The Box

"I'm gonna be indigo," Reggie said to me. We were playing this game called Chimera, where we guessed what mythical creatures we were going to change into. We had already done cheetah-man and hawk-man and everything, and any number of religious creatures and cartoon characters, so we were now trying to do really elaborate ones. We had made it up about an hour ago.

We were doing a sensory deprivation experiment at the university hospital. We were locked into a box that looked like the ice chest outside of a gas station and it was pitch black. I could not tell how long we'd been in, but our breath echoed close to our ears and where I heard Reggie's face was this pale, no-color fire. He described an oversized, potato-shaped thing, with a bunch of bristly legs all over it, hairs that it used to propel itself. It vibrated instead of vocalizing.

I thought that was pretty good.

We had signed up because we had very little money. We were in this warm, breathy, matter-sucking soup, bathing in it. So dark it was as if we were being eaten by space. We were. I had no idea what was going on out there. Anything. It occurred to me that I could be in love with him. Which was news and as soon as I thought it, thought to reach my hands out and feel for his face his face, to mash our mouths together, stubble on stubble, it was gone. I gulped hard and dry. Reached for a thought. It was the box, for sure.

"What kind of creature would you be?" he asked me.

I said "Fuck this game." We hadn't been given instructions. Maybe the experiment was to see how long two grown straight men would passively sit in a dark, black box without kissing, or thinking to. Maybe the experiment was fake and we were locked in here to die. We were nothing, we were insubstantial, in a stasis, neither living, nor dead.

My ears were fumbling around for sounds other than our breathing. My eyes had started painting negative colors on the air. If I kissed him, would we fight, physically fight in a space we were both crammed into? We could say it was just the box if we liked it. He was my roommate. He was grossly familiar. I had walked through his old, balls-smelling laundry, had watched him cook lazy meals and eat them, his fingers clamped around a stuffed tortilla, hot sauce staining his mouth. Plus I didn't think I was queer, so none of this made sense.

I asked him if he heard the music, although I didn't hear any myself.

"A little," he said. "Like little beeps?"

Yeah, I told him. "Do you want to kiss?" I asked him.

His breathing stopped and his legs shifted a little. It sounded like thunder. "No," he said. "Are you serious?" He fake-laughed.

I told him I was.

"No way," he said. And then he said "Thanks, though."

It was quiet a long time. I was saying "It must be the box," when the door opened and light flooded in, wrapping around everything, clanging all over our hands and faces. A doctor was peering in. He made some garbled joke my ears couldn't even take. We both climbed out on wobbly legs. They made us do puzzles in separate rooms and asked us to describe what we experienced. Then they gave us a small bill and let us go. When I was done, I went right to the bus stop, although me and Reggie had driven together in his car. It occurred to me that the box had been like being held. But by no one in this case, nothing, no one who had to or could stop. When the bus came, I got into a seat, put my knees up on the seat in front of me and hunched into my own lap. I shut my eyes.

Of Demon Bondage

“Hank, I got those lab results back.”

“Yeah?” he said with his mouth full, turning in his office chair, part of a sandwich in his hand. I don't know how he could be eating, after all the carnage we'd seen last night. But then I saw it was a French Dip and then I wanted one. He had au jus dripping down his chin.

“Okay," I said. "So amongst the bodies: blood, obviously, and lots of it, burnt vinyl and leather residues, as well as copious ash, Brimstone to be exact. Hard alcohol, which accelerated the flames. Cocaine on the ceiling, charred flesh and lots of bodily fluids, mostly semen and you know, that was man-semen, but there was also dog semen and fish semen... Coming from a marlin... But get this: the lab found a lot of demon semen.”

“Carl,” Hank said to me, “Do you want the rest of my soda?” He looked at me dully and belched. It smelled like baked pickles. Hank's skin had the texture of angel food cake. He kept hot dogs in his desk. He wasn't bright, but you didn't need to be for this job.

“Hank, this means there was paranormal activity! Those teenagers went to their Black Metal show and through magick and scrawling runes and chanting their Nordic chants, they opened a portal, I'm sure of it!” He opened a package of moist wipes and cleaned his fingers, shook his thick hands at the wrist and just looked at me.

We got a welfare call from the Old Woman in the Shoe, that lousy bitch. Her kid had gone missing, so we went to the show. He wasn't there, though. We picked him up stealing hot cross buns. He couldn't even pay one a penny. We were done on this. The Vatican cops were at the scene. Suddenly the precinct dog came in. I kicked it, I was so pissed and it shrank away whining.

“Carl, demons aren't our jurisdiction. We just found a burnt VFW full of dead teenagers wearing homemade wristbands and white makeup. And top hats and shit like that. So they probably were practicing some ancient pagan rite. So what? Their death is just the same. We'll let God's police take care of them.”

What Hank didn't know that I am into demon bondage. I love nothing more than going to a cheap motel out by the freeway and going into a closet and opening a portal into the Nether-realms. An imp comes out and lashes me with its pointy tail and cackles at me and titters “You a bitch... You a little bi-itch...” and I come through the roof. The wife doesn't care; she's a centaur fetishist, herself. What tore me up that these kids, watching Blackest Ashen Skies, Dark Unicorn, Moldyrdrygylarr, Hellgape, whatever the flier said, had probably had the best demonic orgy ever, really a demented, fierce, dark sabbat with the forces of Hell. I mean there was demon semen spattered like tar all over the walls and solid layers of twisted corpses on the floor, a Satanic lasagne of burnt, intertwined bodies. What were these kids getting into? I remember in high school, there was a forest spirit who would rub you through your pants if you gave it enough dew, but it was in the shape of a pussywillow. I might as well be a virgin.

“Hank,” I said, “We're gonna take this thing on. I know we're only nursery rhyme cops, but I don't care. Maybe this is related to some nursery rhyme we don't even know about: 'the teenagers banging/ at a metal show/ the demons who screwed them/ where did they go?'”

He opened a bag of chips, put a handful in his mouth, slicked back his hair with his greasy hand. A fly buzzed in a circle counter to the wobbling ceiling fan. It was humid awful. Simple Simon was out in booking, his head bandaged, moaning. I wished he'd been at this thing; I could go back. Hank picked up a dossier off his desk and handed it to me.

“We have to find out who the dish ran away with,” he said, crunching.

I didn't care. Whatever it was, it wouldn't beat me, it wasn't evil and I couldn't fuck it.

Chautauqua

Let us be Canada geese and the where to go. No.

We are rapids talk all night to no one, move shatter move, think themselves still.

Of all advice, I never paid attention I was looking out at barn swallows I wanted to see through break the sky and go past where I could see I never once heard what was said. Blood runs down the years, the place I was made and saw and wished not to see is gone it is locked it is buried I could burn all as well as know again.

Dark in the midst of trees and one sits low, what sleeps and what runs past. No voice speaks every voice is present telling. Saying rock drops on rock, shale and chert crack unless chucked in creek clay. Water pulled in pools scumming, blowing clouds of mosquitoes low cliffs over large lake throw bloated baby starlings high in the air where they land on gravel road. Car comes every so often alone the headlights wrench back night and sometimes drunk you don't see her green eyebright step in, brake shatter the back of a doe and the tears sung spooled among the fog where she is laid out thrown will tell her what you want to mean: O a mother.

Iroquois we know and never, hills with trees now trailers tires, boundaries water roads in names we cannot spell. We will bowl, tear tendons from tiny bones we pile brightest orange fat ripples in our bellies glistens fingers as we fumble, purr to sleep.

I only ever wanted to be warm the world screams white dunes crawl.

You Already Knew

"Look at his handwriting. It's like a little kids."

Laura was right. His letters tilted to the upper-right. His loops were flattened and words broke apart with odd breaks. The line of his hand tilted and sloped, more scrawly meaning he was fucked up. Lots of things were crossed out and his spelling was awful. We were reading my father's diary.

There was a lot of mention of my dad's friend he'd stay out with, a guy named Rob:

Stayed up all night. Left the bar. Me and Rob drove around back roads talking only. At morning the frost n ice on trees lookt like evrything was made from brite dimands. Mist work. Rob is always kiddin.

I hadn't wanted to read it. We found it in a pile of his clothes and things in the closet of my parent's bedroom. My mother had smashed his whole side two nights ago. His work clothes, Carharts, streaked with grease and smelling like his sweat and tar soap were heaped on top of his dress shoes, his work boots. We crawled in there and picked through it. There was an old porno mag, women with teased hair, sitting on Mustangs and Camaros, rubbed their oiled breasts. One of the captions said "Do You Have a Tool For Me?" I was only eight and I knew this was incredibly stupid.

Laura was my neighbor, four years older than me and she watched me after school. She held the magazine up to my face. The smell of the paper, musty newsprint, but mixed with that citrus stuff they wash their hands with, scared me and made me feel like he was going to come walking in and find us. Laura saw how my face went and said "He's not coming. And don't go for women like this." I said I wouldn't.

It was odd to me that my father kept a journal. I never saw him read a newspaper. It was a spiral-bound yellow pad and all the entries were only a few sentences long, all about Dad's nights out with his friends, drinking, driving around, sleeping it off at their places. When Laura found it she said "Hello..."

On the day my brother was born, he wrote:

I have a son William. 8:22 AM. He came out his head pointed and his eyes buljing. Purple head. I thought he was retart. I said to my self sorry to God I said I am sorry I did it. Dr. says no it gos away.

His hunting boots were gone. His gun was gone. There were shotgun rounds sprinkled throughout the pile we were sitting on. Mom had broken the top shelf, while screaming how he's not a man. There were two holes in the closet drywall she had punched while my brother bawled from the crib in the next room. I could see his place on their bed still disturbed and dirty, their wedding photo smashed on the opposite side. The cover of the notebook said "For You Bitch". The last entry said:

Faggot. You fucking faggot. YOU

The last page was ripped out. There was a little tangle of paper caught in the wire binding.

My mother made spaghetti that night and told me that my father was not coming back. I kept my eyes on the table.

Laura came over that night. She and I watched TV and, during a commercial, she reached over and grabbed my wrist and looked me in the eye.

"You're better off without him," she said. "He wasn't shit. He was good with his hands, but he didn't know shit."

I said okay. She kept her eyes on mine.

"You won't be like him," she insisted and let go of my arm.

"I know," I told her.

On TV, space people had landed and a woman shrieked when their ship opened. But the space man wasn't scary. He was a man in a silver suit with his face painted green. Smoke blew all around him. The people of Earth fought back with machine guns and tanks, but he killed them with rays from his hands. The show tried to trick you at the end. He'd be someone with an important message from the future, or an alien who came to cure all diseases. Everybody knew the trick was coming, so why did they try to make it a surprise?

Once you stopped to think about it, you already knew.

Walk the Earth

What was it that homeless man said in Kingman

I wouldn't have you choose this life for anything

I got grandkids your age and I would hate

for them to live out here

When the Asain tourists piled out of the fiery busses

on the way north to Vegas, that glinting rash where

one America is enshrined, my comrade and I stood off the lots

of truckstops and some men stared at her, snaggled

in sweaty breasts and greasy hair, beautiful

Without knowing anything, the dried apple faces of

maybe a million elderly women wanted to strip

me of my flesh and

men in pickups, themselves with nothing obvious to do

told me to make myself useful, Why don't you pull some weeds

when all it is that I want is I want my breakfast

of peanuts and chocolate milk

before the heat compresses the world today

again in a map of possible sanction

I will walk myself into in every single place

I want to go.

That I would lose my money as if it were air I breathe,

that shit would get so real at that point, I knew. That's

what you fear, the asking, that anyone would be kind

without a secret plan to fuck me or hit me and they

are out there like rabid strays, I admit, I know

The vast majority were simply indifferent, accelerating

like soda-weaned children with sore asses, their

minds clutching bright promises of their destination

But a woman picked us up once.

She was moving with her baby and played Christian

rock soft on the stereo of her vast 70's Olds and gave us

sugar- snap peas and, leaning back, I fell asleep next to

her chattering son, something I would never do

in the presence of most strangers in their cars

and I would only mention her because the absolute

most simple and quiet things happen and grab

the scruff of your gruddy, crusted neck

and tell you things about people you never hear

and with that understanding I come back to life

believing nothing of condemnation and

aspects of the beloved burn in everything

Empty Hands

I could consent to lose everything

although I don't believe

any of it comes back. I just know

the rhythm of the scene setting

when you are looking at the falling

bulk of what you have known

crash around your hands face and feet--

and calling to it, commanding it to get up

come up, trace where it was or dream it back,

there will be a flaw, or deer path,

a change that is so slight you won't

think to see it until you are done

screaming and wishing to have never seen,

but there, in white-lit grass and churning dust,

is a small, brown bird disrupted from sleep

and if you can just look at it

and notice, it will fly in the direction

you are to go in

and if you go you will forget much

and get up and

gain back the breath

to greet your days

Braggadocio

I stand on earthquakes and amplify my voice through the hollows of logs, make great meals from what is to be stolen from under rocks.

When I am 150 years old, I will be the stringiest thing alive and the children of the village will take wrestling and singing lessons from me.

As soon as I step into a house, it bursts into flames. That's just fine. How to proceed from ruined things is a great aerobic technique for the health of belligerent and infinite vascular ropes of veins.

I have made love in at any number of outdoor places, climbing out of various states of incongruous dress to proud, pale undress. I have never been embarrassed there, nor ashamed.

I am sweating and type with squalorous fingernails. My teeth run away from my terrible mouth. Your roof, I got there, I fucking climbed my breath. I wrote this there and gave it to a creature with a burning head.

I have congress with monsters and devils and they are sweethearts. I put my hummingbird tongue down their throats and we talk about the state of things.

I sucked electricity out of the wall when my heart stopped briefly and my dreams, whenever it is that I sleep, are all about the terrible treasures of the humming seeds that bust forth from my defeated body. The seeds are poems.

All the music I know is being baffled by beauty that is prevented and it syncs in perfect time with the rhythm of what I know to be desire. All the refusal is accompanied by an equal acceptance and you to whom I'm calling and have never met, you know exactly what I mean.

To this end, the world I know is a piano I am kicking out of and these are the sounds as it breaks.

Weed Inside Mirror Inside Mirror Inside

I've lost sight of my original intention coming in here. Most likely I thought "The Vortex" was just an odd name for a pub, with "The Abyss" being more fitting, if melodramatic. Since I've been in here, though, it's been tough to hold onto beginnings and all I'm left with are memories that are leaving me. The hole I'm crawling into and out of is just behind the bubble hockey machine. I wouldn't even be able to recognize where I began if I tried.

These are the things. I arrive every time with some amount of money in my pocket and order beers. People mill in from outside and climb from the portal. No one says much. The bartender changes, but it's the same kind, surly. I would fawn over the prettier ones until I realized it gets you nowhere.

What I remember.

I climbed a mountain once, a low one in the Adirondacks. I hated the whole experience, my lungs constricting, my blood pounding in my head at my temples and sinuses, how easy it was for my friends to dash up the switchbacks. But the view: a long valley with a lake, another hump of a mountain on the other side. Once my heart stopped rattling and my sweat started to cool, once I stopped feeling like I was gonna puke, I was able to appreciate it. My friends, too, we got quiet and just sat there and looked out at it and stopped trying to talk.

My family, too, they disappear. I don't remember my grandparents, but I remember my father. His rituals: before work and after, his various styles of facial hair, but nothing he ever said. I remember my mother trying to console me after getting my ass beat at school when I was ten or eleven. When I was older I'd have to sneak past her when I was staying out late. This bar is erasing them, if you can believe that. I have no idea how long it's been since I've seen them.

Why I came in here was a bad week in which someone died and I want to say my wife was not so supportive, but I'm fuzzy on the details. I forgive anyone involved, I will say. And I believe I wasn't so much depressed as curious, because the portal is in this big cubby, near bubble hockey, like I said. You climb up, stoop into it, go around a corner and it's just a circle of green light. It looks fake, but sure enough it resets everything and you get back right in the bar with most things changed.

I was accumulating what I thought to be clues, reading coasters and people's t-shirts, looking for commonalities, sequences, grabbing a newspaper and seeing what had gone on wherever and whenever this was. I didn't see any order. Phone numbers don't work. I started writing basic details down on napkins, once I figured out what was happening. But I could have written anything, as much as it will mean to me. I don't know if I'm aging, I don't know if there's time. I don't know if there's a version of me still in the place I came from.

Yes. It is funny to not know, per se, if you exist. Something I'd never have considered. I took a lot of things for granted.

Now it's the intercession of things that have happened, or happened to a version of me. I won't say they're definitive. I believe I have children, but it doesn't seem real. I just get pissed, get up, walk into the back and go through the portal. It's always this shitty bar with a mumbley jukebox and these regulars who I could know, who could be anyone, who don't talk or stay long. In the event that it's not this bar, I will stay there. I will open my heart to whatever law and sense that applies there. I will stay.

I'll tell you. The first time I had sex, it was awkward, but once I was alone, taking a shower, I felt every drop of water. I saw everything, every surface. Distances, the taste of foods, for a day or two, everything was so intense, it almost hurt. I remember my drive to work, though I have no idea what that was. When I was fifteen and decided I liked cigarettes, it was like bringing a dog home, in a way. There was a new presence to look after and with them, I would climb inside a private cave or something, out in the night, my night. In the country, where I grew up, there was this incredible blanket of stars and the hazy fog of what? They floated in it. Galaxy?

I've been outside the door to the bar, gone a few blocks, but I am so afraid that this world will shift and it will disappear. I will be trapped in the world that isn't real. It throws perspective on the one I've known for sure. But you have no idea, it was real to me.

I hope I was kind to people's children or my own. If I stopped moving, would it matter? Why would it matter where I am. These worlds are labyrinthine and bunched like an onion. If I've reached out to anyone, I don't remember.

Do you have any idea? Do you hear me when I talk to you? Who are you? Are you different every time I arrive? I imagine you like a little recorder, a tiny, hidden shell that everything coils into and proceeds out of at some hidden other end. My voice, my thoughts will just get slowly sucked up into you and you may take notice that I was here. To hold you in my hand. I know there were girlfriends and teachers that I'm combining, tying them up in you. Why do I do that? Do I need someone to talk to? What stays the same. This voice. I just keep talking to my chest, into a glass, to no one, to ears in the sky and I keep asking and asking, asking what?

Another Aphorism

You know I hear God never opens a door without shutting a window. That's God; opening things, shutting windows, unscrewing lids, turning switches on and off, levitating things, making walls bleed. No, shit, wait. I mean poltergeists.

I'm No Expert on Women

I'm no expert on women. In fact, I'm probably one of the last guys you should ask on the subject. I just don't get 'em. And not because of "misogynist" things like I don't understand "emotions," or that I'm against women's lib (though I will say it's gone far enough). I think it's just because I don't take hints and I really don't temper what I say, ever. I'm just honest, okay.

So this whole rigamarole with the dragon and my wife, that's on me. I understand. I understand she got upset, but I'm not clear why. Not what she wanted, I guess. Honestly, as poor a husband as I am, I'd be a worse father. I mean, you should see how I treat the dog. Not well. Although I have no idea why I would. Fuck him.

So my anniversary, the fourteenth, the traditional gift is ivory. Ya hear that? Ivory. A dead elephant's tooth. I don't even think you can get that shit any more and for some reason, it's frowned upon. As if there aren't enough elephants.

So I bought her a dragon. You know, spice things up. It wasn't a dishwasher, but it wasn't what her sister, Ida said, a trip to the spa. You know, a gift for both of us. She can raise it to adulthood and it can keep her company when I'm away and keep her secure. And I can use it to get these bastard neighbor kids out of my yard and get some of this damn sumac out of the back lot. Because it breathes fire. These things were also a sign of prestige, back in elden times, or killing them was, anyway, but here we are, the future. Can't kill anything anymore.

Is it a status symbol? I don't know. Do you have a dragon?

I picked it up at that new store, Wizard's Menagerie. It was smoky inside and there was elven piping. The wizard who runs it looks like this old pothead in robes and a floppy hat, a beard and he's got all sorts of creatures in cages: a griffon, a wyvrn, a baby minotaur, some creepy little imps all lashed together at the wrist and, out back, warming in a brooder, some dragon hatchlings. They looked like goddamn bloody snakes with legs and tiny wings, but you know, all babies are ugly at first and then they grow to look like people. I bought one. I won't say for how much. None of your goddamn business, that's why.

So I find an old lunchbox and punch some holes in it with a screwdriver and keep it in there until it's the big day. Me and the wife go out to the Troll's Diner and get some pancakes and femmy morning drinks with wine and juice, I don't know what they were. And then I give her the package, which I had my niece wrap, so it'd be neat. She opens it and is kinda scared by the hissing and scurrying coming from the box, so I tell her to open it a crack. She refuses and has this look on her face like she's disgusted and I say Happy Anniversary. It's a dragon. I bought you a dragon.

She got up and left. Walked out to the car. Refused the thing. I let it go behind the restaurant. It beat ass towards the bushes and was gone.

No one else's husband would have bought them a dragon. It is not because I don't know what I'm doing. You get around someone for so long and things start to feel too familiar. Too sleepy, if you get me. I don't like to travel abroad, as I find foreigners sneaky and we'll never have a big enough boat or flat enough TV, or children. So I said fuck it, a dragon. Spice things up. There's something you don't see every day. Women want to nurture things. It could be anything. Ida said a cat. Fuck a cat. We already have this dog and the thing doesn't respect me. A dragon says something. I don't know if that something is I love you, but it definitely says something.

Don't Kiss Me Through the Bars

She had gotten from Raton to Taos and that would do it for the night. She had lost Tripper Jay and was posted up in some cantina. The house band was playing a rendition of "Red Red Wine" and she looked up at a plaque that informed her that the table she had been sitting at had been filmed in a movie starring Clint Eastwood and an orangutan. A man, some shitkicker with no eye for obvious cues that he signified nothing to her, had bought her enough drinks to form a bridge between feeling annoyed contempt to bubbling hostility. Now it was this woman, who, if she was forced to choose, would be the one person in the bar she could have fucked, but, within seconds of opening her mouth, the woman had erased any possibility of that.

The woman's name was Stacey and she was fucking stupid. Stacey had asked her where she was from and she had said that she was born by a river, in a little old tent.

Stacey said "You were born by a river?"

Any goodwill had plummeted off a cliff from there.

Stacey had asked her name and had been told it was Indira. This was true. From a mother who somehow got it into her head that Indira was the daughter of Mahatma and that such a child would be some marvelous angel. Who had never bothered to check and when she found out, had been deeply disappointed. Which was fitting. Anyway, Stacey didn't know who the fuck Indira Gandhi was, nor really Mahatma. And although she had a lot of energy, this stranger, and spunk, and used her hands to talk, to Indira, her stupidity was on par and it negated her.

The band finished up their set. Around them, ranch hands and bikers monopolized the pool tables. Everyone was connecting invisible lines to the few viable women in the bar and trying to come up with the correct formulae to get them to blow them in their pickups. The jukebox started up Charlie Daniels.

Indira had asked Stacey what she did. "Waitress" was the answer. "Waitress" in Indira's head was "wench," in the same phonic ballpark as "bitch."

When Stacey asked what she did, Indira told her she had thrown her backpack in the weeds out back, because she didn't have a job and was hitchhiking and currently hustling for drinks.

"I found a vacant lot to sleep in, under a semi trailer, in case it rains," she said.

Stacey hadn't felt right about this. It had shown on her face and it gave Indira pleasure. She imagined dragging her back to that lot like stunned prey.

Stacey had mousey hair and some interesting necklaces, hemp bracelets. It was obvious she was some sort of work-a-day hippie. She talked about a string of fests she was at, a litany really. Perhaps friends with ten thousand new-grass bands and a slave to those jam-electronica outfits that were both reminiscent of the Dead and neo-tribal. Stacey had maybe flamed out any part of her brain that could carry something admirable: an independent thought. Indira, with the onset of stomach upset she attributed to the Manhattans she was wrestling, had been at the table flipping pages of an old Dell paperback, Hesse, methodically folding down the pages and breaking the spine. She wondered, for an instant, if she was too rough on people and then concluded that she was not rough enough.

After her day with Tripper Jay, she was sunburned and scorched out and now she was drunk and she wanted, really, to fuck this girl violently, not against her will, but to shock her and rip the veil out from around her. To impose herself and to show this other person something new, to leave her someplace unknown.

Stacey said "I'm not coming on to you. I'm not a dyke or anything, but you can stay with me if you want, just for tonight."

Indira stared straight at her, would liked to have bludgeoned her if she had had something sufficient at hand. There was silence as the jukebox stopped and the band went back to their instruments.

Stacey asked "What are you reading?"

Indira held the book up and it fell apart in her hand. She got up and went out the back door.

A Trap

I caught the faerie because I am a mythical primate and my mouth resembles the orchids they take naps in. She crawled in there, so sleepy and my jaws closed.

An Anthem of Rot

Our Ranch slick is a rich biotic community. We're here, on an oval plate, dropped behind the bus station and we will never be found. And here, we are the causes and solutions to, so many diseases. My god, the city, it is a foamy swirl of bruise purple and banana yellow blossom of filaments, because buttermilk breeds so much hot, tropical life. And you used it for your tots, lined your stomach with soothing, gaseous waves of animal-fatted pleasure. It is our Mother Ocean. We are a coral reef, an intermingled ecosystem and in days we will develop motive appendages and walk and walk and we will curl into vibrational chambers to talk and sing sonorous songs. Thank you accidents or the determination of some god. We are down by the heating vent and under a cart. Moisture was caught and expanded by heat and no server picked us up. Please let us be a jungle, the miniscule civilization of collective microbial spirit. Our flag encrusted spore and flower.

You Can't Escape Under the Sea

He walked through the door, took off his coat, dropped it to the floor, walked past it to the fridge, opened it and pulled out a beer. Opened it.

He saw them like hurdles, ten he'd jump over, or like snow drifts one could slam through in a pickup over winter. At ten beers, he would be tired and sleep.

Because of the mermaids. Somewhere deep in the lake, their long, kelpy hair stringing out, about their faces and past their fish-pale breasts.

He had taken up fishing because he had no more work. On a steady diet of fish, he had just been moving through the money he had accrued, spending it on beer, on lotto tickets, the occasional movie. There was no end in sight and now these mermaids.

He had been at the pier, the power plant off on its little peninsula, catching the fish that liked its warm exhaust water, not really thinking of the heavy metals that were concentrated in their flesh, just getting drunk with the beat of the earth, climbing up and up it with a rack of Old Steel Beam, a high-gravity brew, as it announced itself.

He had seen a woman's back flash out some distance off and dismissed it because it was May, he was fishing in a lake where hardly anyone swam, in one of the most foul parts of an extremely befouled body of water. Then he saw another, a fish's flash of a tail, big as a marlin's behind the swimming woman. Another popped her head and shoulders out, exposing her naked chest and his mouth hung open. She reappeared closer to him, her head emerging from the water, smiled coyly and with a white, webbed hand, waved to him, like a delicate wind was blowing through her fingers.

What she told him was that he would meet them, out at the break wall. He packed his shit up and drove to it, walked all the way out and clambered down one side, where the break wall caught a strong current and made a bay. Two of them had come up and sat on a boulder. They motioned him over and sat with him, running their scaly hands through his greasy hair, cooed to him, flicked their fishy tails and had held him to their chests. He didn't say shit, needed to, but fought to control his breath. He thought he was dreaming, so he stayed in the contours of this world, did not pick apart any of its incongruities and stayed with what was happening. A hot sludge of comfort and fear rippled through him. When he started whimpering and losing his shit, the one had pried him away from her. She looked him in the eye. Her skin had a greenish pallor and her eyes were a dull yellow.

"This is all you get," she said. And then she smoothed his hair with her cold, wet hand, kissed her palm and brought it to his mouth. They jumped off the rock. And he noticed the cobalt sky and the dullness of the waves as they swam through them, saw the flash of their backs, their tailfins whipping up as they dove down.

In his house, which he knew he was losing and had no desire to keep, he drank the last beer. The obvious answer was to go and swim to them, because fortune favors the bold, they say, but he knew that it was madness and that when his bloated body was found floating at the pier, it would be deemed suicide. The mermaids had said that this was it. He knew he could fish and fish there and fill his stomach with mercury and the rank fumes from the power plant and he'd never see them again. He kept on the road he was on, drinking was waiting until he would be moved. And he would never speak a word of it. Thinking, briefly, while his bathwater chilled around him, he could not decide whether the world he had been shown was a gift or a curse, the one he had been returned to, which? His wife had told him he was a coward, when she had left and he knew this was absolutely true. The plant would not hire him back. He hadn't been particularly liked there and they could get someone else to get the tomato paste up to the vats with a hose. Was it a blessing or a curse, to be touched and for an instant, let oneself go over to it, when it could never be repeated, when the memory of it absolutely made no sense? He couldn't decide on any of it, as his mind sank further and further into the muddy depths of the bottom of the lake. Somewhere he had heard that a fish has no memories, that its mind is continually refreshed. He loved eating them for this. He pulled his head below his bathwater and imagined them, wished for the millionth time that he were a merman.

Postcard: Land's End

They ate the oysters right where they found them, shucked them with a screwdriver and sucked them out alive, washed them down with a five-thousand-dollar bottle of champagne they had found. Took the morels from the small paper bag and put them down like popcorn. Some woman's wedding dress and a military dress uniform. The ocean was one deep clouded eye swirling around them, smacking jagged tooth rocks with creamy foam and off the shore, sea lions watched them, their heads bobbing near the wreckage from the marina, which stretched everywhere from the shore. The sun made the shape of a red-roofed pagoda as it went to the horizon and the wind picked up, scouring them, freezing their messy faces. Things were muddling together now and they had no more sense than to climb under some scrub, into an animal skin. And words would not service them, nor cage them any more than meaning could be derived from reading the swirling grime beneath their fingernails.

Stillness Will Come

You turn purple
with fear and loneliness;
go up the ladder,
have secret, squalling throes
and heave back to land
convinced

It would be an honor
to die alone

Then your diaphragm
aches as the worn skin of a drum
and it can make the
humiliation

into the carpels and stamens
of a perfect flower—life can
pour in then,

enticement to live
or to know that as bad as
it will ever get,

after the passing of
this shrieking vision
and visitation, you
have been born again.

What is Sufficient?

The house shed its stuffing
and kept its frame


Not enough for the room
to blow its mold, kick that cough
or have the cracks in the windows heal over


nor have a sharp knife in the drawer
so tomatoes don't look like they were sliced
with drunk index fingers


The lawn became a lush mouse and spider land
and we moved out by taking everything to the curb


I heard someone mention a cloud city
I want you to know its been on my mind,
to weave a rope to fasten to the sky,
to feast in our great hall we climbed into, yet


I know I have everything that I need here

It has all vanished and reappears everywhere

The place was the people within it

Hot Out

Summer is blown out with flowers ripening to rot; mother nature is
dragging her greasy umbel on your face and bees are tumbling through the weeds
for their sluttish queen, at home, engorged on sugar and sweating eggs. Dogs and cats roam the streets fucking and fighting. Boys and girls in their summer finest,

stroll ascotted and beskirted, if any of them would touch me, I would howl
in my burning houndblood, just a handshake or giving me my change, no one is flirting with me, but I could be a moth beating myself to fuck a flame.

Moths don't fuck light, I know, but stoners drag their hands over glistening heads of lettuce at the store and wait for their girlfriends in the hottest month, moaning under a thornbush and drinking up the swamp--anything balmy

a rabbit knows, fear and fucking, you can dress life up and freeze her in stone
but some statues could be licked and if you touch some, you'll be knocked up, sure
as July is pushing the cock's crow up your dick for fireworks.

Alien climes (Washington Park and downtown)

We lunch on what's left of
a child's birthday party--

a bag of Ruffles trayed in
an empty box of copypaper
set by the trash can

The remnants of a picked-over
fruit platter, pineapple baked

through the clear plastic garbage bag
in front of the old elephant house

Its dented sheet of steel bathroom mirror,
its snug, just-elephant size

Down the hill, we skirt a young mother
spanking her three year old son

She asks him, See, we don't yell at each other?
and we cross the street to pass her

The same fallen dolls left on the lawn
of the park have risen into red dresses on our way
to get donuts and a woman, mouth spattering,
throws a lit M80 at our feet from her speeding car

Worlds explode. Ask the girl with the
tree branch we met the other day and invited
into the pizzeria. She can only say

murdering me, it's not funny, my boyfriend, this music,
they are killing me, hot poison. Chews breadsticks

Boils over with tears and wants our numbers, holds out
her phone, says The phone is real, see? What's more real?

and we have no answer and you will revisit us later,
though we'll never see you again

We pray you stay away
from the cops and your mother

We can only repeat no no no and
turn away and leave you

Rites

Right now it is still freeboxes belching out soaked jeans
and musty baby jumpers, Frommers guide
to Italy bloated and wavy

When the sun proclaims itself
in August, I'd imagine, it is the garbage
that is the dazzling flag and bolting lettuce and for
a few weeks, we get to parade around our tits
frisbees, park books and kittens appear

Oh sunny paper napkin closed around
the orange-seeping bones of chicken wings
set on the power meter mounted to
the dumpster enclosure
near the eyebreaking collage of
festive color on the county elderly rec center

Looked like an old diaper
or a greasy flower peeling open

Automotons

He saw her on the mover, slouching in her sling, the suspended piece of cloth supporting her weight. Her face was blank and rubbed out. Her eyes showed nothing.

People took up all the slings in the mover and the ones who didn't get a sling velcroed themselves to the walls of the car with large, rasping straps. He wondered why they didn't make all the automatons take the velcro straps. Or ride in compartments above, like old skis stacked into the rafters of a garage. Or separate cars altogether. Merm was an automaton himself, so these thoughts didn't upset him. It just seemed like it would make sense.

The woman he was noticing was an automaton as well, one that was run down and in need of rehab. She was positioned awkwardly in the sling. She was rangy and in an uncomfortable position. Her bones were sharp and looked like broken wood. She was breathing evenly, but looked like it was hard for her to do it. The people near her were uncomfortable. While an automaton had never attacked a vitamaton, vitamatons were generally uncomfortable with automatons, although they never directly said this.

The mover was gliding into a stop and jets of air billeted the car. People were wobbling around in their contrivances. The woman didn't appear as if she knew that they were stopping, or that this was the last stop on this line. Her hands went to her scalp and she smoothed back her hair, pulled at it slightly. A dull hum came from her. The vitamata around her looked at their shoes and gave her a wide berth as they got out of the mover, down the steps that led from the elevated track and to the pods where their bubblecars were parked. When vitamata left Terrestrial, they ascended up to their great masses of podclusters that floated up in the high atmosphere like spinning diagrams of molecular structures. Automatons went to the tenement cities that looked like the waxed cardboard takeout boxes of Chinese food. Then morning came.

They were the last two on the mover. A little recording of a bell was being played over and over. The doors were open, exposing the night. He moved the slings aside and walked towards her. Her eyes ballooned and he saw her faded, pink irises. He thought she was going to scream, but she just said, looking him in the face, “I'm dying.”

Humane is a Sentiment

There's a cat in my neighborhood that I call Gruddy. He's orange and white, with a mis-shaped head, like his skull slopes down one ear to the other, not quite a dent, but certainly something. He is filthy and his eyes are a misty yellow-green. I always see him at this house with boxes and old trash on the front porch, hand-lettered signs taped to the screen door. I sort of want to pet him, but in reality, I definitely would not. He's not into the idea, either. Every time I come around the corner of where he lives and he's there, he just sits and stares, intensely. Because he's so fucked up looking, I can't tell what the look means.

I've lived in more well-heeled neighborhoods and in those, you get well-loved, almost disturbingly friendly housecats that run off their porches and flop around under your hand and squawk when you crouch down to pet them. Up here there's an abandoned house on a lot where a whole colony of strays live. People leave tins of wet food down there and with what they can glean from rats and garbage, they maintain some sort of population. But they're a bunch of skinny, wormy, skiddish things. They stay pretty well hidden. A bunch of old, derelict property has been torn down around here, so their range has been shrinking. But as long as there's food, there will be kittens, tucked away in the grass and old car parts on that lot.

I was on a trip abroad with my family. I was reading Amy Hempel, coincidentally. We saw a spectrum of stray dogs (I think stray cats would just get eaten-we didn't see any) and everyone really responded sympathetically, although it was apparent that, where we were, there were different values at play on how to deal with animals. Where we were, I met one person who had a toy poodle as a pet. Mostly, you kept a dog in your courtyard for protection and ignored the packs that roamed the neighborhood. I never saw anyone being cruel to any of these dogs. Most were acclimated to people, too. These same places had mothers sleeping with babies on cardboard, on the sidewalk. People with fucked teeth and open wounds begging around the ATM, which was manned with guards holding semi-automatics. People we see at home, who became more vivid because we were not.

I think I recognized that you can pet a dog and have a more immediate, straightforward interaction than you could have with a person. You see a stray and have a clear concept of what it is. You never question a dog's values. I've been around too many drunk discussions about poor and homeless people, so I know the assumptions that get trotted out about how and why those people are the way they are. In this way, too, animals are entirely innocent, they make no choices, whereas people are not. You can openly empathize for the hard life of an animal, which is easy. Wrapping our heads around the sight and pervasiveness of human poverty is different. It requires rationalizing the continuation of an inequality that is central to the makeup of our society. We bemoan the kind of welfare we have to extend to people, giving pocket change, for example, and our solutions don't go beyond shelters. Sterilization, which we use on animals, seems like a sound solution for poor people if you're far enough from the problem.

I wonder what happened to Gruddy's head. Did something fall on it? Did it damage his brain? Does he go out into the neighborhood at night and stalk, like other cats or does he stay on the porch? If he got really sick, would his people take care of him? Why doesn't he clean himself? I mean it that I wouldn't pet him. And it's not about love or attachment. I've taken in strays before that I've given up (or they ran away). I talk to people I know and they assume that I'm naive, that I have a pulpy, gloppy heart with no goddamn sense. That it will leave me awash in the world, prime for the exploitation of meaner people, and worse off, possibly homeless, worthless. Because of what I don't seem to understand. This is not so. Gruddy doesn't want me to touch him and my hand would smell disgusting all the way home if I did. I am not blindly in love. I understand a great many things.

I've had so many chance encounters with people, with animals. Some were fucked up and will evade detection and capture. Others will not. I'm getting at the idea of a world where the life of animals and human animals is valued and where problems are deftly and (whatever this word means), humanely handled. Going further, a world where exclusion is not a given. The necessary path to which I would love to be gentle, but I know will not be and I am preparing my heart for that. And I don't want my sympathy to be appropriative. I want us all to stand behind the conviction that the forces meant to lock up or drug, to prolong the condition of or destroy the remainders in its human equations should watch their fucking backs, whether it's you or someone else they're coming after. That is they don't stop, we would make them. I would love a society that sets to work doing this, one that doesn't presently exist. So if I don't know where to place my love, I certainly know where to place my disgust.

If "humane" is a sentiment, how do we concretize a compassion that is divorced from mere pity?

Live and Let Live

These sewer monsters are some bullshit. I never knew they were down there. I mean, I didn't believe in them and they were pretty easy to ignore. After the flood, though? Oh man.

It rained this winter. And I mean it rained. It rained and rained. The sewers were getting full of rain run-off and people were talking about pets going missing. I was out on my porch one night, arguing with my girlfriend on the phone and I heard my garbage can being kicked over. I thought it was the neighbor's kids, out in raincoats, making a mess. I jogged out to the street and saw a bunch of strewn garbage and some dark, hunched shape straightened up. It's gnarly face was lit for a second by the street lamp. It looked flat with creases and bumps all over it, like a moldy waffle with tusks. I stopped and wanted to yell, but I couldn't think of what and honestly, I was petrified. The thing was big. Black bear-sized, in rags. It was soaking and this low growl, deep like a diesel engine idling was coming out of it. Then it just turned and blew down the street. It jumped the fence to the burger place, I mean it vaulted and was gone.

People always talk about the monsters in the sewer, but then people talk a lot about a lot of things. People around here are religious loonies and there are a lot of bad drugs around here. I don't know how many times a band of people has run down my street, sprinting from some sort of Armageddon they're just hallucinating together or the times I've had to get preached to by some strung-out wacko wearing a religious sandwich-board and talking about soap. I have a fucking job, thank you and I keep my vices down to a 12-pack of Old Steel Beam on a Friday night and one doobie when Steve Miller plays the fair bandstand every summer. I guess the monsters live in the sewer because the people who settled this area chased them out of the woods when the valley cleared to build the city. Is that a nice thing to do? No, but that's progress.

After I saw the monster, I went back inside. I was soaking and my girlfriend was calling me and calling me. I answered and told her I saw a sewer monster and she just got quiet and said she'd pray for me. Did I mention that? She's tied up in all this stuff, too. I don't think it's gonna work. She took me to a service at her church once and we stood in the dark with flashlights someone had passed out, waving the beams all around yelling NOMONSTERNOMONSTERNOMONSTER and shit. I started feeling a little funny and then I remembered eating the little pills they passed out. Everyone was eating them and my girlfriend looked over like "come on...," and I took a couple. A priest of some kind started walking through the crowd, jabbering away about the monsters and signs and signals, being watchful, something about holy combat. I didn't catch any of it. After the service all these wide-eyed people with bad haircuts and worse teeth converged in a courtyard behind the church and we all chased each other around and when we caught one another, you had to pretend like you were wrestling for a couple minutes. This was a re-enactment of I have no idea what. I woke up in a big pile of people, naked in the church basement. Men, women, hairy legs and bodies tied up together everywhere. I'm pretty sure some sex stuff went on, which I wasn't happy about. I know I wouldn't have done anything. I'm not like that. I told her I wouldn't go back there.

So, admittedly, I thought monsters were fake, but as it turns out they're not. This is not making me question anything.

I'm doing two things. First, I'm breaking up with my girlfriend. Second, I'm buying a gun. The world is prettymuch going to shit and if these monsters don't get back into the sewer, they're gonna be working government jobs and TV shows will have to be about them and they'll be allowed to play football and everything. And then these religious loonies will have something to really set them off and I bet, when people get fed up with the monsters, they'll join the religion. I might even side with the monsters on that occasion.

The night I saw the monster, I came inside and changed my clothes, dried off and wrote a letter to my kids, apologizing for not being there for them. I packed a duffel bag and put it in the back of my closet. I'll send the letter out if I can't take it anymore and have to leave. My guess is that this will all blow over, but I'm getting pretty sick of it all. There's got to be a place for, regular, decent people to just be left alone.

Eternal Victory for America

Hands up to lights, holding wide, golden belts or diamond-encrusted women up. Spray-tanned fat roll over tights, thinned hair a mess, cut on forehead channeling blood around white of beady eyes popped, enthralled, neon-laced boots full of sweat, glory. A plateau of continuous flying elbows, titles, the shots that make each bench press feel like coming inside your arms. Figure-four leg-locks and hair-pulling, protein shakes and oxycodone. The same urge toward staid stories of disgrace, loss and the road to triumph, its dazzling electric pulse. The words that get peppered onto the adversary are incomprehensible, but livid, calling enemies Brotha! Like Brotha, do you understand, you've broken my back and disgraced me! But Brotha, you can't keep a snake in a box and take away its light and then not expect that snake to BREAKFREE AND STRIKE, cause that snake's got a fire inside! A raging fire that is OUT OF CONTROL And this Memorial Day, Brotha, at Nassau Colosseum, that fire's gonna take you and BURN YOU and that snake will become a RAGING DRAGON with WINGS that BREATHESFIRE and it's gonna be OUTTACONTROOOOL!!

It is the same spirit who is portrayed in vivid, awful tattoos, the basic idea being A SCREAMING EAGLE IS COMING FROM MY ARM, who rides with victors through every shooting of the man who fucked your wife, the bellowing Drill Sargent who kicks your worm ass through basic and gets you through bloody sand and mortar a man, back to Fort Collins, a stream of montages with crunching guitars, about running and punching red-gristled sides of beef in a meat locker, in your infinitesimal personal squalor, rising. The blonde spirit crouched on the hood of a Dodge Charger with breast implants and a banana yellow bikini, holding AKs, whose mouth is fireworks and threats. The spirit who leaves its charge one night full of slipped disks and corroded knees, swimming in dope and reading the family Bible, seeing the final angel as a serpent coiling through the words and his message is written in smoke, until the realization in deafening light of what it means and he goes to raise himself and his sleeping family to the enrapture of the highest glory of all.

Lineage

I thanked everyone. There was peanut butter enough (though we put it on chard), and a flowing river of dogs and acquaintances with humility enough and vast reserves of patience, enough to grow something fragile as compassion, from which justice is apparent and not the threat of a cage. I have been faulted for dwelling on parties, but there were sufficient ones in a crepe-paper chain we bound ourselves to, the only thing. And we took the marks and cuts welted to us and applied poultices and spoke them off and when we were becoming rid of them, we walked better, our senses came in and the oaks and pines climbed into our perceptions like names we had forgotten. And if ever the feeble old goblins we knew returned, we gradually learned to surround them and shoo them--watching croaking birds, we learned this. I thanked everyone for learning the old tricks and ruses that would set us at each others throats, how dumb that sounds and dancing around them like the greatest fighters knew how to. Kids go in baths. Potatoes come out of the ground. Forget shoes and talk to the things that melted into the land. There was no exodus. There was no escape. And when we found we had one choice, we learned we would never be alone. I thanked the ones who spurred us here. To the eye I was talking to nothing. I was talking to the ones woven in.

The Distance: Randall Cunningham and the Infinite Run

December 27, 1992. The final week of the regular season. The Eagles hosted division rivals the New York Giants and were looking for a win to increase their playoff seeding. They were down 16-10 and needed to score a touchdown on the game's final play to win. The Eagles were pinned down on their own 24 yard yard line. The Giants expected some trickery, a Statue of Liberty play, a series of laterals, in a last-ditch, desperate attempt to score. No one could have possibly imagined how long this play would take. That, extraordinarily, it still transpires to this day.

Eagles quarterback Randall Cunningham snapped the ball with fifteen seconds on the clock. The Giants knew that Cunningham was the most dangerous player on the field, by far. They sent their defensive backfield back into prevent coverage against the pass, but everyone kept their eyes on Cunningham.

After deciding against a Hail Mary throw, Cunningham broke the line of scrimmage, attempting a run, which everyone had expected. What they didn't expect is that, once Cunningham was approached, that instead of pitching the ball to another teammate, he would keep the ball himself, running backwards, coming close to being caught, but never being tackled. This pattern would continue into the night. The game clock had expired, but until Cunningham was tackled, the game wouldn't end.

He has remained on the field for nearly 19 years. Fans, initially enthralled by the masterful evasion Cunningham displayed, stayed in their seats for days, some for weeks. Now the stadium seats are a shanty-town, with filthy, drunk, bearded fans waiting for the outcome, so that the 1992 season could conclude. Cunningham has dug himself a foxhole with one of his cleats, and subsisted from food and bottles of Gatorade thrown from the stands. He has advanced as far as the Giant's 16 yard line and retreated as far back as the Eagles' own two. Every time a Giants defender has come within a couple yards of him, Cunningham has darted away, sprinting down the sideline, or, on a few occasions, leaped over the defender. The Giants have massed six players near their own goal line, where they have stayed, in a demilitarized zone of sorts, making a touchdown nearly impossible. The Eagles have roamed the field, making the occasional block. Six players, three from both sides, have been injured on the seemingly inifnite play. Eagles running back Herschel Walker appeared to have broken his leg in 1996. Unable to leave the field, he succumbed to what was probably an infection and died. His body then decomposed on the field. The field itself has been dug up by hand by the players and is covered with earthen turrets, mud huts and garbage. Flies, crows and rats are everywhere.

Cunningham sleeps standing up, with his eyes open. No Giants player has touched him. His uniform is soiled and fetid and, like all other players on the field, he sports a massive beard. No one can fathom why he would prolong the outcome of a regular season game, when his team has already qualified for the playoffs. Eagles coach Rich Kotite repeatedly tried to signal to Cunningham to kneel down and end the game, but Cunningham has never looked over. Reached near the sideline, Giants linebacker Gary Reasons has told reporters that he wishes the game would end, so that he could hug his children, or have sex with a woman. The Giants, he said, have resorted to male pair-bonding. Players from both sides have been seen holding hands and kissing. Public outcry was intense when this initially developed, but since, fans have accepted the logic of it all.

America, without football, is in the grips of a national tragedy. Many fans turned to other sports to watch, but found them boring. Without the presence of the mass spectacle and its attendant commercialism and onslaught of sexist beer commercials, a peaceful, egalitarian society has formed, where there is no poverty or material need. Many believe that this may have extinguished enthusiasm for the playoffs or the next season, should they ever occur.

Married

Her lips were chapped. Because this was the desert. She was off in a little ditch, by the asphalt road, trying to get a ride while the heat roiled off and blurred everything she saw. Thunderheads were massing at a butte in the distance. They cast thick purple shadows that swallowed the hills and let loose curtains of rain. It just dumped and she could see the cloud slowly making its way to her. She could see for miles across the pastures that seemingly held nothing. By the time the cloud got there, she wanted to be gone. Nonetheless, cars were blowing past her.

At her feet, all over, were red and black grasshoppers, the size of a finger. Their collective hum was awesome, like a thick pulse of electricity filling the world. They were screwing and doing flips, making a dry pop when they snapped off the ground. They'd often land on their heads. Cars would smear them when they blew through, but it was their season out here. Fucking and flipping.

“They sure is seems to be having a good time,” the guy said and laughed. Even his laugh was fucked up. A gargle-y old alcoholic laugh.

To her right was a guy that called himself Tripper Jay. He didn't even have a backpack. He wore a kerchief around his neck and a greasy tie-died shirt with khaki shorts and sandals. It was impossible to determine his age. He talked about some war, one she'd never heard of. He'd been rode hard, for sure and had wrinkles and cuts all over his hands and face. The cuts, he said, were from his old crew. Who had stolen his gear, burned his sleeping bag.

He balled his knotty fists and said “They took my fuckin' dog, too.”

Tripper Jay wouldn't say why they had turned on him. It could have been for grievous things, or really trivial things. Rules were unevenly applied. Traveler drunks can be cruel and stupid and sanctimonious.

She had gotten picked up off the ramp in Raton, had seen him stumbling around at the ramp in the morning and not trying too hard to hitch. A ranch-hand had taken her up to where he was turning and she was very much in a remote place. She had begun walking up the highway and drank all her water, which had been warm. She had met Jay up the road. He'd been picked up later and taken a little further than her. They had played leapfrog like that twice more. Two men who thought she looked presentable enough had picked her up, but refused Jay. Some vestiges of girl were left in her, she guessed and they had minded their manners, but they didn't want some roadkill, this scraggly, wilted, crazy hippie, so she had dishonestly apologized to him, stepping up into their trucks and thought, twice, that this was the time in the universe where they'd part.

But she kept running into him. He had kept getting rides after her and getting dropped off ahead of her. He kept leaving off his stories when she left him and picking them up when they met again. They were long, boring, about the war, about traveling, good acid he had done, women.

They were standing in the midst of the mating grasshoppers, coming off the road like popcorn, and her water ran out. Jay gave her some from a gross-tasting canteen, said it was springwater, but it tasted like shit. She smirked at the thought that she might be dead, in Hell, that they would be repeating this cycle for eternity and Tripper Jay was her own personal tormenter.

“It's like it's a... It's like it's a...,” he stuttered. “A orgy.”

She imagining unclasping her knife and killing him. Could feel it in her pocket against her leg. What she didn't know is that a van was coming for both of them. That they'd make it to a town and part there. That the ride would be two hours. And that the water they shared was swarming with giardia. She saw the thunderhead moving like a drifting battleship towards them, shuddered to imagine them huddling for warmth together in a monsoon. No one was to touch her, as a rule. And it was one people sometimes made the mistake of trying to break. But in his way, he was already inside of her, his infestation, swimming. The van would get them before the rain. She didn't know that for a week, in her aching guts, that they'd be married.

Galatea

I bought one, a sponge girlfriend. You get them at the Dollar Scholar. They're these little pressed-sponge pellets in the shape of a tiny girlfriend and you toss one into a full bathtub and then the next day, you have a full-sized girlfriend made out of a soggy sponge.

The one I got was named Alexandra. I helped her out of the bath and she was one solid piece of soaked sponge, bright blue and she had a dress sculpted onto her body. She had a good shape and she had a wet voice, if that makes any sense.

Okay, I know it doesn't, but you should have heard her talk.

She knew a lot about books, but in that strictly academic way. I think the word I want is “sclerotic,” which is applicable, because, after all, she's a sponge. I mean a sponge is nothing if not flexible, but it was like her opinions were implanted into her. Which they must have been, shriveled up in her head, just waiting for moisture to blow them up.

Sponge girlfriends drip. I should tell you. That's a drawback. If I held her, I would get drenched in water that smelled like chemicals. It made the colors in my clothes run. So, while the whole idea was to just have someone to hold onto and talk to and do it for cheap, there were these unforeseen circumstances. Also, she was a good cook, but when she was frying anything, she was dripping water into the pan and oil started shooting everywhere. She had to stick to boiling things. We ate a lot of spaghetti.

We didn't agree on much. When the war started, she was so angry and I said it was hellish, sure, war, but it would be for the best. She said some liberal shit like it was just to benefit the rich and powerful. I told her that she was a sponge from a Chinese factory and just three days old, so what the fuck did she know about anything? She wouldn't speak to me for days after that. One day I just broke down and apologized. I'll tell you I cried. I told her I didn't soak her in my tub to mistreat her, but to love her. I held her. She was clammy and a bit mildewed, but I squeezed her so hard that water gushed from her waist.

You're wondering about sex. Okay. I'll say we tried. But her dress didn't come off. I mean, she wasn't anatomically specific. And I wasn't going to get a pocketknife and just cut a hole in her. Good God. It wasn't all about that. We had to do it in the shower. Let me say we made something work and she apologized profusely and that kind of broke my heart.

She was hanging out here for a few weeks. I didn't know what to do with her. I didn't think I was going to have to find her a job or an apartment. I mean, she wasn't even real. I was uncomfortable with the idea of taking her out and I certainly didn't want to introduce my friends to her. I mean, I was okay with it, I told her I loved her, but people would just get the wrong idea. It became obvious that she was out of place here. She kept getting my magazines wet. I kept throwing towels down and she kept giving me these annoyed looks, from her puffy pupil-less blue eyes. I put her in the tub, to sleep. I started to get black mold everywhere and I got this bad cough.

She dried out. I let her. I'd go to work and come back and she was sitting by the radiator, steam rising off of her, just looking at the wall, this smell like boiling cabbage and turpentine coming off her. She wouldn't speak to me. After a couple days, she started flaking and once I asked her if she shouldn't get wet, but frankly, I was relieved. I wasn't ready, not even for a sponge.

I came home one day and she was lying on the floor, a bit smaller and completely still. I nudged her and she was so light. Her skin made this scraping sound when I touched it and dust motes rose off her and caught the sunlight coming through the window. I bunched her up and put her in a garbage bag. It was so weird. I took her down to the dumpster and put her in.

Sometimes I miss her. She knew all the words to every Patsy Cline song and did a mean Wanda Jackson. The first night, we drank a bunch of wine and she had me put those LP's on and she danced everywhere. I think she was happy to be full of water. She was a little seed that had popped. While she was twirling, her feet had squished in time and she flicked water everywhere, making these little blue specks all over the walls. That was the first thing that had upset me, but I have yet to wash them off.

What Did You Wear to the Punk Show?

A poncho made of a bunch of plastic bags of old dog shit.

A fake-fur trimmed parka I found in a vacant lot, a burnt wig and spandex crusted with old ranch dressing.

Infinitesimally small buttons that I have no idea what-all they promote or rail against. "Apartheid?" Yeah! I love them! This one's just a fist. For fisting?

Boots with old dildos for laces.

My own hair, which I have beaten to a chipped and flaking consistently and painted a defiant rainbow of black, ash-color, soot-color and old-gum-disease-color.

A rugby shirt made out of rejection letters from shitty zines that have become squalid with mosh-pit sweat and the offal of numerous spider-bites.

Idiosyncratic glasses like Lisa Loeb used to wear, but the lenses are rotted ham coldcuts.

The encouragement of my overindulgent mother, inside, like this little light of mine, which I'm gonna let it shine. And some old, destroyed camouflaged chucks that Ben Weasel wiped his semen on.

A beard that looks like a small dog someone crushed and glued to my mouth and neck. Smell it when we kiss!

A bunch of surface-piercings tied together so I can go all primal and suspend my self from the ceiling and I swallowed a bunch of Dubble Bubble and dime bags and axioms carved into leather scraps and y'all can hit me with yer Louisville Sluggers until I pop open and gush that shit all over and then it's happy fifth birthday Adam, from the punx.

My own urine, on my ripped pants and like a black vest soaked with a thousand thrown beers and they're all obscure, bargain-basement lagers with industrial names like Cuyahoga, Erie Canal Water, or Steel Beam.

My own smell, which is rife with nutmeg because all I eat are vegan blondies. But don't worry, 'cause it's also gross b.o.

Alcoholism, but I'm carrying a book, so it's less that I'm an alcoholic and more that I'm smart.

An ammo belt made from used syringes, a corset made of saw blades and blood-flecked Kerropi socks.

A bunch of frayed caveman bike fashion because I love bikes and my bike and my bike is a fixie and fuck that bridge and I can't decide if I'm a hobo or fanciful and all the fucking songs I like will be about bicycles. All of them.

Some serious raver shit because I thought it was a rave.

I dressed like Lady Gaga because I am awful.

Tears streaking the dirt on my face because life is pretty hard right now.

Nothing, because it was a naked show.

Mutton at the Movies!

Mutton is at the movies. He snuck in to sleep. The first shift of ushers are long-term employees, oblivious to man such as Mutton sleeping in the back row, but the second shift is manned by high school kids, proud of their first job and their tiny scrap of authority. You can't just sit through two movies, if you only bought a ticket for one. You only bought a ticket for one movie, Mutton. You can't sleep here.

When Mutton was a teenager, and if he had worked in a movie theater, he would have gladly let someone who appeared to be homeless sleep in the back. Nam vet or old alcoholic, someone harmless. They didn't harm shit. Now, if the guy had started whacking it or yelling, he would have been asked to leave, but Mutton never would have made back-handed comments at the guy, even if he did think the man smelled like pee. Mutton had always picked up hitchers, smoked a doobie with them. He was always kind to animals.

Mutton, are you going to sleep? Hey!

When Mutton wakes up, there are three guys standing over at him saying “Hey! Junkie! You suck dick for coke?”

Mutton! These kids are fucking with you. They're asking you if the sixties were cool and what Woodstock was like! Did you do acid? Are you a crackhead? There are three of them. High school boys. In this haze, their faces are lit up like old statues in the ashen movie-light. You're pushed back into the corner, away from everyone. No one's even watching this movie. You weren't bothering anyone. Were you snoring?

Once, you went to this party. College party. Maybe ten years ago. You had come in behind some kids, after you had been in town a week or so. You thought this was Barry's house. He invited you over to play chess and drink a beer. You sit at the kitchen table. Mutton, you don't actually speak to anyone and ask if Barry's here. Why not? Are you shy?

The stereo is playing a song, repeats “This is how we do it.” Some girls in the corner start laughing. Their big bracelets swing on their wrists as they whisper through their beautiful mouths behind their hands, looking at you. They're talking like a wave, a joke is being shared and rising. You're wearing your big sunglasses and a jean jacket, like a popular professional wrestler of that time, Brett “The Hitman” Hart. A guy drinking beer out of a stone jar is asking you if you have the password. You look up, through your pink plastic lenses. You don't say anything. He waves his hand at you, come on, urging you to speak. You don't belong. He is very big and wearing a rugby shirt. His hair is tied back in a ponytail.

“Get the fuck out!” he screams and kicks your chair out from under you and you crash back on the kitchen floor and roll into the dog food dish, sending kibbles all over the floor. The room echoes with laughter. Everyone is bellowing--they've never seen anything so funny. You get to your feet and someone grabs the guy. He has his fist raised and ready to plunge into you like a piston, until you are gone. You don't look back as you get to the door. They all have money. They will all be shielded from making the kind of decisions you have made. They have been chosen. They are all saved.

So here, in the theater, you know enough to not respond to what they say. You and these kids are two different species. They will go to college and stay with their tribe of mean, pampered assholes who nonetheless rule this life. You can't be hurt, can't even really understand what they're saying and you don't know why you should be ashamed. But you can't stay. You know if you tried to fight, they'd relish beating your ass and then they'd call the cops and get you charged with assault.

So you push past them, step over a row of seats awkwardly, and go out the emergency exit and it's snowing outside, behind the theater, where you belong.

A Sampler

This classic parable was a crocheted reminder of God's presence, hanging in my grandmother's front room. I'll share it with you all today:

Jesus, I was on the beach and I saw a set of footprints, my own, because I was walking on sand and everything. And when my life was going fine, there were just my footprints. And then, when I had trials, as well as tribulations, I noticed a set of three footprints, which I don't understand, because I only have two feet and I cannot, for the life of me, think of what made the other footprint and I am deeply disturbed and scared.

Jesus said:

My son, there were only your footprints, because when things are going fine, I'm helping any one of almost seven billion people on the earth. And the extra footprint? When you were going through your toughest times, I strapped one of your legs to mine and we ran the three-legged race. And let it be known that, when you're down, I'm doing most of the work. Which I am more than capable of doing, but I just want you to know that you're lazy and it pisses me off. Why are you always at the beach?

Good Luck Mutt

I must have prayed for something over ten years that someone would watch The Great Piggy Bank Robbery with me (Neon Noodle! P-P-Pumpkin Puss!), that the same person would cock their head to hear the smashed gibberish that pours out of me and these opinions. That I could pick through their bins of stories and sore spots, or that, with telekinesis, underpants would be torn from their body! That's some goddamn witchcraft! And you read?

The falling propinquity gets to be a hurtful little string that gets plucked by anything. What was once a speeding car, driving past those receding bastard totems that would jump out and beat me stupid, were we not driving. We are not driving.

Life has turned into a scramble, like a little mouse does and the cats, clumsily charging, will be outwitted and I have no idea what they are, but they are pissed and huge and mean to eat me. But more of the same should not be harried and confused with impoverished, brothers and sisters. When at the bottom of someone's sight, just fly over them--the summation of this life being glory and no less. Little shreds that remain well-tended in place are the best ones preserved. I am now coming through louder, and of what has left, I am wearing what I was taught like a drooping coat crusted with badges that are names.

Morning in Another World

The flower pot on the patio of her apartment was filled with ashes and cigarette butts. She had three dishes, with the thought that simplicity would help her keep tidy, but they were sitting in a small, guilty pile in the sink.

She took a shower, absent-mindedly, and prepared and ate an omelet with tiny sausages on the side. Ate it off a magazine.

This was a somewhat magical world. She called a unicorn over to her window and stepped onto his back.

Whoosh!

Let me tell you the difference between this world and ours. By trekking through work and the banal, you were awarded fantastical prizes and privileges in this increasingly magical realm. At the end, it was like stepping off a boat you had suffered on, to land in a place of mystery and beauty. Believing in this possibility was a large part of making the humdrum everyone knew more palatable. The unicorn taxis, the water-spirits in the drinking fountains and werewolf hairdressers were all evidence that a better world was coming.

Our heroine would take the unicorn to get to her job, a shoe-store for the wealthy and uneasy to impress. His name was Fancycorn and he would let her off at a gas station for a few seconds if she needed something to drink before going in to her job, or some cigarettes. He wouldn't let her waste time, so if she, let's say, read a magazine before buying something, she could expect to find Fancycorn floating in the sky above the awning over the pumps, using the power of his magical horn, which, you should know, lit up and played spirited elven music when in use. To her, that was the sound of guilt. She would have to apologize to him to get him to come down, but she knew it was for her own good.

And off they would fly! Amazing!

[elven-style flutes heard]

Scummer's Strategic Reserve

Wesley and this awful guy, Crayon, who was always around, started some stupid shit. At first they collected seeds from their shaky bags of weed in a candy dish, and then, in the bathroom, cool rocks they found. I found a stash of old National Geographics packed away behind the couch.

Then it became dumpstered cookies and potato chips, shit that, under no circumstances, would it be tolerable for us to eat regularly. But there they were, in the far corner of the kitchen, a whole shitty treasurebox full.

Wesley was Suzie's brother. She had to move and he came up to take her place. This guy Crayon just started showing up, staying later and later, until he was installed on the couch. He said he was a shaman, but he was a real asshole. He just smoked Drum and watched TV all day. I think he was looking to get laid, too. We knew we'd have to get him out somehow.

The thing that did it was the corn syrup. These two stole some from the soda bottling plant out on the highway and somehow siphoned it into a half-keg, which they rolled back through the parking lot and under the fence that surrounded it. Some third party must have been involved, because they certainly didn't carry it here.

I was getting ready for work when they dragged it in. Yes, I had a job then. Shut up.

I heard alternating scrapes and whumps on the stairs, like they were dragging a sculpture or big speakers up the stairs. They got it through the door and were high-fiving. They kept talking about their "strategic reserve." You know, enough sugar to live off of. I think they were gonna put it in coffee and everything and thought we were going to be all for it. You know, 'Hooray, let's just eat a bunch of high-fructose corn syrup.'

When they told me what it was I told them to get it the fuck out of here. They were crestfallen. Crayon's stupid mohawk/rat-rail thing hung in his eyes like he was ashamed and he looked down, but dogs make the same face when you yell at them.

I got back from work. Mind you, I was gone for seven hours. The thing was tipped over and there was a slick of corn syrup all over the floor. The two of them were asleep on the couch, head-to-toe. The Nintendo was on and there was an empty bottle of Pappy Sam whiskey sitting there.

I roused them by screaming in their faces.

Now Wesley was a young one. He was eighteen and easily influenced. I could see how this type of life would appeal to him. His scummer friend could be no less than thirty and I always had him pegged for a deadbeat dad, a traveler-kid with warrants and someone who routinely burns up good faith like it was that brown, headache weed they loved, that probably cost them five cents or a crystal.

Ants were already swarming this thing and getting trapped. There was a ring of dead ones surrounding the globby puddle of it in the kitchen and a bunch more were struggling in futility to get free.

The deal was that someone else told them it was okay to keep it here for the day, one of the other roommates, Nicole. They tried to use a tap on it, like it was beer, but it wouldn't pump, so they took the tap off and poured it, from the keg. They had been mixing it with their whiskey and were quite impressed with themselves. They had made a jar of "Super-sweet Pepsi" which was labeled as such in the fridge. They had it propped on some National Geographics, under one side, so they wouldn't have to wait so long for it to pour. It tipped while they were drunk and asleep.

I told them to clean it up and they started throwing dirty towels onto it, like that was going to do anything. I told them to scoop it up with a dust pan and chuck it into the sink. I boiled a pot of water on the stove and told them to pour the water onto the corn syrup and get the rest of it it up that way. It had a taffy consistency at that point and was hardening still. I left, because if I had to look at them, I was going to just lose it. I drove out to a field and screamed in my car for the better part of a half hour.

When I came back, the entire floor was sticky and they were gone. The downstairs neighbor had left a note saying that water was leaking through his ceiling, everywhere. They had boiled pot after pot of water and poured it on their mess. It went into the heating vents in the floor. We had fucking corn syrup in our vents.

The next day there were yellowjackets everywhere. No one would go inside. Crayon was nowhere to be found and all his asshole friends in town were pretty tight-lipped about where he could be. I found Wesley at the laundromat and tried, as best as I could, to gently tell him that he was no longer welcome around here. He started crying and apologizing, but how much goodwill can you extend to someone like that? I was firm and as nice as I could be. His sister had been so sensible, so you know, I was trying to see the balance of it.

We all got evicted. It was nothing we could fight. We couldn't even go up there for two weeks to get our stuff out, because the pest-control guys had a hell of a time getting the wasps out.

Now every time I see ratty kids down by Safeway begging for change, with their fatigues and overalls, their sunburns and mangy saddle-bagged dogs or kittens tied to string-leashes, I look closely. If I see Crayon, I will destroy him. I might even go to Rainbow one year, to catch him, but I doubt I will. There are probably hundreds of him there that even the Rainbow Family can't deal with, a whole tribe of people hard-wired to haplessly dismantle everything.

Swamp Hag

Swamp Hag walked into the general store and the cascade of whispers that accompanied her up the road came through the door. She had the appearance of a vomitous burlap sack that was full of dead flesh. Her teeth, when she grimaced at passersby were horrible green pebbles.

The men by the feed barrels stopped playing strip poker and tried so hard not to blush, as the lumpy, lichenous, saddled curves of her body, under her rotten frock went back towards the ice chest. She undid the latch and grabbed two cases of beer. She grabbed some saltwater taffy and some pemmican, a free copy of Horse-coach Trader and took it up towards Dillard, the shop-keeper.

"Dillard," she croaked with her decayed breath, "you will charge this to my account."

Dillard frowned. The other items looked like pathetic little accessories to the two wooden crates of beer. It would be less conspicuous if she just bought the beer.

"Swamp Hag," Dillard said, "You have never paid your tab. I don't know why you persist in this vanity."

Such pert things were never said to the Swamp Hag. If she came into town, the people knew to placate her, to hasten her departure back to her accursed home.

The Swamp Hag looked him in the eye. Slime dripped from her hair. Dillard had wandered near her fence when he was a little sapling of a near-man and she had done for him what she had done for many of these miserable sucks of men. They would come back for further trysts, the ones that had been obviously marked and could not marry (they called this "Hagitis"), and to trade for Swamp Grog, the dangerous psychoactive liquor made from mold, bugs and swamp-water.

"Listen," the Swamp Hag said, "I am curdled and disgusting and I live in a goddamn swamp. And I drink a lot and I never asked anyone's pity."

Dillard started to wave his hands, that she should just leave.

The Swamp Hag continued. "But you know I relieved you of your boyhood and at that time, I put a hex on your precious little piece of flesh and if you or anyone else wants to deny I had them and show me disrespect, I will collect on that hex and it'll make that Hagitis you all chirp about look like a steak and a show at a ten-dollar whore house."

Dillard busied himself straightening out the counter. The men playing strip poker looked down at the table. The Swamp Hag snatched the cases of beer from under the other sundries, which landed on the floor. She walked out the door.