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He lay in bed looking as if he might fall out spotted by no one but the thud laying there sweaty exhaling the dust into the legs of the nightstand stumpy dusty corner legs who doesn't have their headphones in? who is that? report them to me before they let their noise disrupt what half of my ass I have left to give to the day. Correction, report them to him I get carried away when it looks as though he's had an accident and won't be stirring about the pot not from the night before not too long before less than a couple of hours actually but stirring the pot with so much sticking to the sides we'll be headed for another collision sooner than we think suppose it'll get stuck in our throats and make us cough that way we did at one of those parties long ago when they asked us to leave not because of the cough mind you but all the other stuff that gets caught in one's throat and makes it difficult to carry on a conversation or face the scrutiny of those too impatient for the delayed ends of sentences.
"How is it?"
"It's OK I guess."
"Really?"
"No, not that good really more of a resemblance of all the other disappointments throughout this I guess you could call it what would you call it?"
"Life?"
"Is that what you'd call it?"
"More like when you try to get candy out of a box and someone has pushed the tab in."
"I feel as though I've been given a tremendous lack of opportunity to do what I do almost somewhat adequately."
"Are you going to try some more?"
"They used to always say before you go in to have a list."
"A To Do list?"
"More a list of questions to ask, but I never could think of any. Think of what to ask so few words from loud towering people. Guess that's why I would spend so much time looking up at tall abandoned buildings. Only then they could overshadow so few words and such long silences."
"Do you think art is what drops off the conveyor belt or what stays on it or both?"
"Whatever gets caught in the gears or none of the above."
Water that makes up
most of her
is evaporating
long hair returning
about to be cut
cashed in
not as much this time
this time this wretch
before a break
from the disturbed sleep
turning on the fan
unplugged from the wall
the wall blocking out
replicas of your insecurities
turning on you
- Max Stoltenberg
Loading please wait loading a log of shit please wait logging a tremendous load of bullshit please wait or fuck the please just wait or don't be on your way don't need me to say it or anyone else or maybe that certain someone that certain high school face and it was never the same handling anything after that dropping something would never be a small matter just a glass bowl full of the reddest bloodiest fakest bloodiest fruit punch crashing to Earth and staining your spotlight in front of the group splitting and resplitting into thousands and millions and billions so rapidly your heart not yours for sleep in a lost peace as the pillow tears at your eye closed but like a garage door being forced open to waking moments of insomniac frustrations and deadlines and people who you are being convinced by yourself you are supposed to rip your brain in half to give a fuck about while they make up their minds glued together with deflections and rhetoric whipped on a rowing machine into shapes and sizes of thumbnails that make your eyes gloppy with mucus of isolation and just a side note behind the very turned banana peel licked by the cat a stain of something it finds reminiscent of the edible once found in the cuts made in the rotting land between locations for passing out after talking each other out of doing much else things taken off of other things or put next to something reminding someone of a boxed existence or part of one.
"Mention his name go ahead I dare you."
"His name?"
"Yeah, go ahead I fucking dare you to and see what heap of gnarled shit-storm will come raining down on you."
"I don't think I could."
"You see you've probably filled your pants with a load of excrement in anticipation of the wrath of our own torment or maybe who knows maybe you might get lucky and be spared losing only one limb."
"No, I mean I think you're referring to her the woman who liked to wear all black well I don't want to assume she liked to wear or liked much of anything I think your feigned optimism struggled in all its strident echo chamber of hollow motivation in the face of her pushing back I don't want to read too much into it it might have just come naturally to her for all I know and that has always been a failing venture on the downside of vague too forlorn to be able to focus and keep my place when reading others I tend to find myself out in the hallway hit in the seat of my soiled pants by the impatience of those behind me in line at the checkout."
"You said her name once I think you got it wrong. It doesn't surprise me with your way or lack thereof."
"One thing I do recall is that book I lent you because you were obsessed with making small talk more microscopic and when asked for it back several months later you smirked and made some pun of the book's title and walked away. You shrugged and walked away."
"You keep insisting I did that."
"I don't insist. I bring it up whenever the noise dies down for a brief moment every few years or so. Not a frequent event. It could also be when I come across something like a lighter with not enough fluid to get past the spark."
Delving into nuisances
Bending back to the window
Heading for the disagreeable
U-turns into silence
Changing one's stale mind
Thoughts unbrushed with paste
She knew holding
the last time one could
muster tears
or tear into muster
gone now
bellowing in a house
with knocks
to bring one to a barren keyhole
- Max Stoltenberg
Got the case mixed up upper or lower the beginning of each plane flying over the house the shower has run cold figures ran through the steps and can't simply add one would think one would run out of reasons for trying to hit print again except that you are expecting something else to happen for example for it to work and that would be asking a column not to fall on you look up and the color of your eyes might catch a hint of what used to come in through the window through my mind when I used to look up not like you no one could do that the way you could when I paid attention outside the folding information promises of better and worse flatten into each other when folded over into beds made by my deceased togetherness.
Trying to put an ear to the door that jiggles in the lock barely held and going nowhere hardly a purpose shut open and shut a strainer over a small child's face the metal cold eyes squint in a manner that between planets would conjure a recipe for emptiness die and make sure all evidence of your existence no longer makes you cough while you try to listen to another transferred call. And her glasses were broken she said was what she was trying to had said and that was it as the tub the drain clogged got the instrument next to the snake that shed its skin in the corner the forgotten part of the neighborhood texted a reminder to bring the letter sealed with tape didn't appreciate how envelopes didn't appreciate a tongue and she left with her picture framed of a ship with a framed relative on board the ship released too late to enjoy freedom having died within a weekend.
"Let me see."
"I have no control over that."
"You have very little control over anything you crack in the cement."
"I didn't think I could even manage that much."
"The stairs."
"It's impressive how they can go so long without blinking."
"No, the stairs. Where do they lead?"
"Lead? They stop after about 3 and a half floors, but it's your funeral."
"We'll see about that. I've fallen down a flight of stairs."
"Just another day for changing your mind?"
"About what has befallen me or what I'd like to befall me?"
"I hear a nibbling inside my head."
"A rodent or bad idea?"
"A rodent with a bad idea. It has a mind for sewers in the belfry of my skull."
"Turning over an old leaf?"
"You know me too well."
"Like an overcooked burger."
"Undercooked vegetable."
Trees for climbing and bleeding
Blood for dripping and signing
Chambers for gestures twisted
By bigger people cruel with disdain
Dark hallways stretched with failure
Mind is an accordion
Thoughts unsuccessful
in keeping the walls apart
defiance is measured by suffocation
- Max Stoltenberg
Been signed out for a long while since the dawn of the shroud mincing words with the weakened fortresses of sick and contagious anxiety chests at attention most of the time overtime so over it not over it into the night that deals its horrors in your dreams in your cranial furniture the cesspool of flawed blendings trying to spit out words spitting or drooling with punctuation or pauses or and or can he or she or it or and or this that common distinctions ending where I fall asleep almost and then startle with another segment of the worm that loops in my markings and grades never entered for anyone to remember or even or odd or and or terse knocking at the wall behind the picture of the child wearing a sheet over his whole dirty body no one to remind him to shower they just never leave their rooms they just never leave their rooms.
"There, I said it," she said.
"There, you said it," he said.
"It always sounds better when you say it," she said.
"But, I didn't say it. I just said that you said it," he said.
"You did," she said.
"About what you said," he said.
"You did make it sound better," she said.
"Who told you that?" he asked.
"I told me that," she said.
"No, I mean where did you get that idea from?" he asked.
"From myself," she said.
"Who else in your life said that other people take what you say and say it better?" he asked.
"The others, I guess," she said.
"What others?" he asked.
"Everyone else takes what I say and makes it sound better," she said.
"They don't exactly assume your raw materials or shitting pot you hang your lips over. It tends to be closer to a starting from scratch process," he said.
"Like that for example," she said.
"I am not they," he said. "Or perhaps I am no matter how much I'd like to refuse membership with everyone else," he added.
"No matter?" she asked.
"Like that for example?" he asked.
Shuddering vision
Diffused with closed eyes
Vulgar kissing sounds
Ushered in by your tired asshole
The distance is populated
by the mean
Reading blank pages
curving into the everyday death
reawakened into coercion
- Max Stoltenberg
I wanted to ask and kept it to myself like a name-tag falling down your shirt and just laying at the bottom above the belt where I wanted to ask ask the question and kept it to myself like a name-tag falling down your shirt and just laying there at the bottom above the belt come to think of it after you spent that time all that time sitting there on the edge of the tub the one with the little hairs not the curled ones the short straight one don't try and tell me you I want to ask the question and kept it to myself like a name a tag falling down your shirt and just laying at the bottom hiding behind the TV behind the wall in the back of the closet sliding down the rhetoric of a shaken soda can dropped against the edge of the table laying at the bottom above the belt waiting for it anticipating the spoon wooden in expression knowing the eyeliner of boldfaced lies canned bubbles folding around the edge curled ones short ones straight ones don't try and tell me you I want to ask the question and kept it to myself.
"You were punching yourself in your sleep."
"Why didn't you stop me?"
"I'm hypothesizing or it could be hypothesized that you were punching yourself in your sleep."
"Is that what you're putting on your paperwork these days?"
"These days."
"What was that?"
"A repetition. Filler."
"No. It sounded like an explosion."
"Just more rotted buildings collapsing about."
"Oh. I feel these ditches all along the right side of my nose."
"You were scratching yourself in your sleep."
"I did have a dream about giving a cat a bath in a sink."
"I didn't know you had a cat."
"A cat. I said a cat. I never had a cat. A decade or so ago I had a recurring dream for a period of maybe a month where every night there was a bilby in it and I began to wonder if I had one of those things as a pet, but as it turns out I thought I had those dreams because I mentioned it to this coworker at the hole in the ground I used to work at."
"Hole in the ground? When did you have a job?"
"As it turns out it was nothing official and I never got paid. Just a hole in the ground."
"Where was this hole in the ground?"
"Next to some pile of corpses."
"One of those arrangements."
"Never seemed to put a dent in it. Turns out I never mentioned any recurring dream to this coworker. Was never very good at making friends at work."
"The story keeps changing."
"What story?"
The edge of the table laying at the bottom above the belt waiting for it anticipating the spoon wooden in expression knowing the eyeliner of boldfaced lies canned bubbles folding around the edge curled ones short ones straight ones don't try and tell me you I want to ask the question and kept it to myself.
- Max Stoltenberg
Backwards from a hundred working back to a thousand a million and so on and so on it goes I go she goes on without me into the dark with her flashlight texting as the beam jiggles over where we used to walk like the time when words could convince us that things could grow into something wonderful or that it would all be destroyed and instead we have these things lying on the ground run over wrapped around violent swift replies since our heads can't do it can't even step into the chalk rectangle taking a bat to our windows on our empty eyes drawn by crayons melting in the desert. Nonsense burritos nor couches riddled with pee sprinkled from on low medium well dressed person staring at you because they have more lines more expressions rapidly starting to sound all alike and yet if you separate the shit with your hands mind you with your mind got to hand it to you there appears well it's already there nothing appears except what is already there never mind got to hand it to you hand you nothing there did it already and thus the conclusions reached by your DVD menu form a way around the shrinking room.
She bent over the bendy straw and thought she noticed a tear along the angle-adjustable bellows and thought she saw her the one she used to be in class with in online college and imagined what she looked like until she sent her a friend request after a stream of commentary on fossilized families.
Tense caffeine shades
alarm clock minefield
boots leering emptied
stiff laced eggshells
anxious unraveling enigmas
shredded DNA laundry
- Max Stoltenberg
The two of them will find a locked door to separate to keep them both out while the rest of us attempt to figure things out distracting ourselves away from our distractions pixels of thoughts safety pins puncturing from behind towards the next step into the sewage backing up into the landscaping forgotten memories smelling rotting corpses under the buffet is that where that rank is coming from the offer letter in a format for no more revisions unless they want to interrupt your complaints the tightness in your neck now that they mention it now that you mention it. The two of them will find a locked door an unlocked door to separate to keep them both out while the rest of us attempt to figure things out distracting ourselves away from our distractions transposing for someone else on the other side of a locked door they will find will have found the two of them will have discovered that the next thing to be possessed of a mild or moderate disjointed company protected from any voice shouting at its walls the floor creaks and thumps with adjustments making a few irregular thumps with pauses for another sex another sewing together two or three layers of pizza slices have had enough of this face tilted down at the sky reflected in the nothing that I can tell could even possibly reflect haven't thought about it and I can say it again because that is what I do if I am not tearing the skin from my fingers with my teeth when I am drunk with suspicion and envy and rot the desert rot the desert kind of rot.
The three of them will find an opened door left open by one of them the one who rushed after dragging their stinking ass behind the rest of them the other two the rest of the three including the one of them the one who rushed after dragging their stinking ass behind the rest of them feeling something fly out of his beard having scratched at his hairy neck further down the steps as they twisted to the right into the dark where the backpacks and the chew-toys the leashes the harping on not being able to find the paper where the thought of using the answer b on the multiple choice exam might have be considered as excessive or overly redundant.
Would he go over it and discover the answer b kept reappearing? He would he had and it did the answer b kept reappearing and re-emerging in an act of resignation filling out a life made of choking down deal-breakers. Menacing eyes burned through the dark of his closed lids into his puzzled brain twisting his nut-sack into a posture of pretend engagement with the farce on the other side of the desk drooping in front of an old paint job in need of another one that comes after you quit or attempt to in your ambivalent minding of the store of the decreasing initiatives singular now they waited for it and here it is a unifying tactic ground into the powder of reduced neighborhoods refined by having only one left of everything. Touch yourself and pull hard pull until you peel off the flypaper of the universe and rise out of a sweaty bed and adhere to it again the double-sided moebius strip of shit.
- Max Stoltenberg
