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.