OBLIVIOUS STROKING

He always considered today just yesterday in remission a pain to shoot through his mind putting an imaginary gun to his head his eyes widening as they split his view from over his own back to watch the bullet passing like a subway car plowing through forgotten memories waking up briefly just before they were obliterated his ideas always culminated into a cul-de-sac of mediocrity and repetition tripping over the wire recharging his phone pulling it off the table and smacking against the tile floor cracking the screen apps shrugging along the fracture. Recidivism blues totaling up to peroxide poured into your lap. Where are the shorts? Where are the boxers? There they are on either side of the flesh tower with its smoke stack billowing out colors of pain scrubbing bubbles of abrasive lacerating cleanser driving driving when I'm driving if not in this parking lot of a shit-hole inching along a slowly vomited exaggeration a pogrom of another aspect of myself another swathe of the dream the nightmare is peeled off and flung to curl up in the corner until the dog will carry it between its morsels of conjunctivitis and then ejected out its ass in the backyard among the other searing rocks covered in noxious dark pudding. 

"Then I told him my name."
"And then did he hit you?"
"No, he hit me before that."
"That's because you didn't tell him your name."
"It's not that easy to remember to say to remember anything to say anything when you get hit."
"You need to pull yourself up."
"I do when no one is around but that's rare nowadays and the meat gets rare or raw that's what I meant it used to get like that during a period not a period what word am I looking for?"
"Your name you told him your name after he hit the snot out of you."
"I remained pretty congested actually never could clear that up allergic to the desert and all the stuff that pretends to grow in it and the trash."
"Eventually you got to some rank and serial number eventually something toward the prelude to the conclusion eventually?"
"Model number I think it was."
"Serial number you mean."
"He didn't want or whoever he answered to didn't seem particularly interested in anything identifying me."
"That's weird."
"It's not weird at all really more a come to expect it as the way things will be from now on or how they've always been."
"It's still weird."
"Spoken like someone whose favorite words are: weird, really, and seriously."
"I wish I could have had both of them removed."
"Why on Earth?"
"Well, for starters this looks like all we've got and on the other hand I wouldn't have to wear a fucking bra."
"You're book-ending with on the one hand and starters?"
"You're missing the point."
"I am missing the point both of them. Interval that's what I wanted to substitute for period. My find and replace is rather languid."
"How many times did he hit you?"
"I didn't count. I was kind of focusing on getting up off the ground so he wouldn't kick me."
"Model number of what?"
"I don't know. Something I thought I had. He didn't believe me. I didn't believe me. My head doesn't feel like it can hold a conversation anymore even though it manages to fill in what the other person is saying that's why I think I just stopped going so I wouldn't have to carry on with anyone else just know that I would fill in what they would say in here this skull that feels like one of those brittle boats that someone steps into and both their feet go right through the bottom. I think I will just you will just pull the trigger and off I go again you go again I go have been going on can't sleep my head doesn't feel like it can hold a conversation anymore even though it manages to fill in what the other person is saying."

And that's when he decided she needed to make up her mind about the emergency brake whether he was the one who left it up as he tore the sleeve of his sweater reaching over to rub the knuckles of his right hand against her smooth face that wasn't that smooth wasn't that young wasn't that open wasn't even there wasn't that even wasn't that it wasn't that. And so he put it down where she could find it and maybe get it done she had put it off for so long and with a good half-assed reason only a run-over owl could fabricate. They wasted the rest of their time arguing about destiny and fate and paralysis.

Tomorrow had a pass
On clouded judgment
extra spaces filled with
obscurantist gestures
floating nightgowns upset
with windy sighs
more frequent now
than an 8th grade math teacher
looking looking
where she wishes
she wishes where
she could not be
could not
a tub sculpted by discouragement
forced into lips
wrapped about a cactus
stitched shut 
spineless worms
slither to the gym
strutting across cremations
spackled with semen
smirking at the thick window
of his ignorance
where the silent windy sighs
fall to the latest hang-up


- Max Stoltenberg