allegedly, things appear exactly as they appear; or, the addition of a trite oppositional qualifier

I had just finished urinating and felt again for that urge and there it crept, like a phobia of something insubstantial, something so terribly vague it could not articulated.  But as are all things.

Welcome to Colorful Colorado, it exclaimed in its rustic but inviting demeanor.  Things took on the form of the living elements of this world.  And there it was again, waves of the feeling, crawling like scorpions, translucent and deadly, through the numbered gaps in the mesh netting.  Spirals of glass, forged through lightening-speared sands, tumbling down through the libraries and catalogs of communal recollections.  Did he really exist, he wonders, tugging at the door while tugging at his cigar.  Teeth and lips and tongues and gums gunning towards the noises of the knocking.  Chains lashed accordingly, removed and reeled.

The wiry alphabets scrawled behind everything and try their best to remain undiscovered.  So far, things run fairly smooth.  She will call soon and those particles will cement in my ear drum, quick-dry through membranes where they will set.  Future tenses.

"We already have one of those," he squints, teeth squirt.

"I am leaving in the summer, then," she responds.

So it came to pass, as they say.  It did not do so with a sense of sharpness, however.  Too soft.  Edges frayed like a used stick of butter, left out for gouging and gorging.

"God, I wish I had something to smoke," his head shakes too slowly for the banality to not be apparent.  In all of it.  Airtight.

Well, you don't she thinks.  Up the hill and beyond the loggers work at their destruction, now adapted to a mode of silence never before seen in the natural world.  A quiet destruction, a beyond-quiet destruction.  Something unheard of, in all senses of that phrase.  He laughs to himself with that one.

The most grating sounds erupted then.  Triads of a cacophonous wonderment; it had to be.  There were no bones about it.  Bones, gray like grease on a white wall that has tried to be cleaned repeatedly.  Notifications coming from all angles.  And that word loses more of its diction each day, its pronunciation rendered lax like the lips of the infirm.  The ones who smell their own impending deaths.  She laughs to herself with that one.    

Targeted, slated.  Horns squeal.  Time to ramble: nothing has ever made itself so clear as the water in the bowl replenishes itself like a Belgian fountain.

  



 

well it does now

I can recall the recent debate on whether the picture dealt with entering or exiting of the car.  Surely, I was on the losing end (and I cannot recollect which side I'd argued for).  Well, it exists now so it is a non-issue anyways.  In fact, it has been for a long time.

_____

She mistakenly bought the light olive oil last week and is still apologizing profusely for it.  A colossal blunder, she'd called it.  I pan-fry some perogies, using the oil for the first time, and she strokes my back.  Her fingers feel like hummingbird feathers through my jersey knit pullover.  A kitchen light flickers.  In the pan, the crescent shapes began to crackle and crisp.  I turn down the heat and she compares the oil's procurement to Seward's purchase of Alaska.  But that was only a contemporaneous folly, I respond, the decision was irrelevant by the turn of that century with the discovery of gold up there.  She acknowledges, first, my accurate parlance then, secondly, my wider notion that all decisions filter away through time's sieve.  Those are her exact words.  It is all about relativity and context.  Those are mine.  And when combined they make more sense than onion powder and paprika.