Monday, April 25, 2016

TREES CHURN THE WIND

Take a deep spluttering
anticipation of nothing new
that's why it left my mouth
and is dead on the floor 
between us trying not to bump heads
foreheads or clacking eyeglasses
to turn our faces at angles
all tried before 
stiff sprained necks before
bodies wrinkling apart
folding into ourselves
caving in sluggishly
the ceiling lowering us
down into the worms
and the maggots 
that suck the last 
meaningless versions
of what we say
of gestures made
cadaverous language
by any other tongue
sticks to the roofs
of our shadows


- Max Stoltenberg

Sunday, April 17, 2016

SKIPPED TRACES OF THE UNDERWHELMED

I want a disease suspended over my regrets to let fall its shroud of loathing and abhorrence which having tumbled down the stairs of her annoyance and the corridors of her trauma that will jump across the ravine of disgust to plummet to the labyrinth of stolen minds below. They make their way something else's way who are we kidding who am I beyond the name and the numbers and the log-ins and the passwords coated with special characters distractions from the grout between letter tiles word rooms phrase buildings communities sentenced to drudge up continuations. This brain rests on fists deflating with lack of interest in the next day propped up with unfolded laundry.

"Where is it?"
"Look to the right?"
"Are you sure?
"I was giving an example?"
"You're making this up?"
"Making? Am I making something?"
"Aren't you?"
"You're asking me? For the past who knows my lungs have been exhaling question marks?"
"Do you think I'm tired of telling? Do you think I've had it with suggesting? Do you think I'm done with wondering?"
"When it was all sent away for salvage? Is that what they're calling it? Salvage? Housing it all under anxiety?"
"What did we call it before that?"
"Were you talking to me?"
"Is there someone else here?"
"Does there have to be someone else here?"

She fell asleep on the couch and dreamed of food that thawed into people she had tried to get away from and they kept showing up in different guises different contexts the same baskets the same carts the same accidents running across the desert and slowing down into the neighborhoods exhausted grinding to a halt in the beds soaked with the condensation of disappointment.

"What did we call it before that?
"Were you talking to me?"

Bends in the water in their bottles water bottles knocked over by their misunderstanding each other half hearing each other over their laptops looking down into the light from below seeping out of tragedies that hold less of an anatomy bleeding out of routines that hold less of a memory vomiting out of batteries that hold less of a charge.

"Is there someone else here?"
"Does there have to be someone else here?"

Disrespect for the shadows
The palm rubs the blood
off the table
off the side of a leg
Fingerpainting in shit
letting the other
sample it spit it out
into your darkening eyes
these windows of disbelief
that knew all along
wasn't there wasn't here
to put down your head
pillows of glass and needles
sticking the forgotten
and remembered together
injected with shame
coursing with guilt
through veins of criticism
bulging and thinning
in every breath
polluted with life


- Max Stoltenberg