The Ice Melting on the Hood

There are things to cling to, like the clean pebbles in the pockets of
my jackets. I have too many jackets. In the last two years, I've only
worn one of them, on less than a dozen days altogether. It makes more
sense to wear sleeves long or carry a sweater. Also, most days there
are only a few minutes in the naked outside for which a jacket might
be preferred, and those minutes are only slightly more terrible
without one. So the closet stays closed, and the jackets and the
pebbles are forgotten, dumbly clinged to with hands that aren't mine.

It occurs to me that the path to work has become wild with thorns and
tough little vines, pleading calls from birds in unseen shadows.
Sometimes the scabs and pale scars on my sun-darkened arms startle me.
I'm not getting used to them and the people I know ask if I've tried
this lotion or that salve. I don't prefer to do that, though. The same
as how I squeeze my head in red hands rather than swallow something
benign from a plastic bottle. The only things I actually treasure are
irrationalities, anyway. The way spitting makes me feel in control,
the way spitting fingernail splinters makes me feel like some kind of
victor, the way a terrible mug of coffee validates this whole
enterprise.

The New Mormon Boy

In the convention center, Genevieve Reed and Steven Hart Brindell compare expensive new DSLR cameras. The woman's hummingbird mouth speaks soft, moldy words. The drowsy-eyed man has trouble following her; her voice cannot compete with the constant rattle of pitchmen and projected animation.

Mr. Hart Brindell has been in similar situations countless times: situations in which he is unable to fully comprehend the verbal information he is receiving. His mind, given to automythologizing, has decided that some party is actively working to block critical information from him. Fearful of succumbing to paranoid delusion, he has taken care to formulate a plausible hypothesis.

He has assigned blame to time travelers who need to prevent him from making certain cognitive links that will add up to an idea that creates a reality they oppose. Desperate to maintain a sense of decorum, Mr. Hart Brindell refuses to voice this hypothesis to others, or seek assistance of any kind. After all, who is to say that these future-folk are wrong? And who is to say that they couldn't have simply killed him? He has taken this as a show of good faith, and though he is an affirmed atheist, decided that if there is to be an invisible force influencing his actions from a distance, this one is acceptable. It is this ability to compartmentalize his paranoia that allows him to seduce a woman like Genevieve Reed, to involve himself in sex stuff with her, and to father several children with her.

Unfortunately for the future-folk who so boldly meddle in the affairs of the past, one of Mr. Hart Brindell's descendants will do some really rotten shit and make a mess of things anyway.

Sean Michaels Became a Professional Wrestler When He Grew Up

I am compelled, on occasion, to disturb those ladies with whom I engage in the sex acts. "The sex acts" used to be my favorite term for naked times with women, until I heard famed cable television opinion generator Bill O'Reilly say "sex stuff" while interviewing the Insane Clown Posse. So, sometimes when I'm doing sex stuff with women, I'll say something jarring. For instance, I might say one of the following phrases.

A. "I dreamed of a spider last night."
B. "This is like hockey."
C. "I love this."

I know that option C seems tame. It might even be welcomed by my vaginally blessed counterpart, given she's one of those who enjoys verbal communication while doing sex stuff.

To clarify: I'll say something innocuous, but say it in an unsettling way. For instance, in the voice of a cackling witch, Quickdraw McGraw, or a sports talk radio host. I don't know why. I usually don't like these women enough to care, and maybe it will give them a wacky thing to tell "their girls."

I don't even enjoy sex stuff.

Among White Time

The boxes were empty now. We admitted triumph, finally able to see through the coronal discharges of our flesh casings, and spoke words of satisfaction to each other. The air was prickly with glee, subtle as fine mesh.

The vehicle on the slab was warm when we reached it. You knew how to operate the radio, and I asked you to do it. The pleasure you felt was obvious, though you attempted subterfuge.

Against the sky's diffuse glare, I felt my awareness descend gently. And you spoke seven sentences, seven perfect sentences imparting some shaded emotion. I felt your body's approach and I allowed it. I was willing. And I didn't disagree when you opened my trousers and called what you saw a callow amphibian.

Welt

The family I remember might now dwell inside a plastic bag on the floor. One smells its moistness as one approaches it, and regards closer investigation with a measure of repulsed respect. Most of us can understand that feeling. The peculiarity of a holiday meal in a dark place comes close.

The dark place is under this theme park, under the shuttered amusements and rusting thrills. It is under the concrete and its accumulated layers of sweat, sugar, saliva, and bird feces. This list of substances feels like a specific description of the stratum between our meal and the empty park above, but as we chew our meager ration, we ponder the indescribable, immeasurable mass of substances accumulating above us. It cannot be without weight.

One of the dinner guests crunches ice loudly and irritates the nervy interior of a tooth. As his or her neighbor silently despises this habit, the offending party momentarily comes to terms with the dreadfulness of the accumulating waste of more than birds and men.

Pain is its own kingdom and the purest ecstacy; it is the orgasm denied summation.

Funny Calcium Carbonate

Beautiful follicles, bear your peppers in that place of a keen description. Your body in this locomotive is entirely lovelorn. It cannot.

Your delicate goal is closer here, by a shampooed mole outside the false trousers. You offer to appreciate your shirt, seldom smelling of personality but defined especially with its ears. Put to that, the dove's bleating and dried head atop that nowness, or that acquired machismo which when listened to is woven like strands of your voice. Those reported to that to fart between your thin kin and the peculiar window mimic our ruse.

Unfortunately Yes

But I don't have a choice. I'm hoping. Yes. Can we giggle together? Is he okay? I'll be there soon.

I will be there soon. For the infant we have, I will bring some food. I will bring processed fruit. I will bring salt. I will bring melted ice.

I am copied. I am pasted. I know fax machines and I am good to go.

I'll be there soon, with no choice, but hopeful.

Half of Some Rice

In the workshop, poets hold a singular sky quietly. Call this the crushing elegy of a haunting blissout. Two. Sharing the finest indie-folk ideas, 14 lone wolves elevate both fire and space. A craft for two. Phantoms of, of, of the last decade lay together in Texas.

Friendly songwriters aimed their tunes together, searing the running tape. Two. Enough dark talents come under this craft to, to, to... to will collaboration and folk performance. Each one leaving the poet’s surroundings. In creativity. Seem to become each other’s match. In between night and Jason Molina.

Through the Pages

I feel creeping feminine nature
The feeling like ivy
Something like clouds
The other side of a secret
That is on the garden idea
I also prefer a stone
With scene of greenery
Wall, door
But not too wonderful

With Vinegar

What is that thing on the counter? I didn't put it there. I doubt you put it there (it would be uncharacteristic). So what is it anyway?

And why does it matter? Why do I care? There it is (it ain't taking up much space). It's just a thing there. It's got distinguishing qualities such as color, shape, size, odor, digestibility, number of vibrations per second, buoyancy, blindness, gravitational pull, time it's been there, time it will be there, and hidden love. So I don't care that it's sitting there. That's not it at all.

It's just that in this place we (I) love to maintain an accurate accounting of objects, gasses, and whatnot. We keep mirrors on the walls so we can be sure of our own presence here, signified by our ability to reflect light. I (we) also choose this as the place where we tend our tamed bodies and partake of foreign nutritional items.

And then there is the sex we do and the mental accounting we keep. One day it will be our last day. One day there will be nothing before us but the numbers and dollars and calories we've accumulated. And that thing. That thing will be among them.

That's all. Come.

Cephalopod Swashbuckler

These words speak to our fantasies, those we share in the darkness hidden by kitchen appliances. The fuzzy shadow behind the range. The rough-hewn gray-red behind the refrigerator. The cool cowardice beneath the toaster. Our hands sit naked atop our laps. Our tongues are suspended between our jaws. As if palming a tack.

In these tasselled lawnchair moments, varieties of anger concocted over hours of stiff labor settle like tin shavings in the bottom of a jar of glycerin. Let the houseplants sit wanting as static mimics the moonvoice. Let the glue dry to crust. I really mean that last part.

We don't need glue now.

Periods Correspond

These religions is the mystery

Who has parched this land under this mountain?

The nature of the cult is secrecy

Who gathered the unchosen heresy?

New faith concluding the narrative fountain

These religions is the mystery

Cradling scraps of garments to chests, fiercely

Who felt with their tongues energy undaunted?

The nature of the cult is secrecy

Who undertakes the promise of our sincerity?

We all shall be revealed to the crowd and taunted

These religions is the mystery

To be newly arrived is to gain one's longevity

Who knows the desperation for hands to be counted?

The nature of the cult is secrecy

Who has overtaken me with such parsimony?

Bleeding from gashes, hobbled and hounded

These religions is the mystery

The nature of the cult is secrecy

Perfect Stick

One blue-mouthed woman, silently waiting

Waiting for words to fulfill her intent

Flesh inside flesh, insistent creating

Dying, the coward's voice is fading

Wisps of sugar vapor, toward ears are bent

One blue-mouthed woman, silently waiting

Television is investigating

Emissaries to the brothels are sent

Flesh inside flesh, insistent creating

Our emissaries, giddily braiding

Their languages together, bleached and bent

One blue-mouthed woman, silently waiting

The cowards and emissaries shading

Their flesh under skin stretched tight into tents

Flesh inside flesh, insistent creating

Here we engage in more fruitless mating

Displaying these organs, purple and rent,

One blue-mouthed woman, silently waiting

Flesh inside flesh, insistent creating

Watching the Program with Children

I am a dude,
A rich broth of contradictory thoughts
When I am nude

Parents are rude,
Demand confirmation of what was taught
I am a dude

Humble and crude,
Devouring the lunch meats (which I have bought),
When I am nude

Shielding this brood
Teaching my body things others will not,
I am a dude

Eating more food,
Opened and bloodied when it has been caught,
When I am nude

Endlessly shrewd
Owning the property which I have sought
I am a dude,
When I am nude

The Singer Oriented

Our companion mammals are made of noise

And swaggering we walk to the kindness we know

Filled with the dimness of muscular joys

Hands filled with hands filled with these broken toys

Created as bodies for the ones put below

Our companion mammals are made of noise

Hands for the labor of milking this noise

Sheathed in plastic, sweating, cold as reflected glow

Filled with the dimness of muscular joys

A golden seepage encircles these boys

Creates an eternity to know and unknow

Our companion mammals are made of noise

Swaggering with kindness, words soft and coy

Summoned back to the places where ash blackly blows

Filled with the dimness of muscular joys

Children will sleep clutching these broken toys

Lidded eyes perceiving the residual glow

Our companion mammals are made of noise,

Filled with the dimness of muscular joys

Under Blown Leaves

The earthworms give us red bracelets. The goldfinches give us new flavors for unsatisfied tongues. The origami elk gives us a virgin's wisdom. The somersaulting children of immigrants give us anger to wield. The earthworms give us red bracelets.

Sandstone and limestone.

Cumulus and cirrus.

Scissors and tweezers.

Steel and aluminum.

Lizard hips and bird hips.

If you can know these things you can grasp the difference between, between, between Muddy Waters and JL Hooker. You can wander free of memory and labor.

The mallard gives us a clean thirst.

In Hair, Words

Don't tell no one, not one other or each other, not one another, not a man or a woman you see. Don't tell no one of my presence or the sounds my body makes. My voice ain't not a thing at to see or hear no more than rocks and food are things to be noticed or matter.

Don't tell no one. Don't tell no one. It's not a thing right to do. Don't. Do one more thing when I hide behind you. Behind my back I'll hold this rabbit skull and behind your back you'll hold me so don't tell no one that nothing is behind your back.

Back behind the shed in the wheelbarrow we flipped upside down before winter, in that wheelbarrow I made tracings so if you betray me don't tell no one but that would hear you about the tracings and I can forgive betrayal and I can feel your heart beating under the palm of my hand and I have the rabbit skull in my other hand. It's clean.

It is Our Only Way to Imagine a Tongue

Crows are little things in the sky and the gold in the ladies' pockets feels cool and happy. We have time here to let thoughts play quietly like slow water, lingering on subjects like the kinds of scissors we've used or the way airline tickets have changed since childhood. We have time for subjects that feel like nonsense and beauty and ultimate meaning all at the same time. Our bodies click and the shelves of our homes moan with the weight they bear, the weight of accumulated sentiments. The weight of our prosperity.

Use the Word "Agenda" in the Title If You Ever Write a Thriller

Business schools are loud places with bookstores, coffee shops, and plenty of restrooms. The toilet paper is generally required to be two-ply but some states have different regulations. I've seen women wear just about every color of necklace at business school, including blue and white. I have also seen an exterminator spraying for pests at a business school.

There is usually a gas station near a business school. Sometimes public officials visit a business school. Typically, a mayor of a city is a business school graduate, which uniquely qualifies him or her for the task of cutting the ribbon at the grand opening ceremony of a new business school which signifies his or her dedication to improving the standard of living in his or her city. After the ceremony, the mayor might attend a luncheon with the business school's board members. Sometimes a local student who has received a scholarship will also be there. This is a convenient photo-op for the mayor and the student.

The student's family might frame the photo, place it in a scrapbook, or simply file it away with memorabilia of the student's other accomplishments. Doing this is of little consequence, ultimately.

This has been a general description of a common event in modern America. Specifically, there was one time when the mayor and the student engaged in a torrid affair involving sexual intercourse of a deviant nature well-suited to colorful verbal descriptions. You may assume that this situation brought a generous amount of infamy upon the lives of the principals. This actually wasn't the case; instead, the minds of the entire population of the small Midwestern town in which the affair occurred were opened to the mutually beneficial possibilities of fiercely raunchy actions between lovers of very different ages.

Checkbook Frenzy

I don't know why my fists are full of dead air and nothing with no weight in them and no blood. There is a place for them, for both of them, in my pockets but I'm not putting them there again. I am going to hold them up for these people to see and I am going to try to sell them. These fists are useless and stupid things and I do not want them any more. I will ask twenty dollars for each, thirty five for the pair. That will be my firm price because I can then eat at a casual dining restaurant. And this time I will eat the dessert on the tabletop placard, and this time it will be a real thing in my stomach.

Chalk Wit

Our goal here, in this place defined by its peculiar nowness, is to appreciate that which you offer: your entirely false machismo. Woven between the seldom shampooed follicles atop your head, delicate strands of acquired personality, smelling thin like dried peppers. Your voice, reported to mimic that of a locomotive outside the window, cannot bear that description when listened to with keen ears. It is closer kin to a dove's fart or the lovelorn bleating of a mole. But put your body in that shirt, and those trousers especially, and the ruse is beautiful.

Allegiances, Thus

A mystic circus does not change what you see. It is a system of internal attributes representing the ultimate states of reality. Even the cosmos itself allows us to predict our whimsical animation and cognitively heightened sense of the interrelating cycles of behaviors of people.

A negatively charged electron cloud provokes a teenager's raging hormones. The causal implications of carnally inspired mating behaviors. Our teenagers, horny and proud, are constantly interacting and competing in network relationships; they are the very fire in the engine of usefulness.

Encyclopedic Nostalgia Vapors

This is the the one time here the one the one time it happens now. Now. The happening. The burning. The writing to the memory, the chemical transaction, the reinforcing by repetitions. This is the one time and the one time will occur again. This is the plug and the socket. This is the electrical kiss.

This is the exchange of saliva. This is the plug and the socket, the happening of energy, the temporary existence. There under the floor is just nothing but unseen worthlessness in the darkness and a nameless voice never silent. This is the plug and the socket and the cord is hot with blood.

We are a sugary mass full of the the the the the the the the the the the particles and tiny energies in their patterns. The patterns happening one time and one time and one time destroyed and silent. The patterns swallowed and vomited and the becoming of songs. The words now are receptacles of tensions. We are a sugary mass deluded and hungry. We know hunger like anger and anger like peace.

This is ripping it apart.

Fist in Mug

Our abdomens full of a slurry of grains and a certain high-quality carbonated beverage, we lay drowsy, idle things on the floor. The cold glass of the windows flutters like something cheap and ephemeral but there is nothing any of us can reach that may be thrown, that may be used to puncture these flimsy skins between the inner and the outer. We might spend the rest of this night discussing the championship. We might reminisce about childhood wardrobes, the smell of fires, the manifold sensations conjured by abandoned shells in the sand. Also, we might spend some time brainstorming all possible reasons for an old man with a limp to be carrying a bucket at one in the morning in the frosty grass. I will strenuously argue for my own pet theory: He is a forgotten one who is looking for the apples he picked.

Island Flatness and Proof of Contour

I don't see a major problem with the mincing manner in which I walk to the frozen pizza for a piece of it. This feeling is full of intensity, of thrust and the power of going. Across the street there is a cold abandoned church with the bird's nest and the wet flannel shirt. There is also the five hundred square foot bungalow I could not have noticed in its place, being where it was, not with these plastic eyes in their rabbit's head. I reach out to the hairy neck in front of me and I rub it.

Croc Window Snacks

This diva that has been defined by her failures and successes will diagnose a whirlwind of facts to get your transparent blood wrapped up with reality. This spoken word artist displays the passion of her box to stir up cognitive thoughts to describe society. She has successfully completed the feelings of a writer with a dose of words in her writing.

This woman continues to break barriers with the emerging of the heart and mind of a poet. The passion this writer shares with you continues to get your blood thirsting for your pain. There is no particular box big enough to fit the soul of a writer and author and mind of a poet and other poets and writers and now simplifies the feelings and gives you insight to make a mark in society. She has successfully completed the stroke of her pen.

Boots Full of Pitch

I cannot feel the moon on my skin here in this emptiness, in this field of crushed styrofoam cups. The afternoon's hazy freedoms and the sensibilities of the toddlers with their toys is a light quaintness in the pocket of my coat. Not the outer pocket, but the inside pocket, with the zipper, with the fabric care label, with the memories of how proud and envious I was as a boy, as a teenager, as a man.

I carry my water in a fist-sized bottle, once home to a traveller's portion of shampoo. I do not travel, and I have no need of cleanliness about my scalp. The water will do well for me, and the thought of its eventual weight on my tongue and the miracle of ingested liquid brings me a sort of resolve. The absent touch of this moon in this sky with its blackness and manifold retinas and the whispers of their fires, it remains. The absent touch of this moon is something I can abide.

Grandpa

Sand in this hat, twigs and pebbles in these shoes. Salt in this fist. Pepper in this fist. Bear trap in the linen closet. Just a deadly thing.

Brother To A Dry Tongue

There, against the rotting pillar, stands our uncle. Is he angered over the events of the last hour? A devastation seemed to settle on his face like a charred bird alighting on a sinking ship. Great fellowships he has known are dead and there is an emptiness in his coat now. Electricity. In several years, we will remember this moment as clearly as if we had taken snapshots: the brokenness of a man who held us as children, who fed us macaroni and cheese on weekends. His hunger is an ignored nuisance. Mouth cannot know loneliness, heart is only a thing pumping under ribs, ears are full of cold air.

That Is Not Chalk

Probable fictions are littered across the pavements of this city, so thick in places that the tread of our name-brand sneakers is thwarted, filled with the muck of it. The trajectories we walk are indistinguishable from each other. On restless days when the mundane complaints of walls and machines live like rashes on our skin, every surface suitable for human foot traffic is coated in a greasy film of benign lies, imaginery terrors, olfactory violences, and partially hydrated laugher. We carry our daughters and sons and leave anxious pets to the houses we've abandoned, where they soil the windows with the moisture of their noses.

 

I have seen men fight on these days, driven to a murky anger by the crowds of aimless pedestrians. They throw clumsy fists at each other. They lock their arms together, they grunt out misty exclamations of saliva, they clutch at coats and pants. They fall to the ground, to the tacky paste of our futures. They smear it on thair faces and execute the fiercest of blows with their knees, elbows and foreheads. Their blood flows to the ground and mingles with the pulverized fiction and it is a stench to be surrounded in. We watch and we cannot think of doing otherwise until the beaten figures exchange hoarse apologies. We remember the purposeless wandering we have forsaken, and we resume it. Until the machines come with the fall of night, we sweat in the mingled heat of our bodies.

Burning Pillow

I know the voices. Know the voices of the soil's darkness. The voices crammed together in the air around our ears. Voices unhearable in stone like stones in clasped hands. They tell stories of endless brutality, of the greed of jaws and the anger of bloodied feet. There is fire so sudden it does not exist. Before tenderness was a possibility, this fire was alive in our lidded eyes. I close my eyes and hear the guns screaming our names.

Heroic Mouth Stench

The groaning sound of growing fungi wakes me in the morning and I put my feet into wet shoes and let the weakest light of the sun put itself on my skin. At the urging of my gut, I ingest a serving of some hot concoction, some slurry of grains, and I inventory the oblong utensils I keep in receptacles. I feel clouds of thought condense and dissipate endlessly. I imagine the tongue in my mouth to be an egg from which a thousand tadpoles hatch. I touch the members of my family and their cold acquaintances with my windshield-wiper hands. I am a silent wholeness and altogether proper in my involuntary form.

Finger Serrations

Blanket over my head, I get in the car, the car I own, the car that is paid off with money earned working in the kitchen at the casino, the casino in the hills, the casino by the golf course. The car was bought with this money but the blanket was stolen from a neighbor. I had been given the keys so I could keep an eye on things while she was away. I could let myself in if I saw flames or if it looked like a mirror was about to fall from the wall. I could enter the house and correct the problem, by taking action such as dousing the flames with water or securing the mirror to the wall.

Instead, I let myself into the house in the middle of the night when I could be fairly sure that other neighbors were not watching, and I tried to be bad. I tried to force myself to look in her underwear drawers and medicine cabinet, but invisible barriers stopped me from doing it. All I managed to do was go through a linen closet, where I found this blanket.

Since then, the guilt has been an acid in my lungs and I have stopped eating, and I have stopped going to my job at the casino, and I have been called by my manager several times but I never answered the telephone and the last time she called she said do not come in you are fired we have someone else do not come in keep your apron.

So I get into my car with the blanket over my head and I will return it now. I will drive the car head-on into the front of my neighbor's house and I will use drunkenness as my demon and in the ensuing ruckus I will throw the blanket into the house and she will find it after the emergency personnel have gone and while I am being harassed at the police station and the blanket will be a minor mystery dwarfed by the wind gusting through the hole in her house. I like this idea.

The Ink

I keep a brooch in a box in a kitchen cabinet, a piece of handmade jewelry purchased from an artisan in the town of cactii and sandstone. I keep it for her.

 

She lives atop a stream-kissed mountain, amidst sighing evergreens and sky-filled ponds where she is kin to the birds and beetles, to shy fauna and their humble raptures. There, she is a wordless voice and an aimless wanderer, litter. But one day her animal life will end and she will descend unheeded and it is this for which I have prepared myself.

 

The brooch will be a gift of mundane beauty, a piece of elegance to pin to her ragged garment and it will be her first taste of culture after living upon the mountain. She will be eased into material concerns by the brooch I have held for her, among colanders, slotted spoons, and my cast iron skillet.

 

She will see the home I have kept tidy. She will step onto the lawn I have richly nourished and carefully tamed. Despite my years of diligent preparation, I will lack the confidence to look into the pupils of her eyes. I will watch her feet, pale in the lucid grass.

Hatred Season

I knew a man who was a brother to another man. As brothers they were known for the dry soup they carried in their pockets. They were known for the anxieties of their parents.

This brother bore a birthmark on his neck in the shape of a hammer's iron head. His walk was sparrowlike and his thoughts swirled like paper beads under his breeze-filled hair. I touched his ear while he slept, once. It was warm, hairless.

I spent time with him in a humid dormitory where we shared deli meats and paperback books. On sunday mornings, he left me voice mails distorted by the volume of his screaming. Upon learning of the recklessness with which I tended to my laundry, he scolded me softly, explained the importance of garment care, and asked if I would allow him to take it upon himself. I answered no, and he asked if he might teach me. I answered no, but said I might allow him to be the steward of my clothing in exchange for me dispatching one of his own chores. This was how I came to transcribe his dictated letters to his family at home.

When I saw him last, he was wearing his suit, on the roof.

Our People Swallow This

This place is a city and it is made of streets for the use of our vehicles. The people here accept standards of conduct and the lives we live are enriched by the convenience of vehicles and our lives are whole. Men and women we trust have created unattractive white vehicles. We all them ambulances. I mention this because I see one now. Crammed in this ambulance, the heat of bodies bind people together and their pulses are quiet but true. The immobile occupants fill themselves with the voice of the siren which heralds their coming. The voice is the medium for the song of alarm.

Skull Fist

This is an aluminum can a quarter full of paperclips and ball bearings. When you are scared, shake it. I will come to you and I will vanquish the source of your fear. If it is a person, I will command that they apologize, depart and not return. If they resist or refuse, I will engage in an act of cruel physical force; for instance, I might clutch their face in both of my hands until pain and aversion to facial damage forces them to beg for mercy. Or I may use my legs and feet to deliver blows to their torso, back, and head. I cannot predict all methods I may use as their bodily movements, whether offensively or defensively undertaken, will require split-second decisions. In any case, you will watch me subdue the individual who has caused you such distress, and you will understand my power.

 

If you are scared by an animal, I will use similar tactics, though perhaps I will not act cruelly; it is not necessary when dealing with animals because they do not act with malice. They are stupid and more than likely act out of their own fear. I do not believe that an animal would have one such as I who on their behalf would come to their aid or defense. It is not the animal's way. However, if such a circumstance arose, I would take on that protector and vanquish it in the proper fashion.

 

There is a chance that the source of your fear is imaginary. For instance, you may be frightened by an inanimate object or philosophical concept. I will attempt to eliminate your fears with reasonable counsel delivered in a calm and soothing manner. If fear persists, I would more than likely refer you to an institution specializing in such issues. Really, it would be out of my league.

Today We Haven't Woven Anything

Last night, we bought magazines and removed expired foods from the pantries. We held crystal trinkets to our eyes and stared at hundreds of candles. Then there was a single candle and with its reservoir of liquid wax we gave ourselves new fingertips.

 

"Now we can touch everything we're not allowed to," you said, and I said that I would do it. This time, I would do it. There was the closet with the heirloom ear muffs and the coat with an unpronouncable name. There was the porcelain whale and the porcelain wolf's head and the porcelain owl and the porcelain chilld wearing a tee shirt, carrying a lunch box, smiling with imaginings of the thrill of driving an automobile on roads of dirt under a round sun in the sky. And there were things not made of porcelain, there was the box of dog's teeth and under it a vintage magazine of radio stars.

 

Finally we had touched every forbidden object in the house and still there was not enough touching but there was nothing to be done about it, so what was there to do butwhat we did? We saw the quiet, cold television and we sat on the floor with crossed legs, we turned it on, we allowed ourselves to be brought to a comfortable stupor, eventual hunger, and a final buttered slice of bread before sleeping.

Shaven, I Purchase More Garments

As I stood in my home with my body oriented away from the 37-year-old man in my kitchen whose presence I wished to unconjure, I tensed all muscles and felt all of the interacting forces that served me. There was water pressure and rivers of electrons and gravity and the opposing strivings of wood and screw. I felt like an intruder and a weak pimple and a decomposing gourd.

When the 37-year-old man had been been unconjured and his face was a whispered description of a historical event I felt like something no one had ever thought of, like a person imagined by a writer or sketched by a teenage girl in a the margin of a notebook and lost.

Thus began the Quiet Months.

Help the One Under You

The 37-year-old man stood at my sink in my kitchen which held my shoes full of their diminishing suds. He was wanting more of my gruel but I did not feel comfortable feeding him more. He was never an invited presence. The day he was first present, it was due to an unlawful climbing over my fence and though I felt urges to care and comfort him in the darkness and uncertainty he bore, my feelings of charity were now faded and ratty like bad socks.

There was an incident in which the 37-year-old man sleeping in my chair was abductied by a creature-like woman with no face and incomprehensible strength in her body which had an appearance of weakness. In the morning I woke from an ugly sleep to find that her feet left a glittering trail, and my perceived duty in the life I would live that day was to follow her to ensure that the 37-year-old man who had been my ward was safe in a comfortable place.

Had he not been safe, had his comfort been eroded, had he been in danger of bodily harm or mental anguish, it would have been my somber task to pull him from the situation by whatever means necessary using the intellectual tools and physical prowess I had accumulated in life to that point, either by effort of will or chance and unchosen circumstance. The spectrum of possible outcomes I pondered was without boundary, and I thought of houses in trees, roofs of public high schools, and other places more unsavory and now a burden to conjure.

What I felt was that it was a greater confusion to come to terms with when I discovered that the glittering footprints took me to my own home, where the 37-year-old man was lounging in the same chair from which he was abducted the night before, perusing the classified ads for free pets.

Though the result of the day's searching was indeed that the 37-year-old man was safe and in comfort, his unwillingness or inability to account for his whereabouts, to divulge specific details about his day spent with the creature-like woman, struck me unable to feel a sense of relief and satisfaction.

So I did not want to give him more of my precious gruel, which was a source of sustenance and warmth in the soul's dark moments when thoughts of the inevitable erased the nuances of a life enjoyed and connected to a web of other lives. In such moments, all existence seems to be a useless parade circling a block of condemned buildings and never concluding; the ingestion of my self-concocted slurry of grains and the exotic blend of spices integrated into it is a renewed connection to the secret physical world and its sensations and pleasures I hide from the dark hand looming.

So I did not want to give him more, and I frowned with a hard chin and I turned from him hoping that his presence would cease and the impression of the light reflected from his body would fade from my eyes, my hardening eyes.

The Source of Ambulance Voices

I sat on the small blue stool facing the chair in which the 37-year-old man sat with the newspaper, perusing the classified advertisements, and pulled off the shoes. My feet felt relieved and cooled by the air and the day's worth of sweat, heat, and pressure resulted in a funky odor. The odor was tucked into the shoes I wore, the sneakers, but with no prompting it brought itself into the room and immediately it offended the 37-year-old man who lowered his newspaper slowly for comic effect. With his face, he displayed a lopsided frown and furrowed brows and I felt bashfulness on my skin and I apologized silently.

"Where were you today?" I asked him.

"You'll see," he said. He rose from his chair, took my shoes gently like puppies or bunnies, and put them in the sink and sprayed water in them and squeezed a big dollop of dish-washing liquid into them and stood over the sink staring at the foam pouring out. He looked up at me, standing in the doorway of the kitchen, and with a rakish smile asked if I had any more of the pasty grain concoction I recently fed him.

Held In Chapped Lips

After leaving the cemetery, the glittering footprints of the creature-like woman, who presumably still was carrying the 37-year-old man who had eaten a slurry of grain with me the previous day and returned to my home the previous night and then had his slumbering body carried away by the creature-like woman, spread out and lost their habit of forming graceful curves and loops. Past the Serbian laundromat they led me, past the Mammal Rehabilitation Centre, past the home of the retired comedian. Finally, they led me to my neighborhood, my street, my walk, my porch, through my front door, and to my living room. The smell of cinnamon was thick in the air.

The 37-year-old man sat in my recliner, reading a newspaper. He had flipped out the optional foot rest, and bore the attitude of a well-leisured gentleman. He looked up and smiled to me nonchalantly as if he expected me, spoke the customary monosyllabic salutation, and turned back to his paper.

"What are you reading?" I asked.

"Classifieds."

"What are you looking for?"

"Free pets. I'll let you know if I find the right thing."

"Okay."

"I'll let you know," he said in a sing-song manner.

The soreness of my feet after a day of walking around on varied terrain was acute.

Snow Loop Origami

The glittering prints of the creature-like woman's feet now led me to the cemetary, and I was awake in its placid greens and the ripeness of its floral gifts to the dead. Here the tracks took on sharp turns and knotted up near graves as if the creature-like woman had stopped in confusion or elation, to wonder or to dance, or to do both, for all I knew.

I touched these grave markers because they were smooth and hard and polished to a shine that wasn't dulled by the elements. Polished stone is one of my favorites. I have polished stone bookmarks that I adore and I dream of a coffee table made of a polished slice of petrified tree, but I do not know if there exist any undiscovered petrified trees of adequate size. They have all been found and cordoned off or cut into morsels for souvenirs. Souvenirs are proof of the world because memories are not.

With the enthusiasm of smooth polished stone on my finger tips, I continued my following and my feet bore the beginnings of soreness but still I continued my following.

Deathly Bargain Bin Scarves and Gloves

The sun in the afternoon brought its protons to the earth with such sincerity that my hunchbacked, crook-legged gait was no longer necessary to adequately follow the glittering footprints which it was my voluntary duty to track. It was a fulfilling feeling to engage in this research and fill my mind with possible outcomes. Here were my favorite imaginings:

1. An apartment in a brick quad-plex, warm with radiated heat from a seldom entered room nestled deep within its body.
2. A wooden house built in the boughs of a fine old tree scarred with the marks of lovers eager to leave evidence of their deepest passions in the moment they were felt.
3. A barge laden with pastries from recently renamed countries across oceans.
4. A serious blackness in the depth of the Earth's wounded mantle.
5. A high school with a rooftop greenhouse where a popular but misunderstood student with athletic proficiency seeks solitude for introspective times.

I awoke from a daydream looking up at one hand at the end of my arm against the richness of a blue sky and the involuntary smile I felt on my face receded as if its hourglass was up and a new smile on a new face was summoned somewhere else and my time for smiling was over. I walked and soon became aware that I was following a great arc and it was looping back on itself and it came to an intersection that wasn't there before and with calculations I figured out that I was close to the creature-like woman, whose progress with the 37-year-old man in her arms was slow, slower even than mine. My daydreams about my destination were doing me no harm and it was here that I opened my first granola snack bar and gratefully felt its sweet nutrition in my mouth and in my body.

All Juice, All Juice Is Mine

I walked through the whispering place, and the flowered park, until I came to the last of the food vendors, the brothers with the blanket covering their radishes. I found them on their knees, dirty rags in their hands, furiously scrubbing the concrete. But though their hands were raw and their rags were shreds, the footprints were not disappearing at all and glittered on the concrete like they were new and fresh.


The younger brother looked up to me and with tears in his eyes said nothing at all and I shook my head at him to let him know that he was a pitiful person attending to a futile chore.


"Your radishes are creating a moronic humidity under their blanket," I said.


"In that case, they are similar to the brain in my skull."


"Stop before there is nothing for you to do but languish here forgotten by all whose love you've let fall away like flakes of dry skin."


"Sir, help us. My brother is mute and deaf and nothing else will bring his current madness to its end."


"You are not mine. No."


I stepped around them and the interminable trees were hushed around us and as I strode away with unblinking eyes I balled my hands into good fists and let myself regret my lack of useless charity for only a few seconds before swallowing all empathy in my mouth, swallowing it into my throat and into my abdomen where it would be converted into fragrant pellets to be discarded quietly in a sweaty moment out of the sight of other human eyes.

Coleslaw Shoveled Into Truck Beds

The town in which I live was full of sunlight and food vendors. The tall grass in the abandoned lots was full of chiggers and the gravel under the soles of my shoes was dry, grumbling, and there was not a breeze to be felt by my skin, nor the skin of the food vendors. I heard their catcalls as I passed and their aromas wound tightly together but I was not deterred from my task and I kept my eyes trained on the footprints on the ground which glittered like sugar.

 

My knees were stiff and ached so when I came to a cool spot under an awning I stood up and put my hand to my brow and looked out upon the street and the picturesque courthouse square with its cardinals and finches scattered like fallen Christmas ornaments on the lawn. I heard the clock tower chime eleven times and that was when the mayor and his entourage of drowsy braggarts approached me with the musk of nicotine hanging around them and the mayor's top man clutched my arm in his hairy hand.

 

"Never hurt the mayor," he said, with sincerity in his eyes.

 

"I never will," I said.

 

"Nor will I," he said. The rest of his party continued shuffling on until they reached the hamburger restaurant. But he held my arm, and squeezed it. "I never have and I never will."

 

"I believe you."

 

"You should."

 

"I agree."

 

"Why?"

 

"Why what?"

 

"You agree that you should believe that I have never hurt the mayor and never will. Why?"

 

"I can see in your eyes that you are a trustworthy ally of the mayor who deeply believes that his policies are correct for our town and that he has the resolve to make the decisions that need to be made, and the strength of will to resist the temptations of power."

 

His eyes welled up with tears, and his death grip on my arm released, and he embraced me like a father, and let me go like a healed thing.

 

"Thank you, boy," he said.

 

"You're welcome. You go on to the hamburger restaurant and I'll continue following these glittering footprints to where they lead."

 

He winked and gave me the approval finger and we parted with lighter souls.

Slogan Barter

I spoke to myself in the mirror, still fogged from my recent shower. I spoke to the blur of my face.

"I need my jacket. My jacket and my sneakers, my briefs and my jeans, my baseball cap, my socks, and my wristwatch. I need a canteen of fresh water and my backpack with beef jerky and powdered soup and granola snack bars. I need hopeful thoughts in my mind and good intentions and a certain optimism about my face which will cause all who encounter me to feel a sympathy and not fear."

This was why when I stepped out into the rising sunlight and saw my neighbor, I was not obligated to apologize again for exposed privates. Instead, I wore my blue jeans and a red tee-shirt tucked in and a tan windbreaker and white sneakers and my digital wristwatch with compass and timer and thermometer. It was 68 degrees Fahrenheit. I wore a bright green backpack containing the soup and jerky and the granola snacks. The canteen of water I wore clipped to my belt with a carabiner, a strong one I trusted not to break if I needed to jump or run.

The glittering footprints were dimmed by the sun's light but still visible and I crouched low to find a good angle at which to view them, and I found it, and I proceeded away from my small brick cottage-style home with its kitchen still stinking of scorched gruel which masked the fresh soapy smell of my recent shower and there was the house behind me and I did not look back to it but I knew that unlike the void of death and hollow despair the previous night, the good brick house stood firm on its foundation, on the bedrock of my town, on my continent and my living planet tethered to the sun and it would be there when I returned. I did not look back.

Coin Soup

When I finally slept, I slept hard with my knees and feet on the floor and my wrists and face upon the cushions of my couch. My dreams came like knives and chisels, and in the morning I awoke with the cold light to find myself still as a doll among shattered images and memories and emotional refuse of dreams and a glow in my eyes. This is different from other glows because this glow was in the eyes themselves, in the globes of them. I could feel unnamed heat and my vision was restless and new and I showered and reheated the discarded slurry of the previous night and encouraged its taste to strive for glory with exotic flavors in plastic containers. As I waited for my breakfast to come into its own self and be ready for the business for which it was intended, I held the belt of my robe in my hands, an end in each hand, and lamented its failure and the exhibition of my genitalia to the creature-like woman and that was the first I thought of the 37 year old man and his being carried away by the creature-like woman.

Upon reentering the room in which the events occurred, I saw faintly glittering the tracks of her feet on my floor, and I walked to the door and opened it on its hinges, and saw again on the ground of the outside world the faintly glittering tracks of her feet, her footprints. A neighbor of some worldly renown loudly derided my genital display and I apologized with my hands and entered the house again, and I thought that what I would do was tend to the gruel scorching on the stovetop, and follow the glittering footprints, and along the way perhaps purchase a new, more dependable robe.

A Lonely Form of Punctuation

Whistles sounded from the outside, through the windows, back and forth, one after another, like a morse code alternative or a stereo test. I rose to my feet tightly, feeling the confusion in the muscles of my ass and legs, still staring at the 37 year old man in the chair with his feet like hiding lambs and his impossible knowledge of an ancient language and his lack of similarity to any person I could remember. As I listened to the whistles with my body quiet, I had my first fear that my memory was unworthy of the trust I gave it. It was as if I would turn around and behind me there would not be a couch with a blanket and a wall and a kitchen beyond. There would be a yawning void and blackness beyond darkest imagining and I would be dissolved into it with a sigh and an absence of sadness.

But entering through my front door came a creature-like woman with white hair and a clear voice and I knew then the source of the whistling; it was a product of her many voices which convened around my house, gathering in the cold night, slowly and in harmony. I watched her with stillness and did not turn around. With her glassy eyes she carried a basket I recognized and approached me with no face and handed me the basket and in it I saw several plastic wrappers which at one time held gift sausages. She held a twig to her lips and I obeyed, and was silent, and with strength not possible with her body of sparrow bones the color of rice she lifted the 37 year old man with her arms and like an infant bore him from my home and into the cold outside. Then was when I noticed that the belt of my robe had become unfastened and I felt the embarrassment and forgot about the void and therefore stopped believing in it.

Linger Like Citrus

So it was like this: with a bowl of cold gruel at my side I sat in the mode we call "Indian Style;" that is, with my legs tightly crossed before me, knees pointing to imaginery spots on the walls on either side of me, and my hair was oily and in need of hot water and shampoo and the confusion of my mind was heavy and a difficulty for handling, like a large batch of bread dough. I do not know how much dough is typically handled by the average person at home, but I imagine it is close to a very small amount and therefore the handling of a very large amount with the hands and forearms would be a vexing problem full of the probability of a temper tantrum.

 

Amongst this a 37 year old man found a peacefulness in his sleep and from his person seeped an odor of fresh water in the shade and air laden with gnats for whom a man struggling to transport a large amount of bread dough from one location to another would be something akin to nothing. 

Magnetic Soil Carrier

I was awoken in the night in my nest of secondhand comforters and blankets by the sound of the 37 year old man's knuckles repeatedly making sharp contact with my front door. His eyes had some ragged light in them and his collar was soaked.

 

"Friend," he said, "may I again impose on you to feed me and provide me the comforts of manly company?" I cinched up the tie of my robe and ushered him in and sat him in my most comfortable chair. When I returned with a piping hot bowl of tasteless slurry, he was asleep. His muddy boots lay discarded and pathetic on my Looney Tunes throw rug. His feet in their sweaty socks were tucked under him like frightened lambs. His calloused hand, I noted, lay in my ashtray, a drunken sailor in a life raft. The contents of the bowl in my hand rapidly cooling and solidifying, I listened as his dream-stained voice delivered falsehoods and obvious riddles into the room.

 

When he began speaking in the half-invented tongue known only to me and the forgotten siblings of my childhood, my lungs became excruciating confusions in my chest as if all oxygen molecules spontaneously swelled into lime-sized chunks.

Corn Without Friendship

A 37-year-old man climbed over my fence to see the shivering lather. After bringing him into my domicile and feeding him heartily, I felt a kinship. I divulged my creeping ambition to undermine the potential of lip-synching. But he was too focused on the act of consuming the slurry of grains in his bowl to listen. I stopped mid-sentence and allowed him his shy narcissism.

 

"The molecules I digest make their way into my reluctant cells by using an unorthodox game plan" he said, "and the hairdos I've sported are known as the bad boys of their respective sports."

 

"I have the ability to get laughs at mom's expense over multiple conversations," I said.

 

He shrugged. "With the weight of several hundred broken childhood promises, I am forming a virtual creature in the sky. I have the internet in a frenzy."

 

We hugged and I let him out, with a parcel of gift sausages to distribute as he saw fit. Or devour senselessly in the cold.

Pale on the Playground

The man in the car is someone we knew and when we parted ways we expected, and hoped, never to see again. His eyes are set on us; clearly, his memory is moving at high RPMs to determine our identities. Are we movie people? Are we clerks at an establishment he frequents? Are we, indeed, two with whom he has traded words, opinions, and drunken vulgarities and slaps? Maybe my well-manicured mustache is throwing him off the scent. Maybe your formerly shabby appearance is effectively negated by the designer apparel you now wear. Maybe my throat is swelling and my skull is fracturing and my intestines are waking up and angry.

His car is idling. The cardboard box he set on the roof was completely forgotten when he saw us. The food in the box is full of something we knew when we were in school and swore never to taste again and now its in us again, the smell of it is, and the steam is backlit by neon lights and it is garish and we are menaced and we walk to our destination unsure if the hands we hold are hands we have ever held before.

Pretzel Shirt! Pretzel Shirt!

The tree's leaves lie like ripped parchment on the ground, but still their canopies are full of captured dreams, and derive nourishment from them. The purpose of dreams is debated by men and women full of wonder and fear but the truth is that they are a simple way of dispensing of the souls of consumed animals. When an animal is slaughtered and eaten, its soul cannot be digested by the human stomach and its chemical arsenal. Nor can it be properly dealt with by the excrement-producing organs. Therefore it is sent to the brain, where the knotted memories it contains are converted into a vapor, which produces hallucinations as it is expelled through the ears. This is the truth. There is no other possible explanation for how trees don't die in the cold of winter and fall to the frozen gray turf.

Gadding About With a Man and a Teenage Boy and Their Pet

Me, I'm just a fellow in an inside-out sweater. People think I'm a little bit loopy because I have some dietary restrictions and also I am a confrontational person with authority issues who cannot hold a job and I prefer combative conversations. Last autumn I was fired from a retail store for throwing paper airplanes around one of the departments. I've also been fired for climbing warehouse racks, for constructing little alcoves out of discarded product boxes, and for carrying on with one or more female coworkers in unprofessional ways.

This is all because I am a man at discord with the world and the culture I was born into. I touch money and it becomes a stiff and unspendable thing. I speak to mothers and they lose the ability to recognize their offspring. I speak whispers full of germs, I have stolen hats and coats from hotels, and I distrust soap. I do not believe people when they tell me their names. I give them mine, instead.

Play It Laying Down

Wait with unblinking eyes, with dim breath, with a feeling like your head is wrapped in gauze and hidden and warm. There is no source for the sound in your ears, like a screw, like a portion of stiffening foam. This is empathy for the aggregate breakfast meat and the interaction of its fluids when heat is applied. In this chest is a heart. I know because I see it through the strata of skin, muscle, and other unknown tissues. It is bright like a needle.

Our Collection of Grappling Hooks

Literally, I know the language of eggs. It is formed of the sounds of yolk's thick viscosity, vibrating proteins, and suspended liquids, all echoing in an oblong carapace. It is a language without nouns and its music is a slow as a dying lawn. This is an utterly useless knowledge in this world but I know it, it is mine, and I belong to it, and this is good and right, and I hold an egg in my hand and feel the music in my skin, and I consume it with my mouth.

To do this and know, simply begin by breaking an egg. Then start getting it real hot in a pan, and fold some vegetables in it, sort of like a burrito. But it is called an omelette. The spelling is disputed, but I stand by it, and I am full of this food and this unheard voice.

Historical Personage

Our soldier stands atop the embankment here with chunks of mud and grass on his boots and the facial expression of pride tempered with a breed of confusion. His glasses are wet and the small hairy man tells the woman he married to take digital photographs of the person in a helmet. Instead, she says "smile in camera" and takes several photographs of his face, a sequence of growing aggravation becoming anger becoming sorrow becoming a slow descent out of frame. The wife loses herself in her purse among the mints and spare change and receipts of food purchases and wordless sins.

 

The man on the ground looks to me to say something and he says "help me stand up again." I say "you can't stand up," and he says "okay, okay," and turns all concentration to the parts of his body currently engaged in gravitational intercourse with the dry golden grass and the person in a helmet steps away to the vehicle with the wandering voices speaking of games and the movie about the American general that's the greatest movie my father has ever seen, and President Nixon. He is shortly replaced by the chihuahua dressed in clothes. I am offered the mint with lint which I don't mind. I put it in my mouth and tolerate it until it is gone.

Groan of Purchase

This is a digital image of the front cover of a book entitled Modern Expressions in Quality Management: A Customary Approach. It is a collection of 60 writings not entirely dissimilar to what the author posts here at Cosmik Wolfpack. It is available right now, here.

The Song of The Living Skeleton

I've got a good idea of how you got here. It was in the back of a well-maintained automobile, late-model, driven by the woman with a high mouth and the habit of squeezing fists. The radio was tuned to the numbers and your little fingernails gnawed at vinyl and your nose felt full of something gummy. Now you've put yourself in a garishly patterned chair on the other side of this desk. I've asked for a different chair. I've put in multiple requests. I'd appreciate it, but I don't expect it. It's not a priority.

I can't place the smell on your breath, somewhere in the middle of the spectrum between wool and styrofoam. I have paperwork, stacks of it where you can't see. It's meant for men like you. Menacing fool, your eyes are inside out, porcupines of nerves and spitting capillaries, eternally reflecting themselves.

Glamour Swamps

This is the new television program we will watch. I particularly enjoy it for its liberal employment of enemies. I lack any true enemies in my life, and to see enemies in a somewhat natural environment, pursuing their own ends by nefarious means, is quite a satisfying way to spend an hour each week. This is also a reason to watch the nature programs from Africa. I see no difference. I dearly hope that the ratings for this program are strong. I look forward to owning multiple seasons in the highest quality medium which I can afford. The discs would include plenty of value-added behind the scenes information and featurettes about the process of creating such compelling characters and engaging plotlines. This wouldn't be a rinky-dink release with some cast biographies and photo galleries. The studio would go the entire 27 feet to ensure that we, the die-hard fans of the show, were satisfied with the product. It would also be appreciated if a fold-out poster of the show was included, featuring the main characters posed in a group in such a way as to suggest what the main conflicts are. Also, our sexual impulses should be titillated by a certain quality in the more attractive actors' eyes, as well as the positioning of certain body parts. I hope that the writers are mindful enough to anticipate future developments in the lives of these characters and write with the "big picture" in mind. We are terribly let down when it becomes clear that the writers are "making it up as they go along," and especially when it seems that they aren't respecting past events. Respect the relationships you've written, and respect us enough to take risks, to take the characters in bold directions, to challenge our biases and expectations. Just be true to the artificial personalities you've created, and we'll follow you where you go, hand in hand, blushing, nails ragged, comforts forgotten, sensation forsaken, fists arthritic, quiet, tidy, cool, faces flinching in the light of your love.

Help from the Glove Compartment

We set fire to our drought-choked gardens and in a simmering mob crept in inches to the mayor's house. He watched us through gauzy curtains, forgetting the residue of 2% milk in the glass in his hand and the toilet running on and on in the bathroom behind him.

He lay in his bed, slippers on his feet. He watched as a dozen of his constituents entered his bedroom. After taking a full inventory of all of his personal effects and snapping photographs for our records, we acted out a short drama called "The Day Grandma Invented Rice." Then we took the underwear and socks from their drawer and gave them to the children for their craft projects.

Later in the day, as we watched the children play flying carpet on a quilt made of the mayor's undergarments, a traveling salesman sold us cigarettes made of a plant called silverpocket. We all got so high our eyes crossed and we woke up in wrong beds in the middle of the night and searched through unfamiliar refrigerators to kill ugly hunger.

We left the houses we did not know and wandered until the moonlight revealed familiar forms and the combination of night heat and silverpocket daze and taste of someone else's food gave our homes a new menace that never went away, not after the elections, not after our children's graduation, not after old age stole away our sense and our memory. It was always young and fresh and unlaughing.

Bulk Fluids and Limited Purpose

It is something to be whisked up into a gray cloud with your head's internal pressure approaching nil and to feel colors sipped through your mouth, through your throat, filling lungs and abdomen with weird energy.

Up there, with useless feet, the night is red like bird's blood and the heat of the stars is on your face. It feels right to be nude and your fingers busy themselves with the unfastening and loosening of garments which fall like leaves unsummoned to the empty lands below, where night is a cool notion on parking lots.

Under eaves windows are moistened by sleep-breath and unseen dreams play in heads distorted by gravity, understandable as they are attached to reclining bodies and the drums and goat-spirits inside them leave no evidence of themselves, are conjured and unconjured with the same lack of will as dandelion growth.

Your garments are inaudible as they fall on roofs, inaudible like snow, like the release of dandelion seeds on a breeze, like colors in a throat and the heat of stars and useless feet, inaudible.

Cracking Horse Face

We see our hands like thoughtless sea creatures at the ends of our arms. They are untrainable things we take little interest in unless we're spurred to consider them by televised documentaries or richly photographed spreads in collectible magazines or fiberglass dioramas which we've paid some dollars to see.   At night in the rooms where we keep our beds we lie in the beds among color-coordinated textiles and the hands are buried and restless. We pull them out and hold them up, silhouetted against windows to the dim blue outside and they are black shapes. This is how we begin to understand our hands and how ambitions are sparked. We sleep and when we awake we forget these new feelings and the queasiness is attributed to the hunger for breakfast foods.

A Good Name For a Woman

Some of the possessions we left behind we won't miss a whole terrible lot. Like the ungenious one-wheeled wagon and the molded-sponge statue of a child on horseback. Those sorts of things we recognize as superfluous and not an incredible bonus to keep around. But it's a throbbing pain to me to think about my old bucket of nuts, bolts, screws, washers, and other metal fasteners with unimagined names and exotic utility. It sits dumb and heavy in a garage I will never enter again.

A tool-handed fellow with frowns on his eyes will happen upon it and see the evidence that a neglectful man with a weak and wasteful mind passed through. He will reminisce about experiences on athletic teams and business committees, and the kinds of silent havoc men of limp wills can wreak. His spouse will beseech him to enter their chambers of privacy; swelling with lust, she cannot comprehend the trouble on her husband's mind. Her needs will go unsatisfied tonight. The murk has returned.

The Frugal Eco-Traveler

Sometimes the customers wear authentic smiles. I like it when they show us funny photos they've taken. My favorite ever is a picture of a doggy but there is a fish-eye lens effect that cracks you up to look at it. But I am not laughing just because a doggy with a big nose is being shown to me by an old woman wearing an old woman mask. It's because I am smart enough and kind enough to imagine that I am the fish looking at the doggy with one eye closed. For fishes all of life is protruding toward them in the center so that's why our fish-eye lens effect looks like the picture was painted on a fat belly. I am a fish afraid of being eaten by a doggy so I turn and zip away in the water with strings of bubbles behind me and I am giddy with fear and swimming. That is why I am laughing, and also I like the taste of bubblegum flavor too.

There Are Pieces of It Outside

This sky we have now is a ripped and lovely thing. It is odorless and we think about half-forgotten dreams we had in which it served as an unlikely protagonist.

The children we keep are sleeping on the lawn and they are inscrutable monoliths for the grass-dwelling things. Brown ants. Confused spiders. Beetles like charred jewels. Under our sky these children absorb color and their minds are humming. We feel the humming like a creeping breeze.

Tomorrow I'll announce that I am leaving to be among the sun soaked rocks I saw on television last night. No one I leave behind will understand. They will tend to the children like adoptive parents, with nervous and obligated hands. And I will forget them and find out the things I need to find out.

In Discount Cupboards

There is something I can tell you about the finest accomplishment of my life. Since it's really important to speak about the fine things we do, and it's also important to listen to these accountings when we have the chance, I'll sit here, and you'll sit here, near the canister of mixed nuts and elegant little napkins.

 

A few young men and I ran a dental products company for a while. Our most popular product was the toothpaste "Heart and Soul." We weren't tooth geniuses. We didn't know much more about mouths other than that they're great for food insertion and the initial phases of digestion. One of my associates had never heard of kissing, so he had to be taught about that just to be brought up to speed. Kissing is one of the activities we remind consumers of when we market dental products. Kissing is a major pastime of many consumers, who fret endlessly over kisses, both in anticipation and examination of prior performance. So we brought him up to speed. But in the big picture, it's like this. It's like expertise isn't an essential thing. Knowing a lot of things about your product's purpose isn't like the end all be all. It's just not all that wholly important for being in business and making money. I hope you follow, this is where lots of folks get lost, and need a face spanking.

 

The whole reason we were able to amass a large wealth between us was that one of my associates was a cousin of Mario Cipollina, at the time the bassist of Huey Lewis and the News. And through him, we were able to obtain an audience with Huey himself. By our pluck and bright, winning attitude, he was convinced to let us use their superb single "Heart and Soul" in our advertising campaign. We even had a picture taken with Huey, and he signed it, and we framed it, and we hung it on the wall of our conference room, and this was the greatest time of my life: living well, eating the best foods available, drinking copious amounts of inebriating fluids with comely young women of diverse backgrounds. I like a spirited woman who doesn't wilt under the harsh gaze of a full-blooded, upstanding gentleman.

 

I should also clear up that the associate with the News connection was not the same gentleman who had to be schooled in kissing. Obviously, the cousin of a bassist of a Top 40 staple in the 1980's would be a real authority in the field of kissing.

Waffle Crisis

There's a fellow rapping in the aisle with the paper simulacra of housewares. I really need the 100% Natural Fiber Colander but he's standing right in front of it. Three times, I've walked to the mouth of the aisle and peered down, but he doesn't seem ready to stop. Rapping seems like such a hostile action to me and I dare not turn down the aisle. I certainly have no intention of asking his pardon so I can reach what I need. Maybe he's gone now. I've been standing by the miniature televisions like one who is ready to urinate for several minutes. Maybe now.

No, he is not finished. Worse, his eyes met mine this time. They were wild, white, and sharp and he perceived me to be an aggressor on his territory and it spurred his rapping into cadences and rhythms more violent and defensive than before. I can't really understand the words of raps. I just want them to stop so I can get this colander I read about on a blog.

The Wrinkled Slabs

The classroom windows are full of gray faces in wigs. There are carrot colored wigs and wigs like bean sprouts. And the smiles on the faces are crooked with anger. And the anger is full and dazzling and capable of making us swoon.

When certain music plays the gray faces rock back and forth in time, slow as fungus. The eyes fill with tears like amber syrup and the tears spill over and leave tracks down the cheeks. The faces are slimy and gray and moving in time to the music like toys.

But the face on the end has only the capability of one tear because of a defect. The tear descends and as it reaches the crease of the mouth it turns back and crawls up towards its eye and the head loses time with the others and we know of smoke above the school and the flag is too heavy for the pulleys supporting it and the flag slides down its pole like a wet and wretched thing and distant parents feel pains in their chest and think it's nothing, it's nothing, I'm thirsty. I haven't kept hydrated. How stupid of me.

Silk Spurs

Welcome to Victorious Brad's. We think we have the finest casual dining restaurant in the world! We think you'll agree, too. Our menu is designed for diners of all stripes, offering popular selections that have been woven into the very fabric of American lives for decades.

Victorious Brad's is a non-smoking establishment. Thank you for refraining from smoking! While we respect all citizens' rights to do as they wish, we feel that the number one right of our guests is the best-tasting food for the value! Our flavors are strictly controlled, engineered precisely by our Yum-geneers in our top secret laboratory in a converted missile silo in North Dakota. For your convenience, we do invite you to join your smoking friends on the Nicotine Patio, available at more than three dozen Victorious Brad's locations.

If you are not satisfied with your meal, kindly press the yellow button under the table. It will trigger the skylight above your table to open. You will find a jet pack under your seat. When engaged, a scorching flame will be emitted from the jet pack, propelling you high above the now-burning restaurant. You will gain new prospective on life as you soar through the clouds, an angelic choir accompanying you the whole way. While flying, you will feel the very exhilaration of God upon the creation of His cosmos. It will be the finest moment of your life.

But you will return home changed, given to fey moods and with eyes like those of a sleepless phantom long since divorced from the sensual pleasures of the world. You will shun all frivolity. You will seek violence without thought of glory or honor. You, a cowering thing, will be known as the bane of all loving persons.

Fuck you and your wallet of lies.

Drooling Dixie

My burro is laden with bags of hard bones and I call him my friend. I know of nobility because of the years I have walked with a beast of burden. It is something too few of us do. Modernity does not demand it. But it is a choice one can make. It may not be a choice all are capable of making, I will allow. Our possible choices are determined by a fluttering multitude of factors we have no power over. My multitude of factors is mine alone and I cannot fault others for not having them.

So I walk with a burro, and I almost always call him friend. One exception was when I made a good woman laugh by calling him my "boo."

The Groping Atlantic

There is a restaurant to be known. Customers there are fed and duly exchange currency for their satisfied hungers. They also include a fraction of the total remittance in gratitude for pleasant considerations from the staff.

The staff has been recruited almost entirely from other establishments in the hospitality industry. They come from a variety of backgrounds. Most, though, are from the surrounding suburbs. Nearly all of them drive themselves to work. A small percentage are chauffeured by willing relations. A smaller percentage share rides to reduce individual fuel expenses.

We will recognize the owner of this restaurant when she ventures forth on errands personal and professional. She will entertain our gracious compliments. She will collect our flatteries. She will mount them like Luna Moths in shadow boxes on her office wall. She keeps her office dark and cool and with her slow heartbeat she is a brooding thing and a thing to be ignored.

Island Phantom

I put together some words. I keep them on a card in my pocket. On the outside of the pocket I've written "For The Possible Daughter of a Friend."

The card reads:

Your father cries and you wonder what it is that can make a father cry. I don't know all of the things that can do this. There are so many. But don't waste sparrow feathers on guessing them all.

Your father speaks to many adults who you have never met. This also should not concern you. These conversations are like the sound of your finger through the sand.

The love your father has with your mother is something alien and wonderful to me. It is something I never could have imagined, like the taste of saffron rice before its taste I knew. If you have not been fed saffron rice, one day you will taste it yourself and maybe this will make sense to you.

The love your father has with your mother humbles me and I have for a long time denied an easy jealousy. The love your father has with your mother resulted in you and you are the offspring of an unimagined miracle, and if this does not put a shiver in your throat, I am to blame. Not for weakness of ability. For the vain altruism of the act in the first place.

Also, sparrow feathers are the currency of imagination, FYI.

In case you're wondering, I have written this on the pocket every pair of pants I own. Also, the ink is permanent. You can buy this kind of pen at the fabric stores.

Efficient in Terms of Consumption

The monument here is erected to the deceased amateur mycologist we revere. Some of us remember nights out with her, performances of dramas by costumed players with voices like splendor or patronizing alcoholic beverage vendors and getting rowdy with sex.

She was a goodly woman, full in the bosom, with a laugh like surging profits. She owned a dozen pairs of cargo shorts, and the finest compass any of us had ever seen, inlaid with turquoise and silver. It was needed, she claimed, to navigate this land and remain oriented. But we were aware of the flicker of cold vanity in her eye, and spoke much of her hypocrisy when her attention was diverted. In this, we were loathsome.

We come back, though we can hardly abide sleeping in this place. At least seventy animals occupy the forest here. And the moon's shadows are sickly wraiths with bloodless dreams.

Blonde Boat

I can't get over the light in this room. It is something that needs to be described in a somewhat convoluted fashion.

The light feels like a syringe has been painlessly inserted into the head of the occupier of the room, filling them with one of the noble gases. I think that one of the noble gases makes humans laugh. If not, it's whatever gas does that. I don't think it's neon. But that would be appropriate, because there are such things as neon lights. I've seen them in store windows, and also in the cinnamon scented dens of men.

Trying to describe the joy of light by comparing it to being filled with a gas used to produce light, well, that's the definition of appropriateness. So I really hope that neon makes humans laugh. The laughter is crucial to this and it justifies me.

A Single Condom Full of Condensed Milk

Sauces are important. Sauces are the culmination of a lot of technologies. They increase the attraction we feel for portions of meat. Thinner sauces are popular on the coasts. Thicker sauces can be stored in sacks made of stiff cotton canvas. I personally like the thicker sauces.

Our sauces provide an occupation to spices in thumb-sized jars. We find these jars all over town, source unknown, and we don't feel right leaving them sit for the raccoons to covet, collect, and molest with their prayerless hands. We take them and our pantries fill and without all of the sauces we know, our lives would be destroyed by the surplus.

Without spices, the raccoons are depressed and starving creatures. They lay across curbs like beached whales. They are a feast for oily-eyed carrion birds. Fattened, unable to fly, we fell them with projectile weapons bought in retail stores, next to the automotive department. We clean them on special patios, dress them, roast them, and serve them with our sauces. We all have favorites. Personally, I prefer a thicker sauce.

Flummoxed Banker

I like the streets of the town here. The people, I find not much likable about them. It is a despicable thing to watch a person and think about the probability of Escort Services. These are services that are for obliterating people's loneliness, but to me it is like making beef jerky in the middle of a star like the sun. Our sun is a star.

When I walk, I carry a cassette player at chest height for maximum delivery of the emitted sounds. Also, there is another thing. I wear a mask in the likeness of antelopes. Antelopes are a thing with legs and eyes and the ability of jumping. I restrict myself from jumping specifically so the people who see me in the antelopes mask won't be aware of who it is I am. I can jump frequently in the mask and never at all when I am not wearing the mask. That protects me so much.

I know already about the last day of the antelope mask. I am scared of it and I consider it my practice death. It is like a rough draft of death. It was spoken to me in a dream that was like the light of a fading flashlight.

I will be about town, seeing the streets of the town and knowing that the people have no awareness of me, on account of the antelopes mask. And the cassette player will be emitting its sounds. As I jump and jump like something frantic in the street, the battery cover of the player will come apart and the fat D batteries will fall out like dead beetles I was trying to keep secret. And I will be helped by a man who calls himself my servant, and collects the batteries from the asphalt, but one of them, it rolls far. The man runs to the battery, as fast as antelopes, and as he grabs it, a soda truck obliterates his body the way a prostitute obliterates a man's loneliness.

The mask, it is something cheap. I find that it disintegrates at the touch of my sigh. The people become aware.

Robberies in Close Up

Against the cold and the rough light of this place, we apply fruity moisturizing lotions to our hands and the exposed parts of our face, our cheeks, our nose, and our forehead. We hold jewelry in our teeth and fix our attention on subtly flexing muscles in our catalog apparel. We kick at rocks with the weathered toes of our shoes, errant pieces of the greater rock. Inside of them are stories of movements, swells beneath the flimsy soles of our shoes.

We leave evidence of ourselves. A shoestring tied to a lost finger of a juniper. A chewing gum wrapper folded into a sailboat and set in a wren's abandoned nest. A false eyeball, pushed into wet soil, unlidded, staring at the sky's endlessly shifting interaction of light and matter. The rock here is filled with the opposite of awareness, which is not to say that it is not aware. Not exactly.

Whoever Put this Catcher's Mitt in the Oven is Not My Friend Anymore

I heard that you sat with Claire today. I hope she told you about the weekend we've planned. It pleases me to know that you know about the farmer we know, who grows heirloom winter squash on a farm in another county. It complicates things when the farmer's wife is around. There is something wrong with her that causes her to covet me lustfully. I would be very surprised if Claire told you this, as it is an embarrassment to her.   But I am happy to. It pleases me to know that you know about the farmer's wife's lust for me and the embarrassment it causes Claire. I feel like it will enrich your impression of me. Now you will never look at me again with that look, that look of a dullard gawking at a fast food advertisement.

You Learn to Follow Master

My butt is so nice, it is so big, it tastes like rice.

My father invented his pedophilia one summer with a sophomore girl I knew, conceiving a half brother for the family. It also became a slow manslaughter when the girl became a suicide. My father was a real multi-tasker.

My butt is so nice, it is so big, it tastes like rice.

The boy is older now, speaking, an alien voice in this apartment, unable to recognize the dim light in my mother's eyes as a strange thing. This half-brother doesn't wear clothing. He wears laundry. He has a song of nonsense. He sings it at least a hundred times a day, which is not an exaggeration. It is seriously not an exaggeration.

My butt is so nice, it is so big, it tastes like rice.

My mother explains to him that it is fine to let the mouth say silly things when in private; for instance, when driving. You will love driving cars. You can drive them far to see high states with skies like being inside God's eye. But you will never get a license to drive if you don't stop singing this song in public.

My butt is so nice, it is so big, it tastes like rice.

I personally hope that he keeps his song forever, and never stops singing it to doctors, teachers, cashiers, and the odd relation who can abide his presence. I hope that he finds a person to love, and sings it on their first date, and during their wedding ceremony, and while creating his own good offspring.

My butt is so nice, it is so big, it tastes like rice.

This is how I avoid madness the madness my mother is flirting with. I imagine the life of the boy and the stubborn song that is tied to his throat, and I imagine the song in other people's ears, I imagine their amusement, annoyance, grudging acceptance. I have written it into a story, but I changed the words a bit to make it more fictional.

My butt is so nice, it is so big, it tastes like rice.

I tell people where he came from, and to relieve their awkward horror, I have a line I recite. My father, I say, was a real multi-tasker.

Video of an Impossible Fight

We watch our step. Paper is scattered about the floor here, a hazard we know. There are syrups and bitter spirits for drinking, and a wall upon which patrons write messages in permanent marker. I watch someone write "hungry for tacos." He hands me the sweaty marker and I draw the shirt I wanted to wear, but didn't because of gaudiness concerns. My companions remind me to turn off the little telephone I keep in my pocket. I thank them and do so, and we stand quietly behind a fizzy couple, watching their hands bashfully. A man arrives and stands amidst devices with uncertain names and purposes.   At the sound of your voice, why do we cry like you're gone?

Shapes of Modern Colanders

Sweetly several of us tall and shadowed loom over your bed on your birthday to sing the Song of the Naked Sleeper, composer unknown.

You loaf of hairless malice. You swaggering fart. You plank of chapped flesh.

You swallowing void. You falconer's bane. You spelling bee deserter.

You uncertain beverage. You colony of curdled nerves. You ceaseless whine.

You filigreed hairbrush. You floating coin. You charred pupae.

You verbless declaration. You flat knuckled combiner of cancers. You customer of lust.

We take the pillow from under your head. It is choking with your death dreams. It belongs to us now.

The One Rodent

A woman's voice is squalling across the petites section of this department store. A mother flees, her hand on a child's red wrist. A dyspeptic member of management squeezes his temples until they burn white like the bitter aspirin ground between his teeth.

For my part, I lean against a mirrored column, my neckwear deliberation interrupted. I shift on sore feet. I transfer a set of keys from one pocket to another.

I was once the recipient of a department store tirade. I think of the vague-faced woman who delivered it, disinterested in her current circumstances. I am lead to thoughts of other women. Some names I remember. Some I don't. It is the same with faces, occupations, living quarters, musical taste, and kitchen acumen.

One woman is a leaf of tissue paper in a zipper sealed plastic bag. Another is an orange, exploited for a milligram or less of zest and discarded. One sleeps on something called a Bird's Jaw. She says it comes from somewhere in the South Pacific.

Vivid is a woman whose memory consists entirely of the sensation of her tongue in the notch on my forehead. It was given to me by my brother, with a tire pump.

Punctuation Take Flight

Flawlessly our children draw horses, filling stations, licensed characters, the crescent moon. More wonderful things: political appointees, psychoemotional flowcharts, internal combustion engines, mirrors reflecting nothing, the voice of heat. We contain our awe clumsily between bites of something microwaved.

Untrained on electronic devices, the children compose their works on paper we purchase from retail outlets with names like "Goodness" and "Virtues" and "ArtPlay." These are not literally the names of any store I know to exist. But they sort of capture the character of those we frequent.

Filled with Obsolete Adhesive

This machine is a creature of eternal sloth. I know that I have been swindled. The knowledge is a cold rock in my nose. I pick at the frayed elastic at my waist.

The perpetrator of the swindle was a soldier missing his right foot. I last saw him swallowing great bites of a dry sandwich in the window of a bus. He is gone and I am alone with this absence of worth on the asphalt, a dry sandwich of my own in a paper bag. I have a notion to eat it now.

I imagine it in my mouth where the slug of my tongue sleeps restless dreaming of a moaning whirlpool. It's slow and full of wordless breath, full of nullifying hunger.

Prestigious Real Estate Portfolio

It is true what they say about this woman. That she is a tall tongue on the front porch. That she collects appliance brochures. That there is an animal in her basement. We have to navigate this terrain with her. There is no way around it. I suggest that we learn a new dance, something Latin. I don't know the names of many Latin dances. But I have a feeling that this action may appease her. If you disagree with me, please let me know. Do not fear my wrath. I have none.

It's Woven, It's Alive

Stand here, on the skeeball game. Stand in the shoes you bought secondhand, stand here against the heat of the pizza oven. Listen to the needful voices of three dozen children. You will appreciate the way they decompose into nonsense. You will compare it to cheap chewing gum or a cassette tape unspooled on a bus. When a mother reacts in anger, bring her your eyes. Bring them sternly. Bring her a conjured ugliness. Insult her verbally. Do it only one time. Make it count. I suggest "French Headache."

Ignore the itches of your skin. These are distractions conjured by jealous nerves. If you have a really hard time resisting, I have a trick. Invent a new color. It works for me. Don't worry, it's hard for everyone. We all have difficulties. Difficulties are the ligaments of capability.

Rye Bread Pillow

The moon last night had a funny odor, like a new mint. I ran to my neighbors' bedroom window to tell them, to see if they would come out to the lawn, to see if they fancied a late night bull session in our pajamas.

Neighbors in the midst of coitus is something all of us must deal with at some point of our lives and it is best to do it the way our grandparents did. With a "stiff upper lip" as they said, with a serious nod and tidy hair. We should take the time to appreciate the nuances of our neighbors' bedrooms, the errant bits of laundry, discarded pocket ephemera, the half empty glasses of adequate beverages.

The Compendium of Shyness

In the lifeless orange light, a tattered paper cup perches on the curb's edge. The occasional breeze threatens to send it toppling over the modest concrete precipice. The cup's colors have faded, old discarded seductions. But as long as they are visible they speak of the monotony of the commercial libido. We have ingested hundreds of gallons of carbonated soft drinks from wax-coated paper cups. We have done it wearing hats and jackets of different colors. We have done it in sadness, together and alone. Our lips are familiar with plastic straws. Our teeth know ice. With a mysterious innate sense we regulate our inner air pressure to invite these manufactured beverages into our bodies, into our warm throats, into the cauldron of our stomachs, receptacle to receptacle. This is our accomplishment and a sublime comfort.

Liar's Truce

We grew up far from piers and lakes. We grew up in a town of transitory commerce. Our fathers grew up loose and ragged to make dumpsters in a loud box away from houses and schools.

My memories are loiterers and lost parents. The lingering stink of road skunks. Pocketknives. The book of stamps we found for your mother. Astonished in trunks and flip flops, staring through a cyclone fence into a derelict waterpark. A cactus on a dusty bay window ledge. Cruelty in a pharmacy. Burning board games.

There was also the time that we spent an entire night dreaming up Tony Bennett's Television covers album, Marquee Croon. I remember that best.

Groveling Knees

This water is a gray disappointment. The fish taste germy and bitter. I have come from a city, following power lines and obsolete campaign placards to this place smelling of sodden burlap. The reeds rattle. They are nervous fingers.

The vessel in which I float is made of bone. It is true though you scoff. It is true. There is a factory in the Netherlands which processes ground bone fragments into a durable construction material. These boats come as kits. As my toes stiffen, bullets in my boots, I feel positive that a Dutch instruction manual is a foolish thing to decipher. It is for me.

Recipe Slump

Yesterday three teenage boys came to my door - none over five foot four, all wearing egg-colored sneakers with stiff tongues. I smiled to them through the storm door. Their leader, a blonde small-eyed thing holding a crudely fashioned wooden box, spoke with a wordless mouth. I pointed toward the kitchen and made the hand signal for "I have a cheesecake in the oven." The glass of the storm door became milky with heat.   Just then, the other two boys commenced a mutual act of physical violence. As the oven timer made itself known with shrillness, I watched a boy in my front yard slam his knuckles into another other boy's skull. The leader handled them like towels. He scolded them, gave me an apology with his white bony hand, and took them down to the sidewalk and away from my property.   I noticed then that he had dropped his wallet in the fracas; it shivered like a neglected thing, a dog, a malfunctioning timepiece, on the concrete of the porch. Inside was a kiss from a woman I'd never heard of and a license for a youth baseball umpire.

Wrapped Up in Smooth Comfort

The smell in this automobile is recognizable after a moment. It smells of the great shopping malls of the north. Hands can grip this steering wheel in the proper orientation, eight hours apart in the wandering light of our small but growing city. This air is the air of ragged luxuries: freshly waxed floors and perfumes with the demeanor of comedians in the afternoon. The directional with its soothing click is the salt of the hot pretzel, harvested from some exotic inland sea. The maddening voices of the captives hangs above the driver's head, under the hard and cold moonroof. Under cheapened starlight.

The Tumbling Lizard

Our hair deserves the attention it gets. The stares from uniformed public servants. The catcalls from dark windows. The leers of crooked legged imaginary grandparents. Our hair is the color of granola, gallantly styled, comatose. We've enslaved ourselves to this paltry vanity. The pockets of our slacks are laden with quarters. The hunger of Arcade Row is palpable.