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.
7.12.2012
Briny Wings
It manifested itself in obscure ways in the twilight time before puberty claimed these gray parents. It lived in words shouted at a tree. In the ghost imparted into a plush toy. It was a soiled ribbon pulled tight around another child's neck.
I am essentially the game of a child, cruel in confusion.
6.18.2012
Crowbar Teeth
At a family gathering of no small importance, dad gave an impassioned monologue to his collected relations. "It ain't stealing if it's honest. Bashing a man in the face and taking the things he carries is an honest thing to do. It is transaction. Maybe you call me a thug. I will wear that garment. Like all other garments I wear, it is one I procured through no small amount of skullduggery. This food you are eating, the utensils which transport it to your mouths, the napkins, the tablecloths, the chairs you sit upon: all of this has been obtained by me in the most honest way I know, by violent force.
You may say 'I don't relish sitting on another man's chair!' To you, I say: if that other man truly wanted that chair, he would have been prepared to keep it. When I rang his doorbell and grabbed him by the collar of his shirt and kicked him around his yard, he would have given me twice what he got. As I tossed his chairs into the back of my Isuzu, he would have tripped me, punched me, smashed my knees, anything to stop me from taking his chairs.
But he didn't. As he lay in the grass nursing his wounds, he agreed: this was a fair price."
Everyone knew all of this, but allowed him his time to speak. That wasn't all he said. He said a lot more. But we all wanted that soup and didn't care if a woman was shoved into a garbage can so we could have it.
6.16.2012
ESPN Star Cricket
Two friends converse, both seen in profile. They exchange a platonic kiss. One friend lies down, leaving the frame. The remaining friend turns toward the viewer, revealing that one of his eye sockets is sprouting with a thick growth of pubic hair.We'll see increasing profits for a while, methinks.
A single plucked crow left on the doorstep of every citizen of a given municipality. When a citizen dissects his or her bird and disarticulate its skeleton, a fun word game is revealed: each bone has been etched with a word or phrase, and when placed in the correct order, they reveal an engrossing narrative which extols the virtue of a pharmaceutical which may be of particular interest to the recipient.
A hill where there was none before.
A social media campaign which saddens and confuses the aged members of the pharmaceutical marketing community, who feel that the world is leaving them behind in a mad rush to the obscene obliteration of identity looming on the horizon.
Hip hop legend Dougie Fresh and acclaimed actor David Hyde Pierce star in the buddy cop series Two Terrific Cops, which features copious product placement of pharmaceuticals. It's a proven winner.
Treated condoms as a delivery vector for exciting new pharmaceutical products.
6.15.2012
Homeopathic Probiotics
Trust me, the three individuals in this sedan have been vetted. None clutch to illicit secrets. None are eaten by guilt over past offences. None are obsessed with genitalia to an untoward degree. They're just fine, salt of the Earth type folks. We can like them and not be all suspicious.
There was an additional passenger, but I had that one removed. It looked at the sedan and remarked, "the design pattern has serious consequences not only for consumers and the environment, but also for the automotive industry as a whole," and I just told it to get out and walk away, and heeded not its woeful protests.
So, we'll have to find one more. I'll put up a few flyers and run an ad on Craigslist. Then we'll have a new one, one ready for being uplifted with the colours of glory we'll apply to its neck with the pigments we've collected during our travels.
Wall of Wind
My body stands as a stupid and humble thing, unsure whether I exist before verbal communication or after the death of language.
6.14.2012
Hot Pink Bleach
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
6.13.2012
Don't Give the Confused Lord Anything
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?
4.05.2012
Exterminated Well
3.29.2012
Leather on Fire
3.11.2012
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.
3.07.2012
Put a Label on Your Experience
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.
11.20.2011
Shall We Flourish?
I will, however, regale you with the story of how I obtained the unique apparel I while preparing the victuals upon which you are presently feasting. This is convenient, as it relieves you of feeling obligations of conversational reciprocation, i.e. saying stuff to me, too.
Upon Senator Hill, a lovely Lesbian Woman who drives a Dodge Ram has taken up the pastime of leathercraft. After seeing her wares at a local arts festival - of which I am a perennial attendee - I set my mind to the purchase of comfortable britches, a belt, a tunic, a jacket, and a heavy apron to protect the rest of the ensemble from the messiest of the foodstuffs with which I must contend. I've commissioned a cap as well, but this final element is not yet complete, and to be perfectly frank, I grow impatient with the excuses I hear, week in and week out.
I just really love quesadillas.
11.07.2011
Egg One
When you land in the giant's soft lap, don't hesitate to still your mind and catch your breath. Scramble down his pants. Don't lose the eyelash. If the giant's cat harasses you, there is a bazooka hidden behind a potted plant. Shoot the cat in the face and run. Actually, shoot it anyway, harassment or no. I hate that giant's cat. Hurting it will distract the giant.
Don't lose that fucking eyelash! I need it.
11.06.2011
Succor For Tormented Fathers
11.05.2011
Ha Ha, I Wrote the Poem
When I was in a funk, I sold purses on the boulevard. I knew three brothers with different knives and big antelope colored faces. I never fought anyone and I never let people insult each other. By that, I mean that I spoke up and registered my disapproval when I heard one person insult another person. That's the best you can do. You can't stop people from insulting each other. You can't stop some friendly ladies full of ancient worries from chasing these dogs away, either. You just wish it wouldn't happen so much.
10.27.2011
Faux Pas Dudes
I said, "young woman, I think of the pleasures of holding my breath underwater when I see your comely visage. It is my habit, when swimming in a person's pool, to hover weightlessly, curled into the fetal position, submerged where I only hear the throbbing sound of the filter pump. Don't put a pool near an oak tree because of the acorns."
That young woman wasn't too impressed, but didn't turn me away when I offered her smooches, heavy petting, and a nap. So I hope that she might oblige me with something really frisky next time!
Astute readers who are knowledgeable about my biography may look askance at this story. I was raised by two homo papas. Well, I still got to learn a lot about what young women are raised to believe. I learned it from their fag hag. Her name was Chrystol.
10.13.2011
Snow Kone
I am a smart guy who can understand that my impulse was weird. I was angry at them for engaging in potentially dangerous behavior. I didn't want them to hurt themselves. But I wanted to hurt them.
I discovered that in my heart I want to be the only one to hurt people.
8.06.2011
Mango Lassi Enema
7.20.2011
Millions of Kisses and Good Wishes
7.14.2011
Drawer Cream
I must acknowledge that I know you aren't terribly concerned with my choice of garments for this apology delivery. You are concerned with the apology itself, for the mere mention of apology inspires the imagination to concoct a multitude of scenarios, from banal disagreements turned sour to tawdry occurences which will forever stain the offended party's view of me, no matter how gracious my apology may be.*
This apology, delivered in whatever collection of garments I settle on at some point tonight, is intended for a blogger of no small influence. It seems that I, in a moment of revelry, pissed and shit upon the hood of her automobile. Now your imagination can rest, and you can sleep invigorated by the knowledge that I've done something gross to a blogger and it's crazier and worse than anything you've ever done to a blogger; Lord knows that you don't owe a blogger an apology.
*I assure you, it shall be gracious as fuck.
6.15.2011
Grown, Blown, and Flown
10.27.2010
My Goodness and Warmth
holder of his trust. I change His damp linens and when He slays an
angel I am the one who salts its white body and see it entombed. For
these reasons, He considers me His beloved servant, prideswollen at
the sight of me in the distance, adorned in His good colors and
bearing His standard.
He is pathetic and it endears Him to me further. His knotty red
knuckles and quivering eyes are mine to serve and I cry for Him when I
scrub the garments it is mine to wear. Others claim to serve strong
monarchs with tight fists and unmovable hearts in their chests. I wear
my colors because they are mine to wear and I know that these others
are bad liars, bad liars who serve rulers as weak and unworthy as mine
and in their lying eyes I see the same loathing and love that fill
mine. He will be staring into those eyes as he dies in my arms and my
death will be in weeping.
10.13.2010
Cocking
That's why I wear this jacket with its screwy zipper, and these glasses with their incorrect lenses, and these briefs which pain my testes, and this hat with its obviously misspelled word. I offer this of myself to those who I cannot care for, and it is payment enough. Their pity, unwarranted though it may be, offers a validation which far outweighs any effect my imaginary empathy might have.
So suck on that, haters, and please: when you inform me of the mustard stain on this jacket with its screwy zipper, be tentative and patronizing. Hold me in your fat eyelids.
9.02.2010
Chard, Lemons, Iceberg Lettuce, and Meat Fat
The reason we're walking away in this silence is obvious, is it not? As obvious as the dry yellow grass. The little telephone I carry in my pocket starts making a racket and to a distant observer--our piglet, let's say--I begin inexplicably smacking my hip. I whisper "I'm embarrased it's orange." But you hear, "Time for ass, it's on."
Now I'm in a pickle, attempting to explain the unlikely sexual congress that transpired in my recent past. I cannot reconcile the easy lapse of inhibition as our encounter occurred with the disciplined way that I normally conduct myself. LOL
8.26.2010
Shallow Guy Eating Chips
I know about the teachers and the things they believe because I have a hiding place in their lounge. Ever since my early student days, the teacher's lounge gripped me with fascination that couldn't be fully realized in glimpses through the cracked door. I found reasons to stay at school as long as possible: extracurricular enrichments and playing the volunteer. I became the child ghost of the waxed linoleum.
Mrs. Linkage had me assist her with the decorations for Mr. Tolbin's retirement party. As I hung crepe paper owls and twists of tiny incandescent bulbs about the room, my breath was thick and fruity in my chest and my eyes felt heavy with tears. I also felt Mrs. Linkage's gaze upon my deliberate child arms. She felt such happiness in my presence. I was an awed child, calmly appreciative of these teachers, a small walker with gentle footsteps. There was a natural goodness in me that she never recognized in her own children.
None of this is conjecture; my aforementioned hiding place made me privy to such things. In my old age, the ache in my knees is the legacy of my crouching teacher's lounge hours.
8.25.2010
The Ice Melting on the Hood
my jackets. I have too many jackets. In the last two years, I've only
worn one of them, on less than a dozen days altogether. It makes more
sense to wear sleeves long or carry a sweater. Also, most days there
are only a few minutes in the naked outside for which a jacket might
be preferred, and those minutes are only slightly more terrible
without one. So the closet stays closed, and the jackets and the
pebbles are forgotten, dumbly clinged to with hands that aren't mine.
It occurs to me that the path to work has become wild with thorns and
tough little vines, pleading calls from birds in unseen shadows.
Sometimes the scabs and pale scars on my sun-darkened arms startle me.
I'm not getting used to them and the people I know ask if I've tried
this lotion or that salve. I don't prefer to do that, though. The same
as how I squeeze my head in red hands rather than swallow something
benign from a plastic bottle. The only things I actually treasure are
irrationalities, anyway. The way spitting makes me feel in control,
the way spitting fingernail splinters makes me feel like some kind of
victor, the way a terrible mug of coffee validates this whole
enterprise.
7.25.2010
The New Mormon Boy
7.21.2010
Sean Michaels Became a Professional Wrestler When He Grew Up
A. "I dreamed of a spider last night."
B. "This is like hockey."
C. "I love this."
I know that option C seems tame. It might even be welcomed by my vaginally blessed counterpart, given she's one of those who enjoys verbal communication while doing sex stuff.
To clarify: I'll say something innocuous, but say it in an unsettling way. For instance, in the voice of a cackling witch, Quickdraw McGraw, or a sports talk radio host. I don't know why. I usually don't like these women enough to care, and maybe it will give them a wacky thing to tell "their girls."
I don't even enjoy sex stuff.
7.07.2010
Among White Time
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.