These nerves are voiceferous and restless, like a baby with Batman, a highball hangman, make them speak, red walls with dust, a sleeping woman, a YouTube chime in the head, celestial salad raining down from space. This world all nonsense, like the gravity of a rainbow, the yoga of a leprechaun, the salsa of Chen Chin Chong.

He feels plastic and numb. He feels as flat as a flatline. The interstellar heart like a champagne rowboat floating. He just realized that he no longer laughs. Does he even smile? For real? What does he feel? A perpetual boredom, a perpetual disinterest in life. The pharmacology of alteration. The pills keep us in line. Living life in short bursts, like fireflies in the grass, momentary blips of Hollywood, champagne bursting bubbles, rubble, glittering crackers. And why do we divine so much time to barely trying to survive? If we could just be what we wanted to be… Imagine the world. Instead, we wrap our wrecked minds around all the glittering nonsense, all the traps, all the worries, all the fucking battles with bread.

I fight to find purpose in my movements. I struggle to fill in the gaps between the numbers of the atomic clock. I ache to flow like the softest, unmuddied river. I wander like midnight in the gardens of Ankara. The tower bells toll. The smell of fertilizer comes from space, the air is wet, lights flicker, traffic groans out there on the great Interstate rolling west, rolling east, the great asphalt ribbon full of crazies and hipsters, and the dead, and the meek, the young ones rolling toward new life, the old ones rolling to final spaces and memories.

Sometimes I don’t even remember the days on which my parents died. Ah, this littered life, my constant motions, breathing but a tick, I’m a clock with a sock stuffed into the medusa obligate, like irate pyrite, irrational hawk men, desperate gold men, trapped in a Cripple Creek hotel room, dim and dark, gold and orange and green reflections on the streets, ghosts in the halls and I felt them there in that desperate getaway from death, the longitude all latitude, my drunken attitude, playing mechanical poker at the bar, alone, made her cry for the very first time on those streets of gray gold. The red brick buildings, the church on the hill with its faint stained-glass preaching pictures, and we drove in the night, and I made her cry under the mountain moon of blue.

END

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