Visions lost in cracking air
dirt and crumbling sidewalk

I drag my feet homeward
one more time

I dream the dream of dying
I wake gasping

I am locked in
this chambered hell of body

I see fire under rocks
I smell smoke in the bathroom

The night breeds evil smells
they float into my nostrils

Hope is lost, it flew away
I woke up laughing with the dead

Give me a safety pin
I have to pin myself together

My body has parted
was it a distorted mirror?

I touch my eyeball
and it sinks

I spit out teeth
with blood

My fingernails
have fallen off

Tired, I am so tired
i wander crooked streets

Shadows on the grey walls
my only companions

I am daughter of radon
I laugh as my hair falls out

I am so hungry
hungry for life

This steel landscape
of bed pans and commodes

The chill enters my toes
I wake up screaming...

Your love is pure, your heart is true
And every time I look at you
I tell you that I love you too
All you want is to be near
My dear friend, I feel the same
The look you give me, those big brown eyes
Are a blessing in disguise
I wish I knew what you are thinking
But instead you will just lick me
We play a game of "Bite the hand"
And then I give you a command
Your brows go up, you are confused
That scene just makes me so amused
I rub your ears, give you a kiss
You lie down near me in a bliss
You fall asleep but still alert
In case your nose smells a dessert
It's not that time, you need to sleep
Recharge for next day's little treat
You are the purest soul I know
My furry friend, most loyal creature in the world.

Fireworks were cool. Framed metal chairs with woven nylon Americana on watered lawns on the outskirts of the edge of Los Angeles. Hairy neighbors, Miller Drafts and dog ****. Sally ****** Jim on the corner, and Jim drank, or started again and wouldn’t stop, but was good with a flat tire and chain adjustment. His kid had a glove like a vacuum. His daughter was a *****. Sally afforded a Mexican gardener.

Tim always had fireworks. He had gasoline and willed fireworks into his driveway. He had rope and a keg.

Schatzky keep her cool. She had to. She worked the 5th and taught everyone’s kids. She taught their parents too, 10 years ago.

Her son Donavan and her husband Keith lived for the 4th. Little pink houses and Jack and Diane kind of ****. So they watched fireworks on flag hill while their neighbors ****** and got ******* and burnt their eyebrows. Donavan was ecstatic.

Each year the hill was gilded in gold for Donavan and Keith and and Schatzky, because each 4th brought fire and explosives in a way they could never afford.

Keith was more patriotic than most. He waited and enlisted and became a hero. Donavan watched on TV. Schatzky watched too. We won the first gulf war and everyone knew it: https://youtu.be/4gNhs2SRacs?t=1m10...

They celebrated the fourth in baseball stadiums. They celebrated life and heroism and purpose, and they celebrated with F16s and the best explosives the peacetime nation offered.

And Keith celebrated and embraced purpose. He even became a leader in the 2nd gulf war.

Sally stopped ******* Jim. Jim wasn’t married anymore. His kid lowered Tim’s basement and didn’t steal the copper.

Tim’s house was worth a fortune but it had a radon problem.

Schatsky was accused of drowning her dog, but she didn’t do it.

Jim still drinks; he’s smarter now.

They all meet on flag hill every 4th. The fireworks aren’t as good. A lot of build up for a finale that feels like an accident.

Water seeps through my jeans and no one can see my face as I limp home with a broken rubber sandal and a bucket of ice, a dog tied around my legs, and a kid face first on the grass, a wife whose friend drank our last beer an hour ago, a phone with  two-percent battery left and my mom wants to show me what fireworks look like in California.

Her blood is cyanide
She cannot seem to hide
She is light as helium
She's strong as aluminum
She is graphite carbon
As subdued as boron
Abundant as hydrogen
But toxic as nitrogen
She's precious as platinum
Her skin is thallium
In her lungs there is radon
She is as rare as xenon
Helpful as iodine
Whose life is astatine's
She is soft as lithium
Her eyes are beryllium
There is nothing I can do
Already the tumor grew

for them to write a haiku,
for us is to write A, or B, or C -
if our form of encoding
sound wasn't  as it already is:
we wouldn't have chemistry -
say Na and sodium,
               Rd and radon;
they write haiku like
we write A B or C, to them haiku is
our version of the alphabet,
the succinct -
         hard to orientate
units of encoding
as complete meaning /
majestic -
                    we just find
it hard to spell /
put the puzzle back together,
the puzzle is still
a  b  c  d  e  f  g  h  i  j  k  l  m  n  o  p
            ­         q  r  s  t  u  v  w  (x  y  z)
      v.i.p reservation
for mathematics (in brackets):
now... the mystery of life,
primarily? put that puzzle back
together. is it a puzzle in
the first place? how should i know?!
       it's all fair game:
they write a haiku we write an A,
   they write another haiku,
we write a B, the ****** puzzle
is there for the taking:
   all you have to do is take some
play-dough on your little camping
adventure and come back with something
remotely needing boxes and shelves
and libraries, and university lecturers;
perhaps a few cannibals to boot too.

Within the mundane confines of
each woman's work, you show up.
As toxic as the radon they stick in their mouth,
you give the next victim a sickly smile.
Not convincing enough to make them unaware,
but with a sweetness present enough to trust
You slowly sink into their heart stream
similarly enough to the eventual build up of chemicals
within the precise bodies of the mechanical clock painters

We may postulate till abortion becomes our birthright. It's tenfold 100. But that ain't the total girlfriend experience nor the girlfriend as experienced in her totality. Her mystical & whimsical demeanor moshes no make-up/mark-up in Cebu, in Bacolod, in Pampanga. I can't cough up a hocker to the radon enigma as it's too enigmatic to compare with phlegm or phlegmatic, productive cough-ups tinged red.

once again: there isn't really anything
to write about:
once upon a time: in those
c'est la vie days of yore -
where people could have
their spontaneous elevations of grandeur
and sophistication -
or a complete lack of it...
whichever whatever...
it was somehow a duty to write
a doodle of rat-scuttling imitation:
not some grand fictive escapism -
but this little bit of nuance here...
this little bit of nuance "there"...
fine fine, fine... in the days of c'est la vie...
hell: it's not like we're going
to revise the original thirst of science:
science as an adventure as primordial as
rock star thrilling -
like discovering new elements:
marie curie and polon and radon -
it just seems when chemistry has exhausted
its quest: the two sciences either side of it:
biology and physics have become...
science fiction or... a... debate...
i want to stress that last word with
a dryness -
biology as some variation of
darwinism - this quest of: forever in theory
but never in polite society a practice -
or otherwise post-theory and so otherwise:
merely talk of weather can be more
entertaining -
when science was adventurous:
when it was tinged with the alchemical -
somehow you could weave in a momentary
lapse of: the desired outcome with
some linguistic mini side projects...
like ☿...        mercury -
then again: jupiter - ♃ -
extending the prospect of 4...
♅ that belongs to... SHA... cyrillic - ш -
and of course ♆ and phi -
- but how isn't one to behave
on-and-off like a solipsist these days...
it's impossible to write anything
when so many people are not living
their very own...
but when **** good pop comes along
i just want to get out of bed...
miley cyrus' midnight sky teasing
at something that could have come from
a tina turner repertoire...
revisiting the 1980s...
it's a song and i feel
myself immersed in that moment of
stepping out from the underground
while heading to camden town...
teasing at the same sort of "hopes"
as: foster the people's sit next to me...
or LP's - girls go wild...
king rat pretending
to scuttle this little me and my d.j. side-project:
ha ha...
i sobered up watching le mans '66
and couldn't believe that: there's this now:
while there was also: that, then...
i drank too much water and
vomited while taking a shower...
seances of a pedestrian executions of:
out-of-every-instance: an insistence -
my definition of existence...
the best pop in: towing a town along a
great breach of desirable plumbing work-arounds...
that science these days is
this rigid statistical beast:
that anything new is so niche add-on specific
and hardly a thrilling escapade...
a pop song can: change a life of not anticipating
a white noise interlude prior to noon
in an instant... which is kept...
what it would feel: best kept secret is
to froth at the value of feelings that can be
mastered - in this current currency
of fudge-packaging of thought: from the on-high
onslaught of a morbid ms. mundane
about: i put on my sunglasses anticipating
white light from the old mythology
of the bomb not dropped for collateral rummagings
of stat...
lips tied to a bottle...
and an arrow shot at a cloud...
something breezy something easily-come-by
a negation of everything except
a revisiting of spontaneity -
contorts in cubism: that someone somewhere
is somehow playing 4D chess...
because the admiration and skewed rhetoric
is just this now and there was a hunger...
me and my filter complications...
sieving a readership thank god:
that there is no automatic picking up of
a tabloid newspaper like:
sitting on a toilet and nothing is missing:
perhaps beside the ******* to leech on
a hatrick on the throne of thrones...
it's so comforting that you only
eed to keep a cat and wait for it
to trigger a process of petting...
when it wants to be petted while you can
ignore it: for the best part: cactus sire...
best kept in the dark like some *******
mushroom...
hardly thought projects with
solipsism as base and side project of so many
people...
come 00:00... a divine adieu
that will also whisper: come tomorrow and
every branch of my little defeatism -
a life a tree which will never come around
a shorthand of a crucifix.
dangling pseudo-apple: corpus christi -
well yes: a pristine revamp of the old testament...
a genius at work...
otherwise                      really?
see words with hieroglyphic clarity -
now that i might overload on emoticon saturation?

I am the Guinea Pig, my own
fault for not reading the reviews
before I dined at Soos Chinese
restaurant at Mallow Co Cork
in Ireland, today at noon.

What a disaster, everything is
laden with sugar, the sauce is
commercial, it is in The Spa
area of the town where Radon
is active, cancer causing.

Low rents, because nobody
wants to live there. The food
was lousy, the price was high
and I regret not coming home
to cook something wholesome.

Ps.

I don't read reviews
but I do write them.

Today is our last day at
Iskeroon.com, tomorrow

Mallow, once more it is
back to the urban myth.

Neighbours, the smell
of meat cooking,

Carbon monoxide from
Polish coal,

Cars passing non stop
day and night,

Trains, four an hour on
a ten arch steel bridge,

Dogs doings on the paths,
litter along hedge rows,

Baby's nappies in streams
and town supply aqueducts,

Contaminated tap water,
carcinogenic radon gas,

Solemn knells of funeral
bells, encore cancer victims.

Certainly not the best place
to live, but a great place to die.

                     <>


www.visitmallowb4udie.com

                     (not)

Live love is

as light as hydrogen

Memories of break ups are

as heavy as Radon