hello kitty

Then in my apartment everything began to burn,
starting with the lampshades. Like bad haircuts
splitting apart to reveal the grey black brains, or
splitting overstuffed pieces of orange furniture.

The vacuum cleaner swallowed a rubber band and
gently smoked. The carpet oozed its own juices. The microwave
set itself to high, revolved for thirty five seconds, and then
blew itself apart from the inside.

I wandered the lost shuttle of rooms like an agape mouth, believing
everything is lost. The paint in liquid came off the walls
peeling synthetic raindrops which sounded like the pow pow pows
the mute grinning and grinding of factories and my teeth
chewed themselves into a localized anesthetic of frenzy.

O Mardi Gras Tuesday! the girls in bead skirts and shirts
have not noticed the gulping gasps coming from my window,
the black feathers of a smoketail like a diver’s wetsuit swimming out
from my chamber-tank. FM radios blare like the town air-raid sirens.

They are delivering babies at Athens Regional Hospital
to the sound of an electronic heart monitor, the first noises in life
I think, with the fire alarm like an ostentatious red flower next
to a tombstone with my name on it.

this was inspired by chinese internet addiction

spider solitaire is angry at me
i keep failing it
i need to stop promising to always win
i need to stop promising to lick the corner of the screen
whenever i lose

spider solitaire never asks me for anything
but i still feel compelled
to rub cream cheese around its cards

i won't forget the time it let me win
i won't forget all those days it was happy for me
when it abandoned sarcasm and i found myself singing to it
softly and without a melody
like whenever i would bury my pets
or the love i felt originating from my stomach

part II of my fiction writing. sorry it is not my turn. someone tell me if i should continue this piece.

J was at a loss. He had been searching the 2002 world almanac for hours to no avail. There have to be answers here, I know it J thought but his outward expression of this thought was the word fuck. His phone should have been ringing all morning long but it was not. J had not paid his bills, and this was the least of his concerns. J plucked hairs from his beard one by one noting with each strand the singular impulse of pain and numbness that seemed so intertwined that he might never separate it into two parts. He was memorizing numbers now: population of Missouri 5,595,211, most deaths in a Scottish train wreck 227, total refugees in the world 14,544,000. Beads of sweat glistened on J’s wrinkled forehead and every so often one fell carelessly to the page below threatening to erase a mass of people from the books of history altogether. Jonathan sat on the mini fridge looking at J with his usual face. This would have been consoling to J if he were reading a dictionary and could identify console or consolation as words that meant something tangible. J was reading an almanac though. Light blurred into the peeling paint of the bare apartment walls and lulled J into a feverish sleep.

Bertha was angry, very angry. “Carl” where is your dumbass friend J” she asked in more of a growl than a human utterance. Karl knowing that she had in fact pronounced his name with a c and not the k as it should have been said nothing. She could at least know my name Karl thought as he scraped the burnt cheese off of a pan that had been brought to him by another employee whose name also had several variations. Karl was a reasonable man. He reasoned that J was not going to come back to work anytime soon and also that he himself should probably consider a similar course of action. For all his death metal exterior gruffness though Karl was really a scared malleable man. He scraped his knuckle on a rough edge of the counter and kept scrubbing the pan as his blood mixed with sudsy water in the sink below.

What the streets don’t tell you is that the steam that rises off the blacktop after a summer shower is really the souls of all the downtrodden men who have walked on that surface at one time or another. What they do tell you is to keep moving, to keep your eyes directly ahead lest you see an alley in your periphery that leads to a different outcome. J was walking the streets and he was looking, his head was spinning. J saw a man in a fine suit, a real nice suit. “What kind of job they got you doing where you wear such a fancy suit” J asked the man. “I am a stockbroker” replied the man somewhat annoyed at J’s directness. “Oh you are like Will Smith then,” J said “in that movie where he sleeps in the subway bathroom and cries”. With a look of contempt and a quick adjustment of his tie the suit walked away at a pace such that any person passing by at that time would know innately that this man was important by his gait alone. J felt nothing about this interaction except that time was definitely different after the encounter was done than it could have been before. J asked a street vendor who was nearby for the time just to verify his suspicion. “Eh man, I saw you mess up that guy’s day man and I got to say thank you” the street vendor said. “He comes by here every day smirking up his face and acting like he is better than me just cause he wears a suit that costs more money than it’s worth”. I am a hero J thought and felt unchanged by this realization. “How much is that hat” J asked pointing to a red hat with earflaps covered in faux-fur. “For you, twenty dollars” the street vendor said. J looked at the laminated paper with prices that was hanging on a post nearby and saw that the price read: HATS $20. J gave the man his last twenty dollars and put the hat on. “Pleasure doing business with you sir” the street vendor said. “Your price sheet is peeling in the corner” J said pointing to the sheet which did in fact have a corner where the laminate was separating. The man looked at his sheet and then back at J. J walked on, the street was still for too long and so he was compelled to move. The city was small enough that you could walk on its streets without getting lost too easily but this was no consolation for the already lost. As J was walking he ran into Karl. “Hey Karl” J said and kept walking. “J, are you ok Bertha has been flipping out at work all week. She said if you don’t come in tomorrow you are gone for good and even if you do you are on probation” Karl said very earnestly. J stopped and turned around to face Karl. “Karl, what exactly happens on probation? I mean do they lower my pay from 5.50 and hour to 5.15 or do I have to wear a special colored uniform like they make the mentally handicapped wear or what?” Karl didn’t know how to answer that and so J turned around again and kept walking. After awhile J began to feel like someone was following him and he looked back. There Karl was matching him stride for stride and so J stopped again to see what more he must do to appease this man. Karl walked up to J with tears in his eyes and he hugged him. J was confused. His head was still swimming with numbers and he was lost. He began to walk again and this time Karl walked beside him. They were a regular modern day Don Quixote and Sancho Panza those two minus the donkey and the ambition--minus the donkey and the ambition.

Jonathan was meowing as loud as he could. It was a rainy day and the sun had not come up. On days like this Jonathan would dig in the trash and find what he could to tide him over until J woke up. He had already licked all the aluminum crisp pockets clean and picked the little Debbie wrappers apart. J opened one eye and saw an orange and white blur. PANICK! “Oh shit I’m in space, I’m in space and I can see fucking Jupiter” J said rapidly. Then he smelled shit and snapped out of it. Shit cannot exist in space because space is too awesome to be contaminated with such trivial pieces of matter J reasoned as his vision cleared and he recognized his cat’s ass in his face. J had forgotten about Earth. “Well Jonathan, lets get some breakfast” J said. “Meow-wow” Jonathan replied. J looked through his plastic cupboard and found that all was left was the cat food. The two ate and lay themselves down on the cool tile floor near the door. In this way they passed the whole day.

FEBRUARY HAIKU !!!

Staring up at me
is Panic! At The Disco.
Fuck you Rolling Stone.

this is the beginning of a longer work of fiction i am writing it might be shitty

An orgy of light filled the air of J’s studio apartment. His cat had chewed through the blinds and the Sun was fulfilling its obligatory duty as an eternal alarm clock and device of vexation. J scratched his stomach really hard. When he removed his hands there were red lines showing him where his nails had been. J felt excited and forgot to be angry at his cat. He scratched out words on his stomach. The word Fuck was brightly emblazoned on his bare chest. J laughed. His cat, Jonathan, meowed. “Calm down Jonathan,” J said “or I will eat your cat food all by myself and then you will really be screwed.” J was serious, it was in his nature to always be serious. J walked to the mini-fridge sitting by the tv and grabbed a Hot Pocket for breakfast. He began to sing “who you gonna eat…Hot Pockets!” He realized he had somehow mixed up the song from the Hot Pockets commercial with one from the children’s show about Pound puppies. It is important to make such distinctions when one creates new songs J thought to himself with a very solemn look on his face.
“Meow-wow” said Jonathan.
“It’s not ready yet” said J.
“Meow-wow” said Jonathan in a much more insistent tone than before.
“Yeah, you are right buddy,” said J “ Hot Pockets are a pretty shitty breakfast.”
J had a knack for misinterpreting Jonathan’s pleas, and Jonathan had a cheerful disposition that allowed such transgressions to fade into distant memory almost instantaneously. J watched as the numbers on the microwave ticked down to zero. He found the chiming of the machine to be very unnerving. Once he had been draining the water from a pot of ramen noodles and the chime had startled him and caused him to miss the sink. A waterfall of boiling water washed across his lower stomach and the area below. This was an unpleasant memory for J. So here he waited with his finger hovering over the stop/clear button on the microwave ready to pounce at the first hint of the chime. J had his quirks but this in no way diminished his seriousness. J ate the hot pocket quickly. His tongue was the victim of a glob of melted processed cheese getting its revenge on mankind on behalf of cows everywhere. J knew this in an oblique sense but didn’t know exactly how he could make it clear to anyone besides himself. It is better to know ones own self than for others to know you J thought as he put on his jacket and combed through his beard with his grease-stained fingers. J grabbed his keys and left his apartment. Jonathan sat in the window with an empty stomach and a cheerful face watching as J rounded the corner and left his world

J looked at the time clock when he punched in to work and saw that he was six minutes late. J asked the nearest employee he could find if Bertha had been looking for him. “Shit J, I don’t know man. Did you bring me that cd?” The man’s name was Karl. J knew this because he was wearing a nametag that said Carl on which he had scratched out the c and scribbled in a k with a permanent marker. “Yeah I got it” J said handing Karl a hot pink mix cd with the words DEATH METAL MEGAMIX written on it. Karl grinned really wide and took the disc from J’s hand. It slipped right out. I wonder when Bertha will bitch at me for being six minutes late J thought to himself as he slipped on a pair of powder-free latex gloves. “You are six minutes late” Bertha said in a monotonous voice as she put her manly hand on J’s shoulder and pointed towards the time clock. So much for wondering J thought and wrestled his shoulder from Bertha’s grasp and shuffled off to the area where he would put on his scrubs. J felt like he should be a very important member of society wearing his powder-free latex gloves and scrubs. J walked over to the burrito bar and stood very still hoping none of the students would see him. J was a cafeteria worker and today he had to make burritos, lots of burritos. Several girls came over to the burrito bar. All of them were talking on cell phones, very new top of the line cell phones. J was not impressed by this but he was very tired. The first girl looked for a minute at the ingredients and then began the familiar process.
“Can I get a chipotle wrap” she asked.
Chipotle is just a fancy word for red shit wrap J thought but he replied “Yes, and what do you want on it?”
“Hmmmm…Hold on a minute Jess,” she said into her bright pink cell phone “What is that one right there?” she asked pointing at the beef strips.
“Beef strips” J said.
“Oh ok, I’ll have some of that then, the steak strips,” and her eyes scanned down the line “and some black beans, lettuce, tomato, red peppers, no green pepper please, some of the white and the yellow cheese, olives, onions and that’s it.” She said breathily.
J began to scoop all of the ingredients onto the tortilla and the girl looked on waiting for J to forget something. When he finished putting the mess on the plate he looked at her with his usual look accompanied by a pause in which he expected the customer to ask for something else or to tell him where he messed up. She looked slightly annoyed and grabbed the plate from J. This process repeated itself over and over until he came in. He was a very big man with very coarse hair on his arms and a very noticeable bald spot on his head. J did not know the students name but he mentally noted that it must include the word ogre. J began to steam a wrap for the ogre and wiped a line of sweat from his brow with his shirtfront. The burrito bar had somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 or so different items that could be put in a wrap. The ogre wanted all of them and he made it clear that he did not want the normal scoop but double that amount of all of them. J was always amused to see that these students, these future leaders of America, failed to acknowledge that the wrap was one constant size and that the doubling of items would ultimately result in nothing less than a cluster-fuck of torn tortilla and salsa all over the plate. The ogre had his specifications and he was set in his ways. One of the managers walked by and saw the monster J was creating. “Whoa it looks like somebody has an appetite today he said with a big smile.” This was a joke to the manager--that is how managers tell jokes. J had an idea. “Hey boss I am having trouble with the wraps again do you think you could show me how to do it?” he said. The manager turned red in the face and his pupils dilated. “Yes J I sure can” he said as he reached for a pair of gloves. He stammered a few incomprehensible words and set to work on the wrap. It tore instantly. “Whatever, I’ll just take it like that” the ogre said smirking at the manager. “Oh no no, J can make you another one real quick, I apologize for that” he said turning more purple than red. J made another one. It tore instantly again. The manager said fuck but it was muffled and J laughed on the inside. The ogre went away pleased with a busted burrito and a sense of superiority over the two men who just made it for him. J made many more burritos and eventually clocked out.

this is an old graphic i made that never uploaded correctly.

AMERICA !

I watched Dr. Phil yesterday. Everything he said was so right. So true. I was humbled in his presence. I took green beans out of the fridge and spooned them into his pixelated mouth. I saw him flinch a little before saying, "You've got to learn that marriage isn't some roller-skating party. It takes work." I knew he felt my offering. I took macaroni and cheese out of the fridge and stuck them onto the TV around his hair. He was getting lighter, i could feel it. Dr. Phil looked a little panicked. He wasn't ready for his apotheosis. I touched his wrist. I said, "Phil. Phil." He looked at me. He was hurt. I said, "Phil." I lowered my eyelids. I leaned against the TV. His shirt was warm. I touched the space in between his eyebrows. I noticed he probably hadn't shaved that morning. Phil said, "We are ready." I said, "Yes. You got us here." The TV turned off and I laid down on the carpet. There was a humming and it was new. It was the sound of a bitter savior.

--------------------

Beau Jewkes who I remember three things about fell in love (a mormon)
with a girl from summer camp in the desert who he said

made her mark with her conservative clothing on his mind and who
I must have been a close friend of his to have found everything out

had never snuck out of her house at night alone like he did one time
but who lived in a big house with her father and mother and a huge dog

her name was Iota and she was mixed half Shetland half Wheaton
which in good Beau Jewkes humor he wrote a poem about (he never wrote poems

he said to me, but he always had ideas) and the poem was about the way girls with
their dogs lie on the couch in the same silhouette a river makes in the shallows

skips over the water like someone swallowing a cup of milk
because he had ideas about poems and they were often about the way

people told their stories to other people in the vast recollecting unfaltering voices
Beau Jewkes was a Mormon and he called me one night in the middle of the night

on drugs and I asked him why and he told me he had cancer of the testicles
I remember the day he gave them up because I remember my idea

was to write an elegy to his unborn children (the girl he fell in love with
was out of the picture) because by April the testicles were gone and I remember

thinking what he must have dreamed about in the nights after
maybe Jesus crossing the quiet oceans from the red seas of Africa to the Atlantic

coast of America to those red skinned Jews the thirteenth tribe of Israel
when from the blue depths the children of Beau Jewkes were dragged from his womb

one by one like cadavers from a tidal drift or like buttons off a seaman’s swallowed coat.