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.