Hustle&bustle

The pavement cracks from pressure and velocity, each new fissure spreading with its own sense of urgency.

Shakespeare died a long fucking time ago

Roses die and then what do you have, oak bark for skin, bitterness crawling underneath like maggots, and some vague memory or idea about a rose. Cracks showing on the bow of the SS Idyllic. That feeling in the pit of your stomach is substantial, that drop out from under you is an indication to head for lifeboats, if there had ever been any, which there are none. Drink up, then, the best moments of your life are not ahead of you in the frozen black North Atlantic death rising up, they are not in the constellations shaped like roses, mocking with the sharpness of their patterns out here where you can see nothing else. Drink up, these are the best moments of your fucking life, such that it is, this feeling of cold wind raising your skin like whole oceans.

Thumper's Aphorism in a dark bedroom

Some things are better left unsaid. Maybe that's why the puppy shrieks nonsense at strange dogs passing the window, shrieks at volumes that pierce the walls and reverberate in the belly of my guitar. Shrieks all night, man. I think, to keep from saying something she'll regret.

Instead of a rainbow

Rain sprays from one shoulder of the road to the other, glinting in Florida sunlight like glass shards, so that one has to blink to make sure their eyes haven't shattered out into the passing storm.

Creed of the USPS

 In this digital age, how might we transpose the blood soaking the mail carrier's socks and darkening the legs of her uniform?

What Floridians might do after a hurricane

Ice cream melts. Birds' nests burn, and windows yield to shattering forces (such as trees containing the nests). Cars move sideways down murky flooded streets. The sun emerges from curtains of rain swept violently out of sight. We dance in rocky road puddles in the kitchen,staining our feet with chocolaty goop. We patch our roofs with charred twigs and invite the birds inside. We brush glass from the sill and hang ornaments on the tree's crown jutting into the living room. We wade through the carnage with some new things to share.

Plot holes in Futurama

Bender's tie is magnetic as he rides along the starship Titanic, but this cannot be. Magnets dig into his subconscious like a finger leaving a hole when it is plucked free, leaving only show tunes to play viciously as he swings about like a sad Disney creation, trapped along the side of a track where grubby-fingered children point from passing railcars. But he is not trapped in a Disney ride, he lives in a world where jokes upon jokes cover up his friend's, his only friend's shattered timeline. And so in this moment he is not himself, though he is in love with the robot countess who is funny because she is Rose from the movie Titanic and this is funny because we can understand, we can relate to this, though we cannot because the robot countess stretches infinitely into a black hole, neither living nor dying (says Schrodinger). And so love is lost, God is dead (says Nietzsche) and so what do we make of Bender's tie. This tie that goes unexplained, that cannot penetrate his love in this moment, that cannot leave a hole. What do we make of a world without holes.

Misplaced body of water

When the shore shines most brilliant, white sand blinds my teary eyes and I cannot find the ocean. The sky, too, vanishes. And then I, myself, burned up by the afternoon.

Disillusion

Surrounded by ants. The dogs haven't shit. I'm looking around for something beautiful. Not sure if I can see it. But looking around seems good, at least.

Bricks at sunrise

Workmen wake before the sun.  When it rises, they lean into it and wipe their muddy brows.  These endless days (though the days clearly have beginnings--this much the men have seen) turn their forearms to leather, their fingernails caked with crescents of dirt and cement and clay, their boots splattered permanently with the same.  A low grumble, a clatter, a hissing, and the shrill, penetrating, echoing warning sound of machinery going backward as well as toward.  The birds can't compete, they go back to sleep; the morning has been taken by the workmen, it belongs to them.

Subsurface REM cycle

Sleep seeps in like water into the lungs, a weight that sinks a forgotten dreamer to the ocean floor so he may finally rest there, softly, far below the tumult of the air.

Libraries and florescent light spectrums

A wall of books has only so many colors.  You must pull them from the shelves, pitch them to the ground so that they open like oysters, and there reflecting across the words, like pearls, you will see how a ray of light might be torn apart.

Kinds of birds

If moonlight glittering off sea foam is the Atlantic's milky way, and jellyfish the clouds, and pillars of coral skyscrapers reaching up from the softly sifting sands, then fish must be some species of bird not yet cataloged by ornithologists who think, mistakenly, that they are not standing beyond the stars.

Unable to lead the mourners in song

Hey hey, my my. RocknRoll will someday die. Glancing at the preacher, Niel averts his eyes; Hey hey, my my.

Study in Entropy: above, below

If a comet reaches to the sun and expands, melts away, trails, and if ice cubes melt in the summer, pooling the cement, slipping past the roadway shoulders, or first evaporate, then fall in sheets of rain, then slip past, what other parts of us can we expect to melt away in space and seep into the dirty Earth?

Ursa of Аляска

One Kodiak bear says to another Kodiak bear, "Why do we kill the defenseless animals that hop around the woods?"

The other Kodiak bear looks up at her confused.  She doesn't even realize there's blood all over her snout!

"Actually," the second bear says, "we mostly feed on Salmon, and rarely attack the woodland species such as deer or goats.  If we eat their meat, they're usually already dead from the winter."

The first bear looks skeptical.  "Then why do you have so much blood on your face?"

"Oh, that," says the second.  "You see, we all have that."  And it's true! The first bear has blood on her snout!

"How is this possible?" says the first.

Says the second, "Because it saves us the trouble of confessing later on."

So both bears stand among the trees under the northern borealis, emerald and pink, like fresh salmon arching through the sky. One has only to look up at the salmon of the sky, and easily forgets the blood matting the fur of the bears' snouts, as do they.

Slow rise

It all seems a bit silly, this brick-by-brick ascent.

The power goes out

The Earth grows dark. Well, what is there to do? We could go extinct. Or panic, loot and horde munitions, murder. We could conquer what is left in the black night. But that is uninteresting. Unoriginal--we've done that already. We could dream. Dreaming is a bit of old hat, but at least there are possibilities for novelty. Endlessly so. Yet dreaming seems somehow unproductive, or an irresponsible use of our time. Well then, we could go about making light. But that seems unlikely. Not anytime soon. Or perhaps the dark is an end, and there is nothing to be done. Dusks and dawns have for too long been regarded as givens. It's time we learned what we've been taking for granted all these mornings&evenings. Yet for those who've stopped to look at a pink sun setting on a gulf of green waves, it's unlikely this thing that looks so much like another world is being taken for granted. It seems unlikely that our fragile incubation, circling one behemoth spherical incinerator of billions, wouldn't still excite (or horrify) us. Can it even be said that we deserve this darkness of the planet Earth? We can always hope that it is an eclipse. If it is an eclipse, we will have learned something about ourselves. Even if what we've learned isn't entirely clear, and anchors upon the image of a corona. But could it really be said that we haven't learned about ourselves already? So we are left with this question, then. Unanswered. Unanswerable. The Earth is dark. At least maybe we can make up our minds about God--but probably not.

Identifying features

Soon enough your skin flakes off, your nails and hair grow until they need to be clipped, old socks get holes and are replaced with new ones, your DNA becomes new DNA, or something like that, and suddenly you're an imposter. Though if you're a new person, with new socks, maybe this means your memories aren't yours anymore, either. They belong to that other person, who is also an imposter pretending to be you. Liar! Well, you can scream, or you can turn to the present moment, which is wholly yours.

Worry

One thing people don't worry about is the death of the last veteran of war. Or maybe people worry about it intensely, so much so that they begin to shoot each other in the afternoon sunlight.

Cleopatra's lawn care ordinance

A worm in the warm dirt must wonder, why are the people so jealous of birds? Flight can be brief and cold and sharp and deadly, but the dirt, one can never get too far ahead of one's self in the dirt.

From a blind man to Mr. Humphrey Davy

If you stare into a light bulb intensely and for enough years, when the filament breaks, you won't even see the black-singed glass, the dark thing right in front of your eyes.