THE FAMILIAR AND THE UNFAMILIAR

It flew out of his nose some time during the morning to obscure the distinction between the familiar and the unfamiliar.  While rejecting the idea of a poem wiping his right nostril evoked the stickiness of frequent hard returns.  Frequent hard returns in the streets of the familiar and the unfamiliar.  Deuces run over by bicycles racing in pairs of young people talking to each other competitively.  It was in the cards and over the cards flattened by circumstantial evidence for patterns only confirmed by habits and easy erasures of the familiar.  Their conversations felt off the pages into whacked weeds of deceptive subjectivity.  Paragraphs stretched like pizza dough and metal trays burning typing fingers that would rather examine other ideas between the words.  Destiny was a ship that sank surprisingly close to the coast astonishingly in nice weather at the hands of a crew of cohesive and adhesive characteristics made for athletic repetitions and cleaner nasal passages and narrow excretory straits.  The Captain was said by no one that could be relied upon for accuracy and/or consensus of the and/or to obsess with hallucinations of powerpoint presentations appearing in mid-air on the bridge as he stuck out his tongue to the ocean.  Bulleted outlines of integrated models of circulatory malfunctions and geometric topology waned and wigged in front of his eyes.  This had everything to do with it as everyone was looking for answers and snacks to chew their nervousness into oblivion in the sweaty face of unnecessary mistakes condemned with interpretations by brains both wet and dry and in between and upside down and backwards topologically in a torpor holding its breath beneath the third sentence up above these knuckles of ours these hecklers of us these trustees of the teasing small tiny banter tiny banter bracketed and blithely cantoring on and across the alphabet's letter c to d denseness.  No foul smell yet has wrenched more hilarious gestures out of the rigid and professorial and elastic comedians fumbling for the end that never quite unplugs the morning alarm clock nothing more than a murderer of pillows that drift into damp grassy knolls and picnic blankets of familiar cookies soft with soft dreams that wink out of existence and memory until rekindled by an unavoidable physical injury at the office.  Physical texts pairing and paralleling nonsense for tropes encased like sausages and thieves ensnarled in air vents.  Blocked by the air conditioning breezing comfort to suffocating and desperate measured men who don't appreciate it for familiar and unfamiliar justifications ignored by viruses and and nose hairs adhering to the upper lip in a poor imitation of wrinkles maturing the excluded beyond their years of failure and traumas.  Got to get down there not where the ship is no one survived quite and uncannily without mention of the dictionary's explanations flapped in the wind.  Not where the bicycles have been buried but deeper and underneath that below the answers and be denied richer layers of decaying and better questions to puzzle those who attempt to whistle with shanks through their throats and thorns in their additions to the family welcomed home from rehabilitated expressions of inattention.  They are still going on and on and on and still on and on even more so on and stopped for a moment and then still on and on and on and on and wait yes on and on with their racket that cannot afford their paddles to get them to the other side of the lake due to their boats ending up aground too many dead bodies that suffered the heart attacks and relatives from out of town attacks and some cancer and some more cancer mixed with instances of immune deficiencies and environmentally poisoned factors not taken into account deliberately from the start halfway through the soup splashing onto the lap trembling with dissatisfaction and empty predictions in empty envelopes gutted by patterns normalized by formulas based on crooked lines painted in the streets familiar and unfamiliar.


- Max Stoltenberg