things i did today

I spontaneously edited most of my old triceratops posts. I got tired of them. I like the new ones. I will probably spontaneously edit them in 2-3 months. Here is a manifesto i wrote at work.


The Manifesto Manifesto

1. Fill a pants with round-stick Bics!

2. black ink

3. Your scalp is not an honest substitute for a squirrel's nest.

4. String Theory is not real until Al Gore says it is.

5. PowerPoint your desire into a less problematic fluid.

6. 75 WPM is the hallmark of any democracy worth saving.

7. scream your poem into a legal pad and wait only 3 days for rejection; this is a limited time offer

8. South Dakota is not acceptable legal tender. It is not valid in Canada, astronauts, or Super Mario Bros warp to level 5.

picture

Sex Fantasy

three mean-faced hookers are huddled together on North Avenue
in the flat cracked parking lot of the Church's Chicken
that never stays open past eleven o clock

one of the hookers is wearing a cherry red basketball jersey
from 1986 when the Hawks were actually a good team
the other two wear tube tops and gold skirts and platform sandals

a car stops in the Church's chicken parking lot
the girl with the basketball jersey walks up to the window
she says something suggestive to the man behind the wheel

he says something suggestive back to the hooker
he makes a remark about a popular television show on cable
he wants the hooker to dress up like a nurse

then Jay B walks up to the car
he introduces himself as the pimp
he says that will cost $5000

unfamiliar in the conventions of bartering with pimps
the man behind the wheel hightails it
a long black exhaust pipe smoking in the black ass of the night

the hooker says to Jay B that she would have performed
for the man in a nurse costume for a price
far less prohibitive than $5000

Jay B is busy sucking on an unlit cigar
it is cold enough that his breath is clouding in the air
but not cold enough for him to light his only cigar

he does not listen to the hooker
he knows that in the business of turning tricks
you have to rely on yourself for all major financial decisions

Jay B grew up in Bankhead
he saw a boy get shot when he was fifteen
he saw him fall down into a pool of blood and die

he knows what it is to stare a man in the face
after learning what it is that he most wants
and charging him a fortune to get it

the car returns. the man rolls down his window
he says he has the five thousand dollars
but he has a stipulation

he is married and he wants his wife to watch
he wants the hooker to tie him down
like he was in a hospital in a coma

and he wants his wife and the hooker to spit in his face
and tell him about the pleasure
he is unable to give them

he wants to lie there tied up all night long
while his wife drives the hooker back to Church's Chicken
and gives Jay B a blow job

like a sentinel or a telephone pole Jay B watches the street traffic
the hooker begins the arduous process of making up her face
the man in the car begins to sweat a little behind his neck

the other two girls have begun to glow
because the headlights of the car have illuminated their skirts
they giggle and two more cars pull up and they scatter and dance

TV on DVD

i think we should have a roundtable discussion on TV on DVD. i will start things off by asking a few questions.

Daniel: How many times have you tried finding Tsunami/Hurricane Katrina footage on one comprehensive, ultimate, collector's edition DVD? How much would you be willing to pay for such a thing, even if it did not include detailed commentary by David Lynch?

Ryan: How has post-structural Marxism hindered TV on DVD's effect on Christianity? Does it have anything to do with the 2% decline in overseas evangelical missionaries? Shakespeare had Marlowe, NASA had whatever Russia's space program was, Lassie had Leave It To Beaver, Jimmy Carter had that Dunkin' Donuts guy, and I guess what I'm trying to ask is, will careless marketing imbue 21st century capitalism with a sense of apocalyptic doom underscored by an insidious jovial mask of edibility?

Ashley: I heard on NPR the other day a news story about a 17 year old boy in Nebraska who watched the entire second season of 24 in one sitting and had to be hospitalized for 3 days. His 14 year old cousin was found the next week, disoriented, in the DVD section of Wal-Mart, with apparent memory loss. Whose responsibility is it to protect our children from this gross sin of distraction? When will HBO start offering cheaper box sets?

Ian: I have written 378 poems this month about some form of television. Am I too far behind? Please tell me you're not already up to 500. When do you plan on shooting footage for the pilot episode of your as-yet-untitled drama, which critics so far are describing as "ER for the poetry world" simply based on the first 10 pages of your script? Is it true you wrote it in a fit of mania, after an uneventful Six Flags trip when you were 15?

Who knows how long

Your skinny
white
finger
is poking
directly
into
my eye


You know
where
the
color
stops
and
there is
a dark spot


Well
your finger
has penetrated
my eye
and
now is
playing
the piano
with
my fontal lobe

While
you finger
me
I twitch
like
an animal
runover
by a car

I
feel
intense
pleasure

And
the part
of me
that
creates
working memory

Imagines
a long lake
frozen
like
a fingernail


I don't
want
anything
that you
could
not
give
me

sneak preview

here are some quotes/lines from a story i am writing about a human person.

"[My wife] has a tendency to hear what she wants to hear. I never proposed to her. We were in a Red Lobster. I came back from the bathroom, and she said 'of course I will marry you.' We had been talking about bagless vacuum cleaners. People at nearby tables were looking at me. I thought I had missed something. I said, 'Great.' We celebrated with a molten chocolate lava cake.

"I think my wife is stealing my DVDs and mailing them to her parents."

"The founding fathers had excellent sperm. Yesterday I realized I had been standing in front of a microwave for minutes, watching the popcorn bag slowly fill with air and lose it's flaccid shape. Then I remembered to shield my crotch from radiation with an oven mitt. Last week I vomited into the kitchen sink. It had been completely unexpected."

"If my wife ever turned into a zombie I would have to decapitate her without hesitation and sentiment. I told her that she could count on me for this, that I would try my hardest. She looked up from her Reader's Digest and said 'you should read this article, it's about cancer.'"

"I ate 4 Krispy Kreme donuts this morning. That's really going to throw off my anorexia."

"I tried dying this afternoon. My wife was at the library and I was doing the belt thing like I always do when she leaves. This time I figured I would come and then just hang there until everything went black and my wife would have to wait a few days before starting her latest John Grisham. But I thought of my poor sperm just lying there on the Berber carpet. I couldn't abandon them. I took them and put them in an empty pickle jar, which I hid on my side of the closet next to all the unwrapped Christmas gifts."

AWP...

THIS PICTURE IS 99% ACCURATE.

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.

fun.

i wrote this in the last 20 minutes..fuck it if its no good

You might say to me, if you had word shapes that could fit in my word slots
That it is human nature to think more clearly when nearing death
And I might say we should think clearly at all times then
And my face would be red
Or my face would be pale
And yours would be its normal color
And this amongst other things would cause me to stop talking

You would scoff and return to watching t.v.
This is ok
You would be content


If we acknowledge that it is a rope
Our footing
And that it is low
Even so we must confess to a fear of falling
And strive to strengthen our ankles

Some would say that strong ankles wont change a thing
And I would smile at them because they were receiving my thoughts as words

We are waiting in this iridescent light for change
Never realizing that to some extent it is presently arriving
Due to the nature of iridescence

Clarity speak clarity to my neutral face and make its structure fluctuate.

You have constructed a notion of freedom that insists that we not insist upon it
This could effect movement in my lip region
But I am not home now
I am not home


Lets hide in the closet
Lets not hide
Rather lets live in the closet
We can create our own ecosystem and change science and be changed too.

But in our hiding we are feeling the sunburn that would necessarily accompany a voyage into out there.
This may or may not be a result of blushing and our capillaries taking in too much blood.


We are constructed yes.
And we are seeking at some points of our lives to be deconstructed.
But not before we construct a second self for the future which we will always fail to finish

Laugh now let us laugh.


It can be said that fate if we must name it such is following at a pace that we cant hope to maintain and so we fall.

You ran fast I was watching you in a pair of binoculars
But I had them backwards and so you looked as small as you were feeling
And then you fell off
To which side it matters not
You fell
And that is that.

I am yelling can you hear my volume change?
Are the words striking your face like crashing cymbals.

And through the flexibility of our language I am meaning nothing to you perhaps
Or something small
And that is a different outcome than I had planned originally.

It is objects that made this for us
It is our belief in objects
Shiny teardrop reflecting objects

Our steadfast grip is withering under truth storms

Truth is a word.

Lets walk in tall grass
We cant see the rope anyway so lets choose tall grass for the sake of having more fun
We can pick a piece apiece and chew on it for eternity
Until it is over.

It will end.
If it is kind.

We are very much the same
For one in our physical structures
But in our fear in the face of vision as well.

That we are seeing and fearing simultaneously and without an escape hatch
Is why you are still listening to me talk when I say things that bore you.

The nature of the word bore.

There is no turning back.

this might be a useful link for people who read this

zoooooom

Alexander, Who Used to be Rich last Sunday

weighed four hundred pounds and lived alone
he carried a gun in his hip pocket and he carried a flask
in his front left pocket and ate his dinner
out of the plastic compartments of a microwave dish
bent low in the carpeted corridor of his one bedroom apartment
he watched headlights flash against the walls like animal eyes
still in the quiet forest of his mind
lying in bed with curtains drawn it was Sunday and raining
all morning the wet pavement outside his window swelled
to the size of a Georgia peach the smell and the hairiness
of a wet crotch he played Van Morrison tunes and cleaned his gun
in love he was thinking of a girl at the gas station

she called him darling when he paid cash for beef jerky
she had black bobbed hair with huge hoop rings in her ears

swelled to the size of a can huge with botulism
because I remember a story about a family in Mexico
who ran a grocery store and had a bad batch of canned pears
distended like an exotic pregnancy and the woman
with her dog who bought the fruit and ate it and died
(or it the woman selling the fruit in her store
when Alexander walked in and bought a case of Keystone and walked out)

bid farewell to the cracked floors and the old sofa
big in the back corner of the pale room and farewell to
the hairy table and the clean lines of the plates and forks
when he with his big hands took hold of the double barreled gun
and did something none must have heard about not at least for a while
until they found him when they knocked and he didn’t come
or rather when they opened the door and there he was and that was it
really nothing left to salvage so with a barrel of gas and a flame
they burned the building from the inside, burned out the smell
until at last the gundpowder explosions and the alcohol flames
burned Alexander out so you couldn’t tell

poem

you might ask about the power of resolve.
you heard this phrase somewhere and so you ask
and we are answering the unidentified question
in ways that are not the same really or relevant.

“it has to do with graham crackers, and the perforated line”
i might say, and you would respond
“it is about the ten year old boy who was lost in the mountains
carrying only a hatchet” and we would divorce our own ideas

we are not right
because we are what is left
when words don’t make themselves

and because we are left we might be what remains
though this is troubling
charred useless remains are all that is left of our right
which we never had
to identify each other as speech receptors
reciprocal patterns that reinforce the notion
of being
which we are not
by way of negatives and their canceling effect.

lets light off a few black cats and listen as the machine-gun
rips our silence apart.

ask me why I woke up to tell you this
ask me why I woke up.
i would ask the cat as well
as he might know better answers.

we are eating our own shit
but we are doing it well and without remorse
or second thoughts about whether our enamel will seal it out.

its about perforated lines
snapping.