Moses Monet Socrates invented the parenthesis, and he still works at Dairy Queen

it has been a week full of chasing suns (in more than one galaxy). i don't know how students keep their mind focused while working on one task. for example, as i read rabbit, run by john updike (a novel i am enjoying very much. good choice dr. rai peterson!) i let my mental list of things to do bleed all over the pages. concentration on a single thing is difficult for me. my eyes will move anywhere. i have been training them while reading to really eat each line like a perfect portion, to give rhythm to the swing of my ocular muscles as they climb down the page (very slowly that is. i am a tortoise at the page. but i enjoy it's not a bad life).




i tried to write a flash of realism this week (ala kim chinquee. i read oh, baby one night. it was pleasant). it was difficult for me to stick to realism. it's my tendency to ache my lines toward the alternate dimensions (i really have it out for the particular dimension we're stuck in). it was about a family in the dark

The Candles from the Basement

The electricity went out so the family pulled the living room into a messy oval. The mother said there were candles in the basement. The father hesitated to give her the flashlight. For a few minutes, two-thirds of the family contented themselves with the darkness and the eerie, wind-blown elms scratching the top of the house. The mother returned with a handful of candles. Some were scented. She tore away a match (The Hotel Aruba Restaurant graphic and phone number on the front of the cardboard flap) and placed the little flames around the room. The room became comfortable enough to read. The father had a beer. He said of his expensive ale, “Can’t let this get warm.” He read an issue of Science. The mother wrapped a wool parka around her and her son, age four, and plucked soft melodies into his pink ear. She kissed him in gentle rhythm at each chorus. His puny marble eyes sunk in slow waves, and soon, he was asleep. She carried him to his room undisturbed, candle hoisted in hand. She straightened the messy sheets, placed the limp boy under layers and folded him in. She left the candle on the dresser, its soft tongue of light dancing in the mirror.


professor lovelace awarded me a nine out of 10 on this one. i believe on the next draft i will add a bit more conflict, maybe give it a bit more length, give the little kid a fever or some sort of viral infection, the father needs to be more of a douche to contrast the soft gentle aura glow of the mother's kindness. hmmmmm. LOTS TO WORK. goodgoodgoodgood as they say in Minnesota.

i also read high water mark by david shumate. i really dug the cover and enjoyed the poems.

another flash for ya. i like cool pictures.

Bunker

Like a mannequin looking lost, and between the iced retaining walls that gave my apartment the facsimile of a bunker, I chomped a Camel in noncommittal patterns of in-hale/ex-hale. That week there was a lot of ice. Crooked lines of black walnuts keeping the street wavy and white oaks loitering behind this lot were weighed down but were strong and didn’t ache or splinter. I watched the second floor across from my ashes and foul smoke crumble in. I watched the roof resigned to rehabilitation, right then and there. People ran out of units onto the cat-walk style balcony. A kid grabbed a bike. His skull slipping out of a straight-bill cap. His legs pumping underneath jeans bleached fucking nuclear. A woman, a grandmother, a brother and a little sister in braids and a ribbon, blue, in the file of entropy, burst out and screamed at the bicycle bound boy. Like the collapse was his doing. Like they had just found weather plans in his journal, or on notebook paper tucked in a nightstand drawer. The back of the bicycle flailed like a fish on sand, and he floundered into a gray storm. Sirens wretched up and down the esophagus of the empty avenues. I didn’t think anyone was hurt. I lit another cigarette mumbling light prayers. I studied them as they cleared the living room with plastic shovels.

this is a goddamn poem or whatever but it's not going to have the perfected (ha!) line breaks showing. stupid blog incompatibility bullshit monster.

agodfearingman’sguidetothecompletehistoryofwoodrowwilson’sfinaldaysinthevalley

they call him professor they call him president they call him nineteen eighteen they call him nineteen twenty-one they call him governor they call him new jersey they call him president they call him world war II they call him the federal reserve act they call him versailles peace conference, they call him no conquest, they call him no dominion, they call him no desire – they call him papa on the token, they call him communist of the waves, they call him beating the children with glasses; with bones, people laughed and they told other people about it. they told him to drink five hours in four calories, and he said what the fucking shit; he stormed out the toilet with pants around ankles, making locomotive vowels. he punched his mother, punched his grandmother, stabbed his father in the left leg and broke the dog down into columns of metal. he floundered to the river and waded into the creek; he thought of a man far off, playing the violin.


over christms break, my granddad gave me a coin (it's actually called a token as he corrected me every time i said yea hey, this is a real cool coin granddad, thanks). the token was a component of campaign strategy, mainly used a trinket for people who came to particular events. it's the size of a quarter but is gold in color, maybe it's bronze, i'm really not sure.

one last cool picture and then i'm done with this gig...

oh you know it's going pretty good i guess

a band of musicians (Evan Owens, Nick Carpenter, Ray Gibson) played a stellar cover of Rocket Man last night. and it was awesome. and i was like huZZAH THIS IS FAN-TASTIC

thanks guys for the live sHOW! the music is/was/always will be great.

the first portrait tells man to submit to a higher power. he bows under waves of love and gamma and empty space ships tiny, tiny in size. he has a look on his lips. like he just finished saying i have had enough. he is waiting for the sun to come back. he is waiting for his wife to heal. he is waiting for his son to say mommy or daddy or hey! look at those robins in that elm tree over there! he would thrilled at the construction of any word or sentence.

he waits by his wife in the hospital. she doesn't say much. she chokes a faint mumble in her sleep at night; he mistakes the clicks and beeps of the machinery for words she struggles to share.

there are young in-resident doctors betting on the super bowl outside.

he nods off and wakes up. she is still asleep. he turns on the game. she dies two minutes and forty-two seconds into the second quarter.

they rush her out in a swirl of white lab coats and blue and pink scrubs. they pound on her chest. check needles, pinch all the hanging bags. they can't figure it out. they add electricity, water, the elements, metal, light, more water, they adjust the thermostat.

a doctor drops a hand into his pocket and retrieves his blackberry, probably to check the game.

it infuriates the man but still he sits and watches the silvery stuff-of-matter stream in a vertical, anti-gravity parade toward some throne of god.


my spit is orange like oranges. will you please stop laughing, your tv is not funny when the sun decides to show. my spit is orange like bad cigarettes, like cheez-it molar-goo, like dental office carpet, like the outside-in of exotic perfume, like the jewels stitched to your navel, like the center of your tongue, like free willy, like Job, like globs of crystal displays under oily thumbs, like empty beards, like flakes in patterns, like endless loop nights, like extra-dimensional pressure of your senses.

uhhh yea about those proficiency tests and ice cream social participation...

lists are cool. i'm trying to learn a few things today:

1. the location of my ears
2. walking on ice
3. digging my car out/physics/salt
4. consequences of shaving my beard

• cold fact, redder skin
• flakes
• goodbye multicolored hair
• new costume
• Muncie water makes hair follicles grow faster
• aftershave = Old Spice
• reunion with the bomb, the Barbasol
• those damn nicks, little blood rivers, little winking eyes
• getting more use out of the mirror ($49 retail)
• mustache = deconstructed
• stubble itch
• lumber-jack disguise (blown)
• wooly mammoth cover (shed)

on the infinite opition

i am
terrified
of this

here's a list:

1. three red balloons for sale, icy landscape
2. sandwich shop windows are fogged
3. women with no traction
4. a dog laps an icicle
   
5. bookstore coughs dust, vomit in the gutter
   
6. FOR RENT FOR RENT FOR RENT FOR RENT
   
7. COMING SOON banner dances with passing gusts
   
8. crawdad erupting from brick and metalwork
9. McDonald's litter
   
10. cars scoot along and I cannot catch them.
    
11. it is 12 degrees. it is thursday, i think.

here's a flash i should have turned in this morning

Parasite

There was a glow where a glow should not be, beneath the pallid tissue of her flank, light love-handles, the outline of a familiar fruit.

She poked it. Two fingers together massaging the glow how the chart in her bathroom showed her to screen for lumps and cancerous things.

At night, sometimes, at random hours (she kept a log on the empty orange stripe of a Wheaties box: 3:15 a.m., 4:18 a.m., 12:53 a.m…twenty total instances recorded) vibrations rang her cells like the rattle of a distant L-train.

Last night, she heard a muffled beep beep beep followed by three or five seconds of toneless waves riding, tickling her freckled flesh.

By the end of the week the phenomena had traveled, broadcasting now from an inch northwest of her navel. The glow pulsing in a more defined shape. The notes louder. The vibration tighter.

The waiting room was for people without a whole lot of money and it smelled like babies and wafting fungus. She breathed through her mouth, which was only open to a slit, and forced her mind into a year-old tabloid magazine: a gay pop musician and his husband coddled a child, a very, very small child. Adoption. Diapers. She imagined that baby ripping out of her; steel stirrups and coarse sheets. She would prefer birth in an inflatable pool filled with warm water, the newborn like a torpedo, leaving one pool for another. She thought about elasticity and condensed physics and integrals. She snapped a rubber band against her wrist until it painted splotches of red.

“*garbled*, Jordan,” the nurse entered stage left and announced. “Dr. Hausmat will see you now.”

She orphaned the gay men to a rickety end table.

Dr. Hausmat had enormous hands. With his mighty gloves he folded the gossamer dough with a gentle, Eastern ease. She bit her lip. Rolling and pushing, uncomfortable with her shirt pulled up just below her bra. She settled for staring and attempted to astral project her next boyfriend on the lunar surface of a particular ceiling tile.

The walls were thin that even the click of pen penetrated into examination room 4. Hausmat paused for a second, left ear twitching like an insect’s antennae. A nurse gossiped, then, as if sensing an eavesdropper, she faded.

After he stopped rubbing, he snapped his own pen and scribbled runes on a prescription pad and said, “I give you this. This make you better. Drug react within one hour.”

She readjusted her crinkled cotton scooting to the edge of the table. She asked, “I can’t read this. What is this? Pseu-donox-io-den-phillus?” She looked down again. “What is…pseu-donox-io-den-phillus?”

“It is…” he started and went off into a dated Slavic derivative and left in awkward stride. She thought he had said (in quick English): it eliminates the core.

Three forty-seven p.m. the next day, after the pharmacist deciphered the note's slashes, she swallowed the two pills in the orange bottle. Thirty minutes pushed her porcelain.

She sat wondering what would appear.

Her anus felt ergonomic, excessive and then way too popular.

She wiped and surveyed the iPhone submerged in the toilet’s blue water.

yumYUMyumYUMyumYUMnoMnoMNOMNOM

i make eggs, scrambled, and i watch their yolky-ness
like i'd watch a toddler in Las Vegas

"hey no! don't go in there!"

sometimes:

1. the suns burn
2. their white hems curl in and burn
   
3. i find a shell
   
4. the pan gets too hot
5. cheese is added

i serve them hot, around candles in dixie
cups, one of them may have been lit,
box of matches, reads: Texas Style Fun! Live
Country Music and Dancing Nightly Mesquite-
Broiled Steak and Ribs (and at the bottom,
positioned square below a graphic of a
cowboy riding home) Trail Dust Steak House

the eggs are done. what have we learned?
i forgot my book today.
i forgot my pen today.
i read too through chapter 7.43, not 8
i was thinking of other things.
my head was in the clouds.

on carbon and fingernails

REVISED COHERENT

the setting is where i’m sitting and that is in a red chair,it could be green, it might be leather or cloth, there are some shoes around my feet or whatever; i am four floors above something like ants in wool. it’s monday and i return to the toll booth in my 2011 neuron standard. the man who grovels on duty looks a bit like me: stupid, and with facial hair that is thin beneath the jaw, skin showing pink and shaped like Sierra Leone, blood and clouded diamonds wanting my carbon, digging for any allotrope, and with stupid fucking eyes that are too fucking small; he has to squint at me to make sure i’m safe and not drunk but he agrees and allows me to skid across black-top questions, shouting threats at quiet skies, skies with thunder in them, skies that show rabbits in the gallows row. i wander away from the thought at foot with waiting room music in ear, waiting for a representative to pick up the line, and back to: once a letter denied her existence…i didn’t know what to make of that, hurt people hurt people; how long do you hurt? how deep can matrimony’s muted blade cut? how does it hop through time and space like bums grabbing free trolley rides? will it ever dull? fuck it – i’ll file the claim, my address is blah, at blah zip code: blah, yea, yea, yea that’s blah blah blah – a son of a bitch in texas took my card and shot those digits straight to match.com and i can’t yet conclude why i was even born. blah, blah-blah-blah, blah blah i feel like the peanuts parents are shackled in wax and anvil, and i laugh that i’m low enough to distract myself with this phantom view: carbon on snow and ice, carbon manipulating movable display, carbon bitching that the weather doesn’t fit their carbon arms, their carbon noses, their carbon fingers flushed like carbon flushes this carbon forgets the month easy, this carbon consumes the combustible, and willful, this carbon wonders when his carbon will be carried off to some throne of god.

on the nature of shadows and thousands of eyes (poem from chapbook)

LUCY SEES DEMONS

football is sponsored by soap, today;
rain flails on the concrete while we

absorb green geometry glowing together, jigs flicker light:
bisected white, and LED, incremental chalked yards;

you sit and chew gum like black holes in far space
sucking up matter and the apartment cat outside;

your jaw vibrates the time-space afghan over our laps
like a sunday’s warmth across confused midwestern electricity

and baby, it might be me but when you chew,
intelligence demands prophesy kept in cookie and light,

change the channel, ya ass-hat –

dusk often rubs you pissy, sometimes
causing skies to sour, and yea maybe
then the rain evolved animal, but i agree
we pull windows shut to save ourselves;

we destroy coffee tables, babe,
and that does something for me