Random snippet

A languid derelict sits casting the cobalt shadow of a boulder hanging from a cliff in twilight. Stacks of papers surround him and his whirling typewriter. The room is dark, largely empty except for a small desk behind which the distraught figure does nothing but contrast with the background in a faint bluish gray. From his window, he can see the snow begin to pick up and obscure the landscape. Weather is something he had always felt strangely in tune with, almost forcing himself to recognize even the slightest change in barometric pressure, temperature or humidity and then to construct a reaction accordingly. The temperature gauge outside his window reads 12 degrees Fahrenheit. There is nothing on the page issuing from his typewriter except a single line that reads “To you, my aphelion,” His eyes follow the browning contours of the stacks of papers that grow from his table and he feels that he had never wrote them, not one word, instead that all those words randomly materialized on paper before him with help from some cosmic order that arranges the nebulae and the stars. Pencils, pens and notebooks litter the floor around him as he sits in stolid stasis of the bustling cosmic order pushing and shoving things slowly into place around him. His mind drifts back to college and the bright idealism he held forth for all to see and hear, his stomach churning in a warm solution of ethics and buoyant youth. They had the means to change the world for the better and it seemed everyone was overflowing with words like “revolution” and “freedom”. Now, after these flashbacks have faded into the distance like a thunderstorm they left behind halitosis and indigestion that could last for hours, days even, without some arbitrary activity taking hold of the foreground to cleanse his pallet. He would take walks, play with his dog, but recently he found these activities left him wanting. A sense of anxious recollection would well up inside him and eventual consume everything before his eyes. His condition made him develop a new habit, something he discovered to be the only thing that offered solace from the blinding acuity holding him hostage. He called his new habit “ran-dying”; it consists of randomly dialing numbers out of the phone book. After teetering on the edge of malicious recall for a few days or so he would flip through the yellow pages and pick a name then call it from an old MA-BELL pay phone he found in a dumpster behind a gas station some years ago that he rigged up to the LAN line in his house. He would pick up the receiver, drop a quarter in and wait for the distinctive click in the dial tone of the phone accepting the quarter in its mechanical innards, then hold the receiver to his ear with his shoulder and flip through the phone book, avoiding the blocks of Smiths and Johnsons until he came to a name with some pep then followed the dots over to the number and dialed it. Should the other end pick up even after not recognizing his number on their caller ID he would start off the conversation with a carefully calculated tone of haste, such as is found in the voice of federal workers who sit in tiny cubicles with attachable ergonomic shoulder rests stuck to the backs of their work phones and who have developed through years of practice a lightning fast dexterity of the fingers when it comes to dialing unfamiliar numbers. So with this tone stitched through his words he would claim to be from the department of so and so, inserting an official sounding accolade in front of the name he made up from jamming together first and/or last names of characters in the broad spectrum of literature he had acquired over his years as a student of English in college and later on as a published writer of fiction. A light headed rush of extreme clarity over takes him as he pieces together his moniker and lets it roll off his tongue thick into the receiver before a faithful reply of acceptance tinged in slight concern comes transpiring back. This must be the sentiment of the jackal, he thinks, as it cackles, peering through the brush at the soggy remains of something that once was alive, but can now only provide sustenance for the living. After the conversation is over he would hang up the receiver and use the screwdriver he attached to the side of the phone via twine and duct tape to pry open the metal seams of the phone and retrieve his quarter unless he felt the conversation truly warranted the payment, in which case he would leave the quarter in the dusty mechanical innards of the phone and sit back down at his little desk between his browning stacks of paper with the contented bliss from his hearty smorgasbord still ringing in his ears.

The blizzard has knocked the phone lines down for an amount of time he doesn’t want to remember. Outside the snow falls in ragged white clumps that streak in a rapid static across the windowpane.

Cynicism is my Forte

Translucent crevice fixed clear

Across this epoch resting in

Ashen wrinkles of deprecation

Hung so hauntingly loose around

Bones of something more.

A white tree grows in Brooklyn,

Yet no one can determine a species

As they walk past in recognition

Of a quibble laid as keystone,

Supporting blind mothers,

False treaties and vomit

Disguised as what might be

Possible in the frosty

Reflections chiseled in

Corneas of skewed reverence.

Paregoric and Phantoms

Paregoric and Phantoms,

Unless the earth swells in a lush brilliance;

It is denied, false prophet tickled with beauty behind a mask of lye.

She carried around a pocketbook with loose change in words of innocence:

The soft rapture spills rust,

Effusive dribble etched in a tombstone.

She died on a Thursday morning

In February with fog in her windowpane

And entrusted her pocketbook to me in words of solicitous intent,

Citing motion and decay,

The Moon and transience,

Poetry and Purpose.

I spent the loose change at a Coke machine.

Something, I Think

Something is said to crawl under the skin of select stimulant users,

Something adjunct to the platitude of that transient, metaphysical tonnage

Supplied by Eve’s delicious apple as it falls

From her womb, fecund, imbuing the soil of the Eden we find ourselves in,

Mouth agape,

Silent and lacking something, something,

Something subliminal, visceral,

Lurking overhead like a double consciousness that floats softly

And contains a dismal presence of ourselves,

Insatiable, yet full to the brim of every last moment cast in a black shadow

Of time we can’t believe as truth

To agonize the last waking seconds of something, something,

Something we describe as life,

Or reality in a fish bowl of transparent ether denied to be seen

And wholly realized when it drifts above the mind

We find ourselves occupying in incompetence

Without a song, limerick, or rhyme;

Instead, mouth agape,

Screaming an abyssal void into an echo

Reverberating through the walls of some fool’s history

Scribbled on a wall of limestone and seashells

To be packaged in tiny capsules of cellulose and crime.

Creation Schema

Wall-eyed and hollow,

A concerting clock knocks away

At the ardor of frantic babble

As it foams on the surface

Obscuring the moonlight

That slithers like splintering

Serpents of white electricity.

The depths bellow blink with

The ephemeral eyes that

Christ wears on the cross

Exacting the treatment necessary

Of suspending an effusive

Frown on a wire as ravenous anger

Separates flesh from the sacred.

An apparition of a dank

Sepulcher; corpses rotting

With mortal smiles spread over

Faces as fragile as morning frost.

Rats mingle and grow fat

Talking of the crusades, Nero

And the unattainable, all the while

Probing, dumbfounded and happy

As the walls are wrought with seed

And undulate following the

Whims of the sages that stare

Wall-eyed and hollow

At their creation through every

Crest and trough, mutating at

The rate of infinite that hangs

In the sky like a behemoth

With tendrils descending

To lick the monoliths of

Man as serpents of white electricity.

Watch the Sun

Watch the sun make lazy crescents in the sky,
Late April, dark blue and screaming
Through everything that has come out
Of the soft soil and felt remorse articulated in existence.
It grows higher, ascending a bright zenith
To cast the slight shadows of time;
Length objectified in a whorish form
Of renewal and want.
Watch the sun as it is lead by the reigns of exactitude,
Demanding the life of every vacuum
Claiming to have rendered Red in a pure spectrum
Of pale defiance in an otherwise paltry mind
Hung up over a mantel, writhing in ecstasy
And lost thoughts of pain resonating through
The void of a verse corrupt and fleeting,
Smeared for all to see – invalid, obscurely quaint.

Watch the sun laugh at his apex,
Denial in his tracks; a haunting specter
Brought from a world singed by the flames of
Queer solidness, so shiny and perturbed,
Yet so false and sheathed, denied by the
Powers of humanity (who sit at clever
Brown desks to dole out the ordnance
And never once think of their bright spark)

Watch the sun descend on us all,
Leaving behind faint hints of power, lust,
Sex and the ambiguous, pushing to a further
Oblivion when the hands of time will
Undo their sacred vows, washing clean
The dust of a thousand lively corpses
That infest the ages of now.