All of the entries below are archived Wordles, uploaded on June 13, 2022.

90.

Tote bags and purses, another email offering them to me with unprecedented levels of customization, I respond on the next desk over with a pencil drawing in 2B and 6B, a frame drawn on as an after thought so that I don’t have to fill the whole page, but it should be enough Re: tote bags and purses, coat racks and nurse’s scrubs, smoke stacks and hearses, porch flags and converses, it all needs to be covered in something. I draft a formula for the relationship of this to that and that to this other thing and put it in a box because it’s too complicated and might take more than one piece of paper and several more pencils if I don’t hem it in and scan it in. (Ultra hi res, 1 billion pixels) What about the interstates? 65 billion square feet of prime real estate, print some Colgate ads and I there with the already swirling collection of white and yellow lines and arrows. Is painting the trees before they turn into paper a problem? It all needs to covered.

89.

Items 14.3, 14.7 & 18.11; several specimens harvested near the beginning of the 20th century that eluded elucidation for nearly 90 years. Scraped off the bottom of buckets, boots, and barrels at riverside construction projects in New England, these were pickled in milk jars by underpaid lab assistants and lost until very recently when rediscovered at an estate sale and carefully labelled here for you.

88.

A section in the strip mall was labeled as “Party Emporium” with exciting neon signs indicating it would be open soon, for the next holiday season. Anyone observant would have noticed this had been going on for some time, over four years now, here at thirty twenty-two west forty-first street.

87.

I found this specimen nestled in the grass, grainy air clumped up around it defensively. I almost tripped over the pulsing lumps poking out of the ground. Like a small earthen iceberg, only the ploop hole and two sweaty eyes were visible, and as I knelt down to get a better look, a stale stench of dead leaves and gut gas overcame me, something acrid and piercing was in the mix that left me paralyzed for some time before I came to, slumped over beside it to find the sun was going down and some small black tendrils were wrapped around my wrists. Night came quickly.

86.

It’s a matter of mathematics, and the science of nurture. The record showed piles and piles of evidence against anything resembling the gooey goodness of forward progress but when the covers were pulled back we saw the crusty cremains of what could only be explained as a massive exodus upwards and outwards with telling footprints wandering around the room and in some hazy discolored flashback I could see just how it happened; a group of experts, narrow gauge needles poised precipitously, parts of the unfinished script pegged to the wall leaving slimy silhouettes, and then the whole procession dragging themselves out into the street to divide up the tab. I had planned to go on a walk with you after the show, hand in hand hopefully, but I didn’t know you were ten stories tall, I didn’t know your stories were such delightful and delirious tall tales, I didn’t know you didn’t know this about me either. We ended up mopping it all up together, darklit alleys gaping, hoping for a bite, we flew away and I broke everything.

85.

It was a different road on the way back. A swirling, rapturous beast ever swallowing me up into the dark pillars between the trees and recessed houses and slumpy tobacco barns. No one should be going this fast, but slowing down was impossible in this state, at this hour, with my headlights only barely illuminating the road and the winding double yellow lines swooping back and forth with my windows rolled down so I can absorb the whole whipping world lashing me violently in the face and eyes along with my hair so I grit my teeth and squint a little more and lean uselessly into a terrible turn in the wrong lane as some classic rock radio station threatens to rattle the panels off my doors and the teeth out of my skull just draining everything out and I can’t tell if the whole world can hear the wailing guitar solo and sad lonesome screams of the lead singer or if something’s wrong with my car as I feel strange rhythmic vibrations through the gas pedal but it’s just the kick drum pummeling me on through the night. I keep one finger tensely poised on the high beams, prepared for some oncoming car to crest a low hill or round a bend and I lower my lights so I don’t kill them in some great bright blaze of headlight and grassy ditch but even as they approach and lower their own in a gesture that feels almost neighborly we always reach a point of apocalypse where the whole night and the rest of the world too is engulfed in their headlights and I wonder if maybe this is the one second where I needed to turn or miss something in the road and I’d never know because I can’t see anything and I can only assume the other person is sharing the same moment of reckless bliss and I think maybe next time I’ll swerve preemptively to miss the deer that has got to be in the road at that helpless moment one of these days.

84.

A kind of travel log, part one, some things happened before, some things will still happen, but we (Peter, Holden, Rachel, Ryan) started in North Carolina, jetting off west and north with a stop in Denver where the airport had free mini golf and birds loose in the terminal as a bit of an homage to flight maybe and then up to crisp clear Calgary where a car was rented to drive up up to Banff and Jasper where the world really felt free to open up in huge voracious jabs at the sky through the billowing broiling clouds with our dinky little roads wandering along between it all best they can just trying not to disturb the wacky colored chain linked lakes and shriveling glaciers which once scraped out huge gravelly swaths across the continent now lodged forlornly in the taller ranges and jagged peaks to be monetized and pitied with sad big wheel bus tours for $100. An oracle at one low lake directed us to a talllll misty waterfall to stand under for its rejuvenating powers I’m sure so I used an umbrella of course and later at a coffee shop in town we caught a live show by the funny wacky and talented Zulu Panda and he let me take a picture holding his custom “Millenial Falcon” guitar (so go check him out) and then we were off on more masochistic hikes up to more glorious mountain tips.

Part two, more driving and sleeping in tents and living out of the car and wandering out into the great green and blue yonder speckled with all manner of tiny proud wildflowers in yellow and purple and white clumps in the sunshattered rocks piled up to the sky or down to the river riddled ravines where you can catch a brief break from the 18 hours of sunlight every day, mixing up your head, stirring up your body, keeping you restless and awake until midnight when the last rays of solar warmth disappear from the clouds above and you knock off only to have your tent illuminated 5 hours later by the same big bright guy swinging right back around the other side with no delay or hesitation but the dew is inside your tent flaps and your toes are cold and you have to pee so you finally get up and shake it all off to drink some water and find a granola bar somewhere and read huddled up at the picnic table with one hand between your thighs for warmth while you wait for everyone else to wake up.

83.

The distant dissatisfied rumbles of some thick clouds behind me did nothing to improve my mood as I slouched sideways deeper into what seemed to have been a week or more of such groggy and soggy feelings sloshing back and forth in the earthy afterbirth of the backwater town filled with unreflecting brackish eyes which I thought had at first seemed welcoming in their indifference but now nurtured some distaste for where I sat and what I stood for even though we all knew if I wasn’t here then another one would be shipped in to have their jaw ripped off and replaced with a stainless steel grate impossible not to drool nonstop through in long oily strands covered in swirling rainbows the likes of which I knew would never be seen in the sky any time soon so I fell asleep in the uniform one more night and the next morning the whole town gathered around to not notice anything not changing as a sort of solemn ritual.

82.

We had an unspoken agreement to meet in a clearing by night and sit there facing each other to exchange some words about the way things had been happening to us since we last met but it seemed like lately the woods had been towering up higher and higher and blocking out more of the moonlight than I liked with what seemed to me an increasing amount of tense tangled vines encroaching on the serene circle in an orchestrated effort to swallow up the grass and the dirt and us with a decade-long thirsty slurp I felt like I had no power to stop if it was even happening at all outside of my imagination where through the filter of my eyes a lot of things around us seemed to be rippling and grinding along in unnatural and eerily aggressive frames strobed by the flickering passage of the sun and the seasons and I knew before too long there in the glade where we muttered things back and forth with our knees touching we would either run out of space to sit or night in which to say them.

81.

Ok. It plays out like a theater scene, with the lights and everything, careful faces posed like stricken marble sculptures casting some insidious shadowy undertones across the rest of the scene where chairs are set up in strenuous postures and armies of hands toil away at invisible or out of view levers and knobs working an intricate system of pulleys and ropes and counterweights whizzing between the boards backstage as a low rattling sigh echoes throughout the whole rickety structure and the nails barely hold and the chairs start to lose their footing as the audience gets worried looks from the cellist and a single suspended waver from the baton betrays the awful windswept emptiness of what experts had once described as a historic and heartfelt leap skyward but as the curtain falls so does the facades and the fairy tale in a sickening silence that mutes the feet of the bowed heads shuffling out of the entrance.

80.

Every now and then on my way to work I would stop by and lean on her fence when she was there squatting low in the dirt with her hair up and her thumbs pushing seeds down into the soil which at an interval became green sparkly things unfurling above the loamy clods up into our passing conversations now extending across a series of seven or eight seasons during which I found she had some regret and disregard for my position at the birthday candle factory where she thought it was rather disingenuous and arbitrary and dumb and a waste and lots of other kind of hurtful words she used to toss aside the whole industry by the handful and while it shocked me at first I soon grew used to it and even later realized she merely felt threatened by the cheap manufacturing of things to wish upon when she toiled away every day at growing these shooting stars on slender stalks in her garden which would soon shoot up and away and fizzle out in the night sky in a brief glorious spasm.

79.

My jitters rattled along for a few days until I settled into some sort of resident frequency and cracks formed up and down from end to end of me beneath my skin like china dinnerware looking out from a shelf. The low choral notes and reverberations of people walking around the house encouraged me to the edge and off it and there I was, spinning in space, lost to the ledge and the rest. Try to hit me in the air with the good silverware and something homemade and let’s make a real meal of it before I become too many pieces.

78.

A dim blue tone lapped at the edges of my hunched figure awash with the subtle swirling arpeggios of sinking emotion and pale breathing that left the echoey bottom chasms of the lungs totally undisturbed and one fingertip at the end of my arm resting as if a corpse left behind at the end of a prolonged battle and I couldn’t for the life of me follow through the channels of my mind and down the course of my limbs to figure out the lax and twisted pose or the muscles to flex to make things move if I even had that ability anymore much less the all important desire.

77.

Guided to a wooden chair with sparse and stiff leather upholstery I glanced around at the musty panel walls creaking like the timbers of an old ship and watched the clerk take his seat on the other side of the desk and pull a folder out of a pile of papers and put on his glasses so he could look down through them at the carefully transcribed accounts of my past visits here and his brow lowered a little as he reached a little box near the bottom of a page showing elevated levels of soul recidivism and just by his posture I could tell I would probably be here for months or years or more this time before they let me out of the pasta roller. He reached for the buzzer with his eyes still on the paper.

76.

That night as I drove home a warm winter wind played in my hair and the air nuzzled me there on my neck so I couldn’t help but scream and yell at how great it all seemed in that little moment as I pounded at the steering wheel along with the throbbing sound of the music and the engine and the tires on the road and I flailed so hard I twisted up out of the car and out of my clothes and soared up into the humming damp welcoming buzz of the stratosphere blanketing us from head to soul to toe and back again in something just thick enough to be a challenge to breathe and encourage healthy coughing fits back and forth from lung to lung and as we exchanged that mucus, that tar, and that warm translucent bile we got a little on our faces in the heat of the moment and smiled at each other with our noses touching with blurry throbbing eyes blind to everything but the backlit possibilities shifting there at the basement of my ribs with a good amount of uncertainty but an alarming amount of inevitable doom.

75.

For too many years the gardeners overlooked my cozy chasm in the back of the sea where miles of black water crushed me down into the shape of the slowly separating planetary plates and I had nothing to do but feel it choking me and wonder if my eyes were open or closed or completely backwards in my head where they would have seen a great slumbering resurgence of life broiling and trying to bubble there within the twisted unrecognizable husk of my motionless body. The oceanic pressure poked at me with vast invisible poles in an attempt to mash me deeper into that inky gash where as the years floated by I found myself growing along and out of the crevice with icky formless appendages and bulbous lobes and long wavering stalks and nodules everywhere clinging onto and sucking life from the very rock and the lichen and little deepsea wanderers unlucky enough to waft near me on some doomed current. I began to recall the events of my banishment here and what was supposed to be the final verdict of my life after a long string of contorted accidents and misunderstandings and as all this spun forever in my head I eventually found that I had the strength to extricate myself from the crack and in fact I wasn’t convinced I had ever really been completely stuck and so I set off along the seafloor to return to both the city and a verdict of my own.

74.

This was it. This time you wouldn’t back down or break up or step around or go any other way besides right through the bloody swollen center where everything that made it in was sure to come rocketing out the other side twice as fast and with twice as much gumption and only half as much of an achy little thing they called “fear” that kept filling you up and making your insides sour the more you sat there perched on actually really good and perfectly acceptable excuses about why not stay in today? or how nice it is out here where the buffalo wings roam free down our complimentary conveyor belt and easy concentric circles ripple out with bumps so subtle and so silent you’d say you actually liked it that way and that’s probably a better way for it to be anyway since there’s no pain in harming what can’t be hurt and no satisfaction in listening to what can’t be heard.

73.

Halfway back across the floor I found the crack I’d fallen into before. I saw the scratch marks and the smears and the little holes in the smoothness where they’d driven in their anchors. I was on my hands and knees with my cheek pressed down and I slowly slid my eye out and looked down over the edge. Tim was at the bottom, sitting against the other wall with his eyes closed, but I could tell he was screamingly awake. I screamed at him and quickly scooted back, leaving my fingers clutched over the edge to betray me. I knew they would never get him out of there at this rate. Anyone could see the way it was going to play out, but I didn’t think anyone was actually looking. One day the floor would be resurfaced, one day there wouldn’t be more cracks than people in this household, one day I wouldn’t be stuck here in this weird situation with Tim and he would be suspended there forever, an amberous bug. I left. That’s what anyone would do, and that’s what everyone had done so far. I could see a small indention in the cement that millions of years of non-committal visitors had worn away. Each one plagued by dreams and good intentions, and each one scared away by the awful thought of what Tim’s hand might feel like if they reached down to help him up.

72.

Without excuses it’s hard to say exactly how much padding there is in your average car seat or velvet settee or shoe interior or how they could possibly know what I wanted for dinner tonight without resorting to archaic and prehistoric methods which so far I’ve had the distinct pleasure of avoiding in my life and work environment and patioscape where I think square thoughts in a square room with no ceiling which we had realized was a really good way to catch a whole lot of both rain and sunlight in our laps and upturned faces as we sat with our half-melted hands palm down prostrate beside us on the the low couch we had spent so many slow rusty unaccomodating years trying to slouch through to avoid small inconveniences and burdens like cleaning the welcome mat or finding the oldest thing in the fridge or running back and forth from the bed to the other things that weren’t as comfortable and back again in a hollow and echo-y attempt to get tired enough to sleep and sleep enough to keep working hard and making unimpressive people proud with one more well-crafted step in a precise and well-lit direction to distract and mask an excited display of exploratory flailing and frantic searching going on in the honest shadows behind us with all of it punctuated by the presence of a deep intentional and expansive sigh.

71.

No way. The deep reverberations of deflation and hugging the floor rattled whatever was left of me lying there sloshing back and forth with the motion of the universe and I began to wonder how I could switch places and become the kid shaking the present under the tree instead of the action figure inside. If I was lucky, he'd switch my head with another one.

No again! Rip me up and out of here! Let me do it myself! There's nothing to inspire greatness like a moment of despair or a lifetime of being helpless. I'll move my own arms and legs, and I'll pop my own head off and put it on another, better, endless body, without form or definition or arms or legs or a name.

70.

I was barely being held together by staples and other rickety little bits of stitchwork all up and down the sides where everything had started spilling out onto the floor and little ripples had lapped at the window sills where the neighbors had finally taken one self-preserving step back from their voyeurism in case they got any in their gaping mouths or worst case scenario what if they had to groom the front lawns again with little push mowers while I slipped through my own fingers and tried to charge for admission at the same time.

69.

Again the crowds gathered on the second day with quiet mumbles and whispers to hold down the ground and pass around PVC pipes with various end pieces previously collected and measured out by The Boys of Obliteration who had been subsidized to do such things and had huge stockpiles of these pipes and other plastic building materials for projects like this which would eventually be fully assembled within the coming weeks as each day the crowd would be a little bigger than the day before and in the final hours ten thousand wordless hands would make the final fittings and drop the heavy canvas curtains as the women brought in the children and livestock to prepare for the congratulatory conflagration to send themselves skyward in a roar of uplifting songs and flames to reside in the higher land where they secretly hoped plastic pipes and firehalls didn’t exist but they all knew that if there ended up being another level above the one they were about to barf themselves up into then there wasn’t anything anyone could do to stop them from congregating and burning themselves alive to try to get there.

68.

She had a magnetism that seemed to make all her clothes tight and it attracted me as well before I had even taken a second to consider it and looking back I don’t think I ever thought to think or stop to breathe in those hours when even the cold days were sunny and my room was a deep shadowy lurch in which I would hide away to slowly peel away pages in sketchbooks until I had a reason to poke my head back out into the sunshine and overcut crabgrass struggling in the loam spread shallow over a huge lump of black rock that stretched from coast to coast and went down a thousand miles or more farther than anyone had ever drilled in fruitless exploratory probings doomed only to waste money and drill bits and make what ended up being a planet sized beast just a little bit angrier.

67.

With the ends of my legs secured in my shoes and my thoughts arranged like a rock collection I stood up and took a few over-confident strides across the room in the direction of the front desk where I could see the hairy bun on the top of the receptionist’s head where she must be examining the quality of check marks in check boxes or lamenting the chips in her fingernail polish worn away by years of neglect and soulful introspection down at the bend in the river where they put out some patio furniture for those who wanted to dribble their fingertips into the water and let it wear them away in a fashionable form of erosive self-discipline that found a foothold in many disenprivileged throatless eyerollers that in those days could be found roaming the streets and powerlines and cracked parts of town that Mother and Father and Brother had carefully and with a lot of legislation put up fences around to keep themselves out of so that they wouldn’t be tempted to spend money at the KornerShop where we’d lost Other Brother all those years ago in the middle of a plea for better prices.

66.

Deep in sickly woes of men
Sunk and lost and blind therein
Caught in thoughts of "could have been"
Spinning 'round and 'round again

There we lost our ship that day
And today it still does stay
In that lurch of cosmic gray
Chaos searched for weary prey
Found us almost straight away
And tossed us into dark dismay

Twirling in the vast array
One bright speck, one astral sleigh
One small wreck of cursed ballet
Stuck forever, 'till today

65.

I’ve got these thirty-seven flavors of vinegar in my kitchen all sorted by source and sourness that I collected during some tastings I used to go on every year instead of doing Christmas but now that I have one for every year of my life I suppose that it’s time to move on to other less sorrowful activities like figuring out what the amplitude knob is for or this switch labeled “deep bone resonance” in the thick spiked tangle of all the other dials and knib-knabs I personally detailed in the manual for you some eons ago in perfect handwritten sandskrit so you could say you both pored over it and also didn’t comprehend a single ancient etched line of it there on my sandstoney back stretched on the machine in the dim breathless dungeon that also served as my kitchen when I needed somewhere to hide from people like you who had their hearts stuck in me.

64.

You’re a little plumey above the collar today. Let’s plug each other’s ears and bubble down below the townside surface where you sold lumps of lemonade in steamy beachfront cones sliding down thighs in my eyes trying to find a reason not to send you home with a strongly worded letter expressing my hopeful longing and desire for your top ten or five or one big reason not to sweep me up out of my leathery clodders and around to where there are strict laws against rules and we can all be strictly free for once in that same puffy haze we thought we’d been igniting and sending up into the struggling atmosphere this whole time. But it was the smoke from the fire.

63.

Inspired by your captivity i pace back and forth before your chains wearing a smooth rut in the floor.

62.

I’m contractually obligated to say that the lines, all shapes, dots, and tones portrayed in this drawing are fictitious, and no identification with actual persons (living or deceased or undeceased) is intended or should be inferred.

61.

Looooong loopy lozenges lodged in my craw kept creeping back up and saying things in my voice for me.

60.

Just a bit more blue and just a little bit more pink polka dots of people posing face to face trying to stare holes in each other’s eyes but getting distracted by the pearly sweatdrops poised so perfectly there on each other’s furrowed foreheads ready to leap into heated saltwatery battle in the air between at any second or the slightest jostle from their intense host mentally quivering in the anticipation of something, anything, hopefully a thing like a deep scoop of ice cream melting on the edges or the splash from someone else jumping in the pool while you sit by the side because you didn’t want to get in but you are really hot because it’s a hot hot day and you complain a little about “Hey I’ve got my phone!” but the water felt good and the sunrays do backflips on the ripples and bounce back up to the sky to get filtered a little by the atmosphere before continuing their great cosmic journey across the universe to places you tried to imagine imagining one time but your brain started feeling really empty and numb to think of something completely new made of shapes and colors and feelings none of us had ever felt before so you lean back in the lawn chair you put in the shower (a bright idea, for sure) and wash away the uneasiness and grease in your mind until either something more comforting moves in or the hot water runs out and you know all the ships you meant to buy tickets for are blasting off without you to those places you meant to go to for so long but you were just trying to be financially prudent, but after all, just imagine not having to try imagining! Ah, but then maybe you’d be q-tipping your ear with your eyes glazed over and a weird little wad like a twisted up raisin will come out and you’ll be disgusted at first but soon realize that was your imagination muscle that you haven’t used in so long since everything you used to try to imagine is right there in front of you, and all shriveled up from disuse you flick it at the wall and it sticks.

59.

Blasting off and away that day we glued our eyes to the windows and kicked back blindly in the lounge sipping tiny amounts of things from small glass pouches sometimes glistening and catching a stray sunray now only half filtered by the dwindling atmosphere usually so heavy on our heavy heads full of questions about what the air could possibly have done with the rest of the sunshine that we so desperately needed and maybe even deserved according to some people who built great vertical ships and offered rides to the brave and rich that hoped they weren't instead foolhardy and bad with money up to a clearer more empty place where none of this pesky impertinent air stuff would bother or crowd them in anymore or steal their rightful bright and shining sunlight blazing out across the universe.

58.

Underfunded underground baseball leagues spread across the nation posing as dormant hopscotch hostels hoping to discourage amateur heartbreakeries stuck deep in the dirt and sprouting up and out casually across the street without using the crosswalk even though the cops are like right there underneath the traffic light casting terrific shadows into that parking deck which I haven't added to my journal yet.

57.

I think I've accomplished what I set out to do I said handing him a capsule of the mindlessly unstable stuff knowing that he wouldn't be afraid to handle it with appropriate roughness when the day came and I went on to say with one arm around his shoulder and my eyes on the ground that I thought we may indeed now be witnesses to the reverberations and cautionary ripples of some new canyonous rift in the way things were and the way they're meant to be and I made eye contact to emphasize the point I knew was lost on him but all the same I left for good that day knowing that whatever happened at least we'd be making a great leap in some direction that wasn't backwards.

56.

Don't you ever look at me like that again or I'll have your gun and badge and brain and ears and I'll have em good and stuff em down the drain so far you'll never see the sweet sweet light of day again or sniff the evening soils rising up between my toes and wish they were your toes and I'll take a sharp twist to the left and a little gurgle will make some bubbles squelch back up to the top to jostle for space and pop one by one to release some breaths of spent beetle burps and cicada sneezes and mingle amicably with the rest of who knows what all swimming about in and out of our wheezy lungs.

55.

Blessed are those who gorge themselves on the foggy mountain dew and spin their eyes on pointy sticks.

54.

Long columns of slanted words slid by as intended so I nodded and motioned for it to continue and for them to toss more fuel on the fire to make it all slide by faster and to make it all be over quicker because no one was really reading any of it since we just liked the way it felt under our fingers in subtle raised mountain ranges and sinkholes seeping noxious naughty fumes too fat to float or fill a foggy storefront where those same finger tips danced across each other before resting on something they hoped nothing else had ever thought of resting on before in some pointless expeditionary shopping trip at a well-used book store guaranteed to provide only the best in italicized literature and reference material for today's low-pulp parlor people hankering for the next cliffhanger to never read the rest of.

53.

Sticky sandy soapy sweet we spiraled slowly into lines on a poem etched on the rocks tossed in the creek and laughed at the sticks we stuck in the fire engulfed in our flickering eyes ever swiveling star wise where wider whimpering cow sighs muted our cries for anything other than what we could scrape off the rocks around us or find in the yellow pages or fit under the door in unmarked envelopes the contents of which we knew were skimmed over before being passed along so we worked out a secret code in which we never said what we actually meant and so the world kept churning out fresh people while we tried to chew them up as fast as possible but our eyes were bigger than our little tummies so later everyone regretted almost everything.

52.

Even after checking our facts two or three times with good sources we realized that if people wanted to paint us in a bad light then there we would be slathered all over with the eeriest of hues and unbelievable refractions only the most twisted minds could concoct in many-sided cauldrons and dangling glassware in lurky shadow glittered grottos of the mind where the wrong sort of things festered and feasted on the wrong sort of food and common sense would happily tell any one of us to steer wide of that mental armpit and loiter instead in places where we one could find themselves being given fives so high you had to jump for them and also challenged to give others the same sort of skyward impetus at the very least.

51.

An exchange of handshakes would seal the deal but our arms got tangled together at the last second and when the conventional wisdom experts they called in to untie our locked eyes were as stumped as the amateurs there was nothing left to do but stumble down the expanse arm in arm and ear to ear we exchanged little secrets we made up on the spot to lull the other into our puddly pool of confidence and there ankle deep the sky got in our eyes and distracted we blinked and let go of each other to rub our faces and stumble around blindly just enough to lose each other forever only left with the winding twisty ghosted shape of where your arm was once strangling mine.

50.

I took a vow and with those words mumbled in good intent I very unceremoniously set out across the country with my eyes at my sides and my hat on my head to see things the way they said they should be all stretched out into fragile triangles and difficult gulps at unexpected questions you asked me there on the steps of the museum in the blasting cold with little scattered lost sides of quadrilaterals streaming across the sky from the backs of airplanes and other things which most of us hoped were airplanes and I walked away a little richer for the moment but poorer for the sight of another empty arm and another pebbly pavement where the rocks only kicked in one direction and the elevator rides were altogether all too certain underneath crunchy stars and cereal-studded Alamos filled to the brim with stubborn looking eyes and eyebrows that would only ever have my own fuzzy reflection.

49.

At about 5ish I ducked my head out the window and saw Fords lined up and down the street with the long low rays of the sickly late afternoon sun sprinkling across them from the widening alleys and narrowing buildings where all sorts of other cliché stuff I can't get into right now spilled frozen from the windowsills and held me entranced for a moment before I realized I something was terribly wrong with the way things had been unfolding for the past two or three years and it all started with that little impromptu memorial service down there on the sidewalk across the way with five rows of four chairs and a priest and hymn singing and caps in laps and standing room only for some uniforms.

48.

Older than all of us combined sitting there on wobbly lens flare and cheese dinner pillars wrapped up in double stuf deep slaughtered Southern style sidelong glances and a slight lick of the lips that drove us all just a little bit more than a little bit crazy that week at the lake where the sun ballooned up out of the water on rooftop gardens laid out for everyone to see slowly blinking in the knotted hazel daylight and inky seditious trickles of some Tuesdays and Thursdays all across the board where some checks and Xs and other meaningful marks signified a well-spent life we could all really just be super duper proud of dude.

47.

Lumpy longing leered back at my long gangly legs and laughed and laughed and laughed at my little hint of hesitation to hear him out and hand him heaping humps of hard hot happlesauce seeping sopping soothing through my sorer searing muscles.

46.

I'd never seen her in that sort of incredible half apocalyptic and half Kinkadian lightscape before and so I got caught up by a few of her glowing stray hairs wafting in a frail halo around her head while she chatted on about some unrealistic short term goals and leaned with two elbows on the low brick wall behind us with a posture that seemed almost irreverent considering the circumstances and I wondered if I reached out and touched her with one finger right on the elbow would I get shocked and would the floating hairs around her head fall gently to lie limply with the rest but after a lengthy consideration I decided that the only way to do this without interrupting the stream of syllables bubbling out of her lips would be to sidle up next to her real chummy and cozy like and play it all coy and cool but even when I had an arm around her and had touched an elbow or two I felt no spark and instead I felt the hairs tickling my ears and eyes and so I smiled and encouraged her on with a nod and stepped back to where I had been before or even a little farther than that and gazing into her luminous halo I decided that she was better as a spectator sport.

45.

"I could use a shave..." "Ok well we can talk about that after you finish your artwork." "...did you get me the supplies I asked for?" "Yeah in there." "These are toilets." "Well is it good enough or not?" "They're toilets." "Look man, I think we were pretty clear in the ad, we-" "Alright fine, look, I work in very s-... very specific... conditions." "What like you gotta take your pants off or something? Look dude, do what you gotta, we're all about to head out for the weekend, so you'll have the place to yourself. Just don't-" "No. No stop. Stop. I know. Look, before you leave, I just need you to turn off all the clocks in the building, or anything that might be making any sort of ticking noise. That includes the fridge in the break room. I won't open it, everything in it will be fine, and I'll turn it back on when I'm done. I brought beef jerky and Ho Hos. Also can you set out just a buttload of both roach and mouse traps around the edge of the room. Like every one or two feet." "Uh, heh, alright dude, I'll see if I can find some clocks to turn off or something, but there's no way Greg will let me turn off the fridge. And I think we've got like... two extra mouse traps. Yeah? What dude? Why are you looking at me like that?"

44.

We stepped into the next alley and in his trembling palm which he had to steady with his other he showed me a dull gold watch with only the second hand on it which caught a glint from a faraway streetlight and I could see that the hand seemed to be caught somewhere between the eight and the nine in a spasmodic motion that made me a little dizzy or sick to my stomach so shaking my head I stepped back and was going to tell him he had the wrong guy but he was already leaving the alley the long way down at the other end and I found the watch pressed into the palm of my hand and I saw that it was actually a wrist watch without a band and that the hand was still twitching between the eight and the nine but I quickly stopped looking as the slightly nauseous feeling seemed to be coming back and I realized that even with that glance it seemed like a lot of time had passed there in that soggy alley so with a scowl at my surroundings and a quick pat at my pockets to make sure everything was still there I headed back toward Jim's with the watch clutched tightly in my fist.

43.

And so I decided to introduce myself to a new breed of me with a fresh hunger for motivation that wouldn't get bogged down in the little daily trivialities like eating and sleeping or checking the mail or thinking about money or doing the laundry and folding it or making the bed or ever doing the sheets or scrubbing at moldy spots in the shower or calling that guy back about that thing or picking my underwear up off the floor or doing something about my car before that grinding noise got worse or peeing or replacing that lightbulb or EVER at ANY COST taking out the trash and so everything seemed to be going great as I sat there and worked with a bewildering and breathless fresh vigor and level of productiveness that I had never known before until eventually despite my best efforts and incredible performance everything slowly began to slow down and before I knew it the world was grinding to a halt under my feet and the planets slacked in their orbits like yo-yos on a limp hand and the constellations sagged and became unrecognizable and my heart and lungs swelled within me so that I could hear and feel nothing but the shallow rasps of my breaths struggling through the pummeling fuzzy thunder of my relentless pulse that seemed to be trying above all else to escape from my wax paper-thin skin now swamped in a torrent of slimy cold sweat that poured off my nose and fingertips in steady streams to gather in a little pool at my feet and seep down into the seizing core of the planet through fresh hairline fractures now spreading at impossible speeds across the surface to find weak spots and fault lines and all the paths of least resistance whereby the Earth might be torn to bits from the top of the tallest mountains down to the very foundations now trembling in anticipation far below.

42.

A broad ecumenical forehead was built firmly above the man's slightly crossed eyes and much further down a wide generous swath of a smile whispered vague ecclesiastic secrets that some clients tried remembering or spouting back to each other with a little more vigor and less accuracy from cheap ornamental fountainheads at the bus stop of nations where the crust of the crop was the cream as well all swirling together in a sludgy goldenrod and inchworm green goop in an inky number three four three four three four cast iron pot perched perfectly on the pointed tips of some pink Persian plum and London blue milkbuds all set ablaze at the soggy snap of fingers and the sluggish blink of heavy eyelids pulled skin tight over gargoyled eyes.

41.

A few characteristic features here and there separated them from each other if one took the time to look closely enough but it was rare that anyone did anything even remotely observant and so they continued to lie about in endless textureless fields covered in dirt for long years of unfocused introspection and regret that swirled down into a shortness of breath at bedtime or solitary meals at uncomfortable wrought iron cafe tables along side other ones discussing the differences between shades of Café au Lait and Chamoisee in weighty patient tones that made it perfectly clear they were fully aware of how much time had passed and how much more still remained to slowly grind away in those dusty rolling years and under those sleepy blinking stars where time only passed fast if you wished in futility you had done something with it at the end.

40.

Prematurely popping pimples pithy packs of party poopers practiced partly peeling peppers.

39.

A room full of legs safe and sound in pants where half baked and poorly aimed haikus floated through the air and ears and hair on bare heads belonging to people who thought they were people and mannequins who thought the same thing and which crackled with anticipation at the chance to reach out and call down coppery lightning on anyone slowly blinking with an uncomprehending swimmy stare or anyone who looked like they might have even the slightest inkling of unbelief because even the empty plastic heads knew that progress needed to be made in great uninhibited leaps and bounds across and around the poor shriveled face of the Earth in these crucial early stages when new lands were sprouting up in the cracks of the old and whoever was there to grab them could have them and do as they pleased.

38.

In the thick fog a small area thinned out into a fine mist where some of the more intelligent droplets were gathered in an expert dispersion to discuss some matters of state and wellbeing in an attempt to bring about a steady incline in their numbers instead of the recent drastic drop accompanied by the sun rising over the dewey treetops to the East where great glorious beams of brilliant heated light were slanting aggressively through the leaves and causing mass hysteria among a bunch of droplets who began getting far too restless to remain there in the once peaceful gathering and so they found themselves abandoning each other and fleeing skyward to meet up again in the Great Blue Yonder where all the droplets lived in floaty peaceful bliss until they inevitably grew too intimate with their friends and lost their selves to become One Drop which the Drop ended up feeling really weird and uncomfortable with so in desperation it flung itself at the ground far below to shatter apart and soak into the dirt with seeping relief as each droplet sighed and slowly started crawling out of the dirt to loiter in the air some more.

37.

They sifted through garbage bins and cluttered alleys for billions of years until finally one day in an abandoned and dusty oceanbed they eyed their heap and one of them shrugged and the other sighed and raised an eyebrow and so construction began with the same unhurried eon spanning antiEpicurean planning and diligent manning of basic tools that the first stage of this colossal endeavor had also shown in this making of a moving machine that could pierce the cracked dirt beneath their grimy toes and continue on down past the Litho- and Asthenosphere and the rest of the mantle and find the juicy succulent outer core where molten iron and nickel sloshed about in endless searing currents just waiting in roiling anticipation to be slurped up by the outstretched proboscis and crafted into a giant impregnable capsule and cocoon and as the planet's rotations would grind to a halt by lack of inner spinning lubricating magma and lurch off its orbit the vessel would be unceremoniously launched off into the wild black yonder to careen along for who knows how long before nothing would continue to happen for longer than it didn't.

36.

With the needle poppin' over F I swung out at the swipe of a palm to where it was all laid out under the tunneled trees and lofty lenticulars perched on the tips of the rest with the sun nestled hazy and low in the billowy valley piled on the yellow leaf glints and so I stepped on this and sighed on that and turned up whatever was on and whatever it was seemed like it had been sculpted for that exact unreproducible moment and so I kept driving past where I had planned to go just because the song wasn't over yet and I didn't want this perfect snugly fitted puzzle piece instant to end by any fault of my own but after some amount of wind and shine had filtered though my hair and eyes the song ended and the puzzle relaxed and I figured they could go ahead and never play that song again to any useful end.

35.

He offhandedly told the mostly snoozing students that if they shot for the stars some of them might make it to the moon and as he looked along the board tray for a usable piece of chalk he could see them choking on lunar dust after hurtling ungraciously through space to a calamitous crash where he admitted they would have a fairly good excuse for not doing their homework or indeed not having school at all if they managed the feat of etching out an existence on that little dead globe and as he raised a stub of chalk to the board close to his face and began writing he watched the white powder waft down from the tip bumping and scratching there autonomically and wondered if it tasted or shared a similar consistency to moon dust.

34.

After shrugging off a few crucial responsibilities it became much easier to squat in the corner with a grimace and flex different parts of my back and spine and shoulder blades to try sprouting wings but instead everyone started looking at me funny which seemed a little hypocritical since a lot of them were just standing around with shopping bags or freshly combed hair or little packets of dry air for just in case situations that could never happen to anyone even if they traced their constellations backwards and forwards with the right vague gestures that would please even me in this uncomfortable position where nothing but painful tendons of disappointment were erupting out and spiraling up from my tense shoulders and a concerned looking man in a sharp suit was now leaning towards me with an extended hand which seemed like it might tap on my shoulder right away if I didn't do something about it or fend him off but at the flash of my eyes he withdrew it and resorted to just mentioning quietly in my direction that I was making a bit of a scene with my squatting and grimacing and that most of these people were quite used to seeing this corner occupied only by a potted plant.

33.

Leaning back to rest my tired and aching eyeballs with a tight squeezing of the lids I made the mistake of taking the luxury of a deep sigh which flowed across my body and let my eyes fall out of their sockets and back into my empty head where the colonies of polyps were straining up and caught them on the first bounce and my now loose eyelids flapped open to shed some light on the situation where I could now all too closely see the little anemone-like tentacles passing my eyes along towards what seemed like a great chasmic mouth at the base of my skull and I stared on in unblinkable horror as I was tossed into that darkness and digested in a matter of paralyzing minutes by that parasite living in my spine that had long ago slurped up my brain and before too long I realized that my vision was returning except that I could now see with every inch of skin and strand of hair and even with the lining of various internal organs where things weren't as dark or red as I expected them to be and so I gazed about everywhere in somewhat blurry wonder and growing disappointment as I realized it would be more difficult to get glasses to work with this strange new setup.

32.

Thankfully it took us only a few generations after being stranded on the island to raise up a crew of good shipwrights and then only a few generations after that to accumulate enough competent sailors to man the frightful frigate they pieced together and although in some places the decking seemed choppier than the sea itself we were all happy to leave that small pimple of land we'd all but completely drained of every natural resource and as we got underway and headed off to some glowing spot on the horizon below the drooping sun we all settled into our spots on the ship and the grim reality of the long voyage ahead of us to a destination we knew almost nothing about except that it must be a warm and bright and golden place if it was where the sun decided to rest every night.

31.

We swung around yet another block and although our feet still felt fresh we soon tired of saying "wow" and pointing at things so we hired a couple of large men hawking themselves as "goons" to point at things for us who quickly picked up on the finer points of the gig and along with some very proficient pointing even started interjecting a few wows of their own when they saw fit or started to see the pattern and shortly we realized that we had inadvertently hired and trained our own replacements so after pushing them on ahead down the sidewalk with some brief instructions to stay in the general downtown area we cut back towards the alley near the harbor where we'd hired them and donning a couple of dark hats and coats we took to the plan of filling their previous and freshly vacant jobs and even though we had slighter builds and fewer guns and small clubs concealed on our persons we reckoned we could make up for it with an enterprising and shrewd spirit and perhaps some bold rebranding since the hastily scrawled "goons for hire" with a swooping arrow at the front of the alley did seem a little lazy and sloppy.

30.

Therefore is it not now much lengthier or any farther away than all those before us having been there since before time began surrounding us there in the shadow of our legacy or longstanding and ever ready perfect poise on what you hoped were high and lofty things both seen and unseen which hereafter will be both foreseen and forbidden in the coming days of that same length and breadth and such fathomless depth wherein the people and their sons will lose them and themselves and all of their own in a sudden broadness of hearing and a narrowness of voices and vision there in the fading light and darkness falling on their faces and spirits to find that they would have no more or any less than what hadn't been set aside for and by them before all this began?

29.

I ducked under another low beam and it became plainly apparent to me that over the years the building had gradually settled and what surely at one time had been a lofty series of cellars was now reduced to these cramped basement quarters that I currently found myself stooping through with an awkward loping sidestep at the heels of some girl who was supposed to be showing me the plumbing problem they had called me here for but she kept finding fresh doors to go through and it seemed like each door was a little older and thicker and lower and rusty-hinged than the previous one and every time I worked up enough perplexion to offer a question the girl would rattle off a few very casual comments about the empty rooms and passageways we were walking through such 'there's no drain in this room so there are some stains' or 'notice the lack of any odor whatsoever here' or 'we try to keep the blood out of the hallways' and I nodded along to her tour guide-like babbling lost in my own sort of reverie wondering about what sort of plumbing could possibly be in a basement this old and this deep until before too long I realized for the last couple of hallways I had been bent over and then crouched down ungraciously with my fingertips on the floor for balance but now to continue forward I was actually crawling on my knees with my hands on the cold stone floor and the girl was in front of me on her knees fiddling with the lock of what she assured me was the last door.

28.

I noticed a slight perturbation flicker across his eyes which he was admirably and heroically attempting to keep cemented on the horizon where some slightly less heroic looking mountains were jutting about and stumbling over themselves in what must have been a huge sore spot for the endless grinding tectonic machinations that had put so much work into spitting all that earthen element upwards into the sky only to have huge chunks of it flop over in ungracious hilly clods that could hardly hope to inspire the hike of a mountaineer much less a mountain goat or a cursory flyover by a buzzard but nonetheless his eyes were there fixed for good and forever as he slowly slid down the stake into the ceremonial quicksand pits with a well-clenched jaw and a stoic stare.

27.

There is a tale of a vote that was counted long ago in a small leathery tent at the edge of the desert and disaster where some of the likewise leathery men had cast their rawhide ballots one way and some in another more volatile direction hoping to nudge things towards the all out war a number of them had spent so many generations preparing and breeding so generously for but here at this pivotal moment all the votes were found to have fallen perfectly balanced even after multiple recounts and checking of punchcards for defects and for hanging swinging pregnant dimpled or in any other way not fully detached or unpunched chads in a thorough effort to make a fair go of it but by the time these procedures had been completed everyone was in a bit of a huff and the rest of the guys that hadn't been in a fighting mood before were well and ready now so they all shook hands heartily and punched each other on the shoulders a little before heading off to their respective camps to gather their endless armies and do their best to annihilate one another.

26.

The sun paused in its sweltering trek across the empty sky and looked down to notice that all the things which might be considered normal and rational and well thought out had been at some point carefully stashed away or buried or destroyed and what there remained strewn across the surface of the dusty planet were all the things which might be considered twisted and thoughtless in great displays of disarray and never ending irregular clumps of dormant chaos with which the sun was having a difficult time drawing long parallels back to the past where some of these shapes had been of altogether different and more intentional forms even though as far as the sun could tell most of the little people there milling about seemed to have been living entirely unintentional lives with little accidental arcs spiraling along and fizzling out underneath the sun's own vast relentless circuit.

25.

Gary the Great Archivist of the Turquoise Lips and Sapphire Shroud stood in front of his mirror casting glances toward himself with shifting glares and slight grimaces trying to make his sunken pits of eyes glint or glimmer a little in a way that someone might find attractive or threatening or regard in some way at all out there in the courts and squares and marketplaces of the city where he knew that even though he was a fairly attractive man or at least above average he couldn't quite figure out why most people seemed to look only around or away from him if at all possible and when confronted with the task of interacting with him eyes were often fixated on his vestments or jeweled archivist amulet as though it were some safe haven for the gaze which he thought he could possibly draw up towards his well-sculpted face if he shorted the thick chain it hung from but deep down he knew it was all pointless and a wasted effort and he could glint and glare all he wanted to no avail if he never got around to overcoming his strange fear of sharpening his two teeth to needle-sharp points as was the custom and way of the day to avoid looking like someone who bit and chewed their own food.

24.

The house looked and felt altogether too clean and too well put together to actually be a place where a whole family was living like somewhat regular people and although I'm sure they intended it to seem clean and welcoming and comfortable I was even more sure that they actually lived in the walls so as not to disturb this shrine to clinical homekeeping where they emerged in the evenings when the sun went down with tweezers to pick up the fresh specks of dust that had settled blasphemously on the couch too full of cushions and throw pillows to sit on and go through the rug in front of the gas fireplace with a bone-toothed comb and every application of a cleaning product anywhere was followed closely with a gentle wafting of something neutral-smelling and mildly musky to mask the harsh criminal chemical scents that might suggest to a lurking visitor that there had ever been a reason to clean something here where even the sunbeams slanting rebelliously through the curtains taunted and teased them about finding an article in Better Homes and Gardens about how great of an idea it would be to just board up all the windows forever.

23.

They boarded packed to the brim with only their hopes and dreams after being told they needed to leave behind all their luggage and children to reduce weight and alleviate some ballast issues even after one enterprising father submitted that the children themselves could be used as ballast instead of whatever was down there now but no the captain shot that down right away with a dismissive glance into the distance over the shoulder of the man and said that children moved and shifted about far too much to serve as ballast and unless the father could hogtie some two hundred children in fifteen minutes then they would just have to get underway with the children of the crew down there which most of them had been thoughtful enough to lash up before even leaving the house so as to not cause a ruckus or delay for anyone like good respectable people so the man swallowed the lump in his throat and standing at the railing as the ship pulled away managed to toss a spare length of rope to his eldest and waved lovingly telling him to learn to bind himself well and maybe he could make it on the next ship out of port.

22.

After a healthy measure of time went by the acrid stuff began to sink in through the tarmac of his skin and the other essential layers wrapped snugly about his limbs and cavernous chest and feeling the dull sting of it all he let out an echoey mutter about the way things used to be or maybe the way they could have been but his words slipped away with his tongue and teeth leaving him only with his far more viscid and vivid thoughts gurgling up from some hidden unpluggable deepsea rift around which vast bewildering crystalline structures had been gradually forming and daily they seemed to become a little more interesting than any of the stuff deck-side so he wasn't too upset or hardly even noticed for that matter when his eyes also sloughed off and bouncerolled into the gutter somewhere.

21.

It seemed like it must have been a hundred years or more since I'd last been there to see the kaleidoscopic looseleaf garden shifting around under my eyes with branches hanging in limp cascades across still more thoroughly obscured panoramas of thickly textured thickets and sinewy verdevermillion vines pulsing with a little strange blood of their own drawn from something below which made one want to watch his step and although the air was thick and soury sweet with a comforting loft to it anyone with half a brain could taste on the tip of his tongue there in the aftertaste some sulking undertones of what was going on in the looming loamy dirt and the strangely absent sky and so once I'd found what I came there for I decided I might wait twice as long before returning again if I could.

20.

I am a warm light flickering around the corner and I am coming when you're going and just getting started when things are wrapping up and I am the long ghastly pause after terrible news and I am the neon letters reflected in your glasses that spell things backwards and I am always swirling down and scooping up those people that are weird and sweet like honey mustard and I am a trailing sound from across a field and a falling tree that no one cut down and the thunderous silent boom that no one hears and I am there to scam you out of the little knick knacks you didn't really want anyways and I will never look back or over or up or down but just in and around and I will see what you want me to and lay hands upon it carefully and with great crackling power I will send it back to whence it came with its tail between its legs and it's fur on fire sending up a great plumous pile of smoke to the sky in erratic zig zags that will scar the clouds and there explain what I really am. What am I?

19.

A long drawn out signal note wavered slightly before being punctuated in the alley by footsteps that made no detours for a few dark puddles and fording the marbeled rainbows of the swirling oil in the last one below the cement slab at the door with a final bold step a hand at the end of a jacket sleeve was raised to make a crisp motion that brought the droning note down an octave and maybe a half-step more and lent an eerier air to the scene of the same hand now rapping twice briskly on the door directly in the upper center where it sounded best to knock even if you knocked on it from the other side which it now seemed that someone was doing with quite some gusto and intensity with two hands at the very least until silence arrived abruptly and in force from the other side of the door and even the now somewhat raspy tone from far above the alley faltered briefly and a small tasteful envelope slid out from under the door onto the grimy concrete in which was an even smaller piece of tasteful paper on which were printed the words "No one's home."

18.

There on the counter plugged into the wall
Senseless destruction would often befall
Freshly cut portions of flavorful bread
Too young to be paired and sandwich-ly wed
Or soft to be slathered with thick fruity spread

Oh deep down we knew that they never fled
So glued to our seats we looked on in dread
And secretly hoped to never recall
What that flaming fixture in fiery gall
Brazenly did there in front of us all

17.

I saw something a little better than last time wedged up in the ceiling corner held there with an epoxy of blind hope and well-researched dread slathered all around it so thick it was hard to make out but I knew that's the corner I always looked at for the next thing so I kept poking and prodding with the end of that broomstick I should have really instead been using to sweep up the skybits on the floor from the last time the world exploded and released eons of pent-up life and death distilled to a syrupy sticky stuff that got between my toes and really slowed me down when I really yearned to be getting stuff done back at the home office and so as the harsh reality of all this came back to me in a heady rush I put the broom back on the floor with a sigh and a soaring sound in my mind as I could still see more than I could ever ignore up there in the corner.

16.

I shortened my jeans with a couple of cuffs and tiptoed out across the seashelly beach where I could just barely hear those whispers coming from what seemed like just behind my shoulders whenever I turned away from the waves and the endless rippling folds of the ocean but I knew those voices had to be coming from somewhere far away on the other side where other people were saying other things I'd never thought clearly about before but even when with a slight swish and crook of my hand I brought the tide up higher than it had ever been and gently eased the beach houses up to their necks in deep sea creatures and then lowered my arms with a calm crouching motion and sank the ocean down and hid it away in the earth through Neptune's drains in a glorious whirling disappearance that left the damp floor of the world strewn with all sorts of things we'd left in the dark and the deep for so long that I reconsidered my plans to set off in that direction to see who had been mumbling under their breath so aggressively at me.

15.

Don't act so surprised when it takes a little or a lot longer than you expected to crawl down that gravelly path worn low by all the times you'd gotten that far in your dreams but always turned back before you got wherever "there" was in a sense of dejection at it continually not being just around the next bend or the next hundred bends because you forgot that they said it's not in the journey and "there" isn't actually around any of the bends but in the gravel in your knees and how you grovel to the trees as they inch by in the other direction without a glance so you squeeze into some extra pants and hope that if you crawl for some long time in one direction you'll eventually get good enough at it to pick up some decent speed to hit the edge of the trail weird and get a little bit of air to crawl up and out of this rut or at the very least to get a glimpse of what's ahead or even where you came from.

14.

Shriveled spineless clouds are rising from the horizon in lazy spiral arcs across what I can only assume must be the last remains of the sky and I sit back and blink and take a surgically enhanced sip from the large earthen jug in my hands and I wonder about what might bring the sky back or what even made it leave in the first place in such a rush that it forgot to pack all of its clouds or at least have the decency to leave a note or tell someone of its intentions so that humanity could make a few hasty preparations for a new sky or something smart I'm sure the scientists and higher thinkers would have thought of just in time but now it all seemed like a bit of a lost cause and no one felt like working on anything anymore because it was night time all day since the stars were now always out and even when actual night time rolled around and people decided to let off their slothfulness for a hearty bit of well-deserved rest and relaxation I began to be a little worried that the way things were going these little inchworms of clouds would get wind of the same scent the sky did and follow its cosmic trail of breadcrumbs outwards and far away from our desolate little planet.

13.

It was the 67th day of our journey when the heavy fog that had been lingering over us for two weeks lifted in the heat of the day and left the entire company in light spirits under the fresh sunshine until as we came up out of a small valley between two hills we all at once stopped in our tracks as we noticed these colossal monuments of stone jutting offensively out of the ground far away in a jagged range that ran off in either direction across the horizon and showed no intentions of stopping or letting anyone pass unless there was perhaps a way to wedge between them or under some of the great vicious-looking crags careening off at odd directions at what seemed to be thousands and thousands of feet into the darkening air with profiles against the sky unlike any mountains any of us had ever seen before and so with a double dose of dismay after seeing these and also noting that nothing of this sort was noted anywhere on any of the maps in our possession or on any maps anyone could ever recall seeing the whole company's morale once more dipped down perhaps even lower than it had been before the fog lifted with the exception of Pagolo who had remained in a considerably low mood through the whole ordeal with respect to the foot he had lost a few days prior.

12.

The twisting endless glasswork of narrow tubing and connected vials and sluices were expertly woven together in a dizzying convoluted cascade that brought down the orange juice concentrate and codeine and red number 4 and ten thousand other nameless liquid odors in precisely measured and metered amounts dripping drop by drop into the offered cartons below where everything and who knows what else slowly gathers and separates and congeals into something perfectly resembling a small tub of Neapolitan ice cream in which the vanilla will give you feverish dreams that show you why you really don't want that high life you've always been longing for in the back of your head and the chocolate will give you an uncomfortable flash of nostalgia back to that little ultimately inconsequential thing you didn't do but even now years later you wish you did because maybe if you had it might have had some consequence and when it comes down to it the strawberry will taste just a little too sweet or fake or something and you decide to put on a respirator next time you come in here to avoid even the faintest hint of this ice cream we all scream for.

11.

They fled west across the flats at fantastic speeds only exceeded by the swirling stars overhead in which they had so often tried to trust and relax in the knowledge of but now felt desperately abandoned by and saw that those lifeless searing cosmic specks were very well caught up in their own feverish throes of bursting or erupting and couldn't be useful for much more than identifying the skies and seasons with connect-the-dots puzzles one had to solve with a raised and outstretched fingertip leaving you standing there like some beacon of hope and good news of something you saw dimly descending from far above but they now knew that any diversion from the flaky earth at their toes was only something that would slow them in their flight and send their heads spinning into the aching inky yonder once again.

10.

Often in the amped up anticipation for what I might accomplish the next day I can hardly lull myself to sleep or even crawl into bed to fitfully drone away those hours in unconsciousness only to rise and find myself immediately languishing and loitering about forever hardly able to work up enough mental horsepower to even count the fingers on one hand or the other or both on a good day to discover that there are as many on one as the next and by the time I know it the whole day has slipped through my barely numbered fingertips and just as I'm getting into gear with ideas and pulse-quickening motivations my poor mortal body starts to run out of gas and my eyelids grow impossibly heavy and my head follows my shoulders in an unwilling slump to the bed as the awful orbit swings 'round again.

9.

After accumulations of illuminati accusations gathered in the gutter I gathered that to utter or even start to stammer with a stutter that something may have three sides or in some other way look pyramidal slightly or a little would usher thoughts apocalyptic and hushed and careful cryptic conversations about that odd and triptych theme would ensue and it would seem that although no one knew a thing that's exactly what they feared and the image that was seared in their minds had persevered through the weird power of rumors and tumorous whispers of hooded lunar greetings and fleeting secret meetings where the world's inner workings and soon defeatings and depletings were decided by lurking men of power who may or may not exist or persist outside of paranoia and perplexing plot.

8.

Stepping in from the back porch I closed the screen door behind me and mentioned that maybe someone should go get more trash bags from the store and although it really was just a thought in passing its audible presence made me realize that there really were almost none left and the lack of disagreement from anyone else present was truly an encouragement to me and improved my mood significantly as I washed the plate and the bowl and trimmed the scraggly fuzzies from the carpet with some fingernail clippers so I could get down on the side of my face and look straight across into the eyes in the baseboard under the chair there where I wondered if they blinked when I blinked or just when I looked away or if they could even see anything like I hoped they couldn't.

7.

A few years ago a number of friends and I spent the summer wrapped up in a foolproof plan to make a quick buck by means of exploiting the utter dead dog on a hot day exhaustion of the average workingman at the time and their instant willingness to throw a couple bucks at any problem to make it go away if it just meant they could mindlessly in- and exhale a couple more times before crawling back into those slatherous screaming chops again the second that relentless scorching star swung back around to shine what turned out to be a little more light than most people seemed entirely comfortable with despite their collective best efforts to raise a thick veil of choking billowy denial and heaving squinty progress in some direction that seemed vaguely profitable which was something I found myself really getting behind at the time in some misguided desire to break off a chunk of it for myself and hide it under the mattress where the beetles and worms would break it down and turn it into something useful or at least slightly less incriminating.

6.

Trying not to look and trying not look like I was trying not to look I snuck a look to the left and was mostly disappointed in what I had gone to so much effort to be discreet about mostly not looking at so I went ahead and took another much more bold and daring almost glaring glance up from my book to make sure I hadn’t missed anything notable and sure enough both my peripheral sight and mental flight in their blurred eagerness to jump to conclusions had told me a fantastic and mostly untrue story to which I wished I could now rewind to and continue to be nervous about and tiptoe around all its unseeable timid wishful glory.

5.

I burned the back of my eyes out staring at the sun in yours and as the fatty fumes of fried optic nerve rose out of sight in fat lazy curves I reached for your hand (or anyone's) but found it much further away than I (or anyone) could have ever predicted under what I had thought were normal conditions for standing on stage and getting firm handshakes and a wild flurry of up upped thumbs amid the flashing bulbs and Nobel Prize recipients oiling their backs with aloe vera and novocaine to numb the pain of the pat and then doing just that while nodding aggressively and pointing and grinning maniacally at various downtrodden people in the writhing crowd elbowing each other to get a glancing glint of a fingernail or tooth intended for someone (or anyone) deep under their feet gurgling in the milky runoff of ten thousand people wandering steadily in the wrong direction pushed on only by those in the rear straining to see where everyone (or anyone) was going

4.

They felt strongly about the issues at hand so of course a strongly-worded letter didn't seem uncalled for or completely out of line and so just such a piece of correspondence was drafted up with great care to spare no murmuring word or smoulderous grudge from any of the choiry host gathered there that hingeful day when the future swung open in the other direction and entire armies stepping in time tripped at once on the same uneven paving stone to that poor stone's untimely demise.

3.

Tracks wove themselves across the countryside and chugging locomotives made the whole continent a pulsing mass of golden girders barely bearing the weight of those silver steam engines and copper carriages rocketing off into crowded kitchens and the breakfast nook so rudely interrupting us where we were trying for the tenth time to have a civil discussion in a taxi headed downtown about where the sun goes when it goes down and whether some things like that really matter or not even if you really think they do when no one else does if there’s no evidence to the previous when all signs point to the latter or the batter or the pudding where we all know the proof is even if kids are really more into GoGurt these days in a dangerous way that requires some snorkeling gear or a consent form at the very least lest we get our Sunday pants sued off into oblivion by some litigious Apache attack chopper mom sixty-five feet tall loaded for bear lumbering toward us knocking over small buildings with papers begging our signature in one hand and heat-seeking missiles and heavy machine guns bulging from her other 12-horned hands dripping with magma and mustard gas while we frantically peruse the menu from small metal chairs and try to find something a little less spicy and more suited for a light brunch and don’t even talk to me about quiche I hate that stuff yes I have tried it.

2.

Analogies and metaphors shielding their sons and daughters from the coming storm with scavenged bits from the remains of a well worn walkway between tall trees and wooden buildings only a few people have the convenience of remembering the combination to after all they've weathered at the steady hands of their home owners association approved pediatrician under the guise of just going in there and replacing a few of those loose lightbulbs that were looking a little troubling and could've surely gone out at any time in an apocalyptic blackout because then where would you be if you weren't smiling without all ten thousand lumens blasting your lips out of the way and drowning everything around you in a blazing white light I think we can all get used to if there's an extra little eye-plucking combo deal thrown in there somewhere.

1.

Scribbling furiously through the night and into the brick wall of the morning when all the fresh loaves of banana bread slowly slice themselves obediently in some hidden rhythm known only to those churning the soon-to-be butter at the mills in the hills where the river snakes through and people on paddleboats scoff at pedestrians with cat-sized dogs and short pants in floral prints reminiscent of gardens no one's ever tended or strolled through pondering the purpose of all those pagodas and gazebos scattered across the face of the earth left empty except for an also empty umbrella stand glistening in the early dawn sun rays slanting through the recent holes in that wall.