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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
Take take me take me out take me out of this take me out of this game take me out of this trap take me out of this pit take me out of this cubicle filled with desert take me out of this not because I fucked up take me out not because I care take me out not because I'm nearer the end take me out because I don't make a difference take me out because I don't give a shit take me out because I'm closer to the middle take me out and put me in the corner take me out I'm not getting it take me out I got it take me out I knew all along take me out as a little boy take me out to a field and shoot me in the head take me and bash my brains in with a long rifle take me out and let me fall to the bottom of the fields take me out where the hard ground meets the pain bursting around my insides take me out as the sound of the shot twists into my closing lids take me out the plastic ones don't fit take me out never did take me out after they warp take me out too late after returning take me out what journey take me out itinerary stuck as a plug into the leaking crack of a tire take me out.
- Max Stoltenberg
She signed her name and looked at it for as long as she could until they took the paper away and promised to get them a copy as they stood up and put down their reading glasses and left her alone in the office staring at a desk bare and empty after the paper had been taken away and they shut the door behind them behind her and she listened for their footsteps fading into some copier room somewhere in the suite sticky with expectations and bursting with silent gaps inflated into erect vegetables slumping in the corners of his associations ready to be fired at her just poised for interruption to prevent her from speaking her what was it again? Questions disguised as window cleaner you know to make the world a spotless puzzle until the edges of the pieces begin to wear away into what the wall has become where the commode lid rubs against the back of your mind.
Get up get up fight sleep sleep fight with the conversation with yourself that used to be with someone else who had the last word which reverberates along the banks of your wheezing sickness called a job employed to listen to people trying to look better or worse than they really are flat-lining skeletons coated with shit and pushed about by gas the existence that got away from the void.
Fragment of an Idea #178
Sleep Fight:
A series of 5 or 2 minute-long vignettes of combinations of professions paired off and tied to mattresses of varying degrees of discomfort and are threatened with their choice of a six-figure penalty to the wallet, a three-pronged spear to the chest, or a double-sided steel brush to the face to fight in their sleep. Proposed matches for the first season would be between "You'll never amount to anything" vs. "Everything that craps out of your mouth depresses me"; "Take this expression and simplify it to the sharpest point that will cause you the most harm" vs. "Say not what I throw away, but do what comes out of my ass"; and "You'll have to start completely over" vs. "Go to the end of the line." Have a feeling it will be renewed for another season.
I Am the Decomposer
took away the lines
for notes to drop
to the basement of her
sourness brought on
by his selfishness
took away the words
left out the voice
to go up or down
forgot the beginning and the end
neglected the middle
I am the decomposer
chipping away at empty
fictions on the rack
her feet fall off the bottom
toes the diving boards
into bloody pools
of repressed abortions
for those to ooze with life
and fuck it all up
yellow teeth
gnawing on conjunctions
and the tangles and knots
remaining in the folds
of the ambivalent
- Max Stoltenberg
He stored his memories her memories in a pot in the cabinet in the loft that had become overrun with ants and crickets and not the kind that spoke or played fiddles just the ones that now stopped removing their dead what was the point at this point? Fortitude was a word that they almost spelled with their piles of filth they made out of their bodies climbing over each other as they gently ran out of room as they gently overran the unvacuumed loft as they gently made their entrances over and over again like shit gently leaving a crack.
She stored her memories his memories in a loaf of bread that had gone bad dreams and promises had deteriorated in the one day at a time advice of others who had moved away without giving without getting the fly-swatter dropping the tray in the desert left a bone on the clipboard no one to find it amusing whether there was someone or not reading the answers mesmerized by the clenched jaw and how it reminded her of the dent in the world moving away was less and less possible every year as the dent took its toll on the bridge tilting in her attention away from numbers and what they represent to others not her not her.
Crap came up again
Blended to the music
silent for the whispered hum
tired of weddings
tired of parties
tired of selling
being sold to at the openings
of doors and closing
of thoughts of black trees
have you seen them
next to that house
the one where something
went wrong
or the other thing
depending on how
you avoid looking at it
nests of wipers
ass-wipers penetrating dialogue
just between acquaintances
bumping into each other
never thought of that
what she wanted
she never thought of that
no one ever asked her
before
triple take
slowed down
into a story
that drags into
the roots of those
weeds that won't die
"I shook out my skirt and guess what came out of it this time?" she asked.
"A banana peel?" he answered trying not to pick his nose as he peeled some crust from the edge of his right nostril feeling the red stinging skin surface exposed and the tangled string of snot that begin to pull from inside his brain.
"In addition to that you aberration," she posed and she posed like someone who had given up caring many spoiled leftovers ago.
"Can you narrow it down a bit by category?" he asked clearing the phlegm into an interlude that reminded him of a wash he had wandered into ages back when he was less ill and less connected, "Ah the contagions of being more connected!" he blurted out suddenly.
"It's your grimy wash fixation emerging yet again," she said distracted.
"Toupée, my pet tarantula!" ejaculated he who had had no reason nor anything resembling any reason since the weekends preceding the massive barren dunes overwhelming all the housing associations.
"Is my wig slipping off again?" she asked putting her hand to her head and contemplating the rubbing of her belly.
"I'm rather fond of the purple one," he mused fondly reminiscing when he told himself that fiction about her being all those fictions.
She stored her memories his memories in a loaf of bread that had gone bad dreams and promises had deteriorated in the one day at a time advice of others who had moved away without giving without getting the fly-swatter dropping the tray in the desert left a bone on the clipboard no one to find it amusing whether there was someone or not reading the answers mesmerized by the clenched jaw and how it reminded her of the dent in the world moving away was less and less possible every year as the dent took its toll on the bridge tilting in her attention away from numbers and what they represent to others not her not her.
- Max Stoltenberg
