So I scuttled up, until I found a voice like Japan, I read him his rights, turned out the lights, and laid right back on the sand. They said, "Sir, he was much of a father to me, but we were labeled his kin, right in our family tree." "Oh wow", I said, with a gentle, smooth voice, he went missing last August, but now he wants back you boys?" "Oh yes, he sure is a feral man. We think that's why he dried up and flew to Japan." Right then, the two of them went silent just like two second story men, so I inquired, "What happened then?" "From Monday thru Sunday he took to prayer from the bible, and on every other weeknight he watched Japan's Top Model. He threw gallant parties to a harem of wives, he read each of their palms, and looked in their eyes; some time later, when everyone was about to leave, he'd turn on Happy End and start a wild ****." By this time I was tired, the sun began to set, I grew tired of my beach patch and yearned for my bed. Although soporific, I tried to be polite, I said, "Let's finish this conversation some other time." "Of course!", they said, "We're off to bed. We'll see that you'll do the same." Then they stood up quick, and reached down and picked up my chains. The beach we laid on was black top, asphalt and tar, the bed I craved was behind a row of private bars. The two of them, them both, were children of mine, because my memory is shot, this might've been their millionth time. i got locked up in a county that's dry as a beach, like Elizabethtown, Kentucky, where I was raised till 13. No one, not even the warden, knows really why I'm here, even some man from Cell Block Five, asked me last Sunday, why was I here. My beach perhaps, it's love at last, concrete, gravel, and stone- a 6' x 10' room with bars and a porcelain throne. It's mine I cry, each night I die, with glee, with smile, with rite. But it makes the other guys run at me, and try to start random fights. I don't remember the boat I took, but I remember the tour, going to Japan at Epcot Center since I'd never gone before.

angry men who do not know I do not have a dollar or a cig to spare. Ugly irrefutable contagion-handed howlers. Angry mischievous heathens that pantomime on 6:00a.m. sidewalk, Wicker Park gallow stop-sign, choreographed gutter-punk drunk walk. And of all he wants and could ever want splits down his gooey membrane brain in the outline of a noun shaped fragment of a clause, "Couldja spare 80¢ for the train," but of course I don't spare on the ellipsis or the period. Semi-colons I won't! My rubber-bottomed leather boots lash out, heavy scraping sounds trail this mirrored shadow half an angle behind me.

*****!! Blonde framed sunglasses from American Apparel, a gift from my sister in a folded Ray-Ban case is scattered on last nights bedroom floor, my girlfriend has certainly not noticed, the gloom-coated morning sun spray has not noticed; but I have unzipped a fissure in the ocular lens. My heart skips a beat. Her bedroom might as well have swallowed them whole. Now the house can halt and have the shade, swaying in Spring air in 10:22a.m. shadows. The aviator himself Howard Hughes would strike me with his 488 aircraft. Edwin Starr in his invincible sinister calypso of War would turn me round. I was sturdy as a rock until I began to forget my forgottens. These unknown unknowns I knew I needed. I'm over a quarter-century on to noon going nowhere- and quite blindly.

But then, still she could stand upright and find me. Her neck crooked, looking onward through the East, the gristly roots of rhubarb buried in her searching fingernails. She's threaded worse, and of course if I could just tell her- this is the kind of nursing which requires acute temperament and flexibility. I am thus on a journey to strike nonsense and fear from the idiotic vocabulary that put this nonsense in my head. Split through me like a butter knife into my apotropaic. Perhaps tar water could cure my ails. If not, certainly a sliver of vanilla would set me straight. Or if could just rain rain rain all day, then I'd make do without, but she is at school. My pistons are racked and nervous, and I'm not going anywhere but my rucksack stoop. I am camped in midwestern Spring soup. Fog, rain, and shade. The nightmare of day.