Spring? (i.p.)

Like dead seeds scattered,
you spread your dreams upon
the cold Winter’s ground.
They fell
hard like
concrete
and sewed stones of maybe,
and were resurrected before the fourth April rain,
that blossomed in the Dogwood petals of
pale pink and purple that
line the gutters of my street.
The natural pallet of
the colors of Spring that
lay pasted,
sopping up runoff
on the runways of
cement
and
down
pipes.
In chorus with
the
cigarette wrappers
and
shards of broken glass
that
lay discarded and forgone
but
not
forgotten
as they swim past the petals
in
a muted image
that is
so beautiful
it makes me

stop.

T.V. (i.p.)

Gentle and inviting is the television invasion and the hot reckless laugh,
where the lonely know God not.

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I’ve seen bodies prostrate in half-realized existences,
with reflected images treading obtrusively across static-kissed faces of blues and greys and whites. And shadows cast like dancing silhouettes in firelight,
struggling to be rid of their weight, the part of them that breathes.
To break free across the surfaces of couches and the smoothness of walls.
To leave.
But they continue to change direction as the static rises and falls,
forever being pulled back and tied to the thing which has borne them.
The body that lies.
The face that opens its eyes and peers into the static,
searching for something familiar, something it can recognize.
And all the while pours itself out through its peering and its pores until the floors run thick with thoughts of commercialized satire and ready-made lifestyles, where people and styles exist without life.
Roles without conscience and unconscionable goals,
that ford the rift between fantasy and the wandering amorphous souls of the children who lie in the living rooms watching.
And with hollow-eyed stares and weak emptied minds,
like canvasses blank and sponges readied and dried,
they sit and they baste in the shit we provide.
We nurture with waste and their minds waste away,
incubating caramelized cartoon drivel and carnal sin from 9 to 5 dribbling across their eyes and down their spine.
Until it is all that they know.
And worse, all that they want.

Extraordinary Rendition

Moving beyond "He Remains Aground," into the illicit string of underground Black Sites, which lay outside of the mainland United States and legal jurisdiction.

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Silence. It wrapped itself around him. It was the first thing he heard. He laid there for a while, vacantly, suspended without thought. Only as his mind began to struggle to the surface, and the veil began to lift, did he realize that he had a body. The silence was met with a rush of blood in his ears, which kept time with a part of him he did not yet know existed. His head began to swim. Next he became aware of the short, labored, half-breaths which his body forced down his nose and across his clammed upper lip. Each exhalation was accompanied by a dull pain, first along his left breast and then increasing with intensity as it passed across the whole of his rib cage. The cadence of his breath and the tenderness in his chest struggled to be rid of each other. The harder either of them worked, the closer the two of them ultimately became. He coughed until his lungs burned and the pressure inside of him reverberated as they tried to regain the air they had lost. The veil continued to raise. He knew that he had legs now. He could not move them, but he could tell that they were there. It was the quiet numbness of his flesh and the sharp aching in his bones that assured him. His right hip and his right shoulder came together and told him that he was laying on his side. The importunate sincerity with which they begged let him know that he was laying on concrete. Languidly, he forced himself to roll over. By now, the initial silence had passed over him, and the quiet of unconsciousness was replaced by the roar of his own body. He fought against the swollen weight of his flickering eyelids, and the world flashed, out of focus, before his eyes. Having not the will to move his head, his sight fell upon his own body as it materialized into resolution. His legs were still there, tucked up towards his chest. They were sheathed in a tatter of brown fabric, which would have at one time passed as clothing. It was the only garment he wore: his only remaining effect. Next, his arms came into focus. They were bare and bruised and married at the wrists, bound by what appeared to be wire, palm to palm in mock prayer. The strictures were held painfully tight, and his wrists bled in protest.
An idea seeped into his thoughts: Have I been moved again?
Vision then fell past his tired body while his mind tried to cling to the environment surrounding him. Beyond the horizon of his arms he tried to construct what he could from the dim void in which he found himself. His eyes met first with the damp grey concrete on which his body lay. The ground was stained with watermarks, puddles, circumnavigated by crusted saline rings of yellowwhite filth, and other congregates which he could not decipher. The window wells, of which there were two that he could make out, had either been blackened, boarded up, or bricked shut. The only light in the room came from a deep crack somewhere in the ceiling, which threw its blade against the wall opposite from where he lay. It cast itself upon a network of pipes, which ran up and away with the shadows, into which he could follow. Three faucets intermingled with the maze of piping, showing what they could of their empty luster through a thick of lime and rust. The faucet on the left dripped steadily, softly, to the concrete below. There the water was collected, and slipped down an open grate, to whatever lay underneath.
His eyes began to convulse from exhaustion. They had moved him. The world, it seemed, was room, and he was its only citizen. Cold and pained, he recoiled into himself, submitting to his eyelids as his mind shut off that which was outside of his control. Sleep then fell upon him as a warm leaden blanket. It was sleep without dreaming, sleep without feeling, but more importantly, it was sleep without himself.
-

Chic

This just bubbled up while my alarm was going off this morning. I have no idea what it may or may not become.

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The girl has no conception of money or time. She keeps a tattered, spoiled scepter woven into the frill of the headboard on her four poster bed, suspended above her as she sleeps, while princess dreams and multimillion dollar inclinations swirl, not unlike ideas, and seep into her brain, which operates purely on basal functions and a distorted perception of self. When she wakes and when she sleeps the girl dreams of American aristocracy and the floating heads and perfectly flawed pedomorphic faces and lifestyles of the gossip rags. New York. Los Angeles. Dream big, she thinks. Dream so fucking big that everyone will remember my name. I’ll run up enormous bills and cumbersome, unthinkable debts on the walks at Rodeo Drive. My marquee on Fifth Avenue. The Shubert on West 44th. Yeah. The girl dreams on and the girl dreams big. Bright pink sports cars and black SUVs. If you ask her, her favorite color is pink or black, chancing on when you ask. I love pink. Black is hot. And so on. The scepter is pink and her sheets are black.

Culture of Fear

400

"We’ve all been there. It starts out with a tap of the horn, a dirty look; strangers in their cars, ready to snap, driven to violence by the wrong move . . ." The warning rang out of his thoughts, ran down his arm and around his right hand: paralyzing. " . . .The most disturbing aspect of the growing trend towards roadway violence: We can’t choose whom we drive with on the highways . . ." He exhaled with purpose but couldn’t force his fingers to respond. It happens without warning to ordinary people. Oh god. Nothing but the series of tinny mechanical clicks, nearly audible, as his key passed out of the ignition. He had his arm back. The cold sweat dissipated as he opened the door and looked helplessly down at the idle sedan, and then to the dingy metal garage door behind. Then himself to the kitchen door.

"It’s better like this. I’m liable to be shot along the way." He set his keys down on the linoleum counter top and wiped the grime off his kitchen windowpane and glanced out. From what he could see the sky was blue, as it ever was; the street pulsing with empty faced pedestrians he had never seen before, as it ever had. Sense slapped him in the mouth for a brief second. "I should walk to the store. Who would bother with an old man? Yes . . . Who would bother with an old man? No. Who would bother to notice if I should fall and break my ankle in a ditch crossing the street? They wouldn’t. The city is in such disrepair." He had learned that a local commission was lobbying for road repair in his neighborhood in pouring over the mornings paper. "I’d die. Christ. There’s no decency anymore." It was enough to make him tear up the paper and vomit in despair, had he anything left in him to expurgate. Instead he folded the day up neatly and placed it on the pile: second row, fourth stack from the pantry.

Into the sitting room. He turned the nob with his right hand and melted into the armchair. It came over him in slow, calculating waves. "In tonight’s program, Teenage Time Bombs. Don’t miss Dateline or YOU could be the next victim!" Timidly, on the edge of his brain, he pulled the walls in around him and drove headlong into the static.

I saw it in the news.

For

In dusk I stir and open parched eyes to lavish turns and guardians of the falling sky. Thursday nights I meditate on Tennessee whiskey and bad rap music. Juveniles cruise by reckless and swollen. Smoking in their own escape. Polluting the air with Febreez. They have been me, I say. I do not wear sunglasses during the night because I find it pretentious. I wear sunglasses when I sleep. To distance myself further. I am aware. I am running from real time to the graces of elaborate time. When knowledge stops. I see the moon slide and drip and I see my clock move and I see chaos. There is no reason to this. All of this. I push it all away. If you encourage me. In the pause. We’re gonna get raked and go touch each other. Behind her eyes she grabbed me. And everything is brought to rights by the left. Happen. This way

Schizophrenesis 8705

This comes as a brief homage to Joycean superparatactic methodology. There is no definitive statement, only a precession of cryptic statements of disappearance.

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. . . slolely and flowing. The bengender, she plies and pouress and poles the walksiding, sliding unto one two tree and fifty metars. Lays capit cis, blooding and bludging. No audimony in replis or division or lectorums gone come or came but went, whooring off imbibed and driving diving strivations of. Con. The pubs down for dawn, pups done fer Dante, and morticules full o fur confused bludgening bender renders Dante in the dawn. Yells and ports, screechingly offofoff the road and contemporaniations blind up slugish consciens or bind around morseless taughtthoughts, retracting out inought oneself or in nondescript egress. Automotion peels and reels and steels and the fends til the brutest layaman peaks palecrat and the old familialar claphumclaphumclaphumhsss. End or the empty necraway with sun gone, stands ejected in the disperring window margin. Wayaway. Moving drags trace spot tops and bottoms smot a fur and bludging and dentationing increment over the fender. Long along and a long when he ports and passes porter and the commodius gastrocracy pungesex and places head under wing over mind over dripbowl ruminations. Dripslip and Dropsendrip. Decomporreness a pang twinges hyperolial, rolls up, runs in, rowdening out, and sends senses or sinkings and a tongue glossing til angled angeled murk comes. Crosses the I’s and the me’s and the thee’s with the they’s and the trees, where he passes into dreams. Macronics shakes many mindings in the Melahanepolis, shrunking or small or falling and dissolving. Fallssolving. And drifts discharging rifts arc and growing and build on black to give way or draw back. Al di fuori and dawn cracks on unpremedicipitations in hyaloid line a highway. Him down down down, bumstumbling rightleftright . Stop. Foot. rightrightleft or leftleftleft. Felt feebling go opening and sedening and torsioned with negscopitable thinkenings to going. For dry fur lips licks whettedly, steps on pulls out slugishly and going and pulling out or peeling and feeling no sun sound swounds. Knowing lessonliss not a missages til bends round and round and alooking down. And aloofing. High saltsatising goes wheel sends fleel goes flailing with a yelp. Thumpbump. Thumpbump. Magneyes shake to wake beholdence at theem or they, nod alevving not awalking node athunking, just sailednees and a rolling sees the woman up and a head. Catacollisioning is she nonsachant mirrorsing with unleashed and brimless floding comeing out and . . .

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