Thursday, February 26, 2015

LATE EARLY LATE

Late in the night early in the morning darkness blankets it all for the coffin of ideas snoozing and coughing back awake not quite but late for breakfast and more hot grease in your veins ear lobes raised to the ceiling where they smash into blocked eavesdropping all the floor you plummet to in desperate anguished flossing that snaps the strings attached to every word you stir in the bowl that won't flush you won't flush to keep the ground from getting shit on oh wait like that hasn't happened before overflowing toilets happen brimming with excitement that kind that makes you declare, "Oh, shit!" to an audience packed into your musings your lips are moving ever so still but if you listen carefully or in case you missed just in case you missed it the echoing in the bathroom is you coming out of one hole or another in your body sprung a leak your father did into your mother who sprung a leak and here you are draining away into a bowl that's overflowing and leaking into the bedroom where you have to wait for it to maintain some sense of not being so wet and not smelling too bad before going to sleep and then you sprain your neck looking up at the clock that reminds you how late in the night early in the morning darkness blankets it all for the coffin of ideas.


- Max Stoltenberg

Tuesday, February 24, 2015

DISHWASHER EPISTLES

In the back was where they still sat as the time clock conveyed them from town and from out of town in the back was where they still sat as the time clock conveyed them as they sat on their objections thumbs plugging up their bitterness their murkier chambers for inconsolable arrhythmia thumbs up jammed in the direction of the betrayed secrets of the disheartened. The autosave is fucked up and another crash strains tongues through cuffs of shattered glass. Normally wouldn't mind when waking from forgotten dreams dissolved in the acid of thoughtlessness another headache slept on the left slept on the right didn't matter again the ibuprofen isn't where it's supposed to be it suppositions of nauseous setting of the Sun. Brought this on ourselves did we trapdoor clerks spilling out the bottom of the building's ass.

"What is that beeping?"
"The fries are burning?"
"We are the fries. Is someone's hard drive broken?"
"Did the administrator forget she left a call on hold?"

Graphic calendars you think you're going to tell me what you think we went out we went back in and we're stuck hearing about the day and what it could be somewhere else and it doesn't matter because we're stuck inside hearing the same things over and over again and there was standing on tables and crawling under pews sliding along the floor pulling ourselves up to that spot that very spot where we stand and get stuck where graphic calendars fall from the balcony poured down by the overweight dissatisfaction of doing what you resent and there is absolutely no way out of it and the gory positive attitude's blade is turning in our backs holding us in place graphic calendars you think you're going to tell me tell us all what you think what we think out we went back in and we're stuck hearing about the day and what it could be somewhere else and it doesn't matter because we're stuck inside hearing the same things over and over again and there was standing on tables and crawling under pews sliding along the floor pulling ourselves up to that spot that very spot where we stand and get stuck where graphic calendars fall from the balcony poured down by the overweight dissatisfaction of doing what you resent and there is absolutely no way out of it.

"What was I doing in here?"
"Are you the one who broke the picture frame?"
"Came in here for something."
"Stumbled into or out of the obvious have you?"
"The obvious? I've been bringing down the Earth's value since I was born."
"I gather you're going to claim it was the slamming of a door that led to the broken picture frame."
"'Twas the infinite regress that led to the slamming of a door."
"Says you," they quipped as they dug at an actual substance on the keyboard and ended up typing the letter J 28 or 29 times.
"The infinite regress keeps me flapping my gums."
"The three-bumped block."
"The what?"
"The lego the one with three connectors on top a sixer cut in half. You think a kid running with scissors is bad."
"I do think they're quite bad."
"A kid wielding scissors cutting one in half. Have you seen what it does to the underside warped under there that's me."
"Are you trying to get out of doing even less work by not having to operate scissors?"
"No I'm warped."
"Always suspected you were. Your underside is warped?"
"Now is the perfect time to mock me."
"And I haven't worn a watch in a spell a little past half of forever."
"You should then move on to puncturing me with receipt holder spikes."
"Have you ever looked at your personnel file?"
"Then dump my bleeding body into the incinerator."
"It doesn't matter if you're too disinterested to ask as you would put it there's nothing in there."
"My inflamed horrorshow mortal remains end up getting jammed in the shaft and you would be obliged to harpoon me down with a broom handle."
"That's because they know they know all the time I've wasted and that's why they hired me."
"You can't divide forever in half. It wouldn't be forever if you could."
"Or this is all about their critique of my theory of knowledge."
"I didn't think you had a theory."
"Neither did I until I sat here one day and noticed I was getting ink from my signature stamp all over my papers and desk and my clothes put too much into it I guess didn't want my stamping to fade as quickly as it had before and I knew it had to be from now on keeping this world in the window a small flat circle there from such a distance but there so I was aware of what I had checked out of into my spectator theory of knowledge never could get used to the sound of my own voice could have been a bark or a chirp the shrieking death of a rabbit for vanity the dark implicating stains of ink on my pants called out to me in the ink of my signature in the alien groan of another unfamiliar recording bad aim of the knife slitting the throat of theory draining the blood out into a hollow purity choking on the emptiness of nothing but theory."

The prospect of staying late they peeked past each other around the corners of stacks of documents the heat of desert darkness encroached on the walls of the office one of them told the other a short story a former employee had told them of Whistler's Orchestra a short piece in 8 paragraphs of which 5 had been lost and only half of one paragraph poorly reconstructed or so it felt that way at least to the one telling the other would have insisted this to be the case even though the other's disagreement with this opinion would soon follow. The teller of the former employee's shorter short story visited the bathroom prior to starting in order to avoid any more ruined pants in a likewise interrupted and already butchered abridgment.  He told of how a former employee in the cafeteria told him about the motley crew of eldest born teens who had walked off into the waste and came upon a building once a library that had been turned into a mausoleum abandoned to become a makeshift concert hall and then a fast food establishment that had burned to the ground. One of the adolescents spoke after a long silence standing around blackened walls the shortest said that her parents had taken her and her brother to see an orchestra perform and instead was tormented by a large puddle of folding chairs filled with people who put their lips together and fifed large logs of annoyance none of them seemed the least bit invested in putting a point on to let fall and splat on the stage from between their legs to end the wheezing and skirling. She recounted how she and her brother walked out and drifted through a nearby park that had been ripped by a succession of messy storms and her brother sat down by a hole where one of the biggest trees used to grow and asked her to tell him one of the bedtime stories she made up for him when he was younger maybe she would remember the one about the duck who was an aging knight fighting his last battle where his bill was cracked off from his head and as Sir Quack lay dying on the field he saw his bloody and dented helmet and then moved his eyes ever so slightly to look upon his bill open with the melting voice of his killer.

Graphic calendars you think you're going to tell me what you think we went out we went back in and we're stuck hearing about the day and what it could be somewhere else and it doesn't matter because we're stuck inside hearing the same things over and over again and there was standing on tables and crawling under pews sliding along the floor pulling ourselves up to that spot that very spot where we stand and get stuck where graphic calendars fall from the balcony poured down by the overweight dissatisfaction of doing what you resent and there is absolutely no way out of it and the gory positive attitude's blade is turning in our backs holding us in place graphic calendars you think you're going to tell me tell us all what you think what we think out we went back in and we're stuck hearing about the day and what it could be somewhere else and it doesn't matter because we're stuck inside hearing the same things over and over again and there was standing on tables and crawling under pews sliding along the floor pulling ourselves up to that spot that very spot where we stand and get stuck where graphic calendars fall from the balcony poured down by the overweight dissatisfaction of doing what you resent and there is absolutely no way out of it.


- Max Stoltenberg