Hypodermics in the Sea Foam

These things tend to accumulate without homes further than files in folders. Might as well get them out.

-I wish N*Sync had gone out with one final album, called “Spit On My Dick”, and promoted the shit out of it.

-Supposedly there’s a video in which a guy sings the “Terminator” theme song while slowly, slowly raising a shotgun to his mouth. He pulls the trigger just a few notes into the part with the horns. The video is called “Possibly The Funniest Thing Fucking Ever”.

-When people ask me if I think Beyonce’ was good in Dreamgirls, I tell them no. But I don’t think they’re ready for that jelly.

-My grandfather used to say “I’ve never met a man I didn’t meet.” However he also used to call teardrops “Kid Lube”, so it’s not that cute.

-I don’t think I got the job. During the personality test they asked me if I thought rape was the same as murder. My answer was, “Did she enjoy it?"

-Best way to get rid of homeless people: yell "Get out of here, you GHOST."

-"I don't think we should be friends anymore. But hey, here's a t-shirt, thanks for comin' out."

Strepsiptera

Under feet built of echoes the dead town sags, dreading and melting under the strain of the ages. Building down to the Hell of the Earth, breaking down in distances of half-lives and termites.

I feel my fingers across the brick, the tempered pieces holding back the tests of rain and wind. Holding in the insectae, the pupae of evolving beasts cowering in the cold of the hidden side. Bugs that fuck and birth until something is born different and better. Something to reign.

I walk around puddles now. All the breakdown means more than anti-freeze and dust. It’s skin, it’s polymers. The Age of Rot Resistance, one and all. What burns will burn as rain, what doesn’t will know ancestors of the next keepers.

Something shifts in the day and I finger the trigger. Turn everything into sound, wait and hear and decipher the Morse code of the dead. All that’s left now is hands and guns, and sex is both. The sound passes, the moment gone, and I put her back to sleep in my pocket.

The glass goes to sound, spraying the floor. Again I listen and then I step. A crowd of cigarettes watches, a pool of tickets and gum. Like most now the air inside is damp with things rotting and growing. Expiration dates like lame jokes. Shelves hiding abandoned nests, room corners made of animal shit and seed husks. I get behind the counter and collect foods. Beef jerky and pistachios first, the proteins, and then the breads and such.

When I bend down footsteps shuffle-step past the store. I sweat pills and canned fishes. A sour smell moves through the hairs and sinuses and I wait seven full before I even scratch. Ten and I move, onto the bottled water and beer. The pack feels better now, heavier but not excessive because pounds equal seconds when you’re running hard.

All this because the Fire Realm didn’t want me.

cRickets

The book of vanishing people said: "His story started with bones," as the avenues of Manhattan collapsed into flooded subway tunnels and turned back into rivers. Rivers the otters could reclaim.

Speaking of such a thing, the woman smiled and said: "My bones are going to Hell in a handcart." Her body-frame light with laughter and degenerative loss in swiss cheese and honeycomb patterns.

And a Father, sitting in a cabin, preferred the sound of shifting wood to the voice of his wife.

The Planner

He said, “This is a story about fire. The kind that chooses.”
Rubbing his fingers together, he spoke of a time when paper meant something.
A time without fifty years of plastic,
Floating in and out of fish.
He said, “Remember this.”
Then he left, appearing on the news later that night.
The headline read “Man Murders Wife of Forty Years”
And when they dragged him away he was screaming my name, saying:
“Remember this.”

Memo.ry

With a tongue like a can of mace it jumps, eyes wide and monsterback flexed. Fire from the computer screen blowing out hopes of a failure, beasts at it’s side with paper mouths and corporate clearance. Each tooth is a gun aimed at each other in a standoff drenched in threat and laughing through sugar and caffeine and internal organs bloated with common abuse ignoring the irony of a murderer preaching peace spelled like price.

He crouches for two years on land like a sponge that absorbs but doesn’t give back. His home is set to self-destruct on Christmas Eve, papers on fire mixing with the snow. When the plows come their drivers will be paid extra to sift through the slush, handing in evidence for what may have happened here to cause such a harsh end to a six year love story told in long distances of silence, bruises and uniform smiles.

Miles, Dark Miles

Hold out their hands
Beautiful things, dripping with the sight of the two-thousand
Raging raptures and vanity cuts
Entering into battle with the alarm of the sun


And it comes to the pitiful
And focused wrenching of eyes
Twisting in embers of a family taken by flame
Photographed for politeness sake


The ships will sink
Flying sails meant to welcome the glory of the new air
Salted and salivated and dancing with the blood and seed
Of victim eating victim eating victim
Eating victim

the meeting

On a day like every other I met a man who smiled and laughed and talked to me for ten minutes until he mentioned his wife. With a different face than before he said she was

“terminAlly ill”

and the sentence started out strong but ended up _the other.

For months, he said, they’d been dealing with thi s. It’s history in the grooves of his vinyl record v0ice. Now he was here thinking he wanted to start being healthier, and when the door opened and he stopped talk|ng, I realized why.

I met his two daughters, young women w^nting a lon g puppy with little ears but not really excite.d about it. In the way they didn’t seem excited about anyTHing from now on.

He sm+led a little and told t hem he _wasn’t sure if he wanted a dog. But then his voi?ce didn’t sound like .::it::.wanted anyTH\ng an ymo re, except m

aybe o ne thin g:

to %not hav e to exp*la:n to a [d0g]

w((hat his wIFe %used t# be like .

Speed Shop

A place like this will never give you a story that starts with I was there when.

Nothing happens, not even on Saturdays when the hours are longer.

Larry will just grow his hair longer as his scalp thins and Ed will leaf through catalogs of tuner parts and Louie will quietly watch the chests of girls as his kidneys steadily calcify. On Wednesdays Louie will disappear for an hour to walk across the street to the barber. He’ll sweep up around back and take the garbage out and for that they’ll cut the hair he’s still got. When he walks out he’ll put his hat back on, the one with the pins.

Filters will sit on top of gaskets on top of drivetrains. Water pumps on radiators next to ignition wires. Spark plugs and stems, tire chains, warmers and chargers and jumpers against performance boosters and starters and compressors.

The walls will never change here really, they’ll just fill up with cable ties and lug nuts and oily dust until it gets so bad that Larry takes notice. Then he’ll clear something out or sell something or wipe something to make way for the refill. Everyone will make jokes about it or cut out aerial photos of garbage dumps and write the shop’s name across it in red marker, but no one really wants it to change. It’s an easy joke, and the complaining kills some time.

Ed will have a mustache as people wonder if he works here. Leaning over his round stomach he’ll show them pictures of the car he’s spending a hundred thousand to redo the interior of. Then he’ll say how the property taxes are getting ridiculous around here, goddamn almost nine grand and that’s a lot of money.

If you say hi to Larry he might not answer you, because that puts him in control.

An hour after noon a honk will announce the silver truck with the fold-up sides pulling up with hot dogs and Jamaican patties and potato chips and everyone will walk outside for something. Everything slow. Squinting into the weather that wasn’t how they said it’d be. They’ll all come back inside and eat around the counter in a wet chorus and talk about people in the only ways that matter: how much they weigh, how much they make and what’s wrong with them medically. “How’s the wife?” will always be answered with her latest surgery.

When asked a question, everyone will make a sucking sound against their front teeth and pause for ten seconds before replying. Anything negative ends with another pause and then, But it’s not the end of the world. Anything to abort the emotion of the thing.

And Louie, Louie will look like an ashtray with a scar up it’s neck.

Off to the left, a counter will feature fishing supplies where lures are two for five and the friend who runs it hasn’t poked his head around here in months.

And not everyone knows this but if you walk through the back, into the garage, make a left into the tires and make another left at a machine there will be a tiny bathroom with a crate of porno in the corner, mostly girls but some boys too. A sign over the toilet will talk about bulls with short horns standing close when it means to say don’t piss on the seat.

If you come back in five years, this is still the scene. Maybe missing the chair that broke and wearing different dust. Ed will shift on his stool and tell you what cancer took Louie and that it’s not the end of the world. Then he’ll tell you he doesn’t like anything foreign and it won’t sound limited to cars.

Larry will say You never know.

If you look around, you’ll find the dust is winning.

deluge.

There's something supernatural about words, the way they float around in the air like static waiting to be used. I can't count the number of times someone has used a word in conversation, one I've never heard before or maybe not in years, and it catches my attention. I let it roll around in my head, I might look it up or write it down. Then later that day I'll be reading, watching a movie, and there it is. A word I never see, never hear. At least until now.

Today I was talking to a woman about the storm that's expected. She referred to it as a "deluge", and I started thinking about the word. How I liked it, how it comes from another language. An hour later I picked up the book I'm reading, an anthology of experimental short stories I found under a table, in a second-hand book store. I read a story in it called "Motherlogue", and right there, in just the second paragraph: deluge. This is a story written in 1970, so the word isn't fresh in people's minds as if I were reading a current bestseller. No, this is just another random intervention; a word given to me and then regiven to me to highlight it's importance.

The word "deluge" isn't native to the English language, it comes from the latin root. Dis meaning off and lavere to wash. In the bible, the great flood is called The Deluge. And I've been told the Spanish word for storm is deluvia, an incredible word itself.

The only thing left now is to wait for the storm, along with anything else that may fall from the sky.

Welcome to the City

bloodstream city (blud'stre-m. sit'e-) : The human body envisioned as a metropolis, at once both foreign and home. A frightening shell in which one spends a lifetime, coming to grips with while watching it decay.