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A desire for it and there it went into the elevator shaft along with the ups and downs of uncourageous distortions of the world an aftertaste of misunderstandings and knowledge of nothing useful arguments that have been run over time after time in the middle of the road a favorite of the taller turning their tall backs on the shorter pauses in their day as they got shorter with me as we do that with each other to roll over and pretend to sleep worrying about what the morning dawn will send piercing through our blinds and our eyes forced shut through the night the darkness of the universe so much space invaded by so much light fuck the fire.
The crushed fauna did it look like it ever had a tail to tell it which way it could have gone to survive another tire another invention putting a spin on the air for movement for purpose surrounded by nothing so much nothing invaded by so much light fuck the fire.
"Must I go on?"
"It's up to you?"
"You don't sound sure."
"As sure as you or perhaps less."
"That is the closest thing you've said to anything resembling any transparency a glass room with walls to walk into and hurt your pride your something never quite approaching that. I've had so many people say to me: you know, to be honest with you. Let's me know that whatever they are going to say will remain in the light until the end of this sentence until it disappears into where it belongs where they belong where we all belong."
"And where is that?"
"In what we're surrounded by."
"Sales displays?"
"Behind those."
"You mean the overstock rooms?"
"Yes, the overstock rooms. We'll go with that."
- Max Stoltenberg
The ground falls to the tray melding with the deceased ways of troping and mellowing out for more uptight renditions of nauseating soliloquies pent up and squelched by cattle cubed and hammered into submissive prepositions where she took off her hairband and played with it while watching the children run off into the wash funny how dry those things are what a dry sense of humor the cracks in the desert are surrounded by piracy from above and below stretching your expressions until they come apart in all their horror and superficial ordering from the menu of repetitive lines of code.
I want her
to stop
Got no one with that didn't see it coming just stings saw it come and drip and pour like an old filthy bathtub that wants to vomit but can't but does it ever so slowly and painfully just stings.
"I want her," she said to the stuffed fish.
"To stop?" he asked looking at the tan spot by its gill knit shut.
"Among other things," she said looking past him to the china closet filled instead with papers riddled with algebra.
"Among other things?" he asked feeling like he had to shit but knew who wouldn't be able to again.
"That's what I want her for," she said thinking of the feathers that stuck to the carpet under the bed under the ceiling under the sky under the universe.
"My time here," he began squinting at her hair limp with sweat.
"Among other things?" she offered tilting her chin down to the broken vacuum cleaner under the table.
"Among other things," he trailed off in a haze of certain exhaustion.
Her notes
mixed with knuckles
expelling anxious misgivings
palms turned up then down
pretending to force stale air
to the rest of the room
the message will get across
eventually after they've left
and forgotten
all we've tried to erase
no longer scrawling it in the dirt
behind the heel prints
- Max Stoltenberg
A mouth collapsed
across the desk dirtied
by silence and loud looks
perhaps to lift one's punctured head
up into the flames of the Sun
clouds are sticky notes
floating reminders of useless barriers
to which a dark hat
surrounding thoughts relentless
spinning until the gravity
brings them back to the center
of horror
those nightmares again
porcelain mountaintop
articles of holes dumping
forgotten mottos
known all too well and cut
into eyebrows painted
with self-consciousness
recognition of what is
over my head is up here
stop staring at my eyes
her our what is
over my head is up here
- Max Stoltenberg
The woman behind the counter argument she was having an argument with the man over how they remembered or failed to remember things, events, each other, they never forgot each other's faults no matter how hard they tried. The night before it had been the photographs in several plastic drawers and how they whispered to both of them is that how it sounded the silence narrowed into either whispers of regret or tinnitus. Bold face typed lies stuck to the inside of your jaw post-nasal dripping into eating our own thoughts the words of our own thoughts cognitive snot.
Green I want to go somewhere green and take a breath that doesn't feel like choking on half a dune more than half more than half our lives choking coughing below the line you and your counter your counter argument a command of language I can only read in a faked deeper voice disposing of phrases and turns of phrase you startle as I miss another turn distracted by that time when you found the foot of a bird and told me about how huge your backyard seemed to you when you were young and how you rode on our tricycle around the neighborhood where you lived where you wandered off where your tricycle stopped in the crack of the sidewalk of your conscience of your desire to get up and wander and wander you delightful blue-eyed dream that woke up in my forgetfulness.
"Where are you going?"
"Outside."
"Did the bins blow over again?"
"It looks like they did, but it's hard to see."
"Why don't you wait if it's hard to see?"
"I was going to invite you to go with me."
"Or did you just think of me because I reminded you?"
"You remind me of a lot of things."
"You're too generous."
"Not enough in my usual estimation. Speaking of, I found a receipt in one of your back pockets."
"A receipt? That must be an old one. Brings me back to when we could do that."
"Do what? Buy stuff?"
"That, too, but I meant when we could actually worry about you know subtraction."
"It was always subtraction wasn't it?"
"Mostly. When are you going?"
"I'm debating."
"Are they at it again?"
"Like nihilistic cats."
"Let me know when they've exhausted each other."
"If I think of it."
Destiny flattens the pillow
deflating vision into darkness
empty fruit
hollowed out
and full of ants
musical leaking
running along the familiar paths
worn out by the same old
same old
branching out associations
like her hair growing back
from the fallout
machines crushing her body
that's all they do
- Max Stoltenberg
The math was overly haunted with multiplication and division and wrapped in burritos of noncommutative geometry stuffed with pads of steel trying to make it last as it sent its needles into her thumbs quite by deliberated tantalizing gum drooping from under the table his pants were open not that open for developments of a parenthetical kind following on the heels of their yelling all the carrying on loud parental escalation and even at the mall a word if you will now around the corner behind the what's the name for it her everyone including me have continued to underestimate her with our impatience along the way of this overlong monotonous excuse for a chapter that should close including other branches and when we stroll by if we feel like it and see their shopfront sign shrink more and more lines contemptuously peeled off.
He opened the front door and stepped out onto the sidewalk pathetically attempting to ignore his place of work's mutilated legend and removing his hat addressed the crowd that was not there that had dispersed in sporadic installments of passersby avoiding and eluding.
"I will speak in a manner possibly not familiar to some, but I would hope more in tune with those who do appreciate the esoteric references of a worker drone and a failed candidate for interim assistant manager perhaps in the tone of my mother now dead not just dead expired for close to a decade as she used to say, just because you set the kitchen tablecloth on fire doesn't qualify you to set the world ablaze with your passion. Twice I have had to emerge almost twice only once I have had to emerge from my routinely criticized weekly newsletters foisted upon me by those who deny their right to an imagination although their insults betray a taste for the unoriginal. I can tell by the looks on your faces if your heads were turned this way if any of you were actually walking down this street or anywhere in the proximity of this septic tank of a county that invoking one's familial and wounded tongue just makes it unintelligibly swollen in this mouth of the unexpelled. I have given up on stories. I was born with a brain that probably will never make it to the end of recounting and recalling to others without distracting myself before getting there. My eyes still look out the window waiting for trees to pass by but delayed by neverending stretches of waste voided by people who can't cook or make things last can never give up on hostile attachments stained humans perfumed with forgiveness that we pretend doesn't reek with memory categorized into top 10 lists moments drowned out by commentary that has been charred with another layer of analysis. What it has been about men women and children unaccompanied by description only differentiated by medication united by common pharmacies locations engraved with impoverishment. It would be better that I not return resign instead of someone else another piece of shit dislodged from between those on the floor above, but I shall slink back before the heat reminds me of my lack of composition. I can be found in Cubicle 8 toward the back adjacent to the dead cockroach which has not been disposed of yet. My colleagues prefer to compare themselves to others who have eluded being sentenced to this employ while I have chosen to contrast myself with the vermin and decaying elements that crawl and lie stalled about."
Almost an even set of years
under the stairs of abuse
darkness envelops her breath
wrapping anxious arms
about her bosom
the timer has gone off
and the blame runs out
into the muffled night
jets circle the inmates
housed in the neighborhood
of numbers defined
but not linking as cleanly
as understandably
as once supposed
teeth have fallen
out and into
the vanishing puddle
- Max Stoltenberg
Notorious for putting on the kind of smile that would take down a plane of reality at a distance of up to one solar system stepping up the blood feathers were drenched and the perch was inverted without a washer to do the past week's load of dirty laundry. He took him to the window and had him look at the crowd that had dispersed. His new partner had denied there ever was a crowd. So, he shared with him what the next door neighbor had told him about the table the kids had dragged out of the house and how it only had 3 legs and one of them stood by that corner because that was their job their assigned task their reason for being a part of the little band of kids to begin with and while they stood there they thought of being outside and their pants had been too small for so long was this growing up and when whatever you were involved with didn't have enough legs to stand on you were the leg? Was that it? Hard to pay attention to what else was going on and the crowd that was alleged to have gathered to see not much of a crowd if there ever was one.
I'm repeating myself less
sometimes
but he keeps listening
to amuse me or himself
or hear it again
really repeating myself less
sometimes
the words are roped
or coiled in the garage
tried to consolidate the boxes
accidentally broke the one
that holds them all together
my brain is running out
the sides of my neck
that's where I feel the most
pressure
escaping
- Max Stoltenberg
Unnurtured unrecognized
Spaghetti on the tree
with damaged gifts underneath
floating boats in circles
maelstroms of habit
nerdy requests swatted away
elevator never comes
prematurely closing for the night
the day's illnesses wrapped
in leftover present paper
the present usually gets papered over and
sent to the lavatory
without a roll
so many parts to play
juggled along with melons
and bowling shoes
forgot to spray those
that bug that knocked
at the door the other door
had to have been just shy
of 4 feet tall
broke the lock
twisting it so hard
both sides
not going anywhere
- Max Stoltenberg
Listening to the sound of the air conditioner kicking on and off so frequently a part had probably failed within it just like some part had failed within the head that was listening were the senses deceiving themselves no they were usually very reliable it was just everything else. A fondness for cliffs that shrank into garbage heaps imagining a looking over the great landfill the Earth made holes in it and then tried to fill them back up and smooth them over so no one will notice until the inevitable collapse just like the head that was listening to the air conditioner fancy that conditioning the air with all that mucus flying out in the middle of a conversation plugging up ears as if underwater in the air conditioned so well so frequently sitting up in bed stretching to loosen the muscles used less to lift the chin and remind it of the longest act of drowning.
"We'll clean that up later."
"I think they are going to notice."
"Maybe or we can rely on them becoming too desensitized."
"That's the problem we're relying too much on that."
"And not ourselves is what you're zeroing in on."
"I was going to say that the only thing we can rely on about ourselves is that we're unreliable."
"It's more a matter of threat level."
"They don't bother with updates anymore. When was the last time you recall them updating us on threat levels? We just go by how much of the building is left," said Percy.
"I never knew that."
"That all the even numbered floors are gone?"
"No, that your name was Percy."
"It's not. Someone's just fucking around."
"I could do with a bit more of that. It's been years."
"You don't know what those are anymore."
"You want me to say it's been months?"
"More like years."
"See."
"But, you don't know what they are anymore."
"I don't?"
"How many days in a year?"
"I could tell you more accurately in weeks."
"I want to know in days and you don't know is the truth of it."
"For me the days fit into the weeks, but after that it's weeks and months jostling into each other trying to squeeze their corpulent asses through the doors to ride those oncoming years barrelling down the tunnel."
"I think the part of your mind that produces your metaphors has received the most blunt trauma of late."
"Of late."
"We'll clean that up later."
"Until they remind us."
"Again."
"With their threats."
"Yes, with their threats."
- Max Stoltenberg
And you didn't even get to it.
And
And you
and
wait for the next meteor the size of a hill of toilets not a large hill maybe the size of a small building or a medium sized building just partially demolished equivalent to the size of that hill of toilets full of tremendous shits
and
and you
you drove me to the airport where I thought about when I drove you to the airport and I went back to behind where the school used to be and worked on the corner of my right thumb and stare off into space and not wonder why there is more of it or less of it or remember the last time we waited for the next meteor and worked on the corner of my right thumb and noticed that the corner kept getting deeper and further away from my memory looking down on that pit we used to sit around and talk until you fell in since then working on the corner of my right thumb each scrape each dig alternating guilt and pleasure blending into a synthesis of a medium sized building partially demolished where something use to be after something before that used to be.
- Max Stoltenberg
He looked at her on the bed sleeping after all that yelling her talking loudly at the toilet where she had dropped her very small pen the purple one that said something it didn't or hadn't said anything it just had printing along its fuselage that had faded or been scratched away with an insistent thumbnail and the fields the fields of her aunt's house the back porch wooden and cracked teeth pleasing death and decay with their half-smiles and all this time all of it poured into clouds sinking into the cities and dissolving into yards and yards and yards of waste rolling over and turning into empty magazines sneezing and unfortunate for sores in the shape of dances long forged by other stumps he had growing out of his neck and just because he didn't watch what he ate and just because he'd be damned if he'd eat anything again he'd be damned electrocuted by the light another day brightening into the disease of exposure thinning one's point of view drying on the line tightening around the noose following your every thought sliced into smaller bits of meaning and the rest will crumble on its own.
He waited for her to move maybe a kiss on the cheek the one that wasn't too caked in gore resting face down as she tended to do in the evening before the morning of our shitting ourselves depending on how the formula finished up on either side of the greater than or less than an estimate of what was outside the room or below the bed so many legs came out in the dark and tortured the sides of your face sweaty with menus running together onto the floor but that is for another time another crack at it.
"Do you have any idea how many shorts are stacked next to the ladder?"
"What's your theory about the blinds?"
"If I had to make one up on the spot I'd go with exhibitionists and fast food diets."
"On the spot? You proposed a theory just after we moved in. Something to do with abstract art and road rage."
"Moved in? Somebody's putting quite a harshly slapped spin on being brought here against our will."
"By extended family you mean?"
"Are you referring to the shithole before this?"
"Or maybe the rat sewage silo before that?"
"They didn't even bother to fix the locks. Just drove nails into my valves."
"Extended villains with their nails and the coffins where we spend our dark nights of insomnia."
"What happened to the shorts next to the ladder?"
"If they were next to the ladder."
Frogs the harbingers of stuckness
Throw that mucus at your pallbearer
entrenched in dust
a sanctuary for worn out counters
islands with sharp edges
the backs of chairs for the perspiring
crumpled graph paper
rejected multiverses
changing out majors
crossed out diagnoses
Ants the moving pleats of trousers
the backs of chairs for the perspiring
sharp edges with islands
graphic crumplings
stained with multiverses
thrown like mucus
at a pallbearer
- Max Stoltenberg
Not that it mattered much, but the news of their deterioration has been mostly acting as if it is attempting to mimic some version or variation I am he was she still is waiting for her sister to get back with an answer on which one is more appropriate to use and steering back off of the shoulder one of the slumped ones weighted down by insecurity reproducing itself into a world of more and more and smaller and smaller compartments and yet not a wall remains left I feel the little partitions the tiny slots dropping to the floor of my gelatinous brain hitting the floor and bouncing around under the desk shoved in my head-space to collect dust tangled in there as if it is attempting to mimic some version some variation some kind of I have forgotten see how it works maybe you do and maybe they do instead of you the crowd turning about in their mass graves of order submitting online whose orders names and digits can't seem to remember past the fourth one the column that leads down into the yard underneath the weeds and in the beds of slithering insomniacs as if attempting to mimic some kind of version of the next permutation guessing at the next repetition steering back off of the shoulder that vibrating between your disks between your pages of gibberish and she sat up and gave herself another excuse not to tell him what she really thought of him and as a result her shape of things to come spluttered and dribbled out of mute animals quiet except for the slithering of life decreasing as she went to the fence and stopped to answer her phone.
"What took you so long? How does it feel to hear me say it? Where's my food man? Man? Pinched loaf of half-assery? What does it sound like? What am I going to leave out next? When? When am I going to leave? How will it depend? Did you want to hear a story about my father and his sympathizers? His trail of followers through the pipes the tubes? Out? Down? Into shopping carts with the wheel remember? Have you ever felt so much heat coming down off of such grey fucking clouds? How dry am I? How many guesses should I give you? How many chances? How many phones?"
Her hand tilted and the phone slid slightly towards the edge of her palm where the fingers began where they got together and pretended they could roll dice and solve problems collaboratively he liked that or pretended the best the most effectively to keep us showing our stuff to keep us. So much broken glass and still hanging back to see if that jar will ever hit the floor throw? throw what? the cement is coming for me and all my doubts the cement is coming for me.
- Max Stoltenberg
I won't look at her back at the wall and the cracks in her sentences how I have kept her on the floor the second floor and the light is on all day it seems she leaves it on and rest of the neighborhood knows about our usage so what is it to you to me I won't look at her back at the orange that fell on the rug and seeing the dark specks instead of plucking them off and getting rid of them I will take them I won't look at her back and take them to see the pillar on the back patio not the one on the North side the South one not the North the West and not the West the East perhaps South and lay them there carefully making sure not to jostle their sensitive nervous systems flooded with my sweat the sweat of my hands all that twiddling has made me recall the diseases that snuck up on me every night for the past several months and time has forgotten me and good riddance to this snuck up upon doldrum infested coffin-shaped excuse for a procrastinator withholding progress from their greedy paws to fling me into their pit of figures mannequins no numbers yes outside the parentheses again at last and it rarely never does.
From "At the South East Pillar"
Couldn't tell you where they were
but they were on their knees
if they had any
before the towering support
blocked out the part of the sky
they would have dried out under
miserable specks dark and minimized
to tell the truth
speaking so unnaturally
is what it meant
stars entered into it again
as an afterthought
the stars were an afterthought
smashed into one
narrow cognition
no effort
no matter
thin chance
- Max Stoltenberg
It was his least favorite thing to do to say to ask to try to point out as the car sped along the dark dirt road along the narrow side of the mountain the side of the die least likely to make any way that you can see yourself clear to put in a word for him for her or their salt crushed under the counter dispensed with along the narrow side bulging with regret and memories that overlap with torn chip bags inside out and empty haven't thrown them away keep forgetting and suppose you get there and tell him then what you've been already doing that and now he is taking the middle ground the one that keeps sinking making their asses collide into each other a folded sleepless canvas of asses.
She told me once about her nightmares had the same ones for a week at a time or several days thereabouts and she would paint her hair with meteors orange and smearing the world sitting on a rooftop each leg on a side of the family home to not feeling like much of anything what I wouldn't do to lounge with her there atop the sinking middle ground bent for emphasis the italics of what I wouldn't do the basic fundamental measurement of my existence.
"Slide closer to the door and then push it open."
"I am too busy scratching."
"Scratching what?"
"The same result."
"Petty was his middle first last name all of them it was silly to pronounce it at any speed. The only day I can recall with clarity the kind that is sharper than the highest definition is the shittiest. The one where I opened my mouth."
You don't notice
what I notice
that you haven't noticed
that you've never
said or denied
was a big deal
hurtling towards the basement
punished down there
bumping into what
mother what father
claimed they could afford
dripping it dripped already
and watch where you've sneaked
around the dark center
touching what
you don't notice
what I notice
that you haven't noticed
that you've never
said or denied
- Max Stoltenberg
Bending to the image
narrow desert slim chance
rusting leftovers
noxious side eye
plentiful instructions
lost in the footnotes
warped nails frustrating removal
climbing out of the escape
lifted into the trap
an appeal rotting on the floor
stepped on by avoiding shoes
she knew what to do
just waited too long
was always hoping I would get it
get it she thought
one thing only thing
she got wrong
get it she thought
hopeless fucking face
in the mirror
I always knew that
spitting into the sink
my only connections
networking into something
to keep the bills at bay
my string of saliva
to the hole in the room
going on and on
about damned elephants
when there are holes
all over your dying
sack of a figure
dragging this sack
bending to the image
narrow desert slim chance
- Max Stoltenberg
I throw the ball of paper crumpled in my fist toward the ceiling toward the crotch of the sky between knees of contemplated non-existence wiped from lips that split and bleed fragments of reasons for leaving reasons for staying the stuck manifesto translated for menopausal figures in the corner launching shit across the rug despite the after effects of not smoking for so long so many hours so many days across the rug despite to spite myself and my maternal silence can she not hear me as I stare into her reflection as I drive eyes on the road as I die as I want to as I sit here bathed in red covered in green pissing yellow over most of myself my figures in the corner launching shit across the rug puzzles on the floor pieces kicked about the room mixed with hair and toenails and dead skin meaning for a greeted enemy sharing too much too little in common suppose you breach the birth suppose you say what is on your mind and find out it was never yours where did that line go wandering into the desert the one that divided us and rotted into that canyon between our thoughts.
She looked over the top of the partition and concluded she must have gone to the bathroom in her cubicle never got around to making it in time that was always the issue when one neglected to consider sharp office supplies and their craving internal organs for the puncturing random aspects of equations she could never copy down the way she had seen her write them down in fading colors always yanking drawers open and listening to the sound of metal drowning out the joking ignorance stitched into sweaters or skirts that lay at the bottom of a smelling cubicle.
"You are a disease."
"I forget which one my parents named me after, but I don't think it got translated accurately."
"You are an illness."
"I've relied more on excusing myself and slipping outside for a meandering into the distance. Didn't realize the two halves of the world meet in a vanishing point that disappears once you get around to it."
"You are filth."
"I am flushed with embarrassment."
"You are a contagion."
"I've never been one to overestimate my influence."
"You are a waste."
"She says very little now. Her voice is like sun tea that has been forgotten on the back patio. It's what she'd been picking up on. What was missing from every photograph or couldn't be erased when a couple of dimensions happen to be so thick. That night out what made the place our favorite it was only the appetizers they had bruschetta with sauteed mushrooms and zucchini sticks. Ruined by how he deformed what she wanted to say every future moment to take place in an empty room prostrate on a dark block."
Bag without handles
devoid of seeds
the moon rises
caught in the mesh
of surreal variations
on the day
swamped by the waves
of past residue
memories pasted
together in the septic tank
- Max Stoltenberg
