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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
