to mary

I missed the bus yesterday. It was supposed to come at two thirty, but it usually came late, so I decided to arrive at two thirty five. There was nobody there when I got there. I stood around for a while, waiting, hoping something would happen. Nothing did. Nobody came. The buses in my city come once every half hour. I don’t like standing still. My house is only about three miles from the bus stop, so I figured I would probably beat the bus there if I walked. I walk decently fast, about a mile every ten minutes. I started walking. Abou half a mile in, I passed somebody. We both saw each other from far away, scrutinised each other, and then turned our heads until we drew very close to each other, at which point we both looked at each other’s mouths, and nodded in some sort of obscure salutation. More of an acknowledgement of existence. After walking for a few feet, I turned around and looked back at him. I assume he did the same thing. I kept on walking.
It was autumn, and the leaves were falling off of the trees. Most of them were orange, but quite a bit of them were also yellow. I thought I saw a green leaf in there somewhere, blending in and standing out in the most confounding and ponderable mix of subtlety, efficiency, and audacity. It crumbled – partially – my confidence in my senses, it made me wonder if there really was a green leaf, or if it was just a phantasmic blur in my peripheral vision, in and out of eyes and brain like a racecar crashing through a cheap restaurant. Or maybe there was a green leaf, but only for a split second, or rather a few split seconds; long enough for me to see it and percieve it, but not long enough for me to know whether or not I had actually seen or percieved it.
A fast gust of wind blew in the opposite direction I was walking, making the piles of leaves on the ground collected by the low-wage immigrant workers perform some sort of surreal tapdance, each leaf jumping up and down momentarily, and then lightly falling back into the pile.
Another gust of wind, this time in the same direction I was walking, blew. I heard a scratching noise behind me. Another gust of wind blew. The scratching noise continued, and then stopped. I felt something fall into my hand. It was a crumpled-up piece of non-lined white paper. I dismantled the ball. On it was written a poem, with an illegible name written at the bottom.
Titled, to mary
I met a big man
In the city
With a bathrobe
Slung
Over his shoulder
Pounding a nail
Into
A
Piece of wood

The nail was rusty
I didn’t stay
To see
Whether he was
successful

Testing

“This is your test”, he said.
He pulled an ostentatiously long silencer out of his back pocket and an ostentatiously small gun out of his inside pocket and screwed them together. He ran his fingers up and down the length of the barell, slowly but deliberately.
“It’s like a dance, just like a dance. Just put your hands in the air and do a spin. Good. Now walk to that wall” (he indicated a nearby wall) “look at it” (I looked at it) “closer” (closer) “study it” (I studied) “notice the bumps, the intricate crags and cracks, the perfection of it all. Notice the beauty in its whitewashed absurdity, so blank yet so varied, but with nothing to offer. It is pure beauty, devoid of any meaning. Nothing exists there, it floats in empty space, a brain in a jar. Look. See. Fear. Think. Love.
“A blackened piece of toast tastes like hell. Eat the whitewash, feel the poisonous perfection tarnish the inside of your veins. Lick it” (he pushed my head against the wall) “can you not taste it? Does it not warm your soul? Replenish your spirit? Accomplish your tasks? Better your world? Diversify your palette? Does it not destroy and replenish at the same time? Can’t you feel it”, he moaned, “oh can’t you feel it?” A gast of pure ecstacy escaped him. He pressed a gun against my ear. The bullet slid in with no noise at all, swimming through my ear canal. The beauty is gone now, if it ever was there.

new poems

a red car
drives slowly

past a castle
leisurely crumbling
to the ground








it starts to rain

the man walks on

his home

isnt too far







it is warm in here
too warm

someone should
probably
turn the heater off

shinin bright in the sky

twinkle twinkle
little star
a house is burning down in minnesota

Scar

Whilst walking down the street was when I first gained notice of the scar on the back of my hand. It was shaped somewhat like a mattress, if there had been a mattress with the words, “I am a thief and a no good dirty liar” written on it. Naturally, I was very confused, as anyone typically is when they notice strange mattress scars on the back of their hands. I resolved to find out where it came from and why it was there.
I went to the fortune teller. Sat down. Crossed her palms with gold, so to speak. She stared at her little crystal ball for about five minutes, then pulled a sheaf of papers from under her table and started to write, rather voraciously, if you can even call writing voracious. But it was rather frantic, and maybe even frenzied, nevertheless. It was some odd crossing point between a normal, composed state such as she had been in when I walked in, and the stereotypical fortune teller frenzy that often proves itself to be a sham owing to its over-zealousness. After she finished scribbling, she handed me the piece of paper and told me to get the hell out of her place. So I left.
I went to the closest deli with sitting space, ordered a sandwich, and sat down to read the prognosis.
After I had read it, my mind was racing. I ate my sandwich quickly, paid for it, and walked at the speed of light back to my hotel room. The ten minutes it took to get there seemed like years, to use a cliché that hopefully will not betray a lack of creativity on my part.
When I got to my room, I laid down on my bed and stared at the ceiling. Thinking. Just thinking about what I had read. Was it true? If so, if I made it true by accepting it as true, then I would just be damning myself to a long life of self-torture and pain. Could M.D. really have killed E.? It didn’t seem possible. But then again, there was that time in Jakarta when M.D. and J.F. beat each other unconscious. And K.E. couldn't have stolen that shipment of diamonds, they were so securely locked away that K.E., an amateur locksmith who created and broke locks as a hobby starting two months ago, couldn’t possible have gotten at them, and therefore this who affair with H.O. couldn’t have even come to such a bad end at all. I tried to think it away, to create an alibi for M.D. He was at the coffee shop, yes that was where he was it never happened at all that fortune teller is just a stupid liar and I am not a bad person and this is all a dream and when I wake up tomorrow morning my scar will be gone and everything will be sunny and happy again. I giggled.

Tin

I woke up that morning in a cookie tin. It was your average-sized cookie tin. By the smell, I guessed that it had contained Danish butter cookies at some point in time. Not anymore. There wasn’t anything in there except for me. Little old me.

In case the reader hasn’t already figured this out, there really is not much to do in a cookie tin. You can throw stuff at the walls and listen to the loud clang of unspecified material hitting metal and then the echo of the sound waves taking a jog around your ears. You can also pound the walls with your fist and scream, if you’re the more desperate type. Or you can just sit there, crunched up into a little human ball, and close your eyes and pretend you’re in someplace beautiful instead of this damn tin cookie container. I did all of them. First the second then the first then the third. After a while you give up hope. I wasn’t sad, though. I was just resigned.

I had nothing better to do, so I reviewed the events of the past night. It had been a Sunday night. I was walking around the streets of the city aimlessly, trying to have my eye caught by something, some store, restaurant, club, person, anything. At about eight o’clock I began to get hungry. I went into the nearest restaurant that seemed cheap and generally not unappealing. People talked all around me. I couldn’t hear one person at a time, but rather an anonymous din of yells, whispers, screams, grunts, clangs of utensils on dishes, opinions, expressions, individuality, all the same old shit you get when you go out. The public is rather dull, they seem to all just be talking about variations on the same theme. I want ¬this I hate that. I don’t want to want anything anymore. People are always talking about it, and, to be honest, I’ve really become rather tired of it.

I ordered my food from a fresh-face young boy who’s nametag said ‘Albert’ on it. He seemed college age to me. I commented that you didn’t see younger people with that name anymore generally speaking anyways and he replied that his parents were living in the past man or at least they had been when they had him. I ordered a turkey sandwich with tomatoes and other stuff on it and he brought it back in about ten minutes. Pretty fast cooks here huh I commented yeah he replied. I ate the sandwich. Tolerable, it filled me up. The tomatoes were crunchy.

After that, I left to go walk around some more. Nothing notable happened. Just the minutes backwards somersaulting by and the hours snowballing until it was midnight and I was tired so I went home. I had an place on fifty-second street. I walked into the apartment and flicked on the lights. I filled my pipe, lit it, and put on a Coltrane record. After the album was over, I read a bit and went to sleep.
I had one dream that night. They say that we have lots of dreams every night, it’s just that we don’t remember them. The ones that I can’t remember are obviously irrelevant. The one I can is rather irrelevant also. In it, I was sitting in a cave. It was underground. There was one stalagmite, standing way up tall, parsing my field of vision into two halves. One the right half, the rocks that made up the cave walls were blue. They had scratches all over them, as if a lion had been sharpening his nails on them. The other side had green rocks. They were actually black, but there was so much moss growing on them that they were green for all intents and purposes. I remember thinking that the moss was poisoning the air and that I was going to die and that then the lions were going to come home and eat my remains with chopsticks and fried green beans. A cold gust of wind blew through the cave. I thought that that meant that maybe there was a way out. The air had to come from somewhere. I searched frantically all over the walls of the cave to find an opening, but to no avail. I felt myself begin to suffocate slowly, and as my face turned blue, the whispering came out of nowhere –

I woke up then. Or maybe I just don’t remember the rest of it. It doesn’t matter anyways.

The tin can began to get colder and colder. Eventually it froze. The ice began to creep along the walls, slowly and steadily making its advance toward me. I sat there, shivering, waiting for the ice to envelop me.

In the end, it didn’t really hurt that much.

The Bar

There is a bar on West 54th street where people go to get away. There isn’t really one specific kind of person that hangs out there, but they all have one thing in common: they’ve got nowhere better to be. Some of them just found their significant cheating on them, some of them just lost their jobs, and some of them did both of those a really long time ago. They're all drunk, but not drunk enough to get rowdy. Just drunk enough to forget they exist. Nobody vomits in the bar, and there are never any fights. It’s always quiet in that bar, the silence only punctuated by the occasional mumbled call for another drink. Most of the people there lean their elbows against the bar, and prop up their heads with the arm attached to that elbow. Some of them look asleep, sitting there with their face down. But they aren’t really asleep. They just don’t want anybody to talk to them. But nobody ever comes into the bar looking for a conversation or a good time. But nobody’s there for a bad time, either. They’re all just sitting there, because they know that nobody will disturb them. They can just sit around and think about not thinking about whatever got them there. It is the most comfortable place in the world. They do what they want, which is nothing. The owner doesn't make much money, but enough to survive. The lighting is dim, and the bathroom is relatively clean. Some people smoke cigarettes. Some don’t. Nobody cares.
At around four, when the first rays of sun start shining in, people start to clear out. They leave money at the tables. They aren’t paying for the liquor. After the last customer exits, the bartender and waiter hang a big closed sign above the door. They begin to clean up. And when the bar opens at eleven, they’re ready, ready to accept the new crowd of broken souls, ready to provide a safe space for them to feel better, ready to make them feel comfortable and accepted, ready to let them know that everything would be better soon, and even if it wasn’t, they’d always have the bar to come to.