Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

56. BALLS IN THE HAND:

Balls in the hand heads on the roof gnats in the dormers money on tap jiggers in a row menfolk feasting strongly nine boots in the alley beggars without handcuffs nightcaps in the morning schoolgirls with no shame mothers on the counters old men leaping candles and horsemen on the water - and with everything trailing a long train of flame.
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It's an insidious anarchic mess this newer form of writing and my late hands are tired from pouring on the oil but I stay with measures given and mark by chain places I've gone and how deep I've descended but such record-keeping grows tiring in the end yet I soldier on trying to parlay my mention to a goal above intention : 'don't put no money in the meter - I'm going home and they're done for the day you'll be OK' I heard the meter lady telling that to someone who was digging for change and I felt that was pretty nice of her telling him that she alone was finished for the day and therefore there'd be no more ticketing done - expired meter times or not - but somehow I'd still be worried I figured because there's at least five thousand other cops in this stupid city and I bet not a one of them would care about whether or not SHE was done for the day and they'd be MORE than happy to write the offender a ticket - but as in the rest of life I guessed it was all about WHO you put your faith in and how the moments ran.
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I could have sworn there was nothing more to any of this but happenstance but then I was proved wrong by everything around me : sources I never even gave a thought to and things which began running through my head and one of the most important actually seemed to be a fearsome figment for I'd come to sense or 'imagine' all around me the about-to-happen spectacle of huge animal-creatures materializing before me and stalking off in each direction at most any instant and it was all-consuming to me as I'd visualize them anytime and anywhere and it all became confusing to me whether or not they were real - I just could NOT distinguish the reality from the figment of this - large long-limbed animals prehistoric in their size and visage and speed stalking fearsomely over the modern landscape and intermingling with buildings streets avenues and lanes and traffic and people swishing through the scenery soundlessly and then just that quickly gone and I couldn't make hide nor hair (whatever that meager expression is) of any of it but just had to walk around with it all inside myself as a secret vision or a very weird fear or the twisted imaginings of some urban madman and none of this could I tell nor tell apart from regular reality and I became frightened the more it happened and scared too of what to see and of what was to come from it but I remained silent and vigilant to see these huge animals again.
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And I looked up into the three a.m. sky and remembered reading about one Grote Reber - the 'great sounding' name of the man who built the first radio telescope in his backyard in 1938 in Wheaton Illinois when there really WAS a nightime sky for a dedicated astronomer to study and I wondered if - as he looked up - he'd ever glimpsed an inkling in THAT sky that it would someday have become THIS sky and then in some further accidental reading I found this little poem by some little kid written in some Harlem schoolroom competition (11 year old Marvin Mercer - PS 153 in Harlem) and thought it pretty apt : 'My heart trembles like a poor leaf / the planets whirl in my dreams / the stars press against my window / I rotate in my sleep / my bed is a warm planet.'
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(The stars are done and - for the moment - we too are finished.)