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.