ODE TO OMISSION

Just another minus sequence

Mentioning the imperfect made

Into typographical errors undone

One eye focused through the space

In the fence that blurrily

Crosses dirt toward the next fence

Figures walk in line between them
Ahead of schedule
Kicking the backs of boots
In front of the next

Looking for a word
That word that either started with a "d"
Or had a nice hard "d" sound
In just the spot where it is

Just another minus sequence
Mentioning the imperfect made
Through appeals for more appeals
For more appeals that are

Just another minus sequence
Mentioning the imperfect made
Through appeals for more appeals
That are ahead of schedule

Put in order
Put in sequence
To count the days
Mentioning the imperfect made
Through appeals for more appeals
That form more reasons

For more appeals that
Just another minus sequence
Mentioning the imperfect made
Through appeals for more appeals
Built out of what is left out
Making sure to leave more out
Don't want that in there

Must make just enough room
Just enough space to
Just another minus sequence
Mentioning the imperfect made
Sure to not be mentioned
As it is left out
And ahead of schedule
With more time to walk between fences


- Max Stoltenberg

IMMURED POEM

Inbox

Accept or else
Sign name

Subsist
Brief breeze
Hold breath

Murmur
Mutter
Murmur

Beat
Beat
Beat

Gasp


- Max Stoltenberg

CONVERSATION BETWEEN SHADOWS #1

Cannot see each other's faces only however so little apart.  Together in the disappearing light.  Disappearing suddenly.  Where did it go?  Trying to see his hands.  Moving them and clumsily striking her.  Where did he contact her?  Accidentally.

She: Ouch!
He: Sorry.
She: It's OK.  I'm OK.
He: No it's not.
She: Are you saying I'm not OK?
He: No.  I mean you are.  It's not OK to hurt you.
She: I'm not hurt. 
He: Tag.  You're it.
She: I guess I am.

They stand in silence.  Or maybe they lie.  Will they drift off to sleep or fill the shrinking space with rushing to give their dark formlessness contours?

He: I think I see your eyes.  I know they're blue, but I'm trying to convince myself I see blue.
She: Don't hurt yourself to be convinced.
He: Want it just to be . . .

There.  Before him and within to express nothing more for than what is when it is submerged in the dark.

He: Trying to find . . .

She feels his cautious and searching hand caressing her toes and deflected by toenails.  Pressure is noticed on her cast of his palm.  She waits for him to attempt another extremity, but is surprised to become aware of his finger wiggling its way into a hole in the plaster. 

She: Found the hole.
He: Where is skin?

His exploring digit taps against more material underneath.  A plaster cast within a plaster cast.


- Max Stoltenberg

THE IS NOT

As the woman, no longer a member of her youth entered the middle of her age, she vomited up the remainder.  There she goes.  Laboriously lifting her head to get the hair out of her face for now to hang limp in the absence of the wind.  Nonchalant.  There she goes.

No longer a member of her youth.  Now entering the middle  squeezed between and there she goes.  Trying to remember those songs from that decade that spins in the nausea swirled by the hell of others.  Slapping Sartre and there she goes.  No longer a member of her youth.  Now entering the middle.  The middle of her middle.  There she goes.  Holding her tongue.  Biting her tongue.  There she goes.  The nausea makes the music skip.  Scratch.  Scratch.  The music is stuck and skips ahead.  No longer a member of her youth.  Slapping Sartre and there she goes.

Thoughts tangled with lyrics no longer memories of her youth.  Skipping ahead over the stuck stuck stuck skipping ahead to the middle of her middle.  Hold her tongue.  Bite her tongue.  She thought she thought of the building.  The assembly and the loud nausea.  The assembly of disconnection disconnected by phrases of others nauseatingly afraid.  They and their fear that they reproduced by the disease of language's mutating nonsense.  There she goes.  The assembly.  Nausea.  Stuck music.  What about what she liked?  Liked?  Gravitated to.  She had gravitation?  Nausea.  The assembly.  Never had she recalled pretending not to be alone among so many people assembled together.  There she goes.

No longer a member of her youth.  Skip skip skip over the middle to the precipice of death.  Now there's a wind.  Now her hair is filling with gusts of emptiness that pushes out the nausea.  Nausea.  Yuck yuck yuck yuck.  Back again and skipping past the music she is trying to hold on to.  Nausea.  Being sliced by the petulance of the wind.  In her hair.  Her hair filled with the land of others.  Hell is others.  Slapping Sartre.  Bitch of a philosophy.  Bitchy language.  Washing her worn face over the slippery sink.  No longer a member of her youth.  Slipping and skipping ahead.  There she goes.

Her bathroom.  There she is not.  Just a box.  On a ball.  Nausea.  Won't go away.  There she goes.  Where?  There.  There?  Fingers want to comb the terrain.  The hair is knotted.  Limbs are caught in the knots.  Knots and scratches and glitches.  Skipping over the music that cannot be recalled.  Nausea.  Skipping off the atmosphere.  There she goes.


- Max Stoltenberg

AT THE FLUORESCENTS

Trepidation captured it.  It captured him.  No, it captured her. She waited for him to provide security access along the hallway.  She could have sworn she heard some kind of music playing faintly.  It possessed a tune that reminded her of that song she thought she remembered.  Was it the one that she used to play frequently before she relocated?  The one when she lived in a different state.  A different state all together.  She then realized the melody resembled more the rhythm of an animal she once heard in those woods.  The bright woods darkened by the forgetfulness of time.  Her passing through time.  It'll come to you.

She was back in the hallway.  The noise she heard was no longer musical, but the sound of the door's lock being opened in a slow and mechanical reticence.  She pulled on the handle and lifted her face in expectation of her appointment and noticed it was someone else entirely.  She asked them where he was and the administrator offered the words, "I don't know where he is."  It'll come to you.

Another body entered the hallway as it began to fill with more bodies.  This third person attempted to capture a glance at her face and the woman who has been waiting responded with half a smile and raised her eyes up to the fluorescents.  It'll come to you.

She turned around.  There was another way around the back.  She walked and not too fast.  Taking her time to allow it come to her.  Where was he?  She had spent her whole life pretty much waiting for this moment.  This moment to be of use.  Usage drained slowly out of her aging body as she passed along the back hallway.  Trying to find a way around.  Through time.  Through her life.  For this moment.  To be of use.  Usage.  Draining away.  Not as slowly.  It'll come to you.


- Max Stoltenberg

THE DELETED MAN

Typing the title and erasing the front in order to make it more concise.  The subject begins to take shape.  No.  Not yet.  There is another way.  No.  Putting it back the way it was.  There was not another way.  There never was.  Now the title has something resembling a person.

The man found a missing section of the fence at the end of the park.  He passed through and half noticed thoughts that had been cut off mid-sentence or so - if that is what they were - or the manner in which they could be referred to.

He walked on into harder terrain that did not retain his footsteps.  They became or were prints of a fainter quality and off they went to thereabouts.  The breeze became a thinner barrier to no more.  As it disappeared, the sun's heat erased what little issued in the way of expression from him.  Not by himself - not him.  Today is being swiftly undone along with whatever came before.  Whatever did.  Perhaps it did - not by him.  Any?  Any more?  Not as many as he thought.  Not as many as he thought together.  Numbers.  The numbers were overestimated yet again.  Being adjusted down and less.

The landscape took him further away and down into an area of lower and less elevation than loftier memories.  Perhaps not so lofty as he supposed.  Suppose not.  In a time when more was not enough.

And now as the wind increased. There was more neglected land and unused space or abandoned it was or will be.  The dust.  The dust rose up and he did not enter or become surrounded by it.  He just became less.  And that finally - for a change - or not.  Was enough.


- Max Stoltenberg

AMBLINGS OF A PEDESTRIAN

One of the many amblings of the pedestrian is noticing the growing aches in his legs and feet.  How fast the "Don't Walk" sign flashes on.  It prompts an acceleration in the muscles and footfalls are more pronounced.  Did he press the button for the direction he wanted to walk?  Does it really expedite matters anyway?  There were so many signs with their statements, instructions, and demands.  Did the pressure applied by his feet or fingers really matter?

What seemed to smother this line of thought was a sound - what was that sound?  It sounded at first like the strange and surreal sucking sound of a tape being played backwards.  Voopt.  Voopt-voopt.  It sure did sound like that.  Then he noticed that he was walking under the highway and that it was the sound of tires passing over the road above.  Cars and trucks moving forward or so it seemed. 

Soon he walked by a very large sign for a fast food restaurant and heard another odd sound that passed itself off as a variation of the tape being played in reverse and the sucking was more like a flapping.  And it was - a flapping of the sign which was a tremendous canvas having its name receive a pronouncement of the wind tearing holes in its name.

Eventually, he reached his destination and was informed that his car could not be fixed and he would have to go to a transmission specialist.  He re-entered his car to drive into the flow of traffic with its vehicles moving forward and in reverse back to where they started and where they left from and where they started.  His thoughts leaked ever so slowly along with the fluid that continued to seep from underneath the gas and brake pedals. 

Go.  Stop.  Like a tape being fast forwarded and rewound and played in reverse.  Drip.  Drip.  Drip.  That sucking sound.  Sucking the sound out of the road and his feet and fingers whose applied pressure made little difference.  Leave.  Return.  Leave.  Drip.  Drip.  Drip.


- Max Stoltenberg