instantaneous

under a freezing blue sky
did I feel my fingers drift
of their own accord
into parts of the air
that I could never conceive
in my brain like an ancient
oak tree

while my mouth knew
only ignorant paralysis
umm
well
yeah
was the cadence spewing forth
from my blimplike head
which seemed to float
wistfully
over the crowds of people
who knew what they were doing

as it seemed to me
they writhed in eminently
familiar ways
which I would attempt to imitate
with arguable success
followed by
somnolent humor
and then a heartfelt confession
which spawned
whole colonies of laughter

with the only result
a creeping befuddlement
with all things that fall
beneath the autocratic bootheel
of reality

freewrite

There was a parrot on the HMS Gregarian who knew the coordinates of an old sunken ship from the days of pirates. It recited these numbers constantly, but no one knew what the numbers referred to. The parrot’s deceased owner had wanted to pass the information along, but generally couldn’t bring himself to talk to people. Thus, he spent weeks, months, reciting the same string of numbers until it was all the parrot would say.

Many of the sailors onboard had their own theories about what the numbers meant.

The treasure went unfound by any of them, though. And so it was only hundreds of years later when a team of archaeologists explored the wreck, and found a man from 50,000 years ago still alive down there, living in a large underwater cave, where he grew enough crops to keep the air fresh and provide him with food. The man had a small tobacco farm, and a pipe which he had fashioned out of bones from the skeletons of the expired crew. The man had apparently been aboard the ship when it went down, frozen in a block of ice. The ice melted after everyone else drowned, and this man found himself on the bottom of the ocean, but close enough to this underwater cave to swim up into it.

Ridiculous, why is he still alive after probably hundreds of years living in this cave? There could be some sort of unique property of a certain type of moss or algae that grows in the cave. There could be many things. But there aren’t.


The left-side tire blew out, sending the semi trailer careening, flipping off the road. Sammy jumped out just before the explosion, and found himself in the middle of the dessert, sitting on a cactus made of icing, chocolate flakes everywhere. And thousands upon thousands of ants swarming over the monstrous cake. He tried to fight them off, to save what he could, but there were too many. They ate it all up.

They ate his feet, too, and it was many years before he was able to fashion new ones. He never could get them quite working right, so he just attached giant springs to his legs. These were a disaster, and quickly got him killed.


He was a superhero whose only power was the ability to grow taller. But he could never grow smaller again afterwards, only taller, and taller, and taller. When new challenges presented themselves, his natural inclination was to just grow a bit more, until the problems seemed more manageable. Eventually, he became his own problem. He was too big to interact with others, then he was too big to even stay near others, for fear of crushing them. Eventually, he was too big to breathe, as there wasn’t enough atmosphere. He gasped his last, and everyone else on the planet died with him, as he sucked up the last of the oxygen on Earth.

Somewhere far away, a great bearded man watched it all through a telescope and shrugged, unable to intervene, only to watch history unfolding, and barely even comprehending the magnitude of the things he witnessed. That night, he disassembled the telescope, and went for a long swim in the bay. In the morning, he would do something different with his life.

Serial, Stage 4

I stumbled over the rocks and dying undergrowth to keep up with my companion, who ran towards the smoke with a concern I had thought him incapable of. The main, indeed, the only street in town was a boulevard in Hell, with every building from saloon to outhouse a mass of flames. He nodded at the ground, where clumps of hoof prints circled each other before racing off to the West. “Musta come through last night. Dozen maybe.” He spat on the prints and nodded to the fires, having exhausted his meager confabulatory reserves.

The dead horse was still there, but several other corpses had joined it, each now coated in thin layers of dust. Some buildings would soon be only embers, while others roared at the height of their intensity, adding to the already pitiless heat of the morning sun. I yawned and scratched my head, while the empty bank collapsed behind me. I wondered if the teller had ever woken up.

My companion had not once exclaimed what a shame it was, and his usual grunts and rumblings were absent, replaced by a more complete silence. I stood looking at the inn where I had slept the night before last, right next to what had been the train station. My worthless bank notes lay in my pocket, my suitcase still at our campsite and stuffed with contextually inappropriate clothing. An unwieldy embarrassment clogged the back half of my skull, and I lurched to a run towards the flaming inn before me to try and escape it. “Damb! What!?” was the cry that followed me through the front door.

The bar was on fire, the cash register was melting. The shelves behind the bar were on fire and emptied of liquor. The tables were on fire and the corpses sitting at the tables were on fire, and the old player piano in the corner was on fire. The ceiling of the common room was two stories up, but the entire second floor was a sea of billowing smoke, glowing orange and red, groaning and roaring. Everywhere the sound of wood cracking. The poisonous air joined the embarrassment in my skull, and I shook an old man at the nearest table. “Get out! You have to get out!” I coughed and coughed and kept shaking him, though flames danced on his head which lay in a pool of bubbling blood. I might have kept on shaking him, had I not heard a cry from up the stairs at the back of the room.

Past the player piano and up the steps into the smoke, with enough sense to wrap a discarded rag around my face. There was a small child on the steps, indistinct through the tears in my eyes. And then I was carrying her, rushing out of the smoke and back through the room. An ember falling from above lit on my forehead as we raced out the door, and waves of heat chased the poison from my skull. I dropped my burden in the dusted road.

My companion was next to me now, and he shouted, “Ahbrow! Ahbrow!” then slapped me in the face. The burning subsided. I lay on the ground and ran a hand across my forehead to feel a small colony of blisters rising where my right eyebrow should have been. I blinked and looked at him where he stood sporting what must have been his first smile ever, clashing with his mustache, which was like a hairy frown of its own. As my vision cleared, I nearly cried out in horror as the muscles in his cheeks writhed with the pain and effort of this newly discovered expression.

Serial, 3rd entry

In the night, I was plagued by a sickeningly comfortable dream of my family’s house on the East coast. The white-washed walls, the sound of surf audible from the deck. Father and mother’s uniformly disapproving stares. Jane’s sandy white dresses, and Jay turning blue in the face from the tightness of his bow tie.

As a child, it had always seemed a long walk to the shore, but it was just over the hill. My adult legs trod carelessly over the flowers and insects I used to examine. I quickly reached the crest to take in that familiar view of the surf stretching across the horizon.

It was only just then, as I blinked in the sunlight, that I realized I heard a howling wind, and not the waves. In place of the ocean, lay a vast and crooked desert. It creeped up the shore, killing the grass and the flowers as it went, and my skin blistered in the light. I felt a hoof on my shoulder, and there stood the horse on its hind legs, tongue hanging out and stumbling, neighing intensely while it pointed out a dust storm in the distance. It’s big horse lips were on the verge of forming human speech. “Wahg op, ged! houhyhnm!” it said.

I opened my eyes and blinked away sandy tears, the taste of a nightmare on my tongue. My bearded companion was shaking me by the collar. I pleaded with him: “What!? What did you say?”

“Ah sed ‘wake up, Kid!’” he said, “’Gimletsville’s ahn farr!’”

And it was. Winding towers of ash twisted into the stratosphere. I couldn’t muster much sympathy for such a place, but we set out to see what was the matter, regardless.

inappropriate

i am bird shit on your head
and the bird that shits on your head
and the head with bird shit on it

I am the whole
digestive cosmos
I am the dog at play
I drink my urine
to survive
I am God

and you are in my stomach

Serial, part two

Gimletsville had been a one-horse town

until very recently, I saw

but it’s dusty corpse now rested in the middle of the street
it’s tether frayed and one ear missing.

My guide was a mustachioed man who expectorated on the horse’s corpse and exclaimed: “Damn shame!” I couldn’t say to what or who he referred, as his slitted eyes broiled on me as he spoke. Later I would realize that anger was more of a lifestyle than an emotion for him.

The bank was apparently abandoned except for a single teller. He slept soundly at the window. As he was not roused by my companion shouting “Damn Shame!” at the walls, I raised my hand to shake him by the shoulder to find it was covered in cob webs. Rigorous oscillation drew an irritated mumble from his depths, but his snoring remained. This was distressing to me, as I relied on my banknotes and carried very little cash (at the behest of many of my wisest friends).

Eventually, he roused enough to pocket the notes I handed him, but fell promptly asleep again after telling me there “weren’t no money.”

“Dem shaim;..” said my companion, chewing his cud.

I returned to the street to gaze at the dead horse and its floppy tongue, which a withered feline batted at with its paw. The heat was growing intense, and the noon star baked the thoughts right out of my head. “Well um i guess.” I lacked ideas on how to speak or live for the present.

“Yap,” said the mustache man. “Diiim shim.”

That night, I bunked under the stars with my loquacious companion, who set to his boiled horse with a will. My own appetite was lacking as I felt on the edge of being gobbled up by the desert.

old poem

grounded dreams of dreary days
lie cradled on the shore
of oceans spent on goddess ink
to ask for so much more

Where are the bloated visions of yesteryear
grumbling, gurgling, feasting on the lore
they lie now in numbered graves
brittle and rotten at the core

to leap from mountains became
to hop from hills
to skip on moondrops
now to pace the shore

of the dreams you once had
when worry was a boy

to walk the moon
the eye of night
as she folds you
in her silent dress

to talk with death
the sigh of life
as he holds you
to his viral breast

dusty black and dreaded white
where went your roaring breath

it left you at the edge of hope
where skeletons of monstrous plans
smother in the stink of life