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She walked away from the car and contemplated the morning and evening only to come around to the afternoon when feeling a rock had gotten into her sandal she stood on one leg not for long as she lost her balance and thought of the mop next to the vacuum cleaner next to the chopstick one of the chopsticks that had fallen onto the floor next to the birthday card from last year the one she had told herself she would get rid of during that really shitty week quite more than all the other shitty weeks.
She walked away from the wash and distracted herself from the thought of the noise the thought of the silence only to come around to the afternoon when noticing an anonymous message had gotten into her stream running down this leg of her journey looping around the wreath she swatted at covered in gnats someone had told her not to do that trying to remember when that was when someone had told her not to not to think so much about the noise about the silence and when she had first told herself not to think so much about what someone had told her not to do that trying to remember passwords or names or numbers or addresses as she walked away from the wash from the wreath of wire not covered in anything and distracted herself from the thought of the noise the thought of the silence the thought having to do with what she would be covered in eventually.
depressing hands it to her
changing shifts of repeating grunts
aging into sheets of spilled coffee
walking the dead dog
over to the cliff
of his presumptions
her expectations always
ended there
orange excuses for solutions
stirred into routines
accumulating into a pile
of fans clogged with thick
dust
where he returned his efforts
and she walked away
again
leaving the blame
where it belonged
and its smell tried to follow
vines of sarcasm knifing
memories and connections
puncturing her future
- Max Stoltenberg
Went down the stairs and to the sliding doors pulled the stick out of the track and put it on the bench where this ass would sit gradually slid the glass door with hand prints that catch the stare of the Sun until it blinks again with pollution walked without shoes over the rocks in the backyard this one had bigger ones sharper ones than the previous house that burned the smolder is still in my head moving from the middle further back with every scrape of forgetting stub one of the toes of the right foot beginning to climb the back wall could have gone out the front door wanted to do this way don't know if wanted is the word have always liked to do away with words haven't talked in days or weeks and yet there is still all the thinking envious of the cat read the eyes the whiskers of indifference muffled silence not bringing anything she said I left my notepad somewhere stopped showing up for sitting planes circle in the water within me as it evaporates as it all evaporates disrupting nothing for changing nothing heels dig in to the back of your neck digging in for another mesmerizing rehearsal of routine checks that bounce off the chest lungs fill with disgust no that's not it nothing is it not even despair watching people avoid death by watching it all day dragging their folding chairs closer to the precipice of involvement in the whatever of picking up an empty cup sticky bottle cracked plate greasy napkin and leaving them in the next room over the wall snapping your finger at the hot air what a what mismatch an asking myself what I could have done differently and yet and yet doing it in yet another different wrong way under the same heading that keeps all the weight of the abyss of the universe from crashing down on your sweating head taking nothing with you as you jump down to the sidewalk on the other side of the backyard wall back on the street as the cells of the neighborhood pass by behind you as you drift off into the point that never vanishes the walls the houses the landscaping the drains that pretend not to imitate each other or maybe they are so proudly so pathetically feet burn as the sidewalk turns to crickets turns to dirt and weeds stretching for miles between addresses clearing the throat no heads to look with misunderstanding with eagerness to stick their interpretation into your eye sockets until your head leaks with ribbed ego condoms sticking out of your passages tickled by the deadness of outside where you and everyone else took it out on that until it ceased to look back with anything only walking on the bottom of the dry tub of existence looking for the next hole to drop down and land you never keep falling just roll over and onto the floor of some department called the following day when you went down the stairs Went down the stairs and to the sliding doors pulled the stick out of the track and put it on the bench where this ass would sit slid the glass with hand prints that catch the stare of the Sun until it blinks again with pollution walked without shoes over the rocks in the backyard this one had bigger ones sharper ones than the previous house that burned the smolder is still in my head moving from the middle further back with every scrape of forgetting stub one of the toes of the right foot beginning to climb the back wall could have gone out the front door wanted to do this way don't know if wanted is the word have always liked to do away with words haven't talked in days or weeks and yet there is still all the thinking envious of the cat read the eyes the whiskers of indifference muffled silence not bringing anything she said I left my notepad somewhere stopped showing up for sitting planes circle in the water within me as it evaporates as it all evaporates disrupting nothing for changing nothing heels dig in to the back of your neck digging in for another mesmerizing rehearsal of routine checks that bounce off the chest lungs fill with disgust no that's not it nothing is it not even despair watching people avoid death by watching it all day dragging their folding chairs closer to the precipice of involvement in the whatever of picking up an empty cup sticky bottle cracked plate greasy napkin and leaving them in the next room over the wall snapping your finger at the hot air what a what mismatch an asking myself what I could have done differently and yet and yet doing it in yet another different wrong way under the same heading that keeps all the weight of the abyss of the universe from crashing down on your sweating head taking nothing with you as you jump down to the sidewalk on the other side of the backyard wall back on the street as the cells of the neighborhood pass by behind you as you drift off into the point that never vanishes the walls the houses the landscaping the drains that pretend not to imitate each other or maybe they are so proudly so pathetically feet burn as the sidewalk turns to crickets turns to dirt and weeds stretching for miles.
- Max Stoltenberg
Left it beginning behind the couch in front of the screen in the screen digging at it with these nails wrong nails and the toolbox grinning and bearing it alone in the garage where I am when I get lost in responsibility or pretending to be responsible and its supplies of phrases and bending of the knees and walking they call it moving they call it showing up for shit they call it shit they call it happening they vomit it out of their brains the backs of their brains in the form of growing hair and lengthening fashion that spreads its shapely deformities all over the world seeping into the cracks of the likes of us clicking and licking each other's clicks and licks and rummaging about in photoshopped stains and haphazard exchanges within one's one's whatever the hell this is superstitions stuck between your moments of contributing whatever the hell this is and picking at it with wooden sticks until the gums of your reflections bleed with sighs of disbelief at all the things your mind keeps crashing into hitting itself against the wall of nightmarish fantasy naked and spit upon lubed for repetition even though you left it beginning behind the couch.
"Put it down."
"I can't think of another insult."
"That's not what I meant and yes you could. I meant physically."
"As if my insults my the put downs the metaphors had nothing to do with the physical world this narrow entrapment of being here fuck."
"I'll put it down before you spill it."
"Don't touch it don't touch me and there's nothing left to spill sucked it all back into its solid dry orifice with the slurp of absorption."
"Least favorite number."
"The process has done another number on you has it?"
"No what's your least favorite number?"
"87."
"What don't you like about 87?"
"I just don't like it."
"My daughter fairly loathed multiples of 25."
"I didn't know you had a daughter."
"25, 50, 75, 100, she especially didn't like 125 and she would get quite cross if you asked her about it to explain it I mean."
(They sat in a row as if on a plane indicated by backpacks for falling down and paper bags for throwing up. In a row they sat as if in a desert which they were the three of them as if one of them died which they had).
"I'm still waiting."
"For me to move them?"
"To start soaking their sleeping bag with blood or something as they rot."
"They were really to themselves rather tight lipped so much so I don't think we're going to see much of anything."
"I've stopped breathing."
"What? You, too? Is it contagious?"
"Not permanently. I think I've been putting forth an effort to time my inhales."
"I'll just go on feigning to relate to anything you continue to relate to me."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"I value my insomnia."
Swords in my stomach
twisting and nagging
turning me over in my bed
yanking on the sheets of mediocrity
searching for faces, clothing
when there was a time
for waiting in line
before we got out
to what lied dead
to what lied to us
in the desert
however you say
however they said it
purchased it before
a place to call our own
grave
- Max Stoltenberg
Person thing that you passed by and pretended to ignore that is what they told you after you sat in the lobby that smelled of waiting and boredom reeking with being put off for more important more strident complaints don't say another word answer me and remember to be specific and really try this time not to repeat yourself or had all those extra things in on the tail dragging behind you leaving such a putrid brownish mess where you've been and once you've read over it make damn sure to erase almost all of it and speak to someone before you decide to quit I mean are you sure are you really certain and you and I both know how ambivalent you not only can be but how your mind just drops down the elevator shafts of both arms split into a collapse of binocular fashion vision depleted of any effort you worthless scum of the planet as it floats out there here bastard to come back another day to be obliterated or not by some meteor some object of interest filed aside swiftly with an ignorance you cannot seem to muster for any other more useful occasion playing and losing at pretend succeeding in only deceiving yourself sometimes you fall into the front row seat and look up blinking the stage-lights out of your skull cracking with a desire for stars but pay attention better attention to this direction rubbing your nose against the wall making a line of blood as you pass the person thing that you pass and pretend to ignore poorly.
What was I thinking when it crossed my mind the lives and the confusion word games and detours slicing my face in two with the sharp edges of its signs I have half a mind I mean half of that even it's what I started with only recall back to the crib filled with dead birds dropping out of the ceiling or through the window clouded with dry smoke and regret before I had done much stalling still stalling and who the fuck cares what was I thinking when it got knocked over by my reach fingers conspiring against the muscles tied together with string knotted into loops little people better off never coming out from the blankets of their nightmares the one where the apartment complex was underwater and little arms tried to make their way up into dry smoke that led up into a narrow throat getting stuck under a filthy staircase and its peeling paint of hopelessness floating up instead.
- Max Stoltenberg
Dear F,
Last August was it? or July? or April was it? A couple of years give or take a life yours or mine can really fly with a motorcycle down that road now we're going down that one I guess, but before I do go down again this time which would be the let me think and I remember how you have always told me that was a dangerous thing to do. Imagine a thing doing that what was from before or after we tried that had too many of those chips and besides all the time in the bathroom there was all the coughing and choking and cutting my right hand on the razor wire that brochure had blown into the fence not out of my hands mind you from some other hands cut one of them on the razor wire trying to pluck out that brochure with the picture of hair green or yellow with that body growing out from under it with that sneer registering for not for it was registering that look of confusion you know the one where nothing registers no not a one signed up or showed up just an empty hallway not even a hallway just the desert that same blank stare of the planet indifferent towards you or whatever the hell we think we're doing. So let that be a lesson or one of those unteachable moments of which I have made sure to be a part of most of my life and see your way clear to return it when you're done with it done as in after the first 5 minutes after I gave it to you just leave it out behind your house far behind your house where the tracks are just leave it on one of the rails and if there is still a train that runs somewhere and makes its way out by you and the wind continues to never pick up again it'll just get cut in half or close to half.
signed
H
Dear H,
I am beginning to realize again or keep realizing just less often even with not as much to drink that the only difference between you and me is that pronouns tend to pop up in the oddest places in what shits out of your mind and the damned grammatical particles tend to fall between the cracks in my mostly gas induced utterances come to think of it I do do a little of both which would mean that this only difference has suddenly dropped out the window and landed on who the hell knows what, but whatever the fuck you think you've gifted me with or tried to rid yourself of more likely I haven't the faintest only that I almost fainted last week or only a few hours ago it's hard to tell where I begin and where the mess on my desk ends or where to begin in ending this or ending it all all I do know is that I keep seeing wrists sinking in the water and then it gets harder to seem them through the clouds coming out of them colored with the soggiest of yarn. I thought there was a question in there somewhere and then the only one was that are you sure you want to quit and now it's like you wish that question never even was there you could just press delete or why did there have to be a button fans just swish the invisible around in the stinking mouth of it is what it is.
signed
f
Take a deep spluttering
anticipation of nothing new
that's why it left my mouth
and is dead on the floor
between us trying not to bump heads
foreheads or clacking eyeglasses
to turn our faces at angles
all tried before
stiff sprained necks before
bodies wrinkling apart
folding into ourselves
caving in sluggishly
the ceiling lowering us
down into the worms
and the maggots
that suck the last
meaningless versions
of what we say
of gestures made
cadaverous language
by any other tongue
sticks to the roofs
of our shadows
- Max Stoltenberg
I want a disease suspended over my regrets to let fall its shroud of loathing and abhorrence which having tumbled down the stairs of her annoyance and the corridors of her trauma that will jump across the ravine of disgust to plummet to the labyrinth of stolen minds below. They make their way something else's way who are we kidding who am I beyond the name and the numbers and the log-ins and the passwords coated with special characters distractions from the grout between letter tiles word rooms phrase buildings communities sentenced to drudge up continuations. This brain rests on fists deflating with lack of interest in the next day propped up with unfolded laundry.
"Where is it?"
"Look to the right?"
"Are you sure?
"I was giving an example?"
"You're making this up?"
"Making? Am I making something?"
"Aren't you?"
"You're asking me? For the past who knows my lungs have been exhaling question marks?"
"Do you think I'm tired of telling? Do you think I've had it with suggesting? Do you think I'm done with wondering?"
"When it was all sent away for salvage? Is that what they're calling it? Salvage? Housing it all under anxiety?"
"What did we call it before that?"
"Were you talking to me?"
"Is there someone else here?"
"Does there have to be someone else here?"
She fell asleep on the couch and dreamed of food that thawed into people she had tried to get away from and they kept showing up in different guises different contexts the same baskets the same carts the same accidents running across the desert and slowing down into the neighborhoods exhausted grinding to a halt in the beds soaked with the condensation of disappointment.
"What did we call it before that?
"Were you talking to me?"
Bends in the water in their bottles water bottles knocked over by their misunderstanding each other half hearing each other over their laptops looking down into the light from below seeping out of tragedies that hold less of an anatomy bleeding out of routines that hold less of a memory vomiting out of batteries that hold less of a charge.
"Is there someone else here?"
"Does there have to be someone else here?"
Disrespect for the shadows
The palm rubs the blood
off the table
off the side of a leg
Fingerpainting in shit
letting the other
sample it spit it out
into your darkening eyes
these windows of disbelief
that knew all along
wasn't there wasn't here
to put down your head
pillows of glass and needles
sticking the forgotten
and remembered together
injected with shame
coursing with guilt
through veins of criticism
bulging and thinning
in every breath
polluted with life
- Max Stoltenberg
