Progressive Car Insurance

Pinch the streetwise tea kettle in the glass display box, come alive in the ecstasy of the transgression. Twist your jelly bean toes in their sockets as you glide away, an otter through this dissected throng. Emerge like an embolism in the starlit avenue where the inflations of powdered bards hang: they collect themselves into the breath of invented megafauna. In the overturned wash basin you'll find me and the things you covet.

Otis Saw the Mouth Slats

Trombone head, please come back to the booth. I've wiped clean the old menu. Apologies, but they haven't any newer ones. So the best we could do was to tape that flappy old laminated corner. It's functional, if admittedly below your standards in "visual victual communication media."

Trombone head, pass the framed bacon and hard gum globe to rejoin me. The humbled staff will surely acquit themselves with admirable diligence and tidy cordiality.

Trombone head, we can mourn our agency together over a mediocre repast. The tableware will at least be clean. The sky will at least carry on its chromatic duties and we'll exit into a comforting dishospitality.

Falsehoods of Spiked Misery

If only I wasn't required to raise my arms, speaking servitude in this room upholstered with a woman's mischief. If only the heart in my chest was a fully synthetic thing, a petrochemical invention which, if discarded and buried, could conceivably be found by future scavengers — or, more optimistically, archaeologists of high ethical standards and unfamiliar colloquialisms.

Also conceivable is that such a fine cardiac instrument, once invented, will find its way into my chest like an intruder. And these desperate diggers or scholars of distant cultures will find such a thing in a bone lattice, in a box dripping with velvet like tattered flesh.

Roses of the Infirmary

Epic red banners in a good boy's bedroom drip rehydrated dream-cum into the pillow, fermenting acrid visions of tennis court massacres, detailed spreadsheet forensics, fisted eel parties, wholly rejected careers. Tooth gray sea songs from the gazebo outside promise something else, an alternative doom. But everything hinges on the half-life of gratitude, undetermined.

The Wife's Mantis Puppet

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.

Raid Pinch Rush

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.

Against the Snake Truck

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.