Germs crawling over your bodies, your tack hammers
blemished by petrified daisies

that told stories to their children about crazy ancestors
whom outlived what was expected.

Cherubs! Cherubs reaching from aluminum clouds
to stab the hearts out of lover's--kings and queens of too much is enough--minds.
Bold martyrs dying as abolitionists
                        to an illiterate pop-fractal-culture
weeping about zealous posters of apathetic narratives.
                                                     ­          The infinite wilderness of glaciers calling the fading background
                                     of planet Earth--steamboat particles in reverse
                                               suckling till the chimes of apocalypse come.
                          we are slaves beyond truth and defiance

Sneakers hit confident roads with black widow nests in gutters
                                                         ­   --the sun is a word,
                                                           ­    she says it is a culture.
                                                        ­   --The dark is a force,
                                                          ­     she says it is a child.
                                                          ­             realistic tendencies are as hollow
                                                          ­                                                as romantic ones
She laughs and I laugh
                                          pity is polio
                                          too sick to bend and
                                          too accustomed to power

I want to see where nice words are used on young ladies.
                      ****** Rome of rude-bred heights from the balcony of the city of dynamite.  The villagers sacrifice their seven pounds of worry, and sleep like children in caves of textile reactors. Souls packed in coins and gasoline sin are sold hot at the bazaar on a University campus in America. What the **** do these lambs do in societal gardens? What the hell do pets know watching letters drizzle from the clouds? Parcel dreams scattered on foster children--I want to know where all our words for niceties went when we paid the women to be young.
                                                                      Devils make knees slick
                                                                   barbwire anacondas bless our country
                                                   write a laugh--write a song--and we will all work it out

                       We--used as a rapier to categorize the salt in vigorous blood flow--the bells, the bells of centuries worth of midnights. I--the edited cobble in roads that precipitation breaks in stride. Hearing the  rambles of lucky men in the next room, but I know young ladies don't kiss and tell to friends they find effeminate, they rupture and explode. And laugh. And laugh. And laugh. And laugh with squeaky voices as true as poetry. Now they mumble till they are paid.
                                       But you--are no *******, just an empty glass with chunks of broken accents skipping deadlines in life, for new deadlines in life. Abstract puzzle pieces resemble therapy that burns the interrupted wick in--you.  
   But as for--them--they--or others--delirium commercializes whispers aching the back of their tonsils till there is no relief, but coin to pay for more coin that will pay for more coin. Relief is in another language they refuse to learn because they are arrogant.

Cats scowl at one in the morning for attention, nails anchored in carpet, the rest of us are tired by the week of spending. They want more, more, more--till the gates in your eyes open.

Calm these rabbits around the spirals
          the *** is still in my wind pipe
and the morning will be late till spring.

         Screeching lightbulbs rewind impatience
------The naked nuisance is scrubbing into your nebula.

Hands that helped us into the pit
            Beware       them
                                            again

Popping trophies and other autobiographies
coil into soda cans like strange theories.
                     objects    objects
                   everywhere you go

                faster. slower. pause.
                revival. tow. exhaust.

There are                no teeth in my apple
                 and my lost love takes pictures

                                     with backgrounds that I spy
saturation in. She misses me,                                 I know it.

  The litanies of street performers, and go-go rockstars--she shares the same
plea.                          But I do not know if she uses the same words.
                                  But I hear their rhythm throughout the film.
        Graffiti dollars nestled in the dark of my wallet--preparing for the rocks.

Birds broken loose under couches
roasting spits on regional traps,
granddad beat her senseless on the crane handle
that was his arm. Back spinal snaps--fingers are numb--without the ability
to see her pleasure.

I hooked myself when I hooked her.
          Right answers look at you
          straight
          down
          the
          scope

I don't wanna die
I don't wanna die

"You are a soldier! Now man up and find your hand."
She may never come back
but maybe neither will you...

I

Angry stupors succumb her sternum
                                          --battered cavities
                             and shoulder sockets.
   Mates with shotguns and pitchforks
           snapped femur bones holding to hope,
  cat nap toes struggling
                                            to climb the miserable

  The greatest beasts reverberate
                        --Fathom and Torrential/Alice & Skippy,
                                       & Orwell and Bukowski
   with pit mentality swarming
                            her literature
                            his neck.                   Never be the Republics.

     The wall is wood and bare. Ammonia wet seal--
              
            Alice, with her sweet, clawing voices sees
                          this escape is a prison.
        The dove sent to fetch Peace's growth
                  got stuck                                     in the chimney
                             that Skippy built with his stubbornness.

     Alice touches her tacked on remnants
                       --feeling the double home.
                                  Skippy stands still unless Alice calls
     for him
                  and he runs so fast with heart halves beating
                                                                ­       slow.

   *II

           Skippy looks down the abyss and sees Julius Caesar,
                    Cthulhu, and a black flag
     calling back for ceremony
                                 in honor of facilitating fear
                        holding tears
                                   and hugs with arms of falsehood.

    Providing bread for mothers and fathers,
            captors of our tables of silence.
       Fear--making dead witnesses into no soft music,

                                                         ­  no music.
                                                          ­       No,
                                                             ­  facilitators near the top.
                                              What the minds of men
                                                             ­                have done to him...

III

                            Wet paper skin,
                       flat screen canvases--cute satisfactions
                                  asked mean all the world
      but yet                                nothing              but petty questions
                                                       ­                              that break the camel's back.

   "Do I deserve to do this to you?" Skippy asks,
                  helping Alice remove her other lung.
   "Pages will tell babblers later
                           in history", Alice replies.                   Shrieking

    Skippy quarters Alice, the body, the organism's pillow
                    ink
                    oozes
        ­     and    
                             squirms.
Silence,
               as Skippy does the deed.
Wallowing
          back
into
           the
swamp
            of
obsessive
           perception,                        climatic disintergration
                                                 ­                   makes flint hit steel--making another heir
                                                            ­                                       in her litter. Her name is Pain.


IV

       Loving Alice
                           watches         as she falls,
                                                    crashe­s,
                                                and rises.
She smiles softly.


V


  softly with lips of jasmine, the butterfly conundrum is strapping
            fingers made of chalk and other media to
red bricks,
red bells,
it is but a ghost of a casket. She breathes in this casket--in the belly of a bell, she survives.

                                     It doesn't take her long
            to finish
                          what she has done
         --nails faded back to purple polish.

  Falling through her father's philosophy                         a ladder,
                                                         ­                                    a rope
                                         to strangle the blade of Lady Macbeth's sanity.
          Alice takes one last look
  under jasper eyelids--pulls the rope & becomes lactic.
                                                         ­              A motion film.

Nostalgic hypochondriac,
psychopathic goddess--we pray to your weekends.

                     Sunday night industries hold lunch breaks,
starting with a red bear,
                        a crude blue-eyed, red bear
            by the hands of a child.
                             Soft steps. Physical form.
                   Its eyes suddenly gleam
                   as it moves,
                                 red colors run
                                                           forming waving arms that swim into river canals.
   Dripping rain forming acid that eats away at the sides of the darkroom. Winding staircase
trees rooted and spiraled like broken porcupine barbs existing off the wall. Each leaf made
of copper, tips of yellow
                    floating just as drops from the beginning,
                                            expanding to the form
                                                            ­               of hot air balloons.
                        
                       Some of them supernova'd
            --momentarily spreading themselves thin
                                                     --layers of butter coating this world.
                each puddle of lard echoes with the voice
                                and memory of silver-eyed Alice
                and her children.

                                                      ­                 Irises of cut granite,
                                                        ­                        wine-stained pupils,
                                                         ­  she breaths like Jesus on the cross

                                   --inhales of his bear pelt.

Catapulted                      sub-genre painters,
                        'the boys--the dogs of war
                                    no one knows about'
    shot across                   opposite tobacco oceans,
                                         eaten by Helicoprions,
                                                               a B-rated villain.
Otherwise these teeth whips
                are starved by peanut-hull boats

                                    --the artists barely make impact--

         Hungry drip paths,
         bright stars stare back
         with teeth like oak chairs.

                  Happy children,
       always happy children
                   run with kites on orange-sprayed blades of grass.
                          They trip
        --forms of dice against doorknobs.

                           The eternal squares before the yellow canaries
                           are so fast
                           they crest the eagle's head
                           atop the totem pole.

            Mad ******* cry, as Alice commanded, about the death of all oral tales
                         --enraged laborous *** laughing
                                   at what we do.

I

          Aspiring to reach the solar rabbit hole eclipse
                  --climbing up the well,
                                            the photon test tube
                                      sodden and crusted on the outside
                  by angsty
                                adults
       snorting obsession
             through The Manhattan Project straw.

                    The pirate boy wanted to be named
                           Skip--so determined Alice named him,
                                    Skippy, conqueror of blueberry mucus
                 --he reminded her of sidewalks
                         she found far in the misty woods
--no one walked
                      the unexpected like                                           him.

          Each placement of a pore: a bat cave
                                                       a depressed skull
                                                       a hollow exploit
                                                       a lame *** joke
                                                       a mildew plop

Almost certainly this cadaver matryoshka doll
would be human by the time
the two runaways
were born again                               Hallelujah! The dish breaker is crowning again
                                                           back to the galleons, rotting awkward candles.

               "Leave what is human                                       in
                                                                                            inhumane
                                                                                            places." the well speaks.
          Skippy tears the corners of his lips
          to his ears. Alice turns her temple to the sharpest part
                                                                            of the monumental
                                                                     test tube
                                and cracks her childhood back to the bottom
                                                                               --back to Euphoria. light poles open
                                                                                  up faces and throw their lights to the ground.
Both of the thrift store
lovers continue to climb--ripping off purchases
                   to the beggar's tin cup.

II*

   Severed hearts beat without metaphor
          as the empty vessels that hold them.
Spines sing of freedom like centipedes
                      facing fan blades.                                Pirate boys mock the smoker's language
                                                                      of mutiny.

Devalued skin,
                                        ***** armor
casted,          
                          lowered,
   teased, by the cadence
            of tumbling blood.  Marking territories other brother's can smell

                  Obediently, we see what
       gods are doing to them. They're paying
for drawing the different suits of God
   on the cave wall.            Hit jobs--vacuum spoils,
                     sucker punch postage stamps
              --revenge from a peaceful creator
  forcing the two to climb/climb/climb
           back to a speck
                   where dandelions grow
      from the revolution fetus and graphite,
& tongues, & lips, & nerves, & veins &
wolf spiders pour down/red matter clusterfucks.

A shroud of air
on all the lines of sight
fills the shelf space of my existence library.

2012, the year that was supposed to end                           our race
                                                --a water-line for the universe
                                                  that apparently doesn't care.
      In the tally on the wall and the chalk that makes it up there is the reverence to cultivation
of change--fear.  It was this fear I felt all 365 days that caused my arteries
                                   to ***** and my blood to accelerate. Fear caused pain
and love and both of them in hind view are venomously magnificent. I may be a descendant
                       of primates,
                       maybe--but I met my hope by the ocean. Leaving messages in the sand
for passers and onlookers. It is wonderful how the sound
                                             of the ocean--a voice--a warning--a heartbeat keeps us alive.

I

Crested by the infamous gown
during a tribute                            to all digestible,
                                                     ­  sentient,
                                           grown strips of light
            playing splatter off the sockets
                                                         ­      of fishermen birds,
                                     who can no longer ignore all
                                     the puppy dogs and kitty cats canned
                                                          ­               in squeeze tubes.

Now every corner of this landscape--a puzzle-piece room
                                           designed to think in shades
                                           and seasonal plume dances.

The usual beautiful* late evening
has become clotted with hip hop Down's Syndrome
mixed with jazz Dual-Personality Disorder.

                                                   Vampire Hades' skull evacuated of ****** power,
                                                          ­      a scene of literal watercolor
                                                    wh­ere moods collage with paper rings

                   on their stubby tongues. An unfixed saturation,
                                                     ­         clean oils
                                                            ­   split
                                                           ­    like the parting of hair

                        Alice's pirate boy, her beauty is parched of tomorrow,
                                                       ­ a wolf for a blood-red moon
                 that works like a farmer
                          to      
                                                              th­e                       water.

                            Let us all that are wild
              quote the stormy truth that                          shifts the particles in space
                                             "It is all in the direction a flower grows,
                     educating a sea of doubtful faces--to the cruelty of nature
                                      Close the brutal mind,
                                                           ­       unless your eyes are flame-proof, Alice."

--It is yours to consume
but it is relatively us that belongs to the consequences--

                                                 ­  Churning coffee water,
                                            reenacting romantic bloodshed
                                    to addicts in attics
                                                          ­  --jostling war heroes
                                               back to this side of the looking glass.
--coming back to their tempest
                          of cremated breaths--a den with no one
                                                             ­   to sing with.
        Sad Alice,
   always sad Alice--mud on her face from             the Dead Sea's end
      of immortality           because Death is albino.


II

  
The top of the day,
                                                            ­              negative space
  has a dying voice        as it lies under the boot
                                       of the night sky  
                                                           ­      watching stars.
                                              "Simply tomorrow is right there
                                                above the mortals," Sweet Alice
                                                speaks, "To the many heavens
                                                      its­ overpopulating the fields."

       The earth needs its cotton blankets.
   Fresh air accents symptoms --dancing on slick gravel
  at 10:18 at night with a pale, pompous view of someone else's Paris.

Crocodile roads spit up by patterned archipelago drags,
updating the scream, "think more about going off the edge of hair and the last number
after twenty shots                         of anesthesia." The culture of Spanish sun denial devolves
         the fig tree
     novel delights.
99% of the fear that saturates the throats of people is a blonde tumor.
1% of the love is too passionate to contain the fires of field cotton.


III

         end of immortality
accepts her                 trying to escape her pirate boy
              but tones of nostalgia prevents the revival--a war with God, herself,

                                                       ­                 trying to escape looping Paradiso,
factory vents malfunctioning forth
                   the guts of Inferno.                     Purgartorio  plots on
                                                              ­          erased continents
                                                      ­   rolled down lamp shades/ everything is useful,
             waste nothing.

Republics spawned in damp pits stamp bargains on trust
     ringing each solo anthem as one: I saved you,
                                                            ­  feeble beast.
                                                          ­    I saved you,
                                                            ­  dear lonely and you didn't care.
                                                           ­    I reserved us both
                                                            ­  and you cast me back
                                                            ­  into Dante's imagination.
                                                    ­          I saved you,
                                                            ­  you feeble child
                                                           ­   and you burned
                                                              me­ with your
                                                              wo­rld.

     Weaving Alice, calm Alice lies in a dingy on the river Styx,
                                  cobwebs fit to her feet like rank shoes
           she gave her children when they were born malnourished
                                        ---starved of insurance money, mouths agape
for the silk heart of their father--an image of a moth in the shape of a human pelvis
                                                      with­ alligator mouths on the wing tips. They shared
                                      --Alice and him--those wings like scribbles tied together on chalkboards
                                                     ­                                 
                               ­                                       --places to venture--

Your Wonderlandia, she spells, a wasp's nest
                                  of combs
                                          in a hive locked
                              in with the others--concave atlas skies.

            Alice smiles with inebriated
   country boys
                          tossing comrades in the natural flow.
             Richly blonde Alice, admires the impression
                        of the night
                  once charred dreams,
                                               now volcanic forests.
              She glides on a dingy
              across the luscious joy
                             --lubricated veins in atheist's beliefs
                                 don't get lost here, just new places to venture.

Beneath malicious eternity, on the River Styx
                                                            ­        
               the boy she adores
                                    all of a sudden, she steals his hat,
looks into his double-barrel eyes,
                                       sees how sad
             she makes herself                  --like a mother tired of brushing
                                                                ­ her daughter's hair, looming tears
                                                           ­                                         extend beyond widows
                                                          ­                                          to the water.

                      The pirate boy says
            his friend isn't far up the river--she cries through her hand.

                               Hopeful Alice prays, smiling, hoping everyone goes to Wonderlandia.
                                             The pirate boy never finds his friend
                                              but keeps his promise
             and takes her away from Euphoria
                                                        ­       --the cranium loss still fresh.

Some people remind you
of hurricanes
    cold surfaces swirling,
crushing
      the glare you get from an overhead
light
        off bathroom walls.

Drinking Duchamp Whiskey
                 0 grams of protein
             250 milligrams of sodium
               34 grams of sugar

The grouts of your favorite poetry book
                  bound in a trapper keeper
know
            how you will be forgotten.

It's first words
are "The day thee art"
and you fill in:

-'someone who won't freak out
              about what I do.'

-'the oils from your nose
     smeared across those
        bacterial tiles.'

But remember what the poet meant:

                 The Stagnant Bourgeois
e     v     a     p     o     r     a     t     i     n     g
  out of existence because
Darwinism
      has a germ any scope can see--Greed.

            Some people
the fittest and weakest
are in one big ***--getting crushed
    no matter what

The night of crime awaits you. It flows like a river called morality by people who think of silly things like that.
Children frolic in it by day, and sleep in it by night. They drown themselves in it. So the morning is more newer and the night don’t reek of sins unforgivable by baptism.
But a heart swollen is a heart swollen.
And what lives in that river loves everything with the kind of intensity that flays the purpose off of everything else

The beak's vessel plunders
    the death of Queen Anne's
                                           twisted, soft scent often. Convenience stores
                            serve war in boxes.

                   A red giant's dimming
wit,      a devil in your balloon. The old governors burn their clothes
                                    at four,
                           four flags,
                                               free, fly
                                into home
                  where the birds die.

My half-century railroads heard the forest is green
when the trees are brown and burning
and the foliage is just a dream

              from the quick,        
                                      the blind,
                      and the ***** that can't dance with the sun like the others.
Water running at the end
of predestination of an unborn's underbelly.
                                                                ­   Say out to the head board
                         begging for attention
                                       --rather be a bridge
worn and bruised, understood and here. The night is here also,
                
             not alone, but no words shared. I rather wait for the walker
who can't sleep
                              to stare at water underneath
           and feel warm from its reflection
                                          --and can't sleep the entire night.

Throwing the baggage onboard, I'm *****,
and straight forward with you. No games.
If I ******* like you,
I won't spin this web of ******* and pain.
I ******* like you that is that.

We'll work out the rest, we'll deal with it,
and these sorry *** lines later.

You're more than some walking-wet-bag for my ****,
You're you. And I like that ******* it. **** the rest.
That is the only straight forward part of my life right now,
you and writing. This is the best poetry you're gonna get,
because the rest of what was planned for this poem
             went into conversation and pre-emptive love. What ever the **** that means...

             But there will come a day when friends can't understand my poetry again,
              that's when you'll know what has happened to us.
       You'll know...

A smear of a dead roach
like the talons of a hawk
perches over a closest

locked.

Printer ink, moist black
oyster in a cocoon
--of pastel sub-plots

More touch
           --more touch
Less ***
          --less ideas.

Balance should be the advertisement
                           on
            our caffeine eyeballs

Telephone poles
                                     thrown in stitches
across the never-ending blanket
                                                 -- that you stopped following somewhere
after an indie rock concert. The pattern that gavels crusades
                                                               on segmented streets--loss balance
                        bookshelves. Times when tongue-tied families test the lengths
                                                                                                      of rapture and abundance,
            both mouths tired and one eye black--a sock monster. A dog outside barking
                                                                              and lists,
                                                                              and lists,
                                                                              and lists,
                                                                              and so on.
                     All this while you watch the tide fall and rise.

Locked from the top
is a Tuesday night rockstar
cut on the weeds and steam
off of cars speeding by. Tearing off the graceful bonds
called bone sweet
carving flesh pulp
strange and the blood
candy cane ruby red
to the grass bedding below.

Fast lane puppets
caught at lights six miles later. Five year old wails
about God pimping coke addicts with
gloves on,
gloves off,
pounding on asphalt doors
hiding ******* shots--it's raining inside. Her pants are down
in the gutter--scene on TV, reality on fire.

Living in tail lights
till the red blushes
at the cute landlord watching the gore
past the building dishes and shot glass

eyes burned out of lost friends
from staring at blown bulbs.
Mumbling nirvana crawling like beetles
from tripping lungs

taking the same bible spine
away from yesterday. The junk that tickles,
makes the moon spin,
mad women dance
in the bankrupt birth
of  humid H-bombs.

Shovels scoop up gravy
for wood chippers, the springs of History
foaming at the mouth,
shredded to delicate words such as 'fault'
'blame', 'regret'.
The stoop kids play card games as the sirens wail
and another turn passes.

Air fresheners killin' me softly about
judgment moments--days bruised hearts sing about
within the reach of hell--and she told me about her allergies

Of course Polaroids stalk what we don't see--those kisses
and the homeless starving, and flowers, and ****, and books, those tears,
and when she broke the fever from food poisoning. I bet we'll remember that

--And the exposed arms around your waist,
lips on midday, heart up early, breakfast for two underneath
the only red umbrella
left after Gabriel's tune
we remixed
the night before.

Standing on the brink of the Lazarus water-mark
--And the man behind you, and the lack of others behind us.
Gehenna before us
wiping away the unforgivable.

--And they make us forget you were allergic
to the pollen of spring--the death-throes of day flies.

Last week we bought a bottle of epilepsy to share
at a party made to crash on dinner plates
rolling down uphill battles.

The clustering warm anticipation set to pounce falls short
with talks of who is late and who can't make it
because someone in the family disapproves.
Who cares about the bitter salt cakes in the dust of fossilized crustaceans?
The polar bears march to beautiful, pointless noise beating off the living receptacles.

The locals are scars in the conclusions deep in the visiting sounds—almost forgot but still murmuring.
*The first citizens of noise.

Chop down the city lights of Paranoia.
Cathartic beads of sweat roll
off the horrors of your back
under the saggy breast lamps

in the pitched dreams where the nightmare kids
come to watch you sleep.
           Somersaulting walls made of human tissue,
the love of your life overseas, and everything you say
comes out as water torture on hollow centers of hope.

                        poetry is dead.
                                                  Liars smoke ten packs a day,
social criminals stroll in marathons of perdition
across the rot of post-modern vices,
their feet stomp closer to watching faces under the bed.
                                      'This is a story. A dream!'
Everyone sees the fire under the bed.
Watch-fires earthbound by every word
before it is said,
gagged in envy--brought to glow by spineless atoms.

        Every sexless sun has a beard, a saved flirtation that singes
          the vacuum of today's soul,
                             a dead dream because you didn't pull it from the brink.
No one has a name in poetry. A task. A point. An exit.
                                                  One bed-room apartments locked with pearls
                                                     visible only to soloist dogs.
No sorry for vagueness or shut-mouth or bleeding upwards. The meter is running....
to the pharmacy
because it could be pregnant with all the possibilities.
And the whole amphitheater wants to hear one line, the life changer you brought
--here it is: Forget your name.

Sleeping in bookstores
      dreaming dragon wings of Poe
the baby Barbie dolls dystrophied
across the floor.
                        raspy hounds of a scarecrow's hands
curing a vintage disease of information.

Palpable ornaments weighing tons
on the back of an eagle with a pocket watch
sprouting from its beating morsel

with every shattered piece of Frankenstein's monster
fighting for consciousness.
                                              The blank has snapped
    in the corner shelves on
              how to make bottles.

the recycled song
that repeats in the throats of the lovers that came so many times
they were invisible on death's radar for just one night. Is it possible
                                                        ­                  for the same two people
                                                          ­                to live in that kind of
                  perpetual amazing-ness?

                  A white flag of surrender in the nose of scolding lips--her lips--those wonderful lies.
The best beard no one will forget. That last sentence makes no sense
                           without the breakfast it went down with. My eggs over well, the bacon still moist with grease, the toast over golden, the grits sloppy, the hashbrowns like a fried sandwich. I need a fantastic cup of coffee.                                                          ­              with her perfume. I'm not sure
                      if I am what she wants, but the alcohol in the
wine I had for                                                              ­            New Years still lingers in my throat.
                                                  
                                                I still feel the burn of loss in my esophagus. The white banner starboard,
blood in my teeth and an opera on my fingers--
what a beautiful world for this day to begin on                and this night to end on. I am a man
and                                                          ­               woman
My feet are hairy--my heart is bruised and young,               like crossed lovers in heels and breeches.

                             The faith of a white flag--a serpentine
                             coast in my suitcase. The world awaits,
                             death can wait--and thanks to Hemingway,
I begin, end, and live my life around the word
                                                            ­                       'and'.

Out in a cabin in the back
    woods once again
            
               what speaks louder that words
               are my words and the masses just whisper.
                                             Rabbits **** bears,
timber
exoskeletons
crack,                                ­         porcelain
                                                    und­erbrush
                                                    surre­nders,                          those red strings
                                                         ­                                        nudge me
                                                              ­                                   to acknowledge it,
the Shakespeareans are creeping in on purpose,

      i've tried too hard to please this hardwood floor.
                           Excuses:  I am--
                                                     --walking on the body of a
                                                               ­       violin
                                                   ­  --measuring the plucked
                                                       requirements of the craft,
                                                          ­                    a melodic one.
                                                     --forgetting my voice.
I met your envelope
                    of panic
switch--vapor lights
staring down on my skin.
                            Pink elephants
                     bound on crosses strung up in red
                                                  --you stitched their brick hearts.
                               I was welded
                                        to the screen door by the touch
                                                          of a                 one-way street,
epidemic voices are farming the cure for salvation before our cauterizing
                                                     ­                                                 muzzle flashes

                                                        ­                           --the outline of your fleeing justice.
I smell rain and why I fell in love with you,
                                                            ­                       --you never write when you're angry

The face of the morning
that pulls the crazy out of things
                                               unloved.
Sweetest rounds, some sort of grandeur
                                balancing on hexagonal perfection
--pulled by wanting inside a dead body's heart
                                                   waiting to wake up.

Before you extinguish, you must distinguish--that one day
                                         when the royalty you pull joins the charge
and pulls the chair sat upon.
                                        One day, that'll be of no use too.

You look absolutely ravishing
in this photo. The ethereal red matches
your sodden skin perfectly. It is no wonder
why there is a spiral about your neck, lying on
the mouth of your chest.
There she stands
watching the sun start and end
all in black and white, hipster hues,
till the end of time. A train whistle blew.

In the morning, I awoke
                               to the smell of burning rubber--the bats in paradox
with their champagne necks broken,
                                                         ­            telling stories from atop
                                the blisters on the celestial skin.
A sublime masochism with irises that devour events, and ribs of sunshine,
and this was the gong of the eleventh hour somewhere after four a.m.
when the mockingbirds lie bodies in strange angles,
                                                         under tracks and atop cars.
Garage underdogs howl at the fog
after self-inflicted shotgun wounds lying in the corner
of the greats things lost and the worst things gained

                the bleach corrodes the bombarded sidewalk
that you almost hear smoldering, whimpering on the empathetic verge
                                                                ­                                   of the ocean
                  where mini-stars explode, civilization ribbons coat the throats
                                         of you pedestrians, humanitarians
        all dressed and gifted
                                         to the ****** of equivalence,'
            and I am tooth drunk
                         on the placebo slide, carnations washed beneath the broom
                                  clinging to morsels that ***** blue sky down on the trumpeters.
On the fall of the eleventh hour---Carpe Diem crushed by sweaty palms into ***** work
and screaming
dance parties.
How low?
He, they,
it, I, she
throw lives away like ships
slicing through the ocean, the same reckless, but disciplined authority.

There are times          --like when I told my professor
                                                       ­  these marks on my body
                                      were just the last drops of intelligence leaving my rind.

                                               --where girls are women dancing across tickling sunshine,
                                                      f­elt crevices, hills, plains, cliffs of paradise. She and I love to fall
                                                    for ideas of people. Without looking twice--every memory isn't crippling

                                          --who I am is just a really big, personal word for someone sitting flat
                                                          on a mirror in my mobile home.

                               --crimson stains/the blades of a metal bird./It's beak dulled by the friction of battle.
                                   It's tail maneuvers/till bent and broken/and the body ruffles
                                           as metallic feathers sway/to the commands of war parasites
    There are times I realize lighting is wasted energy,
                                                         ­          just cracks and cuts
                                   changing out the insides of words as I see them.
                 There was a time I thought I knew what storms meant.

                                                   My old self knew what to do, just wait
                    --the crisp clock strikes its coldest hour
                            as much as the chooser's tick, but the rest of the endless regulation is warmer,
                          I promise.

Rummaging noises that muscle into stark gravity

                           maiming
                                          black & white finishes
into the hands of young artists
                        and everyday geezers
                                          --drinking wine made for mad housewives.
                  We are seduced and strangled by this.

                  Spirits that knock seven times
on Hiroshima's soul that                       levitates through
                      planet Earth's oceans
                         --how can we not pull a ****
                      from our sweaty palms?
                                          Gods, and doors, and chalk spittle
                 that gores the gorilla's back in the abyss
                                threatening hopeful snow--the lifting of applauding
            violins. We are seduced and strangled by this.
  
                                        Cultural amoeba--
               the dimensional of minds
                                   --made up of blank smoke
                         and film negatives.
    And oh!
  How the gasoline pours rainbows
                  on the pavement, fertilizing the crosswalks
        where we danced...
                          seduced and strangled by this.

Ornamental graves set like feasts
                                                                             for unfaithful lovers,
                   the broke marrow of virtuous phantasms,
                                                                      now swaddled rapture
                                                                      chanted as basilisk verses.
                                           Scarred Alice wraps it around
                                                             torn limbs--
                                               festering gauze--the cynical made anew.

                         "Creation moves," the gluttonous moper speaks again,
                                                     "to erase itself."
                                            Alice's children blasts
                                            the afterlife caboose
                                            to the front of the freight
                                           --saeculum saeculorum--

               "Wake again and again
                          without ghosts and wrath,
                                 dear children." The wind whispers their souls
                      back to her--"the molding of men
                      and women attend to sponge the graves dry."

          They will raise themselves
                            --chanting the basilisk verses,
                mother Alice
                               departs her children twice
                      to the corridors of rose fields
                      in her naked cloud.

                                                    "Come back, dear mother...."
                                                    "Come back, dear mother..."
                                                                               they chant,
                                                     "Your salted epitaph
                                                        still lingers in our throats."

            Not fit there
                   or here.
           Nowhere, Miss, nowhere--

                                     Sin is the party
                                           that doesn't die
                                  and neither does the health
                                               of lyrical sand.

                              --Floaters like discontent
                                         Alice,
                                     recreate the world,
                                  --our world with
                                 pastels and finger-paints
                doodles on Arlington headstones
                                             --messages for our ear bones
                                             --disasters on eleven
                 turning stones roll over--tortoises play dead
                                                            but whisper,
                                               "Clergy cerebral
                                                 won't wisp away
                                                  beds of jewels.
                              I pity people who think
                                          themselves powerful.

                    "Frost-bit devices dilate
                   like the hands of a watch
                          tearing time apart with
                     rusty blades.  

                                                                                      "Counting fingers--useless freedom
                                                                                                                     --bothersome slavery."

         Alice knows what the basilisk knows,
                              we would sacrifice
                              the only righteous heart in *****
                                                                           & Gomorrah
                                                                           to save
                           &n

Iodine damnation cleanses Alice--rock-and-roll medusa
                                              alone in the field,
she waits for the flies to eat the spider
                 --the third testament of law
                                                   divinely christened as low as $19.95.
                  Hell is where
       Schrodinger throws the bodies. Revived Alice is in a burlap sack
            embedded in the cubbyhole
            of a mortal anthro-rubix,

    the small garnishes that spot livers during cancer.
                         "Hello and welcome
             to the resting place of all Blues songs."
     speaks the curbed lips of Gluttony. A name that vomits
            up rebellion, like cleansing the glucose off
   fish-cleaning tables.

   Alice touches her eyes                                       rolls them
                                                                        --fortunate galleries,
broods deeply on the jaws of her receptors.
                    "After the last drop, the hard boiled spoil
and the cats won't eat 'em. Neither will I," Gluttony spews, "You all show up
                    as do I, magnifying the cruelty of digging,
                                                                             digging,
                                                                             digging
                                                 that follows me and you to the bitter stem
                                                  and rough petal--throwing this rose,
                                                                                                that rose,
                                                                            here and there inside the carcass of lust.
                                    The scalding photograph of a guerrilla war playground
                                                                                   hangs over
                                                            the mantle of a prideful garden.

        "Pulp wisdom
         looking back at the names of thieves/murderers
                                                       of simple thought
                                over-turning scars of fallacy
                                         in that garden.

            "Picking,
             picking,
             picking out the best arrangement
                           so it doesn't look like I went
                                                                         through a drive-thru
                           for what to say.         'Hey.'
                                                               'Yes?'
                                                                'I love you.'
                                                                'You too.'
                                                   Something in between
                                             what you, I, and the others were looking for
                                            has uprooted bushes--the tilled chest of my sister
                                                                   and lover--disarrayed, dirt thrown
                                                                                                         to the side.
                                            Fibonacci colors patterned
                                                                        across the moist earth
                                                      to distract you and I, all from the dread, and all
                                                                                 the relief
                              of ripping apart the white, pink, black, and red."

I

Wonderlandia, torn off the submerged lung
of a daydream diary.                   Reoccurs
as she does with silver eyes, weary Alice
during tea time--bullets burning past her
                                     like flowing nations.
Everyday similar tsunamis fund
                                     the lack of 20/20.
Nose to tail--the surge of angry engines
splits the ends of her blonde strands.
    Each one the last witness to maddening hospitality
--utopia never sweats as it talks and withers.
Amnesia blots,
new aspirin machines
vaporize apples and ***
on the other end of spectrum,
                                                     trans-positional labels--

Guillotine gargling teapots
       have no patience
         to the bushes of Olympus opiates
                                      bound in yellow barrier tape,
                     five o' clock traffic
               welcomes her back to what we are facing.


II


Dreary weather of late fall                       and her beautiful,
              powdered face

great mouth of atomic hell,
         when she speaks--80,000 deficiencies boil alive
                                                   --Trinity's teething test
                                                           on the tired bones
                                                   of a story-teller's raspy cards--

"None the wiser," she speaks,
                                "during the transition of ships
                   vermin turn into krakens culturing
                               on the surface of a raindrop.
    Heroes, villains, animals frozen together
                 after now eating for four days.
     The transition of one genocide
                                                        ­  to the other,
                the delineation of cat-and-mouse,
   mingle too long
   with the dead
   and its necrophilia."

                 Blind Alice wanders off the highway,
leaves her brewed cup of steamy static
on top of the unimportant saucer, sticks pins in her *******,
             and enjoys the sound of Cleopatra
             rolling over in reincarnation.


III

      Dear Alice smells
sunbathing, studded tangerines
                      assimilating liquor within the vast,
       empty, glowing nausea that is--
                        the warm germ

Oil                                    and                 ­          water
               rippled glass too silly for skulls
              made humid by distant salt water,

blood, acid, enzymes,
cheating probability
that runners with drunk kids
have blood between their toes.
                                                      Death­ to the distillation within
                                                    --the chronic diamond too polished
                                                       in *** to see the roses in her *****
    She curses these wood songs,
             heritage patriots with the pelts of wild lions
             with antlers over their heads,
                                                  faces advertising war paint
                                                applied by gargoyle hands
                    --sad memoirs always drink people
                                                  that use God as a cookie jar.


IV


  Gorgeous names
  on graffiti institutions give her a home
                                                         a market
                                                         a nickname
           still                  Alice only accepts Alice.

Grace periods where she misses tyranny
                  rise and fall like endorsed breathing.
    Now Alice feels her dress fall off,
                                  extinct years message future occupancy
                                  about what to wear.
New era, this era, past eras plead guilty
in a      clinic museum
             of forcing demons
              down the medical
              throats
of first graders. Court adjourns at 9:01 PM, Saturday

             The populus can sleep now,
                          but not her.
                 No one gave her clothes
                 to cover up the drained monochrome.


V

Instead she celebrates her flesh,
                                        the broken glass,
   and quakes and leads off to expose
           others to its potential vital prosperity.

         Instead
                     headlines like bumper cars read
                     about the beheading of weeks,
                     failing rescue missions,
                     and debates on teenage tolerance.

Nicotine intoxication points Alice
to over-extended memories--wards of music
sequenced to point out the extinction of marble tigers.
                        Only 550 expected to understand
                         tethered to millions able to survive.

  Flood waters look at moral standards, a mean hurricane
                                   that collapses the death toll
     all patented 50 states
     have a dating service
     and huff paint as a way
                              to pray to art.
                                                      Double­-canvas faces
                                                      dyed in pixel     hope
                                                       that the media levees hold,
             but volunteer to herd sheep into poppy seed fields.
                                            She refuses to stay,
                    to watch the long night
                    of castration on men with mud-covered ankles.
                                      Television says eunuchs want
                                       to be prodigal's children,
                                       everyone wants to come back home
                                       to mom and dad, safe zones, away
                                       from themselves.
                                                     ­                 It says our ancestors want
                                                            ­          this for all of us. They worked
                                                          ­            so hard to tie up the hair
                                                            ­          out of Aphrodite's face.

                                     They treasure the silver eyes of Alice,
                                          but call them blue,
                                                  they issue her high cholesterol
                                          but pump sweet ****** into he stomach,
                                                  they tell her to put down the drill,
                                            so she can finish their orchestra--

her lightning
    is
     a
  string
     of
  souls



VI


     She decides to depart Sunday,
to discover the ordinary beginning,
                        painting WHY? on its delirium.
re-arrangeable viewers become
                      inserted sounds under percussion and piano.

       Caging various important charts
                                          undetermined
   ­                           as finished attention.
                                                      ­              Three movements in flux
open end the people                     vacuuming
                            craftsmanship blocks
                   from                                dogs and zen.

                                                 The
                                 suspended letter               is happening in 1951
   drenched in existential white                                            spacing
        ­                                                   the viewer
                        from integrated architecture.

Down
the
bell is a structure called
"the quarantined wheelchair."
                               Dead ignorance changes pattern
                               after six movements of the second hand.
Alice speaks, "To you all, know
                                       that this is an un-dramatic situation.
          Everyday windows with the same
           participants have girls drinking
                                                     orange juice, activate fluid,
                    both exist as objects
                    and caught propaganda."

                                                   ­                      Six tunnel
                                                          ­      audiences are watching
                                                        ­        drown in the plastic silk
   her                                                       built by the motorized collage
                                                         ­                                        spider.

          Alice, a kinetic mannequin pop star
                        is limp in the glass point.
             Rhythmic flux is objectified war torture
                         censored in fitness magazines
by simple toilet literature.

                                        Six tunnels worth of eyes
                                 latch to the *******
                                           as a way to bury **** protesting.
                                  A coat of pepper spray
                                   works in front of the exhibition.
This stage is shaded by moans.


VII


      Alice the female, has a door-to-door friend
                                                          ­    over the sea
of the cathedral's ceiling               who died of disemboweled
pulchritude             at the mutilated nuclear other-place.
                     Her friend was a synthesized example
                     of staged catastrophes. Her friend is her, silver-eyed
                                                     ­                                             Alice.

            ­                     She performs herself and herself
                                 but they are played by polished, scored poets.

Everyone of them incorporates the events
                                 of a dancing gunshot. Everything rests
                                                           ­ at an intermission

               but after fifty minutes of pondering,
          the lost audience remembers
         her name is Alice.
                   So it comes back on with a shower of sweat
                  and this clear
                                  substance
               ­                                 called
                         ­                              patience.
       This composing, peering vulnerability
                        psychologically destroys the flux tension
              like analog genocidal dictators.
                                   Ultimately this is dream liquor

     commentating war to the war tree
      using trauma and chairs as humor.



VIII


               Patience on the water level lives translucent
                                            on networks that brand flesh
                                            with displaced identity.
Alice convinces us all that pickled ***
                                                             ­               takes eight years
                     to ****** and we accuse it
                                         of being fake. Afterwards, her character dies
in confident silence.


IX


     Not majestic, but she does cough
                  to mock the earth.
        The seeds of Alice are ripe,
                        harvested early, and now her children come out and dine
        like speaking tongues on gibberish.
                          The room is fat with hair

and kindness. Feeble, mundane hands chew on each other,
                                                         feet stand proud.
We even call her Alice or "the beautiful *******,
                                             a black cloud feasting
                                             in orange."
                       Everyone feasts on the nectar
                                                         she has, but never the rye
which makes her round. Juice is squeaking and her children laugh
                         as in competition.

     It's a distinguishable game as the mixed
                                                           ­      couple up front
              begin to play whistles as
                                         everyone eats
                   the pride of the silver-eyed Alice's children.


X

                                                ­ The children's souls
                                                       bow and say
                                           "Thank you for barely growing."
                                                   and dissipate after five minutes.

          "Curiouser                                   ­                                      and
           Curiouser"                                                       ­                   they
           say                                                              ­                        as
           they                                                             ­                       leave
           this                                                             ­                         homage.
                  The decimal backbone
                     of each of sweet Alice's
                                   blonde strands
                   divorced by the gust/ of a green light's/ allowance.


XI Epilogue*


  The day crawls away
                   a vigilant pest
     of the nocturnal project
                   --suns beam down still, like
                  stomachs of grinning felines
                           at Valentine's day.

toxic-dyed fingers
                        soldered
to bodies pittering across rainy streets

--legionnaires with hearts on stones
                         we are waiting for her orders,

     thistled-teeth clench,
                                         but did she
                                          actually
          ­                                ever come?

The driver wears a clock
with a hat
and it tips in favor to the newest customers
twice a day.
It drives a bright orange cab
delivering backseat baptisms
to the patients walking across the flat-top abyss at night.

I see the cab roll up beside me
and its only one step to get in but, flights of stairs are truly there.
Judas with three hands invites me forward to sit down
but, he starts shouting in tongues and all I hear is something
about shoebox pupils.

The weather in the cab isn’t inviting,
it believes in me though
and hands me a paper bag to ***** the obnoxious ticks
away, leaving an empty stomach for fair elements.

I hear my stomach quote: “I am the egg,
a sack of an embryo
of culture and ******,
chairs open doors for me.

You are the prized treasure
of the spider’s remain bag.
Bleaching light is afraid
of you.”

The driver then says with solid breath,
“Jukebox oven needs only one more
piece of our lives.
It promises with frigid fingers and leftover voices
that swamps will always run under us.
So we do as conscience demands, we pay the fare
and believe that is fair.

Childhood was the greatest time for Timothy, and he remembers it that way. No disposition on the fact that his parents divorced when he was eight. Just old enough to develop a mental connection with the idea of a union. So when he was ten, his father remarried, moved to a farm in the southeast, and tried living off the land. The topic of an ecological environment had hit the internet heavier than global warming hit the ice caps. And everyone was pursuing happiness with steep drops in city living, and an up swing in rural living.
Timothy's mom refused to believe it though. She wrote about such cultural climates, the invasion of neo-british pop boy bands, the decline of football, and the hippie lifestyle clawing its way back up the columns of big city papers. So when the recession hit, and it suddenly became cool to dress like a homeless person, she saw the disgust, moved overseas and focused on the world-political spectrum.
“Societal fads be ******! I'm going to do something that actually matters.” And she did.
Timothy Glasser, age 82 looks back on that moment with pride.
“There was a sense that she had the ***** to change the world. With Russia building up Imperial popularity, it was cool to be big. America was on the decline by the word of all the heavy-hitter magazines.
“That was when I started to take my life serious. She had shown me all the would-be Bob Dylans, Lennons, Hunter S. Thompsons. She would say, 'These kids have all the brass words of a ****** who can bite down ******* the world, but they don't have the actual brass. Men who are not recognized for what they've done have the brass. Hell, women have ten more pounds of that kind of brass!'
'I would laugh, but she was serious. I think she thought I was too masculine to understand what she was saying.”
When Timothy's father moved him and his little sister, Sunni Glasser out to the backwater community of Oggta-Cornelius, there was a certain relief in his demeanor. In a matter of months the country way of living had worn down his impatience to a sluggish pace.
“Greg was my father's name. He's been raised in a similar place in the Midwest, but the slowness of that life got to him in his teens so he left for the city. I guess when he met my step-mom he found the good ol' girl that he'd been trying to cling to since he left home. And it was Sunni's choice to come with us. She always had the same kind of 'brass' Mom had, but there was a closeness she shared with Dad that adventure couldn't break. It's a **** shame too. But once the slow pace of the backwater hit Sunni, she rebelled. It was a catastrophe to watch her and Dad argue over the most petty things you've ever seen. The way our step-mom, Claire would fold clothes or how early she had to wake up in the morning for school. Five o'clock, five days a week, and sometimes Dad would wake her on Saturday just to punish her for talking back. There was always blood in the water.”
Timothy's face settles, his lower lip curls, and his eyelids clinch for a moment before he changes his position in his chair.
“Is everything okay, Timothy?” I ask.
There is a pause, almost as if he is reliving what he was just describing.
“**** has always been real, you've been fantasizing.” I hear him say. He refuses to look at me, let alone answer my question.
“Mr. Glasser?” I ask again.
He exhales suddenly, eyes watery, and lets out a sigh.
“Let's talk about Sunni. I never really talk about her much, and I think now is a good time. Don't you?”
I nod in agreement and try to give him a smile.
He still refuses to look me in the eye.
“When Sunni was in first grade, she was beginning to prove to be a bit of a handful. There was a small patch of corn out back. Maybe half an acre Dad keep for us to put up for the winter. Sunni was about seven years old around this time and she had the idea to make crop circles. Now I was out with my friends, played football in those days so I didn't have the time to be home all the time. Dad and Claire kept themselves busy with the work about the place, so Sunni got bored real fast. One day during the summer, Dad went to the store to get some groceries. A friend of his came up to him and said, 'I was up in the plane yesterday and I saw something strange in your cornfield. Like some kind of crop circle. Weird ain't it?'
“This rattled my Dad's brain for a few minutes until he got home and saw the two-by-four with rope tied to either end of the thing. Sunni was staring at the clouds and Dad walked over to her, and yanked her up off the grass. 'What are you doing flattening my corn for? Don't you know that's goin' to save us money in the long run?” She just stared at him. Not dumbfounded, just intrigued.
“That was kind of the starting point of their bickering. She had blonde hair running to the base of her skull brushed down neatly. A subtle blush in her cheek from the sun. And she always wore a dress, especially if it had sunflowers on it. She brought life to that house.
“On her tenth birthday, Mom sent her a touch screen phone, an iPhone, I think it was called with a two-year contract. It was so long ago minor facts like that seem to hang on for no reason.”
Timothy shuffles in his chair. Then clears his throat.
“Would you like to take a break, Timothy?” I ask him.
“I ignored most of the arguments Sunni and dad had after I graduated high school. As soon as fall semester started at Cornelius College I fled the backwater and started by life near the OceanFront. Oggta-Cornelius was divided into two sections: the Backwater and OceanFront. And like a sports rivalry there was always trash talk about the tax bracket you were in or how much you worked. After the first few weeks for sneaking into bars and partying on campus, the fun died down because of the arrests. I almost got caught twice, but my sixth sense for trouble tingled at just the right time. When the middle of the semester hit I was over-booked with mid-terms and reading assignments. I actually lived in my dorm then. Never really left the place. And soon fall semester was over. Nothing worth mentioning now. Sunni and I texted often, but she had become a brat and I wanted alone time to learn what I'd read. For everything literary to go beyond just test and quizzes.
“But right towards the end of the semester, one morning I was walking to an early exam and on the ground was a kid, a little older than me lying there looking up at the sky. I had the urge to walk up and ask him what he was doing, but it felt too rude so I left him. I kept walking and heard a voice call back to me, 'Hey, guy.' I turned around, 'Yeah you, come here.'
“I walked up to him, he motioned for me to kneel beside him.
'What day is it?
I told him it was a Monday.
'Really? Wow, must've fell out watching the stars with this gir--'
He reached to his other side, feeling for a body, but no one was there. He never broke eye contact with me.
'Well, with his lovely imaginary girlfriend I have. Her name's Elsie. She's a charm.'
I helped him up and he left without much of a goodbye. A disrespectful mysteriousness. And I didn't see him again till the weather warmed up in the spring semester. Which was a repeat of the fall.”
Timothy asks me for some water. I started to feel like I'm one of his grandkids. How far in the trunk of memories is he going for this information?
“Thank you. Now the next time I saw Alan was in a smoking gazebo along a walking path on campus.
'Hey, guy!” he shouted, getting my attention. I walked back to the gazebo, coughing as the smoke roughhoused it's way into my lungs. He had those circular shades on, like the one John Lennon wore back in the day. A tie around his head, a light blue button up shirt that hung loose off his think frame. His hair was long and parted, and he sported a straggly red and black beard.
'Top of the morning, ta ya.' he said, putting out a cigarette on the tray. I opened my mouth, but all that came out was coughing.
'Course, the Irish don't really say that. It's actually quite racist, but I'm half Irish so no skin of my knuckles. I'm a mutt.'
“He smiled with such pomp. The arrogance was so natural, it fit him like his face. Other people around him were having conversations about Samuel Beckett, John Irving, Stephen King, and Jimmy Hendrix tripping acid together in the great T.A.R.D.I.S. in the sky. I remember laughing at that. They were all smiling at the ludicrous actuality of it happening. And it was late evening.
'Stay! Be silly and merry with us!” he shouted. I held my breath and sat down. I never made it to the rest of my classes that afternoon or for the next week. Alan and I chilled in my dorm, burned incense and plotted a protest. The whole time I was telling him he had to be literal with the cause. It couldn't be just because the college bookstore sold shot glasses, but confiscated any paraphernalia they found in the dorms.
'*******,I say. It's hypocritical and a scam. Like police pulling you over for going two-miles over the limit because they need to feed their kids. It's a Darwin rip-off.'
“Later that week he took my phone while I was sleeping, got my number, and Sunni's too. He never asked if he could come over after that night. He just did.
'I thought it was cool since we had a good time.'
"I didn't know what to say so I let it continue. His reason for stealing Sunni's number still baffles me. He said he thought she was a girl I was into. She was my sister, he was right in his own way. It was a while before he ever texted her.
“The next time I saw him he told me, 'I feel like a clockwork man running on thousands of gallons of caffeine.' I laughed at him and told him to stop reading Burgess.”
I stop Timothy for a moment. “Anthony Burgess? The author of A Clockwork Orange?” He nods and goes back to the story.
“You know, with the Second Cold War flaring up again I don't think it's wise to be worrying about an old man like me. This has been a century of second fillings. There are still Hipsters running about. This makes me feel no better. I want to go home.”
“Alright Mr. Glasser, but can we reschedule? I need to finish this article.” As he rises out of the chair, he agrees and goes for his coat.
“One more question, Mr. Glasser. Can you give me another quote from Alan? A bit of closing for this bit?
He turns around and looks me in the eye for the first time since the beginning of the interview. He squints his eyes at me and says, “When we would hang out at the gazebo where we actually met for the first time, and after that week I got back in the habit of going to class and doing my work. As I would leave I'd say, 'Alright man, I'm off to class, to learn and stuff.' He'd moan about it, and say, 'Look at him now, growing old and dying young.' Behind that same pompous grin."

Afraid of the lake roofs beaming headlights
off immature consciences
burrowing wicked roots.
She is sweet and frost on the hood of cars I've never seen.

Libra eyes
returning the music from the 1990's—strung on trot lines
catching loves from last summers
in love letters.
With all the fine burdens
****** markers provide trying to find a lost person
can give—I miss that pause we get when we look at stars

In seasons we sprout,
dressed to the nine
                               in compliments under
flocked skies of abandoned webs. The jaws of breeding

snapped shut
around the ankles of his inky blue wingtips
                                    her glossy leopard skin high-heels.

Forgive us tree of knowledge, we have recreated you
                        fonder in the image of a concrete rose,
a bull freed from its matador,
a thorn on the vinyl to cycle the serenade.

Please listen--envy the blister silence,
it sweats in the mind of the innocent.
The days of milk and fruit are over.
We are ready to depart the branches of thee,
                            feel the glassy snow beneath our feet

The stakes of civilization burn mundane flares fighting wars with HAZ-MAT suits. The nonsense blabbers death on the rotting flesh of surreal zombies. Late distillations throw parties--singing songs to dummy suicides, martini holsters in bubonic grief. Stupid people do smart things in this 24601 world. Frost penalization claims ghosts as lost lovers. Stupid people make catacombs from burning villages in carbon sockets.

My father lit a cigarette and smoked the room up
                  with choked circles,
                                                                    he rewrites every woman
                                               he sees,
                 metamorphosis asunder,
                                                              because nothing is on tv.

                                  My mom was hauled blindly
                                              away from love to evening's riverbed
                                                            --to **** the fear of
                                                                                        correction away.
                              Birds talk about fish
                                            that fly in airline crusades,           gobbling up wise owls.
                          Blossom talons pluck
                                                              --up their words,
                                                                         the closest a lie can come to the truth
                                                               and be set in stone  None of them
                              will be remembered
                              the way they want to. footnote retribution.

                     The wandering dead only care about
                                                         modeling on the covers
       of psychology magazines--hailing reviews that digest indulgence
                                                                         beautifully,
                                                carving chocolate waists
     down
  to starvation--we melt away to gnats
                                       in Prozac hives
                                            shingled with academic love papers
                                            & bible covers.

                Dear Alice,
                            you stole our table of tea, our shaved vigil,
                                          our western rodeo,
                                         our alcoholic omega.

                       Midnight on the dishonored battlefield
          with the scythe beneath us,
                                     we murmur love back into
                                    our sheets of high horror.

  Your meteorite adultery could not wipe
                      this hard drive clean--what we would lose...

   the things we cannot                                                   touch.
                                         Cloud 9 LSD,
                                     its warriors passing
                                  weapons down to the flock's ashes--to wives who fear

      the wrath of their husbands. Chlorine gills quit
                                          cold turkey
                            --sinks overfill under unorthodox skies--the turning of centuries
                                                                is nothing like flipping
                                                                                                      pennies
                                   into wishing wells.

There is nothing new under the sun, but it was night and the indifferent blinks of gaseous lives above looked down while my friends and I were at a new fast food joint that moved next to a now lonely Wendy's, with a faded sign tarnished by something the new fast food joint had yet to experience—mundanity by time. But I had my notebook with me while we ate outside, but it was in the car. My mind is always in that book, and I remembered something I had written for a novel in progress: 'Nothing is new under the sun. How is it possible to watch stars die? There is nothing new to their dust. We are the flies of the universes.'
It was just when I had finished my BBQ pork sandwich when Ariana suggested visiting a graveyard. I had the idea to visit a Satanist graveyard that our friend, Lanessa warned us against for the better safety of our sane souls—good luck with that. I wanted a revival of fear. How the beast would rip at the roof off our metal can of a car—the greater our barbarism, the greater our admiration and imagination—the less admiration and imagination, the greater our barbarism. But Ariana disagrees with words I never say, Nick laughs with my simple words to that previous thought. How funny it would be to burn eternal.
But then he suggested we should go to the Trussel in Conway. I had no idea or quote to think about to contribute to this idea. I wander, as I like to, into the possibility that his idea is a good one. Like some wanting hipster, I dress in an old t-shirt with of mantra long forgotten in the meaning of its cadence.
That is the march of men and women into the sea—honest, but forgetful and forgotten.
I was wearing a shirt sleeve on my head I bought from a mall-chain hippie store, and exercise shorts, finished off with skele-toes shoes. I was ready for everything and nothing at the same time. And that fits, I suppose. But all that does matter—and doesn't, but it is hard as hell to read the mind of a reader—it's like having a lover, but s/he doesn't know what s/he wants from you—selfish *******.
But there I was,  on the road, laughing in the back seat, sitting next to a girl who was tired, but also out of place. I could see she wanted to close arms of another, the voice of another, the truth that sits next to her while watching tv every time she comes over to hang with him, but never accepts that truth. She is a liar, but only to herself. How can she live with that? The world may never know.
The simple rides into things you've never done before give some of the greatest insight you could imagine, but only on the simple things that come full circle later. That is a mantra you can't print on a t-shirt, but if it ever is, I'm copyrighting it. And if it's not possible, I'll make it possible!
When we got to the Trussel, the scenic path lit by ornamented lamps seemed tame once I stepped onto the old railroad tracks. They were rusted and bruised by the once crushing value of trains rolling across it's once sturdy structure. Now they were old, charred by the night, and more than just some abandoned railroad bridge—the Trussel was a camouflage symbol birthed by the moment I looked into a Garfish's eye as it nibbled on my cork while I was on a fishing trip with my granddad when I was eleven. I remember that moment so well as the pale, olive green eye looked at me with a sort of seething iron imprint—I needed that fear, it branded instead of whispering that knowledge into my ears.
That moment epitomizes my fear of heights over water—what lies beneath to rip, restrain, devour, impale, and or distract me.
But epitomize is a horrible word. It reeks of undeveloped understanding. Yet  I want a nimble connection with something as great as being remembered—a breathe of air and the ideas  thought by my younger self, but I will never see or remember what I thought about when I was that young—only the summary of my acts and words. And by that nothing has changed—am I too afraid to say what I need to say? Too afraid to hear what everyone else hears? Or is it the truth—depravity of depravities that has no idea of its potential, so I am tired of the words that describe my shortcomings and unextended gasping hope. I am tired of living in the land of Gatsby Syndrome waiting for Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy!
But when we got to where the Trussel actually began I felt the fear hit like the day it was born—all hope was drained, and I was okay with abandoning all aspirations of having fun and being myself in the face of public criticism. I was flushed out by the weasel in my belly—the ******* beneath those still waters. I compare it to someone being able to handle Waterboarding, but can't handle being insulted—it's that kind of pathetic.
I stood just on the last understandably steady railroad ties that I knew were safe and watched my friends sit off the edge of the bridge, taking in the cold wonder of the night, and I was told at least I was smarter than my dead cousin who managed to get on top of his high school in the middle of the night, but had to be cohearsed down for fifteen minutes by a future marine, and future mourner who still grieves with a smile on his face.
The future mourner, he laughs at the times he insulted, or made fun of, or chilled with his now dead friend. It's never the bad times he cries about, there are none—just the good times, because they don't make them like they used to.
I watched them in that moment, and I don't know if I can deal with knowing my life is real. I began to blame my morality on this fear even though I already justified the fear just seconds before. But as I write this, I look over my notes and see something I wrote a few days ago: 'Life is ******* with  us right now. You laugh and I laugh, but we're still getting ******. The demon's in our face.'
As morbid as that comes off, it resonates some truth—what is killing us is going to **** us no matter what we do—and I don't want to be epitomized by the acts and words I didn't say.
I was never in the moment as a kid—I was raised by by old people and kept back by my younger siblings. The experienced tried to teach me wisdom, and the inexperienced kept my imagination locked in time. I don't want to go home as much now because I see that the inexperienced are becoming wiser everyday and the experienced are dying before my eyes. My idea of things is enduring leprosy.
But back to the simple moments.
Ariana saw a playground as she stood up and investigated the Trussel. It was next to the river, behind the church, fenced off by the fellowship of the church to keep the young ones in and the troublesome out. Of course, we didn't realize there was a gate and it was locked until Nick stated the probable obvious within ten feet of the nostalgic playground. And that's when Ariana pointed out the bugs swarming the parking lot outdoor lamp that blazed the fleshiness of our presences into dense shadows and more than likely caught the eye of a suspicious driver in a truck passing by. But I was still on the bridge—back in the past, never the moment. Me and my friends are still children inside these ***** forms. I muttered to myself: “Life ain't about baby steps.”
Nick looked over and asked what I said. I turned around, dramatic, like I always like to and repeated louder this time, “Life ain't about baby steps.”
He asked if I needed to do this alone, and I said he could come along. I walked rhythmically across the railroad ties, and heard Ariana comment that getting to the railroad up the small, steep hill was like being in the Marines. I laughed sarcastically. Nick and I had been to Parris Island before, and I know they test your possible fears, but they beat the living **** out of them.
I casually walk into the room where my fear lives and tell it to get the **** out.
When I reached the precipice of the last railroad tie I stood on before, I felt the old remind me that death awaited me, but there was no epic soundtrack or incredible action scene where I stab a manifestation of my fear in heart—a bit fun it might have been, but not the truth. I bear-crawled over the crossings of the ties and the structure of the bridge itself. I felt Relowatiphsy—an open-minded apathy self-made philosophical term—take over me. It is much simpler than it sounds.
There was no cold wonder as I imagined. There was just a bleak mirror of water below, a stiff curtain of trees that shadowed it, and the curiosity of what lies in the dark continuing distance past the Trussel.
Nick sat with me and we talked about women and fear, or at least I did, and I hoped he felt what I did—there was a force there that is nabbed by everyone, but cherished by few—courage. And I thank him for it, but I know I did it. Now I want to go and jump in that still water below—Ariana later says she's happy I got over my fear, but I'll probably have a harder time during the day when I can see what I'm facing, but I see it differently. During the day, the demons are stone and far away—like looking down the barrels of a double-barreled shotgun uncocked and unloaded, but at night is when the chamber is full and ready to go, and you have no idea who is holding the gun with their finger on the trigger and your destination in mind.
Then we threw rocks into the water in contest to see who could throw past the moonlight into the shadowy distance . I aimed for the water marker, and got the closest with limited footing, using just my arm strength. But it wasn't long before we had to leave, making fun of people who do cooler things than us, on the way to the car. I had to ride in the back seat again because I forgot to call shotgun. But on the way home, the idea popped in our heads what we should get my hooka and go to Broadway, and get the materials so we could smoke on the beach.
Nick's girlfriend and her friend joined us.
I missed a few puns against my co-worker as I was sent to get free water from the candy store where I work. I ended up doing a chore because I was taller than most of the people there. Appropriate enough, it was filling the water bottles up in the refrigerator.
All the while I loathed the fact that I would have to be clocked in tomorrow by two in the afternoon. I grabbed the water and got out of there as fast as possible without appearing to be in a hurry.
Impression of caring matters more than the actuality where I work—and yes, that makes me a miserable ****.
Perhaps it's not too late to admit I am recovering pyromaniac from my childhood and the flavoring we use for the taffy is extremely flammable. It would be a shame to drench the store in what people love to smell everyday when they walk in, and light the gas stove. Then, maybe I could walk away real cool-like as this pimple in this tourist acne town pops like the Hindenburg. The impression of splendor is like a phoenix—it grows old, dies, resurrects into the same, but apparently different form, spreads it's wings, and eats and ***** on everything simple, or presumably so.
I forget the name of the beach, but it was the best time I've had in a while. I was whimsy, and high on the vastness of the stretch of beach around us. They could bury us here. But me in particular. I rolled from the middle of the beach to the water, stood in the waves and shouted my phrase I coined when I realize something as wonderful as conquering a fear or realizing a dream;
--******' off!
And I stared at the horizon. My friends came up behind me and I looked back to see it was Nick and his girlfriend hugging. I gave a soft smile, put my hands in my pocket, and turned back to stare at the clouded horizon. What beasts must lie out there—more ferocious than the simple fresh water beings that wait beneath the earlier placid waters. I was a fool to think that was the worst. Nick said as I pondered all that, that I looked like Gatsby, and I tried to give him a smile that you may only see once in a lifetime, but I'm sure it failed.
I wanted to tell him that, “You cannot make me happy. It is usually the people who have no intention of making me happy that makes me smile the quickest.” But I don't. Let me be Gatsby, or Fitzgerald, if to no one else, but myself.

Hell is the deterioration of all that matters, and as the five of us sat around the hooka, and inhaled the thick blueberry flavored smoke that hinted at the taste of the Blueberry flavoring I use to make Blueberry taffy, there was a satirical realization that the coal used to activate the tobacco and flavor in the bowl is sparking like a firework, and reminds us all of where we're going.
It's a love affair between that hopelessness and hope of some destination we've only read about, but never seen.
By this point Nick and I are covered in sand, because he joined me in fun of rolling down the beach. We want so bad to be Daoists—nonchalant to the oblivion as we sit in. Just on the rifts of the tide, he and I scooped handfuls of wet sand, and I lost my fear of making sense and let Relowatiphsy take over again.
“Look at the sand in your hands. It can be molded to the shapes your hands make. We scoop it out of the surf and it falls through our fingers. There are things we're afraid of out there, and we sit just out reach of them, but within the grasp of their impressions. The sand falls through our fingers, and it plops into the tide, sending back up drops of water to hit our hands—the molders of our lives.” I said all that in hope against the hopelessness of being forgotten.
Then he said, “What if this is life? Not just the metaphor, but the act of holding sand in our hands.
I relish in his idea of wiping away my fear of an unimportant life. And by this point, it's safe to assume I live to relish ideas.

The last bit of sand from the last handful of sand was washed from my hand and I looked back at the clouded horizon, pitch black with frightful clouds and said:
“Nick, if I don't become a writer. If I live a life where I just convince myself everything's fine, and that dream will come true after I finish all the practical prep I 'must' do. I will **** myself.
I looked at him, Relowatiphsy in my heart, and he said:
“As a friend, I'd be sad, but I'd understand. But that means you have to literally fight for your life now—regardlessly.”
And he left me with those words. Just the same as my granddad left me a serious heed before he wanted to talk about something more cheerful, when I asked about his glory days fishing the Great *** Dee River. He said: “I wish I'd been here before the white man polluted the river. It would've been something to fish this water then”, then he paused to catch his breath, “Guess there are some things that stay, and others than go.” Then joy returned, as it always does.

But the idea of what was happening to me didn't hit me until we were a few miles away from the beach, covered in sand, but the potential of the night after conquering my fear of heights over water had been shed in the ocean.
Around midnight, when the headache from the cheap hooka smoke wore off and the mystic veil of the clouds over the horizon has been closed in by the condensation on the windows of some Waffle House in Myrtle Beach. There was a wave of seriousness that broke over my imagination. Works calls for me tomorrow by two.
There's not much vacationing when you live in a vacation town.
And midnight—the witching hour—spooks away the posers too afraid to commit to rage against the fear.
But there are others—college students that walk in and complain about the temperature of the eating establishment, and the lack of ashtrays—how they must be thinking of dining and dashing—running from a box, but forever locked in it.

They make annoying music as I write this. That is how they deal.

There is nothing new under the sun, but it was night and the indifferent blinks of gaseous lives above looked down while my friends and I were at a new fast food joint that moved next to a now lonely Wendy's, with a faded sign tarnished by something the new fast food joint had yet to experience—mundanity by time. But I had my notebook with me while we ate outside, but it was in the car. My mind is always in that book, and I remembered something I had written for a novel in progress: 'Nothing is new under the sun. How is it possible to watch stars die? There is nothing new to their dust. We are the flies of the universes.'
It was just when I had finished my BBQ pork sandwich when Ariana suggested visiting a graveyard. I had the idea to visit a Satanist graveyard that our friend, Lanessa warned us against for the better safety of our sane souls—good luck with that. I wanted a revival of fear. How the beast would rip at the roof off our metal can of a car—the greater our barbarism, the greater our admiration and imagination—the less admiration and imagination, the greater our barbarism. But Ariana disagrees with words I never say, Nick laughs with my simple words to that previous thought. How funny it would be to burn eternal.
But then he suggested we should go to the Trussel in Conway. I had no idea or quote to think about to contribute to this idea. I wander, as I like to, into the possibility that his idea is a good one. Like some wanting hipster, I dress in an old t-shirt with of mantra long forgotten in the meaning of its cadence.
That is the march of men and women into the sea—honest, but forgetful and forgotten.
I was wearing a shirt sleeve on my head I bought from a mall-chain hippie store, and exercise shorts, finished off with skele-toes shoes. I was ready for everything and nothing at the same time. And that fits, I suppose. But all that does matter—and doesn't, but it is hard as hell to read the mind of a reader—it's like having a lover, but s/he doesn't know what s/he wants from you—selfish *******.
But there I was,  on the road, laughing in the back seat, sitting next to a girl who was tired, but also out of place. I could see she wanted to close arms of another, the voice of another, the truth that sits next to her while watching tv every time she comes over to hang with him, but never accepts that truth. She is a liar, but only to herself. How can she live with that? The world may never know.
The simple rides into things you've never done before give some of the greatest insight you could imagine, but only on the simple things that come full circle later. That is a mantra you can't print on a t-shirt, but if it ever is, I'm copyrighting it. And if it's not possible, I'll make it possible!
When we got to the Trussel, the scenic path lit by ornamented lamps seemed tame once I stepped onto the old railroad tracks. They were rusted and bruised by the once crushing value of trains rolling across it's once sturdy structure. Now they were old, charred by the night, and more than just some abandoned railroad bridge—the Trussel was a camouflage symbol birthed by the moment I looked into a Garfish's eye as it nibbled on my cork while I was on a fishing trip with my granddad when I was eleven. I remember that moment so well as the pale, olive green eye looked at me with a sort of seething iron imprint—I needed that fear, it branded instead of whispering that knowledge into my ears.
That moment epitomizes my fear of heights over water—what lies beneath to rip, restrain, devour, impale, and or distract me.
But epitomize is a horrible word. It reeks of undeveloped understanding. Yet  I want a nimble connection with something as great as being remembered—a breathe of air and the ideas  thought by my younger self, but I will never see or remember what I thought about when I was that young—only the summary of my acts and words. And by that nothing has changed—am I too afraid to say what I need to say? Too afraid to hear what everyone else hears? Or is it the truth—depravity of depravities that has no idea of its potential, so I am tired of the words that describe my shortcomings and unextended gasping hope. I am tired of living in the land of Gatsby Syndrome waiting for Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy!
But when we got to where the Trussel actually began I felt the fear hit like the day it was born—all hope was drained, and I was okay with abandoning all aspirations of having fun and being myself in the face of public criticism. I was flushed out by the weasel in my belly—the ******* beneath those still waters. I compare it to someone being able to handle Waterboarding, but can't handle being insulted—it's that kind of pathetic.
I stood just on the last understandably steady railroad ties that I knew were safe and watched my friends sit off the edge of the bridge, taking in the cold wonder of the night, and I was told at least I was smarter than my dead cousin who managed to get on top of his high school in the middle of the night, but had to be cohearsed down for fifteen minutes by a future marine, and future mourner who still grieves with a smile on his face.
The future mourner, he laughs at the times he insulted, or made fun of, or chilled with his now dead friend. It's never the bad times he cries about, there are none—just the good times, because they don't make them like they used to.
I watched them in that moment, and I don't know if I can deal with knowing my life is real. I began to blame my morality on this fear even though I already justified the fear just seconds before. But as I write this, I look over my notes and see something I wrote a few days ago: 'Life is ******* with  us right now. You laugh and I laugh, but we're still getting ******. The demon's in our face.'
As morbid as that comes off, it resonates some truth—what is killing us is going to **** us no matter what we do—and I don't want to be epitomized by the acts and words I didn't say.
I was never in the moment as a kid—I was raised by by old people and kept back by my younger siblings. The experienced tried to teach me wisdom, and the inexperienced kept my imagination locked in time. I don't want to go home as much now because I see that the inexperienced are becoming wiser everyday and the experienced are dying before my eyes. My idea of things is enduring leprosy.
But back to the simple moments.
Ariana saw a playground as she stood up and investigated the Trussel. It was next to the river, behind the church, fenced off by the fellowship of the church to keep the young ones in and the troublesome out. Of course, we didn't realize there was a gate and it was locked until Nick stated the probable obvious within ten feet of the nostalgic playground. And that's when Ariana pointed out the bugs swarming the parking lot outdoor lamp that blazed the fleshiness of our presences into dense shadows and more than likely caught the eye of a suspicious driver in a truck passing by. But I was still on the bridge—back in the past, never the moment. Me and my friends are still children inside these ***** forms. I muttered to myself: “Life ain't about baby steps.”
Nick looked over and asked what I said. I turned around, dramatic, like I always like to and repeated louder this time, “Life ain't about baby steps.”
He asked if I needed to do this alone, and I said he could come along. I walked rhythmically across the railroad ties, and heard Ariana comment that getting to the railroad up the small, steep hill was like being in the Marines. I laughed sarcastically. Nick and I had been to Parris Island before, and I know they test your possible fears, but they beat the living **** out of them.
I casually walk into the room where my fear lives and tell it to get the **** out.
When I reached the precipice of the last railroad tie I stood on before, I felt the old remind me that death awaited me, but there was no epic soundtrack or incredible action scene where I stab a manifestation of my fear in heart—a bit fun it might have been, but not the truth. I bear-crawled over the crossings of the ties and the structure of the bridge itself. I felt Relowatiphsy—an open-minded apathy self-made philosophical term—take over me. It is much simpler than it sounds.
There was no cold wonder as I imagined. There was just a bleak mirror of water below, a stiff curtain of trees that shadowed it, and the curiosity of what lies in the dark continuing distance past the Trussel.
Nick sat with me and we talked about women and fear, or at least I did, and I hoped he felt what I did—there was a force there that is nabbed by everyone, but cherished by few—courage. And I thank him for it, but I know I did it. Now I want to go and jump in that still water below—Ariana later says she's happy I got over my fear, but I'll probably have a harder time during the day when I can see what I'm facing, but I see it differently. During the day, the demons are stone and far away—like looking down the barrels of a double-barreled shotgun uncocked and unloaded, but at night is when the chamber is full and ready to go, and you have no idea who is holding the gun with their finger on the trigger and your destination in mind.
Then we threw rocks into the water in contest to see who could throw past the moonlight into the shadowy distance . I aimed for the water marker, and got the closest with limited footing, using just my arm strength. But it wasn't long before we had to leave, making fun of people who do cooler things than us, on the way to the car. I had to ride in the back seat again because I forgot to call shotgun. But on the way home, the idea popped in our heads what we should get my hooka and go to Broadway, and get the materials so we could smoke on the beach.
Nick's girlfriend and her friend joined us.
I missed a few puns against my co-worker as I was sent to get free water from the candy store where I work. I ended up doing a chore because I was taller than most of the people there. Appropriate enough, it was filling the water bottles up in the refrigerator.
All the while I loathed the fact that I would have to be clocked in tomorrow by two in the afternoon. I grabbed the water and got out of there as fast as possible without appearing to be in a hurry.
Impression of caring matters more than the actuality where I work—and yes, that makes me a miserable ****.
Perhaps it's not too late to admit I am recovering pyromaniac from my childhood and the flavoring we use for the taffy is extremely flammable. It would be a shame to drench the store in what people love to smell everyday when they walk in, and light the gas stove. Then, maybe I could walk away real cool-like as this pimple in this tourist acne town pops like the Hindenburg. The impression of splendor is like a phoenix—it grows old, dies, resurrects into the same, but apparently different form, spreads it's wings, and eats and ***** on everything simple, or presumably so.
I forget the name of the beach, but it was the best time I've had in a while. I was whimsy, and high on the vastness of the stretch of beach around us. They could bury us here. But me in particular. I rolled from the middle of the beach to the water, stood in the waves and shouted my phrase I coined when I realize something as wonderful as conquering a fear or realizing a dream;
--******' off!
And I stared at the horizon. My friends came up behind me and I looked back to see it was Nick and his girlfriend hugging. I gave a soft smile, put my hands in my pocket, and turned back to stare at the clouded horizon. What beasts must lie out there—more ferocious than the simple fresh water beings that wait beneath the earlier placid waters. I was a fool to think that was the worst. Nick said as I pondered all that, that I looked like Gatsby, and I tried to give him a smile that you may only see once in a lifetime, but I'm sure it failed.
I wanted to tell him that, “You cannot make me happy. It is usually the people who have no intention of making me happy that makes me smile the quickest.” But I don't. Let me be Gatsby, or Fitzgerald, if to no one else, but myself.

Hell is the deterioration of all that matters, and as the five of us sat around the hooka, and inhaled the thick blueberry flavored smoke that hinted at the taste of the Blueberry flavoring I use to make Blueberry taffy, there was a satirical realization that the coal used to activate the tobacco and flavor in the bowl is sparking like a firework, and reminds us all of where we're going.
It's a love affair between that hopelessness and hope of some destination we've only read about, but never seen.
By this point Nick and I are covered in sand, because he joined me in fun of rolling down the beach. We want so bad to be Daoists—nonchalant to the oblivion as we sit in. Just on the rifts of the tide, he and I scooped handfuls of wet sand, and I lost my fear of making sense and let Relowatiphsy take over again.
“Look at the sand in your hands. It can be molded to the shapes your hands make. We scoop it out of the surf and it falls through our fingers. There are things we're afraid of out there, and we sit just out reach of them, but within the grasp of their impressions. The sand falls through our fingers, and it plops into the tide, sending back up drops of water to hit our hands—the molders of our lives.” I said all that in hope against the hopelessness of being forgotten.
Then he said, “What if this is life? Not just the metaphor, but the act of holding sand in our hands.
I relish in his idea of wiping away my fear of an unimportant life. And by this point, it's safe to assume I live to relish ideas.

The last bit of sand from the last handful of sand was washed from my hand and I looked back at the clouded horizon, pitch black with frightful clouds and said:
“Nick, if I don't become a writer. If I live a life where I just convince myself everything's fine, and that dream will come true after I finish all the practical prep I 'must' do. I will **** myself.
I looked at him, Relowatiphsy in my heart, and he said:
“As a friend, I'd be sad, but I'd understand. But that means you have to literally fight for your life now—regardlessly.”
And he left me with those words. Just the same as my granddad left me a serious heed before he wanted to talk about something more cheerful, when I asked about his glory days fishing the Great *** Dee River. He said: “I wish I'd been here before the white man polluted the river. It would've been something to fish this water then”, then he paused to catch his breath, “Guess there are some things that stay, and others than go.” Then joy returned, as it always does.

But the idea of what was happening to me didn't hit me until we were a few miles away from the beach, covered in sand, but the potential of the night after conquering my fear of heights over water had been shed in the ocean.
Around midnight, when the headache from the cheap hooka smoke wore off and the mystic veil of the clouds over the horizon has been closed in by the condensation on the windows of some Waffle House in Myrtle Beach. There was a wave of seriousness that broke over my imagination. Works calls for me tomorrow by two.
There's not much vacationing when you live in a vacation town.
And midnight—the witching hour—spooks away the posers too afraid to commit to rage against the fear.
But there are others—college students that walk in and complain about the temperature of the eating establishment, and the lack of ashtrays—how they must be thinking of dining and dashing—running from a box, but forever locked in it.

They make annoying music as I write this. That is how they deal with the inevitable death of the night. They bruise the air I breathe with love and faith and trust with no meaning—without even meaning it. But what do they know what I didn’t feel when I sat on that bridge or cowered on the fringes of the ocean? Their hands aren’t ***** like mine—their confidence does not seem fractured by these words that will never reach them, or their kids, or grandkids.
As day begins to move, I know I work at two and will be home by midnight again. The witching hour—where some stay and others go.

Landscape the fatal solution,
abandoning the pre-world
                                          he takes pleasure
in mutely, and often
spacing out, tipsy, drunk, confident
till the juice runs out.

What made him hold onto such damnable
                      lilies succumbed
with the raw roots of melancholy?
Never purging the dancers
                                   twirling
through a decade old sound system, they say
                "I don't think you know what you did."

***** circling in his eyes, they dance,
                                                 "But I'm going to help you."
               The dancers rebel
      across the floor, down the stairs
   ---to the dark, his eyes
washed by the caked acid running
                               down executed cheeks
so helpless, the rhines of a ranting romance
roped idiotically to the gospel grave.

All the ways he sighs,
at all the wrongs snowing down
on his neck. "Nothing about us ever shivered."

Jump out to the camera
homage to the renegade beats.

For weeks reading screams
mock us, their torment
crossing mental frontiers
—loud streets, sprite deviants
smashed 1999.

[Abomunist Jail baby]

Stop suffering, you weren’t swallowed
God machine Thursdays.

roses are sentient, violets bounce
prophet muscle
—abracadabra headaches
purging Hephaestus,
whose breath at my altar
awoke. I never remained
a threatened voice. Hollow voice,
fleshly chain torture,
“my Satan you are truly a dance”

discharged generation
thinking conversations

As Fitzgerald said, "Give me a hero
                                   and I'll write you a tragedy."
--and that kind of running never lets you down.

“The curiosity of the city rings with the death deliverance of grieving mothers and drunk fathers and optimists who claim the world is made, of more than just those two people. This is the Republic and the gates are open for service. Comedians were once serious people like all the rest who were mocked and remained vigilant in the face of despair. Life and death are part of our lives, but not the entirety. Grave markers have no grace for that truth. Summing up our choices to dashes in metal or plastic. What about the singing in the shower? The embarrassing time we were caught ******* or with ****? The overall fear of death creeping over these moments. Where is the answer? I wish Philosophy had a wick, something tangible to grasp onto, but it is no different than alcohol or drugs. Even that is no different than the dash. It only sums up our existence in simplicity. Labels of any sort do no justice to the comedians, mothers, fathers, republics, cities, and or life. In short, this land is the Atlas-cyst.
I look up at the clouds and see the impression of silver cherubs sitting on  flying horses. If they were real, they'd stab the hearts out of lovers from their aluminum vessels.
We are kings and queens of too much.
How many people have died for something that was not the cause—martyrs labeled as abolitionists. But to the illiterate-pop culture they are the heroes. Zealous posters written by apathetic authors trying to call back to the glaciers till the chimes of apocalypse come. The sad songs are true. Pity is polio too sick to bend and too accustomed to power. More than anything it is the simple moments that make the best music."
I remember telling Kaitlyn all that after we had ***.
"Should I continue?" I asked.
"I guess. I do like listening to you." she said.
“Your name is a word, but I think it is a culture.”
“The dark is a force,” she said, “But it is a child  too.”

She was the first one that made me realize that romantic tendencies are as hollow as realistic ones.
She laughs and I laugh. We are slaves beyond truth and defiance.
I can almost hear the old people that were friends of my granddad saying, “Remember your path.”
A failed proverb. Now as my sneakers hit the black top at night I see a messy web in the gutter belonging to a black widow. Every town in America should have a street named after Leo Szilard, the idealist father of the atomic bomb. I wish the one I was walking down now was named after him, but instead it is named after Hemingway. Hemingway St.--
“Everything I want and I couldn't be happier.” Kaitlyn says as she rolls away from me. Almost in cinematic beauty.
Now Sedans pass by playing catchy music--reminding me of the same melody earlier in the day when we were on our date at a local pizza place. The waitress was late with our order and we were making fun of Communism and Southern women on verandas.
“Oh Charles, I don't know nothin' about birthin' no babies!” she impersonated.
I laugh, gather myself, and add, “frankly my dear, I don't give a ****!”
Our giggles and bursts of laughter spawned our waitress in record time.
Later in the night, a ***** sock is still on her door as I leave her apartment. There are things still to be done. We aren't married after all.
I hear sirens in the background, downtown and I laugh to myself.
“Avoid the police! Avoid the police!” I promise myself I'll tell her tomorrow.
As I cross the street and the stench of wet dog in the night becomes second nature to me I add a conclusion to the communist joke from earlier. Imagine nowadays walking around Moscow passing out pamphlets about Communism to Russian citizens. The punchline sets in as lame like a worn lobotomy—no one would get the joke or take it too seriously. It's one of the commodities of sanity.
“You're never angry with me and I like that about you.” I told her once our pizza was delivered to our table. That statement cleaved the conversation to a halt and all we did was eat for the rest of our date there. She is the perfect bride I may never marry—a wedding in a box. Other than that she brings  spinal traction in this rough world—I feel like a man.
3:55 am brings ego death from acid. Not a song for the kiddies, but it is a recycled song for the college kids down the street. Even though the closest college is two hundred miles away. I call Kaitlyn up, she too can't sleep.
“How many times can a woman scream after *******?” I ask.
She exhales heavy when she smiles. “As many as I can.”
I do the same when I smile.
I imagine it all again: “Being absent on death's radar for that one moment. Teenagers dream about it, preachers scold it, tv promotes it, children have no idea what it is.”
“You make it sound so bad. Like ****.”
“It's not bad. It's a faith in a white flag.” I say.
“Of surrender?”
“Yes.” I reply.

The next time I blink it's breakfast, over at her place.
“You have the most fantastic beard.”she says.
The compliment goes down good with eggs over-well, bacon still moist from grease, golden toast, sloppy grits, and hashbrowns flat like a sandwich. I need a cup of coffee to level out her perfume.

No one knows I'm unsure if I'm the one she wants. But I would want her, no breakfast, just her and her aroma steeping in my life till my body runs cold.

“I surrender.”
“What?” she asks.
A torn piece of white fabric lies on the table.


The wine still lingers in my throat an hour after New Year's. The burn creeping down my esophagus much slower than the glistening ball in New York on tv. I taste blood. I wonder if it will last the year. The white flag is now starboard. And there is an opera in my fingers.  That last sentence makes no sense.
I know I am a man with hairy feet, a bruised heart and young. As Ivy Compton-Burnett says, “Real life seems to have no plots.” But it does have star-crossed lovers stuffed in suitcases beside heels and breeches. Traveling along the serpentine east coast watching the world in anticipation. Death can wait. I wonder if the same two people can live in perpetual amazing-ness apart?
I don't know. I can't wait for the answer. I begin, end, and live my life around the words 'and' and 'more'.
She doesn't know I barely move from my bedroom.

Promises like the grape vine
burning down outside

make me regret learning
about the nuclear bomb

A mellifluous sextet
circled in awed child beauty,
          reserved for post-modernists
in the dead mary-go-round
Inferno.  Civil war is
                                  on the tongues of roses. Trap-
                                                                           door seats, enigmatic music,
control of arms gyrating
out of American dreams.
Boring clocks toll for the death
                                                                of painters holding depraved,
easy lives in service of
                                     stripped one-hour masters,

but we all have hair and bills,
neglect and hours setting
up appointments to escape
what we owe                    to turpentine
           obsessions for running off.

Thousands of grains of rice boiled and resting
on the lining of unconsumed human veal. No one can **** the dweeb
who suckered that one kid at the party out of drugs
with the help of the cutest girl there. He knew how to hurt
the best in the world with one word.

Sweet tea and *** goes much deeper than the ribs
and out the back door much faster than a deadbeat dad. The stomach
rumbles the world far worse than a string of serial rapists on trial.
World hunger is a yo-yo doing pendulum swings over summer BBQs
drinking and popping *** and candy from the local radio station.

“I'm sorry I felled you. I should have done better by you. I love you.”

Vague women with just five minute existences of commitments, those Senators of Love
vying for second and third terms
before they sink into those holes in South America you hear about
in the news.

Men know nothing but control. Women know nothing but control.
Numbers know nothing.
Collapsed tunnels in the mind of Prometheus
before calendars and Twitter and liquor
just the dark and blunt
objects

The writer is

                                                             ­ bound by the Oedipus
                                          cauldron stewing          can't relax

                          --all women are mine--
                                                          ­       but this doesn't stop the bloating bubbles.

                     But the writer did not invent Wonderlandia
               --no double-sided tape or wrong number or sloppy poetics.

                              Wonderlandia was born from the ***** of the stars
                                                         --our fathers,
                              and the void of space,
                                                     --our mother's womb.
the writer

                                             was busy staring at the girls that walked by
                                        ditch diggers for renovations on Euphoria.
                The hippies are disappointed in this current Wonderlandia,
   or they would be.

                               Their dreams had dirt in the mud,
                they walked upon.                Our Woodstock
                                                       ­         is celebrity interviews,
                                                     ­           reservations failing,
                                                        ­        political satires--the last ring of change
             sold at five cents a word. Period.

the writer
                                        says it understands and writes:
                      "Sticks shaped from elitism
                        rare.
                        Usually a vibe too brittle,
                        breaking in battle.
                        The bass thundered robins.
                        The snare's firearm stabled the swift,
                        electrifying beat.
                        The brass was addiction
                        to the crowd's ears.
                        All before the elitism was born,
                        a symphony was constructed in the drug's head."

the writer
                                knows about D. A. Levy and his revolution,
                  we all felt that voice, so the writer replies:
                               "Did you hear about the John Lennon poser
                                 waving his gun on TV?
                                 While listening to the Beatles, you
                                 sit and watch the vagabond cry.
                                 He says, "Counter-culture is dead, entombed
                                 in a metal casket.
                                 We need a new flame. Those watching TV
                                 get your hands out of the basket."

the writer
                                        walks with grandma Alice
                                       by lakes,
                                                       thrilling dementia
                                    "Don't tell me what taurine
                                      and caffeine can do to my heart.
                                      I can have alligators in my rib meat
                                      eating away at bone marrow.

                                      High? That's your question?
                                      Hi...I am a float
                                      in a useless pond
                                      bordered by malnourished trees.

                                      By the love of hell you better not
                                      fertilize those ****** trees
                                      because if I die
                                      the alligator of my ribs
                                      will dine and take your ****
                                      girlfriend straight to the vet.
                                      I thank you for asking though."

    the writer misses
                                 the syrup in the tree completely
              
                     I am not your beatnik
                                or future idol--burn your 1970's classrooms away.