(alzheimer’s light)

Slum Lexicon Blues

I went down into the slum of my mind again—

past the leaning tenements of unfinished thoughts,
past the busted neon of old intentions blinking
YES
NO
MAYBE
YES
NO
MAYBE
through a rain made of coffee grounds and dead radio stations.

I was hunting words.

Not meanings—
meanings are rich men living uphill
behind fences of grammar.

I was hunting words themselves,
barefoot little alley-rats,
grease-faced syllables,
runaway vowels sleeping under newspapers,
consonants with switchblades,
verbs dealing counterfeit revelations
behind abandoned laundromats of memory.

The streets had no names.

Every sign pointed somewhere else.

A billboard said APPLE
and beneath it a drunk prophet sold umbrellas
and swore he was the moon.

I wrote that down.

Or maybe I didn’t.

The notebook had become a pigeon.

The pigeon had become a tax receipt.

The tax receipt had become a philosophy.

Everything was changing addresses
before I could pronounce it.

I walked through District A,
which yesterday had been District Q,
which tomorrow would be a damp cardboard cathedral
for saints of lost vocabulary.

There were children there
playing kickball with fragments of sentences.

“Hey mister,”
one shouted,
“you lose a metaphor?”

I checked my pockets.

Sure enough,
three metaphors gone,
one simile leaking badly.

The kid laughed.

The ball exploded into adverbs.

Nobody seemed surprised.

Nobody in the slum is surprised by anything.

A parade marched by:
drums made of static,
flags sewn from grocery lists,
a brass section blowing hot weather reports
through dented trombones.

At the front rode the King of Almost,
wearing a crown of interrupted conversations.

Long live maybe,
he cried.

Long live nearly.

Long live the thing on the tip of the tongue.

The crowd cheered.

A hundred mouths opened
and released only commas.

Commas floated upward like dirty balloons.

I followed them.

They led me beneath an overpass
constructed from forgotten books.

There I found the old women of Echo Street.

They sat on milk crates
sorting language into piles.

Useful words.

Broken words.

Words with missing teeth.

Words that smelled faintly of gasoline.

Words nobody had touched since 1974.

One woman held up a cracked adjective.

“Still works,” she said.

Another shook her head.

“Only in dreams.”

A third sold me a handful of punctuation
for seventeen cents and a childhood memory.

Good deal.

Maybe.

Hard to say.

Currency fluctuates wildly down there.

At midnight
the alleys folded into each other.

The sky became an inside pocket.

The moon turned into a fluorescent EXIT sign.

I wandered deeper.

Past warehouses stacked floor to ceiling
with abandoned first drafts.

Past rivers of crossed-out ink.

Past junkyards where obsolete opinions rusted
under mountains of forgotten certainty.

The air buzzed with unfinished poems.

Thousands of them.

Millions.

They nested in telephone wires.

They slept beneath staircases.

They drifted through broken windows
like holy trash.

One landed on my shoulder.

It whispered:

blarf cathedral locomotive onion
sleepsleepsleep
jazzbone thunderbucket
hallelujah crankshaft zigzag eternity

I asked what it meant.

It shrugged.

Meaning is optional in this neighborhood.

Rhythm pays the rent.

Further in,
I found the Word Market.

Chaos.

Beautiful chaos.

Merchants shouting:

Fresh nouns!

Two-for-one exclamations!

Locally grown astonishment!

Organic bewilderment!

A man sold jars of concentrated silence.

A woman hawked imported nostalgia
by the kilogram.

Someone in a trench coat opened one side
and revealed dozens of illegal revelations.

I bought three.

One dissolved immediately.

One turned into a sparrow.

The third is still unfolding somewhere.

Then came the maze.

Every slum has a heart.

Every heart has a maze.

This one was built from mirrors,
receipts,
bus schedules,
half-remembered songs,
and every sentence I’d ever started
without knowing where it was going.

Especially those.

Mostly those.

I entered.

Hours passed.

Years.

Minutes.

The clocks couldn’t agree.

I searched room after room.

A chamber full of laughter with no joke attached.

A chamber full of answers missing their questions.

A chamber containing seventeen thousand identical doors,
all labeled ALMOST.

At the center,
at last,
I found a small shack.

Tin roof.

Crooked porch.

Light leaking from the cracks.

Inside sat a single word.

Just one.

Tiny thing.

Dusty.

Patient.

It looked up as I entered.

“Are you the word I’ve been searching for?”

The word scratched its chin.

“Possibly.”

“What’s your name?”

It opened its mouth.

Out came train whistles,
saxophones,
rainwater,
old photographs,
sparks from trolley wires,
moths,
laughter,
broken clocks,
night buses,
and the smell of distant bread.

No name.

Just weather.

Just music.

Just motion.

The word smiled.

I smiled back.

Outside,
the entire slum began rearranging itself again.

Buildings drifted.

Alleys wandered.

Roofs traded places with rivers.

The sky forgot what color it was.

Everything loosened.

Everything sang.

Everything became gloriously,
magnificently,
unhelpfully uncertain.

I left carrying nothing.

Or maybe everything.

Hard to tell.

In the slum of the mind
the maps are forged,
the landmarks lie,
the directions dance barefoot through puddles of static—

and still I return.

Night after night.

Pocket full of commas.

Shoes full of rain.

Following the distant jazz of runaway syllables,

searching,

always searching,

for the next beautiful,
impoverished,
impossible word

hiding somewhere

between blarf

and hallelujah.

— Adam Donaldson Powell