I plan on moving my writing and what-have-you to a new Tumblr account. I know this one has been somewhat orphaned for some time, and I apologize. If anyone is interested in the new address, please let me know, and I’ll message it to you. Thank you very kindly, all of you who have read my silly and amatuerish stuff
The pinot in my head ferments too rapidly. Rotten turpentine personality that dribbles out my mouth any time I can't keep it closed. Like a mongoloid child sucking on a greasy nickel. I try and focus by rereading a passage in the tattered half-remains of a dollar store book. Within, a woman who runs, barefoot and nightgowned, through the frozen streets on New York. Screaming and laughing and sobbing that she is a sad, lonely fraud. The searing cold scrubbing her lungs raw.
The Black Monday Murders greeted me in an old, yellowed newspaper. I squint at the blurry words by the gray and waxing light of rainclouds. I'm hyper-aware of my poor investments through the static of spiky and indecipherable line graphs. I make a discipline of paying small amounts of life into a growing pool of wastefulness. Investing into more efficient ways to squander my time, on empty streets and in abandoned storefronts.
I search old, tinny voice messages for clues as to where I went wrong. The sunlight of earlier mornings is gray and makes my bones hurt. I kiss my dogged partner's messy red mane while she sleeps. She's too good for me. I stand in a scalding shower and stare at empty hands. I feel a piece inside me replaced with rust. The steam of the shower is my soul escaping through the tiny sliding window into the gray and frigid morning.
The skies cleared in jagged streaks across golden highways. I smuggled precious cargo in the backseat, swaddled in blankets. The clouds split at the seams, an inverse ocean of antiquity framing the ground. The playlist in my car stuttered into tinny, predictable echoes over many hours. The sun extinguished itself behind countless, abandoned strip malls. A thousand empty vehicles predictably clogged the roads the rest of the way.
She scolds her suitors softly for their solipsism. There is no room for fervent letters of any flavor in her heartbox. It's hard to confess any succession of affections against high-built, brick-and-mortar walls. I steal pieces of her a little at a time. Eroding her palisade with gentle sapping. When the weathervane whispers favorably, and the hard rain tastes of calcium. I work slowly, waterslick and tenacious, so as not to startle the world.
I search the grout in the shower tiles for answers about old age. A calcified showerhead rains tepid absolution across me by way of wasteful washing. Years of beating myself into health are beginning to wear at my cracks and seams. Nothing heals the way it used to, any more. I'm disconnected from everything but the water sluicing off me and circling of the drain. Rinse me away with the soap and the mold. A bottle full of bleach may help clean things at last.
A clock like an Escher painting unwinds itself across miles of pavement. Old tunes are carried away by the stars and the trees. White gauze exhaust suffocates tiny marionettes inside their dollhouse. The last push up the hill is so close. The frogs are silent, and there is no mist to greet a silent stroll around an oval trestle. The science of pragmatics has failed.
I pack my life away in a brand new messenger bag, with a rounded brass buckle. I head off across the sea with only a laptop and dissatisfaction. I flee this pocket of the universe, so overly damp with spores. Out here, contentment and emptiness are synonymous with fog and sunsets. Once I’ve put some mileage between there and here, I fish around in my leather satchel for a cure. There is no remedy to be found. Just the exhaustion of a too-easy existence.
I replay a conversation with an autistic man in my head, for no reason. He had babbled about sandwiches and co-conspiracies. I searched the inventory inside my brain while he spoke. I couldn't find even a plastic smile to offer him. He then stopped abruptly and wandered away, with a cardboard box full of silver coins clutched in his hands. I nodded indiscernibly, while holding handful of caseless ammunition in calloused fingers. Unspent bullets of a one-way friend I've never met. He might have known how to better respond.
Last night I bathed a handful of mermaid scales with excited, acetone breath. I first brushed my hands free of dust, before inspecting them under a halogen light late into evening. As it turns out, they were only mother-of-toilet-seat tokens. I let them fall into tomorrow, as a storm in the valley rinsed the last of them from my fingers with warm, greasy rain.
Their relationship escalator ground to a halt with a sharp staccato of barked orders. It set the tone for a weekend of patchwork affections. Ragged and grimy and salvaged from a fancy garbage heap. They wrapped themselves together in the distraction of comforting lies. Reaching out to snatch some peace from a sea of fading stars, in between the skeletal boughs of a backyard willow tree.
She picks vowels out of her teeth with the bones of a conversation. Her smug and distended lips wrapped around a choking sum of confirmation bias. Horn-rimmed glasses, nose piercing, dyed hair, lipstick of indignation-- all impossibly, ironically iconic. Her collapsible echo chamber throne can scarcely hold the girth of her righteousness. Truly, she is the magnificence of ignorance. A vision of widdershins progress.
Her palms were cut with a hundred slices. Braiding expectation into resentment with careless fingers bred septic hands. Entitlement made for a long car ride into the city. The skies were dark gray and loaded to dispense filthy rain as an afterthought. With enough words and gentle shaking, one can sort out the knots from anything. Everyone’s rusted and reliable life will be waiting for them at the end of yesterday evening.
A fishing rod with braided hooks casts about in sewage runoff. The fisher concentrates on one thousand thin-stretched miles to Paris, to alleviate boredom. Liquid dissatisfaction streams downward in the shape of tiny, privileged minnows. An orchard of withered telephone wires hums in the background. The accompanying coffee can of worm bait is more interesting than any white-eyed catch that could be pulled out of the drainage. The nearby fishing basket is tired and empty.
With eyes closed, the suns sets behind our irises, from soil to the sky. A concrete breeze washes us with present tense. This alcove is a pocket universe that is only ours. Crushed leaves, wet grass, and broken twigs offer the comfort of clouds. We open our pupils to dying light, and the static of classroom radios. It's time for work.
She pins an off-hand confession en passant on message board of dried heartskin. Out there, there’s no foot traffic worth a damn. Her note is pressed from skepticism. Folded twice to hide a double entendre. To set her suggestion aside is to summon a storm of uncertainty. She's counting on a tsunami.
