Short Story Excerpt

This is an excerpt from a short story I was writing, and which I've now abandoned temporarily (gotta pay the bills). It takes places as a journal entry from a freshly independent (sort of, he's been orphaned) guy who's hesitant of everything and suspicious that everyone he's ever known has been lying to him about everything he's ever heard. I just haven't posted anything in a while, and to those 2 or 3 of you who actually read my blog, thought you might be interested. I'll try to finish the story soon, possibly for this writing contest I'll probably lose.


Dream Journal Entry 64: Suicide by Spider
I'm in a bathroom. I fumble around the medicine cabinet for a while before I find them, reading labels, deciphering elongated physicians' babble and looking for just the right touch of morbidity to splash in my hand and throw down my throat. I was hoping for something red because I thought that if I took enough of the stuff, I'd start to foam at the mouth and that crimson might offer up the most shocking hue to fit the mood...but the pills were white, like most pills. I didn't know this, and didn't really care once I realized the fact; but regardless, ever since I could remember, I always hated taking pills anyway, white or otherwise. This seemed to be the genius with this course of action. To say that I was attempting this abhorrent cry for help purely for my own bizarre experiment — to analyze whether or not I had the stones to cast the first stone on myself, for the purposes of forging a new path toward identifying the lengths I'd travel for my quasi-suicidal obsessions by subjecting my own brain and life to them — well...it seemed to me, logically, a stroke of pure Einsteinian poetry. It appeared to me, theoretically, as the kind of thing that garners the bestowing of some international prize for brilliance. It was going to be the cornerstone of my maturity into a devious but respected career, one that would seem to critics and colleagues in the field of non-licensed psychology as, technically, "risky," but ultimately hugely beneficial to the evolution of the school of human emotion. Or maybe it was, actually, just a kid in a medicine cabinet with a broken heart. (Why does my heart heave?)
I knew that my girlfriend at the time (who was she?) would have had some kind of capsule to aid her in sleep. I am about 18, I guess, in the dream, and wrestling with the silent slings of sorrow found within someone who's walked in on his lover — at our shared apartment, on my bed — banging guts with someone else. It's a vivid image, but I'm sure it's happened. You'd think I'd have encountered this fabled scenario later in life when I was a middle-aged, hair-plugged desk jockey for a crumbling insurance firm with a Porsche parked in the lot; but alas, sometimes life speeds things up. I couldn't have blamed her. I've been known to bother zombies with the lawnmower pull-cord ritual that passes for my nightly respiratory activities. Dreams don't care how old you are.
I find the cylinder that espoused the longest ingredients and purported triggering of pharmaceutical wizardry, decode the hospital jargon (though I didn't read anything, I just knew...) that professed that the pill would make me drowsy, and then suddenly feel myself hesitate. There seemed to be a chink in the armor, a rabbit-like trance ensuing like when danger's near and instantly there's no direction to run that seems absolutely safe.
Looking around the bathroom, I begin to take note of my surroundings, sort of acclimating myself, I suppose, to the weight of the gift of free will on human boys fresh out on their own with a gal pal in tow. Could it be all that bad? Could she have simply been confused and drunk in this mirage, and thought that she was actually riding me like Barbaro in a mad dash to the finish line at Churchill Downs?
So go the hazes of a man gut-shot by a woman, even in dreams. So focuses my eyes to trivial things on the wall. (There's a rustle behind the drywall, like a trapped rodent beating its head against the studs.)
I see the seashell pendant that I'd given her, which my mother had given to me to give to her, which my grandmother had given to her to give to someone, anyone else, really, as long as it was out of her bulging ruby- and pearl-bulged jewelry boxes. I see a sloping claw foot bathtub. I hear my dog (I don't have a dog...) snooping its sniffity snout all along the bottom crevice of the bathroom door, begging with weak, bitchy whimpers for me to open up and pet her, probably sensing that I was doing something ill-advised and hoping her preciousness and innocence might rouse me from my ruse (that or she was scoping out a brand new corner of the house to shit in). Corners...
I thought of the time that I'd cornered my lover by the sink while she brushed her hair before the Christmas party; she was wearing a glittering turquoise party dress, the seashell pendant swung tenderly across her collarbone and dangled neatly between her breasts just above the low-cut neckline of the gown. She was about to affix an equally marine-colored corsage hair clip to the up-swirled do flanked on the left side of her mane when I stopped her to tell her how much I loved her. She smiled in the mirror at me, never turning around, never saying anything (with her mouth, anyway; I don't remember her face), just staring into the reflection of my eyes, blushing and looking more vulnerable and capable of submission to the love I'd paraded in front of her. She was capable. She knew it. She knew I could be the one who would take care of her, who'd caress her when she was somber, and who'd admonish her when she'd done something wrong to me; I could be the one who stuck it out and battled through this fork-and-knives life for a shot at some spoons on the other end. But she looked afraid. (I see a black widow now, descending down a silken thread from a new hole in the wall...that hole wasn't there a second ago. My chest hurts...) And behind that mirrored stare of hers, into the eyes of my reflection, was this bottle of pills resting even then, which I was now about to imbibe. To crush her. Finally. To make her feel. Forever.
I blink a quick daydreamer's blink (it's a nightmare... I know it now), winking out a swift and lonely tear that drizzled down to die on my bottom lip. (The spider is now the size of a small cat, swelling with an unknown bulge, hooked up in a lonely web next to the medicine cabinet...) I stare at myself for about five minutes into the mirror (five minutes in dream time, which felt more like an hour). Do nothing more than admire and repulse myself. Another two tears descend from my bottom eyelids and join the still-salty reserve of the first, creating a kind of crybaby bridge between my top and bottom lip. (The red hourglass on the belly of the beast is opening up like a pod, expelling smaller arachnids that form a line into a tiny opening in the frame of the medicine cabinet...marching like black-death brigadiers...why am I not reacting to them?...) I’m not necessarily sad or depressed, just ushering in that kind of apprehensive pout inherent in all the facing of new experiences; like swallowing a lump down your throat when you meet someone new — I'd never met this bottle before. (The host spider sits in stoic meditation, with thousands of eyes reflecting my furrow-browed gaze at it. I could swear it's smiling...)
When I figured I was ready, I shut off the light, light a candle (the mother spider squeals at the flame...) and turn on the faucet of the bathtub so if someone comes home, they'll think I’m indulging in a late-night soak. (There are noises, like keys on a typewriter coming from within the cabinet...) I write a note. It’s a list of the people I'd miss if I didn't wake up (from the pills in the dream, anyway), and a reasoning for why I think this was such a monumentally inspiring thing to do. (The cabinet begins to shake and pop with what sounds like popcorn, blackened ooze, syrup-thick, seeps from the cracks in the door of the cabinet...) I pop the lid off the bottle, up-end it into my mouth (the bottle was nearly full and consisted of about 40 or so pills) and crunch down the drowse-riddled devils. Their bitterness mixes with the salty rim of my lips and reminds me, briefly, of opening my mouth in the ocean for the first time and tasting all the fish. (A torrent of tiny black widow offspring shoots from the exploded door, some halved as if they've been given live autopsies. They lunge in one huge black cloud of terror right into my face, and I claw and gnash at them with what I come to realize are long, razor-sharp fingernails. Their black blood and my blood mix together and my face begins to erupt into plumes of acidic smoke. I try to scream, but my mouth is filled with them. I look into the empty cylinder of the pill bottle and see only little black legs, spider parts, black ooze, sour smells.)
I stare at myself for about five minutes into the broken mirror, my face contorted like a splintered Van Gogh, rivulets of purple goo road-mapping an otherwise calm visage.

Thrift Ticker (What Happens in a Recession Makes You Real Again)

Down the estate sale, refuse rows I walk, where everything smells like a sneeze, and the only things worth my patronage might take weeks to unearth. The hardbacks loom with sky-high tags and gutter-gloom titles; the keystrokes of only the most saturated serial novelists weighing the foreverness of a secondhand shelf to the pompous or the poor (it's tough to tell, most often).
The treasures frown behind a locked glass case, victims of a thoughtless throwaway or desperate pack rat purging. Everything looks sad; everything has a story, a life of its own, a memory shining in the flickering closet dawn of a mind too willing to forget.

The smart trousers ding-dangle on the edge of a clipper hanger, trying to hide in a thicket of slacks, belaboring the grip and tug and pull of another voyeur vagabond to stretch and tease their limits. (The red-stickered sale denims know that the crimson appendage they've been bequeathed spells doom for their waistbands; who wouldn't want size 34 501s for $3?) To be cast aside a second or third time (doomed for the landfill after four) the ultimate fray in a threadbare, boot-cut nightmare ("Those denims have eyes," you think. "Them buttons, they cry and bleed with every pudgy finger smudge.")
All the sad picture frames full of strangers, for the lonely to hang in their homes, creak and splinter, specters staring with lost eyes and yellowed complexion, no smiles, old clothes, marked for death, watching from the cart-clogged aisles their wardrobes fondled. Not one of the bleeding pairs of eyes (no buttons, real eyes) could be attached to someone tall, for no shoe size measured within these walls eclipses 11, and so I go barefoot forever (and secretly believe that having larger feet equals larger heart equals longer life). And every waistband's Humpty Dumpty girth means the appetites of the dead or purging surely beat my own.
Dog-eared hare plush spits an alkaline spark to a crooked 9-volt beat in a sea of toys, twitching a tourette break dance in the company of his inanimate peers, juking semi-circles 'gainst the bargain bin bears and cubs like a meth-head Haight Street panhandler on the make. Twitch, twitch, slide, fidget, futile begs for snooty connoisseurs, their helium heads already cloaked a morbid black within the jaws of the generous equine.
The vases stand full of perfume. The candle's wick hollows half-mast a phallic Virgin Mary. The heroin kid down the turntable aisle neglects to note the irony of lamenting the absence of the needle, and another skims the records for hidden tracks.
Cyclical. Figure-eights. Grooves in the Bread records spiral to the center and stop, and skip, and fuzz-hum to a stuttered thump, like the world outside these walls; like the walls within every wondrous life ping-ponging within my view.

The Land of Stinging Nettles

After snaking through the arbor tunnel, greeting waves with a tall, gray-haired man with some sort of tribal sword tattoo inked on the right side of his neck, talking on a cell phone, we circle a small welcome grove to come upon the den-home of Mandeja. I've never been to such an instantly awe-striking dwelling. After traipsing up the stone walkway to the front door, you're suddenly socked by a sun-room study with window-ledge reading/lounging bed, the whole ceiling a grid of windows and new, unpainted crossbeams, travel books erupting from a Vesuvius corner shelf, seashells and ships in bottles adorning the sills, string lights lining the doors and the smell of new wood.
It's nestled in the northwest portion of Puget sound, surrounded by woods of tall, naked-trunked trees, redwoods and firs, ferns, all manner of budding floral growth and something called a "Stinging Nettle," which I'm told to avoid for obvious reasons. Dragonflies have already taken an interest in my scent, and probably seethe with the intrusive plumes of cigarette smoke I exhale into the frigid, starlit dusk.
Up one small step through a door to the left of the entrance is situated the living quarters, which consists of another window-flanked day bed, a clotheslined row of matching gardening gloves hanging by clothespins from three branch support beams running vertically, and a dining table fashioned from a knotted plank of glossed wood in the corner.
There is no TV, no computer, no contemporary gadgets of any sort save for an antiquated CD player with a bold collection of salsa, calypso, blues, folk and Latin reggae albums to its left, the tones of which serve only the more to levitate this wooden jewel to loftier bravado. Like a magic pyre jutting from the ashes of a genocide, or a secret gingerbread home where Hansel and Gretel surely must have inhabited at some point - a Tolkeinian hallucination fathomed only in dreams and with total disregard for the whims of dirty white men living in the emerald castles across the Sound into Seattle.
The air hangs like muggy clouds in a terrarium haze to hide the sheets of sunlight, while wild hares sit idly in the fever-green meadow lawn, thinking of nothing, never blinking, never rooting around, just being in the no-nothingness of a twirling forest world.
The cottage Mandeja's built is almost too perfect. Nestled just north of the main house, its flanked by a garden with snapdragons, slug-tailed prehistoric foliage and salmonberry bushes. There's a quaint shaded staircase that leads to a cold porch with a table and two lonely chairs. The resident renting the abode is out, so I peak through the window-grid door to find an empty Bohemian living area; a mysterious tome at the spine rests on the coffee table in front of a trippy day bed davenport. Around the back, I can see the staircase to the loft bedroom, from which the thicket mesh of cloudy island fog and camouflage-fragrant woods kiss their reflections in the mirror.


Through the forest blockade to the rear of the cottage lay jungle trails, swampy, soupy paths more often matted by the hooves of deer than by size 13 Asics. John the woodworker whistles while he whittles away his day, giving refuge to veining, wooded routes, in some spots speckled with functional gypsy wagons; in some spots muddled by foot-long diameter fungi. The scent is like being born again.
By now I know already that the whisper-leave hush I hear is tempered resolution - the hominid vulnerability, tranquil untouched microbe husk in real-time dying woods, with gasps of cackling motor boats chugging from the capitalist cuneiformia to Asia and the Bering Strait as reminders to the necessity (disease) of distraction in the name of progress. Their foghorns honk, gasoline-spewing engines push the hulking steel through the salty waves, cutting fish in half, killing crucial oceans by insistence of the dollar, yet still we watch, in awe, and listens with paws cupped 'round our ears to the orchestra of powerful, catapulting evolution in the old Sound dissonance. It's a give and take, always. You take the sweet with the sour every day of your life.
Further west, where those old cargo vessels float toward but can't continue past, the apocalypse manifests with an invisible roar, genocides that are hidden to the States rage free and clean like the flows of an impenetrable lava, burning everything in sight, in path, with zero defense, therefore zero concern. The ancient wars explode into myths, then legends, then reality, and back again in a cylindrical assembly belt - blood as lubrication for the cogs, pride siphoned for power, death as the final stickered product. But if no one sees it - if it's marketed poorly or there's simply no capital with which to burst its hype, we're not buying. Darfur. Sudan. Israel. These wars are waged on principles that people who live in glass houses would never examine. Nest-egging shatter-proof walls seems safer. Everything boils down to love, anyway. Unfortunate are the myriad avenues to fail at it.
But back in Langley, the cold black streets creak with every footstep, tease the foundation floor off the coasts of Whidbey Island in the vast expanse Utopia off the western shores. You need a ferry ride to get there, and an open mind to stay. It's littered only with the misty stench of drooping sea, fragrant redwood Pitney trails and the loaded nostalgia of a seaport villa - like an Under Milk Woodian mirage just a quarter-turn globe spin away; Dylan Thomas' eyes closed forever before setting their thinning, bloodshot maculas on this treasure. When the tide is low, summoned by the stubbornness of the swiss cheese moon, you can wander 200 yards into the swampy water world of stinky seaweed and hermit crab castles, cordoned, of course, to a point by the waterfront real estate parallel posted to keep the tourists from the talent. It's a sad, romantic strip of road serving as the cultural epicenter of this mostly unnerving miasma, but as with almost any island community, its endearment is measured in its quaintness, rather than any contemporary elegance.
Seagulls perch and squeal atop any and all forms of precipice; earthy throwback activists with dreadlocks and rainbow-dyed T-shirts saunter and sip soy-based libations, and cradle organically crafted local wares as symbols of status in the dithering horizon shadows of the Space Needle skyline across the wavy sea. Garbage hides not in crooked corners or guttered walks waiting for street cleaners to sweep away the guilt, but in the proper waste receptacles; spendy vessels teeter by the docks, moored by a love of the shackle-free dominance of their resilience and a totalitarian bondage as useful lodging and transportation vehicles rather than gleaming trophies for insecure mainland putz exhibitionists; and the children skip and breathe fresh air, cradling soppy ice cream cones between their sticky fingers, laughing, bedazzled in the kind of wonderment of the world you'd be hard-pressed to duplicate in the clogging, smoggy fog of a major metropolis.
A thousand threatening redwoods couldn't break this enchanting post. A million bolts of lightning couldn't forge a dent in its mystique. A hundred days of rain would never drown the din of its silent, peaceful majesty. I don't think I've ever visited a more wonderful place in my life.

Sticks and Tomes

I Am Matter, Nothing More

Old Skin
Skin. It's the cloak that binds you; blinds you from the world. It's the spider web that warns the fly to rethink his route. It's the costume that ignores the tact of full disclosure and implores lengthy brooding analyses to the prize within the guise. It's your private canvas for you to paint and poke and cut and mold and stitch and ink and tan and pinch and bathe and kick and spit upon, and it's your blank page to write the wraths and remedies of your world. It's the front you plague upon the Earth. It's a business-plan synopsis - full of engaging anecdotes and bristling wit, only to bow under the burden of what's really underneath it all... You.
Ah! That's what we forget! It's you, and your hang-ups, your dreading, your bleeding heart, your fickleness, your quivering palm, your wavering sweaty soul, your crooked intent, your bellowing lovesick tummy in the humdrum sun-bloom afternoon, your elated tongue-dart psychoses, your plaintive floor-tom heart, your pulse-pump thump neuroses and your malevolent pig-fucker charity siren song that lurk beneath that old skin bag serenade. You've got a lot to hide. You've got the weight of the world beneath the skin on your shoulders alone; imagine what lies beneath the rolls of your brow! Second guess the synapse-strum of what you bury below your cell-speckled molecule hide, and when your house of cards slowly crumbles to piles of waxed-paper Arabic numeral nightmare, with Anglo-Saxon monarchy symbolists pointing and prodding your mirage, you're doomed to a stint in the pit. Everyone loves an ace in the hole, but nobody unearths a diamond in the rough without using a club. Check your vitals; it's the truth.

The Shedding
Slither out, frail pupas hominid; embrace the wind and heat and rain to your stark-pink sheen veneer. You'll always need to shed your skin, no matter what. No matter the social armor, no matter the costume, no matter your education or lack thereof. You grow and you wrinkle; you spread and you flake; you burn and you shiver. That's the way of it. Of all the ways to nullify the importance of your life, clutching that which is not you anymore is the most depressing. Ignoring the ripples in your mind, negating the chill at the back of your neck to morph and to mince words with yourself is to deny the essence of the journey. I've shed my skin too many times. Not to forget, or for regret, or for insistence on a me I'd like to be, but to evolve in the most natural ways to what is comfortable. Your skin is magnetic - attracting the positive, repelling the negative, in every way. Jobs, friends, love, bugs, harboring ultraviolets, shooshing the whispers of the damned. And there's no way around that. You are a billboard, painted with the missives of your world. And people are noticing, all the time.

New Skin
Embrace the changes. Get lost. Find things that nobody cares about but you. Tar and feather yourself if the mood strikes. Bleach and etch and cut and bruise. Everyone loves a clown. My skin has been stretched and shrunken, fattened, thinned, besmirched with plaintive worry lines, tagged by errant numbness in the legs. I walk around in this cellophane wrap, coolly calculating the streets with my tired muscle-lunge. This skin bag disguises phantom bone chill, broken heart, flat-panel rib displacement, pensive guts, weighty apathy and more confusion than the wayward moth in firelight. I will treat the outside as I treat the inside: I will degrade and deconstruct this flesh to mirror its infinite beyond. I will flake and burn and cut into it when I feel it is necessary to focus on pain and discipline instead of poverty, hunger and ignorance. It is mine. I am matter, nothing more.

From Main To Main

It was a chore, it was. Boxing all those doodads, scrubbing all those soap marks off the corner tile in the bathtub, sifting through six-and-a-half years of a life that I no longer recognized, all to move into an unknown city, with a long-lost friend, and mope and pace somewhere that didn't make me nauseous. I packed boxes full of papers, boxes full of toys, boxes full of trinkets, boxes full of trash sometimes, just to box them, to organize what was important to me, and what was in due time going to be in the possession of the noble panhandler armada on the sidewalk outside my storied Tower loft. I packed boxes of things I knew I would throw away. I supposed they needed a good send-off. They were precious to me at some point, and I was convinced at some point that they'd be precious to me again; that they'd tell my story to whomever came upon them so I wouldn't have to. So I could remain the stoic figure I feel like on the inside but don't resemble in the mirror. The tin Eiffel Tower key chain might have orated loftily of my time spent in gay Paris, though I'd never actually been there. It was kept to remind me that someone I cared about had been there, and had cared about me enough to dish me a novelty nod so I would remember that they cared about me somewhere else other than right in front of me. The black iron lamp with loop-de-loop ambient sheen and the crooked shade, which Robin's aunt Lynn had given her by default when she succumbed to cancer too young and then I threw away, might have expounded on my antiquated tastes in practical illumination, at least in a relative sense.

And that record collection. By God, those twirling black grooves would have proven, absolutely and finally, the merit with which I opine upon the world of music so routinely and profoundly. If only I hadn't had to sell them all, so that they were still sitting in neat rows on my wicker shelf that I threw out, whispering the cosmic coo to lookyloo voyeur art Nazis that even though they disagreed with my assessments on the wildly influential derivatives of Mark Arm to a new generation of fuzzed-out retro hippies, I was probably right. The proof was right in front of them. Who would they be to argue with their paltry stacks of CDs and an iPod full of illegally downloaded pander-punk and neo-gospel soul? They would be, well, the people who would know the story of my life without me having to tell it to them. And I might miss that most of all.

Owning a lot of things doesn't make you richer or greater or more sentimental or more worldly or more insane or even happier; it just makes you weighted. It just means you fill your space with things that might serve a function to you that you'll never use for that express function, that you keep bottle caps and newspapers and birthday cards and 10 cent jewelry to help you remember things that you don't really care to remember, that you're ignoring breaking under the weight of a bunch of detritus that you don't realize yet is stifling you from learning about the future instead of making you worry about remembering the past. If life is about what you have, and what you have is a lexicon of largely unimportant knickknacks and hand-me-down couches and chairs and a bed that your friend sold you for $25 and posters and dishes that you only use a few of but keep just in case people come over, it seems an empty life. To fill it, you have to go, go, go. Outside, upward, downward, sideways, fly. What you need is inside you; it's always been there, and you can add and subtract to that treasure of you as often or as little as you like. And you don't have to pack any boxes to do it.

And my friends, my family and my former lovers; lest I forget them. They've been stacked almost as densely as all those records. They don't get thrown out or donated or sold. They become foundations. They hold true the walls, rafters, ceiling, floor, stucco, windows, doors of me. But they aren't there anymore. Not the way they used to be. Not in the flesh at my call. Not here to distract me from the absence of my possessions. But they're inside too, and they kick and throw fits and pester and nag and elate and comfort me still, like the memories of my grandmother at home next to her stereo that she gave me and I threw away. Like the way I can taste food I love but can't afford before it hits my tongue. Like the way Japanese Maples remind me of 7th Avenue fall in Chico, or how the scent of bad coffee I can afford reminds me of my dad. Like the way the first few notes of Saves the Day's "Rocks Tonic Juice Magic," from their album that I sold, whisks me away to when I was 19 years old, to older friends I don't even talk to or want to talk to anymore, to ex-girlfriends who've long since moved on, to the baby steps of living on my own for the first time. Like how seeing gallon jugs of water flashes me back to dropping acid in the field behind Kent's Market by the Redding Airport, and how easily I had crushed the jug to pop the top off with my super-human drug-addled synapses and then was convinced I had been the cause for JFK Jr.'s watery death the following morning, even though he was all the way across the country and stone-cold sober.


These things don't go away, and they never will. Those sensory attributions may seem base, and mostly they are; but they're mine. And they're all I need. It's the little memories, not the little gadgets and medals that make me who I am and provide me with even the smallest semblances of worth. So, it is with pride that I've found myself on another Main Street, this one in the wind-swept Northwest metropolis of Portland, OR, 500 miles away from my old Main Street in the sun-scorched valley din of Chico, CA. I am lighter now, in more ways than one, enlightened. I've got an empty room to prove it.

Crooked Arrows, Crooked Tongues

You used to be a mission bell, measured clangs at hour's half, flailing gongs inside the steeple of the pyre-high synapse.
In the morning you would wail and creak, your brass-elastic moan took turns to mark the mealtime break and seek the salvage of the summer's burns.
The click of second hands insisted strides to tread the toil in time; the minute-slither hoisted tides to bend your choral waves to rhyme.
And sea-salt shock of ocean's freeze to tease your toes meant little more than empty deeds to feign your hunt for keys to unlock hidden doors.
When Earth stood still and turned to you, alone and shrugging, burned for you, to know which way to turn for you, to wonder when you'd chime in tune,
you closed your eyes and fled the sky and crashed into the ground to die, with shards of chords and tones you sang, refusing evermore to lie.
For time's a fleeting whim in wind when fires grow too bored to scorch, when flocks prefer the south to north, when old men pace on half a porch,
when rugged stones are smoothed by river flows and ancient tallowbeds, your moments, ticks and tocks and bells won't spare one wink for sleepyheads.
So sleep to dream, through smiles lie; smash every clock and lullaby.
Your timing's never what it seems. The mission bells will always sing.

Serial Balks

I keep myself company
with black asphalt snaking up ahead,
canyons blooming with the dead
of a hundred thousand trees.

And when I read between the lines,
I skip the consonants and rhymes
'til nothing matters but the whines
of Us and Is and Ys.

And colons seep like python bites
to trickle, cloak, envelope, dive
and filthy every other word,
annunciating useless verbs.

But every time I see a ghost,
I'm reticent to make the most
of he or she or it or thing
and ban my eyes for simpler things.

When I looked into your eyes
I saw a copperhead with fangs,
dripping venom through your thighs,
wafting toxins toward your bangs.

Moons are blackened by your ashes,
suns are crimson through the gray,
smoke and sorrow blankets grasses,
Buds and seedlings hide 'til May.

When in June you reappear,
dusting aphids off your shoulder,
seething with a different fear,
with the news you've gotten older,

Every second seems a lifetime,
every victory's a gaffe.
Each and every time your heart pumps,
you're almost certain it's the last.

You know you lived among the lilies,
and you drank from bubbling streams,
'Til you collapsed from your Achille's,
had you the warbling top of dreams?

So with or without syntax spike,
we'll croak and eek and sputter noise,
and with or without trails to hike,
We'll find our way. We're lazy boys.