little red lines

The firepit left in the middle of 1st street is dying and you are eating salad. No one can eat the leaves without feeling them slap their chin, and there. That is universal. You are somehow fancy by wearing the same thing everyday, by gazing up at billboards and requesting them. Eyes. That’s sort of all it takes. The upper triangle of face, cornered at the end of eyes and bottom of the nose. What is making me dumber? I’ve tried prurience, I’ve tried quitting. I’ve tried sticking to lamplight, heeding the advice of my mother, and I’ve tried ignoring my mother entirely. What sticks is knowing everything will be hammered if it's improperly measured. That things break before they’re touched. Lies relive themselves over and over, and she wants me to track the lie at the end of the arch. Impossible. How dare you request anything of me after your hand was stiff in mine. Some people want to travel and some people want me to travel. I’ll travel. I’ll scare you too. I used to have premonitions of our reunion being one of great motion. Legs would swing in air and hair would swing like legs. Now I imagine the awkward after and the unimaginable silence of the train ride home from the island of “happenstance” into the borough of “circumstance.” I’ll stand frozen but you will know I was in motion before and will be after now. We stand around the firepit in the middle of city summer and it’s hotter than equator flame. I try and it handles me all the way to a tiger lily in the dark. It is hotter yet. It can get hotter. 

discretion is paramount

The slug exits mole city, it rickets and bumps against the sides of the lane. I could conjure an image so fast, faster than you. I see a train and I know it's really a bowling ball. If you ask me what some cryptic thing really is, I’ll tell you, and I’ll be honest. You have a son and then you have a daughter who looks just like the female version of him. Oh and the city is still and stuck in (brain) fog and (real) fog. Famous Singer says that Famous Singer 2 says being alone in the city is harder than being alone in the country for a variety of reasons, but mainly one in particular. I have to agree with them. 

First son has made a wax man in his own image. Now that it's done he doesn’t know what to do anymore. It’s perfect, Nordic, and booted. Since its done he can look at it as a perfect narcissistic pastime. He waits for his mother to notice it by finding empty eye tasks. She does and takes pictures. He can drop the wax man later and kill him to practice for his own drop-kill. Limp in his hand, he could crumple him into a ball for a proper Nordic Viking funeral. Let the slug run silver tracks over his wax form. 

Looks like it’s gonna be a great day today. Six people across from me are split between black and white uniforms. With linked arms they make discrete colors into a stalking mechanism that watches you through the pitch window down the street. Only one is wearing the shirt that fits them just right. Slip yourself your own sedative or beauty which last night necessitated. It came to light in the form of a flash photo of a tiger lily and likewise enabled the circumstances which left a steel fire pit in the middle of 1st street. Fiddle with your satanic monogrammed bathset. Flip it over, once, twice, and run away as fast as you can. 

thoughts from the train pt. 1

Feeling relatively lucid today. I say this confidently and still manage to wonder what it means. For example, putting on my black boots of three years or so is just that—putting on the pair of boots for whom my affection has waxed and waned but has emerged from the tunnel of love in distilled simplicity; “I like those boots. I wear them most days.” The love is ongoing and flat.

But lucidity, what is it exactly? When words or phrases fall down easily, thickly, and plainly is the simple answer. But where do we locate its exigency? Locate it in a jolting between places, sounds, and sensory experiences; locate it with an open satisfaction with previous days’ expenditures rewarded with sensations of the distilled simple. The distilled simple, might I add, could be the greatest gift of all. 

I am thinking of all this because I am greeted by an unoriginal hometown, which usually puts pressure on my major joints—knees, elbows, ankles. But with the falling sounds of the distilled simple, I can stave off the emotional body ache of a repetitive location.

I can even watch it from a train window, which excludes me from being confidently placed within the soreness of town but rather rolled up in its immaterial biforcator, its hard-up and sweet body of passage. There is a clear observer and observee formulated by the window pane, separated by its distinctly hard matter. It’s separateness is even corroborated by several conductor witnesses whose bodies and minds are affected by the incorporal experience of occupying a train car for eight to ten hours a day. They are impartial witnesses of soul transference. 

note: hair up is occasionally a sign of spiritual recession. One conductor has exited the train with a high bun and two backpacks slung around each shoulder. When she gets to her car, she will let her hair down and unzip the contents of her bags to find her heavy soul distilled into a drinkable form. She’ll gulp it down, embody herself, and before she puts the key in the ignition, she’ll take a second to appreciate the comfort of a heavy soul once again. Not just comfort, but gratitude, because once she thought the lightness of an absent soul in a day’s conductor work was a distilled kind of simple, but now she knows it’s just probably a distilled kind of pain. The heavy soul, she has found, is far more preferable.

Aquatic Tension

The diagrammable prescription
“in case of emergency”
is an herbal of dark
of the single finger you left waiting
in your water glass
limp and breaking aquatic tension.
Ears popped
and the apartment was marshalled through
we, the undersigned dark.

And man,
I was paying attention
to your words so good
that I forgot the song of the living room
and the content of the kitchen.
Which worried you.

You seemed worried
by my proclivity toward
concentration,
so you bent that lazy finger back
and tipped the undersigned glass.


So the spillage that occurred
at 4:45am Eastern Standard Time
happened simultaneous to
undersigned ear-poppage,
and with it
my focus rested
and ate with its small hands:
Eggs,
Toast,
Stymied juice,
Pills,
and Pebbles.

It burped and ran for the train.
And it tried hard to evade the fare
cause it didn’t think you should pay to
be scared in terminal dark.
And it found a man watching it
legs pinned in the turnstile
(a kind of device whose sole purpose
is to move in one direction)
in the eves of downtown paraphernalia
frozen in perceptive on-the-run
moments like these
focus knows when to dissipate
and join its own
undersigned.