sleepstealers

Of all the nights to be asleep it should be tonight and these fingerless green woolen gloves were made to pull back bowstrings and to slay leafcrunchers and limblickers and my neck is sore from shaking and we finished reading one book aloud and now we are on to the denser second the better second and we have no idea what the third volume will contain at least i don't know and i think that if i make it to seventy will my fingers look like little oak trunks and will my toes alter the shape of the houseshoes that i will undoubtedly wear over oriental rugs and tiny barking hounds and my ears will sprout hair like soy stalks spry spears but compacted and flayed a little at the top in dark spinachy fireworks and of all the nights to be asleep it should be tonight and these fingers want to wander partly and be still mostly and part moistly and mostly partition mossy parapets into the ashen haze curling outwards from the besieged tower of soulful internalities and heartfelt heart feeling and intangible typewritten ploys and spools unfurled and banners laid at the conquerors' feet with nails that need be trimmed daily and grimly grime their way into blackness like mold like desert eclipses sheathed in velvet tubes of obsidian. 

chlorine

I remember spinning around and around with a long shallow blue meshed pool skimming net and being able to just focus for the first time in my life on one thing that was still while everything else was in motion.  Surely there were sounds like helicopters, like emergency responders, as my eyes locked on the stiff netting that turned everything around it into thin ribbons of speed.  Later that night I threw up in my bed and cried some more because I didn't know what was happening, I didn't know what was coming out of my mouth and it was orange and it burned and I thought, then, it must have been fire.  I had this light blue electric blanket (the same blue as the pool skimmer net) and it was really soft and I puked all over it and it smelled so bad and I tried to keep it in like Jackie Kennedy did with her husband's skull-bits and brain-parts and then it all smelled like pool chemicals after that.  They ran in and said something to each other about me overdoing it today and the heat but they didn't know what I saw on the screen before all of it, before the propellering, it was droplets of blood from noses and rusty scythes and payphone receivers ticktocking like metronomes to the rhythm of televised death.

  

through grid and grit

The questions and the answers.  Free-will blowing through the treetops.  Rubber hearts balanced on the elm boughs teetering above the dried-out lochs.  Consumptive skies.  Hungry roads gobble up the tired feet and the hardened minds.  But my mind is soft, he says.  Well, my feet are exuberant, she replies.  The flying buttresses of the oaks, the naves of the leafy clearings.  The iron beams of the balmy air, they come and go, they rust.  Return to them, return to the vast hands and the avant garde lands.    

       

the fracturing of all names

The detoxification of calculus.  Formulae and their subsequent replications.  The forging of plans, different times, and different measures.  Strands of hair spread between fingers like decorative willow branches in expensive and narrow ceramic urns.  Brevity beneath the blankets.

these grab-bags of peoplefolks and their [re]visions and their lamp-burned eyes and they are all over the place with their twine-wrapped porkloin dreams

Anderson’s sideburns. He combed them profusely, obsessively, in the chipped motel mirror after we watched People’s Court on channel seven (the only channel without distracting amounts of snow, either in the visual or audible variety and the one with that coiffured news-muppet Matt Mattingly). Anderson would stroke them at the most inappropriate time—once, on top of our stained crimson comforter back home, he removed his hands from beneath my bra so he could finger his facial hair instead of my hardening nipple. But he would pet them absent-mindedly too, like at the counter in Denny’s between swills from the pale ceramic mug of decaf; or he would caress them in line at the bank, his eyes wandering to the teller’s towering beehive but not registering its existence.

I see her in my parking lot and I thought she’d looked familiar with those eyelashes.   

Harvey loads the mattress on his back with no problem but then I heard his back and it cracked so loudly my hairs stood on end. 

I used to imagine it was me inside of that buried time capsule instead of those Action Comics and that half-empty pack of filterless Luckies.

He arranges the action figures for the customer.

There had been better days, Raul muttered into his reflection on the stainless steel range hood. The steam from the bubbling pot of basmati was wrinkling his silk tie, painting his forehead with beadlets of sweat, but he couldn’t steal away from his shimmering, steely double. In a skillet next to the rice, two thin veal cutlets, basted in extra virgin olive oil and fresh basil shreds, warmed in their clear juices. A small plasma television beamed up from the marble counters, its silent image of a stock ticker streaming across the polished black surface, a reversed, refracted rendition. Raul didn’t need to decode the flowing current of numbered fractions and three letter acronyms, he lived them everyday; the ebb and flow had turned into, as of late, ebb and ebb: the coast was naked, exposed, parched.

I run into Karl this morning at the car wash.  

I used to imagine that I could run across the pool’s surface water and leap over the other children, splayed out on giant inflatable crocodiles and neon pink intertubes.

She cranes her head to see the drop of rain spread out across her shoulder.   

There had been better days. But those seemed to exist for him so long in the past, years before the border crossing. Thinking of the guards even now, their sullen gray wool, their fur hats, their Kalashnikovs, render him into a state of confused duality: anger and fright. But, he remembers the lessons of his grandfather, those two emotions are one in the same, as the phrase goes. It sounds so commonplace, so trivial, now, here, hundreds of kilometers away from that place, a current place safer but not, magical but not, fertile but not. The Regime, with its ruthless poet Colonel, like every place he would ever reside, he would ever thrust his tired, hunched form across, would remain in the shaded limbo between good and evil.  The Banal flows. 

He is running right into the lake and I’d expected him to topple any minute now. 

I used to imagine that it was a hailstorm that caused the awning at Franklin's Hardware to turn into a Swiss cheese-like canvas of gaping holes and elliptical slashes and not the knife-wielding Franklin.

There had been better days; frankly, she couldn’t wait until the day to utter such words. Indeed, the truth was that she had never been able to view a single thing through the lens of such pessimism; and such were the words of the anti-optimist: there had been better days. The type of phrase that leached out from pursed lips, from shaking and sallow heads; a front porch lament to a young neighbor’s child in a shifting neighborhood, a deathbed confession in a forgotten wing of a forgotten retirement home. Maybe. But it was not in her make-up, her nature prevented such musings, such ill-guided generalities. She had yet to feel remorse and all of remorse’s varied, inbred kin, drop in for a visit, no matter how brief or how long. 

I used to imagine that the bark on freshly-planted trees could be peeled off in one continuous act like my grandmother used to be able to do with an apple skin.

But then he started doing lines every morning. He eventually stopped going to class. Now he works at the Chevron on South 8th and Vineland.   

But then she started shaving her head. I told her to stop that trend. We broke up.

I used to imagine that Curious George would one day come out with a story where he would mercilessly maul his handler, that asshole in the giant yellow hat.

The picnic tables fill up by nine. The bar inside: forget it. There is a line for the dart board, and the bathroom and the pool table, and the water jug.  “Where to?” Frank frowns.  New lines carve and others rise upon his left forearm from the heft of the glass pitcher there in his hand.  A two-person plastic table in a far corner opens up. Frank sets down the pitcher, the amber beer sloshes around a bit but stays within the rim.  “Are you still not drinking?” he asks.  “Not since the appointment,” I open my soda can. The hiss turns more than a few heads.

But then the group ate there two or three times a week. The place started getting a following again. The new location opened up North last week.

But then she started putting the gun in her purse. Her neighbor had said that was a bad idea.

She is cleaning up trash on the side of the road now for every weekend of the next eight months.

But then he started changing all his light bulbs. His obsession was ceaseless. Now we only use candles.

I see her now across from me and I open my mouth. 

He pushes the revolving door with so much gusto the panel behind him clips his heel. 

Yuri ponders the dynamic between the rook and the queen and I panicked and jumped at the thought of defeat.

They stare into each others faces but he lost the concentration first. 

i really like to hear myself speak don't speak

I have these itchy knuckles and I need to develop some new thirty-six exposured philosophies about the sky and I have to juxtapose my preconceptions against my non-existent ankle-scar and it is almost time to return to the cavernous folds of our bed's clouds.

Regional rule has passed me over, he thinks as he unrolls the Scotch tape to its definitive end, and the era of the self arose.  Unnecessary words, a false joining of thoughts, really.  Windows sigh open and lucidity appears and the old toaster has scorched his bagel gloriously.    

awash in granules of light

By the end, she had a face like a French Bulldog. She enjoyed books about ikebana but never bought fresh flowers.  She hadn't talked to her son in three years, seven months, and fourteen days (their last conversation was about her physical and mental states and if they were sound enough to warrant a drive up Highway One to Big Sur; he'd said no, she, of course, felt otherwise).  Her wrists were the size of a toddler's.  Her favorite program was Wheel of Fortune (and that is what she called television shows, 'programs').  Buried in the back of a still-potent cedar closest was an old mink scarf that had its head and feet and tail but was conjoined in the midsection to the pieces of other countless minks giving this one the impression of being ran through a massive set of enormous rolling pins, flattening and stretching it out.  Her favorite colors were teal and fuchsia.  She drove a 1987 Lincoln TownCar and had a shoebox full of I Like Ike! campaign buttons on a shelf in her pantry, above cans of expired pumpkin pie filling.  She collected ceramic lizards and tiny-potted succulents and kept these things on sprawling display in a pine gazebo in the yard aside her kitchen.  Her hair looked like a gray palmetto and she always wore lipstick.  She liked to cook scallops in butter on the stove and kept bacon grease in a Folger's can on the counter.  She burped a lot.  She sang to birds. 

"She said she wanted to be cremated because she hated the thought of being eaten by worms."

Halos of light sang from the sconces.  Grim, grave old men in dark suits folded their hands in front of them because that is what old men are supposed to do in these situations.

"She would have hated these drab flowers."

The rug's paisley flourishes curled around folding-chair legs.  Middle-aged women in well-worn polyester dresses embraced each other and picked lint balls from one another's clothes, like chimpanzees de-licing their kin beneath the shade of a zoo-stunted sycamore.

"She thought of you often and hated how long it had been since you two talked."

A tiny, almost translucent, spider tip-toed its way up to the crown molding on the wall opposite the round-top window.  Boxes of Kleenex printed with a pastel country sunrise sat atop scattered cherrywood telephone tables, apparently bought for only this purpose.

"She had dreamt repeatedly since her youth of owning an orange grove; she loved saying how each tree produced the bounty of a hundred tiny suns.  I had told her that sounded so ridiculous, and it still does."

And the sound of melancholic organ chords and throats clearing.  And the inexplicable smell of fertilizer.    And the thought of thousands of individual zeniths zephyring through all the ends of almost all the days.
    

we'll be holding down the rosy fort for you here

I haven't even had my coffee yet and I haven't even seen the snow yet this morning and I am already beginning to see the world through bloody lenses and feel it feel the pull feel that sense of getting ripped off of feeling like I have been overpaying for life for the last couple years with too much of my chemistry I could have been getting better things for less cost what is the currency we are dealing with here anyways what is our system of exchange is it hemoglobin that the semi-goblins are clawing for I will give you this many chits for that many widgets and we will have to find a way to make up for the difference for my shortfall in the windfalls and I feel the profits whoosh by me and I feel the cold and the hard and the hot and the soft cash stream like crimson conduits before my rigid face cut like a comic book character from the bygone days of course they are bygone you said they are from forty damn years ago from the times of sharply linear cars and broad rimmed feltish hats and how could it not be defined as such let things go let things let these eras pass you as they are supposed to let these elements of design mature before you as they have to do so just stay with me just stay with me here and we will keep everything in line and we will keep everything in our little perfect order so just stay with me here and just stay with me and just stay with and just stay and just.
 

loosely influenced by an undiscovered madness letter [subtitled 'upon owl feathers'] of 1889

Flaying, lashing, the owl descends like a broken elevator.  Noisily and fast (like in the movies, the snapping cable always sounds exactly as it should, a metallic whiplash) in its Icarusian fate.  But the squawk of mythology, like God, is dead.

"When you were a child did you ever season the skies of your Crayolascapes with those curvy-lined birds, the ones that looked like smooth-mounded lowercase 'M's' or gaping 'V's with a little too much arc on their mirrored peripheries?"

Who is she asking, the heavens are devoid of even a barrenness these days (this is not some Existentialist ploy or a simplistic, symbolic representation.  I am not capable of such things anymore, anyways).  Thus spoke those harvestmoon eyes and those airy projections that resemble something like tufted horns.

"It is a fact," she says, "that two eggs are always laid but only one ever hatches."

"What happens to the other egg?"

"It is left to rot.  If it is not carried away by something else first," she shrugs.

His walrus mustache quivers as it tries to brush away his mouth's grimace all on its own.  The hollow bones hit the pillowy forest floor in a silent crash but the earholes keep scanning for that something to sink its imperfect step in.      

recursion and redirection

"Of all the death masks I have seen, Pascal's is the most jarring."

"Why?"

A squirrel barks at the metronomic tail of a beagle and the world continues to calculate with its creaking cogs.

"Because he doesn't look dead, he doesn't look old."

"Well, he was only thirty-nine.  And he had just turned."

 The espresso ebbs away from the eggshell island of milk foam.  I frown and swirl my cup to just sink it all in a tsunamic darkness.  There is no retort and nothing dramatic to serenade the topic's ending.  I mean, besides the combed profile of the scooting post-oak leaf viewed from beneath a sun-backed awning or the way the old woman sniffs every time she pencils in a crossword answer like it's a mathematical proof, hastily and illegible.

"Is this the part where we delve into the specifics of his contributions, the lavish intellectual bequests that have befallen us?" 

"Lector, Si Monimentum Requiris, Circumspice: Reader, if you seek his memorial, look all around you."

I bury my words behind my tongue, prod at them, then finally push them back, where they lay astride my bottom right molar.  I lift the small espresso cup to my ear, the foam hisses softly like snow on prairie grass.  But it looks like those minuscule air bubblets that encircle the surface of wet plaster mix in the bottom of a broad bowl.  I imagine it over my face, sealing it, nestling into my pores, and settling there as it hardens into the shield capable of reflecting all but that that matters.  Light, words, the innumerable things that appear again and again, smaller and smaller, until we think that they are gone.