Operational anxiety. The words I've been using don't make any sense to me anymore. It's all quiet and I have so many questions. The mountains shout, "*******!" over the Gros Ventre. And I'm lifeless and apathetic about lessons. I just turn on the Philip Glass and go for **** misunderstanding. More of it is coming and somehow I allow it in. A me circle of despair, loss, and immense love. My subjects must be growing curiouser and curiouser. Some of these adverbs dress in white dresses with black boots and carry scars on their palms while they bribe you off their tears to crawl back into the dusty desert graves your skin wants back.

My oven mitts aren't even of animals. I stare at the deer and moose from our second story balcony. My wrists hurt in a loss of practicing this habit. Subject matter that burns through the nights where I don't sleep. I torment myself in nursery rhymes that don't rhyme. Beds that don't water themselves, and the stories that keep my fingers soggy and pruney, drowning their dactylic digits in infinite keyboard unfulfillment.

The music is familiar. It throws its knife-wielding notes into my gut- my innards are bleeding, and my headache is growing stiff. I could mutate like Alex Mac and operate in a vacuum. I could be an incubator of self-aggrandizing disastrous behavior, an awful diaspora of introspection, a sickness that starts in soft flesh and tissue and summarizes me in the faces and heads of people and children that never turned their heads to listen.

I am wrestling your poems out of your hands. A royal couplet you try to explode against your innards, and a ****** prose that cascades upon the walls, in a mushy textural, even artistic mess of crimsony soulless words you throw around, things haven't changed but you I think you were just pretending to be haunting.

Winter hoarfrost and summer sweating. Integers upsetted by short-acting suns and cold and chilling dips in frigid waist-high water. The rocks are slimy and I don't feel like the fires are still coming. I point my nose to the water and take fifty paces. When will I have my forty-two minute day. Children are ***** liars and ought to have no sugar or treats. But let's not feed them from bowls we place on the floor.

My fingers are freezing, my cheeks, nose, back, and elbows too. I am smoking and never going to stop. I have met Joe Black and he tells me he used to command David Berkowitz into shooting people in cars, so I tell him the only thing certain in life is death and taxes, and that we need a new dishwasher, a cheaper place to buy ice cream, and a rough concrete square of floor I can torture myself for experiencing too much as human.

I woke up in yet another mess of bed sheets
with your bare chest up against my back
and my legs tangled up with yours underneath those flannel sheets
that haven’t been washed in weeks. The candle beside the bed still flickering
from the night before.
You loosened your grip as I crawled from that queen size bed
searching for that baby blue blouse that I dropped onto the floor
last night after we were done talking in circles.
I slid into it in a lame attempt to hide the not so invisible ink of our past
that speckled my upper body like freckles across my face
after a hot, summer's day.
Steam filled the small apartment,
leaking out of the bathroom door after you managed to roll out of bed
and into the shower. As the hot water hit the bottom of the tub
we spent hours in over the past year laughing until our fingers turned pruney,
I striped the bed
getting rid of the *****, wax stained sheets we used to sleep in
with the hopes of this time leaving behind the people we once were.

i was a floater by definition
a name plastered on my chest since grade 2
i would just float around.

our names were classified by how we lived
i had nothing to hold me down
my body would move from place to place
bumping into things
not staying for too long

i was happy i guess
i wasn't lost
i knew the exact pinpoint in the ocean
the singular sand particle on the beach

but there was a big wooden ship behind me
with the Captain singing a sweet sea song
and the Sailors' voices lilted
carrying bottles of blue sea glass
pretending they were telescopes

so, I took my little body,
wrinkled from the Sea,
and my waterlogged fingers gripped the boat tight
the Captain's song found its way into my lungs
and I could see the encroaching shore,
but I wan't worried
because I am still riding that ship.

sometimes, Sailors go their separate ways
find new land, find new ships
sometimes, pruney, little hands grab a hold of the hull
and We pull them on.

one day, I will leave this ship,
but it won't be forever
because I am anchored.

You know we used to go swimming
down in the quarry holes all summer
out near the bend in ****** Creek
on Highway 60, where the trees were wide
and the woods were thick. These weren’t the Bahama blue
pits you see in the movies and on TV —

they were deep dark-green pools like the holes
in your great-grandma’s gums — been around
forever too. If you swam down deep enough,
you could see the scars still carved into the stone
where they pulled all that white-rock
out with axes. But I went deeper once,
way down where the water was black and cold
and you could feel it crawling in your ears.

We were in a large pit called Half-Moon,
one so deep it had no bottom, and it’d been
around since who knows when — it seemed natural
anyways, not something man-made,
and my father used to tell me that it was
the first hole to flood, back when they didn’t know
how deep was too deep to dig, and they hit
Bluesprings Caverns or the Lost River,
one of the two. I’m telling you though,
that I know different after tasting
all that salty water near the bottom —
it’s not ripe for life down in that pit,
the way it is, so deep it’s like swimming in ice.

I was fishing with a friend on our day off,
throwing ****** chunks of rotten-smelling
week-old chicken liver out as deep
as we could toss them, when I got snagged
on something fifteen feet or so from
where the shoreline dropped off a cliff
down to the water. And I had fancy hooks
tied on my lines back then, so I jumped in
hoping to get myself untangled and save
the new tackle strung up on my line.

I must’ve been in ten feet of water,
just past where the algae sticks like tape
to the back of your knees, when something that felt
just like the biggest fish there ever was
took hold of my foot and pulled me down
even deeper than where the divers
training in their sheriff’s scuba gear
to dredge the bottom for a pruney body
say they’ve seen catfish the size of cars
or bigger — I could hear those big fish grunting
as whatever-it-was pulled me deeper,
moaning just like diesel engines — and we kept
going further and further, like we were in
the caverns now, or lost like the river,
until I couldn’t see the sun at all,
just the foggy glow of an old oil lamp
half-tied with a rusted chain around
the broken axle of an upturned buggy
rising up from the red sediment where
the horses should’ve been before it sank.

And there beside the drifting lamp, wrapped
in tattered clothes that waived like seaweed,
was the bleached-white skeleton
of some boy, with his head turned backwards
on a broken neck — and he was looking at
the largest pile of gold I ever saw,
which filled the whole buggy and looked
as new as yesterday, it was so bright,
but it could’ve been pyrite or spray painted
for all I know, because I never touched it.

And if I did bring that gold back with me,
you can bet I wouldn’t be here today —
or at the very least, I wouldn’t tell a soul
about how I came across it all
in the bottom of that pit — that’s how you know
I’m telling you the truth about it now.

I woke up on the other side of the lake
with my tackle in my hand, and the start
of a headache that lasted two weeks — but I would’ve
jumped back in to find that hoard of gold
if my friend hadn’t called the cops, and if
I knew for sure exactly where it was
and how to get there without drowning
before I got to that endless stretch of water.

But listen, if you’ve heard about this place
and know the things that happened when it was wild,
you’d say it had to be the gold Sam Bass
and his gang of bandits got off the train they robbed,
and I don’t know what evil kept it there
just to tempt a kid to drown, but
there’s a reason everyone is filling
all the quarry holes with limestone,
because I’m telling you, what flooded them
wasn’t a river or some cave they cracked —

it was a dead man’s greed that dragged me down
like all the other kids that have drowned since then,
and those jealous waters don’t end until
you’re **** near through the other side of the earth
or more, if you believe the stories they tell
about the Donaldson Cave at Spring Mill.

Her heart was just pumping scar tissue
Thumping dry red dust
A reflection of last night’s affection
Pain pointing to another *******
Skin so thin but opaque
Raw nerves and edginess
Desire lacking eagerness
Child in a monster’s nest
Two packs of smokes a day
One bottled downed and another one saved
Could have been a beauty queen
But now she’s just a dried up pruney thing

You pulled up the roots,
From in the ground,
Stirred the soil
Pruney palms browned.

Shredded the leaves,
Of the maple and pungent fern,
From my patience,
I wish you'd learn.

The patterns I follow,
Hands stretch for the crescent up there,
slowly steadily
creep with flair.

Rip off my shield,
With your blunted knife
Etch your heart
To your partner for life.

“I think that I love him,”
I wrote down in my journal that day.
Words scrawled across the page
curling like timid spring tendrils.
I swam in it all afternoon,
turning pruney with the feeling.
Indulging in the thought that this
was what I’d long been needing.
But day turned into night,
things changed within the hour;
lovely feelings, slowly budding,
became shrunken withered flowers.
With a friend I had been talking,
he asked, “What do you know about Justin?”
The air was cool on my teeth as I smiled,
“It’s hard to know about Justin.”
In that moment, my heart was swollen
with hope that my friend would spill
words that I could indulge on
like red wine to the ears,
and I felt my face turn ruddy
with anticipation of the pleasure,
it was almost too much bear—
my beating heart could hardly wait—
And within that same moment, he said,
“Well he really likes your roommate.”

Our footsteps dominated a small part of Pisgah National Forest in the Summer heat. Reading maps from local hiking stores, information tough as plastic Nalgene water bottles. Letting the snails make their way across the trail, watching spiders construct their webs in an articulate manner. Licking the dirt off your leg to compare to your natural skin tone, squashing ticks and eating ants. Conversations of back home, discussion who dates who, how one got in a car accident, and how one's football team lost in overtime during the Homecoming game, thus distracting from the pain presented by trekking up and down the trail. Peeling off wet socks at the end of the day to relieve pruney feet, taking care of blisters and bug bites which dominate the skin. Turning to your friend in the middle of the night in the tight, snuggly tent, deciding whether to wake them up to see the stars, and before a decision is made on your end, they get up and ask you the same thing. Time moves slower.

Having to drink the excess chicken juice during dinner as no waste would be produced. And being attacked by a hive of yellow jackets that woke up on the wrong side of the bed. The pain. Running three miles with a forty-pound pack on your back in the pouring rain as lightning is chasing you, just to arrive at your destination at a lower elevation right in time for the hail to invade. And the lightning. The feeling of the ground rumbling as you see the bolt strike a tree multiple yards away, the sound blasting off every cilia left in the ear.  And the strangers met on the trail; the only topic of the conversations were the bears and the weather.

I witnessed everything. I woke when the sun rose and I slept when the sun set. Everything moved slowly with the assured fateful speed of the stir-fry being consumed after a long day of milage, like the snail making its way across the trail, like the spiders constructing  their webs.