Thursday, August 31, 2017

BUG ON THE LENS

It's cool I mean it's hot it's neat I mean it's dirty bathtub on the runway bloody feet pumping the brakes and tipping over the empty china closet that's what was back there awakened somewhat call it tomorrow the moment if it pleases you if it drops you down into a more natural tone of doubt spitting out crickets crossing the street slowly in the heat the kind that makes the top of your head itch a neurotic static like that and not like that more like the muttering of dislike under his tooth beneath his regret and right eye. 

"What would you prefer to kill me with?"
"You're putting me on the spot again."
"I have reason to believe you'll hit your mark."
"Or you."
"Or me."
"Do you imagine the same thing is taking place on the cellular level?"
"Two cracked and peeling doormats miniaturized and injected into some poor bastard's arm and wading up to their testicles through some mitochondrial jelly sent there by some administrative assistant whose name eludes me."
"Unfortunately, not enough words elude you."
"Unfortunate for you."
"Unfortunate for me. A wasted lamp wearing a head for a hat."
"Skirtless infiltrator that I am."
"Pass the stencil."
"All I have is my finger."
"You did shuffle along as you drew your line in the desert the other day."
"The other day."
"I wandered accompanied as a pest unhinged death-rolling about in a bed of twine."
"Here we go."
"You mean I mean here I go. Don't give me that here we go nonsense!"
"It's your nonsense. Have at it and flail to your cholesterol's overweaning fucking pride."
"Fucking pride. I attempted it in an alley once no twice maybe even a fifth occasion, but the emaciated thing felt like it was going to crack in half or even more invisible to the eye subdivisions. Crumbs if you will."
"I have no will. An imbalanced vat of soup scum. I remember when I was in school and had tried to eat a cup of soup my stepmother had put in my lunch. There was some mass I felt and choked it down to get it over with. That's how I've always been. Never one to spit anything out always swallow to get it over with. Not even a choking more like it's some manner of centipede propelling itself down the slimy dull red gullet. And then the waiting for the acids to simmer and burn as this mass grows demonic wire brushes abrading its way to my sphincter, but postponing its exit like mucus in the back of a nostril. A comparison that comes close would be the only one in my life I ever tried to kiss a year or two prior on the bus and our mouths failed about each other like orifices forced open beyond their capacity fissuring with the thwarted attempts at escape of our miserable parasites."

Love no drainage
from the amputated memories
our images just valves
blocked with blood clots
nurturing our darkness
chafing it under the blankets
stained with sweat and despair
coupled like conjoined roaches
brought together by a coercive faith
what cut you out from the beginning
somewhere along the way
the brittle lip of sarcasm
coalescing into beads of resentment
as the beginning stretches
across the insatiable chasm


-  Max Stoltenberg



Saturday, August 19, 2017

MAD ABOUT

Half-assed he looked for the fish food that should have been next to the jar empty from years of forgetting to refill the beans marbles jellybeans jolly-ranchers allergy medicine more like a sixteenth of an ass past tense he had pulled a muscle from avoiding exertion no pants fit right just to rub it in kneading the fleshy memories in his body of how often he fucked up his re-entry into any social group society of the Earth's atmosphere a turbid cloud adorning his sardonic baggage obscuring his confusion. The worst years of their lives scorched by proverbs combined with oracular ventings penetrating clouds of compact slipped discs scratched over mountains of salt rather small mountains with their faces shaved and bolted together pins using people of common interests an affinity of insecurities. 

"As a wise person once said, Make sure you leave it in park."
"Which reminds me of a quote I once heard."
"I don't want to hear it."
"How unlike you."
"You and your sarcasm can drive into a brick wall and then have your vehicle put in a car crusher."
"I wasn't being sarcastic. It struck me as uncharacteristic of you wanting to hear any quote not from your own dank cellar."
"I said I don't want to hear it."
"Your don't sounded like do."
"I'll wager that never worked on your mother."
"My father never appreciated my poor hearing."
"Until his own began to wither, eh?"
"It did work on my mother, though."

I wanted to be your book
So I could be in your hands
You push through being tired
Keeping your last light on for me
Until I see your red eyes
reading me
close me fold me
shut me down
turn out the last light
all the pushing you have done
exhaustion is the gravity of the void

"Are you dense?"
"I've put on quite a bit."
"And not in the way of knowledge."
"There has been some."
"An announcement a selfish meandering looking at the blinds and stopping her from opening them when she wants to see the lightning outside ignoring the flashes inside your sockets the madness the madness games."
"Just because it's alphabetical doesn't mean that's how I want to look for what I don't have or sit next to those who take what I thought was mine."

Repetition and the past will always be the most popular fads for going out of style like a ferris-wheel spinning off the dock into the ocean and the tide goes out. Talking to each other while applying hand-gel is singing extremely slowly to deny we are in a soap opera. Afraid of catching something while wading through this immense toilet swimming in each other's waste as fish in a tank a very dry tank putting on airs wrapped around a bulging globe of anxiety cellophaned in breathing exercises.


- Max Stoltenberg

Tuesday, August 15, 2017

ELEPHANT FURNITURE

Listening to the absence of rain
Ignoring the hot wind
Unsuccessful a middle name
shared by many
Potatoes muddy to the touch
Trying to apply so little pressure
to so much absurd vanity
do away with mirrors 
and then 
each other
another apocalypse come and gone
is that what that was
was it
put it down
to excessive time
for plans dented with human thought


- Max Stoltenberg