Parenthetical

I (the narrator, who (in this case) happens also to be (as far as you (the reader (I realize that is (very) presumptuous of me; (I used to think (though my stance has changed (somewhat) recently) semicolons were a fun (or at least esoteric (a fantastic word that I probably (incorrectly) use) enough to merit praise from the (grammatically) uneducated) form of punctuation) perhaps the story was read to you aloud) of this text) can tell) the author) ate a sandwich (tuna fish (a pretty (and majestic) animal (whose majesty (not to be confused with Her (referring to the Queen of England, though you could easily (and probably should) substitute any number of female persons (might I recommend the mighty (and tuneful) Bette Midler?) for all I care) Majesty) instills guilt deep in my heart (not literally in my heart (and not literally guilt, either. More like (vague) remorse). The heart here is a metaphor (how poetic, the heart being a metaphor...) for uhh, whatever part of your being (concise description is beyond me, as you can tell) feels guilt) every time I consume its meat), all reflective electric blue scales), for those that care) today.


Just a little experiment. I was trying to make it much longer, but got so completely bogged down I couldn't go on. It was surprising how difficult it was keeping track of the parenthesis. Another goal was to actually tell a story within the parenthesis, to introduce some sort of developing narrative that would make the whole thing worthwhile. I failed, but am interested to try again. Bonus points if you can figure out what the original sentence is.

Gravesite

What am I supposed to feel? Like there is some connection between myself and the piece of marble at my feet? There isn’t. The engraved letters just spell a name, they do not represent the man six feet below them. There is nothing here. Nothing. No matter how much I want there to be. Somewhere underneath my feet is a decaying body. I’m tempted to dig it up, but I know that won’t change anything. The body is only a vehicle for the person inside. And yet, here I am. Standing in an empty field of dead grass, talking to a stone rectangle on a sunny day in January. What do you do all day, I ask the stone, get shat on by geese? I don’t know what else to do here. I’m not sure why I even came. Curiosity, I guess. But now I feel like I need to have some sort of experience, like I need to pray out loud or reconcile past differences or cry my eyes out. I don’t do any of those things. Instead, I take an apple out of my jacket pocket and sit down in the grass and goose shit. I eat my apple in silence, watching the leafless branches of a nearby tree sway in the wind. When I’m done with my apple I stand up, put the core on the corner of the gravestone and walk to my car.

Past Life Resurfaced

I met Kayla Hergert in the library on campus. Except it wasn’t the library on campus. I was dreaming. It was late, somewhere around 10:30, and I was sitting at a table reading some unknown volume. Next to me was a group of students I did not recognize. Until she appeared, like a ship gliding quietly through a bank of fog. She was wearing a yellow shirt, tight blue jeans. Her hair was the same as I had remembered it ten years ago, though it didn’t seem out of date or obsolete. She recognizes me and approaches. Oddly, we don’t hug, we don’t exchange any dialogue. Instead we leave the library and return to her place, motivated by unresolved attraction. I know we talk along the way, but not about anything important or worthwhile. We drive to her house, in her car. I remember now that we talked briefly about the last time we met. Tenth grade. She drove me through the school parking lot to my car. I tell her I remember that I was wearing a brown Beastie Boys shirt. I don’t remember what she was wearing.
We get to her place, go inside. She turns on a dim lamp, one that does little more than suggest the interior of the small apartment. She puts her things down on the couch, which is situated immediately to the right of the door. She puts her things down and walks off into some dark corridor. I’ll be right back, she says.
I stand, awkward, next to the couch, attempting to make out the geography of the living room. After a few minutes I hear the faint footsteps of bare feet on carpet and turn to see her emerge out of the dark, the pale orange glow from the lamp soaked into her skin. She is naked, her hands at her sides, eyes reflecting the lamp as though it were a candle and not a light bulb. She bites her lower lip, cracks a half smile and turns around, sinks into the black hallway. I know this is a dream, but I follow her anyway. I leave the lamps orange orb and plunge into darkness. Soon I realize that I’m lost. I call out her name.
Before me is a maze of equally black hallways, their presence suggested by doorways of pure darkness. I call out her name. It’s cold. I hear her voice, a warm whisper in my ear. She calls my name. Her breath thaws my frigid neck and I turn, expecting to find her in front of me. She isn’t there. I’m immediately pulled out the maze by my ankle, like a rabbit caught in a snare or a calf lassoed. I claw the ground, for purchase. My nails dig into the floor. I feel a cavernous abyss approaching and I know that I’m about to be pulled into oblivion. When I reach the edge I thrust my hand out in a desperate attempt to grab hold of something, anything, to stop my fall. I feel her, feel her hand grab mine, feel her fingers interlock with mine, feel those fingers slip through mine like snakes through grass. I fall.

Trains

The pain in my frontal lobe tells me it’s happening again. Little lightning bolts striking inwards, licking my cerebral cortex with quick, electric tongues.


These two sentences represent the only fiction I've produced in over a month. I thought I could go somewhere with this, and I probably can, but the train had trouble leaving the station, so to speak. Fortunately the massive check I received from Walkabout for my story means I don't have to submit new work for some time. Oh, yeah, I almost forgot that Walkabout is a free journal exclusive to the CU campus and has no money to publish, let alone pay, its writers. Guess it's time to push the damn train out of the station.

Cat

I saw a cat get run over by a car today. I saw the small black object leave the curb at top speed on a course that deposited it directly under the rear tire of a big black SUV. The cat’s momentum immediately ceased, and I could see what I thought was the tail blowing in the wind. When I passed the cat I discovered that its tail was not blowing in the wind. That cat was not dead, and what I thought was its tail was in fact its right front leg, twitching violently as the animal engaged in a desparate battle with death. The front half of its body still moving, convulsions coming in spastic waves, building up to a final jerk, one last siezure, and I looked directly into its wild eye, wide and on fire, absolute shock pouring out around the edges of the eyeball, soaking the pavement with terror and panic instead of blood and gore. Four seconds of complete destruction. All this less than a block from my apartment. I went home and threw up, the cat’s sinlge eye staring up at me from the toilet bowl.

Altitude

A woman sits next to me in this soon to be airborne cylinder. She eats an apple and has expensive looking boots. Coffee was a poor choice before boarding. The energetic sweats can be hard to explain in close quarters. Takeoff pushes too much blood to the back of my head and I think I might explode. The ground falls away and all I see are soft drops of amber light absorbed into a black paper towel, arranged in neat squares and rectangles. Or maybe the lights are under water, or ice. Impossible to discern their origin--just observe the result of their illumination. The glow, the product of their purpose. But now we’re so high, concealed by elevation, and the needles of light are swallowed by an impossible distance.
She hides the apple core between the seats and I think I’m in love again. She closes her eyes, to sleep or to pretend to sleep.
I can see other lights in their holding patterns, little orbs drawing tedious ellipses in the sky. The ground gets closer. Closer. And I wonder what will be the last thing I see. What will be the final image burned into my retinas, still visible through opaque eyelids.
Altitude is marriage--power and aerodynamics. Engines and fuel. Maybe the lights below are fluorescent drops of paint or Predator blood.
Lost contact, swallowed whole. Depth / Darkness. Columns of broken bones scratch at the swollen bellies of clouds, invisible when it’s as dark as it is now. Catch the stewardess counting change with her fingers, the man across the aisle mixing Jack and Coke from tiny plastic containers. The same awkward conversations and the smell of many humans packed close together. Baby cries. Proximity. Altitude.

Depth

When I am here in my bed, propped up against the wall, lights out, eyes unfocused, I can feel every shadow. I can feel every shadow that probes the darkness, every shadow that surfaces into perception from inky depths. I can feel the abyss creep up my bed, over my sheets, held at bay by the light of my computer screen, a non-dark island, a sanctuary. Or maybe I don’t want sanctuary. Maybe the island is a hindrance. Maybe I am stranded. Maybe I want to escape, jettison myself into the abyss and let the dark wash over me and surround me and cover my body and fill my ears and mouth.

The standard conception of death is a tunnel of light. I see a hand of darkness. A hand that rises up from underneath my bed, like a shark surfacing underneath a boat. The hand approaches the surface, breaks it’s plain, makes a fist around my bed. The fingers rise like bedposts, close like tree branches. The fist pulls my bed down, down into the absolute darkness that you can defeat if your eyes are closed tight enough. Tight enough that bubbles of colored light bounce and pop under your eyelids. Reds, purples, low intensity wavelengths. Death is water. Death is drowning. Death is depth and the resulting pressure. The goal, then, is that moment when you cannot hold your breath any longer, that moment where the part of your brain still wired for primal survival takes over and forces your mouth open, forces your muscles to contract and fill your lungs with water. Only instead of water your lungs fill with oxygen and you open your eyes and the bubbles are gone and you are no longer at the bottom of a dark ocean but rather on your bed, where you were in the first place, propped against the wall, lights out, eyes unfocused. But they are focused now. They are focused on the one point of light on the wall ahead, the one point of light broadcast from a needlepoint hole in the curtain. And this one point of light becomes a tunnel, a tunnel of light that leads to heaven or Eden or maybe just a library of memories of life up to this point. The goal now is to remember birth. Remember the transition from warm dark to bright cold. Remember placental fluid sucked from unused lungs, the first particles of real oxygen and how they stung fresh tissue. Death is drowning and life is that first breath after.

Random Generator

1:36 in the morning and I’m eating fistfuls of raisins, smashing them into my mouth, agape receiving raisin nutrition at a small but massive pace. Trying to equalize the pressure in my nostrils, to find an even ration of pressure. My eyes are tired, their surface, marbled slightly , encrusted with various proteins or whatever it is that forms over old eyes--like soft glass, still clear but with an adhesive quality to the clearness. Fast violins in a hallway full of soaring cellos [nafgigating] cloudform sunrise. [qhwn m] more raisin food energy will sustain further developments of upstairs [drui,ciorl;es]. Think I am beyond the point of coherentness, the yellow cigarette fog descends on the room, leaving everyone vacant [wywa xloaw rhwy rKW QIRH RHWM RHW BllNXW ns feCIRT RHW AXEWWN EOCISWA. NOQ MT QOELS AHkwa NS REWBLWA] that should have been a disaster but it should be fun to decipher. Ready to jump off a roof or lie completely still before I leap off the building into the night. Turn away from the globes [gloves] of light before they are attracted to your eyes. Replacement and replication are two undesired outcomes of the current situation. Beat concentric watercircles [watersuckes] until [tghe caroet fkiirm oretebd ut us a kaje] if shaggy fibers shake [sjjake] the world [wirld] until balance is negated entirely, strings thin as spiders web [we]. From the electric light abyss word projections spew out of the screen, cascade onto the keyboard like rainbow waterfalls, the yellow cigarette fog descends on the room and leaves everyone vacant beyond the point of coherence co hairance cohairlance parliament druggadelic. Best [fuistemate ate guess riddleface lclain twi opriwlcats lurk in stomach ulcers. Lungs dried sponge or cinged catgair, land avasting catfood tail lock zixxle ie bnabdjdwikghg7asdluihgfskiswjuefnjds] This is how my mind became a random generator.

Episodes of Sunshine

Remember her clothes on the floor,
the taste of her tongue that circled around mine.
She is on her side and the sheets rest
at the summit of her hips, a single finger whispers lines of
latitude up her meridians, following epicurean topography.

In the midnight snow night is day, orange and yellow
under lamplight sun. Each bulb its own globe, interlocked like
a three dimensional Venn diagram.
See the end of a train slip through the snow like a shadow,
a spectral snake veiled in night.

Remember how her jeans seemed to melt off her body, how
her shirt slid over her head in one flawless motion, how her bra came off
like turning a page in a book.

But she is the train, her eyes pulled through the dark
by mysterious engines, only glimpsed and long since gone.


This be a new one, fresh off the press or something like that. Obviously it shares the title with my 'novel,' but since that project has been abandoned I figured I shouldn't let a good title go to waste.

Eight Minutes at the Bottom of the Ocean

Bubbles caress my face,
weave their way through my hair and wobble
towards cerulean surface, but I listen to blackbirds
on a cobalt autumn day. I
sit on the front lawn and savor the smell of gasoline
and cut grass.

I see myself walking out the door on the first day of fourth grade.
I walk across the street and turn back, to look at the house I
grew up in. I see my father, and his father,
and his father’s father on the front porch, smiles and
waves call for me to come back. I try to run to them but they
sink
farther and farther away.
They wave to me before vanishing
into some unseen precipice.

I am the house, the tan siding my father installed
one hot summer. The cornflower curtain over the window
in my bedroom and the sound of a lone sprinkler,
running all night long.


Maybe I never posted the original version of this? Odd...

Low Earth Orbit

Atmosphere burns past my windows,
casts pink glow on living room control panels;
television screens and radios.
Barren walls, a sympathetic surface for lunar reflection,
pockmarked with meteor impacts.
Footprints left in a millennia of dust, detailed
descriptions of paths followed and not followed.
The air is sterile, vacuumed silent, and once orbit is reached
frost forms on windowsills, evidence of extreme cold or
lack of heat.

I wait for cracks to creep along the windows, for
them to shatter and let the void that lurks outside fill
the inside, my home or my body or maybe just
nameless space.

Blood

Accidental teeth tear into lenient flesh,
the electric jolt, the diffuse pain, the entire body aware
and focused.

With my tongue I prod the wound, separate its folds,
let the taste of blood tickle my throat, like syrup or
melted wax.

Veins dilated, blood like fire burnt through open passages.
Eyes unblinked, head down, feel my heart race then stop, still,
the last drops of blood drained like bathwater.

Bones

Clothes and skin in excited heaps on the floor,
her naked skeleton on my bed.
A slender hand drawn across my back, needple-point fingertips
etch shallow canals on calm surface skin. She
pulls me close, to whisper in my ear, but all I hear
are the movements of her jaw, cool bones that click
and clack indecipherable dialogue, cold to the touch but
fevered with desire.

The End, though not quite the way the end is typically thought to be, while still being an end of some sorts.

'Tis the end of the semester and I have of course been frantically trying to finish projects and papers at the absolute last second. It has been quite a lot of work, but the good thing is that I've had to revise all my poems, which means I can re-post them here and get two posts for the price of one poem. So, then, in the next few posts are the select few that aren't crap, in their new and (hopefully) superior states. This post is completely worthless, no?

Things Smelled Different When We Were Young

We orbit on polar opposites, our gravities in unison oscillate Earth to oblivion. Emptiness releases us and from the stars we can see remnants of the world we destroyed, little pieces of planet drift in all directions on exploratory missions of vacant space.

Now we glue Earth back together, only it’s not so much Earth anymore as much as it is Glue Earth. We struggle to simulate ecosystems; so caught up in replication that unnoticed Oceans of Elmer’s slosh and spill onto solidified continental plates, opaque and elastic. When the seas calm and the mountains settle we leave Glue Earth to rotate and collect momentum: a sibylline facsimile of life as we knew it.