• Author
  • Untitled

    December 31st, 2007

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    Throttled awake by nightmares, these powerful dreams command my participation. Dreams of ridicule and exclusion. Nightmares of a severely practical nature. They descend upon me like latent fire and floodwater, frightening in their tangibility, their believability. I experience them fully and lie awake ruminating once again my precise role in this life. I ponder the nature of the nightmares, their purpose in my world. Have they been born to thrust me into some sort of action or inaction? Fear is a mechanism of creation, a shield against failure. My mind is sending me signals, frightening me out of this trap where ideas fall short, where indolence and stunted creativity are hell because the turning point is always right at my fingertips. Like a stutterer burdened to defend his life with a torturous oratory, the ideas clear and righteous in his mind, the words webs of quicksand on his lips.

    I tell myself to think of the nightmares as a safety net. They leech the sleep away and drain the mind of energy but at the same time resuscitate the deepest channels of recent creative void. This is having a new toy and no batteries to operate it. What results is a haggard presence in this world, a deep commitment unfulfilled, always searching for that next clear idea, that next deep sleep.

  • Dreams

    December 24th, 2007

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    I don’t know, doctor. Things just aren’t right. I think the overall problem is compounded by these dreams. 

    So you’ve been having dreams. What type of dreams? 

    Well …  I guess I really can’t describe them. I mean, I’ve never tried to describe them. I probably couldn’t even describe them to myself … 

    You can try here. Just relax, lie down. Close your eyes. Think of yourself as resting easily. Think of the world as black, your body melding into the blackness. Think of the universe as a giant sponge-like void. Think of yourself as water infiltrating the sponge. 

    Infiltrating the sponge? 

    Infiltrating the sponge. Try to control your breathing. Focus on your breathing. Slow. Deep. Easy. 

    This is helping. 

    I know. That’s what it’s supposed to do. I’m a doctor. Think of the world as a giant mound of ice. Think of yourself as a flame, melting into it. 

    Okay. 

    Now try to tell me about these dreams. 

    It’s like I’m in the future, I don’t know when. I’m married to some woman, but I never see her. There’s just this sort of implicit acknowledgment that I’m married to her. 

    You’re not married in the waking world? 

    I’m not. But I’m married in these dreams. 

    How often do you have these dreams? 

    Every time I try to sleep. 

    Are you having one now? 

    No. I’m not sleeping. I don’t think I’m sleeping. Am I sleeping? 

    Tell me about these dreams. 

    Well, there’s this woman. 

    You think you’re married to her. 

    Yes. And I think she’s plotting to murder me. I don’t know how I know this. I’m paranoid in my own home because I’m certain she’s trying to murder me. 

    Are there children around the house? 

    No. 

    What is the house like? 

    It’s just a house. 

    What does it look like? How many rooms does it have? Is it in the city or the country? 

    It’s the house I live in now. A two bedroom one-level in the suburbs. 

    And there’s this woman you’ve never seen that you think is your wife and she’s trying to murder you. 

    She hasn’t actually tried yet. But she’s plotting. I’m sure of it. This is really hard to explain. 

    Go on. 

    And so I lock myself in whatever room I’m in. In any room in the house. To keep her out. I go to the kitchen to cook something or get a drink of orange juice. I lock all the doors I can. There’s a hallway opening in the kitchen that has no door. I turn to face the opening, always within reach of some weapon. The kitchen is the safest even though it can’t quite lock me in completely. All sorts of instruments of death in the kitchen. One can always feel most at ease in a kitchen, even without a crazy wife plotting to kill them. 

    So she’s crazy. 

    I don’t know if she’s crazy or tall or fat. I’ve never met her. I say she’s crazy because crazy people plot. This is what crazy people do. 

    This isn’t true. But please go on about the dreams. 

    I always feel most vulnerable in the bathroom. I feel exposed. No deadly weapons in the bathroom to protect myself. Just a little razor I use for shaving. There are two doors, I lock them both tight. I can’t hear her walking or laughing or breathing but I know she’s there. I can feel her on the other side of one door or another, standing with her eyes closed, plotting. She’s waiting for me to come out of the bathroom because she’s not going in after me. She’s holding a knife. She’s very calm and patient. She will wait until I die just so she can kill me. 

    How do you know it’s a knife? 

    I just know. It’s a giant knife. It shines, even in the dark. Like it gives off a certain amount of light. 

    To be cut is the most invasive of violent acts. Body raped by steel. 

    I’m tired, doctor. 

    How do you leave these rooms in your dreams? How do you get up the courage to face whatever is on the other side of the door? 

    I don’t. That’s the thing. I wake up because I’m so frightened and tired. I’m tired of waiting to be killed. I’m tired because I wake up, because I have no courage to face her. Each time I try to sleep is a different room, same wife. I wake up still stuck in whatever room I’m in. 

    By not facing our fears we allow time to control us. 

    Sometimes I wake up and I’m holding something tightly. I’m clutching handfuls of bed sheets. I’m holding a book. The pages are creased and torn in my hands. One afternoon I woke up holding a knife that I must have got from the kitchen. I had no prior history of somnambulism. It was a huge knife. I could have killed myself in my sleep. 

    Dreams of violence and paranoia as inward manifestations of our primary urges.

    I always wake up sweating, dying of thirst. 

    Our brain matter absorbs the body’s nutrients and uses them to sustain our doom. 

    These dreams are in the future, doctor. I don’t know how I know. I just know. 

    The future frightens us. We cannot control it. We are fascinated by the violence around us. 

    I want to wake up, doctor. I want to sleep without being frightened all the time. I’m so tired. I want to live in a world where the future doesn’t matter, not even for a microsecond. I want to be able to dream peacefully, forget my backward flaws. I’m tired of stretching out on the crux of this world. I’d rather operate as a vigorous fixture of my own rules. 

    The world we know is created by us. It’s not the real world. It’s the world within the larger world. 

    I can’t sleep during the night because it’s too dark. I can’t sleep at day because the noise blinds me. 

    When we fail to mesh with the world we create, we lose all identity. 

    The strangest thing is that I’m deeply attracted to this woman. My wife who’s plotting to murder me. I see myself making love to her facelessness. She’s silent and holding a giant knife, the shiny point scratches my temple while we screw. 

    Desire is destruction. Our most primitive truth is not to reproduce, but to destroy ourselves. 

    I’m tired, doctor. 

    Every conflict forces us to either run or stay and fight. 

    I think of what type of offspring we would create. Me and this mad wife. I wonder if one night or day I will wake up and I’ll be on top of her, strangling. I won’t be able to disprove her existence. I wonder if our children will plot with her or against her. I wonder which of the forces of good and evil they’ll adopt. 

    Our identity lies in the liquid shape of our actions. 

    I’m tired, doctor. 

     We are the sum of our dreams. Take all the maddening irregularities and add them up. 

    I’m in the bathroom again. I’m locked in. 

    We cannot hide from the truth. 

    The walls are bare, doctor. Pure white. I smell gasoline. 

    Take all the lessons about life you’ve ever learned and watch them burn. 

    The mirror is rimmed with fire, doctor. 

    Our strongest moments of clarity reside in complete submission. 

    So much blood in the tub. 

    We see what we never thought we’d see when we simply allow it to take shape before us. 

    My throat is dry. I’m having trouble breathing. 

    When we are too afraid to kill ourselves we thrust our imaginations into guilt. 

    I’m bleeding, doctor. My throat. 

    Our lives flow away from us in pigmented thickness. 

    I’m tired, doctor. 

    We spend our entire lives speaking to ourselves. From idea to thought. From thought to language. 

    I’m dying, doctor. 

    Our voices carry eternally. They are the tokens we keep. They add substance to our memories. A whisper becomes a breeze in the cold night across the galaxy. 

    I think I’m falling asleep, doctor. 

    Death is a state of eternal subconscious activity. I think you’re cured. For now.

  • Holes

    December 12th, 2007

     

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    I killed the last drops of whiskey in my flask and reached over to the passenger seat for my little red beacon. I put it on the dash and flipped the switch. I didn’t need it, though. Around these parts people know me well enough to know that if I’m following them close enough for long enough I mean to pull them over. I hid the flask away in the darkness of the glove box, pulled out the .38 and hid that in my back pocket.

    The rusted white pickup in front of me slowed to a crawl and then stopped on the shoulder of Highway Six, a one-lane asphalt road and the only road in and out of our little desert town. I turned off the cruiser and took the keys out of the ignition and eased my way up to the young man in the pickup, my hand at my holstered Desert Eagle.

    Sweat had soaked completely through my Stetson and dripped from the lid. My khaki shirt was heavy with moisture, my badge leaning on my heart and glistening in the dry sun. The young man sat idly in the pickup.

    “Hiya, Randy” I said. “We got us a scorcher here, yes indeed.” Randy didn’t say anything. He looked straight ahead through his windshield and the heat vapors dancing on the hood of his truck. His knuckles were white from clutching the steering wheel. He was a good kid.

    “What’re ya doin out here, Randy?” I asked. “I mean, where you headed?”

    “Just drivin’, sheriff,” he said, and swallowed hard. “Nowhere in particulars.”

    “You mind steppin’ out of the vehicle for me, son?” I asked. It was a bold move, but I figured Randy wouldn’t question it. No one around these parts ever questions what I tell them to do. They trust me. I guess that’s the best part about being a sheriff out here. The only thing I ever have to worry about is getting re-elected, and I hardly even have to worry about that.

    Randy stepped out of the truck with his hands at his sides. I could tell he wanted more than anything to hide them in his pockets.

    “Now I’m gonna search you, Randy,” I said. “Don’t make any quick movements, or anything.” I patted his waist and pant legs and searched his ankles and then his back. He wasn’t carrying anything. His shirt was soaked through with sweat.

    “So,” I said, “What did you say you was doin’ out here, Randy?” He put his hands in his pockets and took them out just as quickly. He was jittery, almost like he was hiding something.

    “Just drivin’, sir,” he repeated, and dropped his head.

    “You wouldn’t be tryin’ to get out of town, would you, son?” I asked. A hot breeze ruffled his blond hair. “You wouldn’t be runnin’ from somethin’, would ya?”

    “No sir,” he said, looking me in the face. He could probably see his reflection in my sunshades. He shook his head in small sideways shudders. Somewhere off in the distance, a vulture dropped to the ground in a spiral.

    “Have a seat over there,” I said, pointing to the dirt shoulder behind his pickup, “I’m gonna search your truck.”

    “What’s this about, sheriff?”

    “Just have a seat, son,” I said kindly, and Randy did exactly as I told him.

    I walked around the front of the truck looking through the windshield as though something interested me. Randy watched my every move. I went around to the driver’s side and leaned in, not letting Randy see me pull the .38 from my pocket and place it under the seat. I let it sit there a minute and glanced back at Randy sitting on the hot asphalt. I reached over and opened the glove box and closed it, then dallied a little bit underneath the seat again.

    “Well, I’ll be doggoned,” I said, raising the .38 with the very tips of my fingers. Randy looked at it like he had seen it before. “What’s all this?”

    “It looks like a pistol, sheriff,” he said, and swallowed.

    “I believe it is a pistol, Randy,” I said, the sun burning the skin of my hands. “A .38. What’re you doing with a .38, son?”

    “I’m not doin’ anything with a .38, sheriff,” he said. “It ain’t mine.”

    “Well, it was in your pickup,” I said, dropping the pistol into my front pocket and looking back into the cab of the truck. Randy just sat on the road squinting in the sun, his hands clasped in front of him. He cleared his throat.

    “That’s because you just put it there, sheriff,” he said. A lone cloud drifted over the sun, blanketing the desert in pale shadow.

    “Pardon me, son?” I said, tilting my head. I took a step toward him.

    “I said the pistol was in my pickup because you just put it there, sheriff,” he said. “You know I never carry a gun.” He shifted his weight uncomfortably on the burning ground.

    The cloud passed and the sun shot back into the sky. I hadn’t expected him to say what he had, but I pressed him anyway.

    “If I were you I’d watch my tone,” I said. “You’re speaking to a citizen of the law.”

    “I know who I’m speaking to,” he said, his eyes narrowing.

    I kept silent for a moment, thinking of my next move. I wanted to scare the kid, and he was obviously scared. But I hadn’t expected him to handle everything so well. Suddenly the weight of my clothes, my belt, my hat, all of it was too much to bear in the heat. I was tired. My mouth was dry, my lungs were melting. I knew what I had to do, but I just didn’t know if I’d have the strength.

    “You know,” I said, standing in front of Randy, looking down at him, my hands on my hips, “Tracy Cavanaugh was shot to death last night with a .38.” Randy didn’t say anything. “And I’d be willing to bet that a ballistics test would prove that this here pistol,” I said, patting the .38 in my chest pocket, “is the guilty little party.”

    Randy looked up at my face, the sun beating him down, and then he dropped his gaze to the pavement between his legs. He was looking for something, maybe strength, maybe some sort of cowboy courage that only exists in movies or books, or in real cowboys.

    “And I’d also be willing to wager you was leaving town, Randy. But see, you can’t run from the law, son. And I happen to be the law in these parts and guilty men can’t outrun me. I been chasin’ ‘em down longer than you been alive.”

    “That’s not so, sheriff,” he said. “And you know it.”

    “I know that you was the last one seen with her last night, before she got killed.”

    “I walked her home from Dora’s tavern, that’s true,” he said. “But I wouldn’t ever kill her. She was my friend. We talked the whole way home about how she wanted to leave town on account of her bein’ afraid for her life.”

    “What was she so afraid of in our little town, Randy?”

    “She said she was afraid of you, sheriff.”

    I dropped my gaze as another cloud shrouded the sun. I hadn’t thought this encounter would be so difficult. But I was willing to take it as far as I had to.

    “She said you been touchin’ her and things for a long time, sheriff. Since she was just a baby. She said the last time you did it would be your last because she was gonna kill you dead herself.”

    I took a deep breath and drew it out long, listening to the hiss of air escaping my lungs. I noticed my teeth were gritting hard. The sun lit up the blighted earth again, burned holes on my body.

    “That just shows how stupid you are, son,” I said, staring him down, trying to break him. “You let a dumb girl like Tracy Cavanaugh warp your simple little mind with lies just so she could get what she wanted from you? Now look where you are. You’re alone, son. Like you always will be.”

    I turned my back on Randy and spat on the highway, listening to the warm breeze shift in the canyon. I turned back around.

    “You didn’t even fuck her, did you, Randy? You never even tasted that sweet little bitch, I bet you didn’t. I bet you whimpered like a coward when that little slut made her move on you. You didn’t know what to do. You’re just a stupid boy, son. You ain’t no man at all.”

    “Don’t say that, sheriff.”

    “You probably couldn’t even get your little pecker up, could you, son? You probably ran and cried like a baby when you saw her sweet little bits.”

    “Shut up,” he said, infuriated, and started to stand, hands clenched at his sides.

    “She wasn’t even that good, boy,” I said. “She wasn’t nothin’ like your mama, all ass and juicy as all hell. Your mama was a real trophy, son. Your mama was the rose garden on the other side of the world.”

    Randy stood up and stepped toward me. His face was the color of blood.

    “Easy, son,” I said, and put my hand out. My other hand was at the holstered Desert Eagle at my belt. “There’s a lot of holes in this here desert. Many of ‘em I dug myself. Don’t make me dig another one today. Not in this heat.”

    He took a step back but he was still angry. A few veins pronounced themselves in his neck. His chest heaved with quick, angry breaths.

    “Here’s what we’re gonna do,” I told him. “Just turn around and put your hands up in the air. I’m going to put the handcuffs on you so’s we can talk like adults. That’s all it is, two grown men talking on the side of the highway. There’s a way we can both get out of this with our clothes on and our hands clean.”

    He looked at me severely, with something like hatred, and didn’t move at all. I gritted my teeth and stepped toward him.

    “God dammit, son, do what I say!”

    Randy turned slowly around and put his hands above his head. The poor, stupid boy. I walked up to him like I was going to cuff him, but instead I pulled the .38 from my pocket, put it to his temple, and blasted his memories into the hot desert air. I wiped my prints from the gun and applied his to it, and then I looked over the scene to make sure it was clean enough. I walked back to my patrol car to call Ned, the deputy back at the station.

    “Ned, you copy?” After about thirty seconds Ned answered. He sounded like he’d been sleeping at the desk again.

    “G’head, sheriff.”

    “I got bad news, Ned. Randy Parker just done shot himself.”

    “Where at, sheriff?”

    “Just off the Six, past mile marker one-twelve,” I said. “I pulled him over for speedin’ and he was actin’ jittery. I had him step out the car, you know, to see if he’d been drinkin’, and he walked behind his pickup while I searched it for booze. Pretty soon I heard a shot. Scared the bejeezus outta me, Ned. He did it with a little snub-nosed .38. I don’t know why, the poor bastard.”

    “You say a .38, sheriff?”

    “Yeah, Ned. Suicided himself with a .38 right on the side of the road. Damned saddest thing.”

    “Tracy Cavanaugh was killed with a .38, right?”

    I paused.

    “Well, I’ll be go to hell,” I said. “That’s right.”

    “That might explain it,” he said. “I’ll send the cavalry.”

    I switched off the radio and took off my Stetson in the shade of the car. I almost smiled because having to dig another hole in this God awful heat probably would have killed me.

  • Psalm

    December 2nd, 2007

     

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    “Surely you must be mistaken,” he said. “No one could possibly remember the moment of his or her birth.”

    “Well, for me, it wasn’t exactly a singular moment. More like an all-day affair,” she said, sipping her coffee. “And I remember it clearly, but in snatches, like stop-motion flashes in time. Sort of like a surreal film where certain frames are paused for dramatic effect.”

    “But how could that be?” he asked. “Human beings aren’t equipped with that type of memory. A newborn doesn’t have the capacity to assess perceptions and store them. This has been proven.”

    “Proven by who? A team of neurologists? A psychologist somewhere?” They continued to stroll through the neighborhood and the late morning shine submitted to a dull gray winter afternoon. Her gloved hands held the cup of coffee like a promise. Cars smashed together on the nearby highway, a violent resonance of shattered glass and twisted metal off in the distance.

    “And even if it were true that newborn babies have at best only a slight ability to remember things,” she said, “are you saying that in this vast universe of strange occurrences and scientific anomalies, that it would be impossible for at least one child to win the memory lottery? How can you know anything as an absolute? Certainly you can entertain the idea that exceptions are always made.”

    He didn’t say anything. They walked shoulder to shoulder beneath the giant elms, their eyes focused downward, stealing truths lying in the cracked pavement.

    “I mean, come on. You’re smarter than that.”

    “What makes you so sure you’re remembering your birth?” he asked. “How certain are you that these things you’re experiencing aren’t simply mental constructions, fabrications, some sort of cognitive detritus, equally as true as any other memory you have? Our memories change over time, they become distorted with the added stimuli of our lives. How can you be sure that what you think is a memory is not just a mish-mash of subconscious pieces, a mental scrapbook of all the dreams you’ve ever had?”

    They walked past a small pond, the surface glazed and brittle with ice. Geese walked about in the frigid air, their nostrils emitting tiny plumes of steam. A large house beyond the pond leapt into flames, orange and blue fingers reaching upward past a black curtain of smoke. Alarms sounded.

    “I can’t. But that holds true with every memory I have. It’s the same with you. How can you be sure the memory you have of playing basketball in grade school really ever happened? You can’t. The actual moments we remember are gone forever, never to be true again, their facsimiles suspended in time by our ability to process and store them as separate events. All we have are archives, broken timelines, sensory input with specific associations. It’s a chain of associations. Our mind finds patterns, and if there are no patterns, the mind makes up its own. Obviously, my mind has associated something with my day of birth, and I’ve been the recipient of some strange sensory phenomenon of late.”

    “That still falls quite short of a valid explanation.” He took his hands from his coat pockets and held them in front of him, trying to shape his words with them. “The human brain isn’t mature enough at birth to make associations, to store data. This must be an absolute. I can easily consider the idea of an adult having a flash of nightmarish clarity from their past, maybe even as early as the birth process. But it couldn’t possibly be more than that. To remember the entire birth event would be to ingest tremendous amounts of data, incomprehensible amounts to a newborn human being. Imagine the rush of stimuli a baby encounters as they exit the womb. Imagine how rapidly the brain is working to analyze the sudden flood of data, the light, the sounds. Imagine everything you’ve ever experienced suddenly radically changed. That’s what being born would feel like. It would feel like becoming something entirely different in a totally strange and chaotic environment.”

    Exactly,” she said, looking at him, her eyes wide. “That’s exactly how I remember it. The world as a five-dimensional cubic sphere. Sensory overload. Madness.”

    Children ran after each other and screeched playfully in the schoolyard to their left. A large jet broke apart in the gray sky above and began a wide-arching fiery descent to the earth.

    “I’m not calling you a liar,” he said, looking at her. “But I just don’t see how it’s possible. I mean, that’s a pretty impressive feat, being the one human in history who can remember the moment of their birth.”

    “Like I said, I wouldn’t encapsulate it into just one moment,” she said, their stroll leading them to the frozen banks of a creek. They paused and stared at the soft rushing water, listening to the dripping flow. Snow and ice collected in the crooks of the water. An old woman with deep recessed circles around her eyes sat on the far bank, bleeding from her nose, staring up at the sky.

    “Okay, so it was a lasting event,” he said. “In any case, that makes you a pretty special human being. Did I ever tell you about my friend Georgia? The woman with the artificial heart?”

    She shook her head.

    “Well, Georgia was born with a rare heart condition. She almost died at birth and surely would have, were it not for the ingenuity of her delivery doctor. She told me his name and I can’t remember it now, but he was apparently an amazing man. Georgia was born and her heart was failing and this doctor immediately turned the delivery room into an impromptu surgery ward. He actually performed the procedure himself.”

    “Wow.”

    “Yeah. So anyway, this doctor practically saved Georgia’s life right as she was born. He got her heart in working order so that her parents could take her home after a few months, but her health was still very delicate and she was under strict hospital supervision throughout her infancy. She wasn’t given a decent chance to survive into adolescence without some sort of miracle procedure or something.” He paused and stared into the current. A parade of screaming emergency vehicles sped past them and disappeared up the highway ramp. He watched them and waited for the commotion to settle. They began walking again.

    “When Georgia was ten, her heart started failing her. She had rigorous therapy sessions to try and strengthen the heart, but it was just too weak. Her parents went broke enlisting the help of these world-renowned specialists that couldn’t do anything for Georgia other than recommend experimental and dangerous procedures, one of which was this project a few graduate students at MIT had been working on, a project called, “Project Athena,” obviously named after the Greek goddess. These MIT students had basically created this artificial heart which functioned primarily as a computer, telling itself how to adapt to whatever circumstances the body commanded. It was really an amazing invention, and should have won the Nobel Prize that year, but that’s another story.

    “Anyway, Georgia was dying and her parents were desperate and they enlisted the help of these MIT students and succumbed to the mercy of Project Athena. They had little hope, but somehow Georgia survived the three-day procedure. Her body actually took to the digital device, didn’t reject it. She recovered, and the whole thing was ruled a medical miracle.”

    They walked through the concrete tunnel beneath the highway, cars and trucks thundering past above their heads. A nearby explosion rumbled the ground, the walls of the tunnel trembling. They watched specks of dust shake loose from the cracks in the tunnel wall and fall to the ground.

    “So the idea is, this little girl who wasn’t even supposed to survive birth has somehow defeated the odds yet again. Georgia ended up living into middle age, the little computer in her chest still ticking away like new. It’s really an amazing story.”

    She doesn’t say anything, waiting for him to connect the analogy.

    “When she almost died as a girl, she had these visions,” he says. “She said she could see a bright light, but it wasn’t exactly white. At least that’s how she remembered it. She said the light was too bright to be white, or any other color for that matter. She said the whole experience was like being born, even though she couldn’t really say what being born was actually like.”

    “Interesting,” she said, discarding her empty paper cup into a waste basket overflowing with identical cups. “Death as birth. How Eastern.”

    “That’s what I thought, but Georgia said I was missing the point. She said it wasn’t about birth or death, or even life. It was about the transitory nature of our souls, like the idea of moving to different cities, but instead of cities, we’re moving into different realms of consciousness, of cognitive existence.”

    “Weird,” she said. “Is Georgia still alive?”

    “No,” he said. “She died in a car accident three years ago. Killed by a drunk driver.”

    “Damn,” she said, and they were back at campus now, skateboarders and bicyclists stopped eerily still and lining the curbs, their heads tilted back, eyes held vacantly upward. Automobiles sat empty in the middle of the street, their owners standing in the open mouths of their car doors, looking toward the heavens. A giant red mushroom cloud swelled in the sky above them all, a luminous, foreboding and entirely beautiful phenomenon.

    “I’ll see you later?” she said.

    “Okay,” he said, and walked away from her, smiling, feeling somehow nourished by her presence, as if he would encounter the remainder of the day as nothing more than a simple passing rush of stimuli, the details superfluous and redundant.

  • Fountainhead of love

    October 31st, 2007

    I lie wide awake and rapt by the art form, dizzied by repose. Your body smooth and unzipped wide open by my roving finger, our intimate moments shared without the burden of language, pasts suspended behind us and we don’t dare honor them. It’s a sacrilege to speak, to spoil the sanctity of the tracing motion. Our attention lives hushed in unison somewhere in ridged fingertips, in sullied navels empty but filled with shared moments of raw disregard. Everything we don’t know doesn’t matter, it gets thrust into void. Truth lies in sensory input, in the gentle whisper of the candle at bedside, in the oil on your glowing skin, in the slow rise and fall of your chest. I remember you from a dream.

    It seems I need you to prove my own existence, untangled from you to the fluttering light of the flame, I feel exposed to tragedy, tires peeling past on the concrete outside the window, life exists out there and it is cold, you turn your head and your eyes are easy, reassuring, the stars are aligned, I’m hungry again, to keep this moment packed away, wrapped in little plastic bubbles made of air, slow motion of the will in time performing tricks in my mind, nothing else matters.

    I have orange hair and yet I live for you, in this moment I live for you. Perhaps in my next life I’ll be less poetic, more practical, perhaps I’d rather die slowly, alarmingly, and no one will remember me, I see myself in the reflection of your nakedness, I love what I see.

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