The Dirty Works of Shane Levene

In the spring, when the days first turn good, they sit outside under the Magnolia tree.

The bloom of the Magnolia is white and bulbous and drops like dead doves, weighted in the belly, each one making a little fump:

    fump...
          fump...
                fump...

To this beautiful carnage they drink strong beer and watch the world and lay back in the cool of the blossom. From afar they look like an assortment of old discarded clothes.

11 am. Clear skies above. The lazy sound of traffic droning by. A haze out in the distant like there lies the sea. 

This world proffers daydreams. A daydream that things could be just how they are only better. A daydream that we need no more than temperate days and fruit and water and the cool of streams and grass and fraternity and love. Over there, under the Magnolia, when the days are kind, when the time is right, when a breeze breezes through and tickles over the soul, the drunks and the bums and the waifs and the strays find solace in the low of the day. I too can be found under the Magnolia, drawn by historical forces. My being is light in strange moments in strange ways. Behind my closed lids there is orange dimming black then coming through to orange again. I hear the faint stirrings and mumblings of the others, feel an insect run over my hand, catch another little 'fump' and meditate in the floral fragrance of birth and death. I am close to somewhere I once was, to something lost; something missing; something gone. Under the Magnolia I am not who I am but who I was, simultaneously at peace in various moments of my life. 

I was borne into this world by a drunk: a bad one. My mother did not drink to be saved but for revenge, to wage war against a life which had cast the first stone. I often find my mother under the Magnolia. She turns up in the guise of young women so completely ruined, abused and emotionally swollen that they are no longer sensitive to the human touch. To register at all one must hit hard. There ends no woman left; just broken bones where the soul got out. My mother never stays long. She sits there stewing in her drunkenness, shifting between drink-laden faces, each look a pictogram of the hateful, bitter emotions chewing away inside of her. Then she is gone and there is left a melancholic tranquillity in the day, over the city, like I've stepped back in time.

The world around the Magnolia is full of ghosts. It's what brought me here. People turn up with missing parts, sometimes in flames, caught in existential screams between planes of life they cannot escape. They move in and out of this timeless place, appear for moments and then disappear again for weeks or years or lifetimes. I am here now, I was here before and I shall be here again in the future. On the trunk of the Magnolia I carve my name; on my body and on the page my words. This is my life and this is my time. I close my eyes and hope in some way to go on forever, but I know my heart will not hold out. 

       fump...
            fump...
                 fump... 

...like the only plan I have.​

​