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.

The Mouth of the Issue.

Those sad eyes barrel through me; setting my esophagus open as a tunnel.  And I said, okay, okay.  This can be good, all these things accumulating in me like lost objects.  A pen, a knife, a rusted nail, a broken coffee cup.  Inside of me is like rustling through the leaves in the backyard:  somethings left behind, some in front of you for no reason.  And all the red blood cells mount their horses like riders torn and ride off into dissipation, leaving abnormal levels of chemicals like anguish within me.  I've got to leave and it is going to have an endless feeling to it.  If you could see me before, then you'll never see me now.  When I said I'd do your chore I was just like a sow. And those flames reach to the waist and keep the waves below your wrist.  Shoot your eyes up into paste and get a doctor to look at that cyst.  I will walk into the woods and lay me down for hours.  I will eat up nothing but the goods and pretend I'm building towers.  Something like what I was is what I was.  Something like what I am is what I am.  Like a silent wind through black trees with the moon unfolding a carpet of light for us to walk upon.  We hear bubbling and cursing as we set the thermostat higher.  Bring me those sad eyes for me to open up, let my mouth stand agape as the wind turns the birds to scattered graphite.

Hand to Mouth.

There is a sadness in me that seems out of place.
That black tree that grew across the yard as I cut my teeth
always scratched at my window in order to get me to come over.
And it said I had a glowing pain.
It said I was unable to be sure.
It said there was a possibility of ruin in my heart.
It was a gathering gleam of empty and it tries to take me
down the lonely path.
And it all grew up in me as an instigation.
A sorrow that looses its seductive smile into me like a string of bullets.
The woods wrap themselves around her and she's gone further into the calm.
The humid blanket of twilight further deepens and I hear her ruffle
feathers and dirt and she make herself comfortable.
Such a fool, to listen to her as I stumble after.
And hearing a shatter I trip and I'm just opening my eyes
inside my bed with an electrical cord in my hand.
It was a thick night but only because I had unplugged the box fan.
And my hands like maps of a place I hadn't been
and my mouth gone because it didn't follow
and my eyes blinking without recognition.
She's gone for the moment.
There are so many trees though.

Those Ghosts.

The cold things get to live longer
though they aren't breathing much.
It is as if you want your skeleton
to be gilded with simple glimmer
to brighten the end of sorrow.
Tell me I will die content.
And maybe we do have an essence.
Maybe we don't have to construct facsimiles
of our bodies in hopes
that we may get to see
the sun go down forever.
But oh just to know
that there is something more.
To see those ghosts wink a smile
and leave the room.

Blossom Grief with Imagined Piano.

What the fuck was it that made you this way?, slurs father as Blossom jams his spindles in the air all stupid in rhapsodical parody of a jamstacked to the max piano man real gone on crystal chandeliers and son of a bitch blues.  Blossom lets the unsure beat lure his charred mind through lines of bopping keys and renal failure chords.  He wears stupid stuff that seems like clothing and it is real baggy and charms the shit out of a dog.  The seams don't jive and weave correctly.  He never opens his eyes for he is always in the thick of a sticky imagination with his fingers flailing out before him, his face all screwed up.  His imaginary piano is gilded with rhinestone.

I could slap that face off of you so much!  So quick!  So stupid!, screams father as Blossom sashays around the backyard.  The backyard.  The place where they throw the trash.  The trash seethes wrong in the moonlight if father places it in the bin provided to them by the state.  This makes Blossom scream all night long.  So they must let the garbage blow all over the backyards face.  Father slumps in a lawn chair, his mouth ablur with booze of long gone Sundays still thick on his shirt.  There are palm trees on the shirt.  There is no reason for it all.  Blossom was given to this man as penance for sleeping with a cashier at Petsmart in Gary, IN.  It happened in the birdcages.  He woke up three years later with pink eye and a son named Blossom.  It was, tragically, the mid-90's.  In the throes of a vicious bender, he had named his son after a teen girl lost in the folds of a frumpy sweater on television.  The mother was no where to be seen; she was into dogfood in really weird ways.  Dog parks are not safe.  And the positive emotion movement was in full swing.  And all the children were swaddled in yes-men parenting.  And no one could let the ice cream fall from the lip of the insolent bitch sunk in Barney underwear.

Don't you feel the sneaky self esteem movement convincing you to never stay happy?!  Don't you feel this ever present lust of self preservation slowly squander you?  Don't you see these premium prices tremble as we pay for dump site paranoia personality histories?  I AM LOST ALL OVER YOU, BLOSSOM!  And father just lets a torrent of sickness and rage pour from him like the river that drowns the lovers seeking refuge in the state park.  Blossom does not hear a thing of it.  Blossom lets another fully developed icon of over consumption douche his brain into pristine condition.  He jams hard in his mind.  He gets lost among the lonely pieces of detritus as father sails gloriously into a blackout with urine soaking his zoobas.  They spin as marionettes in a snow globe filled with nothing but their wants of this all to stop; yet another set spun of the Grief Family genes.

No More A Source of Warmth.

She thought she was a lover but she's not one.  Just the pinprick empty, her body all numb.  When the neighbor turns off the lights she slowly dresses.  Argyle and stripes with a licorice whiplash for protection.  She has nimble moves that make no sense.  The sock hat stifles her ghost writing when she scales the sides of suburbia.  A nuclear beauty of a sunset closes in on the tepid landscape of drawn shades, muesli affluence, and branded monotony.  Her head full up with a cloud, lost in there without a sun.  She wants something she's not capable of.  Hopeless romantic...something something frantic.  And without a purpose she cat burgles and drinks from the bird bathes of unknown magnificently middle class pleasure areas.  In the side yard her body manipulates the darkness.  When she gets into the home she wanders around with her mind taking footage like a blank tape.  None of it is recorded.  She doesn't take anything from the break in.  She doesn't mind leaving behind a feeling of unrepentant idleness.  When the occupants of the house awake in the night it is not to a bump in the night.  It is to a nameless grief that streaks in through the windows out there where the mercury vapor decay dreams up more and more roads that lead to work.  The husband gets out of the vague design he sleeps in and stumbles to the bathroom to stare at himself in the mirror with eyes like slate;  she lurks below.  She gets out of there long before the husband points at himself.  She gets away and smirks.  For her's is a life of unseemly cantor in unfamiliar pajamas.  Their bed clothes symbolically wrapping her cold abdomen up in a familial congeniality she can't fathom.  She is of the Grief Family: forever getting typecast as the waste that she is.  She strips off the woolen sweater in the steam of a sultry summer night upon return from another redundancy.  The air thickens around her.  Forgive the lucky end to every moon, she muses as she rides herself into another nightly rut.  She lets go of the crimson cane and it clatters to the floor:  she does not hear a thing.  She pulls the stripes down over her nose:  it doesn't change a thing.  She can't seem to make up her mind on whether she is deaf or blind.

Begin, Third Generation.

The grievous procession waves their hands and they seem to be holding their previous relations at bay while the murk gives them another opportunity to get up and fall down.  They are the third generation of the Grief Family.  No more qualms about it.  The matriarch has fallen.  They tie her up in gaudy pink ribbons and close the lid on her gilded rose coffin with sadness and triumph.  Hats off for the hearse, yet curse each remembrance with a statement whittled thin and terse.  They've got the ideas but not the execution.  Their notions just tease them when they should line them up and shoot them.  And with the smell of death on their shoulders they freshen their breath.  They're a decade older and done up in each others eyes with lies.  Throw everything away so as to doll up this romantic fray.  These days of indecision and insecurity steadily overarching, they are overly conscious of who should get them.  Their words are nothing but gravestones lined up, stone icons of suggestions past.  And present:  They stand.  Done down and damned.  When they set the stone in the muddy ground it will sit and wait.  Over the years the birds will drop their condolences upon the marker and make it look as if it were splattered with marzipan.  Sweet shit, mutters the ugly grandson.  In the haze of the funeral party, each drink is a reminder of the essential inability to express oneself.  They swim out in a consensual circle; the human buoys a chart of single points on a black and white grid.  Unconnected they moan within all this stupid swaying, dim noises out there in the crescent moon refracted upon the surface of something.

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