Sunday, February 24, 2013

SOWN INTO THE BODILY FUNCTION PARADIGM

Forced laughs and heartburn chalking it up to a grid of hopscotch washed away by a downpour sniffing each other's cracks in each other's arguments behind each other's backs to the beginning to the beginning to the beginning that can't be found at least not in the least bit concerned they don't seem to be as concerned as they used others until their makeup ends up ending up on their empty pizza boxes thrown away with what they regurgitated until blue in the face red in the eyes brown in the rear and purple in the private interest more invasive with every opening.

Just for openers while waiting to be terminated.

Zipping up under the chin of the flesh puncturing hose stopping for a bite to surf through channels wedging themselves between two places swept out of memory with each breast stroke.  Letting down another tip here's another tip letting down another tip here's another tip for another sap letting down somewhere in the branch another branch grown letting down another tip here's another tip letting down another tip here's another tip for another sap letting down somewhere in the branch another branch grafted in letting down another tip here's another tip for another sap letting down somewhere in the branch another branch cut off letting down into the dirt by the trunk its roots pushing and pulling where to walk away where to stumble closer letting down into the dirt cut off branches letting down another tip here's another tip letting down another tip here's another tip for another sap letting down somewhere in the looking up at the letting down the letting down of holes between branches letting down breaking up the immense hole of the sky into tinier holes letting down broken up into cells each with its corner for letting down the waste of gaps and holes.

Tuberculosis on the other side of the door there is a knocking on the inside of this frame that doesn't match the landscape of thoughts that can't take a hint tuberculosis on the other side of the door there is a knocking on the inside of this frame that doesn't go well with the landscape of thoughts that can't take a hint pounding pounding headache cracked into odd pieces with an incongruent chisel.  Sheets torn open with public confessions and private parts let the cat out of the bag and into the backseat speeding to the arena showing up before the bell rings tuberculosis on the other side of the door there is a knocking on the side of this frame that doesn't match the landscape of thoughts.

Coined terms have spilled out and roll downhill gathering no use for drinking songs voided onto the discolored sidewalk as coined terms fall off the curb into the gutter.  It was at this juncture at this intrusion upon the last round the last next to last stream of not letting his worm the subordinated underling devote his attention to things diamond and kite-shaped (as well as canine-shaped not so much as in the dog but as in the tooth) and draw hardly an infinitesimal bit of his effort of cognition toward the drenching of his trousers with piss.

"Wet yourself again, sir," said Expectorant looking away as the legs in the soaked pants followed the choreography of a fallen alarm clock messing about the ground pathetically insisting on continuing to collide with the Earth unimpressed with its meteoric and anti-climactic descent.

"Sire," corrected Haphazard managing rather chaotically to reach a position of sitting up on the street corner and in an attempt to look regal or sage-like he placed his hands on his knees and feeling the urine in the material cleared his throat.  

"I apologize Your Magisterial Seepage," answered Expectorant, "my forgetfulness is held in place within my constricted nostrils in the presence of your silent but deadly e."

"Perhaps it would be better for me if I made all your words silent and bathed myself in quiet," Haphazard said.

"I eagerly await your return to the waters of a bath but who am I to hope?  And don't trouble your benevolent self to answer that question.  They are all still here in here," Expectorant said tapping the side of his head and picking at his finger after it had come in contact with his hair.  Continuing he mentioned, "All those hallways and rooms I tried to fill with my anger when others tuned me out all those steps I ascended and descended forcing all the shit I was supposed to give about anything to settle in the bottom of every muscle until the only remaining field of interest left to me was the septic one," said Expectorant.

"Hallways of a thickening darkness due to a lack of windows, a preponderance of windowless walls, or a dying Sun make my stately brainpan itch beneath my fastigium," remarked Haphazard.

"Your fastigium was blown off in a strong dry wind.  Are you sure it's not your scalp eczema?" said Expectorant.

"You retrieved it for me like a penitent mutt," exclaimed Haphazard.

"It was you who in the end placed it back upon your moldering brow when I assisted you in finding the express lane to go fuck yourself," said Expectorant.

"Then where is it now?" asked Haphazard.

"I don't know exactly, but it disappeared into that traffic you threw it into during one of your histrionic and tiresome anecdotes," said Expectorant beginning to see images of cars, trucks, tires, headlights, and something resembling treasure and a mine-shaft cave-in."

"Histrionic and tiresome anecdotes, yes, I was planning on proceeding with one until you opened your disgusting well of a yap.  I ought to wire it shut.  There's enough barbed wire about.  Of course, I would command you to do it yourself.  Ah, traffic.  It used to line up in my honor for miles.  I would wave to them and their faces registered a hearty laughter behind glass windshields increasingly obscured ever so a testimony to the changing variety of what would tend to fall from the sky.  The only occasions I could see faces was when they opened up so they could toss their gifts to me.  Their humble intentions was only marred by their poor aim.  My person, I suppose, was willing to be a banquet table for their recently purchased groceries since my halls were blanketed in the fogs of my many campaigns.  Hallways of thickening dark was where I began," said Haphazard.

"Until I interrupted you with a question my leech," interrupted Expectorant.

"Not a question you fool.  'Twas a limerick or other and you still need to work on your articulation," said Haphazard wringing the cuff of his left trouser leg to squeeze out some excess piss only to discover that he succeeded in cracking off some crust of some kind.  Haphazard kicked at Expectorant and said, "Now get on with it."

"Get on with what?" asked Expectorant.

"Get on with your limerick you mucus membrane," spluttered Haphazard.

"I'd rather you just try to start again and I can keep interrupting you my leash," said Expectorant.

"Come on you essence of what's underneath the refrigerator, I'll even feed you some of my own lines I've been working on since your production malfunctions have only become worse of late," said Haphazard.

"Don't let your criticism be biased by my most recent stretchers," insisted Expectorant.

"They never made it quite above a couple of notches below utter failure," said Haphazard.

"I was suffering from strokes on each occasion, O Hollow One," said Expectorant.

"And yet here you are still at my beckon call to receive my words as my own generosity to aid you in your time of waning adeptness at limerick-making. Now do try to summon what flickering spark remains within you to pay some feeble attention as I feed you the lines," announced Haphazard.


"The only lines you feed me are your insufferable sentences and the strings of snot from your nostrils," muttered Expectorant.

Haphazard recited the following,

"There once was a king on the lam
No one denied that he was a sham
The winds blew him this way
And the winds blew him that way
And all he could blow was a ram."

"And this is an excerpt from your upcoming oral memoir?" inquired Expectorant.

"No, someone else's.  A fair lady spoke it to me when I happened upon her in a forest," said Haphazard.

"I know you're old and decrepit, but certainly not old enough for forests.  Are you sure you didn't pull this out of one of your nightmares or demented states when stumbling into a patch of weeds?" asked Expectorant.

"Your attention deficit is legend.  Perhaps I overestimated your threshold for side quests," said Haphazard.

"My day is made out of side quests," said Expectorant.

"That's because you waste so much time with your commentary instead of just taking my words as they are," said Haphazard.

"You would rather I focus on what gunk is spit from your mouth than all the things you have broken?" said Expectorant.

"You don't appreciate how hard it is to find things to break," said Haphazard, "parts need to be made smaller.  Threatening lumps of sugar and asteroids need to be chunked down.  Don't want any cataclysms scaring you half to death."

Expectorant replied, "Why stop at half to death?  Oh, that's right, you have to live longer in order to have regrets."

"Want to know what else the fair lady said to me?" asked Haphazard.

"When would you have had any contact with anyone else?" Expectorant asked.

"I wander off when you are not aware of it," said Haphazard, "she spoke of her last love affair and the shapes she would imagine in the smoke of his pipe and then entertain him with stories of animals piloting spaceships fueled by their recycled bodily discharges as they searched for another planet to colonize in the far back section of their galaxy that they have been told by their latest chatter show guests is inhabited by those who walk around with their hands in their pockets a species consisting entirely of non-functioning males.  To smoke a pipe like I once did and watch the smoke wrap its way through the top of a hedge.  I could tuck myself in a corner of a hedge and envy the smoke that would fade away."

"I wish you would wander off for real.  Women will be better off the less contact they have with us.  Until then I am condemned to a universe doomed to run parallel to oblivion and never meet it none too soon," said Expectorant.

"Don't be impertinent.  Nothing is stopping you from following me," said Haphazard.

"It must be where I started off.  I began with wonder and then I remember every once in a long while to do it again and it only seems to stir up a sense of wondering when I'll be sick and tired enough to stop accepting your promises of us eventually finding a better place," said Expectorant.

"Would you like to see me levitate?" asked Haphazard.

"You mean stand up?" clarified Expectorant.

"What is the purpose behind your name?" inquired Haphazard.

"You mean besides loosening a congestive build-up?" asked Expectorant.

"No, what device does it serve for those who who ..." asked Haphazard.

"For those who what?" asked Expectorant.

"For those for those who might encounter our words?" asked Haphazard.

"Encounter our words?  Unhinged is what we are unhinged since we encountered that so-called invisible point in our lives you and me you and me both.  We sat at a desk in a row of boxes and that was when they documented.  After we were asked to leave that was when the documenting stopped once we became unhinged," said Expectorant.

"So, you don't think we'll ever be remembered or we're even being watched?" asked Haphazard.

Expectorant replied, "Only if you drop dead before me.  Although I dream of it being the other way around."

"Why don't you think we're being observed?" asked Haphazard.

"Observed?  Are you kidding?  Don't you see the blinds being drawn shut in the windows that aren't covered up yet?  And most of the homes still standing have the telltale signs of boards and the barbed wire.  Observed.  Gave up my observing long ago when growing up and it was every night at dinner observed my mother rocking from side to side in her chair at the table.  The oldest chair she said was passed down to her from her great-great-grandmother and I always thought she was comforting herself in it.  Until one night when the power went out and in the dark I bumped into the chair and sat in it.  It seemed to swing my entire body as if out over the edge of some primordial chasm.  I tried to escape its instability and ended up smashing into the dining room wall.  With the ruckus I caused one would have thought someone in the dark would have voiced some concern, but their voices remained silent until they started cursing at each other in their growing frustration at not being able to find any flashlights with working batteries.  And I returned to it," said Expectorant.

"Returned to what?" asked Haphazard.

"Returned to the chair.  I returned to it because it was the light.  I knew the light was going to come back on at any moment and I needed to get used to sitting on that chair in the darkness even though it felt like it was about to give way I was just going to have to get used to it," said Expectorant.

"Be honest with me, am I turning into a zombie?" asked Haphazard.

"A zombie?" asked Expectorant.

"I am a creature of habit you must concede that," said Haphazard.

"If you put it in that fashion . . ." wavered Expectorant.

"Well?  Am I zombie or not?" asked Haphazard in his demanding tone.

"You might find the monotonous rhythm of your mechanical walking through the stench of washes and abandoned towns and yet another expanse of wasteland hard to snap out of but all you have to do is turn around and find me there right behind with the same mechanical walking.  I don't know.  Why are you asking me?  I think the actual zombies are in the houses untouched watching the colored lights flashing inside that can be seen through their windows until they draw the blinds shut," said Expectorant.

"And that's the extent of your explanation for why you still think we are not being observed?" asked Haphazard.

"You talk as if we're in some kind of medium," said Expectorant.

"Aren't we?  When I think I might be turning into a zombie I feel not quite myself and unreal as though in a medium of some kind as you say unhinged by someone else for someone else," said Haphazard.

"The medium we find ourselves in is a solution of air.  It's supposed to be good for our brains, but by the time we've managed bailing out the last bucket of air from our lungs the maggot of life has eaten deep enough into the center of our skulls to send us going around in circles wrapping our yarns around one of the few testicles to seed in the cosmos," said Expectorant.

"Very good.  Now find yourself a pile of filth to bed in for the night and I will call for you at dawn, jester," said Haphazard.

Expectorant asked, "And what would you like me to begin your tomorrow with my sovereign rash?"

Haphazard replied, "The zombie who thought he was a king."

"Never heard of it," said Expectorant, "but I'm sure I'll be able to go from there."

Haphazard yawned, "I'm sure you will."

Just for openers while waiting to be terminated.

Zipping up under the chin of the flesh puncturing hose stopping for a bite to surf through channels wedging themselves between two places swept out of memory with each breast stroke.  Letting down another tip here's another tip letting down another tip here's another tip for another sap letting down somewhere in the branch another branch grown letting down another tip here's another tip letting down another tip here's another tip for another sap letting down somewhere in the branch another branch grafted in letting down another tip here's another tip for another sap letting down somewhere in the branch another branch cut off letting down into the dirt by the trunk its roots pushing and pulling where to walk away where to stumble closer letting down into the dirt cut off branches letting down another tip here's another tip letting down another tip here's another tip for another sap letting down somewhere in the looking up at the letting down the letting down of holes between branches letting down breaking up the immense hole of the sky into tinier holes letting down broken up into cells each with its corner for letting down the waste of gaps and holes.


- Max Stoltenberg



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