CAT AND THE DRAGGED IN

The sound of flapping the flapping of sound where it does little to amaze anyone anything perchance to skip a letter torn in half or slightly or not so slightly near the proximity of the middle doesn't have a heart anyway just paper and that little plastic window hate that window exposing your name and address where you are stuck in a house and what body you have been poured into congealing with every breath into some grey thing with a chest moving in and out the air of other people's movements in a game where they keep adding sides to the dice and yet and yet to still end up in some corner of the stark flat dry sandpaper decorated with sharp bushes. 

Save it for another page until you forget it and then where are you? Where are you? In the thick smoke of burning post-blackout black and blues not that you can see it only think you can see it while you mutter to yourself and make those weird sounds with your mouth your lips until you notice someone is looking and then try to act like the other you've been confessing this to is really there which is what you thought in the first place and then and then you wonder what the fuck is the first place? You go back and as that lightheaded feeling gets lighter and thinner your fat stomach just laying there under your thinning out of whatever else the first place you try to find it in the desert then the green you thought was before that and then it ends up in a dark shed floating somewhere around Saturn before Saturn before the solar system before the galaxy before one of the contractions and expansions queasiness that's what it is a queasiness.

"Was that blood you just coughed up?"
"No."
"Looked reddish."
"It was lipstick."
"Come on."
"It was ketchup."
"How long ago did you have that cheeseburger? Last week? Month?"
"There must have been some residue in that hole I've been chewing into the side of my jaw."
"It's called blood. Which side?"
"Which side of what?"
"Which side of your jaw have you been chewing a hole?"
"The one that has the where I've been I just wait until I do it again that'll clue you in I do it fairly often many times in a day or just review my dental records the hygienist she thinks I'm boring a hole into myself."
"You are boring to me that is not to that artificial insemination student who walked in front of the SUV the one with all the bird cages in the back what a tragedy an avian tragedy that is for the birds."
"I know he lost an arm and a leg and now lives with his mother blithering on incessantly about being a blu-ray owner's manual. Which side?"
"Which side of what?"
"Which side of blood am I?"
"I don't know. Whichever side it is you could never stand it."
"Not the beginning or the end I mean the inside or the outside of it."
"You're a grinder not a chewer. The only thing I've seen you do with your mouth is let it back up and overflow onto the planet with shit and blood."
"I try to wear something on my feet the bottom of my right heel looks like cracked thirsty ground and the edges keep catching on the carpet like velcro and the segments pull and hurt like hell. Like hell more bugs."
"Reset your browser settings."
"No I mean they keep falling more of them keep falling out of the vents right where I'm . . ."
"Right where you're what?"
"I used to tuck myself up over the backseat of the car when I was a kid and look up at the trees as we drove down those roads that used go between trees. Know what I'm talking about?"
"Can't say that I do. You're letting it back up again and overflow onto the planet."
"With shit and blood. From a hole to a wound to a mission to becoming someone else's toilet."

A disease
strike it out
peel another layer
of skin from a thumb
can't light it
strike it out
a disease
sticking wires in
chest legs arms
tubes with seats
smelling of eaten 
in a hurry
windows nothing flies by
falling through vents
right where 


- Max Stoltenberg