House star fiddling soap emperor cascades down mountain flora searching for a pink heart with someone in it. There’s a black box with insert points, cookies on a chipped plate sitting on a table by a window with paisley curtains. The breeze coming through flops them around like wild flags. “They’ll get cold,” I say. “They’re already cold,” the baker says.
There must be some kind of an electric arrow stuck in my brain. I’m not thinking right today. It’s a blank black chalkboard and I am forcing the white stick. I hate it when that happens. It’s either a blank slate or overwhelming thoughts scrambled like eggs. Either way, it’s hard to put anything sensible and cohesive together. Writing that is. It’s all I do and when I can’t, I get uptight. Wound up. Irritable. I just want to bleed easily.
I decipher the angst of the world, glyphs sketched on the stalks as I make my way through the cornfield. A green maze that smells like earth, looming tall. Revenant soldiers are haunting hallways as I scrawl, crawl through time and space. The world is windowless. The wind lathered by a storm. The sky above turns gray, the stalks begin to sway. Bruises erupt up above, dark Goliaths flexing power, instilling fear. A tornadic maelstrom has come to change the day.
And it feels good to be cold in this bed at 1:35 in the afternoon on a Sunday. No one knows the true depth of my heart—this gray day. The rain lingers, the clouds linger, like annoying guests at a birthday party in a back yard on a Saturday. They ate all the fried chicken and drank most of the beer. Annoying people leave a bad taste in my soul.
Back to being cold… Like a refrigerator.
A bent crow over a winter forest. The trees are bare of all they wear. Now but black limbs, thick and thin. Directionless, wayward, reaching to the sky. They break up the vision so as not to be just one great plate of white on the horizon and up.
The crow cries out. A belfry of loneliness. A quiet crunching of a walk in the woods. No sun today. That makes me a sad star.
Long John donuts are a type of yeast-risen pastry that is shaped like a bar and can be glazed or topped with icing. They may also be filled with custard or cream and are known by various names in different regions, such as cream sticks or maple bars.
He emits a series of beeps and then rolls away
And like I was saying
I was lying right next to a maple Long John
And I had white icing for a blanket
And my mattress was a piece of white wax paper atop a yellow plastic tray
I had no pillow
I turned to the maple Long John beside me and whispered
“Hey, what happens if someone buys me?”
He turned and looked at me like I was stupid
“You’ll get eaten. Boy, are you a big goofball. How could you not know that?”
“But I don’t want to be eaten.”
“What if it was a hot woman who bought you?”
“What difference would that make?”
“Boy, are you dumb.”
Just then a hand gloved in plastic reached into the case and grabbed the maple Long John
I looked up and I saw a woman smiling and pointing and saying:
“And one of those and one of those…”
Just before the maple Long John was put into a white bag, he waved and called out. “Look at her. Hotsy Totsy. Think about it!”
And then he was swallowed up by the paper bag
The bakery woman slid the case shut
I didn’t get picked
I panicked
What if I never get picked?
What will my fate be then?
The garbage?
Surely not
Some delicate person with a sweet tooth won’t let me go to waste
I’ll still be eaten
I wake up from that crazy dream
It’s a brooding gray outside
The sky is the color of cement
Rain is coming down steadily
The house is quiet
Fans are whirring
It’s an adrenaline shot of present-moment reality
But I just sit and wonder
What is a dream?
How can the mind formulate such oddities?
Places I’ve never been to, dimensions unseen
Memories mixed with time and space
Someone should come up with a device
A piece of technology that records dreams and plays them back
It would be fascinating if I could sit down and watch my own dreams like a movie
I watched a show about aliens last night
And there is a professor from Montana who really believes that all these aliens and UFOs that people are seeing are really human beings from the distant future time-traveling back. They’re us. It make sense in some ways. I’d like to be a xenoarchaeologist.
If one were to really think about it, humans do have physical characteristics of aliens, or vice versa. It’s not a stretch to see what we’re going to look like down the road. That is if we survive. But we must survive if we are coming back from the future to stop ourselves from destroying ourselves. It’s all hope and puzzlement at this point.
CEREAL AFTER SEX 