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| Fig.90) Foster and Herd |
She leaves the back door unlocked and slips out through the alleyway. Smoking, Katt wanders the waggle of the lake where the sand and the water seal their deal. The beaches are so terrible with broken glass and porcelain, it's hard imagining anyone being here when the lights are on. A generation of scribbled plumbing has washed up on the shores of Diamond City as babies have learned to dance toilets were being broken and discarded. Trucks are filled with these and all the other things that can fit inside of a wrapper. Once the vacationing bodies go away, taking with them their oil and cigarettes, that's when the trucks are dumped. When the hours are dim and skinny, Katt's mostly indifferent to clocks, comme ci comme ca right? She listens to all of it while she smokes.
"I miss being a painter," Milton says. He's writing a book about North Florida. "When she left, Mom might have had the better knees but I couldn't keep on waking up in the cake." His first-liners can be an introduction to the somewhat long list of places where he's woken. A list that is both surprising and delightful, especially when it's compared with his many others.
I'm talking about noise. The rat's round and it's completely unafraid of me smoking this flat dried out joint. The back door looking into our apartment reveals a lavish space resembling an Etruscan submarine that's speckled with Aldi canned goods and quiet newspapers. I'm listening to Miles Davis albums through the glowing screen. I'm also listening to a Sonic Youth tape that's playing on my cassette player. All of it's getting pretty good at being mixed up. "Some surprise or none at all," this is what I tell the rat.
Inside, in her shower she canoodles L'Isle Joyeuse. A song that's allegedly about transitioning sensitive French documents over to the German's embassy during the war. Was it Rome and Istanbul that got into it that time, Katt forgets. The old world was remarkably attached to itself then, she thinks as the conditioner gives up it's ghost.
Once she's dry and her toes have been fit into their fuzzy slippers, warm from sitting under the radiator and pink from the work house from which they've been set free. Katt nibbles on an apple from the dish and crawls back onto the massive bed. The TV is full of idea's and she doesn't want to miss anything. The smell of marijuana wafts from the kitchen. It pleasantly mixes with the smell of such spices as nutmeg and coriander. Her blankets are red as she looses herself beneath it's comfort.
When Katt bought it, the catsuit was pigeon-grey. She was in college then and her hope was to sell enough maps and buy herself the longest ticket she could on one of the lake boats. She wanted to spend time away from Diamond City. Dallas had just disappeared and it was likely that he wandered down too Old Mexico again. But Patsy was still sleeping under their Kitchen table. Whenever Katt woke up, Patsy was there in the morning with his legs pulled up under his chin. He'd be smoking and drinking thin coffee while muttering meanly about something.
When Katt finally convinces herself that this is real, she's practically a grown up. By then Myko was on the scene and the two of them tore right through the background. This only made things worse for everyone. Reprisals and worry are like cardboard that's been stapled to a twisted up rag. It's left to stand at the edge of the living room where Myko throws chips and flaming darts at it. Katt is looking for her tail in the closet again, Milton can hear the rumble of salty boots being shifted from the right and then back to the left. "We can always call it, Mime Drunk or Bon’t Wait," Milton shouts from across the room. He's admitted to having second thoughts about tonight, about arriving for dinner in matching cat suits. "Isn't it a bit too obvious," he says, trying to poke the bottom?
"So you're a guru of inobviousness too," she asks right back? "Have you gone and lost what remains of that little hat of yours?"
"But to live a second time, to be needed once more. I have to get Montana's typewriter out of my head. Did you hear, he and Dallas are re-writing some of Capote's book. There's going to be a handsome photo on the front of it when they're through. They're calling it, I Think In Other Voices. Or was it, Mina Bird You're A Bird?"
When Katt finds her tail under the couch, she stretches her arms and laughs, "mina bird."
The shock of a system is easily seen in its administrator's eyes. The tools at the board, fingers searching for all the right buttons until some of the circuits finally make their leap. Completing themselves, the bank is built up on the highest hill. It's well above the water, looking down on the town and all of it's people. The bank sits there like a shiny predator, it's great door alternating between grossly dramatic yawns and the occasional display of bathing itself. Katt laughs again, telling Milton that she's too young before heading back to bed.
"Can't we talk about suicide," Milton follows her.
"Can we talk about our rent instead," Katt reaches around, unfastening the tail's metal clip from her ass.
On their way over, smokers and other agents had been gathering themselves into beige huddles. Some of them are in dark gowns lingering in the openings between streets. While many others hide their eyes from us. Some of these recite their own poems about gamblers and truants. Despite the walk being a short, we've left too early.
I smell the gin in Milton's pocket, it gives me the feels. I can feel the hand invisible cradling my inner nads whenever I smile at the thought of having these empty pockets emptied again, voulez vous?
"It's an understanding, there are dogs still. That's all," Milton is arguing about the volcanos that just appeared outside the city.
"Yes and there's a suitcase filled with them in the walkway. We've just passed it by. The walls are even forming a corner over there. Lumps of daub in its crease are like those grey teeth being swallowed by artifice meeting geometry around back of the stage. Still anything other, even a flat sheet can seem itself an apparition of Mary Todd in most of the dreams that we've yet to share."
That actor, the assassin with a secret bride and a playbill is resting in his lap. Murmuring, "Whose soul has stained this thought. Whose worries are an unforeseen taint in a box that's on a scaffold over a van that's filled up with refugees just waiting to dance?"
The park has filled with people that have spread out their blankets on the greensward. An irritant, something misty now wafts over the blank slate wall. All across the sward, bellowing engines and other failures are heard rolling and screaming from the wall's other side.
"There are most certainly dogs. There has to be enough for everyone to have a share."
"How can you think of food?"
"I am what I've seen rather than what Manet's prepared for me." Like sage, the orchestra is filing into the pit. An unseen someone takes a tumble as they pass the kettle drum. They're followed by a cows murmur and then a cold slap. Music can be divine, it's the first jump that can hurt.
There used to be four of us hanging around the driveway. A couple of us with our bikes but not the little ones. They have their plastic Big Wheels. Some of the older-older kids are in back where they've stripped to their underwear, the girls too. All of them are sunning on top of the folded up Coleman trailer. A little black radio plays Elton John and Disco Duck between the morning's car commercials. When it gets too hot we finally go inside.
Its right before the end of the world but our parents have already left. They went off to build more cars or take orders in the pharmacy downtown. Inside our neighbor's house has a shabby smell, it's like kid pee and cabbage circling the richly sentimental furnishings, so so much soothing brown. Her parents work on opposing shifts at a junkyard out past Potterville. One of them scraps cars during the day while the other one tallies its receipts at night. But there's always cereal and milk to eat from the funny little cups we find in the cupboard.
We sit around the table munching and talking about our bikes, so red and green with their long banana seats. We're going over to the woods this morning. We're going to build something with a hammer that one of us found. We're going to hang out behind the school and fish out the old text books from the dumpster. We'll burn them when we gather under the sand hill by the pine field. I have my dad's lighter in my pocket. Its metal feels cool and very adult against the skin of my kid leg.
I'm thinking about the picture we took in the spring. It’s the one where I'm trying to look like a gunslinger that I had seen a drawing of. Al Williamson would to draw the fastest cowboy comics until he stopped, dead and leaky in a pile of math. Eventually he invented toxic masculinity and then he became this powerful magician that drank himself to death. I remember that time, we spent it together well.
When I started to smoke cigarettes it was about 45 minutes after my commencement speech. The first pack I bought was from a gas station that I was passing by on my home from the High School. It was a really sweaty day for sure. 200 of us on a single football field, waving placards and waiting for a turn at the soup. All of us wading through those horrible speeches and the testimonials about honor and glory, such long work. My Uncle never even tried to coming, instead he tapped the keg early. Mom found him in the garage. He was asleep in a garden chair with a well-thumbed copy of Penthouse magazine in his lap.
Where goes the river, so goes the raft, am I right?
My friends and I stay up late getting drunk and listening to the Sex Pistols. Each of us is wearing our dirty cut offs with some kind of short sleeve something or other. Montana's has a crescent moon on it. The Mayor's daughter brings us some pot. Then at midnight we drive to the disco. Inside the girls line up in the bathroom, taking turns the pretend to do blow in the back stall. The rest of us are sit around the dance floor. We're a sloppy looking bunch.
When The Mission of Burma starts playing and some of us think it'll be real kooky to jump around. When they hear us, the girls tear out of the bathroom screaming. Bridges Burning bangs away like its something alien and all of us are too fucked up to realize this little city has already started chewing us up. When I get home the next morning Mom wants to talk about sex. She blames my father for everything when all she ever wanted was to be a fireman too.
Let's skip ahead, I bought this used Xbox at the mini mall by the train yard and then walked home in the sun. We don't have a TV, so I set up the projector in the basement where it's cool. Our couch is plastic cast into the shape of a couch's facsimile. There are cold sandwiches in the fridge upstairs and half a case of Old Style beside the couch. Bombshp has been empty for a couple of weeks.
The kid at the store didn't wipe the console's drive, so Portishead is still tucked away under its wing waiting to be listened to. I play all the games and sometimes get to bring the marbles too. When I come in early and sit beside the girl in front and we watch as the drummer sets up their kit. She has all of her tickets on the table and she knows how to drink. I guess you might say that I'm invested, that I'm mysterious or maybe I've been obscured by the patterns that lurk below the weather. By creating noise, loops of static and feedback that chew on our sense of purpose and collide with our resolve to complete the things we've started, dialogue is becoming a charnel harvest under a buck moon inside of a circle of elms. Information Theory, begging that the topography of any exchange as mapped by our economics be challenging a just world with its false narrative or even alternatively inserting some lawful tendencies back into it with the use of guile? Even the banks have to sing for their soup. I write about all of this and more in my many small books that I've assembled from the pages of menus and blue fliers for better car insurance.
Here's the poem that I'm stretching up in the rafters, "this proud ostrich, this plum scented manager of pasta and glue. You shall be Kool-Aid Drinker No.1 and your lines will feel like mottled bruises. You will throw candles at the wall and listen for quiet farts until you've turned the whole thing over. The pillow that supports your head will be white but the ashes that fill its sham are wet and they're mostly black. I remember hearing about your car, your face and the pleasant way that you would walk away. But then I also I remember the salad days with their clouds of shrimp linings and our own car parked out front." The shallow basement stage is like my frame and these jeans feel thick with my swollen body that's fighting to escape from them. The light in here is dim. Three faces are looking right at me from the table by the steps. They laugh out loud and inside, I die just a little bit.
The girl is also there. She's by the stairs, smoking with her left hand. All of her tickets are gone now. So she's crying but she's also laughing at me. So I feel discouraged and little angry. I just want to go home and practice sex all by myself in the dark.
When my poems are finished, I usually close the book and slide it back into my pocket. Instead I step down from the riser and cross the distance to the table where the three faces are sitting. I look at each one thoughtfully before asking if I can take their drink order. The first one to speak would like a tall glass of water and the next one asks for an ice cold chardonnay with a drinking straw. I laugh inwardly. The bar doesn't really have chardonnay, instead she'll get 7-Up mixed with Rose's Lime Juice and I'll have to apologize for that as well. I like to imagine this being a code. That once translated serves to mean something like, their smug fat faces should be so lucky to even afford the straw I'm about to bring them.
"I miss being a painter," Milton says. He's writing a book about North Florida. "When she left, Mom might have had the better knees but I couldn't keep on waking up in the cake." His first-liners can be an introduction to the somewhat long list of places where he's woken. A list that is both surprising and delightful, especially when it's compared with his many others.
I'm talking about noise. The rat's round and it's completely unafraid of me smoking this flat dried out joint. The back door looking into our apartment reveals a lavish space resembling an Etruscan submarine that's speckled with Aldi canned goods and quiet newspapers. I'm listening to Miles Davis albums through the glowing screen. I'm also listening to a Sonic Youth tape that's playing on my cassette player. All of it's getting pretty good at being mixed up. "Some surprise or none at all," this is what I tell the rat.
Inside, in her shower she canoodles L'Isle Joyeuse. A song that's allegedly about transitioning sensitive French documents over to the German's embassy during the war. Was it Rome and Istanbul that got into it that time, Katt forgets. The old world was remarkably attached to itself then, she thinks as the conditioner gives up it's ghost.
Once she's dry and her toes have been fit into their fuzzy slippers, warm from sitting under the radiator and pink from the work house from which they've been set free. Katt nibbles on an apple from the dish and crawls back onto the massive bed. The TV is full of idea's and she doesn't want to miss anything. The smell of marijuana wafts from the kitchen. It pleasantly mixes with the smell of such spices as nutmeg and coriander. Her blankets are red as she looses herself beneath it's comfort.
When Katt bought it, the catsuit was pigeon-grey. She was in college then and her hope was to sell enough maps and buy herself the longest ticket she could on one of the lake boats. She wanted to spend time away from Diamond City. Dallas had just disappeared and it was likely that he wandered down too Old Mexico again. But Patsy was still sleeping under their Kitchen table. Whenever Katt woke up, Patsy was there in the morning with his legs pulled up under his chin. He'd be smoking and drinking thin coffee while muttering meanly about something.
When Katt finally convinces herself that this is real, she's practically a grown up. By then Myko was on the scene and the two of them tore right through the background. This only made things worse for everyone. Reprisals and worry are like cardboard that's been stapled to a twisted up rag. It's left to stand at the edge of the living room where Myko throws chips and flaming darts at it. Katt is looking for her tail in the closet again, Milton can hear the rumble of salty boots being shifted from the right and then back to the left. "We can always call it, Mime Drunk or Bon’t Wait," Milton shouts from across the room. He's admitted to having second thoughts about tonight, about arriving for dinner in matching cat suits. "Isn't it a bit too obvious," he says, trying to poke the bottom?
"So you're a guru of inobviousness too," she asks right back? "Have you gone and lost what remains of that little hat of yours?"
"But to live a second time, to be needed once more. I have to get Montana's typewriter out of my head. Did you hear, he and Dallas are re-writing some of Capote's book. There's going to be a handsome photo on the front of it when they're through. They're calling it, I Think In Other Voices. Or was it, Mina Bird You're A Bird?"
When Katt finds her tail under the couch, she stretches her arms and laughs, "mina bird."
The shock of a system is easily seen in its administrator's eyes. The tools at the board, fingers searching for all the right buttons until some of the circuits finally make their leap. Completing themselves, the bank is built up on the highest hill. It's well above the water, looking down on the town and all of it's people. The bank sits there like a shiny predator, it's great door alternating between grossly dramatic yawns and the occasional display of bathing itself. Katt laughs again, telling Milton that she's too young before heading back to bed.
"Can't we talk about suicide," Milton follows her.
"Can we talk about our rent instead," Katt reaches around, unfastening the tail's metal clip from her ass.
On their way over, smokers and other agents had been gathering themselves into beige huddles. Some of them are in dark gowns lingering in the openings between streets. While many others hide their eyes from us. Some of these recite their own poems about gamblers and truants. Despite the walk being a short, we've left too early.
I smell the gin in Milton's pocket, it gives me the feels. I can feel the hand invisible cradling my inner nads whenever I smile at the thought of having these empty pockets emptied again, voulez vous?
"It's an understanding, there are dogs still. That's all," Milton is arguing about the volcanos that just appeared outside the city.
"Yes and there's a suitcase filled with them in the walkway. We've just passed it by. The walls are even forming a corner over there. Lumps of daub in its crease are like those grey teeth being swallowed by artifice meeting geometry around back of the stage. Still anything other, even a flat sheet can seem itself an apparition of Mary Todd in most of the dreams that we've yet to share."
That actor, the assassin with a secret bride and a playbill is resting in his lap. Murmuring, "Whose soul has stained this thought. Whose worries are an unforeseen taint in a box that's on a scaffold over a van that's filled up with refugees just waiting to dance?"
The park has filled with people that have spread out their blankets on the greensward. An irritant, something misty now wafts over the blank slate wall. All across the sward, bellowing engines and other failures are heard rolling and screaming from the wall's other side.
"There are most certainly dogs. There has to be enough for everyone to have a share."
"How can you think of food?"
"I am what I've seen rather than what Manet's prepared for me." Like sage, the orchestra is filing into the pit. An unseen someone takes a tumble as they pass the kettle drum. They're followed by a cows murmur and then a cold slap. Music can be divine, it's the first jump that can hurt.
There used to be four of us hanging around the driveway. A couple of us with our bikes but not the little ones. They have their plastic Big Wheels. Some of the older-older kids are in back where they've stripped to their underwear, the girls too. All of them are sunning on top of the folded up Coleman trailer. A little black radio plays Elton John and Disco Duck between the morning's car commercials. When it gets too hot we finally go inside.
Its right before the end of the world but our parents have already left. They went off to build more cars or take orders in the pharmacy downtown. Inside our neighbor's house has a shabby smell, it's like kid pee and cabbage circling the richly sentimental furnishings, so so much soothing brown. Her parents work on opposing shifts at a junkyard out past Potterville. One of them scraps cars during the day while the other one tallies its receipts at night. But there's always cereal and milk to eat from the funny little cups we find in the cupboard.
We sit around the table munching and talking about our bikes, so red and green with their long banana seats. We're going over to the woods this morning. We're going to build something with a hammer that one of us found. We're going to hang out behind the school and fish out the old text books from the dumpster. We'll burn them when we gather under the sand hill by the pine field. I have my dad's lighter in my pocket. Its metal feels cool and very adult against the skin of my kid leg.
I'm thinking about the picture we took in the spring. It’s the one where I'm trying to look like a gunslinger that I had seen a drawing of. Al Williamson would to draw the fastest cowboy comics until he stopped, dead and leaky in a pile of math. Eventually he invented toxic masculinity and then he became this powerful magician that drank himself to death. I remember that time, we spent it together well.
When I started to smoke cigarettes it was about 45 minutes after my commencement speech. The first pack I bought was from a gas station that I was passing by on my home from the High School. It was a really sweaty day for sure. 200 of us on a single football field, waving placards and waiting for a turn at the soup. All of us wading through those horrible speeches and the testimonials about honor and glory, such long work. My Uncle never even tried to coming, instead he tapped the keg early. Mom found him in the garage. He was asleep in a garden chair with a well-thumbed copy of Penthouse magazine in his lap.
Where goes the river, so goes the raft, am I right?
My friends and I stay up late getting drunk and listening to the Sex Pistols. Each of us is wearing our dirty cut offs with some kind of short sleeve something or other. Montana's has a crescent moon on it. The Mayor's daughter brings us some pot. Then at midnight we drive to the disco. Inside the girls line up in the bathroom, taking turns the pretend to do blow in the back stall. The rest of us are sit around the dance floor. We're a sloppy looking bunch.
When The Mission of Burma starts playing and some of us think it'll be real kooky to jump around. When they hear us, the girls tear out of the bathroom screaming. Bridges Burning bangs away like its something alien and all of us are too fucked up to realize this little city has already started chewing us up. When I get home the next morning Mom wants to talk about sex. She blames my father for everything when all she ever wanted was to be a fireman too.
Let's skip ahead, I bought this used Xbox at the mini mall by the train yard and then walked home in the sun. We don't have a TV, so I set up the projector in the basement where it's cool. Our couch is plastic cast into the shape of a couch's facsimile. There are cold sandwiches in the fridge upstairs and half a case of Old Style beside the couch. Bombshp has been empty for a couple of weeks.
The kid at the store didn't wipe the console's drive, so Portishead is still tucked away under its wing waiting to be listened to. I play all the games and sometimes get to bring the marbles too. When I come in early and sit beside the girl in front and we watch as the drummer sets up their kit. She has all of her tickets on the table and she knows how to drink. I guess you might say that I'm invested, that I'm mysterious or maybe I've been obscured by the patterns that lurk below the weather. By creating noise, loops of static and feedback that chew on our sense of purpose and collide with our resolve to complete the things we've started, dialogue is becoming a charnel harvest under a buck moon inside of a circle of elms. Information Theory, begging that the topography of any exchange as mapped by our economics be challenging a just world with its false narrative or even alternatively inserting some lawful tendencies back into it with the use of guile? Even the banks have to sing for their soup. I write about all of this and more in my many small books that I've assembled from the pages of menus and blue fliers for better car insurance.
Here's the poem that I'm stretching up in the rafters, "this proud ostrich, this plum scented manager of pasta and glue. You shall be Kool-Aid Drinker No.1 and your lines will feel like mottled bruises. You will throw candles at the wall and listen for quiet farts until you've turned the whole thing over. The pillow that supports your head will be white but the ashes that fill its sham are wet and they're mostly black. I remember hearing about your car, your face and the pleasant way that you would walk away. But then I also I remember the salad days with their clouds of shrimp linings and our own car parked out front." The shallow basement stage is like my frame and these jeans feel thick with my swollen body that's fighting to escape from them. The light in here is dim. Three faces are looking right at me from the table by the steps. They laugh out loud and inside, I die just a little bit.
The girl is also there. She's by the stairs, smoking with her left hand. All of her tickets are gone now. So she's crying but she's also laughing at me. So I feel discouraged and little angry. I just want to go home and practice sex all by myself in the dark.
When my poems are finished, I usually close the book and slide it back into my pocket. Instead I step down from the riser and cross the distance to the table where the three faces are sitting. I look at each one thoughtfully before asking if I can take their drink order. The first one to speak would like a tall glass of water and the next one asks for an ice cold chardonnay with a drinking straw. I laugh inwardly. The bar doesn't really have chardonnay, instead she'll get 7-Up mixed with Rose's Lime Juice and I'll have to apologize for that as well. I like to imagine this being a code. That once translated serves to mean something like, their smug fat faces should be so lucky to even afford the straw I'm about to bring them.
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