voice wafted over the prophetic breath of YHWH on top of my municipal water bill to say, in so many words, that I should mind my manners when parlaying with those progressives who have our roads black.

I was just about to get up and prepare a guest lecture on Ghandi and everything else wrong with Allison Walker's "The Work of Honeybees" for my veteran populists at our Senior Center, but she'd come back and told me to be like the salmon, and bathe while I worked out a way to bring the weeds back.

***

Fire doesn't fear the water. Fire doesn't have to fear the water: If Fire works hard enough the Water will leave it alone. Fire fears the child called ProMetheus and his six billion hearts because there is no interval when ProMetheus is not beating. There are more hearts in ProMetheus than seconds in a minute, or milliseconds inside of digital-watch characters. Heat flashes, and Water is afraid of ProMetheus' 6 Billion hearts because ProMetheus also perspires with no interval-leaving wastes and deserts in the crook of his neck. Since Gea, Omega, I am the Mother, has been on a radical diet lately and can't eat the salt anymore, when brother ProMetheus goes to bathe in the rivers he makes the fish swim away. And the Water is lonely.

The Fire is afraid of ProMetheus because he is dumb and the flame is what lingers in the air when a bigot's dogma is broken, like echoes. The tools to make a purpose remembered without the hand standing over, protecting the flame from the fragile things that feed it.

So when lightening struck and dumb ProMetheus learned that it was sensuous, he sat for 2,000 years and let the sweat bake until the rivers were empty. Sat poking the flame while the smoke made signals in the sky and started to look like concrete, and asphalt, and Adam Smith.

Amidst all of ProMetheus' fuckery, the Fire and the Water teamed up and birthed Agritheus, who was timid but understood what brother ProMetheus could not. Agritheus was intelligent and learned about his parents, the Fire and the Water, and soon was sorry for his brother's sins, claiming to know a better way: without the black smoke, where their skin would feel like real skin again. Agritheus read his chronicle aloud beside brother ProMetheus as they sat beside the Fire and had asked his brother to walk with him into the Water and bathe for the last time. Well, the Water drowned ProMetheus and the Fire left him, and all was good again.

***

"Stop! Don't eat that, it's poisoned!" My wife yells. "Can't you read: YHWH's swidden left-overs. They aren't from the mother, they're the crumbs from ProMetheus' bread-plate." A swoon and a sigh. "It is YHWH's child, a vagabond now and it didn't come from the Mother. It came from the realm of smoke signals. It is only smoke-signals."

Your characters surround my wife and begin to chant:

"Second Earth, same as the first!
        Second Earth, same as the first!
                Second Earth, same as the first!"

My wife again: "We can't breathe but we keep coughing!" (faints dramatically).

Up again, choking "Sandberg where are you?" and soon a big man is lowering the noose, made of baked Nesquick, around her neck. "We've lost Sandberg! We've lost Sandberg in the smoke signals! We've lost pastoralism in the smoke signals! Oh, weary Agrarians!"  Her final words: "Ashes make the concrete black, but will not burn!" Tears, salty tears shedding. "Ashes make the Sun go away and YHWH cry pains in Nesquick!"


And the rain hasn't stopped pouring yet. Poor David, back from the A.A. Store. A store inside of a bright yellow shell. Oh, David, you killed your mother and screamed when you were born. Now you run from her in drips and puddles of sounds, outside with intimate knowledge. Cold hands keep channels wrong the next. Next channel: Hannibal on Harley Street. Lord help, pray for David. YHWH bless the child, I mean to kill you this time.