Seagulls. (rough rough draft)

I couldnt figure out the best way to pick the seagulls up off the wharf. There was really no getting around that it was my job, and after the events of last night, someone would have to sweep up the feathers, the beaks, the whole bits of bird piled, sometimes four deep. But town custodian or no, I was more concerned about the price of hay.
The thatching on my escape raft was nearly finished, and I’d done all necessary sawing, cutting, welding. Even the sail was complete. But given that most cloth materials were in such short supply I figured hay would be the way to go for cushioning. After all, I’d be on the raft a while.

Then last night happened. Without a lot of warning- some warning, but not a lot- the skyfighters returned and just made an absolute mess of the waterfront. Even in the days of heavy industry it’d never looked this bad. Dead seagulls everywhere. Wharf rats crawling through the bodies, carrying away half-eaten bags of chips left by fleeing shoppers. One giant Styrofoam middle finger, the calling card of the skyfighters.

Still, I couldn’t buy hay anywhere, not on town custodian wages. And paid vacation was out of the question.

I woke up with a note stuck to my ceiling saying my services would be required for at least another two weeks to deal with the mess. I am surprised my bosses survived the melee, frankly. The plan had been that I’d get some hay, finish the raft and disappear. It was crucial to do this before the onset of winter, when all the ocean trash freezes into sharp icicles, that launch into the sky due to displacement. Only this stops the skyfighters, their metal bodies crashing into the same sea that they patrol, their “peacekeeper” badges glowing at sunset. This wasn’t a fight I wanted in the middle of. There were only so many layers of irony I wanted to process at once.

But now here I am, staring at a whole wharf full of bird corpses. If I leave now, they’ll just funnel regeneration funds into Employee Retention funds, and not only will they find me and drag me back, the whole of fucking Bayside will still be a trash mound I have to sweep over. Revitalization. Ha. 

The question is where to take the birds, and how. My bags aren’t meant for anything this heavy duty; I’ll probably need to petition the Society of Feral Cats for their services. I hate that. Joan at the desk is always so smug. “You thought we were a bad idea, but now look at you.” She’ll probably call Shirley at the Urban Goat Alliance and have a good laugh. It’s not that I despise the usefulness of animals, it’s just that there are way too many of these beauracracies and if we don’t have money to keep the schools open, how the hell do we keep three Fitness Gorillas? At least Danny Felds is nice. I wouldn’t want him out of a job. I’ll keep that in mind the next time a city employee satisfaction survey gets passed around. Why they have the “check box if ____ should be fired” box is beyond me. Afterall, Joan is still here, and why? But then, I suppose so am I, and after the whole mess on Rockefeller street, I shouldn’t be. Well, hopefully I won’t be for long. If I could just get my vacation time figured; they never search for those who don’t come back, only those who leave. 

Will you look at the sunset over scorched feathers. The society for unusual bar ornamentation would love these. I could use a smoothie.

So I guess I should find my brooms. If this doesn’t take too long, I’ll just use the hay from them on the raft. And maybe these feathers. They have to be good for something.

4/20! In Restructuring! 4/21! Escape From Green Lake!

In Restructuring
In remembering the brand name beer on the bar glass, there is a noticing of the dyed
hair of the woman with the corgi, taking in the grilled onions and burnt brat.
In taking bartenders advice, the whisper about plumbers crack on stools. In the
grains of the wood. In trying to describe an evergreen to a recently blinded
desert transplant who sings an old song not a minute too soon in an ally and a dark
warm minute. In restructuring life to re-include collections, of salts, of blinds, of who to
complain about to your landlord, who to complain about to your uncle. In retiring phrases
from you vocabulary upon return and holding judgement for a later date. In rewriting
a popular account of your failure as an adult. In stoping your self from fastdancing in
a slowdance bar.


Escape From Green Lake
I don't want to hear about your
cleanse.
I don't want to hear about your
new joggable
stroller or
the ways jogging
and yoga pants
work the same in
kegels.

I just want to paddle my way off beaver island, where I've lived
off nuts and berries for the last ten years, occasionally impersonating
an emaciated sasquatch, and find my way to the concrete path
where
I got swept with babysitting
skaters, their clean smiles
and taught
thighs and
screaming eight year olds back into
the fray of failed body surfers
drunk fishermen
and ducks.

I wanted to get free
but like gilligan
there's no getting off
of this island.

19/30! Combustible Vole Statue Don't Work For Free!

I was worried about the inflammation of the vole statue as predicted by the geologists. It's not that difficult to imagine, how under current conditions the statues of certain animals would be more prone to combustion and inflammation than others. There's also the issue of flooding; one can only hope that the two such disasters would follow eachother; the theory is that they'd cancel eachother out, but I know the truth; everything would just be broken and soggy. In my worry I boarded a bus to the far end of the city and broke sticks in a 711 parking lot waiting for inspiration. The sculptures were all guarding inner neighborhoods, if the worst happened, these blocks would simply look better by comparison. That said, inspiration was not forthcoming and I started to wonder if my fascination with a post-apocalyptic structuralist reinterpretation of classic disney tropes had been a waste of my considerable sculpting and metal working skills. Nowadays, it doesn't seem so much like looks of comradery and appreciation on the faces of the City Shadow Council but. . .

they were laughing at me! And here I am riding secondhand waves of glory in third rate architectural magazines. All the columnists, all the council members, all the neighborhood activists can go fuck themself; I've got a hot tip from the meteorologists and this nine story owl statue at the edge of town will show them all.

County Werewolf (draft)

What do we do with the county werewolf? The rows and rows of potleafs bristling in the draft of the tattered greenhouse, the cash crop that cuts to/
                                                                                                fleeing brides in torn veils collapsing under drooling fangs, moonlight just cracking through the hydroponic lights.
Also, the odd fleeing groom, his tuxedo catching fire as he smokes a joint he knows will be his last,
but as the claws descend, he just wants something for the pain, man.

Some days its medical, some days it’s a fucking feast. Hairs in the meat. We held a vigil at full moon, but no one went wolf. We watched the mountains for howlers, but only a fleeing elk. We use our phones to find the way back, on roads that’ve been here for fifty years.

This towns not that small, that’s the problem. There could be any number of college kids turning
to beasts and tearing the throats out of chickens. Any number of crucified ghosts getting ground on in ritual/

Ground up by ritual.
What do we do with the scratching, screaming women? What do we do with the teeth-red wine?

The sherriff proposed an execution, and a would be mayor suggested treatment, but the pastors said that’s witchcraft, witchcraft, as no one is sure who’s really turning, getting hairy, bearded

What do we do with the hairy, bearded howling men at  midnight, throwing their glasses and pawing at bodies? What do we do with the pastors who say this is never a thing, except for satan, that this is never the cold joke told in the morning, the scattered bones from a chicken dinner, then a scattering of other things, more horrible, between the plants. Bones.

Soft Limits

“Okay, what the HELL?”
He jumped backwards, knocked the knife out of her hand. “I gotta go. Call you later.”
Crunching through leaves to his apartment, he held his bloodied arm, kneaded his
windpipe, reflecting that the smartest thing he’d learned those months in Corvallis was
that there comes a time where it is neither fun, nor sexy, and knowing when to say so.

It was a tepid autumn and his ears itched and scratched up shoulders chafed against
his sweater and he decided to call her back; he was a romantic at heart and all the renewed
tensions between the U.S. and Russia had him cataloguing the best spots to lie naked, bruised,
to watch ash hit the clouds with force.

____________________________________________________________________

This is a riff on a couple of pieces I wrote in high school (!) that for whatever reason, sauntered into my head today. The original piece was a bait and switch (I wrote a lot of those for a while) and the "what the HELL" signaled the switch. there's a oblique reference  to "Time to Destroy" in the last lines, but I fear it'll never be as awesome without lines like "I know that you like it when my troops are deployed. . . "

#29: Merman

There is no use for tenacles on a community college campus. The muscles for walking and muscles for swimming are unique to their elements and suction only goes too far. The day I sprouted four had also been the day I donned my three piece suit for an interview with the dean about possible improvements to the enrollment structure. I couldn't walk anywhere, just flail at passing students, three of whom thought they were doing a favor when they tossed me in the campus fountain, just starting to fill for spring.
But my lungs hadn't gone fishy, my skin wasn't scales, my thirst remained untouched. Obviously, I missed the meeting and my suit was ruined. There'd be no promotion in my future, no raise, no commendations or plaques. Some people started crumbling up crackers and dropping them on my face as the suit tore and night fell and it inevitably started to rain. That was so stupid. Crackers are for goldfish, get it right, I yelled, shocked at the pride I had in my new traits. I tried to dial my phone, but it was ruined, tried to beat people away, but even with flailing I wasn't too good. These were brand new and I didn't know how to use them yet.

fj sketch #6

the men at the dogfights abhor good lighting. all they care about is sound and silhouette. the men at the cockfights, they want to see the feathers casting shadows, angle of each peck. blood on the beaks. at the dogfights, it’s all about barks and growls, yips and howls, the chanting, the cheering. big doug is the onhand vet. the city department of controlled activities turns a blind eye as long as there is a vet onhand. big doug is very good, has saved at least three chickens, four dogs lived to yelp another day by the spiked fences beneath the dental repair school, he is also a bouncer, keeping those like filthy jerry, or phillipe the sexy, from entering and scaring away the respectable types. rumors had it that jerry had spent a year filing and stapling for an architectural firm, paid in vanilla wafers and poker chips, and these are the types of people who give underground animal death rings a bad name. big doug knew the men who came in, whose hair gel doubled as cologne, whose swagger turned to a stomp, whose girlfriends lingered in the back and pretended it was a movie, except for loose mary, who shouted herself hoarse at the scenes unfolding. they all knew—big doug, harold the handshake—who was and wasn’t wanted here, loss of animal control like greek tragedy in another language.

_____________________________________________________

this is part of an ongoing series that should be wrapped/booked pretty soon. not sure if this segment will go in the final product, partly because I'm not sure how well it stands on its own. thoughts?

in other news, Sounds of Youth I Haven't Re-Filed*:

*i still like this a lot. perhaps not with the monolithic "best _____ of ____" that I did, but such hyperbole is best left to youth and music writers.

Peter Falk, Where Are You Now? (post-midnight freewrite, 5/19(20)/12)

the zeros in the alleys. they zero in on alleys. cars parked, lights on. apartments on an incline. they must have been built in the sixties, because they look like something from an episode of columbo. in the parking lot men beat their chest. they zero in on corners. they corner zeros. seriously, from the font to the bad fake stucco to the faux-rockery, the whole building is hanna barbera. they err on the side of cologne. they err on the side of collars, and all the things you can do with them on a night that's poppin'. the zeros in the valleys. the heros in the alleys. the heros in the alleys and the heros who drag them there, by the collar, sucking or slapping. but really, who designs a building like that? can anyone imagine an actual person smoking anything outside it besides an oversized cigar? this is appropriate for talking dinosaurs, but dinosaurs would not survive out here.

Filthy Jerry and the Terrifying Truth About Love and Breakfast (5/30)

271 miles to Spokane, Washington, from Seattle. Filthy Jerry didn’t mind the distance, or the way that the sun curled it’s flaming fingers around his ears and face halfway there and started talking dirty in a huge, loud voice. What he minded was the unsanitary methods of the lone diner he stopped at in Quincy, Washington, whose primary export is despair. As the sun spread his dirty fire over cement and scrub-brush alike, it wasn’t inside that eggs were cooked. It was the pavement. No butter, even. Right there, parking spaces 4-7. You could only get the eggs scrambled, and bacon burnt. Grown farmers wept openly at the sight of chicken progeny, charred and crusty on their plate.
Filthy Jerry had known hopelessness-- in days and nights and hostel rooms wherein he got his nickname—but never had cement felt so much like glue, had the existence of sky seemed to mock everyone. There is no horizon to ride to when it is all horizon. His love was waiting somewhere inland, at a diner with stoves and people who would never dream of shedding tears. She would either propose to him there, he thought as miles of sameness rode towards him, or he’d find her there with a man who’d never been to Quincy.

Someone Else's Countdown

It was a day we didn't have a host, so each of us took turns, rushing toward the front, our nearly-paper Denny's uniforms crinkling with starch, gleaming with the grease in the air. I had a ponytail then, so people sometimes thought I was as old as I am now. A man in light denim and a white fisherman's beard ordered something fish-based to go. That had never been our specialty. He sat in the oval by the windows looking out to a gas station and a parking lot. The cook forgot something and he nodded, saying it was for his wife, so we'd better redo it. He waited, payed, tipped well, mentioned that his wife really liked this Denny's and this dish was her favorite. I nodded and said Well I hope she gets better, I said, so you can both come in and sit down. Oh, he said, and leaned on his cain. She's not getting better.

You never saw me come, you'll never see me go (2 flashquicknesses)

discman
In times of such economic turmoil, political import and environmental uncertainty, sometimes I simply want to stand, 19 years old, watching a wall of department store tvs condense the whole thing into stupid, simplified sound bites, mewling mouths of anchors and beauty queens rashed out by headphoned metal. I could nod there until everything's dusty and blown away, or rebuilt and shiny, dependent only on the lead salesman to tell me when to move out of the way.

everything else becomes fiction

sometimes I sit on the edge of my southside porch,
drinking french-pressed coffee I bought with government
stamps and wonder how anything ever seems urgent.

then a cop car blazes past, at nine thirty a.m.,
sirens shrieking, lamenting. then a firetruck,
then an ambulance, then three more red-and-blues.
I am halfway into my book, about a young man who
grows older as he wanders around the world unfullfilled,
sleeping with lots of women,satisfying all but
the most wanton, admitting to some of his own flaws
but not others. the dustjacket describes it as
thought-provoking. the sentences are constructed immaculately.

the cop scanners crackle hard in my neighbor's truck.
coffee grounds take over my mouth. a fog, in august,
over the tree-line, and more sirens and two old ladies cross
in the middle of the street,one holding a safeway bag
bulging with onions. they cross in front of a bus,
without even looking. if there weren't raccoons, I don't know
what we'd do about the trash.
soon I will trip down the hill for my own reckoning like I've done daily
for a year and a half, all my life.

News From Home

the t-shirt factory burned down and now he have nothing to wear on the tops of our bodies. your uncle painted his torso with the melted skin of the factory workers. the rest of town saw that and liked it. now we walk around beating our chests and thinking of clever designs. Some of the knitting circle sold their sewing machines to pay for glue. Skin gets flakey. There'd been a plan, approved by the mayor and everything, to boost civic pride by creating apparel based on the sillouhette of the water tower and catfish billboard by city limits. The idea, your cousin tells me, is to sell them to chiseled men and tall women to wear sexily in other
states, but now all our cloth is smoke. No one can put our town on their bodies, the jobs are all grumpy and angry, fruit is sad and wilty and we've been removed from wikipedia. This is what the mayor told us when he visited for dinner. We had my famous lamb-chops and he asked about you, what you're doing, I said I wasn't sure because your letters are so vague. We all had a laugh about that, except
for your aunt, who is not well and refuses to stay awake in church. When you come, bring anynews clippings about your activities, some smelling salts and sweaters. It will be winter by then,
I'm sure.

To Fix the Gash In Your Head

Perpetual States

To be forever eating, to be forever drinking, never sated. What they said it would be like in hell (a variety of sources, don't ask me to be specific,) the vice of choice shoveling, battering, inundating. To be forever packing snowballs with no one to throw them at. To be forever pissing, never relieved (bad example: in the act itself there is relief)what they said hell would be like when they believed in it. Sometimes the bus is forever turning a corner and Jerry is always just missing his connector. At times like this the sky remains exactly the same as it was the moment before and pieces of bread fall from the old lady's hand to the pigeons (who eat the crumbs, this old lady is not in hell.) At times like this, and sometimes at other times, Jerry thinks of Joe Wenderoth, sitting in Wendy's, completely dazed on cough medicine and perpetually wanting to fuck the red, soft, wet
mouth of the girl at the register. How sore would you get, from shifting in your seat, due to that wanting, and what about those days when people think you terrible for disenjoying their picnic and being unthankful for your peeling sunburn? There are a few of us, and we are forever realizing we aren't alone.


I wrote these both in under 25 minutes at work. Or you could read James Burns' Largely Correct rant/take on Indie Rock in all it's linguistic meaninglessness. I quibble with some definitions, but I think the larger thrust of what he says is well stated and something I'd have written here but am lazy and hate writing about music a lot of the time.

Pinching, Pulling

Crabs running sideways in sunglasses make me hop quicker than a dance with "hop" in the title ever could. My girlfriend is hungover from wine and whisky after wandering the streets of Columbia City lost but nonplussed. Eventually the bar (there's always one of those) overcharged me for drinks and the man who makes a living playing guitar on cruise ships was talking to the off-duty bartender. It was like a dance. Or hop. The woman he will see later is in California, so it will be much later. I think the off-duty bartender's swooping dark hair has him convinced. Successfully, I guide my wandering girlfriend to her whisky-ginger, which is now mainly melted ice (I hadn't known about the earlier wine) and in low light I still drink IPAs like they were ales with half the strength (maybe why I always have a headache) and the on-duty bartender is reluctant to do anything at all. Half the walk home I had my fingers through blonde hair, staggery past fields of disused tires. This morning I was glad I can give directions and cook eggs, because if there'd been a pack of wild dogs, I doubt I'd have been able to fight them off.

Our Favorite Radio Station (22/30)

By bits and pieces the bendy bus chunked and disintegrated down
into a small, two-door enter-and-exit bus, the whole back
passengership darting backwards down the highway, like cereal falling
back into the box, but we kept driving. The winds tore the roof off
the bus and the doors, too, so we turned up the radio so we could
hear the song. It was a favorite. I was driving and prefer music
to conversation with most humans and now we were in a mini van;
probably some schrapnel that stuck, and all the seats with
the last of the passengers had bounced down the road
like soccer balls down a hill and the sound was loud and bright
but the song wasn't quite as good.

"I can't believe what--"

"Man. That wasn't a party, that was a--"

"Lets stop for a milkshake. The whole thing has made me hungry for rasberry."

We rolled, bits of wet slapping our faces through the windshield-craters and I have to keep shaking bits of what seems like milk? cream? cottage cheese? out of my eyes, steady the wheel with both hands so the wind doesn't take us and we pass it, overturned Dairigold truck spewing it's wares like pressurized gas.

"It's disturbing how quick that's coming out."

We roll over a deer and with two quick jolts we're in a station wagon. We've passed through two bale-wire strip mall towns and now the clouds are purple. The mini-van, the bus and the party? was it? seem so far back. The radio screes like rubbing styrofoam and soon fuzzes out.

"This far north, our favorite station is no longer an option."

"This far north, most things are no longer options."

5 years and she'll own the place; mother will be very disappointed.

They don't serve SANDWICHES in HELL, JACk!

She slammed the french-dip-daily special so hard on the counter the plate cracked. A few straws shuddered in their glasses. Au jus everywhere. As she clomped her shoes-for-crews regulation heels to the room's end, Jimmy the cook started a slow clap. Alfonse turned from the order he was taking and nodded. More claps as Jack balled his fists and swivel-headed to see where to swing. Half the room was in applause. Defeated, he dove mustacheward into soggy meatbread.

Everyone had pegged her as summer-breeze slight; the sort of pixie-do-ed flower tattoo cranked out yearly in the thousands by creative writing and graphic design programs. No one thought she had it in her, so they were surprised when next she headlocked Mary, and with a . . . we're going to finish this TONIGHT, bitch. . . dragged her outside.