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