You Are

You are the bright obstacle
To all things made or imagined
The wasted dress maker's
Drunken sleep, the drink
And her reason for drink

The showman's two
left feet, his stage fright
The kings conscience
And his lover's lies

You are the winter's warmth,
The swimmers drought
The daughter's lust
The widow's memory

You are the anchored ship,
The wearied antibody

You are the body
Un-embodied, the stars
Unearthed in the heavens,
The spirit that wanders
Toward them forever
Forgetting earth

Attempts

from my attempts to reach you
there came an opiate child, formed
awkwardly in the trunk of my car
moist and kicking - a red eyed screamer

he would not call himself december
but ached with tremors and snow

I say this only to insult you
to make you guilty - to force you

to return my calls

Daylight Sources

placated days obey the hit parade. final whistles
the end attract, draw close the kids in the back wondrous
as a heart attack, the open core of travelers
traveling digitless, amazed cabling, construction scaffold world
made world, sinless but still afraid, self assembled star raided
gambler in a song they used to play, bury your assets in the sun.
they will not search their own - but mind the burning. assemble
no candles there, or fuel or houses, books or minds.
bury only ghosts, pocketed souls, animal voices of the murmuring kind.
These, or the winter passengers by whom no fire may be set:
The spiced children that die - the sugar children - the lyme
and snow children, only of the sightless kind, dark as that fluid
which first you breathed, suckled from daylight sources

splinter

The strange winter sun went nowhere. Meaning it did not shine, or at least did not shine to where it could be seen, to where it could light the room and the world Jonathan found that morning. It was a strange winter sun.

Screen

There was only a buzzing through the speaker where once there had been a voice then came a kind of whisper inside the machine, a rasping syllable that may have meant something to some other machine, but not to him. To him is was only noise, only the nothing of circuits continuing along a straight of time closed to him. He threw his drink toward the screen and the lights went out. Fuck it, he said.

New Blue

The radiator struggled like a drunk being beaten in a back street waking Jonathan into the 3 am cold. Once the rattle gave up everything was all the more quiet by contrast. Sleep would not return. He wrapped his head in his pillow and thought of nothing, closed his eyes against the dark that was never dark enough, against the absence that would not yield itself to him, would not open to accept him, into the hours of nothing before dawn.

Seething

The dog ran down the open alleyway to find only that it deadended. The rain collected in deep puddles. He looked around for any exit and found none. The footsteps where coming nearer. Soon they would have him. Despite the downpour he shook himself, turned to face the way he had just come and prepared in the wet for what was coming.

Mint

The standard events happened in order: waking up, wandering through it, alcohol and sleep. Food scattered throughout. A little water, conversation and piss. The rare shit in a public lavatory. All of it added up to a day, week, month. It went on this way. It goes on this way. It will. The sun above us the sun beneath.

Brown

Unscrolling the paper leavings of a drunken evening to discover where he's been. He finds a note on the back of a receipt from the Red Avenger Lounge. It said, "stay by the window display of the nuclear blue cloud... the tall one. You can see it from here."

Not really anything

strange were the songs of the bright light that guided us onto brown planets where faces of those others were glassed and stared an image back at us across the open landscape, some wandering particulates together, saying the same thing, coloiding round your name

Flight

Nothing was said about delayed flights, crap food, the waiting or the alcohol. Instead they sat largely in silence, watching the bubbles rise in jumbo sized Sam Adams, listening the tuneless hum of the thousand nameless. A child wandered away from a mother on a cell phone. It was dressed in duck covered overalls and lifted its knees wildly in the new thrill of two legged. Jonathan watched the kid absentmindedly taking occasional sips from his beer. The mother noticed by the time it had almost reached Jonathan's table, scooping it up a few feet away. As she pulled her baby toward her something changed fundamentally. The air seemed finely clear and he felt as though small particulates, the atomic elements of the world were suddenly exposed... as though one he had one eye to a microscope and the other fixed on the view from an airport bar. This did not startle him. It seemed only natural. But what did startled him was how desperately and how suddenly he wanted a cigarette after so many years. How every part of his body ached for it in a kind of rhythm, in a kind of time.

Paper

He cut his finger on a piece of notebook paper. Flicking his hand away he stared at the clear line as blood clouding into few the spilled on to the surface. Everything counted in the grand scheme of agonies, even the small ones, even the paper cuts.

Windows have Erasers

Jonathan stood outside the cabin and watched the old yellowed window fling oranges against the dark. The rain had stopped and his dog was circling uneasily, about to shit. Mist hovered around him and on the lake it settled down like a meringue. Somewhere a fish clipped the surface of the water and disappeared. The dog found its spot. Above him the sky scattered its blue particulates, spittle exploding from the cough of some ailing god. People still smoke in this world, and the next.

Idiot Money

He deals in the markets of every day misunderstandings, misconceptions, out right stupidity. Say someone should enter the name of a famous website incorrectly, or the last digit of 1-800-SUPPORT as 1-800-SUPPORZ; or say a man walks into a gas station restroom sits down in a stall and is perplexed by the "Jenny Loves Tommy" etched into the door in front of him. Only then does he notice the alien sound of feminine voices. Somewhere these items are written down, added to the ledger, and as is always is the case, somewhere someone gets paid. Danny is that someone.

Not even November

Months were passing now like trees along the highway from a speeding car. Nothing was centered, nothing distinct. When ever he wished he wished for colder, darker, shutdown all of day. Make the colloidal galaxies burn themselves out starless on the evening's plane.

Listening to Orange

A long orange, metal ribbed tube dangled from the 10 floor of the parking lot halfway down to the street. It waved with the wind. No one noticed, not even michael as he pulled his dark blue 3 series into the garage and waited for the ticket to click toward him, then wound his way up cursing the SUVs and idiots who left adjacent spaces unusable until on the thirteenth floor he finally slid between an Escalade and a Jetta. He caught his door just before it collided into the Cadilac and held his breath to squeeze out. No fucking point in any of this. Some where at the far end of the lot something sparkled brightly like sunlight on a watch face. Michael squinted toward it just as it vanished. Footsteps wandered casually away unseen. He checked the time. Late for the day but early for the meeting. Two stories beneath him the orange throat gasped a long gulp of air and went slack against the wall. Something in Michael clicked and he got back into his car, unwound the 13 floors, paid $5.25 for 8 minutes of parking to an elderly asian man, drove 12.6 miles to his apartment, walked up 3 sets of stairs, opened the door, went to the bedroom, picked up his alarm clock. The red lines glowed 9:38. He smashed it on the stained concrete floor. There was another reason he was here. There was something else he was looking for... something in the closet, above the clothes. The cold weight of it now in his hands, this thing he came home to find.

Sunday Men

The day spread out in all directions. It had no end. The waking dawn had given way to a ceaselessness of bright pricing sun. White, miles of white, a son's lifetime of it and a fathers'. Where every they went a kind of blindness seemed to follow. Both of them knew this, even spoke of it from time to time. Still it made no difference. And day after day they emerged from their dark houses onto the pearl blinking fields of praise.

Leader board

The same solution each day:  line them up, lead them out into the bright courtyard, stand them up against the wall... examine each of them closely, try to find a difference. But it never seems to lead to anything. They stare back happily, vacantly. They never say a word. There isn't a word to say. They can't say a word. That's why they are here. That is why they are examined... why you examine them. This one's eyes are gray, but so are all of them. You think this gray is darker, more defined, but it could just be a play of the light. Soon it will not matter. Soon no one will even think of them, huddle together out in an abandoned school at the edge of town. They will be entirely forgotten if they haven't been already. And one day you will disappear as well and no one will be left to lead them back again from the courtyard and through the winter garden.

some other

In the center of the room. In the absolute center of the room. He sits. There is a place to the side of him where a sharp square of light has rested. New afternoon sun on the wood and white. Wonder at it all. The plainness of lines intersecting. The abstract corners the sheltering box. Pastures lie there on the blond floor and wait. The landing figure of the meadow ponders his unaccustomed brow.

Some words

Things remain generally how they should for Ran Thistle. His daughters continue their somewhat steady growth toward the sun and away from the dirt, this wife plumbs and diets, plumbs and diets, and his job pays for all of them, all of them together. So he doesn't end up worrying that much. His sleep ranges from six to nine hours a night. The years settle into their groove and loose themselves in the steady rhythm. So it does come as a bit of a shock to Ran to wake up and find himself naked on a strange bathroom floor. If it is a bathroom. Yes a toilet. Yes a bathroom. So it is odd to him to find himself half naked, down to his boxers really, on the cold tiled floor of a white bathroom beneath Florissant rectangles. He rights himself and starts to unswirl into consciousness. Something is seeping under the door. Two half skinned finger pulse toward him. Ran, someone whispers, Ran? Can you hear me? Ran? 

The furthest City Light

A large bug flew past his ear and collided, recoiled, re-collided with the stinging blue street light above the intersection. Jeremy was drunk for the first time in weeks and flicked his ear and shook himself free of the imaginary bugs that remained with him. Nothing spoke in the blooming artificial simmer around him. No footsteps feel. He had out walked them all. Still the lights remained. Each city perimeter spilled into another. The next as empty as the last. Hours no longer mattered. He listened to himself think.

Short for Abbreviation

Not that she could remember what it was that her body had been doing while she slept. It's just that it would be nice if she could, you know, remember if her arm had flailed around like a fish as she ran from the ravenous coke machine in the school cafeteria. Had she tried to cover her self during the naked in public places dreams? Had she kicked her legs desperately trying to catch that bus already too late for class though the quicksand mile of a strangely familiar unfamiliar door to the edge of the street and the very slowly departing bus? Had she gasped for breath in the face of the perusing shark? Had anything moved? Or had she just laid there, while inside everything flickered, and jumped, ran and screamed? Had she been still? Did that mean anything? About her? About the bed? About anything else or anyone?

Will Wonders Never Cease

She made a beeline for the northwest exit of the train station. Nothing seemed appropriate. The face of people were overly who they were. Like a sudo documentary on how people look in train stations. Not a real documentary, you know. But more of an actually scripted film made to appear like it was a documentary on what people look like in train stations. Like that exactly. This is what she thought as she pass a little girl picking up a cigaret butt and drop it again over and over. Passing the time until the father was done buying a coffee. The sun lit the station through a half oval illumination of the white streets outside. Too bright, she thought. The girl was still playing with the butt when she glanced back. she felt the overwhelming urge to stop her, to slap the filth from her hands. The little girl appeared to repeat the sequence of where she would drop it. Moving counter clockwise between her deliberate locations until she reach the last and the loop would repeat. Across, at the far opposite end a massive woman sat with an old basset hound in far fewer cloths than Julia, or anyone, would have found acceptable. Yet she still seemed hot in the climate controlled bubble. Fanning herself with a copy of In Shape. It never seems to end.

New Friends

The dead have strange imaginations, thought the little dog as he regarded the phantom bird. If you could call it a bird. The ugly flightless thing resembling a plucked chicken that a child had attempted to re-feather with elmer's glue. It spoke constantly of heaven, of the kingdom awaiting him in all its glory following the little dog through the streets on his daily search for food. "If you could only see the eyes of the maker, you would be at peace, my small friend," He would garble out as he scurried to keep up. "There is a warmth in all that is living and all that is dead. There is shinning ghost. There is is holy spirit to nourish us. He is the bread of life... or the something of life. Anyway, the toil we find here is but a moment and then our reward is eternal." The little dog was busy exploring an over turned garbage can. This seemed to annoy the bird. "Any moment now I might ascended into his glory, little one. You out to pay more attention. The word I bring is THE word." The dog emerged with a bit of chicken which seemed only to add to the phantom dodo's agitation. It clawed at the ground and looked at the sky in anticipation. "Any moment now, my friend. Pie in the sky, as they say. Any moment now." Nothing happened and the bird look around bewildered. "Well, I must still be here for some reason. The master must have some use for my soul here on this earthly plane. Some task... some..." The Christian dodo trailed off as if distracted by something. A wind blistered itself against the little beagle, lifting his floppy ears as it passed. Down the ally the sounds of large men shouting to each other echoed back and forth then floated out into the world. The dog attended to his bone. The dodo to his soul side by side in the the city as it emptied itself of men.

Away

It was a kind of winter but one without cold, or ice, or snow. It was an indistinct winter, impossible to demarcate form the preceeding fall or coming spring. There was only the rain, the constant rain that arrive at the end of a drought that had lasted all of that previous season and most of the summer before. For Jeremy the winter of that year began with the first rain that anyone had seen in a long time. He had been standing outside of a corporate coffee shop in the early morning. The sun was shining, a man crossed the road with a yappie little dog that kept looking back at something then up toward the sky. He felt a drop on his hand and looked up. Nothing. Through the columns of concrete only blue and the old sunlight of dawn, fake old movie sepia. Then another and then the rain. Not a downpour and not a drizzle, it was the slow seduction of an old lover. The rain slipped into the world again as though it had never left, without announcing its return it closed the door. It hung up its hat. Shit, thought Jeremy. No fucking umbrella.

Decided

There was nothing left to decide. It had all been taken care of already. Plans had been made, dates set, money had changed hands. Certain events had set all of this in motion, certain unrelated appointments, crossings of paths, misunderstandings in the middle of the drunken night. But now the rest was inevitable. Someone would walk down the street for the last time. Some else would pause at a fountain, a small toy dragon sleeping at the bottom, the sound of falling water and the world would go black. Two people who did not know each other never would "get" to know each other. These things would happen. These things had to happen... now. Jeremy shifted his weight to his left foot and bounced a little against the cold. The train was nowhere to be seen. How stupid people could be, how careless with everything they had been given. Wandering around in their idiotic houses oblivious to it all, to the odious rank liver stank that oozed out of them all the while, all their shiny fucking lives, the slime and stench from which they had crawled out of the damn fucking ocean still reeking inside them, inside their golden tits and silken cocks, inside their mauve marc jacobs matching set and Spartan audi hygiene, inside of their clean and glistening moments of warm dark whatever, beneath the winter garden of all of it... that stench. So fucking oblivous. How could they not smell it? But he could smell it and he could do something about it. He could hold his nose and walk among them. He could monitor and record, could understand. Jeremy could undo the highest latch on the door and slip away unnoticed. He was good at that sort of thing. These were his talents, his glorious way of unseeing. Things had been decided. Jeremy held his nose and stepped onto the train.

Away

He had gotten away from earth awhile and could not tell what he missed or if he missed anything. Somehow he thought that he ought to feel differently, more lonely at having left everyone, the girls, parents, dogs, friends, all the people who had surrounded him for 23 years. He ought to feel a tearing, that is what, or a longing, an ache somewhere. But nothing seemed out of the ordinary. This is just what has happened. This is just where he is: on the planet beside an ephemerally colored ocean in the viscous blue flamed fog and soundless tide. There is a warmth to it all, a kind of singing sleep. It is a happy drowsy world. He thinks that last night there were stars, but can't remember. When it gets dark sometimes the ocean fills with glowing creatures pulsing on and off like Vaseline drowned Christmas lights. He is not sure if he sleeps, and that if he sleeps that he dreams. But nothing is pulling him home. He does not feel like he should.

The Last Clock On Earth

Rapidly, instinctively, he stuffed his few supplies into his pack and floated through the dark hallways to the stairs listening for anything that could indicate the presence of the intruder. Nothing. Only the wind and the rain covering what ever warning he might have been able to decipher. He managed his way in the black not from memory, but from something older and was 10 flights down before he thought the better of it. Up instead... 30 flights up... the roof, a rifle in the rain... more waiting. He covered himself in a slicker and stared through the sight waiting for the dot to disappear.

Sheets of rain seemed continuous papering him like a soggy tissue gapped only by the stronger gusts of wind then everything stopped. Everything dripped and the sun seemed to be rising but wasn't. It was as if there were light but there was none. The dark glowed. The red dot on the door blinked. He fired and something screamed then whimpered away. Another shot but not his own, a streak of glimmering heat not yet pain awoke in him and took aim. He ran toward something he had not seen but knew would be standing their waiting to disappear.

The man sensed his approach the way he sensed everything as an annoyance, a yellow stain on a white shirt, a smudge of grease on the perfect glass, as something that should not be there. He sensed the gun pointed at his skull and simply slipped away to nurse his wound, and to descend a thousand stairs, vanish again. Today was not the day after all. There would be others. There always were. People get tired. People forget things. Lanterns are left on, shadows are cast. Even prayers can be whispered too loudly. life itself gives the living away. In this world breathing can be a bad idea.

The Last Clock On Earth

Water rang through the city in the wavering tone of a vanishing ghost. The night continued and the lights shone out their last dim charges of collected sun. Skyscrapers crowded together for warmth shedding the flood from their slate gray and dusty clear selfs. Streets rivered and receded, sewers swelled. Things functioned according to their form nearly unobserved. In some far corner in some small room a lean little man squatted in the dark and watched. He scanned the fading outlines of the city for an irregularity, for a blip in the regulated sheen, for a warning of life.

The Room

"There is someone here", said the little girl to the dark and open room. It's newly plastered walls glared back across the emptiness. "I am sure there is someone here," she said again, this time a little more hopeful than confident. There was a dimness that made the contours of the room visible but she could not determine its source. It was as if the room itself exuded only the slightest pale glow, an umber blue cushioning the black. In the center of the room a long rectangular shadow hovered a few feet from the ground. Slowly she made her way toward it. "I don't mean to intrude. Normally, I am a very polite little girl. It's just that I don't know where I am right now... I don't know where it is that I am or where it is that I've come to... I mean, how it is that I arrived here... in this room... with you. So if you could just say something. I mean, tell me where I am or how I might have arrived and thereby how I might return the same way back to where it was that I was. Then you could go right back to what you were..." She bumped into the soft cottony shape at the room's center and nearly screamed.

From all around her there came a long hissing sigh. It surrounded and enveloped her and seemed to come from both without and within her simultaneously. The pitch modulated from high to low then high again and it faded in and out like gusts of wind through a long tunnel. Hundreds of different voices seemed to be speaking independently of each other from within the sigh one becoming distinct only to spill into another. All of them in languages so foreign to the little girl they could have come from creatures of another sun and another time.

The whole of everything grew louder until it seemed that everything, the room, the dark and the little girl would be shattered into a thousand pieces by the screaming wind when all became quiet and the last of the blue dim was crushed by the heavy dark.

"Hello, little girl," came a voice not unlike a human voice, not unlike a little boy's voice, but with a strangeness like touching a metal toothpaste tube with your tung. Even a friendly metal is to be feared. "I am here," and the room was blinked a blinding white by unseen fingers and an unseen switch and before her eyes could adjust to the small figure staring suspended from the ceiling above there was dark again and the camera flash of the room laid upon it from the back of her aching eyes.

"Is your name Amelia?" said the voice as the girl rubbed her eyes in the dark.

"Pardon me," replied the girl.

"Is your name Amelia? Is that what people call you when they say something to you and no one else... when they wish to address you?"

"No... my name is..."

"That's a shame," the voice interrupted. "I have always wanted to meet a girl named Amelia."

The room blinked a blinding white again and directly before her was the upside-down face of a little boy with enormous glistening eyes and a terribly long face like that of a baby horse. The little girl swallowed the terror in her that would not scream at the site of the face blurring into focus a few inches in front of her. At least he looked "like" a little boy. His skin was pale cream under which pulsed tiny blue estuaries. For a moment she was sure she heard the rapid, hungry beat of a digital heart but could not be sure if it came from inside him or inside her. The whole of him was rather tiny, with skinny bird arms and bony knees above chicken legs.

She stepped back and saw the the boy was floating upside-down as though suspended by tiny invisible wires. He had his legs crossed indian style like you sit when you sit on the floor of the school gymnasium. As she backed away he drifted toward her keeping his face only a few inches from hers so that when she stopped suddenly their heads nearly collided. He backed away a bit.

"Who are you," she said.

He closed his eyes slowly then just as slowly opened them while his gaze remained constant despite the lidded vail of flesh: through her, into her, toward something she contained. For a moment there was an underwater stillness. The blueness returned and softened the astonishing white then pulsed away again like a wind blown smoke. The little boy's large snout sniffed hungrily at the air. Something open and something closed in another room. They stared at each other for a long while without speaking. The little girl could not move. Everything was new and as it had been. Everything was awash in a still born light.

"Excuse me, little boy," she said, waking suddenly. "Do you know how it is that I... I mean where is this place... where am I?."

The little boy blinked his long egg shaped eyes and yawned, revealing a mouth that seemed to grow vastly larger as it opened. It was filled with row upon row of small fangs cushioned in the softest and slightest pink flesh. They filled the whole of it and each of the thousand appeared to be moving independently of each other, reaching out, searching, straining towards her eventually in a momentary and unified motion like the feigned bow of a merchant dignitary. A thousand kneeling teeth. And although the little girl knew that she should be afraid she was not. She stretched out her hand to touch them. As she did so the boy snapped his mouth shut, not in response to her gesture but automatically as though some clock had reached the moment of the closing of mouths. His look was still on her like the gaze of a bird, a pure optic transmitting without comprehending, a television lens broadcasting her into the air of an unknown audience.

"Amelia," said the boy, his voice different now... older and younger, dissolving back into a sigh.

"What," said the little girl.

The room went black again.

"Amelia," said the hissing. "Amelia of the unseen hand."