sam kieth

Another reason for not being on the internet is all the dying.

In comix no-one truly dies.

In my memory Sam Kieth looms weirdly larger than his actual presence.  It was the inking, of course.  The full-on, all tactics accepted, rock'n'roll, performative way Sam Kieth inked.  There weren't many dudes making my hair stand up that way.  Sienkiewicz, for sure.  Mike Drinenberg, maybe?  But Mike's linked to Kieth, isn't he.

I know Sam Kieth first hit my life indirect.  I came to Kieth's name from scattershot sources:  The Comics Reporter, or the Amazing Heroes annuals, or The Comics Scene.  Those magazines were the only way I was able to learn about the greater wealth of talent operating within the field, because Kieth wasn't in all that many places.  Initially I associated Kieth with Willian Messner-Loeb & a strange-looking comic called 'Epicurus The Sage', which--  if I remember correctly, at this moment  --was published by DC's 'Piranha Press'.  I'd heard of that before I ever started reading 'Sandman', for certain.

'Sandman' I came into a little sideways, because it was THE book anybody in the industry had a take for.  You might not have given a single solitary fuck about Batman but if you were reading comix in the late 80s, early 90s, you were talking about DC's biggest gamble since they first yanked Moore's beard.  'Sandman' was a strange-looking book, especially those first, ungainly issues with Sam Kieth's art.

Have you ever read something where the artist looked like their work was the product of a greasy pizza?  Like, the product of miserable indigestion.  That's what Sam Kieth's work on the first few issues of 'Sandman' was like, to my eyes.  Like it's just uncomfortable.  The work feels like a misjudged assignment.  Like every page was Kieth trying to fight it out to the next page.  And then he's out, and the hot potato is in Mike Drinenberg's hands, and he's actually able to Hold It, Properly, before passing it on.

I don't know what Kieth's next assignment was, in that time period.  He hit me next with his arc on Dark Horse's 'Aliens', and man, did that book land with me.  It fit him.  He's maybe the only artist I feel like was able to capture Sigourney Weaver's likeness on the page?  He certainly got the gigeresque stuff right, like it's full on Biomechanical noodling everydamnwhere, which was definitely my vibe in high school.  I'd scribble biomech in the margins of lined notebook paper for hours.  I was starting to itch to be able to ink LIKE Sam Kieth, though this wasn't something I could properly articulate then:  I dug the granular, textural quality of how he laid india ink down on board.  He made ink his dominant FEEL.

And then, of course, there's Marvel Comics Presents, where Kieth rocked out for a bit.  Was he doing that stuff before or after the Dark Horse Aliens run?  Did he create Cyber?  Yes?  No?  Maybe it matters, maybe it didn't.  But the Wolverine stuff Kieth did--  that was a turning point.  I was all over the style, the absurd ribboning of fabric and the macho porcupine stubble and the vascular density of the triceps.  I was in love with The Maxx before The Maxx even happened.  Because you can see Kieth's Maxx all over where he was headed.

Like I know Arthur Suydam and Frank Frazetta were the big influences on Kieth.  Most people--  cis-het people  --see the Frazetta, because of how Kieth drew women, but what I saw everywhere, over everything, was Arthur Suydam...  But not gross?  Because Suydam's vibe is kind of squishy, and dank, and horny.  But there wasn't the hillbilly leering to how Kieth drew sexy stuff.  He had that "appreciation" for the human body you hear hifalutin' art dorx wax enthusiastic about:  he could draw hips like someone who wasn't trying.  As in, Kieth wasn't drawing with a pencil tied to his dick.

You know what I'm saying.  Some artists, you can tell where their mind is at.  Neal Adams couldn't draw sexy because he got too weirdly flustered when he tried.  Sam Kieth didn't seem to have that neurosis.  Does that sound like bullshit?  It maybe should.  Because there's a lot of working out hangups about sexiness on display, in The Maxx--  point of fact that seems to be the dark pulse compelling Kieth's work throughout that era at Image.  'Friends of Maxx' and 'Ojo' and everything else Kieth did, it always came back to feelings & feminism & fumbling through whether heterosexual men in america were fundamentally broken.

(Bad news for you, Kieth, where-ever you've gotten to...  Jury's out on that.  Like, at lunch in a greasy spoon, and probably not coming back unless it's with the shits.)

Anyhow, Kieth got all that stuff down, coherently or not--  I'm no judge, I'm only Your Average Fan  --Kieth got it all down on paper, without seeming like a creep or a cretin.  To me.  Kieth's art had an honest power to it.  He made drawing look fun.  He made me want to hold a brush.  He was there, early as any of the Big Names that hooked me, and he seemed like a weirdly humble dude.  And he made Image a better place?  Of all the names that jumped onboard during that second-to-third wave of 90s Image, Kieth was one who really CHANGED how the brand landed with my generation.

Because McFarlane, let's be honest, the only reason to read McFarlane is the kind of cartooning that came perfectly naturally to Kieth.  The excess, those noodling repetitions of heavy metal signifiers like shredded & wind-whipped fabric, etcetera, the tensed coiled clusters of muscle--  yeah, McFarlane sold himself to the world as horny for needless detail, but what he was celebrated for, his silly-ass "style"?  Sam Kieth was the original gangsta.

Tell me you wouldn't have read Sam Kieth's Spider-man.  Tell me you wouldn't have actually loved Spawn if he'd been a little less Al Simmons and a lot more Maxx.  God-damn.

Anyway.  Sam, my man.  You made it look righteous, and you seemed righteous, and does any more need to be said?  Selah.

boring is beautiful

I'm not typing here much right now because I'm working on making comix.

Also, usually anytime I type something, I'll glance at the datafeed on my menu bar and notice that we've bombed a series of cruise missile launching sites defending the strait of Hormuz or some such, and I'll feel like, Hey, kids! comix isn't exactly the energy I can bring to the internet in 2026, so why pretend?   This has never been a site poppin' with Hawt Content anyhoo.

Most of my spare mental energy that isn't dedicated to my husband, my job, or my art is dedicated to a late in life discovery of Chester Gould's cartooning prowess and the weird machine that he created.

Because Dick Tracy is an engine, my friends, that never stops running.  Dick Tracy is a perpetual comix machine, created & designed to last Gould's lifetime, and beyond.  I'm only interested in the bit Gould's hands were on, of course, but fuck, that's forty years of productivity.  Piss on Dave Sim's paltry 300 issues.  Dingus cheated with all those text pages anyhow.

It's been instructive to look at on any number of levels of craft, but foremost is its gridwork and its pacing, and how the strip adapted itself to the rigors of the publishing format it was alotted.  (Also how the strip was adapted, in its anthologized & reprinted incarnations, where the strips are cut-up and re-configured to more fully fit the dimensions of north american newsstand comix.  Which changes the rhythms of the story, seemingly, though how could it?  Spatial re-orientation of integers in a numerical chain doesn't change the value of the numerical chain if you're just linewrapping the digits, and this is all a comix reprinting of Tracy technically does; yet somehow re-orienting entire tracy arcs, as Blackthorne famously did with its weekly series, wholly changes the delivery mechanism of the strip format therefore the way it hits is just. different.)  Because webcomix have returned to my mind.  And I have a thing called 'The Hero of the Fever' that I'd liked to serialize here.  So reading Tracy is helping me think through how I'd like to approach webcomix.  Because I've been here before.  I've turfed out, too.  So Tracy is guiding me by example.  Gould didn't turf out.  Go on vacation or abandon it to his art assistants.  Gould stuck to it, and he was plotting on the balls of his feet most of the time.

So yeah.  This is what I'm thinking about, most of the time.  Staring at clouds that aren't there.  You know how I get.  It's pretty boring.  But it's boring like walking the beach and observing the quality of light beaming through fog transmuting into cloud is boring.  I do it every day and it doesn't lose its lustre.

I did a little of the beach thing already.  Stretches and yoga and studying the clouds and watching ducks nap.  Did some drawing.  So it's back to Tracy.  Volume Two of the complete dailies & sundays.  Let's see if Steve the Tramp gets what he richly deserves--  I mean motherfucker spent half the first volume earning it!  Like, Steve is the heeliest heel to've ever heeled.

"Wuxtry, Boy Commandos!" - March 2o26

Concrete, vols. 1-3 (1986-1994) - written & illustrated by Paul Chadwick

These left an imprint.

The cover copy for volume 1 of this 7-volume library, repackaged & published in the early 2000s, sez "Classics and little-seen stories from the legendary series".  Which is a little funny, because by the time these books were published, the Dark Horse imprint Legend was exactly one decade in the rearview.

Yesterday I found out Mike Richardson has been pushed entirely out of Dark Horse, and the publisher has been eaten by another of the ever-circling bigger fish.  Some leviathan or other will munch them all, eventually.  To me, it won't matter much, because the big money can't buy my love.  And I quite loved--  still quite love  --Concrete.

Last month the annotations were sweetly silent for ya'll, so if you'll pardon the digression, I'ma go down a rabbithole into the world below: memory.

Concrete was one of a holy trinity, no, quartet...  Maybe quintet?  of comic books that I cared enough about to discover for myself.  I was already a little hooked on Cerebus, in the late 80s, early 90s--  I was a high schooler, what d'you want? --and I was definitely addicted to Eastman & Laird's Turtles--  even though it was something of a chore to find the Real Turtles, and not the TV Turtles, on account of living in Dogwater Alabama, where all the commercial world could be found if only you ventured a county or so over to the nearest Wal-Mart, where Spawn & Youngblood were being packaged up in heat-sealed plastic bundles; god help your degenerate bones if you wanted an actual comic book SHOPPE --and some dumb how I'd even wound up addicted to Bob Burden's The Flaming Carrot-- of all the damn books --but the easiest "indie" comic in the world to find and stumble into, at that precise moment in my narrative, was Concrete.

What would the fifth wheel have been?  The Tick, prob'ly.

(Sometimes I call my narrative My Troubles With Comics, in homage to R. Crumb.)

((My Troubles With Comics was a sub-serial of autobio comix within a webcomic I used to do, titled 'Welcome To Crooked Corner'.  It chronicled the first and only time I was suspended from school, for "trafficking pornography", which meant I'd loaned the H.P. Lovecraft issue of Heavy Metal to a friend in art class and his mom found it and narc'd me out to the school.  The comic contained t&a, you see, to say nothing of Alberto Breccia and other adult horrors...  But none of this had happened yet.  And we are still figuring out how many b&w comic books I was hooked on in 199_, so selah.))

Concrete used to be one of the more popular, and marketable, black & white comics of my adolescence.  That sounds weird to say today, but back when advertising was more complex and difficult AND expensive to create, Concrete had risen to the top of a developing boom in publishing.  It was a black & white book created by one guy (give or take the letterer) and had survived the indie glut of the late 80s by dint of being pretty much the mascot of DH's premier anthology, Dark Horse Presents.  Which was reason #1 for Con's popularity, in a nutshell: its fungibility.

Concrete was a full-length comic, an ongoing series, but Concrete was also a VAST, seemingly bottomless well of short stories & whimsical riffs-- within Concrete's own series there was a sub-serial called 'A Sea of Heads' that showed up as much as the 'crete stuff  --and the character was iconic enough to be a toyetic mascot for its main publisher, acting as much as a pitchman for Dark Horse's stable of properties as for DHP.  And Concrete was everywhere.  You could find Paul Chadwick's bouncing baby at any major comics convention; Concrete was in Wizard, and The Comics Journal, and The Comics Reporter, and Comics Insider...

But why did I like it?  Pop prevalence notwithstanding.  It's all very well to be addicted to pop culture trash.  I grew up hooked on the Beatles, for chrissakes, listening to tales of record pyres; you can get hooked on a thing purely for its cultural cachet and not GET it, y'know.  Like, everyone was "into" the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles...  But how many people actually *read* the o.g. Turtles, and Grokked It?  Significantly less than you'd think.  Comix people read Thee Turtles, whereas TMNT were everywhere for the casuals.  The Turtles made a certain kind of pop sense because it emerged from a stew of influence whose top notes were martial arts and anthropomorphic funny animals.

Concrete, in contrast, was a book about...  a disembodied political speechwriter with an affinity for environmentalism.  A comic containing only one Fantastic element, an alien abduction, which never recurs.  Concrete was a book about figuring out how to be human, in a culture that didn't value humanity.  And it was--  to me, at least  --an art comic.  It was a comic you read for the art.

It was a comic I read for the art.  Concrete was an Art Comic.  The black and white was my life's blood.  There were a LOT of b&w books to be found, in my youth, veritable oceans of content left over from the boom & implosion of the marketplace in the wake of the Turtles finding a foothold.  But there weren't that many books that looked as Sharp, or as Pop-Influenced, in their black & white rigor.

I'm pouring out a 40 in pure verbiage here because you wouldn't think it to look around, now, but Paul Chadwick did a little to change the indie comix landscape in North America--  as much as Barry Windsor-Smith, or Dave Sim, or Los Bros Hernandez, or those terrible turtle boys.

Let's pause here for an admission.  A confession, truly:  I wanted so bad to rip it off.

I probably spent as much time trying to imitate Paul Chadwick's clarity of line & control of feathering as I did practicing my Frank Miller dropshadows.  Saturdays were spent at my aunt's house, poring over comics bellydown on the hardwood floor and tracing off my fucked-up pencils onto typing paper for inking.  It was Saturdays when I could convince my aunt to drive me to one of two comic shops, where doubtless satan was waiting to sell me magazines designed for single-handed enjoyment, and god smile on her bitter christian soul, she did, with little reluctance.  I guess if the options were godless rock'n'roll and heathen lit, well, at least the comix shops didn't have Perry Farrel's obscene poster of Ritual de lo Habitual hanging over the cash register.

If I had to pin down the exact moment I fell in Love with 'Crete enough to want to steal its main conceit, it was probably when my aunt was having her hair done.  There was a hobby shop at the entrance to the shopping plaza where her stylists worked, so whenever I got bored of leafing through Details magazine and trying to piece together the Wild Palms comic, I'd wander up.  The hobby shop had only a handful of comics, all trade paperback collections--  The One, by Rick Veitch (who?) and Snarfquest by Larry Elmore, and (maybe?) a Sandman like 'The Doll's House'.  But then there were these two issues of 'Concrete', singles, totally out of place amidst the lead figurines and Dragonlance novels.  'Concrete: Eclectica'.  I didn't know what they were, besides issues of my favourite book.

See, what they were?  Was colour.

Concrete, as I said, was a b&w book.  Black & white was why I lived & breathed.  I'd gotten 100% hooked on 'Crete the same way I got hooked on Cerebus--  I bought an issue in the middle of everything with no context for any of it.  My first Cerebus was a Flaming Carrot crossover, at the ass-end of Church & State book II.  My first Concrete was issue #9, the one where he grows horns.  It's a weird as fuck book, if you don't know the characters.  It spends almost the entire issue indoors, with the titular character bound to a chair, starving himself & tripping out.  If you're entering it context free, it's a bizarre In to a world of near-infinite potential, and reward.  So that's what hooked me.  It looked goddamned amazing, and it didn't do what comix had taught me to expect.  The story is very static, containing barely any action worth mentioning.  It's almost entirely an intellectual exercise, as a story.

The 'Eclectica' pieces?  I'm going to be honest, I don't remember them, today.  The essentials have evaporated.  All I remember is the shock of seeing Concrete in full colour for the first time--  if one disregards the cover art for everything Chadwick had drawn, or all the DH house ads, or the luxuriantly gardened painted posters of Concrete that had started to show up in shops.  It wasn't just 'Crete in colour, it was Concrete in computer colour, then still an innovation.  The stories were oddments, stuff Chadwick had dashed off for one project or another that didn't fit in, precisely chronologically, with the greater series which was--  then  --only beginning to be collected.

I do remember there was something luminous and uncanny about seeing 'Crete in colour, and that led me to scribbling my own ideas for a rip-off series.  Something I wouldn't attempt for years, and when I did attempt it, saw as only grotesque & misconceived.  But it got me started on Making, and not just Consuming, comix.  Chadwick, like Byrne, Sim, BWS, Moebius and all the others, got me started.

The aborted rip-off comic?  'A Lunar Body'.  Like, even the title is a bit of a stylistic lift from Chadwick--  he liked to title the individual issues subdued stuff like "A Remarkable Life" or "A Stone Among Stones".  My thing was going to be kind of a Carter of Mars riff where a dude goes to sleep and wakes up in a weird new body, in outer space, and has to re-orient himself in order to survive.  Not spectacularly well-conceieved, my concept guttered out after a few pages of TOO MANY narrative captions.  There was no-where to go with it because my core character was, of course, me.

Anyroad.  Concrete:  it's what my foundations were set in.

Dick Tracy: The Complete Dailies & Sundays 1945-47, vol. 10 - written & illustrated by Chester Gould

Dick Tracy: The Complete Dailies & Sundays 1947-48, vol. 11 - written & illustrated by Chester Gould

Concrete Colour Special (1989) - written & illustrated by Paul Chadwick, coloured by Elizabeth Chadwick

Concrete: Eclectica (1993) - written & illustrated by Paul Chadwick, coloured by Elizabeth Chadwick

Dark Horse Presents #16 & 18 (1986) - featuring 'A Sky of Heads' by Paul Chadwick

Dick Tracy: The Complete Dailies & Sundays 1933-1935, vol. 2 - written & illustrated by Chester Gould

the contrary girl strikes, & gutters

youtube is more fun than bowling sober

blogger doesn't like these posts, and who can blame them

OM (or OtM)

My childhood PTSD has led to me being largely unable to remember my very brief time involved in Olympics of the Mind.  It would have been 1982 or 1983, when I was attending Cedar Springs Elementary.  Why was I selected?  Dunno.  I had taken an IQ test, and then a scant month later the school funneled my neurodivergent ass into this program.  It made me miserable because none of my friends were there.

(Mm.  This isn't entirely true.  Jay Phillips was in that class.  Jay was a bright kid, and had extraordinary skill as an artist.  He could draw comics better than anybody my age.  I liked Jay-- but he was the only kid I knew, and he was more plugged into what was happening in that group than I would ever be; he Fit In and the other kids were really into him, whereas I was a weird-shaped peg.)

Anyway I phased myself out.  The organizers didn't ask too hard what was up.  They just shrugged and gave me a certificate.  Which still has Olympics of the Mind printed on it, so my participation must have been before OM had its legal squabble with the Olympics Committee...

I've always looked at this blip in my school history and asked myself what it was about.  But maybe it was simply that the school didn't know what to do with me.  I was pretty boggled and could barely function, some days.  And then I managed to get into some fights, and the school pushed my parents to move me to another district.  Anyhoo.  All that's really sure is I have a piece of paper, and memories of cinderblock rooms without windows, with no rows of desks, and not fitting in even amongst outsiders.

dream - o21626: escapes & avalanches, in no particular order

The dullgreen fluroescent throb of artificial light as I cross the transom.  Every upstairs is a further level.  A whisper of air kisses the arch of my bare foot and I bend to slip free slats of hardwood, revealing yet another stair.  This access narrower and even less lit than the last.  The passage littered with aged newsprint.  Headlines from forgotten papers fluttering like agitated birds in the subgreen.  I hear a rustle, a granular grating of stone against stone, and step backward from the secret passage.  A bricksize rhomboid clatters, redounding off shelving overhead like a pachinko pellet, setting off other avalanches, wrecking surfaces, wrenching brackets free, the whole storage system collapsing in fits of tumbling slats, dust rising and boobytraps raining all 'round.  Looking on the collapsed egress, I sigh.  Siegfried sighs.

"At least we aren't climbing down that."

dream - o2o626: mask off

Traveling with Siegfried through Japan.  Intimate rooms, golden light sprawling into partitioned shadow, across tatami, spilling through ricepaper all the colours of stained glass.  The other guests don't trust my face, and it's easy to see why:  streaming tears, eyes strained by rictus of repression, gasping for breath.  I feel my self-control slipping.  Begin slapping myself.  The blows don't land with any force-- because you can't combat yourself.  I can't, at any rate, the schizoid impulse to destroy my own reflection stutters, dims, all wind going out of the internal storm.  All that's left is sorrow at humiliating Sig, who has to account for my strange behavior in a stranger's home.  The scene recedes in my mind as I wake, shaken.

Walk to Montrose bird sanctuary, thinking the whole thing over.  When I get there, a finch is on a branch, peering at me.  I raise my hand and it flits to light on my fingertips.  Flies off.  Return home feeling better.

"Wuxtry, Boy Commandos!" - February 2o26

And so we return and begin again.

Maybe less annotations & notes this month?

Dick Tracy Weekly #s 49-52 (1955) - written & illustrated by Chester Gould

The Beast of Chicago (2oo3) - written & illustrated by Rick Geary

The Black Dahlia (2o18) - written & illustrated by Rick Geary

Dick Tracy Weekly #s 57-60 (1957) - written & illustrated by Chester Gould

Total THB vol. 1 (1994-95) - written & illustrated by Paul Pope

Evita (2oo2) - written by Héctor Osterheld, illustrated by Alberto & Enrique Breccia 

Dick Tracy Weekly #s 96-99 (1963) - written & illustrated by Chester Gould

A Treasury of XXth Century Murder compendium I: containing 'The Lindbergh Child', 'The Terrible Ax-Man of New Orleans', & 'The Madison Square Tragedy' (2oo8 / '1o / '13) - written & illustrated by Rick Geary

The Fatal Bullet: The Assassination of President James A. Garfield (1999) - written & illustrated by Rick Geary

Dick Tracy: The Complete Dailies & Sundays 1931-33, vol. 1 - written & illustrated by Chester Gould

Children of the Voyager #s 1-4 (1993) - written by Nick Abdzis & illustrated by Paul Johnson

Strange Days #s 1-3 (1984) - written & drawn by a murderer's row of punker Brits, including but not limited to Peter Milligan, Brendan McCarthy, Brett Ewins, and whoever else was passing that godlike bomber 'round.  these are not comix for sober people

Paradax: Remix (1987) - written by Peter Milligan & illustrated / re-painted by Brendan McCarthy

The Lives of Sacco & Vincente (2011) - written & illustrated by Rick Geary

The Mystery of Mary Rogers (2001) - written & illustrated by Rick Geary

Annihilator: Rainbow of Death vol. 1 (2026) - written & illustrated by Josh Simmons

Dream of the Bat (2007-26) - written & illustrated by Josh Simmons & Patrick Keck

Concrete, vols. 1-3 (1986-1994) - written & illustrated by Paul Chadwick

dream - o2o226: line to the moon

My grandparents' house, the living room.  Empty except for myself.  The faux-western ornamentation on the shelves heavy with their absence.  The edges of the collected Zane Gray gone papyrus.  The cut glass candy dishes dim with accumulated dust.  The rotary phone by granddad's chair rings, a jangled robot exclamation of alarm.  My grandmother's voice on the other end-- a voice out of darkness, out of naked space, distant as the moon.  They don't believe their son could have acted the way I describe.

"He couldn't have done those things," she says, and using a damp washcloth I carefully wipe between the rows of exposed nail ends protruding from where the padded headrest was.  Busying myself with cleaning, dusting granddad's favourite recliner, I listen patiently to the denials, only occasionally asserting the abuse that became my birthright.  In my mind I trace the call, visualizing from whence grandma's voice originates:  a faint blue line describing an orbital trajectory, overlaid on infinite black.

Observing the lunar surface around me.  Pitted ash underfoot, inverted cones & craters in the hundreds of thousands, fine as the dirt floor of a barn and as suggestive of antlions, the vista assumes primacy and the "reality" of my grandparents' room falls away, except for the dull weight of the plastic reciever in my hand, against my ear.  Without any energy I protest, anger dead and suffocated, wondering why no-one ever believed me.  Imagining the moon in its arc, circling in sync with the denials of my dead family.

There:  center of the coal-gray plain I'm standing on, a singular light, a miniature moon, phosphorescent as the soul's own glow.  I study it, no longer truly listening, feeling hollow, ageless, indifferent.  Wondering why I am trying to make my case, when there is no jury to agree, no justice seated on high, no opinion to court.  Grandmother's voice fading as I permit my receiver hand to drop.  Tracing paths through the vacuum with my mind's eye.  Lit by the brittle sphere of imagination. Waiting in wonder.

dream - o12426: the rotted synagogue

There is dark, the dark of gables two stories high overhead.  A blackish poodle runs through the incense-scented ruin, pulling a chain of dust behind him, sewing discord through the pews, encircling the bimah with his rough little whoops of alarm.  The dog is as unknown to me as their owner, but I follow anyway, thinking perhaps to gather the little noisemaker into my arms.  He eludes me and the urge to escort him out fades.  Lit by faraway dusk leaking through boarded-over twin windows, a bundled crew of parkour athletes lift a scroll from within the sundered ark, laying it cattycorner atop the reading table, knocking free charred fragments of fir, the char bouncing with a glassy clatter between the traceurs' feet.  The young men carefully unspool the scroll, "reading" the red line of the EKG as it charts the events that led us here.

I am the only other person here, besides these young men in their military surplus, and do not recognize them beyond their profession.  Their voices do not form words so much as an atmosphere of forgotten song, and it draws me in:  I stand below the railing of the bimah, peering at the end of the scroll as they spool it, scrying the QRS complexes for signs one might identify with sound.  Meaning eludes me.

Did I arrive with these men?  It feels like I arrived after, or independently, and we only converged here by chance.  They do not acknowledge me; in fact I might well not exist, were it not for the evidence of my smudged hands and the bounce of my tread through the boards in this sundered place.  The disturbance of the dog fades, perhaps having found a way out, leaving me behind.  Wordless chanting descends all around like constellated motes in a sunbeam.