Gush and fume in a drawer.
Hunt for a few bronze wafers in a long silent romance.
When the charred hair whispers, slip away from your relations and teach yourself fake spells from a self-published fantasy novel.
Then soak your own brain in ostrich egg albumen and watch your black eyelids flutter to the carerra marble countertop in this contemporary kitchen.
Striped papers indicate a habitual grip on actual pathogens. Stinking oily banisters indicate a cessation of fabric mergers. Everything else is quite simply, prismatic metallurgy.
Free and twitching, my inheritance is slipping between some other guys lips.
Father reconstructed the conical structure, complete with the jaw-shaped indentation in the floor. Basically he remembered all of the features and created it in a fashion that we feel possesses some measure of fidelity. His resources are considerable so it's not surprising, what he's done. I guess that pretty much the way we justify our endorsement is that we respect hard work and the will to complete a complicated task.
The ultimate tribute will be a book of high-resolution photography. Exterior, interior, schematic diagrams: all celebrating in sensual colour the nature of the conical structure that both terrorizes and comforts us. The surprising hexagonal tiles, the fish scales hung on minute threads of equine follicles, the thing with the mammal inside. All of this adds up to a portrait of a man seen through a mirrored funnel. Occasionally cannibalistic, the gathered siblings compliment each other in earthy pastels.
Wobbly on desiccated legs, a proud father of three dictates his grocery list on the grand veranda. Potted trees hung with opals - the most magnificent any of us has ever seen - rotate on unseen mechanisms behind him. Occasionally a child throws a bushy little mitten or decorative writing instrument over the edge, and it falls into the mostly ineffectual moat below.
Fiddlers and trumpeters recline on salvaged comforters on the lawn, awaiting their moment to raise a joyous noise. Wistful in poultry waste, a music expert balances on a sycamore log, forming a capital G with her beastly body.
The young women next door communicate with each other by way of rocks, painted with intricate patterns and left in designated locations in the yard. I have discovered that the content of the messages is determined by a number of factors, including the colors and shaped used in the pattern, location in the yard, orientation of the rock, size of the rock (ranging from the size of a plum to the size of a grapefruit), and taxonomic identity of the rock.
My efforts to decode the messages these clever young women leave each other have been fruitless. I applaud their ingenuity but gravely fear the intent of their clandestine communiques: too often, I have observed, such extreme measures are only used by the most nefarious individuals!
We have been commanded to make a specific soup recipe, a flat soup with caustic fibers suspended in a brash peppered broth, topped with a mixed-starch crust.
When I say "commanded," I do not mean that some fickle Earthly authority has issued a painfully-worded dictum from the musty den of a tiresome bureaucrat; no, this command comes from that great ineffable presence we all are subject to, and whose presence you yourself may have grown increasingly aware of in the months since inauguration.
The soup is offensive to all but the most finely-honed palates, and I am personally honored to be among its most vociferous proponents. Sir, will you crack the crust with your preferred oblong utensil and verbally communicate your reaction?
Cantankerous, the author must attend church. His lapis lazuli finery and porridge-colored briefs are admired by 33% of the parishioners. The other 67% feel threatened by him, so they pack heat in the form of really good and powerful handguns.
Fruit and free chewing gum fills the collar of the grunting book writing guy in the back pew (stained as it is with greasy exhalations of five decades' worth of Christian rectums). But when the bad kids come around they get their fruit and gum. Because two thirds of the congregants value their childrens' pleasure, they refrain from shooting the novelist in the face, thighs, breast, and wormy dick.
Family means writing and rewriting the rules for cooperative sports and playing word games until the distant scent of the beach seduces the elders. I thank God for hobbies: climbing a lot, tumbling by myself, coming repeatedly for the perfect man. Why doesn’t he love me?
Anthony is ready to bring girls to Chicago, letting me live in their world. Letting me notify God of my new arrangement. Letting me play alone in the garage. Anthony is on God’s phone.
I can't see the cat in my mind these days. There was a blue sheen to its fur that seemed possible, if one had the privilege of ecstatic product.
I was allowed to lounge beneath the static sizzle for most of my forties: patient like a meal uneaten, dull to anxieties, promised to the gentle pull of entropy. I was seen or unseen by relations and colleagues and strangers, an occasional reassuring reminder of existence.
The throbbing didn't begin until the lichens had gained purchase, transforming flesh into vapor and light into flesh, transforming ambition into a gauzy sense of retreat upon its fresh exposure to the electrochemical background noise of the home neighborhood. Standing erect, the concrete was hot white foam and the fiction crackled like ribbons of ceramic.
Upon graduation, I grabbed a pumpkin-shaped hand and it took me somewhere new, the dominion of odorless doctrines. I found most of the relevant equipment there defective, most of the tissue friable and pale, most of the beverages inoffensive and listless. I let go of the hand after several days of purposeless chaperoning and fell immediately into a shallow trench, where I was allowed to have sex finally. Great sex! Certified, I plagued the starchy citizenry with strident requests for clean garments, none of which have, as yet, been granted.
This thing I found has tendrils, hirsute vining threads that leave welts. I cover them with gloves, but then I'm wearing gloves, and people ask me about the gloves. Is it an affectation? No, I hiding the welts I got from handling the thing my living mannequin friend sent me via UPS.
A green face witch questions my choice to wear two aprons: one in front, one in back. But I have been told that a mess can sneak up from behind. I listened to her counsel and removed the front apron.
This left me with an extra apron. Which I sold to a duckfoot gnome under the pier at Golf Beach. With the payment (seven striped crab carapaces), I purchased my own swift little wooden scooter.
As a current hunter and science fiction fan, Joshua is always ready to become extinct. The governor of Nevada will survive if he has life changing allegiance. Going ahead with his plan to quit smoking or die, the man behind daytime television series dated both of my parents. That is unbelievable!
I was inadvertently involved with a serial killer when I became a bounty hunter. The casino workers didn’t cooperate with a policeman. The “cowboy” was a rookie police officer, the son of a powerful father. The catholic priests that murdered the youngest mayor in California had lots of enemies. If I didn’t cooperate with a crooked cop, I would have grown up an only child!
Chime and we fall theatrically. Rubber snakes on concrete, startling the occasional passerby for a moment, but we're quickly forgotten as they walk, the next place and the place after that. They might hear the chime themselves, but they don't know.
We fall as we do and let the things on the ground traverse us. A hand might fall on a calf or a finger might attract a sourceless trickle of blood. A tuft of killed plant (maybe a sweetgum seed) might sneak under a sweatshirt or blouse. A gaze might line up with another gaze and the exchange will never rise to the verbal like a plunged thing desperate for the surface of the water. The chime, the specific type of fall, and then silence for the allotted time. Sometimes things fall on us. Insubstantial, usually.
The things on the ground learn us and ignore us again. The people come to scoop us up, load us into the truck. And eventually we'll find our way back here, or another place, form another clot, hear the chime, fall in the customary way.
Throttled by hubris, disastrous husbands careen towards middle age with gross burgers in their glove compartments, with lubricated condoms. Under their flatulence-soaked bucket seats: cigar boxes full of dog tags they never wore. Their guitar string thongs and suede ponchos and pepper pelts inspire revulsion among anyone with minimal cognitive ability.
Vomit. Bile. Tree bark elbows, broken toothpicks in our heels. Ducks' heads in a circle on the floor under the throbbing bed. Paper cut mouths in N95 shells, sucking at themselves.
Stained thermoses of something bituminous, rolling on the corrugated rubber. Patches and emblems and insignia shaped like shields because that's exactly what they are.
Crooked shopping carts, gritty citrus soap, screw broom on pegboard, smelt. Nets. Tents. Denim. Scattered beads, not beads: popped baseball cap pegs, everywhere.
In the rock and roll graveyard, she learns the astronomy of insects. The great motorcycle sculpture, looming above the troubled population of this town, her birthplace, ignites its headlamp for the first time in a generation. Bandanas and fairy shawls drift to the ground, crystals of frost reaching up to catch them and pull them into the organic substrate.
A fifty year old bachelor will give you plenty of ideas for a singles weekend, and serving a healthy realization of those traditional flavors. Teenaged boys of his interesting and unique conspiracy will want to turn to tough guys, and deceive him with sometimes decadent brunch recipes. He defies them with a quick breakfast. Whether you are looking for a powerful photographer or not telling his wife what they were looking for, his pipe collection is your source for what they were looking for.
married to a dentist
graduated from the New Age
the first wedding, thus
took one of the ribs
the same word used of a potter
after divorcing she practiced
years of seclusion, being
his gratification or his flesh
the first use of anesthesia
The devil tried fiercely to run from government agents, but he's living under limited information. The Palm Reader is a world-famous boxer whose praise and worship accidentally reveals tortured bounty hunters. Now they're both taken to jail on national television and they'll either have to sabotage an implacable curse or, through a dream, die in the traps of the wizard!
I knew of a boogey man in my neighborhood, a crooked little frozen mouse-eyed gentleman if you believed the accounts and reenactments of the older boys in Judas Priest tees. Once, this subdivision was a farm, and once the dead tree just past the border was a good tree for climbing, but a boy fell. Slowly died, so slow he still had life in his eyes when the scavengers arrived.
One night I would visit dead tree and piously wait, and if the clouds were just right the boogey man would announce his real-life identity with a cracking shuffle in the shadows.
I would clutch the knife in my hand to defend myself and vanquish his hell from the cul-de-sac and when he came for me
I would bargain for reflex and observation but the knife is a comb
it's the one my older cousin put in my stocking last year
he's in the air force now
the boogey man's quick sharp feet dance all up and down my skin and he knows how to grab the moon
he brings the moon crashing down
on my head shattering like a fluorescent tube shatters
the shrapnel hits me
enters me there's no pain at all
a sort of fleeting rush
I'd chase it forever, my fumbling adulthood
There I'd meet it and fall into the fir tree in the median the neighbor family dresses up yearly in multi-colored strands of lights.
Help to make equal the arrangements of the festivities. Your eye for relative quantity, trained by years in the retail killing fields, is as renowned as it is a curse. A soda-colored burden pressing stiff knuckle hands into your each day's efforts in the realm of enjoyment.
Quick, various measurement, fatigued convenience. Steady dependence upon the judgment of temporary shepherds. A rinsed and scraped mind, an abraded sense of pleasure. Tilted back on your heels by this imaginary wind.
Mold breath couch beside kneecap indentations, and Stereolab, maybe Sonic Youth. Probably Sonic Youth. The tunings twisted, improper, like my ambitions here — I'd like to say — but I can't claim that intention. Someone else monkeyed with my guitar. If only I could keep the steady synth throb in my chest, if I could capture that and implant it I'd avoid so much of what's coming.
Most of the land is industrial, but an above-ground pool is a pretty good luxury to pick. Acting like a cable installer, because I lack the foresight to aim for the wine repository.
In 12 years, Thurston two-times Kim. Lee seems alright though, stick with Lee.
A green fabric swatch holds a single egg representing fertility or imagination (perhaps fragility or refrigerated psychosis). Advertisement-grade models parade themselves around it with phone lenses trained on the vertex. The gathered footage is collected thus by sheepfaced women and men who edit it together, intercutting and splicing to find evidence of the marginal viewer. And their sheepfaced offspring are charged with the task of sweeping up the chitinous rubbish left behind, the exoskeleton shards and dismembered elytra once belonging to involuntary invertebrate participants in this dance of futility.
Glen raises goats at Gas Pot Downs. Willie, age 8, scoops licked bead mix from the trench into a converted PVC violin pool. When summers are wet, you might see Clara and Hettie hugging in the makeshift alley where the blight cannot see.
Bracketed by musk jars, the goat bone tower tells the date and time to Willie's potential guardians. Goat skull pavement shines in a drenched musical kinda way.
In drought months, Clara cakes goat tummy drums with Glen's stashed bills, floating baskets made of bead mix scoops lashed together with goat rope in the cistern, as a way to celebrate fungus nutrition and distant goat vision.
Below the neon barrel, where eel men strangle their fears, a golden weaseled friendship reaches its final curtain. Greasy streaking blue white clouds spread sickly in a second sky.
I sweep the blue streak from brow to nipple, iron teeth harnessing ambush tongue. A stomach full of rags. A throat lit up with static.
Spilled into the heart shaped tray, mother's pearls melt into goo, entering the next state. I squeeze the oblong utensils in each of my hands, vibrating with rediscovered glee — reborn, unborn, reborn and on and on.
The seeds in my hair will remain dormant until I pack my head into fresh compost. The flavored lotions I applied to my calloused feet, made from said seeds' place of origin (fruit from XXXXXXXX trees), leave prints on the floor; though the manufacturer of said necessary plane counsel hasty remediation of such blemishes, I will leave them. I appreciate a well-discolored floor.
Ice colored like cloudy fish soup squeaks between the garden orbs. There's a dead patch where a chair faded into clammy mist last September. When the neighbor smokes long on the step, I effortlessly ignore him, his orange blaze, his knife hat.
Your hair lingers in the drain.
One mascot crimps the cosmetics while a second winds a line of dog ornaments around a synthetic column.
Watching, eating Oreo cookies, Mrs. Pool pranks haughty ass air on the stained porch. Old planks of shredded dough crack like dung boards invented accidentally. This is how an afternoon's leisures are forgiven.
A couple under a castle (or a bridge?) stoops down for hand cup water. Eyes to the worm cloud, he feels the same as a decaying vine lost to its roots. She forgets the only trap she ever fell for. They look through small tubes to find a communication from the contractors they hired to bend the incantations of their legal advisors.