Chinese Whispers

I fire through the door like tired dynamite at two in the morning.  The cat is already howling.  She meow speaks in high pitches and peeks into the outdoors, probably to check for something to chase or chew.  I tell her in human speak that if she escaped, she’d be dead within a week.

I shed my coat and greasy shoes.  The cat motes around my silent body, making an absurd amount of beg noise.  I set the six pack down at the base of the stairs, flick on a dim light and cadaver-walk to the refrigerator.  The beer is there now.

The cat is screaming at her floor dish.  The floor dish is silently cupping several pebbles of cat cereal.  I mound another handful in and watch the pieces crack like tiny cocoons in her teeth.  I swab my mouth with my tongue and it still tastes like deep fried kitchen residue.  I beer myself.

Meows keep pouncing out of her and I release a lot of sighing prisoners from my lung jails.  She wants a massage.  My body aches from labor lifting.  Why should the cat get a massage.  It lays down all day like a flesh statue.  Another empty beer bottle clanks on the countertop after my lips finish making out with its neck hole.

I wobble over to the cat as she collapses on the floor, already purring.  I knead her furred body like it is lifeless dough.  I am not delicate.  I am at the threshold of breaking her insides.  My shadow overtakes hers as I kneel above her, her entire body like a mass of rapture meat, her paws flexing outward as if to embrace me and whisper secrets about the universe into my stone head.

A Coming of Age Story

I couldn’t get rid of the cops.  I slipped through narrow cracks in the traffic and screeched around every turn, but they were still tailing me in the rear view.  Something wasn’t right.  I fingered the surface of the mirror and felt a slight ridge outlining each car, so I started picking at them with my nails.  One by one, I peeled them off and flung them out the window like chewed and flavorless gum.  That’s when I realized there was probably a lot of money in the business of robbing banks.

The Second Date

As a general rule, I refrain from calling until one week after the first date.  However, the situation was dire, so I called her up.

Cheryl?
Yes it’s me.
Cheryl, I left my winter cap in your apartment.
Oh yes, I noticed that.
I need the hat, Cheryl, so I’m coming over to get it.
I’m not home right now.
I’ll smash through the front door with an axe.  I’ll pay for it later.
I’d rather you didn’t.
Okay but I must have the hat, so I’m going to throw a brick through your window and use some climbing gear to get up there.  Don’t worry, I’ll make all necessary repairs.
Please don’t do that.  I know how much the hat means to you, but just wait until I get home.
You mustn’t separate me from my hat for this long, Cheryl.
Don’t panic.  It will only be another hour or so before I get home.  Can you be at my place at 8:30pm?
I’ll be waiting for you.  I can’t promise that I won’t already have entered.  You understand.
Yes, I understand, but please try to remain calm and think pleasant thoughts.  I can’t have you breaking in whenever you please.
Whatever, Cheryl.

I hung up the phone, already on my way out the door.

As a general rule, I tend to show up ten minutes early to any of my appointments, business or social.  In this case, though, the desperation was so strong that I could feel it goading my veins.  It was impossible to resist.

I sped over to her apartment, and blasted off the doorknob with the shotgun I stole on my way over.  I examined her couch for the hat, where I expected to find it, but only saw an empty couch.  I tore through her laundry drawers and closet, targeting especially the locations she showed me where she kept her hats.  I found nothing but insignificant hats – hats that only cared about themselves.

After I urinated in her bathtub on accident, I paused in front of her bathroom mirror.  My head looked like a landfill hill of rotting garbage.  Without my hat, I was nothing.  I was just some cauldron of boiling oil used for cooking, soon to be discarded.  I blew the shotgun at the mirror and the pieces fell like freezing rain to the tile floor.  I was overwhelmed with immobility, and I lay on the cold bathroom rug.

Just then, Cheryl entered.  She was wearing my hat, and it made her look radiant.  I felt a stinging in my veins again.

My hat?
How dare you break in here like some kind of contemptible burglar!
Cheryl, my hat.
Since when do you have a shotgun?  You clearly have debilitating psychological problems, and I don’t want to see you anymore.
I am paralyzed with joy, Cheryl.  The hat.
Get out!  I will bill you later for a new door and mirror.  I should make you reorganize my chest of drawers and closet, but I’m too angry at you.
I will never leave you.

I could feel the features on my face lifting like dirty sandbags tied to a hot air balloon.

Disregard all of my former attitudes and behaviors; I have seen something glorious.
GET OUT.  GET OUT.  GET OUT.
But Cheryl…

How Much I Hate the Yahoo! Toolbar

I would rather be fed grapes by supermodels, then make love to each one of them individually, the supermodels, not the grapes, than install the Yahoo! Toolbar.  That’s how much I hate the Yahoo! Toolbar.

Vomit Sonnet

I hear the cat vomit outside my door in the night
I enter the hallway from my room, barefoot
I can see nothing but dim pools of moonlight
My feet poke the carpet like they’re trying to wake it up

People probably aren’t happy when they look it
There’s a lot of faking it to keep from being disruptive
I want to trust everyone
But I am trusting no one

Every footstep is an experiment in moving forward
If I should not bury myself in closed doors
I’ll be forced to march through a minefield

The cat sleeps easy on a carpet of its own hair
It is smug like a motionless cloud eclipsing the moon
Not feeling shame or really anything

Hubba Hubba Proselyte

I want to grab you by the shoulders
and convert you to the church of
garment removal, which is not a church
but a method by which I might convince you
to willfully remove your garments.

Clearly, nobody was made for anybody
but the fateless geometry of your face
is reminding me that we only have so much time
to waste, and I waste so much goddamn time
when your torso comes to life, fluently.

A world occupied by indifferent objects
should not be forced to share our horrible
emotions, and oh my god you are infinitely better
in real life than in pictures, so stop doing anything
but folding your hands into my church.

That Special Someone

I don’t want to date a pretty face or great tits.  I want to date a girl who will yell at me.  I want her to tell me I am a horrible person and smash glass bottles on my head.  She should threaten to leave me every step of the way, and should say things to me like “you are an asshole” and “I am a bad person for spending time with you.”  I want to date someone who will get me out of bed every morning, aggressively, and tell me to stop whining like a little child with a spider bite.  When I ask her if we can hold hands in public, she should use my hand to hit me in the stomach.  For my birthday, she should give me an already open bag of rice, and among the rice, she should mix in dead spiders.  If I ever tell her I love her, her response should be “you are ugly and I am leaving town for two weeks.”  Her pupils should look like canons.  Also, what I said about a pretty face and great tits; she should have that stuff too.

Steady

Drinking water is a
lot like breathing air.
That’s it.

The Outermost Forest

I.

There was an event, with pretty faces shining
and it was all within a moment.  The event
happened under a chandelier of white light
and the white light was in their eyes.  It was in their teeth
and their teeth were a lot like their eyes in that moment.
They were the kind of teeth and eyes that are worth
touching but not holding on to.

II.

Oh look.  There is a pile of feces.
I enjoy it as an object that obviously is
meaningless and isolated.  Why don’t you
sniff it.  Okay.  Maybe I will.  I mean,
I haven’t been depressed in a while.
This could be just what the doctor ordered.
Yep.  That smells pretty
horrible, just as I expected.  The doctor is unkind
although I think he has my best interests in mind.

III.

There are many red lights
alone in the woods.
I am moving toward them.
I have been afraid of them
for a very long time.

IV.

One campfire is clearly bigger than the other
but that is beside the point.
The point is that one campfire is
patiently hotter than the other.

V.

How come you don’t understand what I’m telling you?
I’m telling you right now what I have been through
but you are not listening, and I think you are ignoring me
because you have been afraid like I have been.
That is a mistake.
You are faking many things.

VI.

Listen to me, even though I am saying nothing.
You must try to listen and understand
that I am saying so much.  I know
this whole thing is forced and dishonest
but that’s exactly it.  That’s where it sets up tent.
That’s where the fox burrows in the cold cold snow
knowing the cold cold words cannot
possibly live up to the actual snow
which is cold, and cold again.

Not Even Baby Talk

My grandma’s cat is pretty stupid.  It plays with pen caps like some kind of mindless idiot.  It pretends the caps are its children or something, because it gets really loud and makes whiny mom noises.  It paws at them for hours and looks down at them like it’s saying, “I won’t ever let anyone hurt you.”  It won’t shut up about those caps.

Whenever you walk close to the kitchen drawer where the pens are kept, the cat goes buck wild, jumping all over the place and everything.  She makes this noise like a cat version of howling.  She can’t even control herself.

All her racket really gets to you, so you give her a pen cap, and then she’s off to making those weird mom noises.  It’s fascinating at first because of all the noise and the flipping out, but then you can’t talk to it about why it does that stuff, so what’s the point in being fascinated?

The thing that ends up being fascinating is that people try to ask the cat why it does what it does with the caps.  I ask my grandma why she keeps talking to the cat, but all she says is that the cat is fascinating.  I tell her I don’t think it’s that fascinating, and she tells me I would if I didn’t think about it so much.  But then I’m thinking, thinking is what causes fascination, so I don’t even know what she’s talking about.

I walk into the kitchen, and the cat gets all crazy when I walk by the pen drawer, and all I can think is that my grandma thinks the cat is a person.  That’s got to be it.  Why else would she talk to it, unless she’s really just talking to herself?