A black and white film
About an old man and his dog.
There is no dialogue.
Just ambient sounds -

First, of the alarm clock’s
monotonous song.
Followed by an abrupt
cutting silence as his hand slams
down on the snooze button

Then, the sound of a coffeemaker
spitting and burbling.
The coffee, pouring into a chipped mug.
Sugar, then milk,
the clink of the spoon against the ceramic
as he stirs
the long first sip

As the man looks curiously
at something on the fridge,
just out of frame.
A bag of dogfood opening.

hard kibble ringing against the metal dish.
The dog grumbling - impatiently waiting.
Tupperware  opening
The hum of a microwave, and the beep.
Last night’s stew poured into a bowl
the rest, over the kibble.

The closed caption reads:
[Enthusiastic, sloppy eating noises]

The sound of water running
as the bowls are scrubbed clean.

The door closing as the two leave
for their morning walk.
The old man and the dog
are now sitting on a park bench.

The grass, still wet from the morning dew.
There is a beautiful sunrise
over the nearby lake.

The camera pulls away,
as music overtakes the diegetic sounds
of nearby parkgoers, birds and runners,
and teens playing hooky.

The camera cuts back to for a beat
to the kitchen
in the empty house.

The camera zooms in on a weathered
and well loved piece of paper
held up by a rainbow magnet
on the refrigerator door.

Fade to a black screen,
with white letters:
Fin.

Somebody Take Me
by Ryan P. Kinney and J.M. Romig

You shook me up
And poured out my mind
Cooked me ‘til I crystallized
Crushed me up and smoked me

You got high on my experiences
Took my stories into your body
You loved it

Then the bad trip came crashing in
The heartbreaks, the beatings,
The suicidal thoughts
I made you paranoid, cynical, and distrusting
Every loss peppered with a smile
Each warm, glowing moment
Tainted with the debauchery of the act

You’ll pay for all this in rehab
Blood and tears diluted with stale coffee and ****** cigarettes
(They all taste the same)

Go ahead, Detoxify.
Spit me out
No matter how you try to purge
You’ll never be rid of this poison

Old gentle vague dark sea
stars uncoffined above
my drummer grave
blind of age,
meet Mr. Numb Feelgood
he is dying - chasing smoke,  
following a blind parade
wanderin’ anywhere forked like Yes
at every dusty, homely, strange-eyed landmark
until driven deep down dead

Dear old diamonds,
my sleepy southern song spell fades ,
my past was a young clown
dancing, swingin' my magic heels
raging and cursing death’s grip on time

Now, I feel that morning’s fierce burn
vanishing into a tambourine memory
and I’m caught madly dreaming
against the ragged anywhere
to return green tomorrow

everybody’s angel bodies
find happening midnight
on Kansas pavements
hipsters’ motherwords are wholely robed by time
instant everything is ordinary
buggered city  immortals --
annoyed, parentless, marijuana everymans
swiftly digging unknown eternity
groaning strange in the long mysterious night
roaring, vibrating kindness
from their holy tongues
blazing inner hideous human gold
draining ***** forever
draining everything
forever -
Moloch, Buddha, Abyss
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

I
The phone was screaming in my pocket
its voice was muffled by the pile of clothes
on top of it

The hotel water was almost too hot
it blushed my scalp
and cascaded down my face
in a way that should have felt like baptism
but didn't

After what felt like an eternity
the call went to the black hole
that is my neglected voicemail
now at over a hundred missed calls

I didn’t want to talk
not to Dad, not to Mom,
not to my fiancé,
and definitely not to some reporter
trying to make our ****** up family
the topic of the nine o’clock news

II
The pipes in the wall
clunked around for a second
as I turned the ****, cutting the water off
I stepped out of the shower
somehow feeling less clean than when I entered

For a moment I stood there,
towel over my head
in complete darkness

I closed my eyes and saw him
standing across from me
his eyes, locked with mine
dad’s gun in his shaking hands -
pointed directly at my head
unblinking, full of hatred, anger
and fear

They’ll call him a monster
and knowing what he’s done,
I won’t be able to say they’re wrong

III
Sympathizers will say that the divorce
messed him up somehow
or that he inherited our mother’s mental illness
or that he played too many first person shooters –
which is just ******* stupid

Lying on the hotel bed,
I nakedly examined the ceiling
mapping out the distance between water stains
like a cartographer

The last time he called me
he was in tears,
because some ****** from his school
beat him to a pulp
and shoved his face in dog ****

I can’t help but dwell
on something I said to him that night:

“People like that don’t change
they become ******* adults
and keep kicking people around
because they can
Because they’re rich and we’re poor
and they don’t want to see people like us
we remind them that the world isn't perfect
and doesn't revolve around them”

I don’t want to believe
that I planted the seed,
that the one time he listened to me –

IV
Six people died
most of them, kids no older than seventeen
one teacher, and a janitor - tagged by a stray bullet
two kids have been in critical condition
for the last three days

He must have been terrified
in those last moments
before the cops riddled him with holes

He must have regretted it
or at least regretted
not having an escape plan

He never did think things through
unlike me,
connecting the countries on the ceiling
drawing imaginary lines
of cause and effect
and trying to figure out what it means
to be a big brother
in the absence of a little one

Jigsaw
by J.M. Romig, Amanda Whitlock, and Ryan P. Kinney

The first time I watched a man die
It wasn’t a man anymore, they told me
Just like my mother wasn’t my mother anymore

I will never forget the wrong answer
And the empty hours
When the minute       hand was always longer

I often welcome sleepwalking through most of the week
In the few instances the machines malfunction
I curse being awakened

I don’t see how anyone
Can smoke at a time like this
When the air is so heavy
It’s like breathing cement

I’m in stressed and panicked misery
And I’m vomiting
Lots and lots of                              stuff
That stretches vast
And expands to eat up everything

The guilt of my sin
The heft of your innocence
Weighs heavily on my soul
As i drag you down with me

Her lit cigarette burns
So brightly from the porch
Against the darkness
It reminds me of a lighthouse
Or a bug zapper

And what is that moth doing there anyways?
People are trying to sleep

Meet me, once again, at the breakwall
where we will spend time sitting
reminiscing about times we spent wishing
on a sinking star for more time to spend.

Let’s go fishing for our selves
in snapshots of past lives
and see if we can find,
in this murky water of nostalgia,
some kind of definition.

We will quest forth, finding more questions
than answers, and accepting them
with a peaceful resignation
we could never have in our raging youth.

I’d talk about how
we used to debate
with our words
carved into primitive weapons
for savage discussion -

To win arguments with each other
doing battle for days
not realizing that language
was not evolved for the purpose of combat
but rather, the opposite.

We’d watch the waves wash ashore
all the places and people we’d been
all the bits and pieces of past tragedies
will lay before us
like a thousand-year-old shipwreck.

We will laugh together
the way you do,
when you see the heavy black clouds
storming off toward a distant somewhere
and they seem smaller somehow
less frightening.

You’d say something about how
we were the most obsessed with our mortality
when we were furthest from ever facing it.

And we’ll sit there for a while
just thinking about that.