toothy grins and nap time whispers

Lindsay drew a portrait of a child for me.

We were seven years old together,

sitting with crossed legs on colorful carpets.

Getting rough in gym class, in hopes you would understand.

In rows, in sneakers, filing into heavy double doors, and out of the sun together.

You still had running in your legs,

and I still had jokes to tell you.

I kept my playground pistol close,

holstered by the back of my waistband, 

a method i had seen practiced by men with guns in television shows.

We were given thirty minutes to rest on nylon cots.

but the two of us would be wide awake,

shooting toothy grins and nap time whispers in the dark.

A gentle compliment to loving dream worlds

“Talk back to me again”,

dares the monster that spoke with hands that crept through mud.

He marries dark dampness with a wife of cold storming.

And with this,

Children shake upwards through dreaming,

distrusting brand new visions,

reconstituting evil in those mirror-shaped eyes.

the sounds of no sound sleep

Minutes act as lazy couriers.

It seems like months since hours.

I need a friend to sleep right next to me.

I need a witness.

Do I snore?

a nifty salesman

toddlers like to play in sand and run from waves.

i am no different.

i set fires and put them out in hurried quickness.

i stay inside when mornings are cold.

stuck in stand offs. 

shaking shivers off.

i speak as if a nifty salesman.

i’ve got a silly face.

self assured.

breathing words.

i know just where you’ve been.

i sleep there most nights.

waking up is rare when sleep is never there.

television keeps me angry.

i’m so tired of being angry.

when i pull back the blinds on the window i’m drooling over the fresh air out there.

time is butchered.

i place my words carefully before they’re said,

but if i let them spill they scatter.

my floor is littered with the things.

frantic penning makes the carpet’s landscape.

it’s so nice to be alone here.

i am a human radiator spouting silly colors.

i am the devil.

and thats ok.

Saving an animal(fragmented recollection of a dream)

We were rescuing some sort of animal. 

it was black and white and had no fur on it. 

it was small so i could hold it easily in my arms. 

I struggled for a second to tie my shoes while cradling the thing.

There was snow all around us, and an ocean near by. 

It was a strange sensation, the salt of the sea, hanging on the cold arctic air. 

I forget who i was with. 

After all of our efforts, the thing escapes, this is the worst thing that could have happened. 

Its been spotted making its way over a series of neck breaking ridges, they rise and fall like statistics on a graph, marking the progress of an indecisive cancer patient. 

like a hero i can climb these things, taking almost no effort, but the animal is just so far, reaching the ocean now.

Before the actual ocean there is a cold, shallow sound. 

the animal is splashing in the water, making its way towards the deep. 

He looks at me, i tell him i can’t go in the water, i’m sorry, you’re going to have to go in after it.

i turn and backtrack to the level snow. 

i’m not the hero, not even in my dreams. 

moments later he returns with the animal in his arms, and i wonder if it really needed saving.

George's Window(an unfinished short story)

The sun beat down and crept through george’s window. 

The light painted heavy shadows on his bedroom wall. 

He woke with a heavy sigh and shot a glance to the pistol on his nightstand.

What he knew was that he was going to kill himself. It was a question of when and where.

With this he was at peace and felt contented. 

No more would he wake up to sobbing motors of cars, and the soft whimper of the mind numbing night before.

And he wouldn’t have to walk the long narrow hallway that points him towards the stairs that carry him to the front door and out.

Every member of his family had died or was fixing to die in far away houses.

They were all alone. They never spoke.

George’s job was killing him.

It was killing him faster and with more conviction  than any one of the bullets in his pistol would allow.

It was his fate at birth to die.

The job, and the useless quality of its nature:

He wakes at five. 

He makes a small breakfast of eggs and toast, taking good time to pop and drain yokes.

He rides his bike to the edge of town to a small wooden kiosk with the words fadedly emblazoned, 

“WELCOME TO WINDERMERE CREEK, A PLACE OF PEACEFUL LIVING”

He would sit and smoke cigarettes,

making note of every entry or exit of any persons. 

And in fifteen years of holding the job, 

George had just began to realize that every designated box on every designated sheet of paper had gone unmarked.

Bone white and dead empty.

What does he do on these pale mornings?

New sun beat down and crept through George’s window. 

He shot a glance to the pistol on his nightstand.

this is a poem

Dancing angels pass the sun,

Their silly souls ensnared.

Make homes in the soil,

take naps in the tall grass.

you toddlers with wings.

The empty church sings it’s own hymn,

an echo of it’s simple servant’s whimper. 

An empty church who’s only tenant pays rent from the outskirts of atmosphere. 

A chapel dances when it’s lonely.

Trapped souls can offer no obstacles;

this weathered wood can improvise.

Blue turns grey to purple,

and purple black.

Count the stars if you wish to know their numbers,

feel free to chase the ghost.

The memory of that light is just as so.

a poem entitled "open evil"

he woke up in a strange town.

the highway markers had altered.

route 46 had shape shifted.

his grandmother had been stoned; the centennial of a doomed generation had awakened self realized.

let us glance downwards,

let us cast judgement.

wake up jesus,

die slowly saviour.

the dirt so packed down;

we wait so patient.

the devil;

our god spoke:

let us refute our greatest pleasures. 

i want the answer.

i exist.

don’t pretend.

the long lonely isle.

the shadowed self denial. 

and yet we wait.

the plastic self so proclaimed.

evil is out in the open.

dead dogs

Dead dogs will raise their heads to catch a glimpse.

one morning i woke up and the sun was setting and i forgot to ask why.

the best days occur without question.

Oh No! Everything is perfect!

I like to throw mud into the ears of my friends,

i love the sound that it makes when it lands in an empty brain, releasing thought.

Puddles upon puddles of thought....

I tried to stop them but i just ended up smiling.

those small wooden soldiers looked delightful!

they peppered my horizon, silly boys.

one of them told me that he was going to kill a man.

and that he was so excited.

 

I ran like a mad man to the breaking waves of a beach, and i found that people were sitting there under umbrellas, drinking beer and making sandwiches. 

I asked a fat man with a bears belly to tell me what on earth he was doing.

“Oh umm-well if you’re looking for any kind of answer I’m sorry to say you’re a little too late and most definitely asking the wrong person.”

He knew of the militaristic adavances, and he relayed this to me while he stirred his drink. I was so furious with him. He was hogging sun and gulping at martinis and all i wanted to do was save him.

He was more than drunk when the dunes were shattered by steel toed boots. The festivities erupted in bloody fashion as Bullets we’re clouds of locusts that tore through beach balls and spilled intestines onto colored beach towels. I was  watching babies die. One soldier harpooned a beached whale that wore a tie, as he bled sheets onto the white sand he let go endless remorse; he would surely be late to work this morning. Soldiers were crying out and babbling, blood at the mouths, foaming, intoxicated with murderous glee.

After Sand had become ash, and the sea had no crystal quality, it was him and i standing; he with the belly. His martini glass had a bullet hole in it and he craned his neck under it to catch the spilling booze. It was then that i cut the bastards throat. But he didn’t die just then. to pass the time We shared a walk on the beach and planned world domination.