nightime is quietime is thunder

 

 

 

no avail and she was veiled.  the skies have opened electrically by now, saturating the air with an excessive charge.  miles to keep, and all of that.  not sure about sleep.  not yet.  nightshots of screen doors and latticeworks, the backdrops to a mid-western storm.  centralized and focused, it is upon us with all of the doubly-met drama of a post-death monologue. 

inmate

You are here, you are mine.  And if you are not yet you soon will be.  Alternate, altercate.  Alternate, altercate.  Broom-headed mane and all.  But I have nothing more to say about this matter at the present moment.  We are cooking, here, inside the hothouse of our existence.  Sluggish shutterspeeds like syrup-soaked spoons.
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"Attempts have been made to train zebras for riding, since they have better resistance than horses to African diseases. Most of these attempts failed, though, due to the zebra's more unpredictable nature and tendency to panic under stress. For this reason, zebra-mules or zebroids (crosses between any species of zebra and a horse, pony, donkey or ass) are preferred over purebred zebras.

In England, the zoological collector Lord Rothschild frequently used zebras to draw a carriage. In 1907, Rosendo Ribeiro, the first doctor in Nairobi, Kenya, used a riding zebra for house calls. In the mid-19th century, Governor George Grey imported zebras to New Zealand from his previous posting in South Africa, and used them to pull his carriage on his privately owned Kawau Island. 

Captain Horace Hayes, in "Points of the Horse" (circa 1893), compared the usefulness of different zebra species. In 1891, Hayes broke a mature, intact mountain zebra stallion to ride in two days time, and the animal was quiet enough for his wife to ride and be photographed upon. He found the Burchell's zebra easy to break, and considered it ideal for domestication, as it was immune to the bite of the tsetse fly. He considered the quagga (now extinct) well-suited to domestication due to being easy to train to saddle and harness."

self-referential

your everyday 'before and after' look.  like the neck exerciser advertisement (say it: ad-ver-TIZZ-ment) she'd clicked on and we laughed about.  so this is the after, then, i'd wager.

verbosity on vellum

the funeral games of the Middle Ages.  pockets full of ashes. and a yellow mop bucket with an akimbo-armed stick figure: we all fall down.  but first it is just you.  the world.  the world is spinning around like a child latched to the cold painted pole of a four-swinged swingset.  elevators beep.  stand clear of the closing doors.  dandelions and dragonflies spawning amongst each other, with each other.  everything is flying.  walled cities float by unencumbered by the tests that they failed for the maintenance of their sanity, their sanctity.  joking, laughing, legs hooked around stalks, knee-backs irritated in the upturned soil.  tell me a tale of yore-days, of late-night table-sitting.  fueled by a focused fault.  we have lost our goal, our tract of land.  lost it to the approaching notion of consistency.  my hair is falling out.  eye-corners enact their role as trickster once more in this sweepingly  archetypal production.  the all-encompasser that you are, you shall dictate the usages, proper and improper.  by definition, naturally, this adherence's requirements are astutely fashioned.  everyone is from another country, including myself.  i am not from here.  i am from there.  a childish routine it all is, steeped in leaves of a time-wasting acridity.  what does it all mean, anyways?  what does it mean any of the time.  fresh contacts manufactured, or rather, manifested.  there is a difference.  there is a lute string or two being plucked, overheard overhead.  everyone was so used to death, so used to suffering.  fourth (+ n) nature.  indices of indexes.  page numbers used for the very first time.  the smells of the burning fields, the woolen mills overtaken by tainted germs.  doubly.  doubted.  the sad festivals of birthing, tears fountain outward and upward at the presupposition of a freshness.  stagnancy, at last, rushes in on the paws of unexpectedly fast bears, raking at the murkiness in hopes to make lucid a solution.  it is that transparent (on all levels here).  movable type, a half-dozen millennium too late, at the very least.  it all sounds so old in my ears, the repetitions and predictable conclusions do nothing to assuage this momentum, like oxen suddenly finding their scapulae unyoked.          

yes she is

 

1944.  It opened with an appeal to purchase war bonds.  Look to the heavens, with an unblinking confidence, because it is not bombs that are falling now.  No ma'am.  

henri, henry, drink your milk

I still feel the weight of all of their shadows bearing down on me: the past pervades the present.  I guess it's to the Cote d'Azur, then, for a little rest, rejuvenation, and cathedral building.      
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the ballad of st. paul

I am about to be in the dark writing, wrists writhing.  I am about to dream of park benches covered in snow.  I am about to dream of pine trees swathed in sunbeams.  Unlike the tepid seas that foamily, lazily, lap at your tanned ankles, my own cold lakes sever Achilles tendons like spoons through kitchen-counter margarine.  Buckling over.  Proselytizing futures.  Coughing.               

He was a real jocular kind of fellow, that Saint Paul, with his piano and his peanuts and his blond beers.  This one is to you, my good friend.  Your arms must have been so hairy and the beard's greatness goes without saying.  And if the movies have taught me anything, it is that everything was lashed with those itchy rope-belts and shit.    

I remember humble headstones and entire basket-loaves of Wonderbread and everyone being some cousin of someone else, nth-detached.  Comb-overs and crow's feet.  The Patron of the Broad Clouds whistles like a songbird then eats a single pretzel from a plastic bowl that is supposed to look as if it's made of wood.  Like the archaic weight of an ancient VCR or the long panels bisecting the sky blue of a decades-gone American station wagon.      
  

       

flashcard

Everything itches, everything.  A calamine lotion ocean, pink as a labial sunset, could not even dulcify this scaliness.  He is a small business owner (let's be honest: a partner), of course he is out cavorting in the linear modernity of an upscale establishment.  Mojito glasses clink and wink at each other.  They are in over their heads.  Mint leaves swirling and plastering to the interior of the sweaty cylinders and he thinks of the old avocado wallpaper in the house where he grew up.  Today, he wishes he could become even more obdurate to the advancement of everyone's zeal.  However, just because he has dry skin doesn't mean he is a snake.

"It's, like, the worst time right now to upgrade your units."

"Well, the weatherman said there was going to be a sixty percent chance of rain tonight."

A dissonance in the scratching of heads that engenders an even deeper cacophonous lacing of the metaphorically mental shoelaces.  Tomorrow morning he will hear his shower running while he still lays, sweaty and prickly, in his three-week unwashed sheets.  Christmas lights with small, but boldly colored, paper globes (like a dozen eyes) act as crown molding and doorjambs, ambient gateways to other worlds.

She produces a handful of matchbooks from her purse.  She narrows in on one of them in particular.  A conglomerate of numbers more than letters.  

"I have something I want you to look at," the look of remembrance still twirling in her eyes.    

She holds the matchbook a pinky-length (the average sized pinky) from his nosebridge.

"Can you read this phone number for me?" she eats her left lipcorner in a rapt fear.

He unlatches his hand from the tall drink and aims his fingers for the rectangular shape.  Water-beads recede southward down the glass.

"No, no," she is defiant but amply playful, "look at it from where it is."

He squints his eyes and plucks at his chin scruff like he is picking up dry elbow macaroni noodles that spilled from a kitchen counter, one by one.  He smiles that smile that most would call a smirk, the smile's rough-edged, Old Crow-swilling uncle.

"I am very happy with this," he responds, deepening the irony, "Okay.  1-2-3...4-5-6-7.  Is this some kind of joke?  That's not a real phone number."

"So, that's what you see, too, eh?" she quickly buries the matchbook into the cavernous folds of her purse once more.

"Where did you get that?"

"I found it."

The Puerto Rican rum has fully embraced the raw sugar coating the back of his throat and has sent him somersaulting into a visible torpor.

"Where?"

"On the train last night.  The Q line"

It all seems so heavy.  And he realizes he hasn't raked at his dessicated arms, his parched neck, or his arid soul with those clawed, oily hands of his since the tiny enigma arose like a patch of rosemary in a crack on a twelfth-story fire escape.