Push the Button, Frank

We've all had the feeling. It's late. You need some rest. After all there's that thing and the one you forgot today and the person who has to know something asap or it will be too late. Okay. All lined up and ready for the morning. Your body is a mass of nervous tired. Covers up. Light off. You slowly close your eyes and

BOOM! Breasts! FIRE OH MY GOD FIRE! "Sure but what does he know? I mean..." DEATH! Indy 500 CLOSE UP! A Jetta commercial on speed. "It's the square root of EVIL!" Bodies writhing for the DANCE. Snakes DYING!

Open eyes.

Shit.

Is this what speed is like?

Shit.

You can't turn it off. Channel a big ball of light or a stream. Try to remember what silence sounds like. Tell the world to fuck off and hope it forgets you soon.

This is, I'm sorry to say, a regular occurrence with me. I wanted to attribute it to genius, but since I can't seem to find any empirical proof of that, I now call it overstimulation. It took a while to find the conscious relaxation technique for me. Here it is for your edification or entertainment.

It is pitch black. I walk forward, hand out. I touch a doorknob, cold brass and smooth. Turn and enter. A billion lights on a control panel. A plane or mad scientist playset. I move forward and begin slowly switching off the sharp points of light, feeling each move reducing power in the ship or machine or whatever. I do this systematically for about a minute. Each 'off' reduces the tension in another part of my body. Click. Left foot. Snick. Right hand. That's when I see it. A comically large, red button at the top right. How did I not see it before? Failsafe. Master Dead Switch. Yeah, like the one at the gas station. Hit the button, Frank. I palm it hard and it all goes down. Everything. Every light. Every sense of power. The hum I wasn't even aware of drops from tenor to bass and dissolves to nothing.

The Titanic. Night. April 14, 1912.

Suddenly I am in a lifeboat, safe and distant. All at once the massive liner goes dark, lifeless. I'm not cold as the hulk lurches to the left the moonlit water like a giant finally dying on the horizon. I've left the great vessel of life and am beginning to float further out into the darkness. It's not scary. I'm warm and the world's want gives me a bye. It's okay. Just go. You won't be missed. Everyone understands. You've done just fine. I stop worrying about every little thing I am expected to remember when I wake. Whom to love. The dates of war. mad motor skills. Whom to leave alone. I smile. I breathe. I leave behind even the darkness.

Goodnight.

Road Trip

Half drunk on his own sad, he croons badly to his country. Salt on his tongue, he smiles, thinks about running away from statues and spotlights towards things hell bent in the wind. Hands and knees on dirt. Spanish spat in slurred anger. The rights of stars. Falling back in roadside bushes, tumbling the world down a thickened vision, it's due south and saying somethings are rightfully ignored. Forgotten on purpose.

In Superior

What do you do when you are too sick to go out, clean house, or otherwise be helpful? Rework scraps you find in drawers, maybe remember very special nights up north.

In Superior

the nameless points on the horizon,

where sight surfs on white flashes

and into the black suede above,

show us everything we need to know.

I love how it makes me young, my eyes

suckling the full breast of moonlight.

I love how it makes us old, two smirking stars

who have watched it all come and go together.

In the morning it’s almost gone, just a glance

over breakfast and bloodies and the world’s tide rolling in.

So let’s not rush.

At the place where the night starts to see,

when the day closes down

I'll see you there.

Don’t say a word.

Get ready to jump.

Some Mondays Are Better Than Others

Pushcart Prize Nomination

I'd like to thank words, without which this would not have been possible.

I post more regular updates over at Facebook. If you're not following me there, you're missing out my almost daily quips of pyrite and nickle.

Multiple Choice

The secret night opens six inches in front of your next step. It is exactly 12 years from your past and half that from your future. You have to enter it else be trapped forever. The solution is understanding:

a. Why
she feels slighted at the Oscars.
They don't know shit she says in the dark,
no make up and writing her own lines to boot.
No idea.
Weighted with bags enough, she practices with
couples in the park. They just smile and stroll on.
She doesn't hear cut and keeps talking until
the last bench, where she sits to smoke,
stretches her varicose legs until her bit part
in the next scene.

b.How
some people
are completely themselves in public,
as if the open air act of being noticed
enables their own private perfection.
For you, he laughed, its a gauntlet.
Just make it through and shut the door.
Exhale. Allow the closed world
to refill what keeps getting taken against
your will.

c. Where
the perfect blue is cut slant by architecture.
This sky so close above you,
Some worlds need pressure to form, you think.
Something about oysters and pearls and
small incisions that hurt now but help in the end.
Blue oblivion edging the relief.
But then there's the steady state view,
something says. An old man every night
outliving us all in a field
just outside the city.

Tunnel

The strange chemicals in my brain have leveled out once again, and the world is no longer seen as a reddened singularity. It is fascinating to watch myself, as if from the outside, behaving like my father. Those times when he would implode and wend, with perfect subtlety, from stoic king to half-mad emperor. Kurtz ala Brando. The tribute to Hollow Men. A concrete weight is placed on the face and heart, the air you breathe rationed with sadistic measure and scented with bondage. The world you have created for yourself has been effortlessly assumed by sly raiders who have done nothing to earn it, save for their patience in waiting for you to drop your guard.

Fairness becomes an excuse for the beaten. Entreaties from everywhere like peels of sardonic laughter, masked just enough to keep you playing the game. It is not unlike dreaming, when the monster is upon you and you're slowly sprinting in quicksand. But here you're the monster and the horizon is teeming with hoards of  decisions that have brought you here, to the place you cannot bear and cannot leave. So you rattle the cage, ironically impressed by its solid construction, by the beauty of light glinting off the life your very own hands have shaped.