Wall of Wind

I affix the name of a color to a single guttural syllable. It becomes something strong with scent of juniper and pinyon, built by the subliminal industry of ants.

My body stands as a stupid and humble thing, unsure whether I exist before verbal communication or after the death of language.

Hot Pink Bleach

It got humid in the closed room where the carpet glows, too humid for Apple's popular iPod media player. Grody Bob was out picking up hot pizza from our favorite local pie joint, so I had nothin' for no one to do, least of all myself. The paper was spinning all the same old sob stories and quaint anecdotes, all crammed between bleating adverts. I loosened my leather belt and slicked back my hair. I imagined the musical stylings of a jazz musician I know.

That was when I realized that my fingers were bleeding.

The editor-in-chief writes, "Hold onto your hot cola. Keep what you own inside your own radiant soul. Smile grimly upon thine seed and impart unto them thusly the Sublime Importance of holding onto one's own hot cola."

I dunno works for me

Don't Give the Confused Lord Anything

What are we selling? Why are these cables around our necks? Who put that black box on the desk? Where is that friend I knew?

I can see the screen, and a bottle of juice as well. It's all on my desktop. I use straws because I hate lifting the bottle to my lips. This way, I can just lean towards the bottle and grasp the straw's tip in my lips and suck the juice into my mouth. Sometimes I don't quite grasp the straw. I bump into it with my lips and it spins around. I call it "the straw problem" and it never fails to elicit a chuckle from Dawna Kaylee Stritt, a woman who sits at the next desk over.

I learned about preservatives from Dawna Kaylee Stritt and was horrified so that's why I drink the juice I drink. I'm not trying to impress her; she's married to her second husband, her face is unattractive, and her political views are frankly revolting. There is no reason to impress a woman like that.

How long will this pain last?

Exterminated Well

I keep things pretty well secret from most people, like I don't say if I'm going to wear a tie, or I don't say like "such and such is my favorite color." That's not in my character. Full disclosure is for chumps! But I do tell folks that I'm a sucker for that kind of music that basically sounds like an angry person at a carnival. That's cool music.

Leather on Fire

Swollen with the food you ate by the wall, you called me on the cell phone. You described your mouth's inside to me and the saliva was a runny ink. You wanted it thick as glue to shoot like bullets that harden in midair. You said you could spit at me and crack my skull. My neck jerks, my eyes bleed, my head opens and thousands of Agnostid trilobites pour out into the sunlight and immediately die.

Path to Citizenship

I go away for a sweet numbness and listen to the rising and falling cheers of some gathering somewhere below me. This topography comes blowing out of me and manifests itself on this city. All of it is somewhat less than my sickness of cynicism feels capable of allowing. Cynical, cynical, cynical tight little mass like frozen black blood, digested hair, bone flavored paper wad and clay. Ears floating on oily water. Just ears.

Put a Label on Your Experience

My finest aspiration as a child, a boy, was to be a lake monster. Not in the sea where such ugliness seems to ooze from hadean chimneys super frequently. Not in the sea but in a lake, in a small spot of water near a town, fringed with fine conifers and full of pristine little pebbles which would tickle my monsterbelly, which would skip from child hands on the surface above me, leaving momentary silver blemishes.

I would pick one child to befriend, one needy boy or girl with darkness on their brows and hunger and empty shoes. Having watched and waited, I would pick one sad moment when the child's world was like a sack of molasses and I would rise above the cool water and the eye contact would bond us.

And there would be adventures, naturally. There would be dopey sheriff's deputies to foil. Wicked land developers to battle. Bait shop owners to confuse. Victories and heavy auras of champion energy. One day, boosted with confidence and a powerful sense of self-worth, my friend would walk away from the lake forever to enrich the world with whatever the hell it was they wanted to do with their adult lives.

I loved talking about these dreams to the children at school. I rendered them in finger paint, in poster paint, in crayon, in marker, in colored pencils. When they put the kibosh on my dreams, I argued that they were wrong; in their mind they were the experts, but I wasn't happy to accept their cynical bloviating. I noted with bitterness that fairly frequently, they tended to have a habit of translating something weird into something somewhat less splendid.

That's a problem. That's a dealbreaker.