A Cordial Welcome
Cosmik Wolfpack is a playground and laboratory for flash-formed poetry and nanofiction written by The Debtor, a white cisgender male and citizen of the United States.
If you have something to say to the author, send it to cosmikwolfpack at gmail dot com.
6.28.2010
Welt
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.
4.26.2010
Funny Calcium Carbonate
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.
1.08.2010
Unfortunately Yes
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.
10.29.2009
Half of Some Rice
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.
10.16.2009
Through the Pages
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
9.04.2009
With Vinegar
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.
8.12.2009
Cephalopod Swashbuckler
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.
8.10.2009
Periods Correspond
Perfect Stick
Watching the Program with Children
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
8.09.2009
The Singer Oriented
8.07.2009
Under Blown Leaves
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.
8.05.2009
In Hair, Words
7.07.2009
It is Our Only Way to Imagine a Tongue
6.15.2009
Use the Word "Agenda" in the Title If You Ever Write a Thriller
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.
6.10.2009
Checkbook Frenzy
4.24.2009
Chalk Wit
4.22.2009
Allegiances, Thus
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.
4.10.2009
Encyclopedic Nostalgia Vapors
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.
4.07.2009
Fist in Mug
4.06.2009
Island Flatness and Proof of Contour
4.02.2009
Croc Window Snacks
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.
4.01.2009
Boots Full of Pitch
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.
3.26.2009
Grandpa
2.15.2009
Brother To A Dry Tongue
2.10.2009
That Is Not Chalk
2.06.2009
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.
1.30.2009
Heroic Mouth Stench
1.28.2009
Finger Serrations
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.
1.22.2009
The Ink
1.21.2009
Hatred Season
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.
1.20.2009
Our People Swallow This
1.19.2009
Skull Fist
1.17.2009
Today We Haven't Woven Anything
1.15.2009
Shaven, I Purchase More Garments
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.
1.14.2009
Help the One Under You
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.
1.13.2009
The Source of Ambulance Voices
"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.
1.10.2009
Held In Chapped Lips
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.
1.07.2009
Snow Loop Origami
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.
1.06.2009
Deathly Bargain Bin Scarves and Gloves
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.
1.05.2009
All Juice, All Juice Is Mine
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.
1.04.2009
Coleslaw Shoveled Into Truck Beds
1.03.2009
Slogan Barter
"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.
1.02.2009
Coin Soup
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.
12.31.2008
A Lonely Form of Punctuation
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.
12.30.2008
Linger Like Citrus
12.24.2008
Magnetic Soil Carrier
12.23.2008
Corn Without Friendship
12.22.2008
Pale on the Playground
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.
12.21.2008
Pretzel Shirt! Pretzel Shirt!
12.19.2008
Gadding About With a Man and a Teenage Boy and Their Pet
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.
12.18.2008
Play It Laying Down
12.17.2008
Our Collection of Grappling Hooks
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.
12.15.2008
Historical Personage
12.13.2008
Groan of Purchase
12.12.2008
The Song of The Living Skeleton
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.
12.11.2008
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. |
12.10.2008
Help from the Glove Compartment
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.
12.09.2008
Bulk Fluids and Limited Purpose
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.
12.08.2008
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. |
12.05.2008
A Good Name For a Woman
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.
12.04.2008
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.
12.03.2008
There Are Pieces of It Outside
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.
12.02.2008
In Discount Cupboards
12.01.2008
Waffle Crisis
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.
11.30.2008
The Wrinkled Slabs
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.
11.29.2008
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.
11.28.2008
Drooling Dixie
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."
11.27.2008
The Groping Atlantic
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.
11.26.2008
Island Phantom
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.
11.25.2008
Efficient in Terms of Consumption
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.
11.24.2008
Blonde Boat
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.
11.23.2008
A Single Condom Full of Condensed Milk
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.
11.22.2008
Flummoxed Banker
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.
11.21.2008
Robberies in Close Up
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.
11.20.2008
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. |
11.19.2008
You Learn to Follow Master
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? |
11.18.2008
Shapes of Modern Colanders
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.
11.17.2008
The One Rodent
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
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.
11.16.2008
Filled with Obsolete Adhesive
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.
11.15.2008
Prestigious Real Estate Portfolio
11.14.2008
It's Woven, It's Alive
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.
11.13.2008
Rye Bread Pillow
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.
11.12.2008
The Compendium of Shyness
Liar's Truce
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
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.
11.11.2008
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. |
11.10.2008
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. |