Andrew Spiess

Strangers call me, craving to reduce
my quality of life for their benefit.
Strangers I’ve never met before.
Strangers that have my number.
Strangers that care.
Eating more is living more.

Carry yourself as if every corner you
turn you might get punched in the face.
You are now aware. You are now
dependent on an item or invention.
It is you that is thought of and
well chosen and interfered,

a specimen examined by several
assholes paid with the only money
there is. Don’t act until it’s a crisis.
Like you, they sent me back and forth
to be photographed, strapped me
to a clock that heats up,
glows gold to white.

I don’t trust confident personalities.
I only trust those who don’t smile.
I only love you when I’m lonely.
If more people thought I
was a bastard, I would find
more people to be agreeable.
I don’t even have a reason to like you.

I’m keeping the window open
while I watch

a fly that I swatted
clean itself and rummage over

the fresh carcasses
of five other flies that I killed

under a lamp.
I watch it lose its senses

in a bright envelope the way you
and I watch television,

its blue light offering comfort
from fear of the lonely future,

when you get up to turn off
the faucet and wonder

if the living room clock
is ticking louder than usual,

if there’s any way to
fix the steady vexation,

any honest way
to hold back.

Someone lights a match
at the window, lets it burn
to the fingertips, sinks away
into the dark. It is 12:14 AM
and the front door is ajar.
The bulb hangs from a floor lamp
like the wet tongue of a dog.
The blue walls are a fuss.
They are ready to sing,
ready to flake with teeth.
Canned laughter drifts in
and out, drifts into living rooms,
licks the heat from meals,
sleeps in your hat.
Delusions sleep in the moments
between moments.
I am a hot swollen tongue
in this dark mouth
we often call a room,
moving here and there
and slapping up against
the walls, confusing
and almost teenage.
Too hot on the cushions,
in the kitchen, even
out on the street and
downtown where a bum
like me doesn’t even know
what to say to store clerks.
At times it seems that I cannot
peel myself from this position,
can’t even move the corners
of my mouth, so here I am
waiting in the middle of the room.
And what is it that is stuffed
under the couch? I pick at it
until there’s too much blood.

Kids
scratch walls
with rocks
to be involved

Kids scratch
their names
into glass
with shards
of glass

1
There is nothing but what is near to us. If you don’t believe me, go down the street and drift around. Eels of light slide from dim streetlamps. Like eels, my thoughts radiate from my bulbous head, bleed together like a blend of yellow episodes, like a bowl of soup between two lovers. My voice like an eel with heavy teeth, drifting through curls of smoke. I only have to close my eyes to possess myself.

2
Dream out of focus. Fragment. Stark faculties. The sharp call of crickets drifting and riddling the cold spaces of my inner recesses. In the swallowing night, dried leaves skitter on the street leaving footsteps in my ears. Footsteps that fold and collapse. The implications of folds. My mind folding over like skin. A fabric so thin, it must be touched to exist.

3
Shadow-eyed, I watch moths beat themselves to death against the streetlamps, listen to the rhythmic knock of their bodies against light. Moths like desperate knuckles knocking against doors, the knock and flutter of thoughts and stuttering talk, the limitless flickering of their wings.
When they drop, my eyelashes catch them.

4
There is a sound in the back of the freezer, maybe something alive, but every time I check nothing is back there. And sometimes I think I taste something synthetic in my sinuses and throat, but there’s nothing in there either.
Even the wind carries synthetics.

5
Stirred into the platinum mass, I spend my curiosity pacing through revolving doors made of intangible glass, my scuffed boots smudging the smooth floor. Am I a small part of the whole or of no significance? In the waste I am motionless, floating lungs full of sluggish air. I cannot help but notice that I am waiting.

Listen close to the bitter groans
of a biker passing down your street at night.
Ignore the reflector’s glare.
Notice his eyes, his slackjaw,
his yellow teeth.

Release a burning scream
in a hallway followed by five minutes
of silence each night.
Linger a moment. Run your fingers
through your hair.

When I rub my fists into my eyes
dust spreads out into a cloud around my head
Dust shakes from trees when the animals and I breathe
Dust pushes me out of cracks in the street
I don’t belong underneath

Cars squeal out of the mouths
of streets and into other mouths
A howling train rolls through town
slug-shaped and pale
chased by the dawn

Two bees fly crooked and burst
into dead leaves
Two shots in the distance
Even the scraps we save for later
can become confetti

It was as hot as it was going to get late in the afternoon even though there was some wind and the sky looked white, almost grey. The flies were lively and sirens tore through the heavy air somewhere far from the gas station downtown, where Mark and Lauren were standing outside.

“It’s fine. Don’t worry about it,” she kept telling him. “Don’t worry.”

Mark furrowed his eyebrows and scratched the skin under the hairs on his face. Everyone he saw driving by bit his or her nails. They did not smile or sing along to the radio. Lauren held one of her arms close to her chest out of habit, which made Mark feel nostalgic. She’d been doing that ever since he knew her, but for all she knew she never did this. She pushed her sunglasses up her nose which made his right leg shake a little bit and he hoped that she wouldn’t notice.

“Is your leg shaking?” she said.

“Why didn’t you call someone else?” he said. “I don’t want to do this.”

“No one else answered my calls,” she said.

“Sure,” he said.

“You’ve bought cigarettes before. It should be easy. It’s all about confidence. My confidence gets me a lot of things. Don’t you want to feel like you can get what you want?”

He didn’t say anything.

“My confidence gets me a lot of things,” She said again. Mark waited for her to list her benefits like money and power and respect and sex but she didn’t say anything else. “Is your leg shaking?” she said, finally.

“No,” he said

“It looks like it is. Try hard to stop doing that,” she said. She kept thinking about how he’s bought cigarettes before, how the cashier can’t tell how young she is because of his facial hair, how it can’t be any different. He just had to attract respect when he walked.

“It’s not easy,” he said and the fact that she doesn’t understand this brought his eyebrows down.

Lauren kept cracking her knuckles, each one individually over and over again as Mark pushed against the door but it did not budge so he pulled it open and walked inside.

Mark shuffled his feet in the middle aisle of the store while sucking his teeth. The sirens rang outside as he scratched his beard. It smelled cold in there. He picked up and replaced several different items, feeling the smooth plastic of the packaged snack foods, noticing how much was inside each bag. Finally he landed on a bag of pork rinds.

He glanced out the glass doors to see Lauren looking in, cracking her knuckles. There was no way he was leaving. And the footsteps from costumers that he can’t find and someone quietly speaking german around the corner.

Mark looked around for the general manager of the store. He was a balding man that wanted to be able to look at you in the eyes and the floor shook when he walked by, but Mark didn’t see him around anywhere.

Instead, he watched a man standing in front of the cashier slam his palm against the counter. “Talk to me,” he said.

“You’re unavailable,” the cashier said. She backed away from the register.

“Is there something you’re not telling me, or are you telling me nothing?” he said.

“It doesn’t matter,” said the cashier. “There really wasn’t anything ever promised. Considering that you owe me you’re in control. What I gave you is gone. Considering that you have nothing I can’t take anything from you. And I am not one to fight.”

A chorus of ambulances outside and the howl of a train passing through.

“If you’re so smart, why don’t you know that?” said the cashier.

Mark walked up to the counter and stood next to the man. He looked out at Lauren one last time.

“Get out of here.” the man said. “The store’s closed!”

“You can’t do that,” the cashier said. “You can’t turn away our customers.” Tires squealing in the parking lot outside. Mark paused. “I just need some…a pack of Marlboro’s,” he said.

As Mark fished through his wallet for the right amount of money, he listened to his heart beating. He listened to everyone’s hearts as they beat faster. He swallowed and wiped the sweat from his forehead with his forearm and pulled a ten dollar bill out of his wallet. He wasn’t shaking, but he wiped the sweat from his forehead again. He handed the cashier the money and she paused, staring at him for what he believed was far too long. She was a petite girl. She had a very coy look in her eyes despite the bruise under one of them. She handed him his change and he took it and immediately scratched the hair on his neck.

“Thanks,” His nonchalance cracked a little and so did his voice.

He walked out the door like everyone else because it is easier to move through the motions than not to. He saw Lauren waiting outside, a semblance of a smirk on her face, and beyond her was a guy and a girl standing on a sidewalk holding each other tightly.

It seems to me that the trees are rising in the night and I realize that I may be having a panic attack so I call James who has a prescription for Xanax in order to ease his own anxiety issues. Nice enough guy anyways. Big metalhead, or maybe punk. Either I can’t tell the difference or there is no distinction, considering the similar way he speaks of both. He wears black shirts and has long straight locks and thick chops made of course dirty hair. I walk over there, crossing streets lined with awful houses and streetlamps, and each one I pass flickers and dims, leaving me in spots of shadows. Dry leaves crunch under my boots. The cold Midwestern wind resists me and bare tree branches reach out, vanishing at the tips. I hear an animal scream somewhere close to me, brush past rubbish and disappear. I stand where I am for a second, looking around, smoking a cigarette, and then move on.

I get to his house and let myself in through the basement door. The stale air inside immediately takes me. James sits on a couch. He looks at me and nods and mutters something but I don’t want to talk to him so much as get a glass of water, yet he seems happy to see me or at least to see somebody, as he is often desperate for human interaction, which I doubt that I can provide for him at the moment. He pulls a pill bottle out his left cargo pocket and tells me that he has more than what I was expecting, and at that point I was willing to talk, but I desperately needed a glass of water.

He shows me an eighty milligram pill of OxyContin, the old kind, one that you can grind into powder, which I hadn’t seen for weeks and as he hands it to me I am instantly overcome by how well I am able to breathe through my nose at the time, how strong and healthy my body has become as of late. And in a way, I could feel myself dissolve on the inside. I sit down next to him on the couch and pull the coffee table closer so I have a good surface to work on.

“Come on, Matt,” James says. “You’re going to tear up the carpet doing that. Fucking be careful.”

“Sorry. I didn’t think of that.” As I say this I wonder why anyone would install carpet in a basement, although this is where he lives. I suppose he wants to make it as comfortable as possible. James hands me a hose clamp and I bend it into an arc so I can grate the pill into a pile of powder, and the simple act of grinding, the scraping sound of it, induces a euphoria in me and I think about the past month or so, how hellish it was, the anguish, the way that my body sickens without this substance in my system.

And all the while, James is ranting about something that he thinks people don’t understand: “I’ll tell you about punk rock: punk rock is a word used by dilettantes and…and heartless manipulators about music that takes up the energies and the bodies and the hearts and the souls and the time and the minds of young men who give what they have to it and give everything they have to it and it’s a… it’s a term that’s based on contempt, it’s a term that’s based on fashion, style, elitism, Satanism and everything that’s rotten about rock’ n’ roll. Of course, I can’t say that I ever knew Johnny Rotten, but I’m sure… I’m sure he put as much blood and sweat into what he did as Sigmund Freud did.”

I look him in his half-shut eyes as long as I can and ask him how much of this shit he’s done, jokingly. And for some reason, I can’t help but picture him re-shingling his grandfather’s roof, and also the effort he puts in to his job at the Honda dealership. He tells me about his family sometimes, about his father’s success. He says he’s on his way to his father’s efficiency. A practical man, a Jack-of-all-Trades, so to speak. A useful friend.

“I think it sounds like trash,” I say.

“Well, okay,” he says, leaning closer to me. “You see, what sounds to you like a big load of trashy old noise is in fact the brilliant music of a genius, myself. And that music is so powerful that it’s quite beyond my control and when I’m in the grips of it I don’t feel pleasure and I don’t feel pain, either physically or emotionally. Do you understand what I’m talking about? Have you ever felt like that? When you just couldn’t feel anything and you didn’t want to either. You know? Like that? Do you understand what I’m saying?”

I don’t say anything. Eventually I tell him that I’m meeting her later and he acts like this is typical, as if he knew I was going to say this or that I already had, which doesn’t make sense to me because I have not spoken to her in some time and he tells me to get out, possibly for ignoring him. As I walk out, I promise him I will pay him for helping me out probably in a few days.

“Fine.” He lets out a sigh the sound of Central Air, leans his head back, and closes his eyes.

…

The last dream I had involved Sarah. I don’t remember much of it. It had something to do with myself sitting up on my side of the bed, moving my feet to the floor and rubbing my oily face with the palms of my hands, sleep smearing my vision. Dazed from waking, I looked behind me and saw her lying there, deeply sleeping and serene, the curls of her auburn hair splashed over half of her face and on the pillow under her head. I can’t tell if it’s the trickery of my blurred vision of waking or something leftover from the night before, but I tried to focus on the living curls of her hair, coiling around her face and around the pillow, tickling her nose. There was another part that had to do with something I have already forgotten. I’m not sure when this dream occurred. Last night I dreamt of nothing.

…

I meet Sarah at a local diner over coffee and to talk because we haven’t talked in a while and I’m certain that it bothers her. I pull open the door to the diner and motion for her to go in first. We take a seat at a booth next to a family of a mother and two young boys. I watch one of the boys pour into his mouth a couple packets of sugar I was hoping he wouldn’t. Under the table, I pull out a bar of Xanax from a pack of cigarettes in my pocket that I took from James and squeeze it between my fingers.

“Can I get you anything, dear,” says Margie, the waitress, standing over the two of us as if she just sprouted out of the ground. I order a cup of coffee, as black as she can make it. Sarah asks for water with as much politeness as she can muster up.

“We should have gone to a coffee shop.” Sarah says. When she speaks all her teeth show, and I can’t help but think about how much we have in common and how she is so far out of reach. A warm sea apart. Earlier, she called me and I thought about letting this one go, but I brought my phone to my ear and said hello. Her voice the tone of a lovely violin. I imagined her breath smelled like sweet fruit. She always seemed like a stranger, more or less, but there was something between us, something that felt tender but uncertain. I felt like we both wanted to figure that out.

“This place is fine. I like it here. Don’t you think it’s comfortable, welcoming at least?” I want her to understand my sentiments.

“They don’t serve tea here.”

“It doesn’t matter because we need to talk.”

“You haven’t spoken to me much.”

I pause. “I haven’t been myself lately.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

I don’t say anything. Margie comes back with a mug of coffee and places it in front of me along with a small bowl of half and half creamers and sets Sarah’s glass of water in front of her and walks away without giving her a straw. I stare at my coffee, watch the steam rise and the thickness of it swirl like a puddle of oil, and as I fix my eyes on my drink that I have utterly lost interest in I know that Sarah is staring at me, trying to extract some kind of value from my face. I try to stay stern.

After about a minute of silence, Sarah repeats what she said.

I do not say anything.

And at this moment, a man that I’ve never seen before walks into the diner and recognizes Sarah sitting with me, and he takes a step towards our booth, a giddy smile stretching across his face, ready to greet her, but when he notices that she’s crying, his grin dissipates and he turns away, and as she wipes the tears from her eyes I eat the entire pill as fast as I can, washing it down with scalding coffee. She stands up, maneuvering out of the booth.

“Never mind. I might call you later.”

“Okay. Call me if you want.”

…

James tells me I owe so many people money, and so I’m losing friends, then he tells me that he likes my shirt and asks me if I liked a certain band, but I had never heard of them. James and I are a lot alike. His back is fairly straight. We walk the same stride. Our friendship has always involved the utility of drugs, and it’s not easy to readjust, so we try to distract and sedate and plug up the holes that belong to us.

Someone else sits in the room that wasn’t there earlier. He seems rough, with two lit cigarettes between chapped, peeling lips. “I’m holding this one for a friend,” he says.

A flash of stillness occurs. A balloon in the conversation. Everyone falls voiceless. We stop talking for a while and listen to the basement breathe through radiators, seemingly moving, almost alive.

The sun comes up, unwanted, and I am irritated. As I get high, I realize I am afraid of something I wasn’t considering before or maybe I just didn’t understand, and so I decide to leave. But the truth is there is no coming and no going. I stand up and do not look at the stranger or James, who was busy shuffling a deck of cards.

“This was a bad idea.” I told him, knowing that he might misunderstand such a vague statement.

“Yeah,” he said without saying goodbye or looking at me, and so I eventually made my way through his door and that was that. That moment was a failure. The next may be better.

Only the glow
left and the shadows
of white coils
tentacles of plastic
now sixteen
in a cast
of light

An ellipsis, the screen
is a backlit semblance
of a silhouette

A mixture of pops and ticks
a hissing behind a shadow
close to a breeze

Down hallways
the smell of water:
a chorus of whales
in the late dark
beyond the glow

Only mistakes stain for years
and shape the earth

Only light through a hole
the more holes
the more light

Only twitches of synthetics
and synapses
and the glow

low world colored
flat, yet rolled up
to feel solid

night advances the way
wind pushes smoke

a motion
a flock of feathered
moments squawking
like phone calls

like rain
I am all around
and shown
in occasional
flashes and screams

the wind exhales
chimes
chilled over
pill music
pale sweetness

flecks mocking light
drip from the inside
of my nose
and the back of my throat
down to my eroding
stomach

the next moment
I am not myself

A river of faces
forms the procession.

Faces as stern as a corpse,
eyes glimmering
mint and pristine.

In a dark corner
I drink black tea
from my lover’s cup –
My eyelids fall
like the lid of a coffin
as I listen:

A thick fog of gossip
The stink of talk

A slice of shine
severs with the edge
of ascendancy.

A deep knock on planks
blond hair flops and spreads
like a beached jellyfish,
legs stark and gnarled.

A dark slug, a malignant thing
crawled out from the unnatural
opening inside me, born from a hole
and hungry, must be removed or killed.

I am stuck in a drone,
my spine, a dry stake.
Scarecrow, pale and cloaked,
to make not the pain,
but just the groans.

Scarecrow,
We walk the same stride.
We dug our foxholes
in the same corner of town,
the same corner of the mind.

Scarecrow,
use smoke to gag
the energy out.
Fill that void
with humor or kill it.

Scarecrow,
My skin is tighter than ever.
My nerves burst forth
like coarse hair and straw.

Scarecrow,
Every night is solid
all the way through the inside.

Scarecrow,
Soon enough
we will blow over, scattering
in the spaces between blades
of gray wheat.

Listen, you need to focus! Stop pacing aimlessly in your kitchen. Stop talking to yourself. You must find your wallet, your cigarettes, and your cell phone. You need to find a lighter. Get money fast. If there isn’t any money in your wallet, use your bank card at the ATM. Don’t worry about overdrawing if your account is low in funds; you can pay it back later when you get hired somewhere after submitting those job applications to the several restaurants around the city like you’ve been meaning to do. There is also a phone number on a strip of paper lying around for a bike messenger job that you ripped off the bulletin board at the Laundromat that you go to. Relax. Maybe the Laundromat is hiring.

Your wallet is probably under all the trash on the coffee table. Check under the magazines, ashtrays, and empty cigarette packs. Your cigarettes are probably mixed in with all the empty packs. Shake them all until you hear something rattling inside other than loose scraps of tobacco; search for something solid. There is a chance that you might find a single forgotten cigarette. Nothing? Nevermind. There’s your cell phone, under the photograph of your mother smiling and drinking iced tea on the patio back in California. Put that in a place where you won’t see it. You will not think about your mother. You will not miss her.

Call that guy Pockets. You should have his number. Did you see him a few days ago, or was that last week? Nevermind because there is his number. He told you he would front you again if you paid him back. He likes you. Don’t ask him for his real name even though you want to because it’s not a good idea to get too personal with people like him and it’s all just business anyway so forget about making friends for now. Just find your wallet.

Search under the couch cushions. Nothing but some pennies and plastic wrappers. Are those your cigarettes? You must feel so relieved. Now, find yourself a lighter. Move the couch and check underneath. Don’t put the cushions back because it’ll add that little bit of weight and you don’t want to strain yourself. You are too tired for that, and you don’t have time either. What do you see under there? Nothing but crumpled plastic bags, fast food trash, and cigarette butts. There’s a lighter! Reach for it and test it out. Is it empty? Shake it up. It must be completely dry. Forget it. Just find your wallet.

Look around on the floor. It’s that simple. This place is a mess. Everything you see belongs in the dumpster. And maybe you eat too much fast food. You should take care of yourself. You should vacuum. Make a note to clean yourself up and organize your belongings later. Is that the number for that bike messenger job? What is that tiny piece of red material behind it? It’s a portion of a pill. There must be at least twenty milligrams left. That’s all you need to balance yourself. Once this is in your system you won’t feel sick anymore. You don’t have enough to get high, which would be ideal, but at least you won’t feel this disease and depression that has been dragging the skin on your face down all night and causing your eyes and nose to leak like a sieve. Your bones won’t feel so hollow and fragile. You’ll even be awake enough to begin submitting job applications, and you should probably call your mother.

But you need a dollar bill and something to grind the pill with. First, rub the red casing off with some spit and a tissue. If you can’t find a grinder, find the closest Wal-Mart in your immediate proximity and buy some hose clamps. It works as a miniature grate to grind a pill into a pile of fine white dust. In order to buy these, you need to find your wallet. Buy several hose clamps for when you lose one, because you will lose one. You will lose them all eventually.

Remember: there might be a dollar bill in your wallet. Just relax. All you need to do right now is smoke a cigarette, but your eyelids are falling. Maybe you should make some coffee. You shouldn’t sleep even when you’re tired, when you’re too exhausted to function properly.

Ivy climbs up
the resilient trunk
of an oak tree,
choking, but
there is no struggle.
Light barely touches
the cracked bark
as the ivy wraps
around gnarled arms.
There will be no blossoming
of leaves in the spring
for the staggering branches,
but the leaves of the vines
will always glint
and cover and thrive.

Fog hides a tree –
Is it there?
Gasping tip of a branch

Mat of overcast
solid and heavy -
I am trapped and waiting.

Winter wind –
A sharp gust
taps dead maple branches together

Winter sun
pulls ice
to a point.

Glaring up,
bright yellow breaks through,
leaks from a shell of clouds.

Breathing again –
the fresh air stings
the wet grass

Sunshine envelops with warmth
illuminated trees
darker underneath

Sharpening shadows
heavy upon the pavement
a solid patch over the road.

If a girl was not
crossing the street,
there would be nothing.

Old windows
old eyes –
the sky is marked

On dark flooded roads
there are no cars
only rushing waves full of light.

Still alive, smoke
draws arcs that rise
grows out of an ashtray

pills
there are so many
liars

Man walks out of
A public restroom
biting his lip

The swallowing night
burns away
by the streetlamps.

A trucker’s goatee dances
as he chews,
peering into our windows.

Watch the air cook
On the bricks of a wall and simmer
In the sunlit spaces outside
For hours
Until it changes into a thick black.

There is a natural grease
Coating my eyes as well as the world,
Helping me easily slip
Into soft sleep,
Plummet into a solid dream.

Gather 200 people
To push the earth so it mills
On its axis with madness
Until everyone has lost
A year of life.

Do not shake machine. Shake hands.
Grazing the walls with my palms,
I tend to leak between cracks and fingers.
How big is the gap between two sets of eyes?
Nothing means everything anymore.

Spend a night coughing
Behind a stranger.
Do not speak or make eye contact.
Do this often with different people
And develop a glaring affection.

1
On an off-white bathroom wall, a clock ticks. Analog face. A clock that attracts eyes. Begs for a short moment of attention, delivers guilt when guilt is deserved. A ticking that hammers nails into studs of concentration. A ticking that plucks nerves. There is a snap of a whip that can be felt on the backs of those who sleep at the wrong hours. Disobedience. Lashing in equal intervals. Straight hands are never wrong.

The hand strikes
Every notch fixed
With a balance of space

2
Riding my bike down streets and sidewalks, I saw a young boy walking along the narrow top of a short stonewall holding his father’s hand. And while holding his father’s hand, he fell down and hit his head on the sidewalk. Further along the path a little old man with a long white beard jumped to one side, shrieking, as I passed by, but I would have avoided him. I wonder who should feel secure.

father and son
smiling, hands tightly locked
behind a demolished wall.

3
Waiting through hours. In New Orleans by 2:11pm on the Wednesday before the New Year. We’re all tired after crawling through long hours on the road. We’re all excited to be here. I’ve already seen skeletons of abandoned houses in the wrecked neighborhoods left after the hurricane. Our room is high up in a skyscraper and looking out of the window down at the city is like looking into a video screen or watching a simulation of reality. I’m tired but I won’t be able to sleep until I witness this solid, city, its hard concrete walls, streets and sidewalks, and its fragility.

Crude messages
scrawled on walls and sidewalks
in reckless spray paint.

4
I crashed my bike into a bush by a sidewalk. Cars drove on at the intersection where I paused on my knees. The concrete scraped some of the skin on my left palm off and the wound stung. There was blood. I stood up, fixed the chain on my bike, and rode off as the adrenaline ran through my veins in torrents.

A hot trail,
The sun leaks from a wound
At the eastern horizon.

5
At the restaurant, I reach into my pocket and drop a handful of dusted rolled-up dollar bills on the counter. The cashier and I stare at each other for a stretched moment and much like a wide-eyed dull gorilla, much like nothing, he clears his throat and hands me my receipt.

Listen buddy,
Just give me
My tacos.

6
The wind was rushing with the force of an endless train. I climbed up a loose ladder to reach the Pagliai’s Pizza sign: “PANCAKE BREAKFAST AT THE VFW 10-2”. I removed most of the letters, while holding on to the sign to resist the hazard, and set them on the narrow platform where I stood. The same way that kids run off laughing, the letters blew away, scattering and cracking in the parking lot, and there was nothing I could do. I only needed to spell out “VEGETABLE SOUP”.

Running pests –
I chase the letters
Of the alphabet

It hurts to be here, to stand by the window,
to see the clock, watch the hour drip,
and wait until it’s already late.
A television stutters with small talk.
The blackness of the windows from the inside
makes me think there isn’t enough to observe
and sometimes my eyes burn at night
When I stare at the single dim glimmer.
The black air presents a streetlamp,
a grin with a gold tooth, the darkest mouth
and an aggressive gesture that bends a tree.
Black air doesn’t speak but pretends it will
and I just want it to stop.
The sound close to ink.
The hour leaks, bleeds if I hit it hard enough.
Never shouting enough.

I can feel something punching against the inside of my ribcage
like it’s trying to break out, trying to escape.
Often it stalks behind my eyelids
and scrapes against the inside of my skull.
I always feel it moving inside.
Its face is like a gripping fist
or a flickering light bulb with four-fingered hands
and dress shoes at the ends of wire-thin legs.
Sometimes it makes my eyes water.
Sometimes it drags the skin on my face down
and I can’t help but spit and cough dust.
I talk to it every night, let it know it’s nothing
but a personal thing and I swallow it down again
and smoke cigarettes until it sleeps.

Lemon scented fumes
Make the skeptics believe in lemons.

Spray more of it,
Manipulate the air.

The screen and I share a stark adamant gaze
Eyes of salt water
Eyes made of white grain

Red lines wavering warm
Around cavernous blackness: staring

Into sharp cerulean high pitch
Switch to color blocks

Or the chieftain’s serious profile mugshot:
It’s not funny.

Chief displays the hunger of someone
And I am weeping as I should be.
I need to blink now
According to schedule.

An ellipsis and I hear the clock tick like whiplash.
Eyes wander towards the edges
of the yellow pages, I pay attention
to the ringtone of neon augmentation:
concrete fingers reaching up to
the wild sky growling over
a dense metropolis. A heavy gauntlet
cups the limitless muzzle.

Stirred into the platinum mass
I spend my curiosity pacing
Through revolving doors made of intangible glass,
scuffed boots smudging the smooth floor.
People shift in endless cycles like moths
beating against each other by the streetlamps,
like black and gray flecks on the television.

1
Condensed Measures.
Easy to swallow.
Painless activation.
No longer will you burn in meditation.
Have the dimensions of every day deflated?
Do your vital organs lack incentive?
Is every new second tightly
Wrapped in dry latex?
Now you can indulge in immediacy
Like those of The Excited!
Fresh from our fever labs,
Liveliness of the mind and spirit
can be reformed once more.
Even tomorrow will stand on its feet
like a new born war horse.
Resurrect your mental children!
Animate your dying future!
Unleash your inner ravenous cartoons!
For the exhausted populace
suffering from idle time and leisure,
our counteragents offer
a chorus of ambulances
to your auditory walls.
One dose will fill
your veins with sirens!

2
Premium reception has never been easier.
No compromises. No limitations. No conventions.
At last, we have siphoned the effort from making memories,
removed the clutter of passionate rat kings.
We have replaced the frenzy with empty space.
We have sealed stars with an innovative lid to lock in the astonishment.
For a low expense, the clearest dark can be delivered
to your choice of cavity free of danger and chance,
free of venture.

Alone on a dark pastel neighborhood. I drop and stand tall on a friend’s porch while casual, caustic cop cars watch and pass by. They have nothing on me. I am simply a standard presentation of Young Eccentric Humanity. The mad eyes in my mad head glow with specks of black and grey like a static TV. I feel enlightened and can’t stop laughing. My only plan is to smoke a pack of cigarettes and maybe try to sleep, though I know I’ve just sacrificed the ability; I smashed my machine with a single tab, disconnected for only a momentary holiday. Squads of thought invade me like an imaginary charge. It’s almost too much to handle, but I can’t stop laughing. Music leaks from an open window with warmth and happiness swells inside my stomach. As I perch myself on a ledge like an alert cat, I only begin to notice the significance of light from streetlamps smeared on shiny parked cars. I begin to notice significance. I lose sense of time and deconstruct myself while I try to confide in burning tobacco. My vision becomes profoundly stylized and smoke always dances with the liveliest temper and the shadows drape under trees and everything feels great from up here and I can’t stop laughing.

I have heard some striking stories on the effects of LSD on a person’s rationality and logic from people that I know. These are people whose minds have been slightly warped due to a thriving market and culture. Consumers crippled by the products they demand so fervently. It is fairly well known today that marijuana smoke is extensively more harmful than tobacco smoke, yet I frequently come across flyers around campus suggesting an organized effort to legalize marijuana. The conflict seems to be amusement vs. health. But civilization has been infused with passion and excitement with the rise of intoxicants. Risky impulses have been fulfilled with the rise of intoxicants. Every day life isn’t such a droning, bitter and bland routine when we disintegrate and disorganize. We hold infinite perspective in the palms of our hands. Recreational drug use is a way of life among the curious youth that cannot be willingly resigned. How can we give it up?

The perceptions of the effects of drugs on people today are radically different than they were in the 1960s. Back then, the psychedelic van strolled down the American road full of loving animals. Psychedelia first became a lifestyle and a major component for the intellectual type. Drugs were the right way to increase creativity and mental power. They were imbued with a spiritual nature and were not illicit. Drugs were innocent. An entire culture of people tightened its affectionate bear hug around mind alteration and kissed the pipe. Hippies weren’t even the first counterculture to compete with mainstream structure; the Beat Generation embraced marijuana and mescaline, among other drugs, as a means of perspective as well.

Drugs have now become, for the most part, a venture of escapism much like our beloved television, video game console, and fantasy novel. Maybe it has always been that way. I cannot say that this is either good or bad. Most classrooms are too dull, most jobs are too repetitive, most lines are too straight, and most people are too bored. This is a matter of simple pleasure. It is the cold numb space that I drift in when I’m high. The self-inflicted glitch in my machine. It paints the walls with intense technicolor, adds action to my stable life. I close my eyes and watch strands of radiance swirling like a screensaver. And as it wears off, I get dragged down to the solid world. Indole alkaloids, such as acid and psychedelic mushrooms, have more than once left me as a sickly sewer rat in the dull grasp of The Ordinary by the end of the day. My throat dries up. The nutrients in my body get depleted. Everything that could be considered good about it is entirely fleeting. We soon regain strength, replenish. Wait a few weeks and you figure out that the feeling is so utterly temporary and all you want to do is buy more products. Maybe the impermanence doesn’t even cross your mind, but either way you still want more. Sometimes I don’t know if I need it more than I want it, or vice versa, but it feels good and that’s what really matters. The key word is hedonism.

Aside from abusing drugs for the sake of amusement, we self-medicate with them to muddle through cruel emotional troubles. Alcohol is one, if not the only socially acceptable means of self-medication. Drugs are a coping mechanism. Those prone to fear tend to lift off in illicit shuttles. Depression rises from our fiery bodies for the street merchants to extinguish. Sometimes we feel guilty when in a stressful state, as if depression and rage are simply the wrong emotions to feel. We could blame this societal approach on a frustrating dependency upon demanding institutions, vague and deceptive advertising, public relations scams, fake primetime comedies, etc. Commercials for fresh medication tell us how to function and offer their pricy comforting solutions. In a consumerist society, we as average citizens are given a small number of options in life and are persuaded to buy supplies for bliss. If we are not fully aware of what we’re hearing and why we’re hearing it, we end up convincing ourselves of how we should think and feel based on what snake-tongued profiteers say. Thus, we resort to self-medication in order to obey and fit like puzzle pieces within typical human organization. Many drugs are stress relievers, but the fact is that some are legal and some are not.

But there is more than one type of salesman: the above mentioned Street Merchant. I’ve heard the argument that drugs are first and foremost a financial institution. Cocaine is powdered cash and marijuana is as green as the dollar bills that may or may not be in your wallet or bank account. Criminal organizations all over the world are fueled by feel-good toxins. Street gangs in dirty urban areas frequently release blood over drugs. It is a thriving, violent market. A dealer once told me he is a businessman before a junkie. I’m almost surprised that marijuana is still illegal when considering our capitalistic society and all the pill commercials on TV and all the stocked medicine cabinets across the nation.

Many components of popular culture have and will always embrace marijuana as the safest jail breaker. In the 60s, a kid could tune in to any radio station and hear lyrics of drug romance: the Grateful Dead, The Doors, etc. Weed still emanates from the words of hip hop and reggae, and there is a following in the genre of stoner metal. In any case, censorship has taken these references off of the airwaves. High Times is a strong proponent for recreational drug use, though it can be difficult to take this magazine seriously. Hollywood targets smokers with the outwardly delightful stoner movie, such as Half Baked and Friday. Reefer Madness, a film from the 1930s, is an anti-drug film yet it is regularly grouped in with stoner movies as ridiculous entertainment. In this sense, popular culture and the media can be subtly expressive and indirect of what is acceptable in the world when regarding recreational drugs.

Still, society is torn on how to handle drug abuse. Vast amounts of research have been conducted on all types of drugs since the late 60s. Physical addiction is the cold essence that our blood envelopes. Therefore, cocaine and heroine will never detach from a hard stigma. Our entire population is fully aware of the harmful possibilities of recreational drug use.  Information like this can be accessed all over the media. There are anti-drug websites with archives full of personal drug narratives. One could simply open a magazine or turn on his or her television and see an anti-marijuana public service announcement. These PSAs are also on posters and billboards across the country as well as all over the Internet. Media claims like these spit in the bloodshot eyes of drug inspired entertainment. Everyday we are subject to so many mixed messages on the topic of drugs through popular culture and popular news media by separate organizations with separate agendas. The key word is contradiction.

I’ll leave you with one last thought: consider the groups of people who flock together and assert themselves as “straight edge”. This basically means they take no part in substance abuse of any kind. They represent a conflicting subculture, coinciding with the punk music scene, to that of drug junkies. Thus, sobriety has become more of a definition, a lifestyle rather than something natural. It seems that society sleeps in constricting cabinets as we begin to dichotomize the natural aspects of our lives. This may signify how permanent drug culture has become and how it will continue to solidify over time.

I haven’t slept all night and I’m not going to
Bear with me as I feel this town
Feels like a stuck pig
A rat actually
You are domesticated matter of some kind on a garnished platter
and I can’t relate.

Get laid immediately or get sedated or cut these open
But it only ever feels good for a moment.

Some don’t understand how much filth and rain there is
They are not convinced
They don’t think
It is past six
It is not early, it is late
and don’t you forget that.

This is important
I can’t stress that enough
and there isn’t enough space
there is structure.

I took a walk and saw two birds fighting
This kid I know, he is a fight
He doesn’t wake for simple pleasure
Those accepted conventions and cute sitcoms are placebos
Don’t you forget that.

Poor little city mops wear a lot of greasy t-shirts
and almost nod off by the stalling clock
and miss their mothers
and only want the feathers to expand as they flutter

I can’t sleep because of all the colors
Swimming in the thickness of values
Trying to dodge lapses of thought
I keep my red-hot confidence locked in a jar
and set my stomach on fire
and seethe while the authorities spit warped judgment

I don’t want to speak with them
I want to talk to you
on the telephone.
and as I blink my pink eyes, I become a god and evaporate
Consume this and fuck mediocrity.
and what is that medicine smell?
Get it away from me
I’m going to go take a piss and be disgusted.

The front. Thick green sweat. Condescending wet chops. Hot grease. All I need is cream all I got is foam. In the mouth of a hound. Brash motherfucker with a set of bone metal knuckles. Tense dog blending in with smoke and bricks. Harmless. Soft all the way through the inside. Sharp mask and erratic collar. War paint. Watching everyone get muzzled. Panicking over passing light-up cars. Crooked unremorseful uniform. Small Town is the name of a signpost shoved in a dry shallow hole. Disgusted underground kids. Manic youth confined in clinics. Big gap no exit. Blank off-white wall. Elaborate mural of boredom. Ok open up your skull. And as I stumble by an innocuous mutt on a leash I think damn he got fucked.

animal mind
all I ever want to do is
fuck and fight
we will not speak
we will grunt and howl
bare our teeth and breath heavily
all I ever need to do is
release
release my blood and instinct
salivate in front of a plasma TV
that would be nice

Written in wrinkles are senseless obsessions printed like incurable diseases.
And on a need-to-know basis, words become contagious killers, saturating the air like graffiti on a wall.
Our minds are easily infested with laughing pests, speaking of false intelligence and very few would rather rot in the corners of sterilization until it’s safe to move on.
We have been told that our heads are full of sin and viruses and disability.
Give me pills. Quickly fix me. Forgive me.
We are force fed the newest diet plan.
We have been diagnosed with profitability syndrome. They tell us we are sick bugs who need them.
Five-thousand dollar burial box.
Headlines and controversy and commercials fed intravenously into our veins. Catheter full of excitement and concern.
The nurse vigorously licks the bottom of a coffee cup in front of a beeping screen.
Entertainment is the late breaking news on the lives of our most well-known, no-talent alcoholics and cokeheads.
This stylish exploitation is a fashion statement.
What they’re looking for is blood on the pavement.
These filthy, self-proclaimed professors wade in shallow wastewater and don’t bother to wash their feet sensibly.
My body feels like a chunk of raw meat, salted and seasoned for the geniuses to eat.
Even as we migrate, the spread bites us.
Our only solutions come in silent syringes blinding sight and attention.
Focus our wrath and cold apathy and see what’s happening.
Take the vaccine, a suppressor in a subtle shot.
Wipe the insecticide from your eyes!
This is the apocalyptic lecture of social skin spots.