Toothsucker Takes His Reward.

It feels good to hold the young punk's head underwater. It feels good to be a young punk while holding another young punk's head underwater. He'd scattered his brains across these streets like confetti for a decade and the steamship coughs smoke into the opal green sky just the same as it had when he first began. Now he is just as desperate as before. His cup is just as full of an ebbing tide of dim lit change and coagulated blood flecks. Here was this little fucker telling him off. Here was his head going under a murky depth of seafoam. It just feels good to issue a fee that is nonrefundable. It feels good to hold a young punk's head underwater. A feeling of remorse peaks up in someone's conscience. It's not his and he sucks his teeth thinking of all the injustice done to him in the past thirty nine minutes. What was it that was said to him by this fledgling mistake of a young punk? Dream on fatbag. Slop doesn't eat itself for free. Now, thinks the young punk who happens to be holding another young punk's head underwater, what is that supposed to mean? What is a fatbag and am I one of these things? Can slop really not eat itself? Or is it that it just doesn't do it for free? The young punk ascribes a dire meaning to his taught arm muscles by sucking his teeth to a further degree. A slurping sound licks itself up and down the throbbing alleyway and the young punk, the one with his head underwater, writhes like the photomontage of a genocide flowing past at a rate of two thousand images per second. The scene is there: a young punk holding another young punk's head underwater.

Sing It, Bluesman! Or Don't. Just Be Drunk Instead.

Let us all rejoice for our heads are bulbous and our souls are treacherous. We do not steal from the gold pit, we mitigate it's sadness. We leave behind a stench of decadence like a cloak of happiness for those without. We look upon the derelict house we once were told was our home and slip upon the ice to crack open our tiny childish dreams. We treat our weariness with gray liquid, sullied, staunch, and sanguine. A complexion of rouge blooms under our cheerfully flat eyes: we are complacent and we toy with ideas of grandeur. We, at one point, let our hands lose grip of our passports, our mainline, our poor, poor dayjobs. We, at some point, saw the ship approach to take our love away. We, at no point, lose the will to take matters into our own hands. We are together in this because we have no more to be sorrowful for. For sorrow beholds that which is empty. Like a ragdoll. Or a pin cushion. For we laugh upon sorrow's rapturous journey through our lives. We look straight into the soothsayer's eyes and declaim, "Low and behold! The drunken taxi driver keels over, perilous and dry, finally bringing us to our final destination!" We do not cry tears in the booze. We cry like the orphan who spies the lurid details of a lonely man losing his virginity. We cry out in agony and lust. We cry for the dreadnought who surpasses our very desires. We pain ourselves to seek that which won't be made clear: if it were just the future than it would soon be the past. So let us rejoice. For the future is always there. To be taken like a pinprick.

Not So Silly Walking.

Straight up and down his hands are restless, jittery, even. He looks at those old worn planks rotting along the river: Am I older than them? Will I last as long as them? They are the skeletons of a forgotten industry. Steamboat apparitions left to worry about all the cargo they once serviced. The river laps against them taking a bit of themselves with each lull of water. His own utility now looks futile. He wants to tell the clock on the wall to shut up. I'm not here to rest! I'm keeping this fusion of life and despair alive! Like an encumbered log taking in the restless sea, no, like a tiny splinter of wood already taken from the tree, he is looking foward to a future uncertain. These are the days of the snapshot of archaic lanterns. They cast a dim light upon an age of backbreaking work, coal streaked on cheek, miscarraige left ungrieved. The age of toiling away without a thought. The mind wasn't so pristine as to wonder what it was then. It wasn't there for itself. It lifted hands for the shovel. It tore blisters from an axe. It stole years with a pick. Now his kind has all of time on their hands. To while away with thoughts bouncing, sending terrifying echoes of self fulfilling mortality. He is of the age of self awareness, lack of industry, tourism, the sights, leisure, entropic delight. Your checkout time is 10am and there is no extra charge for the forthcoming uncertainty.

Lynch, Palm, Island.

Frightened by his own sentimental mind he drops everything he has with mouth agape. Looking out of tearstained eyes at dazzling island melodies, sun sharpened knives of light and color tear through the palm fronds sheltering the temperate dreams trembling in his skull. The tropical climate makes him mad. Those around him play cards, tend yards, bleat "howdy 'pard." He's caught in a lowly intermission of thought: Nothing keeps this sun alive except salt water drunks. Snapping back to the parasol of reality, he wonders what he's been doing here in the middle of the ocean calm on drugs and edgy with panic. He's even further on his way to an even further panic. A further destination. Condensed experience melts down into wisdom, he tells himself, and the conveyor belt of mundane dribble he's been working on for years won't abide any character development. "This won't change a thing, these worldy pursuits." says the tired midget starved with chicken wing dangling inches from mouth. The midget that inhabits his soul. The little guy so warm inside with self doubt. So he was here to make amends with the lifeless existence he'd been living. He was here to wonder aloud, with strangers staring, what all those glistening babies that were his cherished memories had grown up to be. They may be drunk rumbling castaways tearing apart fabric with mangled cogs of hands; society reeling for an answer for this madness. They may be tight little curls on a young, affluent women's hair style; bobbing as more money changes hands. They may be burning an effigy cast alight for fear of losing the keys that once entered upon sanity. They may have never even been born, those trembles: to think, I've done nothing but sit here for the bite of worrisome thought. I've done nothing but hold out my hand, asking for change. The sun beats him down, his face is withered paper, his hands are kids gloves. The salt licks up and down his legs, leaving a floe of silt like purposeful snow banks upon an ancient river. Frozen, or wishing to be, he doesn't want this equatorial climate taking his moments for a malarial ride much longer. Deciduous thoughts are raining down on him like tattered leaves from a long gone elm in November. He faces towards the bottom of the world and he gasps.

Order for Do Not Resuscitate.

...that this world is falling apart. Once I saw the thirteenth advertisement for a plea to "raise your voice without saying a thing," I realized my spectacles had long since been tinted a dead gray. I'm looking out upon a child swinging his arms in the air like a mad beast laden with woe. He screams, "I am a blackberry phenomenon and I love the way the Walton's give me LOW LOW OPTIONS!!!" We are inside of one another fighting for a way out. I met a gypsy cyberpunk who told me of his days flinging oversized computers into the Pacific. It was the only way he could hack into the system. I suggested he take his chip out and cleanse it in the waters of solitude. He sneered at me with obvious glee: "I won't be taken for a ride by an acid reflux disease of the mind." With the world gone will the information junkie fold? Like a wasted paper bag will he flutter in the breeze, caught up in all of our past misgivings? The hard drive is the long drive and we've been on this drive for a long, hard time. It's all about to give up one of these milliseconds. Keep your eyes peeled for the shapes shadowed on the wall. When they begin to vibrate incongruously I'll be there to unplug you.

Sin is Always Fun at First

Dramatic outings carry themselves from the lake stumbling. Confessions of a hanged man: Sin is always fun at first. You're left thinking of the past; left wondering whether you are the shining example of goodness you once thought. All choices have come together and everyone keeps saying, "You must be so excited." You can only reply with a vague shrug. Maybe I've gone too far? Maybe it's never been the gold rush but the oil boon. Maybe I've got a pocket full of cash long since turned to ashes. No, they do have value, these rings cast of precious metal pawned as spent fossil fuel. Though these pollutants poured into my soul may be causing the smog, that bright pink sunset leaves me with the hope that the pollution may be a benefit. The back and forth of a guilty conscience will produce some solace, some content. Content with leaving for a while, you know those loving creatures leaving marks on your memory will be here when you return. A dream informs you of what will be when it won't be and how things might be. A nightmare seems to be what was and all that may be if things weren't. A waking moment gives clarity to life; telling you there is pain with your existence. That aching back lets you know you've arrived. From the world of nothing but wisps of smoke to the world of tactility and touch. Facility is rough; for that which allows the ease of use can often create the loss of meaning. It's been such a free flow run for now that the truth has been overcome by the need-to-know. Agency is tough; for that which allows for use of power can often create a nameless victim. Without knowing who wronged who there is a loss of order. You've forgotten why your emotions are playing tricks on you.

A Comedy of Errors.

Lowlight bitches saunter like streamers hanging in ditches with stitches holding together their elbows like hinges. It's evening now and tumble deeds for cars roll on down the lonely plains keeping the bankruptcy attorney in love. Without his slobbering child to keep in line he knows he'd be king. He's several beers deep as he ponders why all of those under exposed women he wants in his snapshots keep flinging their panties to someone else. The door slams wide open in the dusty wind and he stands there agape; minstrel, tuneless in the sun, strings popped. It might have something to do with the dim googly eyed toddler of wonder he knows must be, at this ungodly hour, wheeling around the front room with a dumpling hanging out his diaper. So stupid, he thinks. This is why he drinks. This is why he never got nowhere. It's 2 past whatever he once thought was early and the careening boob of a bartender lulls down, easily sweeping the grub bucket underneath the man's chin into oblivion. The grinning wildeye barman replaces it with something else. Looking down, a grin scatters the man's gaze and everyone in the bar knows where the toddler at home got his vacant stare. Though this easy-grinding desk jockey throws his own son's accusations out the window, they all know: You beget your son and thus beget yourself. He stumbles from the tavern dripping spite: "Sir, could you spare a minute to save a child?" The charity gatherers are on the street in full regalia. It is two o'clock in the afternoon. He crouches in the glare of unholy sunshine. An arc of spew springs from his mouth, hitting the pavement in a splatter effect so unlike beauty it's unavoidable. The not-for-profit beggars careen as far away from this wreckage of a man, no doubt running off to some other change in policy. Oh why do they ask for my treason? I've given up my wayward child. Seven fingered like the serpent with one more digit added, this toddler of wrath and pain was slowly sucking the dredge closer. Those banks that were his sanity have eroded long ago yet this managerie of electric drunk continues on. He is a comedian and his last show is years from now.