Action Sequence via Suburban BBQ.

Where were you. When I was deep in the woods looking up sighting three legged dogs leaping alongside deer with shines of faraway lights dim in my pupil. Where were you? While I rang up the coroner to inquire of the party supervisor, while I tore my clothes off in the river, while I leapt from the bridge embankment in slow motion with an explosion tearing out my eardrums. Where were you? You were out in the backyard flirting with the lady with the black tooth and shaky hands. Gripping a drink with slow ice cubes revolving like heavenly bodies, looking up coquettishly in a random display of lust, you were coercing some lovely broken waitress behind the proverbial dumpster to have a go at love and dreams and mental breakdowns. That's where you were. While I flung a detonator in the air with the glass of aquariums spiraling about the scene, somersaulting into the nearest cave that conveniently shielded the blast, you were standing with your left fist jammed into your pants in the backyard; at a barbecue that dripped with amnesia. You didn't know where you were to be exact. While I was parachuting downtown with a knife clenched in my teeth you were lumbering about a suburban cliche and summarising plot twists to eight year olds with a dazed look in your eyes.

The Cynic Picks 'Em Off.

When the insightful music chimes in after a profound statement is uttered on the dial he has to restrain his cynicism from putting a red X in the box marked "No Contribution." Whenever he sees a symbol of hope flit across the sky in a blur of white he has to squint further to even get it. It dawns on him like a silly mistake: this life is meant to be cherished. That's why all these cheermongers keep placing samples of uplifting monologues in their positive vibe soundtracks. Why do they seem so complacent, these life affirming sentiments? Why, when he's yet to experience any sort of tragedy or massive upheaval, is it so hard to walk the soft ground without the hard thought? There may be a wicked trench yet to be uncovered, a foreshadowing, a thunderstorm upon the plains in the distance, a death, a love gone, a decades worth of tears, a paycheck like an affirmation of the worst: there may be something in the future that gives reason to these stupid preoccupations. He wants to fall in love, and yes, that doesn't happen. He wants to feel complete, and yes, that hasn't happened. He preys upon contentment like a jackal. He's just full of wants unfulfilled. The skeptic sits upon the ledge of the ominous building across the way with a sniper rifle. All those reasons to be happy come streaming out of the trapdoor on ground level only to be picked off one by one... a self fulfilling prophesy, these bullets laying within the chamber. To pass is to be over, and yes, this too shall pass, all of it.

A Tune Like Smoke and Mirrors.

I want to just keep creaking and swaying and pretending that I'm a pillar of a community that rallies about me like flotsam about a dead branch. A flooded town of doweries, unpaid ransoms, celebrated porn stars and deviant plans bent on production. A valley brought down with the first railroad line cutting through it like smoke through a straw. Collections of dust, like stamps posted upon dry shutters clapping in the farmhouse abandoned long ago when there was a fair that came through every year to keep the children from running terrified into the stupor of crickets and flowing water. Oh I just went too far with them; those thoughts. I built a tree fort that resembled a fortress and convinced my best friend that we were deftly manuevering ourselves away from the clutches of the malevolence next door. We were somehow loose upon a world that was of our creation. The yellow jackets swarmed from the hole and they were the fourth reich and we defeated them with a can of gasoline. We kept evil at bay and looked out over a field just waiting to be turned into suburban sprawl. And the riding lawnmower murmured a tune like smoke and mirrors all wrapped and held warm in the glow of summer and adolescence. We weren't mistaken: this was something free of wrestled thoughts.

Auctioneer Sneers Across the Crowd.

The hope is that you'll be sold and we can all move on from this ordeal. Towards something worth it. Towards something else entirely. Like wine pouring form into a vine. The steak forgetting the steer. The stake laughing at the tree. The castle weeping for the quarry. The soil forgiving the corpse. The idea giving way to the unimaginable. Left alone, these are the things of dreams and longing and feelings unrequited; peeling away to reveal some of those lost in the woods. Tears streaming down their faces, hiccuping in the ash of the autumn, carving a pumpkin with a knife like a prayer. The salt flow washing the dirt from their cheeks as a slap would; that hope that you will be sold. I don't know what you became when you slipped on that suit coat and sold that used car. You are a retired boozehound with nothing left. You are a man with hulking masculinity all shriveled and useless. You lull and sway and mince words to the surprise of the support group you attend. You try to remember the raw materials that you are composed of. You try to remember what you were, what formulated your current self. You want to forgive those that came together to make you what you are: a retired boozehound with hopes of selling yourself.

Nihilism...Fuck Me.

Do not fear, my ever-effluent embodiment of ethos, that which burns is only your body. For it is of flame. You are creased across the middle like a doll all stupefied in the woods when the headlights alight upon its forehead. Looking up from the carcass steaming in the emptiness of a cricket orchestra; dim save a single bulb casting daunting shadows from a porch aslant three acres far. Southwestern desolate states of crossing the lines and edging ever closer to the heaps of lumber to be burned by the ill at ease. You are an exhaustion. You burn up bright, a ball of tinsel dancing in the eyes of a toddler already middle aged and crying in a cubicle. The coming on of a belief structure is a phenomena akin to the tripping of a steel trap. Those teeth just get in there and an amputation is required to free oneself from the idea. The burning point is too up there to let one walk out the door without a detrimental sacrifice. You are just too pervasive. You are a mental itch so delicate and unseen as to envelop every unconscious effort and estimate each divisive action in advance. The building blocks that seem to resemble free will, when built up, suddenly loom as fate does. You create that feeling of endless possibility while curtailing a revolution. The eyes of the blue, blue fox, caught in the springs chest heaving and life all aspun and stopped up; a secret terror is unveiling its invention. At least it's an ethos.

The Future Enabled. The Past Possibly.

The future is a mess we all know how to clean up. If the past is a mess, it was meant to be. Pouring into the riptide the enabler feels this epitaph sink into his bones ticking and swaying.

Don't leave my emptiness unfilled. Don't unlose this loss. Don't decant this morose and pitching love. Do not tear up this feeling. For his zealous actions there were passwords scrambled into cryptic enigmas swaying lovely drunk on mescaline across the streaming catwalk of the internet. The digital mistresses all called him at the same time demanding a broken family, a wife left behind. The subject line kept blinking all acursed with a cursor; driving him up the wall as if the highway went straight to that waxen moon like bone dramatic in the brilliantly empty night sky. He doesn't have anything. A plastic card dripping numbers and security codes and years of direct deposit all credit checked and loosed upon a serious wrinkle in his forehead. Wimpering fine, ribs tuned like mandolin strings, he enjoys long walks on the beach until the surf laps upon his singing toes to woo him into the rocks beyond. He stirs awake to crash amidst the commiserating outcroppings of stone, sent there by the arms of the ocean. The riptide and the empty heart lost within one another's eyes; an astronaut harvests useless rocks on the other side of the moon where the enabler can not see why the tide keeps its time with this body relenting across the sky on a diet that leaves its body waxing and waning unhealthy and bright. It's all an illusion, the crescent, the full, the past, the future, the loss, the gain. They're all just some sensation merged at the edge of some pointless shootout set off by some misunderstanding told in the script, illuminated by fertile verse and cunning insight. Let me look upon my life with keen understanding, thinks the enabler as his body crumples upon the desolate makings of the shore to the cheering of the vast body of water surrounding every piece of land we have ever walked upon.

His Loss, Your Loss.

It was a notion within his mind to be better that slipped silently by like the leaves fallen into the dead black creek. They'd quit the sky and wind and bothersome quarrels of flight and pennance terraced and dim across a milky sky like China smoldering across the way in its dim period. Muted tone. Duty born a loose leaf promise torn up in a heated moment while the brittle heaps raked up naked against the fence sum up an entire year burning. Delicate and cautionless, he entered the furthest banks with a mindless stare doing up his face like some sort of thick make up. He was hell bent and straightened up so taut as to afflict a note. Twinkling and gleaming like a broke music box in the castaway's palm. The water teems with carnivore melodies; lapping against, slathering, foaming against the rocks like teeth and spittle and careless banter emerging to the aghast crowd screaming out across the millions of miles of problems and love letters lest they be burnt and cast up into the sky with the coming of winter. Our loss is their loss, our broken heart bleeds out blood that came from another, the river leaves here and looses itself into everywhere else. The ashes of one's past breathes out over the vast plain of everything else and he feels like someone else took for granted what had been given to him. Together we'll look up one last time to see the last shooting star out there on the horizon eke out it's last brightness and we'll make our last wish in our heads like something cast in pink glitter and blowing in the bruised twilight of a dying day.