More Paths

Yet again we mistake our mistakes
for consistency, admiring the facts
in which they fall just because we
cannot be bothered to fix them for
the next time.   In the end the people
will gather 'round the old campfire
and sing songs, and roast dogs, and
wonder aloud about the point of it
all.  They will throw their hands up
in defeat and say that this is how it
is and that's why the way was the way
it had to be, as if it is written on a stone
tablet like those brought down by
Moses.  In the light of moons and
stars the world and its neighboring
cosmos will ponder the inevitability
of inevitability.  For what is destiny
but an interstate blindly followed
until the age of cataclysm when all
will be brought to darkness that
blinding blackness that consumes
all, but we needn't follow the same
path to reach the end, for the end is
coming and that is the only inevitability.

There is No Post-Production

Do you feel that twinge in your back
the one that tells you to wake up
and start your day.  Don't ignore it,
because it will continue to pester
you until you find your way crawling
on floor for breakfast.  It'll slither
you on through the door and self-drive
your car.   You will fester at work like
an open soar or boil that is waiting
to burst.   You'll gunk up the rest
of your co-workers with your gruesome
bile and all the while that pestering twinge
in your back begging you to wake up.
You will sit silent at desk, cubicle, counter,
and you will ponder the evils transgressed
around you but if you do not give heed
to that twinge in your back you will
be left with nothing in a world full of infinite
variability.   If you do not pick a number
that small twinge will spike and hurt you.
It will beg for release, and all that bile will
build back up just as it was before until
like a brain vessel bursting in your brain
its too late.   You'll be dead and you'll have
concocted a dozen or so million reasons
to ignore it, or poke at it, but not accept it
that twinge is the possibilities of tomorrow
but if you keep on keeping on, and keep
calm and carry on it will kick and stab you.
It will scream out to the ire of your friends,
family, lovers, acquaintences, up until, and even
passed the moment of departure.  It will scream
aloud, "I was the real you, I was your potential,
I was your inner child screaming to be set free,"
so chill out, sit down, laugh, love, and experience
the fun of your eager little hearts.

The Technician - synopsis.

It's the story of a man
consumed with wrath
against an abandoning mother
who likes to look at
other peoples memories,
ideas, and dreams.  It's
invasive despicable and
he knows it.  Yet he continues.
He strikes keyboard keys
on a daily basis, staring
at heartbeat monitors
and peaks at his clients
minds when he gets home
to his shithole apartment.
A failed med student is
his boss, a chatty single
mother, his co-worker, and
the one neighbor he has
he knows only from a
misplaced piece of mail.
On an ordinary Monday,
a new guy comes in to
visualize an idea, but
when our man sees this
idea is to perpetuate an
act of violence against
the most beloved man in
the world, he has to fight
with something he's never
had to confront before,
his conscience.

Nonsense Words Redux

on the other side of a locked door is a key
the key to the door that is locked from the other side
on the other side of that key is a door
a door that you are locked behind
in order to get the key you have to be the size of a flea
but the flea is not big enough to get the key off its place
no the key to getting the key with the flea is to attach a string
a string is the thing to attach to the flea, that is key for the key
and when the flea reaches key he must tie string to key for the thing
and the thing with the key tying flea is that thing must know how to tie
flea and key with string and returned to you but only if he tied the thing
all the time you sit and wonder just how in the hell you ended up
on the other side of that door you wonder about how much time you sit
and although the key is on the other side of the locked door and you can see it it is not something that will ever be gathered by you but its so much more than anything else
and in this moment there is nowhere anyone can go but its too late for the end of the earth
for the key and flea the thing on the string learning lessons
rising tensions and everything else inbetween.

ascending bowel movement

under a certain disguise i may have been something more than what i am,
but unfortunately whatever that may be is beyond my understanding
and here i am faltering to think of something to write because
i am tired of all the nonsense words that seem to keep
coming up out of my fingertips and mouth but
there is no one who cares to read them just
the incessant typing of my fingers on
a keyboard that is trying to scream
and yet no one is listening for
they are deaf to the noise
they are mute to me
silent and sickly
searching for
the thing
to say
now.
Why
do we
commit
our crimes
outright like
we do when the
truth can simply set
us free to get out of this
mess, but we just decided
to let death climb over us and
take its time in bringing us to old
age and there is nothing really that
we can accomplish if we are going to
be the key to the next generation.  So we
go on settling into the guise that we have been
given at birth but to what end do we dress up for
this non-celebratory holiday, because I cannot see
the reason in burning down the trees just to create paper
masks to parade our ignorance with when their are people who
wood work and grind away toiled into oblivion and they do know
the way to get back home, but here we are again.  Yes, here we are again.

Low Caliber - brainstorming opener.

Another B and E that's all it was.   Jerry would kick in the door and Chester would follow him in and they'd pick off a few pieces of jewelry - earrings, necklaces, bracelets - and then pick up any petty cash or small electronics like - PlayStation's, DVD players.  Filling their five dollar backpacks - each one carried two - with whatever would fit.  And me, sitting in the car having a panic attack and cursing myself that I'm doing this again.   I'm not even sure why I said yes.  A part of me laughs at the notion that I'm a getaway driver, on his way to retirement - college - and that this is my last job that I've been pulled back into by my crime family - childhood friends.  I'm going on the straight and narrow.  I'm going to study business, economics, and make a name for myself.   Not likely.   I may have high hopes for my eventual entrepreneurial skills but I'm big eyed and bushy tailed enough to buy into the idea that it'll be anything more than a mom and pop shop in my hometown.  That's fine.   I never wanted anything bigger than that, I just didn't want to be like Jerry and Chester.

My names David.  I'm sitting in the drivers seat of my parents Ford Focus sedan.   It was a graduation present because I'd done so well.   Tenth in my class.   Not bad for a class of three hundred plus.   Yet, all that potential - I suppose - and here I am.   I've known Jerry and Chester since I was six.   We moved into a modular home down the street from the school.  It was a quiet community, not affluent, not degraded.  Chester and Jerry lived on either side of me.   Childhood friends, neighbor friends.   Our parents couldn't have been any more different.   My dad's, Frank and Theo were rather committed to their marriage and I was born to a midwife on the thirteenth of July, Dad 1 claims he was the donor, but I look more like Dad 2.   The numbers are alphabetical order.

Chester's mom was a drunk.   His fathers, of which there  were many candidates were any one of several thousand - exaggerating - rejects that Chester's mom picked up on a Saturday night.  I'm not saying his environment led to his psychopathy, but I am saying it didn't help.   Chester didn't fall into that category of child development as a product of his low socioeconomic status.  He was one of the resilient ones, highly intelligent - whatever that means - but 200th in our class roster.   He couldn't give two shits about high school, but he was extremely calculated.   He loved his mother too.   He would often sneak out money from her purse just to go and supply the house with groceries, and they'd let him purchase a bottle of vodka just because they knew just who his mother was.  Chester was hopelessly devoted to making his mother happy even if that meant feeding into her addiction.  She'd chastise and hit him for taking the money to buy bread just as she screwed the cap off of her Absolut.

Jerry had your typical household.  The nuclear family.  Mom, dad, one sister, and him - the oldest.  He was an idiot academically and had the notion of being a rapper - like Eminem since any respecting white boy slinging ghetto speak aspired to be.  His parents hated the way Jerry talked because they knew it wasn't his natural language.  He'd accuse them of racism, and they'd yell at him, and he'd go into his room and crank up Rap God and force them to listen to him sing along - he was terrible.   It didn't stop their for Jerry though because he was keen on being a real "gangster."

That is where our mess happened.  Jerry was fixated on stealing stuff.  He was a kleptomaniac.   His parents were overbearing - I only bring that up because he always used that as a bullshit excuse.  He'd walk passed the teachers desk and take a stapler and slide it not to conspicuously into his hoodie pocket, and then in the hall when I'd ask him about it he'd say, "My parents are always riding my ass."  He didn't keep any of the shit he took.  He just dropped it in the trash can on the way out the main doors.   That was in middle school.  Around the sixth grade. 

In school we were nowhere near each other.   Not if we could help it.  We had friends from classes - mine were usually girls caught up in their bisexuality and gender non-conformity who were super proud of me for loving my parents - but Jerry, Chester and I were not associated in school.   I cared too much about making my parents proud, Chester didn't care about grades because his mother didn't care, and Jerry didn't care because his parents berated him constantly about why he should care.   Outside of school though we were inseparable.  It was mostly convenience.  Living next door was easy, plus I had all the cool new gadgets and my dad Frank was an accountant who being a neighborly guy helped Jerry and Chester's parents maximize the returns on their taxes every year, and my dad Theo was a landscape architect.   Dad 2 was obsessed with appearances, and when he bought the fix me up ranch house, next to the trash heaped front yard of Chester's, and the overgrown grass of Jerry's homes he saw the potential to develop his skills into beautification.

I'll admit my respect for my academics wasn't completely out of respect for my dad's.  There was a fourth member of our gang - which would be a more accurate descriptor of our life by the end of the sixth grade.  Her name was Emma.   She lived across the school district, was salutatorian of our class, and my girlfriend.   When I wasn't with Chester and Jerry I was with Emma.   We started dating in tenth grade.   Jerry had lost his virginity in the eight grade to Mary Lou Michaelson, but I didn't lose mine until 11th.   I only say that because Jerry was obsessed with his junk.   In our earliest years he'd always talk about his dick and balls, and just had an unhealthy obsession with sex before he even knew what it was.  When he found out what it was - he was away - like a horse at the races.   By the time I caught up with him he had already fucked six girls in our school.   Though I didn't understand why, Jerry was a dick himself.

To clarify, we had a bond, but I didn't particularly like them.   We had been through a lot and before I met Emma I got caught up in being a little crazy.  Like I was saying before I got distracted, Jerry stole shit, all the time.   He'd break into houses eventually, and pretty soon he was the dirty public secret of the neighborhood.  People wouldn't let him near their houses.  There was never any proof that he'd done thing so Jerry never ended up in Juvenile detention, but he ended up adopting this persona.   Ghetto speak I called it, but I called it lousy imitation.   It was the way racists perceived the average African American.   It wasn't an homage, as much as it was a middle finger to a race.   He spoke in "What up Dogs," and "catch ya later -" just insert your favorite racial epitaph here, and then his pants sagged to his knees.   The joke was that we had maybe four African American students on campus, and none of them sounded like Jerry.   We were in a decently affluent neighborhood.  Our school had a roof and running toilets, and state of the art computer labs, which is golden compared to the conditions of the schools in the City.  Jerry made up his ideal hoodlum, and sought out anyone local who was a punk and that was how come he met Tommy Reid.

Tommy Reid was a dirty rumor around town.  He was the nephew of a major crime family, and he was the network connection to our little suburb.   Tommy found Jerry because Jerry tried to steal from Tommy.   Tommy dealt coke out of the back of his Taurus.  He saw the potential of Jerrrys theievery but Jerry needed a car, and Jerry didn't have a car, but I did.

Raining Recital

It is a dreary sort of business
looking into the sky of rain
and deeming it to damn dark
to give a damn at all.   In the midst
of a sudden stroke of genius
the abysmal sky demands
that you let go of the world
and take a moment to breathe
in the wet and fragile showers.
In the words of a better poet
the people pitter patter as they
chitter chatter over the pinging
and panging of a torrential
raining.   This is the lullaby
of bitterness, as the sun is coated
in disguise by the cumulonimbus
formations of ugly grays
on these here damned dreary
days.   What is it a man can hope
to dream when the brightness
is not even upon the earth,
because fall rain is shrouding it all
so that all is stark and drained?
Sing the rhyme in time and take
a chance that a rain dance
was committed by some nobody
on the other side of the world. 
When the oil slicks on sacred lands
trip up the doctor who screams to the sky
for the earth.   Here it is a botched
ceremony causing the week long
tear fall of accumulated moisture's,
and we left to cerebral tortures
as the downpour trickles out
in slow but deliberate dribbles
until building up to a chorus
of forthcoming signals.   This
is the answer to the age old
question, an inquiry rife with time
wounds, and considered a perplexing
denouncement.  Who is in control?
The man, the god, or the earth?  Perhaps
all three, and, and is the word to throw about
for its god, and earth, and man, and we
all but strangers in our promised land
suffocated and weeping on end,
decidedly beside itself with heaping
of turmoil and bloodshed, and when
god lets his terrible voice shown down
he unleashes a gasp of sadness from
our choking mother earth, and the people
drown, and the people poison
commuting to and fro, and demanding
power to power their entertainment systems
as the sports men play sports ball
and the cartoons recite the age old
adage of the fart joke.   The rain,
yes, it all comes back to the rain,
we keep it acidic and it keeps it dreary
and we keep inside all worn and weary,
our minds filtered till its nothing else,
as the dreaming comes to an end,
as the dreaming comes to an end.

An Evolution of Nations

Perhaps it always was the best choice to execute the traitor
for who cares what it is the turncoat had in mind when
he decided to betray those he was entrusted to serve
was entrusted to protect.   I guess the only assumption
that can be made is that he wanted something different
and it did not matter if the motivation was money,
fear, or idealogical shifts.   The bottom line was wanting
a difference of focus.   Be it with the gun at the back
of his head, or the allure of gold glinting in his eyes,
he strove toward that goal, and he ended up paying instead
of being paid.    When they put the hang mans noose
round his neck they could not give into the hindsight,
it was an absolute truth that the execution happen as
if written innately into the fabric of the earth or in the
essence of time and space.   Then it came to pass that
some of the people misconstrude his actions, and made
of him a martydom either by accidental coincidences or
by purposeful exploitation.  His actions though ghastly
were not exactly immoral, though the state deemed
them a travesty of the highest degree.   In the peoples defection
as their thoughts shifted, they took it upon themselves to stage
a coup and in the end moved themselves an idependent entity
strong enough to attack, and willful enough to defend.   Then
as all time does, it came to pass that a new traitor was bore
with radical notions, and this new idealogy born from
the thoughtful convictions of a traitor themselves
tied the rope round the neck of the new betrayer, and let him dangle
feet frantic at the gallows.   And just as though the gods
were sitting high above they shook their head, and chuckled
as the traitors young son sprouted a plan in his mind that
would evolve to a cause, a cause to a coup, and a coup to a new idealogy
so that all nations were born of the traitors blood,
and we all in turn are turncoats.

a reflection for this day

as i pulled into the parking lot on the far end of campus/ i was struck by the quaint way the museum of cars sat/ as though the world didn't exist/  all the commuters already inside/ the hidden headlights passing through the tree line in front of me/ just the quiet vehicles/ abandoned/ like the way you'd see the empty highways on one of the walking undead shows/ the music on my radio thumped out a bass tone against my leg/ the speaker present in the door/ i switched off the radio then/ turned the key to silence the buzz of my engine/ removing my phone from my pocket/ as i had observed the laws of the road/ keeping its screen backlight from averting my eyes/ my attention as i drove the twenty or so minutes to arrive here on campus/ social media pulled the tap of my finger/ drawn to it like a magnet/ a product of our time/ to keep in touch in bitter silences/ spiteful laughters/ reading up on the ups and downs of strangers once friends/ once schoolmates/ that once upon a time/  first thing to greet me/ at the top of the feed was a headline/ mass/ dead/ concert/ shooting/ vegas/ a quick google search brought me to the full story/  the usual suspect of words/ the cache of bewilderment/ avoiding the comment section i exhaled a breath for the unobserved frustrations i'd find/ an assortment of finger pointing/ instead of observing the unfiltered truth/ the perpatrator a radical of some sort/ just a man who should remain faceless/ a shadow/ who should fade away/ given no credence/ just a mist/ or a piss/ we can easily forget/ as it circled down the bowl/ into the sewage/ with the rest of the extremes/ regional concentration didn't matter/ a bastard/ made for the fires of hell/ a personal pet to lucifer/ one who should be prodded/ plucked/ double-fucked/ by the pointing end/  i tried to react/ looked to what words could be typed with my thumbs/ in what way my minor contribution to social media might be impactful/ maybe not/ though in the swirl/ storm of the political madness/ maybe a way to contribute a voice amongst the anarchy/ in order to say that madness is its own territory/ no more belongs to political parties/ idealogies than the moon belongs to a sovergnity/ all gods children/ perhaps/ though what have we become/ disappointments/ even the ones who swear highest allegiance/ misconstrude words/ the christ figure maybe dying for nothing/ if we can't even see light in our enemies/ just a digression/ this dog/ rabid/ blood-thirsty/ sorry sack of flesh/ he was someones son/ maybe/ but no more a man/ than an ant/ more a cockroach/ more a virus/ an infection/ so i will not see him/ as i do not see the flu/ he is but the gum on my shoe/ a nucance/ sitting in that car/ on campus/ letting a momentary fear ride over me/ like a deluge/ that thin tidal wave of thought/ a ectoplasmic wall/ what place is safe/ ignoring/ for what use is fear in life/ not for me/ i got out of my car and walked along/ a heavy psychology book weighing down my backpack/ about child development/ about children/ babies/ fetuses/ about life/ i get to where i need to go/ taking the quiz that i need to take/ about learning/ speaking to my mother of the barrage of news she will have to hear/ as my dad's morbid curiousity keeps him glued to the news of mass murder on tv/ a fascination/ asking why/ why/ why/ i responding who cares/ a beast/ a rageful stranger/ with a trigger finger/ a goal/ some madness/ maybe/ maybe not/ random/ perhaps/ perhaps not/ i look to correspond my answers to my quiz/ a vision of younger siblings/ little niece/ little nephew/ a vision of victims on the strip/ in night clubs/ around the world/ on trains/ humorist offices/ sure its all around/ not of everyone/ amonsgst those gone/ there are those who cared not to think/ found solace in forgetting/ of singing along to songs/ of the happy observance of their contemporaries/ dancing/ smiling/ sipping a beer/ the country singer/ strumming a guitar/ a drummer drumming/ not my type of music/ music though/ a universal truth/ perhaps the only one/ across idealogy/ across regions/ cultures/ across religions/ what is there to gain/ from this loss/ no business sense/ in this life/ not a business/ a contribution to madness/ then come the clowns/ blowhards on tv/ passing theory for wisdom/ seeing it all set out/ i open up my computer/ i want to write something down/ never able to full say what i want to say/ gotta let something out/ but what contribution are their in words/ still/ i find the address bar/ typing in the words to bring me here/i type/ as i pulled into the parking lot at the far end of campus...

Societal Tones

Withheld from the edge of knowing,
as though knowing were a disease,
as if showing the world that you learn is
a cause for a cataclysm of concern.
Withhold truths so that the liars cannot manipulate
that which it is they know but refuse to
acknowledge it so that they can persist
in their down grading attitudes in order
to perpetuate the myth of their own legends.

What do they do if they gather up the knowing
and parade it down the square so that passerby's
unwield their eyes, and hope to know what it is they can't,
but the uninitiated will clamor against the wall,
and deem the knowing as a form of class warfare
that no one will survive.  and in the midst of their
cascading tears they will dismiss the truths and the lies,
and little in a world of perpetual agony, because they refuse
to take a side.  

It is here at the middle where the outside grips at the wrists
and tugs and pulls and shreds the skin so that it peels apart like
a plastic bag.   No satisfying tearing sound only symphonic terror
that belts from the masses like the final rattle of a bleeting sheep
to old and fragile to be any use in sheering so sent off to slaughter
for being itself.   Raped by the blade and bleeding on the countertops
where its only a mutton of its former self.

On the other side, as in that plain of existence so ethereal God looks down,
he is shaking his head, hand over eyes, ashamed that his tree bore fruit that
no one cared to ingest.  Oh, they bit into the knowledge but they never broke it down,
and digested, and he had given them all they needed, but they saw that higher knowledge
as an affront to their faith, but no one stopped to wonder how it could be so when he gave us
that tree to bleed on.

So like the serpent in that oft forgotten garden the liars will slither around, and cast
the doubt in the middle of the pen where the sheep will be frantic and tip toe
out of fear of being bitten and poisoned to death.  the outside ones, all nose in the air, will take their knowledge
and they will horde it, for they superior in degree, with degrees will never hand over
the key to their city, and it'll be a pious little oversight to witness the birth of ignorance
not from the liars, or the sheep but from the sheer audacity of the wise, to never sprinkling it down
properly amongst the lambs.

Boils and Sores - a short story

 Rachel removed her revolver from her holster and stood atop the ridge in a stance of particular disdain.   On the other side of the valley she could see the encroaching riders in a scattered line, kicking up dust as the neared.   She raised her arm and steadied a bead at the head of one of the incoming men, and prepared herself to shoot.   When she pulled the trigger the gun clicked with an unsatisfying ping and there was no expulsion of any projectile.   Save for the bullet in her head.   She readied the weapon back on her hip and made her way back up to her homestead and settled at her place at the table knitting the blanket she'd been neglecting for those last few moments of make believe.

Outside the sounds of the horses galloped into a steadily declining clop-clop until it was nothing but the sound of a rider heavy with fatigue landing upon the heavy earth.   There were three such sounds, each one bigger than the last, and Rachel kept her eyes on the knitted blanket as the heels of their boots clamored upon the wooden porch.   Then the door flung open in a bout of violence, and she smiled at her visitors.

"Go'dam Rachel, you ain't got no fire for the kettle.   You knows I like to have my tea, I'm parched."  The man with a rather large moustache smacked his lips a little bit to emphasize their dryness, and licked at his lips.   Behind him entered two other fellows, one a tall scrawny man the other giant in both height and width, he being barely contained in his trousers.  The mustachioed man appeared agitated at Rachel's non-response and so he sat himself at the table and removed his buckled hat, placing in front of him.   As he folded his hands, with elbows secure on the table he spoke, "Why don'tcha got no tea whisslin on the kettle Rachel?"

Her attention cast upon her work she muttered, "Didn't right feel like it Howard.   Don't feel like you woulda done felt like it either on account of how hot this here house has gotten.  Mine as well be in the fires of hell.   That's the truth."  She chuckled at herself.

Howard looked back at his companions who shrugged at him as if to say they didn't know what to make of such backward talk.   As if to say they didn't want to take no chances in chuckling or correcting the wife of their friend and employer.

"Rachel?"  Howard said as if to a child.

"Yes Howard?"  Rachel said as if to a ghost.

"Could you make us some tea, deary."

"I don't think I will."  She responded.

Howard chuckled and once again cast his eyes up towards his compatriots.   The fatter one chuckled, and shrugged, "Women.  Even my Peggy done say the darndest things when shes left alone and all."  He relinquished the volume of his chuckle until it trailed and faded away into an almost whimper.

"Rachel?"

"Yes Howard?"

"Why won't you make tea for me and my friends.  We be riding for days on end, our water run dry, our bones be weary.   Just a kettle of tea.  Please, deary."   His manner of manners was less polite and more demanding, he spit upon his floor and shot but a short glance to his partners, and returned and waited for a response from his dear young wife.

"No I won't.   There's kindling in stove, there's flint near by, and you got two hands to use, and eyes to see, your legs though weary can carry you 'cross the room.  With a scratch and a blow you can start your own fire goin'.  Easy.  Deary."  It almost appeared her attention was far more absorbed in her work, even letting out a smile, and what sounded like a pleasurable giggle at her neared success.

The lanky boy with the great stature and shifty eyes chuckled slightly, and Howard cast his eyes up to him, "What's funny boy?"

The boy swallowed a lump of nerves down his throat, and remarked, "She's got a wit.  Wit is peculiar, my fiance back home had wit, and her ma and pa had to lock her up in asylum.   Give her a good lesson in being human, good lesson in knowing her place.   She come out more ladylike, more quiet, I just think she got wit is all, its just peculiar is all, strange."

"Wit.  Right."  Howard spit at the boys feet, and once again turned to his wife who was picking at a stray piece of string protruding from her blanket.

"Rachel?"

"Yes Howard?"

"Make me some tea.   I'm weary, and sore, and now in more ways than one."

"I won't make no tea, I'm busy."

"You'll put down that useless mass or else I'll make you put it down.  We done been through this already."

Rachel's eyes shot up and she scolded him, and said in the calmest tone she could muster, "You touch my knittin' and I'll prod you in your fucking eye, pluck it and gouge it out then who will follow you, just a blind man riding."

Howard needed little less provocation and he reached across the table and with a violent hold he grasped the blanket and true to her word Rachel freed up her hand and tool, and used it as a rod to pluck out her husband's eye.   But, not to its complete freedom.   It dangled and dabbed against his coarse cheek and he exclaimed a line of expletive expulsions as he stood and backed up knocking over his dining chair.   He held a palm over the eye and moved it up to try and adjust it back into its socket, but it slipped and fell from his fingertips until his maneuvering loosened it so that it fell freely down his chest to the bottom of his frantic boot.  And then, squish.

"Seven hells Rachel, seven hells."  He was exasperated in his panic, and breathed in a spent heave.   "I'll kill you for that."  He looked at her properly then with that one attached eye and saw her with her revolver drawn and focused on his compatriots who had been attempting to draw their own weapons.

"I'm gonna give you an order or two Howard, an order or two.   But I ain't gonna be you, I ain't gonna use a fist or two.   I ain't gonna make you bleed, but I'm gonna give an order or two."  There was a quake in her voice but her hand was steady on her trigger, and her eyes focused, and trained on the lanky and pronounced giants.   Howard knew she could shoot.  He'd trained her, helped her, back when they were both younger, and foolish.  Back when he was kinder, and she was less wistful.

"You boys are gonna put your pieces on the table now.  Just right here, right next to me.  Right here, in front of me."

"You shoot one of us honey, the others will just drop you dead."

She turned her pistol on Howard, "Not if I shoot you dead, you're boys are dumb and dumbest, ain't got no two wits in them aside from what you show them they have.  I kill you they die anyway, useless as they both is."

The two men, giants as though they may have been looked at one another and at their boss and reached a consensus with their eyes that what she said was true.   They made ready to remove their weapons from their places.  "What's gonna stop her from shooting us all dead then," Howard tried to reason.  The men haltered their unholstering, and examined Rachel for a new confirmation.

"I just need y'all to let me leave her.  I just need your horses, but if you trigger I trigger you and you and you.  Do you get my meaning by trigger?"

The men nodded like infants.  And placed their revolvers on the table.   Then they slowly backed away as though that might impact the painful quality of a gunshot.

Rachel smiled at Howard.   "Now you deary.   Won't you deary?  Its on your left hip i'case you don't see it."

There was a thin layer of blood enveloping around Howard's fingers that covered over his socket, and a constant grimace of pain on his face, but there was also some level of admiration that his dear little Rachel wasn't so dear.   Fist to cheek, fist to stomach, fist across neck, and she'd never showed signs she'd been this strong, this fiercely animalistic, and he felt a twinge in his loins, and a thump in his heart, and he wanted her more, wanted her to attack him with all that ferocity but he'd make her bleed first, punish her first, take out both eyes for his one, and then mount her and take her as he would.  She had to know her place, had to find it amongst his submission, but damned if he didn't love her more than ever.

He lifted out his revolver and dropped it at his feet.  He smiled, "Get along bitch, ride as long as you can."  He raised his hands in the air, his momentary surrender.  Then she pulled her trigger.

Click.  Empty.   And she smiled.  And he moved on her, but she lifted up the fat man's shotgun and blew a hole through her husband so that his chest was a hollowed splatter of a former heart.  She shifted the gun on his mates, and she said, "Go on now, and be good to your wives."

They turned tail and ran without another second thought, if they even had had a first there was very little time to get it passed instinct.  They moved out the door and the horses soon followed into a faded gallop away from the foundations of that house.

Rachel removed her revolver from the pile on the table, and dropped the shotgun there.  She holstered her piece, and returned to her blanket.   A stray piece of thread protruded from the top and she held it in delicate palms and plucked at the thread till it loosed.   She turned it over in front of her and was satisfied with her work.   The smell of blood hung thick in that room as she laid the blanket in an empty bassinet.

Powers of Our Perceptions

Remembering how the rose wilted was one of the most painful experiences of my life and all the thought that went into contemplating that complexity has led me to lead a life of solitude,
For what can bring one back from the edges of that despair, and what chance does a soul have to reenter a body it has left when it is bereft with such traumatic sadness,
As the garden faded into natures dust, and the sands of time blew over everything I was an unfeeling mass of ectoplasm hovering over my own grievances,
I could not feel the kiss of the wind nor the caress of blasting sands but only the tender nothingness of floating as an ethereal presence only staring at the earth as an observer through a screen,
In the midst of that pitiful reaction I settled down amongst the ground only to find that I missed that level of viewing and the sight from a top was frightful and distracting,
I could not see those woods for those trees and all the bleakness and the missing bees of that season were there attracted to the simplest life boat - a sore little flower determined to grow,
Remembering the spring time I felt a tingle of response over the jellyfish membranes of my afterlife go and remove itself from that place and I was warm to the pecks of sand that comforted me in the winds,
On the other side of my remorse and my pity was a budding world where stinging insects dissected the milk of the flowers to create their colonies and it was beautiful and soon by judgements all my own, I willed myself back to my body,
Though it had been buried under the sand trap of time I dug my way out cherishing every shouldered vertical push until the beams of the welcomed sun seemed to lift me up to my feet,
And through my eyes - for they were the same eyes - I saw that the rose pedals had never wilted it was I,
I who had perceived them so.

A Cleansing.

The young boy ran among the muck and decided to drown his hamster there.   The beating rain that rattled against the moist earth let out a funeral snare so that the entire world surrounding that place could understand the horror that was being accused.  Much to the boys surprise the hamster did not flail or fight back, it twitched, and then accepted itself to the afterlife.  In this way it seemed mother nature took pity on the small creature, deeming its demise a liberating act to the atrocities of the sick child.

The boy named Trent dipped his booted feet into sinking soils and found his way home covered in the grime of the world, the lifeless brown muddled mass of mud in one fist.  His face beemed a satisfied smile but the beating of the rain drops told a story akin to disapproval.   Somewhere up above the people would have surmised that the Lord was troubled by the acts of his creation for after all he knew every hair on his head but he did not gather all the thoughts within.

At home young Trent buried his poor pet hamster in the sewers, flushing it down the toilet bowl where its coat of mud had broken away in a mist amongst the blue hue of the toilet water and circled its light brown mass through the funnel of draining water.   His eyes followed it as it vanished, and when he could not see it it was out of mind, and he wiped his filthy hands on the sides of his khaki shorts.  He exited the bathroom with a calm sigh of relief and went to the kitchen to join his family for dinner.

His mother looked aghast at him standing before the dinner table all covered in natures grime, she observed the hand prints upon his shorts, and the mop of hair that fell against his forehead having been forced that way by the driving rains but now was in that delicate and disgusting area of disrepair but unable to fix itself.  She chastised him and he huffed at her and scowled his unsettling scowl, and she dropped the point.  Now that her exasperation was mooted she returned to eating, and he too began to eat.  He rudely reached across the table passing his disgusting hands into the buttermilk biscuits leaving his mark on many of them.

"Son of a bitch."   His father exclaimed just after the door slammed shut near the front of the house.   "Who tracked mud all over the carpet?"   The boy called Trent sat silently eating his biscuits, and he did not react.  Not out of fear, but out of pure bliss of knowing that he was safe from reprucussion.  The father moved into the kitchen and saw the muddy child, and he swallowed the swell of anger that was growing inside of his throat.  His face reddened with rage returned some of its natural color and he moved to his location at the head of the table.   The father reached across the table and retrieved and dirty biscuit, and he stared at it and then at his wife, and young Trent bit into his own.   The father bit into his, mud and all.

Later that night when Trent himself had felt that he had been dirty enough he walked into the shower and washed off all his mud.  He did not notice the clogged toilet bowl rising water over the rim that splashed all over the linoleoum floor.   And his feet heavy with lathered soap slipped against the floor and he was suspended ethereal in the light of the singular ceiling bulb.   The collision with his head against the edge of the bathtub was subtle but cracked enough that he was instantly lost to the human world.

When the body was discovered the parents of the little boy Trent decidedly quickly to cremate him.  It wasn't for any other reason that to ensure that the flames perfectly consumed him and when they brought his ashes home they emptied them into the clean toilet not knowing that they were uniting him with his dearly departed hamster.

Cycling

There was a decidely dark day in the middle of a measely may rain when little children sparked the spirit of disinterest in the hearts of adolescents adorning the aged halls of a secondary school,

They fawned over the height of intelligence that the towering teens demoted and graveled at their feet with questions as wisful and precarious as the precious poetry of children's vocabulary,

The older children commended the appetite but did not feed the mouths of the babes for they were too preoccupied with racing minds of sexual desires and motus apprendi of self esteem assaults,

They were told to look with lidless eyes into the abyss of future times so that the horrifying detrimental faces were all the little kids could hope to abide for that is what they saw in their saintly little eyes,

Afeared they were of growing old that the children read up on Peter Pans and Wonderlands, craving to crawl through cavernous holes to follow the white rabbit towards a better goal,

But after all of that the adults still drove them towards the end of the earth where seniors in schools stood on the brink of an amazing abyss and shout to them to grow up and be damned,

And the people on the other side of the monsters eyes, who are imprisoned and watch with tearful blinds, continue dribbling out the sadness sanctioned on them by those who pushed them over the cliff side,

There was a decidely dark day in the middle of a measely may rain when little children sparked the spirit of disinterest in the hearts of adolesencts adorning the aged halls of a secondary school.

Preying on the Future.

Yearly a young sapling emerges into warms and is systematically cut down in order to give way to the holidays,
A little speck of inspiration that itself inspired to grow extremely tall at one point in its life but cannot now for abomination of selling spirit.
Can you truly underestimate the idealogy of the masses though, who see upon this young tree and epitome of jolly tidings,
it should be their perrogative to value its budding growth in whatever way they want, so that when they cut it down
they believe it should find solace in bringing them a greenish warmth of its forever green dying leaves.

Developmental Hellion

On the edge of the last street out of town stands a child prone to crying
out in little fits of anguish and despair.
His mother, or father, brothers, sisters, aunts or uncles, not even distrusted
cousins cannot be notified that the child is turning in circles and pulling
the hair out of his head.   When you go to console the child you cannot
fully understand his pains because he is not from your block
he is far off on the other side of the spectrum of your distrust
and because of this he cannot awaken inside to your stranger gaze
because he does not trust the person you are.   The morality
and well wishing you want to spout off and despite all the assurances
of your insurance in goodness he will still scream for his parents
even if they have in their hearts the moral bankruptcy associated
with wolves in sheeps clothing.   It is in this moment
that we take offense we storm off and brandish our defenses
like swords and instead of our protections
they are now weapons that penetrate the blood lines of people
who do not understand.  Deceptive we are to our own selves
that we hold onto these whining attritions even tighter, even as our family
and our friends tell us we are irrational.  To be right is better than to be wrong,
especially if you are wrong.  Still, the child screams, and you have now
reassured him that you are the wolf, blatant and scary as he knew
you would be.  Welcome to your moral bankruptcy because you didn't
care to understand.   That is the ultimate defeat of your personality
because you let the distraught be the cause of your pains even though
they did nothing to hurt you but to diminish your feelings of self-glory
by giving momentary comfort.   On this street on the way out of town
the child stands, anguished because he does not know what it is that bothers
him, and because he is innocent to his own answer to his discourse
because his development is little, we provide the fears to him that
he is wrong, and we introduce ourselves as the spawns of satan,
and we have already started to corrupt his youth, and in turn
corrupt his spirit.

The Meaning

Took long enough to understand the nature of the human condition
but it was much easier to forget.  No matter how many times the truth
is spoken the people are often sticking ice picks in their ears to dull
the sense of understanding.   In the charisma of the snake charmers
men are lulled into complacency till the venom is surging through
all veins, and the heart is pumping nothing but poison because they
could not be bothered to pay attention to the dangers.   In times of strife
pickled pigs feet are being eatin as substitutes for bananas and cream
cheese bagels because what does it matter what one consumes if one
is already dull to beauty.   In that wishy washy way they will say give
unto the world your best achievements but we will hoard them in the back
of the bus because we could not deem them perfect enough to be given
unto the rudimentary masses that followed us.   All the days that go on
with the sun burning high in the sky out there in the outer spaces
the men on the dark side of the moon who toil away at the cratered impact
blemishes searching for answers when life is being sent in cosmic rays
against the magnetic poles of our mother earth; it is not their fault
for forgetting for we tend to make men work with kinked necks and troubled
backs so that they can never look up.  Tell them again what you know
on social media, and let the like button be executed a thousand times
so that its death is many and just as the man who passes in the night
it will have no true consequence to the end game.  So eat your canned
ham, chicken and tuna and commit yourself to the absurd ordeals
of domesticated life, with ears bent and tail wagging in submissive
delight to the twirl of the auto-correct button on your IPhone 2000.
Took long enough to write nothing of consequence and redundant
in its absences of any real weight.   The people will look at what you
have said and scratch at the crusted sleepiness that sits dimly in 
the corners of their eyes and they will wonder why you waste minutes
of your time typing up impossible tasks.  For who can expose the truth
if they are unwilling to expose themselves to any real ridicule or lofty
ambitions.   Sit down and think it over, since you will never be this
young again.

Game Called Circle

Preliminary evaluations suggest we should check our speed
because moving to quickly in reverse at our current trajectory
is grounds for chastising.   When the little old ladies with wrinkled
faces and sweaty palms prone to speeding while under the influence
of anti-psychotics witness our insane bouts of banana driving
they will be implemented into your plot and proceed to push the pedal
to the metal.   The race will be on but the clock will be in reverse
and the smell of nursing homes will emit out of the exhaust pipe
of her Lincoln town car.   The sort of automobile reserved for the gods
of Egypt, that is too say ancient and falling to pieces because a bucket
of bolts is always set to overflow as the pavement is littered with potholes
and the wheels are sinking in.   There are no winners but there are also
no losers because everyone is falling behind, and continuing toward a point
in the beginning that they were always continuing toward.   The crowd
scratching its head in joined bewilderment will begin to file out with their
disappointed fountain sodas, and half eatin ball park franks.   While we discuss the future and continue bouncing about and spilling our guts about the world we live in
and our geriatric rivals watching us through competitive eyes parallel to our ride.

Ignoring the evaluations we are caught up in the conversation, and that
is when the lightning storm arrives.   Just in time the lightning flashes,
so we hit the brakes on the edge of the Atlantic, but the denture wearing
NASCAR grandmas don't know how to counteract so that their boat sized
Lincoln town cars fly off the docks and cliffs and splash down in ocean time.
Those crafty broads are safe and sound ejecting from sun roofs and pulling
parachute cords so that they float down like brittle flowers into the roar of a raging
sea.  We are there proud to be the leaders of the race, and crafting smiles as we laugh
at our shared interests.  The past generation has no hope to proceed passed the finish line,
and they were watching us for tricks but now they float in the ocean waiting for pick up.
No competition when it sabotaged itself, and though we are so far behind
we are now in the lead, and recover just fine.   Negative numbers dwindle to zero and we go on through to the finish and do laps around our words, and ignoring the catastrophe around
us we are set to come out on top.  I make a sign of the cross and you feel my cheek with a cold
palm, and when the kiss occurs I know it always was set to occur, and we
drink our victory champagne and we dance the night away while the coast guard gives
the little old ladies blankets and hot coffee because they are shaking and shivering off
the water in minute little droplets.

Bullshit Stuff

Even in the most intimate sort of settings music appears to play a certain part in igniting thought and discussion, or maybe it just instruments the discourse one must feel to fall in and out of a particular emotion.
A calamity can cure cancer but only in the end game because shuffling around the board is not enough to warrant an inclusion into scientific studies because what can one hope to see if one is constantly poking out his eyes.
Sewing is great if you have a thread but if you do not procure the needle then you are left twisting the vine with no way to penetrate for the creation of any sort of hocus pocus, and thus creationism is left to creators who no know how to use the pointed end.
The last time the world stop spinning was when it was first created, an orb on the other side of the great ravine where no one really go to put it down again because no one wanted to pick it up so it was just a useless little marble that god decided to build, like a shaped cats eye and stealies are not the sort of action that gets to happen.
On the way to the market you can forget to buy the bread as long as you've picked up the milk because while peanut butter sandwhiches are all fine and dandy you can spoon feed the butter into your mouth but you need to wash it down with a larger glass of milk.
Thus my class begins and I'll speak in foreign tongues and not understand half of what is said but I will grasp some sort of concept for that is the purpose of learning, and then it spill out one ear and into another and I fear I am doomed to repeat for never gaining credit is my game to lose.

An Urgency Inherit to Children - short story

Samuel took a step forward after he had stopped his bike on the neighborhood path.  He straddled the foundation of his bicycle and gripped the handle bars as he scooted his feet along the pavement.  His fist were tight and his eyes glued forward where his feet were bringing him.   He'd never seen a dead person before and now there was one laying out across the path obstructing most of the way.   Had he been younger than he was, or older he may have reacted differently but he looked on then with a genuine albeit morbid curiosity.  It was unmistakable that there was no life within the corpse of the man, he was pale and stiff eyes faded into gray clouds of mist.   Samuel lifted a leg over his bike and let it fall to his opposite side just as he neared the man's mess of floating hair.   It had been picked up in the breeze a gray yellow lifted and dropped all at once so that it appeared to levitate.

He squatted in front of the man and cocked his neck to crane a look at his expressionless gaze.   It could not have been painful whatever it was that befell him, there was a serenity to it.   A look that said he had been content with his moments up until then, and Samuel thought on that old expression of life passing before a persons eyes before they had breathed their last breath.  At the angle Samuel peered the man's face appeared upside down, the ever changing shadows of the floating hairs on his forehead.   Samuel stood back up, and looked from one end of the bike path to the other, and saw no signs of passerby.   It was early morning then, the sun making its progression to its highest point in the sky but not quite there.  Then as if become with shock Samuel hurried back to his bike and rode back toward his house.

The trees whipped passed him as he pushed one foot on each pedal with a harsh and determined move of his leg.  His knees rose in bends, and straightened at speeds he hadn't fathomed he could reach.   The ending of the path seemed so far then, so completely foreign to him that he might as well have been traversing some foreign desert or navigating the amazon without a guide.   He knew though that home was forward, and that the body was behind him.  The middle aged man staring at the storm encroaching upon his iris'.   

Then an end.   Samuel slowed himself a little as he approached the street, the wisp of cars sneaking away in front of him, their bodies existing for a minute amount of time as if to say they hadn't existed at all and growing in size from matchbox size to their rhinoceros width bodies.  The stop sign to expanding its red hexagon body and white lettering:  STOP.  Samuel obeyed and realized he had been sweating immensely all over his t-shirt.   He wiped it away at the top of his forehead along his hair line, the back of his hand glistening with the run off like grease in the sunlight.   His breathing was labored, and he coughed from a pain of sharpness in his throat.  The whipping cars continued on by and he waited but felt the tendril hands of some monster encroaching upon his shoulder.  The man dead and forgotten on the pavement some mile or two behind him.  The cars kept going.   They didn't see him, they didn't acknowledge him all of those commuters on their way to work, and school.  On their ways to responsibilities and errands.  On their way to relaxations.

Then a lull, a moment of peace upon the street.   Samuel prepped himself and peddled across throwing his look to left and right over and over the entire way just in case some magical truck emerged to destroy him.   And as he pushed on forward he felt the talons on his neck lose grip and lose ground.   And then he was home.

He dropped his bike in the yard  and it clattered as its chain slapped against its metal bars.  He'd leapt from it and stumbled through the grass almost falling, and out of breath but he ran for the door and opened and slammed it behind him.  His bike alone in the grass obscured and forgotten.   Passed the kitchen and passed the living room he ran down the corridor to his parents bed side and he shook his mother awake.   She groaned and chastised him for the interruption to her dreaming, and he lamented, "There's a dad man on the bike path.   Really dead."  His breath was caught in the roof of his mouth and the sweat dripped off from his forehead.  But she tossed in her bed and moved her face away from his.   His father too hushed him, and Samuel gave up and returned to his room deciding that he'd be better to wake up twice to forget the whole affair as in dreams.

In a Perfect World

Maybe I'm silly for thinking so but your smile tells me otherwise
because of the way you own it and determine to yourself that
you will smile through the awkward pains.  It isn't so strange to admit
that you are something of an enigma, and when your cheeks dimple
I can't help but sigh in side as my heart fans itself from too much admiration
for something that you can't quite control.   Maybe it's silly to think that
I'm creating laughter that emits from you belly up through your throat
from that dimpled grin and explodes into the world like a platter of fine
wines sorted out in particular cups.   A dose of medicine that you've concocted
just by being you and its intoxicating to see that and hear you in the way
that makes me anxious that it isn't all a fantasy.   Maybe I'm silly or pathetic
for inching a finger toward your hand in order that it will be taken and cherished
but despite what possibilities may come from my adorations of your life I can't help
but feel defenseless.   If you are indifferent to the affection that I want to convey
I will fall on my sword eventually but as it stands it is sheathed, and I am content
just to breathe the air in the same spaces that you stand.   In such a simple and sublime
way I am thinking of you with a dream and a prayer, but it is not so bad as to be the end
of the world if dreams do not come to pass.  I have lived long enough into the days
to understand the limits of attraction, and to possess a defense for sword wounds.
Maybe I'm silly for thinking so but your smile tells me otherwise.
As do your eyes.

Possible new novel idea.

This is a short story or novel idea rough draft.  I'm not sure what it will become but I'm pretty proud of this opening.  Again, rough draft so it has a lot of unnecesary words in it and some trimming that could be done.   So I'm aware of that, but I do like the ideas  in it:

THE

TECHNICIAN

I hate the way the image freezes on the picture of a fading child.   That sad picture of rolling waves that ebb and flow and attack the shoreline only to miss the child completely.  It’s a fabrication, something someone altered to make nice what was once bitter and cruel.    What they don’t see is the child going forward in life and her eyes watching in disdain as her own life passes her by, for those three or four years.   She’s filled with resentment, but she’s tried to forget it.   Her mind has deteriorated and all she sees now is her child.  Fading away as a specter.   She doesn’t recall the moments when she started to fully hate him, and his stupid big eyed stare.   That genuine pathetic curiosity of the world.   She ignores it, but if I plugged my own mind in and thought hard I guarantee I’d see her looking back at me from the kitchen table.  Cross legged and dragging on a cigarette and emitting the smoke into rings that I was mesmerized with.   I could recall though that although she could do magic her eyes were devilish.   Smoke rings were the only thing that ever made my mother ethereal.   The last time, out of the very few times she ever touched me was when she squeezed my shoulder and leaned in to my ear, and said, “Do good.”  A slight pinch of her claws, and then a clack of a step, a heel – she loved to wear them – and a slamming door.    It was cold in that room, in that facility.    I was a puppy dropped on the doorstep of a farmhouse, never checking to see if a fire burned for the chimney or if water ran through the pipes.  Left where it appeared to resemble a house, a yard.  My mother.

I scroll the ball mouse and click to drag her imagery into the save file, uploading them into the tank.   Next to me her chamber moves a slight hiccup.   She’s convulsed in a minor way as they all do.  Minute and quick as if a probe in their heads wasn’t etching a copy to pass through the channels into the bank system.   If I wanted to I could scroll the mouse a little more, click on my grabber tool and skim around the recesses of her repression, comb away until some sort of sorrow emitted itself.   Instead, I click the power down icon, and the chamber squeezes out the cooling mist of oxygen reserves and the dome cover opens.   I hit the page button for geriatric services.   The business of memory storage had struck a chord the last twelve years as dementia and Alzheimer’s had increased exponentially.   People had begun to live their lives through screens and social media.   Their minds were prone to weakening more than they had ever been.   Soon, they couldn’t form memories properly, couldn’t contract the diseases of never forgetting, or else contracted the real diseases of forgetting everything.   My mother fell into that category.  As she began to stir she routinely turned her face toward me, as it lay there upon that silken pillow, and asked the question, “Did you find him?”

“’fraid not ma’am.”  I lied.   After all I was right there inches away from giving her that reunion she thought she so desperately wanted, but if that were the case why would she have someone fiddle around and make nice that which she wanted to know.  Of course, the altercation wasn’t recent, it was some long off thing she had done shortly after giving me to the foster system in order to diminish her guilt.   The boy in the image wasn’t even me.   I was a dark skinned Hispanic boy, a tuft of thick hair atop my head, and with tattered clothes.   Her new son was a shiny Caucasian with perpetual smile, his hair cut short and neat.   His clothes pristine and new.

Her name was Martha Reems, serial code: 2-2-56.  A Second generation client of a Cerebrum Depository.   It being one of the original buildings of the system.  A milestone in mind management.   Not just a storage facility – that was just the civilian application – but a research compound.  That was downstairs, and above my clearance grade.   It was nothing terribly sinister depending on what aisle the protesters landed on.   They saw memory storage a slight against natural degradation, and the will of their god.   Others saw it a perversion of nature, which was just another way of saying what the first people said.   Most batted for the same teams, but I had been down in the compounds when I was originally hired in.  A guided tour passed ceiled doors in glistening white hallways.   No one was screaming, no cadavers piled in cold storage.    Rows of computers, volunteers, and non-disclosure agreements.   It was perhaps twisted, but not vile.   Her name was Martha Reems, second generation donator.   She got to revisit the memories she wanted to see, and the depository got to map her synapses.   In exchange for her to see her own lies of the past and look at her glittered mistakes they got to take a pretty picture.  

What the nay-sayers never cared to admit, or to acknowledge was that because of said pictures, scientists could confer with medical professionals, and shape cures.  Every day new cures were being implemented, new tests were being done, concoctions concocted.   Slowly the damage of deteriorated brain diseases was being undone, yet not at too far off stages like that of 2-2-56.   No, her mind was passed the point of repair, but if the depository had come so far in curing mental breakdown what would be their motivation in helping sick old ladies live their lies?   Marketing strategies.   People liked to revisit their memories of course, if something particularly magical happened: a child’s birth, the engagement party or quite the popular choice was first sexual encounters.   I’d rather watch a million child births.   The system was mostly automated; I was a glorified button pusher.   Dragging dated hardware around to point and click and drag to trash cans and folders while people slept semi-comatose in shiny glass balls.   Technicians were a necessity.  No matter how much automation was pushed for, because machines are and always will be prone to breaking.   A loosening bolt here, a malfunctioning door.    Often we were there to simply make sure the clients didn’t get their gowns caught in the doors.   Nearly unnecessary.  

Most importantly though technicians watched the code.   Which meant we watched the memories.  There were hiccups with the little bridging claws, like needle and thread.  Weaving in and out of sweet spots in the brain and playing connect-the-dots with various associated memories.   What might have lit up a recollection of a lover’s final quarrel might also invigorate the first sexual touch, and vice versa, like word association.   These jumps were not made easily in the code, the computer had trouble determining priority no matter what scripted events we implemented based on our clients wish for that day.   I had to take my clients trust and be their fingertips.    But with Martha, I gave her plenty of scars.   Highlighting a memory would reveal its emotional resonance on a color spectrum, joy, hate, fear, sadness.    I perceived that she would have liked to visit as much biting sadness as she could, the kind people gritted and pushed through as the tears streamed down their faces.   Of course, they too had some control and she always brought herself back to me, but not me on that beach.  The bitch, my mother.

Cures abound, a long list of ailing clientele set to fall off the mortal coil, all these issues plaguing the fears of the stockholders.   That was when dream storage was born.   The bread and butter of the business.

Martha, my birther, got up out of the machine.   Sitting on the edge her bare ankles dangling a couple inches from the floor.   She coughs a little and reaches for a glass of water we always have ready for them – it gets terribly dry inside the dome.  “I’m not so sure this is working, I’m not so sure what I’m even doing here.”   She said it, just like she always did.  She was quite present right afterwards, the electrical charges in her brain stimulating enough to give her a relapse into normalcy.

“You know they say the more you go the better the chance you’ll figure out just what is you are looking for.    What else do you have to lose Martha.   Ms. Reems I mean.   You’ll be back again next week and we can look in another nook, in another cranny.   It doesn’t hurt.”   I tell her knowing full well the drain it has on the mental mind, its tiring, exhausting having probes poking in dormant places.  It excites the mind but then the forced open flowers begin to dwindle, and fade away.    And her condition, beyond repair, always a whole island missing when she comes back and I hoping as I do that not all islands will be gone.   I know that I’m killing her though, or assisting in her death at least.   The more I meddle the quicker she’ll go.  Not if I was a good little technician and followed my script, their clients are fine and content not to see everything, but I need to find myself somewhere in her altered history.

The doors open and snaps shut, and the nurse greets Reems, and gives me a nod that I’m free to go to the lounge till my next client arrives.  It’s a new client, a dreamer, and I must have my entrance interview before I’m allowed to work on him.   I hate that part.  I grab my manila folder from my desk and lock out my control console.  I look back at Martha when I reach the door and the nurse is leading her to the dressing scrim, and I like how weak and frail she moves across the room.   It also worries me, she could go any day now, die without telling me in her pretty little pictures why she would abandon me like she did, and then replace my face with some blonde-haired brat.  “Have a nice evening Ms. Reems.”  I say it like I mean it in that customer service play voice and leave the room so I don’t have to listen to her half assed response.

A Population of Flies

There were several little flies who buzzed around the heap and discerned nothing from the smell.
They could not differentiate between it and the fresh cut grass that surrounded but they were sure it was right.
For you see the aroma inherit to the senses of the fly are different than traditional.
They sense a smell and are accustomed to swarming not caring if a scent is good or if its bad but it does not matter either way in reality.
For there is a certain beauty in the natural breaking down of what they can get and it is not so bad as to wonder as to how this sort of relationship to the problem and the buzzing can solve the ecosystems woes.
Do not disapparge the fly for the disgusting beauty it perpatrates because even the fly has a duty to uphold in the face of man made catastrophe.
In the end it will not think, for after all it cannot because it can simply walk on the wild side and see the sweet success of the carcass.
Rot is one persons vomit enducting edict and another flies opportunity for feasting.
We are all but an organism in the end, and we should not lift a foot out of the cycle for then we are left with a growing pile of foul smells.
If it is the wish of mankind to rid itself of the buzzing of fly wings then it would seem in their best interest to not give them room to overpopulate our planet.
That being said because the more we stack the bodies the more the fly, and the roach, and the dwindling bee will have dominion.
A buffett unto the insectoids, and they will not see the terror.
Bottom line, no need to hurt eachother, or destroy the lives we have built because there is no reason for giving feed to flies.
Why do we serve eachother up, when there are plenty of moments for nature to create a platter.
I digress, because while the fly that buzzes has a purpose I abhor it in my ear as I attempt to write what it is I can, but what good is creativity if there is no one around to read it.
Take a moment, and pause and think on the sins, for the fly will take opportunity, and we should be wary how much opportunity it should take.

Long Winded

In the mind of most it is common to never decipher the truth,
because it is of no consequence to the average mind what that truth is,
but in the end maybe it should matter because often falshoods
are what lie on the other side of the vastness of the oceans
of speech.   A good line leading men to drown themselves for glory
is just as dangerous as a bad line leading men to not react and gorge
themselves on the sloth of their devising.   Do you not see the paradox
that the average idiot conveys?   Or is the blindness so common that even
the deaf cannot help.   Lead the men forward and let the dum speak, for the stupidity
of the carcasses is legion.   That great horizon with that orange setting sun
is humming a song that no one wants to wander near, but most sleep and dream
about.   The cataclysm is coming but not in the way that they thought,
but in the heartless actions of the speakers, with severed heads in fists, and orange
skin of shreiking voice, and who can determine the compasses directions,
when the compromise of compassion is given way to statehood.   We are all a race
of idiots, but we can swim, and we can dig our way out of the holes we have dug,
it is only a matter of will power.   Or else we can scratch and sniff the sticker
at the bottom of the pool, and dig lower to the molten core so that we are
eviscerated through vaporization our own bodies a whisper of a gods joke.
Don't laugh too loud, for then everyone will know you've figured it out,
and they will never allow you or the multitudes who know to ever let it go.
It will be the end of all, for the lake is acidic and we can not hope to crawl
away.

The Sight of the Blind

I am frozen in this midst.   This being the everlasting need to get rid of the uselessness.
As the catastrophic fantasies that we make up for ourselves consume our thoughts, and
I suffering through my own am useless in attempting to alleviate the pains of the sufferers.
For how can one who is screaming on the inside from relentless self doubt, hope to offer
anything of value to another seeking validation for some sort of conviction.   As they muddy
their feet and leave track marks on the carpet so that you can follow.  And what are you, what am I that follows the track to save the dreamer caught in a cast trap even though I am within arms length.
Then, a sense of deja vu.   As you glance about the room and feel the shackles on your own ankles, and the rattling chains that drag like Jacob Marley in Dickens tale suffering to wallow in self pity.   Then on the other side of  a garden of dying lilies the illuminated smile of evergreen rains that sprout up the buds to flourish again.  And I in the midst.   Everlasting stares through my uselessness, mistaking my bearing witness as a taking part.   And the dreamless lullaby never providing enough slumber.  Tip toes across ugly shag carpet from the pages of my own history.  Emerging through the pages of the catalog, buying the toys, the gadgets, the junk that will alleviate my mind.  Until I look up again and spot the wounded.   And I, nursing my own infection stumble forth like a sickly puppy hoping to find a distress to disperse.
I am, what I am.  A sufferer, suffice to say a wanderer.  With bare feet like a hero cop, top floor of tower building, and trampling through glass.  Grunting the pains away and being ever close, but the script lets loose, and the pages blow away and I'm an actor forgetting his lines and failing to improvise, and the scene collapses and the people are watching.  The people, those evergreen droplets always rejuvenating the floral arrangements before I can even reach with my watering can.   Useless but not motionless.  Useless but not determined, useless but not silent.    Used up, slinking on, tossing one side to the next step till at the bottom stair.  The final tier.   Sitting and waiting to be picked up, hoping to be brought up,
up to a higher stair.

Empathy Entrance

I am a simple sort of person thinking on a million problems all at once
because all of the solutions seem so simple.  As I ponder upon the issues
and take on the battlements it is a peculiar thing to feel the heartbeat
of my enemies.   My sight is transfigured into a thousand souls and I hear
the thoughts of a thousand men, and I am overwhelmed by motives
I feel the inching predicaments that will lead them to their graves.  I
forget that I am not to care for the blood of my foes, I forget to pray
for the souls of my friends for I see them rise up over the trenches
muddled among each other and confused that they are one and the same
and it is a curious thing to observe my depression take shape in the half cocked
smiles of dead men.

Interesting Endeavor

What an interesting endeavor
to sit and wait.  That anticipatory moment
just around the corner waiting
in return for your relief of an embrace.
In what other way do we concur
the doubt of wonder, and in no certain
terms where do we go when the light
is burned out.    A chair, the epitome of a throne
that is the necessity of the world weary.
In this calamity of our day to day
do we even begin to ponder what sort of beginning
we will even begin to see.  

What an interesting endeavor
to a have that disposition of awaiting the time
when the world will never give up
its grasp and sanity will return to leadership.
When high backed furniture refuses to levy the world,
and gives it a predisposition to imploding.
Do you hear the incessant qualities in the night
as the vocalization of nocturnal fowl
who about the whats in the darkness.  Because while sitting
in our living rooms we have only determined
to attribute nothing to our existences
but the smell of slow and normalized
decay.

What an interesting endeavor to see
nothing through the lense-less frames
that populate our faces.   Its only right
to determine that what is left is the epitome
of brokenness.   Give into the whim of
desperation and wait no longer
for on the other side of the sofa lounger
there is a buffet of sustenance
that your brain has been longing
to consume.

The Body Betrays.

Never has a child demanded to be tickled
because it is an unfortunate attack on the body
to elicit a sort of joyous noise which to the
attackers ear sounds like a pleasurable note.
In fact it is a type of canned up laughter
the sort saved for the special occasion to visit
the cinema or some other such place were
farce may bring forth giggles and whines.
So when monster claws scratch at delicate places
and the laughter comes out against the victims will
it is not on purpose.   The boy is betraying the
victim but in the attackers ear he hears an egging on
to commit more crime.   In truth, the tickle is painful
it hurts, and it betrays a sort of warped bond
in the mind of the assaulted.   The laughter isn't real,
the joy heard from response is not what is factual,
it is a fabrication of nerve endings in silly little
places.    Never has a child demanded be tickled
but they anticipate that tickling could be coming
but that doesn't mean the oppressor has to do it.

Exhausted.

Juxtaposed against a backdrop of happy greetings is a young man who will not be unheard.
Within his hands he carries a megaphone like a blowhard and demands the people listen to his soft indictments of their undertakings.
He is trivial in his maniacal melancholy, and he adheres to nothing that makes more sense than what is already done.
For on the other side of the world he wanders and raises a hand and says nothing of value.  there is nothing of value to be found after all, in the penniless misshapen gate of his walk.

For Nigh

A group of men of varying statures
were tasked with finding hidden treasures.
Given to meandering off of their path,
the men took care to follow there map religiously.
In great red, inked in the center was a bold
 X, marking the location of fantasy at the end.

They followed the instructions at every new juncture
because a task was set aside at each to complete.
Soon they were told to kill one another,
and strange alliances were formed and tasks carried out.

What started out as a kindly expedition
turned deadly in search of that end.
The last man blinded by the blood in his eye
stumbled upon the treasure spot to
find that it was never even there.

In the Backseat

Perspiration trickles down
Sweat beads, that caress
Like inspiration on goose pimpled flesh.
Responding to scary familiarity,
trembling hands go fumbling
to grasp at straps
and buckles and skin.
Taught reactions fraught with impulse.
Worrying about predatory familiarity
as whispers gush for secret places,
afraid for the thoughts that wish
for a four letter word that isn't love.
Simple kisses erupt in magma flows
that fertilize the broken soil,
for nature seldom complex's thoughts.
There's a calmness in the promises,
but crosses stare down
memories of forgotten lectures.
Exhale. Then inhale,
with balled up fists
and a cold streamed shower
to wash the sin away.
If human nature be worth it
to condemn,
then condemn,
for I partake for silence.

Trembling Hands

In a certain light,
Trembling hands that grasp
as though driven like a cat
To mouse, not starved
but hungry for that urge
to hunt, and nibble.

In a certain light
Sinful to be that impulsive
With those trembling hands that grasp
At clasps, and buckles
A heart deprived and thumping
Out of a confused chest.

In a certain light
Trembling hands that grasp
Into fists after kisses curse
That clothes fit so right
Despite what eyes betray
And goose pimpled flesh conveys
In shortened harsh un-composed breaths.

In that certain light
Where trembling hands can grasp
A mouse, like a house cat had
And bat around till it gone limp
With shock and awe
Satisfied with the game for now,
But not forever,
No not at all.

Predatory animal skills
Sometimes as savage
Often more gentle
In a certain light
With trembling hands that lust.

Familiar Predators

FAMILIAR PREDATORS

they slink in like rattle snakes
shaking their tails for music
drawing forth attention with rhythm
or to wise, a warning song
and then they choose to be bitten
with a certain intoxication that only venom can bring
though they bleed through puncture holes
and though they are swallowed whole
some prey discern no pain, devoured wholly

a skillful hawk descends with piercing talons
and in its sinful search pauses in momentum
piercing the water with a needle precision
and pulling them up one by one
carrying it squirming, flailing and dripping
grasping it tightly, firmly delicately,
as jealous flesh holds jealous flesh
hawk to sky, prey to sea
married to each respectively
till it being torn from habitat to nest
is dried and died in the moving
ready to feed a hawks family
with every little thing it had left

a lion dominating his lioness
biting neck and growling submissions
like whispered threats in her ravaged ears
for she stronger and sleeker than he
feeds him and the mass of mutts of cubs
smarter and more cunning, her strength his drive
aroused over mutual predatory instincts

and a house cat, never starved but still
pouncing on the field mouse
as though driven by something deep inside
poised to strike by command of parasites
because the shape of mice unlocks the sight
and claws once retracted grow
and the house cat licks its chops and struts
a sway, and tip toes under patted feet
till its cornered it, now given a choice
to deliver its mouth promptly, a killing bite
soaked against the predators tongue,
or to toy with it, and let it suffer like a toy
once warm blooded eventually cold, rigid, and
slain.

Abstraction Absolution Abonimation

I contribute a listless life to this universe
Non-categorized among these numbered pages
Because what can hawks gleam for sustenance
From the dusty bones of a human skeleton
What is gripped in the talons of that predator
Will burst into minute powders that flail away
Like memories of long lost lovers who found
That what they loved was control of hate
So red and volatile as the lust in their loins
Penetrating each as if they should just be knives
Or a prodded utensil like Satan's pitchfork
A torturous device to emit the pain close to death
Because what is more angry than a fallen angel
Scolded for being cast down by the father
And mothers who themselves were no damned saints
You in the puddle with water like blood over it
It being the skeleton clenched by daggers of a terrifying predator, spawned by hellfire.

A Wilted Wallow of Willing Willows

In a dying garden a girl walked among the fade of the roses
The wilted browns dwindling through a line till they were cool gray
In the depths of cold and winter, heavy in the shade of the trees with no leaves
The wilted keep on dwindling until the facade they use to have gives way to faded memories
In this their final bow before the curtain unfurls in its horizontal falls and folds
The wilted will silently escape the evisceration of the world as the rest of the living become dead
In all the world no one really cared to take the steps that would result in the scent of the dying roses
The wilted seldom want to be adored as the skin cells know the score having died always
In those oncoming tones as the phones ring off the hook and their annoyance ring and ting
The wilted cannot cry, for they cannot feel, not of their stems, not of their senses, not even of their non-existing souls

Abhor the Ab-horror

For the sake of tomorrow let the hours wile away and deceive themselves among this present digression
Let the words of the fathers fall on the deaf ears of mute sons who cannot think but to speak of nothing of the sort
In this the final hours of the human race in which the focal point is now of fecal maturation on the eve of the sinners reign
Let this shit show initiate in the eyes of the regime the reigning faults of the feeble minded, who ignore the factual facade of the festering fall
For the sake of tomorrow let the hours wile away and deceive themselves among this present digression
Let the mutual admiration I shared for the amicable platitudes that betwixt the swan song of the morning dove
In this their final hatred let the devilish adolescences slew their parental confinements and emerge as copulating saints,
Let them be unafraid of the masturbation of their sins, as their flesh is akin to singing full of lust and love, and little else
For in the throes of love making they can ignore the materials of this realm and those of their fabled other, and the sex-full people will spread
They will gather all exposed,  all those body parts warm and cold, in the seasons twisting through days and years and lifetimes
For this openness they can see that nothing was so terrible as they said, and their exhausting need to control the populace was unwarranted
Let the record show, the oral sex, and penetrations were not the coming of the anti-Christ, but instead it was the restrictions of their  biology that caused men to grow rigid in mind
Where they felt compelled in boiling minds to trample on the free love, and joint smoking masses who didn't give two shits about the hereafter
For the sake of tomorrow let the hours wile away and deceive themselves among this present digression,
Yes, for the sake of our unborn children, let us stop the abhorrent need to abhor at all, let the hate fade, and yes, just let it fade.