to

December 23rd and 24th

Jeff Bennan, Nicole O'Brian, Casey Bracket, Debrah Morkun, Linda Thea, Victoria Tran, Austin Wylie, Khalil Smith, Hal Bernstein, Jenn Washington, Chelsey Del Castillo,

Baby walrus. For entry hit glass here. Get the mind away from reality a bit. Like Casiotone. I miss happiness and the white folks aren't the ones to provide it. Sida is a great beverage. What if it was the only suicide spot? Such a struggle to find Maine babes on a flight. Post-Thailand I want to pilot either a plane or a ship. To see the sunblasted clouds every day. I love the noisy rumble inside the plane's midflight cabin. It is gray. It is concentration. I'm drinking blueberry beeah. I could totally see them all on meth. The silence. Think about all the places that don't get any light at night. Cepelinai. Lithuanian dumplings. My belly is finally back to obesity. I was going to walk into the woods and blow my brains out just to see what it would be like but Robert bought a gun safe. Remember Ice-9? When's that gonna happen? Over a river and through a wood to grandmother's house I go. Bring in a training manual. Westbrook reminds me of my longing for you. And my bulging choc gut. Trojan horse it. Find me a black babe that's turned on by young fat white guys so I can fuck the checkmark away. Wish I had money for Z-d. Wish I could teach an acrobatics class outside of Munich. I'm glad I like olives now. Post-feast depression. Jamming to Patsy Kline. Fatpick. After tomorrow my diet for the break is going to be whiskey and coffee and lettuce. Just shat a horn of Lucifer. Happy Holidays from America featuring rum and eggnog. The dog opens presents. Hold yer muthafuckin' horses before I explode in joy. Choose my own adventure little pony. Feel like jabba da huh-it with this gut right now. You deserve it for being a sweetheart. Fat and happy in Maine. You should have rejected the gifts. Ironic broadsword. Zero. It's actually clear as glass. And the air is so clean. But it's Maine and pretty much horrible. Yah doo. Get some cheap whiskay 'n' walk roun' to find cars to spit on. Find bars to talk to strangas outside of. Pussy monster? I poke her face off and now she faceless and I just made her face need a face lift. Young moola baby. That's beyond my control now.

from

December

Jeff Brennan, Hillary Galvin, Steven Silverman, Hal Bernstein, Khalil Smith, Eugene Vaynberg, Bess Friedman, Victoria Tran, Linda Thea, Daphne Koek, Austin Wylie

Just realized that everything in my stomach today has ended with ine. Bucks is going out of style. Wish I could lose my whole body and just be a nervous system on a me-sized i.v. Rack. Who needs bones even if they are this lovely? The train is late. The train is late so we clear the benches--like someone's hit a deep fly or a fight's starting. When I murder-suicide Don DeLillo make sure they put our ashes in an urn of our composite busts and shoot us out of a great cannon into deep deep space. Suicide is just obvious symbolism. It's people converting to everyone else's fiction. Just talked to our Koss representative for way too long. Told him about the headphones I bought at Trax. Told him about the retards. We set a price point. Let's get jobs as Santas and every culture's Santa analog. Ho ho ho. See the world. Asian women seem to only write about Asian women identity. That airport employee camper is back. Blaring on her cell phone. She's my official enemy. She's "at work." She's the reason people hate unions. This place is the march of the monsters. Suit doo koo? Just had someone return White Noise because she hated it. The awesome thing is that I sold it to her like two weeks ago. My biggest regret about this job is never finding that fucking phantom. Sidelong in the R1 window the all-biology part of my eye is moon-sical. Cheekbones. And that all-shnozz that enables safe passage everywhere but Gaza. Or race-blind plantation united under substances and nameless movers. Angel in the snow. Love that babe too. Abandoning poetry. Too much like a magic trick. Too many black-hatted rabbits. Besides my lines are just the meaningless stuff I forget to text you. Who put the lam in the sham a lam a ding dong? Gotta fly international to explore customs. Flagworld is recession-proof. It's freezing and we need oil. Ethical. My pants ripped when I popped a boner while reading the word of the day. Got sent home to change. Today is the day of the kooky old ladies. The most extrovertedly depressed person just bought the Road. You're gonna love this, I said. That's like meat day. I love meat. Sunglass Hut has babes in every stage of decline. These soldiers are so young. Let's write a movie about butch lesbians serving in Afghanistan. No red coat? And what's with the fisheye lens? You're fancy. How unethical. You're red as you need to be. I'm at long in the tooth. I can't do music and booze tonight. Feels like an all jack hammer fueled construction crew is digging ditches in my head. Most defeated el group ever. Obscenely sad. Get Josh or Steven and come do fake fighting with me on the dance floor upstairs. Trainage wreck. There is a light and metal bird are both tracks. Can't kill myself at least until it leaks. I guess I should've gotten wasted last night so that I'd have to pass out at your place then would've been able to make snowmen . . . duh me. More powered turds. Typical. Space heater. One of those heated water bags. Long johns. About to fuck my. Just left Trenton. Should be back around midnight. Let's get a drink at Inst. Kind of want to walk around in the cold ash castle. Moving snow is one of the ways the dark ones control us. Dark because it's night not because they are black. Lost baggage. This is a crazy trip oh my God. So yes I am without anything. Quirky ticket seller told me it would be happening. Late to work. Love how my client's family did not shovel. I love the part of hunger with the weak leg back tingle and you say things like healthy sexy vagina to healthy sexy warmly dressed babes. How's that baldness coming? I think the number 4 is my favorite to draw. Confronted my enemy today. Can you buy booze with your food stamps? I can pay you back in real money. Skinny tastes better than any food. Remember it. Today is the day of insane phone greetings. The key to water gun fights is to aim for the eyes. The key to soccer is call-movement. The key to Borders is not caring. The key to the airport is emergency. The key to happiness is rough sex with people you're only loosely invested in and ascetic eating habits. In the spirit of the coming Christ would you like to donate a book to sick kids? How can I offer my assistance this post-solstice evening? I am an evil forest that could kill a man on the day his life seems sweetest to him. Let's follow up our novel of obsession with a novel of forgiveness. Really nice wasted red necks. How'dja know we's fixin na go to Raleigh? I can see your future. Driving in your car that has sand everywhere through the low sun-bleached snowbound Maine twigs with a cigarette going and listening to something acoustic because what else does a guy like you listen to at this time of year in Allen's country. The sperm is the only cell that has a tail. Production begins at puberty. For females, production of eggs begins before they are born. 2 million! I hope there's some snus in that dragon tattoo. Wanna burn one down and throw some stars? No drying rack. And the glory of the lord shone round about them. Best part of that magic. Imagine having a relationship like Eugene and Alex and having to kill it because you are us. Let's throw everything away and become back-alley abortionists. Gonna document my enemy. Timestamps and everything. Just quit food. Odwallas and Zyrtec-d are the diet. Where is the supporting picture? Thanks for making me feel special. I will show you the iron discipline I've learned in the AIR FORCE. We can make dirty Frenchmans. Wine and olive juice. At least there aren't clouds of foul smoke floating around like Smelladelph. You fly there? This is the lonely Christmas with Morrissey. Gonna try to fuck a stranger or someone famous tonight. Grizzly like Ed Gein, make her face feel face pain.

Weezing Geiser

I am without feeling now, says the sparrow.
I am without feeling and my wings are like ice.

But then I spotted a second sparrow walking
away, down the ice ring, around the circle.

It's hard not to think about the job you perform.
Big moolah for your molars.
Baby.

Buildings felled in every direction.
The hands of a stone giant captured on my digital.
When we were teenagers we would sneak around.

Self-complexities. Reaching around to your neck.
Your neck brace was made with gold.
I am the sparrow sinking into quicksand.

He didn't know how to draw a bald eagle. He subdued.
The train kept coming. Over and out again.

Positive Integer

Thanks to Greg for editing.

Pastor Tyler was stuck in transit. Stuck somewhere in the forgettable New Jersey night in a place he’d have to consciously think about remembering only to remember more original thoughts. It was the abnormality of forcing typically-subconscious commitments. And he’d have to personally key into his sub-history the sidereal mutant orange from the New York his crumpled ticket promised, data-log the sense of public trappedness. This was the apathetic community he shared with fellow budgeted passengers, the cell-phone talker in the back, a slurry of slang-crusted Spanish, the girl seeming nice right next to him, how courteous with their shared dome-lamp she’d been, the noxious clouds billowing chaotically, birth-defected, in contrast with the cruel symmetry of the wrought-iron estuaries that spawned them, the Ionic lattice works with Clinton-era bunting, pithy revelations: we make refrigerators here, this is where Teflon comes from, sand production, glue gun ammo. It was all illuminated in some fake way by the unblinking sodium bulbs refracting in the glassy quiet of the inbound winter. But then again if the mind only deposited what was essential then what the fuck had he been doing all these years?

At least they’re paying.

He took what was always his own advice and prayed. Prayed for his family, his neighbors, his steadily swelling readership, industry friends who came through when they told him they “knew people,” who told him they’d get him noticed, you’ve got the look, the message, you’re what the people, the people you want to be reaching, are always looking to find. He prayed until he cracked that smirk, the one that shone only with reflection on his mission's greatness, on his aptitude as an instrument, His instrument, a sense of self/creator-satisfaction known only to the premier fraternity of prophets.

I’ll bet Falwell isn’t carted around on busses.

He drifted out the window into the fleeting immobillia to catch some industrial chimney’s vigilante flame jet disturb the late December cold: such dependability, and the permanence. He passed between these worlds, the frazzle-wired metaphysics of the beleaguered self and the observable external world, the subordinate exogenous one of plural egos, ecosystems, of seemingly random variety in the hidden creator's dominion, all serving as proof of some disparate genius.

Book deal...lecture tour...eventually national radio syndication. My message can travel beyond busses. It can travel without them. That’ll be alright.

He saw the other cars. He eyed them suspiciously and wondered what their drivers read. Maybe they had headed into town to see him to see him, or catch a matinee of some tawdry spectacle entering the sixth year of its run. Bring the wife, kids, and then head over to the talk. Come to hear him, get his books signed, one per person, it's included in the ticket, shake his hands, smear tears and makeup into some brackish ecstasy .

He thought of the branched nature of experience, the entanglement of narrative possibilities for those beings imbued with the radical capacity for free-will, existing in a society of others. Willers, id-abusers, megalomaniacal super-egoists, atheists…

He liked the line and wrote it down for his lecture. Audiences love personal experiences. You introduce a thought as “On the way up here I was thinking…” and it has gauranteed success. By demonstrating personal incompleteness the introduction provides authority. It provokes an endearment in the listener, a disarmament strategy. Really, it is grounding. Really, anyone could write this stuff. It'd been around for two thousand years. Everyone was paraphrasing from their forebearers. It wasn't the content so much, but delivery, showmanship, the verbal magic-tricks, the rehearsed idiosyncrasies, the self-caricaturisation necessary to become digestible through personal fiction.

The bus crash could happen so suddenly. Exit 8, I would die right now thinking about Exit 8. The Parkway of the Garden State.

He thought about his best friend in sixth grade, Andrew Mason, Andy, who lived on the small, Connecticut street, whose mother died of breast cancer, her ashes scattered in the family’s backyard garden. He thought about the way Andy cradled his head in his hands for a week after the wake, how he couldn’t attend the service, how, after returning to school a week later, Andy was greeted by being absorbed into the popular kid’s group, sitting at their lunch table and smoking cigarettes and learning about pornography and all those weird sex moves that you only ever hear about in seventh grade on the bus ride home and how Andy eventually abandoned his once best friend to join the elite caste even though they lived on the same street, even though he’d been the only other person in their grade who really actually knew his mother really as a person rather than some harrowing event, and how she drove the two of them to the bus-stop in the winter even until the last days, listening to NPR, Morning Edition, with the heat was on high, wasting away under her body’s betrayal and the chemotherapy, and how they even went sledding together on the day of her passing, down the hill in the woods behind the house, where the property lines ended, and back under the rope swing, where talking seemed redundant. How he was the only one who didn’t talk to Andy about it and how this was the major mistake in seventh grade. The green sweater on the day of the funeral. The snow-laden evergreens. How there were teachers in attendance: Mr. Lossey, Homeroom and Math. How after the service in the wood-paneled basement the two of them played soccer on Super Nintendo and how Andy was much better because it was his game and he knew how to do a bicycle kick and he wouldn’t tell anyone how to do it: “Figure it out,” he said, “like I did.”

Tyler’s message is simply about positive thinking. Sure, someone is always going to be telling us how horrible things are. People like the horrible, they need the horrible. But these wants and needs are all the evidence required to understand that this revulsion to ourselves is itself a vice. We understand there is a Perfect. We are part of that Perfect. We march toward that Perfect under our cross, under the word, under the Lord. With this message Tyler has inspired thousands. You can change your life today!

How easily this bus could crash. How quick it could happen. How at the second the driver loses control, you’re at the mercy of some foreign, depressed machinists' engineering of a more productive decade. Notice the integral force of whatever you’re colliding with. Notice there are no seatbelts, unlike a Greyhound. These fuckers won’t even pay for a seatbelt. Do they salivate while pondering post-mortem sales?

Out the window again, into the world of arterial soullessness, inter-state transience, the windowed world who’s lifespan corresponds with the width of cool plexiglass framing peripheral limbo. The closest we could get to understanding Earth’s rotation. This is what they call the empirical world. It was labeled thus by the maniacs busy smashing atoms together, dropping pennies off observation decks. Yet we only observe everything you’ve already heard, everything that’s already obvious, everything that coheres.

We pen mental forecasts to ourselves in the now and call it experience--half the sum-total of human philosophical endeavors--or wisdom, that taste of the unobtainable omniscience men like himself, like his followers, those with eyes open, slouch towards, like in that poem, toward the tragic asymptotic truth.

He wrote this down too, for his audience, his flock. They’d have to love him now. Yes, now.

Hopscotch

Post Moles reading/performance

First of all let's not forget Fatima performing Nina Simone.
Let's not forget the voice as the most beautiful musical instrument.
Let's not forget sturdily-structured architecture from Jacob's 1860s.
Or chair rearrangements.

There was a fabric'd mousy woman who talked about electricity.
And another Jen who knew Futurism and other nonplus activities.
There was a hatred in the air toward personal experience isolation.

Kim and Frank were there, smiles sincere, they lightened our lives.
What it means to be from Philadelphia and engage in dialogue.
What it means to talk about Invisibility and radical daughters.

Jeff talked about the elevator and Tower of Terror perf-romps.
Rattled. Three bulldogs. Hounds moving along the windstreets
with a white slaver and their slouched faces acting beauty.

We saw hopscotch on Master Street in duct tape.
The storm was coming in according to Carlos's wife.
Underneath the El there was the El Bar and an old shimmed building.

He took my dollar and we talked about Chile, Copenhagen, and Spain.

We road home and I, encouraged, talked about vaginal bleeding
and Sammy being raped by three guys: there was Lil Walter too
and the Dome knowing seizures and knows it's giving us seizures too.

We fire cruise missiles at things we don't understand.

Only one thought of suicide this evening; do babes bring
malefaction? Or is it the empty beer cans rested with
digital audio recorders that remind me of pints of water?

I sit here in my ink-stained glasses, shirt, and remember We.
We should transform ourselves into Raiders and seek shelter.

A Basis

In our lives I am hunting.
There was once a feral field.
A boy and a girl shared flowers.
The past has was yet to come
forward, but we were to believe
in it, when time has ripened.

For us, love occurred to make do.
On the will of the rain, serenity.
There are natural things that are.
The exchange of stems between hands.
A purpose is known yet is not.
In the collective existence only history.

Some moments only have the self.
It stands in the wind facing uphill.
Other moments there is plurality.
A decaying brick that our eyes stare at
shudders like a guitar strum.
Instrumentation defined by one maker.

My music shivers and is acknowledged.
I am the sound-boy made into magic. Selfish?
The earth always shifts with the dipped spade.
A grip makes the insert and then a path exerts.
Life itself is corroded when pursued.
A quest occurs because there are examples.

Apple

Clumps of Dirt

My A-freek, steeling of calm: steal, stealth
(fowl missionary posits--
positioned satellites, 101 course images:
en route to ward porous cashery, the rendezvous twice tripped,
laden with gold, cramped-crimp fingers: delusional parents)

I forkful mushing meal.
I put on my old brown shoes.
I put out the fire in the stove.
I take the last sip of the coffee.
I move through the rotting door.
I feel clumps of dirt on my cheeks.
I understand the fame in the wind.
I believe in the lack of skill.
I scream into air like a wolf.

Ouched and outed into the howl;
I will forgive their grinding machines.

(a dirty sunrise, moors over bluffs; chastisation
while a widowed daughter buries her lover using rusted shovel:
we are haunted
by what remains
to be archived in the earth)

Indifference

Too bad Derrida died
before the Blackberry became so popular.
He could have done commercials
about there being nothing beyond the text.
People would like to see that creepy Frenchman
(no one to them) huddled over a device
and mention things in a funny way.

Light Logic

How far the city lights skim space.
Distant presumptions of occupation
and life- yet there is no necessary link
between light and life.

With so many lights on
you could forget the dark
that's always there
and unknowing-
better to assume the lights
are on for someone.

Mid-Coitus Considerations

Early morning in March on Spring Break:
role over and she's there and she makes
the request and the mechanics of stimulation
go into effect and the sheathing and the slow breath
rear-entry penetration and the slow movement
slow breathing all in and towards the it.

She breathes into the sheets, quiet breaths
there's no one else in the house she had said
I wonder about it as rubber and flesh
stir liquids and that all-desirous nothing
seeps from white torso, bent legs, hidden face,
hair by the sheets moaning.

Mid-coitus and I look away, still acting,
but then I begin noticing the clay pots
on the sill, opposite side of the room
resting in the morning shadow, small
clay pots. And I wonder when they were
put there, their contents, their intent as
decor or utility.

Rubber and motion
these coated joys toward nothing,
continuous mechanics.
Clay pots counted, and morning shadows.
Fucking bored.

Cabin Pressure

For cigarette prohibition

You, yeah, you
You're with me
We're going to destroy the lavatory smoke detector
or at least tamper with it

the hangover, the Snus, the psuedoephedrine

look at our University system
          our Boeing hangers
          our train tracks

take in the cloudscape
the world's sidereal temple garment
the bleached hurricane paper shredlets

elementry foliage, forclosed canopy
that we figured was too big to fail

The authorities report that Mr. Polanski
must remain in his Swiss chalet

"Remain in your Swiss chalet Polanski!"

Mr. Polanski confessed to giving a 13 year old girl
Quailudes and then raping her in the ass while she cried

"Remain in your Swiss Chalet Mr. Polanski"

FYI, I'll be fighting you for your flotation device
in the event of a water landing

the storm extends its Dracula phalanges
the vapor becomes something countable

I wonder: "How many Barack Obamas high am I?"

the visible world again, the final descent
understanding everything shares the bend
the arterial infastructure
the outlying mountains, found earthworks
Graphite romantics, the subjects of screens savers
the shared logos of forgettable things
                           of summers
                           of worms
of the moving sidewalks of life where they've prohibited smoking
for the children
because they eat the future

Colony Collapse Disorder

After the inaugural Wrestling Night

Alright, I'll believe in your magic for another minute
just promise me you'll remove the boots.

There's a cold science to traffic
that we're always in the process of understanding

the quiet times, the nurse trash times, solvency

One can't help but pity
the Australian highway system
their inaccessible middle
their clog-hearted coast ribbons
their black ballroomism

water colors into bruise swirl puddles
into unnameable nudities
we requisitioned by not improving anything

here's to grappling, to the head-tap
that your unconscious response
let's me know you aren't ready
for me or the bees
who were so horrible who
we want with all our atoms
to come home.

Divine Lorraine Demo Release

Download Here (Let me know if the link expires)

======= DIVINE LORRAINE ========

-- Walpurgis Nacht --


Walpurgis Night, Good Friday morning
in your bed, in your spider web
at dawn, with the AC on

me only seventeen, you showed your face to me
made of smoke, but you never choked
silk tongue, like the yarns you spun

we chilled the bile, we toast your child
to wealth, and the best of health
to fame, but let us stay the same

we ride, at night
sure thing, but let me hang the ring
close your eyes, and learn to love the red red red red light

-- Gasoline & Lime --

A Asus2 D

Look Alive
the battles in the jeroboam tonight

hit the lights
we're feeling through the family tomb it's right

C#m Fm E D

Were you born an anarchist
without a place to hide?

do you fear the fetishist
or the beam of light he rides?

It's alright
your treasure chest is safely stowed inside

behind
the men we made of frames and sturdy twine

can you smell the river now
or is it all still ice?

are you on the pills again?
I know it's not my life

babe
I am o.k. I am o.k. alright

i lied
this skin you see's all gasoline and lime

but if you think i wrote this song
and coded every line

then you need more help than me
more help or more white wine

-- The Artists --

C E Am C E Am C E Am C E Am

we know who we are
born beneath pale stars
running laps toward the light
houses liquid night
and the black bubbles in
just as thick as our sin
just as thick as the crowds we've left behind

F G C E Am F G C E Am F G F G

dissolved with our blue-print minds
at sun rise the shadow both lives and dies

We'll be dropping our bombs
any day now
we'll be snaking your drains
implicating Mao
and all that that once was
lost to summer's buzz
and some kid breathing dirt breathing soot

breathing air while God's own voice eddies his hair
think in lines and get straight your alibi
sit for moi, we're artists we're NOT bourgeois
note the schwa WE'RE ARTISTS WE'RE NOT Bourgeois

-- (Old Me) --

G B C Cm

The old me wouldn't take it so lightly
cold beneath the shallow dark of birds above the wires

A D C Cm

On fire: who sing without their eyes
and wing into some sky

And bold: the black ones make a game
of unlearning their names

you told me this dirt would make me holy
three/four weeks pass before the bears come out from hiding

their babes who only want to play
they only want to play (and lay)

and get old but wrap your face in gold
and horde your bones in holes (with souls)

you know me a still villain of cracked glass and white lies
know you're free to leave behind your pretty window eyes

and sleep, sleep out on the sand
that's spilling from your hands (and glands)

and rise, to meet the blue of noon
and mend the milk-wet moon (to choose)

the old me wouldn't take you so lightly
the old me throws no leaves or thorns upon your already kicked fire

-- Peggy-O (Traditional) --

G C G
As we marched out to Fennerio
G G/F# Em Bm
As we marched out to Fennerio
C G
Our Captain fell in love
G G/F# Em
With a lady like a dove
G C G
And he called her by name, Pretty Peggy-O


Would you marry me, pretty Peggy-O?
Would you marry me, pretty Peggy-O?
If you would marry me,
I would set your cities free
Free all the ladies in the are-o

I would marry you, sweet William-O
I would marry you, sweet William-O
I would marry you but your Guineas are too few
And I fear my mama would be angry-o

What would your mama think, pretty Peggy-O
What would your mama think, pretty Peggy-O
If she heard my Guineas clink?
Saw me marching at the head of my soldiers-o.

Come a-steppin down the stairs, pretty Peggy-O
Come a-steppin down the stairs, pretty Peggy-O
Come a-steppin down the stairs
Combing' back your yellow hair
Bid a last fair well to your William-O

For if ever I return, pretty Peggy-O
If ever I return, pretty Peggy-O
If ever I return
All your cities I will burn
Destroy all the ladies in the are-o

Sweet William he is dead, pretty Peggy-O
Sweet William he is dead, pretty Peggy-O
Sweet William he is dead,
And he died for a maid
And he's buried in Louisana country-O

As we marched out to Fenerio
As we marched out to Fenerio
Our Captain fell in love
With a lady like a dove
And he called her by name, Pretty Peggy-O

-- Scarecrow--

Intro: G

Am F

THE SCARECROW
IN CINDERS

C G F

there are two suns above your sharpening stone
we lost your pretty pearl in our house of bones

Am G

THE FROST ROSE
FROM THE OXBOW

stars shake, famously burning slow
strung lights in canopies have blown their bulbs

Am
DESERT BLOOM
F
THE NEW MOON
C
THE SHOW ROOM
G
A STONE MOVES

We hold you
and robe you
then crown you
dethrone too

and loathe you
bemoan you
and stone you
alone

the scarecrow's
skin shivers
still arrows
in quivers
not taken
or blown gone
or strung up
and so on

-- Predatory Lending --

C G Am F G C

we all know your face from your mistake your flims have broken in your grave
a grand jury your fiancée framed photos from your fathers wake

C G Am F C

wake wake your eyes,
sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep your alibi

spent fall on fire shoved round the wires that leak and tweak into your bane
it's not the same this acrid rain corrodes and roasts the amber grain

OLD OLD OLD YOUR NAME
NEW NEW NEW NEW NEW NEW NEW YOUR FAME

a new roommate warrants all states commands demands from conscript knaves
conflagrate back draft to face our cells wilt down like paper...


Let's explode this maze and drive the porters off their barricade
all those blood-forged barbs all turned to shards that skitter down the palisade

flee your bleeding mind mind mind mind
mine the bread crumb trail you leave behind
check for cuts and lumps
your two heads fuse fully to one

-- Deaf and There --

F Bb F C F Bb Dm C

She was deaf and there folding her proteins
as they spoke of the symbols they found in their wet dreams
jilted and jaded tornado eyes over her paper
scanning the pages and all other titles and labels

she was deaf and there, despairingly empty
and the lines round her eyelids curved circularly
their tracking told stories of worlds she should fear
but it didn't consider all those who can't hear
so their tales of terror fell only on ears
that were painted like white spots upon baby deer

she was deaf in the dark in the light of a bright screen
watching pictures and adds pinks and yellows and pale greens
and they screamed for attention but got no reply
as she closed the windows and then closed her eyes

she was visited strangely that night in a dream
by a soothplaying satyr of sweet melodies
then a choir of cherubs plunged from the sky
and crushed the poor player thus ending his life
all the cacophonous clamor of all of their cries
the wreckage spat splinters in all of their eyes
the rumbling tremolo of old oak's demise
ruptured their eardrums which served to baptize
all the innocent singers who finally realized
this was the most beautiful song she had heard in her life

diaphanous smog of the party let no one breath
the evening was waning and new lovers started to leave
a white silver crucified christ hung between
her white silver breasts that had gone sight unseen

she spotted him there in the corner his mouth asking please
his hissings of lust wove sibilantly
a drunk irish catholic boy: the new philistine
but goaded by contact that all of us need
she turned down her hearing aid, nodded, agreed
and they traipsed back together both dumb and lonely
and she tasted his sweat and smelled his disease
romping and rolling their elbows and knees
all the spinning and skinning, exposing her seams
arrested by the mess she thought of her dream and in

agony she spoke, and choked, it's too real for me, it's too real for me

I wasn’t ready to see

-- Lorraine --

E B C#m A

The holy ghost is slowly headed home
can't you see him
all image and bone

the glade and spring are mixed beneath the snow
we got what we needed
now give us more gold

C#m B G#m A E F#m A E

highway signs for
paradise
but we can't find it on the map
so I guess we'll just turn back

Let's get depressed and change our names!
"I'll call you peter
but I'm staying Lorraine"

let's don our capes and save the day
"give me the signal!"
"then get out of my way!!"

your soft-spoken heart's broke
cause two years is no joke
and then
this is how it ends

transz

Hungarian-Transylvania Kányádi Sándor's VÁGY has been translated into the English by me. It's my first translation--in Hungarian or otherwise, and I apologize for that. Going to try and find a previously-translated version soon.

The Original:

az esti folyó illatát
aratás idején
a küküllő esti illatát
aratás idején

s egy marék vizet
hogy arcom visszamosdjam

Translation:

Desire

That nighttime river scent
approaches the harvest here

The night trash scent
approaches the harvest here

and a single handful is diluted
so to remember its core

November: Outbox

You can listen to a reading of this one too. Click.

Recips include: Jasmine; Jeff; Steven; Victoria; Thuy; Kathryn; Bess; Eugene; Hal; Casey; Stephanie

Ran into Sarah at the rave. Crazy. How are you our starlit night map? Finally got it all documented. Wish the aliens would abduct me to their UFOs.

SEPTA is a rotting horse carc. Just wana ride and die for my steel champions. Just wana grab some babe and save some day.

The smell of eggs and coitus and death and apostrophe and maligned souls and burnt rubies having been burnt by lazers and honesty’s chafing arguments anarchist women who are babes but taken by themselves in South Phila eating dumplings ‘n’ raisin bread ‘n’ drinking Tuscono wine under a quiet roof hiding from frozen fingers. It’s okay to save weird for later sometimes if you’re not like me ‘cause I fuck shit up through illogic.

Beefcup panty surprise. You miss’d the most insanely depressing morning ever. I recommend you van it tomorrow if only to know this stagnant misery. If that wasn’t the most miserable waiting period of this city’s boiling year I can’t figure out what is.

She has a good kind soul. Wish I could be a rebel without feeling so alone. I understand why all men in Victorian novels hate women their age and go for the youngins. With what machinery will we yank them all?

Another night alone. A great feeling for a 23-year-old. Can’t wait for the two year abstinence anniversary. Should be pretty soon. I love the floors after last period. Like looting the dungeon. I see you but you’ll never see me. Neon gummy worm waste gut. Hope Mangum has been writing albums this whole time and releases them every month in 2012.

What a fuckin’ night! Insanity on the open plane. One of these days I need to convince a City year babe to take a day off and fuck me for the entire ten hours of the shift. Experiences become fresher through the ages as information becomes more available. Harder for us to get into reality. Slower to exist out of such. Tonight is more about opening people’s minds up than anything else. Doesn’t matter your stance. My performance will be addressing greed and hubris society-wide

We don’t need more Creeleys dicking around with single eyeballs. Only way to survive is to join something or make it. That only matters to silencing fields. I’ll read it all when I’m in Hell’s quantum playground. Sugar Mom’s. Land o’ Lakes and cheese fry innuendos. For every brute a brawn. Some more soul-crushing weather.

The Names by Don is agonizing, hilarious, merciless and important for expats and airport enthusiasts. Gonna skip everything tonight and read it, I hope. Wish I was on the Olney East team. They are in their office doing makeup reading, playing cards, and drinking juice boxes. The them is neutrinos and their presence in dark matter. Vice is perfect. Brian is awesome. Optimism personified. Like Jasmine but not eighteen. The El Bar’s backyard is like Union Pool but for people who know they are fucked. Strippers dressed in unicorn costumes. True story.

Alone at Fox and Hound is like being transcendentalized by a wash of noise. Just got done the interview. One hour long. Amazing. And The Names is great humor too but marriage dysfunction is the big lesson. And that is what comes next for us lame duck isolators.

You are the sweetest heart in all the Atlantic. We need a leader we can fall in love with. Where did political romance go? I like the smell of your curry.

Dome pg 28: Allens. Dome pg 35: LCD Soundsystem. Recovery from last night’s nonsense. Today has been nomadic misery. The pains of being pure at heart are nails in the head. The sky is great and post-Leonid creamwash this morning. Your sister called me last night. Said your other phone was found or something. Where can you get Grimbergen here? You drunken fuckfoot. Incognegro.

If I’m free. Many things. Maybe Blind Man’s Ball Tuesday. How old are you? What kind of cooking? I leave for Maine on Wednesday. Same schedule situation. 23. Stews are precious. Will update you after lost planner madness is resolved. Strawberries are a dollar a pack. No answer. Feverish.

I’ll get the cert in January. For now gotta make sandwiches and contemplate why not offing myself. Snusing on the job. Scoundrel of a raging soulless. Like in Myth 2 where I was number three on the official ladder. Bat your eyes mate. Weed cookies. A sly fox. But skinnier. Pic image you blues busta. Cookie effect noticeable. Bottle of aura and uproarious coping viz. Get up on it or bow down low before the elephant.

The ghosts are moshing. Fuck Mitch. Assembly line assassin today. Post-weed cookie and gregarious feast hangover. Feel like a cookie monster. An egg salad sandwich gutterfly. The warehouse was called Wood Stove and the dogs were perfect and I remember spicy cornbread and a curry dish. Oh no! My brother! Snuggle with the decapz!

You or your fam want chocolate PIE? I swear your insanity is bolding. Same diff as head exploding Mine defined. Yours to be announced at your convenience. Goodbye all the lonely train trax. I forgot about the absolute terror of driving through Maine backwoods stoned into treebark. Bush transplants and shit. Trying to figure out naughty vs. nice. They don’t sensor the word “tits” on the radio here

Four out of ten spice-wise. But the nicest male waiter in all of Portland said a 20 has been done before. Hope hope hope I get to see you, oh Smile of Maine. Take Benadryl and zombie this one. It’ll resurge your Goats commitment. Plane leaves at 6:09. I hope I’m not delayed at the PWM eleven-gate wonderland. Is hanging in PHILADELPHIA ok, oh suburbanista?

I’m gona fast all week. Anti-caloric highway patrol. Remember Disturbed? Maine radio still plays them. Other highlights of the past three days—Blink 182, Tool, Eminem. BUY 3 SNOWS GET 1 FREE. Tires Brennan. It’s all about the tires. Drinking Long Trail. Typing. In front of a half-cranked woodstove. Now I know why Creeley loved this region during those last days.

Hope I don’t get arrested for medical THC blobs. Boarding time. This team blows. Too passive. Where and when am I meeting you plague fiend? This plane is so cramped. Nice seats though. The background on the phone of the person next to me is of herself. Made this shit. Bar bar bararanne Philadelphia’s air toxicity makes my grin much deeper.

Ungodly screams from Spaghetti Warehouse. Tenth and Vine. Homeless summit. Bring your baby carriages. Rolodex init. 4 blox My phone’s dying Front left Sex and all Jonathans in ten. So tired Someplace does. Some nether region place I feel like the underbelly of Hope Blvd. All of it.

I wish we could wrestle at that house every night. Lucky foothold. Sexual demon. Want a babe? Maybe two? Or three? Come to RT where the pussy’s free to see. Irish dancer convention. Creepily beautiful children with kinky curls. Thanks for the animalistic evening I love you both as though you are older siblings

No road tonight. Just too many lagers. Battle wounds. Miserable in the land of redbots. It’s so funny how lonely it gets at City Year when you succeed in rebelling. Buy a pink helmet. Start a development off to the side. My uniform. My bloody mouth and Rittenhouse Square. You are the stochastic huzband. Face mask land. Espresso suck pump. Banks armed with cash like Kabul patrols. Heroin sequin dress. Keep your eye on the lost memory of penguin warmth like me It’s where the ogres originate. A paisley time.

Just learned Olney’s Hispanic guidance counselor was jumped by a bunch of youth last Friday afternoon. Was on his way to the clinic for his heart. Died. Heart attack. We don’t know anything right now Short notice issues. Did she cure you for that day? Short lived departure. Fear is too large. Sexuality prevents. I don’t learn anything when I’m abstinent. I unlearn things when sexually active. 2 reasons to die. You can take it right between the eyes. Suck up.

What does that Japanese mean? And what existential place are you at? And why strange? I just made 2 delicious potluck items.

Jeff Brennan’s Last November of the First Decade of the Twenty First Century

You can listen to a recording of most of the following. On it Jeff plays guitar while I do vocal reenactment. It was recorded on November 29th in the Ol' Bread Factory in Philadelphia.

(6)
Wiki ruby ridge and you’ll get it. Played the adjective icebreaker. Want to fuck Artistic Allie and Adventurous Amanda.

(13)
Elliot Smith heart-stabbed himself at this time of day on a day like this. I read these guys to access the forbidden intelligence they wave in front of our faces like the opposite of money. And what’s tomorrow? Also: easiest airport day ever. How’s the sogworld treating you? Rescued another person from Ayn Rand. Made her buy White Noise.

(15-17)
Most zombie day ever. Two sleep hours. A whole new kind of moonwalk. Hope you didn’t not make out with her.

Snus was made to go with warm mustard pretzels. These should be the themes of Steven’s party. Moments like these are what make being most likely bipolar worth it.

Wish we could just vote Dave into office and get it over with. Went rogue. Person Pitch as anti-R1 ambiance weaponry.

(18-19)
Swamps finally dead. Call in the fish gods for the tree-bare rapture. Back at collegiate weight. Gonna eat pure garbage to celebrate. Chainsnusing. Looks German. First time this feels like my neighborhood. I know because I would kill a malignant invader.

20
Soldier returning from two years in Iraq. Left a baby here and gets three months to be its mother before heading to Afghanistan. We should adopt some Asians.

21
Market East brickwork deserves its own monopoly space. I never remember summers. Winter though. Winter is familiar. Seeing Victoria alone and leaving that place was my demise. Oh and the pills. I need to learn fitness or at least the cheat code for it. Should’ve prepared a lesson on snus since I just explained it to everyone anyway. Snus, Delillo, airports are the only things I think about. It took a tobacco to push suicide out of the top three.

22
Don’t let prostate cancer take you out of the game. Wish I were allergic to something weird.

23-25
Marathon babe as supercustomer. Tampa-bound. I would make this Alabama babe my lady. I can’t believe they left us with these hippos. These hungry, hungry hippos. This place is retarded today. These are the kinds of days where I buy Dewars and Vaseline on the way home. Austin is probably the best place in America. This sickness might be the start of a new Quiet Times.

25
They put angels. Christmas music is undoubtedly the most suicide-inspiring. The babes are the only things that keep me going. The media is here. Going home early. Sick as shit.

Combos and scotch. This is what I am now. You can’t. You just straight can’t. Haha. It’s awful. Nothing good in there.

26
Let’s start a non-profit steam factory that we only the truth about to children. We could put it near the airport with the others. Where they’re zoned.

Just release a hurricane of matter. Biblical bowel movements. The airport is only ever morning. Agnostic recreations.

27
Dome life looks pretty good. Let’s settle there if we can resolve life. Toblerone is angel feces.

Just saw new Nick Cage. Awesome as usual. Killing time at the old wooly mammoth until the Road starts. Love this city and St. John’s Wart placebo effect. Bawitdabaw. Get in the pit and try to love someone.

The Road is great. Pretty much what I imagine suburban Toledo to be. At Skinners thinking about life choices. Gotta score some molls for the showdance. Would rather culture a supervirus than life with this cold one more day.

Make her snus and then she can live in the dome we’ve commissioned. This is a rewind to my high school soul.

28
Trapped in a colony of unrealized sexuality. I understand my self-genesis through these humbling epiphanies. Might not make the show tonight. I think I have the flu. Can’t move. Hot and shivering. Vomitron. I’ll know by five if I’m up for it. This headache could be a headache celebrity. Gotta get my bike too. Oh no. Oh no. Dreamt of football pirates in teacups eating spam. Cell phone screen light hurts. Remember elementary school where ice-bags cured everything?

Where can a nigga buy some sorbet in this ambulancery? When will you be home? That’s why we let Maine stay in America. I miss being able to drink beer bottles in my house Metro workers are the carnies of the Winter World.

29)
I’m still at this hen house. Waiting for the infirm to awake. Meanwhile staring at a map of Australia, pitying their highway system. An inaccessible middle. Santa was probably much more believable in the time before Toys ‘r’ Us.

30))
Just me and the ambassador of crack on the el now. Taking inventory, stock of metaphysical things. Needle in the hayyyyy. Hysterical American Life segment on Chik Fil A The goal of today is 500 calories. Zertec-d makes one superhuman. I am becoming. Time releases, ticks on black wire. The world as static touchpads and orgasms. A truly Cyber Monday. This life is just one big burn after another

Babylon was built on bad smell air.

Guy Debord would’ve loved Zyrtec-d. All the personal illusions of health but the worst, spectacular Castorpian coughs. Inside me is the ideal image. The image and a Breughel phlegm pallet in lower relief.

Yoga and yogurt. Who was the defiler who made pseudo into speed?

The day was great. She’s great too. It’s confusing. Maybe I’m entering incel as you depart it. Just watched a child get locked in the automated checkpoint. Her backpack initials: DMT.

Been choking on tongue coat flecks all day. Not too far gone to care.

Teddy

my high school guidance counselor's husband won the lottery and she quit the next day

I took ceramics because nobody told me to take AP English

I hate the lottery

The Penguins (previewing)

Introduction

My penguins are hotter than yours.


Part One

My penguins are dicier, more clavicle, robotic-winged than yours. I don’t care if you’ve never seen the colony. I watch my penguins with interest. It is all about penguins, snow-white-fresh cocaine, and me. Believe me as sucker emcee. Goodnight, y’all, believe me and the ball that got rolling when I necked down on the floor, soaked in patio grime tracked in from outside under the slivered moon and purposed children were dancing for once in their God-forsaken lives.


Part Two

When my penguins get together they listen to up and coming orchestra. The flapping of wings and sucking of frozen feet, limbs appendaged upward, create snow dust on the coasts of Antarctica. The great mother looked at her children and screamed about politic's policies. I'm getting used to freezer burn. I'm getting used to being a loaf left in the back for months. My penguins rule the country while sucking their faces off in lust. My penguins are sexual deviants.

Part Three


Deicer, the word that the penguin king lives by, is like a cloak of ice words getting ready to melt for a few moments. You will be consumed by its chokehold. You will drown and the king will smile. Fresh bait baited.

Cameron Diaz

For The Fat Asshole I Almost Hit on My Bike

"Well for one thing you're going the wrong way"
"I know," I say, "I know I'm going the wrong way"

I feel like all the people who were just kicked out of the library for looking at porn
Who are they kidding when they claim a banana is a "solid food"

Hello, we're calling from the Suburban Station Lost and Found office
Mom thought you died or something, nope, still here

"Your session is over because this is certainly not research"
"I know," I say, "I know this is not research"

I find a watch on my floor and ask my friends if I should wear it
-Yeah, wear the watch, sure
-Do you like the watch? If you like it you should wear it, ya know?
-Watch?! I don't have time for this or did you forget what I'm going through!

An older friend believes his virus scanner is what's giving him viruses
"The fix is in" he says, smiling with pride
smiling because he's above the corruption
the corruption that's drowning us
that we're pretending we're swimming through

The way you set up your room now makes me think you're having sex with other people in it

This is me at my most spaceman
doing a whole new brand of moonwalk

This is about the time of night I start thinking
about the letters spelling Cameron Diaz

The time i think about "sweeping up"
in verb form

The time I think of Jodi Picoult
menstruating somewhere
somewhere woodsy where the heat's always on
because it always just snowed

Tourism

from Don DeLillo's The Names

"I began to think of myself as a perennial tourist. There was something agreeable about this. To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't clin to you the way they do back home. You're able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity. You're expect to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travelers acting stupidly. You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don't know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it. Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm. You can exist on this level for weeks and months without reprimand or dire consequence. Together with thousands, you are granted immunities and broad freedoms. You are an army of fools, wearing bright polyesters, riding camels, taking pictures of each other, haggard, dystenteric, thirsty. There is nothing to think about but the next shapeless event." (pgs 43-44)

Panomie

After Koestenbaum

Shedding the filth of adult urbanity,
you may have recognized them as necessary golem.

It is in true thought, in perfect form for the deranged,
that this is all hotel life. The transient stagecoach.
The backward doors and upside down Chinese in mirrors.

You would do this amazing thing with your hands.
Choke up on the buster of greening balls. It was made:
adamantium, human skin; oil degreaser concocted
by the wrinkle wizard wearing blue satin.

He was in his penthouse suite shining his shoes.
Too soon, you said! Grabbing your stickered bag
and letting go while spied upon by private eyes.

Snickering curses through the revolving portal.
You were the large gray whirlwind up front and in tune.

You were wondering in idealist conjecture.
Where there's will there's an answer. I could
have lost you like tennis balls flying by cameras.

But inside and then underneath your clay pockets
sat a recording device: vibraphone; instant finger
plucker response system. Your mind painted news.

It was you on the opposite veranda. All balsa.
This capture the flag game. This treaty of verdant sides
creeping along another king's kingdom garden path.
Where they hide the dead, where they hide your family,
is what sucks you up and makes the skin sticky.

You packed up bags and fled, thinking about robot
transfusion, neutrinos, and the red dots bouncing off
black holes during a mushroom trip your boyfriend had,
where the ceiling was molecular pancake mix frying up.

There is no blame to be spent when courtesy markets
are down: shareholders holding pens like pigged projects.
A giant glass dome made out of thousands of squares.
Rectangular thought provides intimacy and warm showers.

The Haunting of M. P.

The first time Margerie was haunted it was the one year anniversary to her marriage. She was getting married to Benjamin Russle on her 23rd October 25th. It was a date I recommended to her on the eve of my honeymoon while we both cascaded significance through painkiller cocktail torpor. As I bit lazily the dead skin at the base of my cuticles, peeling off strands, pretending to get ready and spit them out of my mouth in haste, but primarily swallowing them down, I assured Margerie that as her father I was an authority on each October 25th in her short life's catalog. All save the last, her 21st, which occurred while she was, as she told me, studying diligently at school. Little did she know that I checked all the credit card bills that came into my addresses, including those which contained purchases on the card I had co-signed with her. The card was for emergencies. It was her first time away from New England, away from the town in New England she grew up in. And as a responsible and progressive parent I nodded off under the gulp of a pill for back pain the strange, minute charges for soda, trail mix, and condoms over in Flagstaff. How she made it all the way over to the other side of this country without using her plastic is a phenomenon even to me, her omniscience. It would be a lie if I told you I hadn't screamed WHORE to a beige living room wall at least once after the weekly, alcohol-soaked social. But this is not about me. This is about Margerie Pacingfield, and her haunted existence.

October 25, numbers one through twenty, were important dates for all of us. We always prepared for Halloween in our own ways, starting on the 25th of the month with a bang. Here is a brief composite of Margerie's explosive wind-up prep periods:

1) Ba-ba.
2) Da-da.
3) More cookie dough please!
4) I don't want that.
5) When are we going to the store? The doll!
6) I need more makeup!
7) I miss Kelly. (this was her school friend, a female)
8) I miss Bobby. (this was her school friend, a male)
9) The bad kids told me they'll egg me if I go out there.
10) But what if I just made a costume this year!
11) I'm gonna get more candy than anyone else out there!
12) Can I go trick or treating with Bruce this year? (her first boyfriend)
13) Mima's having a party and yes her parents will be there so can I please go? Please please pretty please?
14) I don't want to talk about it to any of you.
15) Halloween? Halloween is for losers!
16) Halloween is so fucking awesome! This year will be the best! (and I don't care WHO you are, I said, I told her, but watch your god damn mouth when you're under my roof)
17) Halloween is against my religion
18) I'm just gonna stick around here this year.
19) If God is dead, then Halloween is dead too.
20) (most recently) Josh and I will stay home and watch the candy. You guys go have some fun. (her first "steady" relationship)

Josh was the last one. With him came the haunting. He held the ladder when I fell from it and injured my spine all over. He was okay in my book otherwise. The association still paralyzes. The purple pills paralyze. Unfortunately despite Josh's good intentions he failed at severing the cord attached to the failed relationship with Margerie. Following the breakup, exactly two weeks after Margerie's 20th Halloween, Josh began his frenzy. There was reclusion. There was aggression. There was anger and pain. Like many hauntings, there was a lack of evidence, and a victim. There: Margerie smiling despite everything wrong inside the picture.

DUNE DUNE DUNE DUNE

1

oh my good GOD
---my understanding of you
(now that I know you've got
a calf clutch
on that T-Mobile
flip cam)

2

Listen up there
instead of down here
where my head sticks out
like an architect
on the verge
of collapsing
cell towers
disguised as birch
queens.

3

It was redemption at first.
At second (glance)
my QWERTY
caught fire and was more
dust for the fingertips

TESOL Free Write On Pedagogy

We start with the system
it's working parts
the consciousness that seeks to be assimilated
Frank O'Hara sounds that way because he thinks that way
I do this I do that
and schools are birthed
and entire industries from those schools
which is what Pete was talking about, passionately
which we are coming back to

the big picture and only mattering details
teaching as impressionism
only approaching, like cursors
for the occasional Icarus crater
or the tenebrism
or if you're Dan Brown the way St. Peter
sort of looks like a babe

the big picture and the system that produced it
which is the point of systems
and why we like pictures

Wishing You

Unlike the wavering reception of the traditional accordion, which derives its hulkish, centipedenal sound from some handsome 19th C Germanic roots (Dear Christian Friedrich Ludwig Buschmann, this one's for you, who never did dance with me, when I was traveling back in time, and couldn't get a grip on your skeleton's claw! You who sulk! You who unfolded your instrument for me and begged me to worship! Nevermore! Nay, I'll keep an eye on you as I pry each of those diatonic buttons out and pound them into your corpse dust!) and has long fallen decayed to the many tests of Father Time, the twin-lipped human whistle has proven its significance through a popularity never known before. Since its inception, and through until now, the whist, as it is called back home, a name generally accepted and often found adorable, has captivated audiences of all circles for a good twenty years now.

The whist is one part synthetic-human lip-skin, and two parts conducted-air current. For every batch of tones created, only a select amount of joules are needed, and these are negligible when the measurement of beauty commences. Have you noticed the latest tools in aesthetic quantification? Look into the matter further, if you dare. Buschmanns need not apply.

It is no surprise that the whist is finding its way in every home. Professor Dunbar just purchased one two years ago and utilizes its preset tunes every night. He marvels at the Bach; he snaps to Eldridge; he bangs his head to Megadeath. He is quizzical and prays to God every night on the euphoric, almost sinful qualities of this curious musical instrument.

Little Annie down the street knows similar aural satisfaction and bewilderment as she listens to the mouthed -O- coo her to sleep. Ba Ba Black Sheep, Have You Any Wool? And when she wakes up in the morning to Miley Cyrus, the mimetic inclination rings her own lips as though one day, yes--oh, she is just a dreamer.

And yes, Marcus, oh Marcus--how his life was changed by the whist. Found on the streets by the WhistWonder 2XXL, a gigantotron of a whist, proudly displayed in the front window, bullet proof, down on the block, Marcus did not even know what was in store. But he stopped dealing, left the crowds he always considered friends, and family. Now he is off unemployment; off food stamps; and away from the government-issued housing projects. In the day M does cultural development and marketing processing downtown at WhistWonder's HQ; when he gets off, he sets up his two whists--one a prototype that only a select group of WW employees are allowed to know of, the other the original 2XXL--definitely inferior, though humorously, and touchingly nostalgic--on each side of the room, and creates mash-ups of popular folk songs. Big Rock Candy Ring of Fire actually found airplay at the local WURY station, famous for its innovative playlisting and advocation for experimental "sound artists."

Before I took the five minute drive to go and buy the whist, my life was hell. I had been a scholar in classical composition; my forte was piano sonatas. I could never "get it up," as they say in the office, to the string quartets or the symphonies or the nu-operatic. Even the dueling xylophones over on Ridge Street, during the student block parties, made me quiver more often than not. But none of that matters now. The plaguing life of family--wife, daughter, daughter, son--and the university position at the local League school--who really cares at all about 'consonant vocabulary' of late 20th-century composers?--and the weekend job doing research for a local comic book hero-artist, which sometimes provided me with the opportunity to write up some of the subplots--all went out the window, the attic window and the basement window, with the arrival of the fantastic machine.

As humans we spend years moving outward onto instruments. We strive for abandonment of our bodies. Security is fashionable. Always. From the dawn of time the goal has been to feel extremely comfortable with our own bodies by distancing ourselves from them. The painter picks up the brush and oils and canvas. The writer picks up the pen and notebook. The engineer builds models out of small wooden pieces. The doctor will only feel okay in life if he wields his scalpel. And the warmonger his tank. And the goddess her lightning bolts. And me, well, my whist.

With the whist comes a rationale that is grounding. It sobers. The whist will make us cry, will make us laugh, and make us love. The whist brings peace. At its current rate, it should end poverty and world hunger in no less than two years. In four I suspect the imperialist system throughout this globe will deteriorate and fall off like some old garment no longer desired, no longer sexually appealing. In eight years, the whist will come to be a language commonly accepted in all households. In ten, the whist will be a model of worship. Inevitably the whist will end and will be replaced by something else. The emulation of the human voice will be surpassed by the real human voice; but that state of enlightenment will not be immediate. There will be a crysis, then a dark age, and then, perhaps, the renaissance. Our mouths will quake and our moans will be deep and sound. I will be long dead, probably gathering dust right next to Buschmann. But that is okay. The whist, sitting next to me in my coffin, will provide my requiem, and my safe passage to the land of the silent.

Littering

He was prostrate on the blue rail bench trying to work the last of the coffee out of his body and commit the defining event of the day to memory. He imagined he was safe here, with his water, a lemon in it, at the Philadelphia International Airport, at the Terminal D R1 stop, the only sheltered railroad stop in like the entire airport rail-loop with benches large enough to lay prostrate on. It was so ordinary--a notable ordinariness considering what had happened. “How could everything feel so ordinary?” he thought, laying prostrate in the enclosure, waiting for the train to bounce back from its final stop: the E Terminal.

This is what he always did after work although using a word like always seemed more than a little ridiculous in light of the circumstances. Henceforth, he thought, there would always be the way things had been before the event and the way things were after. His life-line now sundered by some pre/post duality. It had been one of those days where history becomes binary.

He noted how ordinary everyone else was being.

“This is ridiculous,” he said to no one in that nothing-voice we use when addressing ourselves.

“But-,“ he almost replied before being rebutted by some other cerebral pundit. In times like these self-talking is often shaken down to breath-heavy prepositions or whichever expletives we’re most invested in at the moment. Plausible narratives, causality, other words that basically mean “meaning” weave slip-shod quilts in the frontal lobe and, due largely to latency issues, these paltry push-pins of language are all that escape. It’s as if what we conceive as our “lips” were trying to remember the dreams of what we conceive as our “self” had had last night.

He sat up. He was sitting up now, no longer prostrate, although we know that the rail bench was long enough to accommodate his 5’10” 160 frame. He thought about what he must’ve looked like there on the blue rail bench, under the sign that said “Terminal D: all Gates, Ticketing, Baggage Claim,” at once the Airport’s anatomy and its religion, mouth-speaking things to the ether. He thought about memory and experience and perception and eventually cinematic perspective. According to the sorts of authors he always cursed because they were always right: “I’m in your movie; you’re in mine.” Ergo, he wondered: where would they place the camera in this scene of the bio-pic? What would the other scenes be? Surely today’s event would be incorporated. How could it be skirted? Anything with this many breath-heavy mouthed words behind it must hold some belly of biographical significance. Surely, some theater-goer or reader (because, at some point, he probably would write some memoirs or letters or something if that’s still the trend for “the greats” when he’s had enough life experiences to be called a “life” and the desire to feel young again—a desire to return to days like today: the day of the event…the day that changed everything forever ago.) Surely someone could cull some meaning from things like this, things this traumatic, things this memorable, things that inspire this much fucking introspection and meta-fiction and poetry that will surely be anthologized as his post-“whatever-the-media-and-internet-are-calling-the-event” period, which represents a major departure from his juvenilia.

The train slid in exactly when the paint-chipped sign said it would and he left the enclosure, leaving behind the empty cup, a depleted lemon inside.

“What an asshole” everything who boarded previously at the E Terminal and sitting in the seats with windows that could see into the enclosure thought as this indignant, self-absorbed litterer walked through the requisite series of automatic doors and joined them as passengers.

Sixty years later he still feels guilty about littering because it’s the only thing anyone else remembered.