troum

there were four of them, withered husks of human beings. jewish captives in my house, guarded day & night by nazis in crisp uniforms. one day the nazis went across the street for something. i & a friend had schemed - well, it was mostly him - to get the prisoners out. for whatever reason they were clad inappropriately. high heels - ridiculously high heels. i was shocked. can't run in those! tried to find the old woman some sneakers in her size, but she could barely speak. 5.5 is what i got out of her eventually. i was frustrated with their lack of motion. needless to say, the nazis came back. discovered our plot. i locked myself in my bedroom. also, there was a black man i was trying to help. he had returned for something he'd left behind. i hid him beneath my desk and began ripping the screen out of my bedroom window. they were there already, walking across the grass, tromping over my mother's bleeding hearts and enjoying a snigger at the inadvertent metaphor. they looked up and saw me trying to dismantle the window and escape, and pulled out their guns. no one escapes from the nazis. one of them jumped in through the broken screen and started firing at me. i dream-dodged most of the bullets. a few caught me. i felt the warmth of my own blood spill out, from the side of my throat, from a place below my clavicle. sticky on my skin, like maple syrup. one bullet i blocked with the gun & then i started firing at him. of course, i missed. swore i would do anything in my power to find him and kill him. when i found him, he was immaculately dressed in a sweater vest and combed hair and a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, sipping tea in a green solarium. he was chortling, his head thrown back at someone's joke, when i, bloody and barefoot, aimed at his adam's apple and shot him through it.

weird, brief dream.  wandering the streets of portland (park ave, specifically, at the foot of the hill) in a dense fog so thick it is signifying the end of all things.  i am walking with a device that doubles as searchlight (poor in the fog) & music-player.  i am with two others.  they eventually fade away into the fog.  i hear the rumble of enormous doors sliding closed.  i am trying to find my way home.  there is (of course) something in the fog.

sunrise

the bony trees scrape
their fingernails across the sky

the blood pools
on the horizon

oubliette

and there,
outside the window,
the world sits,
unchanging,
staring eyelessly -

i inside have insulated myself
from it,
blacked out the windows
pinched the switch
on the lamp. took a hammer
to each clock.

the throaty roar of the heater
hoarse from its battle
with the insipid, creeping cold -

outside the window and
up,
the great woods. sharp
black forest. a tangle of
rustling and
silence.

the eye of a frightened deer -
glassy, wet.

in my small room
the hardwood floors
are unfinished.
i cover those places with dirt
and later,
snow.

soon the outside world grows in
around me. the sun worries a hole
in the black sheets i've strung up.
the walls fray & the wood
rots. the door
falls off its hinges, hammered
repeatedly
by the wind's invisible
battering ram -

& there
i am
sitting
in the middle
of the day
or night -
naked -
a needle in one hand
thread in the other
sewing my eyelids together -

HOT NEW BAND NEXT BIG THING!!

1. using the random article function on wikipedia, construct a band name, an album name, and however many tracks you want. do the same for album art.

()()()()()



band: microaerophile
album: headbanging

001. north-south position
002. underline
003. Ioniko, Ilia
004. Radzanów
005. Sücka
006. education in Siberia
007. the children pay
008. Puget Sound
009. shatterday
010. Winter Hill Stakes
011. fail-safe

gato negro

the world seems shut down today.

Hi, Wes - good to hear from you

everything i listen to lately has the shelf life of milk in the sun.

except the first movement of gorecki's third symphony.

i haven't been writing, though i tried to fool myself into believing i was. i get drunk and scrawl madly at the bar, hoping no one will bother me. hoping someone will bother me. i keep getting drunk and listening to other people's problems. their loneliness just bleeds out of their wounded mouths. what happens when i drink too much: i play bad 80s music on the jukebox and become increasingly violent towards myself.

so, nothing changes. i don't even like bad 80s music. i just play it because i know everyone else at the bar will love it. i rarely do anything for me. asked myself that on the porch yesterday morning, smoking a cigarette. what do i do for me that makes me happy?

i forgot to mention. i'm officially a waiter this coming Saturday. after two years and a handful of months, i'll be making good money and working a schedule which includes some day-time shifts. force me to get out of the house. to be awake & alive during the day.

and all the sad people are lonely & getting lonelier. the crush of winter is here, and we're all bending our backs, craning our necks, in anticipation of the first snow.

wrote an email to my mother. she's no longer with my stepdad. they broke it off. my mother moved out. then she bought a house a county over with my stepdad's friend, who is also her paramour. she recently retrieved all of our family's things from the basement. the weird assembly of nostalgia. mentioned she found a lot of my "old journals," which could be anything. asked me if i want them. she has hundreds upon hundreds of photographs in albums. documenting our lives.

here is something i wrote in the bar.

& where is she? there she is, in a dim spot, reading Anais Nin. she is throaty, guttural with it, chortling at the men & murmuring at the whores. her in the cold, buttoned up to the chin, scarved & mittened. the heat is broken, won't pipe into the house. she is drinking shitty red wine. it is coarse on her tongue. he can feel her sadness. she is a pulsar, throbbing like an untended wound. the bulb in her reading light is flickering. she doesn't notice. on her shoulder, a writhing mass of tattooed vines, seeming to hiss. when she smiles, it is faint... a wan shape that begs a crescent moon. her eyes move over the page like a cursor, blinking once, twice - a metronome - as if every blink is a swallowing, digestion of what she has consumed...

the din of self within self, a constant angry grappling. narrowed eyes in the mirror. reflection seems a fraction of a second behind the actuality. where hesitation lives. he leaves the house minutes after having armed himself.

twins, working the bar, bizarrely syncopated in every motion. they barely speak to one another, yet work in tandem. for them: anything. men lean over the bar, leering, & yet they remain chastely aloof - though not without occasional smiles which seem beatific. they float, yet are earthbound, which causes them to become attainable by any standard - yet like soap bubbles, evade the slightest semblance of a grasp.

these are three things which have everything to do with one another, yet it is completely unclear how.

lately: ideas for stories, and yet, no writing.  can't blame it on an input-output phase.  hate it when people ask me "how the writing's coming."  it's not something that happens constantly.  idiots.  it's not like i AM a writer, so that i can be constantly expected to have updates for you.  james is a photographer - it's what he does.  he takes pictures, always wishes he had his camera on him.  gets up, goes places, takes pictures.  you can ask him how his photography is coming.  not me.  but then, photos are more immediate.  writing ... not so much.

"destrudo, or, destrado" is the title of a book that _____ _______ is working on.  it is about a boy who, when lucid dreaming, commits suicide - nightly.  

meanwhile

kfjdsa;flkajsdf;lkjsdf;lkajsdf;lkjsf

had a dream i lost my job and that the propeller on my laptop stopped working.

it was one of those horrible sequences of events where your whole life changes and it's all because you fucked up.

.... i think i'm going to lay low this week-end.

dreams about my father.  what is he doing sending these increasingly psychotic postcards, signed Papa?  what is this metaphor he keeps referencing about the Scarecrow?

i jump up & down on the bed to see if there's a fire in the woods, behind our house, or if it's the sun setting.  it's the latter - for once.  

feels like an airport novel.  pre-kidnapping.  chapter one.  dread in my throat.  when he shows up, he is ghastly.  tears make a mess of his face.  there is no roof on the house.  i remember no wind, and no stars, but the smell of burning. 

"destrudo, or, destrado"

shadrach + meshach

fog on the streets.  the forecast on the weather channel says TODAY: N/A.  the icon depicts a small, monochrome sun with the same letters inside of it.  

i am working on a new idea for a novel.  november is swift approaching.  just found a great book that i hope to be inspired by on ebay.  

also, david foster wallace is dead.

they said they had a 30-min conversation regarding my taste.  he said it was "uncanny" how my recommendations were always spot-on.  i feel strange about this.  like i should be both proud and humiliated by it.  it's what i've always strived for.  to hear that kind of feedback.   now that i have it, i wish i didnt.

i'm not always right, you know.

watching movies from childhood.

notes:

"super mario bros."

+ not as awesome as it should have been.  but damn.  fascist Koopa.  right out of kafka.

+ god, john leguizamo. your accent is awful.

+


"little monsters"

+ fred savage, strutting down the hall, casually disaffected, reminds me of a very young john cusack, who was, at the time of this movie, starring in "say anything."

+ howie mandel, i wish i could time-travel. tell you not to make the deal. and while we're at it: did the character of maurice inspire any of johnny depp's jack sparrow?

+ howie mandel pulls down fred savage's pants with rubber arms! then the fat polka-dotted monster behind him says "nice ass!"

+ wow, with those sunglasses, fred savage.

dreams: the cat being tugged upward by a huge spider in an enormous web.  

being threatened by a gun in someone else's house.

can we come back from identity politics?  is it possible?

called her a starfucker & she gave me this little smile. it was supposed to say "i have a secret" but instead it looked like she was going to vomit. she was drunk, so was i. we smoked weed in the tiny bathroom of the bar, tried to cover up the obvious smell by exhaling into paper towels. we were unsuccessful, and fled, giggling, out onto the street.

this is the wind from the hurricane. she makes a comment that touches on how everything is related and she forgets sometimes that this is so. i don't say much but nod wisely, like i know. thankfully this goes unnoticed. she rambles about the boys she's fucked, and that's how she says it: fucked. it's a litany of the upper echelon, boys whose names anyone would recognize from posters on telephone poles, from reviews in the local paper. she is proud of it. i find myself a little disgusted but don't let on. i am a terrible liar, even through omission, and my ears turn red. she is suspicious. we flick our cigarettes into the street and barge inside for another shot. this is when, post-tequila, i call her a starfucker & she smiles.

she is set upon by a gaggle of her friends, all martini-ed & immaculately dressed. i give her the slip while she is busy exclaiming! at her hot friends. this is the wind from the hurricane. down the street, a young fat guy is cradling his cell phone in his hands and staring at it with candor and love. the width of his pupils in the streetlight cause me to conclude mushrooms. when the phone rings suddenly, sharply, he starts and smashes it to bits on the sidewalk. he is a zoetrope of emotion at that moment, all regret, remorse, ecstasy, and emancipation exploding on his chubby face.

beyond that, the night is uneventful. there will be other starfuckers whom i won't be intoxicated enough to care to speak to. there will be other idiots crashing around with their mouths blaring, staggering like the noisy undead, filling the streets with their obscenity. i will shrug on the jacket of indifference & feel slight nausea at the superiority it grants me. i navigate towards home. i slip through the cigarette burns & slide off-screen. being the antagonist, this is available to me. the harsh, gaudy exit is unnecessary. belongs to someone else. the real hero of the story. the one she goes home with. who plays the guitar and never says he loves her.

the more i think about it, the more i feel that thought is a curse.

my ideal night: sitting in the kitchen drinking a good local brew and listening to these new albums i just got.  with stan.

my night: stoned & watching trash television, broke & feeling stupid.

i am fairly sure i have an eating disorder.

those idiots.  and that idiot girl, with the sad madonna smile.  her slurred speech.  the eventual inertia of last call, standing outside the bar in a clot of people who also have nowhere else to go.  it's been like this since time began: "and on the eighth day, God created the bar."  and all the animals and all the humans wormed their way out of the sea and up the hill on their bellies towards the bar. 

billions of years later.  same scene, though we have all forgotten where we came from.  however, the book prophesies that one day, all of us will lift our bottles and our glasses at the precise same time, and the sound will be so loud as to remind us of the sea.  chagrined, we will slide onto our bellies again and head east into the Atlantic.

that sad, sad girl who wears happiness like a cellophane mask.  she is sure she's been cursed, somehow, but she isn't sure who - or why.  she asks me with her lips and eyes to lift the curse.  i give her a cigarette & say something stupid about rain.

i remorselessly cop lines from television & movies in my daily conversation.  i wonder often what would happen if someone happened to be channel-surfing & recognized the source.  some of them are less than reputable.

this is a fact i am slightly ashamed of.

cannot stop thinking about the wilds -  the thick, knotty, piney wilderness.  the crisp, blanched air.  the all-consuming inkblot of night.  i hallucinate that there would an utter silence, though i know it would be loud. 

he calls me "kid."  wants to read my novel, which, as many times as i've said it and will continue to say it, is really awful.  he thinks i'm being self-deprecating.  he is drunk, wants a drag of my cigarette.  i know that the next day he's going to hate himself.  he is exasperated with my cynicism, is charmingly frustrated.  to this, my defences collapse and i admit to my cautious optimisms.  this isn't enough.  he's built himself up to the point of a gale now, railing on about this indecency and the other - it's almost comical, though he is too impassioned for me to laugh at - when i do, he whirls on me, chagrin hueing his tone.  he knows what it is.  he's having one of those EVERYTHING IS CLEAR nights, though his brain is a stir of heavy-handed drinks & conversation.

he calls me "kid" like i'm younger than he is.  i don't mind.  i shut up & let him tell me that i 'get' it.  in my private, solitary moments, i allow myself to smile.

a nice fellow who shares a dream with me then immediately regrets it.  speeds off into the night on his motorcycle.  i am left alone in his apartment and begin systematically reading all of his books until he comes back.  when he does, taking his helmet off by the door, he stares at me and is angry.  now you know everything about me, he accuses, and the lights all go out at once.  when i come to, i am in a basement with a shadow that is more like a moth, flapping madly at my face before vanishing again.

i am writing something in the goopy, melting cement of the walls, and it says, TRUTH, which i claw away in a fit of vengeful fury.  this has the added benefit of causing the walls to completely melt and collapse and the entire thing falls down around me.  

the sky is a polished gun.  the sun is the smoking hole.  the bullet, speeding through the space. 

"The entire sense of self-control and self-responsibility that man acquired during the Neolithic Revolution when he first learned to plant grain and domesticate animals and live in one spot of his own choosing was seriously threatened.  The threat had been coming since the Industrial Revolution and many people had pointed it out before Ashton Clark.  But Ashton Clark went one step further.  If the situation of a technological society was such that there could be no direct relation between a man's work and his modus vivendi, other than money, at least he must feel that he is directly changing things by his work, shaping things, making things that weren't there before, moving things from one place to another.  He must exert energy in his work and see these changes occur with his own eyes.  Otherwise he would feel his life was futile."

- Samuel R. Delany, Nova

dream

dream: lying on the back of a truck under blankets.  bluebirds keep zinging down from the sky.  angry.  other birds.  i catch one that comes too close and crunch it in my outstretched hand.  //

my bedroom is in an alley outside of the house.  a crazy fucked-up woman won't leave.  follows me to work.  hides in the basement.  wont fucking leave. //

opinion

haha > lol

nota bene:

"Crouched in the broken shadow with the sun at his back and holding the trap at eyelevel against the morning sky he looked to be truing some older, some subtler instrument. Astrolabe or sextant. Like a man bent at fixing himself someway in the world. Bent on trying by arc or chord the space between his being and the world that was. If there be such space. If it be knowable."

- cormac mccarthy, "the crossing"

questions

"where am i," i asked thickly. i'd just climbed through a construction site and found no way around it until i did. i had to squeeze around a fat construction worker who appeared just as i was wondering where everyone was. he ignored me and i jumped off of a cliff that was much higher than i thought, though i landed gracefully and without breaking any bones. i bent my knees upon landing, because that's what they tell you to do, but it wasn't necessary and i felt like an idiot.

"the food court," she said, without looking at me. all my friends were there but i could not see their faces. "you need to calm down."

i got really high before i went for a walk. the fluorescent lights were sputtering like indignant old ladies over my head. "am i dreaming? i can't tell if i'm dreaming."

"look" she sighed, and pressed against the two corners of my eyes with her thumbs. "you need to calm down." she pulled her thumbs away and showed me how they were wet.

"but i know i'm dreaming." my voice was glue in my mouth.

and when i woke up a second later i laughed and said

"I knew it"

second strike

they were in their forties, playing soccer in the tall grass by the beach - sandy-haired and boisterous still, though out of breath, playing through - laughing, even, expelling breath when there wasn't any left to give.

lightning snaked a fraying rope down the sky & strangled one of them. he fell to the ground, knees buckling, skin spasming over his bones. he had no hair left, and a thin tendril of smoke curled curiously out of his left nostril. in the air, the exploded smell of burnt rubber. it left a coppery taste in their mouths.

none of them had ever seen someone die.

Jacob More (cont.)

"Eliane," he manages, though not without difficulty. "When it comes to such beauty, pain and pleasure are hard to distinguish."

She smiles, somehow unable to help herself. She doesn't know how to explain the hot jolt of panic that explodes in the forge of her heart when he bleeds ... when she speaks. It is so tied to her tongue that she feels inaudibly guilty. She has never so much as laid a hand on anyone else, and now she has made one man spurt blood thrice in the space of an hour. It is hard to camouflage the sensation of power she feels, though it is tempered intensely by wariness, by curiosity, and lastly, a sympathy that she has never experienced.

"I have spent a great deal of my life seeking true, complete silence." The old man spoke blandly of it, distancing himself comfortably from the story. "I have travelled the world, tried every technology, and I have come to the conclusion that it does not exist."

She knows this. She nods.

"The very hum of the sun itself disprove it. Sound is ubiquitous. There is no escaping it." A desperate lie hovered in his voice & she heard it - but did not acknowledge it. The old man was becoming agitated, his sadness visible on his face, shining like a new coat of paint. "My father was wrong. All of us, wrong. Perhaps we should suffer, bleed! Perhaps buried in our genesis is some old sin, unique to us, that we must pay penance for!" He seemed paralyzed with this new agony, flourishing his rage like a sword or a gun, waving it wildly in front him. He had turned into a demagogue before her, thundering, apoplectic - and yet there still seemed something specious to it, something hidden, deeper, the notice of which still kept to herself.

She reached across the table for his hand & grasped it in her own, running her fingers over the map of raised veins, pushing herself out of her fingertips, through the whorls of her fingerprints, exhorting herself out of herself.

The old man looked up, spent, drained, but startled, hurled into sudden quiet as if via catapult. "Yes," he whispered, brimming with tears. "Please."

Eliane smiled, withdrew, and took a sip of his iced tea. The heat was returning, the shrieking sun burning through the clouds like a molten harpy. She nodded, and bade him to continue.

The evening beat at the windowpanes like a horde of moths. It was the first thing Adolfo noticed as his father dragged him from the kitchen, leaving both their plates to cool. He was deposited on a chair with only the smallest bit of ceremony, and Jacob More turned to follow his son's stare to the window. The panes seemed to bow in with the pressure of the night outside, pockmarked with the white boil of the moon and the measles of the stars. "Please," said his father, grappling with the words like a tiger in the circus ring. "Understand." He seemed to be collapsing in on himself, rebuilding, collapsing again, and mustering the strength to tower, like a thundercloud struggling to reach anvil-head. "Love. Emily. Mother."

Adolfo didn't speak, unsure if his tongue could do what he needed it to do, unsure if he could use the words he'd learned so carefully, so reverently. "No," he said. "No."

"YES." his father said, turning around with the force of his own shout. It seemed laboured, as though the word had percolated in his gut for years. He expelled it from him like a missile which failed.

"Please," said Adolfo. "Why?"

From the kitchen, the sad clink of dishes being scraped, the gush of water in the sink. The scrape of chairs and the rustle of napkins. His father was silent again, rounded in his silence, more himself now that the words had left him. He strained still, in the dark hollows of his eyes, tempted by the taste of those three small words in his mouth. He gave in, capitulated, and said them again, ghosts of what they had been. "Love. Emily. Mother."

It wasn't enough. Adolfo stood up and vengefully stared at his father. "Apotheosis," he said, as challenge. His father shrank, a miasma of misery, shrouding himself. "Dandelion." He took a step forward. "Melancholy."

Jacob More wheeled on his son with a ferocious backhand, knocking Adolfo to the floor. It was like an explosion in the room, as though that missile had finally reached its target. The air vibrated with the force of the blow. Slowly, Adolfo picked himself up, shakily wiping away the sticky blood which leaked from his nose.

"NO" - then, from the doorway, and both men reeled back, Jacob lumbering like a shot beast, heavy against the wall, and his son, stumbling in the same direction, woozily collapsing against his father's bulk. Jacob wrapped his arms instinctively around his son, bloody hands slamming on either side of his head. The room went dim, and Adolfo fixed his eyes on the shape of his mother, trembling like a reed in the doorway. She wore a white dress of fury, stained with the sauce of their dinner. Her mouth opened, closed, and then opened again as she advanced on her husband. Adolfo felt it in the stomach of his father, seizing, spasming, against the small of his back. His mother, continuing to advance, striking blow after blow against his father like a tornado, hurling, hurling, spitting, snarling, though voicelessly.

Jacob More slumped, taking his son with him, crashing to the floor in a black heap. His hands held the side of his son's head like a steel vise. Adolfo squirmed in the hazy hum, the deadly sound of his mother's voice blossoming inside of his skull like an embolism. He felt it press against his brain like a fist into putty, the ache of it like an ice-pick, drawing warmth out of his ear, trickling down his jaw. He felt his father quake, and then, finally, go still, like a sigh which has reached its end. He felt his father die, and he saw his mother, terrible & huge, glowing in front of him. He watched her stand, motionless, as if all of this had happened before and would happen again, as if she had found herself inhabiting the climax of a dream and was now, only now, finding herself comfortable there. He saw her fists, unclenching at her sides, saw something inside of her shatter, saw the shards of it prick her behind the eyes, and yet still, remain motionless. Then the haze, the pain, and the blackness consumed him and he fell willingly into its maw.

Jacob More (cont.)

A gesture drawing of Emily More would be composed of thin contour lines pressed closely together, like high elevations on a topographical map. She seemed to vibrate even while standing still over a rabid pot at boil on the stove. She had always, even as a child, been possessed of a tungsten-white energy that caused her hair to float away from her scalp, buoyed by invisible static. Her mother had called her names in bitter jest, all of them relating to her loquacity - she spurned all forms of religion, preferring in their stead her own wildness, trusting the wind, the fire & the storm.

Later, she would find comfort in alcohol, fiercely infatuated with the scourge of it down her tender insides. It was her adolescent way of externalizing her unnamed fury - violently drunk, marking her face & eyes with makeup & plunging into the crackling neon sea of the drink. She was the remainder of her mother & father's divorce, left to smoulder in the house while her mother attended fastidiously to everything in sight, preserving every room as though it were a museum. Emily left it at eighteen and never went back.


The summer was threshed by heat. The air seemed pulpy, like the meat of an orange. Experimentally, he bit into it. This was the third time since he'd burned his words that he had come back looking for it, and had still, found nothing. He persevered in seeking, however unlucky he was, possessed of a fear that he could not put a name to. The house had seemed flimsy that morning. The sunlight seemed to permeate through the walls, which had thinned overnight. Even the mice, with the comfort of their scrabbling paws against the floor, had vanished. It was as though he had gone to sleep on land and woke up underwater.

His father had gone already - and perhaps that was what it was, Adolfo thought to himself, descending the stairs. Perhaps the bulk of his father was the only thing keeping the foundations secure, perhaps his father was the personified force of gravity - perhaps, without him, they all would float into the atmosphere. The kitchen was empty as he entered it. The sunlight illuminated every mote of dust which meandered in front of the window. The humidity was cloistering, even inside. Adolfo felt like he could be pressed to microscopic implosion - pieces of him mingling with the dust. He walked from room to room, investigating, heart crashing inside of his chest - they had vanished, disappeared, and he felt a loneliness spread in his gut like a hot poison. Reason asserted itself. All he'd have to do is wait. They would return soon. In the meantime ...

He stepped over a seething pile of animal droppings. The leaves, fat & green on the trees, seemed to boil in the heat. A bird's sickly warble quavered, then fell lamely short. His footsteps were heavy with despair. He had long since taken his shirt off, tying it around his waist. Sweat dripped into his eyes, stung him, and slipped out the other side like a malevolent hornet, and yet still, through the haze, he refused to abandon his search. Perhaps it had been a sign from somewhere. It was the first time Adolfo had ever thought of omens, had picked up on the prickly feeling that something deeper lay beyond an ordinary circumstance. He felt it inside of him, a chill in the blood, an electric current diving through his brain to clench his jaw & fists.

It was also that he couldn't bear the emptiness of the house, the micro-whispers of dust accumulating. Reading was no help - he couldn't unstick his brain from the sound of the pages turning. A fly in the room, hurling itself at the ceiling over & over again, seemed monstrous, about to bring the whole house down around his head. This irrational fear gripped him every morning, and before long, slipped into the marrow of his dreams - he suffered from nightmares, thrashing in the sheets, possessed of fevered images.

(he is an old man, stumbling brokenly through the forest, bleeding from the temple & nose. he is being chased, and he is chasing. the sun is wheeling like a firework, cackling as it zips by the azimuth. the moon is in pursuit. the trees are purpled and have heartbeats, thudding faster than he can move. and his mother is sinking in a bog, her tongue cut out, her ears bleeding - he rushes to save her, but she is gone. he is sinking in the bog. the sun is a bomb that goes off. the trees shrink in the blast, shrink to skinny vertical lines and then wink out. he is in a desert. grit in his eyes, in his mouth. the horizon is a frenzy of sand, a cloud which blocks out the sun. thunder breaks the sky in half. in the darkness, a star goes nova and )

He wakes up swimming in his own sweat, dizzy, and vomits all over himself, all over the bed-sheets.

Jacob More (cont.)

"It is easier to say yes," he said, gray rumination moving over his fissured face like a low cloud. "I believe that is true - to accept, rather than negate. This is something my father - my God - taught me. To bow to Yes and to Please, and to shun No. Ironic, then, that we were so forced to inhabit a void of sound. And I haven't yet explained the reason for that, either."

The sky overhead, smoky, choked with still-dark cumulus. The sun hummed through the spaces between them, probing at their weaknesses. The scene became mottled, the puddles rippling with the last furious gasps of wind.

"We were silent out of deference," he said finally. "Out of respect for her." Out of his breast pocket, the old man unsheathed a pen & pushed it towards the woman. "If you wouldn't mind, I would like to see your name."

She stared at it, laying between them, glinting. He had given her no paper. She picked it up & clumsily extended her hand, tattooing herself on the back of it - one word, her name, & showed him.

He smiled. "It is a beautiful-looking name. I wish that I knew how it sounded, as I have never before been acquainted with it." He met her eyes. Something behind them she saw glowing like slag in a blast furnace, smelting, fusing together -

"Eliane," she spoke, delivering each syllable purposefully. She tasted each letter in her mouth as if she never had, shocked at her own voice. Her tongue felt numb, dry, as though electrified. She swallowed, and tasted lightning.

The old man shuddered from the stomach first, arcing his spine, baring his throat as her name rioted through him. Eliane watched him, unable to suppress her fear for his well-being. He opened his eyes, finally, & choked out a brittle laugh, barely a rough whisper. "... beautiful ..." he rasped. "Beautiful." He turned to one side and messily spat a gobbet of blood. a trail of it drooled from the corner of his mouth, and, straightening, he rubbed at it with his sleeve, still smiling - still, smiling.

Jacob More (cont.)

he filled his room with them, tacked them to the walls in one fit of rebellion. it didn't have the desired effect. his father had stopped in the doorway & surveyed his son's handiwork. the moment was steeped in his memory with a greenish tint - the fawning sun outside his window, sinking to evening, but also the hue of disappointment, of failure, and lastly, of envy. then he was gone, like a ship in the night.

Adolfo had stared at his bare, dirty feet & the hardwood floor. the next day, he tore every single word down & stared at the heap. he took them out to the woods, a sheaf of them struggling against the wind, bound together like captives to the gallows. as he knelt, matches in one hand, untying the bundle with the other, a single word slipped its fetters & flew greedily off into the forest. for a moment, Adolfo hesitated - was it worth it? - he decided, and struck the match. acrid sulphur rocketed up his nostrils & his eyes sprang with tears. the flames devoured his years of tireless work, and did it quickly, efficiently, remorselessly.

he would spend hours into the chill evening, hunting down that final word, crashing heedless & blind through the brush & low bramble. he would find nothing.

he returned to the house, purpled with both dispirit & with a deeper, secret jubilance to which he didn't dare admit. his parents sat, wordless, eating their dinner. Adolfo pulled out his chair & sat down. he picked up his fork, and joined them.

"Ah - to this day, I can remember the color of the sky that night - it was black as a bruise ... blacker than ink ... starless, moonless, & unforgiving ..." the old man coughed and squinted at the sky. "I must apologise," he said. "I know it must be quite boring for you. Rather like a member of the congregation forced to listen to the prattling sounds of an inept priest - but here, the storm is passing, & soon you'll have no reason to remain." he polished his glasses with an unbloodied corner of the handkerchief. "Am I quite right in assuming that?"

She stares at him, then looks away, at the street & its gray puddles, then down, at her lap, where she has unconsciously laid her laced fingers like a docile cat. instantly, she pulls them apart, tucks a wet strand of hair behind her ear & fixes her eyes on the old man. he has been watching her, the barest suggestion of a smile on his crushed, purple mouth. he has been watching her decide, and how to decide to convey her response. it comes like a film in a projector, of course, in her eyes, snapping to the front - there it is, the slightest defeat on her lips.

"Very well," he acknowledges, & continues -

Jacob More (cont.)

the sky: flat black, like the belly of a leviathan passing over the town, sounding out the depths.

his hands like wrens, swooping.

he eased a sigh. "you grow tired of your own voice." his smile, brittle and sad. "silence became my God, but also a devil that plagues me. how terrible it is to be confined to the lower registers of sound!" he dabbed at his brow with a pocket handkerchief and glanced at the splotches, mouth twitching with regret. "i was born and bred in silence - wrapped in it, clothed in it. my father took hold of my hand and led me through its frozen wilderness. we snapped no twigs, crunched no leaves. we passed through this world as though invisible, barely disturbing a thing." he paused, looked at her face, assessing it for the possibility of understanding. she was quiet, though not with curiosity. perhaps that was the moment when the old man felt it, seeing the interest glowing. "i would love you more if you spoke," he said tiredly. "even if it did kill me."

"i have no wish to hurt you," she said, and he jerked back as if struck by lightning, raising his handkerchief to his mouth. he trembled, as if fighting with an earthquake rooted deep in his spine. the shaking calmed, and he opened his eyes. in their depths was a golden ecstasy.

"thank you," he whispered. his voice sounded like sandpaper. "i will treasure that sound."

she smiled, and made a motion with her hand for him to continue.

"my poor, poor mother..."

he took to writing, just like his father had, years before. his adolescence was a forest of notebooks & a landfill of looseleaf pages. he lacked the orderliness that had seemed to plague his father - his room was a constant shifting dervish of frenzied pages, in no particular order. where Jacob More had taken to philosophy & theological study, Adolfo More took to poetry. he kept a small black address book by his bedside and did not fill it with addresses, but rather words - extraordinary words, the shape of them on the page, the space they filled. each was written carefully, transcribed from the place he had discovered them - for example, from a sheaf of typewritten pages found in his father's collection, the word "apotheosis."

it was from this wild and unruly obsession with language that Adolfo learned poetry, combining words that somehow fit together. he became a tailor of words, stitching them together over and over again, discovering their patterns and how they fit together. at night, under the covers, he whispered them to himself. he was thirteen years old, and just starting to feel the drop in his throat, not understanding why his voice kept splintering on certain sounds. this was his private reverence, his only joy - but still, something was lacking. he felt empty, hollow, after he had finished, and sometimes would weep miserably into sleep, always eventually drifting off with a wet place beneath his cheek. there was a missing place in his eyes when he looked in the mirror in the mornings, checking for the evidence of a beard like his father's - and that's when he remembered. he'd seen that emptiness before: in his father's eyes, a same pitiless darkness. though worn & weathered, he recognized it across the breakfast table that morning, shrouded in silence save for the clinking of silverware against the plates.

"Father," he said, "why are we silent?"

his mother flung her hands to her ears, blood rushing to her face. he had never seen anger as he saw in his father's face at that moment - it bloomed within him like a volcano's gouting lava, accumulating, hardening, and piling atop itself until it reached his mouth - he opened the gate of his teeth and abruptly snapped them closed again. he laid the silver down, knuckles clenched around them, and stood, raising himself with both hands like a thundercloud. he did not speak, but fixed his eyes on his son - terrible and disappointed eyes. he came around the table, slow steps towards Adolfo, and laid his hand on his son's shoulder, pressing down hard before clenching into a fist, hauling him upright and nearly knocking over the chair. the last thing Adolfo saw before he was dragged out of the kitchen was his mother's mute, pleading eyes, fixed on her husband's back, and the seed of fury somewhere deep within her, banging around like a fireball inside of her.

Jacob More (cont.)

the bed roiled like a boat at sea. his mind was elsewhere - she saw it recede from the forefront of his eyes like a hermit crab, tucking up deep inside the nautilus of his skull. they bucked & strained at each other, her astride him, profiled in the lightning like the figurehead on a prow. the house shuddered & moaned as the rain scourged its sides. the river down the road swelled like an orchestra & splashed over the sides, grappling with itself. the inevitable flood. the harangue of weather against the soft cheek of the earth. this is the seventh such storm in two weeks, and the land has had enough. it spits back. the thunder is little more than a rasping cough, gurgling. everything is filled with fluid.

at the same time as the hasty levee that old man Whitaker built collapses -

at the same time as the gnarled oak is rent asunder with one bolt -

she falls parallel to him, clutching her breast, exhausted. her eyes close. his gruff murmur, cadenced like a priest's during the liturgy, rising and falling. she opens her eyes and sees the ceiling - dark, seeming infinitely distant, vaulted - and feels herself become the smallest bit

heavier -

"of course," he says grandly, doffing his hat and motioning at the empty seat beside him.

"you're a gentleman." she said, somewhat distantly, and sat, smoothing her dress out beneath her out of habit, crossing her legs deliberately. composure had fled her, left her unbalanced, with water in her left ear. her dress clung to her lasciviously.

adolfo glances around. his neck cracks. "i have to warn you, there is a condition to my chivalry."

she stops in the middle of wringing out her hair. her lips are about to form words, but he continues as though he has not noticed. "the condition is this: you must not speak."

he watches her eyes tumble through the kaleidoscopic shift from confusion to rage. "and this is why: i am not human." he paused to take a sip of his tea. "my species has a unique codicil to our ... shall we say, contractual agreement with God ... and that genetic amendment is such that the voice of a human female causes us great pain."

"i don't understand," she said, staring him down haughtily.

adolfo winced and held his hand up.

a dark ringlet of blood leaked from his brow, appearing like a shiny worm from under his hair.

he took another sip of his tea and gently pushed it towards her.

Jacob More took his son into the study & pointed at the window. the night was so dark the glass could have been painted over and the difference would have been impossible to discern. a star, here or there, looking more like a flaw in the windowpane. the ferocious glitter of the Dog Star. the storms had left the valley, and fog seemed to leak from the trees like a gas, chilling the air. the river sank back into itself, grunting grayly, hissing and spitting treachery. "Home," his father said simply, then crouched by the boy & held his face towards the sky.

"Home," the boy repeated, but as soon as Jacob More released his chin, his eyes went to the walls around him, to the amber light of the desk, to the door, shut & locked behind them.

on the other side of the door, Emily crouched, her ear pressed to the smooth wood. heard nothing. pressed her eye to the keyhole. saw only the shifting black bulk of her husband. a flash of fleshy hand, darting out to grab the boy by his neck of his shirt, drag him to the window.

"Home," said her husband.

"Home," echoed the boy, dutifully.

it had been years, she thought dully, since she had used her lips for anything but kissing Jacob. or, from time to time, the pretense of healing her son's weeping scrapes & abrasions. she crept back from the door, and there, tentatively, in the dark of the hallway, hummed a single note. it was soft, and scared, wobbling out of her throat like a newborn deer-child. she clutched instinctively at her neck, to choke it, to grab the sound out of the air like a gnat or a mosquito, and crush it in her callused hands - but it escaped, slipping neatly between the ring finger & little finger of her right hand. it floated to the ceiling & vanished there in the inky corner.

she sat there for a moment, eyes turned to saucers, battling herself on the precipice of tears. she imagined it, that lame child, stuck where it was, wildly spinning a sticky web for the notes yet to come.

the lock in the door exploded like a shotgun, and she hurtled downstairs, veered into the kitchen and collapsed, barely buttressing herself against the sturdy table. the candles flickered in accusation.

she heard the heavy tread of him, descending the stairs. waited for the usual tumult of her son in tow, clamoring down - but this time, there was nothing. she seized up with the fear that Jacob had done something terrible, had exiled her son, her boy - her Adolfo -

and there they stood as she turned, stopped at the foot of the stairs, looking jaundiced in the candle-light. her eyes fluttered up like a damaged dragonfly, locking onto him feebly. he was impenetrable - a fortress of a man, the rook, the king's Castle - he stood with her son's hand firmly in his fist, and then separated from him. he knelt, and it was then - only then - that she noticed the blood trickling from her son's right nostril. "There, there," crooned Jacob awkwardly. "It's all right."

she took a step forward, apologies rushing to her mouth, crowding her teeth and tongue -

Jacob stood, abruptly, and extended his palm to her. there, in the center of his hand, was a small wound, which bled remorselessly.

she met his gaze. his eyes were boggy with the humidity of tears.

it was the only time she ever saw him cry.

Jacob More (cont.)

the first glimpse of her was a shred of white, greedily sucked away by the wind. she was engaged in a flailing rescue, momentarily off-balance, grasping for her hat. unlike him, moments before, she was unsuccessful, and stood still for a second, watching it shear up, up, and away. an infinite patience settled into her eyes, as though this had happened before and would happen again, as though she had stood in that very position and had found herself comfortable there.

(lightning!) her pale skin, three shades paler by the electric light, but only for a moment, eggshell turned to alabaster, and her so frozen there, sodden - she was an ice floe in an Arctic night. he watched her melt, shielding her face from the rain as she made her way quickly towards the cafe. he heard the sound of a sizzling, and the collapsing, deflating noise of a power outage - he turned to glance indoors, and the cafe had gone dark. within, the scrambling silhouettes of its occupants, as if clumsily enacting a farce.

i remember his father, sitting at the dinner table with both utensils grasped in his meaty hands. he had been assembled from these things, by chance, from both his sire & dam, some drunken hand of chance selecting properties, traits, addictions, habits - and, though inebriated, wisely left room between those things as one would leave space between creeping phlox and the other flowers, to leave it room to spill out, to grow -

and the shoddy clapboards of the storefront vibrate in the ensuing thunder, chattering like teeth. the quick sound of plastic against glass - they have CLOSED the cafe, and she is there now, running up against the door, pressing her cupped hands against it, peering in for refuge. they, the hard-hearted purveyors of caffeine and pastry goods, are not allowing anyone else inside, like a full bunker against the insidious whisper of nuclear fallout.

he is surprisingly dry. a few insouciant droplets of rain have spattered on his shoulder. he begins to call to her, but his voice fails in his throat, like a gramophone not properly wound. delicately, he coughs into one hand. he can feel his lungs expand like fists inside of him.

his father, Jacob More, was a scholar with eyes given to him by a devil - black holes bored by a gimlet. sometimes light shone through. it was more likely that they would slurp in the light from the exterior like black holes in deep space. nightly, his bulk could be found bent over the desk he’d made himself, in his study upstairs. if a storm were coming, he would not be found - his mother, Emily (nee Rabinovitch) would fret in the kitchen, wandering from the counter to the table, adjusting lightbulbs in their sockets. re-arranged the silverware from the tangled mess he’d deposited them after drying. stared out the window, pale eyes reflecting an invisible sea. eventually he would return, suddenly within the walls of the house, dry as bone - somehow a touch wilder, electric at the fingertips. all of it was worth it then, as she fell into his arms and let him pluck the head off of her like a dead marigold.

“may i?” she was indicating the chair beside him, wind-whipped and thin like a reed at the shore. her eyes reflected the rain, darker than his mother’s, speckled with filaments and scars of gray.

Jacob More

even the vegetation shrinks. the bloody peonies on their thin stalks, bowing and murmuring to one another; dripping, bulbous. the thunder crawls up the sky like an ant before disappearing into the crack the lightning has made for it. gray, heavy clouds press east, herding one another towards the sea.

the wind is knocking things over, tears his hat right off of his head. it stays aloft for longer than it seems it should before thudding at a bad angle to the ground, skidding along the sidewalk. he is forced to take a few ungainly leaps after it, but is successful in rescuing it (at the last second) from the garble & mutter of a passing tourist couple, ensconced in their travelogues and their maps of the city. even so, he mutters an apology and scrambles out of their way.

he can feel it approaching in his cracked rib, the one he never got fixed and which healed wrong. sometimes he felt it when he breathed too deeply. he would feel it when she lay with him, when she rolled on top of him & mounted him with breathless abandon, eyes full and round and bright. he can feel it, marching in a wet gray phalanx from the west, like a weary platoon of soldiers ready to lay down their arms & spring into the arms of lust.

the rattle & clatter of a skateboard on the opposing sidewalk draws his attention. it is the sound of a failure, over and over again, a determined failing punctuated by viscid expletives & furious gobbets of spit aimed at nowhere in particular. it is too humid for a shirt. the tiny curl of sweat tattoos the young man invisibly as it wanders over his topography.

the thud & bump of a cadillac driving by, unreasonably quickly, blaring fuck-me music. a girl with platinum ringlets & thick lips tossed her cigarette out the window and screeched around the corner. he shook his head. the mating rituals of the young had, somehow, overnight, turned obscene. rue filled his head as he recalled & reviewed the various trysting places he'd visited in his flaming youth. he smiled & chuckled fondly.

the sidewalk was beginning to acquire polka-dots. he looked at the purposeful trees, planted soldierly in distinct distances from one another and watched them turn coward in the throat of the storm. they waved their thin branches frantically, bending & twisting at the abdomen - even their leaves flinched, turned belly-up & blanched. he had not thought to bring an umbrella. did not know it was supposed to rain. but there, up ahead, lonely in a tiny patio, a small cafe with two outdoor tables - one with, and one without, an umbrella. such a small thing, seeking shelter from the imminent storm, brought a bit of a giggle to his mouth. he eased into the chair under the umbrella and sat back. instantly, the redolence of the ocean rushed into his nostrils. the dying nasturtiums in the wooden flowerbeds wriggled, pale with both the loss of the sun to the clouds & their annual sickness.

thunder - again! a friendly waiter with a nervous eye that keeps leaping heavenward. he wants to question this man's judgement, sitting outside before a storm hits. it's going to be a doozy, says the radio, crackling & chuckling in safety. the waiter bites his nails and leans against the front window, staring out. he brings the man a glass of iced tea, which he has asked for very politely. seems a bit fey, he remarks casually to a co-worker. weird old coot.

adolfo is the name the old man wears. he wears it like an old coat, and it is a hand-me-down from his father and his father before him. one of those things you take out of the closet & dust off. for fancy occasions. he prefers not to wear it, instead opting for the anonymity of the streets, where he peruses strangers like books on a shelf.

the skateboarder - Boyd, since we're giving everyone names, now - is brow-furrowed, resolute. the thunder of his deck against the concrete is matched and surpassed by the sudden sonic torque from above, preceded by lightning too distant to see. adolfo is watching him from beneath the worn umbrella, whose flaps are agitated, whose material is becoming heavier by the second with the rain. but it hasn't broken yet. the air plugs up adolfo's nose, fills up his mouth with sand & grit, and he coughs & hacks out the invasion to the best of his ability, screwing out the same from his eyes with blinks & facial winces. eventually he must doff his gold-rimmed glasses & rub at his burning corneas with the edge of his sleeve.

this is nothing, he thinks.

"probably blow right over," he hears someone say as they stride rapidly by, seemingly uncomforted by their own forecast.

there - lightning! the white-hot brand against the clouds, almost runic, spelling out some coded message for someone, somewhere.

adolfo could wait. he drank lustily of the iced tea & laced his fingers together. inevitably, his eyes trundled back towards Boyd, who seemed totally unfazed by the sudden demand of the weather. it was as though he hadn't even noticed the sun had gone, or that rain was falling - fat, fat drops which hissed after splattering on his skin. he did not notice. again and again, picking up his deck & attempting the same trick, and again, failing, swearing, spitting.

adolfo thought he would have been tired of the sport by now, but Boyd's tireless monomania was enticing. it was something to watch while he waited.

bees

last night i dreamed i became a beehive. i moved in and became a beehive in your house, and you were horrified at the stench - the sweet cloying stench. we lived by the sea, but the salt water did nothing to combat it. i was about to burst, and you ran away crying. in the old wooden house by the sea. my cracked & swollen face gave birth to a thousand angry bees.

yesterday, while sitting out smoking a cigarette, i came upon the conclusion that what i thought has been a noble pursuit up until now has actually been not only detrimental to my life & the pursuit of happiness (as it were) but also, in the right light, is twisted, ugly, and ignoble.

everything online tells me that dreaming of bees is good luck. reversal of fortune. somehow i am disinclined to believe it.

someday soon, oh someday soon, i'm going to lose all of my teeth & all of my money & all of my friends & everything i own & i will be itinerant, peripateic around the edges of everything until the fire that's raging at the heart of everything finally makes its way to the outskirts & finds my corpse.

cheery today, aren't we.

last published

been thinking about old friends.

CHRIS FLETCHER

WILL FLINT

(in capitals because i am invoking them)

the haze of summer, as though looking through it. squinting in the sun. the saccharine twinkle of the ice-cream truck around the corner. clouds muscling in overhead, tired from their eastward trek, bogged down with unnecessary luggage ...

i am giving you Eddie's house because i never saw yours, Fletcher. you lived at the top of the stairs and just off to the right. it was dim in your room, and some broken blinds over the lonely window weren't enough to keep out the sun. you had a Nintendo and two controllers. the ashy, variegated carpet that made me feel like i was standing in a litterbox. Eddie was a humorless sort, but you were not. your family was poor, and your mother was still at work when we got home from school. right away, you showed me your toys - exuberant over the stamina of your oldest action figure - Commander of Planets, Master of the Universes - i can't remember. i remember the look on your face when i broke his arm off - accidentally! - like someone had just punched you in the gut.

Will - you'll wait for another time.

fairytale coda

the woodsman returned home
with the wolf
tossed over his shoulder,
smiling grimly
through a haze of blood -

the sun in the fairytale forest
buzzed through the trees
like an alarm,
a warning.

the heroes, the sidekicks,
the kings, heroines,
& all their animal friends
crept warily
out of their warrens -
spite lolling in their eyes
like a growing glaucoma -

what now, villain!
- their boisterous cry,

come back the echo -
what villain, now?

the seafarer's wife

she keeps a bird
that only sings
when it rains,
to muffle the sound
of the world outside
being systematically drowned -

the ceiling leaks,
regardless,
dripping over the
left side of the bed
where she sleeps.

by 3 AM
we are floating
in our own bedrooms,
laying stiffly
beneath the sheets.

she accuses me through grit teeth
of leaving the window open.
&, i, of course,
deny everything.

when the water reaches
the level of our mouths,
we swallow reflexively
until the room is dry.

the outlets drip
with sparks,
snarling like angry dogs
at our waterlogged silence,

& when we sleep,
we wash up on a monochrome shore,
islands away from each other,
even
in dream -

harvest

the wallpaper peels
& beneath it,
pulpy fruit she'd planted
the night of their marriage.
she'd buried it
with a sly smile
beneath the baseboard,
crouched,
whispering lovingly to it
after the wring of a summer day
& with sweat
leaking from her brow -

he puts his hand to it
& it comes back to him
sticky, wet -
it has a heartbeat.
he is afraid it will explode,
or rot.

years have passed
since they split in the middle,
since they,
for the first time,
squeezed one another
& writhed in the juices.
he is,
inside himself,
withering, wrinkling -
can feel his organs
dying on the vine

the day will come,
he realizes,
sitting cross-legged on the bed
in the humid dark,
when he will desperately
eat at the walls,
and then, still not sated,
suck out the wine
of his own heart -

wrath

son Thunderstorm,
in vesture of charcoal,
scourging the earth
with lightning -
lacerating the ground,
tearing the sky
like a piece of
construction paper
in his fists -
the crack of thunder:
the grind of his molars -

the ocean groans
like a mother
& her hair
turns white with worry.
she frets at the shore
while casting her eyes up
at her wayward child.

& us, below, are scrambling
into our houses,
peering out of our windows,
staring in awe
as he passes,
returning reluctantly
towards his mother's embrace -

...

in the far room,
behind the wafer-thin walls,
i can hear her
gnashing her teeth,
weeping,
as if to make an
ocean of her own
to give birth to
the rage in her womb -

Ceres

she kept a garden -
a furious garden
of fulminant hue,
like a stalled explosion
whose fire faded
with the season
as though in time-lapse.

her hands in the dirt,
shoved deep into the earth,
fingers wriggling like roots,
blindly in the shifting depth.
it seemed she was
hunting for something,
perhaps something lost
a long time ago.

she stayed out till the
sky turned charcoal,
till the match of the sun
fizzled into the horizon,
the wiry, arboreal shadows
bowing over her,
solemnly.

eventally, bats,
winged jigsaw pieces
toss themselves across
the ashy sky
& mosquitoes clamor tinnily
at her ears.

she sighs
like a parting prayer
& returns indoors,
cheeks smudged
with the tender soil.

she smells of it,
raw,
like something just picked,
wet
& new -

stasis & her child

they tried to leave the city
but never made it
to the front door.

their limpid eyes
filled with tears
that clung to their corneas
& stagnated there.

words made landfills
of their mouths &
they choked on their rot.

they lay together
& every night,
fused together at the hips.
in the mornings,
they wearily used a scalpel
to separate.

their breath purred,
stuck in their lungs
like a reluctant cat,
peering past their yellow teeth
before darting back down.

- & her son, her son!
stalled in the womb,
growing hair, nails,
whose teeth lengthened
& whose bones stretched -

he grew to be eight
inside of her.

there they are,
tottering towards the television,
blindly shuffling
around the easy chairs,
suffocated
by static

widow ((unfinished?))

1
the rotting flowers
of the rhododendron,
limp & sagging,
turning ashen
like a drunk
at sunrise -

the malnourished cat
with a sad bell
at its throat,
mistrustfully peering
at passersby.

2
she, in her boudoir,
furtive fingers
nipping,
pinching
at her thinning hair,
watching the muscular clouds
ganging up on the windowpane.

she is comforted by
the layers of dust
over everything she touches.

3
the harrow of evening!
chilly rain,
remorselessly attacking
the shingles -

the attic rattles
with the possibility
of ghosts.

4
the garden, overgrown
with itself,
bulging outward,
spilling over the fence,
clinging to the boles
of knotty willows.

5
in the wet postpartum
of the storm,
the shadows at the gate
shiver,
jiggle the bars,
& slouch off,
defeated.

6
in the ballroom,
a toothless harp
with a tarnished frame.
a chessboard,
one move away
from an impasse.
the fireplace stinks
of cold ash.

7
the wisteria claws
at the side of the house,
vainly stuggling,
heliotropic -

8
she will,
without fail,
stumble through the graveyard,
murmuring eulogies
to her brethren;
runs her fingers,
tremulously,
over her last name
etched again &
again

with her other hand,
her nails tattoo
another name
into her palm.

9
she totters home & sees
her house,
bellowing silently,
blank windows like unlidded eyes
fixed on vague,
faraway mountains.

10
once inside
her ears fizz
with the terrible echo
of silence,
filling the empty rooms
like an odorless gas -

anterograde amnesia

she, dazed,
in a quiet winter
of nostalgia,

a patina of dust
over her memories -
on the crown of her head,
like a mold
or a lichen.

& she is
walking in a dream
where the streets bend
& the trees are bare
but for flocks of birds
staring her down.
there is music in her ears,
a white fuzz,
effervescent like peroxide.

behind her,
an ominous fleet of clouds
sails in.

she stumbles
& smiles vacantly
at the nothing
between buildings,
fixes her eyes
on another nothing,
the space between
two lovers
standing still
as though drowning
& unaware of it

the thud
inside of her.

(hummingbird -
suffers a heart attack -
drops to the ground)

give it a minute,
whispers one parked car
to another.
a lascivious, leathery breath
leaks from its windows -
it'll all come back to you

buzz

there's a hornet in my room.

i can hear it buzzing.
but i cannot see it.

i think it's trapped in here,
and getting angrier.

i, too, am buzzing.
three shots of espresso
& half a pack of cigarettes.

maybe,
while napping,
i swallowed the hornet
which would be why
i cannot see it.

outside, the sun
hisses through the clouds,
like a flame in a wet blanket.

later,
the stars will do the same,
jittering
in the black stomach of the sky

titles

+ WANT

+ FREE PIANO

+ DAVE GRANGER

+ ERSATZ MOON OVER MENLO PARK

interlude: cats

i am convinced that the cats operate under a science-fiction soap-opera dichotomy. gato, the dumb one, sidles up to curry, the smart, street-savvy calico, and sniffs at her face. recoiling in disgust, she paws at him in total disdain and he withdraws, shame-faced. he returns to staring at the things which move, or the things which make a lot of noise and could, thereby, be threatening. brings new meaning to the phrase "fraidy-cat."

it's just like the oafish thug who serves as the comic relief and the sharp captain who secretly loves his brutish ways btu who scorns him in the presence of others. sometimes gato & curry sleep on the same hemisphere of the bed, curled up near, but not too near, to one another, eyes closed, breathing in tandem. he's a bit of a hedonistic glutton, though, only living for the next jaw-scratch or the next tail-yank. curry is best described as aloof, and is yet tortured by gato every time the food happens in the early morning. we have to separate their dishes, else gato (who wolfs down his food with the vigor that only the starving have) will turn to her and stare at her while she nibbles and masticates delicately. it might have something to do with her significant lank of teeth that causes her to eat so cautiously, but gato never has been sympathetic to her disabilities, and will often chase her rambunctiously through the house, as though he were a dog in a cat's body. the more i think about it, gato is probably the world's first feline to exhibit symptoms of a species dysmorphia. perhaps he should get an operation. i wonder if he'll chase tennis balls. or frisbees. i've heard he's pretty crazy around those laser pointers.

um

HUH?

and, because it's so awesome:

huckleberrying through youtube:

- dead poets society



- the goonies



- the west wing



- an american tail



- return of the king, bakshi style



- return of the king, jackson style (please ignore the advertisement)



- the land before time



- magnolia



- homeward bound (TRY not to cry, i dare you)



- young frankenstein



- guys & dolls



- the godfather



- roger dodger



- requiem for a dream

also:

can't help but think that the coming revolution will be a lot less dignified than the ones which have preceded it.

so drunk.

and yet, somehow, even with that 11th hour pack of smokes i bought, i managed not to overdraw myself & even ended up with $3 to my name.

ditched three separate sets of people in my errant drunkenness. told 'em i was just going outside to smoke a butt, when in reality i was actually leaving without saying goodbye.

what'd we used to call that?

oh, right:

ghosting.

N.b.

GET FOCUSED

emulate

so i thought i was sal paradise that summer and i was looking for a dean moriarty. problem was, they never existed in the first place, so i guess i was just filling a void. other problem was, i found a dean moriarty. he had those little pieces of white and orange (sometimes blue, sometimes flesh), colors of the devil's own rainbow.

a summer later, a new novel, and a new friend: i wasn't looking for anyone in particular but i guess a japhy ryder happened into my life. we tripped, got high, got ludicrously drunk. dropped acid in december, the first snowfall. smoked salvia divinorum and flew around the world inside of my head. skyscrapers and all. then we broke on each other and flew apart, as if discovering all that time we'd been lodestones of the same polarity. as if all that time we'd held to one another, vibrating furiously.

winter was always the breaking point. the late gray of january and the mess of february. by march and my birthday, everything: different, in a violent way.


i take myself way too seriously.

fear of abandonment

dream:

my front tooth falls out, and draws out from beneath the gum a strange formation of ice, which melts in my hands to reveal a slim quartz crystal.

we're (all of "us") sitting in a movie theater and the movie is sold out. there's chairs in the aisle, though the aisle itself is so deeply slanted that sitting on the chairs induces a sense of vertigo. the theater is dark and the movie hasn't started yet. i don't know what it is.

i've only been asleep for ten minutes.

memorial day with sun, then clouds

there's always a space between me & the thing. a safety zone. i am, right now, at risk of further mythologizing that space.

for once, i will have noticed it & not picked it to threads with analysis.

yesterday: big out-door gathering. had nothing to do but sit, drink beer, and smoke butts. clouds antagonized those wearing sunglasses around four in the afternoon. i don't know; i took my watch off when i realized i didn't want to be aware of the time. the sun drowned in their gray swaddling, and sank futilely into the horizon without our being aware of it. the hours culminated in a drunken bike-ride home.

new bar, located on the fringe of the old port, nestled into a strange little culvert. iron bars on the windows. an eleven-page beer list, spanning the globe when it came to their country of origin. had a calvados from the UK. some dry, spicy sopressata and gorgonzola. some olives, both moroccan dry-cured (not my favourite) & provencal. some exceptionally sour cornichon pickles. excellent music, not too loud. i'm keeping it a secret. it's my new plan. less of the downtown lounge, and more of having a beer or three at ______. seems i can get drunk in a variety of interesting ways with a variety of interesting drinks. next up: the Cantillon "cuvee de champion," which is a lambic. it will be nice to learn about new things.

in the between-time, there are many things i need to do.

also: there is a mourning-dove outside my window, tucked somewhere in the eaves. there is no word to describe the weird ululations that come out of them, nor the pulsating rhythm to which they perform.

grief

she's treading
in a sea
toward a blue horizon.
the water,
the sky,
the same thing -
one face
mirroring the other.

in one hand,
a bottle of wine.
it tints her eyes,
flushes them
with dark,

he isn't gone,
she tells me,
& her,
attacking my collar.
he wouldn't leave me
she says.

she is as drunk
on desperation
as she is
on the wine.
this, i feel,
is a glass
we can share,

a glass which fills
a lot faster
than it is
emptied.

three-thirty in the morning: stoned.

lately i keep tripping over myself. in the worst ways possible. choking on myself. about to say something, then it refuses, changes its mind, dives back down into my throat & burrows miserably inside of my chest.

can't sleep, tonight. killed time by watching various episodes of stupid television on the stupid internet. no attention span for a movie, or a book. even a short story. so i get high & blur out to comfortable idiocy. the saccharine moments, enough to bring tears to my eyes. maybe that's the weed. it reminds me of vomiting, the way my mouth fills up with saliva & these needle-like jabs of pain.

then, it all kind of stops. even this, right now, at the time of. present moment, though i am describing it in the past tense. this has been the refrain of my brain's song, lately: extended flights of emotional frenzy, punctuated by

"wow, this is stupid and dramatic. i am stupid and dramatic. over-emotional. i am damaged. this is self-pity." sometimes, brief chords of "i'm a closet egotist whose veneer of insecurity and humility is wearing thin." or "i actually think very highly of myself and suffer from delusions of grandeur."

then it goes away, swallowed up by the miasma again.

and my phone is ringing now. well. vibrating. there's a text message. an incoming call i have to let ring itself out so that they don't know i'm ignoring them. this happens so often lately that i wish i wanted to smash it. "i want to see you again" only it's not "you," it's "u" and that awful silence in the car the next morning. it's not just that - it's everyone i ignore. i am becoming something different suddenly. this is a very strange time, and keeping my face straight is suddenly an incredibly taxing exercise. i want to talk about it, i want to feel totally comfortable and just - say. i want to be able to say how i feel when i feel it. it's funny, because the more i find myself needing to speak, the less i do, and the pain of unsaid words just sinks into the lining of my stomach and fizzes acidly. i want to say everything, but there isn't an everything. there's no end to it. and it's worse when the silence happens. you know that. it's not that there's an end, it's either that you felt bad for as talking as long as you did or you felt that it was time for someone else to have a chance to open their mouth.

i am a mumbler, and people don't hear what i say sometimes. i am frequently interrupted, though maybe it's because i interrupt frequently - although i can't be sure of that. to be honest, there's very little i feel i can be sure about. what's nice is that T. is coming home this weekend. although i find myself lately trying to lower my expectations so that i don't find myself disappointed. don't think i can really handle that on top of whatever else.

so then work becomes an issue. maintaining my false - whatever it is - to the door, to the patrons, to my co-workers. feeling ashamed of the lie. but how do you ...? you "leave that emotional shit at the door." dr. f. has told me that i am too extreme, that i gravitate to extremes like an out-of-control see-saw. my words, not hers. it hurts when she tells me things like that. they stick in my brain. partly, this is a good thing. i am made aware of it. i can try to avoid that kind of behavior. unfortunately, most of the time it isn't apparent until hindsight kicks in. there's the challenge: discovering what elements trigger the recognition of the pattern, and applying them to foresight. attack the problem at incipience. kill it at the root. but being made aware of other things isn't what i need. i am already far too aware, though i feel i look without actually seeing a lot of the time. i talk without considering what words will fill the space, and with the motive that i know i should talk because i'm being talked to. without much regard for what it is i could possibly have to say, my diction becomes fumbled & my consonants a boggy glop of drymouth noise.

some days i don't use my voice until the sun sets. i didn't notice that until the other day when someone said "hi" to me on the street, and when i tried to say it back, nothing came out. like those old nightmares you have as a child, when the monster's getting you, carrying you agonizingly slowly past your parents' dark bedroom (you can see the red LED light of their clock, on the nightstand) and you scream with no sound, and they can't hear you, and you're doomed.

i would like to be approved of. i would like to be validated. i would like to approve of myself, and validate myself. i would like to believe it when someone likes me. i would like to be able to trust myself to like someone.

there is no way in hell i am ever going to get anything done with this yoke around my neck. maybe i should salinger off to the woods. but is isolation...?

what it boils down to:

the phone won't stop ringing. well. vibrating. and i haven't listened to the voicemails yet. i haven't been eating regularly and i have been consuming an incredible amount of alcohol on a nightly basis. it's not any one thing. it's everything.

and as we all know, there's no end to everything.

darklings

electric moon
dangling over the city -
a white taunt

draws the ghosts out
fickle little darlings
to dance in the streets

they flash their knives
& their teeth,
whirling, blurring -

our shadows
between our legs,
we run home
to tell Mom all about it

but her lips tighten
& her knuckles crack
in her pockets.

later,
we hear the sound
of her footsteps
followed by the
snap
of windows, locking -

paradigm

everything:
reflection,
every moment lagging
just slightly
behind itself.
this stutter of time,
inspiring brief,
violent nauseas.

the heart behind its bony bars:
more a tumor,
meant to be removed,
more an unwelcome squatter
in a dilapidated house.

the intrusion of a stranger's fingers
infects an icy chill on the skin:
small arctic patches
that no sunlight can melt -

even the pass of eyes
is the swing of a scythe:
i am beheaded,
& the next three seconds
last forever -

the dog-catcher (continued)

4. (son-of-a-gun)

the phone rings,
and its dull echo
hangs in the air
like a sardonic grin.

a roll of grudging thunder
shoulders through the window.
it's echoed in his head
by a streak of
dangerous thoughts

the gun he knows
he won't use,
smothered under pillows,
whining at him
like a baby from a nursery,
but tinny, & metallic.

the phone, jangling.
quiet, suggestive murmurs
from the room next-door -

he lifts it
from its cradle
& drops it again
as though burned
but without a flick of pain
on his face.

a lick of lightning's hot tongue
across the ashy cheek of the sky.

he stares into a mirror.
pulls at his eyes.
squints.
bares his neck
then his teeth.
his mouth is dry.
fear lies on his teeth
like dust,
but rabid rage squats
in his eyes.

the click of his tongue
against his palate:
hollow,
severe.

Warrenville (#9)

Warrenville by night,
huddled hills,
thick-spread dark.
the wind reveals the trees
by turning the leaves
belly-up.

summer storm rattles windows
with the bloat of thunder,
the startled shriek
of lightning.
stray cats leap from the shadows
& quiver under porches,
eyes mad
in their tiny skulls.

inside, covers scrunched to chins
children eye their closets
for any sign of movement
within -

the churchbell.
the hiss & chug of the train
messily bisecting the town.

a gun goes off, but
it is camouflaged by the storm.
the aura of powder hangs
like an incrimination,
mutely accusatory.

have faith, cries the preacher
every Sunday.
they murmur & clasp hands
against all their respective ghosts,
go home & strangle their wives
with silence

Magellan

out here
the threatening curve
of the horizon,
bending
where it shouldn't.

it drove Magellan mad,
&, whitely furious with the sea,
he tiredly drove the
prow of his ship aground,
teeth jolting in his jaw
with the force of impact

inside of her, later,
he felt isolated
& fixated instead on
the rumpled, dirty sheets.
all her coy murmurs
turned to the susurrus
of waves,
lapping
at the shell of his ear

he spoke to her of the water,
of dry climes & of frozen,
sadly told stories of dead sailors
sinking into new depths -

she pretended to astonishment
but was empty for a good fuck.
under the sheets, she toyed idly
with her sex, imagining
another man

Magellan's white fingers
navigating her body.
he is imagining another
new ocean,
feels fear
quivering
in his bones.

the window is open.
from without:
the sound of rain -
the sound of bells -

bar blues (gesture drawing)

the whining wind outside,
caught like yarn
in the wet trees.

then, his roar,
quickly muted
even as his ruddy eyes
flick from her to her.
alcohol rasps
down his throat.
the beat to an unnamed song
turns his hand to
a telegraph,
tapping cryptically on the bar -
his other hand,
buttressing his sinking chin.

in the dim mirror of the bathroom,
he sees his face,
half-eclipsed.

outside: the asphalt,
pretending to be ice.
turning red
with the stoplight's glare
as though something
deep beneath
is shuddering to life

the dog-catcher (unfinished)

1. (prelude: ghost, son & shadow)

the ghost is always with me.
it turns its non-eyes on me
from the chair in the corner.
i have kept the lamplight low
so that no-one sees it
but me:

i see it as a brief flicker,
a vague ripple of motion
like a cloud of gas
issuing from some unseen fissure.
late at night, it hisses
like an angry cat

i am the Son
waiting for the Father
to open the door.
it has been twenty years
since he closed it on me.

the ghost is always with me.
i have never named it.
my shadow is afraid of it
& runs like a puppy behind me,
shrinking between my legs,
cowering.

the clock: just evening.
humid summer seethes outside
like an invisible jungle.
jaguars in the parking lot,
purring - then growling.
the clouds stack up
& collapse, blackening
with the effort.

rain threatens, as i step out
onto the balcony.
i can feel it on my skin.

the horizon wriggles
with the heat.


2: (Father, dog-catcher)

the van is idling.
its fangs are sheathed.

in the driver's seat,
a living shadow,
hand on the keys
at rest in the ignition.

in the back,
a stray dog barks, howls
& whines

his hand turns the key
& it all quiets down.

brief thunder -
sewing up the sky,
crawling along its ragged edge.

derision in the dark house

the children stick
to the corners.
their eyes glitter
like cats

in the den,
the psychotic television
spits out static.
splashes the walls
with electric blue

wrens bash into the windows,
blinded

& nothing
is creeping up the stairs
from the basement
slowly
stealthily -

chrysalis

my father's wet,
pink heart,
harvested from him
preserved in a pile
of stuffed animals
at the foot of my bed.
it had outgrown him,
peeled away his flaky shell
& now pulses weakly
among the blank-eyed inanimates.

its arrhythmia
keeps me awake nights,
stuttering a stychomythic score
to the cinema of my dreams,
snapping me to consciousness
to see the furtive black hands
of the clock grasping feebly
at two,
three - sometimes,
four -

it seems sometimes to wheeze,
curling like a mewling newborn
shucked too soon
of its protective shell
just beyond the soles
of my feet.

almost instinctively,
i begin to moan in tandem,
as if trying to provide solace
to its distress,
but we sing in different tongues
& both of us
remain lonely,
even made more uncomfortable
with the very presence
of the other

one night,
it stopped
& began to rot,
melting,
staining the sheets
with a ruddy lake
of blood & water.

the morning after was
claustrophobic -
unfriendly.
the gauzy, flocculent sunlight
battered at my face & chest
like a violent horde of moths
trying to get in.

i sought refuge in the
dim cloisters of libraries &
bookstores,
stealing one page at a time,
and,
when night again
wrapped itself around our house,
i, with saliva &
shuddering fingers,
knit a wet chrysalis
for myself

once inside,
asleep,
the turgid, febrile pulse
of my heartbeat
filled my ears,
stoppering up
any other sound.
i held my breath
& waited

& still,
i wait

there is no victory, just a breath between losses

tonight is walpurgisnächt.

the walls between the worlds suffer a slight spiritual hernia: the dead pass into our world and, perhaps, vice versa. bonfires are lit to keep the spirits away. to keep the light, holding to it like the doomed survivors of "Darkness". then, tomorrow is May Day, Beltane. the sun and the light return to the world.

it has rained here for the past three days. the trees, budding in panoply, sagged under the weight - it was not quite cold enough to freeze on their boughs. the cats huddled indoors. curry ventured out once or twice, but only nosed cautiously near the steps of the porch, unwilling to proceed. today: cold, a stiff, pugnacious wind. i went out for a brief errand and it punched me in the chin, forcing my head up and my eyes to water. i tripped over a loose brick in the sidewalk and inhaled sharply, my heart speeding up a beat. that happens a lot. the long-melted snow combined with the odd temperatures have left our roads and walkways a peculiar ruin. i'm not yet used to the new topography.

that goes for a lot of things, actually. terra infirma.

>>

at johnny's house, both of us a little tipsy, stoned out of our minds. he heats up two butter knives by sticking them between the coils. at their tips, a mess of scalded metal, black and gray variegation. we balance an iota of weed on it, press the knives together, and inhale rapidly through the remains of a bic pen's outer shell. these are knife hits.

JOHNNY
...i don't care about any of that shit, man. i only care about two things in this world: the work, and someone to share it with.

the coughing rasp of his fingers sliding on the guitar strings, and how all of the muscles in his body twitch when one snaps. ryan is sitting quietly by the bookshelf, knees pulled up and arms wrapped around.

i start in on some babble, trying to understand what he means while trying to understand how i feel about what he's said as i'm going. i feel like it's a good quote. a quotable quote, even, a phrase that shows his character like nothing else. his steely determination to the Work. his references to Abigail. his swerving, bilious suddenness, staggering around the living room in the dim light as though hit by a bullet, right in his gut. his rant is punctuated by near-manic laughter, as though the sound of it is the only thread keeping his seams pulled together. he pinches his nipples and does a jig. we do more knife hits. i punctuate the awkward silences after his campfire tales with an ironic "your turn," and point to the stove.

he brings up cities we could move to, in the fall. as always, i am vacillatory. i don't commit to either new york city or - really - anywhere. in one particularly inspired outburst, i blurt out my desire to say fuck it and go live in the woods. johnny, wiser than i in such matters, immediately corrects the spoken desire and correctly interprets it as social frustration. i accede, and admit that i am too hooked into modern conveniences. plugged in, i should have said.

>>

it's a struggle to continue writing in here. the reason i never kept a diary was because, secretly, i just wanted someone to read every entry. every dated passage was written from two perspectives: 1) my own and 2) myself in the future, reading over it, disgusted with what burbled through the spaces between the words. thank god for the internet, where the availability of even a possible audience is enough to get me to say something. not that i have anything to say that is of much worth anyhow. comes from a lifetime of indecision, of hesitance, of preferring others' opinions to my own. how do you break out of such a mindless cycle? chalk it up to a rip in the schematic of my brain.

in that vein: other random exploits including an apocalyptic hangover on friday (category 5), another humiliation at work on monday, cold fingers throughout. made a list of things needing accomplishing on sunday and have checked off three thus far. some of them are impossible dreams. i tend to insert at least one of them in every to-do list i make.

now the fun part: deciding what tags i want to use on this post. categorization, you've always been there for me.

of legal age

i just heard that 26 is the new 21.

...what does that even mean?

xkcd

beast.

the shrill whine of the phone, like a shocked animal. unexpected at this hour.

spring has just shuddered around the bend, gracing us with warm days & with balmy nights. the window is open & the bedside lamp is staining the walls with diluted yellow. i can't sleep. i've gyrated from position to position, ultimately no more comfortable in one than the other. the sheets are a mess. i've stopped caring.

on the display is an unfamiliar number with an even more unfamiliar area code. by the third or fourth ring, panic grips me. indecision stews in my stomach, but it doesn't even have time to simmer before, for whatever reason, i answer. it's S on the other end. i knew it, somehow, maybe the fog of insomnia gifted me with extrasensory perception. i heard his voice seconds before he spoke, like an echo ahead of itself. with that recognition came surging dread, and the muddle of my thoughts gave me away.

i feigned drunk, too drunk to move. certainly to hang out. he doesn't want to "rekindle a relationship," he says to me, but he "misses" me, and "was thinking about" me the other day. of course he was. they came into my workplace. and due to my conspicuous evasion of them - (which, by the way, is no longer a question) - he found it necessary to recall my number from the swirling depths of his memory & use it at four in the morning. not that i begrudge him. i never sleep early. i don't think that will ever change. i will burn myself out on late nights. he told me he would call me tomorrow, but he hasn't, and i know what he heard in my voice, and i know what i heard in his: disappointment.

i am wilding around the edges, creeping with a sort of acquired fauna that appears lichen-like but which behaves like bacteria. i am concerned for my gulping, pulpy bagpipe of a stomach. for all of the slick organs, pumping in tireless rhythms against all the other rhythms. eventually the drummer's arms become weary. i meant to say that i was fraying at the edges by the word "wilding." not fraying harmfully, but in a slow pattern, as if getting one's favourite sweater caught on the exact same nail at the exact same time every day of one's life.

it's windy and E. has put out the table & chairs in the courtyard by our porch. there will be a lilac tree in full bloom, and what appear to be tulips, proudly striving to always be the first flower of spring, yet constantly beaten by the smug daffodils, the crocuses. the tulip is a flower in denial.

the son of vladimir nabokov, dimitri, has decided (against his father's last wishes) that the last novel (unfinished) will be published.