el you see kay

It was you who made me start to believe

in bad luck

when I would show up late for work

with no socks 

because i was looking for a clean pair,

or dirty socks

because i had found a dirty pair.

They had to be the same

because you said so.

And then there were the street signs and telephone poles

that could not split our hands

apart when we walked,

so i would walk sideways
to your side

making a fool of myself

--my hands and feet scattering to the orbit of your hempisphere,

at times to make you laugh

and others to make sure you love me.

And i would rather not see my reflection

than to carry those years of it broken

by the wind

or another ending lease and a rocky Uhaul.

My knees still raise high above the train tracks,

and my breath still holds past graveyards.

And i know why

i put myself through this spectacle;

it’s because i believe it all

because it comes true,

all of it,

not when you leave,

but certainly after.

Razor Dreams

Okay, so there’s this dream, okay, and it spits in your face every day, in traffic lights and snow storms and air conditioning, and it spits all over your face every single day and you choke on the green grass and the other sides and stupid euphemisms that leak from your cortex, dribble down the two accordion disks of your spine and plop onto your stale, stale tongue. The grass is greener on the other side, or a soft gold, but anyway, over there, where it all is, that poltergeist of a dream sits on a pink and green lawn chair with a flip-flop tan on each foot, and from that lawn chair, with its flippy-floppy feet sprawled all the way out into the white sand, sand as warm as your insides, that poltergeist dream can see its face in the reflection of each perfectly pedied toenail poking out from the white, warm sand, shining bright like the sun above, which literally—LITERALLY— wears big, black RayBans because everything on the other side, over there, where it all is, is that fucking cool. It’s all out there, with the green-gold grass and the other sides, and the unbuttoned shirts and salty lips and SPF-8’s and glistening baby oil, baby, and all those avocados in lieu of mayonnaise and oxidizing apple slices can be eaten in the shade of a palm tree.

 And oh, the palm trees, because they are so luxuriously indigenous out there, how they can be seen for miles, so indigenously, along median strips in perfect equidistance from each other, so naturally, and in all shapes and sizes, from comically oversized pineapples to skinny two-story bellyscratchers of bleach-blue sky and everything, everything smells like tomorrow and nothing exists of yesterday unless it’s vintage. That poltergeist dream has a name, Lance Razore, and albeit Jhonny Columnist with his scarf-in-summertime skeptical speculations, it’s his real name, and goddammit! doesn’t that name sound sharp (pun) and edgy (intended), and everything that someone with an unbuttoned shirt and a 24-hour five-o’clock shadow would want?  L. Razore, turning the world over and shaking loose the change from its pockets, hoarding all those important phone calls and TMZ cameos and freshly apricot-skinned women that dangle and fall into the off-pink bed sheets of a kingsized Tempurpedic, four hours after a quick five-and-a-half $9 appletinis, sweet and sour and strong, and they don’t have olives because olives are so-o gro-oss, and they have those icky pit things.

It’s another morning, early, the sun not quite finished with its second cup of coffee and still wiping away the crusty clouds of dawn. The wind caresses the white cotton curtains dangling from the window frames, and outside and inside, the wind mixes gently with yawning mouths and coughing coughs.  It’s that certain chilling warmth where only a thin layer of bedsheet is needed for such a sibilant, soft, and cool-in-both-senses-of-the-term wind. 

It’s a Tuesday or a Wednesday, or three or four mornings after Clay Primiasma’s third or fourth thirty-third birthday downtown last Saturday, but a good portion of the party had continued up until this moment, or just a few hours before, when everyone finally passed out wherever they were standing when it seemed like a proper moment to pass out. 

Bodies littered the floors and couches and the deck out back, as Lance stepped over the party debris, close to half-quietly, a one-hundred percent effort of full concentration, but he couldn't shake the fact that his head was screaming like a thousand colic babies with megaphones.  In a primitive, mental grunt of globby semiotic association, he asked himself: Where is my/a goddamned lighter?  

The goddamned lighter, it was just the first item on a long list of Where-is-my-Goddamned's?.  The list reads as follows--Where is my Goddamned: a) Cell phone? b) Wallet? c) Goodies? d) Car keys? e) Actual car? f) etc.?  All of these, including the etceteras, were replacable, all something worth worrying about tomorrow, whenever that comes, or today, if it never leaves.  Right now, he had one real focus--he needed a lighter, a goddamned lighter.  Even if (a) G/god did damn this highly saught-after lighter, Lance made a deal with himself that he would go to the deepest depths of damnation to find it, a lighter, one, just one lighter, a goddamned lighter, he would go there and battle all the demons and the fires and the pitchforks and the worst imaginable things that one experiences in the underworld, because right now the worst thing he can think of is not having a lighter.  He would flip over the smoldering rocks, traverse the bubbling lava of Styx, suffocate that three-headed dog, Ceberus or something, squeeze through the fiery gates of Hades/Hell/whatever, walk straight up to that ugly, hoofy man, the main man himself, the taskmaster of torment, the patriarch of pain and punishment, the last laugh, the materialized result of the shoulda-woulda-coulda's, El Jefe, the boss, that guy, and Lance would stand there at the fiery throne, handsome and messy and wearing Prada, surrounded by minions and demons and slaves and ghosts and ghosts of slaves, and he would stick out his hand and demand that the head honcho of horror hand over that little handheld plastic spark machine.  Not only would he receive the lighter, but they would exchange business cards.  Lance promised himself he would do this, he knew he would, all of it, and it could be done as long as hell was within arm's length of where he stood.  

He looked around at all the beautiful people, ugly, the way they lay like rag dolls, and there on a coffee table, next to all the ashes missed from the full ash tray, all the magazines and black wood, rested a yellow lighter.  Close enough, he thought.  

Now he needed a cigarette.

****

Maslow woke up alone, next to his fiancé.  Or maybe it should it be: Maslow woke up next to his fiancé, alone.  She was sleeping soundly and he was soundly awake.  Nothing new, nothing was ever new.  The growingly-antagonistic red glare in the dark from the corner of the room shined skinny and digital: 5:56.  Each morning was the same, waking up with the mild relief of him somehow 'beating' the alarm clock to the punch--just knowing there is an opportunity for four more minutes of slumber seemed like a temporary win--followed by the mild disappointment of it still being another day.  Each day seemed tagged with an expiration date--each day was stale bread, bad milk, bruised bananas, leaky batteries, a sad-blue, a faded tattoo.  He watched the numbers change in slow motion on the clock, fabricating the imaginary tick-tock's in his head, their echoing like an army of gongs.  

And there they were, she and him, together, but for him, apart, together alone, together a million miles away from each other in the same bed, him a slave to his own head, digesting irrational nuances, neurotic and anxious, self-phobic, stretched thin and feeding on his own mental paroxysms of self-doubt and something else unrecognizable to the word-arsenal of 'feelings'.  She was quite the opposite, simple from head to toe, her feelings seemed to fit perfectly into little shoe boxes and stacked quaintly and happily in an order that fit accessibly inside the closet of her heart.  She was content.  He was stale.  Maybe.

Because of their opposite natures, they seemed to meet in the middle of each other's preferences.  For him, everything seemed average, vanilla, and for her, she was content, a perfect environment for the zygote stages of an American Dream.  The first step was on the way, to get married.  They found themselves suspended in average mediums, watching average shows, with average conversation which eventually lead to average sex.

She had no idea.

He had dreams the night before that he couldn't remember.  He rolled over next to his fiancé and put his arm around her.  She woke up and kissed him half on his lips and put her head back on the pillow.  He liked that, the imperfect kiss, and in fact there were lots of things that he liked about their relationship.  He liked the comfort, the obvious comfort, the ease, the doting, her efforts to make him happy on the outside, her ability to deal with his meltdowns, her unconditional dedication, the mildly jealous looks he would get from other men walking with her when she dressed up.  She was very pretty, beautiful even, and he liked that, too, her chalky chestnut eyes, her wide smile and her jawline handsome jawline.  She was, in the grandest of senses, what others called a catch.  

He had dreams the night before.

Slow Roast

I had some chicken in the fridge that was about to go bad.  I didn't have any BBQ, so I hastily put a can of pepsi into the crockpot with the chicken, and then some Greek liqueur Lyle gave me.  It smelled like licorice.  Being a fan of neither liqueur, liquor nor licorice, my actions don't make much sense.  Part of me had become tired of looking at the bottle, while the other part of me thought that there wasn't enough liquid in the pot.  (I'm new to this, but why would you or anyone put chicken stock into a crockpot of chicken--to make the chicken taste more chickeny?  I also didn't use oil because I didn't want to fry it in fat.  Then again, Pepsi is electric deer piss, so yeah.)

What I thought had been a fearless whim turned into an unpalatable impulse.  I tried to cover up the smell, and hopefully the flavor, with bay leaves.  I left the chicken on slow roast and came back twelve hours later.

When I returned the whole house smelled like an old rum and coke.  I was famished, so I took a bite anyway, thinking it wasn't so bad.  It was a little bitter, but whatever.  I piled a couple large spoonfuls of chicken into a tupperware container and left for work.

After about thirty minutes of eating my chicken in my cubicle, I realized how I felt a little warm around the cheeks.  I couldn't concentrate on my work.  I felt light headed and my nose smelled my breath, which was the smell of the chicken, and inherently, the smell of a drunk dude at work.  

I couldn't have been buzzed, could I?

I looked up "slow cooking with alcohol" on Google, only to find an article that read "Five Common Mistakes People Make with Slow-Cooking (sic)."  There it was, info on how only fifteen percent of alcohol would burn in a slow cooked environment.

The rest of the day was really weird.

Paco's Cough Syrup

Paco's Cough Syrup

Paco used to drink a bottle of cough syrup every day.  And sometimes, on ultra boring Friday nights, or even deviant Thursday mornings, Cole Rose would drink one with him.  Paco told Cole that when he would drink cough syrup, sometimes he, Paco, would see God.  And not just a vision of God, either, but actual God.  When this happened, Paco would look at God and, at the top of his lungs yell, "Fuck you, God!"

Cole said that cough syrup gave him a headache.  He could only drink it once in a while.  He didn't understand why Paco liked it so much.  Paco said a bottle only cost $5.49, and what was weed, like twenty bucks?  A week of cough syrup costs the same amount, Cole would argue.  Paco would always respond in saying it's not that hard to steal your own.  He told Cole that, listen, he wished he smoked more weed, much more, but he didn't really like reality anymore.  

Cole said Paco kept drinking cough syrup, and it "disassociated" him.  Cole said he's disassociated, too, but not as much.  He then said that Paco jumped off a bridge recently and laid on the ground for three or four days before anybody found him.  It was really bad, Cole said, and he didn't know if Paco was paralyzed or not.  He said Paco was now reading a lot of Carl Jung, however, and you need fingers for that.

We were sitting around my living room.  Cole had a large scab on his forehead.  He asked me why it felt like he had an arrow pressing into his forehead.  I asked him if it was just the scab, but Cole said no, "I feel that in a different place."  Then Cole started rapping.

I couldn't get Paco out of my head when I heard that he had jumped off a bridge.  What bridge could it have been?  How had he survived?  How high was the bridge?  What was his condition now?  

I wondered if it was the same bridge that my teacher had jumped from years earlier.  I remember when his problems came out, my teacher's, and I remember the very rapid, very public downfall.  For years his problems would cross into the shallows of community conversation, between parents, students, newspapers, family functions, aunts and uncles whom were also teachers--everyone knew his problems, so it wasn't much of a surprise when we heard he had jumped off a bridge.   The news was alarming, nevertheless; however, it was also a relief to know that he and others were no longer suffering.  Whether it was the insurmountable years of legal issues that caused him to leap, his anchoring alcoholism, or his irrevocable predilection for minors, boys mainly, he jumped off that bridge that divides my home county from where I live now.  

I remember when I was little, I used to imagine what it would feel like to free fall, like a raindrop, but I could never imagine hitting the ground--that idea wouldn't even cross my mind.  But now every time I drive to my father's house in Woodbine, I cross into my home county and picture the falling body of my teacher beneath me, falling in a dream world beneath my feet.  I still can't imagine his body hitting the ground.

Anyway, a railroad track runs along a tributary of the Patapsco, probably ten stories beneath the bridge, right between Howard and Baltimore County.  If there is a moment to pull your eyes off the highway, you can glimpse at the tree tops below.  

It had been a weird few weeks when I was hanging out with Cole, but maybe it was just the winter.  We tried playing music together, but we were always too fucked up.  It was around that same time when someone found David Pomp laying decrepit in some bushes behind his friend's house.  I think he laid there for hours.  His friend said David went on the roof to smoke a cigarette--they were drinking lots of Kentucky Gentleman--but after waiting long enough to wonder, his friend went upstairs and climbed out onto the roof to check on him, finding in a perfect line David's shoes, phone and wallet, all lined at the edge of his rooftop.  When he looked over the edge, he saw a homeless man pulling David's broken body out from the bushes along the pavement.  Everyone was screaming for help, except David, obviously.  His blood was spread like a comet tail along the ground; and there was blood on the bricks of the wall, and on David.  They took him to the hospital and immediately performed spinal surgery.  When David finally came to, he had to tell everyone what happened.  The hardest part is that he didn't know what happened.  He had no answers for landing on the wintery ground three stories below, behind those bushes, whether he had slipped drunkenly, or something worse.  He didn't know what compelled him to fall, though 'fall' may not be the correct choice of word, especially when hovering above all of us was a very painful and black truth; it was swirling and gleaming and shooting sparks.  Even David knew it was there, the truth above our heads, that we could all put ourselves in that place again, that exact moment on that rooftop where he was smoking a USA Gold one minute, and the next week-long minute explaining why there is no feeling in either of his legs.  He had to tell us, "I don't know if I tried to kill myself."

Paco had a similar experience--he doesn't know if he tried to kill himself, either.  He doesn't know how he got to the bridge, nor the edge of the bridge, but he does remember falling.  He felt his head hit something as his feet hit the shallow water.

He said that when he came to, a while after he had hit the ground, that even though he was gasping in pain, there was a wet leaf stuck to his face.  It started to rain.  He confirmed that he was not dead.  At first, he didn't know why he should even be dead, but a few moments later it all made sense--if he jumped off that bridge then he should be dead, or at least hurt very badly.  He confirmed that he was hurt very badly.  It took all he could to roll over in the shallow water.  He crawled as much as he could out of the water and onto the pebbly shore.  He laid there motionless until the next day when it started to rain again, but much harder than the day before.  He spent the portion of that storm crawling to the bridge.  He doesn't remember waking up after that, but he remembers the next day being covered in flies.  He wondered about his death and how he would die.  He agreed with himself that he would probably die of starvation because there was no one down there.  That's when a couple in their twenties arrived.  

Paco says his love for cough syrup started after his first meltdown.  He says he has always felt himself going crazy, but he has always wished to be actually crazy so he wouldn't know it was all happening anymore. He's only now in the process of going crazy, but he's not actually crazy, at least not anymore, not like when was actually actually crazy, before the DXM and the cough syrup and the Triple-C's, back when he had his first manic breakdown.  

Paco told his parents that he thinks his first manic episode was caused by ingesting too much LSD at one time.  But it could be anything, he says, which is a shame because he loves LSD except for losing his mind.  He says LSD pushed him towards an understanding with Kenny Rogers, or at least his lyrics, "I just stopped by to see what condition my condition was in."  It was shame, the meltdown.  He said the world got heavy and pushed the heavens onto him.  He passed out in his bedroom and woke up seeing trails, more and more trails, that he thought about Kenny Rogers and then immersed fully into a blackout.  His blackout lasted an entire week until he woke up hearing his girlfriend's voice in a hospital room.  He was forced to stay in the psychiatric ward for a month and a half, returning home to his girlfriend's request for a "break."  It wasn't even really a break, he said, but a break up.  He was depressed for months.  His life continued like that, until one day he and his friends were looking for some pot, so, in a hasty attempt to substitute anything with anything, they bought some Corcidin Cough & Cold.  He tripped hard in his mother's basement, fully understanding the unlimited integrity of T-Rex's Electric Warrior.  After that, cough syrup became his remedy, his combatant to the various psychoactive drugs the medical world put him on for his mania.


Under the bridge, he asked the young couple to call 911, but they didn't have a phone.  They offered him some heroin, but he declined.  He said he couldn't roll over to do it.  They wished him luck and continued into the woods.  He said thanks.  It wasn't until the next day that an extreme bicyclist found Paco under the bridge.  He has no idea what happened after that.

Paco walks with a limp now.  Actually, he walks sideways, or almost sideways, as if someone tried to snap an unpeeled banana at the middle.  He follows his feet carefully as they walk forward, his spine rearward, to the right a tad, pushing him back--as if an invisible limbo stick hung permanently at the center of his rib cage and he was forced into an eternity of avoiding it.  He walks as if the clouds are pulling him towards them in a magnetic field that does not reach his feet.  His feet are his engine, his wheels and his periscope.

From his halfway house, Paco dreams of being homeless again.  He was homeless three or four times, he thinks, and he loved it.  He dreams of playing lead guitar in a punk rock band.  He wants to be the singer, too, like Fat Mike from NOFX.  He wants to write a book about all of his experiences, and be an actor in some movies.  He wants to drink more cough syrup and smoke crack like when he was homeless.  He used to drink a bottle and read books at the library until the effects kicked in.  He would walk to a park and watch the world from his pineal gland.  He says it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society, just like Jiddu Krishnamurti says.  You just have to know your own condition.

heaven

to me, heaven wouldn’t have to be so perfect. it can have sadness, or at least not be without poignance.  or maybe it should encourage the whole range of emotions you feel the most--or all of them.

what if heaven started with your music library, all of them, the entirety of the music you’ve ever collected.  you get to listen to each song once, and cleanse and think and cry and remember, but you only get to listen once.  and then you have to listen to library all over again, and that’s it, heaven, all the music in the world over and over again at the end of your life.  iTunes always says the total amount of time your music would add up to, those would be the years you live in heaven, until you become infinity years old.

or the years could be turned into seasons.  summer is your music library, autumn is your poetry, spring is the art that has inspired you, and winter will be all the stories you’ve read.

only until recently have i felt that the afterlife, or a place like heaven, these places would be boring.  i have never known how to balance out the idea of meddling with something that is everything i could ever want, but i've always felt compelled to defy this idea.  it is only until now that i realize art is where i could live forever.

A Turtle's Existentialism

El Existencialismo de la Tortuga 

Sometimes I can't tell if my turtle just wants to call it quits.  This would be ironic, its having another five or six decades to plod through, minimum, but I can't help wondering if my turtle is satisfied with living.

It just sits there, ever underwater, beneath a big, fake rock, surrounded in a vulgar milieu of rigid, plastic plants and a bumbly pirate theme of sunken treasure--a treasure chest which bursts with bubbles on one end of the tank while a skull (adorned with a pirate hat) rests agape on the other.  And what could truly mock a longing for death like a skull, la calavera itself, in costume?  Its manufacturer's soft swing at realism leaves the cartoonish skull with a sparing amount of teeth; its mandible juts outward with a smiley underbite.  A pirate hat remains above the cranium, though skin and hair must have long since been eaten away, and in only such a treacherous abyss like the one found in a 45-gallon tank, the same tank that became the burial ground of this presumed Hanna-Barbera character's head, apparently lopped off and tossed into the murky depths of Baltimore City's water, sinking all the way to the bottom, all 18 inches, and where after some time was pecked bare in the livingroom darkness, is where only my turtle now lives.

Anyway, the turtle just sits there underwater, staring out at a bookshelf with books, old CDs and a framed quote from Thoreau: "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams.  Live the life you've imagined."

And that's what the turtle stares at all day from under its fake rock.  Looking away from the pirate scene and at the bookshelf, it faces a quote from one of the most progressive, ascetic minds ever, an enviro-anarchist at that, one who protested the very same capitalism that had these words framed in the first place, the same words that are probably on fifty-plus percent of graduation cards around the United States, all sold in mass and bought in haste for $4.99 a pop, most the time accompanied with a check from a guilty uncle, an awkward neighbor or an AWOL godparent, the child's name written legibly if the name is spelled right; these are the Go Git 'Em words of the future that this turtle stares at all day.

Her name is April, by the way, and she wasn't always like this.  She used to swim all day.  When the room was empty and no one was around, she would climb up onto her plastic, floating island and bask underneath the heat lamp.  This was back when she still had the island, and when the tank was filled to the top.  April isn't actually mine, either; she's Tommy's--I just live with the two of them.  Anyway, when her tank was full, Tommy used to have a floating, little island for April--he got rid of it when he lowered the level of her water.  She would swim feverishly around the tank all day, and when she wanted to rest, she would climb up onto the island and chillax in the human sun.  I never actually got to see her perched on her island because, back then, the slightest movement would send her careening back into the water.  I just know that every time I entered the room there would be a splash.  Now she just sits under the rock and stares.

I think it's sad, really.  Would she be happier outside, in a stream?  I feel like her life expectency would obviously be cut by decades what with predators and harsh MD winters.  But wouldn't she be more a fit to her natural role in life, if there is in a fact a natural role when borne into the human hands of captivity?    Tommy bought her out of a kiddie pool on a street corner in Brooklyn.  She even came home with a brother, Soapy.  The two of them were swimming around the inflatable pool with all of their brothers and sisters when Tommy saw them.  Actually, his girlfriend wanted them, so Tommy bought them.  They took April and Soapy home and watched them grow.  

Eventually Soapy got sick.  His eyes swelled up and he went blind.  He couldn't find his food, so Tommy had to feed him by hand.  Tommy would push Soapy's jaw apart and feed a vile of liquid protein twice a day for Soapy.  He even gave Soapy daily (and expensive) antibiotic eye drops.

The hard work never paid off, though, as Soapy would eventually pass.  Tommy felt super guilty and told himself that the same thing wouldn't happen with April.  He went to the pet store and consulted the pro's.  He took their advice: he bought the best dehydrated krill out there; he got cleaner and a new water pump, a treasure chest water pump; he started filtering her tank bi-weekly.  He started giving her playtime outside of the tank.  He got her a small crew of various little fish, for companionship he said, and even though she ate them one by one, he went out and got more.  The only piece of advice he didn't catch, or at least failed to infer, was that the tank shouldn't be full.

So for a couple years, that's how April lived, in a full tank, and that's when I met her.  I guess it's hard to tell if a turtle is happy, but I could tell that she was definitely more active.  When she wasn't swimming furiously about the tank, she rested under the heat.  When she was swimming, she would follow passerby as they walked past her tank.  She played with the bubbling, pirate chest water filter.  Each time a bubble emerged from the belly of the chest, the chest's door swung open.  April would float above it and try to keep the chest shut.  It was like her game, or her meditation in motion, or her daily workout; she would play with it for minutes on end.  

Then Tommy found out the tank shouldn't be full, so he emptied it down to a quarter its original capacity.  We felt guilty--should she have been forced to swim that much?  It made me think: with all that swimming around, she must have had some serious little turtle abs under that shell.  

Now I am not so sure.  Since the lowering of the water, I've only seen her sit under the fake rock.  The island is gone, too, just sitting in a shopping bag on the floor next to the tank.  And so she just sits there, staring out at the picture frame.  She pays less mind to the people who walk by her.  She gives her chest little attention, and when she does, her chest "wins" every time because she can no longer float above it--the bubbles swing open the door and blast her little arms away when she tries covering it.  It's sad, really.

So what is to make of this whole operation or ritual or cradling?  What, or who, is April, and what is the meaning of her existence--is her shell her home, her tank her planet and our house her universe?  What is the role of Tommy, or me for that matter, and where or how do we co-exist?  I've never felt that our lives are meaningless; I think that life, whether it is engineered or an accident, the results are a beautiful gift and should be showered with celebration every waking second.  But as for April, what is she doing here, in this tank?  It's like the tank is furniture and she is a toy, or she is just part of the furniture, a living piece of furniture.  Who started this mess, not just April's situation, but the whole declining population of turtles on this planet, los tortugas entiro de la Madre Tierre?  Who started selling turtles?  Who started buying them?  Who is breeding them?  What is this sick cycle we perpetuate, one that spontaneously sparks in me enough existential anxiety to cry in my kitchen on a Monday evening after work?  

This can't be what it feels like to be God, but if it does, if there is a "hand that feeds" from the skies, is a turtle tank a microcosm of it all?  Are we all stuck under a fake rock, just staring at the direction of a once-shiny quote, now hackneyed and mangled by the rest of us, casting spells and shadows at each other from our own tanks, cannibalizing our own kind, leeching off each other for shit like ego and money and material, which, when thought in the context of a turtle's tank, is all meaningless anyway?  Is that what we're doing, creating our own gods and killing each other with them, even killing ourselves, all with the same shit we adore?  And if these earth gods we create are in fact meaningless, what is to make of a God god--is a God god even there, or just forgotten?  Is there a God god circling around our overpopulated tank, checking in on us twice a day, making sure we are caught up on our premium crawdads?  And if so, if from outside the tank, if this is what it is to be a God god, simply by being a neutral third party which keeps us alive with minimal effort, if this is what it feels like to be God god, then a God god could just as easily forget the tank and start over.  Being a God god is to have no consequence.  Nihilism can be the name brand and the erupting liberation of no commitment is the currency.

It is only by this comparison, my life and hers, the human population and turtles', which makes me question whether April wants to die or not.  She is just sitting there: this is her eternity, her yesterday, today and tomorrow.  She doesn't have anything to feel and even less to work for, and just knowing that, to me, with this wealth of human experience, I could not live that existence.  I live to be moved, but that is only because I have felt what it is to laugh in fear and cry with joy.  But what about the pragmatic essence of never feeling moved, no pain and no joy, just... being, maybe, just maybe turtles in her position are lucky to be so confined, and maybe, just maybe they end up on top.  They don't have anyone else to quarrel with, especially about money or God, because to them, money is nothing and God is boring.  They, too, can live without consequence, just like a god.  In essence, the raw, concentrated peace of nihilism without knowing a damn thing makes them their own god, or better yet, breaks them free from God.  One day it will all be over anyway.  But for now, April can just be.

In the meantime, it is we who should never forget to enjoy the heat from above, even when you're swimming furiously.

Trailer Park on Air Force Base (to Flood of '72)

Trailer Park on Air Force Base
to melody of Flood of '72:

I am in a trailer park on
an Air Force base in Florida
cramped in Tampa
Bay
and wondering if today is Christmas
or just the twenty-second of December,
But I don't remember
because the members of my creation
can't bear such a presence in these quarters,
at least when we are in front of one another,
so right now I am standing by the water
watching cargo planes touch down with graceful terror--

But around me
are all these things like palms
from other places we forget
and brown beaches
thick with mud and carcasses
of armadillos.
Nonetheless I have my health
and the wind to blow away the smell.

pea (Towson Town Center Mall)

I can never find my way out of malls,
but I don't mind.

These places and stores
line inertly in the lasting low light--
everyone stands in their assigned places,
mannequins that can talk
and yawn
with an unglued mélange of boredom and pressure,
boxed and wrapped together with the stinging words,
"May I help you?"
It is commonplace that everyone in here looks at each other
without seeing a thing.

They should bring some dogs in here, or something--
you can't pet dogs on the internet yet.
Maybe that could work.

Everyone in here knows the truth;
it hangs above everyone's heads,
it crawls inside their covered mouths, and it saturates their eyeballs;
it is a frozen pea to a trachea;
and inasmuch no one will say it:
"We could all do this [shop] on there [the Internet] anyways."
Everyone knows it: shopping with your feet has become ersatz,
but not for me--I like to look at calendars up close before I buy them.

Except for the slow-walkers, slow-talkers
and a select few teenagers who can still feel
the integrity of this sad, tiled hum,
the same who still give this place breath in January
afternoons,
except for them,
everything seems kind of hollow, even the light.

I bite into my hot pretzel and keep walking,
encompassed with a cloudy, familiar blend of ten million smells at once.
Its colors always change, but the crisp smell of consumerism will always be the same,
that vague, familiar scent that never leaves once it stamps its mark;
it's ingrained in the tiles, in the moving hands and the swaying fabric,
in the faux wood of the faux eyelash kiosks,
in the bad cell phone service and the slight wobble of every table,
in the clumsy, nervous, ever-avoidant eye contact,
in the abyssful echo of the bathrooms and the drowning engines of the hand dryers,
in the yellow plastic and the wet floors,
in the light.

I leave with a fifty-dollar mustache razor
out of the wrong exit,
wondering, "How do they get the Jaguar to the fourth floor?"

Starfish

I want to cling to the skin of your brain
like a starfish on glass
and suck on the flesh of your thoughts,
gestating your mind:
your words, ideas, fears, horrors,
into a molten core
of my womb
until I grow and burst
into your entire world.

Coma

Here's something weird--Walter told me that prison was actually good, at least for him.  When I talked to Phil about his time in prison, he never said much, but it wasn't anything positive.  I doubt most anyone would say that prison, or jail, or incarceration for months on end was something good.  But Walter said it was good.  This was all before his accident.

Walter told me that when he stepped out of the yellow lights of Central Booking and into the acrid streets of downtown Baltimore, that he got into Austin's car and Frankie Valli was playing.  He said he broke down and started crying, and that Austin kept driving, not saying much.  Walter said that his bunkmate used to sing "(Oh) Baby Baby Baby" every single night while Walter and four other cell mates laid and listened silently in the almost-darkness.

Walter described the ride home as an ambivalent euphoria, a foreign sense of pure harmony, and I could only imagine--like a major blood vessel bursting with emotion, of freedom and safety and cleansing, of graciousness, an end to the months of longing, of longing to return to a life that would never be the same.  He said he wasn't crying for any reason at all other than that his feelings, like himself, were no longer locked away; they were no longer dormant or put on hold, that they were free to crawl around the walls of his heart, swelling and pushing, bouncing and careening until finally bursting out the corners of his eyes.  He said that hearing that song in Austin's car had unlocked the chest in his chest, the steamer trunk they were stored in, and that the song was the trigger, the crowbar that cracked open their seal and let them come wild and flyin' through.  Oh, baby.

He said that while his bunkmate would sing, he and the others would listen in contemplative silence.  He said they had a bond, everyone in jail did, but especially the six who shared Walter's cell, that moments like this reminded them that they were still human, that they could still feel, that they needed to remind each other of these simple facts.  He said that while Kevin, the crooner, a forty year old black man who coincidentally grew up ten houses from Walter, that while Kevin crooned, Walter would picture his life leading up to his incarceration.  Walter said he would think of Maggie, and how she would ask to take walks around their neighborhood in Charles Village, or down the green paths of Wyman Park, or even just around their own block on 27th to look at the old rowhomes.  He said he never went, but would, at that moment, in his cell listening to the nightly crooning, most obviously do anything to go for a walk with her.

Walter was telling me all of this while we sat in my living room.  I hadn't seen him since he had gone to prison.  We'd known each other for ten years now, and in intervals of every couple days, weeks, months or years we would cross paths.  We were sitting together in my living room, rain dripping through the crumbling ceiling, plaster littering the couch in melted globs.  He told me that prison was good for him, that now he was almost finished with his engineering degree at UMBC, that after this semester, he was going to start applying for jobs.  We had picked up right where we left off that rainy night, like we always did.

Where we had left off before that rainy night was before he went to prison, and before I had left the country, at my old house in P-ville, after we had discovered we were living down the road from each other. We started catching up again.  He brought a blunt over.  We talked about Salisbury, WuTang, our lost, sick friends, college.  He had just started going to UMBC, and I at Towson--neither of us lasted at Salisbury, and it had taken us both a while to academically readjust.  I had always known that he sold herb, but I wasn't aware of how much he was pushing anymore.  That said, I wasn't surprised by the amount he was pushing because Walter was a yes man.  Nothing could stop a yes in Walter's life, not even the ramifications for being considered a kingpin to both the city of Baltimore and the county.  I guess it's all relative, but Walter has always just been Walter to me, and I feel like Walter has also maintained the same, genuine self-understanding--whether he was giving you a gram or picking up 25 pounds, he was always just Walter.

And Walter never said yes out of self-profit, or even for the wealth of experience; he said it out of the well-being of the people he cared about.  I'm not saying that Walter went to jail for all of his friends; I'm just saying that Walter was there for all of his friends.  He was the guy, and no one ever stopped him.  If someone asked him to stop, I bet he would have, but no one ever did.  So he kept expanding, and so would the people, all gathering under the radius of his giant wings.  He was the guy, there for you when you needed him.  He was unconditional--he never held a grudge, never raised his voice, never flinched at the request of a "fronted bag," met ya when convenient, and overall, never made it a business, at least not first, second, or even second-to-last.  And Walter doesn't live with regrets; in that growing sea of all of those yeses, it's just how he operated.  The only yes to which he would never subscribe was the only yes that would haunt him--Maggie's request to go on a walk.  He brought that up in my living room, before the accident.

This story is not about the time Curtis stabbed Walter with an ice pick.  However, I think it's important to mention because I think that's when Walter said yes to the game.  This was freshman year, when Walter lost three grand of herb to the Salisbury football team, maybe more.  In a way, it wasn't even Walter's fault.  After setting up the deal between Walter and some old teammates, a mutual friend/ex-SU football player tried stealing a tiny nugget (for himself) from a QP bag.  During the exchange, Walter waited in the car while the mutual friend attempted to liaison the deal.  The mutual friend stepped outside with the little nug in his hands, claiming to "smoke a cigarette," only to have the players kick the door shut on him.  Someone jumped out the window with the goods, leaving the mutual friend, and consequently, Walter empty-handed.  After that, Curtis came after Walter in a cocaine rage, broke into his house, stabbed Walter in the side and left.  Walter didn't even fall over; he said it felt like Curtis had punched him, but then he looked down and saw blood pouring down his hip.  When Walter left the hospital a few days later, he never actually gave away Curtis's name.  Anyway, I think that's when Walter said yes to the game that put him in prison for five months.

That was all before the accident.

tbc...

When Stony Shot Someone

Talk about not having an ego--Stony killed himself with a plastic bag.  He put it around his head and drowned in his own exhalations.  He died from his own living breath!  I heard he shot someone in Florida, and that his life had gone downhill after that.  I was the first person he had ever sat next to on the bus, back in ninth grade, right there in the second to last row, this pudgy kid walked confidently up to my half-empty seat and asked if he could sit next to me.  Of course I said yea, and we got to know each other briefly.

I knew he had anger, sort of, but not the brand of anger that shoots somebody, or let alone shoot somebody and start kicking their body while they lay on the ground.  I don't think the person died, and in fact I heard the person had only been shot somewhere in the arm or the shoulder.  Maybe the person lay there in shock, maybe he or she played dead--I won't know.  But Stony shot someone.  I also know that Stony wasn't a bad guy.

I don't know why he was in Florida when that happened.  If I recall correctly, his mother lived down there.  He lived with his father in HoCo when he and I had met, and I don't know if he considered me his first friend, his only, a meaningful friend, or a friend at all, but he was mad when a newer guy sat next to me from an earlier stop, this guy we called Greg Thanewguy (that's how I put him in my phone back then).  Anyway, I never asked for Stony's number, and I didn't fight too hard to say that the other fifty percent of my bus seat wasn't actually vacant, but maybe I had a disarming vibe back then where new kids had less trouble approaching me.  Maybe it was because I had been the new guy so many times, or maybe it was Greg Thanewguy's awkward inertia that carried him to the back of the bus on the first day he stepped onto it and had no choice but to desperately ask if the one open spot was open.  I remember when Stony stepped onto the bus and saw tall, skinny, awkward Greg Thenewguy sitting next to me with his backpack on his legs, but Stony muffled something that was meant to be heard but I didn't hear it.  He put on his headphones and Slipknot could be heard growling out of his earphones a few seats up.

Anyway, so I think Stony only attended school for about a year or two longer, but since my mother had moved thus changing my bus route, and since we were all on the precipice of a driver's license, I am not sure how the seating dynamic continued really after that year.  Stony didn't sit next to me again, and I don't recall feeling too worried about it.  I remember his getting out of hand from time to time, but it was only in the sense of a rowdy chubby kid trying to make his peers laugh with the only means he had--over exuberant physicality.  I remember he would poke the back of the heads of kids in front of us, or he would yell PENIS as loud as he could, or do dips between the seat and kick his feet around.  It was annoying, but it wasn't anything atypical.

Then one day he quit coming to school.  He got suspended for breaking a window.  Then he got caught spray painting the trailer classrooms and the gym doors.  Then he fought someone who made fun of his dad's boyfriend.  Then he just quit coming to school.  No one knew why, but people could make their guesses.  Our homogeneous school body had rejected him like a bad kidney, sent him--no, catapulted him--to Florida.

I heard he started selling weed down there.  This was around eleventh or twelfth grade, or after.  I remember hearing he had a gun, but didn't believe it the way I wanted to believe it.  I didn't hear much after that, and after a while, it seemed like I had reached a point to where it almost became normal in my mind--I ended up meeting other people who sold weed, other people who had guns, and other people who invested in both.  I remember having a handgun pointed at me in jest, another time someone forgetting their gun next to my couch, and I remember unzipping a duffel bag in someone's pickup only to find a sawed-off 12 gauge shotgun.  I remember the same kid reassuring me that it was only to scare people, that it was only loaded with beanbags, and that he would figure out what to do later when that point came where, even if no one was murdered, there was an inevitable case for assault with a deadly weapon were he to ever use it.  I remember thinking, "All this for green?"  Even so, even with all of us sipping a lofty cocktail of invincibility and curiosity, it never seemed real.

I don't know when or where it was when I heard that Stony shot somebody.  I think it was at Hugo's.  Hugo was a genuine kid who also toed the margins of acceptance in our white-washed school, unless, of course, he was throwing a party--then everyone showed up.  I think it was inside his dad's garage, through a cloud of cigarette smoke where I heard that Stony shot someone.  One of Hugo's friends was friends with Stony's brother.  Stony's brother had stayed behind, had chosen not to go to Florida, and instead expressed his defiance through studded denim and a mowhawk.  Stony's brother was a year younger, but looked years older--he didn't have the boyish pudge of Stony.  He was quiet and brooding, unlike his brother, and usually kept his back against the wallflower wall, too.  I remember seeing him tonguing his lip ring a lot.

I think it was in that garage when I heard that, down in a Florida parking lot, Stony had handed someone a half ounce of weed, expecting to be paid the standard 180 dollars that it cost back then for said amount.  I heard, instead, the kid turned and ran with the bag, and Stony, whether cursed by impulse, heavy legs or probably both, lifted his pistol and fired.

The story is as hazy as the night I heard it.  The details are filtered through the mouths of many, through the minds of more, and embedded by half-lives somewhere in the ore of my decaying memory of him.  I heard Stony shot the guy in the back, or his arm, or his shoulder, that the kid fell to the ground and Stony started kicking him.  I know nothing after that.  I just couldn't believe he actually did it.

I don't know what happened to him after that, or before the last thing I ever heard about him.  Just a simple search on Google initially lead to no traces of his existence.   I clicked Google Images only to find a swath of different faces.  Then suddenly I saw it, that baby face pudge emerging like a live ghost, like a face from a black lake.  Staring back at me was Stony, with a flatbrim Ecko Unltd. hat, heavy peach fuzz on his upper lip.  I clicked the picture, and sure enough there he was, on a myspace account which now seems like a preserved artifact.  I looked at the few pictures he had existing, one of his pet snake, some pictures making funny faces, friends drinking handles of rum in random apartment living rooms.  One picture bore the caption, "My life style is party hard. My drink of choice, the CAPTAIN," yet the photo was of his brother holding a bottle of Port Royal.  His location did not say Florida; it said our hometown--Lisbon, Maryland.

I don't where it happened when he did the next thing, or who found him.  I don't even really know why he did it, other than what I'd suspect was an unbearable existence, probably riddled with legal problems, possible addiction, and the lightning quick realization that it is very easy to disappoint everyone you know.  I don't know why he chose to use the bag--maybe because it was the cleanest exit, maybe because it wouldn't hurt, maybe because it would take just long enough for someone to find him in the nick of time.  I don't know why he did it, but he did.

Somewhere in this timespan came a complete reversal of invincibility.  That same stinging warmth we all used to carry around infectiously, feverishly inside an impenetrable bubble of youth, the same youth that led us to believe that we could operate the way we did, had vanished for Stony.  For the rest of us, we still had our red carpets to walk on; they would unfold until one by one we would earn our first couple, very privileged strikes, or until the monsters we create came to life and consume us whole.

I never knew Stony more than I wanted to, but I know that I would now give up my seat for him, and not out of fear.  It's because he became real to me again.

When the Shaundertaker Killed 300 Monsters

I walked through the door flaps and entered the kitchen.  Shaun was standing at the dish sink, washing out the soup containers.  He had his portable head phones on.

'What's up, Supaman,' I asked him, rolling the black sleeves of my work shirt up to my elbows.  I was looking around the kitchen line to find evidence of today's potential specials.  Nothing in sight.  Shaun continued washing the soup containers.

I turned around and ask Shaun again, a little louder.  'What's the motherfuckin' word, Supaman?'

He turns around and removes an ear phone.  'What's up, Captain motherfuckin' Crunch?'  He says it enthusiastically and claps my one hand and half-hugs me. Just for the sake of brevity, picture Macho Man Randy Savage in camo shorts, sporting a thick goatee and oversized thirty dollar ear phones.  He's our daytime dishwasher.

'I need you to get me a diet soda,' he says, handing me his own personal 32-oz. plastic yellow cup.  He is always drinking diet soda, and he is always asking me to fill it for him from the bar.  He's afraid of our owner.  'I hope I don't die from this next one, huh.'  He laughs.

Henry told him that diet sodas will clog his colon and kill him through a long, constipated  cancerous rotting of the asshole.  Henry said if you drink too many diet sodas, the olestra and the high fructose corn syrup will collect in your lower intestine and outlast your stomach enzymes, and then your stomach enzymes give up on breaking things down, and in turn, break down, and then the shit you eat, the regular shit, it will become impossible to shit.  Henry says dying inside out, rectum sphincter first, is one of the worst ways to die.  Henry also says if you snort Xanax it doesn't last as long as if you just eat the whole bar on an empty stomach, and he's right, but, well, yeah, I digress. 

I come back to give Shaun his diet soda, but he and Henry are talking.

'Who do I need to write it to?' Henry was asking Shaun.

'Just the MVA,' said Shaun.

'What does it need to say?'

'Just that I been good, you know, workin' here the last ten months, been good, no problems with no one, you know.'

'Like how you tried to stab me twice?' Henry said with seriousness in his levity.

'Yeah, that, you can put that on the second page, man' he said and put his ear phones back on.

Shaun is ten months fresh off of an inpatient stint at Springfield Psychiatric Hospital, where he received treatment for bipolarity after being picked up off the side of the road in Daytona Beach selling an assortment of things ranging from coat hangers to crack.  He told me they used to call him the chef, he could cook it so good.

He did some time at the Westminster incarceration center and after was put on parole.  He was living with his mother up until his birthday, when he went to a restaurant and racked up a huge bill, gorging on food and alcohol.  Nobody in his family came to visit him, so he left without paying and began walking down Route 32.  The police picked him up about ten minutes afterwards.

He told me the monsters sent him that way.

If you ask him a question the wrong way, he will think you are interrogating him.  I asked him where he lives one day and he took off his ear phones and stared at me dead into my eyeballs, all the way to the back of my skull.

'Where do YOU live?' he asked me.  I told him Woodbine, but he backed up and walked over to Henry, never taking his eyes off of me.  Henry laughed and kept cooking.

Another time Shaun told me he killed three hundred alligators in Louisiana.

'That's ten alligators a day,' he said.  'Shoot 'em right in the top of the head.'

'What were you doing in Louisiana for a month?' I asked him.

'Killin' all them gators.'

'What would you do with them after you killed them?'

'Killed what?'

'The three hundred alligators,' I said.

'I don't know,' he said, and put his ear phones back on.  'They're all monsters.'

A different time I told him that he looked like Macho Man Randy Savage.  He told me that's bullshit, and that he's the Undertaker.  

I now call him the Shaundertaker.

Crackhead Mark and Me

 (As morning sniffles and coughs out day, the May flowers tremble through the comforter of earth.  Weeds sway like feathers on a hawk, weighed down by glassy beads of water. 

The heavy, grey yawn of dawn smells a little lonely.  I feel like it is something easy to overlook in the grass-spit, fog and dog shit.  This morning looms but doesn't linger.  A sleepy greeting to everyone and for no one, a glowy stasis between yesterday and afterward, undisturbed peace without resolve because there is not yet a wrong to make right.)  

The engine in my muted silver two-door Hyundai Accent grumbles moodily (in actual hue, I prefer the more suitable moniker of gunmetal) .  I am waiting in a quaint driveway, squeezing out the last staticky bit of All Things Considered before Mark lugs himself into the passenger seat and starts talking about enough or not enough coffee, advil and sleep.  In front of me is the covered frame of an old pickup truck with a blue tarp tied by bungee cords to its top.  The end of a ladder pokes out from its rear through a tear in the plastic. It doesn't take long for Mark to exit the rancher home of his mother.  The screen door whishes and slaps shut.

Grey shirt tucked in, gut tucked out, Mark follows his belly to my car with a proud hobble.  In his younger days, his dirt-bike-on-main-highway days, he found himself being tailed by a state trooper who wanted him to pull over.  He made his great getaway by turning off I-70 and into the woods, just out of the stretched fingers of the law.  He dashed between poplar trees and oaks, over logs and through the tributaries of the Patapsco, until the blue and red lights were a distant hue of the interstate.  He did his hip in good that day, he told me, he did his hip in real good.  

What happened was this: In a determined attempt to make it to a local bar, his bout with reason came to a ceasefire when he agreed that he was far too buzzed to drive his old truck anywhere, so he took his dirt bike instead.  Fortunately for him, he could also take his dirt bike into the woods.  His escape from the cops that day was what saved him from a DUI, an obvious thorn in the side (not necessarily the hip) of anyone's driving situation, but unfortunately for him it cost him the loose movement of his right midsection.  He hit a log and slapped his body against a tree, giving him the lifetime fluidity of a broken popsicle stick.  What was hurting his driving situation these days, the reason for why he had not owned a legal driver's license since 1989, the reason for why I was waiting in his driveway so he could make it to work, were those seven other DUIs on his record.

Anyway, that's why his hip is bad.

He opens my door and hands me two orange Powerades from across the seat, and then helps himself into my little vehicle.

"I couldn't 'member if you like blue or red juice, so I brought you the orange," he says after breathlessly strapping his seatbelt.  "Fiffy nine cents apiece for them little guys at the Shoppers market there.  I went and got me myself fifteen of them bastards."

I thank him and switch to the classic rock station, turning Ted Nugent down a tad.  

"S´pose to rain today," he says rolling my window down and making his elbow comfortable.  "My ma says the news says at four o'clock.  S'pose to be a big ol' thunderstorm they say."

*****

I wiggle and weave throughout the inertia of 695, fulfilling the daily routine of an asshole calling everyone else an asshole:  'This jerk behind me is tailgating me like a jackass.  Do you hear him revving his engine?  Yeah, there he goes, right there, let him pass in that shiney, Whinnie-the-Pooh yellow.  Ugh, I just realized that I hate yellow now.  And look--fancy spoiler he's got on that, what is that, a Cobalt?  Ha, I bet he spells 'wheels' with a 'z'.'  

Mark always agrees, nodding his head and looking at his hands.  His hands look stoney and mangled, years of missing the head of the nail on rooftops, or victims to heavy-placing porcelain toilets.  They look like they would jam a sawzall.

My hands are still babylike, fresh and fleshy. 

Mark, a weathered Elmer Fudd and a raspier Foghorn Leghorn, talks with one eye.  His head never faces the listener, only that bulbous old-blue eyeball, his periscope, his ambassador for conversation, as if to move past the surface of his skull, one must first dance with his dominant eye to rightfully see his face.   Above his eyeline is the horizon of forehead that stretches far back to the center-top of his head, where a few sparse curlies tuft out like a sea anemone.  It is safe to say that had he his whole set of bottom teeth, he would have a distinct underbite, but instead his mouth slightly jowls downward like an old hound.

He precedes each sentence with an 'I tay-yah what,' and then he tells you what.  This time he tells me that he only had two beers last night, the first and the last--'the other eighteen in between don't count none.'    

*****

Traffic doesn't lighten as we approach the Francis Scott Key Bridge.  This is the city's tribute to a major figure in our history, an anthem to his Anthem--a toll bridge. It reminds me of a large, sleeping stegosaurus, resting heavily across the black Chesapeake.  Factories sprawl across the short horizon ahead, their smokestack towers blasting cumulus nimbus factory clouds like cartoon church organ pipes.  The cargo ships float inanimately, docked beneath blue brontosaurus cranes.  Abandoned warehouses and jejune jetties, old and forgotten remnants of piers, perches for black crows, are all part of the entrance of watery South Baltimore.  It's pretty in a can't-turn-back-because-this-is-what-we-are-now kind of way.  Gone are the days of golden eagles and birch canoes and happy crabs and clean marshes. This is the rustic side of Baltimore now, the industrial side.  Even Bethlehem Steele has called it quits, shutting down and bleeding into the river until lawyers come and clean it up.

Dundalk approaches and the smell of Baltimore's sewage surrounds us.  It is not malodorous, but dank and almost sweet like burning potpouri.  We pass the two sewage towers, the giant golden eggs of Dundalk, for what it's known for: the giant poop eggs.

I continue driving towards the propane yard.  The traffic is still stifled.  Mark says, 'Guy in fronta us is drivin' almost as bad as this jackass to the side of us, huh, like what, one horse power?' Bumpers push onward, starting and stopping abruptly, like two south poles too shy to ever kiss

*****

At the propane yard, our job is simple: don't inhale and don't blow up.  The radio plays until the batteries run out.  If we were to split the cost of more batteries, it would mean we should probably skip lunch.  If we don't buy batteries and don't skip lunch, it means we could probably leave a half hour earlier.  That's if it doesn't 'thunnersterm' at four.

The job is actually not simple.  It takes lots of manual labor to unscrew the brass nozzle from a steel, semi-empty propane tank.  It takes a seven foot steel pole and the force of two mens' arms to pull the nozzle off.  When the nozzle is separated, the propane comes shooting out.  It is your choice as to whether or not you inhale it, and even if you choose not to, you will still inhale it.

To pass the time, I listen to Mark's treasurable honesty.  He talks about the time he smoked a bunch of queludes before a Led Zeppelin concert.  He talked about the time a guy was bragging about having six hundred dollars and how he hit him over the head with a rock after they both left the bar, and how he went and bought himself a "big ol' blast."  He talked about hitting the tree on his dirt bike, and the time he lost eighty pounds smoking crack in Denver when he was on the run.  Or it was meth.  No it was both.  And he talked about the Marriotsville reservoir where he'd go take big ol' blasts with whichever girl he or Kenny brought.  I asked him "A big ol' blast of weed, or of crack?"

"Weed," he said.  We kept working.  "And crack."

Clown

Clown

My stupid red nose:

That bright cherry red foam

atop the exploding strawberry that breathes beneath

porous and spongy

and hidden

above my permanent frown.

And I did not choose to be the sad one

-- they needed me to be sad:

‘Cheerless Charlie lost his fingers,’ they said

‘Juggling fire

and so he drowned in the dunk tank.’

And so my friends are seals and zebras

And whips and little people

who dream of being shorter.

And I dream of hair

in the middle of my scalp

not so red.

I dream of feet that walk in straight lines

and make no sounds

to the applause of my defeat

Four Scenes on Addiction

Cue Scene 1: "Recovered" friend of roommate enters home at full volume, sweating profusely and talking about being a DJ. Takes puff of vape pen and slugs energy drink. Claims he can fix missing sound on record player. Overly trusting friend (OTF)/roommate gives go ahead, so N.A.-Hero (NAH) simply cuts out equalizer and hooks phono straight to receiver. Works briefly. Beirut is playing, NAH starts scratching vinyl to prove DJ integrity.

Bite tongue, leave to get lunch with tsunami of a cringe.

Scene 2: return to find sound from record player completely unresponsive, even though everything is aligned. NAH nods in and out from couch, does not hear about newfound bent needle. Rework system with new turntable and NAH asks "What's up with this African record?" (Graceland-Paul Simon). Stands up and knocks over glass in process. Breaks said glass, subsequently makes four jokes about it being OTF's fault. NAH says he's been sober for ninety days. Takes a sip of whiskey and passes back out.

Scene 3: NAH asks for water. Asks where the ice is. When told "In the freezer," he asks "Is the bottom one the freezer?" Leaves freezer ajar.  Walks back to couch, claims to be bored with the football game on TV, changes channel to X-Games.  Says, "I want to write a book.  Me and [OTF] are gonna make a movie one day."  Looks at OTF, says, "Get some pictures of me in my WuTang jacket."

Scene 4: NAH accuses everyone of letting him fall asleep again for "not paying attention" to him. Immediately asks for everyone's Facebook names. Immediately asks everyone to accept requests. Immediately tags everyone on FB with post about his shoes. Falls back asleep.