Nighty Night.

That loan sister came out of the crawl space with a cramp in her side like a piece of chocolate.  She claims that no one ignores her anymore.  Her original use is to be unnoticed.  She gets all this attention and she isn't up to it.  She was made for extreme neglect; wandering eyes looking off to the cobwebs where the daddy long legs holds a search party for struggling prey.  And there are eddies of particles shimmering in the air, dust angels lost amid the empty space between everything we make up of ourselves.  Her personality feels threatened by all the questions.  Are your eyes where they need to be?  Do your arms make noise?  Have your hips continued to baffle?  She knew Madrid was a place to go, anywhere was, really.  She knew she could get married and hear her husband whisper bridey bridey bridey in her ear as she fell over a cake.  But it was not meant for her.  Her hands twitch and contort:  thoughts rolling like eyes through her head.  Get me get me get me out of this hospitality.  So she wanders away from the house she came out from under.  She leaves things behind;  her flesh and bone, her biography of Abraham Lincoln, her previous volition to maintain a callous existence.  In front of her lies a haunted jungle, all verdant and stupid with yipping nothing dark and dense.  Behind her is what she thought was a biography of Abraham Lincoln.  Wrong, it is a biography of Gertrude Stein.  And she slips into that humid terror like a dress and wakes up in a stranger's house.  There are glow sticks scattered about the floor like oily teeth on Halloween.  As she sits up in delight, stars erupt before her eyes; neon ghosts are making everything work for her.  

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.

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.