the graveyard of wambo
Poetry
The Goldmine, ELEVEN AMENS, The Prison, Raccoon Valley, The Wind, The Hours (Softness), Women and Country, Wrecking Ball, Hypotopia, Walking Distance, A Cabin in the Woods, Blue Rose, Merle Hay, O MY IN MANY NÄM REDACTED SORRY NOT A SPOIL O BARE EXCESSIVE INTÏM ACIES, Nasty Flowers, Ooze Like Preeny House Dolphin, BATWING BRAN NESTIFUL series, Goodbye Tuba series “the sexual assault poems”, In the Afterlife, A NEW LIGHT or WHERE DO OUR BLUEBIRDS FLY, Slow-Shattering Crown, Violators, A Body Down the Block, Notes to Self, Triptych of the Mask of Death, in search of so little, Lily May series, The Big Bombing, Had Enough series, Mouthy Snore Tactics series, [When I found out the truth…], The Jason Really Unwheel Now, When is a Man Just Some Dude, Shadowing, [i feel like a sundried tomato in autumn…], Departure, THE MYTH OF IS AND WAS, When They Buried Blanche, Boats, How to Get Cool, An Old Country Farm, {Love letter}, I’m in My New York School Era, [I stand in the park and begin shouting slurs…], Church Poems by Smokin Aces series, [because she appeared to us here on earth…] (mary), Father
Lyrics
black bells, took not the blood, i heard you laughing, the bull, i’ll be gone, at your table, lemon door, common dove, word wall, the fair, dansville, cloud, proshai anushka, black sun
Fiction
sketches from True Dancer
Poetry
The Goldmine My favorite thing in life is getting drunk alone in a fancy saloon. I love swallowing drink after drink and eyeing all the patrons with disdain from the shadowy recesses of a back table. Half the townspeople don’t know I was the chief regulator here when this was just a small frontier mining town, before they chose a deputy who didn’t have any part in making it what it is, when it was full of harder men who went down into that dark hole every day, who brought on all the prosperity the younger ones all take for granted. They chose a man who never even roamed these parts when it was all still wild, a man who thinks of his pistols as some kind of fashion accessory. I love to get so full of booze that I start shooting up the chandelier in there while hollering “I’m the black rattlesnake of this whole territory!” to a crowd of folks who are sick of putting up with me. The barkeep tells me they all genuinely appreciate me, and that in fact they put on a whole ceremony last year where I was wined and speeched and honored, and that I was just too drunk to remember it. But I do remember it. It was a town obligation, following a statewide initiative passed into law, rushed through the legislature by a man who doesn’t know these parts, and who was backing it for some other such reason, and so on and so on. Nobody said a thing to me personally except from the podium, with that detached and insincere delivery of mere recitation that passes for polish and wins elections around here for some of the softest men among us. Even so, I suppose the old barkeep’s at least partly right. It may be that my time has come and gone, and I’m now just some old snakeskin on a tumbleweed, rattling in the wind, rolling toward one of the old mine shafts. When I start to feeling like this, my favorite thing to do is to stumble out into the dusty road shouting “I’m the original cham-peen gunslinger!” and start shooting out every star in the sky. When I’m through, I throw my gun straight through the glass window of Harold’s Billiard Parlor, where the deputy likes to spend his nights showing off his shiny pistols to impressionable young women. Nothing fires me up more than the thought of him showing off his two gold-plated pistols to some beautiful young flower, telling her all about how they were made with the gold they took out of these mines seventy-five years ago, and how it’s his duty to carry on their legacy, and how the pistols are his way of honoring them, like he’s the holy heir to it all and not just some boy who bought the office with family money from back east where he was born and raised. When he comes out of the billiard parlor to investigate, I challenge him to a showdown. That’s when I get to do my favorite thing in the world, which is to draw first and intentionally shoot only the hat off his head, and then allow him to shoot me in the gut a split second later. And I love to smile as I lay dying on the ground, uttering my last words, which are “I won, Clay. I won.” And I believe that in time, they will all understand. ELEVEN AMENS In these days straight hateful I lay down eleven amens * You and I pal? we stand away immanent, blurrybright frightful in whole-holly hallowed in whole-holly aleatoric amen stand away bright frightful gust immanent , I sing you pal eventful In bright fresh electric god-bless-you amens * Whatever you are walking whatever it was you were brightface mcgillicuddy... today I say stand up eventful you and I onely atone! You and I brightly alive kissing special in blessing bright face in brightface amen! You and I all alive special In all alive little bright blissful amen * We stand torn away bright frightful. From whole-holly asymptote. In blissful unsettling aleatoric amens * I say it again hey the same way! Pal along brightful. You and I bless us in blissful mcgillicuddy heavens amen I say frankly in frightful! In glittering blissful mcgillicuddy eleven eleven eleven eleven eleven eleven eleven amen. I say to thee. You and I. Bliss frightful. You and I blissful mcgillicuddy amens. I sigh alive frightful. I sigh alive frightful my blissful bright sailor mcgillicuddy brightful my sailor in aleatoric heavenly frightful in several mcgillicuddy sigh-alive frightful amens. I sigh alive frightful! I sigh alive frightful my blissful eleven amens. * I whole-holly immanent frightful. I whole-holly immanent frightful in blissful amen! I whole-holly immanent alabaster blindly bright frightful my blissful my sailor my blissful mcgillicuddy whole-holly sailor my blissful bright frightful amen. I all-alley alabaster. Pal, I all-alley alabaster! I all-alley alabaster all-around frightful a bright light a brightful a blissful elarial frightful in bliss sally asymptote salad elerial brightful in light stress alightless amen. In light stress alightless amen. In light stress alightless amen. I series sing blissful mcgilly in seven Octobering ever eleven amens. O blown series, I sing bright frightful! Blown series pal-poly asymptote fright alive brightful in blissful insightful mcgillicuddy elevens. (Heavenly! Heavenly!) I sing alight pal-poly asymptote immanent brightful. I stand alive immanent I sigh alive immanent high align immanent brightful elevens again amen again amen again amen again I sigh alive brightful elevens amen. (Ad nauseam- * I sigh alive immanent brightful amen! I sigh alive brightful in pal-poly asymptote simmering brightful in frightless amen! I sigh alive rightful. I sigh alive rightfully. Rightful alive in our bliss-blurry asymptote glitter amen! I sigh alive rightful our blissful eleven amens! * I sigh alive rightfully followed allowed and unfurled in brightly in bright stress alightless amen. In bright stress alightless in blissful unfollowed, in salad, all pal in salad, all pal along stress among pal along stress in blissful eleven in lungless amen! * I sing it I sigh alive frightful. Eleven in blessing eleven amen. In restful you did. You sighed alive brightly in blissblowing palatal, souring brightly amens. Souring brightly in cellulite blissfully brightful in rightfully bless-you amens! In bless-you amens! In bless-you amens! Cellulite blissfully souring brightful in pal-poly asymptote sputtering sailor alearial sightful in glittering blissful amen * Amen amen amen amen amen amen amen amen amen amen amen The Prison I am a grownup, a hammer. Occasional respect, thank you. Most hammers grow up humble. Anyway. My lip bone anyway. This is a Band-Aid. Quite frankly. A gaping wound. A compliance. Mostly gray and red. Behave slowly and gray. A cell: Only and warm. Only and so. Deceleration. One man at a time. Operation Concrete Tongue. This is a crude hospital. Quite frankly. Opinion Phase at a toast: Most inmates would rather be inmates than opinions at a toast. Laughter and applause. So Justice poses, crowding, and if it fails, we’ll still have This. And it will be good. Raccoon Valley I’m at the baseball fields for my last game. I keep begging Coach to put me in. He says I need to settle down and I can tell he’s kind of worried about me. The shrimpy kid who can’t hit is playing my position. He does okay. Halfway through, I finally get in. I head out to centerfield. Four other people are there. I ask why. One answers We’re just a bunch of bodies. I watch the other team hit home run after home run. We lose. The park empties out. A big hole gets dug up around home plate. The dirt is all wet and slushy, like at the beach. I never fielded a ball. I never even got to bat. Coach is still there, clearing the dugout. I say Coach I never even got to bat. He doesn’t answer me. I say it again. He just stands there looking sad, squinting out over the field. It's early fall. The park is windy, the sky a pale gray. I think it was his last game, too. The Wind [veils in the storm turn to jade beneath the weight of its torque stamens in the spinning wind address the concerns of its designer that coils might emerge in their defense] when a cool hand wafts the air into a wind right to graze a cheek or stir the leaves enough to raise the heart’s attention in that pivotal moment before perception in the dark turn of mind comes a reflection in the outer design a corollary without faith this is limited to experience but with faith may come delineation as if the shape the arm takes out the driver side on the ribbon highway could sound out the mystery at hand as the wind at bethesda imbued the pool with healing the pneuma blessed with groundlessness in essence intuition culls an egg within a nest of clouds humming with dull light on the outskirts broken into pearls then cast across another day beneath the veils sunken into strange and stained earth yields on a hillside once-patient fields of lavender grown taciturn the storm draws its hair out laid bare as if to pose a question in the wind might it clear out the rot from the thickening clouds could the jade fade away retreat into pale opalescence the hillside flecked with rogue violets each poised without sleep firm restless in search of light were there better design in the breeze could we patch this day into peace with just the way they reach across the sky * as god struck down the tower at babel so too did human wonder seeking more in all push past the limits of our sky begin to ease the firmament into decay thus in slow obscura shrunk the human heart’s recall sharpening perception of obsidian pitch watchful with the scattering expanse of ruins on the wind for any glint of light the void this left in collective knowing compels them still at dark faithless of stars to scour the earth below alone in steady broad self-splaying to wander what remains inert in meditation in wayward holography when one at last unearths a geode shimmering there one knelt and rose the stone in palm a sacrament before the eyes then felt a corollary into life between self and stone that each in blank and simple psalm could from without divine within such crystalline geographies by which to see the heavens whole again * so did collective will regain its form and aim: in the rubble of the firmament ash compressed to fumes grew slender sending tendrils of a complex odor with potential both to reignite old systems stretch & strengthen fundamental neural trunks enabling new pliancies of intake for the senses * by what but the grace of a beach altar’s conch in wind could hearts begin to suss out essence and method of phantom homunculi verily quivering canticulary in the anti-matter who stay governing crucial pillars of processing to clarify condition to induce malleability harness there a music between prayer and math stumble into self-refining modes of expression when tasked with an abstract unity : beached rainbowfish silvering the shore these fruits of evil force forth again the issue the too-familiar violence exhaustively confronted calls for an inversion of inquiry o may we begin to map our meditation over these intricate tho digestible icons to step back and behold a latent triad the human eye : the sea of scales : the sun the interplay of color shape and light incorporate the obvious into its opposite hunt for the hard-wiring armed with stillness as deer dream the route to the clearing probe into harmony an array of seemingly disparate fates of fireflies against the constellations affirming agency where silence seams to see the glow of holy orders into emergence any issue reflected in the scales say any angle caught a flash of sunlight reached your eye demands you bear some witness over a period of time covering casual extermination of creatures with rare skin not so much warning as guidepost for a final hope a vividity scrambling to suicide to self-immolate for the prodding or the prospect of jolting the will toward immersion in the ecstatic light could we saturate the everyday in opalescence inject a pure and gentle radiance into the ancient forms into idle wells of faith for all to dwell and reanimate with the wisdom of stones of geodes & their swimming inner light a technicolor ethics a translucence charged with the whole spectrum and a light to guide all eyes through its wonder The Hours (Softness) 1. (Low bow before Sebastian) I followed you (all the way down) to the Hours. And couldn’t help but rest there awhile (in quiet journalism). I felt all soft. Aunt Judy was there (already), now flowering to the tune of my (sudden) arrival. (She waved me on through) O Matilda. My little daydream. My Esther in ferns. My Violet in courage. Harriet’s silver disguise while Alyssa with her eyes wide open. I went numb. I felt like a new lamb. (In Barbara we trust) Purring white whistles, hum of royal cotton condensed over centuries. A parade of softly hissing flax bubbles from shoulder to ear. (Halt) The pink ruiner wears a stare. A good way from home. Squalor personified. The woods had its way with him. Frame like a young tree of fragile ivory. Littered with semen. (Just) the rosiest cheeks. Had he come to drown me? My heart so hardened you could not pry a sound? Coward. What a selfish coward I am. O the shame that echoed through me & O how it struck at whim.. The ruiner barked me to attention. 2. Weird how things just keep getting born, said Tony to a disease. And all the grasses applauded, the gnomes gleamed and purred, and the fattest house in town sat down and said baby it’s finished, i’ll love you all over again. All the soft Harrises and chuckling Phils got such a kick out of the eternal grace of (Jesus Christ) our loving savior. Then right on cue the big ship sank. Like the tits of an old woman the great sea sagged, and on the word of Julius it ebbed and sagged in the undertow, and the beach bombs all swelling in the selfsame sag all along, and still it sagged on some more and then more and all the more butter in slow motion (unsung). The (damn) ship was in pieces. They couldn’t decide the first thing about it. All the to-do men were clenched in a think, the most of everyone fascinated in one great overtone. That’s how Tony one day found Balk: It didn’t make any difference. The whole thing was a wash (which was fine). He raised his eyebrows and smiled a little. There would be no more human undergrowth or mossy ulteriors. The shipwreck was a tragedy and it all felt very comfortable. How they all are. It was fine. You could stop thinking about it. O sweetest soft Blanche and the legions of the hilltop swallower. Awash with drought. Grief. Lesions. Stamped out. Defeated. Eased into something more formidable, prior. From the unheralded echo in her willowy mind. All purple and billowing. Esteemed Blanche. Gentle, fertile Blanche in the outstretched belief, a relief. By a stone. Wise (and we know). As buttermilk pie all rested gentle outsung. A spring doe. Pyre of well-worth-it. Reassuring, Affirmative Nod. One True God. 3. Quiet Charlie careful as a milkbone. Spent one smiling. At last aloft in the one all are from and among. Life. Passed. Past passionate. Everlasting placid. Lasted. Helpful Daydream. The wee ones in the sigh parade all lilted afool. Plain reason and palmable psalm. Hand in hand. Justified. Proud. Heart in the clouds. All the lesser Eliases foamed at the gills, rustled dutifully in advocation. O windburned flesh at the delicate Nancy. Schlepping along a puerile rhizome. To be seized and to sigh it all away. Will the wind find its way home (repeat) I guess it didn’t matter anymore. In the washed-out space between sigh and dream. The animal lived on. There flutters Azalea in a column of wind. True and just Azalea. In the warm golden gown. Grown taciturn. Among the patient first departed from belief. Glanced askance to the new light peeking out around clouds (alert whisper) Women and Country Pretend I’m an idiot with a hunch. It hurts to understand as a lover inside that mother’s burden is a woman’s body. This government is a flirtatious government. It’s asking itself Do I have the time to jog off and smoke a cigarette? People keep asking me What are you doing to your skin that’s different? Well I want to be crucified in this ad space. & I My hands are raised. It’s the phrase that set off a thousand wars. The sun is a coin that runs in the family. Is the phrase. A world inside out, the moon’s a bellybutton overwhelmingly with blood. And why not. We’re such property. Or just voices. I mean we aren’t even voices. Anymore. We’re a special kind of mud. And so on But. With enough hard work, effort, and over a certain period of time, a pig has no face. I haven’t seen faith like that since strange lamps burnt miracles into my soup. We’ve got to frighten the public. Roseville Cemetery’s across the street from Roseville Elementary. Saying Hm. Fifteen times back and forth. Is a conversation. At the end of the night everyone pours the last of their drink out on Trash Kid and then Trash Kid sleeps. These are just questions that we need to be asking and if they’re not answered by the time we’ve lost habit of asking them then what exactly is the point of continuing on? There’s people starving in the Grand Canyon.. I’m thinking a road trip may be in order. That’s what the pig muttered in its sleep. That’s why you cry blood in the supermarket. That’s why you sigh in a motel. Wrecking Ball 1. Aw shucks, I drowned a rat. Were you fat once. Why doesn’t that comfort me. Is there a god up in the sky. I don’t know, Tom. I don’t like it when you comfort me anymore. Are you that fat bitch I waited for. That wasn’t very nice, Tom. When you think about it. Look at you for example. You put nothing into the machine and receive cola. You know a lot of bad people, I can tell. Sorry Tom, I just had a long day at work. I didn’t mean what I said earlier about your weight. I know you work hard. Pay your taxes. But the blood’s on your hands too. But I don’t wanna talk about that. Here’s me in a swimsuit. Then I aged gracefully. Is there a god up in the sky. No Tom it’s just planes and shit no one cares about. 2. Hi my name’s Tom. I’m an alcoholic. I work with kids. It’s gonna take a death for my family to get closer. Here’s my daughter Scarlet. She’s four. Daddy do you hear god whispering to you sometimes. No honey you should be ashamed. I’m leaving you, Scarlet. Scarlet’s new dad here: I know how wild you get when you’re alone. Maybe we could turn that into something. Yes sir. Not now I’ve been on my feet all god damn day long. This one’s a real prize, Tom. Listen I know I ain’t been perfect but I’m a good man. Perfectly natural to die before a change. Tom sat in his motel drinking thinking of Scarlet. Saw himself wicked & passed out. Be warned Tom, the grief will consume you, said his dream. He doesn’t think about Scarlet anymore. As if to turn down the volume before the chorus. She wanders out there like a wrecking ball. Sorry Scarlet dad just had a long day at work. I swear to god you’re the prettiest girl in town. You’re gonna kill it out there. Hypotopia I. I’m a slave no longer to my nympho junkie roommate, or the man-faced bunny & his long crescent claws. No longer will I cry to mom while the bunny stands guard, in union with his cousin, sympathetic coward, before the door to wherever I may need to be. I refuse to allow another minute of harassment by the old men breaking into my room as I sleep to poke my chest, accuse me of stealing Xanax from the pharmacy to feed my addiction. I’ve never in my life used this drug, and I’m sick of their bullying. For their relentless prodding, reminders of personal failures I began to believe myself.. I may never forgive these men. Despite the evasive nature of my sentient apartment building, its constant swapping of entire floors, false doors, staircases upon staircases of artful misdirection, despite the brigade of British policemen deployed to prevent my flight across Snake Pit Gulf, Despite all this I will reach the den reunited with my love for the viewing at last of the sacred rerun. II. In Hypotopia we cry in slow motion. It takes around three minutes for the pain to set in; Upon my release from prison, a pizza party is thrown in my honor, though I’m denied pizza. There are scores of hot girls, but I’m allowed only the special green drink which evokes a notion of perpetually impending dawn, thus the death of the party within me. At a child’s impassioned proposal from the creek below I took to unfamiliar trails in my party’s somber wake. Nothing changed as the crash of steel in railroad cars outside the window of my mind. The mist bitter, my breath white & I, through. Which brought me to my next point. To spot a water tower is not salvation, or even a town. Or for that matter, water. It’s merely hope. Even when you reach the great Mississippi railroad bridge, you may meet there only the ghost of an old friend, subtly bragging of his dinner at a luxury restaurant. A familiar scene beneath the bridge could I describe the air between the river and its bridge. Then beneath the surface a more familiar serenity if the water is shitty and you are a fish at the bottom of the Mississippi the kid skeleton has a kill on. He’s chill and has one on. III. We came in on a bus. When I found my kids missing I surveyed the usual spaces. In a storm I trudged through the swamp that led to Valley Forge. Under the fertile willow by the mural I called the brave kid’s name. I even checked the amusement park. I had not considered the hill until I saw my kids pour out the bus in Redfield: a dog chase up through prairie where atop the thoughtless highway hurried by to him then her like moths to the light. The sheriff tells me gesturing toward the desert north the ones the highway didn’t get it’s likely she took care of. I spend the next two days shrouded in internet, for fear I’ll reveal my guilt, and to research the incident in the public eye. They blame it on the drivers of the cars, not me. In fact I’m offered cards of sympathy. In Your Time of Grief my guilt grew like a slow sword. IV. In Hypotopia “Please, I have children” & “Please, I’ve no children” mean completely different things. If my focus is on the child and yours is on me why is the child crying? I lost my hat drunk one night in Hypotopia. The guy I asked about it said yeah people lose their hats all the time around here. Walking Distance When Muff Kid gets spaced out I erase him When Muff Kid gets fried I tie it up & make waves When his insides pop I walk that beach I pound that ground I spend a weekend in the mountains... Man, I just get too hot when I think. I took a wet hurl. I used to love toys. I wanted it to be so good. Man, sometimes... Sometimes I get so mad I could stand up. I could sleepwalk to the wide open door. Sleepy barber, for I have sinned. Wow you really did come to me in a dream. Well it's not gonna be that easy this time Maria. & here, I wanted it to be so good. Every once in awhile you make a stand... ...I went all over this strange land. I shared a towel with a cowgirl. I howled, awl in hand. I saw an owl once. I been all over. Things got way rosy though, I had to sit. I just get too thick with splitting. I heard he missed his plane. I heard it meant a bunch of cash and a rash of bad blood & he never got over it. He went to the train station & got sick with slipping away. Threw it all on the fire & got sketched out on trying to make it rain. Man, he made it wade. I must have forgotten about him. I make a wide-eyed promise to myself. When I get erased from sight I’ll make plans with the light. When Muff Kid combs the shore I’ll watch from 50 yards in the ocean. I guess I’ll see you later man. I’ll try & live one out for you. I just need some time to get this thing loaded up & alive. I’ll see you down in the garden picking lilies at a furious pace, tracing stars in the dirt with chewed up nails when the driveway shines with shattered glass. I’ll see you at the dirt cloud at the time to be determined. I’ll see you at the kid with four toes in the dark hallway for who knows how long. Beneath the bright stretch of stars when time slows down near the old reams of paper spread out across the ocean. I’ll see you at the big bridge. And see the kid through the wide open door. A Cabin in the Woods A bunch of children are held captive. A woman & her infant son used to be part of the cabin. The Man in the Hood bashed her face in with a stone. Her baby was tossed in the cauldron and boiled alive. The man asks all the children what they’re afraid of. The Brave Kid says Nothing. When he first came to the cabin he saw the baby’s dead face in the cauldron gnashing. The Man in the Hood is annoyed. He boils water in a pot and fires up a piece of food on a stick. He gives it to another boy and says he has to eat it. The boy cries as it burns him. The baby comes back to life from the cauldron as a ghost and kills the Man in the Hood. The baby’s ghost chases the children in the forest. The Brave Kid makes it to a road. He’s shouting for help, repeating over & over— The child’s spirit has risen! Blue Rose They say at the hospital you never see the same doctor twice & they all have a different opinion. I see Shea with the short hair shaking her head no. I ask her to show me the garden, but she leads me to the dark room with the computers. Shea with the short hair and the power smiled at me in the blue fluorescence And Shea with the long hair with the flower who showed me compassion and never wrote back. And Shea with the long wavy hair scattered in the black satin dress who smiled in the blue fluorescence and never wrote back. Merle Hay So I’m at the shopping mall with my buddy, this little dago midget Jimmy. He’s always scheming to get a job there at the high-end retail store. He has no chance, of course. Two guys work there who both hate him. Some kind of tradition of discrimination at play is what I took from his ramblings. An Italian thing, I think. I don’t know, I never pried. But it wasn’t that, really. Jimmy was a disgusting person, always showing up to friendly gatherings, barbecue sauce smeared all over his face. He could never work at a place like that. All the regulars at the food court avoided him. It actually kind of pisses me off, bailing him out all the time, but what could I do? I’d moved back out here after college, both of us at the mall pretty much every day. There was no sense fighting it. Everybody needs a friend. Especially him. Anyway, he was acting shifty all day, pacing in front of the store, doing the rounds alone, hitting on all the kiosk girls. Just more desperate than usual. Something was up. He was pounding long islands at the bowling alley way before anyone else even got there. Everyone looked to me like I oughta do something but he was paying for my drinks so I couldn’t really talk. I don’t know, it was just Karl and Linda and some guys from the mall. Those two only ever came out because Linda made sure Karl see his friends but really we’d drifted apart a long time ago and needless to say he and Jimmy never quite got along. And the mall guys, we saw them all the time. Who cares, you know? It wasn’t that we didn’t like Linda. All in all, she was good for Karl. We never held it against him. Just kinda missed him I guess. You know how that is. Anyway, after a little while, they got out of there. Jimmy was passed out in a chair. We said our goodbyes, and I remember watching them leave and kind of reflecting on what Jimmy meant to me. Sure, he could be an asshole, but he was a troubled guy. He confided in me. We spent a lot of late nights together, just me and him having some beers. After a while he’d get talking. He could really work himself up with it. He had about two or three stories he’d get to and I’d sit there and nod, sometimes ask a question or something to maybe help him through but he never really took to that. I think he just needed a buddy. And I hated seeing him go on like that so that’s how it was. I loved him. He was a fighter. He never quit. He had to keep telling those stories, keep finding somewhere to put it all into. When his mom got sick he waited on her hand and foot. Not a lot of people know that. Actually that’s not true. He told anyone who’d listen. But he liked to think of himself that way. Strong, silent Jim. Bears his cross with a quiet dignity. Those kinds of things never worked out for him. But he still did it, you know? He cared for her. And now she’s gone. What a lot of people don’t understand is a guy like Jim, he doesn’t have a lot of options. He can’t afford to sit around waiting for people to realize over time what a good guy at heart he is. Like a slow blooming rose. Right. Then as I’m standing there thinking all this I hear the loud thud of the door that goes back into the mall. It was like he’d woken up in the middle of some divine mission. By the time I caught up with him he’d squeezed under the fence of that department store somehow and was tearing the place apart, all the alarms going off and everything. It was sort of beautiful, actually. I have this wonderful memory now, I see it in slow motion, of Jimmy hurling a pile of designer pants in the air as one of the owners tackles him to the ground. That was Jimmy all right. I ended up buying a couple suits to smooth things over. “Well, at least we saw some action tonight, huh? Didn’t expect that,” I say. “Yeah, you’re right. It was a good birthday. All things considered,” he says. “Better than last year,” I say. And we smile, remembering the zoo. Then Jimmy starts to cry. I try to cheer him up. I tell him I’m here for him. Things’ll turn around. You just have to hang in there. “I looked after my mom before she passed. She didn’t have nobody,” he says. “I know, Jim. That was real good of you,” I say. “My dad fought in the war,” he says. “He was a hero.” “You didn’t have to pull the fire alarm,” I say. “I didn’t pull any fire alarm,” he says. “You’re right,” I say, “It could’ve been anyone.” O MY IN MANY NÄM REDACTED SORRY NOT A SPOIL O BARE EXCESSIVE INTÏM ACIES (in carebears color swoopn in I looove . to um, respect u lol (kneelin at) s)om hidden puddle o hydroflora, howe’er temporary after rain in the rumored garden of saints behind the waterfall an atmosphere of sapphires glistening n mist, marble cherub twirling gently toward the sky, this chosen land a testament to a less rigid gradience between planes owing to the purity of martyrs, fatal as puppy economics, slithering across into blossom in clumped platoons of zebra orchids. Gathered with lust-like devotion to vilify and ostracize the amateur theosophists, base charlatan zygote energies who dare to claim eminence here. One orchid is thunder flashing in past a crimson sky, o deep beyond the stratocumulus. I surrender in slow-blushing peril to the sting of their crystal harmonies. This will turn into something evil. When incredibly… the soul follows through. Preening harlots deemed violet, inadequate wool, pollution-blind fingers, love one another restlessly, leave out the back sad. Starry mouthwash replace bbq grill-out atmosphere vanishing into petty thievery, serfdom, and the broken translation of Thirst I have jokingly looked off the table into what I will see: A new Psalm come into town, thrashing its toy anus. American currency among the dopest and most private. Centuries of pre-pregnancy terror where a lady says This is where I keep my F e a r . Her mother makes remarks for only seconds after a full body wax until she is again indecent filthy unpresentable smut maiden unless in full niqab, where almost lime were the ovaries of American currency in John F. Sanctuary. He isn't gonna tell anybody it's not a good trade, bums never understood living on the air, scratch out the Henry Burns mathematics of diversified eternity so we can have a little memorable gulch on the outside of this town's Feeling it. Thereupon the reverence of other things the basketball sizzles spitefully away in the late pornographies of Meryl Streep. Nasty Flowers She’s so human the spit in her eyes taught itself to dance down her cheeks whenever she aimed to be held. If asked she’d be quick to answer (incorrectly, unbeknownst to her) a handful of problems on the multiplication time tables. Legend has it, Charlotte starved to death on a brownie. Don’t tell her I told you that and don’t tell her brother I told you not to say. If it wasn’t already, believe it or not, God made my piss sound like Weezer when hit the toilet bowl so that I’d laugh myself into coma and wake up diagnosed with heartbreak over Charlotte. Her hair looked like old bacon. It looked like a burnt fish out the oven. Smoker, sinner, smoker, enema, diseased lawless cousin on a deceptively comfortable sofa who claimed to have known her intimately. But as usually plays out, when we beat the true story out of him it opened up only more dazzling a door of prospect and potential into the mounting wonder of her. When all of us got legit sick we found out the piglets that acted liaison between Leonard and his perceptions burst into squeals at just the quality of light induced by his idea of getting everyone in school sick at the same time. But then God made sure to confuse Leonard’s conviction so that he’d have more fun kicking it around in his head all day instead. And all were saved. That’s how legit sick God was. And why I know He will always have my back. Ugh! Anyway. Charlotte. Everything was so fucking cadillac hollywood back then... My old man was a surveyor and when she first got into town noticed her family lived in a cul de sac just like us which I thought was huge. She didn’t care. She’s so human you could light her up with pilgrim anesthetic and point a stale twizzler around the corner just to put a turd in its place. Charlotte was the whole reason we even started in on that. Harry once lit up a stiff one (twizzler) til it got melty and tried to stick it up his little hole. Made me think then and now always of nasty flowers that barely live. If nature be ever deemed callous look only to the tulip wilting in heat, to that poor boy’s mess of what once was cock and now is wax. Where I, moved to act, went to the garden and burnt a ring around what tulips remained such that no little wildfire ever may reach. And wept for Harry. There is no proper mourn there for loss of thunder no boom there no pickled pride stippling any there in his region, just rice and rotten rice, rotten gone cabbage, rice rustling all unaflow. And just weird. You cannot name it and I would surely be called sick to dwell as I am. The point is it was her, Charlotte. Resenting that level of agency as we did. A class two grades ahead of the whole town. Back to baseball. You batted second twice in a row already so why not put that shit to good use and eke out an Impress or something. I forgot what we were even talking about. It do honestly piss me off to talk about Charlotte. And the squeakneedy pasture of suitors left to roam, managed by her crystal intuition. It left us practically impossible to ever talk. She’s so human she left a note in my locker saying She Noticed and Not to Worry. Fuck. And every day like having to decide what to wear to the dance. And bags under her eyes at first like she was hit but on the true just surefire evidence of this bodacious purity like flung from her human heart into the agony of the everyday. Life and sports. Where sports was queen but she could suck you into the sun. And without the fake choice of unicorns vs. stallions to fool you into bondage. I’m talking like real hearts with real wings. Charlotte was a cab driver on the weekends. She paid her way through high school and lived at the mission. Whenever she got into a funk she drove her cab off a bridge into the the river and hit the reset button. I lined up to drown with her, me and Steve. In the pasture. When Steve got back he couldn’t even talk, he just drew a bunch of spooky diagrams that proved nothing. Before that we would just lie awake and debate the details of a shared fantasy. The whole town’s, really. He was never the same but somehow more fully human having at least allegedly drowned. And drank all that water. More and more these days I cannot believe I made up a single story, or am no longer if I ever was fully human. If any last vestige see it here in my whirling blue rose just amounted to hacked files of God bloody and bashed on the fat wooden T. That is to say I blame myself, least of which if not especially for not having gotten the chance to get to know the real and true Charlotte, beneath all my hostile assumptions. Lord, how many bake sales arranged under false pretenses? How many imagined? Within such limitless, frothy enthusiasm. Boy howdy. Man alive. Thirsty delusion, this last claim has made waste of me and for that I say Sorry. Saddled as I was with an inferior predilection, I delivered a ham-handed proposal thru videotape that went to be broadcast across the whole state to my eternal embarrassment. Where were you, Charlotte, when they dragged the first trailer to that coal camp? Who hauled his whole family and three cousins across half the blue ridge, when the early evening crickets all sang together and a truck full of boys with their tub of green soda shouted for joy? Who closed and reopened that old woman’s legs each time her water broke for them boys, boys every time, one after the other? Manic tomatoes obsess over blood. About being full of blood and ready to explode. The threshold is the nervous system. Can there be thought without a nervous system? Is a vine thinking its way up the wall? Ooze Like Preeny House Dolphin Buckling under sunglare, I set off in unslapped clarity in full resignation toward alignment toward mantra toward a man of standards choiceless in shards all in how without sound toward where without faith lost in doglike splendor toward a posture neutral as imprints in the human moist begat the sunglass and starling alike when a thing with eyebrows rose up under wave after wave of karma thinking wildflowers into being in service of my as-if, the off-key film score of a life on a loop at strange and varied speed then valiant without compromise for want of willful untacky to reach with an icy pride toward wow I hear the angel all that you’ve done here is nothing now a thin sheet disappears seen from the side and all that seems to matter doesn’t all that I’ve spoken into vapor settling into a pool beneath me rising to my throat when I lost the dogs sent a shrieking wind saw a sleeping blade flip over and flash in the nightlight in the absence of even an as-if a want will plow itself without stars into nearness to be where again provisional O sinless fissure sent glowing I stand again smirking unslapped before too many kindnesses unslapped beneath stars unslapped before charging dogs toward halfway heaven I pray for unslapped virgins spent slapping a day through crowds toward wows of heaven forbid without boundaries unwound in starful murmur O bruiséd reed O eucalyptus In me, unimaginable koala, ancient koala whom purity be smooth and starless tho imperiled for without want of possession to proceed sleepingly beyond the peerless ancient shrug generous o well o deep water cheery gleaming I was marked once I knew And let go Let drift Let loose Without shame Til a face Parched in light O queenly light In light of you There are bells In the clouds Bells Ringing bells truer Than all brass In all light Of all suns And hidden wings Hung just so in the air Just for falling I am found And how Harpless In human moist Last among counsel In the first thing that clung to my heart That you made the trees And the grass And all the little flowers My faith whittled down To just that Unslapped O restless rabid heart Illuminate thy footprint In greenly nurture o heart To wander unseething pre-invisibly toward ecstatic shards in such eerie holography Batwing Bran Nestiful Batwing Bran Nestiful BATWING BRAN NESTIFUL When u have a froth. Thats gettin the filthy job done and right. All in all and all of a handful of cognitions away from able to sustain the all at a normal wavelength from here afall if allowed if unfollowed. Who will assist mango framely a gathering? Frankly and bummed from Example Alan to lost his face hand to sorry. And then boulderly w the juice of silence tumbled to sour an Alan et cetera too fallow lousy bright oblong station but obedient windy fixating until traitor salvation the posh chemical gymnasium. A butler drowned, you all. You all in fault of you and all of you. Then after words after wind-whipped and borrowed months a feeble self-offer. You could uh sell uhh much at a uh diner. Sustain life maximum heartache like where's your dinner coming from. At the start of this I thought we had a shot, he said and spit. That guy. Don't say guy. You guys. Don’t say guys. What you managed on the street was part real estate. Welfare. Infrastructure. Now because you from of all: a pair of asses stall to star in cementing other people's legacies. To specialize in infamy like their inspiration melancholy television counterpart. Followed by a call to resist trauma-based programming. Which is what these days is all everything. As much slime as we do. or ooze.. One time as we do this thumb will seal a pretty harder. Microtip special, humiliation station.. Bran bran food dim miracle moneyback miracle worker money & hm If you're not careful someone will call you beautiful say in a language not (un)shared, or strained in translation be on alert in this body it is said beyond power The nest nightly unfrittered - in relief - will w jewels glisten in coolly * A bright but elusive color palette impels the homunculus to explore the area behind the mouth, behind the nose and eyes, investigate their heat - without heat no roses no writing no fractions up the wall were you here for a little paper in the first place. Strawberry Harvey and (bought) the technicolor ham and still what's behind the mouth and eyes. (sure to quarrel over fair share) Flinch repulsion of fetus inches behind the face. Dandruff in relief. Blank fetus poised hung hovering above summit of throat. In darker deliberate technicolor jazz & (lacily) taste behind face. Wimp of valium, wool dishwasher whirring to teal all soap suds aghast. Liver-like throat, fetus convulsive inches behind the face. Strawberry punch spiked with oracle entering, no small haven of Valium pinched on a spit about the eyes ears & throat for a deep deep seep inside the deep in a face. We'd simply arrange what time is it 9068 windover daring escape, cool metal eraser glaze fabric, dryish green fallow thought, humble cloth caper, all spin mix with the whirring floridome. It speaks. Remember holy the biosphere. Campaign raise awareness of the biosphere inches behind the face. * Revenge of the nits. Dandruff without relief dig like plunged liver outside the gut-supple face. Nits up rain pole rutabaga shine. Stella said what said Saul said baseball a blimp full of blood. Gamboge tendril unsteady pole-alight pencil. Wet water baseball pole rain head pokémon raincoat antique dubuque raincoat spider egg pewter. Resting the haver, will have have having finally dinner, scotch. Adjust a complimentary little chickenhawk for strangers. Ranger flayed, ketchup-coral meat pile ping. Whole oregon went tasty aloft. Like a broke terrain spooky unfrazzled wine-coral destiny savage askew. When I told you to meet me at the jerky do it oracle Jordan. Possessing strength. Phrase root. Here to listen micro listen. Stomach cancer. I borrowed alabaster scrap metal tunic (crush-dusted geode authentic with tentacle). Now the job glistening sparkwise among allies. Boss Baron tongue hang plaque-gasper grasp: pathetic. Designates me periwinkle coconut asp rancher, so wine bark fades into glade. Circus tent sensitive peppermint pepsi fresh tactile barometer syndrome. Fuckin task-nasty ass dweller. Forsakenly done some, scum Baron done some unmistakenly dumb. And done. Done and done. Ash ash for all for life. All afterlife well after lash sash assassin Dover, Maryland. Prow of sable. Ditch desert salmon granola, I pray real simple my practice overboard. High silver burnt over orange over jokes, percentage my sister sleek like well-rested achievement & willing to show up against & again of those choices, willing in several with lime we can do double do these are cold with the sets, Are in relief the quite frenzied. Agreed. Agreed But: keeper kept egging pout low cabin shout stout confront him watchful attraction producer hose, Swoop ____ Swoop cherries glows hairy sigh glider, that’s a murder. pal-pauly asymptote basic. style vinegar cherry express. future birth: delete space, delete space frankly, netspeak golf delete stately bob delete delete pink space. * (Back about Face, rest of it find come back out about what happen ill) Bit storm abrasion, old caddy gravestones Beet sold soul hole sound hound Toronto Byron Ecstasy Friedrich von Kevin Boris Trumbled Bah Humbug Bowl Order Bowdown Brow Crow Stow Owner Down My sibling how feeble ease cherry phase beagle, feely skin swiffitips whisper in season. How exclusive the stage. Rarefied victor steadily increasing contemptible. The only acceptable pride is visceral and uncalculated. The only authenticity is thoughtless and unaware. Intelligence is dangerous demonstrate at your own peril. Inches behind the face. Airwaves & Alabaster =. How light in the last part of a document. Blue is the color of my Ascended Master. Wax is the candle, blue is the color in flame. It was the orchids pass it on (it was magnolia 2---- Blythe fruit rogers stings citrus, tempo allegations gets the dragon fit to ride. Contemporary storm is polite; exists only in the before and after. Without consensus there is no storm. A naturally-occurring soup of 'Want to speak' assures the transmission of a collective message without ever a single solitary Speak. Until the Wants resist in protest and the soup turns bland and slowly an attention is had. They stand still. They feed silence into fever. Docile nut job double crossed His name is Email and all he ever says is "Not interested" Spider says let's talk about culture email says Not interested. You get the picture Look at his big hands and long fingers like some kind of king his long hands and fat fingers like he's some kind of fucking king he thinks he is If he's not careful someone else will be living his room before knows it. In such danger O king. I don't think aware. Yes unaware daisy fruit scepter, maladaptive coral-essence bottleneck ocelot cottonwad ass garden. Ass garden. Ass Garden. Ass garden ass garden Ass garden snakes in the ass garden o my god o my garden my ass garden ass garden snakes in the ass garden god o my god o my garden Just when he was considering a secretary Look how long his fingers are and that weird look on his face Imagine what you have in common yuck He presses them into his pelvis for his bones to hurt. He knows he doesn't get enough exercise He knows three songs on a guitar He's losing access to what's vital Them long fingers will wither o dream blister pal 3 Monster scoff. And we're off. Applied to Vietnam. Applied to one more. It looks like the videotape to the words "Buzz" are in the alphabet. Pita. Yes. In terms of inside breakfast this funky paranoid animal deigns to mask it up for the Recover a Jess. Tony, She's a weeks. Bleat phony bleak, fake opaque summary, peak pheromones rote indigestion, both need parrots and bleed some topics, bum shove it and punch it around the room. Paraglide homeostasis ballistic Albuquerque pivotal solar destiny epistolary post apocalyptic fissure itinerary scab domain. Scab domain. Bursting get out of here, ya cause I know the type money inheriting. Blister glitter, life's a riddle the recipient imposed watch-scoffully. Carefully runner attention ready every time they type. Deify the storm. She gets drafted and he gets access, when jims here to crucify the numbers. Whether they’re one or are one in number, we must miscue. For there are Charlatans when your therapist can't hand over the sunshine. Septum revolt. Then one workshop we visit a toy store, the kiddieish table & toys. A fat and kind gamer came in while a kiddy announced he's your brother. Porous and blue-drunk, sullen fall manhole fallen immediately, much energetic in face of frank postural, stinky disputant antimony to the day-crowd obligations we talked about. So it's. Bunch in a skill set. When I stand up multi observe in reflection, candid procession, everlasting plastic, gel pen keg wart pheromone body, hobbyish 24 hours a week, pine blossom hard tough to turn to that yesterday. Making me feel, turn to the class leaky feel of afterwise, pal forsake ignorant otherwise shown. I thought that might be a truck screech of voice, teeth-piercing sheet. Bar burying barbarian prairie king I'm potluck soldier inevitable pause frankly I'm really reams to recession mandatory skill set. U need a package a day, Pepsi? November? the foundation? Gosh, thank you. Brindle Barry. His mouth splattered in drag. Everything's gone downhill urine the arrhythmic tick. Dipshit. Heart. Tell me you and Bear shouldn't reaffirm your favoritism, hourglass (for sake o the Parks). Wait! Switch the visit for waking hours. Gatekeepers fallacy, I lean back on chair and rest my case/ face. Gelatin Albuquerque. Anonymous right now. James Coldon, James Haddenburg, Eventual Willoughby let me this process to work thru a trauma, Detective Burgenshire. All manifold of the hypotenuse square. Journalism. Nantucket. Rudeness. When you've got to know. Expend the political divestment, pay me. Ralmatten. Porgrof. British emotional airport. I think a person at 75 here can you hold this, filthy expendable? gun control And where are they going. They exist. Without markers. Intelligent learning. Ah-ah-ahh, eat-your-food. Would've raised anything reasonable. Five year old says no weapons officer does he go to jail? Yes.. leans on the balcony. You know that old stair where they got that girl all laid up? Tips his hat back. Float along that street there until you get giggle-chills. Then pout gigolo. It'll have to fast-Nancy you onto the domicile, you might wanna recuse yourself. Horror holidays tyke happy hunting. Poof. To the witch giver’s. Whatever the bell was well it rang. It was grumpy and I won't exclaim what I’m cursed to take to bed while I'm- & with bodies before notice, dizzy instability of moment, pregnant shivering aurora ouroboros, lights out- I could did and would will freeze up at any time. Teletubby. Accompanied. Friends and family buried around the steps. Quivering * your dream again amen again .. holy horseshit .. again holy horseshit don't look at him again and the power the image gains in your resistance holy horseshit in the stall the barn stall contracting all quivering horseshit in the stall the motel lobby clerk conversation all ever horseshit from a vacation to just two days to asleep on the floor missing a sister wife and the dream condensing into the center of consequence of you there horseshit in the fetal, holy horseshit with reverence increasingly, reverend run down the road in assistance with the lost of your clan and you helpless but the thrust of the help of the reverend and finally you there at the bottom with a clear Hm at the reverend bare in his ministry where never you'd had the ill luxury which from to meditate collapse and proceed, still there in the horseshit amen, approaching grateful willfully but without the accompaniment of reassurement personified and only then from the mutual faith in the other, now among none but the missing and the horseshit and the absent motel clerk and the sleeping street reverend found the right stride to gesture recording this rescue mission driven now by faith in the prospect of a strong lesson for the next generation, the stall still horseshit sink-twisting with the increasingly fetal in solitude condensing faithfully toward a fate less dreamt, with real dignity in horseshit, with women still lost with scribbles and hindsight, scribbles and god bless us til horseshit in the shrinking stall, god Bless us amen again amen til when & bless us all * God bless the cockswinging damned, god bless the aphids, soft metal sharp metal sleep, sheen lick of metal god bless us all and vice versa et cetera, god bless the Yankees and the chiefs and Steve. God bless uh Maryland. The fine string strung tightly & clung and the purple thumb of the reverend it hid from. God bless the pterodactyl. The uh pterodactyl again what could it hurt. What's the difference over eternity bless her as well an amen God bless the weird beer at the wrong time which hands did shake over. God bless the women who filmed it. Honestly god bless the women who filmed it, no shit. And the truly fucked undevout withering stunned on the other end covered in horseshit amens. Fucked finally ever, decidedly ever in horeshit amens I say stately in hateful amen. When barnblaze & Kathy with Ashley in secret the barn space went sloppy, the frothy hush underbelly of blaze-radius townies did dip into action. Such is their calling. The ask-bags to weep in the desert unfucked and unhugged, Miami unbuckled, from gossip-impoverished. Glitzy chrome yeah-tides sloshing accosted unsloshing forgiven. Cal poly technical institute. They ran their asses out of town. There are labs in Maryland how many. Dabs. Sick. The American flag. Sick. Pumped. Ready to fuck. Absolute dumbest of shit. whittled down, poisoned soapstone burial, yellow pastel pore orbital gosh under muck. Much muck in done orderly. Look up there at the flag. That's plants in the American flag plants ripped apart the flag do you say go plants because of it or ruin yourself naked in protest at the gall. Just the gall.. Do you wax polyester at even the thought. Do you water em til grow it more plants out the flag. Make it green again the flag the original flag was green swear to god. Green flag. Bleed green. Green stars green stripes green Kevin potting soil leaf stamen amen Hung gore out the shit. Practically habitable news glacier plasticine glimmerous aorta fluttering depakote avalanche, freeze fried and frosty benevolence slow-lacquer caramel motor oil Albuquerque ding dong Lancaster fat separate fat non-native fat pancake batter wapalo Texas Kevin Cornish game hen wrench the senses up here in that I used to be a regular Calculatory Dog of a sheriff mcgillicutty Now that it’s done & we're back in the jungle to no in-between. Funds in preparation puce bite pickle diddy hom-wolloper cockamamie Arkansas willowberry ashcan callous Alice discharge the sissy in charge. Providence welcome VonGleeful, harrowing glad-clad Excalibur marketing initiative, Baron vine-whipped into the black crow across acres of better funding hand to government one hand to access one hand away from potential torment away from human playing cards tickets to let me take attendance mandatory resistance let me sign something here let us know by chance or choice a willing body permits disengage its faculties to us hernia, bitch area, rib tits, tits & slits, piss willow his daddy whiz kid hiss. That my caddy boss wound ouch-shouting valid looter two points if ya listen to it. Iowa scooter Public housing investor. What was I gonna say poem. Three things. Maybe it's just... Couth? No. Shavings? No. O were we no longer allowed to suck derelict smog sap, o to slap on em pocket boys bind-evasive terramony (via ‘alimony’ bwo enviro-immediacy). Don't you agree. Blindly. Grainted? Toward the official shrimp smokestack? But George suey still aint he up the hill screwy. Jobs-->Joirs. One beautiful paycheck. The Dharma Army (her monthly payments you're responsibility say it to them). The pet value of em the pet bill em crazy. Shall sum. So you think is the correct strategy. Yes Yes Yes yes yes VoicemAil. And who said that to you. VoicemAil someone's home. Sounds like you is it you, sitting at home, on the phone. What's the most hidden cash amazing in my life. I was gonna tell you later but high unemployment bug bomb polyester snapdragon warthog palindrome needle variant taxonomy left field Albuquerque syndrome, alight on doctors had no time I bet you never talk to people that way, here boy spoon media high caliber Bristol aluminum can brand exorcism. And it's the anti deposit Friday congratulations. Chil (a guy interrupts, reading for 5 minutes interrupting). Hey why don't you print that hang it up that's amazing that might be a story hope you ride both stations maybe it's a poem. I am referring to cornshells. To eviant. I am gonna list some cornfield image crazy two pencil in sorry I get like excite to reading I could read like story in the summer. Can I say something blue jeans. In sad, ae We're talkin bout sad for that Letter poem we write. And that's eerie.. and that's emotional cause what's not there is going on around here and what's gone everything the manuscript should do. And I know so youre finally productive. And like aside from the crowd you..testify art mistampl le. Paley will stop you Fartknocker. Pants get back Suzy brief New Hampshire too big a hunch. BATWING SHIT 2 The handswriting was alone enough to put the old couple out once and for all. The change this had on the Iives of the two and their surroundings had a flattening effect. It was a testament to the devotion and reliable good-spiritedness that each contributed the entire duration with very little deviation. Already keenly aware of the relative impatience and substandard pool of others awaiting them brought on an acute, painfully intense period of grief they would in time feel grateful for, recognizing it as a testament to the clarity with which they grasped their situation, and a token of memory that if left unsuppressed could disturb self-confidence due to the excessively rational, daresay unhealthy line of thinking that was winning out under a circumstance in which Puppies restricted dirt and a break at last , pitch groper, yes finally poverty came in clear and with pitch, no playback necessary, at last the raw messy uninhibited Pre-, defying years of programming , cum daddy stuff, meet the cum daddies man , reason to die recalling REASON TO DIE I just need one reason to die, one reason from recollection into happenstance I can safely occur and lowly amble resign into dark dreaming. Step into soft soil. Simple arraignment. Sleek black coffin arrangement of flowers. Magnolia, rosacea, liriodendron tulipifera, excesseroni. Tony excesseroni. Lol. Ok. Ya [the goodbye tuba poems] I wrote these poems on my side in bed over the course of two or three days, always very late at night, wearing sunglasses intended for the blind. The poems are about sexual assault and a little racism at the end. This isn't for serious people. I’m also tempted to say “This one’s just for the boys.” Goodbye tuba 11/13 Poen 11/13 (Editor’s note 2/12/22: This is the “How It All Works” poem for how to read the thing) I stay low Garden fundamental Clarifying Not me writing a poem I go slow I am Toby Poem 11/14 Grow garden Say again no grow garden dribble Only real ones make it to the end What is tobys failure Something to consider Poem 11.14 Tuba Poem 11.14 I make one last REAal effort I spin around wiith the cows closed Bashed eye lids sparkling Wow I am genius: TUBA I’m writing for her now a little Weird running into you Really weird Could have been worse Still pretty Pretty sweaty You had on all brown No more The first sexual assault poem Im so sorry for everything Imt aking my little penis away from everyone soon Just farted No more mr sexual asaulter Bringing a big change to life You gotta mean it to believe it Im honkering all my fancies Conquering all my fantasies lol I’ll never change Bah humbug Run it back nigga Nahhh lol I’m a big time sexual asaulter I made them think they liked it Or wait no they did that To themselves I'm pretty sure I do the thing and they think about it A job well done and simple I wash my hands Seven miles per hour I chose sexual assault It could've gone a million different ways I could've stayed right where i was and done nothing Instead I chose sexual assault Now everybody knows After all that was it worth it Yes and no What a question I hope you're proud of yourself I didn't do that There was more to be said I don't think you took this seriously Look what you did And you think that's ok The seuxal assault poem Brand new tuba 1897 Things were worse then But to bring the focus back on me I committed a serious violation I touched a tit I fondled a breast in the morning What did i do wrong She was sleeping Maybe she wasn't sleeping The night before we were all drunk She and her friend took their shirts off and asked me to get in bed with them So really it was their fault I got in bed and went to sleep Then in the morning I became the fondler I showed her my brand new tuba 1897 things were different back then The day if my assault I was wantsing around the hall Being a boob Making tuba sounds Really headed for violence They took me to suck the yak out of my brain A full drama of admonishment Nickelodeon 1975 I wasn't alive May this poem rest in peace The first in a series of shallow provocations This is for all the dudes who've been accused This is for us bro They think it was such a big deal And to be fair in some cases it was But it's not always like that For the most part it wasn't as big a deal as they made it out to be They need to learn to chill on all that Like imagine all the people who got hurt from what you said Like what if that was your brother A lot of people are in pain from your words But you never thought about it It’s honestly fucked up that you never even considered that My frinking assault He sat on me so I couldn't breathe Because I beat him in NFL blitz 2000 I sleepwalked and pissed in the trash can He caught me and made me go take the trash out I was so gross and smelled so bad I never cleaned my room He made me take a shower He showed me how to clean myself Gross now to think about Now because of all that I'm not to blame For any sexual assaults I’ve done since They give me a much lighter sentence Because of all the sad crimes done upon me I'm just another victim in a long line of victims Thank god Destiny's child Bro I seriously don't even know It's only a matter of time Not much longer now I let it all go This is actually fine Much to consider I'm an artist Aggressively shitty artist I do sexual assaults Oil on canvas Play tuba in the mirror With my sunglasses on What is a guy really supposed to do Everything is assault They just decide later So what I feel ok Uhh thank you This is my gay little chapbook The theme is tuba Im a fine art master of sexual assault Theres a fog of desire around my penis I feel the woozy vibrations Way down in my bewwy When im about to do a sexuwal assauwt Youre a sick person Bad man Youre the reason things should be how they are Thaats violence Lol Im gay Im a gay faggot People say im queer I went queer to hide my crimes I went the trans for clout route I go gay to do sexual assault Undercover gay guy Fucking hot girls who think hes gay Going trans to avoid the cancel Its going down See you on the other side brother I let it stay slippery I do violence on your thing when i let it all hang loose Its fun Doesnt mean anything Dont care how you feel Im a slippery little faggot lol Goodbye The last one They want me because im white You can tell sometimes Im ok with it Why Why not Glib Bad Racist Racism wherein I take on the subject of racism by talking about it Im racist Im like obsessed with race Have you told the authorities This is such a danger My big one on racism I'm writing a big play about racism with some specific parameters. I don't want to run into any objections when it comes time to get it on stage. So I will keep things real simple. It will be an all white play about whites who are racist and stay that way. Tackling the subject of racism by showing how it doesn’t change or gets worse or something. All five characters start off racist. They are all saying racist things to each other and over time they change— They become even more racist. They blame their problems on people of other races and bond over that. They become closer to each other through the power of racism. They have white children who like them can't write plays about anyone but white people but it will be different because they won’t want to. They won’t know any nonwhite people. They'll have moved out of the city by then. Life will be easier. They'll only know about racism through stories their parents tell of how it used to be but they won't really understand. In the Afterlife They feed you pennies until you’re like a bag plopped on a stone in the river under the soundless rustling of trees, your feet brushed in the endless rush of salmon. A man in a canoe rows by, asks you to join him again and again you decline. As the day stretches on there are bluebirds silent as the trees they settle into, the sky growing mauve as you wait for him to return. A NEW LIGHT or WHERE DO OUR BLUEBIRDS FLY to be swept in a midst, in the midst of something looming, considering something else, O but always considering breath, dancing with the ever blooming room of maybe, ever blooming room of how can i make this mine, how can i regret stasis, how can that man hit the child with the baseball bat whose house burned down mysteriously, reasonably, as so: Didn’t they always wonder anyhow? That man I suppose they always did, with their neighborhood eyes they wondered about him if only for their own sake, they said for the child but in truth for the body itself, in truth for its own, O in whim of protection, O in honor of grace could they take to the field and consider a new light, with their banjos and such & consider something less--, something less fractured or enduring or necessarily--, as if to unfreeze for the sake of against-Christ, to defer Christ for his own sake, to then consider at least imagination for its own sake & imagine this, imagine if pain for its own sake, can it fly as the frog imagines flight, at least fleetingly? or at least in its own right can the pain consider emptiness as the needle flies, for the bluebird and where, and where do she fly?, as salvation frightens the weak, as if some blind motivation, as judas loved christ, as christ saw no point, as he gazed toward the ever blue sky, as the crisis itself in its own right considers christ the child, as it considers walking the line for its own sake, please for its own, if you would, could you even? For its own sake in its own right to consider even the frog? Consider even christ in his own right to defer? as if the frog a new buddha, as if a spark in its own fever, in some riddle, as if where do our bluebirds fly, as if where do our bluebirds fly? as if the frog it wonders with a gaze toward the ever blue sky, toward each and all true, and where do it fly? & so earth will pile the bones, & in the end it will grip us in its own chorus, in a chorus of elsewhere, from a slumber of without-weakness, in a chorus we barely in recognition consider like a frog blowing gracefully in the wind, like a feather on the pond, if on a tadpole supposedly, always if supposedly, at least some education to make it all right, the as-if-education, a flash in the jungle like dew a moist new dawn of at least new dawns for their own sake, of a new light, a new place to song, at least as if to clear this magnetic fog, to breathe in the blue, the blue a new peace in its own right, for its own sake, to transcend the girth of civilization for the people in their own right, for their own sake, & to own that, really own that, to know we breathe not alone, to waste unending with the axis and pray, to pray for its own sake and consider like a small thunder in us, to ache with this, or to at least be as if charged with a something-or-other, if even that, if even how we wished it could be: enjoyable, necessary, even all if only for its own sake, enjoyable at least trying peddler of marked distinction, the pillar of ash, the waning sliver of moon left of this dying thing, a drifting whippoorwill, the heron’s wings on the final grand flight toward ascension of the posture, frightened lady of the second apocalypse, weep elsewhere, stand solid as marble, then as if to end the chiasma, chimera of dead hope on the dawn, lightness of believability, the frying likeness of smoldering gods on a stolen pitch, fractured vice of a people, wailing incoherent chaos without insight or reservation, to touch the complacency, frightening and dogma to the burning of the flag, til dogma no more, til belief in ashes in the mouth of the forest, to deliverance in a pocket of fog, as we lay here dying, as if some floating pollen of a young man’s dream, as we in sweetness recall, we step alive as some divine practitioner, guardian of the altar, forest of dense fire of dreams raging, gnashing as if toward its obvious conclusion, solace of emotion, fresh urgency, fresh guttural outpour, we are the surface on which dwelling finds its way, breath of the collective soul on a great storm, an end to indifference for proud, strong mountains, a new belief in ashes everlasting, ashes as if on some new morning, & if willowy & abused, if shaking as dust on a new moon, we find it in this aching chorus lightly, luminous entangled on this dawn, the unending axis to that end, to end a nuance easier than music, less recognizable not in the desperation of belonging, not by the struggle with the windburned vagaries of arms outreached, not the breathless agitation-- our mind the sick eye of some elusive derelict, the O if this catharsis let it be the almost real, if to let at least the almost real consider the daisy, consider the tallest man for the sake of the people for theirs, to consider the flag in its own right as grossly exclusive, unnecessary, and how she sings in her wild blue breeze!, to own the breeze as if to end, for the blue!, for the blue for its own sake in its own right!, to tie the ribbon too tight as if for its own sake, & of lessons for a new history: against stasis, against weakness, against flighty violence, against wrists as blunt instruments for the sake of shaking for shaking’s own sake!, toward a new light!, toward a new light in its own true right!, even if only for its own sake, to frankly oppose the what-is-known, for the new place to recognize wandering for its own sake as pure and enduring & to dance in some frank gardens as death grows jasmine for its own, then as if suspicion ending, for wild and wild and elsewhere i will find it, in the great moment all are from and among, as the gasping cluster of stars ushers us in from the boundless grace ever-present, from the ideal vision, through the restless patient pulsing aura below the light, we step alive in the wonder, gaze endlessly toward the brilliant blue and gather within us the divine, the aching thunder ever breathing, ever present flame, O passion!, O to touch the pure beginning!, to graze endlessly in dream, in the lush field under orange sky, to bask in it all, to steal away toward a new light! to find our new vision and dash forward, ripening in its true new path, O should it all be! i’ll insist upon it, now i lay me down to sleep, out from the great aural war fought with forged tongues, out from massive exclusion, from disgraceful indifference, still i rise, still i sing my bright sweet song of morning, of the gaping stars and the precious specters that guide us in and out of the great wonder, in a holiness more patient and willowy, O for all things passing as we fade away, O from below for the rowing rhythms, and for the fiery sky thundering without reservation, O great wonder how from nothing yet aches within us unmistakably and always, from a pressure that stands between the silver and its sun, O the restless agitation, O endless grazing star. O will i touch you once more. To see the one true burst of life at the mouth of it all. O reverence! O passion! awestruck in the oneness of god, O the river and the light to pour forth in all directions, O do you ever flow we have been burned by the wind, down to the wild nothings which stir beneath our skin in electric coils, seeping through the virginal omniverse spreading its musky smoke through sweet sectors of luminescence gone fugitive, raked with glass, ignited, gnashing in the new storm 2. Those of us forged in the fires and flames of a thousand red suns who made plans with the shadow are called to bathe others- and bask -in the wild blue light all are from and among. I will find it. In the gasping cluster of stars which ushers us in and out of the great wonder. And their raging expiration! From here to eternity and back once again. O great wonder how from nothing yet aches within us unmistakably and always! From a pressure that stands between the silver and its sun! O restless agitation! From the unshakable wisdom ever present ever dwelling within us.. The holy river and the light which pours forth from life in all directions. O placid wild brevity! I will find it there. Hiding in the seeds and the flowers. In the wild nothings which stir beneath our skin in electric coils. Through the omniverse spreading, parading in a sweet specter of luminescence gone fugitive. Raked with glass. Gnashing in the parastorm in vague aspiration. To use. And be used. To forsake the blind man for the mistaken fawn. Wan beauty, vapid lust scraping corneal caricature of light. Heaving on the promenade. From the without-justice chained to this gasping soil. O rabid Soul, Illuminate thy Footprint! Whip at the veins of our teeth The Angel flings bowls full of coins backward, slow glimmering arc rainbow of the full moon. Tall withering pine. …… …… …... Slow-Shattering Crown I confess to an inner density that refuses to dissolve. The lost souls of stray dogs and flayed jackrabbits have been almost fully subsumed into the black holy ghost, from whom emanates which potent perfume of gaza? I have been appointed witness to an erosion. I thought myself an unworthy thing... In the long run the body disengages like a slow-shattering crown in the maw of a hippopotamus. Violators They are fueled by the fallout of energy in the execution of daily distractions— in the time spent deciding which lamp, which box of cereal, in the protracted hours of getting dressed. In the moments past the amount of desired liquor in the pouring of a drink, in the brief and blank attention paid to an ambulance, in the silence between friends when passing a beggar. It all goes to the violators. And they’re happy to have it. You can spot one by the way they respond to a stranger’s genuine concern for their health and well-being. And by the manner and circumstance in which they ask forgiveness. Instead of white linoleum beneath fluorescent lighting, a violator in severe stillness may perceive an aqueous pulsing in the color spectrum of bruises. They will remain focused on the speaker, still waiting in expectation, after a joke that landed with everyone but them. You will notice two of them in a community and find yourself unnerved weeks later when they have become inseparable. And always that simple stare. And your choice to linger. As if in acceptance of an invitation back to some primal area. You will convince yourself that in just the way they smile at anything you say, they are seeing through the many layers of you, past all the fakeness, right to the naked core of desire that ought to be left unpunctured. They are a patient bunch. They yearn for a place where the blinds are drawn long before natural sunset. Where they can begin to undress and become again whatever it is they really are. A Body Down the Block An anticipation. Something in the blood felt and left unreported. You curse yourself in the dark, unrelaxed, a reflex. Where one should let hope take on an iridescence, let accumulate in the bedside glass of water. I could allow that for you. A place where you could listen and learn to be. Transcend the burden of recurring memory. Soften yourself but not disappear. I wish we were only here to talk about blood. I wish I had the words. To walk a dish of brownies five houses down the block at twilight, peach and pale. To reach in through the curtains of your open window. Where I felt your voice beyond the veil. Where the shape of your coming petrified into parentheses, held to form an oval. A moment. Something I can take home and own. Then grieve by easing into sculpture of mind its smooth marble, smeared with nightshade, all in royal blue. I reinforce thereby a necessary distance, a reminder of the limits of bodies, of brief exposure, abiding inadequacy of neighbors. Notes to Self To the part of me who still wants to explore the pyramids— I’m thinking of twisting my head off and sending it to Egypt. The rest of me will keep up with my work, studies, etc. no problem. To the little guy that lives in my ear— Decatur elevator natives played her song. “Betray her, then evade her traitor’s pint of Gatorade,” they sung. To the part of me that believes I can make sense without making sense— The moon would say I was a good boy. I’d love to finish what I started, but my favorite commercial is on. (It’s not gonna make much sense.) I think a lot about what’s coming. I’m haunted by Nickelodeon. My life is a series of canned responses. (I play yo-yo w/ my therapist.) “You’re a real good boy,” said the moon. I ate a sucker, and now I’m all right.— I’m not really all right. You can find me on a park bench pretending I’m not watching television. To the part of me that thinks a lot about what’s coming (To me, from me 20 years in the future) (A warning)— I make copies. My niece fell asleep in a bag of dog food and I thought that was really something. I fantasize extensively about wrestling an alligator. The crowd cheers, chants my name as I offer up the child, unharmed. I eat chips in my bed alone.
Triptych of the Mask of Death
in search of so little
i make a fist and nod
i am finally sure
i need an advanced tea
to grow sophisticated
look brother of this raindrop
i have made tea
make the wow face
and to each other
hoist proud the new wow
nodding wow i here
in search of so little
in fist have at last
[Lily May] I slept again with the blood. I proffered rage in spite of mounding circumstance. I reveled in the spit left unnamed that fell down your face. It was always blood. Nothing else could scare us into action. Scare us alive. In praise of what reigns in the slop and silt. In praise of discarded memory, in the rashness of burial. To which hydra in hatred today do I send up my snarls? With what sour enema, in praise of which beast Have I availed this waste into song? 2. I speak with the blood in any sleep I abandoned. Your stillness is violence when it fails to bleed. You have been counted safe in the hydra’s captivation and the hydra is laughing. You are sore in the mud, O sleeping thing with lips, O precious blurry body unused until soon. Your pretty mouth is a thing and wow they are snickering (...) They are glittering delight at the blood in your eyes. They have ritualized your smothering into song Where you are delivered so they can live on. 3. You are unpracticed in charming uncertified. You are without ghosts and without blood and Pretty creature alive left unused. What a sad fate we never fucked it out! What a slow creature I am forgotten Aaawwww~ No instead I will sleep with my hate. And not ask you to brace yourself for anything other than what is already there.
[O Heavenly body under watch above my willow,] O Heavenly body under watch above my willow, Have not ye smirked upon my blood sprinkled with glass? O skin hung taut from hooks in the air all unstoried and formless, Who will be worthy to sing you into parable? He who is one with the blood with the strength to stare softly into the lesions He who has knelt to lick the braille on tender piglet teats Are we lost in the blood, Terence? Have we lost touch with the flesh? I wonder if there will be horror at the edge of all this Spread out read? Or yellow in garments beneath the oak moon. Transmissions from Lily May You are like light cast into the corner That shone through a window fresh with blood-- Off the waves a glint of light flashing Choreography of sea and sun in the empty room Where you are still leaking, blood pulsing through your wound like waves Lousy dance of blood and light, room I am called to remain Buddy, are you lashed with light in the morning? Are you the only one on this bus? Is it the grainy cement you almost taste? The papery skin in the wind as you look away? You will be led to no atrium. A new strangeness in the laughter of children will imply you are out of prayers. I have sung for God on the orange wind in the feast of my flesh. I have spent violence in memory squeezing out meaning in the flash of waving grain. I am tickled with the slow blood, I am drunk with hate for everyone with an opinion. I am fake nauseous for effect at your maudlin as-if display. I hereby puke at the sunny savagery you dare to call justice. Red, brown, and white is the color of my dick smashed into feces with a mallet. If I had a gun, If i had a gun uhhhh I would watch the roses. I would pitter-patter through the selfish leaves. Could monstrous roses sneak through piles of them raked. O am I alabaster calm. Lily May Again I promise you are not forsaken. You’re aghast in the rush of what’s all around you. You are drooling diamonds in the brittle aloysius. You are self-made stagnation resplendent uncomfortable verily wretched Oliver. Your pose is known. You are drowning in luck. You are ashamed but not frightened. There is a cure for this. There is everything you’ve witnessed when there is little else. You pray on a lake. 2. Thank you, Evelyn, that was marvelous. Your cake spent naked away. I felt empowered to condone violence in your atmosphere. I staged an autopsy to nod along to. That we could sing ourselves awake in arms. Lily May ~ Papers “You have wrapped yourself in a cloud too thick for prayer to pierce” -Lamentations 3:45 Let loose in the where with a less than expected, Let down to arrive at my violation-- I have filled our floor with dirt, with African violets All that I made you have not seen. All that I’ve done here is nothing now-- A thin sheet disappears when seen from the side, And all that seems to matter doesn’t. Response to Lily May I am looking at my hand. I am still looking. I have prepared myself beneath you to do right. Why do I, am I always calling? Lily May to Me The black beads stretch further into your past than you know. She hung them on the bed frame for him, these These rosaries, They were ours before they were yours. Lily May, Please I stretch my hands, I wilt. I stretch my hands. Lily May, I am static between us, I am light. I am everlasting light. Lily May, I have sung you alive in the choirs of boredom. I have sent you hapless into this scuttling wake. Won’t you be seen appeased. Won’t the light shuffle in unannounced behind my stuttering prayer. Lily May Lily May, in our excrement, In our thoughts and deeds. Still I smile at the circumstance. Still alive, alive and how. Alive and how. In such violence. In such violence. In such violence. (Glory) Glory to the night Glory to azaleas Glory alive in the shuttered violence We have separated one precious thing Lily May O star too thick with heat. O heart weighed down by so many wings, With what pressure am I moved to exhume you! What simple thing I reach to find. I am set with lungs again what moves in you, At rest again in the blood. Until again until. Scurry sacred. The Big Bombing Every time I pass this block I remember the bombing. 😬 Even today, a young girl walks around the block 40 times. 🤔 Even today, a young girl sobbing on the stoop, hoping for a chance at fame. 🤩 At the start of the third class of the year Gallo announces that Emily B. believes we’ve all been liking the class. 🤝 I go into his bedroom to change my pants before class, he says Could you not? 🙅♂️ I go into another room to change my pants, he makes another announcement, I can’t find my pants. 😟 Hannah H. stands in front of the markerboard. All the lines say 22. It’s her birthday. 🙂 Her mother says aren’t you forgetting something? 🤔 Hannah erases all the second 2s, replaces them with 7s. 🤨 Isn’t she older than that now? 🤨 Hasn’t more time passed? 🤨 Isn’t this the type of thing Hannah is known for? 🙄 The girl who rounds the block, does she want to be famous? 🤔 What is it about the bombing? 🤔 When we were accepted into the class, the letter said we were expected to be familiar with the faculty’s work. 🫥 I went through three pairs of pants. Jeans, dress pants, and finally I found some old shorts. 👍🏻 Which it turns out were not mine. 🤷♂️ On 324th St. she sits on the stoop and cries for hours about the bombing. 😟 She walks around the block 40 times wanting to be noticed. 👁️ Her picture is taken hundreds of times, at different locations. 😮 When you work in the government, you are amazed anything ever gets done. 🤭 On her birthday, she is seven years older than she was. 🤔 Unclothed in the kitchen, she erases the markerboard completely. 🤨 She puts something in the microwave. 🤨 Her mother says Aren’t you forgetting something? 🤔 In the teacher’s bedroom, there were boots on the floor and clothing draped over the bed. 🧐 I wanted someplace private to change into my pants. 🔒 It was her birthday and she was seven years older. 🤔 The bad boy artist said Get out of my bedroom. 😠 I was more than familiar with his work, I admired him greatly. 😬 She was seven years older but she called it five on the markerboard. 🧐 Her mother said you know what. 😰 When you work in the government, I forgot to tell you, you feel pity for the conspirators. 🥸 You know nothing ever gets done. 😴 If they only knew, at the highest levels, how nothing ever gets done. 🤭 Had Enough Good job laughing Alex, 28, Lawrence, Kansas He's done fine for awhile Over and over and over. Be not proud like no one said. First thing blue, other red. Come cum dumb rom Go lem cigaret Derno Flomwy Ohhh… wow.. No… Bowelly Boris hoary disavow Now proud owner how tho That route actually is OK. Now Stop. Shh. How I must whisper about the dead. Doomed so to grow to huge blue w the crew in the cold ocean (the arctic..) Oops, you lose. Crew flees. Big Derno wallows shallow, scoop swallows walrus all alone now Sojourn of Weener Loosing the harness in the quiet in the sky Losing whatever pirouette no one ever reasoned Why an unworthy calling unmoored allowed How in the procession of name and age, O faithful au revoir Learn to shove the empty chair away from one you've sat upon Greedy go out proud with a loud sound. Metal flower, you're not worthy. Screechy needless creature in the blink blank breeze. Muck Umber Balm…, it mouthed. Mudslap soot-drunk loamy ochre demon Tuesday motherfucker. Won't go near him. And how. And they'll mulch o’er the river, Lord. Glory be damned. Poo pot willowbrook sticks and stains. They're tearin apart uh we're losin uhhmm Hold on. Omen-Ra glory be anyway, y'all shouldn't be out here. Snakes and stones. Glory be to a birthday’s chance in hell. When you're randy just wiggle that rag at em. Daze of Hate Om mani peme hung hrusen Dem orange arctic cowboys Adrift encircled upon floe White white white white ocean Om mani peme hung hrih Orange ain't the color of my enemy White Blue Red Green Yellow This is United States Army Expedition. I smell some purple hearts! Om mani peme hung hrusen Bless my boogers, I will wake up hateful, wield my hatred, fling my hatred willy-nilly stewing searing hatred, Om Mani, no more! Mouthy Snore Tactics He is one worse than the devil makes relative the devil to me. Well, I never! In all my years. Come so far in the face of so little. Of this fluttering flock of what’s further away than if just now begun & thus peaceful, nod off, big-picture like. Sentenced to chloroform. After a few sample people who just wanted their name and face in this poem, I found me in want more like blood to shine. Starfish between their uhh toes. He actually mapped that out. Really meant to rub it in that he even could. Heard that across the pond. And he wanted a sunroof. A simple call was made. Soon the perfect child conceived, but only so. Always blistering, as if the aim were to undress some grievances. And absorbed in the work as I become, forgot about the blister. I found some old toilet paper. What Never write again. Oblivious cleft lip left glittering in the lighthouse. Isn’t it— Isn’t it true He feared for you Didn’t want to leave it that way, campaign of lame. After you can’t handle him. Even if they thing of your face like deary doe-eyed. They will be sure to lose you. Toss that fuckin cheese into the wind. Lavish in pity. In apocryphal gain. They film everything. I forget if Enter works sometimes... Then just proceed with every substance as if delicate as glass and hold you to the same standard. Same precursor. Mouthy. General mouthiness. A child. Mouthy Snore Tactics On and on the litany of Dear Johnnies, I aimed to compare instead the Angels but ended up just with 10,000 of weird things I hate to remember people do. Sir, you took us to Night Trick, not Angel’s Theatre.. That’s what I would have said were I not enthralled in my personal search for Angels in Night Trick anyway. But ‘that’s not all’ or ‘that’s just it’, isn’t it? I want to every thing. That isn’t a robe. That’s not it. That’s just it, I mean. With enough cloth the make one in this eruption of black suits. Robes, I must return to the Angels. Cuz there are plenty, my lord.. This is far, far too slow. For whose blocked voice must we begin to qualify if we’re to receive our uhh demerols? Before that it was cheap. Was it 13, at one point? “One point one…?” Hahha I told her when her face is vial and her face is lighter. And her face is higher in the air. When her face is tighter and more lively. And if yr face starts to slightly improve. I will take notice. Her face like a revival. Thought you could weep yourself into spirituality, you idiot. You onenote whole song. Good one. How could you(, youuu,) fool to fancy yourself a sparrow in your own dream.. 7. The one I named afterward about the nurse and patient “Well you did a swarmy little job today!” the nurse hissed over his shoulder telepathically to the mute patient. Of whom I have no clear picture. “This is the alternative. We are going to be immediate and we are going to make stuff happen,” the now-female patient thinks instantly, never hearing nor processing the statement. In her unwelcome fantasy as director of the hospital. She was once such a good housewife she knew which furniture before she even entered the store. So you gonna let her go through with this? In that trapped brain of hers every plant went slam. And so finally all the dirt, at long last. She takes all her demerol. All. Long last. Anything to feel weightless again. Stop, we just want to talk about something. She comes flying out a window. 4. Crucial, Mother Earth To some people Ohio is not an abstraction. To most though, it is. Most of us are like O hi Ooooo. And that shape. In godless comradery. Repeat until hatred is sewn. I grew antlers and climbed up an elevator shaft. A child shot and killed his friend for sleeping under his bed. You may never see this, but THANK YOU for waiting that extra 15-20. You know what you did. I appreciate it still. You have a strong eye and keen sense in general of I think damn near everything.. And if somebody allowed me, a close friend maybe Drew who wrote a bad word on his shoes. After his first buck he was not so proud of antlers this side of the dream. A lifelong anxiety born that thanksgiving, Ohio still some far-off, awful notion. “Go on, try somewhere else. It ran its course and lived here already” -Me trying to shoo off a curse, status pending. You are cordially invited to the debut of my dry, barking cough, for which there will be little relief over an uncertain duration. I walk into another public place, make yet another face, more strained and full of that too-common minute and inarticulable worry. Strained. I find it disgusting some would have us fight through this without our drug or drugs of choice. I feel compelled to congratulate myself on staying comprehensible, tho reserve the right to digress. If I could I would advocate for the rights of insects. Imagine the precedent set for human interaction, the assumptions made implicit by Insect Rights laws. An art project, for those with the stamina, the wherewithal. Back to my dry, barking cough. That you are forced to read this, that I am this inconvenience, tho you would never admit it, and perhaps insist on the opposite, lover of literature (and people? me?) that you are. This will not be read again. How do you like Iowa City? I used to hate soccer, now I have no opinion. Diversity. The alt-right.Question, answer. Spin around the light pole. In my family, before I was born, a man would call a woman pig at the dinner table for having too much mashed potatoes. My inheritance. My son shouts the worst thing one can shout out the window of a moving truck. And me, somewhere in the middle. Where do I fit? What all have I done and forgotten? I bleed the things I cannot grieve I sleep to read by feelingly anull I peel away sneering from seedy breeders I speak the need to feel unspent aloud I reap the leers I deign to queerly flaunt I screech a tree into existence, such is my green-conscious conviction I declare Albuquerque on my enemies. I seek-desire unfurl the languorous scrolls of tomorrow / yesteryear… to put to bed/unearthen/wield anew aloud the wool-gatherings of bashful revolutionaries, war-weary rebels grown taciturn, ready for mummification. I wish to drink the sleepy poetry from crestfallen executives I ache with the flagging ambition of visionaries Slow-eroding low, murmurous poem of a dumb kid dumped scribbled discarded scraps of song that absolve into sobs Count thee (me) among the lemmings of Dissenter from Doubt, then debate, then dissent Queer Glare The thrill is less in living than in rearrangement of the lived in a display at once wondrous, freely summoned, comforting. My friend Rhoda showed up in a dream and said this (and this is all it is) with a flip of hair. Yes I have begun correspondence with spinach. The art of a first marriage, a green engagement, proud loving dog owners, allowances hidden in the air that apply at midlife. New Mexico (Albuquerque) as a burden, when as an escape one is drowned in a wealth of what flourishes. How in mocking legacy as a project, in dissolution of the emotional landscape of rigid definition, Pal floundering in watercolor warm w distraction dizzy(in) in vivid liquor before early dinner at the pro shop. Relic of Greek syllabus on etiquette which foretold the spit-take. Traditional echo in the Guild of Manners Fancy (etiquette, again) Wan spigot drained of luster will fissure, too adamant blueprint eschews youthful wisdom. Excessive purity of grace spawns bureaucracy, (tread lightly (my trefoil..)) wheezy lemur has too fully grasped a hyper-condensed conceptual tragedy, calls a lemur powwow where solution is individual focus on other concepts- for each lemur a complex idea to grasp toward crystallize-- faux pas + funeral + contested eviction + reenacted nostalgia falls short + fishing w dad + Christmas-- all regather in hands to impel a central psychic mixture, relieve the initial burden, finally come to a new appreciation for the breadth of experience in the parallel human species. They are nicer to us now but committed most fully to contributing to and expanding their own consciousness. A million fleas gathered in the shape of a man approaching thought choose to scatter a scream of Skittles among twilit leeches. This is their premature rejection of complex realities surfacing from a spectrum (color, emotion, raw data of DNA). “Upon no prize steed weaned from that scene after blending with cold steel, then gently recalled, did I announce the frequencies (radio) I esteem and charities I fraternize & feed.” --Peucil Bow, Jr. Ranger of Theoretical Cognition, Personal Abbott Invest yourself in the slow body, sense a growing attentiveness to sense in cycle. Sense it low murmurous and commit renewable patience, growing smoothly less concerned, flexible enough to apply ‘fashionably religious’ to soothing, dream the mollification of luxurious hair, a cloudspace learning to drape itself in willow less admissible in the mind but with round hopefulness, capable of repetition which resists flatness remains lucid, to seem safe to flirt with violation, retains of its essence what otherwise is lost or lessened when sussed out. Specifically it is the breathing. It has been agreed upon with a flavor of decision that disguises its underlying systems, modifies its processes while operating. Shame as a pumping engine, shame the adrenaline of an amorphous psycho-anatomy, when survival requires a flexible identity, when personality is a luxury... If you aren't drowning in Albuquerque, rehearsing obsession forever, preparing blood soup, delivering what shines. Also elsewhere all wherever so aloft allowed. All of Albert forever. All hail drown out. --Peucille Bowe <}}} acorns Is Woke More than Just Dissent from Apathy? A Tubular Punk Rock Thinkpiece on Taking Real Action and Protesting Like A Fricking Boss! It’s My Job to Integrate Limestone Back Into the Scrump Wedding Economy But I Only Have Fourteen Digits and I Just Got Diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder Dragging a chainsaw thru the desert in fresh high-waisted Wranglers. Tony gives a mean look at the sand and buzzes away for a moment, then turns to the camera, removes invisible sunglasses, and says Bom thats me out there, and your watching Wranglers the adventure. Ride with me! Chilling in front lawn in a bathtub-- I found myself one year in a stretch of winter, often most alive in the deep night, [or at least more likely approaching Lively in the mind], enduring a gray that wore away first what had been a healthy social life, then through my grasp on the basic virtue of companionship, where until human interaction as essential seemed more a proposition easing into fully under a spell of depression, a blanket of seclusion, a hibernation I felt helpless witness to, slowly allowed, then fully embraced. I willed myself into a separate scene of life, of similar idleness and leisure but in summer outdoors, in a friendly little neighborhood, in a place like the home I shared with distant relatives during a transitional period in my life many years ago. I appeared lounging in a claw foot tub on the front lawn in large, dark sunglasses, sometimes with an umbrella, perhaps sipping lemonade and with a supply of chocolates. On the last day of camp whispering into raffis ear to scar him about the way the world is At cyc - messing w dsm. Knelt down and locked eyes w him. Took him by shoulders and squeezed hard enough to beyond firm to painful. Bark at him and shake him at the key point. The only constant in the world is Lunacy!! It fully broke him When there IS a mosquito, there's a mosquitos idea of peppermint. Which I personally find wildly unfair and a testimony to injustice, always in favor of the fly. Egg-whites he's melted down manybsissiaka. And that's exactly what metro is saying but the plot is here attached. [When I found out the truth...] When I found out the truth about how you make money, we were both drunk. I told you I didn’t care, that it’s a job like any other. It’s work, hard work and that’s why it pays so much. When I said that, you were sitting down. You shut your knees tight against the cradle of your folded hands, looked out the window and said you loved me for the first time. I knelt on the floor, took your hands and kissed them, your knees, your bare thighs, burrowed my face as deep into you as I could bear, knowing this was the start of something. [The Jason] Really Unwheel now. Aand for the donut Longman Eagle (Jason) was mute by choice. As in he never took control of his life, or didn't want to, or… fantasized on faking dumb so he could live the lazy life he could shrink within and disappear, and in fact did, for stretches did, but with shame. And with the details came never all together for him. He often quit a job abrupt, dick in hand, for only that glorious American climax, the wholly unhelpless walk triumphant from there to home and the long sleep that awaits. Once in a stretch between jobs he got carried away. Days were replaced with [ ] asleep or awake, all out of step with the sun. He fought the sting of Losering in a common way. Today he visited the flower district to buy poppy pods: his batches were weak lately and he decided to give it some time for the seed dealer to cycle through that round of product. Going straight to the source was riskier: if you went down there and fit a certain profile they'd turn you away (The vendors were well-experienced with a certain subsection of the market and would take the pods out of circulation for weeks at a time to discourage them). So he made sure to look right and the trouble he went through to manage this he reminded himself would be well worth it. [It worked.] He made a batch and poured himself a glass. He recoiled fiercely at the bitterness of the first sip and was pleased: a strong yield. In another swig he finished the whole cup. In another half hour he was nodding off and decided to sleep. The first seven or so hours of normal sleep brought nice dreams. Deep in a mountain cave with a view of the blizzard, watching glittering fish in a pool at the birth of life. [dreams] He woke up feeling heavy. The dull grey light from the blinds meant the day had begun to fade. He felt defeated and lay his head back down on the pillow. In his heart he wasn’t sure what he should pursue. He thought sometimes to join a monastery. Like the faking dumb, though, he had doubts about being able to keep up the faith, which seemed paramount (he hadn't thought all the way through). Tho maybe he could come to love? As a teenager he had testicular cancer and lost one in the battle. Additionally, the surgery to remove it affected many nerves around the area. In some places he had lost feeling entirely. He was experienced enough then to know what he was missing, and this knowing put a damper on his life that proved not easily unshook. His baptism was to take place in the arboretum of the hospital. Jason spotted the sole cardinal. Close-up of the cardinal. When Jason smiled. Soon after, his suicide. After his suicide he was surprised to find he could still feel and hear many things. And could still think, somewhat, though it was slower now-- more like, he thought, how an idiot might think. In a way it fit him: he had no responsibilities, no one and nothing to worry about ever again, no getting up early on weekends for no good reason...you get the picture. They put him in a coffin and closed the lid. He hadn't liked when they closed his eyes and this was worse. He remembered feeling it lower into the ground and how it was just like his fantasies. When the thrill from that wore off, and when he was finally buried for good, his thoughts began to shift: He was staring down now Eternity. In a matter of months he had cycled through every memory, idea, all the general significance of his finished life until, when it reached a point that all relevant matter became arranged harmoniously in orbit of the vague preliminary concepts of Eternity and the afterlife (which were being shaped all the while and had been gently settling in and adapting themselves to aid mercurially in the necessary transitions), and when all awareness of the physical body he still inhabited was let go of, began the ease into the everlasting, Jason began to notice areas activated that were at once totally new and ripe for exploration, yet also quite familiar in form, and with often an overabundance of comfort. This is the luxury of the evolved consciousness, which developed at and alongside the advent of sustained shelter and safety. Strange for Jason though as he had precious little psychic material with which to work from the stores of spirituality in lived and conscious memory-- where many people have stored say the rich religious iconography of Hinduism, or find the animated guidance of a guardian angel that is common in Christian children who are passing, the secular end up drawing somewhat haphazardly from the broader culture, impactful figures (often amalgamations), and the more random realms of fleeting spiritual experience that caught hold and stayed a part of the swirl of wonder that stands in place (among much else) of neo-religious identity. down to even the most tiny and physical aspects of our bodies. An uneasiness passed through him that he knew instinctively he would have to confront somehow, somewhere, at some point out here in these new realms of experience. These special beasts, with just their ability of speed, and with a transcendence of technology (or what the living understand as such, recognition of technology as vestige of conscious function and its possibilities), could and likely would refer you to any careful, deliberately- (and perfectly-) constructed abstract according to your need, when any genuine disturbance began to surface. On the first day, staring down an intimidating expanse of possibility, he created Margaret. As a kind of guide. A common ‘decision’ among the secular dead, anima figure for male Jason to move him thru the ether. She would illuminate his better instincts, comfort or shield him when met with unproductively painful material, and be as often on call as it all allowed or called for. She was warm. She wore purple pants, purple earrings, magenta sweater. Brown hair. Hazel eyes. Bathed in blue light. He felt a warmth like satisfaction, but with a sobering premonition that delivered him back to neutral. If there were tasks, this was one to master if one were called to white out into the sea of souls as some are will or wont to do. On the second day Jason felt the hot air of debasement. If Margaret and her warmth were an overcompensation, if the belly of attitude were left bloated by lingering imbalance in what passed for preference in bodily life. This was something to consider among many as he stayed waiting on what came to name itself the second day. From grief of warmth, he watched excitement snap off, drama fade, and (maybe it was) attachment start to draw away also. In all, an eye opening in the overall expansion (and dissolve) of what Jason, ever-aiming inward and beyond, from without the general experience, was all about. Flattened without dough or pasta, farting without air, or peace with dough...or pasta, unfolding palaces of “it’s okay”, resistance to the pull of what folded out and emerged so gladly as Youth like a bright and strange old pal Sylvester from camp, who personified Beatific Extra or like just to come within touch of his aural. And that meant (not to judge) toward to ratify the forsaken. His playground, its sand, all already confined in the glass eye of who is watched without regard, where watching follows dimly under just the weight of its own hood. Several times a day and intuiting a closed system, Jason noticing the incongruence, soon recognized Sylvester as misconception. And peaced. That’s what you gems do in this life, is it? In a crowded cow barn where you do not belong, where you know to come join me in worship. The cow with zebra stripes and a red feathered mask when she spoke out and struck light in through the barn doors. In big squares. If Jason kept caring so much he would more than be asked to leave. Donut. Jason who loved sports. Who was so stupid basketball. When no one competed in this afterlife. He couldn’t even wait. That made him a trailblazer, he would be hailed a genius, a loved one. He gained relatives from the ordeal. He inherited helpers who insisted on easier shits, and he could not complain and sat still. Basketball. And all if un-only because of it. Daughter, he cooed to no one off-camera, out of focus, [Our limited therapy’s nonetheless cherished, and further I have good news: I found money.] It would be worth the peeling of skin. Worth the vacation with a local boy who lost bones for their sake. Say grace before supper, both parties. And you think just because a boy has patience, he will know how to sneeze properly in our culture. And to wring neck skin by the fistful. Ripe arena for petty theft, psychic-ripe for stomach cancer Back to infinity ::: wow to be inspired. Wow. 400. 75. Ants. . … . . So then finally the third day.. Some cool shit happened today. They turned the heat up in his place. Sweet, great, thanks. From the get-go I have felt shit on. The sole responder on call to mop up the vomit. For the one who puked up a 2. (That's right, a 2.) Heavens, I am plum grown afeared to mosey.. And man alive, if I've lied.. Hand to god. Hand to god do I count myself one among His heavenly favored. Humble tho I am, as I am. Humbled, as is narrow be the gate. My heavens, How! And so few among even the righteous that shall, it is written, feel fit to just mosey on thru.. Much less even up on toward. The Lord. My word, and How.. He does not Know and cannot suffer. Fearful drwsy, unmistaken god laid out land-wise all shining excalibur scape of breathtaking my goodness. Fear of casually. Onward faithful to dome. On call. Spirited, and So. My Cal. Friendly. Associative. Barn of Mutual Trust, of Understanding, the Eternal . I am. Aspect of time that not only anticipates but seeks to nourish what has been missed or let deliberately pass
When Is a Man Just Some Dude?
Do you ever get so worried you start barking? Ask any door:
Skin and optimism are luxuries not all can afford. Flotsam and jetsam.
Don’t google it. Flotsam and jetsam. Difficult memory.
This is the truth. I was this age. Flotsam and jetsam and now
a presence. A disease. Stay hungry, Virula. Stay patient. A path
will be sewn for us all in the red red winter of our sleep.
Flotsam and jetsam I’m too high to drive. Too drunk to walk.
O body, shelter I didn’t ask for, I have stretched us both out topwise
in the collective mirror for the psychic fuel of a perverted diocese.
I have sung myself pure in the salt mines of boredom. I have tried
Lord and failed to scrape my skin of your name. Here’s a secret.
When you wash your face at the end of the day.
You look up expecting a mirror and see nothing.
How you ask the essential question by remaining silent.
There you are again. Exhausted and no closer to the source.
How often walking have you stopped at the wall
and let the other one go? I mean. Maybe you did get the job done.
Or maybe you’re full of shit. Maybe you’re healthy
and clean but with minimal perspective. Like the golf clap
for so many immigrants sent home in a final van.
I mean. Hadn’t you been supportive? Then so why
do all the children wear masks? He asked, answered
himself privately, and asked again. Still no answer.
You just do what you can with what’s available.
Flotsam and jetsam. If someone won’t respect you,
whisper. Godspeed shuffle through that godawful mud. Shadowing I wondered what being a police officer was like so I asked Officer Julie if I could come ride along one day with her and her partner, Officer Angela. She said that would be alright as long as I was okay riding in the backseat with the dog. When the day came I was surprised to learn they weren’t the K-9 unit. They just really liked having their regular dog along with them on the job. In fact all they really talked about was the dog. It was nice listening to them, but I wasn’t sure if I was learning anything. We got two calls that day. The first was a report of a man in a colorful shirt hassling people on 18th street. By the time we got there he was gone. I asked them if they ever arrested anybody. They hadn’t. I looked at the dog. The next one was a stolen tricycle, and we had a suspect. We pulled into the alley behind his house, and it was right there in his backyard. They went and knocked on the back door. I saw him run out the front and down the street. “Looks like nobody’s home,” said Officer Angela. “Think we should take the trike?” asked Officer Julie. “Yeah,” I said. “We make it a goal of ours to do one good deed per day,” she said. We all smiled. “I think I want to be a police officer,” I said. The dog had its head out the window, tongue flapping in the wind.
i feel like a sun dried tomato in autumn i feel like in august when the light burns and there’s no one there to set you free i feel like a junebug in a past life like a burnt up rat tossed in the ocean like a tarp left out overnight a hollowed out rock blindfolded in a van a tired old ball of clay left out in the air a baked bean. a single baked bean. or a weird garden with nobody in it. a muppet with a drinking problem waiting for french toast in a sleazy diner 125 dollars toward a college education a little old lady cutting coupons the week before she dies Departure If what expands in me in all my wandering were more for want of better seeing, less in bitter entropy, escape... If in brief skyward glances, something pure enough to stir the heart’s attention from its sleep, I’d set the stars to singing in its wake. I’d ride the tide of everything that grows and spin a golden thread of fine design. —cheap echoes in a still disordered mind. I’d better trade the fancy of an If, if only– ha ha, there another– I were patient enough to deliberate. I guess instead I’ll button up my shoes and set off caroling before a snooze. THE MYTH OF IS & WAS I. This is the MOLD & This is the MAKE & This is the MISS of IS & WAS THIS is the MISS of IS & WAS II. This is the MYTH of IS & WAS THIS is the MYTH of IS & WAS This is the BUNNY & This is the BOW IV. AND THIS IS THE FUNNIEST GUY I KNOW! When They Buried Blanche I did alcohol to myself I got rid of the ground I slept in a wish She was my wife for 45 years They had her on pills for depression They had our son on ‘em too She used to sway to herself in the sunlight I cried like a baby when they put her in the ground Boats Whenever I go over to someone’s house, the first thing I do is ask if I can spin their globe, because I know it opens up the secret area behind their bookshelf. They say I have to promise to keep it a secret. I beg to tell others and they say Ok but only one. I lie. They don’t know that I’m secretly writing a book about all of this 🙂. We both have green hats. “My life did not turn out as I planned,” they say. “Me neither,” I reply, “I could not keep up with computers.” [drawing of breasts 👍] I was secretly drawing breasts with my finger on a place above my knee, over my jeans. “We both chose intentionally difficult lives and it shows,” they said. “Yes. But we developed character through suffering,” I said. “I’m not so sure I did,” they said. “I don’t know, either. But that’s the idea, anyway. Maybe we lived with difficulty because we thought ourselves special enough to overcome challenges and achieve greatness,” I said. “I gave up trying to understand at some point,” they said. “We both gave up in general, I think,” I said. “Yes, we did,” they said. We looked at a secret poster on the wall in the secret room. The caption read: The enby spokesperson for non-alcoholic beer volunteers at a soup kitchen in a never-run series of commercials. Many have claimed it ends with them drinking a refreshing Budweiser. “What did I have to do to make you want me?” they suddenly asked, crossing a secret boundary. “Do not allude to a shared history,” I replied. “Answer me or I’ll scream,” said they. “Ok. There was a princess and a rock once. We were neither. Let me go, I have regionals tomorrow.” said I. “Very well, then,” they replied. They went to the other side of the door and closed it. I was trapped. Then they popped out the peephole and poked a pistol through. I had been warned of their Jewish anger (🙂 anti semitic joke). I slid a pansy into the barrel. “This proves nothing,” they said. I opened the door as far as the latch would allow. I spoke through the crack. “There is no sense reasoning with you,” I said. “I have two grandchildren,” they replied. We were whispering between the door. “I was born in one place and raised in another,” they continued. “I won awards and became a finalist,” said I. “I volunteered at a church,” said they. “I developed a passion for American folk music,” said I. “I started a foundation for disadvantaged youths,” said they. “No you didn’t. Other people like me did the hard work,” said I. “You don’t know anything about it. I would propose a truce, but we are not equal,” said they. “I agree,” said I. One of us began fiddling with yardsticks (more on this later). It was excellent! Ideas flowed freely. There were no accidents. Every state has a lake. Every lake has depth 🙂. Everyone has feelings when they go to sleep. * They sat down for her interrogation. She put her hand on her forehead. “I answered all your questions. Can I go? I went icewater fishing once. Can I get a drink?” * I can hear beautiful music coming from another bedroom. It sounds like car horns at dawn before a private revelation. I value silence. “I was thinking you might go instead,” I said to them privately, when we were no longer involved, whispering alone to myself in the dark morning. “I have stomach cramps. I have kids. I was given four days off work.” I thought I would be working. They put me on a shift at Raccoon Warren doing Yard Times. I still roll my eyes every time I hear the word ‘yard stick’ 🙂 🤪 . My mother would not know what to make of this. And a big ‘You are welcome’ to all the kissyface folks aspiring cohabitation. On its face, noble Kevin McCallister. Its innards are forest brown. I used to think my life was a tragedy. Now I know it is... My whole family died in a car crash on the highway, while I was at drag queen story hour ☹️… I should have died with them 😞. Now I don’t do anything. I don’t even play video games. I just look at the walls in my room. This is the first thing I have written in over ten years. I will never write anything again.
How to Get Cool
You get cool by receding into darkness.
Start riding horses with the weird side of your family.
They have like a million acres out there.
See a tornado on the horizon.
That’s how my dad got cool too one day.
What’s been up with you lately?
Tilling the cold hard earth.
Though a bitter wind sweep sharp across the land?
Is that a snake in your boot? Was it all of no use?
Brown sob. And all the little pupils in self-burial.
Ladies and gentleman, start your dowsing rods.
I’m not here to make friends.
An Old Country Farm They lead all us kids down into the cellar and have us watch a film of Grandma’s death. None of us really have faith anymore, though she was very religious and wished to pass that on. For the encore they call a few of us up to the front and demand we perform an exorcism on the little girl who lives down the road. We pin her down and she starts to get really wild. The holy water doesn’t do much and someone gets the idea to use a tire pump, like to pump up a balloon or detonate TNT. We pump the demon out of her— a fat dwarf who tosses a brass mug in the air and vanishes. When the mug hits the floor the little girl walks home. We’re all lead upstairs to the dinner reception hosted by a poor uncle who announces he has cancer for good this time and proposes a toast. His wife’s face is all blue with makeup and she turns to ash when they clink glasses. Part of the room catches fire and the lucky few who both recognize this and are not compelled to remain seated escape and burn a ring of grass around the house. I answer a stupid riddle everyone knows the answer to and get unstuck from my seat. The crowd beyond the ring watches nervously to see who’ll get out. Horses, dogs, and donkeys of those still inside amble into the ring and sink into a gray muck forever. Then Grandma puts out the fire and everyone’s saved. She distributes canteens full of bleach and lighter fluid. I ain’t your fuckin Grandma, she mutters, This is the Devil’s farm. I take a deep breath, purse my lips, look down and away, blow the air out through my nose. At dawn a silo rises in the distance where they’ve prepared hot stones to place in our mouths for the beginning of another long day. {Love Letter} How does it all work, then, Amelia, after the venting and prognostication have exhausted themselves into a dewy glow of perfect absence that irradiates poisonously into the aquatic nether-regions of your own basic and inescapable ineptitudes? Do pilots and sick puppies truly spend their lifetimes immersed in a sky without shelter? In a preponderance of characterization that is without precedent and pitifully malformed? What then of the wire transfers, and the alligators who have no agency in the realms of the subtle or among the overabundance of kindly strangers in a post-territorial and legitimately angelic paradise of unwavering pleasantries? Who gave you permission to extradite my willfulness into an uncommon wilderness with that despicable hypnotism of yours? Why have you chosen to extract yourself from your status and enter the dregs of this boogiedom with the flashing amulet of all the unearned wisdom accumulated and lovingly dispersed by your betters among all the lucky ones? I am not after an argument. I am purely resentful of the awesome elegance you carry yourself with so well, and I stand here in humble admiration of the countless incorrigibles you have managed to convert by the simple grace of your enduring presence. I am afraid I am almost out of time now. Please respect my wishes when I say I am no longer interested in dentistry and have only enough moxy for another handful of go-arounds before the sound of a gong. Ok, I lied. While not my truest fancy to remain among the indebted, a corpse that slowly rots has at last completed its decomposition and taken root in the life of a plant I would be risking my life if I had to name here. You are greatly appreciated, and the patient kindergartener within will now begin its long bath of assurance in the tub of the unyanked plug full of all of the ways in which I have changed. I promise I have not entered but exited another nasty psychotic episode, and I know very well now this frothy groveling will win me no rekindling nor grand reunification. But as a seal squints out into fog from an errant floe of ice in the wake of a collapsed glacier attempting to parse out the light from the fog over sea, I offer you innocently this final transmission from the most broken place of my heart. I will love you forever, but perhaps now only in the soft circuitous fashion of a drain that is winding itself down, and when the waters of everything re-enter the plumbing and carry themselves away into the sewers of this city, I will watch and anticipate mindfully the final gurgle from the mouth of the drain. I’m in My New York School Era
My reputation is at stake.
My reputation is very bad.
I spent a decade drinking myself into blackout and I can only wonder at the reports that come back to me as I have no recollection.
Sometimes I think it all must have been a misunderstanding.
Sometimes I feel guilt because I sense their hurt or their story reveals something I had previously suspected about myself, something ugly in my motivations and attitude that I keep suppressed sober.
Sometimes all of these.
Now I’m writing paeans for Ghislaine.
My poems will be known for their urbane wit, interest in visual art, and casual address.
Critics have argued that my work is a reaction to the Woke movement in Contemporary Poetry. My poetic subject matter is often light, violent, or observational, while my writing style is often described as cosmopolitan and world-traveled.
For the last ten years of my working life I have made between 12 and 28000 dollars per year.
I have had to move back home twice.
I have abandoned all sentimentality and am proceeding headlong cynical in pursuit of the paltry pittances doled out annually to artists in the city.
Details have not yet been disclosed regarding how much chosen artists will receive per month or for how long.
No one's reputation is safe. I am not above slander and libel to achieve these means.
Any legal action taken against me will only serve to increase my profile.
I have been to jail many times already for offenses more serious than these.
Literary community. Do not underestimate me.
Great harm will come to you.
Do what I say.
[I stand in the park and begin shouting slurs…]
I stand in the park and begin shouting slurs and it’s Christians immediately all coming to hug me saying God’s grace will heal me and I am loved. They are coming from every direction to save my soul and to shower me with love and forgiveness. All you have to do to receive the attention of God’s people is commit a great crime. If you commit the greatest crime of all the murder of another human being and are sentenced to die a priest will come to you personally and offer to save you and all you have to do is accept Jesus Christ into your heart and know His great mercy and you will be saved.
At my death will my last words be I give my soul to God? Am I leaning on the everlasting arms? Will he open his heart with blood and water pouring forth from his bosom? In my mind’s eye in my cell I look away doubting and strange. But then I know one bright morning when this life is over I'll fly away. [I know too when they choke your faith when it goes underground that it lives on in the folk and we access it there and it reawakens the spirit in us.] But I digress.
Together we can destroy all life on earth and when we are the last alive we will climb up the mountain with our urine soaked sacks and sing fullthroated to sun Who ends death for ever and ever with the power of love we do we do. And who radiant smiles in We conquer the curse of death we do we do. Wow is the power Now is the time we sing out the power of death over life. Wow is my lover Now is her name we sing out the power of love over pain or shame or time or something. Here is my pistol here is my sword something something something my life and my lord.
Wow is the power and Now is the time baby I will love you every single day of my life and never Ever give up on you until the day I die I will love you with my whole heart you are the best friend I have ever had and loving you has been the greatest joy of my life I know it baby I feel it this is my Great love for you I know together we can do Absolutely anything and my heart is on fire with the love of one thousand suns burning with passionate love for you Mother of all life and love and God I will preserve and protect you from All evil and Bad you are the Love of my life and greatest joy of my entire loving world baby I just love you so much and you are the best friend I ever had and don’t forget to check the parking brake and that thing I got ordered for you is already on its way and I will destroy all human life in the name of My god My Love My given Mercy we will rape death into nothing for ever and all of time baby Just you and me Smelling everything in sight Stabbing foreigners to death in the streets Murdering homeless joes on the street Falling back in fields of rape Every single day of Our life with the love of my world the light of my entire Being baby we are gonna freaking Make it everything I ever do I do it just for you baby we are an unstoppable force meet me on the mountain baby I am coming to kill I am destroy all human life conquer curse of death Wow is the power now is the time Who sing out the glory of God baby We do We do
Every day I am making hundreds of mistakes and laughing crying smiling and loving all at once. I am completely myself and I am every single person I see on the street and we will all join hands and climb up the mountain together to conquer the curse of death and gain everlasting life for all of mankind. We sing out the power of love I am swelling up and nearing ecstasy with all the love that has ever been known on earth. The sunglare has bruised my eyes deeply I have been granted a Holy seeing. We are on that ultralight beam we will destroy all human life on earth!! But the radiance of our holy Mother dissolves the flaming sword!! All of our relationships and memories are flushing the love and blood from all my body with their deep Meaning.
I am gathering all of my most meaningful friends in same room we shall all join hands and pass bread from hand to hand and stare deeply into each other’s eyes and confess our deep feelings and be Nodding Yes and Validating before comprehension begins. We are post-comprehension flinging wine bottles at the wall and drowning each other in all the love and light and romance of the moment we are removing our skin and mixing all the blood together and taking turns walking over the sea of glass like our Lord Jesus Christ on water singing our wild songs of love and everlasting life on earth and beyond. We are shunning death from all we are leaning into the everlasting life we are saving the world from hell for ever and ever we are doing it together.
[My friend was actually DJing at Rash…]
My friend was actually DJing at Rash when the fire broke out. Yeah like my close friend. It had been a super sick set too apparently and he had just got all this new gear and people were hella vibing. Then some guy straight up just came in and poured gasoline all over and lit a match and ran off. I saw a drag queen’s hair catch on fire and she didn’t even take her wig off she just freaked out and some guy sprayed the fire extinguisher in her face and she started howling like she was gonna die. She didn’t even know what was going on. Straight up it was hella crazy bro. Total chaos. My friend might not even get paid I hear. They’ve actually already made like 150k tho from the gofundme which is like five times more than their whole staff would have gotten paid in like 4 months. And insurance is covering all the other shit so it’s actually kinda sick in a way. Like not really obviously but like hella people are getting paid off this fire. I know it sounds weird to say but like maybe they could’ve done it themselves the way the gofundme is taking off bro. Lol nahhh I kid, I kid. I mean I really don’t know. I’m just glad no one got hurt I guess you know? That’s the important thing.
Church Poems by Smokin Aces New Groovy Catholic Era The floating monk near the ceiling snapped his fingers and danced the Jigsaw. You can't condemn rock and roll that high up. In fact, the thin blue bishop interpreted all this as jazz and spun off into the ether. The gold trim outline of the cathedral enhanced until glowing hot and red. It made some want to consult a world without color, with only contour. Wouldn’t that be something? From a tiny place deep in the grass, an ant witnessed the sharp red petals of a daisy lift pridefully in the bright new sun: a pornographic delight to the young faithful, which secretly triggered a series of events that would test the spiritual foundation of a diocese. Kloton Kloton Klinton Klank was a robot that lived in the communal closet of the rectory and desired only solitude. The priests were friendly with him but some among them held the suspicion that Kloton was getting high on cough syrup in the closets when no one was around. They worried that one day they would find Kloton had vomited on their robes. It turned out their suspicions weren't too far off. Kloton painted portraits of his favorite priests in the dark closet. At the end of each portrait, while the paint was still wet, he would toss glitter at the canvas, which often wound up on the priests' actual robes. But Kloton was diligent about covering his tracks using the expensive shop vac that had been gifted anonymously by a family whose only son had once shared a tender moment with Kloton, and so no one ever found out about it. What the Youth Knew "Sundays are for worship, but Saturdays are for holding it up...holding it down...raising the roof...the roof of the church..." or were Sundays for holding it down, and Saturdays... The priest sat hunched over his desk trying to structure a homily around that phrase. He thought about mixing all different colors of paint together and pouring it over an old skull, straight down the rusty old bathroom drain. He met a young woman earlier that week who had submitted to science, in lieu of fingerprints, a scan of a single square of Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal. Years later that's all he can remember about the homily. His struggle, the paint, the square of cereal. He winces privately at the futility, then searches his heart for a greater truth. Baby Blues Nobody who hurt the buried baby broke the brown glass bottle that lay in the dirt over her grave. Joining the Church My agent picked me up outside and dropped me off in front of the church for an audition. I was wearing ragged clothes. I thought of drowning in the Mississippi, the water high over my head. I thought of an unwieldy cluster of white tulips that never quite bloomed. The church had never even heard of me. I put on a happy face back outside at the car. My agent apologized and I told him it was no big deal, really. He turned the volume way up on the radio. And yes I know how it sounds but I'm sticking with him. Women For hours the priest in green robes stood frozen, arms outstretched toward the life-size crucifix hanging high above him in the empty chapel. He thought of the women who cried for Jesus, who were in hysterics at the crucifixion of their savior. Women were often reserved around him-- the collar did that, he thought-- and he paused there with the vague notion of having not witnessed a woman's "passion" since he was a teenager, before the priesthood. The closest he had come, he figured, little as he knew, were the confessions of Tabitha Winter, a somewhat familiar face who had married into the church and whose children attended the school there. She came for confession and spoke of an affair. Weeaboo Neighbor Septum Piercing The priests had a game where when they were all sitting up there during mass, one guy would write a quick note on a piece of paper and deliver it to the priest giving the homily to try to make him laugh. They would say things like, "Father John waxes his butt cheeks" or "Your gay!!" with the intentional misspelling, or occasionally a truly inspired and illuminating abstract sketch representing the Trinity, accompanied by a verse or unique phrase that was known to be important in the spiritual life of the priest who would open the note while he was up there talking. It raised the stakes in a wonderfully meaningful way, and added so much to their experience that it became a tradition across the region.
because she appeared to us here on earth because our grandmothers made a place for her in their homes soft and pink and prominently displayed among glassy figurines and nightgowned white beside bedpans in the distillation of light in the flowing drapes because she appeared to her glowing in white and gold in the woods between a maple and hemlock that place singularly untarnished by the greatest fire in centuries as her radiant splendor dissolves the flaming sword of michael and echoes champion to fatima across half a century the same call to penance and the consecration of the earth to her immaculate heart because here she is on her knees facing the light beaming through the ceiling of his church with an expression of pleading near desperation hands fixed not yet raised to heaven but in openpalmed supplication sweeping horizonward toward the confessional and there beneath a growing screech of millipedes emerging through the too-polished flooring in divine admonition of our neglect of the earth in vanities toward comfort to the exclusion of the stinking wretches and wandering poor in orbit of our churches some unknowingly so she is sending pleas in crystal tones to the lord for our sweeping them away from the steps and may it pierce us wholly in our hearts and set the wild birds all into rapture toward that light through her inspiration and if he moves in the least of things and he does it will catch the eye of a wayward boy sucking his bloody knuckles and set the light in him to growing and serve to soften his heart all the days of his life in the image resurfacing in his inching toward heaven in the slow dawning of the light of her grace and his place in the kingdom of god may the cries lord from their singing fingers up to the hooves of the stars inspire them to faith in the auspicious destiny of man in reminding them of your great mercy and strengthen them toward action to achieve these ends amen
[[This all reminds me of something grandpa said one time. He said you could know everything there is to know in the whole world, you could know the name of every tree in the woods and every fish in the river, you could know every home run babe ruth ever hit and how far he hit it, you could know everything and all that and more, but it’d still be only half the story, if even that. He says you could know every single thing there is to know on earth, but without one special thing it don’t all amount to a hill of beans. He says you could even believe so much in your ma and pa, even to them bein like superheroes, and he says it because sometimes i do, and i wont say they aint because it’s never been proven, and he says you could even believe all that and more, even to havin hope in your own self like to know you got somethin big comin up for you, waitin just especially for you and you only, and even with all that put together, that love’s still the greatest thing of all, and without it nothin else of those might not even be. And it’s lucky for us because if we got even just a little bit of it, just one tiny little drop, it goes right to that seed in us that god had got planted there all along. And there's no rush to it. It just does it all on its own. And it never fails. After papa died mama would tell me, the grief never ends. It never gets better. I didn’t like to hear that too much, so I asked grandpa about it. Grandpa says she’s been taking it hard. And that even if that is true, even if grief never ends, it’s just another way things get born in us, and at the heart of everything there’s always that little light there beneath it all, like guiding everything. And even if grief never ends, love never fails. That’s why I love grandpa. He can turn a bad into a good just like that, it’s like magic. ..
Father
I find myself here dreaming with you
I see you at rest again
Not like you were
At rest
In your chair
Turning to the window
Toward a grace you’d felt
But could never claim
If you hadn’t lived that way
If you took a little more time
Now forever if only
What might that grace have become
Been nurtured into
With all the love in you
That even now I grieve
To see still searching the sky
And for what? What bird
Beyond still calls? What flower
Blooms beyond that wall?
I turn myself to all these
Relics of your reaching
I still cannot release
The voicemails
The magic eight ball
The plastic bag of ashes in a suitcase
Last remains of the body unviewable
The body escaping me still
These hands I’ve inherited
This body of yours
I’m ever called to witness
Arrives again in silence
Leaving strange impressions
In small scenes and gestures
To guide my grieving
To find my way back to you
To work out the world in which
You would not belong
Lyrics
black bells
you razed all the land
you lived out your birth
you drank up a lake
just to take up the life it was worth
you fly that black flag
you better be sure
the ones who await
ain't seen plenty of your kind before
the lie that you live down
the love that you mourn
it will ride the black bells
and sing them once again into form
it will ride the black bells
and sing them once again into form
you razed all the land
you lived out your worth
you will ride the black hills
til they sink you again into earth
you will ride the black bells
til they sing you again into birth
you will ride the black hills
took not the blood
felt not the ember alight in your hand
trace the bloodlines alive on your skin
deep in your cups in a procession of
smoke in search of anything to call love
jesus christ, weren’t you lonely enough
did you spill enough blood for all of us
follow it down it’ll swallow you up
and you’ll never get too close to anyone
never get too close to anyone
for the sake of a place to stay
it’ll find you awake
hollowed out into settling down
strung out in the lungs
where you shook out the blood
valentine, weren’t you lonely enough
did you get enough for both of us
swallow it down it’ll hollow you out
and you’ll never get too close to anyone
never get too close to anyone
i heard you laughing
the deuces run wild
with the foals in the field
the aces and eights
the black velvet takes
and it takes
when the coal hit the hills
weston went still
down to work in the mines
all their lives
i heard you laughing
just the same
calling his name
when she came
will you send up your sighs
to pass through the skies
when her eyes
don't lie to me
anymore
let the deuces run wild
with the foals in the field
let the aces and eights
illuminate
the bloody mark
with all my heart
i heard you laughing
calling my name
the other day
the bull
bull by my bed
don't need anymore
of your sweet red
that you could
raise up
raise up
raise the gate on your faith in them
singing you win again
you win again
ghost in your room
won’t need anymore
of you soon
but you could
raise them
raise them
raise the gate on your faith in them
singing you win again
you win again
i’ll be gone
i’ll be gone with the sun on the rise in the sky
i’ll be off with the love in your eyes on my mind
listen up love cause i’ll only say this one time
i don’t love (you) enough and it’s too late to try
i’ll be off with the love in your eyes on my mind
pray the love from my mother’s enough to survive
on and on love i’ll love you the rest of mine
but i don’t love (me) enough and it’s too late
guess all the love that i got was just not enough
guess all the love that i got was just not enough
guess all the love that i loved wasn’t love enough love
enough love enough love
i’ll be off with the love in your eyes on my mind
pray the love from my mother’s enough to survive
on and on love i’ll love you the rest of mine
but i don’t love me enough and it’s too late to try
at your table
springtime still ain’t right
at least the leaves are green
or do i see
just what i need to
of you
o why
was i unable
to take
a seat
at your table
see you in my dream
i do it seems
or do i see
just what i need to
in you
o why
was i unable
to take
a seat
at your table
lemon door
the prairie dogs are whispering
neath the prairie grass glistening
their home no longer what it was before
when the winter winds start blowing
will your compass be there showing them
directions that their souls are headed for
when the evidence starts showing
that your babies are growing
cause your babies never talk to you no more
when your dad becomes less certain
when your mother draws the curtain
and the ones you love dont know you anymore
right through the lemon door, lemon door
you aint who you were before
as the innocence distorts itself once more
right through the lemon door, lemon door
you aint who you were before you
reentered your life through the lemon door
no you never did meet kyle
in that tiled hallway child
fluorescent something something you desired
no you never do get cool
in an indoor swimming pool
but christ alive you try and then you dive
right through the lemon door, lemon door
you aint who you were before
as the innocence distorts itself once more
right through the lemon door, lemon door
you aint who you were before you
reentered your life through the lemon door
common dove
today i thought i was partly lost
then i thought i was partly not
then i forgot
how i forgot
then i thought i was partly man
part of a part of some ultimate plan
so i ran
and i ran
they know that you’re horrible
they know that’s your oracle
the common dove
the common dove
pink’s not the color of your brain
it’s a pale lime with fat blue veins
and that ain’t the rain
you’re just ashamed
they know that you’re horrible
they know that’s your oracle
the common dove
the common dove
one who is mightier than me is coming after
word wall
hey
don’t play
the lawlessness alight in you
the ground
we laid
wait
don’t fade
the holidays are right around
the walls you installed in this place
we made
waving grain
again
the fair
everybody’s juiced up at the fair
reborn dancing around
their stringy hair
takes a lot of sense to work it out
but the shit i got
ain’t worth its value
on the street
in the care
of the ones that sighed
i think i had enough of their shit
i got a miserable thought
that i keep swimming around
i keep myself running
from the sound
i gotta keep her in my life
but she ain’t shown her face
and it ain’t worth sitting around
losing my faith in days
everybody’s juiced up at the fair
reborn dancing around
their stringy hair
dansville
o should a traveler seek harrisburg
tho you know he means smith
show him the way
and hope he finds dansville
the cats were all creeping
and the milkmaid asleep
the bells were all ringing
in merry old dansville
Cloud
Pilate perched on the balcony
Where they called for blood below
There are rays of light through the haze tonight
That’ll never reach you
He stares at the hairs
On his gnarly knuckled hands
There is love in his eyes
There is nothing but shame in this place
All ‘cause you did wrap yourself up in a cloud
That was too thick to pierce by prayer for their love to allow
Now i'm stuck on a memory that made you seem innocent
Holding onto some memory that made you seem innocent
proshai, anushka
she swung her long legs
pale and bare
through the glare of the afternoon light
it was then and there
i became aware
i was scared, i was scared, i was scared
so i went down, down
crawling around
seeking her secret light
i was struck by a look
she was deep in her book
i was hiding my eyes
in the shadow of her toes
black sun
this symbol dont mean im a nazi
it's no dog whistle my friends
just a way ive been reconnecting
with who i really am
we gather and talk up obscure history
speculate on one another's ethnicity
make all the jokes they just dont understand
and we're doing it all to secure the future of this land
yeah we're making big plans
mama i'm gonna join up
on the day i turn eighteen
you'll be proud to hear i been applying myself
at that genealogy
been studying hard for this interview man
reading german memos on improving gas vans
mama dont cry we're just having some fun
tho if all goes to plan i'll need somewhere i can
hide my guns
daddy we're starting the ethnostate
in the hills of old roanoke town
we are still a bit short on the womenfolk
but we're figuring it out
we got enough ammo to last us a year
if those federal jokers come anywhere near
jon's little sister is supposedly hot
but i'll find me a wife if i have to abduct
or adopt
are there any queers in the audience tonight
get em up against the wall
there's one in the spotlight he don't look right to me
get him up against the wall
i heard that one's racist, his friend must be too
who let all this riffraff into the room?
that one's abusive, that's some kinda cop
if i had my way id have every last one of you shot
Fiction
sketches from True Dancer
Vision
A soft orange light of dusk crept into the attic bedroom and swelled the bare walls into glowing, casting upon them through a cracked and dirty window pane the aqueous and glimmering shadow forms that stirred Dylann slowly awake, guiding his blue eyes open and into focus on a shaft of light through which specks of dust floated like evidence, as if debris from a caravan of titans moving in wandering procession through his small neighborhood toward a great storm.
Smiling gently, still on his side and cozy in bed, he arrived at some kind of answer, keeping himself in the moment so he could explore a little and commit the vision to memory. Those titan souls were like valkyries, following the far-off fires of great men in the past who won their place in the caravan through glorious acts, and soon he would join them. He thanked God in his heart who had been so unfair to him, who had shown him no favor. God who he knew would punish him somehow for what he was now sure to do.
He kept the Glock beneath the spare tire in the trunk of his car, sometimes transferring it to the glove compartment or, when he felt daring, carrying it concealed in his fanny pack while out in public. Recently, he had smuggled it into the attic and stored it inside his mattress, taking it out sometimes to play with. He would lie on his back and balance it in the air with his feet in precarious positions that tested his sense of balance and the dexterity of his toes near the trigger, the game enlivened by the risk of misfire in its dropping onto the hardwood floor.
He would wave it in front of his face with the whirring airplane noises of his mother playing here comes the applesauce until it entered his mouth, extending his tongue to enter and reenter the muzzle with a crazed cross-eyed expression of Kali.
He would tilt his head back like a sword swallower to lower it fully into the back of his throat and poke at his tonsils, then whimper from there like a beaten dog recoiling from human touch.
He would point it at the screen while playing video games, fixing in his sights the gamertag of the last round’s top killer and calmly fire off a few phantom rounds. This response to anger was actually a point of pride for him, proof of growth and maturity, a marked improvement from his adolescent habit of throwing the controller in frustration or kicking holes in the drywall.
He would caress it gently in his hands and gaze tenderly upon it as if on a lover immersed in private creative activity unaware of his watching. Or rolling over in bed in the dark to paw at it sentimentally for relief in a moment of self-pity during a bout of insomniatic despairing.
These impulsive expressions of self-loathing and suicidality were made habitual by repetition, carried out emptily and without foresight or reflection, like rituals of forgotten purpose, like the young wayward and disillusioned massgoers of his diocese, dissociated and meditative in their pews, kneeling then rising then kneeling in unwitting incubation of their apostasy.
So calm and at peace was he in the afterglow of his vision that he only dimly perceived the flash of light and sound of a bell from his phone. Reorienting himself some, he removed the warm blankets, sat up on the side of his bed, and lifted the phone to his face. He read the words as if they flowed through the white light straight into his dreamy visage, absorbing their weight before muttering them into decoding. A text from his mother calling him down to dinner, along with, alarmingly, another from hours earlier relaying the final details of her impending move.
The blood drained from his face and retreated into his center. He reached under the sheets into the hole he had bored in the mattress where he kept not only the handgun but also an assortment of pills. Suboxone in sublingual strips left over from a period he needed to ease off Hydrocodone when he lost his reliable source on Silk Road, the profile vanished one day when he went to re-up. Cyclobenzaprine 15mg which he had finessed off his sister after she was finished with them following a sports injury, a score whose quantity made up for its main shortcoming as a muscle relaxant that did not cross the blood-brain barrier. Three hits of an LSD derivative that remained from a strip of ten he had received in a care package from a sympathetic comrade on Stormfront. And Klonopin 1mg which he had stolen a couple pills at a time over the nine months his mother had been prescribed them for migraines.
He had woken up as usual around 7pm. Most nights he would plod down the stairs in a blur and eat hurriedly, avoiding eye contact, keeping all conversation short. But there was a lightness in his step that evening and a clarity in his eyes that brought his mother some welcome relief. He told her he was glad things were all finalized and that he had found a friend he could stay with for awhile. She doubted this but chose to trust him, let his process play out, while at the same time intending to keep a close eye on things as the last days neared.
Truth be told, she was tired of trying to save him. Dylann had known for months now that the house had been sold. He had had plenty of time. Her fiancé Bob, who was privately disgusted by Dylann and considered him a parasite, provided her with support, saying she had raised a good boy but coddled him overall, especially the last few years. And yes he was troubled but he was old enough now that maybe it was best to let him figure things out on his own. And though she knew better she went along with it and accepted this as their official position. “Cut the cord!” he had said in exasperation one night late into drinks among friends and made her smile. She later reasoned that she owed it to herself. She deserved happiness too. She’d carried Dylann his whole life. And she was 45 now, how many more chances would she get?
At around midnight when he was sure they were all asleep he crept down the stairs and out the side door for his nightly walk to the gas station. The air was cool and he could see his breath for the first time that season. He felt the stars overhead, distant and smiling upon the sealed hermetic creature drifting through the dark. He watched the sidewalk pass beneath him, fingering the gun in his waistband through the pockets of his fleece jacket. [He saw giant horse hooves the size of cars moving down the road.]
Dylann Roof, 23 years old, 5’8” and a skinny 130 lbs walked through the glass doors of the Kum and Go wearing blue jeans, a black fleece, and black aviator sunglasses with amber lenses he wore anytime he went outside as a kind of buffer that made things quieter, more mellow, and overall less than they were. He had left home thinking he might just get some candy and soda, he didn’t need to drink tonight, maybe he could add some to the manifesto if he had a little caffeine to help focus. He wandered up and down the three aisles, lingering in one area before abruptly changing direction, retracing a path, hovering aimlessly. He put a six pack of silver tall cans on the counter.
“You play Powerball?” he asked the clerk.
“Not me, no.”
“That’s smart.”
“You want a ticket?”
“I used to be smart.”
“What’s that now?”
“Everyone thinks I’m stupid now.”
...
“Do you think I’m stupid?”
The clerk opened his mouth and started to shake his head.
“You work at a gas station, so you must be stupid, too, right? Or people must think that I mean. I’d rather not have a job than work at a gas station. I don’t mean to sound rude. I don’t have a job. I just think I’d rather die than work at a gas station.”
The clerk nodded, sensing a situation.
“How’s the shift going? You’re on the night shift, right? Here all night?”
The clerk nodded again, glancing at the wallet still in his hands.
“Yeah, I’d hate that. Maybe if I got home before the sun came up it’d be ok. Feeling the sun rise, all that light start to come in, knowing I’d be getting off soon and just going home to sleep. Such a helpless feeling being tired in the early morning, everything all backwards. Rather just skip the day altogether, you know? When are you here til, like 7/8?”
He started to answer and Dylann cut him off.
“Are you all hiring actually? I mean of course you are. You always are. No one stays here more than a few months, right? Or nevermind actually. It’s not your job, that’s annoying. You don’t give a shit. I mean I don’t know, I wouldn’t. I’d feel annoyed if someone asked me that. Maybe that’s why I don’t have a job, huh? Heh heh. Anyway, thanks for the beer.”
He picked up the beer and left without paying. Big mistake, he said to himself walking away, big mistake... The words sounded strange and he felt sure something must have happened. He hurried across the street, still focused on what he’d said, dimly processing the event as he walked into the side of a moving car.
It had been traveling at about 20mph and swerved as if lowering its shoulder to punch him back onto the sidewalk. The bag of beer, passenger side mirror, one of Dylann’s shoes, and the handgun went in all different directions as the car halted.
Dylann first saw the plastic bag a few feet away and wondered how dinged up the cans had gotten and whether they were salvageable. He dragged it over and found one smashed and half empty. He sat up in the grass and took a drink from what was left. The driver got out [like c*** saying why would they park behind me, some simple illustration of her attitude here] and began to make her case that Dylann had walked into the middle of the road without looking, then noticed Dylann moving toward the handgun that lay between them. He made eye contact with her as he reached for it and she retreated into the car. He tucked the gun back into his waistband as she sped away, then found his other shoe. He carried her side mirror in one hand like a trophy on his way back home.
She’d looked pretty good, actually. Just a few years older than him, he guessed. Dressed a bit nasty, probably on her way home after a night out. Kind of early at just past midnight to already be going home, he thought. But he liked that she was driving the car, not just a passenger. Not some girl blacked out and gone floppy to be carried home by the last man who talked to her. Or to wander out into the night, ducking to piss behind a bush and passing out there til first light. No, she kind of had her shit together. She was driving the car. And she was dumb enough to get out and actually try and blame it on him. Dumb or not, that took guts. But he’d bested her with the gun.
When she noticed him reach for it she’d taken in a quick sharp breath that made her breasts bounce up and down in her shirt just so, and for a moment she was frozen in fear while they settled back to stasis, suspended all perky and high in her chest. He bet her nipples got hard right then. He bet she went home and fantasized about him taking her hostage, getting in the car with her, saying go on and drive. Saying he’d make sure she went to jail for hitting him unless she did some things. And with the gun still on him whether she believed that or not. So with one firmly in the chamber he went home and browsed between porn sites for some acceptably similar pair on a pale brunette, adding “drunk girl” “rape” and “choking + spitting” to a few searches to assist the fantasy. When the act began in earnest he turned the mirror-side of his trophy toward the wall.
Work 1, Ice and Not Fire
His most promising job prospect came as a favor to his mother by an old boyfriend of hers whose brother owned a small landscaping business. They had a contract with the city at a local park to do some planting and mulching. This was all vague to Dylann but it meant maybe having some cash of his own, some dim light at the end of a dark tunnel. It was hard physical work and he was small, but he managed it, at least at first. What he could not ultimately manage was an interaction with a coworker on his third day on the job.
At lunch break on the wooden benches in the shade of the gazebo Dylann was asked by a friendly but clueless young man a bit older than him about his hobbies and interests. He asked in a manner flippant and not uncaring but dull and simple and with no real interest, it seemed to Dylann, as if just passing the time. Dylann grasped here a real danger in answering honestly— how it would ice out instantly the amiable and good-natured tone of the exchange and reverberate potentially fatally into the broader work environment. He felt the flight instinct surface in himself from fear of the power his truth would command.
Wielding then like some dark magician a new slyness he himself was surprised by and would later feel he was mere captive to and played no real part in, with an aim to ending this and all future inquiry yet also thereby securing for now his continued employment by affording himself a silence and distance from them, from the unbearable bitterness at their simple camaraderie which he recognized with an obscure and childlike fondness he yearned to belong within again but was now hopeless stranger to, he nodded slightly as if from earnest contemplation, lifted his hand in the air as if serving a pie, then with a breeziness and phony nonchalance not mimicking but arriving just beneath the coworker’s tone, with an aim to inflict a precise psychic damage and secure by inspiring repulsion this ongoing sustainable distance, answered seriously that he doesn’t have any hobbies, that he just goes home and stares at the blank and empty walls of his room each evening until it is time to go to work again.
It was not because they were idiots but because he knew if he attempted to engage in their fraternity he would prove in time as he had so many times before that he was the biggest idiot of all, and it was not worth adding one more humiliation to the endless and haunting recurrence of past embarrassments against which he had few psychic defenses. They were nice to him out of pity, they were bigger and stronger than him and even worse this one was also kind (and that was humiliating) and required a sweeping and absolute rejection of the whole group. Weeks later he would be found loitering at that park in his car past dark and would explain to the police that he had worked there once and now liked to visit at night because it helped him think.
The resulting communication breakdown in the fallout of his icing took place over the course of the next few days. He wore sunglasses at all times and communicated in grunts and strange gestures. He began escaping to the gazebo bathroom to buy himself some nonworking time and return to mill about dumbly and wait for direct orders while the rest of them took to task. The crew boss perceived his creeping insubordination and looking to nip it in the bud asked him bluntly Do you want to work? and was moved to pity when Dylann responded redfaced lip quivering and shaking bodily that he was here to do as little work as possible.
This prompted a confrontation with the owner who, briefed by his brother on the finer details of the hire, paid a visit to the jobsite in sympathy of the boy’s pitiable young adulthood thus far and prepared to set him straight in invoking family ties and get to some core issue and perhaps make a steady crew member of him. He came up from behind Dylann who was trimming some tallgrass with a weedwacker and startled him so that he wheeled around suddenly and zipped him in the shins with it. Dylann [under the influence of an LSD derivative] perceived this cartoonishly and let out unrestrained laughter that canceled all designs and sympathy in the man who then cursed him away. Dylann dropped the tool where he stood and ran triumphantly toward home like an escaped fugitive.
Crazy White Boy, Shame Shame Shame
His one great flaw as a person, Dylann reasoned, was that he trusted people too much.
Once in 6th grade at a school dance, three older kids, more physically mature and all with darker skin, he recalled, had sensed weakness in him and decided to have a little fun. They approached him and asked Spit or swallow? He thought they were being friendly and answered with interest that he didn’t know what they meant, then felt confused and later hurt at how they’d kept laughing when he insisted he couldn’t answer until they explained it to him.
In 9th grade gym class he had made a name for himself. While still relatively puny and underdeveloped, he sometimes displayed a freakish and singular athleticism. Once during floor hockey he had scored an impossible goal from the other end of the gym and compulsively thrown his stick to the floor and broken into a high-stepping dance, nodding furiously and spinning in place, waving his stiff arms out in front of him while alternately clapping.
From then on he was known at school as Crazy White Boy. Groups of upperclassmen would come up to him in the hallways and goad him into dancing for them. And for a while he eagerly complied, thinking he was making friends, that being the first and only positive social reinforcement of high school so far. It took a brief stint as the school mascot to understand that he was not respected, but spectacle. A clown, a freak. The way a group of them pointed and laughed and shook their heads.
Their dancing was not the same as his. They moved more fluidly, from their hips, with a sensuality that scared him, especially at his short stature and physical immaturity. He had looked on with some interest as a wallflower at grinding in middle school. But twerking, daggering, and other Caribbean forms popular at his high school were baffling to him. Still, his dancing had impressed many, and he was encouraged by some well-meaning faculty to enter the school talent show.
His act began with a gun laid out on a stool, center-stage. Was it a toy? He stood behind it with his back turned to the audience. Why God why!, he cried out with his arms raised. Cue the music. He fell to his knees. Oh the pain! The sorrow! The suffering! You’ll all pay for what you’ve done to me! He whipped his head around to the gun, lingering on it for a single frozen moment, then lifted one leg up slowly, approaching the stool like a tiger on the prowl. Hunched over, circling, creeping nearer then suddenly pulling away and dramatically catching his breath. Arms reaching stiffly toward the gun, fingers aflutter, his head pulled back in resistance, a look of horror on his face, eyes unable to break with it. Finally on the floor crawling toward the stool, tongue out and panting as if dying of thirst.
Shame ruled his life. He imagined shame as the engine of the young tumor lodged in his brain like a demonic fetal homunculus bent on inflaming his anxieties, pumping faster at the surfacing of memories like these, swarming his stress receptors until manifesting physically as thyroid inflammation— the shame pulsing and washing over his body in waves as he lay awake at night, propelled through the bloodstream in its vehicle of white cell antibodies to attack his lymph nodes at the prime place of outer powerlessness, polluting and distorting the energy emanating from the blue chakra centered in his larynx, accumulating within and swelling and over time enlarging the throat itself, producing outwardly his unmanageable inner burden, his ‘lump in the throat’, from where in the forgotten dream he would try to speak but emit only aerosols of clay in tiny squeaking bursts.
Sometimes while driving he would rehearse aloud answers to questions never asked him, with a fervor and cultivated nuance that would be sure to impress his imagined audience. Obscure historical and racial screeds. He could be a star if he wanted. He could have his own show, start a podcast, a channel, an empire. He could be like those impressive charismatic men who carried on with a winking self-awareness recognizable only to the initiated. He was a born leader. He could start a movement. He could have a clan of his own. Though he noted dimly he would have to read more. And first maybe try another Craigslist personal ad toward making like-minded friends.
He would do this until he caught himself delighting in it, the pathetic make-believe, and while expelling curses on himself reach into the glove compartment and lift the Glock to point at pedestrians or other cars on the road. Once, he noticed the gun reflected in the windshield and then a frightening face behind it he didn’t recognize and lost control momentarily of the car. He pulled over and laughed hard in relief and took a moment to catch his breath with all the adrenaline in him. And note again that there was a problem, there definitely was and he didn’t know what. But also that he didn’t laugh often and that was the most fun he’d had in awhile and he had no friends so what did it matter anyway.
Shaun White Dream
As they drove past a Best Buy his mother asked him How about there? they're always hiring, you like your computer so much I bet they’d hire you on the spot! He shut his eyes and inhaled deeply. Well, what do you want to do then? Sometimes when asked this he would say he wanted to be a professional clown to make them stop talking. Or that he wanted to do nothing for a long time and see what happened. Which, as they privately noted, was what he’d already mostly been doing for the last six or seven years. Embarrassingly, what he truly wanted was to be a professional snowboarder, but he lived in South Carolina, and he had never tried it, and he never told anyone, and he was now 23 years old.
He didn’t want to work. He didn’t want a job. He didn’t want to go back to school. He hated where he was, but he didn’t want to be anywhere else in particular. He wanted to be a professional snowboarder, or a filmmaker, or some kind of influencer. He wanted to die. He was lost. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t want to think about any of it. He didn’t want to think at all. He stayed in bed and took drugs.
He dreamt he was living in a stilt house made of straw in a low valley. When rain turned to flood his fellow villagers packed up and left him there alone. He sloshed through the muck toward a mountain and the rain ceased as he reached its base. He climbed halfway up where in the distance he saw what had to be Shaun White carving fresh snow on his way down to meet him. The nearer he came the more everything was blurred by snow and light until it was all flashing bright and the motion of the rider transferred into a white llama standing on a cliff overlooking the valley and beyond. The llama bucked and brayed, tossing his head toward the dark storm clouds approaching again from the west.
Shaun White stood at the cliff with his gold medal, inspired, gazing out over the valley, emoting in psychedelic wonder, You can treat a man good, but you can’t love a man like yourself if you don’t teach a good man love in yourself like yourself a good man ought to love… His words went muffled and indiscernible in the growing wind. Dylann woke up sweating, face full and red with blood, reached into the mattress and took two Suboxone and one Valium. He lingered in the dreamspace of the mountain until he was firmly back on the path.
He continued up and through the clouds. He emerged at the rocky peak where stood an ancient stone wall that wrapped in a square around an interior castle. From one corner, a tattered, triangular gray flag whipped in the wind. An archer perched atop spotted him, drew an arrow, and aimed. Dylann reflexively held a shield up to him. The archer recognized the seal engraved on it and paused, lowering his bow. The iron gates opened.
The interior courtyard contained nothing. It was the same as the barren, rocky peak outside the wall. There was only wind. The castle at the center was really a stone hut sunk halfway into the ground. He lifted the torch on the wall at its entrance and descended inside in full armor. In the far eastern corner, a faceless prince in white robes and chainmail sat slumped on a bench. He wore a crown made of bronze and bone, rusty and ragged and bloody with brown velvet like a deer shedding its antlers. He sat before a simple hole in the stone that opened into a volcanic furnace in the belly of the mountain.
The prince dragged a treasure chest out from under the bench. It was full of Olympic medals. He dropped a handful of them into the glowing hole. A spectral Shaun White entered the hut blindfolded behind Dylann. He held his offering of new medals out in front of him and stepped through Dylann’s body to kneel before the prince who placed them in the chest, shut it, and pushed it back under the bench.
Back outside the castle walls, Shaun stood at the foot of the clouds and readied himself for the descent. He had been sent to ride down the mountain, collect the medals, and make the trek back up again to offer them. He removed the blindfold and tossed it behind him into the wind.
Gone Mom
On the day his mother left for good, Dylann woke to find at the top of the attic stairs a neat bundle of items wrapped in two strands of blue ribbon, tied in a bow at the top. The afternoon light shone through the window as he descended to meet it there, sitting cross-legged on the warm carpet. At the base was a Christian self-help book, on its cover a young man in a bomber jacket with a strange smirk on his face, his name huge beneath in gold lettering. A few prayer cards were tucked inside the front cover— he recognized the home-laminated quality of his aunt's handiwork— one of St. Michael who slays the dragon, one of Joseph holding the baby Jesus, one of St. Joan of Arc affixed with a post-it note in cursive “Remember: YOU can squash those negative thoughts and feelings!” with a smiley face beside. A fifth grade report card on which his mother had highlighted a positive comment from his English teacher. And most significantly, a handwritten letter folded into thirds that on sight made the blood rush through him, outward from his heart in a slow burst as he held it up, the ink fresh and transparent in the light.
It all seemed to say this is how much we love you Dylann, see? And this is how good you are, and can be again. But he felt it as a strike against him: nested within all the praise and goodness, a single phrase in her letter stuck out like a lone blackbird breaking through its egg. She charged him with hiding behind a “druggy, homeless persona.” She had never used words like these with him, even in writing. He shook his head. It was too much to take to heart. He deflected: she was trying some tough love, this must be coming from Bob. And though he hadn’t expected it, after scanning the letter and flipping through everything a few times, he found no offer to come live with them.
He remembered when she came up to the attic in the afternoon while he was sleeping, sat on the side of the bed, rubbed his back and spoke softly as he woke. You’re letting your life just pass you by… You need to see someone… I can help you… He thought of her standing at the back door in the summertime, ringing the bell that called him inside for dinner from play. The dream where he lay paralyzed on the attic floor while a giant spider hanging high above lowered her vestigial vagina down onto his face. He stood up and passed the whole bundle through the window where it dropped into the backyard, blue ribbon trailing behind.
Trailer
The moment he stepped in the door Lindsey leapt off the couch and stuck her phone in his face Have you ever been to Lake X? and Wouldn’t it be so fun to go? It’s been so long since I went swimming. Dylann’s eyes got wide and Joey backed her off and Dylann found his way to the corner where he’d sit and smoke and drink and sleep for the foreseeable future.
From that corner he quickly grasped the sad state of life in the trailer and recognized with a shudder that this is where he belonged. Six people now lived there. There was the couch where Lindsey sat and scrolled her phone and where she and Joey slept. Two metal stools by the TV where the boys played video games “all day long, all. day. long...” The door to the mother’s room kept always shut, where she sought rest and quiet and little else when home from her overnight shifts at Waffle House. The plastic-covered mattress in the other bedroom generally up for grabs. The box fan, the mysterious dog bowls, the dirty towels over the windows, the refrigerator. The totally bare walls.
Dylann laughed aloud. Wow, he said. Lindsey recognized the remark for what it was and made a noise expressing her distaste. Joey slapped Jacob on his buzzed head and told him to put a pizza in. We should party, huh? said Justin. Shut the fuck up, Joey shot back, I mean, yeah we should. Lindsey looked up from her phone toward Dylann, acknowledging the car. Yeah, Dylann said, where’s a place around here?
He would go to the lake alone without them and sit and wonder what it might be like to be there all of them together. He sat cross-legged and calm on a stone by the water and looked out over the very still lake. If she could see him now his mother would recognize that gentle expression on her little boy’s face. Maybe one hot afternoon there’d be a rope swing and Lindsey would swing off it and lose her top when she splashed in the water and it would float toward him and she would swim over and grab it and say thanks Dylann with a wink. Faggot, he whispered aloud, embarrassed at the thought. Fucking loser, fucking idiot, he continued thinking, banishing the fantasy and setting himself right as a man. He tried to keep his mind and heart together. He softened his eyes to unite with the lake, staying as calm and still as it, and let the moment pass hoping something else would surface, or at least until it fell away into forgetting.
He had considered himself a bad man for some time now, and he stayed quiet lest any evil might slip through him into that better world outside which held his only hope for salvation. He had to contain himself, save it all for his one big moment which could arrive at any time, for better or worse. The world was trash and he was trash and all were doomed and so it would be better if he were dead and they were all dead too and so why not hurry it along.
At this point he had to do it, it had built up for months inside him, if he backed out now he would have to kill himself, and he couldn’t bear another failure, another unbearable, he would grind himself into nothing with self-loathing if he shrank from action now. And he would already have the gun and being always there with himself would eventually do it. So now it was really either him or them, someone had to die and he was the true dancer so it would be them. And he might die too but at least he will have done something.
Trial
Standing on camera before the judge Dylann Roof began his practiced lie that he was proud of what he had done and shed no tears for the families of his nine victims now present in the courtroom. He knew and God knew, and he knew that God knew but didn’t care because he hated God for not giving him what he was owed and for being unfair to him, that it was wrong to do what he did. But he knew also that his crimes could only be accounted for in the next life and it was not yet the time for that approach, that this was his glory phase, that he finally had the stage and was now in total control of the meaning of his life and legacy to come, which is so rare for any man these days white man let alone, and so deliciously sweet and perfect and pleasing to no end, the thoughts of humiliation and self-hatred that plagued him having been overnight replaced by the more visceral because tangible revisitations of his grand and glorious violence, that he could luxuriate in them within the peaceful and solitary abode of his cell, these things altogether imbuing in him a sense of pride and satisfaction and opening a meadow of possibility in which to graze toward inventing by reverse-engineering a cause for and commentary on his crimes.
All because he had become the true dancer in recognizing the sanctity of blood. And because there had been a discount on the .45 caliber Glock pistol following the 2017 crackdown on gun show loopholes. And because he knew his mother would not contribute to much less support the purchase but also knew she kept over three hundred dollars hidden in a coffee can in the back of her bedroom closet. And because guns are fucking cool and made him feel powerful when he had been a weak and ineffectual loser and complete failure at everything in his life up to that point. And because he was honestly almost ready to back out when the salesman persuaded him with the recent discount on the .45 caliber Glock. And because he was not deterred when he correctly intuited that the purchase might embolden him further toward committing some violent act he had not yet begun to plan. And because it was easier when faced with that vague and perhaps trivial moral dilemma to instead take 25mg of suboxone and play video games until he forgot he ever had a thought in the first place. And because in that fateful moment in the gun store the salesman who clearly smelled blood on him and sensed the degeneracy and corruption at the heart of his journey only smiled his vicious and satisfied smile at the man before him who was really a boy as he knew this was the easiest sale of all and would need only point out the recent discount on the .45 caliber Glock pistol, and while leaning in gently and extending eye contact effect a wry conspiratorial understanding and mention falsely that it simply had to be done following the 2017 crackdown on gun show loopholes, (and send Dylann Roof like some blind agent of fate back into the darkness with the weapon he would only need a little priming then activation from nefarious dark web actors who by now already had him in their pocket anyway.)
If I were somebody else I’d find a way to love me-- some desperate words, some nonsense [that surfaced/rattled around inside and scurried off like a rat at the kick of a tin can (mixed met. revise)] in his refusing something a man shouldn’t think, where is he now my wandering boy, his mother drawing arcs in the sand with her toes, broken circles never mended left alone to blow away, quilt circles, Dylann the director of the film of his life seeing himself through the camera a grown man at last in pure white robes on the ocean shore, thin hair in the wind, facing the glowing horizon, his hand reaching out into the light and meeting his mother’s hand descending into frame, Dylann the director in his safari hat and khaki vest, moved to tears and hugging his cinematographer saying we really did it today and I love you and we will remember this, dylann the boy then grieving the fate he could never bring to life, his foregone fires in wait, this cinematic absolution only fantasy and final unbelonging of his life of the mind in flesh, his film untitled, its secret name the first of seven souls off the sinking ship, the first to vanish in the dissolution of earth into water in the protracted moment of death, dylann on the execution table, the sleep flowing into his veins meeting the black blood carrying codes soon extinguished and never replicated, the subtle spirit then shifting into his sister and stirring to life maternal consciousness, the sister dreaming the curse into form, singing her dream to them in the early morning when they woke her with cries, wondering what evil might follow them into birth, seeding the story, setting the stage for the film of their lives they would struggle to name, the family stain kept hushed so seductively mysterious, so opening a void in them in which something would have to grow, and only under the auspices of his dark influence, from the currents he had diverted into life at the spilling of blood that would find form in their lives as ominous and ever-present storm clouds awaiting a shift in the wind, subject to any mercy or malice from the kin of the slain, the terrible knowing this would inspire in the sister, and how she would harbor them deep in the church like a family of fugitives, and so in the voids from their singing fingers up to the hooves of the stars those strange flowers would grow between.
They would become people who just wanted to be left alone, who would have to fight the bitterness at their lot, the resentment that surfaced at cleaner brighter happier people (+ on screens) who showed them how life ought to be lived and what they were doing wrong and the backward ways of their lives in the church …
Gary’s Bar
If this was his fate at least she’d found the best of them. Church going, mild-mannered, and about the biggest and strongest folks you could ask for, who’d be good for hauling hay, some boys he could root for on the football field, and maybe even one day say with some pride those are my boys. They’d have to achieve a bit more to earn it but they did seem of good stock. And you couldn’t argue with the violence he’d seen Jae inflict on the field. He was a born hitter. A beast. But of course all that really didn’t matter too much anymore since we were all equal now, or at least that was the new understanding and his official position if pressed, at least anywhere outside the breakfasts among men at the diner where they solved all the world's problems.
The things they used to laugh about were contemptible now. When they heard news of public outrage sparked by some neutral incident they paused to consider the thing’s comparative sterility against the shenanigans of their heyday and smiled strangely in wonder at how things had changed. Were they growing criminal in the eye of the collective as the years went on? Was this a mark of the social Progress they ought to applaud for advancing a more fair and just society? Or taking up his drink and turning to meet his brother’s expression which matched his of an impression of polite nonsense, more likely a bullshit ceremony that had little to do with them and they need not engage with anymore than it arose in conversation among (their families) those they provided for. Among themselves they could first work out together the appropriate attitudes and specific parries against these attacks and those men who could invent the most charming and imitable responses were most highly favored. They could launder their words back in through the hearth of home and retain some control over the cultural winds that wished to sweep away all that they valued.
Which meant they had to guard their joy. They could only say certain things at this table and were suspicious of outsiders. Even if it’s right to go along with change, good things are difficult and (suppose theyd like em to/) not everyone has the time and energy to recalibrate their values and reflect on things, you take your kicks where you can get ‘em. Get your jollies off...
Gary walking with him out toward the horses, toward the cattle, the huge sky overhead, sweeping slow his arm across the horizon speaking of what we did here and how we made it.
High noon in the heart of the country, Game Time, he heard the wolves howling with the dead flag blues, the old men alone atop barstools smoldering in silence at CNN in the erasure and disintegration of their now contemptible and misbegotten past, silence their golden only, drink then the antidote for the pain of silence, the inexpressible pain in their hearts that dives down into the primordial churning beyond and before reason and sleeps for a short time before emerging collectively in a ride of the valkyries, divorced from society and animal, devoid much less of spirituality but of any context or purpose at all, yes in their hearts it’s ride of the valkyries, then fetching for itself a suitable rallying point of literature— because no foreigner could by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track across the blue ridge in the trial of a thousand years and if destruction be our lot it must come domestic and we ourselves must be its author and finisher, and because as a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide, and certainly suicide was preferable if they had to live this way.
He was moved to tears at this as he drove past the sawdusted bar a final time wherein the spirit of his forefathers burned eternal and he saw its astral measure wafting into smoke emptying from point into void in the air above the building and coalescing into an orchestra of light and color in spirals red blue silver and gold like peeking through the keyhole into his confirmation ceremony held in the firmament of that other place confirming him fated and glorified welcoming him into its dramas and that he himself today would capture and secure his destiny and inaugurate himself among our gods of war and enter a new dance in the other world with black elk and chief joseph and malcolm and bin laden and sherman and lee and all the warlords of the western bloodlands forgotten and ignored and legislated out of history in the polite progression of a society that dishonored the essential warring which allowed for their continued comfort.
See Dylann knelt and lowing in the mud in the backyard in a loud and violent storm, assured none would hear his cries, no nosy neighbors or mothers behind paper thin walls, the world at last deafened so he could release his pain somewhere not a muffled pillow and in the grandeur of nature too, a calculated grieving, Dylann clenching the muddy grass in clumps, face in the mud and actually eating the mud because that’s what he deserved, grieving himself and his life and he knew not what else and cursing those he’d foolishly trusted with his fragile and pathetic heart, leaning into the emotion like a primal performance as if he could clean himself thereby,