I am bored at work. It is warm in here and then I was reading here. What? They are talking.
A low rumble of voices from the next office. A high-pitched squeal of laughter, quickly muffled. I stare at my coffee, wondering how the milk is pulled from the cow, and the calculator’s blank screen.
I type nonsense, pausing briefly to wonder what they are laughing at. What is on the beach for me to see?
I drop my ink-pen on the carpeted floor and casually bend to pick it up, all the while the murmurings of the departmental Xerox machine crank out copies in rhythmic fashion behaind me. “It’s time for lunch”, my stomach tells me in its stomach-growling dialect. “OK”, I respond to myself in my own mind…
Stupidity. Why In my Humble Opinion and not MPSIMS? Unanswered, except. The moderator could help, the moderator could help. People are in a good mood on a Friday. It’s true then what they say about TGIF. I can’t hear them talking about me.
As the office quiets down I return to my screen. These mustard-colored walls give me nauseau…I’m no longer hungry.
Outside it snows, though since I have no window I am but judging from the hour I walked in. Why does it snow so much here where I live. I tire of the snow; the cold weakens my energy.
What, I say, is on that beach, with its warm sand and gently crashing waves, its hot sun and cool water. The beach is speaking to me…
My boss walks by glancing at me, his face deepening into a frown as he passes.
What have I done…my mind races and my eyes quickly look about the room. It isn’t the tone of my voice that struggles up from the demented bowels of my thought that makes the others look at me…
Really, Uncle Josiah shouldn’t have shut me in the room with the blue walls and the odor that curled my nose and the goose pimples on my cold skin against the bare window covered by a thin shift. My toes are blue…a bright white sun shines on the ice covering the horizon and yesterday when I went to school Miss Nancy called on me and I couldn’t answer the question because I didn’t hear it the grinding machinery in my head drowns out their voices…
I open my eyes, shaken, and look to see my secretary weeping as she walks out of the room…
What on earth did I just say to her?
She returns with a shotgun. She is so cute. I dive under the desk. The gun shoots paperclips.
There is a bottle of BloodSport wine under my desk, and a banjo. I break both of their necks.
The document I’m working on is self-formatting. I watch it mutate like some gamma dosed microbe. The due date is doing a live-link countdown, while the parameters sprawl like urban decay.
Furious clowns, furry clowns, there’s a timebomb in the clown!
Not clowns - they’re local law enforcement, being led by a girl dressed as the Virgin Mary, cradling a baby in her arms that looks just like me, right down to the beard.
My boss inhabits the triangle of disappearance, erecting a barricade of memos. The petals of purple tulips fill the room to a depth of 17 5/8 inches.
I set the laser printer to stun, and grab a file clerk for a hostage. She splits opens, leaking sawdust all over the floor. I sneeze. I grab an accounting clerk for a hostage. Same thing. I brandish the broken banjo. “One step closer, & I will play this thing.”
They back off, uncertainty clouding their reaction time just long enough for me to escape down the paper shredder. There are only 13 pills left. I must conserve them.
She returns with a shotgun. She is so cute. I dive under the desk. The gun shoots paperclips.
There is a bottle of BloodSport wine under my desk, and a banjo. I break both of their necks.
The document I’m working on is self-formatting. I watch it mutate like some gamma dosed microbe. The due date is doing a live-link countdown, while the parameters sprawl like urban decay.
Furious clowns, furry clowns, there’s a timebomb in the clown!
Not clowns - they’re local law enforcement, being led by a girl dressed as the Virgin Mary, cradling a baby in her arms that looks just like me, right down to the beard.
My boss inhabits the triangle of disappearance, erecting a barricade of memos. The petals of purple tulips fill the room to a depth of 17 5/8 inches.
I set the laser printer to stun, and grab a file clerk for a hostage. She splits opens, leaking sawdust all over the floor. I sneeze. I grab an accounting clerk for a hostage. Same thing. I brandish the broken banjo. “One step closer, & I will play this thing.”
They back off, uncertainty clouding their reaction time just long enough for me to escape down the paper shredder. There are only 13 pills left. I must conserve them.
Make that 12 pills.
12 pills in the dusky brown bottle I clutch possessively in my sweaty, shaking hand.
That was close, I think to myself.
I look up from the bottom of the barrel, a fine wine toasting memories of happier more pleasant days. My feet drift off to sleep, snoring lightly in their sensitive slumber. Must move…move…move to the left shake it to the right I believe the fairies in my head are drinking Sprite.
I can hear them talking about me, again. Voices like razors splitting my skin I quickly staunch the flow of blood from the sawdust ladies. There is no tomorrow here…and some say thank god it’s friday. Friday sells matchbooks to the unshaven men sleeping in the urine-smelling doorways.
I crouch, whimpering. My boss, she of the fine slit mouth and poisonous eyes, approaches…
Little by little I determine the cause and effect. But it is a hair-trigger and the people scatter when I “whoo-hoo!”. I suddenly turn up to the lights.
“Of course, I said”, I say. They stare blanks at me and I shoot the same, pitifully hoping they don’t condemn me for my actions and “certainly not”…
Oh dear, it’s starting again.
Poisonous eyes, o yes, this fine wine is a prophylactic against venomous snakes, which seem to be writhing beneath the fluttering purple tulip petals… at least, SOMETHING is undulating under there… leaves waving while something unseen is weaving toward my feet… poisonous eyes of a squamous toad, unblinking under the neon red danger lighting the building has plunged in. Is it a submarine? Have we submerged? If the electricity is out, due to some unspecified catastrophe, what is making that disconcerting whirring noise?
Lie still, little bottle. Only 8 left now, and they’re only 500’s, not 750s.
The sawdust hostages hoist themselves on floppy appendages. The document translates itself into Urdu, into Swahili. There’s a timebomb in the clown, and it’s 10 minutes past closing time…
Swahili! How’m I going to explain that to Michele, when the paper is already 6 days late and I don’t know anything about Central American politics, much less about headhunting or rain in the desert. But my neck hurts like I haven’t had enough coffee, and tomorrow I have to pick through a dead man’s books.
Wine won’t help, neither will blood sperm music, or wet chicory that lies in the field like the sky, like the sky. Joel had no idea, it was total bullshit. I never read half of Jazz because Toni Morrison reminds too much of Oprah.
I’ve got a pile of bricks and buttons and a dress cut short on the floor of the art building. My self portrait box is plugged in but I’ll have to put it on a pedestal and maybe I’ll put the black light in it.
Adam has beautiful shoulder blades that would makes nice handles; I want to latch on to him. Darci has the most perfect breasts I have ever seen. But Wendy smiled at me the other day and said hi–hi!–and I said hello and I meant to smile but I never know if I actually do or not.
One long hair grows from my pinky toe. So what? I don’t care that my husband snores just as long as I can be here. Listening. Nut Brown beer taste fine but Special taste like soap. Hoppy is soapy. Give me stout.
I tried this… but it got pretty ugly pretty fast. Don’t want it sent to the pit. Maybe I should stay off the boards a bit longer. A week wasn’t long enough I feel.
Man…i’ve started a thread like this once…and it totaly failed, why all the enthusiasm for quick twisted Paradise in-lays does one not see the Devil’s Island shine every so brightly with feverish consent without pull-out, phosphorescent slime sleep seeeeeping into shorts, disolve into rectal mucus and carbolic soap is this what fear drives the run run run panama. Aztecs knew the way of the starts, but did they know the law of Man ever growing tendrils of floppy flop run about constriction, gib gibe, given cloud haze. The green streams flow through cold finger pud pudd pull, is this really Zombie Nation? Aquatic panthers roam freely but do not see that the corkscrew action crabby crabs are dripping oooozing man juice. Hey meester, you write not so good, you get prize, something like jellyfish…soft skin dry mandibles wallet size wrist watches do you hear me lord, do you hear me psyche out, oh romulus i love the way you hold my hand burn the chairs…stream…strea…stre…str…st.
…S.
I just accidently superglued my fingers together. What’s that all about?
Nacho gloves. I think of Sara. I don’t even know her. oldscratch kinda reminds me of Gabe from the library, which is why I think I like him, but I don’t really know either of them either. Or vice versa, we’re all like nuns from Assisi.
Walking through life with or without a camera, 20 rolls of film and a thrift store point’n’shoot. Annie Dillard is in my pocket and getting wet while I build a lesbian minister snowman with Nicky and Dustin.
Baby chicks in the basement but some of them won’t make it, “we’ll baby them through the night and take it from there.” Tasha, pigs. Some boy in a truck with his dad. Dagen works in some factory and doesn’t drive a car, and walks through life like a happy barefoot boy. If he read I’d tell him to read Thoreau, but I never see Dagen anymore anyway, and isn’t that always the case?
I don’t know what I’m doing here, I gotta get a job (I gotta get some pay, my son’s gotta go to art school, he’s leaving in 3 days, and the TV’s in Esparanto, you know that that’s a bitch, but alienation’s for the rich and I am feeling poorer everyday) I might travel and I might intern (where?) or I might go build a hut and live with the beavers and muskrat in the Bay City Creek. What’s-her-name–you know, with the hair?–says she saw a bear in the Ravine once, and Paul solemnly nodded and said, yeah, I’ve seen bears in the Ravine, too. But I haven’t and I’m not afraid of bears anyway. That fisherman said someone told him they saw a bear down by the oredocks, but he didn’t believe him and neither do I. Everyone’s gone bear-crazy this past year–how many home videos have I seen of a bear mauling a birdfeeder with someone off camera muttering “shit, ho-ly shit. fucking shit. jesus. shit. goddamn.”
In a green svanna stand two vast penis figures in black stone, legs and arms vestigial, slow blue smoke rings pulsing from stone heads. A limestone road winds through the pillars and into the City. A rack of rusty iron and concrete set in vacant lots and rubble, dotted with chemical gardens. A small of junky hat and death above town deadens and weight thse sentences with “disgust you too see it”. Shawn walked through footpaths of a vast shanty town. A dry winds blows hot and cold down from Chimborazo a soiled post cardin the prop blue sky. Crab men peer out of abandoned quarries and shag heaps some sort of vestigial eye growing cheek bone and look about them as if they could take root and grow on anybody. muttering addicts of orgasm drug, boneless in the sun, gurgling throat grislt, heart slowly in transperent flesh eaten by the crab men…no more true lies!
If I saw a cigar on the way to school, does that mean you love me? Maybe life’s just a barren cheese and we are the mold spores.
I think that washing machines should be used for capital punishment. I think Lawrence Welk and Lawrence of Arabia are the same person, just reincarnated.
J. Alfred Prufrock is my hero, I think I should be a pair of ragged claws, I feel guilty for eating snow crab, perhaps he is my brother.
If I took a bow, I think someone would kick me from behind. And then, a civil war would start in Belgium. But would they do anything? Throw waffles? I’d want to be there. I’d catch waffles and bring them back to America, and then get arrested for smuggling. What would they do, send me back to Belgium?