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.