Another Lost.

When my previous son was born I set an oyster cracker on his head and said he was done.  He turned out wrong.  Soggy from the beginning, he let the fascination slip into the soup of his childhood; tasteless, dumpy, sickeningly sweet.  He put a lacy cap on his scalp and let his hands creep into his locks.  The tumbling curls bloomed down the sides of his trembling, perennial glare.  Do you remember if your childhood went out safely?  Does that reel spinning in your head accurately portray what made you in the early years?  My son's don't.  He keeps his eyes open with the sun dumping it's rays in there like garbage bags wrapped around plastic doll parts.  Cloudy in there, lost inside a horse race that goes round and round and gets him up each morning.  The competition never comes to pass.  I know, it's tasteless to keep him in the fantasy.  There isn't a Melbourne Cup happening anywhere near him.  This fascinator atop his head isn't going to woo the venture capitalists.  They won't be persuaded to lay a piece of a poor country upon his finger.  They aren't there for him when he wakes up sobbing from the slight fares he pays in nightmares. But I keep him satiated with perfunctory glances like 24 karat gold necklaces with fake diamond insets.  His eyes glisten and glow and get stupid with thought.  What if.  What if you had what you wanted.

Product Placement.

When the apocalypse laid it's fingers over the edges of the horizon my skin began crawling like ants in milk.  Slowly, my American resolve curdled into thick folds of self serving skin.  I plead:  Let me keep my hands and the way they do things.  An answer reveals itself in the clouds as electronic waste coils around my ankles.  Not necessary.  I lay me down with eyes unable to stop gazing, an interstate mind in a backwater world.  All of the nutrient rich peanut paste is gone.  One day, if one could call them days, I will stop the ceaseless wandering.  I will set things down around me in an oval.  The top side will be what I had before the end of the world.  The bottom will hold what was lost.  It will be oriented in relation to the dead last sun.  The top side will face where the sunset implodes into another dumb end to the dusk.  That lonely star looks like the stained edge of a cork now.  When this thing, the razing of society, occurred, I lost my wallet.  I spent the first 17 hours looking for it as the house burned down.  Now I have it; full of pieces of paper that bank issued to me.  My eyes are marbles as the wind volleys grains of sand over them.  I don't know what it was that brought me here.  I know my consumption levels were great before the end.   It was obviously and satisfyingly too much.  I still find it funny when the sun gets up again to confront these gray defeats.