CONVERSATION REPELLENT

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