HW6834 2003

In the first days of the month of February
things in Brixton A wing became a bit scary.
It seems Simon the Snake had pissed off someone,
so on the way back from the shower he was done.
Whacked wrong from behind to the head several blows,
227g of pineapples socked -- how blood flows!
A nervous morning for me, that much more for Si,
as fucked up as it was, no one batted an eye.
In no time at all he had returned to the wing
where every London rude-bwai was proving something.

Shortly thereafter, Ol' Si was moved to wing C;
A nicer place all'round; more quiet, sane, and T.V.
I was at the time in the chapel and praying,
"God please smite my enemies - that's all I'm saying."
When I returned to my wing and my cell again,
instead of Simon I found tobacco; godsend!
In his place later on a 'wag came with his kit.
By the time he was settled I had quite had it.
So I moved to the sunny side of the landing,
in with Tartaglialini to continue remanding.

Thomas T. came straight from the old boot of the south,
that Italian knew well how to keep shut his mouth.
The days flew on by us as we marathon read
enough crap garbage novels to do in my head.
Thomas spent 6 weeks in prison, sentence: time served,
for stealing two cuts of gammon. Was it deserved?
We would talk about what we would do when set free.
He said he would go back to junk, decidedly.
I understood him and could not say much with wit.
If a junkie wants junk then that's just what they'll get.

Now Thomas I imagine is on London's streets
measuring time, the greatest of all junkie feats.
Good luck to you Thomas, and godspeed to you, friend.
I hope you find some peace, and some good in the end.
When Thomas left I met the new man to the cell;
Rasta himself, he said my dreads came along well.
Up for a double, the charges spoke of a gun
But according to him, never even had one.
Sunny was laid back, every bit a nice guy;
we got along fine, the Lucian Rasta and I.

One stupid morning the screw came early with news:
"You are up for release.  Pack your shit. Grab your shoes."
The motherfucking bastard was taking the piss;
he looked too cheerful, something was certainly amiss.
He then told me I was now moving to wing C;
a small consolation for all this fuckery.
Threw on my trousers both legs jumped into from bed,
landed in my boots, grabbed my stuff, and scratched my head.
Looked around, said goodbye and bounced down the three flights,
happy to leave A wing's insane screams, blood, and fights.

The Bells

There are no clocks I can see, but I can hear eight working ones in the room, plus the bells of a church.  It's always dark when I wake up, and the light through the window is from a paranoid streetlamp.  I am tired.  I don't want to wake up, but once the gears start turning, the discomfort sets in & I know I'll be awake.  The eight clocks in the room, for LA, NY, BA, London, Berlin, Bangkok, HK, Tokyo, and the dead Moscow clock at night seem like a perfect train of rhythm, a locomotive pulling a slow heart down even tracks.  It isn't hard to fall asleep.  When I next hear them, they are quieter; my mind is louder.

 

I can hear every movement in the house, the flame of the heater, the fan, the metal clicking and bending with temperature, the creak of wood and more.  If I move, it will hurt, but I can't stay still.  Sitting down in flourescent light, putting on ugly trousers in the cold, I am unsure if this is life. 

 

 

Progress

i have no brain for famous names.




or even just people i meet's names



or tying my shoes.



i don't drool so much though



when i'm awake



anymore



usually

Paul Took Offense

He looked through his eyelids, eyelids that had stretched horizontally to frame the line between the sky and plain.  In the night, he heard lions.  Now that the sun was coming up, he could see the antlers twist in chorus against the wind.  They had appetites, these lions, and the gazelles were none the wiser.  Lions were sleepy animals, unless they were starving.  The morning was welcome.  It was cool.

One of the gazelles would die.  At least one would die, or the lions would.  Well, they all eventually would, but one or the other would suffer some fate in the process.  Well, they would all find some fate, but one may be more immediately painful than the next.  Paul closed his eyes. 

It wasn't his problem right now.  He had to walk to get there early to collect some rice.  Zizania, his daughter needed it.  Temitope could use the rest she was taking.  His wife had sleepy eyes like a lion.  He could work for life.  There were some old coffee.  It was mostly water, but even the dirty coffee water was good. 

As he set out, he looked across the fields again.  Gazelles were still there.  So were the lions, he imagined.  That's the way it goes.  At least there was water.  If he had a son, Paul would name him Wanjilanko.

On his way home, he saw the gazelles from well up the road.  It was warm and they were slower, and perhaps less nervous.  He would try to kill one of them.  He only had two rounds, and his rifle was very low caliber.  It was mostly supposed to be for protection.  Against what, he thought, more than being hungry, did he need protection?

When he got home, Temitope was pleased.  She was still a little bitchy though, exhausted by Zizania's antics. 

The Wheel of Destiny

I loved and lost
I frame my hours
With measured breath
Waiting my turn

Life is right now
Just then, just here
I dont command
What I can not

No one is culpa
No one is that
But when I am
I surely am

So take my blood
Number me then
Break me; do try
But dont get mad

I am savage
Its fear and pain
Not greed and hate
And I wouldnt trade

Not for the world
All thats in it
What would i do
With it anyway?

When I despise
The ways of man
It may be because
Im afraid of it

Let he who Is
Innocent cast
The first of the
Meteorites

Yes, I pray wrong
I pray for death
At least for me
My clock is fucked

How should I be?
Life sure isnt easy
What does it cost
To live life free?

Yes, Im a fool
And I forget
Gratitude is
An everyday thing

Should I give up
My dreams and hopes
And watch the news
And believe it

I dont believe
That I am able
Dear Citizen
To be your kind

Where then, I ask
Are the healers?
The lovers, the fearless
Macabre Dansers

Maybe it is sin
Honorable Judge
To take off skin
And dance in bones*

So Lexington
Prohibition
Hunt down witches
And make your war

I dont care, really
Really, I dont care
Water on the moon
Piss in the sea

Baddies and tsk
Owe society
A debt to pay
For pain and debt

Id kill myself
Except sometimes
Life warms me up
And shows me love

Even if you dont
So at my turn
Come, let me go
Far, fast, and wide

I don't know whose side I'm on. Maybe that makes sense.

Last night, trying to fall asleep, I watched Never On Sunday.  It was a Greek movie, and a very good one.  It kept my eyes open and my ears were regularly jumped by the Greek guitar.  The problem, as I saw it, was that a very idealistic and modern American loved the great beauty of ancient Greece, and, after a barfight, decided that a prostitute in the bar was the very corrupt beauty that was fallen Greece.  In a later scene, when Homer and Illia are fighting, she throws a globe at him and he throws a book past her head.  I liked that scene.

This woman, Illia, loved the Greek Tragedies, whatever they are.  I'm not terribly educated, but I have read Medea and it was clear to me that there was no happy ending.  Illia describes her as being very "sweet, but with a temper" and explains that everyone talks bad about her, calling her a witch.  Homer, as an audience to Illia telling the tale, almost loses it.  He had been warned, though, not to correct her.  Instead, he set out to try to reform her.  That is sort of how the book and the globe came into her apartment.  He, though, made a deal with No Face, a compromise to an end Homer saw as noble, for which he sacrificed credibility.  See the movie.

After that Look Back in Anger came on and I fell asleep by the end of that movie.  In my dreams, I was in a big theatre.  It was not a theatre though, it was court.  All sorts of things happened, and it was chaos.  I tried listening for my name, but it was like being in a stadium.  I spoke briefly to a woman who had three slips of paper.  She took my information and then disappeared.  If I could do anything at that point, I would undo what was.  Only in dreams do I have this power.  I don't know what I was arrested for, but it was probably narcotics.  In my dream, I didn't have any.  I hadn't had any.  I was just the man they wanted. 

Go Long

Maps fill me with longing and life.  I love the geometries, the seas, the vast spans and slim isthmus spans.  I love the archipelagos.  I love the little islands, the horn, tierra del fuego.  It's my world, and I belong to it, and if it is as promised by the cartographer, I have a sense of entitlement to it.  When I told Nanu that we were young, and couldn't die, I was wrong.  She, as god would have it, died instantly in a car accident in California.  California is on my map, with rocket skies and thin aether, sparkling lights of red and green topping towers, stars dripping down between peaks of rough hewn geology, a land of desperation and dreams.

If I am elemental, I am probably wind.  The sea is my friend.  I can deal with the magic of fire.  Earth, though, is my contest.  She is so large, encompassing, and substantial I can only barely touch her.  My head is in the clouds.  I don't know, and am repelled by the grave.  When I pass cemetaries it makes me want to spend time with the dead, but I don't believe they are in those plots.  The world can have my clay, but my soul does not belong here.

Petitioning g-d, I want the same thing I wanted when I was too young to know.  I saw the shape of Brazil, and knew I needed to go there.  I saw Madagascar and the name meant, "come here."  Cyprus, New Zealand, and Patagonia all mine.  I would spin the globe, watching the U.S.S.R. wobble topheavy and long, beckoning me to Siberia.  Let me know these places.  I suspect that one can find magic anywhere, but I don't like bowling allies. 

The part that breaks me is space.  Can man claim more than we have here?  It's a sport, an art, a science to choreograph the physics necessary to shoot the moon, but to what end?  In a contradiction, I wonder what's wrong with the Earth.  Probably the piggishness, perhaps, the social desire to claim more, more more.  More land, better land, land for oneself.  The land isn't mine.  I don't want it.  I just want to cross this road, and just the once for now.

Citizens

The night in suburbia is fragile.  It makes me tense.  I see the citizens raking their leaves, preparing for winter, coming and going on their errands in their cars.  It makes me sad for some reason.  It's not that the people are ugly, because I don't know them.  What gets to me are the silly things people put on their lawns and houses to mete out the holidays.  Maybe the holidays break my heart.  The citizens just make me feel lonely.

I'm related to citizens.  I have a mother, a sister, a grandfather and aunts and uncles.  They're all citizens.  I, however, feel like a negro, an indian boy, a savage.  My memories of skies and streets are fading.  The only thing I notice are walls, decorated by my mother with artifacts of sentimentality.  No wonder I always ran.  Wherever I ended up, it would not stink of moderation and compromise.  Wherever, that is, until captured and locked in a stark box.

When I was on the porch smoking in the dark, waiting for the sun, as if the sun promised me anything other than light and warmth, the term "skag" lept into my mind.  I'm not sure if it's American or British, but I know what it means.  I tried to air out my psyche, but it's so dark and quiet and I'm trying not to make sounds with my footsteps on this old wooden floor in this small house.  The double-sneeze is too good to resist, so I make the noise. 

Music charms me.  I seek the feeling I get when life is light and there is no fear.  Drink used to bring me there, but I learned that the panic that sets in when the booze wears off is worse than the original state.  What then, to do with one's self?  Maybe I need to skateboard.  If I'm here in the spring, it would be dreamlike to hop a boxcar with a plastic recorder and play music to the rhythm of the train.  I will make it, god, right?

Errors and Fallacies

The morning surprised me. I was still asleep when I woke up, dropped into a falling panic before my eyes had time to open. Where was I? Shit. There had to be something that could cure this. Where did I put my pills? Did I have pills? Why did I feel this way?

As I stumbled up the stairs, I realized that I needed a cigarette as well. It would be a rough one, so it seemed. Many days had started this way and warmed up nicely, but I was stuck in a fiend for something to take it all away. For so many years, coping with breathing meant finding a way to slow the breathing down, and that usually meant taking something. There was nothing to take.

The cold of sleep made my body feel stiff. Outside, I shivered with a tiny flame lighting a cigarette, the whole enterprise serving to hammer my fragile rigid corpse into flux, and not serving well. Coffee would improve my lot. I put the cigarette out only one third of the way into it, and fled inside. Now the air felt warmer, by contrast, and I breathed a deep breath. It slowed the panic.

I crept into the bathroom on my toes. I gently moved the seat lid up, then proceeded to make a jangling jingling din with my piss. If I flushed the toilet, I'd only make more noise. This was no way to live. How had I managed this? I knew the answer and my own frustration mocked me. Perhaps I was dehydrated. Jason always told me, “drink lots of water.” His helpful face annoyed me by being so right. Coffee was easier to drink than this water. The only good water from the tap is in New York City. Too much mind control in this water.

My socks felt less soft, but not dirty. They were warmish at least. How could people live out here? Why would any of my ancestors, my ancestors' ancestors, etc. have moved away from the equator? Damned fools they were. It was surely over a woman. That's the only reasonable explanation, and in my dissoving waking strop, I demanded reasonable explanations for my self-made hell. I chose to blame those that lived thousands of years ago, and the rest of them up to me. Then again, I left Miami, and I did so by behaving like a wrecking ball inside my own sanctuary. “Fucking fool,” I called myself.

I put on music, and let the gods give me pseudorandom divination in their selections. Gently, they gave me the lovely gypsy choruses of Man Man. Those men knew, perhaps better than myself, what this cosmic comic show was all about. They were psychadelic cabaret, and they played to the early morning, in the dark, before the sun, as I sought to get my bearings. I was ill-equipped. At least my underwear were relatively clean.

It made me feel better to know that I was reacting naturally to living my life in my generation. “Naturally” being a generous term, since my mental cuisinart had wrestled with the A-Bomb and its place in the natural order of things until it was brought to my attention that everything under the sun is natural, or it wouldn't exist. Natural doesn't mean conducive to survival. Death is natural, as natural as birth.  Winter is natural.  It just depends how far you are from the equator how unreasonable it can get.

Belief

At least once in my life, I've spoken without really thinking about what I was saying. Also, at least once, someone has challenged the meaning of the word "believe". A doctor suggested that I rephrase to "My understanding is..." He did me a favor. There is less for petty divertors to grab on to. To believe, as another dialogue digested, is to have a practically corporal conviction. It seems that the word would be given too much then, and worse, tangle itself up in dogma and all of the malarky that goes along with it.

So, by nature or nurture, I rest easier in the abstract, the rational, and the logical. I can dissect, and do, words as well as the next man. Only recently I've had to spar with a girl who has a great confidence in her mastery of English. The problem is that there is a point when the words become trees and the sentences and paragraphs become nests of trees and then forests. If I were trying to explain in many words how dark the forest is, and what that could mean, I don't need to be corrected that a "tree" is actually an "oak". The funny thing is that we can all attack each string of bits as much as the next.

When I listen to speakers diverge, cross lines, and present faulty truths, my natural reaction is to restate it correctly. I do this not for their benefit, but for my own so that I don't adopt an error or incomplete truth. This is great, but having a vague sense of how a string will be interpreted gives the option of presenting facts as truths and allowing the audience to misinterpret them.

There is humor in a later illuminating statement which changes the thread of thought back, with timing that I don't naturally possess, but unfortunately this isn't how I usually employ this. Usually, I'm trying to fob off something to get someone to leave me alone. People aren't stupid, so when they see what I've done, they get upset.

Then they're upset and they have all sorts of words for me. I again have to challenge and try to run around their statements to see if they are true. A wiser man than myself once told me, "If it doesn't apply, let it fly." That rhymed. Better still, a man asked me, "Who is worse off -- the fool or the one arguing with a fool?" That is one of my favorite questions I've ever encountered.

The same man who issued the lovely question said, "Stand for something or you'll fall for anything." I don't hold with that statement, but we're all wrong sometimes. Even Einstein could only see what he could from his magical vantage. A great man told me to listen to my heart because my head will lie. He's very right.

My head does lie. Given rationale, logic, and imagination, I can make nearly anything fit; so long as I have the hamster wheel of higher thought, that is. I don't necessarily believe what I see. I don't have to see something to believe it. Believe and suspect are tied closely for me. There is a very stubborn and immature scientist in me or something; maybe I'm just very stubborn and immature, among other things.

The Turn of the Knife

I knew I shouldn't spend the money. When I think of the money, or think of spending it, I think of the scene in the movie where Hannibal Lecter prepares the man's brain and feeds it to him. If I buy a cup of coffee, I'm actually drinking my grey matter. A bizarre notion, and surely I'm demented, but these are the thoughts that plague me. Still, I was standing in this humdrum town, waiting for soggy cold tumbleweeds to bounce along the wind, which was naturally blowing against me, and my body did not want to walk anymore.

I'm far from physically lazy when it comes to walking. I've walked distances and never really owned a working car. I have two legs, two feet and it's not a problem. It was a psychic wall, perhaps. As I walked by the shrine to american football, I saw a yellow taxi minivan, one of my favorite types of taxi. The van slowed and pulled into a spot in front of me. The driver got out and opened the side door for the passenger. I called out and asked him if he were free. It was providence for both of us.

When I got in, he turned up the radio for, as he noted, my benefit. Some football game crashed and cheered in the taxi. I told him I'm going to Colfax & Eddy. He said, "If you know how to get there, let's go!" He was a little too cheerful. He didn't drop the flag, and the meter stared at me blank and dead. I began to consider the distance, under 1.5 miles, and decided that he would get 5+2 tip. 7 is a good number, and the whole arrangement rang of synchronicity.

There wasn't much to talk about. I asked him if he was from this town, and he said he was. I made up a place that I'm not from, then clarified that "it's not the one in Ohio." to make it more believable, as if he bothered to assess the verity of my claim. God knows what accent I was using anyway. My street came up and I told him in good time. He swung around the corner and I was home. Then, he decided to make a claim of his own. "Ten dollars." I had already considered this eventuality. I have been playing a half-dozen chess games with players better than myself. My endgame for the taxi would be, "Take it up with god or the police if it hurts that bad, but you're getting 5 from me."

I replied to his fare, "That was a really short ride and off the meter. You can have 5." The problem with these numbers is that they're exactly half. People get their knickers all twisted when they think they're getting exactly half of what they deserve. The value of a dollar isn't such that I could have said, "I have 5.50," and my number was already out of my mouth and on the table. He looked up at the ceiling of the cab and threw his hands up. "Oh man. You don't wanna pay me?!"

This problem really wasn't mine. I thought I was doing him a favor by keeping it off the meter and out of his dispatch. These smalltown folk don't understand how it works when there are carniverous fish in the pond. "I'll pay you 5 dollars. I would have paid 2 more as a tip, but I would feel that I was robbing not only myself but you as well if I did pay 7 at this point." "What?! What the hell are you talking about?!" I handed him the 5, looking at him in his rear-view mirror, "Take it up with god or the police if it hurts that bad, but you're getting 5 from me." I opened the door and got out. He no longer existed.

When I opened my door, I thought to call a Jewish friend and share my burden. It was then that I heard his engine muscle off down the street and turn the corner. My phone was still in the taxi. !@#$#@%

Why are they afraid

When I was small, my grandmother steeped me in certain affairs so that I would be aware of the liabilities. Look both ways when you cross the street and don't cross unless you're with an adult. Don't talk to strangers. Don't take gifts from strangers. Tie your shoes. Wash your hands. It's a dirty world, I know now, and as much as I avoid strangers -- there are streets I have to cross. Sometimes I'm not with an adult. I'm 31, and I got hit by a car when I was zipping across a main street, so she was certainly on to something but there is a point when I have to stop and realize that there is more fear than respect.

She would tell us that we had to have all of our halloween candy examined because people put LSD in it. Who the hell puts LSD in candy for kids? It makes sense maybe to dose oneself, perhaps, but just to put it in a candy? I don't get it. For a long time, I've had to rest on the notion that god protects the innocent and the stupid. For as long, I've been in the stupid category. Never have I noticed any acidlike effects, but I don't like candy that much.

The world -is- a dirty place. There are tics, mosquitos, candiru, and herpes out here. I don't like them, but I avoid them. I don't live in fear that something unexpected and bad is going to come down on me, because it would be unexpected. I'm also superstitious and many days are rife with synchronicity in symbol and event, but I'm not going to conjure up all sorts of baddies with a fearful preoccupation. I'd swear that the universe can smell fear, like blood in the water, and it's just not the way.

Once you're on the way you're on the way. When I've had to bluff my way through preposterously dangerous encounters with the law, or engage with the most desperate and predatory in the worst neighborhoods, I succeed when I relieve myself of fear and handle what is. I'm not spending my heart and mind on fear. That would suck.

Besides, it's a thrill to swim in the ocean at night. I just wear a swimsuit, I don't want my dick chomped off.

nice

A grifter; a grafter
A shifter; a shafter
I walk around
With a Deathstar
Inside me
With a love
Inside me
Half-finished;
But I'm full
Of shit & love;
and that's just it.

What was I thinking?

The great beautiful sky pressed her breast against the horizon, her nipple sat in the space between mountains, the empty highway an invitation, a ribbon of spiritual milk for the traveller on his way across the desert, through providence, her unparalleled celestial femininity giving his heart to tide up with love & ease. His ride on his two wheeled ship was suddenly making experientially time bend, each second growing longer, slower. The sun was so bright and clear that in spite of the discomfort to his naked eye, the colors of the sky, and the horizon's razorlike glimmer across her chest made his psyche sing.

I have to pee.

A laugh -- in meter

I want to ride my bicycle south
I want to ride my bicycle south
Down to Argentina way

I want to ride my bicycle south
I want to ride my bicycle south
Where the well dressed penguins play

I want to ride my bicycle south
I want to ride my bicycle south
Where the birds of winter stay

I want to ride my bicycle south
I want to ride my bicycle south
Where butterflies fly away

CRUZ DEL DIVINO

Il tenger carinosia pura
Vida saluta & duro
El amo des pluros y onos
Este no es un hombre
Regular cono fluvia
Soleil y etheria
Los braces teners senteros
Completo & mignon dolce

[this is not a language and it does not make sense but to me-- author's note]

Judge Not

There are always haunted memories. As long as I've come up short, I've had to bear them. Grant was harder on himself than I was. He smoked a lot of ganja, though, so depending on his state and fill, he seemed to be alleviated. I chose smack and swimming. Nothing better than injecting a spoonful of heroin and swimming 100 laps or a mile in the ocean. Blood in the water, I would lose gravity in bouyance and make the domain my own. Sure, it's a bad idea, because if you overdose you'll likely drown, but "bad" is a relative term. Bad compared to going to the local beach resort and eating all manner of grease and sugar? Bad compared to making women your god? Bad compared to what?

I survived, and after I'd leave the water with red eyes, the blacks of which were points of miosis leaving the green in my eyes to contrast the red, I'd go look in the mirror. Not at my body, but in my dead eyes. Full of morphine and endorphin, there wasn't much to be afraid of. My stomach would settle and let me know it was time to feed. "Brainssss" would be great, but the nearest I could come to that would be blood pudding or kidney pie. Only then, with my reptilian appetite aroused, could I even stomach the sight of such disgustation. Then, a cigarette to tame my lungs.

Afterwards, the day usually would drag. When the sun past his acme, I would rest in cool air under blankets and my skin and body would know an unearthly peace. I would wake up soon, slowly and easily, and read or write, listening to music, stare out the window at the circus below, or the window in the ceiling at the sky sliding by. The days were eternal, even though the narcotics had worn off, and I knew that the world and her hearts had nothing more than there ever was. From here, I could daydream about physics, geometry, and energy.

Eventually, I would smoke too many cigarettes and the spell would be broken. Time had his part, but I punctuate time with cigarettes, and that was my meter. When the sun went down, I would feel lonely again, and go for dinner. I chose the most dismissable and unpretentious space, an aerodynamic diner, to eat. It was regular. It was good.

The ropes

The ropes were no longer familiar. He struggeled to coil them, and mistook the whole comedy for the ropes resisting to remember their shape. They were wet and heavy and he kept going to rearrange them as they sat, complicating them, and the whole enterprise took longer than it ever had. Omar needed sleep. He had been watching skies and stars and sleeping spells of an hour at most. The aether was dissolving into a grainy electric field; his vision was polluted.

He craved citrus. The air had been dry until last night, when it poured down and the skies flashed and rolled in a storm that passed the time very quickly. His body was basic and though the opium was helping him absorb his rations he knew he was depleted. During the night, he became obsessed with minerals so badly he sipped a cup of saltwater and crunched the fine ribs of perch in his teeth. This morning his jaw hurt and he was thirsty.

The weather had changed, and the winds were blowing from the southeast. When Argento came and saw his state, something must have been understood. Martis did not appear this morning, but Argento gave Omar a cup of doped coffee. Omar slugged it down for the water. As it sat in his belly, he could feel it settle all of him like a stiff drink without the swimming haze of dry alcohol. His mind would not let him carry on. Omar asked for water and Argento showed him down into the makeshift galley. There were two large casks of water among the rations. Omar asked for fruit. Argento rifled through the lockable cabinet and emerged with a sack, pulled the string untied, took two pieces of dried mango out and gave one to Omar. "Get sleep. We aren't far," he told Omar and Omar lumbered up the stairs backwards and tapped across the deck to the forecastle. He was very fortunate.

The mango loosened with the water and he held it in his mouth to taste the perfect acidity. He was afraid he'd fall asleep with a bit in his mouth and choke, so he finished the rest but a piece the size of his thumbnail, which he put under the blanket under his head. When he woke, he would try to wash his leg, if not his body. The puncture wounds were nearly healed, and the bone was fuzing. He was very fortunate indeed.

As he fell asleep he remembered that his life was not always this and would not always be here. It gave him some solace, the frame of time and limits. As he could see, along with Argento, they were closing in on land. The wind was even more preferential, the texture of the air had changed. The time would soon come when he could take action to free himself.

Evening

I threw the old flowers in the garden, with the idea that they would drop seeds and grow more next year. The garden is nearly dead, definitely dying. The skies are low and grey, and if the sun comes out it's a tease because the air blows cold on your face. It feels like every day is raining, but the sun does come out in between spells.

The banker didn't feel like he trusted me because I'm so fucking fidgety. He did, though, waive the need for a local ID or secondary ID. At the end of our meeting, he was asking me to come hang out with him, telling me he was lonely because he is from Ft. Wayne. His name is John. He's an American, for sure. When he made his attempt to identify with me, he started talking about tailgating. I've never been tailgating, though I've stolen kegs with a truck, and I don't mind if I spend my whole life without knowing what the parking lots at stadiums and sports events hold.

Over and over, I keep thinking about the Einstein quote and her siblings as phrases, "Raffiniert ist der Herrgott, aber boshaft ist er nicht." Life itself is pretty amazing. The bad isn't fun, and in culpability living feels less free and easy, but it feels like it works out. The latinos in Miami tried to tell me a phrase through translation that went, "He may grab you by the throat, but he won't choke you." Or, "If he closes the door, he'll leave the window open." Thank god for open windows, I say, and fresh cooling cherry pies!

Bad Magic

Superstition threatens me. I can't ignore it & I can't not think about it though I try. The notion that there are as many reasons why my pen or whatever falls the way it does as a certain planet or star is in a certain place or state relative to the others makes me all the more sure. When I lived in Harlem, I was obsessing about a now sort of old-fashioned telephone bill that wasn't available on the web. I could have called the phone company, I suppose, but no; I was sure that the bill was in my room. Those nights got phenomenally dark, and my window opened to a sort of three foot space that ended in the brick wall of the next building. It was a good spot.

I, for one reason or another, had a fishing rod in the room. I placed my cell phone on the hook, precariously, and allowed it to spin. It swung the line into a twist and then began to spin the other way. I waited. Eventually, the phone slowed to an average oscillation on a line that passed at the edge of the window. Behind the dark curtain, when I stood there staring at nothing on the windowsill, the edge of a white envelope appeared. The divination was a success!

Well, all these things are fine, but what can I do about dreams? I wrote a name yesterday, a name I rarely picture the face that goes with it, and in my dream she appeared. My rational mind has rules but in my dreams it feels like something is out to get me -- namely, myself. Even recently I could remember the content of dreams that weren't at all bad or stressful. Still, the vast majority of nights are haunted by one ghost or another, and if I'm thinking only in the monkeyworld I'm left to believe it's a psych thing.

So I wonder, "How much of my dreams did my own mind create?" All, none, some, whatever. I can remember things better if I'm hashing them over before I fall asleep, and there have been a couple, if not a few cases where I became lucid for a few seconds when I was dreaming, or woke without realizing the dream wasn't real. This evening I will come up with something nice before I fall asleep. I'll think of Richard Attenborough telling me all the things I didn't know about life. I'll pretend I'm on a private aircraft circling the antarctic with an amazing bed inside, where I'm given to dissolve into the hum of steady jet engines and Attenborough's voice. If I don't get greedy and make myself laugh, or feel compelled to get up and write a play or something, then maybe I'll have better dreams.

In celebration of the unfolding story of Colton Harris-Moore

I sat in the transport, listening to Led Zeppelin, watching the scenery slide by. My eyes were looking for a way out. The next ride would be 4pm, to return me. Barbed wire caught my attention, and behind it was a small airport. I studied the planes the way one studies a menu or a bowl of fruit. Which would have fuel? What fuel do they use? Jesus, that was a last-ditch resort, like pressing the hyperspace button to avoid a sure death.

I reminded myself that I should be afraid to think like this. Unfortunately, I wasn't. I considered the availability of highways or fields. The coast would be a good visual orientation. At some point, I thought, I'd have to cross water, which was a bigger barrier than the prospect of a death in the style of Icarus. Fire, crashing, breaking and bleeding are fine, but sharks would be worse. Already I was sabotaging my gestating escape. As soon as you realize what could happen, it definitely can.

The other option was to just trust that however and wherever the van and life led was fine. "Fine"... well, it's a life at least. I thought of the Wright brothers and early rocketeers. These men had a similar disregard for gravity, saw it as a challenge rather than a law. I couldn't imagine living before airplanes. There have been places and times I lived without electricity, but the air was a natural domain. In my youth, I remember saving my own and Jason's life by grabbing his steering wheel from the passenger seat to steer us out of the imminent death procession of freight trucks we had veered into. Let death be Zen.

The airport finished screening by. Over the radio, I heard, "wheel in the sky keep on turning..." Where was my spirit? Surely the world hadn't crushed it. Even when locked into a cell, my eyes looked for the unseen key. The wall was withing jumping distance. I could practice jumping until I knew I could. There wouldn't be any mistakes. Mistakes cost.

This magical way, seasoned with unlikely survival, gave perspective on the strange things afoot in the universe. I had to be on God's side. Without that, I would surely fail. The monkey and the bat are not governed by this, I thought, but I am. So long as my motivation was pure, I couldn't think of any evidence against notion. Life had given me the keys, I just misplaced them all the time.

What is lost?

All can't be lost. I have my eyes, my tongue, my ears are pretty good. My body, though some time has shown me that it does imprint age upon one, still returns to a fair balance after antagonism. The knot of pain in my back presses me through writhing postures and finally I sit up. It can't be forever, but it's very good for now.

Someone once asked me if I'd do a particularly taboo thing. I explained that yes, I would, if I never cared if I were alive or not. It wasn't a promise, I was giving the conditions under which I would. Shortly, then, after some consideration, I did realize that death didn't scare me. I've seen corpses, been to burials, and as real as death is I came to understand that I wasn't afraid of it. Pain I avoid, dismay and disgust put me off things, but death itself -- to cease the circus of my psyche wasn't a threat.

It wasn't depression. I read depressing books perhaps, and my idle time was meted out in held breaths and urgent sighs, but my lot was not insufferable. My interests inclined to the strange, the bizarre, the magical and musical. Ultimately this macabre rite was a gift, in a sense. In a book titled On the Beach, the characters are forced to reconcile with the obvious and impending finality of their lives. They drank, raced cars, worried about their children, took care of their lovers, and generally worked on the lists of what needs to be done before that time comes.

The particular indulgence that precipitated this core of obsessiveness did not kill me. I lived. Games of chance don't usually appeal because I understand randomness to a decent degree and can see the ratios of outcomes. Recently I was reading a friend and he wrote about how he was leaning out over the edge of a great hole. I saw in that form my own doings, except I dove into the hole. A different and wiser man also told me, "The first rule of holes is: When you're in one stop digging."

So, after a lifetime in darkness and shadows, caves and burden, I wake up and look for the sun. It sometimes takes hours for the sky to crack dark and then blue. Once that sun is up, though, the waiting is done and the day begins. The chores and obligations, social and internal, crop up and then for me is to contend with them one by one until that same sun returns to the horizon and leaves the day to sleepiness.

My dream

Somehow the old man had died in the bathtub. The water wasn't even cold yet. All was dark but his face by light through the opaque window. I shouldn't have been there just then but I was. They sent me the key, and I opened the mailbox and found the old note. The man's right arm was hanging down, and not a foot from his lifeless fingertips a flashlight.

I picked it up. If anything happened I would carry the light out with me. As I did so I felt the shadows slide across the floor. So when I saw the silhouettes outside the window I stopped breathing. Turning, I could make out at least one face shape, a long and serious face, and a young one. I barely moved. There was a small handgun in the soapdish. Suddenly the room flashed twice, and I could see that it was a signal.

My left hand made a splash in the water by his leg, and my right hand barely flashed the light once. I could make out now 2-3 persons outside the window. After the flash, they seemed to acknowledge and move on. I didn't wait for them to leave.

Electromagnetics and Danse Macabre

Bury me under a lightning rod,

in a copper casket

filled with brine

from the dead sea.

That's my only wish.

Turritopsis nutricula can stay,

if she can

handle all the salt

in my electric repose.

Place sand, not earth

on the top of me.

That I can swim out

through fulgurites and

wrest the air again

into my cured lungs.

"You can in fact,

danse if you want to." - me(4)

Don't touch my head

if I appear to be dead

because when I wake,

I may make the mistake

of collecting your hand.

You'll need those,

in theory and fact.

Just save your tears

I'm covered in salt.

For the Magpies

Little white flecks seemed to lurk in the piece of moss I picked off the tree stump. It was elevated, but this is a lawncare sort-of culture, and I don't know what chemistry it could be endowed with. Still pica or insanity compelled me to have a nibble. It got gritty and crunchy. It reminded me of being a taster for someone, to check their meals for poison. I had an internal dialogue trying to wrangle with negotiations for recompense for such a vocation. "Well, sir, if you're prepared to arrange for whatever I concoct as a dream for each day as my last, then I'm your man!"

When I considered the view of the hiring paranoiac or man with such dubious regard for his well-being, I didn't think it met the bargain. After all, who wants to be subject to a man who doesn't mind if he's alive or not's whims? Then who is hiring whom? That could be an expensive rush just to trust that your food is not going to kill you. The grit got into my molars and I realized why stumpmoss was not a more popular ruffage. There were minerals and wood humus and it really didn't taste much of anything; it was more a texture that got to me. I switched sides so that my teeth would be equally worn. My spit was green.

Maybe it's not pica. I did have a phantom sense of minerals in my mind and mouth since I cut the lawn. I don't normally go around just picking things up and eating them, just as I come upon them. Red coloring gives me alarm, that kind of thing. Pines always carried a sharp character I don't think I would want to taste them, maybe I have thin firs, but not from the street. From an inside tree perhaps, that would suit me.

Truly, though, I wanted to know what the moss would taste like. I still can taste it, and it wasn't bad, as compared to the grit it was coupled with. My first nibble before I popped the small sample in my mouth like an old and familiar morsel cropped the freshest of the moss. I appear to be alive still, hours later, and am not able to register any psychic change thus far. If this is the last you read, then you can assume that I met my end eating strange things on a fool's errand. If not, then it is also potentially safe to eat more of the same sample of moss. I still do have an aftertaste, having written it up on my tongue, that I now want to go away and so shall go drink water.

Yesterday

And now I know that the day did close in balance and complete some circuit. It was pretty amazing, if pedestrian, very much literally, and now my legs hurt and I can't sleep.

And `ow.

Earnesty

So, I look up at the blue sky and hold up my hands. I'm calmer now. I carry more now. After two years of sleep, I feel like I'm waking. It's not so cold, and actual sleep is still hard but not terrible. I'm getting some fiber and exercise. Scurvy should be put off by the apple I ate. Rodrigo & Gabriela play Stairway to Heaven in my gifted iPod Shuffle. It somehow fits my mood.

I can barely remember the bus. Somewhere between Philadelphia and South Bend a kid sold me like some random amount of broken .5mg alprazolam pills. Some ununiformed police asked me how much I'd been drinking. I took offense. That much I remember. I asked him why he would ask me that and he said, "You're slurring your words." I think we left it alone. A nice lady pacified me. I can remember her face and form. I can't remember if she was from Chile or from Russia. I probably tried to speak the wrong language, and I can't speak the languages properly anyway. Just Giosuesan.

I watched the river run away from me, carrying foam and leaves, fishes and forms all fast away, like time and life and pain. Let it go, I felt. I just subdued a cataclysm of emotion to write that experience. I can't tell you how tender it is. I think about things like trees reaching for the sun, things to remind me that so long as my core is sound, I can still go. And I'm not in such bad shape. My mind is a bad neighborhood though, and the gimmick of the turn of phrase is terribly true. I should stay out of it alone. I sat and told some woman to do the Next Right Thing. She was worried about money. I told her that money gone is money gone, and that it's not to be concerned about.

She told me she had never cut grass. I've tried to push a man-machine mower through a trailer lot. It wasn't well oiled. I was small, but man I tried. I could get her so far and then thump, she locked up. It's like trying to escape an ocean to give up. If you stop fighting it, stop fearing it, but respect it, she will put you to shore; or not, but what's the difference? Life.

I've been telling myself and others that when I make plans g-d laughs and I'm sure it's been amusing enough. I'm going to the art museum to find some victory. This morning I've been playing Rocky.

A-la. I'm wide awake, it's morning.

Indiana State Signal 41

"Is [there a] lie detector available" There are three sides to a story, I've heard and I believe it. I see it. I love the phrase, "Ask me no more questions, tell me no more lies." I don't like to lie; don't ask me questions. Stare into the blackness or just at the window. The less interested you are in a lie the easier it is. I think sometimes I parody myself lying. That's at my better, then it isn't meant as a prestidigitation.

NYC lies like some sort of matrice in my memory, channels of skyscrapers north and south, east and west. I'm not at home there anymore. I am at home in the speakers with Jimi Hendrix coming from them. That's an old memory too. So lies? Sew seed.

حب

Lamed is the giraffe. I had to ask like nine times. The context was there. The word was Shalom, and that was written in every language. Peace. My hairs are at attention, pilating and that. I'm working on too many projects, the Kryptos sculpture, Hebrew, some book about US media, ugh. I need a break from -nothing-.

Oww.

Well, I find myself sleeping through some less nightmares and with better sinuses. My guts are twisting, but it doesn't hurt. I'm ok. The challenges I meet with others and the forces at hand aren't so overwhelming. I'm cool with it. My body is free of Phy. I know this. In some matter of days I will be ready to take some bites of this life. "Ever since I was a kid I've been a voodoo basket case."

Now, I am given to choosing my way. I'm unsure, but I guess I don't have to know right now. When I need to know I will. Anyway, I'm on like a 15 day hold, minimum. It will be mid-October before I see the next town, the next faces, the next era. Parts of me want to go digging around in the past, but a bigger thing tells me not to. Just move on. Move on.

Music keeps me alive and sane. If I listen though, I can't sleep naturally. I'm comfortable with two sheets and nothing more, but I have my own blanket if I need it. Last night I dreamt I was in an army and on a bus I shouldn't have been on. I was firing .22 rounds at things on the bus, and then some big old soldier. I killed him. The gun I hid under my right thigh. They wanted me to move from my seat, which I did not want to do. That would have been bad. Soon enough I woke up and untangled myself from this dream.

Yawn.

Heart of Darkness

The man was sitting there when I stopped. I looked around and there was a whole other picnic table bolted to the ground there on that intersection in Manhattan. He seemed a part of the scenery, backdrop, not much to concern myself with. He was a large but dismissible silhouette. I sat there and stared. The dark shape grumbled, coughed and turned shining black eyes to me. "Hello," I acknowledged. "Mmm." I received.

I lit a cigarette. The shape became a man and he asked me for one. I gave him one. He asked me for a lighter. I handed him the lighter. Soon, we were in some conversation. He probed with dialectics and then we got into some ramble. There wasn't much to talk about so we did some strange staring contest. I asked him when it would end. He rumbled and laughed. I asked him if he'd seen Apocalypse Now, as an ice-breaker, you know. More mumbles.

I asked him if he'd read "Heart of Darkness" and he claimed he had. Then he did some performance piece of that title. I think he thought I was a white kid being racist. For all I know he was a Vietnam man. More staring contest. It was a loose end I was trying to tie up for myself. I had been in the room but was much more distracted by horniness than I could to pay attention to the stupid movie. I think that I made out with that girl to Apocalypse Now. Bad magic.

He handed me the last inch and a half of dilute 40oz. I felt obliged, so I mimed a swig. Even that disgusted me. Soon, young blacks passed and he came to life. The white kid in the dark corner was nothing interesting. Maybe they had something more interesting than the nothing Mephisto and I were playing about with. He wasn't helpful in resolving my loose ends there. It was a strange occasion though, where a man with nothing had the time to show me the dark blackness of his pupils, stained with the second half of the twentieth century.

I think now, that I was looking for a movie in those black screens as if I stared I could see some echoreflection of the past, and thereby see some vaticination. Even if he held out to me a clear black orb of obsidian, I don't believe I would have been any clearer. What broke this strange game and the laughter and way he sprang to life when the young men passed by voided it in some ways, but I never did forget the strange night.

How to Get Out of Gaol by Writing

The last time I really wrote I was in prison in England. I can't deal with these slimy keyboards. They feel like sticking your hands into a vat of muck and wiggling your fingers around. No matter what I do, my hands come up slimy. Johnson, the Welsh screw, always looked like an older, taller, more sane me. He would open the door, look, close it and lock and my stride wouldn't break. My mind was free. My body was stuck in that damned cell.

I knew that the wall to the prison was within jumping distance from my window. Well, that's what I saw anyway. The bars, though, presented their own problem. The way I remember them is like old fashioned steel bars, but they must have been retrofitted. HMP Brixton was an old gaol, in South London, and famous to me. The days stretched on, mostly in search of one comfort or another, a cigarette or cup of tea, the occasional cup of powdered coffee and books. Of course, writing kills time and days.

The US State Department came to visit me. That was fun. I was probably very poor in condition, but it was someone familiar to talk to. The only other Americanlike person was a Russian. Somehow he had his own cell, complete with binders and boxes of papers. He explained to me that he was being held because he had been raising metal from the sea bed between the first Gulf War and September of 2001. Everything someone says about why they were in there had something off about it. There's too much to go through, and I didn't ask questions because I wasn't so interested.

When you're locked in a room, you begin to look at getting out of that room. Not just, for example, to go get your food and return the room, but to get out of the building, complex, and her governors. In prison, or remand at least, my main interest was my defense. So this was naturally a good thing to write about and I did. My defense was: Let my punishment match my crime, and I do plead guilty, conditionally, though my prosecutors would whisper down the lane the facts as they have been sensationalised by the police. I was pretty fair about it all. The judge actually looked at me and said, "I've read your statement, and it seems you have some degree of education, and I don't think that you are a threat to society. Still though, the nature of your crime and the gravity of it is such that I have to pass a custodial sentence. He paused. 9 months." I had to stay in those cells for 4.5 of the months. They let me out early because of a weekend I think. I had already been incarcerated for more than three.

Non

I will not be a captain of industry. My stepfather reduced man's end to reproduce. That, too, I believe I'm rejecting. I don't believe it made him happy. That, this is my work. How, then, do I go about it? Every time a puzzle is solved, each time I see something better and more completely, when I feel something new as a man, my brain gives me a little satisfaction. Still, though, I reel from it back to some stasis afterwards. Rare is the night I go to bed with a smile with something true. Whatever my work is, it is not just this. Words and ideas can be filed and documented, an index card made for each one, neatly stacked and slotted but this will not be the end, this is not whole satisfaction.

To breathe life into that system, in a sense, does give a fountain of that satisfaction. Some fountainlike youth. A regeneration each time it is used, the protocol is followed. Am I a bureaucrat? Only on my constructive days. The rest are tempted with a streak to test the limits, to stretch, strain, and reach for the better. Without this mean streak, I'm not sure the work could be done as well. Will you find me twitching and spitting on the fluorescent cement floor of some cold library? I can't tell you. I'm just a man, nothing more. What will you expect?

When I am allowed around great arrays of books, long shelves of numbers and all the ink spun and slung I begin to click and whirr. Never have I let myself collapse in the library. There's too much; I can't sleep. The last time I was not careful I found trouble that way. It would be safer to stay in the library I know, but I begin to lose the forest for the trees and therein lay the folletti and other metaphoric creatures of legend. Also in the darkness deep and steeped in restless searching is a magic and an inspiration. I can live with some limitation, but to close certain doors I am unwilling. Perhaps among my weaknesses this could represent me. That, and my intolerance for ticks and bedbugs. I'm now neither safe in the country nor the city; where faute de mieux.

I've lost myself

Where am I? In the park, I went round it. The perimeter was not so big, and the tour was taken counterclockwise from above. There was a statue where the graffiti whispered about it. "Lies" it breathed. There was a phenomenal achievement of graffiti on a Philadelphia Electric Company building sort of pier. "Hot Boo," it read. Such a perfect spot and that is what to write? Maybe an arrow of love shot at a girl, or some story I don't know.

The presumptions make me nauseous, and often enough they're mine own presumptions. When asked a question and I look for the answer lately I've been being made mockery of. I'm not offended; it really is a flattery. At least they're listening. The past two days I've chattered and sang to myself nonstop, to keep the internal dialogue at bay. She still creeps in, the wheels still creak but I am trying to get it all out. I've been on some strange diet of almond granola, bananas, and nonfat yoghurt. Restlessly, my girl asked me if I was on drugs in less words.

I asked her which drugs she would think I were on. I'm not on any, but she suggested narcotics. No, I'm very electrically charged, boceta. Voltaire's Penn Treaty Park set the scene, with redundance and potholes of credibility. It was a perfect day.

Semen and Tears

When we met, I had no money. She approached me in the high school cafeteria where I sat in the windowsill by myself, minding my business, thinking greater thoughts than what conversations were being had over tater tots. She had long, beautiful hair and warm and curious eyes. Beautiful eyes, she had. I wanted to keep them forever, fixed on me so that I could see her perfect eyes with lids that cover the just the top of her iris.

I told her I sat there because I didn't really want to be around anyone. I didn't. Life wasn't easy for me, and I was young to deal with it. She had heard that I was a kid that had run away from home, like actually run away from home and not come back. She ended up being valedictorian, I ended up dropping out, but we had some sort of magical bond that was bigger than can be described. I do feel, though, looking back on it that I poisoned that bond and my antics did break it.

Well, obviously I was back, held back a grade, and had spent my young journey through roadtrips to Louisiana and Athens, GA, college dorms and University libraries. I stole clean socks and underwear, sometimes shirts and that from the laundry rooms in the apartment buildings. I learned along the way that sometimes girls do want you to kiss them and touch them, that alcohol was a nihilist pote, and that one can survive with next to nothing so long as one has faith in g-d and oneself.

We were young lovers. We watched Caligula together late at night in her lovely home and made out on her sofa. I would reach down her pants and feel her soft wetness. She wasn't embarrassed. For a long time, she wouldn't fuck me. She sucked me off and I drank her in. We fell asleep naked and satisfied on her sofa and her mother came out in the middle of the night, woke her up and protected us from her father. What a sight it must have been for her mother. Two naked perfect bodies entwined, sharing breath, clothing scattered between the television and the sofa. I wasn't sure whether to be scared or amused.

School ended for her, and she went to Providence to go to Brown. I flung myself at NYC, stayed with a friend at his family's for a couple of weeks and then my welcome was expired. I slept on subways, on rooftops, in boiler rooms because it was cold. My resolve was tested and so was my faith. Soon, though, it was provided that I had the job and money to rent a room. I had become a part of the living, vibrating machine that is New York. From my little room in Harlem on 135th street, I worked connections and countless faxes for a job. I didn't know how to lie right yet when it came to being a candidate for a job. I was stealing internet access from an account I found logged in at CUNY, up above St. Nicholas park. I did have a phone, and that was my only bill. I lived on 200.00 a week.

While she first went to Brown I was in her heart. I made a point to visit and remind her that our bodies and breaths fit so well together. Mary's mom gave me valium because I was nervous to be a fish in such a foreign pond, but I took most of that on the train. I made a mess of that visit. After fighting my way into a job in Norwalk, CT, an old conspirator called me at work to tell me that we would start a company. "That's great. How do we go about it?" He had a client lined up and all we needed were all the legalities of a business entity. Erik's mother was very helpful, and wielded the reputation of one of the most prestigious lawfirms. Our contracts would bore even Victor Hugo.

Suddenly, I began to make a lot of money. I had thousands of dollars. It just kept coming. I worked, I billed, they paid, and an accountant handled the IRS. Oh, now I just had to fuck her properly. The arrangements were made and I came up. We went to one of the finer restaurants and I ordered ostrich carpaccio. Her cheeks were flushed with the bit of wine she had. I ordered a 30 dollar snifter of JW Blue. This seemed to amuse her. She had always known me as poor. She saw something in me that she liked, but I did not have the money or status her family would expect. We went back to her house.

I remember vividly her laying on her bed, her skin a toned white with lovely red flushing and perfect breasts. She just laid there while I stared at her, hard, my breath still smelling of whiskey. I slid up her body and into her. She made a womans perfect cry of pleasure. She was really hot for me. "Come inside me. I want you to come inside me." For a girl who usually used to have me pull out and come on her chest, this was the most sexually laden plea I have ever heard. She said the words like she was in pain, like she needed me to relieve her.

Her breasts were pink, her cheeks were flushed, and I felt her come. Still, I could not release myself. Believe me, if there would be anything I could do to fill her with my semen I would, but, as she had described me, I was a stately lover. Even if I fucked her like I was going to break her, I would be distracted by the phoniness of it. Oh she was real about it all, it was just me that couldn't. The more I became aware of it the more impossible it became. All that ostrich and Johnny Walker Blue got me nothing more than a woman to finally give me what I wanted, only so that I couldn't take it.

I did love that girl, and had for a long spell. For a time after, she was the forefront of my sexual appetite. I thought of cab rides where I put my hand up her dress to find the softest, soaking flesh and she flashed me a grin, "I told you to watch out." We had our good times but she wanted other ones. She told me she was a virgin. I never believed her, but why would she lie?

She did show me love, and I could see the pain in her eyes, hear it in her voice as she had to part ways with me as I grew sicker in this world. Some of it was rough, the words and the actions, but I think I always knew that she did care. When she sucked me off, she swallowed my semen and in so made a communion with me. I sat on a bench with her at Rehoboth beach, following her by hitchhiking, not sleeping, and all to spend some time with her. There were fireflies and butterflies and a magic of youth that I refuse to wash away as foolishness. As I sat near her, afraid to kiss her, afraid to touch her hand, I showed my heart to her and the lengths I would go to to be with her.

At some point, she decided, and with fair reason, that she would fuck some other young man using a lie to get rid of me from the house she was taking care of. I'm not sure that the young man had much of her heart, but it was an act of finality. I got the point. She either had some oats to sew or just wanted me to go. I was sick. It made sense. Poppies had robbed me of my soul, my love, and all the blessings my faith had bestowed upon me. She deserved better, and the Universe gave generously to her.

The Universe handled me in another way. I had to go through miles and miles, cross oceans and borders and back to arrive not 30 miles from the garden of my youth. When we were younger, when she was in Spain, she wrote me a few letters. She was lonely. I was overwhelmed with emotion and tears fell on my page. So in love, I had adopted feminine dramatics. I wished more than anything that I could be there with her. I prayed that somehow I would be, that her soul be comforted, and that she laugh and smile. Many years later I made it to Spain. She had long since returned to the United States.

I broke a child's aluminum and plastic reclining patio chair while standing on it thinking it would hold my weight. Her friends ferociously incriminated me and it was a grave transgression. If I could find a place to buy another I would, but the way they treated me, and that she defended nothing but the chair left me to realize that it was me in this world with its absurdity. The morning after she lied to clear me out so she could sleep with some boy she called demanding to have it be replaced. I had a girl in my bed and told her on the phone to go fuck herself, I had company.

When I was in Barcelona I went to a bullfight. It was a sick affair, a brutal celebration of death, and a comedy of the pain of a beast. Sometimes I feel like that lesser beast and the celebration of pain and humiliation by spectators is no less sick of an affair. Flambouyance and viciousness. It makes my mind see women and men laughing at awkwardness and social falls. What might they say if they were able to feel welcome?

What might I say to her if I were able to feel welcome. I brought her miso soup when she was sick and shot two bags of dope in her bathroom. She pounded on the door demanding to know why it was locked. "Privacy," I answered. We sat on a familiar sofa and looked out at the city. Time had changed, and so had we. The last I remember seeing her was that day. Her father and family have political interests and I'm a volatile character. Still, to this day, I love those times with her.

Dreams

I am awake. The sun isn't up yet. I had fitful sleep, and vivid dreams. I dreamt of sleeping with an ex-girlfriend Emily, I dreamt of snakes eating things too large for them to eat. I dreamt of strangers looking to burglarize what I had already burgled. I can't remember them all but they all woke me up. Each time I went out to see if there was something beautiful on cable and there wasn't. I returned to bed as boats went up the mekong delta in search of Pol Pot's boys. For some reason I'm not afraid of anything. Nothing that I know of scares me. Not getting shot, not cancer, not lupus, none of that. Death is a joke. It always has been. I'd be a good soldier except I can't kill for something I don't believe.

Someday I love to think that I will have a child to teach all the things I've learned about this world, but I can't see that child's mother. I survived childhood, and if I can do it surely a child of mine can. American broadcast journalism nauseates me, and BBC is only on a few times a day. This is one of those times. Coffee, cigarette, BBC. All that's missing is a woman who understands me.

I can't drink, because I can't drink well. Sometimes I take clonazepam for my nerves and motor tics, and I'm given a half a day of relief. When it was prescribed to me, I took more than prescribed so my girlfriend made me call my doctor and tell him I was abusing them. I wanted her to be happy so I did. I also had to call the pharmacy. All of it very embarrassing. I don't want a lover that gives me ultimatums to embarrass myself, but a woman who knows that I can find a solution.

I don't want to go to Uganda. I don't want to see much of Africa. Morocco and Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt are magical and lovely lands, but I don't have any compulsion in my heart to go to those places. I promised myself I'd go to Argentina. I've told people about my dream. It is real. It came from my heart, and I want to get there by motorcycle. Not rushing, slowly and taking my time. I expect to encounter challenges, but that's the stuff life is made of. If it were easy, every trust fund hippie would be doing it. It's not like going to burning man, it's like being Hemmingway on a motorcycle. I'm 31 and soon I will be too old to get away with such dangerous enterprises. Then I will have to have children and give up my sleep to allow my woman some peace.

This is my dream. I want to see what America ignores at best, and meddles with at worst. People are people. There may be ones that hate me, there certainly are those here. Gary Robinson decided when I was 14 and had run away from home to the University that he would call the police and tell them where I was. He told a few of his friends and they would be spectators. The problem was that I wasn't there. Didn't come there that day and wasn't around. I did learn about this and I challenged him to a duel. I punched him in the face and he punched me in mine and we left it at that. A year or two later I read in the paper he was shot in the head while robbing a kid of his LSD and money. His co-robber had pistol whipped the victim and acidentally fired a round into Gary's head. I think from that I learned that people who do wrong dig their own graves. My dream is one of childish wonder and innocence and for all the wrong I've done it can me amended.

People will have their opinions, people will tell me I'll die. People will say a lot of things, but no one will ride with me. A friend, a true friend of mine, would ride with me, not try to stop me.

The More Better

I was a man back when

I should have been a kkid

Hitting sticks and skipping bricks

Family god gave me and god gave good.

Stiil, I missed that innocence

For me I wanted only good

I wanted my mom to love my dad

She did. He was in jail, loveless.

I used to fear it was a curse

That I would repeat the mistakes

My ancestors did; have children

And show them how to Hate.

I am still a child

Barely a man. I have

scores to settle before

I can give in to youth

The weak weak ways of

Hate and Jealousy, even

Complacency and a two

week vacation to make sense of it.

See, what happened to me

I can't forget in two weeks

I choose the hardest path

before I betray my loves:

Balances

I will die here

I will die here

For someone else

Not for me

I won't die here

I can't die here

A sacrifice I can't

Make of myself

For you to live

Your hopes and dreams

You must crush mine

And I will die.

The Butterfly Knife

Every morning, Craig, a flaming gay 8 year old complete with shoulder fur and occasional skirt was the object of ridicule. The girls loved him, the boys made threats among themselves of the things they would do to him. Dirty gay straight boys. One of them was named Armand, a black kid who was as small as me, but who felt he should use his voice as loud as no one ever should. A rule of life, I learned, is that the louder you speak, the less you have to say.

Armand decided, for whatever reason, though I can imagine that it was because I was in his weight class and effeminate in his own right, that one day after school he would have it out with me. He accused me of being racist for not wanting to talk to him, for ignoring him, for keeping my even strides back to my house across the dirty field. Then the overt threats came. When they were ignored, I felt a sudden blow to the right side of my face. I stopped and turned to look at him.

"What?" "What exactly do you want from me?" I asked with an authority in my voice that was comfortable but somehow felt like it wasn't mine. "Give me what you've got!" I think he was making this up as he went along. I quickly produced a butterfly flip knife and flung the handles around and back so the blade made a forboding motion to lock. "I don't think so. I'm white, but I'm not the right white kid." He got all legal all of a sudden, "MY DADDY'S A POLICEMAN!" "Oh yeah?" I asked. "Then what exactly are you doing right now? "Self-defense" You attack me with that knife I have the right to self defense. "What about my self fence? You struck me without warning." "You're a racist cracker." We went back to this.

As I folded up the knife to put away, he snatched it. A good move, I have to confess. The tables were somewhat turned. I wasn't afraid. I moved in on him. He strugged to get the handles to lock and make the knife a weapon. I moved closer. He edged away. "NOW I've got EVIDENCE!" He did have a sort of point, though truly he shouldn't be assaulting other children then claiming his father was police and thus exempt from the laws that applied to the rest of us kids. I couldn't have been more than 10. What a brat, this kid.

I've had at least two amazing black lovers, and once you have a romantic sexual relationship with a willing, very giving woman from another race you're just not racist. I mean, we're all racist, we cross the street when it's full of black kids and the other side is little old chinawomen. That's just our programming. I can claim, though, that I've been very close, very much inside of the lives of black women, and even though they had to defend me from their friends who didn't appreciate her "peckerwood" and herself from the snide comments here and there down the street, we were lovers. One of whom is dead now, the other I'd rather not see again as long as she lives. In neither final scene of our affairs were there any racial calls before the curtain.

Now Armand had the knife. He was going to give it to his father for evidence. I figured I was just minding my own business when attacked and moved to defend myself. Granted, I was clumsy to have lost the butterfly knife, but I did what I thought was right. My stepfather at the time would lecture about the human condition, survival of the fittest, and wanting to kill your father and fuck your mother. What the hell did he know anyway? He just wanted my mother.

He took the knife running across the field, and later I'd get my revenge, no... let me rephrase. God would redeem that pain by providing me with two of the most gorgeous and hottest black lovers that even a black man could imagine. Good luck Armand. I hope your own father is there to protect you. Revenge is not my business, but you assaulted and robbed me. Did you have any hot sisters?

Love & Hate

The Bus

He had no idea how to use guns. Triggers, cocking, levers for reloading, etc. he had an idea about, but no practical familiarity with guns as weapon for a man. In his hands he had some sort of rifle. It had a switch for fully automatic and burst. Since he didn't have any known supply of ammunition other than what was in his cartridge, he went for burst. Their voices threatened through the windowless second floor, like they were on rooftops nearby. They were hunting someone. He would not be quarry. If they presented their bodies, he would fire projectiles into their heads and move after each volley. No matter how outnumbered he was, he would continue to kill them, one by one, two by two, until they were no longer a threat or he was dead.

His beautiful girl and son were already landing from their ferry across the sea. They would be safe. It was him against a fate, one which carried its threat through wrongness or evil. In his heart, he knew that he had not wronged anyone in any way that gave justice to the assault he faced. Men of hearts they were unsure of had fled, given up their wives or daughters, watched their sons slain in the hope that their miserable lives be spared. More often than not, the final conclusion was several rounds to the head of the man who had sold everything he loved to save a life not worth living.

Good men, loud men, men who spoke with great conviction about righteousness and god were all among those whose families they watched brutalized and whose lives ended without any hope for redemption or salvation. These were sad stories, they lived, and sad endings they found. Omar had been more quiet than most. He was aware that god had the tendency to make men eat their words. To him, tolerance, understanding, and forgiveness were the only ways that one might find their way to a life blessed and under the auspices of god. It was part formal training, but mostly he knew this in his heart.

They had accents from other countries, though he could understand one man from the South. He overheard, "They live like pigs, they will die like dogs!" Girls screamed too nearby for Omar to handle. He clenched his eyes and begged that mercy be made for them, that justice fall upon their attackers. Where, he seethed under his breath, did the Quran say anything about this? These men were savages, brutes, djinn making the devout seem evil. They made a mockery of all that was good and all that was love. It was not Omar's place to understand, but he could not understand how they should be allowed to live in such grotesque blasphemy.

Above, their boots clunked on his roof. He heard them make their way over to the Macias' home by rooftops. They were probably looking for valuables and women. How sick was all of this. Omar felt like he should have emerged to the roof to assassinate the most he could of them while they were still on the roof like vultures. How many families would he have protected? How many tears would he have held back from mothers, daughters, brothers and fathers? What sickness was this?

So many centuries ago, the arabs were at the forefront of architecture, medicine, astronomy, chemistry, math, and physics. Now they were mere pawns for great bloated beasts like the United States and her vicious appetites. He had met few americans. The ones he had met did not harbor any particular patriotism, in fact more of a sheepish almost embarrassed guilt for their nationality.

Where was the good for all of this? "All things must work together for good." he had been taught and knew by his heart. Where, then, was the good for the humiliation of his people at the hands of US and Soviet armed militaries. Their motive seemed clear: To establish the most docile and dependent regime they could and maintain them under their control. For the control of oil, Israel, and the fear and respect in the hearts and minds of people.

We are a civil, and peaceful people. We were, at least, until the Soviets came in and natural selection quickly eliminated all but the most piggish wardogs of us. Cross-eyed and brutal, without the sensitivities and love that man has for his brethren. It was all about who could command the most fear. One of the oldest most profane ways society could play out had done just so. When the Soviets had left, their arms were abandoned to the warlords. The U.S.A. came in with more arms and technology to make sure that the C.C.C.P. was kept at bay, and that no oppressor could ever exploit us again.

Omar was going to leave for Morocco when night fell, but he had to make it through the day first. Bearded men sat around a table with maps and drank scotch to determine the options they had for subjugating the city. Omar had paid his old friend Jacque for transport across the Algerian border in exchange for more money than any of the working class would make in two or three years. It was a cost that was not prohibitive, for it was a cost for life. Omar was buying his own life. That's how his life became so valuable, to himself at least.

Amazing, XKCD

The Man Who Laid an Egg

He sat on the floor of the Brooklyn basement apartment and stared at the other young men and women. He had a deviant smile on his face. Even though he knew it was an advertisement that read, "please ask me why I'm smiling" and so transparent and immature it was embarrassing, he couldn't help it. Andrea was laughing hysterically in the kitchen. We had all taken LSD. She wasn't laughing to be generous to me, or my antics, though if it were anyone other than her I'd surely need such generosity. She was laughing because I had concluded a long standing desire, and invited her in on a very peculiar secret.

When Andrea lived with me I used to sit on her bed and ask her if I could put an egg in her butt or maybe in her vagina. I mean a chicken egg. I had read and reread The Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille and was perhaps a little to much enchanted with the amazing symbolism. It gave me a whole array of colors with which to paint perversions, all of them a spectrum of eggs and eyes. Bull's testicles and the most grotesque acts of priests, the most grotesque victimization of priests. Sexual play with milk and eggs and ever so many more symbols of life and the sights of the eye that, to be honest, I needed a really kinky girlfriend to work out with because there was -no- way in hell I'd take any of the stuff between my head and my legs to any therapist.

I felt bad, though, because I love Andrea. I love her as a person. She's a beautiful and caring person, who at times, when necessary, is able to fuck someone over. She's human, but she is one of the most truly loving, nonjudgemental, and perfect lover of the absurdist theatre that is our lives that I can't imagine what she'd have to do for me not to love her. I don't think she could do whatever I could imagine she'd have to do anyway. Every time I crept into her room, which was only guarded and secreted by a gossamer of a sheet, holding a chicken's egg in my hand, sitting gently on her bed to say good morning I would leave feeling guilty. I felt like I was molesting her somehow. She was for the most part very gracious in her declinations to my propositions for insertions of an egg into her, and I don't think she felt too threatened, but I still would leave her feeling guilty.

The only girl that I dated around that time was a girl from Long Island who was a nice young girl like drinking a glass of water, to fuck her pure and soft, gentle and hungry body to both her own satisfaction and mine. She wasn't going to have me fuck her ass, let alone get freaky with some chicken eggs. I probably should have started her off with the bowl of milk. Either way, she was a dead end. I was a goy and she was a diversion. It was Andrea who was the apple of the egg of my eye.

This guilt I carried for a while. The LSD was beginning to work and I could feel the aether beginning to become solvent. It was clear. I would have to birth an egg for Andrea. All of my selfish perversions were my natural reaction to the fears of my pride. My role in this case was as mother, as giver, as nurturer.

The only flaw in the ritual is that the closest I could come to a pussy was my butt-hole. Holding the egg, a wonderful example of nature's architecture, my mind absolutely knew it would withstand the pressures involved in forcing an egg into one's rectum, so long as the pressures were applied correctly, evenly, and at the right places. Also, the bottle of Vaseline brand moisturizing lotion on top of the toilet was providence. Nature took over and soon and with little discomfort the egg was drawn into my ass. I was so proud that day. I had an egg in my butt.

When I emerged from the bathroom and sat with my smile, I realized that they would not know if I were lying or not. It was amazing. I told a curious and rather attractive young Beth that I did have an egg in my butt, or I didn't but there would be no way for anyone but myself and a man with an x-ray machine to know. This pretty much cancelled out any potential sexual engagement with Beth. No matter how well groomed, gifted of silver tongue or golden charisma, once you tell a girl that you have an egg in your ass -- or don't -- you have eliminated yourself from her menu of fuckable men for the evening. I was after redemption and magic, ritual and perfect ethereal aesthete. The fact that she was confused and still interested in that great question, "Does he or does he not have an egg in his butt?" sated me much more than she would ever sexually.

I ran the room for the determinations those in our party had. Many were wise and declared no disposition. Some reasoned that I was the type who would have gotten up to such buggery. Others said that it wasn't possible. A raw egg would surely break if forced through a tight sphincter. I sat comfortably on the floor, and that was clearly evidence that there were no fragile foreign objects inside of my hind parts. I was brimming with glee. The best part was yet to come. After the conversation on acid had twisted along and away from the "Egg or No Egg" case in theme, I discreetly invited Andrea into the kitchen with me. In a rather crass arrangement, I quickly set up to birth my egg into the trash can. She would know, and only she, that the egg I had begged her to take in I had taken to mothering my own self. Only she deserved to be let in on the great secret.

With surprising ease, I popped the raw egg out and heard it plop into the trash. Nothing but the egg, of course, for that would be rather disgusting. Instead, Andrea began to emit a peal of laughter, a laugh at the beauty of the insane, a laugh as if emitted when tickled by the spirit of the universe. My pants were up, and spectators came to arrive. She was unable to speak, because she was overwhelmed with the laughter one experiences on LSD that can heal years of psychic damage. She was my only witness and now mute. Later she would retell the tale to my embarrassment.

incarcéré (REALLY CONTINUE, REALLY DO, Joshua)

As he sat there on the hard bench, he looked down at his feet and the floor. Luc was being booked into the prison. He examined his wrists, which were fine after being handcuffed. It was well over twenty four hours since his last fix, so the dope sickness was setting in. The quote "No man can eat fifty eggs" mocked him in an internal dialogue he was trying desperately to stifle. He heard that phrase in his old friend Drew's voice. For as long as he'd been not quite right in the head he read too much into things. Things people said, the names of things, the synchronicity of things and the symbolism of experiences held meaning and were omens and auguries. Drew was mocking him in a friendly way from his memories as he sat in a large cell with a dozen other men who were, for now, the bad guys.

"JACKSON" a small man in a uniform called into the room. Luc looked up and his eyes saw the corrections officer in the sickening fake lights. Those lights made his vision vibrate a little bit. They were bright and made every dirty corner and filthy step of floor a harsh reality. The small officer walked behind him and told him to walk into the first room on the right. Luc saw another small man, a dark asian man with glasses and doctor's whites sitting down behind a desk.

When Luc was in the holding cell with the other men, one of the men was spitting on the floor, holding his stomach and moaning that he was sick, trying to make the corrections officers believe that he was somehow sicker than he really was, that he needed immediate medical attention. Luc sat down in front of the doctor on the edge of the chair, his hands cuffed behind him. The doctor asked, "You are Luc Jackson?" and several regular questions. He asked Luc about his addiction. "I know that everyone exaggerates their drug habits so that they're medicated with as much as they can get. It's not my way to make a drama of it, and to be truthful I've been much worse off. The problem is that my drug use is bad and my withdrawal is just starting. Believe me that it's going to get worse." For some reason the doctor looked up from his pad, turned his head and examined luc, smiled and returned to his pad. Then he concluded the session.

After waiting for an eternity in the holding cell, he was finally walked into the prison and to his cell. He had the cell to hisself, and a nurse came and brought him medication that made him feel better. There were 4 white pills and one blue pill. Because there were so many and he was afraid that he wouldn't be getting any more doses, he held one of them in his cheek as he swallowed the rest. When the nurse moved on he climbed back into his bed and took out the pill to examine it. It was marked DF 118. He wasn't sure what that was, but the three he had swallowed seemed to be making him feel better.

When he was still at the police station, he presented that he had a medical condition which could cause death if untreated. True words, they were, and treated as such. So the on-duty nurse that New Year's Eve medicated him with narcotics and what he believed to be a 20 mg valium. He felt just fine. Their threats held little to no bearing over him and so long as the drugs didn't wear off, he was ready for whatever they would throw at him. At least, in his favor, it was a country where they treated narcotic dependence as a disease, rather than a moral shortcoming or other despisable way. They gave him drugs. He felt better. When the detectives interviewed him he kept repeating, "at the advice of my counsel, I decline from making any comment. The hard-nose cops made the point that his responses were his own, and that if he chose not to comment that was on him, rather than on the Solicitor. Soon enough he was back in his cell, a big bright and cleanish one. He was jonesing for a fix, but the meds tempered that. He would make it, no doubt. He had kicked cold from much worse habits. There's no such thing as a free lunch, his grandfather used to say.

All too quickly a van came to pick him up and take him to the Her Majesty's Prison Brixton. It was there that he won the doctor's pity, if not repect, and was given a very generous detox over 4 weeks. In fact, it was more humane that those which had been provided ny insurance or Medicaid in the U.S. The doctor had done him a good turn.

Streetlights Through Nylon Stockings (CONTINUE)

Her skin never saw sunlight. After she walked out the door covered with a hat, scarf, gloves, and boots she turned around and locked it with a key. The door was metal, thick, and heavy. She could hear the cars up the street on the avenue making their engines whine and groan.

"What a fucking liar," she thought to herself. The television had been on all day and she heard the echoes of commemoration coins, new ways to process and store food, phone sex and phone psychics, car commercials and tampon commercials make their last pleas to her mind and hands as she left. The television was a liar, surely, but she was thinking about her boss.

She walked down to the subway, swiped her card and waited for a train. Gum spots, dead batteries, a film of grime, loud screeching trains that flew past expressly went unnoticed. Impatient, she kept leaning out over the edge of the platform for the train lights down the tunnel. It came in its time.

It was a long way to work and she was going to be maybe 20 minutes late. This would be a problem for someone. If it was Hank she would be fine but Helen would let her know that she felt challenged. "Fuck them," she resolved. She was reliable, sober, and competent and if they couldn't survive 20 minutes that was on them. The restaurant could practically run itself.

Ben was talking to Todd about how in Japan they have sushi restaurants where you enter your order on a computer screen, chefs make and plate the order and it comes out on a conveyor. Payment is made by a radio chip in the cell phone attached to a credit account. NPR had a piece all about it. A Japanese art student was telling the journalist all about how her mobile phone was more important than everything but life itself to her. Then she recanted this. The young issue so many words, make so many statements that if they were obliged to eat everything they said it would perhaps destroy them.

Todd listened more than he spoke. He listened while looking at the ground, nodding to acknowledge points heard or agreed. Ben liked this style. When Todd replied, if he bothered to reply, it was short and well scoped. "I want a Japanese girl," Todd concluded. In a way, Ben felt that Todd was always fucking with people but this was borne by Ben's sensitivity. He smiled.

As Lauren rode the train along its rattles and stops, she read the back of the free newspaper with all of its ads for vice and treatment. She wished she had a good vice. Maybe a heroin problem or a gambling problem, she weighed her options. They had television shows about people with drug problems. How great would it be to become a sad story, one that's hard to watch because you're embarrassed for all involved, all spectators, participants, and voyeurs. The whole bloody mess looked avoidable. Her stop was next.

Todd told Ben to get a dog. Ben hadn't asked him anything, but Todd felt that Ben would benefit from getting a dog. Ben didn't like dogs, and felt unsure about dog owners. Having to take care of himself seemed enough. When Ben was young he made proud statements about making a million dollars before he was thirty. He did start that and make significant headway before losing course and living life as he discovered it. To be true to himself, he'd set out on a great voyage and had gained large sums if not in finance. Also true, he had spent his most energetic years and come up with little more than memories and some confidence.

Lauren walked into the restaurant and saw Ben & Todd sitting at a table. It was obviously slow. Helen saw her walking up and yelled after her, "Lauren!" Lauren turned around and smiled. Her hands clenched her bag in anger. "Yes? I'm late. What do you need?" "Exactly! I can't have you being late. What will the servers do if they see you coming in whenever you want to? This is not professional!" Helen nagged. "Ok. Can we talk about this later?" Lauren buffered.

Ben and Todd watched. Lauren went through the kitchen doors and Helen went back to the bar. Ben shook his head. Todd smiled at Ben. "You know what this world needs Todd?" "What does it need, Ben?" "Nothing, Todd. It needs absolutely Nothing." "You're strange, Ben." "I'm OK with that though," Ben reassured him. A fat white man and his fat white woman sat down in a booth for six people. "That's you, Todd." "You can take it," Todd came back. Ben growled and got up and brought the fat couple menus.

Lauren dropped her jacket and bag in the office and went back downstairs. When she went back into the bar, Helen had gone for the day. "A break, finally!" she sighed out loud. The bartender looked up and said "Hey." "Hi Sal." White people with burned pink skin sat around the bar under the fans. They drank beers and frozen drinks. It was a hot day after the afternoon rain. Lauren could feel the barometry slowly ebbing. She filled a cup with ice and soda water and took a long drink until the bubbles hurt her throat.

Ben came into the bar to collect the typical holiday drinks served in souvenir cups for his two guests. They were hopeless. They were so hungry and so fat. Fortunately their order wouldn't take long. It shouldn't, at least, because the kitchen was far from busy.