(no title)

Room for Solitude

Solitude.

Detailing repetition, envious of the rips in wallpaper, competing against the bleach stained cotton decorating the mattress shared among peasants and 30.00 dollar sacrifices to metal coils and in the mortal coil too.

Alphabet.

Sustains the living word, designates purpose for speech patterns rectified by dry throat assumption, blathering about and exposing the finer details of having nothing important to say.

Television.

Stays past midnight, functions to tie dye the shadows designating space to withdraw at the complexion of day-time shows and extend to the floor paneling after the rerun actors recite their dialogue like politicians addressing the nation based on the teleprompters advice.

Electricity.

Delivers on its promises.

Wrinkles.

Discovered and given names to establish company as something one discovers out of necessity.

Numbers.

Another reason to call home.

Appearing to welcome

Numbing the purpose

Asking more of nothing than the space will give

Opposites are Infinite

Opposites are infinite

A namesake shared

CHURCH ON SUNDAY

Relishes the idiosyncrasies

Of free speech

Indoctrinated

By marketing procedures

Posits streets named after white people

To billboards celebrating

Their government names

Age takes tomorrow

Questions the contradiction

Inherit in repetition

At the applegrove a man bonked his head on low hanging fruit

He patted down his pockets to reveal the touch of corrective lenses

But he forgot them and had to rely on his eyes to navigate

Low

Hanging

Fruit

He went home

12 bruises richer

Baptism by Fire

Ten smiles break over the horizon

Chipped bone contributes to a hallucination

Sky lettered

In reactionary politics

Breath of clouds

Sky sighs

Studying textures via touch

Learned experience

Gains recognition

-same-

As its opposite?

Rectifying the ambient jangle

Incites the bargain match

Betwixt

Piercing stares

And the monk

Who happens upon God

In her clouds

Both are fascinated

Design patterns

In order of

What makes sense

(foregone conclusion

decides balance is omnipotent)

Water washes out

What the fire burned

Both elements can baptize

freedom to borrow

Sapphire remnants target the blister, mutating to callus and Dog-ear a page made of flesh containing words written by labor.

Floodlights direct affection for towering infernos, encased in glass, melting to apprehend the flames displayed within.

Sweat. Sweat.

The brutish hymnal resounds throughout the hollowed Earth.

Different glass possesses subtler options of slow moving umph.

Yellow iris poking a hole through the kaleidoscope, observing the sparkling frost designs held against dawnlight,

Or the tomato soup can given away at the food pantry, placed on the windowpane

Contending with the wood screws to relevancy to martyrs come and gone.

At the apex of crosswalk, stoplight and sidewalk ramp a man pushes his suitcase on wheels, pauses and twirls to take in the apartments gleaming yellow from atop their homes. He’s thinking of going home too.

Once he finds it.

turkey.

The playwright stared ahead, squinted and stood off her chair. She approached the baby-blue wall, put her hand flat against the plaster, it was cooler than the air in the room and made her think of flipping her pillow over at night to contend with the transference of her warm cheek to cotton, welcoming the cooler side of her pillow, to refresh her tepid skin. She had a pen in other hand and used it to trace the outline of her spread fingers onto the wall. After finishing, she backpedaled and set her fingers to form a square from which she peered through, framing the traced fingers. She shook her head no and announced, “that’s not it.” For years she’d been striving to be inspired, but her efforts awarded her empty gestures. She was influenced by the desire to follow-up her debut hit with an even greater work of art. “Screw it.” She said and walked to her living room. She slumped into her recliner, removed her cell phone from her back pocket, began scrolling through the various newsfeeds of her social media accounts. She happened across a picture of a hawk that someone she’d never met, or spoken with took. The bird’s face resembled a human scowl and what appeared as yellow irises gleamed like flashbulbs capturing the moment. She peered up from the phone’s screen, a songbird was perched atop the window frame, crooning to no one in particular, when off in the distance a black speck loomed and grew larger in size as it approached the bird, taking the form of a hawk, like the one in the picture. It captured the song bird in its talons and slammed it against the window glass, echoing thuds in the playwright’s apartment with each blow. Startled, she leapt from her recliner and sprinted to the window. While holding the song bird to the ground, the hawk ripped its beak off with its own and spit the pecker to the side. It then looked at the playwright and sent shivers down her spine, before focusing back on its prey and flying off in the distance with the bird corpse still spasming in its claws. She pivoted on her heel and ambled back to where she had traced her hand and added to her fingers a beak and some feathers, resembling a turkey in appearance. “There,” she exclaimed, smiling. “Now that’s it!”

Trust.

Curtain opens and the stage is dressed in the components of set design, blackened at the stage’s base sits the pit orchestra, conductor taps her baton on her music stand, lifts it to shoulder length and begins looping her baton through the air, directing unsaid prompts for the musicians to release a cacophony of symphonic arrangements which set the tone, as ballet dancers enter stage left and coordinate movements to their musical cues.

In the audience, a trained ear recognizes the absence of a French Horn. He leans in earshot of his guest and whispers his disdain for this revelation. He’s met with a shush from a stranger and his guest replies, “just enjoy the show.” He can’t…or…he won’t.

Detectives specializing in kidnappings encourage the victim’s family and friends to appear on television, so they may share descriptions of their loved ones personality traits. This creates an identity for the kidnapped, hopefully, gives pause to the kidnapper’s notion that they’ve captured another face in the crowd, to them it’s another commodity, like grabbing a 12 pack of Coke off the shelf, assuming they’ll all taste the same.

Farmers refuse to name their livestock. If they do name them, they probably read Ayn Rand and consider Social Darwinism as cause to skip legislation going through the Senate to be decided upon by the Courts instead. It’s about the end.

Curating a false flag

At the behest of prophetic earthworms

For

In the land of spineless creatures

Burrowing beneath the surface

Allows them the structure

Their back is lacking

To build and build and build

Waiting for the collapse

After the question arises

“Where shall we plant the flag?”

“When there’s nothing left to stand on.”

anything for the sake of karma

Dress shirt sets wrinkles in earshot and claims stigmata

After the pen breaks and dots greased palms.

Falling to pulse fluctuations, setting the rhythm for a metronome

To track heartbeats.

Sitting cross legged on the platform bench opening their diary to page two documenting reality as experienced by one

Leaves congregate in the air like plumes of dust erupting in sunlight off the force of an achoo

Age described by crinkled flesh holds a pout for the lover’s bottom lip as the assistant waves goodbye ambling toward the moonrise

Denim skirt claims American style in the Eastern stitches hemmed to hold censorship

Quick to rest the fabric which wasn’t used to repair holes in the furniture is draped over the microwaves blinking zeroes

Setting the canvas onto the easel dipping bristles in colors to capture the moment

“Why not take a photograph?”

Remembering merely to repeat or describing to pay homage

Naming Shadow Puppets

Font articulates the context of words through style, but at what point in the history of typeface did letters penned in bigger girth signify their importance above others? That is, if importance is related to focus, which it often is…depicting boldface script as the Class Clown turning a substitute’s faux pas into a punchline, instilling laughter and directing unrequited attention to their victorious sneer.

At night, while patrolling the streetlight lit neighborhoods, the unknown focus perpetuates caution and footsteps follow suit, prompting a near sprint, but adopting power walk pace as to appear normal to invisible voyeurs, peering through slotted peepers.

Glass supplied with greater bulk hordes the light and directs focus onto those brave enough to stare down the abyss. Nothingness rejects that casting a shimmer signifies life. If reality requires a shadow to demonstrate its depth then we’ve been wading in shallow darkness, focusing on the length of reflected shadow instead.

Conforming to What’s Might Makes Right

After the city laborer finished mowing, the outskirts were hemmed with grass clippings designated to the specifications per popular opinion, per tax sponsored research. The landscape inspector was equipped with spectacles containing magnified lenses to examine each grass blade, searching for a misuse of “company time,” on hands and knees, he discovered one blade half a centimeter higher than the others. He grabbed a nail clipper off his utility belt and trimmed the misfit blade until it resembled the others in length.

“There,” he stated proudly “now everything is the same.”

Cars on the lot were placed in order of best seller to least best, giving little chance for the least to become the best, but these patterns appeared to never change no matter the order.

Virgil never encountered the color purple for Dante never described it. Leading biological historians to speculate that the color purple wasn’t able for comprehension to the human eye until recently. As the color spectrum grows in understanding to human viewership, so will humans describe the new colors as always being here, for they were, without us.

Rita raked her fingers through her bag of potato chips, but ceased churning after a few rounds and removed her fingers and licked the BBQ flavoring off and dried her hands by utilizing her denim skirt as a towel. “Shucks,” she exclaimed while pouting. “What?” Her friend asked. “I can’t find a chip I like.” “I mean don’t they all taste the same?” “That’s not the point.” She explained, lifting the bag to eye level and squinting to narrow her vantage point to gain a better scope of her options. “You need the right size too…it needs to be perfect, or it won’t taste right. Ya know. Like the others?”

All detergent smells the same but it differs in name.

Differs in name,

But

Is the same.

Like…REALLY…Drinking Water

Water in the glass

Borrows the room’s temperature

And contours ice shavings

With tepid ripples. Exposed bone

Set awry inside their voice

Functions like a sewer grate.

Holds the shavings

Tongue

Tip

Distance, allowing liquid to filter past

Inducing tingles

To tissue.

How’d the shivers come to this?

Cosmic metals in the company of stardust

Operating from

Orders given by bent Time and Space.

Anonymous molecules lounging in primordial soup

Splashing onto shore

A species who’d thrive to discover fire

And create I-Phones.

Setting the glass down,

Exclaiming the “Ahhh”

Of ancestral grumblings.

Roots as indoor plumbing

Blooming tap water,

Roses picked

Off the stem. Swallowed

To recognize and honor

Days gone by…

Don’t waste

The water, don’t waste

The Soul.