Convention

His wife looked at books on the shelf as I observed her in glances. Out of earshot, her husband--unshaven hair crawling down his neck and up his nose, talked about short skirts and warm weather. A pendant for a politician hung blinking dumbly around his neck. A blank individual with a German last name...a someone or a nobody; probably both.

Numb-Leg

The nurse, speaking like a newscaster about my infection. A scrape in the middle of the affected area is bubbling at the core with watery blood, the round edges caramelizing with coagulant.
She begins plying at the outer ring of the infection, like a block of otherness lodged in with living flesh. Using a small dental probe, she etches into the side of this block wedging it out--Her index and middle finger are the fulcrum.
"Can You feel it" She asks puzzled, with the apparent ease of a Nazi eugenicist who's simply curious--lifting out the dead block. The Parasites inside of the block of flesh had made their nexus in that part of my leg--I see the earwax yellow residue honey-combed and broken as the nurse lifts out the main portion--The moon white of my shin bone stands out. I still feel nothing to indicate that a chunk is missing from my leg, save for the disgust and a throbbing numbness.

Life v.2

Wipers wash water drops distorting vision, flattening it back out to consistancy. I arrive here, at my place of work.

A nun was shot through her large fast food wax-gilt cup. She didn't realize she'd been shot until I pointed out the gunshot wound.

cracking slowly through the carapice. Reality dripping and globbing, the colors swirling in tight coils like goopy oil paint sticking to itself.

Living the life---Contained in it is the code of the maintained life that shoots up through the human-being’s back like the spinal chord; and segmented just the same. The human animal—this is conventionally refers to an authors sense that this idea is somehow ironical, which it clearly isn’t—is the driving force for all human action, and interaction. Art is sex, art is bodily hunger art is nerve ending disturbances, and left-over dream-cake. Life is also—as all things left to themselves for a great long time—cluttered, an absolute mess of images, feelings and sparks of empty-train inspirations, waiting for you to board. Who’s conducting? Where’s it headed—why are there so few on board (besides this woman in a black hat, and the teenage-baseball-boy in the next compartment)? So much of life is rooted in the fear that the living life might be hurt or pulverized in the train. Spiders down a secret tunnel, crawling, biting, laying eggs on the forearm—infection, abscess, gangrene, amputation, sepsis, death.

I knew enough about the destination to know it was not likely dangerous to my life. One can often see the habitable, nesting inertia of the longer life necessitates the hammer- smash of little jaunts such as this. I drink cranberry juice; the sun doesn't set as the aircraft travels with the day across the ocean--so I pretend, looking through the glass, and the warped fellow travelers, bloated male-flight-attendant, Sky-Mall Magazine Text--blazing red like auxiliary power on a submarine. Cleaning my fingernails. My shoes are uncomfortable. The man sitting next to me asked if I work for a famous IT company; I don't.

Everson

I Wrote This a While Ago:

The death of Everson was expected. His father died the same way. Sleepless nights and half conscious days, he drifted along until his death caught up with him—nothing dramatic. He was standing on a dirty side street, with Coke cans and cigarette butts choking up the sewer drains. Greasy uneven bricks surrounded him, and the recesses of the broken tenement house windows made him feel like he was in a soggy bird-cage. An immigrant boy sat on a green knoll behind a waist-high chain-link fence in front of one such house. With his drippy nose and scant clothing, the boy was like a fixture—more like the bricks than like me Everson thought. As he admired the boy’s head with its crew cut and sanguine unknowing expression, Everson began to die. The pain itself was not all that great. It was rather like feeling his body go to sleep—like a creeping nothingness. The pop which could have rendered him unconscious, instead greatly distorted his sight. The boys head blew up like some repugnant circus balloon. Confusion at this sight together with a diminished sense of equilibrium caused him to crash instinctively to the ground whaling like a stabbed animal. The man tried abortively to escape his confusion, as if waking up from all nightmares was practice for this moment. Slipping into his coma, he began to give up and make peace with the nothingness, as all dying things must do—in this regard Everson was certainly a pragmatist: if going with the flow meant less pain for him, then why fight it?
Everson was not an important man. His life was middling

Ice Water

Everything depends so very much on ones state of mind. Even a belch can be sensuous to observe, whilst in the midst of undulating gentle pleasure-pangs of a tired afternoon bowel movement. This goes for gum chewing, and apple biting as well. Sometimes it is a natural bodily function which delivers one to the happy role of defenseless observer--alternately one could have finished ones own lunch, only to be completely drawn-in by a classmate girl's periodic, coquettish little sips from a soda can. The variables of these moments, these human vantages, are infinite, but there is some structure which is important to note--1) The human warmth 2) Digestion 3) Pheromones 4) Mono no aware. The fifth idea, that of vulnerability is never more important than during these reveries, for one could be swept up by a broom, shot by an intruder. The feeling is rather like what one imagines is felt by the struggling anaconda after it has eaten a puma or a jackass, laboring in a grassy estuary hoping not to be caught hiding with its secret digestion, its secret pleasure locked in its head and in its gut, utterly cognisant of the impossibility of escape from those who might seek it out to slit its guts and release its pleasure---either way this prize cannot be held onto forever.

There is a special sound as I sit here in the study with the window opened near. Resonance--a sort of buzz-ring, created by distant cars with their spinning tires, overnight road construction projects, the amalgam of AC fans, late night baseball game skylight generators, 757 aircraft engines---All cutting into the air, slicing it, crushing it, pushing it, sending it retreating in all directions in effeminate clearish purple curly-locks of turbulent micro eddies cracking and whipping, crying, complaining. The battle is far off, sound pillowed-over by distance and obstructions, brown-painted fences, generic aluminum siding, awkward children at play in roller skates on the road slowing traffic, sometimes nearly dying, for games.

Practice. We started giving names to each tooth. One was a porcelain dental implant so was it's neighbor. We like not to think of the screws and cement bonding them to our maxiofacial bones, and for now at least, gum tissue does the job of disguising the complex, sharp, alien infrastructure. One interesting phenomena concerning these teeth is that since they bond directly to the bone, there is no give. A normal tooth can sway 1/4 of one millimeter in either direction without causing the least discomfort-these teeth are hemmed in by a feeling of tautness--they are pulled in and tied neatly then cushioned by bone meat. Normal teeth can also 'feel' the rough surface of the tongue running over them, glazing and cleaning them. The porcelain teeth can jostle against their screw anchor, but the anchor itself is completely stationary--this feeling of inescapable stillness combined with the general bulging shape of the artificial tooth along its rear (as they're designed to prevent the introduction of foreign particles into the makeshift gum-sockets) leave the sensation of a blankness, a vaccuum; the small death-penalty: Two gravestones. In short these porcelain teeth felt like death; Immutable and unnatural. Rocks around which there swirl the liquid complaisancy of life spreading around them--life made to adapt, to swell and create new, albiet auxilliary, models for subsistance.

There is a restaurant where the cows come before you, just like lobster in the tanks, before they are sloughtered for your dinner. The cow is lead before you by the tall French chef's-attendant. You see your soon-to-be dinner as it lives--A lazy dumb, fat, drooling, terrified--simply delicious creature. The walkway is a clean steal one. The tables are situated around the walkway as if this were a fashion show. This is not so different from a fashion show. The lights are all pink red, and the floors, square pillars and ceilings are black. The design is clearly meant to echo and inspire in one the creuel machinations of the sloughterhouse, though tasefully softened by the eleganty festooned company and the perfessional slim-fit service, the lightglobes, the did-up faces all turning and eyeing the prey; hands shuffling between smoke, heads bobbing in silence then variously instigating muffled constipated little bouts of excited discussion. The cow ambles by and turns at the end in a half-moon. Anus showing behind tail, urine dripping. This thing is alive and is slowly, calmly (calmer now) lead back to its death-room--each shadow dances in and out of pink globe light, a spotlight for each conspirator taking turns to sign up--eyes turning (and cow eyes turning) shooting around aiming for others' enlistment, seeking the collective approval--the carnivalesque courtliness of the Killing. It's screaming.