BIG PIGS PUSHED THROUGH THE WALL THAT WE BUILT TOO FAST

WHAT IT IS

2011-08-26T18:21:00.001-07:00

None of the buses worked anymore. Every time they fixed them, someone vandalized them again. Someone got into the depot and ruined their engines or stole their wheels. The entire budget for the buses had been exhausted, so there weren't any buses. None of them worked, so I didn't have a way to get to my job washing dishes and making salads and burning myself on the bread trays anymore. No one would drive me, and I didn't have a car. My grandma wouldn't drive me, and she kept her keys on her at all times. I didn't want to wrestle them from her, though she often goaded me into wrestling them from her. She had an empty swimming pool in her backyard. Every day, she would spit in it. Sometimes, she would pay me to spit in it. She would pay entire groups of people to spit in it because, after all, wouldn't it be some kind of record if you filled a swimming pool full of spit? I had no car. The reason I was working at the restaurant was to earn 2K to buy a 2K car and leave the town.

No bus, no ride, no car, so I had to wait for a boy, Graig, who rode his bike around the town all day. He never stopped riding--even in the incredible heat and sun, even when he was hungry, even when he had to defecate. Graig did not appreciate how much he depended on us in the town. We were the ones who held out sandwiches and water for him. We were the ones who gave him wipes. We were the ones who occasionally tackled him off his bike so that we could take off his shirt and slather him with sunscreen. Graig had fair skin, so if we didn't get him, then he'd have terrible scarlet burns on his face, his neck, and his arms. Somehow, even in the incredible sun, his legs remained pale.

WHO KNOWS BUT THAT, ON THE LOWER FREQUENCIES, I SPEAK FOR YOU?

2011-08-26T18:20:00.001-07:00

How is a small hardware store related to Intolerable Circumstances? This store is on a street where the rent must be high. Many of the things in the store have dust on them. Things do not get sold often. The rent must be high, but the manager says that things are fine. He is not worried about having to close. He has a display with yellow whiffle bats and white whiffle balls. He sells odd looking toilet plungers--ones that look part accordion. It is not clear how a small hardware store is related to Intolerable Circumstances. The man who owns the store is the only employee. It does not seem he abuses himself. He does not stand in his doorway and shout abuse at those who walk by. Who walks by?

There is a wooden case with a glass top. In this case are pocket knives. They have dust on them. The owner has a key machine. He has this machine in his widow. On top of the key machine is a metal rack that has many blank keys on it. Where does he get his blank keys from? Many people would like to order so many blank keys. They represent possibility and promise. They are not dusty. The keys are not dusty. They hang on a rack that's above the key machine. The key machine is an ILCO Manual Key Machine. Many people have wondered about getting such a key machine. Maybe it would be possible to find one used online. If many people were to get such a machine, they would have to figure out where to get the blank keys. Once they got the blank keys and the machine, they would be able to practice making keys before they started to make keys for a living. Or maybe they would make keys gratis for their friends.

It is difficult to think of an Intolerable Circumstance that has to do with making a key. After all, if you are making a key, then you are inviting someone in. The ILCO Manual Key machine is orange. It is an orange that people don't use anymore when they are trying to make a product. It is the orange of a plastic YMCA basketball, and it has grime all over it from the owner of the hardware store. The grime must have come from his hands since he's the only one who works in the store. The key machine is in the window--and close enough to the door--so maybe some of the grime is from the outside. The owner's hand oils and the soot from exhaust outside make up the grime.

The owner faces the key machine. He has a key. He has a key that someone wants copied. He has a key. He screws it into the left side of the ILCO. He takes a blank key from the rack and screws the blank key into the right side of the ILCO. When he moves the left side of the ILCO, the side with the key that's to be copied, it moves the right side of the ILCO, the side with the blank key. He turns on the ILCO. He moves the left side, and when he moves the left side, he runs the teeth of the key that's to be copied over a guide. He runs the teeth over a guide. As he runs the teeth over a guide, the right side of the ILCO moves and cuts teeth into the blank key. He runs the teeth over the guide two or three times. He unscrews the new key--the key that just a few minutes ago was blank--and runs an electric brush over it. He buffs the new key. He takes edges off it. And so he's made a key. It costs $1.50 to have a key made.

He says he never makes bad keys, but he says to people to go home and try their keys and come back if the keys don't work. He does not ask them about their lives. He wears an apron. When was the last time he went to the beach? When was the last time he floated in the ocean? There is red seaweed in the ocean. There are millions of little bugs in the ocean. They get in your swimsuit. They pinch you a little. It doesn't hurt, but it is strange--when they pinch you.

The ILCO Manual Key Machine. It is manual because you must use your hands, your manos, to operate it. It does not take much skill to operate the machine, and the machine does not look as if it's very expensive. But maybe it isn't expensive. And how expensive is a blank key? Is it 50 cents? Less? If it is less--and if an ILCO Manual Key Machine--can be bought used and for cheap, then it might be a good idea to have a key machine of your own. It would enable you to make your own keys and to make keys for your friends and people you wouldn't mind letting themselves in. You could make keys for other people. There is a power line pole right near your house. You could make a high-quality sign that says I MAKE KEYS FOR $2. You could make that sign, and there you go. You could make keys out of your house. It would cost $2. Sure, people could go to the hardware store, but what is 50 cents? Let them come to you. You will make keys. The ILCO key machine cannot make keys that say DO NOT DUPLICATE because those keys are much more complicated. Special machines make those keys, so if you lose such keys, you need to get them some other way. They say DO NOT DUPLICATE but certainly there are times when they must be copied.

WHAT IT IS

2011-08-10T19:32:00.001-07:00

In the salvage bin at the grocery store, he finds slimy mushrooms, soft cucumbers, and wounded strawberries. He buys these things with pennies. He goes to have his hair cut at the salon--not the barbershop. His friends sometimes tease him for going to the salon, especially since he has so little hair. But he likes the salon because Sadie washes his hair before she cuts it. She gives him a scalp massage. It must be easy for her to massage his scalp because his baldness affords her so much access. As she massages him, he often asks her to tell him about vacations she'd like to take.

After she washes his hair, she cuts it. After she cuts it, she washes his hair again. When she washes his hair the second time, he asks her how her vacations were. She says she never took them, but he pleads with her to pretend and tell him what it was like. It's the second wash that he most loves because, when he used to go to the barbershop, the first thing he'd have to do when he got home would be to take a shower to rid himself of all the hair bits that were itching him. Sadie is seven months pregnant, and he relishes the feel of her pregnant stomach against his back when she cuts the hair at the back of his head. Or when she shaves his neck. He pretends he feels the baby kick him. He says, "Ooh--that was a good one." And Sadie says, "One what?" And he tells her it was a kick. When he used to go to the barbershop, he'd feel a belly against his back, too--only it would be the belly of the fat barber.

He buys his salvage vegetables and fruit.

He has his hair cut by Sadie.

After his haircut, he drives around the lake that's in town. He drives through the cemetery and tries to find the stones that have the oldest dates. He knows where all the newest dates are because he hasn't missed a burial in decades.

He looks at the Vietnam helicopters that are posed all over the town. The helicopters are no longer functional. Their working parts have been frozen by welders or filled in with cement.

Years ago, he could have been the one who delivered Sadie's baby, but he no longer practices medicine. Instead, he's devoted himself to finding a boyhood friend of his who disappeared fifteen years ago. He himself had dredged the lake with three types of dredgers. The first dredger was a weighted net. The next one had dull hooks on it. The last one had sharp, barbed hooks on it. He has hired several private detectives, none of whom have found anything. One detective, in fact, had the gall to say that he had made up the disappearance.

He fries his mushrooms and eats them. He eats his terrible strawberries. He slices his cucumber, takes off his shirt, lies on the couch in the parlor, and puts the slices on his chest. He imagines that each slice is someone kissing him. His wife comes home.

"Take those cucumbers off yourself," she tells him.

"I will not take these off," he says.

He continues to lie on the couch. A window opens, someone hunches through the open frame, and steps into the room. It's his boyhood friend--the one who had disappeared so many years ago. His friend wears a long wig, a bridesmaid's dress, and workboots.

"Let's get you a haircut," he says to his friend.

"Will you be my wife?" his friend says to him.

"He's already married," his wife says.

He plucks the cucumbers off his chest and asks if anyone present would like to kiss his places.

7 MWE: Not a single person was calm in the parade

2011-08-10T19:31:00.000-07:00

He tried to sop up what he had spilled on the countertop. He tried to sop up a light green liquid that could have seeped right through the table and onto the floor at any time in the morning. We went to foul the well. We went to spit in the cistern. We weren't supposed to swim in the reservoir, but we still did. We didn't have swimsuits, so we tied t-shirts about our middles. We slept on a trampoline outside. It was a fine way to fall asleep slowly. Our goal was to fall asleep as slowly as possible--to take many hours. We found many comforters in the thrift store. For months, we collected comforters and threw them into our spare room. It became the most comfortable room in the house. We would open up the door, and comforters would slide out. Some of us would sleep on top of many comforters. Others of us would burrow into the center of the room. I stood on top of many comforters. I had a hammer thatIn I used to make a hole in the ceiling. The ceiling looked like cottage cheese. It came down in sheets. I looked in the newspaper and saw that the newspaper printers were trying to get rid of aluminum sheets. I drove a long distance. Her effect on me was not pacific. I had an attack in the middle of a field. It was not quite in the middle. I tried to belittle my sister, but she turned around and spat in a hole I had dug. It was no easy feat. It was not easy to tread water for so many hours, but I had no choice--especially if I wanted to put my head through a large mushroom.

She did not bite her nails. She cut all her nails to the quick. Right to the quick. She had to have all her nails cut close. She tried to cut the nails of her partner. It bothered her that his nails were longer. It bothered her that he wanted the nails on one hand to be long. He said he played the guitar and that he wanted the nails on his left hand to be long. But he did not play the guitar--at least, she never saw him play a guitar. She knew he didn't own one. And, since he is right handed, wouldn't that mean he would have to grow the nails on his right hand long? But he claimed that he played guitars in stores and that when he played them he played them left handed. She had a caniption fit. He vomited in the neighbor's pool. He watched his effluence bloom away from him. He worried he would catch his finger in the filter that was at the bottom of a pool. He had a pit bull mix that, when he threw rocks in the would, would fetch the rocks. He hated the sound of the dog having rocks in its mouth. The sound of the rocks in the dog's mouth reminded him of sunset. It reminded him of when he had a strange thought in a very dark room. He hung upside-down for ten minutes and then righted himself. He heard his blood. He wanted to listen to its blood because, sometimes in its rushing, it explained to him how he should assemble subterranean markings.

There were nuts in the eaves. There were snoozers in the house. They should have gotten up hours ago. She had to wake up the snoozers with a mix she had created. It was a pancake mix. It was not time to be noiseless when it was time for the snoozers to be up. She thought she should dig a moat around the house since the rains would come soon. She saw herself as a mote. She was with a moat because of the rains. Inside the water, she sprinkled oatmeal. She was at the seashore. She had not eaten breakfast, so she sprinkled oats in the water. She swam through her oats with her mouth open wide.

My sister would not eat her dinner. We found we could trick her. We asked her to sing a song-- one in which the lyrics were Open Wide Your Little Mouth. When she sang that song, she had no choice but to open her mouth wide. And every time her mouth opened wide, we crammed a forkful of something into her mouth.

My mother told me where she kept her night-blue nailpolish. It was in a location. It was hard to find. It was not hard to find. The nailpolish was in the attic. It was underneath a pile of spears. I brought the polish back to her, and she asked me to paint her nails. I had never painted nails before. She told me to be careful of the cuticles--not to get any on the cuticles. So I was careful. I painted her nails, some of which had become brittle. Just when I was about finished, I got some paint on her pinky's cuticle. My mother said, "That finishes it. Now you have to paint my fingers. Paint my fingers but beware my knuckles." I painted her fingers, and of course I could not avoid her knuckles. Once I got some paint on her knuckles, she said I might as well paint her entire hands. Her arms. He shoulders. She removed her nightgown and had me paint her chest--all with night-blue nailpolish. I was surprised to see three hairs in the center of my mothers chest. Three more hairs than I have. Would you like me to remove these, I thought, but then I remembered they were there because my father liked them. That must have been a large bottle of nailpolish! And it was. It came in a five-gallon container.

One the side of the five-gallon container, there was a warning. The warning was a cartoon that showed a baby falling into the container. I wondered if babies had fallen into five-gallon containers or paint or roofing tar. Five gallons of it. I called the companies, asking them if babies had fallen in. "Did you put that warning there because of something that happened? Or did you put it there because of incredible foresight?"

The pickle factory was closed because it poisoned us all. We couldn't ride the horse because everyone who rode it got a disease. We couldn't pet the cat because it bites. We couldn't cross the river because we were afraid. I sat on a wooden chair. The chair was slippery, so I fell off it. We were seeing who could sit on it the longest. I was lonely, so I hired some kids to paint my house. Whenever I felt lonely, I'd have a coat of paint put on the house. I would wrap thick ropes around my arms and legs.

WHAT IT IS

2011-08-10T18:10:00.001-07:00

I have just one headlight. I have not registered my car because my license is suspended. Though I'm worried about the police pulling me over, I drive to work anyway because no buses run at two or three AM. Earlier today, I started digging a hole for my trailer. I have an Airstream trailer--one of those long, silver, hot-dog-shaped ones that were popular in the 70s. The trailer has a skylight on its top. If I make my hole deep enough, and if I bury the trailer as I want to, then I will make sure that the skylight serves as a hatch. That's how I'll get into my trailer once it's buried. I'd be able to live underground then, and I'm sure that if I were to live underground, it would be quiet.

There's a warrant for my arrest--but not for anything violent. Just one headlight. On my way to work just before three AM, I see a patrol car, so I flash it with my one light, and it flashes me back. I'm not sure why patrol cars never pull me over so long as I flash them with my one light. Maybe it's because my flash is blatant. It's as if my flash says, "Yes, I'm aware of my delinquency, but, believe me, I will take care of it." Or maybe I don't get pulled over because it's one of my job's perks.

And I am aware of my delinquency. I'm aware that I owe my children thousands of dollars of back child support. I am aware that their mother is still dead and that they live with their sick and old grandmother in the suburbs. I'm aware that they don't want to visit me because, as my son says, "Your domicile is not fit for habitation." The last time I visited my kids in the suburbs, I was impressed by how clear their complexions were. I myself remember picking and squeezing through years of cystic acne. When I visited, I saw that my son had taken to taming magpies. He would steal them from their mothers when they were young and raise them as his own to do his bidding, which was mostly that he wanted them to bring him coins and jewelry.

I was surprised that my son decided to tell me his terrible secret about how he best tamed his magpies. I didn't expect him to tell me anything--let alone his best secret. He told me that when the magpies were little, he would break one of their legs. They never remembered he was the one who broke their legs, of course, and they probably also didn't remember that he was the one who brought them back to health. He made sure, though, that their legs never completely healed. All his tame magpies had limps, and it was painful for me to see how loyal they were to him, how they brought him things they could barely carry from far away. They brought him coins and bracelets. They brought him rings.

"I once saw a bird of mine peck a woman until she gave it her pendant," he told me.

My son. My son also told me that someone was tying gold ribbon around lit cigarettes so that his birds would pick them up and bring them to him. My son wasn't sure if this person who planted the cigarettes was trying to be his friend or if this person was already his enemy.

"Is this person trying to give me gifts of lit cigarettes? Or is this person trying to burn me down?" my son asked.

I told him I couldn't tell him--only that it wasn't I who was doing it. I sometimes saw limping magpies near my trailer in the city, and I wondered if my son had sent them to take my coins. I did, after all, owe my children thousands.

I don't know much about my daughter except that she administers dialysis to her grandmother three times a day. I know that she rides her bike fast and without a helmet. It is not my place to tell her to wear a helmet.

I arrive at work. I have a simple job. It's to clean a bar from three AM to seven AM. The bar, by law, is supposed to close at two, but it stays open for an hour extra because that's when all the police come in to drink. The owner of the bar knows that I have stopped drinking. He likes to tell the police that he'll give them free drinks if they can force me to drink.

"Free drinks for anyone who can get this waste to drink," the owner says. He says this tonight.

WHAT IT IS

2011-08-08T19:26:00.001-07:00

We had a going-away party for ourselves, but I thought of it as a going-astray party. We invited people from our work over, but once they were in our small apartment, I saw it was more of a trap than a party for everyone. We did not provide enough food or drink, for one thing. There were bottles of wine, but I had hidden them in the fake closet that had the heater in it. After everyone left, she spat on me, and the spit was purple because we had been drinking the wine. Her otherwise white teeth were gray because of the wine. She thought a lot about teeth. She liked them straight and white, and mine were neither of those things, so I worried when I saw her looking at my teeth.

At the going-away party, one of my friends got stuck in a wall. Somehow, he had been looking at one of my posters, only to find himself in a wall. I had to remove a panel underneath the sink to get into the wall and find him. I slid along, inside the wall, until I found my friend, who then urgently asked me for all the names of the people at the party. I whispered the names to him, though I wasn't sure of some of her friends' names. And, even if I knew the names of her friends, I was unsure of the pronunciation--that is, if I should stress the syllable before the last one or an earlier syllable.

She spat on me after everyone had left. She was upset because, once everyone left, I opened up bottles of wine and began to make omelets. She was upset because I left our bedroom door open when I cooked the omelets. She hated the smell of food--"kitchen smells," she called them--in our bedroom. Her name was Sycamore, which was odd because that was my name, too. She spat a purple wad onto me. She cried, and as she cried, she produced amazing quantities of snot, which she collected and cupped in her hand before wiping them on me.

She screamed that I shouldn't have gone to my friend in the wall. I should have left him there to die. I should have left him there and called the landlord to dispose of him. I shouldn't have told him everyone's names, and she was certain that, when we were in the wall, we had talked about other women and how we wanted to be with them instead of anyone else. She said we laughed about all this, and I told her I couldn't remember laughing. There were great blotches of wax in the carpet of our bedroom because, the other night, trying to be romantic, we had lit candles only to forget them. That happened the other night. Sycamore pronounced "wax" as "waz."

I tried to open the window in our bedroom. I wanted to escape, but she grabbed me and pulled me back in. I couldn't help but to laugh, and she said, see, that's just how you laughed about the women with your friend in the wall. I realized that, yes, we had spoken about women in the wall. I realized I had laughed. I made a confession to her, and tornado sirens sounded outside. That summer, we had heard the sirens so much that we didn't take them seriously anymore. The first time we had heard them, we had responded and scuttled into the basement of someone's house across the road. We didn't know the person--it was an old man--and we begged him to let us in. We begged him to let us in his basement. He had stacks and stacks of board games in his basement. He had hundreds of pairs of athletic cleats. We later learned that, like some kind of scary human magpie, he broke into homes and stole board games. He broke into school gyms and locker rooms and stole cleats. He told us that the best day of his life was when a pregnant woman cut his hair. He told us that when she shaved his neck he felt her big belly on his back. He didn't feel a kick, but it would have been nice to feel one.

7 MWE: The ninny was sailing his ship across the junkyard

2011-08-08T19:25:00.001-07:00

She did not have much to make soup. She cut up some garlic and cooked it in oil with herbs. She added water and let it simmer for half an hour. That was her soup. She had some dough, so she tossed rubs of dough in her soup. She made dumplings. She coddled an egg in her soup. She had chickens. Yesterday, she had given her chicken mussel shells to eat. It started to rain. She had been bucket bathing for months. It started to rain, so she took off her clothes, stood in the rain, and soaped herself up. She expected it to stop raining when she was still soapy, but it rained and rained and gave her plenty of time to rinse. After the rain, she took her mussel shells to stomp on. After she stomped her mussels shell, she called to her chickens by calling churrras. Churrras. All the chickens came to her and started pecking at the shells. Two days ago, she had gotten drunk and had thrown a log at her chickens. She had only wanted to frighten one of them, but when she threw the log, she accidentally hurt one gravely. She had to kill it, even though she didn't want to kill it. To cut off its head, she slipped it into an orange traffic cone. The head of the chicken stuck out of the pointed end of the traffic cone. The chicken was easy to kill when it was in the cone. All she had to do was chop off its head with a hatchet. After chopping off the chicken's head, she submerged it in boiling water so that she'd be able to pull out its feathers. If she didn't keep it in the water long enough, then the feathers wouldn't come out easily. If she kept it in for too long, then skin would come off with feathers. There'd be a mess. She had to keep the chicken in the water for just the right amount of time.

The young people who got drunk in the square weren't too smart. The square was paved with rock. Under to rock, there were supposed to be many bodies. These were bodies of people who were buried with animals. Many people were buried with animals. They were dead, and then live animals were buried with them. In this square. The young people were nitwits. They were dolts. They were ignoramuses. They were simpletons. They were not too intelligent. They would buy a bottle of cheap cola, and they would buy a bottle of cheap port. Many times, I saw them pour out half the bottle of cola before they poured some port into that same bottle. Why don't you drink the cola, I thought. Why do you waste the cola? Why don't you have a third container? You have a third container to pour some cola and some port in. In which to pour. So they get drunk on their wine and cola. It's something to see them throw themselves around the square. To make money for more port, they sell postcards to tourists. They buy the postcards for one coin and sell them to tourists for two coins. Or, better yet, they steal the cards because the cards are so easy to steal. They steal them and sell them to tourists for two coins. They buy the port. They buy the cola. They mix the two and have a drink. They have drinks because they are on the square. They piss against rock walls in gold light at the end of the day.

She was in the doldrums. The dumps. She was told that she did not hit the ball right. She was dull. She was insipid. She was prosaic. She wanted to hit a cymbal with a sausage in order to hear if it would re-create the sound her grandfather made when he hit his head on a brass bannister. The empty and stupid box. The sadness at the end of Sunday. The excrement packed neatly away for later inspection. She got her comeuppance.

To honor the memory of her father, she tied a kite string around his grave. She held onto the other end. The other end was a yellow plastic spool with handles. She had to pay out the spool to go to other places. The one end was tied around her father's gravestone. The other end was a spool. She had to pay it out. She would get asked on dates, but she couldn't go anywhere on a motorcycle or a car because she wasn't able to pay out her kite string fast enough. "Leave the kite string," some guy told her. This guy told her earlier that he had to get all his fillings taken out of his teeth and replaced because they were telling his mind odd things. "There must be some off metal in them," he said, "because the metal gives me strange ideas." But, later, he told her to leave her kite string and the memory of her father. He wanted her to ride on the back of his motorcycle. He wanted her to lie on the road so that he could try to jump her. He wanted her to come with him to steal strawberries from an old farmer. The farmer did not have a shotgun. That's the old cliche. Instead, the farmer had an atl-atl with which he would launch spears. It was beautiful to see him launch a spear. Many strawberry thieves would pause to see him launch a spear at them. He had a jai-alai glove. My father had a jai-alai mitt. If I misbehaved, I was to put myself against the brick wall that separated our property from the property of my best friend's mother. My father would launch bitter mangoes at me. My friend and I tried to sell those mangoes, but they made so many people unhappy. Instead, we had to go into canals and steal mangoes that drooped over into the canal. We stole many mangoes, and each one sold for a dollar. My father used the jai-alai mitt to throw mangoes at me. They left bruises on me. One hit me on the back of my neck and stunned me. One hit me on my right side--right on my live--and put me on the ground. My father yelled at me that I was faking it. But I wasn't faking it. My friend and I would sneak onto a golf course at night. We would drench balls with glowing liquid and hit the balls.

WHAT IT IS

2011-08-06T07:47:00.002-07:00

Since no one else wanted to be with him, and since he couldn't be left alone, I was the one who ended up accompanying him on all his errands. He had a small dog that never left his body. Most of the time, the dog perched on his large shoulders, but when the dog felt especially threatened, it would climb onto his bald head and make boiling noises. To piss, the dog would scratch his shoulder. He'd hold out one of his arms, the dog would walk it like a plank, and then piss off the end--just missing his stubby fingers.

I was supposed to watch this man--to make sure he didn't kill anyone, steal anything, or take bodies to turn into skeletons. That's what he had done to my grandmother's body. He had made it a skeleton. She had expressed in her will that she wanted to be cremated, but he got to her body first, removed all the meat off it, and dried out her bones one by one in his electric oven. He made a beautiful base out of carved wood, set a metal pole into the base, and, with wires, hung her bones on the pole. What granddaughter can say she's touched her grandmother's bones? Certainly many can say that who are in other countries, but I can say it, too. The man had a tattoo of a beer can's pull tab on the top of his head, but he says he got that tattoo in his drinking days but that now his drinking days are over. They have been over for ten days.

I went to the dump with him.

"I was supposed to be the manager here," he told me at the dump. His dog scratched his shoulder.

"I worked here for years--got this dump under control--and it was understood I'd be the next manager. But they passed me up and gave the post to the son of the fire captain."

The dog scratched his shoulder urgently. I reached over and shoved the dog off him. After the dog hit the ground, and after it got its senses back, it behave as if the ground were trying to eat it. It threw itself at the man's legs, but then I pushed him down, too.

"You're not the dump manager because you can't be trusted with anyone's garbage," I yelled at him.

7 MWE: The bedding, the bloodletting

2011-08-06T07:47:00.001-07:00

He squats in his garden and pulls out weeds. He accidentally pulled a carrot before it was ready. He accidentally pulled a beet. In the newspaper, he read that there would be an auction of the things of people who had storage areas but who didn't pay for their storage areas. His goal was to kiss a crow on the beak. He was told his life would be awful until he kissed a crow on the beak, so he went about trying to tame them. His hemoglobin told him that he wasn't much without his mother. His hemoglobin told him that he wouldn't be much if he tried his hand at technical writing. He wouldn't be much. She was missing a tooth. It was a distracting tooth. She wasn't missing a front one or a back one. She was missing one in between. It made him think she was a horse. That's where the bit could be slipped in.

Some froth around the bit. The horse had frothed a little around its bit. She was inhuman. She had him eat turmeric. They put turmeric in everything because they believed it had some sort of property. Retching on the seat of his country, she found that yesterday the wretched etching in the market could have been a bird's wing but instead it tithed for the right money yes I am not happy in my plot to leak all the water out of the bush in the road with the funk on the model watching your favorite rocket scream across the sky only to walk on the balls of your feet with all your tubular boisterous finality of a juggler who does not know a rod will be implanted in his neck so that he can look only down. He can only look down. Only he can look down.

Moppy rides in the car with her mother. Her mother drives. As her mother drives, she eats some yogurt she had made. The mother loves to make yogurt. She loves to talk about how easy it is and how it was her grandmother who gave her mother a yogurt culture. And then her mother gave her her yogurt culture, and that's the culture she uses to make her yogurt. And then she will give her yogurt culture to Moppy, and Moppy will be the one to eat yogurt. But Moppy does not like yogurt. "You will," he mother says. Moppy's mother drives. Moppy does not like yogurt, but she likes carrying around a candle. For years now, she has carried a lit candle wherever she goes. She has to carry the candle, and the candle has to be lit. She wears tall socks, and tucked in these socks, she keeps a couple of extra candles. She also has books and boxes of matches. She has books of matches. The matches are waxed paper. She has boxes of matches. The matches are wood. She has long kitchen matches. Moppy carries around her candles. Some candles she has can last over 24 hours. These candles give her some relief. Other candles she has last only an hour or so. She always carries a candle. Her mother drives. She has a candle. Her mother eats yogurt and talks about yogurt. Her mother becomes quiet. Moppy doesn't notice this at first because she is busy cupping her hand around her candle. Her mother has her window cracked.

The gory grit. The earthworm. The bostonian with the lisp. He cut off her braid. She had a french braid. The dendrites were gilt. The barrel was lit on fire, and we dared each other to stand in it. Stand in the lit barrel. It was a metal drum with a fire in it. How long can you hold your head in it. In order to make it on the handball team, you had to see how long you could hold your head in a flaming metal drum.

I was the maid of honor in my sister's wedding. I was honored. I was honored and excited to wear the dress. I was honored, but I told her I would not be at the wedding. When I went to the wedding, I saw a python. The python made me remember when I wore a dress. My mother told me to take it off because she said I shouldn't wear dresses. Reaching for a dress, I felt something inside me rip. I ripped through my inheritance. Good riddance to a one-million dollar inheritance. I went through it. I went to a gorge. I wanted to get to the bottom of the gorge. To get to the bottom of the gorge, I had to take a metal cage that was a kind of outdoor elevator. It was attached to what looked like winches and gears and oversized bike chains. I waited in line to get in the cage. The cage could hold only five people, and there must have been thousands of us in the line. I waited to get in the cage. When I got to the front of the line, the cage operator asked me to get out of the line. He wanted to speak with me. He said that he was certain that the two of us had met at a beach park. We had spent the day with each other, he said. He said that, at the end of our date, we ended up sitting at night in a beach park. We both sat on a bench and kissed. Then, he said, to his surprise, I put myself on top of him. He put his hands on my hips, and I took his hands off. We made sand drip castles. We took wet sand to the road. We were given the task of guarding a tree. We were told not to let anyone eat any of the fruit off the tree. It was a mango tree--only, in all of its mangoes, there were gifts. We were told that if we made it through July by not allowing anyone to take any of the fruit, we would be rewarded.

The child never ate vegetables in the house, but when we were outside in the garden, he would eat vegetables. He would eat tomatoes off the plant--at least 20 tomatoes he'd eat. He'd eat raw kale. I hated his kale breath. He often would eat kale and then want to kiss me.

WHAT IT IS

2011-08-04T08:56:00.000-07:00

I consider Mr. Camps to be my mother, but I don't tell him that. I see Mr. Camps in a hospital birthing me. He is pleased when his labor is over and that all went well and that he didn't need a cesarian section. The nurses tell him that they've seen many babies but that none have ever had the elegance about them that I have. I don't tell Mr. Camps anything about any of that, but it's still what I think, and there is nothing that says I can't think it if I can't get it out of my thoughts.

I am in Mr. Camps's key shop. It's where he makes keys--even the keys that say, "DO NOT DUPLICATE." Everyone knows that Mr. Camps will copy such keys. It's just that he'll probably charge you more. He could charge you one dollar more or maybe five kay more. It's all in how you look when you ask. At the key shop, Mr. Camps also bakes bread and repairs umbrellas.

"There are many umbrella in this city, and no one is willing to fix them except me," Mr. Camps often says. He repairs umbrellas for half the price it would be to get a new one. For some extra money, he will even make it so that you can conceal a knife in the handle of your umbrella. If this is what you want, then you can expect Mr. Camps will replace your old umbrella handle with a new handle that's a wooden duck's head. He carves these duck's heads himself, and whenever I am walking around the city and see someone with an umbrella with a wooden duck's head, I often cross to the other side of the street for fear of being knifed.

I bring all the keys I find to Mr. Camps and have him make copies for me. He even duplicates the ones that say, "DO NOT DUPLICATE," and he never charges me extra because there must be something in the way I look that says I have no desire to break into anyone else's room. I have no desire to get at something good. I simply find keys and want to see copies made.

I bring him five keys today. The key shop smells like bread because Mr. Camps is making some wheat bread with wheatberries and oats. He gives me some bread. He has a jar of brown spread, which he offers to me.

"Put some of this on your bread," he tells me. I put it on. It tastes like strange chocolate and is grainy on my teeth. It has grit in it. He says the grit comes from a volcano that killed 50,000 people. He says he puts that grit in his chocolate to remind himself that, yes, I am lucky to eat chocolate on excellent bread, but let me not forget things like volcanoes, which can kill 50,000 people right off.

I eat the bread and feel the grit. My mother, Mr. Camps. Mr Camps looks at his shining, shimmering wall of blank keys and selects the ones that best match the keys I brought.

7 MWE: The fish blinded those who took it from the water

2011-08-04T08:55:00.000-07:00

He has terrible blisters on his arms. Very big blisters full of liquid. He looks in one of his blisters and sees a plastic figurine. He sees a dead bird. He sees a rabbit in his garden. A rabbit in his garden. The road had honey on it. They were trying to pave the road with honey and corn puffs. Good luck paving the road with those things in the summer. He used the kitchen sponge to stop his mother's bleeding. He had to wring out the sponge ten times.

The child was sturdy and muscular. The child could have swallowed a water balloon. They had put flour in the water balloons. When you got hit by a water balloon with flour in it, you got the sensation that you'd never known your loved ones and that, in fact, your loved ones wanted nothing to do with your rotting body. He left his nail clippings in a pile on his night table. If you want to start a fire, a good way to do it is with six corncobs. The cows drink from a trough that always has goldfish in it. The schoolroom is cold in the winter. But if you sit near the iron stove, you will get hot. And if you sit in the back of the room, you will get cold. The teacher painted our faces. The teacher had us take off our shoes so that he could paint our feet.

The alley. The sidestreet. The frontage road. The rotary. A tree hung over the busy four lane road. Two lanes went one way, and two lanes went the other. The speed limit on this road was 35, but most people went 50. A large tree hung over this road, and a child hung from this tree. The child fell into the road. It was winter. There was ice on the side of the road. A man went to his mailbox, which was on the side of the road. He saw that he had a package wedged into his mailbox. He started to pull at the package, but it was difficult to remove. He tugged and tugged. As he tugged, he slipped on some ice and fell into the road. A car missed his head, but another car ran over his hand, making it a flipper.

They are eating hot dogs and hamburgers in a large room. They are eating. They paid $5 for the food, and the money will go to some group that has to do with farming. It's for farmers and farming and the raising of cows and pigs and horses. They are in a large room. The tables have plastic tops and metal legs. Outside, they go to pens and see the horses and pigs and cows. They sit on bales of hay. They are three people. They fall down and hole and can't get out of it. Cows and pigs and horses fall down the hole on top of them. The people who were in charge of the fundraiser start to kick dirt in on top of the. They get a machine that reads their minds in the least intrusive way.

A misfortune was the most noticeable thing that happened today. I was asleep. I tried to sleep on the couch but couldn't fall asleep. I went to the floor and pulled a rug over me. It was in that way that I fell asleep. I dreamed that if I wanted a danish, all I had to do was think of a danish. I worried that these danishes came from out of someone's mind, which might have been a lawn on the top of some building but wasn't since all I had to do was put my hand down a horse's throat to get myself a can of warm beer. I trained myself to like warm beer instead of cold. I trained myself to drink hot beer. It is at its best when it is 200 degrees. I was sleeping on the floor under a rug when someone started pounding on my door. This person pounded, and, as this person pounded, this person also rang the doorbell over and over. It was as if two or three people were doing this, but I knew it was just one. It was one person with a disorder of the first order. A disorder of the mind because he was certain his mind wasn't in his head. He insisted it was just below his belly button. When he was deep in thought, he was not in his head but just below his naval.

Before my dad died, he gave me night vision. He gave me some goggles that would allow me to see at night. This was before my dad died. We lived next to strawberry patches. The man who ran the patches was always warning me not to steal his strawberries. He said he had an intuition. He said he knew when someone was in his patches and that he couldn't tell me how many times he woke up at 3 AM to see some flashlight bouncing in his patches. He said he'd go outside and shoot his rifle at the light, not at the person who must have been near the light. He would shoot at the light, and that would be close enough to scare the person. So I told him that now I knew that and that I wouldn't be afraid if he shot at my light. I knew he was too much of a coward to shoot me with his rifle. But my father had given me night vision before he died, and this night vision allowed me to sneak into that man's strawberry patches and steal many of his berries. As it turned out, he had no intuition. He simply woke up late at night and still had good vision for an old man--at least good enough to see a flashlight's light bouncing in the distance. Good enough to aim at that light with a rifle and shoot the light and not shoot the person. Since I had night vision, though, he couldn't see me. I took many strawberries. Everyone in my family wanted to eat the strawberries with very cold cream and sugar, but I wanted to eat them with lukewarm water and phlegmy spit. I had my entire family spit in my strawberry bowl. They didn't want to do it at first, but then I told them that, after all, we are family, and that it would be my honor to gag on their slimy spit as I ate my strawberries. It was an odd time to be a young boy and to have a dead dad and a pair of night vision I could use any time to defraud my sister's government, which wasn't the least bit fair since it turned off my favorites shows that reflected off the clouds and bounced off the ground five times before I could even kill a bird with a marble or a BB or a sphere of steel shot.

7 MWE: the slovenly hellion couldn't digest mutton

2011-08-03T20:17:00.001-07:00

A bear was in a tree. The tree retched out of its hole. It was a strange tree. The tree had a large hole in it, and it retched out of this hole. The sound it made was one of retching. The guitar was full of rot. The house's floorboards made sounds. The bone broke. It was a green branch break. The bone broke in the way that green branches break. He never loved his favorite son. His favorite son wanted to swim in the ocean, but he first laughed in the tunnel that had no padding in it because if there had been padding, and if all the rocketry had been sensitive enough to quell their anger, then maybe, in the end, they would have flushed three times in an hour.

She was jumpy. She had artificial feet. She showed great ardor with her partner. Her partner had artificial feet. It was a feat of the imagination--when they imagined they had feet. They got free french fries, played some arcade games, got some beer, and then bowled. When they finished bowling, they were some of the last to leave, and they got knifed.

Dunbar told us all he was going to take out the trash. Dunbar always wanted to take out the trash in the summer because that meant he got to be outside. It meant he got to be outside and that, as he walked to the trash, he got to smoke half a clove. He made a big show of telling us he was going to take out the trash. We didn't notice he was taking longer at first. We then noticed he was taking longer. Then, we asked one another if he had been gone for a long time. We then knew he had been gone for a long time, and one of us went to find him. One of us found him by the Dumpster with a wound in his back. He imagined he had been knifed, but, really, he hadn't been knifed. Something else had happened.

I could not prevent what happened. I was absent-minded. My absent-mindedness was what made it so that I could not prevent what happened. I was oblivious. I was unmindful. I was unfamiliar with how they would hunt and kill coyotes. People in town were worried that a coyote would carry off a child. I made my presence known at these meetings. On and on they went on about how the coyotes were dragging off their silly purebred dogs and $900 cats. They went on about that. Next, they brought up that soon it would be their kids that the coyotes would carry off. It was then that I asked to speak. I asked the group if, really, would it be so awful that a coyote carried off one of their kids. They looked at me, horrified. They looked at me as if I were sick. I said, "You look at me as if I were sick." I then went on to say that I don't think the coyotes would carry off their kids to kill them. Instead, what I think is that the coyotes would carry off their kids to raise them, and that they, the coyotes, would probably do a much better job rearing their brats than they would have done if their spaceships weren't broken and their ankles could move in more ways than just the three ways. The three ways: up, down, and to the side.

I was driving. I thought I would be able to turn left. I was in the intersection. The light turned yellow. It turned red, and I didn't turn, so I was still in the intersection. I looked to see if anyone was directly behind me. No one was directly behind me, but I saw that, soon enough, cars would be behind me in the left-turn lane. So I put the car in reverse, went back, and got myself set up again. I was going to wait. It was now that I began to think of other things as I waited for the left-turn arrow. It was now that I thought of things. I remember how I had been part of a club in which, if you wanted to get in the club, you had to find a young married man and cut off his wedding ring with tin snips. We never said how you had to cut it off. You could drug the person. You could take it when he was sleeping. For some reason, though, many of us in the club preferred wrestling young married men to the ground, pinning them there, and then using tin snips to cut off their wedding rings.

These were the things I thought about. The light turned green, and I didn't pay attention. Someone behind me honked. I took my foot off the break, pressed the gas, and promptly went backwards. I had never put the car into drive after having been in reverse. I crashed into the car behind me. I looked in my rearview mirror and saw an upset young man.

I got out of the car. I lay in the prison. This was not a prison made by the state or by some private company. This was one that my brother-in-law had made just for me. This was a rich deposit. I am now in one of the richest deposits for me. When I cut off an orchid from the plant, I felt that I had but a few more moments to live. Those moments passed, and I felt I had but a few more moments. I will use these moments to cut another orchid, I told myself, so I cut an orchid. In the center of this orchid, I made out what looked to be a boat I had once captained. It was not a prism that I had. Before the pale dentist drilled open my cheek, I asked him if he'd like to come to my graduation. The dentist was supposed to drill my tooth, not my cheek. He told me it was a great temptation he faced every day--that is, that he shouldn't plunge his drill into the cheeks of his patients. But that is just what he did to me. There is very little sensation in the center of the cheek. When I was younger, I would often upset my parents by pushing toothpicks through the center of my cheeks.

The resurrectionist didn't get up this time. He was dead this time. The end has come for him, the resurrectionist. Or maybe the resurrectionist wasn't the one who always got up after being dead. Maybe he was the one who got someone else up. Here he is--dead of natural causes. Dead of artificial causes. Dead of artistic causes. Dead of scientific miracles we couldn't help but to credit with the draining of our bathtub after we had expressly told our neighbor to break into our house and fill it whenever we leave. A duty is a beauty.

MY LATE SON

2011-08-03T20:16:00.000-07:00

"Scorsese on the Cross" is an essay by Vince Passaro that appeared in the July 2011 issue of Harper's.

This is the first sentence of the essay:

"On the wall of my kindergarten classroom at St. Aloysius School, among the many typical decorations, hung a gaudily colored print that I used to stare at with fascination."

"On the wall of my kindergarten classroom at St. Aloysius School" is a linked chain--a concatenation--of prepositional phrases that starts this sentence. This is something that we have to get through before we get to the subject of the sentence. We have to wait for the subject. We are being played with in this first sentence. "On the wall" is a prepositional phrase. "of my kindergarten classroom" is another prep phrase that modifies the one right before. "at St. Aloysius School" is another prep phrase that modifies "classroom."

The saint was a Jesuit. When I think of kindergarten, I think of getting traced on the floor. I think of carpet that smells like cornchips.

"among the many typical decorations" is another prep phrase.

"hung" is the main verb of this sentence. It is an intransitive verb--it has no direct object. In fact, the prepositional phrases that start with "On" and "among" both modify this main verb.

"a gaudily colored print that I used to stare at with fascination" is the subject of this sentence, even though it comes at the end of the sentence. This sentence is inverted. It is in a strange form, so it must be in this form for a reason.
--"a" is an indefinite article.
--"gaudily" is an adverb that modifies "colored."
--"colored" is a past participle that works as an adjective. It modifies "print."
--"print" is a noun. It is a count noun and is the simple subject of this sentence.
--"that I used to stare at with fascination" is a relative clause that functions as an adjective since it modifies "print."
--"that" is a pronoun, I guess, since it's the object of the preposition "at" in this relative clause.
--"I" is the subject of the relative clause.
--"used to stare" is the verb phrase of this clause. "to" is not a preposition here. It is not the "to" in the infinitive--like "to eat." No, it goes with "used." It's maybe what's called a semi-auxiliary.
--"stare" is the main part of the verb.
--"at" is a preposition. Its object is "that." The writer could have written, "at which I used to stare with fascination," but that sounds silly and stuffy. To write like that would have been a snoot move.
--with fascination" is another prepositional phrase. Lots of prepositional phrases in just this first sentence. Bryan Garner, in GMAU, says this about prep phrases:

"In lean writing, it's a good idea to minimize prepositional phrases. In flabby prose, a ratio for one preposition for every four words is common; in better, leaner writing, the quotient is more like one preposition for every ten or fifteen words."

The above sentence, which is 29 words long, has six prepositions--six prep phrases--in it. That means we have a prep for every 4.8 words.

WHAT IT IS

2011-08-01T11:05:00.001-07:00

In class, we are playing a fun game. It's fun because the children seem to enjoy it incredibly. They are worked up. I am keeping score on the chalkboard. The student who wins the game will get to be traced by me five times on the chalkboard. I do not know why this has become such a great reward to them--that is, getting traced by me on the chalkboard. They simply love to stand on the chalk tray and get traced by me multiple times. I've even bought more chalk colors so that I can trace them with green and purple and orange. It goes without saying that I steer real wide of their groin areas. I don't like my job, but I want to keep my job.

The child with the lowest score, as a punishment, will have to lick the chalkboard and the dirt outside. The child with the lowest score will have to lick the inside of the stainless steel sink I never scrub too clean. That child will have to lick the rubber cement brush. We play the game. They love the game. The game has to do with shouting words while your mouth is full of marshmallows. The point of the game isn't just to have fun. It's to work on pronunciation. It's very hard to say words with a mouth full of marshmallows. It's so hard. But, once you've tried to say words with a mouth full of marshmallows, it's much easier to say the words with nothing in your mouth. We have also played this game with mouths full of raw potatoes, rocks, and balls of tin foil. The children get one point for saying a one-syllable word that someone else understands. They get extra points for extra syllables.

One child says "Toyota" and gets another child to understand the word. I tell the child that I won't give her any points--let alone three points--because that word is a brand. No brands count as points. I tell another child that "internet" doesn't count. These children are mostly six-years old, though we do have one three-year old in the class and one ten-year old. The three-year old is smart and usually helps me teach for about an hour a day. He teaches forensics, and it's marvelous--really terrific and splendid--that he teaches because it gives me some time to myself and to prepare other activities. I do worry, though, that the three-year old can be too exacting.

We also have a ten-year old in the class. This child is not in the class because he's a dolt and got held back. He's in the class because he prefers to be in my class. If he's not in my class--if he's put with another teacher and with kids his age--he throws a fit. He topples desks and messes with carpets and breaks windows with a stick. He's attached to me because he's the son of my wife. I call him "the son of my wife" not because I'm ashamed of him and can't find it in myself to call him my son. It's just that he's my wife's son because she had him with another man. The man is an astronaut. He's been in space and has set his foot on the moon. He's had many people in love with him and send him videos so that he can spend time with them on the space station. On the space station, he has to exercise a lot--especially his legs--because, in zero g, he doesn't have to use his legs at all. "If I were to spend even more time in zero g, and if I weren't to exercise my legs, then my legs would shrivel. The muscles would atrophy," he often says. That's the kind of thing he says. My wife had a child with that man.

The boy tells the other children--and even other adults who will listen--that I'm his dad. He tells just about anyone that he doesn't care for his real dad and that I'm "more of a dad than his real dad will ever be." He often says that from his real dad, he learned "only how not to be a person," while, from me, he's learned how to be a man. I don't know how he's come up with all this. And I do feel guilty that it's so hard for me to call him my son. Instead, I mostly call him "my wife's son" or "Sweet Charlie" because his name is Charlie.

I'm worried what will happen when Sweet Charlie's real dad will visit class next week to give a talk about how the human body decays in space. I would never have invited Sweet Charlie's dad to class, but I couldn't help that he got scheduled, because it was the three-year old who scheduled him for his forensics class.

Last week, the school was closed because of lead pipes, sulfurous dry wall, and Brown Recluse spiders.

7 MWE: The analysis of the body is an autopsy because it isn't turvy

2011-08-01T11:04:00.002-07:00

The necropsy happened at the one-million-dollar wedding. How was it that a wedding got so expensive? The answer is that it wasn't expensive because the people who threw it were billionaires. My father's favorite joke: What's the quickest way to become a millionaire? Start out as a multi millionaire.

They had to verify that the child's mouth was full of bread dough. He had learned to make the bread dough by reading a book. The book warned him not to put it in his mouth because bread dough is so easy to choke on. It is so easy to find it heavy when all your plants are weeds and your tomatoes are still green. He wondered what it would be like to drop his car through the roof of his house. Is it necessary to say that he found the billboards in the town offensive? All the billboards advertised liquor and soda pop. Just liquor and pop. All that was on the tv were ads for liquor and pop. All that was on the billboards were ads for liquor and pop. When the teacher asked the students if they had any questions, all the questions of the children had to do with liquor and pop. His father, ever night, drank Canadian whiskey and ginger ale. If whiskey is spelled with an "e," then that means it's from the US. If it's not spelled with an "e," then that means it came from England. His father drank whiskey and ginger ale every evening. The whiskey came in a dark brown bottle and had a simple white label with black letters on it. His father would peel off the label and give it to him. "Write me a story on the back of it," he'd tell his son. His father was always asking him to tell him a story. At first, the son felt great pressure to tell his father stories. But then he noticed that his father liked all his stories. The son found that, in order to tell his father a good story, all he needed was two people who didn't like each other and a terrible, ugly room.

His father had worked in the bug factory for 17 years before they dismissed him with no warning. At the bug factory, they grew meal worms by the ton for consumption. They grew cicadas by the ton for consump. They grew great horned beetles by the ton. They grew crickets. That was all they grew at the bug factory. They grew the meal worms and the crickets in a large building. They had a field of trees outside for the cicadas. The cicadas had to lay dormant underground for a few years before they came up and affixed themselves to the bottoms of the tree branches. Then, they'd crawl out of their shells, and the people at the bug factory would catch them with nets. His father was one of the best at catching cicadas. Ever since he was young, his father would bring home cicada shells for him. The shells looked just like the bugs--only they had no bugs in them. The boy would paint them and play with them. He had painted hundreds of these bugs, and he even sold them at school to other children. He pretended they were soldiers.

His father got fired from the bug factory with no notice. The boy was home because he didn't go to school. He wasn't home schooled either. He was something new. His father wanted him to learn by learning only what he wanted to learn. So if the boy wanted to plant garlic, he had to learn how to do it. If he wanted to build a potato cannon, he had to learn how to do it. If he wanted to learn. The father came home. He comes home. This father comes home. He has his pants still tucked into his boots because that's what everyone at the factory does. He has a bag full of horned beetles and some of the gigantic Brazilian cockroaches that hiss. "They gave me these for severance," he told the boy. "As if I couldn't have stole them all these years." He has his bags of bugs. He also has a large bottle of Canadian whiskey and some 2-liter bottles of ginger ale. The pop bottles are green plastic. The liquid inside them is gold. The father buys the cheapest ginger ale. It is so cheap that, as soon as he opens it, it goes flat. The father takes a class. He chips it against the table so that, when he drinks from it, it will make him bleed. He fills it most of the way with whiskey and leaves a couple of inches for ginger ale. "Would you like some ginger ale?" he asks his son.

He was fired. He is fired. He is let go. He drinks his whiskey for many weeks before he decided to teach a class at the local high school. He will not teach for money because he knows they would never hire him. He will not teach for money because he wants to teach the children how to write stories, and no one would ever pay him to teach anyone to write a story. He wants to hear their stories. He asks his son all the time to tell him a story. That has been his son's only education. He thinks that, if his son can always tell a story, then that's all the education he will need. There is nothing more than that. His son does not got to school. He tells his son that, as long as he, his father, is alive, his son will never have to get a job and work. He can always live with his father. He cannot expect, though, that they will live in a style. They have the bugs that they eat. They grown bugs in the house. They have a garden in which they grow corn and beans and garlic. That's all they need. They have four chickens for eggs. That's their diet: bugs, corn, lima beans, garlic. Sometimes, they grow other things, but they don't depend on them.

The father teaches his class at the school. He wants his students to get closer to death, so he writes up permission forms. He asks the parents if they will allow their children to have knives thrown at them. The knives will be thrown by pros, of course. Pros from the carnival. Many of the parents do not sign the forms. Many of the parents complain to the school. But many of the parents are persuaded by his permission form and like the idea of their children learning something by having knives thrown at them. So he has knife throwers come to class and throw knives at children. He has the children wear bullet-proof vests, and he shoots them. (All after permission forms, of course.) He takes them to the morgue so that they can view autopsies. First, the medical examiner cuts the body's head. Then, the examiner peels the body's forehead over its eyes, revealing its skull. Then, with an electric saw, the examiner cuts into the skull. The examiner removes the brain. The examiner lays the body onto a metal table and cuts open its chest, only, instead of making the classic Y-shaped incision, the examiner makes one that's in the shape of an asterisk. When the examiner opens the body up, the body looks like it's open like a flower.

MY LATE SON

2011-08-01T11:04:00.001-07:00

Back to Paul Theroux. This time, I will look at how the sentences relate to each other, too. I won't just parse the sentences and try to look at the form and function of all the pieces. I will also look at how one sentence comes out of the one right before it. I will look at how it is Turtles All the Way Down. I will look at how the writer has the gall to make his own stamp, get it inked up on his own pad, and then make a mark on what could have been a perfectly good blank page.

Here is the fourth sentence:
"His slight speech defect made him seem truthful."

"His slight speech defect" is the subject of the sentence.

"made" is the main verb. It's a transitive verb since it requires something more, though I don't think what follows is a standard direct object.

"him seem truthful" is what I'm going to treat as the direct object since I don't think "him" can be a DO by itself. It requires a complement--something like "seem truthful."

"seem truthful" is a bare infinitive phrase, I believe, since there is no "to" in front of "seem."

"truthful" is an adjective that serves as a predicate adjective--or a subject complement--since it's on the other side of the linking infinitive "seem."

This sentence relates to the one before because it has pronouns in it. "His" functions as an adjective--it's a determiner--but it's also a kind of pronoun in that it has a referent. "him" is also a pronoun. This sentence further relates to the one before because it has words in it that have to do with the voice of the character.

The next sentence is this:
"There was a babyish innocence in 'daily bwed.'"

This sentence has a special form, I think. The "There" makes it special. I think the "There" is what's called "Existential There." Maybe this sentence is inverted, and the true subject is what comes at the end.

So I will say that "There" is an adverb that functions as the subject complement.

"was" is the main verb, the "to be" verb.

"a babyish innocence" is the simple subject.

"in 'daily bwed'" is a prepositional phrase that functions as an adjective.

The "There" in this sentence, in a general way, references all that's come before because it sets up "Thereness." It reinforces that the place in the story exists and that, yes, there is a place for these characters to speak and to be. This sentence also relates to what comes before because it gives an example of the "speech defect" that's mentioned in the sentence that's right before.

7 MWE: She bore braids because they had lead in them

2011-07-31T20:14:00.002-07:00

The small coyote was pious. The town had a coyote problem. The coyotes would eat the small dogs and cats in the area. The people in the town reasoned that it wouldn't be long before a coyote killed a child. The coyotes did not kill alpacas. If alpacas saw a coyote, then, as a group, the alpacas would confront the coyote. The town held meetings to discuss what they should do about the coyotes. In the end, despite opposition, they voted to bring in a coyote hunter. The opposition said that if they were to put pressure on the coyotes by hunting them, then the female coyotes would give birth to larger litters.

Yes, larger litters were tied to kite strings. One cousin taught his much younger deaf cousin how to build a model rocket. They launched the rocket at the end of the day. Now is the line fatter or thinner? Is it longer or shorter? Till when will you hold your breath? Don't you know that you shouldn't allow your children to drink seawater? But my child drinks just a cup. He has a mania. He is a separatist. The child can't help but to go to the shore, get a cup of seawater, and drink it. We have to make sure that he drinks many glasses of water after that. Don't you worry he'll ingest the new disease? The new disease was perched on top of a plastic tube, which was developed by some alligators that didn't know the difference between market share value and the last donut. The injury was a charley horse. It was a mouse. The punch was a rabbit punch? How does the cow eat corn?

Would you like to run over the chauffeur? Is that grotesque? He was 6' 7" and worked as a chauffeur to famous people--often famous athletes.

In each hole, he put a kernel of corn, a lima bean, and a dead fish. This was to make succotash. That's all you need to eat: succotash. You can live off that and that alone. Each one. That was what he put in each hole. Though he planted no squash, his garden was full of squash. At first, he thought maybe his neighbor had done this. His neighbor had sneaked into his garden and planted squash. Then, though, he remembered that he had composted some squash, so maybe some seeds had survived the composting. To punish his son, he made his son lie under some squash plants. He told his son that his son couldn't move until a squash plant sent a tendril around him.

He was tall--6'7" and drove a car. He was a chauffeur. He wore a black suit, a black tie, and a black hat with a visor. You knew when he got off work, because he loosened his tie, undid his belt, and pushed his hat onto the back of his head. He had driven for famous athletes--for basketball players and football players. For boxers. He was tall. His son was tall. His son was just 17 and was already 6'7" like his dad. His son played basketball and water polo. He was a goalie on the water polo team. He played in the Olympics. He told his son that he'd give him $100 dollars when he beat him at basketball. His greatest weapon was his big ass. He used it to create space. He created space with his big ass--the ass he sat on when he drove athletes around.

In his kitchen, he confronted his death. In his attic, he confronted his fame, his success. On his staircase, he stepped on a Lego and nearly died. He nearly dired. It was that dire. It was an island. The island came out of the sea. Birds lived on it. There were tubers to eat--and fish. They made hats out of fronds. They made clothes out of hibiscus fibers. Many of them wanted to die. There was a chamber under a reef that they would swim into. All you had to do was swim in and get someone to pile rocks. They would walk on the bottom of the ocean by holding cannon balls. See how far they could go. Have you ever seen someone turn blue because he's holding his breath underwater?

After a long day, he could smell his feet. He could smell his upper lip. He could smell his groin. He wondered what his body would look like if he were to season it in water, chillies, hope, rockets, smearing salad bowls with garlic because he doesn't want anyone to know that, when he was younger, he couldn't make change with cardboard quarters, dimes, pennies. They were playing tiddly winks. They were playing UNO and waiting to find out if their mother was going to die. They played backgammon. They played backgammon by a public golf course. Their father was a terrible golfer. He told them that, to play, all they needed was a putter, a 9 iron, and some kind of driver. They needed gloves. They bought used hockey sticks and gloves. They put the marbles in their mouths. They put the agates in their mouths.

The children beg their father for agate and amethyst crystals. They are in a store full of crystals. There are large geodes and piles of jade. The store owner, a man with no leftovers on his mind and an incredible blemish on his chin, lies on the floor. The children beg their father for crystals. They want to have bags of crystals. They have been collecting crystals. They have cat eyes and lapis lazuli. The have the crystals that are supposed to represent Jesus' blood. The owner says that, if you can pin him down and burst his blemish, you can have anything in the store for free. He says that he had wrestled in highschool and college. He had been very good at wrestling. He shows them that he has the cauliflower ears to prove it. He has memories of diuretics and carbo loads and running on the track wearing trash bags because he wanted to lose some more weight. He said he smells strange. He said he smelled like spoiled blood. He said he once bled on some concrete. As the days passed, and as the sun shone on the blood, he would go and smell it, so he knew what spoiled blood smelled like, and though he never killed a bear or ate succotash, he knew how to press a knife to his forehead and put in a deep cut. The cut required stitches, but you can't always listen to the requirements of cuts, especially when they come by your own hand. Especially when you've put it in because you've said to someone else, "If you don't stop, I will put a cut in my head."

MY LATE SON

2011-07-31T20:14:00.001-07:00

Paul Theroux has written many essays, short stories, and novels. I have read The Mosquito Coast twice. I know he has written books about Hawaii.

He published a story in the July issue of Harper's. He titled the story "Incident in the Oriente." This is the story's first sentence:

"We were sitting, heads bowed in prayer, waiting for the local Indians, Secoyas, to come barefoot into the mess container with platters of food."

"We" is the subject of the sentence.

"were sitting" is the main verb. It is in the past progressive form. He could have written "we sat," but he chose, instead, to write "we were sitting."

"heads bowed in prayer" is an absolute phrase since it starts with a noun and is followed with a participle--a past participle. "bowed" is modified by a prepositional phrase, "in prayer," which functions as an adverb.

"waiting for the local Indians" is a participial phrase. "waiting" is the participle, and "for the local Indians" is a prepositional phrase that functions as an adverb since it modifies the participle.

"Secoyas" is an appositive that renames "the local Indians."

"to come barefoot" is an infinitive phrase. I'm not sure what do with it. Infinitive phrases act as nouns, adverbs, and adjectives. I have a sense that this one works as an adverb since it's definitely not a noun, and I don't see how it's an adjective. But, if it works as a noun, then what does it modify? It doesn't modify "waiting" because the "We" are the ones who are waiting, and the "to come barefoot" has to do with the Secoyas. Maybe it does work as an adjective and should modify "Secoyas." I don't know. This is my late son.

"into the mess container" is a prepositional phrase that modifies "to come."

"with platters" is another prep phrase that modifies "to come."

"of food" is a prep phrase that modifies "platters."

But how does that infinitive phrase work? If I were to write, "I am waiting for my friend to laugh at me," then what do I do with "to laugh"? Maybe it's some kind of complement since you're not really waiting for your friend, but you're waiting for your friend to laugh.

This is Theroux's second sentence:

"When Max Moses said grace, as he was doing tonight, his terrifying vitality shone in his bulging eyes."

"When Max Moses said grace" is a dependent clause that works as an adverb. "When" is the subordinating conjunction. "Max Moses" is the subject of the clause. "said" is the main verb, and "grace" is the direct object of the verb.

"as he was doing tonight" is another dependent clause. "as" in the conjunction, "he" is the subject of the dependent clause, "was doing" is the main verb (which is in the past progressive," and "tonight" is an adverb. Theroux uses "as" where many people would incorrectly use "like."

So Theroux opens with two dependent clauses. He makes us wait for his main clause. This is especially interesting since, with his first sentence, he gave us the subject and main verb right away, and then made us wait for his sentence to end by using so many modifiers--things like an absolute, a participial phrase, and all those prepositions.

"his terrifying vitality" is the subject of the independent clause. "his" is a determiner. "terrifying" is an adjective. "vitality" is a noun.

"shone" is the main verb of the indep clause. It is an intransitive verb since it doesn't require a direct object. When "to shine" is transitive--when it requires a direct object (as in "He shined a light")--then it goes "shine, shined, shined." I shine shoes. I shined shoes. I had shined shoes.

When "to shine" is intransitive, though, as it is in the above sentence, the verb goes "shine, shone, shone." I shine with joy. I shone with joy. I had shone with joy.

When I first say Theroux's use of "shone," I thought he had screwed up. Then, however, I looked up "shine" in Garner's Modern American Usage (GMAU) and learned all about it.

"Yet rumbling on in his old smoker's vibrato, he did not raise his voice" is the third sentence in this story.

"Yet" must be some kind of adverb.

"rumbling on" is a participle.

"in his old smoker's vibrato" is a prepositional phrase that acts as an adverb since it modifies "rumbling on."

"he" is the subject of the indep clause.

"did raise" is the main verb. "did" carries the tense, which is past tense.

"not" is an adverb.

"his voice" is the direct object of the main verb.

In just three sentences, Theroux has much variation. When I write sentences, I use simple clauses. I have a one-cylinder style, so I am stuck with verbs and the word "and." Theroux, though, with great economy, uses all sorts of things--prep phrases, absolutes, dependent clauses, infinitives.

7 MWE: The drifter caught a butterfly and paid a passerby $20 to rip off its wings

2011-07-28T09:57:00.002-07:00

He drank some cola. He mixed his cola with grapefruit juice and drank. He was not supposed to drink grapefruit juice because of the medication he was on. His father's hobby was collecting rocks to make a rock wall. His mother had a comforter she spent most of the day under. The cola dribbled out of the corner of his father's mouth. His father is in a care facility. His father has a tattoo on his forearm. This was not a tattoo his father wanted. Four of his partners held him down and forced him to get the tattoo. The tattoo is of a window. It is of a squash blossom. It is of a humming bird and a bee. The tattoo has a hummingbird at its center. Someone played the organ at the funeral. They did not have much money, so they had to do the funeral on the cheap. They could not afford a coffin, so they wrapped their father in his favorite sleepingbag. They filled his mouth with worms--red wigglers--to speed along the decomposition process. They filled his mouth with worms. They also put the seed of a chestnut tree in his mouth. They covered him with dirt. They covered him with a dirt nap. A dirt coverlet. He asked that his family grow vegetables on his grave. A row of carrots, a row of beets, a row of chard. Grow some tomatoes and marigolds and dill. Grow some purple cabbage. The cabbage is especially big this year. They took a large cabbage off their father's grave. They also took some new potatoes and white beans. First, they browned the potatoes with oil. Then, they put in the onions. Then, the white beans. Finally, they put in some chopped cabbage, and that was their dinner off their father's grave. Thanks, Dad.

The children went to the music room with their recorders. The recorders were plastic. They were kept in plastic sleeves. They came with a plastic wand with which they were supposed to clean their recorders. They learned to play Hot Cross Buns. The children got bells and learned to play songs with bells. The children sat on carpet. They were told that if they didn't behave they would have to tend the bees without the beekeeping outfits. A mania. An inspiration. An infliction that leads one to kill bees, even though one has never kissed a donkey. A rare disease spread by kissing. A bauble that is covered with chocolate. The children had chocolate all over their fingers. The children wore hoods they had made out of pillow cases. The activity for the children was to make hoods out of pillowcases. First, they put the pillowcases on their heads, and they'd have a partner mark off--with a marker--where their eyes, nose, and mouth are. Then the children use scissors to make eye holes. They can also make nose or mouthholes, but they do not have to make such holes if they don't want to. Then, with pens, puffy paints, pieces of felt, they decorate their hoods. Finally, they are asked to go into town and rob local businesses with knives and zipguns they made in shop class. In shop class, first they learned to make knives out of obsidian. They learned how to break obsidian chunks into shards. Then, once they had knife-looking shards, they learned how to make even smaller chips to make serrated blades. With pieces of wood and string of gut, they learned to make handles for their knives. They learned to make zipguns out of firecrackers and pieces of pipe. They had their masks, their knives, and their zipguns. They went into town to do a bit of fundraising for the carnival. They wanted to put on a fantastic carnival, but they didn't have the funds, so they had to go into town to take the funds. The liquor store was closed because it was 8:00AM.

The children started by learning how to make shadow puppets. They performed short scenes dealing with death and loneliness for their parents. The children learned how to make hand puppets. They performed scenes of sorrow and loss for their parents. They learned sock puppets and tennis-ball puppets. They performed scenes of killing and destruction. They worked their way to marionettes and foam-construction puppets. They filmed a TV show about pop culture and got picked up by one of the major networks that broadcast from the bottom of the Marianas Trench. You would think a billionaire would be the one to build a dwelling in the Marianas Trench, but it wasn't a billionaire who did that. It was a rat breeder. A woman who bread thoroughbred rats. These were rats people would pay $5 for. These were rats that knew language and grammar. These were rats that were obsessed with usage. Unlike college grads, they knew the difference between its and it's, your and you're, there and their. These were rats that charged rates if you went to visit them. One child had a rat. Somehow it came out that the rat was a prophet, so other children would beg the one child to have some face time, some real one on one, with the rat prophet. The child who owned the rat prophet. The child who owned the rat prophet was pigeontoed. This child had a shaved head, but she kept her bangs extremely long. Her bangs, when she flipped them over her face, could reach down to her toes. In fact, that's how she knew when it was time to trim her bangs--when they touched her toes too much. She had a shaved head. She had long bangs. She wore leather sandals with heavy rubber soles, and her feet stank. Her feet did not stink. They stank. She sits in her livingroom, sitting over the body of her mother. Her rat prophet is in the other room and is soaking in a bath and reading a book about edible plants.

MY LATE SON

2011-07-28T09:57:00.001-07:00

This is David Rieff's second sentence in his essay "After 9/11":

"Designed by the architect Michael Arad and the landscape architect Peter Walker and called "Reflecting Absence," the memorial will be about eight acres in size and consist of two sunken reflecting pools, each surrounded by an enormous waterfall, the largest manmade ones in North America, according to the memorial's official website."

"Designed by the architect Michael Arad and the landscape architect Peter Walker and called 'Reflecting Absence'" is a participial phrase with a compound verbal that modifies the subject of the main clause, "the memorial."
--"Designed" is a participle. It's half of the compound verbal.
--"by the architect Michael Arad and the landscape architect Peter Walker " is a prepositional phrase with a compound object of the preposition. This prepositional phrase functions as an adverb because it modifies "Designed."
--"and" is a conjunction that joins the two verbals in the participial phrase.
--"called 'Reflecting Absence'" is the other verbal, which has a direct object, "'Reflecting Absence."

"the memorial" is the subject of the sentence.

"will be" is half of the compound main verb. "will" is a modal that carries the present tense.

"about" might look like a preposition, but here I think it's an adverb. It's like the word "approximately" here.

"eight acres" is the subject complement, the predicate noun, to the main verb, "will be."

"in size" is a prepositional phrase that works as an adjective since it modifies "eight acres."

"and" is a conjunction that joins the compound main verbs.

"consist" is the other half of the main verb.

"of two sunken reflecting pools" is a prepositional phrase. Or maybe it's some kind of complement since nothing can just "consist." Some has to "consist of" something. Not sure here. "sunken" and "reflecting" are both participles that act as adjectives. "sunken" is a past participle and "reflecting" is a present one.

"each surrounded by an enormous waterfall" is an appositive phrase that modifies "pools." "each" is modified by the participle "surrounded," and "surrounded" is modified by the prepositional phrase "by an enormous waterfall." I am using the passive voice for good reason because, in this sentence analysis, what's more important are the things being affected--David Rieff's language--instead of the writer, the agent, David Rieff.

"the largest manmade ones in North America" is another appositive that modifies "waterfall." The thing, though, is that "waterfall" is singular and "ones" is plural, so it looks like there's an agreement problem. I am no expert, however, on any of this.

"according to the memorial's official website" is something. I want to say it's a participial phrase because of the "according," but I don't think that's right because "according" is one of those things that look like participles but aren't really attached to any specific noun. Instead, this is something that might be called an adjunct. It serves the purpose of orienting the reader toward something, but it's not really attached to a specific noun. It modifies an idea or something vague instead of something specific. This is the weakest phrase in the sentence, so it's not a good idea to end on it. And "website" is a boring word, so it's not good to end with such a word.

THE FIRST TIME HE SAW MR. KILGALLON HE FELL MADLY IN LOVE WITH HIM

2011-07-28T09:56:00.000-07:00

1.
One of these dogs, the best one, had disappeared.

His father, a beekeeper, swore by the curative powers of bee stings.

2.
Among the company was a lawyer, a young man of about twenty-five.

Under the rock pile with his feet sticking out was a dead superintendent, a man with cracked heels and gnarled yellow toenails.

3.
Halfway there he heard the sound he dreaded, the hollow, rasping cough of a horse.

He was so upset he tasted his bile, an unusually delicious, flavorful bile.

4.
Poppa, a good quiet man, spent the last hours before our parting moving aimlessly about the yard, keeping to himself and avoiding me.

The hairless horse, one of the oddest things Markham had ever seen, loped over to the fence, making small, plaintive noises in its throat for sunscreen.

5.
Standing in the truck bed, holding onto the bars of the sides, rode the others, twelve-year-old Ruthie and ten-year-old Winfred, grime-faced and wild, their eyes tired but excited, their fingers and the edges of their mouths black and sticky from licorice whips, whined out of their father in town.

Whistling for birds, clucking for horses, Marshon stood on an upside-down bucket, his pants at his ankles and his toes covered with mud.

So we beat on, like boats against the current, borne back carelessly into the past

2011-07-27T20:27:00.002-07:00

A small dog is killed. Its legs are cut off and arranged in a vase.

His father killed the small dog. His father was a short man. His father was in his 30s but had white hair. His father had dark skin and many many dark freckles on his face. The way his freckles looked, it looked like someone had a mouth full of dark liquid and sputtered it all over his father's face. His father had white hair. His father killed the small dog he had brought home. He had found the dog on the side of a road at night. He was just ten at the time, but he and his friends had a car they would drive on dark roads. He and his friends had a car that they had painted matte black. The entire thing was black. They knocked out the headlights and spraypainted the cavities that the broken headlights left black. The entire car was matte black. At night, the boy and his friends would drive this car. They had a set of nightvision goggles. They used those to drive the car at night on dark roads. They could drive by other cars, and those other cars--rather, the people inside them--would have no idea that they drove by. It was one night, when they were driving this black car, that they found the small dog on the side of the road. When they found the dog, it became day for three minutes. It then went back to night. The dog had a compartment inside it that was full of wires and electronics. When they submerged some of the wires in sodapop, the wires sang and spoke to them. The wires sang of tropical islands--where it was easy to get your own tubers and fish. All you need to eat is tubers and fish. Find yourself the right berries. The right mushrooms. Have some wild pig every now and again. The tropical islands no longer existed. The wires stopped singing. The boys had their car taken away and had to spend some time in a dungeon. The one boy brought the dog home. His father told him he could not have the dog in the house. The dog could live on the roof, sure, but it could not live in the house and leave its dog smell all over everything--especially the couch. How about I put towels on the couch then, the boy said. It was that thing that he said--that thing about the couch and the towels--that enraged his father. His father took a pair of tin snips and cut off the dog's ears and tail. He plunged the tin snips into the dog's belly and scissored open the dog's belly. Inside this dog, they found a baby. The baby was the father's son. He recognized it right away. Now, you are a big brother, the father told the boy. The dog lay open and slowly started coming back together again. Its ears found its head and healed. Its tail found its ass and healed. Its legs all came back. The road at night. When it is dark. When a father's hair turns white, and you can't help but to look at all his freckles. The boy has dared friends of his to sneak into his father's room and connect his freckles with a marker. He tells these friends of his that if they connect all the freckles, then they will see a curse word spread across the father's face. The father wakes up. He turns on his shower and uses cold water because he wants to save on heat. He gets himself wet and then turns off the shower because he wants to save on water. He soaps himself up with soap he had made. His body tingles from the chilies he had put in the soap. He does not need hot water when he has chillies in his soap. He soaps himself up. He gets soap in his ears. He uses the soap on his hair. He runs his hands over his face. He knows he cannot open his eyes because then he would get soap laced with chillies in his eyes. He fumbles at the spigot and gets the water back on. He rinses himself off, and that is how he takes a shower. He makes sure that his son does the same thing, but his son wants to use hot water. His son does not want to turn the water off. His son does not want to use his soap because he doesn't like the way its oils smell. His son does not like the chillies, so he kills his son's dog. He takes it apart with tin snips. After some days, he takes the stiff legs of the dog and arranges them in a vase.

She saw some mound rising on the horizon.

She has a small nose and all her other facial features--her eyes and her lips and her mole--seem to want to be as close as they can be to that nose of hers. The result is that it looks like she's not using her face as much as she could. She is in a relationship with a man who already has children. He did not have these children with her. He had them with another woman, but that woman is dead. He had built a greenhouse out of salvaged windows. It was a great idea. The greenhouse worked great. They grew great vegetables, but what wasn't great was that she climbed on top of that greenhouse only to fall through it and cut major arteries on the interior of her elbow and thigh. She was dead. He was alive. His children were alive. The other woman with the small nose was alive. She was so alive that she climbed a mountain. At the top of this mountain, she found a wooden box, and in this wooden box was a handmade book, and in this book she saw that other people had written messages. These were banal messages--ones that said hello to people who climbed the mountain or ones that tried to say something about the mountain or the trees or a particular sunset. She took this journal with her. She ripped out all the banal things and replaced them with other banal things. She was in a relationship with a man who had two children. The woman the man had had the children with is dead. She first gave birth to a girl. This girl proved to be at least twice as strong as any other child her age. When she was five, she requested her own benchpress set. Her father told her she shouldn't start to lift just yet because it would stunt her growth. So she made her own bench set. She made the bench itself out of rough-hewn wood. She even nailed nails through it so that when she'd lie on the bench, the nails would pinch at her back. And she was five, mind you. She made her own weights out of old paint cans she'd fill with concrete. She'd workout and not ask her dad to spot her. Instead, she'd ask other men to spot her. Her mother often talked to these men. Her father would come home, see her mother talking to some man, and ask, "Who's this man?" Only the man would be a large man. The greenhouse. Oh, go tend to your squash and tomatoes. His daughter was naturally twice as strong as any child her age, but once she started lifting, it couldn't even be measured how strong she was. Her muscles did not bulge. She wasn't a bodybuilder, mind you. She was a weight lifter, not a bodybuilder. Her muscles did not bulge. Instead, they became incredibly dense. She trained the nerves in her body to withstand incredible weight. Any normal body would scream to get all the weight off it, but she slowly trained her body to accept large quantities of weight. And then her body didn't just accept the weight. It came to expect the weight. And she was just five, mind you. She was a five-year-old who had built her own masochistic weight bench and weights. She was a child who would recruit men to spot her. She was five. Then her mother got pregnant with another child. The girl was nervous about this child. She started to hate her mother. When the mother gave birth, the child went after the baby. Many people in the hospital had to hold this child back. She wouldn't stop coming after the baby, her brother. No one knew what to do because she was just a child. She was now six. They figured she would get tired. That she would accept her brother. But she never accepted her brother. She would come after him hard, screaming that she'd rip him to pieces. She came so hard. People had to hold her back. They had to take her someplace else far away. They had to lock her up, but she would break out and run back to where she thought her brother was. To kill him. She vowed she would never stop, and she never did. Her mother died by falling through that greenhouse. Her father had a new relationship with a woman with a small nose. She continued to lift weights. She continued to do this. She would bend nails for fun. She would bend screws because they bit into her fingers. She would blend up entire chickens with twelve ounces of warm water and drink that in squad cars. The police did not mind if she drank her shakes in their cars. The police didn't mind because they thought they'd have to call on her someday.

MY LATE SON

2011-07-27T20:27:00.001-07:00

"On September 11, 2011, the tenth anniversary of the attacks that destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the official memorial will be dedicated at Ground Zero (the opening of the adjacent museum had been delayed and is now scheduled for 2012).

This is the first sentence of an essay written by David Rieff in the August '11 issue of Harper's. David Rieff might be the son of Susan Sontag, though it's hard to check this fact without the internet or Susan Sontag's journal collection Reborn. Reborn is fascinating, but many readers are annoyed by all of the interjections by her son. It is touching that her son interjects to explain things or justify his decisions, but some readers aren't touched at all and find such intrusions annoying. Other readers don't understand why he didn't include more of her journal entries in Reborn. At one point in Reborn, after a fascinating list of words and names that Susan Sontag had made, Susan Sontag's son interrupts to let his readers know that Sontag habitually made fascinating lists in her journals. He says this, but then there is never another list in Reborn. Where are the other lists? And where are the sequels to Reborn? On the jacket of the book, it says that Reborn is the first of a series, and yet there are no other collections of Susan Sontag's journal entries. Her son might be David Rieff, and David Rieff is the author of the essay in the August '11 Harper's. His first sentence is above. That first sentence floats like a balloon. Or should it be "as a balloon"?

"On September 11, 2011" is a prepositional phrase that acts as an adverb. It answers the question "When?".

"the tenth anniversary of the attacks that destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center" is an appositive phrase that tells us more about the preceding prepositional phrase about September 11, 2011. David Rieff is making us wait for the main clause and main subject of his sentence.
---"the tenth anniversary" is the simplest part of the appositive phrase. Maybe it's what's called a "head" of the phrase.
---"of the attacks" is a prepositional phrase that acts as an adjective because it modifies "the tenth anniversary."
---"that destroyed the twin towers" is maybe a relative clause. It is a clause that acts as an adjective because it modifies "the attacks." "that" is the subject of the clause, and "destroyed" is the verb. "the twin towers" is the direct object.
--"of the World Trade Center" is another prepositional phrase that acts as an adjective because it modifies "the twin towers."

"the official memorial" is the subject of the sentence's main clause.

"will be dedicated" is the verb of the main clause. This main verb has a modal in it, "will." This verb is also in the passive formation. Who will dedicate the memorial?

"at Ground Zero" is a prepositional phrase that acts as an adverb.

"(the opening of the adjacent museum had been delayed and is now scheduled for 2012)" is something that's hard to identify. What's in the parenthesis is a complete sentence, so the "the" in "the opening" maybe could have been capitalized, and the period could have been put in the close parenthesis. But maybe, instead of being treated like its own sentence, the stuff in the parentheses wants to be treated like stuff that comes after a dash.

"the opening" is the subject of that parenthetical clause.

"of the adjacent museum" is a prepositional phrase that serves as an adjective.

"had been delayed" is half of the main coordinate verb. It's in the passive formation. Who delayed they opening?

"and" is a conjunction that joins the coordinate main verb.

"is scheduled" is the other half of the coordinate main verb. Like its other half, it's passive. Who scheduled?

"now" is an adverb that modifies "is scheduled."

"for 2012" is a prepositional phrase that acts as an adverb. It also modifies "is scheduled."

WHAT IT IS

2011-07-27T13:05:00.001-07:00

A boy went camping with his friend, his friend's mother, and his friend's mother's boyfriend because his father was in jail for just one more day and his mother was enjoying her medication for her broken limbs a bit too much. That morning, the boy didn't have to wake up at 6AM for school as he usually did. Instead, he woke up when he woke up to a house that, at first, scared him since he thought it was empty. But it wasn't empty. His friend's mother was in the kitchen smoking a brown cigarette, and she was the one who told him that there would be no school today, his father was in jail, his mother was in the hospital, and, yes, there would be no school today because they were going camping.

They went camping at the beach, near a Navy base, and early the next morning, the boy saw a helicopter drop many men laden with black sacks into the ocean. The young boyfriend, the night before, made them all laugh. The night before, his genitals had shown out of his short swimtrunks. When he saw everyone was looking at his genitals, he picked some of his scrotum out, stretched it between fingers, and yelled, "Bat wings!" The boy could never imagine his father doing such a thing, and he certainly couldn't see his mother thinking it was funny.

In the morning, after the helicopter, the young boyfriend made the two boys breakfast: Ramen noodles with soy sauce and five eggs broken into it. When the boys got into the ocean after breakfast, and once the water started lifting them up and down in circles, up and down in circles, they both vomited. Small gray fish nibbled at the Ramen bits they erupted. When they had eaten the Ramen noodles, they had enjoyed slurping them because they were so long and curly. But, in the water, with the fish nibbling them, the noodles were no longer long. They were just bits--less than a centimeter--and gray.

The boys swim in the water all day. They push off the sandy bottom of the ocean to catch waves with their bodies. One of the boys has skin that becomes dark with the day. The other has skin that gets terrible red. They swim in the water for so long that they both chafe between their legs. They get what the young boyfriend calls "Ball rash," and the young boyfriend laughs at the way the two boys have to waddle around and cup themselves.

One of the boys--the one with the sunburn and the dad in jail for just one day--wonders if the men with the black sacks are still underwater. He never saw the helicopter come back to pick them up, so he worries he'll feel someone grab his ankle, pull him underwater, put him in a black sack, and carry him to some other place. And then someone does grab his ankle. It's the young boyfriend.

5 MWE: The despot gave us his synopsis

2011-07-27T13:04:00.002-07:00

She was soaking. She soaked. She dropped her book in the bath. She took a bath and dropped her book in the bath when she was taking a bath. She left her book out in the sun because she got it wet in the bath. The book dried. Its pages crackled afterward. Its pages were a bit wavy afterward. She was in the bath. She soaked. She was soaking. A nemesis is not just an enemy. It is someone that you can't defeat. She was scared of her nemesis. When they were children, they planted beans together. They sat and shelled peas for hours together. Sugar snap peas. Sugarsnap peas. Sugar snappeas. He took a swig. He swigged from the bottle. It's always a bottle that's being swigged. He swigged from a cup? Is that even possible? Can one poison another if that other person ate oats and oil earlier in the day? She had to lay her hand flat when she fed the horses carrot bits. Her grandparents showed her slides of the two of them riding ostriches. Her grandmother had recently dyed her hair. Her grandfather had recently died.

The water bug had pinchers on its backside. The rain barrel was full. It had rained last night. The thunder had shaken the house. The house was made of cardboard and zinc. The house could withstand water, waves, lava, dust, and waterbugs. The waterbugs were in the rain barrel. The barrel got tipped over. When the thunder shook the house, it gave off a strange smell outside. To describe the smell would take away its mystery. The night had been warm and orange. The rain barrel came from across the street. Even though the water bug floated in the water in the rain barrel, it, the water bug, could not remember ever hearing thunder or the house shaking. All it could remember was being put in a jar by a girl. The girl had tried to celebrate her great grandfather's birthday but failed because she could not sing or light candles or dance or wear small purple roses in her hair. Her mother spent most of the morning plucking Japanese beetles off the roses with chopsticks. Once she removed a beetle, she would place it on a brick and then use another brick to squash it. She did this over and again until she created quite the paste.

The tourists would leave the ocean kayaks too close to the shore. The ocean would take the kayaks, pull them out to the breakers, and then send them down the beach. If this happened, then someone from the hotel would have to go to retrieve them. Or the tourists would paddle far out past the breakers and become too tired to paddle back in. If this happened, then someone from the shore would release a creature to swim out and eat the tourists. The tourists might fall out of the kayaks and hit their heads on the reef. They might step out of the kayak, step on the reef, and have a morey eel bite their foot. They might put a foot down on the reef and stand on a poisonous sea urchin. You can eat the inside of an urchin--the sea kind. Not the kind that's a child and in Charles Dickens. He shaved his legs. He waxed his lip. He shaved the hair off his toes. He trimmed his toenails and fed them to birds. He invented a material that would allow him to breathe underwater. He waved underwater to all of us. We were eating at a restaurant that, for one of its walls, had a gigantic aquarium. A large tank. Sometimes, divers would appear in this tank and perform tricks. Or divers would have to fight each other toward some kind of death. Or animals were released on them.

THE FIRST TIME HE SAW MR. KILGALLON HE FELL MADLY IN LOVE WITH HIM

2011-07-27T13:04:00.001-07:00

1.
Yesterday it was the Boston Marathon, with crowds gathered, police ready, the runners covered with suntan oils, many limbering up, even wheelchair participants checking their equipment like careful auto mechanics with their tools of all sorts.

It was their tailored hell, with piglets squalling, nuns aflame, horses rolling in bushes of thorns, children blowing over the mouths of green bottles, demolition derby cars painted with scripture.

2.
Hesitant but not uncertain, and drawing from libraries all of her knowledge, she walked into the room for her comprehensive examination, with a feeling that was certainly not calm, because there would always be the unknown.

Nauseated and intermittently retching, and attempting to remember the names of all his mother's friends, he fell down the stairs that led up to his apartment and into a garden bed.

3.
Once or twice the siren, obscured by the sudden explosion, echoed but with a dreadful parody of itself sounded with a noise like a banshee.

Five thousand times the hummingbirds, driven insane by the smell of molasses, pecked the eyes out of rabbits and cats.

WHAT IT IS

2011-07-26T18:25:00.001-07:00

The carpet had wax in it from the other night. The other night, they had lit many candles in a sad attempt at being romantic. Some of the candles guttered--a garish pink one, a wine-purple one--and dripped wax onto the carpet. Last year, too, they had dripped wax onto the carpet by accident, but they were lucky because they had had a rabbit, and somehow the rabbit ate all the wax off the carpet perfectly. It was astonishing how the rabbit ate the wax and left the carpet looking perfectly clean. There was not even a stain when the rabbit finished because the rabbit must have actually trimmed the carpet when it ate the wax. Since the rabbit did what it did, they didn't have to worry about the landlord taking some money out of their deposit to clean their carpets after a night of trying to be romantic in the way that most people are romantic.

But this was a different year--they had no rabbit--and there was wax on the floor again. She was screaming at him. Veins stood out of her neck. A vein stood out of the middle of her forehead. When she screamed, she cried and produced incredible amounts of snot. In between screams, and in between sobs, she would gather snot from under her lip and off her chin. She would cup the snot in her palm in order to wipe it on him. She wiped it on him. An entire wad. Her name was Sycamore, and that was his name, too. Sycamore. I was glad all at the top and I sang.

She was screaming, sobbing, crying, wiping snot, and there was a baby left mostly unattended on the couch. Just an hour earlier, the baby was not unattended at all because Sycamore and Sycamore were talking to him and playing with his feet. They made him laugh many times. That was an hour earlier, before Sycamore became angry with Sycamore. Sycamore screamed, and the baby sat on the couch and picked at its toes. The baby did not belong to either Sycamore. It belonged to another woman who was off working and needed help. That morning, she had told them not to let the baby pick its toes. It had a problem with picking its toes. The baby also had a dark bruise above one eyebrow. The bruise was raised. It was what one might call a "mouse." The baby looked embarrassed to be there, but it certainly couldn't really be embarrassed.

Sycamore said he wanted to leave and tried to leave, but Sycamore threw herself at the only door the apartment had and wouldn't let him leave. He tried to open the door with Sycamore angled against it. He got the door open a crack--outside, it smelled like semen because of a vile tree--but then the door slammed closed again, and he felt terrible about even trying to force open the door with Sycamore there and the baby there. He thought about how, just yesterday, they laughed because of the semen tree. He had tried to find out what kind it was and found it was something with "pear" in its name, though he never saw any pears on it. Sycamore spat on him. She wiped her nose on him. The baby nearly fell off the couch but caught itself. The baby would grow up to be a terrific person.

5MWE: Her ticklish skin made her spry

2011-07-26T18:24:00.000-07:00

Boring. If you are bored, you are boring. My grandmother told me that, which bored me. I would wait for her to leave on her errands before I went to snoop through her bathroom and bedroom. I looked for wooden boxes. I looked for smells. That's what I looked for. Never a dull moment is what I heard when I eavesdropped. Never a dull moment. It was a dull moment. She tried to convince her husband to eat the beets she had boiled. He did not want to eat them. He would not eat them, so she took the beet water--it was still a deep redpurple--and poured it over his head. The windowsill tasted of licorice ever since she had laid many ropes of licorice in its spidery hideaways, which never failed to drown all comers simply by convincing them that, yes, the bombs had been dropped even though it was a balmy Sunday. More dresses could have been supplied to the ugly prom-goers, but they never hatched in the nursery. The ribald damnation was on time for every match, whereas the dowager slept on the roof of the house like Snoopy. As Snoopy did in the failed event.

He always slept on his stomach. He couldn't sleep on his back. It must have been the way his mother lay him down when he was a baby. She must have always lay him down on his stomach, so he got used to sleeping on his stomach, and now that he's much older, he can't help but to continue to do what he did when he was a baby. His wife, however, wants him to sleep on his back. She wants him to sleep on his back because she sleeps on her back, and she wants him to do what she does. If he does what she does--she reasons--then they will do more things together. As it is now, they do not do enough together, she thinks. She thinks that, and she says it. She wants him to sleep on his back. He tries to sleep on his back but doesn't have much luck. She wants him to sleep on his back. Most nights, he starts out sleeping on his back, but then, sometime in the night, he rolls onto his stomach. His wife wakes him up late at night. She is angry that he's on his stomach. But I tried to sleep on my back, he tells her. I must have fallen asleep on my back, he tells her, but I cannot help that I move to my stomach in the night. One night. There comes a night in which she wakes up late and finds her husband sleeping on his stomach. She rolls him onto his back, and he doesn't wake up, though he seems to stir. He begins to surface out of his sleep. He is on his back. She takes two long needles and plunges them through his eyelids and into his eyes. She still holds onto the ends of these needles. She takes these ends and jerks them around so that she rips apart his eyes. He wakes up but cannot open his eyes. There is much shock in him.

The hackles on a dog. The organism is alive. We thought it was dead. The fraud wears yellow pants. When the toady promised to pull me out of the river, I didn't believe him. Her heart quaked. He grew his beard so long he could tie it around his neck. He said it was a natural defense. He grew his beard so long he could tie it around his neck. It was so long. It was thick. If someone were to try to cut his throat, it wouldn't work because of his beard. If someone were to try to hang him by his neck, it wouldn't work because his beard would serve as a buffer--a pillow--against the noose, the anondyne necklace. My grandmother must have used ether as an anesthetic. She must have killed my father's python. Built a fine lover in the very old cathedral next to the new vagabond mercurial fantasy in the doggerel forewarned fisticuffs dangerous this time of year if you don't lull it to breach the breach we shared the fact that we breached together. To get her. To get him. Togethim. We were finally togethim.

WHAT IT IS

2011-07-25T18:59:00.001-07:00

A concrete floor that's always damp. The small room under The Big Blue Building. He tries to bring a mattress into the small room by himself. He had found the mattress on the bank of a stream. The mattress is a heavy queen because it has water in it still, and it buckles unexpectedly as he tries to cram it into his small room that smells of the damp. He has no one to help him. He knows no one in the town. There are young people living in The Big Blue Building, but he is too shy to speak with them, and, anyway, the man who told him he could live in The Big Blue Building said that he couldn't let anyone know he was living there because he was living there free. He wasn't sure if the man who told him he could live in the Building even owned the Building. The young people work at a nearby mountain and are from some other country. At the mountain, they operate machines that grab people by the heads and lift them up to the top of the mountain. Or they work in stores, selling rocks and hallucinogenic weeds. Or the the most talented of them work as trainers who teach people how to run and roll down the mountain fast without getting too injured. He drags the mattress into the small room and is pleased to have a bed where once he had a nest of comforters and attic insulation. He lies on the bed and looks at the various things that are in his room. There is an industrial ice machine that no one uses and that he doesn't know how to turn off. Every day, he has to empty buckets of ice out. There is a pile of old cash registers full of money. There is a cage full of bottles of liquor and a refrigerator that smells horrible when he opens it. There is a toilet with no privacy. There is a sink covered with plaster and dripping with tar. The young people must be home from the mountain because he can hear them tromping around above him. They are probably making pasta. He works at the grocery store in town and has often sold them jars of whatever tomato sauce is on sale and cartons and cartons of pasta. It seems they eat only pasta. He isn't sure if they know that he lives in the small concrete room that's below them. They certainly have never recognized him at the grocery store. They've never said hello. They've never crawled under The Big Blue Building to knock on his door and ask if he'd like to come up and have some of their pasta. He wonders what would happen if he ate the toilet piece by piece. He wonders what would have happened, if, as a baby, he had fallen into a bucket of roofing tar or paint. They eat pasta, and he eats tunafish and mustard on crackers. Sometimes, at the grocery store, he works at the registers. He often makes incorrect change, so, whenever he works the register, he makes sure to have a pocketful of quarters and dollars in case he gets the sense that he messed up making change. If he gets such a sense, he sneaks into his drawer a few dollars or quarters just to be safe. His boss, Oregula, used to give him back his change if he went over, but now she doesn't do that anymore. In fact, she's been having him on the registers more and more, and he thinks the reason is that she wants his money, his overage.

THE FIRST TIME HE SAW MR. KILGALLON HE FELL MADLY IN LOVE WITH HIM

2011-07-25T18:58:00.000-07:00

1.
Great was his care of them.

Horrendous was her laugh in the basement.

2.
The big thing, exciting yet frightening, was to talk to her, say what he hoped to do.

The difficult part, impossible but fascinating, was to gulp down the oatmeal, taste its secrets.

3.
He had never been hungrier, and he filled his mouth with wine, faintly tarry-tasting from the leather bag, and swallowed.

They were disoriented, and they couldn't see the spinning disks, quietly humming on dowels, so despaired.

4.
Soon afterwards they retired, Mama in her big oak bed on one side of the room, Emilio and Rosy in their boxes full of straw and sheepskins on the other side of the room.

We left the cinderblock bunker, Dafa to his submarine, Paga and Marsho to their poison swings.

5.
On stormy nights, when the tide was out, the bay of Fougere, fifty feet below the house, resembled and immense black pit, from which arose mutterings and sighs as if the sands down there had been alive and complaining.

At closing time, when the mushy heads can no longer eat their powders, the people in the little village, two miles away from the Powdery, flashed their inside lights off and on.

5 MWE: Let the deposition begin. Your brooding landlord shaves his strip.

2011-07-25T11:35:00.003-07:00

finished
nostrils
garden
found
fig
rib
alone

He flattened himself before the explosion. She flattened herself. Bleeding ears. Their ears were bleeding. The blood ran down their necks and onto their shoulders. The blood ran down their backs. Sweat going down your back. A drop of sweat dripping down your back. Cold and clammy hands belonged to the nurse. He was happy to be in a field that needed him. He could find a job in any city. He made a greenhouse out of recycled windows. He had melons and squash. He saws bees in squash blossoms. For lunch, he put a wad of white cheese in a squash blossom and fried it. When he learned of his father's death, he changed his pants twice. When he learned of his fathers deaths, he called the mortician and reserved five coffins. He had five fathers. A father for every decade of his life. He lived near a river. He lived near a forest. He lived near a graveyard. He lived near one of the saddest zoos on the country--one that had lost its accreditation. Most of its animals had been seized from drug dealers. It had become a fad amongst drug dealers to keep animals: komodo dragons, tigers, lions, pythons, civet cats.

She was in a basin with a sick pony. She had a pipe, which she filled with peanut butter and lit. He tripped when he went for a run and fell on his front four teeth. He dove underwater, and a surfboard hit his face, breaking his front four teeth. He tripped going down the stairs and broke his front four teeth. This was not his dream. During the summer, he slept outside on the trampoline. He would break open a 10$ roll of quarters on his trampoline. He would jump until those quarters flew up to him. It was ten degrees below zero, but he still sat on his porch. He wore his warmest clothes and had a blanket over his legs. He had a canister of coffee. He put out fake birds. He made fake black birds and set them outside. Look at that black bird. A mendicant on the mend. Small waves in his fingers told him to stop driving, to pull the car over and allow his head to subside into whatever firesale they had going on the corner. The corner was haunted.

He was a poor architect and a poor builder. He had designed and built a building for his family's animals. They kept two pigs and about twenty goats, so he built a building for all of them out of salvaged bricks, cinderblock, whatever sheets of metal he could find. And then there came a windy week, and then this building fell on all the animals. He finished his ponderous work. His nostrils were ripped open by an enemy. His garden was not productive. He found a clog and failed to unclog it. For the first time in his life, he ate a fig. It did not taste like a dried fig. Its inside looked like the pink inside of the id. He researched if, in fact, one could have one's rib removed. He wanted to get out as much of himself as he could because he was addicted to holding things that had once been inside himself. A piece of his hip had been removed--a ball of bone--and he loved to hold this piece. One of his ribs had been removed, and he loved to hold it. It was an epic with a chimp as its protagonist.

THE FIRST TIME HE SAW MR. KILGALLON HE FELL MADLY IN LOVE WITH HIM

2011-07-25T11:35:00.001-07:00

1.
It was the work of the rushing gust--but then without those doors there did stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the Lady Madeline of Usher.

2.
There was blood upon her white robes and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame.

3.
As if in the superhuman energy of his utterance there had been found the potency of a spell, the huge antique panels to which the speaker pointed threw slowly back, upon the instant, their ponderous and ebony jaws.

4.
For a moment she remained trembling and reeling and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated, then, with a low, moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violent and now final death agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse

1.
The wind died as quickly as it had come, and the clearing was quiet again. The heron, motionless and waiting, stood in the shallows. Turning its head from side to side, a little water snake swam up the pool.

2.
Behind us was the town of Castle Rock, surrounding its green and shady common, spread out on the long hill that was known as Castle View. You could see the stacks of the wooled mew spewing smoke into a sky the color of gunmetal and spewing waste into the water further down Castle River. The Jolly Furniture Barn was on our left, and straight ahead of it, bright and heliographing in the sun, were the railroad tracks.

3.
Agatha watched for the star, standing at the front window and holding back the curtain. Because the sky stayed light for so long that the stars would more or less melt into view, in the summertime she had to be alert. Sometimes Thomas waited, too. No matter how often she warned him not to, he said his wishes aloud. As if the sky were one big Sears, he wished for definite objects--toys and candy and such. On the other hand, Agatha wished silently, and not even in words. In a strong wash of feeling, she wished.

[Though grammatically correct, nearly all the changes I've made worsen the writing. And why? Because, most often, I have taken modification (in the form of adjective phrases or adverb clauses) that appears toward the end of a sentence and moved it up. Something else to remember is that fluid writing comes not so much from phrase/clause variation but from sentence length. Most sentences (say 75%) will start with the subject.]

4.
At the admission gate, we paid our dollars, and like famished beggars at a feast, threw ourselves into the carnival. Over our heads like trapped stars, the strings of lightbulbs gleamed. Along with their parents, a lot of kids our age were there, and some older people and highschool kids, too. The rides grunted, clattered, and rattled around us. We bought our tickets and got on the Ferris wheel, and I made the mistake of sitting with Davy Ray. He grinned and started rocking us back and forth and yelling that the bolts were about to come loose when we got to the very top and the wheel paused to allow riders on the bottommost gondola.

[It's nearly always preferable to start with the main clause and the subject. By starting with an inverted element--or by starting with an adjective phrase--you give your readers a moment of uncertainty. They are forced to contend with the modification before they get the modified thing. Sentences that don't start with the main clause and subject create tension. Such tension can be useful, but should probably be present one out of four sentences. In the above PP, when the writer does start with a dependent clause, then that clause does special work to set up a strong moment. Now that I've flipped the order, the sentence looks dead because the exciting part comes first and the set up comes later. So make sure dependent clauses--when they come first--set up something that's worth the set up. And, probably, if the dependent clause comes after the independent clause, then there should be a payoff at the end.

WHAT IT IS

2011-07-24T16:23:00.001-07:00

She is in the shower. The shower is all one piece of plastic. There is no soap on the soap ledge, but there is plenty of old gray soap sludge. She is in the shower. There is no soap. The water is on and goes from being lukewarm to scalding hot. When it becomes hot, she has to press herself against the side of the shower. There is no soap. The shower is plastic. The shower's door is frosted glass. Or maybe the glass isn't frosted--it's just so covered with soap scum. She is in the shower--but still wears her jeans, her vest. She still has her fake mustache on her face. Amazing how spirit gum can stick when you don't want it to and how it fails when you need it to work. It fails when you most need your disguise. The shower is in the kitchen. The kitchen sink is between the toilet and the shower--the shower that she is in. Across from the shower is a stove, and someone is at the stove frying something that smells like tofu. It must be tofu. There is no soap. She has on her mustache and her vest. Everything on her is wet. Everything inside her is wet, too, though she thinks it's all dry. She thinks her guts are dry and her hair is wet. It is all wet. Someone is frying tofu, and a piece of tofu flies over the shower door and slaps her in the face. It's still hot, and then it's at her feet. She closes her eyes and sees images from her awful day: a parrot, a piece of rusted metal, large gray underwear, broken green glass, a pint of blood still in its bag. Another piece of tofu flops over the shower door and lands at her feet. She still wears her boots. She takes off her boots. She takes off her jeans, her vest, her mustache. She asks the person frying tofu to leave, and he leaves. She thinks she is alone, but then, as the minutes pass, she smells thick gas in the air. Gas from the stove. She cracks the shower door open and sees the stove door open. The person who had been frying the tofu has his head in the stove. Naked, her vest and jeans and boots and mustache in a wet pile in the shower, she jumps over to him. He might have been her boyfriend. He was one of her boyfriends. He was her brother, visiting her from Chicago. She is naked and wet. His head is in the stove. The smell of gas is thick. She pulls him out, only to see his is wearing a breathing apparatus. He takes it off, laughs at her, turns off the stove. He takes a beer from the refrigerator and drinks it.

THE FIRST TIME HE SAW MR. KILGALLON HE FELL MADLY IN LOVE WITH HIM

2011-07-24T16:22:00.000-07:00

1.
He ran from the place, leaving the quirt, leaving his suitcase, leaving the oak box of money.
Leaving his suitcase, he ran from the place, leaving the quirt, leaving the oak box of money.
He, leaving the quirt, ran from the place, leaving his suitcase, leaving the oak box of money.

2.
A mortgage financier, a forecloser, the father was respectable and tight and a stern, upright collection-plate passer.
The father was respectable and tight--a mortgage financier, a forecloser--and a stern, upright collection-plate passer.
The father, a mortgage financier and a forecloser--was respectable, tight, and a stern upright collection-plate passer.

3.
After Buck Fanshaw's inquest without a public meeting and an expression of sentiment, a meeting of the short-haired brotherhood was held on the Pacific coast, for nothing can be done.
For nothing can be done without a public meeting and an expression of sentiment, a meeting of the short-haired brotherhood was held after Buck Fanshaw's inquest on the Pacific coast.
On the Pacific coast, a meeting of the short-haired brotherhood was held after Buck Fanshaw's inquest for nothing can be done without a public meeting and an expression of sentiment.

4.
With them, carrying a gnarled walking stick, was Elmo Goodhue Pipgrass, the littlest, oldest man I had ever seen.
The littlest oldest man I had ever seen was Elmo Goodhue Pipgrass, carrying a walking stick with them.
With them, carrying a gnarled walking stick, was the littlest, oldest man I had ever seen, Elmo Goodhue Pipgrass.

5.
Wearing a long flannel nightgown around his chest, a nightcap, and a leather jacket over long woolen underwear, he bounded out of bed.
He bounded out of bed, wearing a long flannel nightgown around his chest, a nightcap, and a leather jacket.

6.
Once upon a sunny morning, a man who sat in a breakfast nook looked up from his scrambled eggs to see a white unicorn in the garden quietly cropping the roses.
Once upon a sunny morning, a man who sat in a breakfast nook looked up from his scrambled eggs to see a white unicorn quietly cropping the roses in the garden.

7.
Out of a box on the bed, she removed the gleaming pair of patent-leather dancing pumps, grabbed my right foot, and shoved it into one of them, using her finger as a shoehorn.
She removed the gleaming pair of patent leather dancing pumps, grabbed my right foot, and, using her finger as a shoehorn, shoved it into one of them.

1.
The rear of the car lifted up into the air for a moment, and then it thumped down with a muddy splash.

2.
Then it moved around the side of the car.

3.
At the back, the animal snorted a deep rumbling growl that blended with the thunder.

4.
The big raised tail blocked their view out of all the side windows.

5.
It sank its jaws into the spare tire mounted on the back of the Land Cruiser and, in a single head shake, tore it away.

Then it moved around the side of the car. The big raised tail blocked their view out of all the side windows. At the back, the animal snorted a deep rumbling growl that blended with the thunder. It sank its jaws into the spare tire mounted on the back of the Land Cruiser and, in a single head shake, tore it away. The rear of the car lifted up into the air for a moment, and then it thumped down with a muddy splash.

5MWE

2011-07-24T13:51:00.001-07:00

We had a parrot. The parrot had a bell. The parrot removed the clapper--Is clapper the right word?--from the bell. The parrot would wear the clapperless bell on its head. I had an awful friend. I had a lawful friend. My friend and I took his cat. First, we tied a rope to a bucket. We put his cat in the bucket and then we swung the bucket over our heads. Around and around, and the cat couldn't get out because of the circle force. The force of the circle. It's pi that makes it go round. Just take some string, dye it black, and there you have your mustache. When I was 8, I went to kindergarten with a mustache. I was not allowed to go to kindergarten when I was five or six. I wasn't allowed to go when I was seven. I had to wait until I was eight. The school was near a graveyard, and I would often recruit other children to sneak with me into it and take stones. We would drag the stones back to the school. We would hit the heads and hands off angels. At the bar, we had to keep a carton of beef broth because there was a man who came in who liked to drink beef broth with vodka. The floor is sticky. The sticky end of the mattress floated into oblivion because it was lighter than the softest oats. I had taken to eating lots of chicken. I would blend up two pounds of chicken with 12 ounces of warm water and gag through it. Spend most of my morning drinking that mix in the broken squad car. Give me some whiskey--at least in my dreams.

Number of sentences. Longest sentence. Shortest sentence. Average sentence length. Percentage of sentences that start with an intro clause. Percentage that end with a clause. Percentage that start with a phrase. Percentage that end with a phrase. Percentage with a phrase in the middle. Let me tell you this. Let me pester you with a poke. Here comes a poke. Here comes me scratching at your shoulder. I was glad all at the top, and I sang. At the top of a sycamore. Sycamore was sick. Sycamore would pick at my face, even when I told her not to pick at my face. I had old scars on my forehead and in my jowls. I had old scars at the back of my jaws and under my ears. Old scars. I remember thinking that if I imagined the smooth marble foreheads of statues, then maybe my face would clear up. Applying things that make it tight can ruin a sunset, especially if you're sitting on a deck whose fumes are making you high in the last time of your only obsolescence. Schism. Smite. Strike. Pass me the mallet so that I can squint into some light and ask if the sound is okay. How is the sound over there? Picking at my face. Wanting to put swabs in my ear when they are not for cleaning ears. Marigolds to keep away the bugs. Beets for boiling. The foundry was next to the museum, and as a result, it was hard to keep it clean. What is it. It is an infested truck that is stuck on the end of a marble hostess.

My father forced me to wear a cup daily. I would come downstairs, and he'd be waiting for me. He had a wooden mallet, which he would use to tap at my groin. He wanted to make sure I was wearing my cup every day. An everyday cup. I wore it every day, so it was an everyday cup. The difference between an adverb and an adjective is not something that I can always inhabit, though, when I was much older I was a soldier in the ocean, pitting myself against the seashore. When I was much older, I had my hands pounded flat until they were flippers. I was lustful when I was much older. I listed. I careened. I careered. I foundered because I did not see the reef. The reef was dead and had many eels in it. My sister was sitting at the end of a dock. There were old tires tied to the end of the dock, and my sister put her foot into one of them. An eel was in that tire. It bit her foot and would not let go. My father had to chop the eel's body from its head. It is hard to see where its head ends. Since my mother had a husband, and since her husband had a mother, and since that mother of his--that mother of my mother's husband--could not be approached under any circumstance, I often found myself finding hopeful mothers in the grocery store, the grocery store where I stocked the frozen food without gloves, where I stocked the peanut butter next to the Fluff, where I often took my breaks only to listen to someone else talk about guns and the price of holding his sister underwater until she departed this planet for another. She has said it's much nicer at the other.

5 MWE: The dour criticism of the chancellor

2011-07-23T10:06:00.000-07:00

She encountered much joy. She had no way to gauge it all, except by sitting in a tattered chair and cramming her fingers into all its holes and damages. Horsehair in the chair. Straw. Outside, her mother was hanging upside down from a treebranch. Her mother had her legs around a branch, and those legs of hers allowed her to hang upside down. Her dress fell over her head. A gardener came by and trimmed her dress with the shears he had sharpened in Tangiers. The family trait was jowls. They all had jowls with old acne scars on them. They all sat on tattered chairs and couldn't help but to cram their fingers into them. They hung--not hanged--from hickory trees. Elms. Chestnuts. They sat on their roofs and sang. They sat on their floors and cried. They, as a family, showed very little emotion. But it was guaranteed--by whom?--that if you were to get them on the roof they would laugh. And if you were to get them on the floor, they would cry. It was not uncommon for people from the town to wrestle them to the ground at funeral time. The funeral bell. It would give two loud dings and then the third one would be off rhythm and muted. The family sent a bus through the town to pick people up for the funeral. The family did this, even though they themselves did not board the bus. It was the first funeral to have not a single family member present at it.

The innkeeper was frail. The innkeeper became an inkeeper when he lost his inn. His lost his inn, but, on that day, he swallowed all his keys, so he became an inkeeper with just one n. The authorities did not visit him. Instead, they flew kites over his new house. He bought a small house and lived in it--only to have the authorities fly kites over his house. He still had all the keys from his old inn inside of him. He was sure of it. Do not ask how anyone could be so sure because that is a sure way to end up with a bowl of grass, no milk, and no spoon with which to eat the grass. It's one thing for a dog to eat grass every time you take it out. What most people say is that it is an indication that the dog is sick. If you take your dog out--and if your dog can't help but to eat grass--then that's a sure sign it is sick. But what if it's your child that won't stop eating grass every time you take it out? What if it's your child? And this same child, when you take it to the seashore, it can't help but to drink some of the ocean. This child might slurp at the little purlers. This child might have its own cup with which it drinks. That it drinks with. This child might have a hole in the side of its head--the result of an early trephine. What if this child were to become a famous cartoonist? This child sits on a concrete patio, a patio that's otherwise used to dry out coffee beans. The bean roasters complain that they often find bits on concrete amongst their coffee beans.

It was terrible because she had a cape made of eyelids. She had once heard of people making capes out of bird feathers. There might be a bird in a forest. This bird has just a smidgen of yellow on its chin, and a king decides that, yes, it's this yellow that must make up his long cape. He wants the cape so long that all these birds must be killed to make it. "How long should the cape be, King? Five feet? Nine?" "No," he says. "The cape will be as long as it must take to kill all the little birds with yellow on their chins." And so she had a cape made of eyelids, but she didn't have to kill everyone on the planet to have it made. In fact, she didn't have to kill--or have killed--a single person because she used the eyelids of dead people. These eyelids had to be treated with certain chemicals to keep them from drying out. In their dried-up state they become raisins. Not raisons. They have no reason, these people who have silly capes made at such great expense. A cape of eyelids. And the eyelids still have their lashes. Twenty lashes for those who don't wear capes. Give me a reason to share with you the essence of the unfairness. Its essence is that you have no frenzied moments in your family's historical interpretation of the rational focused turpentined creatures. Let me give you my motto: Never squat where the squatters lay their pavement.

5 MWE Now, I'm to be mistaked for your mother

2009-03-16T13:36:00.000-07:00

I have never seen a kajet so bog. New ones never helped me pull the skin off my hands. I pulled it off like gloves. Glass. Brass. Have one get another a song for some money. I will now pull up my carpet so that I can lie beneath it. Had the habit of breaking into houses and shaving off mustaches. The family lives in a motel. The difference between a motel and a hotel is that you enter your motel room from the outside. You enter your hotel room via your sister's shoulder. She had it operated. Found a nightstick. Found a glowstick. Saw an inappropriate mural--well, I deemed it inappropriate. It could have been fine to some. My job was shaving persian cats. My job was grooming poodles. My job was to split three cords of wood with a hydraulic machine. I put cuarters in the wet concrete. I sucked on quarters. I asked for some red wine with ice cubes in it. I asked for the cheapest vodka--it must have been Popov. I was told to not get fat. I was told not to get fat and to get an agent by Rufus. Rufus drank a rusty nail. He had drunk three of them. I played a game with friends. We were near a jukebox. It got late and we looked at the Old Main--I thought they said Old Maid--from a roof. I was willing to eat off a concrete floor so long as it was shiny.

Tell me where the wet sand is. I would like to lie in it. I would like to see someone tromp across a wet lawn. You never put your words in my mouth. This is what I wanted to say: Leave my methods be. This is what I didn't say: You have never spoken a three-syllable word. I do not care if you took a workshop. I do not care if you've memorized the manual. I do not care if your friend is a Higher Up. What matters is that I have paved over all your friends--and not metaphorically. I have shaved. I have shaved treats down to what's really inside them. I have pulled out the smallest hairs from the smoothest faces. I have razored out cubes of skin. My chances are slim. I was rejected today by a place. I was rejected yesterday by a place. I was jerected. This is what I want: To no longer be called autistic. What I hear are words change. I hear toy boat become toy boyt. But I think memories have the same potential for distortion. The longer I remember something, the stranger it will cebome. Now hear this: I have forgotten my wallet. My wallet is a hat I like to wear. First, I put a banana in my shoe. Then, I put my foot in the shoe just to feel the squish. Dog shit in my shoe--not on it. My head is on the bridge.

St. John. Caravaggio. Surprise me. Let me hold my breath not under water but under petroleum jelly. The Preserves of Oilmen. Eat that and see what happens. Eat a half cup of almonds, an apple, and a pear. Eat the head of a cat. Heat the legs of a dog. A small dog is killed. It's legs are cut off and arranged in a vase. With ease. Fascinate me, why don't you? Try to show me that you can do something I haven't seen. Much of what I've seen lately has no feel to it. It has a hum that can't be hummed. I was not under blankets. I was under plastic. A jacket made of plastic bags. Shoes made of plastic bags. We lived in a motel for 800$ a month. We all slept in it. We spelt in it. We pelts in it. We were children with books and drawings. It was too hard for us to open certain containers. We got frustrated so easily. We made a juice out of what we found outside. I slept in a bed with my other siblings. We each had our own cherished blanket. We knew our father left the room because that's when the smell in our place would go from bad to better. He had nothing on. He had nothing, no. No, he had nothing. I am so old for thirteen. I felt myself sinking tino my yard. After, I had no losses.

2009-02-09T17:23:00.000-08:00

dousing
hail
toy boat
skies
get better
uncover
island
vessel
balls

We needed a vessel for all the balls we had. We went outside because we thought it was raining. We did not get doused because, really, it wasn't raining. It was hailing. The sputterer went on and on about how he hates that hail is always the size of something. Walnut-sized. Fist-sized. Baseball-sized. Marble-sized. He went on and on. He grew moustaches on the side of his head.

She made a toy boat for herself. Then she made another one. Then she took the one sky and multiplied it until there were hundreds of them. Smoked dope behind a Dumpster. This is when she uncovered her doll's breast, only to reveal a compartment with balls in it. The doll was a vessel for balls. I went to an island for a medical vacation. I could have had the operation in the States, but, for the same price, I learned I could go to an island--get my operation from someone who was almost a doctor--and get a vacation in the bargain. In the days leading up to my surgery, I would be able to lounge. I would be able to get sand in my crevices. I would be able to backfloat on the ocean and wait for any of my three children to swim up to me. They would want to know if I wanted to come back in. And how long until we get to fly the kites?

2009-02-09T17:12:00.000-08:00

cheeks
visible
flushed
underthings
skilled
red hair
pronouns
sacrifice
which

She might have been unskilled and had red hair. And had red hair. Her shoulders flushed. The chest between her breasts flushed. She saw some mound rising on the horizon. At first, the mound looked to me smaller than a house--but soon it was many stories. She had a hydraulic wood-splitter she could use to chop her wood. She poured a concrete slab and thumbed quarters into it. Those quarters. She sacrificed her lunch for a better dinner. When she looked to one side, she saw a mound. When she looked to another side, she saw a frame with people hanging inside. The largest frame built and people hanging in it. It was my job to say what the structure was and whether or not the story was cliched. My advise was to do a freewrite. Some research. To surprise. To put dough over your eyes and hope something sets in. For some reason, I put a photo of a horse with a long mane in her mailbox. That morning, I saw her coming out of a house. She stepped on a lawn, and, right away, I wished that lawn were aflame and that she was rolling on it. Later, I went to a Red Sox game. Got inebrio on Alize. The point of it was that I read fifty pages and didn't get to a point or a theme. These pieces of writing are small.

You're to find a fucking topic. Melville found a fucking great topic in the whaling industry. You are to write about a topic because--look at you--you have so much torment and turmoil in your life. Look at all the deep pain in your family. Look at how they hit each other with larger and larger branches for generations. Why is it that all your write is so short? It is because you do not have a topic that's as good as the whaling industry or the killing fields or desertification.

2009-01-27T10:20:00.000-08:00

So I've decided not to post anymore. I will not post again. Another post, to me, would represent a lapse in what I've already decided. I have decided not to post anymore. I won't post again. I will post,,,but then I won't post. I will post,,,but then I'll erase it. There will not be another post. Another post will not be there. My motivations have to do with my not wanting to post and my not feeling as though I can post. Are you okay? I just read your blog. Why won't you post? What happened to the posting? There will be no more posting. Now, I know you all looked forward to posts--to my posting. But, what had been your looking forward will now have to be your looking back. I have set a record for gerund use. There was a woman once who spoke in gerunds. A gerund is a verbal noun and looks like a participial or the main verb in the present progressive verb formation. I do not know how to play the piano. I do not know how to lay concrete. I do not know how to twist wire into my name. Sometimes, when I have the desire to post, I stop myself by thinking of the things I can't do with my hands.

2009-01-16T17:21:00.000-08:00

He saw a clot. I took the train to Vermont. He took the train. He smelled allspice. He would like to see the lake without the reflection of anything in it. The bustle of the house he lives in. The chaos. The clatter. I cannot write much of anything. I do not know how to write. These are not good sentences--sentences that come one out of the other. I took five bags of clothes down into the basement. The landlord had to put an oil heater in the basement. He put it near a pipe that easily froze. In the basement, a person put lots of electrical equipment. This is not good writing. Good writing is not this. It is not easy to write anything. To write anything is not easy. What they say is that sometimes you have to write a page to get to a pages. Sometimes you have to write and erase three paragraphs. Try to have few cohesive ties in the middle of the paragraph--but then put lots of ties between paragraphs. I will try that in my next five minutes. I could never do it in these five minutes. I drove down to Mississippi to sleep in a tent and sell fireworks. I was in a bad neighborhood--but no one tried anything.

I have this knot that I would like to toss off the dock. He threw the lemon into the buoyant hat. I was giddy about the pack that had its arms at its sides. She was defeated because the escapist duped her into thinking he had escaped when he hadn't. When amnesia is the thing that's most on your mind, you should ask yourself if you're being modest and, for the night, forecast your dreams. See them as a whorl in the air near your head. After they had all forgiven me, I was forewarned of a nirvanic trance. This is a world without end. This is the cutter, the biter. These front teeth of mine are the biters. It is unfortunate that they are so thin. That they are so thin is unfortunate. The manslayer found herself, again, at a keyboard. She controlled the boilers. She controlled the answers for the evening's progamme. She had a mother. She wore a tan uniform. This is the plant I cannot eat. I cannot eat this plant.

I have lost all interest in the five minute write. It is not that I am one to launch a freight of mice in the hellbent lambent cry of mania in the tall woman's throat of ventricles. The sycamore is not a tree I would like to write about. Once in a sycamore I was glad and I sang and I would never want to write a line like that. I would like to find an antecedent. I do not know enough about language to use it. Each sentence here is boring. I do not like writing these simple sentences. I do not know how to write sentences that could be otherwise. Got hit by a car. Broke an arm. Writhed on the hardwood. I listened to the floor. I listened to the snow. I listened to what I thought was a peach heyday. I thought I knew where there would be a panmixea. I thought there would be a big breed, but there wasn't one in the micro fission blast fake your madre in the fought brat broken she is not madre she would like to break the window by tossing a crab through it the session was making me giggle in the dramamine skyline dinner final of the montreal vibraphone the vibes on the basketball court they all sound like they are posing a question the pose of the question

5 MWE--his neck was open and his adam's apple looked like a kneee

2008-12-15T18:04:00.000-08:00

There were small harnesses, and I was told that small horses would be strapped into them. This gave me time to woodshed for a little bit. I woodshedded most of the day--at least, when it was light enough for me to see. Once I no longer was able to see, I made sure to negate what bark I had in my mouth with a funnel. I cut the funnel apart. The game was to first make a mobius strip. I next asked the class what they thought would happen if I cut it. I asked them what they thought would happen if I cut it again. This was when I was on my island of Ascension. Here, I had a cape I had made of hibiscus petals and the breasts of small birds. I had shards of obsidian. I never thought that I would be able to throw a rock to where it would sink. This is my right arm. My arm was a test model yet what I wanted toknow was the I made my head on the light iof my only frined give.

I woodshedded for a while before I put out all the laundry I had. It all flapped like sad flags. Get me some lonely jewels that I can chill in a small bowl of wood. Now, let me say that I have never seen a crayon. Have you seen a wax one. It's what I should have done but didn't. What I used to do was climb the rock wall in the restaurant. I was told to stop--but not because what I was doing was dangerous. No, what I was doing was increasingly irritating to all that wondered who could have ever propelled himself upward so quickly. The anti venin was no longer being made.

They used to make anti venin, but they no longer did. The anti venin was for coral snakes. My grandmother had ordered oranges from Florida. What she didn't know was that that box had a pregnant coral snake in it. She went down to get an orange and got bit by the mother. She asphyxed. Then that thing had her babies. It was not what any of us could have constructed. This is what was floated. That was understood by no one. Consequently, we retched into a cooler. Then, afterward, consequently, we wrapped the chain of an outdoor swing around the neck of a man who could have been a convict but wasn't.

American Idioms from le Fin de Terre

2008-12-13T14:23:00.000-08:00

Jump down my throat.

Vault down my neck. Remove my neck--with it open, it looks like a knee--and throw it across a canal. The canal has eel in it--times, we fish for them. Times, we push the unsuspecting into the canal. These unsuspecting then put their heels or toes in bad hollows and get bit by eels. The eels have locking mechs in their jaws. Hurry down my throat because, if you do so, you will get down to my bowels where all the output from the glitter factory is. This man owned a glitter factory. Jerk yourself toward my neck. I would like to see that.

*They clothed me and gave me money. **We shot horses because they were wild and sold their hair to the makers of hats. The hat guild. The guild of hatters that met in a house with boarded windows. The windows were not boarded up. They were boarded--but by whom? Why, by a man who had a small tv under his arm. As he hammered, he caught glimpses of the soaps. Was Phoebe Tyler on this one? If she was on this one, then she might have to fret about taking care of the ghost of her mother in a church.

Spill the beans.

Spill not a bean--if I tell you this. Spill these beans. Spill those beans. The haricot verts are fucked up this season. I didn't have sperm in my scrotum. I had blackfish.

I put some of my blackfish in a petri dish. Then, I put lighterfluid into that selfsame dish and lit the entire with a homemade match. Do not bung the beans if you're going to watch a matinee. What's weird is that, when you go to a matinee, it is light outside. The beans have streamed. The beans have killed the pigs. We poured beans and beans over the pigs until they drowned in the beans. We wondered if the pigs could eat themselves alive, but they couldn't. Too many beans spilled over pigs is certainly, we discovered, a breed of death.

*I knew what the money was for, it was to get me started. **A comma splice. I had no grease left, it was gone. I did not know what epinard meant, it was a word of which I had no ready definition. This is not a grammatical error. This error is what could be called a pile of epinard I wear as hair. Our goal was to make a toy submarine out of certain materials not ordinarily thought of as appropriate for water.

Pay through the nose.

Pay across many noses, okay. What we have here is lots of noses. Lost of people are on the ground. You simply have to throw your pennies over them. We made little coffins out of balsa wood and put them up our noses. We put them in our ears and said eulogies. We will say a little eulogy for each one. Pay unobstructed through the nose. I paid upon a nose--but never though about how clogged up its pores were. I squeezed noodles of dark greaze out of my invalid father's nose. This was his payment to me. He had spoiled me when I was young. He had said that I was his legacy. Once I got horrible acne, though, he had a more difficult time seeing me as his romantic legacy.

*When it was gone I would have to get more, if I wanted to go on. **Nice sounds here. No comma separating the intro dependent clause from the following independent clause. No dashes. When she named our child Vucan I knew we were going to be apart for the next year, if I couldn't make sense of our son's name. After she ignored my slobbering on the inside of her legs I felt I should offer an apology, if I wanted to light more candles and drip them onto her window sill. The problem is that I don't know how this sentence works.

Wet blanket.

First, I dampened the blanket. Then, I wrapped it around my brother. I got a corner of it deep in his mouth. When I poured oil on the sheet, it got clear. I could see through it. The sheet was wet not with water but with lubricant.

5 MWE--the old farceur and his improbable repartee

2008-12-13T13:39:00.000-08:00

I stepped over what I thought to be a stench. This was when my odor was affected by the wind. That table could have been shortened by removing its leaves. This table is something I inherited. That one small finch is something I don't want to inherit. She was callow. She was crude. She sat on a dock and held her head down at oily water. It was the brightest moon in fifteen years--and we won't see another one so bright for another twenty. What is the dischord you can bring to a life? Name a machine. A snowmobile. Name a facial expression. The grimace. Name a tree. The tree that was sick--and we had to cut it down though we resisted doing such a thing for ten years. She was barefaced when she lied. She was not disguised. She took a class that showed her how to make her face look bruised. She had putty for lumps and plastic liguid for blood. He did not want to be called a barber. He wanted to be called a composer. A figaro. All that's tonsorial. We had angler fish, and they provided the light.

The mercury of the dog. She drank brack, and I never asked her to share it. When she lost her animals, she was concerned not so much with whether or not they'd come back. She worried they'd come back much more crushable than they were before. He launched the limb he had found. After he launched the limb, he found that he could no longer shake hands with Busiris or Poseidon. Also, she was fountaining. Besides, he didn't know how to fit the beanleaves into the small fish. Barring the slashing of his face, he was ready to have his picture taken. Hence, she had her hat between her legs. Howbeit, never once did I shake hands with a palm that was not both clammy and greased. Yea, I had not one kingcup to give to anyone. Get this Buttinski away from me. As I spoke with a woman on a corner, this Buttinski came between us. He camped. He wanted to know if I had sold all my bog violet, when, of course, he knew I hadn't. This was well-publicized. This was nothing but a bungling of the dozens of wards I had to date.

I spy--with my little eye--my posterity. This child sits in the crotch of a tree and makes wishes. This child, earlier, had sat with me on a couch. He had put his head against my arm and had spoken something to me in--I think--Spanish. Je pense que tue est une vaste plaque--mais, au contraire, je te vree dans la boulangerie, I responded. My best French. My youth had been spent on a steamship. My boyhood had been spent on wood. My adulthood--now, this is what I have little to no control of. I walk on bricks when I can, but, at times, I look at the what my feet have been doing. I was sick of her villainy. Her jockeyism. This is my time to answer the fowl with a question. Dear Chickens--which of you would like to have me put pins in your eyes? Which of you are up for stupefaction? The gagman had to give a presentation to us as punishment. He had painted himself gray because he had wanted to be a mouse. He broke a plate to cut his stake. This is sharper than any knife. The horse he bet on was Elliott Bay. Now, this is the culminate. The culminate woman on her fountain. In the fountain was a seat.

5 MWE--the mascot's wand was the miracle drunk

2008-12-07T19:36:00.000-08:00

A corner could have had paste in it. It did not have a vegetable meal in it. A yellow vegetable meal. The corner was what we wanted to include in a stew, so we removed it with a saw. A hollow with an eel in it. I put my heel in a hollow and had it bitten by an eel. I buried the dead eel, so that, months later, I would be able to recover its skeleton.

This was me coming into being with another person. I inchoated my throat. I inchoated around her, but, ultimately, it didn't matter. I believed I had new veins in my feet, so I went to the doctor. He said he did not see them and that I looked healthy for a 27-year-old man. (Spell out all numbers less than 100.) Next, I felt as though a vein in my scrotum felt strange. So I went to the doctor and had him rummage around. He rolled the vein between his fingers. I told him it was a dull pain. I told him it was a pain that could be described as the end of a pencil I'd been using for over a month. I had used the pencil to edit student compositions because I believed the pencil to me more respectful than the pen. "They can erase it", I thought. (The comma should go inside the quotation mark.) The doctor told me to take 3 Advil a day and to try some generic antibiotic.

I told her the veins in my hands had changed color, but she didn't believe me. I told her small red dots appeared on my arms and disappeared. I thought maybe hot water caused it? I told him that I believed wind--but only cold wind--made me smell strange. He smelled me. I said, "But there's no cold wind in here." I was what the teacher called a prime student. He believed I could have done my Ph.D at Princeton--that they would have been happy to have me. He said I chose the wrong thing. He was surprised I was not on my way to Mississippi. At times, he could be succinct. Times, he could be terse. He could end a conversation early because, he claimed, I had exhausted him with all my non-complaints. He told me not to be dumb but more distinct with my silence. Maybe wear a hat you can fold and put in your sock, he told me. I was coming into being--but not in a way that reassured anyone around me. I was inchoating in such a way that I was sure I smelled strange if out in the cold. I thought lots of magnesium would get rid of the smell. Or rolling in a patch of mint. Or drinking so much water with cayenne pepper in it. I told her to slide me in the calcinatory once I got off to sleep. She said I ground my teeth when I didn't wear my mouthpiece. I had made one for myself out of papier mache.

I had dulled my knife cutting packing tape. I sprinkled dill weed into soup. I went in with my sister to buy a fence for a dog. I did not go to sleep because my friend was sleeping on the floor next to me. We told a story about a pig. I would cook myself in water almost too hot to sit in. I believed in the diuretic ipecac because it was what the historian spoke of at not the lecture but the carnival. I smelled like a monk's cell, my mother said. The doctor could not wear latex gloves because he was allergic to them. Jesse James said of my grandfather, "Who is that boy?" And then, his brother Frank, to him: "That is just a kid." My grandfather, Delos, was the first to have an x-ray machine. But I had to borrow a dime. But I had to swallow a dime. These are chocolate-covered dimes for children. The mass in her calf--that clot of green veins--was lithoid. I took it to my sewn pocket only to remember that my pocket had been sewn shut by my mother. If I sang, I didn't stutter. If I spelled the words

An American Above-Ground Tunnel Carving

2008-12-04T07:29:00.000-08:00

Size: 6 meters X 20 meters
Light: a tank of angler fish
Instrument used: sans doubt, a cardboard tube

The building is sandstone, and it has a small wooden door on its outside that is always open. The door is for children. Mothers stuff their children in this door. The leave their children so that, for the day, their children can sleep on stone floors. For the day, their children are put in cages made of salvage broomsticks. The door has a compartment in it. In the compartment are identification badges and chips of ice. A mother is in this compartment, and she claims to be Katherine Tyro. Her national dress could not be worn or performed without the knowledge of how to tie at least thirty intricate knots.

5 MWE

2008-12-04T07:09:00.000-08:00

Stenchy where it could have been hung. I tied the laces of two shoes together. I knotted them. I had not one sloth, though, five years ago, I had stolen four of them. I had mated them. I have no esquire next to my name. I have managed to put an envelope on my head like a hat. My head is like a hat. First, I lay on the rug. Then, I got under the rug. Then, I ordered piglets. I had no way to defend myself against defenestration. There was a fire. The was a gleeman who followed me. I did not pay him to do this. Someone else had paid him out for the year for me. I had no bones in my meat. I had no savory thing to put in a paper bag. I had spent three hours making one grand mistake. She--who never misbehaved--could have gotten her hand skin off in one pull if she wanted to. Her skin was loose on that had. He was in charge of admissions at a small liberal arts school. He had fantastic hair but bad teeth--teeth marbled with orange and brown. In his section of the brochure, he smiled--but not with his teeth. He balanced a puck of refuse on his head.

He laughs. He laughs her laugh. He is over the hedge. He is arch. He is a rhapsodist. He deemed her incompetent. He drinks. He drinks seawater. He is by the ocean. He is tricky. He judged her unfit to have a child without medication. He drives. He drives a motorbike. He is here. He is glum. He is an unbeliever. He elected his father president to a miniscule office. He laughs, but he does not laugh his laugh. He laughs her laugh. He is over the hedge, so he undones his pants and wraps them about his head. He is arch for the moment, and he cannot be arch in an hour because he will be swimming. He is a rhapsodist, but he does not know what that means since someone else--perhaps his father--a man who tests himself with flashcards--gave him that title. He deemed her incompetent, and he could not force himself to unscrew the puck from his head.

The stooge wore not pants but pantaloons. The peach was so ripe it was pappy. I acted in mumm. I did not speak so I acted mumm. I was in the mumm. I performed mumm in the show--the mumm show. The shoes I wore had wood in them. This is my imperial cap. I wear it when I am on ships. I spotted a blue-footed titi. That made me want to retch. It was my job to clean the camp's dishes, but I did not feel well in the morning. I retched. THis is when I saw the wax that I had left was cracked. I knew that if, in the morning, I found the wax uncracked, then I would be able to go about my day as I normally did. But, no, I found the wax cracked this morning, so, right away, I called my mother, Katherine Tyro. She was born eighty years ago. She was not sick, she claimed, because she ate so much yoghurt and germ. The plates of the skull are called the facia. The plates.

American Above-Ground Tunnel Carving

2008-11-08T19:33:00.000-08:00

Size: 2m x 8m
Light: naphtha flames
Instrument used: a key

A gas mask for a man and a horse. A man wears a gas mask. It is the one with glass quarters for eyes and a trunk of rubber hose coming out. A horse must wear one that looks like a feed bag. The gas used was not something that killed anyone. It was an anesthetic released. Men struck by the gas would fall asleep. They would go down, and, then, men with masks--men safe from the anesthetic in the air--would remove the teeth of the down passed. Horses that did not wear masks would also down pass. Men with masks would remove the horses' hooves. They would remove the soft noses of the horses and wear them as epaulettes. Hoops around their arms. They were braggarts. They are braggarts. A sheath with an arm in it instead of an ornamental sword.

10.29.08 / Watson Library / Floor 2 1/2 West

2008-11-02T13:22:00.000-08:00

The thong you have is tangled, but the thing is straight. The thing hangs in a tree, and we throw cigarettes at it. Waste over fifteen dollars. I thought someone was throwing cigarette ends at the window, but when I turned around, I learned the sounds were tumphing bugs.

But how many brothers do you have? I knew all the ways to provoke anger arousal in a tank. I had to have support in the room because I knew they'd be able to make sense of the tragedy better than I could in a slow turnaround.

How does your friend feel about home? About an aroused answer? She had a reticence syndrome. She did not disclose the self, any self, or herself to me. She shelved it.

What do you both do at home? What was the child's impersonation? How was the problem followed? Seeman could not suggest a better countenance than the one I drew on his newly painted newel post. Can you call your brother by his name--or will he get mad? Did you spoil the trip to Mexico?

The language came on flashcards. We glued the cards to restrictive outfits. There were webbed pieces of fabric that kept our arms to our sides and our crotches tight. Does he establish an atmosphere? Now with helium and hydrogen. Does he encourage training? Periodic speech perdido. Periodic dental work about which I forgot. He fit the tooth he had lost into his urethra. Why all the testing?

They became celebrities who amazed audiences. They became celebrities, who amazed audiences that were under tables. Small handshakes for small hands. Dulled by sentiment. The wives on the side were not satisfied.

10.24.08 / Watson Library / Floor 5

2008-10-26T11:31:00.000-07:00

They had to write about the trade they had done, so they did so with lowercase italix they had found on the beach. He spoke softly and sighed. Mumbled. He said gym was hard. He said the classroom had slick walls and cracks in its corners that showed an orange light.

Each found shell was set against a black matte back.

We had discussions about creativity in an ambulance that drove from San Jose to the Atlantic.

They were either unworked or worked. The mealy child stood before us, against the chalkboard, and said, "You know the story before changing tense. Clear. Your island cities each have an overdraft of $5,000. Clear. Your interpretations would not be agreed upon on that nearby coast."

He stood in front of the chalkboard, so we traced him with pink chalk first. Then white. He pointed to the shore of a lake we had made as a project.

10.23.08 / Watson Library / Floor 3 1/2 West

2008-10-26T11:26:00.001-07:00

He had the photo of another face taped over his face. His sister carried palm fronds and tea leaves. She showed much skill when she danced--and this was amazing since, in the house, she had no partner to dance with.

She had to dance with a broomstick to which she had glued lace and sequins. He stood and put his forearm on Proust's shoulder. The image was hazy. He wore a mask. He carried a cane.

Two receding mopeds--we tried to catch up to. Much of the brochure had been blacked out, bowdlerized. She penetrated her parakeet's death with her somnolent sickness.

Subsequent times, he retched over his now dead mother. Sickbed death scenes were not enough. Sickbed seances. The funeral was so close to the tournament of lilies. She did not have eyelids, so she had synthetic ones made for herself. They were made of rainslicker material. She spoke with a distaste of his often invisible entrance.

Erik Satie wore a homburg, pince nez, and a beard like a black icecream cone.

10.21.08 / Watson Library / Floor 3 1/2 Center

2008-10-22T20:19:00.000-07:00

Dialects revealed the outcomes of our romantic education. A huge amount of short-lived bodies we stepped over because we had just bought new kicks.

The financial audit put equal amounts of weight on her hips and the permit of her young son, who could not line his topp teath with his bottum properlee. Her son, who could not align his shoulders as the rest of us could, had secret shadows he showed only to Hispanic Americans, high risk students, and low vocabulary books. (Who would have guessed that the cuffs of his shirts had razors in them?)

After huge amounts of head, she foresaw a Gestalt Therapy revision of the healing arts. She was so controversial behind the fake wooden podium that she broke it. She started to gnash her teeth horrifically, so someone took a pair of scissors out of her perse and placed the blades between her teeth.

Her mother, though sans doubt competent in the pecan grove, never understood that some are clearly collaborative while other want zero to do with setting up new exercises for pubic cuisine. Butter the bread sticks with penises. He tried helplessness.

ssness.

His son, regrettably, remembers his sex education. They gave condoms to kindergartners. One student recalls seeing his older brother having sex on a heating element. His brother's partner seemed not to mind his efforts, though she often described the ninth paragraph of some obscurantist's poem as he slow dipped behind her. The gear housing of the sensory aids had rotted through because it had been made of poorly given therapy. Therapy rubbed in with feet instead of hands. She rolled two pig's eyeballs between her greased palms. Why?

Some loaf. Intellectual functioning that is more than four standard deviations below the plate we had installed over his mother's neck for protection. It was supposed to have been a boat that floated--but it became more of a rapidly established attempt at reconciliation with a woman who had moved to a lava tube in the Canary Islands.

Her husband had been cheating on her for over a year, so she got a coffee drink she invented on the spot and a dark beer for free. She cut the wires in his new apartment. She drove a nail through a wire in his attic. The nail in the wire--a few nights later--heated to over 800 degrees and set fire to dresses he kept. The dresses had been made by horses in a factory in the 1350s.

5 MWE The cook finished by stirring her soup with her long hair

2008-09-27T08:24:00.000-07:00

It is most frustrating to whom I disgust that I insist on building up formaldehyde when, really, everyone knows that lab grade alcohol is what's used by the wretched and chafing bavians. Formaldehyde was never the best preservative of flesh. No, it was inferior to lab grade alcohol. Lab grade alcohol is what is used, and yet, in movies, it's formaldehyde that's got got the cache. What I like most about my boss is that she allows me time to speak with my PO. Your hands smell like your feet. You should be proud of yourself. Her hat had been damaged on a transatlantic voyage. Restrained by a time spent champing. I am in a stairwell near a rusted grate. I have sat on concrete. I am teasing through trash, looking for the tagged fish I had caught. A tagged fish is worth 500$ and a prize. I was supposed to have been the dump manager, but, instead, the position went to the volunteer firecaptain's son. I set all that still looked of worth in a shack I had put in a treetop.

Gargoylism is what she suffered from. She sat beneath a drizzle to annoy me. Here I am attempting to lead conversation. I have a ring on my finger that I move from my pointer to my thumb. I open her mouth and put it in. This is the decline. The humiliation. She reminds me of the Jeune Orpheline in the Cimitiere. She reminds me of someone lounging in Balthus. She boodled me. I was douped. Gouged. Chiseled. I saw that--since I had last seen her--thousands of freckles had grown on her arms and shoulders. Moles were their lieutenants. The word picture was not what we had wanted. This was another story of someone falling asleep with a cigarette. We tried to register our romantic consciousnesses on each other. Abysm. Glans. A derry, a ballad in the brick arm of a crumbling in and out building. She lived in a dome her father had built. She heard children say that they wanted where she lived. She started to grow a tree in her room with the hope that, eventually, it would burst through her roof and ruin her father's property. He gave her mother a disease. He gave his daughter a cadeau that had something soured in in.

I eructed her dish. It had been a ramekin of the darkest icecream chocolate. I am allergic to latex. As a surgeon, I had to switch to a different grade of glove. I go to hotel rooms and worry that whoever had made the bed had worn latex gloves as protection. I once went to a party--saw hundreds of latex balloons on a ceiling--and wondered when I'd start choking. My father and the things inside him--the rancors--the size of pullet eggs. I have a certain aversion to the unconcerned. I have balanced a stack of bricks on my head. Peevish. She was techy. We were in a submarine--on a tour on which we were supposed to see ruins. I gave her a trinket, but it impressed her too much. They had stationed me in the attic--and all I was to do was throw whatever I scooped into my arms into a dumpster. They had to move the ton of dirt from one place to another. He lived in a yert. He had been a balloon pilot. He had sent his daughter hundreds of miles away from him because he was certain that she was taking him on dates when they went to movies. They locked his son in the arcade at night and asked him if he could break in, if he could get any of the tokens out.

5 MWE crowbait for the corpses and sad flags

2008-09-16T16:24:00.000-07:00

Your carping. The pool was full of carp. Someone went off the bridge because he had thought he saw a baby in the river. The bridge had wrinkles in it. Things we could not get out--even if we put cars upside down. Now the pains of the relationship are in a shrub. I went to the southeast side of it to see if I could see other islands on the horizon. Nothing. I could see the reefs and animals they house. What was it but a prank? He came out of his room, stinking of the arcade. He had wooden soles on his boots and wooden palms on his gloves. He carved a wooden nose for himself because he was ashamed of how porous his nose was. He wanted one that, instead, was grained.

I am little if not exploitative. Give me a 500 dollar check, and watch me not cash it. Watch me exploit all that I can. Watch me do but little because I cannot see the toothpicks for the crates. The carp in the pond. The snakes underneath the door in the grass. Stomp on the door and flatten the snakes. He has written many essays about the preservation of nature, and yet he asked me to dump trash in his woods. The Nash Airflyte--perfect for sleeping in. I have exploited all that I can. My father made the mistake of putting me in his will. He should have known that all my letters to him were cobbled out of language I cannot take foolishly. I made them all to appear as little flames. I was an embarrassment. A let-down. Something that should be remembered like a handprint in clay, in concrete. I never wanted to portion our time together into one long remembrance. I changed my name to Had, then Agnus, then Thickset. It never really warranted my hoping to knock out my teeth. The dock had decayed.

She circumvolved while her sister slept. The dock had decayed. Instead of there being planks to walk on and posts for support, there were but posts. Just a bunch of posts coming out of the water. So she jumped from one post to another, pretending she was improving her balance. She did this. Jumped from post to post. But then she jumped to a post but just missed--came up short. She didn't land with her foot square on the post. Instead, just her toes hit, and she came up short. Her toes missed, bent back, broke. As she fell down, her top teeth hit the post and the top of her jaw was pushed to where her forehead might have been. The rink, the show, the theatre. We were on a rink, rollerskating. We did not have the patience to rent abstract animals for even a second. Her perkiness was more of a conceit. Her thoughtfulness was troubled because she could not control it with her hands. It was more of something she indicated with the reddening of her throat. Make some noise to conceal what you aren't doing. If the meal is conjoined, then you have to use knives to share it.

5 MWE The balloon was a decoy

2008-09-15T18:18:00.000-07:00

She would close her eyes and balance a dagger on each of her eyelids. The points of the daggers would not go through her eyelids. She would bounce. He cut the heads off hundreds of matches. He found the section of a birthday cake someone had not yet baked and put all those match heads into raw it. It was disgusting--how she ate icecream. She would load the whole thing onto a spoon and put it in her mouth. Then, in her mouth, she would turn the spoon upside down and run it in and out until the icecream had exhausted itself. Barefaced. This was not a time to be wakeful. It was when you should take whatever cobalt bottles you have and hide them in the gutters. She was aguised when we met. She wore layers. I was a posturer, sure. I was an attitudinarian. I never nixed it because I had what might have passed for a taxing idea of government. Here it is: impudence. There was an assembly. Instead of entertaining them, I began my act by begging. I wanted to know which ones of them wore silk undergarments and when. Remove all of them. Walk a jank step someplace to see if you'll develop an infection.

Choked on a rubber bolus. Tranky utterance. Time to get grandmother in a wheelchair and push her through grass. Get her to the end of a pier and then lift up on the gray handles of the wheelchair. Watch children hit their teeth. Figaro. Bink. The house was not longer what it was--it was a hut. In this corner of the hut, I make noodles. In this same corner, I wonder when I will finally follow the directions in a way that will help me to produce a feathered kite. My father and I went to a field to launch the orange rockets we had made. One had a camera in its nose, and we hoped it would take a picture of all the swimming pools in the neighborhood. We were worried the cloth over our heads would get wet in the rain. We were wondering if we would be able to restrict the movements of our necks with aluminum we cut off cans. I found weeds in the gutters along with cobalt blue bottles. I was supposed to use the droppers to put liquid in my eyes, but, instead, I blinded myself blint with a dropper. A heap of bats. A heap of civets.

Since you're bonny, let's play a game of pills. If I hit solid ones in first, then that's what I am. Striped, you are. No--pied. I had been scalded--but for good reason. I had been bit by the adder--but for good reason. I broke a plant in half and rubbed its seepings on my face. It made my face feel tight, and I could no longer express what I might have in an echoing room slicked with unguent. Bloated. Tumified. Blasted in front of his stupid electronics. He has no sense but to make his legs more bending than they should be. Her legs much softer than I had expected. No time to be desolate because we were at the beach. The trick that I had was to melt plastic against her leg. Now, I no longer believe that my behavior had ever been less that what could be drawn on a horseskin. As I rode the horse into the orange pen, the cuff of one of my pant legs caught on one of pen's hinges. The creature threw me into the tree. The tree had rocks on its branches. Someone had put rocks in all the tree's crooks, elbows, and crotches. Someone had balanced rocks on the tops of branches--and all these fell onto me. I saw a bear running across a snowfield. It was pursued by crossbow-holding things on snowmobiles.

5 MWE Bisect your prancing to go faster

2008-09-09T20:39:00.000-07:00

He is the candor that surpasses understanding. Crucifer, say my tellings to the pillar over there. On top of the pillar was the half submerged arm of a child lost for three days. He could not say what it was that rested on the back of his neck. The glum the candle left. The perms. The sperm. Potion is not an option. Lotion is not an oltion. She was antsy. She was nasty. What he saw were pines. What he saw was a penis. Now, I would like to shave the hair on my forearms off. I will shave it off dry--with no lotion--and try to catch the hairs into a porcine bowl. Its shape is a snout I sometimes hold down in seawater. She had a towel wrapped around her torso. The towel must have not been clean. A moon mansion. Moon cancers. Cancer in the mansion. Under the moon. On the moon. Behind the moon. Moon Type was invented as an alternative to braille. That one girl pretended to be blind, but she never considered the historical punishments for impersonating the blind. The blint. Her behavior was weanly.

The subterfuge of giving me a folded note. I was in my teens, but I was not weanly. Instead of calling me a bastard, they called me a mishap of the evening. They called me in time to stare at the Nymph of the Pave. She was there, on the pave, being a Nymph. I said that we should let her in. So what of my bastardy. So what of my pedomorphism. I was not enthralled by maturing yet. I took an interest in breeding. I took an interest in the culinary properties of yeast. I didn't want to tell jokes because I did not have more than ten minutes of material. And what if that time expired on me? What if I had nothing left? I was asked if I had another name. Instead of denying the one that was posed to me, I took it. I went with that name, though it had too much of the tongue in it when said. I had a tangle of hair I had kept off her. But what to do with this tangle? I could soak it in the spit of my mouth. I wanted to see how long her hair would take to dissolve. I had a clump of it, so, certainly, like a sugar sucker, it would break down in my mouth over time. So I took to sucking on her clump of hair. It didn't taste of anything. It did not wear down much.

Too much turn to the nose. Too much periwinkle. I wanted some skin trimmed because I had just lot weight. I wanted a cube taken off my underarm. I wanted to be passed shears. These shears I would use to take skin off my body. We sat outside on a park bench near a beach. She said she wanted to get more comfortable, so she straddled me. Ten people to a room because there were that many beds. Now, berserk. Now, cant a little. The cant of it. My face is shiny because I greased it just to rub against your chest. I will take off your shoe and rub your foot against my face. We sat at the feet of a sculpture.

2008-08-24T14:15:00.000-07:00

5 MWE

There was nothing to the way I stepped into the diseased tree. I had caught a tagged trout--and for that I won five-hundred dollars. The teeth in her head looked more placed than grown. All right, then groan for me. It was kismet. It was time for her coterie to unnail themselves from the diseased elm tree. Let me indemnify you against losses. The first loss: the nudists carried towels around with them. They were nude, but, if they wanted to sit down, they first spread down a towel. This was their way of offering a small killed thing. I was ready to cut the mole off her face. We had first met in the general store. For a while, stroked her stinking dog. It could have been in the weeds. I could have been the rust on a machine. The assassin was so charmingly others. Lying on the floor. Laying the limbs on the floor. The limbs from the diseased tree had the smell of cinnamon to them. The best bait for catching crabs was the comb of a cock. So I cut them all off. First, I killed the cock. Then, I cut off its comb and used it to catch crabs. I had a jar full of the combs of cocks. I had developed the best method for killing cocks. I had an orange traffic cone with the top of it cut off.

A black hat with a gold braid around its crown. I was a member of the union of hatters. We met in the attic of an old woman's house. This old woman, when she was younger, had been a nurse. Her job was to mix the formula for all the babies. She did this by mixing it all in one big metal tub. The smell of all that mixing beige white eventually got her sick. Her husband electrocuted himself because he liked it. I had dark blue pants with black stripes on their sides. I had red gloves. I had a leather strap tied about my neck. My mother painted the inside of her mouth red. I had a traffic cone with its top cut off, and, to kill a chicken, all I had to do was slide the bird in so that its head poked out of the cut-off top. Then, I would put the bird in the cone on its side and chop the animal's head off with a hatchet. Or a machete. Once, I had a broken plate tied to a broom stick, and that's what I used to cut the animals head off. I knew not to used hedge clippers because, so often, the chicken's neck would simply fold and not break enough. The children chased the headless chicken. They wore gray pants and shirts. The wore gray flannels and got chicken blood on it. Now roll in the road. Now laugh, as if flipping open your heads.

It was night, and I found a magnolia tree. It took me some time, but what I did was take lots of lengths of butcher string. I took one length of butcher string and climbed into the magnolia tree with it. It tied one end of the string around the base of a magnolia flower. Then, I got down out of the tree and tied the other end to the back of a bus. I did this over and again--at least fifty times. It is good to put the chicken in the traffic cone because, when it thrashes about after its head has been cut off, the cone makes it so that the chicken cannot ruin itself for eating and break its legs and wings. We would like the chicken not to be too broken before we eat it. They grew rabbits for eating, but they were too stupid to hang them out first. They killed them and ate them without hanging them out because they were too stupid. The place that I went to make phone calls was CLOCK FOOD. They had a phone in a little booth that I could use. They sold horrible greek salads and chicken fried steaks. I made calls but often couldn't speak for my stutter. Some call it a stutter and others a stammer. I was told that, in order to correct it, I should draw the first letter of whatever word I wanted to speak in my pocket. But this never worked. I was told to put my hand on her chest as I sang. I was told to sing the words that I wanted to say. I was told to imagine a ball in my mouth and I had to make it spin with my voice. But I would imagine a coin and would always ululate instead.

5 MWE

2008-08-16T15:01:00.000-07:00

Get this to my bed. I have written a letter that I would like you to take to my bed. What has happened cannot be put in a tree. She put it in a tree. I have made it so that my only friends are sitting in trees. Only my friends are in trees. I have not been able to be of any help. I had a book open in my lap, but then I took a knife to it. I put the knife in some mud. I cleaned it in ferns. I dried it in the sun. Next, my head was measured for pants. My waist was taken for the band of a hat. I put my face in a liquid. I put my head in a liquid. Describe a place. This place is desolate. It has brown rocks for its floor. My father

walks with his feet out. He would like me to know that "Garbage in--Garbage out" is the main thing to know. We walked to the top of a cliff. This was when I had not the strength to even sit in a boat. They had me take the boat out to find someone's shoes. My argument was that the shoes had already sunk. This was when they were drunk. They had drunk a lot of apple cider. He mixed pomegranate juice with grape juice. He ground something up for me, and I ate it. I did not have the patience to listen to what she had to say. She had to stand for most of the service because she had something wrong with her back.

Had next to no luck.

I went to find materials for my trip to the west. I wanted to eat something expensive, but I did not have the expenses. I rode in a car--and yet--somehow--the driver's side was empty. Instead, what was there was a black salamander with two rows of yellow dots on its side. A small child had drowned itself in that bucket. The child drowned itself, but please do not believe that it had done so with any agency. No. What really killed it was the design of the bucket. And the child had drowned not in water but in roofing tar. To have a child drown in roofing tar is a sad thing. And to think that its sister had seen it happen. On the side of the bucket, with a black pen, someone had written "behind."

Well, what if it wasn't black. What if its voice was so high and strange that most considered it unintelligent? Then she told me that she had said the same thing. But did you think

the same thing, I asked. The kid is a brat. I walked through a crowd because I had been in my room most of the day. I took pictures with a camera I had bought at an auction. I had outbid many people--all so I could take these pictures. It was on a bench next to someone. I had my lips clamped because the smell was so

bad. I had all that I wanted.

I wanted to know what this person had ever made--beside outfits. This person really seems to make only outfits. I would like to see her make something else for herself. I would like to have pants that are much more worn. A worn hat. I do not know who wore this hat. I am the one who is wearing the hat. I wear the hat because I do not want anyone else--when I am out--to see most of my head. There was a raincoat I found. I found it under a box in a field. I had come across a box in a field, and, when I lifted it up, I found a raincoat. My first idea was to get it stuck in a tree. Then, I tried to keep it on the bottom of a river with a rusty typewriter. He has not called me in over a month, and that pleases me. After all, all I ever do is what he considers mindless work. For me, though, it requires a lot of my energy. She had not yet developed an easy style. Her writing was not fun to read, but she had never mixed concrete or tried to get it plastered to the side of an interstate. The designation was not for them--it was for the government. See.

You can see the crowd from this far away.

We will hike up, but on our way down we will fight with each other. Let us inspect our underarms for bleach. This is where the sperm whale killed himself. The stink. What they loaded onto trucks fell off on the interstate. And it stank for months.

5 MWE a dangerous catamaran hilariously placed

2008-07-09T10:13:00.000-07:00

A broken femur. A banyan tree. A dead person sitting on the roots of a banyan tree. It is possible to be dead and still sitting. It is possible to be dead and still in the process of lying. He told me about two of his near death experiences. I didn't believe either of him. I spoke of going to Alcoholics Anonymous meeting with my fathers. I would help make the coffee and take out the seats. I once went to an AA retreat with my father. It was at the beach. I read a book about being lost for 76 days at sea. I beat everyone at Jenga because so few hands around there were steady. My father, when he walks, points the toes of his feet out. He is a narcissist. After he visited me, he was unable to leave his room for five days. He pissed and shat in plastic bags. He could not leave his room. When he visited me, he walked me to school and showed me how to tie knots. He fed me the cheapest food. He made an endtable and then, later, kicked me over it. I heard something down the hall. I had my door cracked open. I had my elbows on the carpet. In the morning, my elbows were still red. He had died under a banyan tree, and we held his services at the beach. The beach did not smell good that day. I found a piece of coral that must have been launched off the top of a building.

He was not comfortable enough to do anything. A daisy. Some goldenrod. A plucked silversword. We weren't supposed to be on the golfcourse at night. We broke open glowsticks and doused balls with them. We weren't supposed to ice skate on certain days. For the first time, I got hockey skates. He was so fat, when he laughed, he moved all the bleachers. He ruined his expensive shoes to impress me. He wanted to impress an menace that was present. He considered me a menace, but his mother plead with me to call her Alberta. I refused, so she broke a porcelain dish and used it do cut the evening's steaks. We put up a tent in the basement, and, inside it, sniffed things we shouldn't have. She didn't give me a cadeau because she was too self-conscious. He had the odd sensation that he could burn it over and again. Touched an oven. Had the odd sensation. Her speech was full of dactyls. She often inserted a full stop. Not one part of our bodies ever touched, so I started to despair off the side of the interstate. I wondered when we would see each other again at first--but then I became distracted by a motorcycle accident and two women who should have died in it.

He preferred the sound of the ratchet to her moaning. Always moaning about some kind of aloneness. It was exhausting, though he took exception to any use of the word exhausting. It was horribly exciting. Was it? Was it really that horrible? It wasn't that it was horrible. It was that it was exciting--and--with that excitement came an attendant horribleness. He had a front tooth chipped. He smoked cigarettes, so he really got grime in that front tooth chip. The wearing of a straw porkpie hat will not be tolerated in this home. His hat has a dark band of sweat. He would like to know how long it would take to feel catharsis. I tell him that better eulogies are on their way. My favorite thing I have ever heard. I have never heard anything better than better eulogies are on their way. It is just the thing, and it makes me feel as though I have just thrashed a childhood friend in the warm shallows of the beach closest to the house. She gave me a switchblade. I had begged for it. I also wanted a medallion. When I was a child, over and again, I drew badges. I made gauntlets for myself out of toilet paper tubes. I hated the bell choir, but I liked the heft of the big ones when I knocked them.

5 MWE a biscuit placed

2008-07-03T08:38:00.000-07:00

An excitable child. One of them was obese and had a skin disease. She missed a few days. First, he told me he was from New York. Then Connecticut. He let me into his house to show me his dog. He had sealed it in a cardboard box. I had trouble getting out of the driveway. I was to take the three of them to the open pool hour that night. There was a child. There was an animal. We killed a wild pig. We shot a donkey first and left it in a ditch. Then, wild pigs came to tear it apart. After that, it was easy to leave a car idling while we got into a yelling session. My point was that no one should have taken a picture. To me, it was obvious that that was the wrong thing to do. She had a lankness. A leanness. I slipped and fell on my hip. I ruined the bottom of my car by going over the construction too fast. My father bought a sailboat that seemed to be made of styrofoam. We took it out on a day that was too windy. Capsized nearly right away. I found a broken car in the forest. I helped him move his books from his college office to his electricityless shack two-hundred miles upstate. He often made fun of the way I spoke. I shelved books on the first floor only to be painted green.

Wretched. Not allowed to act. Left to lift the heavy stones. Left to dispose of the grills. They sat out and sang the songs they knew. The one child had awful dandruff, and the other children encouraged him to wildly scratch his head. It was easy to moisten the kitchen rag, wind it up, and use it as a whip. What animals were out there? There were bears and salamanders. Centipedes. The child was bitten by a spider. A spider bit the child. The child's flesh decayed. Such a creature should never be released near a river tainted with dye used in the coloring of vests. The vest had a patch on its breast. We wore vests when we went to the meeting. The first thing we were supposed to recount was a tragedy. What had happened was that I had pushed another child into a canal. He came up for an instant--covered with mud and with an eel around his neck--before he was pulled by the suck back down. The thread used in the vests was gold and silver. The dye from all this ran off into the river. If a child were to drink the water, then she would probably look for the tree that has a painted white line in its branches. That is how high the flood got up over one-hundred years ago.

He had the saur about him--something huge. Something with stippled skin brought about from too much leathering. The party took place on a first floor. Most of the people looked for a back deck but never found it. She--a monster--could have been tricked into buying a moped. The seat of the moped flipped back and revealed a compartment. An unregistered pistol. An amethyst. A geode not yet split--a thunderegg. I am not one to suffer fools, she told me. I asked her where she first heard that expression. She looked insulted. I told her that I did not mean to insult her. I simply wanted to know where she had first heard that expression. She turned away from me, and I saw that she had a knot of veins raised on the back of one of her calves. That detail made me want to grab the metal instrument and bury it where no professional would be sure to find it. I told her that I do not suffer fools well. I told her that I do not suffer fools if they are asking me to join them on a lake trip. I told her that I do not suffer fools when they show me their back molars and ask me if I see anything infected or sparkling. She said she had never taken an English class. Much more interested in pathogens. Well, do not allow my presence to be pathogenic, I told her. I was a suffering fool, and I could see that she was about to reject my presence.

5 MWE The blackguard, the rodent, and the rockfish

2008-07-02T18:15:00.000-07:00

The buvette was too dark to see inside. The floor smelled musty--as did all the tables. A tree grew in it. She was waspish. She had not bathed in several days, and she made sure to tell this to all of us. The floss in the mouth. He never dried his hair after he got out of the shower. He would dry off his whole body, but not his hair. He would stand in front of me. Red up his face. He said I could borrow his bike. Dilatory. Time dilated. This is when I was not intelligent enough. I had a difficult time putting three sentences together. He could not write a paragraph. He did not have an easy style--something that could be called journalism. He wore leggings that had gold thread up their sides. His father had considered jumping off. His father made a list of what he wanted and then waited for it. His father walks with his toes pointed out. When his father was young, he had spent a lot of time waiting for his siblings. He would sit on the roots of trees and eat persimmons. His father ate salvage mushrooms and canned pineapple. The man ate rice and beans and told his wife that he didn't like the smell she left on the couch. He trimmed his eyebrows too short often. He would end up next to a small cage full of too many green birds.

It was not drama. It was pageantry. I heard a sneck, so I looked up. Saw him holding a homemade weapon to my neck. I was to put gas in the van while he palmed the weapon. I was part of a performance. I was to sit and read while my friend played drums hooked up to waving amplification. Many of the people in the audience laughed at me--and not because I was reading something that was meant to be funny. They laughed at my pretension. The pretense of it. She was not talented when it came to writing. She did not write much, and what she wrote was not cohesive in the least. She was not one to touch a hot bit of metal. She heated up a knife on the electric coils of the stove. She heated it up and held it against her leg to leave a line of a mark. A roar. A rout. A rut. She was exceedingly snide as she ate dinner in the window. Just the other night, she had eaten with another person who had never driven a car into a river. Windows are down. She had an awful tattoo of a bird. She had an ounce of metal she kept in her pocket. The blind man was not aware of the tattoos he gave, but they were much sought after. Usually, the tattoo artist is the one who moves the metal pen. But this other tattoo artist refused to move the pen. He just held it, and it was up to his subjects to move under it. The people had to squirm themselves under him. He just held.

She passed me the snips because I wanted to cut something off. Essex, who could not say certain words because of injuries done to his mouth, asked aloud what kind of tree that was. The tree, which did not exist outside that one block of property near the defunct train, smelled to awful to stand under--even if you were desperate for shade. A little inane. A little insipid. I like most the writing he does after he has done something. I do not like what he writes when he just stews. He writes too thinly about the abstract. We found a can underneath the floor. I attached myself to the wall. We got the wrong bolts first and had to go back to the store. Before I died, I wanted to see a rib of mine outside my body. I wanted to have it until it yellowed. I wanted to scrape out some of my own yellow poppies and put them in my mouth since all I saw were wires. There were wires, sure, but what if I shot a flower into the sky with a rubberband. My mother had to put the rubberbands she got for our business under lock and key. My father put a nice bruise into my mother. Internal bleeding. The giving of a bizarre disease.

5 MWE the darkening gave us the most trouble

2008-07-02T12:07:00.000-07:00

She wore a brunchcoat, so she was mostly undressed. Kudzu outside. Banana polka. Mongeese. The mongeese are out at night and the snakes in the morning. She picked me up perfunctorily. No feeling. He was seeping a little. He should be more careful when he seeps. Although many of the takers had stains on their hands, they still lined up for their chance to taste what was called the invisible sauce. He was not helpful on the dock. He dislodged his body from the wharf when he learned that his lottery ticket was made of mostly cotton. She had a collie dog, which was missing one of its front legs. She slapped her brother who never knew the difference between a solo and a duet. She slapped her brother, who was much to late to even pet an animal. The day's creature was the snake. This is what I thought: discord. I had waited for some time, but, really, I never thought that I would get to meet the person behind the hanging rug. As it turned out, he wasn't friendly. He was, however, attractive. He smelled of the lawn. I was yoked to another contestant.

The guyer joked too much with me. He was a blackbirder. He had stolen children. He put them to work on an island. The was a Phallic Rock, and the idea was to get your picture taken touching it. Or not touching it. Slouching away in disgust. Running away in distrust. We cleaned out the second floor as we did the first. We found cases of silverware. Odd things pressed in tin. Jade grapes. Lots of jade grapes. Porcelain white dogs with metallic ribbons streaming all over their body. The point was for me to hurry up. He ate the Captain's Salad for lunch. Don't be a milksop. The dead branch that's in the tree and waiting to fall is a widow maker. I let myself into my room. I went down wooden stairs. I had locked myself out of the laundry room, but I managed to let myself in with an bent apart coat hanger. There was a dictionary in the bureau and some photos from the winter previous. The Lifties had to sit in a cold shed for seven hours. They were given unlimited chemical heating pads to put in their boots and gloves. The cheapest one to buy came in thirty. We stole hair dye to dye our hair.

She was much too flossy. We ended up in a treehouse, and its floor was made of wood. Her hair smelled of cigarettes, and a sequin got caught in my teeth. There was a bright light attached to the top of the building. It projected out to a field. If we kept our bodies close to the wall of the building, then we were in the dark. She told him that he looked like a man on the back of a book. She had what was called a not to the point aspect. The room had furniture found at a thrift store in it. She had made drawings of boxes exploded. Not at all interesting. Not at all anything by pretense wrapped in what's derivative. We got on the car's hood with the intent of destroying it. Before they kissed, he was polite enough to warn her that some of his back teeth are missing. Do not be alarmed by the gaps. The drinks he bought were for himself and no one else. He had holes in his sweater, and, on the recording, his only job was to sing the cracking back up. It had been a long while since he had last driven a car. I asked to me let out. I went in the woods and found a hammock. It was made of canvas and full of needles. Someone was next to me and then under me. Maybe a little too serious. Maybe a little too pendent. Pendant?

5MWE colic was easy to pick up that day

2008-07-01T19:47:00.000-07:00

This is your flophouse. Sorry to disappoint you, but your tapestry is not ready. You will have to wait another fifteen years. The boy was on the floor of the airplane when it rolled. He did not mean to be flippant when he answered his friend's incoherent letter. It really made little sense. He had found it taped above his door with black tape. He wound tape around his middle. He glued his containers shut because he knew he would not need them for a long time. They met in the art museum to learn about art. They watched slides and took notes. Some of the people there were artists, but others were more interesting in being in a warm place for two hours. He followed the directions closely but still became lost. He was on the pond of ice. There was a tap. A throw. He was arch. Do not clap the dog on its back. If you do, it will bite. Go over the bridge where they once threw the baby off. Ride the bus for most of the day. Ride the bust for most of the day. I would like to complain about the color of the water in the fountain that is on the corner of the vacant lot no one ever thought to manicure with anything but a spice garden. He held tomatoes he had made. She was on the dais, and tired. He was on the bench. Here, the openings of gates. He was proud of himself when he opened it. That gate.

The nepotism was as thick as gravy. Yes, that was a word that he knew. He worked at a dump, but he salvaged whatever he could. He made a plywood room next to his dump office. In this room, he put all the things that he saved. Some of these things worked fine--a bike, say. Others of these things were but a washer away from working fine. Or a twisted bit of wire. But the gravy kept him from a better position. There was a horse standing on the top of a building. We did not know how to get it down. One of us suggested slaughtering it in the sky. Right next to beams that shot down. We couldn't have choked on our meals because we couldn't make as many sounds. We were people who had the throats of chimps. The offspring of a famous person. Dive under the wave. The number was printed on the back of a plate. The number was the one that told her where she'd buy her next wardrobe. She was disappointed because it would be got on the cheap.

Remember when we had to make the formula for the babies in one bog tank? To test its warmth we put out whole arm in. I like my job. My boss is great. She takes me out to lunch. She does not mind if I am on parole. She does mind that I meet my PO at a time that does not conflict with my work. 4:30, say. She doesn't mind if I have to miss work because of court every once in a while because court is every once in a while. But she wants me to meet my PO officer at a time that does not conflict with work because I have to meet my PO so often. Your hands smell like your feet. I hope that makes you feel proud about yourself. He pays the entire fare, but he rides for only half the time. It makes him like an aristocrat amongst us. She lets us go an hour early if we've done our work for the day. I could get you such a position so long as you agree to inflate my bed and welcome me into it. I would like you to put sage in my sheets and clip the hair around my ears when I sleep.

5 MWE From the rest of the grind

2008-06-30T13:37:00.000-07:00

The seat was too high. Lucky for me, though, the seat was on mud--so all I had to do was wait for it to sink. Her smell might have been what I expected. I had looked for rubber tubing but couldn't find it. The strawberries that we had fermented a little so we turned them into jam. The trailer we were in was silver and shaped like a pill. We went to colonial Williamsburg. This was when the sun was up. This was when the night was something I had to learn to see in. We had a cooler that had illegal things inside it. I spoke with everyone at the dinner table for three hours. Then, finally, exhausted, I asked them if I could leave. I put myself to bed, but I still heard them through my walls. I couldn't help but to pretend to still converse with them. I had the opposite of what must have been an imagined malady. I really was sick. I had to sick on the side of the interstate. I wondered who cut the grass. My grandfather in a large leather chair. He has a bed in his office, and I am under it. I am hiding. I hear them call him Dick. I would like to know if what I have seen will ever get me a profit. I would like to know what I have learned. That I am not ready to work outdoors should not be a revelation to you. The machine split logs hydraulically.

Both of his parents were from Arkansas. His father woke him at three in the morning to practice the piano. He should have done it earlier. His idea was that we would clean windows in rich neighborhoods. We would ask a dollar for each one. His idea was that we would breed German shepherds. His idea was that we would hide a camera in plants to catch who had been stealing from us. Her response came to me much too quickly. I wondered what, for once, made her respond to me in what I thought was the normal time. I dug a trench around myself. I was unsure as to what I should eat. I had never seen what was on the plate in front of me. Her chest was a plate. I was too small to operate the vehicle. I was not strong enough to operate the vehicle. I very much regret having rented out the lower pasture to the snowmobile concern. She is known in the area for taking people to court. She is one to step in the green excrement of geese. She brought me to the lake and expected me to get in. The water was cold. The bottom, slimy. I was much too young to know how to operate anything set on the more adult settings. The deck overlooked the woods. We rode in the back of a 1950s Mercedes convertible. My favorite was when they threw rocks at us in it. I wondered how long it would take to become proficient in the manner of speaking I wanted to learn. These words would stink.

She wore an old softball tshirt and a dress. She tucked the shirt into her dress and she was number fifteen--a powerful number in the kabbala but not in the batter's box. She was afraid of whatever came from another human being. Each human was being rude. Each human was being stubborn. Each one was on the road but wasn't buying anything. There were stalls, and each one had a different vegetable to buy. He put his hand roughly on my neck and asked me what to think. There was another hand in my armpit. One on the back of my neck. One on my arm. When my bed was invaded by him, I looked out the window and saw what must have been an alarm on the side of a bank. Both the sidewalk and the street had snow on it. No marks in the snow. It was sidereal. It was of the stars. The park was so vast, and I was stuck in it for so long, I eventually had to learn how to read the stars. I spent much time in the park. A man played with his dog in the park. I watched a man play with his dog in the park. He would bounce a blue ball, and the dog would catch it. This happened repeatedly, but then something unusual happened. The dog lunged for the ball and then fell to the ground. The man leaned over his dog. He put one had on the dog's chest to pin the creature to the ground. With his other hand, he reached into the dog's mouth. I saw him leave the dog and run to our house. He knocked on our door, and Mother answered. He asked her if he could borrow a kitchen knife.

5 MWE decrease your trampling before you befriend me

2008-06-28T12:15:00.000-07:00

The extensiveness. How wrong it was for us, how wicked-hearted. He did not open a box quickly. He would often take three days. He had a sheet rock knife he used to cut through cardboard. He condoned defeat when it rarely suited him on the beach, which wasn't made of all silica but had a lot of plastic in it. A large portion of the world's sand is not plastic. Not a loophole, a hoophole. That is, it is something for you to go through--but it's also a hoop. Another hoop to go through. The hoop was magnetized on its inside. Did you close the flue? Before you left, did you close the flue? You didn't. Perverted. Off to the side. Bespectacled with something made in the dump. She was too lax with me, but that's what I had looked for in a person. I had looked for that and found her. We packed the car and left at night. We listened to something on a tape about lions. They were friendly at first, but, later, the took apart that entire family. They had set up a zagreeba around the campsite. Amazing how that little fence, that little zagreeba of twigs, is often enough to keep out elephants. A creature ran through our camp.

She retroflexed me while I was asleep. Against my wishes. I went to a party where everyone ate too many strawberries. I knew how to imagine what was in their stomachs, and what I saw convinced me that I had not been kind enough to the men that I had met at that tiny busstop. Who would have known that one of them would become a turtle egg poacher. Another learned to order things at a restaurant in a charming way. I did not feel strong enough to lift bags of marbles. These were big bags, and if I were to drop them, I was certain I would never get called back to sing for Jerimp. Jerimp was not intelligent. He was not responsible when it came to anything except getting me on time to my haircut. I had a standing appointment for every other week. When I sat in a seat, I was shocked by how much cardamom I smelled. Where did this come from? I was to ask the mother of the five children how she got them. She said that, five times, she had been looking for something else. Would you open a louvre? What about jalousies? The ends of them must have been aluminum, for they bent so easily.

We played naughts and crosses for our worthwhile lives. Her speech was not measured, but her income was. She gave me a bit of money every month--just so long as I didn't mention what I knew about her hair products. I knew what she put in them before they sold them. Not all of her income was steady. Some of it had to be found in grain silos. Some if it could have made a doorknob a little too slick. Be in space. Wrap your hand in plastic. Look for space. Don't be pathogenic around your children. Take a song and change most of it. Stand up and sing it in the place painted white. If you were to turn, then you would see a large organ painted white. The rule is that you have to wear red gloves to play that organ. The rule is that you have to wear red gloves to touch her. Before she touches you, she will want to blacken her hands with soot. She will want to walk in a gulch and belch. I did not like how she sold all that I had made privately. All that--I had intended to throw it in a river. I had wanted to lift something--but I couldn't place it. Sounded like he had just awoken. Terrible, ugly, shocking. I was too necessary to the operation to be called a remnant.

5 MWE cramped in a tablecloth you should have laundered

2008-06-28T11:52:00.000-07:00

I was not skillful when it came to handling the casks we had stored under the house. They were ungainly. I stuffed myself between two trees, and what resulted couldn't have been any more earthy. I was told not to speak with her anymore. This was because she had turned her eyelids inside out. I'm sorry, but I was unable to meet her at the library today because, really, I lost my way on the most obvious street. There were sculptures in the park. I found writing. Tankage. Tonnage. I was living in the residence illegally. I was an illegal sublease. A spider's venom rots flesh. I simply put the legs of my bed in juice glasses. This, to prevent spiders from crawling in my bed. Was the torpex we found an explosive? We found a fire, and we couldn't put it out only with fog. She was allergic to chocolate. She was allergic to ozone, so we made her a special bread. I will not report anything in a satirical manner. When my history lapsed, I felt so much more comfortable around those in my workshop who couldn't read my handwriting.

Little wild plants. Snowpeas. We were lucky we had vacant lots on either side of our property. She entered the building painted violent yellow. She thought that, if she were to buy five tickets, she would have a much better chance to win the lottery. Her winning tickets. Yellow wild plants. Purple wild plants. Wild Columbines on my great grandfather's grave. My grandmother showed me where my great grandfather was buried. She could not walk well on her own, so I gave her my arm for balance. I gave her half my body as a cane. She led me through the cemetery. She led me right over the graves of other people. I tried to pull her over more to the paths, but she continued to lead me right over graves. This is not what I had intended. She was on her porch. She would ridicule just about anyone who walked past. She always made fun of appearances. She could be cruel when it came to any irregularity of the face. I had a hand spread. I lagged behind her because I did not want to hear too well what she had to say. She asked me something in a tone sycophantic. I halted but didn't hesitate. I knew I'd have to go to the dentist soon. I had to prevent liquid from spurting out of my face. She had a dagger. She had a handcart.

She wore shoes that were easy to slip on, and she stood on a hose. He had tomatoes he had grown in his hands. We set our tent on a hill and dug a trench around it. We had string up. We had tinsel. Though she couldn't remember when she had last shouted across a gulch, she did know how to tie all the knots found under K in the encyclopedia. Her home could not be seen from the road because she had put up so many blankets. What she often put up didn't stay up for long. Especially string. It was now that she became frustrated with everyone on the street. She could have released a bag of bees on them then, but she didn't. She found a marble room and sat on a bench. She saw that old bits of metal moved toward her. They wanted a pet. She went back to her hose and her man with the tomatoes. They were all unintelligent. They all knew how to spell, but they couldn't tell you which was was east. And don't even ask about southeast. The spoke French. She was embarrassed when she found her pygmy goat out of its cage. She would like to get a small sheep for it. She would make the goat's clothes out of wool, and she would feed the sheep milk from the goat. She would pet them both on her porch and wonder how long she should leave her dried beans overnight. A hideous occasion she knew was coming.

5 MWE a father scudded over the waves

2008-06-27T11:13:00.001-07:00

Our home was static. Nothing in it moved--not even us. I wore black dancer's tights. I wrapped plastic tubing around my arms and tried to fit objects in my mouth. First, I lit the humunculus. Then, I made something of an embryo with ferns and rusty bolts. It smelled of metal in my hands. I gave out trinkets because I had made them. My job was to set whatever had been wronged right. I started by reupholstering the chairs. I had learned to do leather work. I did not hide behind the donkey because, today, I had caught my allotment of fish. The other day, I had had to hide because I had not caught enough fish. And what I had caught was much too small to feed an entire schoolhouse of children and mice. I told my darling that I would have to leave because my stomach ailment had worsened such that I forever craved porcelain. I felt cold, so I made a sweater for myself. I did not know how to buy wool so I made my sweater out of plant tendrils. I sought her help but did not find it. Instead, what I found was her veil--one that I had given her--in an empty room that had a For Rent sign in its window. Do not be brattish. You'll get your turn at the machine.

An eelworm. A nematode. The boys on the wrestling team got ringworm on their faces because of the rancid mats on which they gamboled and writhed and dreamt of rope fights. I had brass on my bed. I had nickel on my dress. She wore a dress that, on its hem, had lead trinkets. She wore a hat that had metal charms dangling off its brim. She bought a large container filled with dates and ate most of them before going to whatever was most fashionable that season. I was not ready for anything painful. And yet what I got was painful in the extreme. An outpouring of garbage on my hands. I could not raise my hands above my head because they had so much garbage on them. I found a fan--someone very supportive of what it was I was feigning. I had an outflow of flux. I had a bandage on my arm because I had just given plasma for forty dollars. Now I had enough money for a bike. I wanted a bike because I wanted to put test animals in my tires and ride around. This was a splurge for me. I had never owned such rapid transportation. Once, though, I had sat in the back of a car that had leather seats. They creaked and were a little cracked. I saw that the driver was aglow, so I asked him what made him so pleased. He told me he had caught a tagged fish, and that that catch had made him 500$.

He didn't have faith. He had faithery--it was all fake. A pretense. And what did he have faith in? He believed, full-hearted, that if a dog were to bite him, it would immediately let go. Same with a snake or an eel. A komodo dragon. I was certainly not handsome. Adonic. I was homely. I had scars on my chin. I had hair in the wrong places. The smell that came out of my mouth would not be attractive if I were to go tango dancing. So I hid. I got under a structure and hoped I would not be found. I found a sweaty man in a field at night. I tried to wake him, but he wouldn't. I asked if he was okay. As always, we shared what we had dreamt. She was in it this time. We looked for symbols. The only symbols that counted were ones that had not been made by a building renovated for the surge perceived. Chilly. Wintry. Gelid. Ways to describe a night with me. Here comes the decline. The decline angled down into the ocean and into an ancient trench. The submarine, on a line, trailed a styrofoam cup. The pressure of so many fathoms about it shrank it. Take it to third grade.

5 MWE Stir the bog

2008-06-23T14:50:00.001-07:00

Very little was disappointing. I would degrade myself--but in a way I could tolerate. The road smelled pink. My prescience had left me. My mother has never been called stocky. Though I strained through the morning's exercises, come afternoon, I had a glaze on my face that betrayed my keeping a ten year old secret. I had set chokers on trees. A dangerous job--but I needed the money to put a downpayment on a swimming pool. I wanted to swim with my animals and smell chlorine. The house was on the side of a hillside. It took us days to clean the property. We took days. I had crookback and defacement. I was mutilated, unmackly. I was wrong to look at, but I did such an excellent job. Have me fold a napkin, and, without doubt, I will hide some little present in the creases. He did not understand the meaning of waves. He was not ready to launder his clothes. He had just broken with her, after all, and he wanted to wear what he had worn through it. A canker could have been pleasant. He had yellowish liquid to put on and numb his canker. He had no way of describing the way it tasted. Bricks that are slick.

My body disembodied. Not because of violence--because of discouragement. I sit on a chair that, I myself, had refinished and re-upholstered. Little brass nails. A hammer. Stretching. I had caned a chair. I had done some needlepoint of a parrot. I went to her parents' house because she had invited me to a party. The idea was to press people against the walls and slide down. Writhe on the ground. She showed me the dresses she had been working on in her basement. Then a drive. Some dancing. She asked if she could kiss me, but I wondered what kind of permission would have slid across a room so quick. The drive took us to a building that had once been above ground. On stilts. I became sick from the breakfast she had made me. We had agreed upon an exchange. She would make breakfast, and I would burn our clothes. We had committed a robbery in them. I showed her a river and some rocks on which I had slipped. I showed her a horse that had thrown me and a beautiful woman with an amazingly raised mole on her chin. Her brother did not like me. He did not like that I asked him how he had developed such a strong grip. Once, on the bark of a dog, I saw her brother. He had an odd shadow on his head, and, only later, he told me that he had painted it on. He wanted to be a bit more obscure than I am. Well, look no further than this bucket.

She had a depression on her head. A dent. My grandfather did not know that I was in his room with him. He had a blanket about him. He was tying rope about his waist. He combed his hair and wrote something on a notecard. He had a pen. In private, he often called me The Waif. He said my eyes had nothing but dopey trombones in them. We went to watch kickboxing and were told about a man in shorts. I could hardly concentrate because a woman had a child that I thought I recognized. I had never seen her before, but I was certain that I had seen her child. I could not tell what sex the thing was, but I knew that sex had produced it. The child was wicked and godless. It did not watch kickboxing. Instead, it looked at me. The mother, I knew, was in a relationship with one of the men fighting. Looking at her face, I couldn't tell which man she wanted to win. I had heard about new knots being tied. I knew how to look in the encyclopedia and find the knots in K. I knew how to tie all those. And I had borrowed books from the library, so I knew how to tie knots. But many new ones have been invented. Certain people are innovators and the rest take their shoes off and cool their ankles in a water fountain.

10 MWE

2008-06-23T10:01:00.000-07:00

The toy we played on was a metal shoe. We could retreat to courts when we were finished. A woman watched us from a building. The building had been constructed 2,000 years ago--but just yesterday, renovations had been finished. The dog that he had was named Mr. Chubbs. The dog liked to have a cardboard box on its head. Yes, we had a hedge. We could look through it. The neighbor's daughter told me that her father whipped her mother across the face with a chain. She did not lose her teeth, really. What happened was that her teeth were knocked out by great violence. The children were allowed to draw on their walls. The horrible machine was constructed mostly by children. The machine is horrible. Children had made it because their hands are so small--and horrible machines have lots of crevices that are hard to get to. And why are they hard to get to? They are small and not greasy enough. A family stopped near Niagara Falls. They ate a meal and used a restroom. They saw the preserved remains of a mummy. Somehow, this mummy had been left at a restaurant in Niagara Falls. Thirty years later, it will be discovered and placed in a Smithsonian. We had a straight way to go for at least three hours. I had a difficult time going to sleep because my mouth tasted too much of mint. When the reception finished, I found the first tree that I saw. I reached down and touched a root because I wanted to sense what something alone meant. Did it mean to do harm to me? He drank a glass. He placed a letter. He asked a question that had both and easy and a difficult answer. He felt fine going down stairs, but, when he went up them, he felt horrible pains in his head and chest. This all occurred when something inconstant was happening. I did not unhorse myself. What I had to do was undog because I wasn't feeling well. I would touch a pelt and not know it to be such. I would touch skin, and it always felt oily. I did not harm anyone, but I did manage to get mangy. I would like to ask what was it that pulverized your arm. My father told his friends that he would be able to break my arm by squeezing it. He said all he had to do was grab my forearm and squeeze. Certainly, he would break one of the bones in there. He would not sit on benches, and yet he had no trouble sitting on a chair and spitting between his legs. That watery spit. That antique chair. Grass he had seeded and mown. He was a little too eager when it came to watering anything--even me.

We took too long to paint a gate. We didn't know how to do it. We started by sanding it. We took off some rust. Then, with brushes, we painted it. But it took us so long. We shouldn't have sanded or used brushes. We should have just sprayed it. The water was behind the house. It went out into a river. We got into boats, and people on the shore threw rocks at us. This was all before fireworks. Someone was shot with a pistol because he stole limes. I had limes in my pockets, but I had not stolen them. The signage was all handpainted. I walked until dogs followed me. I found houses that were ruins. They crumbled into each other and made a larger structure. This structure did not look made, but it was habitable. When I first went into it, I was impressed by its blue light. Its green light was not as interesting. I had a water pistol, which I used to squirt lightbulbs and sockets. My head was something that people in the neighborhood looked for. My head was full of portent, they believed. They saw things around it. They saw things squinch out of my nose or ears and eyes. These things would predict the future. They either looked for my head or didn't. I had heard of a performance. This performance was not being put on in a hall or a theatre or a space. Instead, it was in someone's home. We, the audience, were to watch by leaning against the walls. Part of the show took place in a half bathroom. We couldn't all watch in there, of course, so we had to send one representative. At intermission, that person had to tell us what had happened in the bathroom. And what had happened? A Roman Style suicide. The child drew a warm bath, got in, and got himself open deep at the insides of his elbows. What was funny, though, was that red did not come out of him. Instead, what came out was bubbles. Soon, the whole bath was filled with bubbles. A real bubble bath. And these things soothed him, convinced him to get out of the bath and seek attention. His problem was that attention was never anything that he sought. Instead, what he looked for was rockets. Rare birds. Anything of value in the gutter. Very often, he thought he saw dollars on the pavement. When he looked a second time, however, these pay dirts always ended up as leaves or bits of newsprint. He saw that a man named Essex appeared in print. This man went into the room of his lover on the pretext that, in her room, he had left his handkerchief. Then, in the room, he killed her.

The nutriment was not sufficient. Instead of using manikins, the department store used skeletons. I was the one who thought adding flesh might be a good idea. The store had been owned for 3,000 years--long before any of us ever wanted to grow plants on the roof. We grew things that were carnivorous, of course. We grew thorned things--or things that had leaves that could slice open a shin. Just a tiny gobbet of food was what I wanted. I had wrapped myself in the sheet I had slept under sick for eight days. I was sick for a while--and all under that sheet. But there I was, the sheet wrapped around me, looking for any small gobbet. I had finally gotten a job at a deadhouse. My job was not in it, though. Instead, I was to manicure all the plant- and rock-life outside. I suggested that we put skeletons in tanks of water. Then we'd run bubbles through them and they would dance. Their jaws would open and close as if speaking. We could make a tape to play with them. We could make them sound as if they were singing. There was a moroseness in the way she turned on the lights in our apartment. She would reach up, but not all of her would lift. She had just bought that red sweater. She had an embarrassing tattoo of a fish. We are just not the correct biology, she told me. She worked with the upper case D deaf. She had invented new signs. We had to watch the movie on my computer. My favorite scene was when they were all in the hospital. It was there that I saw the little boy was the one who had stolen the drugs out of the armoire. Her favorite scene was when a certain man kissed. Then we kissed and her comment was, What is this? A slow dance. I excused myself and built a staircase to a ledge. I bluffed, and she bought it. I had the impassivity of an animal that never knew it was domestic. Here is my apology: a vase of fluid. Here is what I invented: a vase of fluid. I told him that his candles sent off strange scents. He said the reason for that was that they had his skin in them. The daystar. The commencement. I saw the moon in the day that day. The tree had lots of ferns growing at its base. On the undersides of the ferns were lots of grainy red dots.

5 MWE Prone Apron

2008-06-22T22:27:00.001-07:00

This bothered. It was a bother. I exercised near a road when it was hot in the morning. Never had I drank for a child. Here was a child asking me to drink a glass of something she had colored. This was not a false offering. I asked her what her mother was like. Did her mother have a calculator with plastic buttons? Or with metal? Did her mother have buttons on her blouse? We got into an argument. The road had little on it that I wanted to keep. So what. I didn't maraud, and I didn't penetrate. I had a letter of introduction. I had it for a time before I lost it. I stole a lime, but a man saw. He took me, twisted my arm. A woman leapt upon him, and he took out a pistol. It was now that another man beached a boat. He had animals on the back of it--animals I had no way of naming, but I held my hand out anyway. I remember having watched a monkey eat a strawberry. I remembered being tough with the children who wanted to eat early. There was very little that was useless in the pantry. This was what I was seeing.

The balcony was above an ocean. The balcony was above brush. She was down there--below the balcony. My aunt had to wrap me up before she took me outside. She left me in the driveway. I did not want anything that had to do with shoving a stick into an animal. I saw very clearly then that I was not intelligent enough to impress my grandfather. When he put me on his shoulders, I made it so that my hand served as a mask that obscured his face. In this manner, we robbed a bank. They were able to identify me, the child, but they were not able to place my grandfather. The haircut he wore he got in France. He had to gall to kill the small pet bird in the lobby. He did not have the appropriate boots. He had teeth in sections. He had a nose replaced. He had parts of himself implanted. Later, he had these implants removed and replaced with whatever was more current or of the season. He sat in a trailer. He sat in an old fire engine. He had won the fire engine at an auction. His idea was that he would be able to drive it in parades. This would be good advertising. I hated it that--every time I threw an amulet up--it got caught in a fir tree. I remember being so worried about escaped horses and spider bites. Very early in the morning. Not enough bread to be made.

He made shackles for cats. Not ready to be a burden to anyone, he ate all that he had grown in his garden. The time was too salty for anyone to remember what happened next. Get ready to take a long time walking to the asylum. Her bedroom was a charnel house. He closet full of poppies. What was it that got her to remember her father's wish? He had wished to be the boss of some men. He never had a complaint. He was compliant for a time that verged on record. We played boardgames to be quiet. We went to most of the zoos in the area but saw a small percentage of animals. When something got caught in a tree, we often decided that it was then we should go to the Jersey Shore. This was when breasts. We did not have the legs to make such jam. We were never ready to eat, though we had clean silverware. My job was to boil our meals. But was it illegal? It was. We stayed in a dorm room that had posters of things we could have never expected. Get ready to be struck was what I had been told by yet another man. This one wore a hat that smelled of salt sweat. I would like the cod. The Blue Fish. My turn to rip the jacket.

5 MWE

2008-06-20T09:18:00.000-07:00

He lived next to pumpkins, strawberries, and fir trees. He lived where the ground could have been the back of a large animal. Just a short walk would take him to countless abandoned buildings. Abandoned by whom? Who abandoned? He had a stone wall that pranksters often pushed down. They backed their truck into his stone wall for a laugh. Then, he'd have to spend a few days building it again. He didn't want to cheapen any of the things that he hated. He did not want to get a crew together for any adventure. He hoped that any of the growing things near him would be blighted. Blighted by what? By whom? By kids in a truck? He took a stool with him out to a field of mud. He set the stool in the mud. He sat on the stool and slowly sank. Instead of sitting on the stool, he was sitting in mud. He did not dislike animals--especially larger animals. He did not mind that two boys often launched model rockets in one of his fields. He did not mind that they flew line-controlled airplanes. He liked to see them spinning round and round and dipping their airplanes.

No chance she would stop being agog. She was a substitute for a sister. She lived in a shack we had off our house. The shack had a kitchen and shower in it. If we wanted to, it would be easy for us to put the kitchen in a box. And the shower was orange from some growth she never bothered to clean. She went to school, but, on the weekends, she watched me to make sure I didn't drown. It would have been easy for me to drown in a pool, a tub, or even a sink. I had the part of myself I most hated on display. Or it was in a display--but not encased. The three of us children became adults in ten years. We were strict with each other but not with our parents. We did not like to mix concrete. If we had to, we ate our meals outside. Sometimes, one of us would steal away to the basement. And why? To sit very close to the humidifier. I liked to sit next to sweaters as they dried on the wooden rack. What might have been my indifference was actually a pain I had in my thigh. I was not ready to eat grapes. I enjoyed the entire bowl of nectarines. She was agog because she managed to grow her underthings. This was when we were not frightened. When we could smell metal on our hands one day, plant life on another.

I denied having had a foretaste. A lie. There was a fence that prevented an attack for one day. An animal pushed through a barbed wire fence because of a large wave. A wave with a fifteen foot face. A wave with dirt from the prairie in it. A wave with playing cards of flint in it. To have such a wave go over you. The tornado took tiles off the roofs. Shrapnel. What I would like to see is more bodily churning. I would like to hear the insides of people squinching. This is what it was: riotous. There were children in the park. The park had kites tethered to its ground. None of the children were attended by their parents. Their parents were on an airplane. Their parents were test pilots for a new design of airplane. The children found dogs tied to tree branches. So they released the dogs--dozens of dogs. The dogs were thin and thankful to be released. The children, with the thousands of dollars their parents had left them, bought food and toys for the dogs. They went to whatever stores were nearby. The dogs did not want to eat, however. The dogs sought out gutters in the street, and found openings in the curb that would take them underground.

5 MEWL

2008-06-19T18:59:00.000-07:00

She did not let the height of her stack of silk diminish. She had a face that had once been broken. Imagine the front of her skull a mask--and that mask smashed and broken. The front of her skull had been broken--but it was broken under the skin. The instrument that had been used did not break the skin, but it did smash the front of her skull. Her face. She had a child who loved to take his clay and make noses for skulls. That skulls did not have noses did not bother him. He simply enjoyed to make noses for skulls, and she was always so impressed at how human a skull began to look once it had a nose. Humans are called Homo sapiens, of course, but there are some people who believe that humans, instead, should be called Homo loquens. Humans are really not all that wise. But they can speak, so perhaps loquens is a better fit. She had to have a fake face put in. She was lucky because they were able to make her a fake face to replace all that had bee smashed. All they had to do was take an old mask that she had and break it in a chalet. The chalet had a low price when they first bought it. It was right on the lake, so they knew it would be a good thing to invest in. Birds were what died near them.

Someone had tied a dog to the cross at the top of the church. It was the prank that was so often played. I lived on Church Street, and I woke to a dog. Someone had tied a dog to the cross that's on the top of the church. I went to cut down the dog. It was a black lab maybe. Someone had tied it to the cross. It was tied with its belly to the cross. Someone had once tied a pig to the cross. Someone had tied little goat. All sorts of animals tied to the cross. I wondered if the person who did this also shot out the signs on stores. Would this person shoot out lights? I told the child that this is the factory where they make people. This is where they make most of the people in the world. I told the child that, before the people are released, they all have to eat a special meal. If they don't eat that meal, then they become murderers. That's why there are so many murderers in this town. Not enough of them eat the meal that they are supposed to eat after they are made. What is in the meal? What of it? He was told to eat a piece of quartz. He was told to swallow marbles and throw them up. He was told to hide the marbles. He was told to plant something in marbles and make it grow. What I never understood was how a machine could have so much waste in it. I stand next to any machine, and I wonder when it will tell me which way to the round board.

Her bust, in my eye, was unflagging. I saw what was about to happen in a dream. Because I have synaesthesia, I realize that it is not unusual that I am ambidextrous and that I have precognitive dreams. I experience deja vu often, and I have very little sense of direction and have never done well in math. My brother has epilepsy. He was given a choice--that is, whether or not he wanted to have the hemispheres of his brain cut into. That would relieve all that is in the fishtank. We found an empty fishtank--still unbroken--at the dump. So, what we did was grease it with Vaseline and have people strip down and fold themselves into it. Like geeks. We liked to see what a thigh looked like greased and pressed against glass. A breast, maybe. This was when dirt was on the roof. Our father, with a bunch of other men, dug a twenty-foot deep hole. Our father swindled the other men in that he got to keep the best dirt, while they were fooled into hauling the inferior dirt. Our father put all that dirt on the roof of our house. He told us to go inside while, with a high-powered hose, he shot water onto the roof. We watched as it all flopped down.

5 MWE

2008-06-19T18:54:00.000-07:00

He was a hardydardy, he was. He was under a tent. The tent. Outside, the eight peaks of the big tent looked like teats. The circus put its belly to the night sky. In it, was him--a hardydardy ready to do something we had not seen. We were not intelligent. We wanted to rent an apartment. I found a suitable apartment--that is, one exceedingly cheap. I called the man who had placed the ad. He said he was in a forest--two states away--and that, if I wanted to see the apartment, I could show it to myself. He told me to go into the backyard of the house neighboring the apartment. He told me to slip under a fence. He told me to find a back screened-in porch and to let myself in. He said I could find a key above the porch door. He told me to let myself in. What I saw was filthy and spacious. I could not tell what smelled of natural gas and what of cat urine. One toilet seat had a seatbelt bolted into it. The ceiling tiles looked ready to fall--some of them were held in place by nailed-up boards. I found the heads of figurines all over the place--on top of the thermostat and on bookshelves. I wondered which animals came by at night. I wondered what it would take me to sit down and eat a meal.

The dance was boring. The tree, we learned, was sick. Someone had painted the windows on the outside. At night, someone had played that prank on us--they painted all our windows from the outside. What do do then? I mixed cement that afternoon and paved over the grass we had. I paved over our lawn. The place where we recycled was a vast structure--maybe something like a complex spaceship that had landed. And the creatures who worked there! They were all very strange and so helpful that they got in the way. I went through a tunnel because I wanted to feel as though I were in a throat. And what a throat. It led me to an ocean. This part of the ocean had no beach. There was a gate I had to climb over since I had no key. I had not been invited, but I made friends quickly, and, soon, the hosts were apologizing that they had not invited me. The stand was closed for the winter. Not profitable. We played a game but did not expect any of us to get injured so severely. The courts had a forest near them. A river near them. A man would fetch balls for us so long as we left him beer cans. We were not ready to lose eyeballs. We were not ready to get into car accidents and donate the interns of our bodies.

As I bought milk, someone on the other side of the refrigeration unit in the supermarket stocked the milk. I walked down a road. I saw buildings that had not been lived in in a long time--and what is it to live in a building? So. I bought milk that I knew would be ready for me. I shook it to my ear and immediately knew some plastic treat was inside. A milk company started to put plastic treats in its milk. Whoever stocked the milk had something wrong with this hands. The tips of his fingers looked too white, too pale. When we walked the eighty acres with the ranger, we found marijuana. He pulled it up, and we helped him. We told him that a renter must have done this. Or someone who knew we were just Summer People--people who came to swim and to walk. The Naturists were naked people we rented the farm to in the summer. All the Naturists walked around with towels. They did not wear the towels, but they did use the towels to spread on chairs before they sat down. How polite. When I was a child, they gave me a sheet rock knife. I bought milk but not one that had just been touched. A piece of plastic inside it. What I would most like to know is a child stuck somewhere. The feeling of tryiing to get a metal bracelet off your wrist. What I would like to know is how often can you ride a horse without wondering what that horse feels like.

10 MWE

2008-06-13T19:27:00.001-07:00

Paralysis, death, home, what people live with, the violence that is in us, flight from all concerns, a piece of whistling in the long-toothed dark

When I was younger, I had tried to bite off someone's finger, and I had done great damage. My teeth are not what anyone would call small, though they are not overly large either. I bit as hard as I could. I did great damage to that finger. It nearly came off. It nearly came off my sister. I bit her finger when I was young. She was even younger. That I did this surprised my mother. My mother had once been beautiful, but now she was not. I once had to share a room in an attic with one of my mother's cousins. He assured me that my mother had once been beautiful and that he, too--a close relation of hers even--had wanted to be with her. He assured me this as I waited for him to fall asleep. He told me of his own beautiful wife and children. As he told me this, I waited for him to go to sleep because I wanted to do something awful to him. Or to his car. Or to his children, who were far away. In some other state. When he spoke with me, it had been a long time since I had bitten my sister's finger. I had nearly taken her finger off with what was in my mouth. What was in my mouth at the time? Teeth. But not all of them. I had some of them missing. My teeth are most likely not as strong now as they were. For years, I have clenched and ground my teeth. I did not know that I was doing damage to myself. I never woke with bits of my teeth in my mouth, so I must have always swallowed them before I woke up. I would have dreams about dogs. They were all biting my arms. What they did did not hurt me, but, now, I have a feeling that it got me to clench my teeth in my sleep. These dogs--many of them--biting my arms. It was later that I took to poisoning whatever dogs I noticed penned on my walk home. I would buy a sausage and put dark chocolate in it. I would put Tylenol in it. I would put small silver watch batteries in and feed these to whatever dogs I saw on my walk home. The dogs always ate the whole sausage, and I never stayed around long enough to be spotted. I considered putting fish hooks in a sausage. Nearly bit off my sister's finger. Wanted to do something horrible to my mother's cousin in his sleep. Killed dogs. Imagined myself being speared.

This cousin saw my aunts rub my grandmother's green ashes on themselves. We had been sitting in the kitchen, joking about what we would do with her. We had said that we'd get over one hundred small film canisters. We'd have the grandchildren all decorate the canisters with puffy paints and glitter. Next, we'd put a spoonful of her dark green ashes in all the canisters. We'd have all the funeral guests take them. We'd encourage them to travel and, wherever they went, leave a little bit of her. We liked the idea of this, but we also joked about it. We were trying to show that we could joke about all this. But then my aunts came into the kitchen rubbing my grandmother's green ashes on the faces and necks. They came up behind me and rubbed them on me. My mother rolled off her chair and onto the floor. I had never seen her on the floor. I had always wondered if she had had anything to do with counterfeiting. I knew she didn't go in for the big bills, but I wondered if she counterfeited quarters and dimes. I saw a machine in her bedroom that could have done such a thing. She was killed by method. I was far away when she was killed. She was killed by one of her cousins--one who had once thought her beautiful but who had since gone on to travel too much and rent cars too good for his borrowing. He knew too much about ferns and what his children were doing. He knew a little too much about his children's minds. He knew how they performed in too many ways. He mostly kept track of how they performed abstract things. He knew nothing about music or history. He knew nothing of even what most newspaper readers would know. He had the gall to ask the neighbor if he could smoke on his property. We never saw him. We didn't see him later. He took on a big project--the paving of some ground that was very hilly. He should not have taken on such a thing, but he wanted to impress us. My mother on the floor. My aunts covered with the ashes of my grandmother. My uncle spent two days cleaning a trailer he'd sell for fifty dollars. I spent most of one day hiding ice cream. I bought gallons of the cheapest stuff I could find. I found a scoop in the wash. I walked around the house with a gallon of ice cream and would leave scoops in the luggage of my family. I opened my grandmother's files and left in scoops. I went into her closet and left what I wanted. I left flavors. I realized I had tasted rotten milk many times in my life but that I had never tasted rotten ice cream. I had never tasted it gone bad. I looked for any bit of sky. I looked for anything to clean. I made a woodpile once, undid it, and made it again.

Her name was Mordo, and at least she knew that caffeine is a diuretic. She wanted to be a wet nurse. First, she put an ad up in the supermarket--by where everyone selects a cart. Then, because she got no answer, she put an ad in the newspaper for a wet nurse. She wanted to be one. Though she had never ridden a motorcycle in the snow, Mordo knew that to make a good meal, every now and then, you should add some sort of nut. She rode her motorcycle in the snow, and she did not care if a member of the police would pull her over. Mordo had never flattered herself in front of anyone, but she could have. She flattered herself in her room so that she would know what it's like to be private. She knew how to get to the roof of her house. She knew how to get under the basement. She knew there was a room under her basement. Mordo drank coffee. Mordo had a scepter she held in her room. None of her dresses were clean at times, but that was fine at those times because she would wear her father's slacks. All she had to do was take a pair of his slacks and put them on. She would wear them with suspenders she had won at the fair. Mordo didn't cook with butter. She had to make a path that led from the back of the property to the fount. It was a fount that had been installed before any one of the not too serious holidays. He uncle was a sponger. Her mother was the only one who knew which tree branch to pull. Mordo did not want to go into the river because, earlier that day, she had seen a horse in it. She had walked on the side of the road for an hour before a motorcycle passed by. She began to try to find out if other house had rooms below their basements. And which houses had a room above the attic? She wanted to be a seabird. She wanted to be on the shore. She wanted to see sand between pieces of wood. On the last trip she had taken, she had had to be the navigator and the one who kept track of the money. Her grandmother had done all the driving and all the speaking in other languages. Mordo's sister's only job was to sit in the back and hold the playing cards. She was the unhappiest of all them. She had egg on her lip. She did not see the animals Mordo sighted. She did not get to sleep in the room that had the desk with the secret compartments.

2008-06-05T19:04:00.000-07:00

They called her foulmouthed. They were not of this world but of Mars. Her mouth was foul because she had eaten a lot of mint. The mint smelled foul in her mouth. She was a mother--but not one who spent much time with her children. One of her children swam competitively. He also held his breath competitively, and, each time he outlasted an opponent, he lowered his test scores. Her other child stripped in the open. Her mouth once had things in it. They happened to surprise her--what since they came from Mars. They were not of this world, so they had patience few--especially this mother or her son or her daughter--had ever seen. She had a square piece of wood in her mouth. A block that kept foul out. They were a little gross themselves. They licked things up. They happened to lick certain things up. Her son won some sort of competition in a salt water pool, and, afterwards, he did yell a lot. Her daughter stripped in public. What was it that made them a family? It was their arms and legs--especially when they held or clenched them. She was foulmouthed--not at all ready to show her children what an animal would come naturally to.

It was when he was sick that they started to hamper him however they could. He was happier than many animals he had fed. He fed cats and lizards, and he was happier than most of them. He had a turtle, and he knew it would be a legacy pet--a pet that would live long after he died. He'd have to find a future person for it, his legacy pet. He knew of fish in the Marianas Trench that lived for over 100 years. Parrots lived long lives. Some scorpions lived for over fifteen years. He was so sick that, even if he were to buy a mouse, it would be a legacy pet. If he were to buy a feeder mouse, even that would be a legacy pet. And he knew that feeder mice lived far shorter lives than other mice. He once had a mouse that had long fur--what's more, its fur was the color of champagne. When he had been healthier, he would regularly mow his lawn. His mower had been electric, and he had had no choice but to plug it in in his kitchen. In the same socket the accepted the plug from his toaster. In his house, he had painted ivy over his main door. He did not have all the ivy, though, because it was his mother who had done it. She had started the project and had finished three quarters of it--but then she died. So he can look at one last leaf and one last green curly cue and know that was the last thing that squirmed in her mind.

The chafe between her son's legs was great. He ran around for most of a day and got a chafe. He son spent much of the day in the ocean. He caught waves with a luncheon tray. But he chafed between his legs. She was not a person who planted anything. She never planted anything. When her son slept, she put dirt in his hair. He had ears that stank. He chafed. The ocean was not ready to have people in it. It was cloudy and had sewage in it. Lots of bubbles, and it stank. The surgeonfish has orange razors on its tail. The Portuguese Man O' Was will sting. Her children all drew horses on her walls. So she took kitchen matches to their drawings and blackened her walls a little. She was told that if she made a large fire on her dining room table the flames would reach up and draw designs on her ceiling. The designs would be full of portent. But she didn't do it. Her one son filled a bag full of water and stepped into it. Her daughter drew on herself--on her face. Very little revealed itself to this family. Whenever they went to the ocean, they had to rent a van.

5 MWE 06.05.08

2008-06-05T18:38:00.000-07:00

Very little. He was not excitable or edgy. He did not have bandy legs or ones with knobs on their sides. He was not an example. He was not impassioned or infected with anything. He sank too far into a couch. Someone spoke to him, someone with a face slicked with acne. He was not ready to participate in commerce. Half of the town had been built up--the rest was in the process of being built. Take a right and three lefts and you will miss the church. We got there early--when the trumpeter was still practicing. There were five women in dresses and five men under some pews. This was not when anything happened rapidly. In the sun was her lunch. Her lunch had been made for her and left in the sun. She was not animated, though she could grasp whatever it was she wanted. I shared a room with my mother's cousin. As I tried to go to sleep, he assured me that my mother had been beautiful. Earlier that night, I had driven down a hill to see a dark horse with a white head. I found later that I had walked on the wrong side of the road. And yet I am the one who still has fiery flux.

My family, this farrago. There are the three ruined maple trees, but we do not get rid of them though they are sick. I was told that a man had a piece of metal pipe. He sharpened one end of it. He captured someone--put this person down with chloroform. He stripped this person of his clothes and laid this man on a floor. Then, what he would do is take the sharpened end of his pipe and sink it into the unconscious man's naked chest. He sunk the sharpened end of it, and it went down into this man. It was an instrument with its edges sinking into some dough. He sunk the end in--it had a plug of skin in it--and then he raised the pipe to his lips. He pushed air through it and shot the skin plug across the room and against a wall. This was all there was to do when the maple trees got sick. Allow the neighbors to hunt turkeys. Allow tourists to ride snowmobiles. Allow someone else to rent the south end of the property to experiment with growing grapes. Found animals I didn't expect in the tree. Found things tied to sticks.

A constant fascinator. The three storms in the area will overlap. In the library, there were three busts, but I cannot remember who of. There was a desk reserved for someone. They had the book sale on the roof--a gimmick. The one road met two--merging became tricky. What it was was not legal. I would like to go for a walk before I think about what I have done. No, my character is unready. My character is unlovely. I do not remember whether or not any of my classmates passed anything. Some of them could have been buried. Others were probably familiar with eel eating and lying to whoever was the newest one to ask a question. They found him in the reservoir. They found a wire about his wrist. They found wire in his mouth. His ears were so close to his head--they looked as if someone pressed them there, but no one did. She has not the energy to argue today. I can usually expect an amount of yellow to come out of her mouth. Then green. But not today. Her father embarrassed her by drawing. He was never around except when he drew things. He was what they called an "operator." With it, with her compassion, she went through some weeds. The point was to go through the weeds first and then the ferns. No one could have guessed that the camera was on. My head was not full of much but frenetics.

5MWE 06.01.08 Freshly Foal

2008-06-01T14:06:00.000-07:00

To be the first to eat ash after an eruption is a great honor because it is something where the grit--for once--goes where it should. I was conceived in the air--my parents sky dove tandem and had patches cut out at the crotch. I did not take the first time they jumped, they think. It took a few tries. My friends and I streak naked across the rifle range. We wear masks when we do it because we're all for fun and daring but not for litigation. We are fast when we streak. We've been wounded, sure, but we've not died. Not a one of us has died. We've all made it, and that's not silly. The people at the rifle range are nervous when they shoot. There were some fourth graders at the rifle range once. One of them, those Fourths, had brought a dad, a guardian, with them. What they wanted was to film each other shooting guns so that they could use the footage in a music video that they wanted to make. So they went and did the shooting and filming. They had a dad with them. They got the footage they wanted, but one of their shots hit one of us. This one of us had been, of course, streaking. With a mask on. This shot, though, was more than a wound. I was conceived in the air--when gravity was different to that in a bed.

I am a funambulist. I have fun when I walk because I walk only on rope. I only walk on rope. Only I walk on rope. I walk on rope only, and, when I do, I have fun. I have a house, but I rarely walk on its floors or through its halls. Instead, I have stretched rope all over the place. My grandmother came to my house. She is in her eighties, but she still drives. She drove an hour north from her home to see me. Her home is full of what she has collected. Ten years ago, I could make it though her hallways only by walking through aisles of her collections. Only make it through. Only I. Now, ten years later, she no longer has aisles. She has tunnels. She had built the aisles so high they leaned on each other. She is stooped, so she doesn't have to lean. Me, though, I have to get on my knees just about. She had me over because she wanted me to have some suits of my grandfather's. He's not dead. He's in another house for people who cannot speak and who sit on chairs that can move--by wheels and levers--easily. He sits next to a fishtank sometimes. Other times he's next to a cage full of little birds or a tv. The tv plays mostly things about animals, though sometimes they put in a tape that has a fireworks display on it. I was to pick one of my grandfather's suits. I am a funambulist, and my grandmother comes over to my house.

She had driven her car for an hour with animals in it. She came for me because she wanted me to drive her three hours west to a wedding. We went and got to the church three hours early. Instead of exploring the town we were in, we sat in the church parking lot for three hours. Got sunburns. She said she had not had a sunburn in twenty years. I told her I saw someone get one yesterday. The wedding had a lot of musical instruments in it, and each one, each instrument, was played incorrectly at one point. All the maids of honor had painted nails and all the best men had on coats. I knew no one at the place and let them look at me. After, we went to a reception and ate from three tables that had three different themes of food. A hotel room afterward--one with an elevator and a breakfast. One with an alarm some trickster had preset. She took me to a graveyard, and we easily found her parents, grandparents, and brothers. We stepped over others to get to them. I was holding her hand, I tried to lead her around people, but she stepped on them and over them. She didn't care because she was looking for names. We stepped on little pink flowers. Finally, we saw all we wanted and drove again through a gate. A gape. Agape. She was not ready for swimming since only yesterday she had seen three people.

5 MWE

2008-05-30T21:31:00.000-07:00

What was it but a disaster? Never insulted--but never encouraged. What was it but a mess in a ravine? She was in a ravine--and muddy. She could not have guessed how clouds would drift in the sky. Clouds are not against the sky. The sun is not against the sky. The leaves on the trees are not against the sky. When the ravine became a mess, it no longer interested the people who had first noticed it. These people were not essential to any kind of math. They were not necessary as far as the leveling of mounds go. They simply ate what ended up on the plates they had made themselves. They knew not to put things that had hidden airpockets into their kilns. It was an airpocket. An airpock. An airparrot. An airpatrol. He saw the word antsy and thought nasty. He kept thinking it, though he knew he wouldn't win the next hand of cards. The cards had been slicked with petroleum jelly. They played their game underwater. He did not enjoy the taste of lychee.

What she said was not tasteful--nor was it nutritious. It was not healthful. It was just a cruelty she could get across with her breath. She asked him to find a mucous membrane on her and he did. He had no trouble finding a mucous membrane. When he found one on her, he asked her if he could put an etching into it. That was, after all, his art. He wanted to perform his art. He did not mind if anyone watched his performance. That he did not mind was not unusual because so rarely did he perform his art for anyone--and so often he did it in a darkened room. His dark and darkened art. Children sold mangoes on the side of the road. They sold mangoes and lychee. One child had a large burn on the side of his leg. The other child had a plastic bag full of clear liquid. This liquid was water presumably. "It is seawater," the child informed people. These people were certainly not normal. They had mercy on their faces. They had blotches on their arms that looked alarming.

She was in haste because it was most comfortable. With a little bit of sand in her stockings, she couldn't think. What was it? How had she been heckled on the beach? She had been on the beach--and it was then that she had been heckled by a man. The man had come out of the ocean with his hands full of glass. This was not seaglass--stuff rounded off and tumbled. It was freshly broken. He had it in his hands--and then he heckled. She had not been ready. Her mother had once called all her ranges narrow. All her interests were narrow. She, at least, had never been called hideous. Never such. On the rail, it was. This was the time that the glass broke. How did it break before it ended in the sea? What it was was something mistaken for a breed of cat--a breed that had been made and documented on the television. So much yowling--we had to turn the volume around. We had qualms. We were reluctant. Someone had painted out windows white on the outside, so we had to take our razors and scrape. Someone had painted our windows white on the inside--and oh how our house stank.

5 MWE

2008-05-27T12:53:00.000-07:00

He was not a journalist, and he was not rude. When he tamped sugar against a chairleg, he used a piece of wood. Once, after a thunderstorm, very early in the morning, he looked into a spoon and saw the shape of a dog. It was a breed of dog. The dog was a certain--but unidentifiable--breed of the creature. He sometimes was puffy. He learned to swim at a late age. He, an adult, learned how in a large pool with children. Most everyone in the pool was a child except for him. There he was--learning to swim. His sister had learned to swim when he was a boy. His parents had bought a special one-piece suit for her. The suit, all about it, had pockets that could hold chunks of styrofoam. Each styrofoam chunk was about the size of a hotdog bun and could slide into one of those pockets. There must have been twelve of those pockets. The idea was to remove one stryo chunk as the child got a little better at swimming. His parents, though, removed only the six stryo chunks that were on his sister's stomach. So, when she went in the pool, she was forced on her face.

Such that there was burning. There was stinging. Five rows of people in orange plastic seats--and all of them sprayed with a Police aerosol. He had an urge to eat something. He was responsible for the failure of the crop. He could have washed the rocks, but he didn't. He left them as he had found them--covered with filth. Very rarely was he rowdy. He never got his levels right. He wanted to learn how to speak harshly. He looked for lessons but never found them. She wore shirts that had pills in the armpits and under the breasts. She had jewelry from her grandmother, but she never wore it. An old man has rubberbands looped around the handcontrols in his car. The old man makes odd handsignals at a younger man. The younger man cannot interpret the handsignals. What was there ever to say? There was no curiosity present. It was not yet in existence. Instead, all he felt was the spit on his teeth. He was ready to cut open a belly to see if it had license plate in it. Turtle shells. Anything moving and metal and shined. Who was it shined by? He wanted to be shined by his friend.

He made a concrete structure that went up 100 feet. The concrete structure was just open. It was a building with no top and no floors in it. It was just an empty rectangle that went up 100 feet and was on its side. He had this structure, and he filled it with dirt. He had eight sons, and he told them that the first one to dig from the top of the structure and make it out a door on the bottom would be the only one to get an inheritance. So those eight sons. They tried to dig, but their tunnels would so often intersect. Some of the sons dug in earnest--but others were really only in it to ruin what was going on. Some of the sons died in their tunnels. Did any one of them get to the bottom and through that door? One hundred feet of dirt to dig down into--and all your brothers digging down, too. The one to get through it all will be the one to get my fortune. But the joke was that all eight of them killed each other trying to get down. The old man was left with no sons to leave anything to, and he was too old to have any more sons. He saw what he had made. It was very simple. A concrete structure that went up 100 feet and was filled with dirt. His structure was simpler than things made by other people thousands of years ago. All his sons dead--or maybe they weren't all sons. Or maybe anyone could have gotten involved.

5 MWE

2008-05-27T12:24:00.000-07:00

He crouches behind a frond. The ground around the frond is icy. He has seen something that is icy. He saw an icy vehicle, but he crouches behind the frond. The vehicle he sees is a Nash Airflyte--a car that you--that he--can sleep in. Make all the seats go back, and you can sleep in it. He crouches behind a frond. He would like to acquire a book, but he does not know where he should go. He heard about a place that makes eggs a certain way. People are trained to make eggs, but what do they get? They do not get to eat their mistakes. Their mistakes are fed to big dogs that are black and brown and have orange eyes. What has been said of his disciple? It has been said that he smells like vegetable matter beneath his robes. It has been said that his knowledge of mathematics is stellar. It has been said that when he dances his hips, not his feet, are leaden. What can one do but crouch behind a frond? He lights a lantern and prepares for a night of icy crouching. He wishes he had the manikin he stole.

The clothes that he had made fell apart so easily. The clothes that he made were deadly because they did not protect against the cold weather. Against cold weather. Against the cold weather. Whatever he said was false. She thought he had tripped on the concrete, but he had not tripped. He didn't tripped--just looked like he did. He didn't really trip. This was how it happened: it didn't happen. This is what he said: he said little to nothing. What he hated to eat: nothing. He ate just about everything that was placed in front of him--even experimental eggs. Now, for three hours, he had to sit athwart a simpleton. He felt the warmth of the simpleton as he sat athwart him. The person seized. The person had a pertness. None of this was timely. It was all untimely. What it was was perverted--but not to the point that it couldn't have been on the stage. It was just enough to me warped. It. Something. What. This. It was warped. Something was sad. What it was was sad. This is abstract to the point that it cannot be performed. What do you call that smile of yours?

The protagonist is a prescription in this case. In the earlier draft, there was no protagonist. No protag was there, so what was decided was that a protag must be prescribed. This protag--it was decided--must be on the younger side and must have a severe physical ailment--something readers would understand and latch on to. This protag must be on the verge of finding fortune. That, or the protag should lose a vast fortune first and then spend the rest of the time getting himself ready for a vaster one. He should get some people together and get them to pray in a place that is not a church. He should get them all in an abandoned building and get them to pray. The grass out front the building is very tall--some joke and say that it is wheat. There is a drained swimming pool in the backyard. The pool collects rainwater and mosquitoes grow inside. This abandoned house is not something the neighbors like. They do not see it as romantic or haunted. Hainted. They see it as the start of a blight. But a bunch of people are in it, and they pray. They smell like vegetable matter because that's what they had to get through.

2008-03-23T21:38:00.000-07:00

The fourth sentence from the introduction to Syntactic Structures:

"The ultimate outcome of these investigations should be a theory of linguistic structure in which the descriptive devices utilized in particular grammars are presented and studied abstractly, with no specific reference to particular languages."

The ultimate outcome of these investigations: this is the subject of the sentence. It is not a subject that has volition. No. It is a subject that is described. Described by whom? By C? "outcome" is the simple subject. "the" and "ultimate" and "of these investigations" all serve to specify "outcome." The word "these" is a demonstrative determiner that serves a discourse function. Words like This, That, These, and Those all show relativity, relationships. These determiners are said to show "deixis." Shown by whom? Not by C. "these investigations" has a discourse function, a wider function, in that it points back--ties directly to--another instance of investigation--that is, an investigation that appears in the first or second sentence. I forget which. Which what?

All this reminds me of the time a forty-two foot male sperm whale washed up on a seashore a few hours south of Arcata, California. Marine biologists from Humboldt State were so excited to see the thing. It was dead. They, the biologists, came with large knives--these large blades that were on the ends of things that looks like thick broomsticks. They brought a special, generator-powered large knife sharpener. All this reminds me of that.

should be: this is the main verb of the sentence. This is a copular verb--as in linking or copulation. "should be" is a linking verb in that it links one thing with a description of that thing. "should" carries the tense of this verb--I think the tense is in the past, but "should" is so interesting because it can be only in the past. You cannot have a present tense should--which makes sense. (The "which" I just used--in no way--is directly attached to a preceding noun. The "which" I just used, instead, is attached to an as-of-yet unnamed concept that is somehow inside what I'm writing. Does it seem natural enough? And what is it?)

a theory of linguistic structure in which the descriptive devices utilized in particular grammars are presented and studied abstractly, with no specific reference to particular languages: this whole long thing--not quite 42 feet long--as long as a washed up male sperm whale--is the subject complement--more specifically the predicate noun--of the sentence. The marine biologists had brought those large knives to dissect the whale. They wanted to see what had killed the whale. They had wanted to perform an autopsy. They were also, though, just happy to have their long knives out and a dead whale waiting for them to open. Where had they, those biologists, kept those knives when they, the knives, weren't in use? Did they have a closet? They brought that large sharpener--the one with its own generator--to sharpen their knives. The skin and blubber of the whale is tough. It can really take the edge off a knife.

"theory" is the simple subject complement. "a" is a determiner--an indefinite article. "of linguistic structure" is a prepositional phrase that modifies "theory." "in" is another preposition that introduces a phrase that modifies "structure." "which" is a relative proform. It signals the oncoming relative clause, and it also--in the straightened out clause--serves as an adjective. "in which structure" is how the straightened out clause would read. "the descriptive devices" is the subject of the embedded clause that's in the prep. phrase. This subject, really, isn't a true subject in that it is the subject of a passive construction. "utilized" is a past participial that acts as an adjective in that it modifies "devices." Also, there's something about "utilized" that--even though it's a past part--has something about the passive in it. Utilized by whoooom, we could ask. "in particular grammars" is a prep phrase that works as an adverb. It modifies the passive verb "utilized." "are presented and studied" is the main verb of this embedded clause. This verb is compound--a compound of both "to present" and "to study." What's more, this main compound verb is passive--or doubly passive. Presented by whom? Studied by whom? Utilized by whom? (So this whole thing is actually triply passive.) "abstractly" is an adverb that modifies the main, compound, passive verb. "with no specific reference to particular languages" is a string, a concatenation, of prep phrases.

This long sentence is copular, very passive, and filled with prep phrases.

The whale had no plastic netting in its stomach. It just died, and they marine biologists couldn't figure out why. The whale had been a young male--10--just reaching sexual maturity. I would have thought that it would have scars all over its snout--its muzzle?--but it didn't. It looked clean. I would have thought its skin to be black, but it wasn't. It was dark gray with a tinge or green.

2008-03-22T19:11:00.000-07:00

What is the third sentence of Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures?

"More generally, linguists must be concerned with the problem of determining the fundamental underlying properties of successful grammars."

"generally" is an adverb, an adjunct--I suppose--that modifies the main verb of the sentence. Linguists must be generally concerned? I don't know. Maybe it is a disjunct in that it casts something over the whole sentence. But I don't think so. "More" modifies or intensifies "generally."

linguists: this is the subject of the passive sentence. It is a concrete and count noun.

must be concerned: this is the main verb. It is in the passive voice. "must" is a modal auxiliary. It is deontic? "be concerned" is the passive construction because it has a verb in the past participial form that follows the verb "to be." The tense carrying portion of this verb is "must"--which is, I think, in the past tense.

with the problem: this is a prep phrase that acts as an adverb in that it modifies the main verb. The object of this prep phrase, "problem," could be used as the subject of an active sentence. (Used by whom? Chomsky?) A problem concerns linguists.

of determining the fundamental underlying properties of successful grammars: this is another prep phrase that acts as an adjective. It modifies the word "problem." "of" is the prep. "determining" is a gerund, a verbal noun. "the fundamental underlying properties of successful grammars" is the object of the gerund. What's interesting in this direct object is that there is no comma between "fundamental" and "underlying." If there had been a comma, then that would have indicated that these two adjectives are coordinate--that they carry the same weight. But, because there is no comma, that means that these adjectives are cumulative. Really, the "underlying" must have a strong attachment to "properties"--such that it couldn't change places with "fundamental."

2008-03-22T11:13:00.000-07:00

The more I think about it, the more I want to think "as its goal" is some kind of complement to the direct object. Though "as its goal" is a prepositional phrase, without that phrase, the sentence doesn't look to make much sense at all. So maybe it's a complement.

2008-03-22T10:44:00.000-07:00

The second sentence of Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures is this:

Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis."

The entire Noun Phrase, the complete subject of this sentence is "Syntactic investigation of a given language."
Syntactic: this is an adjective that modifies "investigation"

investigation: this is the simple subject of the sentence. An investigation is a noun, but, more specifically, I would have to say that this noun is abstract. An investigation is an idea, an abstraction of something. We have archaeological investigations and Sherlockian investigations--all sorts of them.

of a given language: this is a prepositional phrase that modifies "investigation." So this investigation has been modified on both sides--once by "Syntactic" and now by this prep phrase. "of" is the head of the prep phrase. "a" is the indefinite article and a determiner of a noun. "given" is a past participial that functions as and adjective. It modifies "language." "language" is the simple object of the preposition. Though language feels like something we all have a handle on--we can almost touch it with out tongues--I will say that language is an abstract noun. A chair is concrete, but a language--even a given one--or an aria is an abstract thing. It does not really exist in a concrete way.

has: this looks like the main verb to me. So this is a little odd. Here, C is saying that an investigation can have something, can own something. I have a language. An investigation has something.

as its goal: this is a prep. phrase that modifies the main verb ("has"). "as" is the head of the prep phrase. "its" is a genitive determiner. "goal" is the object of the prep and is an abstract noun.

the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis: this is long and, I think, is the direct object of the main verb ("has"). So, really, the Investigation has This. It has this long piece of language. I don't see how this makes sense. How can an investigation have a construction? "the construction" is the simple direct object of the verb. "of a grammar" is a prep phrase that serves as an adjective in that it provides more info about the preceding noun--"construction." "that can be viewed" is a relative clause that functions as an adjective. It gives more info about the word "grammar." "that can be viewed" is in the passive voice. It is a clause that has no real subject. Viewed by whom? Anyone can view, or the "who" that does the viewing is not important, so this is an excellent use of the passive voice. The passive voice is used well here. Used by whom? "as a device" is a prep phrase that works as an adverb. It modifies the preceding passive verb. "of some sort" is a prep phrase that modifies "device." "for producing the sentences" is another prep phrase that also modifies "device." "of the language" is a prep phrase that modifies "sentences." "under analysis" is a prep phrase the modifies "language." But I'd also like to say that it could modify "sentences," too. This brings up a problem of the Part and the Whole.

Chomsky, in this sentence, makes an Investigation have a strange thing. Also, Chomsky again uses passive voice and a lot of prep phrases. His prep phrases interlock in odd--not quite direct--ways because of the Parts and Wholes he's discussing.

2008-03-21T18:56:00.001-07:00

Mention Richard Lanham--his rules, how they apply to the first Chomsky sentence. Mention Someone Similar--similar to whom?

Nim, Hans, A.L.Ex, Me

2008-03-21T18:11:00.000-07:00

Noam Chomsky's book Syntactic Structures was seminal, but I'm not sure how seminal it is these days. Maybe people have rejected certain of his concepts. I am almost certain certain of his concepts have been rejected--maybe by Lacanians. It's one of those cases in which someone at a grad school writes a thesis and then nails it to Chomsky's door in Massachusetts. There once was an ape by the name of Nim Chimsky. This ape was thought to possess the ability to generate sentences. As it turned out, though, it was all a sham. The scientist in charge of Nim said it was a sham and that Nim made sentences by rote. He wasn't using the kind of intelligence we believe homo sapiens to be in charge of. Of which we are in charge. So Nim wasn't real. I once tried to write about a fictional Nim. Since my Nim was fictional, I had to change his name. So I changed it to Gnome Chimpskly. See? I had the gall to add the "p" where the previous scientist didn't. What's more, I added that "l," making the creature's name even more whimsical. There was also once a shame horse. He was called Clever Hans. People thought Clever Hans could count and tell time by the sun. Really, though, he couldn't. The trainer had taught his pet to notice certain ways that he, the trainer, tensed muscles in his body. So Hans was a sham, too. What's funny is that "clever"--in the world of horses--does not have anything to do with intelligence. Just quality. (Look it up in Strunk&White if you don't believe me. Those boys, S&E, love those kinds of distinctions.) Hans was a good horse, but he wasn't smart. A.L.Ex also once existed, but now he's dead. Alex stands for Avian Language Experiment. This thing was a bird, an African gray parrot, that people thought was smart. (If I had written "who people thought was smart," then, with that simple relative pronoun "who," I would have implied that I, too, thought Alex was smart. I would have implied this in that "who" is the pronoun used for humans, while "that" and "which" are the ones reserved for inanimates or unsapiens.) They thought Alex was smart--no, intelligent--because he could identify blocks of certain colors and shapes. He also had a vocabulary of a few hundred words, and they thought he could use those words. Some budgerigars--little yellow birds--have been known to have vocabs of upwards of 2000 words. The thing, though, is that these birds cannot use their words in any sort of context. For a while, there were all sorts of contests in England in which people would pit their Budgies against other Budgies and see which ones could say the most words. And the winner would get a recording contract with Parlophone. And those records sold big! But those budgies couldn't use language, while some thought that Alex--though he knew only a few hundred words--could use them in context. For example, if he wanted a nut, he could say, "Want a nut." And if he wanted a banana, he could say, "Want a nanner." If you proffered him a nut when he had really asked for a banana, he would insist, "Want a nut." So I had Gnome Chimpskly, though I don't remember what his story was about. The first line in Chomsky's intro to Syntactic Structures goes:

"Syntax is the study of the principles by which sentences are constructed in particular languages."

The subject of this sentence is "Syntax." This subject is abstract and has no volition. It is a described subject. The main verb here is "to be"--that is, "is." The simple subject complement here--or the predicate nominative (Niminative!) is the study. "the" is a determiner or the definite article. "study" is an abstract noun. "of the principles" is a prepositional phrase that acts as an adjective in that it provides more information about the previous noun, "study." "of" is the preposition--or the head of the prep phrase. "the principles" is a noun phrase--or the object of the prep. "by which sentences are constructed in particular languages" is another prep phrase that acts as an adjective. It modifies the preceding noun, "principles."

Or maybe I've gotten a little confused? I always don't know what to do with these "by which" things--or "for whiches" or "from whiches." "by" is a preposition. "which" is a relative proform that also acts as a subordinate clause marker. If this clause were to be straightened out, then, really, "which" would serve as an adjective--that is, it modifies "principles." I could straighten it by saying, "sentences are constructed in particular languages by which principles." Yes. That is how that works. Ha! Nim! Hans. "sentences" is the subject of the subordinate clause. "are constructed" is the main verb. It is in passive voice. I could therefore ask, "Constructed by whoooom, Nim?" "in particular languages" is another prep phrase, but this one does not serve as an adjective. No, it does the work of an adverb in that it modifies the verb "are constructed."

The first sentence of Syntactic Structures is highly modified--especially by prep phrases. The main verbs are also a bit weak in that one is stative ("to be") and the other is in the passive voice.

I should write a sentence like that one. First, I need an abstract noun.

2008-03-20T14:26:00.000-07:00

"At night, we kept watch for turtles."

The above starts with an into prep. phrase and is followed by a simple sentence. "We" is the subject. The subject seems to have volition, desire, so it must be an agent, a causer. "kept" is the verb. It is in past tense. "watch," I guess, is the direct object, but I don't know. That sounds sort of odd. We kept Something, and that Something is Watch? But what is Watch, really? I don't know. It sounds a bit idiomatic. "for turtles" is a prep. phrase. It modifies "watch" in that it tells us what kind of watch is being kept.

How would I write a similar sentence. Like Noy Holland, will I choose to start with an intro phrase? No, I will not. I don't like the idea of starting with an intro phrase. She has a first person narrator here--a "we"--so would I like to have that, too. No. I'll make it a "he." So the first word of my sentence must be he.

He

What should my verb be? I'll simply look at the dictionary and pick a verb. The verb will then govern what I'll have to do next. Dislodge.

He dislodged

Like Holland, I've elected to use the past tense. The word "dislodge," though, must take a direct object. One doesn't simply dislodge. I could use dislodge as an intransitive verb, I guess--there are no rules here--but I don't want to break a rule in the first sentence. I am looking to captivate all readers here. I want to pull them into my beautiful composition. I want them to imagine all the movies they've ever seen--all the paintings they've seen on their vacations--all the oceans and mountains and trees. That's what I want--and no less--with this project. But this is just the first sentence, and I am not really even in control here. The verb is in control, and I need a direct object for the thing. So I'll just look in the dictionary and find a good noun.

The idiot in me would like to select "his sex" or "his hound" or "the hound" or "a hound." (I have to select the appropriate determiner here. Or I could use this or that or these or those." He dislodged those sexes, for example, is very different to his sex or her sex or its sex. If it were its sex, then maybe he's working with insects. If it's her sex, then maybe he's in a relationship--or maybe he has a golden retriever. If I were to select a word like "confession," then I'm getting figurative. No one, really, dislodges a confession. That's just a figurative way to say it.

He dislodged his slip.

I like this a little. What I don't like, though, is the sound of those esses. To many esses, and this is a problem I have. So I should select a different kind of sound.

He dislodged the crow funeral from the metal house.

Great. That's sensible enough. He didn't just dislodge. He dislodged a crow funeral. This is good. A funeral is something that everyone experiences. And a crow is something we've all seen, so a crow funeral must be a pretty obvious thing. Plus, Noy Holland ended her sentence with a prep. phrase, so that means I should do that, too. My prep. phrase works as an adverb that modifies the main verb. The "dislodged." So, this he isn't just dislodging a crow funeral--he's doing so from a metal house. Everyone knows what a house is. And everyone know about metal. Plus, here, I have no strong ess sounds. Well, I have the house at the end, but no esses aside from that. Great sentence here.

"We made out beds one bed to lie across together, our pillows pushed up in the window we had popped the screen from."

Noy's second sentence.

2008-03-20T14:13:00.000-07:00

S. wants her son to be me. She has decided that she would most like her son to be me. And what am I? I am limited, certainly. Or I am a tree--a linden. I have been enclosed by two-by-fours. A woman had asked me to stand as if for a portrait, but, instead of cribbing my likeness, she had built a construction of two-by-fours about me. Good wood. Animation through symbiosis. Re-animation through symbiosis. Through hosting that which you wouldn't mind sucking on your body. I had been placed on a stretcher, but it became a cot at the back of a room. There I lay, forgotten. I am on a cot forgotten. Parts of her were iguanoid, macaquish. She was a pastiche of macaque but overall pleasant. Pleasing. She lay where the waves his the shore. She lay on her stomach and allowed the waves to do as they pleased. She started out perpendicular to the waves, but then they made her parallel. And then they pulled her out and she had sand in the seat of her suit. It hung there. And children get sand in their suits, but, for whatever reason, do not have the dexterity of patience to get it all out. Their little hands and fingers look dexterous, but they are not. These children are not quite used enough to extrication. Later, they'll get it. They are simply young--say 23 or 25. You're just young. I was once young. So lurid, at the seashore. What a scene.

Superabundant. A nimrod, a nixon. The water in the Styx was run through a machine, through some charcoal and sand. The boy was a monger, a gripper. He became a dope. I have been a dope.

2008-03-20T13:44:00.000-07:00

One chip in extraposition. It is extrapoised. That I never saw her coming bothered me. It bothered me that I never saw her coming. Say there is a small child balancing on a curb. A small child balances on a curb. Well, she has a small yellow bottle of bubble liquid and a small pink bubble wand--the end of which is a pink circle. She loads the bubble wand and blows bubbles onto the face of this child balancing on a curb. I walked right behind them--neither of them saw me. The child had her forearm over her eyes and balanced on the curb. The other one blew bubbles in her face. This was one chip in extraposition. All the chips ground down. Water added. A paste ready to smear on foreheads. If the hair is aflame, then it's a firehead.

A benzene ring. A buildup of creosote. A peninsula with a boat in it. The color pink for a bubble wand. She was severe when it came to letter writing. When it came to letter writing, she was never severe and often ended her transmission with a Yours. But I never ended what I wrote with a Hers or a Mine. A pleopod. Something that once crushed me but then let me. What did it let me do? Or what did it let out of me? It let a lot of frustration out of me. After, I pulled ferns over my body. These were ferns with lots of grainy red dots on their undersides. As a child, I thought I'd put them in my cap gun. I had PopPops. These felt like bits of sand wrapped in a piece of tissue paper. These PopPops could be popped under water. I had a friend who would do them between his teeth. And there were the BoobyTraps--the things that you'd pull with two strings. We weren't devoted to one another so much as addicted. To say each other is to say two people. We loved each other. To say one another is to say more than two people are concerned. Concerned about what? Concerned about the difference between devotion and addiction. The difference, of course--the definition that bringeth understanding--is another abstract noun. We were addicted to one another--that is, to each other and to a number of other people. Exes. Let us not bring up the question of our exes. One is bearded and lives in a small house next to me. He has a black car--the hood of which is pocked from hail. For him, I took large bits of cardboard and covered these large bits with tin foil. I made a large thing he'd be able to put over his car, but, when he saw me trying to fit this to his car, he told me to stop. He asked me what I was doing. He had a beard. He was a question of an ex. I told him I was making armor for his car. In the next hail storm, all he'd have to do is put the armor on his car and nothing would get dinged. What about me? he asked me. He must have meant that he'd get dinged as he'd run out and put the armor on his car. So our devotion was to one another. I was devoted--no, delivered by her--to his beard and his car and to the armor I made. He was not devoted to me in the least, but he worked at a record store, and he loved another man there. They had cats there, too, and--whenever he wanted--he would pet them and allow them to knead his lap. He was strange, and lived in a small house next to me. It was always so easy to guess the days he'd be outside and on his porch. It was easy because it was only nice days. Nice days only. Whereas I would go out any day.

She was devoted more to him than to me. She emoted. She pent time trying to get us to part. What of it? She was fraudulent. She was devout. She was mad at her loyalties, and yet she kept them. Marked by mint. Eelware. I gave her eelware. My gaff was to give her eelware and to find a cat beneath my sink. I had to remove a panel to get to the cat. The cat had been painted purple--but by whom? Well, a neighbor of mine must have painted that cat purple. I started to wash it in the sink with yellow soap, and she--the one devoted not at all to me--got angry. So I called her Gertrude and begged her to leave. I gave her any number of the keys I had found on my wanderings. I told her some of these. Some of these what, she asked me. I got the purple out of the cat and had to wait for neighbors to come home. I wanted to ask them how the cat got like that. Within a braided house. The house we lived in was braided. By whom? The author of the house had to do more research, but he had found a line that he liked. He wore long underwear that he had dyed another color. He wore the long underwear his friend had died in. In which his friend had died. Innocuous. My reading behaviors were once catholic, but now they aren't. The difference between devotion and addiction is dementia. Proportion. Her mantle became so bright when we parted.

2007-11-21T21:35:00.000-08:00

Whatever it was I saw--it was fragmented. I saw a blemish in most of the things I did. I saw armature as something invented by someone I once met. A scaffold, maybe. Maybe we met on the scaffold. I must learn to see past the blemishes in the things I do. If I can move past that scape, then, maybe, I'll be able to droop a little to the side of contentedness.

My sister was the one who called a hibiscus a hibiscuit. She was the one who couldn't swim yet, and I was supposed to watch over her. She could have stayed down like that. We wore suits that had styrofoam loads in them. As we improved our swimming, we'd get to take out one of those styro loads. I pelted a kid. I wasn't supposed to pelt a kid, but I did. I watched what I did through a fence. Between each of the fence's slats, there was a scrim. Eachs skrim had a different color to it. She was a little too heterodox. I was skulking.

Very many formenting guavas beneath the guava tree. The outside of the guava is yellow. The inside, pink. I was bereft, maybe. But of what. I was false. What I thought was false, but I thought it close enough. And what if I am negligent? And what if I am not really bereft, but, really, faking it? I smell some mock orange, I guess. I have smelled the mock orange. Or I didn't smell it with any volition. I smelled it because I had no choice, because I was standing right next to it.

Whatever I was, it was boxed in. I was put into a box and taped. Given nothing but a die cast car for all my efforts. Watching tapes next to me. The whir of plastic through rollers. The whir of images in front of my old man's face. What it came down to was a cuff I was supposed to receive but never did. Let me say this sotto voce. I never received it, the cuff I was supposed to get. Weak pinkies, I guess. He tried to tell me that he knew someone who died from eating raw potatoes. Or, the thing was, a potato root was grafted to a tomato root. And all the poisons still came up and pumped in to the tomato--this poisoned someone later on. This poisoned person had ridden bikes. This person would speak to someone in a shack occasioanally caustically. Would you please pass me the hematite? The blood stone? Do you know your crystals? Do you know what it's like to have to wear a gold ring that's been fitted with an amethyst? Do you know what that is like? And your husband is tinkering with machines he makes as you attend the UFO meeting. Too much traffic. A life in a hovel. Somewhere, the idea was to wear two more scarves than anyone else. The child spent too much of his time designing badges he'd like to win and wear.

Smoke tow. What I had was not an aversion to a woman. I asked her if she found me disgusting. And she did. I sat in a swivel chair. She sat in a swivel chair. But our orbits never did anything. Saw a wretched movie with her. My favorite part was one small part in a hospital--when they were watching something on tv. But she liked the end. It wasn't that she was windowdressing. It was that she was dining with someone else in a window. So I saw everything. She was wearing the same clothes she had worn when she went out with me earlier. She wore jean cutoffs often. Sort of strange. Small black shoes. Too often, she touched the tip of her tongue to her lips. A sort of strange way to thank. I was happier. I thought it was a race, when it wasn't. I thought the end of it all would be when I sold the piebald creature I had found. It wasn't a horse, a no one seemed to tell me it was valuable. I had consulted several arbiters--all of whom stank of pox. They had pox because it was in fashion. I have been told that no one can tell a proper story. We have lost our raconteurs. We have lost them to curtailed cocktails--lines of them, at least, in front of the new signage. What do you say to this misery? What do you say when you see someone studying? What about being callous, especially with gestures of your hands? Take the little man off the glass before you drink. Stand in your garage and watch leaves come down. Tainted. Unhygienic. Things said of my influence. Or is it an effluence? Bootless, I suppose I should brag so much about my socks. I have no boots, but, sure, my socks are fine. But the more I walk, the more I ruin my socks. Maybe she was too kittenish, but she wasn't. Maybe it was my antibiotics? But it wasn't. If you're going to wear a new sweater on a date, don't go in for the frottage. You'll only ruin it.

tops of the spot

2007-11-12T22:40:00.000-08:00

I was a tyro, I suppose. I sat on a cane chair, and she did, too. Earlier, her friends had dropped her off in a white car. They had white teeth. A blind man knew who had white teeth. He always knew who had the whitest teeth, and everyone thought he was magic. Really, though, he just listened to whoever laughed the most. He knew that person to be the one with the whitest teeth--what since she showed them off laughing so much.

She was not frail, but she had broken more limbs than I had. She knew what it was like to be encased, to be carapaced. She once had lice. She once drank much cream--a carton--because she saw it in a pink and white container in the fridge.

This desultory relation of mine, I thought I saw him in a hallway. As it turned out, he was younger than I was and was in a woman who had the same name as his mother. This was not unstable to him. I asked him if I could sample his armhair and he said no. I said what of your headhair, your liphair. He never said yes. What he said was that he'd speak to my father and tell him to get all his sights lined and his rounds cased. Speculation as to how much throbbing. Is the flux bloody or phlegmmmed? What of my shabby cuffs and collar? What of my shappy face?

Anyone as thin as her should have worn all sweaters. So what of the nap. A grasp, a jerk, a sheet pulled tight over her face. Pulled tight over her face, the sheet flattened her nose. She screamed into the sheet, and a wet spot opened where her mouth was or would have been.

the marble has pimples

2007-11-12T20:23:00.000-08:00

Whatever it was in the sky, it scudded. It scudded, scarped. The scarp face of the rock cliff. What if I were to rub my face against the cliff. Looking up, I see something scud. This something in the sky is not black as it should be but green maybe. Dark green. Hephaestus puts weight on his sturdy legs and asks about boxing. Cabalistic, this is. Gnats on a meal I made so carefully. I am not a part of this outfit. I am part of this outfit, but I do not approve of it.

I pulled a creature out of the sea with some help. The creature was green and had ridges on its neck. It had a beak--but if this beak was for coral--for reef--or for me, I could not tell. This is what I drooled upon. The first one I drooled within. I drooled in it. I drooled on it. I drooled with it. Legs that a bandy. The man is a father. Or he isn't a father. He is someone that's been brass hobnailed into one place. He has a hook made of metal. He has a hook made of bone and of wood. What he would like to know is which hook you would like him to chase you with. You may not say none. Not one. Not any. You must pick a hook so he can chase you. This man, this father, this man hobnailed to a floor with brass tacks.

Fraud liquor in a green jar. It smells strong, but it isn't. Sweet talk me, please. Give me a wheedle and see if I will budge. I made lint come off her on November 17th. Now she works in a hospice maybe. Palliative for the dying. What answer do you have for triage?

A shrike is a magpie. Miss Lonelyhearts skinning a rabbit in his legerdemain. Show me Hephaestus sprinting. Have him help me win the Soap Box Derby. Fine. So I am nonspiritual. So I have dismissed her as hulking. It is not her frame that is hulking. Finally, I put a stop to all kneading. I had them all measure themselves up and oppose me. I wanted them each to ditto my fright.

2007-06-04T17:57:00.000-07:00

TINSELWALLOPPUDDING

I had no choice but to participate in an affair of honor, a duel. The reason for it, I do not know. Why? Part of me wants to be a hat band stuffed with money. Buying this hat would be easy. I would without doubt pay 1,000$ for a hat with a hatband stuffed with 2,000$. I partook in an affair of honor, a duel. My ball hit him in the thigh, busting a major artery. The artery is full of red blood, the vein the blue. Burst a major one, and the surgeon did not apply a bandage or a tourniquet. He anaesthetized the person I dueled's head, then wrote on the wounded leg with his pen. Excellent penmanship. I did not champion him. Championing was what I wanted to do or enlist to do at the time, but I was no longer on our dueling hill. No honor ever came of anything. So I went to Spain, wrote in my diary, made sketches. I left it all to my grandson, who had infected ears. My son had infected ears - so did my grandson.

I once collected flocks of pigeons. Pigeon hawks perched on the Brooklyn Bridge would wait for me to release them. Drunks would capture my beloved pigeons. To get them back, I would have to less myself fifty cents. Dig, I said to the drunks in the park. Chip, I said to the drunks on the asphalt. Chip, I said to the drunks on the ice. Squinch, I said to the drunks on the mud. Wake me up when the drunks do something with a material that is not themselves and is not liquid. Pliant, she must have been. These are Spanish pantaloons. This is my pen. This is the artery in my leg. Severed does in.

2007-06-02T13:55:00.000-07:00

TERRACEVENIALISHMAEL

To curve wood, we wet it, use clamps. Vested, I am here. When it got wet, then dried, it got sticky. I have a vested disinterest - that might not be what you think. I am nonplussed, looking at all those types of fish. A nurse does not have to pay anything for health care, but she has to pay for whitening her teeth. All told, it comes to eighty dollars. I was asked to "crowd" someone - something odd then happened, something I'm ashamed to write about. A man with lots of gray hair said someone died in the bathroom. For that to happen, blood drained out of the head and into the jugular vein. But that always happens. Blood drains through and around the brain and into the jugular vein. That is what people mean when they refer to the jugular. And when you go for the jugular, you are going for blood that had just been with the brain. There exist many confluences of fluids in the human body. A nurse still has to pay for teeth whitening, and she said her income is complicated because of health insurance companies. Often I am shocked by how much, how many veins, stick to the top of the skull when I remove it. Inside, I see no terraces. I see no banished people in human bodies. I would think pariahs would be banished to the insides of human bodies. Whitening teeth costs eighty dollars. "Loan" is not a verb. It is a noun. Would you loan me eighty dollars? That is impossible. May I please have a loan of eighty dollars to whiten my teeth. Ohkay. On the Deschutes river. In the tree. Waders are in a tree near the Deschutes river. This looks like a man (sexist prose) hanging in a tree. A man hanged in a tree. What happened between the nurse and the bathroom was not venial. Someone died in there, I think, the man with gray hair said. A man with gray hair said. The gray-haired man. The man, gray-haired, said. Hyphenation is tricky, but most people do not care about it. My name is hyphenated. Oh, is your name hypenated. And locking arms with someone when you walk down the street can be unexpectedly familiar. Or is seems to jaunty for the occasion. This is very triste, tres triste, right now. The pain is in the lower lobe of my right lung. I knew I had a pain in my lung, but, after I felt around in a cadaver, I knew the pain was in my right lung and on the lower lobe. I had a cadaver, and I would touch it. I would touch the part, and then I would try to decide whether or not my corresponding part hurt inside. When I spit up a substance, I see if it floats or if it sinks in water. Is it stringy? Is it thick? Is it thin? Does the water rip it? Yes, the water rips it. My friend came from England to Aix, just to visit me and check on my lungs. Venial. Terrace. Ishmael. Banished, he was ismael. A pariah. Parian. I have been saved automatically by ishmael Stevens. By a Stevens, ishmael. He is "kind of a jerk." He is "intimidated by the class." The hurt happened first. The eighty dollars. I have lost my purse. My purse cost me more than eighty dollars, but I have excellent health insurance. In college, the students are allowed to do things to the dummy. They are allowed to bury it or hold services for it. They are allowed to imagine it grow old or imagine it asleep and very attractive. They are allowed to do the suicide things to it. Look up "best way to commit suicide" on the internet, and nothing really comes back. Some websites pretend to have answer, but then you get inside them, and it's all about thinking about not doing anything. Gregory Corso wrote a lot about stealing wristwatches and wetting the bed. In the one letter I read, he also wrote a lot about masturbation - only he wrote it "masterbation." Thomas DeQuincey didn't go to a party because he was in low spirits, and he knew only his sisters would be there. Allen Tate wrote Robert Lowell a letter of introduction by way of a milkshake. When a vein shuts, it feels like an eye closing. It's is good to imagine yourself closing your mouth, even when your mouth is already closed. Or when you finish a thought, imagine yourself closing your mouth. Or a scrim, a mucousy scrim, a mucousy scrim membrane, should be something you pull on to yourself when you want to be genial, not venial, at a party. If you want to have fun at the party, then imagine the mucousy scrim is warm. If you want to have little fun or no fun or look very sophisticated, then imagine the scrim is cold. The mucous should be yours or the object of your desire's. To my one desire. This is for my one desire. This is when the monkey got tangled in my bedsheets, and I was on the ocean liner on my way to Africa. And I was so mad at that monkey, and that monkey smelled so bad. I wanted someone to get it away from me and tie it up. I never left La Touche because he was such a great short. The zagreeba was what protected us from the animals, though we had very little trust in it at first. Every time I started a sketch, a leopard would crouch near. This is for my one desire. A simple desire. A desire qualified is far more interesting than a desire. To qualify means to particularize - and particulars can become exhausting in anything that lasts long. For example, her teeth were very white because she had had them whitened. She also had poor circulation in her hands - she said that's why her fingernails were shaped in such a downturning way. And yes her hands were cold - so were mine. But my neck was supposed to be warm when she felt it - I see no way any of it, my neck, my neck, could have been otherwise. She touched my carotid. Then I let my jugular be touched. Touch my carotid, and that is all blood that has not been near my thoughts about you. Now touch my jugular, and all that blood contains thoughts about you.

2007-02-27T09:27:00.000-08:00

I lied about having read something, having seen something, and having looked something up in the dictionary. I was supposed to tell my sister about the word "diener" - so that she could impress a surgeon - but I didn't. I was supposed to tell her about a word that starts with "s," but I didn't tell her about that one either. The word had to do with seeing white beneath someone's eyes - it sounded like "seppuku." I was supposed to mail a disk to a publisher, but I didn't. I wasn't supposed to speak about Vaunted getting a grant, and I did. I spoke about it for a long time to the aggressive man who lives across from me. My father figure - when I was 16 - was sort of a cliched character now that I think about it. He, like a cliche, died of a heroin overdose beneath a banyan tree in Kapiolani park. I wish I knew some great new slang term for heroin, but I don't. I could call it "Royce," I suppose. He pushed himself into some Royce. He once told my boyhood friend and me about how he died multiple times, and how - like a cliche - each time he hovered above his body and saw himself dead. But I read an article in the New York Times about how that sort of thing has been scientifically proven. He didn't have any kind of mystical experience - the whole thing was some kind of yet-to-be-explained article. The man who collects dead bodies in Detroit is a cliche. We like it because we are so drawn to that sort of reporting. Hey, he's never recovered a dead Asian person. Half the time, those he recovers are naked or on the toilet. But has he seen dogs pulling a person apart? I went to the Post Office today and saw a tree falling down on my way. I got a coffee in the bread shop this morning, and a man who is always there accosted me yet again. He always wants to know if I've ever read anything about General Custer. A month ago, I made the mistake of telling him I'm a close personal friend of Evan S. Connell, the author of Son of the Morning Star. Jesus is sometimes the son of the morning star, but Lucifer is sometimes called that, too. (I learned all that from reading the notes to James Joyce's Ulysses. Whenever I see Ulysses or Don Quixote or Lolita on anyone's bookshelf, first I think, "Oh, college. The usual exhausting student books." Then I think about cliches.) I can never remember who is Lucifer, who's the Devil, Mephistopheles, or Beezelbub. Evan is just about my grandfather. He took baths with my grandmother in France. My grandmother does not like it whenever I grow any kind of facial hair. She says has never cared for any kind of facial hair. The only time she ever liked it was when it was on Evan. He has some sort of mustache. Now he lives in Santa Fe and bird wathes and publishes something sloppy but named every other decade. My grandmother also took baths with Anthony Quinn and Sydney Chaplin. Quinn's calling card was a little red round of Smiling Cow cheese. My grandmother has a trail of black hair that grows from her groin to her navel. She shaved that thing for some men but not for my dead grandfather because he liked it. He is dead. Before he died, he had to have a leg removed. They also made him eat shark cartilage. The man in the bread shop is something of a cliche because he has lots of scars on his wrists. I asked him about them, and he said he has tried to kill himself numerous times. I asked him if he ever tried to lie in a warm bath after he did it. He said he did. Killing yourself like that is a cliche. Sometimes people open veins on the throats at the insides of their elbows or on the insides of their thighs. Any kind of killing - no matter how creative - is a cliche. Someone told me the story of the woman astronaut who drove 900 miles while wearing an adult diaper so she could pepper spray the rival of her imaginary lover's affections was trite or cliched. Vaunted Sharkey, another of my boyhood friends, told me he accidentally had sex with his sister when he was 8 and she was 10. That is a cliche. Writing about it now somehow seems so tired and familiar. I have often used the word "exhausted" or "exhausting." This is all so exhausting. After I mailed my application to the summer writing retreat (I'm sure I'll get in) and my friend's submission to a publisher, I spat in the bin. I spat in the street. I spat on a restaurant's window. I spat in my coffee. Yesterday I read next to a German man who re-enacts Viking stuff all over Europe and America. He has been to all the contiguous U.S. states. He was a roadie for a metal band in Oakland - I forget the name of the band - they still tour and their name starts with a "D." He was an especially cliched figure, especially when he started talking to some bearded young men about the U.S.'s diplomatic methods. The bearded young men had been in a band and had worked as roadies, too. The bearded young men had ridden boxcars and hitchhiked across the U.S. in the early 2000's. Oh, and the German Viking was doing leather work as he spoke about diplomacy. He was punching holes for silver pieces he wanted to sew onto a leather sack he probably made in West Virginia. Vaunted is a cliche, too. And the boy who sold baby scorpions to all us other boys in fourth grade.

2007-02-25T20:43:00.000-08:00

He came from orange and played on the offensive line for UNLV. Railroad stations come momently. An organ should be re-leathered. The inside of her was re-leathered before we went to the Jersey Shore. She wore a tiger print bikini. We went to the zoos in Philadelphia, Newark, the Bronx, and in Central Park. Joan Crawford was disguised as her maid before she went behind her screen and changed.
In a peach orchard
Athwart his legs
By the crab
In the sea
Death comes momently to the lady in the tiger print bikini. My grandfather had to have his leg removed. The question happened to be above or below the knee. To go below the knee would make everything much more complicated. Whatever the surgeon saves must have a blood supply. Grandfather's minah bird, Georges, eats only hamburger meat. The airstream trailer is too bright to see. She has hair growing up to her navel, but my grandfather likes that. Other men made her shave that or she shaved it for them. Get ready to retch. Near the water pump for cleaning camp plates, you get ready to retch. You water out your mouth. This, after bad cranberries. This, after grandfather's leg. He played on the line for UNLV. He has a ring like a knuckle from the Naval Academy. He dropped test atomic bombs in Nevada. Played volleyball. His workers wear straw hats and black jeans. Scarcely broken, the minah bird, Georges, speaks to me. My landing received, I fell down the stairs and knocked out my front teeth. I am attracted to women with kicked in teeth and canines that flair out. The thoroughfare was flooded with fools schooled at Notre Dame. None of them like aluminum paint like me. The tigers at the Philadelphia zoo made me sad. Their cage looked awful - no one made any attempt to make it an environment. They had hosed the cement, so the tigers had wet stomachs. Inside, stomachs wet. My dwelling happens to be brilliant red and exceedingly demented.
I run underpass.
I know what the Holland tunnel sounds like. Mr. Holland died before they finished him. 14 died. But, hey, it's ventilated. Does it still cost 6$?
Kill Van Kull under the long bridge. I am a fine example of cowardice. I am ready to retch what I have. I cluster because this is it. Once in a sycamore
the strong sea
Phalanx, spread.
My talent was postponed for another ideal wait. The poet's permanent home was fumigated. Mount Pleasant. My progress - I am less sententious. I have decided to write AND live beneath a pseudonym. From my cottage along the river, I see children attempting to fish.

2007-02-11T21:20:00.000-08:00

Now that I have completed my second year, I am HAGGARD. The LACE I bought gave me no delight. I imagined it would, but no. I eat what I can overcome. My brother wears a LEOTARD. He can be in the basement. He can pretend his arm's removed. He can put a cord around his wrist, put the end outside, and wait for something to pull him out the window, into the street, and into the sea. He can change from a leotard to just the tights. Black tights. Up top, he looks 3D. Down below, 2D. You OUGHT to thank me for coming home. You had too much to drink, so, when the alarm goes off, we don't know what to do. And Delos, in his dancer's tight, telling me about the Tybee bomb. He is the gold coin boy. KECK: to make the sound of retching. Get ready to retch. "Keck" was the sound she made. I would like to KEEP what you gave me. The RAUCITY in her peritoneal cavity. I HOP aside, of course, unnerved by nail polish, my hives, and the two-dimensional quality of my brother.

2007-02-11T20:58:00.000-08:00

The email iris inside of her eye is the dark inside of a mushroom. The iris looks too much like the inside of a mushroom. The unlovely sorter of cadavers. She cuts herself - a tidy one with a knife. A thirster but vomition. Four years old and in surgery. A brain injury. He sat thwart-wise from me and dripped. He, the drip, the thirster, and all he sees is vomition. The hand-drill in under the sink. Under the skin. Again, the "k" jumps back when we want it to. Ants in the dough. He, the thirster, was a freak of temperament, of disaster. Her face was freaked with blood - o, the cadaver. How hard is it to remove a leg, an arm? Before I sleep, I imagine my arm's removed my leg. I have a cord around my wrist, and I believe something will pull me out my window and into the street. Then, into the sea. This story will be about ecstasy. It comes by addition or by subtraction. For once, we proceed from chaos to equilibrium. Her face surrounded by bevel gears, by vomition. Fraught with fastenings and bevel gears. The wet-strength of the gauze we use is impressive. I warn the surgeon. The surgeon warns me about trephination. Something about diabetes and the cure of it. The glasses were broken. The glasses were not broken, but the man died. His name was printed on the bow of his glasses. She opposed my opening. Here I am, clear and tight. I have found tasks. I have found discussions about the surgery of the head. The brain.

2007-02-10T07:59:00.000-08:00

Despite what I say, the thrum of her hands is a kindness. We sat thwart-wise for a long time. Wettability, maybe. This was written recently, but it is open for serious crit? Absolutely. He decayed through his ancestors, through his teeth, by burlesque. Yes. Nothing but a burlesque, it was. He pantomimed the scandal on a plane trip to Cuba because the engines were so loud. He could not tell us about the scandal on the plane, because the engines were so loud. The man who memoired the pine trees thanked me for handling all his ordinaries. The man, who wrote about egrets in his poems, proceeded to memoir my pine trees. I asked him not to.
The passage of their necks on my spine. The ballad I heard was sloppy, but it had a thrum to it which fixed the cant of mine. Your Symbolist poetry was a little misleading. In those years, I was ill, less obscure, and should have been obscure. My hat was black. The most delightful images appeared on my mirror. This time I am writing of machinery and broad stone sidewalks. I am writing of a shimmer I saw but cannot describe. Of wettability. The hallucination of having lived a sunday childhood. The reptile's cloaca that clicks in my head.
The wreck occured because there was ash in the air, in the sea, and in the back of their throats. His amusement of my letter led him to his fireplace and chimney. He discarded me. Later, he found a metal box in the back in the bricks. An Italian pistol, two wedding rings, and a round bone. In his life, he was associated with a decade, not a century. It gets easier. This stewardship gets easier. I am not very fond of the charm resisted, the fatality persisted.

At hazard, I asked her if she'd like to walk a circuit with me. In the middle of it, we saw masts of ships framing a plummeting plane.

2007-02-09T18:20:00.000-08:00

Bird beak nibs. Yes, she is clear and tight enough. She was clear enough when she said the sort of thing that does not involve the brain, the tongue, the neck. What she said just involved the glands. Her writing comes from the glands, not the heart. Not the head. Her clear and tight. Dear Puzzled By Indirect Intercourse... What's wrong? Don't you like crunching ice with your boots? Don't you like being told your biology, your work, your behavior, stinks? Don't you like someone hounding you with a camera and no click? She used Like when she meant As. He, the pedant.

Cruel acts which are not bad - I am looking for these. Ever handled a widow? Have you? Have you ever had a standing date with a widow? I have. And we never fail to knock knees. Ashamed of me - more shaking - I drove the car over booby-traps and nothing! Not a one worked, but I wanted them to work. I know what it's like to get it all across the elbows. For days, I've had it across the elbows. Enough. We hid the canteloupes in the theatre, because they had wrapped up the play. In the first act: they cropped him close.
In the second: Moments, however friendly, damaged my eyes. A whole diopter.
In the third: I found a lump of marrow under my seat. I thought it was rubber cement!
Fourth: discordance
Fifth: They got nothing done. Even the curtains wouldn't close. You know when the rod sticks? When the temp is just right and the plastic blows against you and wetdrifts against your thigh? I kept a window between her and me. Then, I painted that window because she sickened me. Comma, she sickened me.