The owl of chirography knows mouse has no autotomy, writes rhymes of such godwottery, hides honey brimming pottery, tempts bear who philosophically sees everything as lottery.

A tocsin from that delphic bird - the shrill lexicon spills from a trap-jaw. Pity those maimed beasties who, severed and crushed by a steely mandible closing, when from out and above comes a wraithlike descent, perish as sinews come unstitched, and joints unhinged.

There are things more dangrous than smoking brown cigarettes. Some night-owl woke me - shattering the dome I dreamt in. He was swooping for the mouse I thought up. His white face bloomed in front of mine, blinking like some dumb desert ghost with those black eyes - those devil pearls collecting a votary. Birds tend to fly at glass and kill themselves. Luckily, the mouse was not eaten.

How does anything live here? I may as well be a whale (come, Ishmael, and die. My namesake; the slaughterer can kill one more). My saturation is ostentatious - I am drinking bottled water. The sun draws the brown melanin of my gypsy-Jew ancestry up through my tissues and roasts me bronze.

The Joshua Tree – the yucca, with sword-blade leaves and a knack for staying alive reaches up and out - bent at the joints - defying the heat.

How did he wind up among the cowboys? Joshua - the warlord, stuck for forty years in the desert slaughters the Canaanites. He is punished - he is glorious, with a tree-body suffering for each of the God-granted dead.

I’ve yet to strap dough to my back and leave the Holiday Inn.

Joshua Tree II                           © Joshua Katcher                    Digital Photo.

There are thousands of burning bushes here in Joshua Tree, in the desert - but God lost his voice to the parched air.

Meteorites freckle the ground, dry like a desolate psoriasis on the face of California. The air cracks my sinuses until they bleed. Sand blows for miles in every direction. Mountains crumble to pieces in the distance. Spectral sunsets burst with blood and fire. There is so much dust that I don't even bother. Small, gutted houses, dwarfed and destroyed are left to erode every few miles. Like those abandoned homes, it is difficult not to be sanded down to almost nothing.

Joshua in Joshua Tree                           © Joshua Katcher                     Digital Photo.

The capital of Hell is hot. Brooklyn, that dirty brother, with searchlights beaming over from Manhattan skyscrapers onto the carking fags of Metropolitan Avenue - seething caliginous desires with French haircuts and tight jeans. Everyone is smoking pot and Camels and drinking beer and condensation from cold glasses. These boys are mendacious. They are kleptomaniacs. Instruction booklets. I open random pages. Blank. The heat is resolute. July hits the streets and everything is rotting like the garbage bags outside my window. The humidity curls my Jew-hair and dampens my folds. This summer is thick and heavy. I am choking in this room, drowning in my sweat and self-pity. He must be there. Shining in sweat - the bar lights swimming on him, waiting to talk about the cosmos, or at least willing to go reeling through them.

The garbage only gets worse. It dives down the sidewalks like filthy birds, crash landing and falling to pieces, bursting like feather-bombs, greasing the concrete. The subways stink of rotting rats and piss. The summer is almost here again – people are running around in sports shorts, looking like they actually mean it. People are scrambling for lovers in corners of bars and bookstores, sweating in the mosh-pits, sunbathing in the parks, biking in the streets, the cats are moaning in heat like fog-horns, and Manhattan is buzzing like a honeycomb on the delta of the Hudson River.

The seasons were dismantling. One rolled itself across the northeast like a thick, spiced dough. It inhaled and leaves were caught in its bite. It whispered an earthy perfume and sang an antiquated lullaby of sleep and death. There was something horribly gorgeous in its offering. The harvest, the fallen seeds and nuts, the apples and pumpkins were surrendered to the creatures that tucked themselves fatly into holes and nests and caves. Autumn was a martyr. It was red, orange, yellow, and brown, a fire-burst fading fast. It was a finale - the curtain falling. The last note played before a long rest. Then there was ice.

No the universe distilled is no mirror. And we are no distillate of any brew. Hinges of space break like the hyperflexed jaw. A mouth gaping at its own sound and genius. Words floating off like a riot dispersing.

Is it a sickness to see no obstacle? Prometheus a fountainhead a horror. What filters we've grown in our eyes and heads. All creatures fair game to our arrogance. Diversity nulled in the shadow of West.

It seems that no green can get through to the heart. It seems we've forgotten just when we were smart. It seems that the future is falling apart. Was civilization a fluke from the start? 

I have no home here. My home will be in the dirt. My home will send the green,soft infant arms of seeds up to break the surface, unlike this decietful city. My home will be quiet minerals, and slow. I like the idea of a slow home.

In a taxi at four in the morning again. On my way to thirty-fourth street I see a man in tan shorts and a white polo shirt standing with his arms inside the torso and his head tucked partially below the collar. He has no shoes on, just filthy, white athletic socks. He is standing in a large entranceway to an apartment building to shield himself from the bitter wind. It is about twenty-two degrees. He must have gotten locked out. Kicked out. I would have stopped and helped if... I should have stopped and helped. Offered to make a call, something. I didn't though. Down through the midtown tunnel then over the Pulaski bridge into Greenpoint. I notice some billboards have changed. Billboards larger than any flag that any country has ever raised.

I have a craving for seaweed and wild rice with sesame oil.

The taxi driver is sleepy and I can see his eyes in the rear view mirror straining to stay open - the lids like elevator doors, like subway car doors, slowy  shutting, then bursting open again, startled. He runs almost every stop sign. I should say something, but I don't. He falls asleep at the next light, and somehow I arrive safely.

Tonight I feel as though I'm riding a monorail through the exhibit of life at some theme-park where there is no cause for alarm. Just cruise along and observe through the glass, not touching the displays. Is this some form of mutilated faith?

While leaving the cab, I find a wallet full of credit cards on the seat. I think about the computer I want, the couch I could get, and the exact sewer I would throw it down when I am done with it. Instead, I call the woman and tell her. She is tired and thankful. I say that I was tempted to use them, but decided against it. She laughs, thinking I was joking.

The puffy, pink man with white hair and a star-spangled tie became impatient. "I don't know if you're jurors or terrorists, so if you don't turn off your cell phones, you'll be dealing with Homeland Security."

I laughed out loud, trying the extrapolation on like a four-fingered glove. It just didn't fit. It was a desperate threat sent into a room full of tired, pissed-off people who'd been called in on this frigid, snowy morning.

The case was about a nose job. The prosecution wants malpractice, the defense claims unpreventable complication. I claim that I don't give a crap about some woman who didn't like the way Mother Nature molded her nose and now has sinus damage. Not enough, at least, to lose six days of pay in exchange for influence over the financial fate of a plastic surgeon and his disgruntled patient who are furthering the cycle of unrealistic standards of beauty.

The place was like a run-down high school. It smelled of musty textbooks, floor cleaner, and ancient heaters. Lots of old white men scurried around in khaki overcoats. There was a woman who seemed to be waiting for her hearing. She made the sound of shooting a snot-rocket about every fifteen seconds. I actually timed it while I was eating lentil salad during the lunch break.

I was not selected as a juror. I was partially insulted, but mostly glad. Initially, when asked, I had told them I was an artist, filmmaker, and environmentalist, and that I thought plastic surgery is socially degrading. I don't think they liked my nose-ring or tattoos either.

The future smells like sulfer, like egg salad. Like the hot guts have come up through the cracks. The future sags, bruised as a rotten plum, as ripe as the Devil's cum. Split down the center. A cracked coconut.

What strength is left? Enough to type, to flip a switch, to press a button, to dial. Not enough to survive -  to dig a root, to cross a plain, to tear into raw flesh.

A barnicle, an apple pit. A carnival? - a throat is slit.

Something is unraveling. I hear metal being cut or shaved. Sparks. Screw-heads sit stripped like busted locks. Every clock is a countdown to death. I feel the rocks shrinking my breath. In a dream I flew through a blue corridor, past doorways and through people bursting into thick lightdust. Thick like pollen, like ragweed, like the sucrose of springtime - like the cavities of summer. The roots of oaks ride canals as boats, in Panama or in Venice.

Somewhere in America thunderheads are poised like flexed biceps, squeezing sweat onto assembly-line houses. The lightening bulges like veins over the graveyards of once-mythic landscapes.

Will there be a grand finale? A climax, a burst, an apex? Will it fizzle-out or just droop? I’m not running around with rattlesnakes, corals, and copperheads raised above my head in fistfuls. Something is unraveling. The signs are like droppings. The dreams are like droppings. Sick. A key with no lock, a foot with no sock, a barn with no cock, a boat with no dock, a ring with no rock. A shock.

On the way there, a man on the subway is reading a trashy sex novel. He is hunched over. The agonizing, thorn-crowned, solid gold head of Jesus hangs between his legs from a chain around his neck. The train is bumping and convulsing, and Jesus swings to and fro, quietly smacking into the man’s crotch like a morbidly sexed pendulum. All I can think is that Jesus is giving head to this man. The tortured floating head of this deity-pop-star is slapping a penis every two seconds. (He’s got the priests beat, and he doesn’t even have hands.)

On the way back, a man is shooting blanks - some unintelligible diatribe. His eyes move like houseflies, impulsive and fickle. He finally bursts into tears, and I feel terrible for not understanding. We are forced to observe one another, he and I, on the train. He looks around, as puzzled by the rest of the passengers as some of us are by him.

Today I walked into a tree. Just like in a cartoon. I swear, it was sad. I was looking behind me, and the second I turned around, there it was. "Hi!" it said. "Oof!" I replied. The man getting into his car in Union Square gave a look of disbelief and either annoyance or pity. Not sure, because I was quickly getting my cell phone out. I spoke into the reciever: " I just walked into a tree." No one was on the other end. I hadn't even dialed. But I was despearte to do anything but walk by the disbeliever with no defense or distraction. He must have known I wasn't speaking to anyone. I would have realized it myself. I was too distracted from being body-slammed by a tree to do the logic. I wonder if he decided I was already nuts, or I had gotten clubbed hard enough to knock a few screws loose?

My night was better than a novel. I left Times Square at one in the morning, a few hours early to cushion my transition to the day-shift.  I carried two heavy bags full of soda cans and bottles out ino the street. The office building that I work in does not recycle. I have made the decision to do it for them (at least on the eighteenth floor). I thought to myslef "It's early, why not take the subway rather than a cab?". And so I proceeded into the gritty intenstines of Manhattan with my fingers already starting to go numb from the weight of my bags of reducable, reusable, recyclables. There is a certain prowess granted to he or she that carries bags of bottles. While it punished my digits, it also freed me to act as if I were outside the scope of etiquette. I could spit, curse, make eye contact for more than a second, sing to myself (out-loud), and just generally be obnoxious. I've always wondered at what point somone becomes a bum or bag-lady. They don't awake one morning and  gather their things up in bags and start wandering. Where is the transition? Have I taken the first step? Have I leaped into it and discovered the liberating effects? The bags were from the Gap - the ones with strigs like nooses on my fingers.

People make assumptions about those carrying cans and bottles in used Gap bags. People were afraid. They avoided me. They moved seats when I sat near them on the train. They whispered and oogled and pointed. "That boy isn't dressed like he should be carrying bottles", I imagine they said to eachother. But on second thought, I was, wasn't I? My fingerless gloves were fraying at the edges, my jeans had several large holes with long-johns underneath. My hair was a crime scene. On second thought, they were saying "look at that boy," period.

Still high on my new freedom, I realized the train I needed to transfer to was not running.I left the subway to find the bus. I was followed by a police vehicle for about 10 minutes. Finally, they decided to ask me what was in my bags. They did not believe I was recycling at two in the morning, so they searched my bags and let me go "haha...recycle", as one of the officers put it.

Three hours later, after getting on the wrong bus once, and the wrong train twice, I arrived home and deposited my "haha recycle" into the appropriate bin. 

 

Wood                          © Joshua Katcher                     clay and oxides.

                    Hips                                © Joshua Katcher                               digital photo

Sap sinks down to sleep in roots - animals hide in nests or burrows, the wind moves across the ground like the notes of some frigid lullaby that hush everything into coma. Nothing is growing here. I wonder how i might survive the winter as any other animal (having gathered and stored food enough for months). The truth is I'd probably die. I don't know how to grow my own food, and I don't know what is edible that grows here.

I didn't grow up on a farm. I've never milked a cow or slaughtered a chicken, but here they are in clean plastic casings with no evidence that they cried out as they're throats were slit. (My father took me fishing once The hook went through the eye of the fish and I couldn't stop crying.)

People who don't mow their lawn get death threats.

There is a tribe beneath my skin, painted with the rich soils of South America, and hardened by the white deserts of Africa. They drum my chest and emerge from dense capillary jungles. Raging red rivers call for my warm flesh forests to go back ten thousand years and start over. Hunters pull at my tendons like bows, release arrow-sharp reactions, then vanish. Gatherers collect my senses like roots and mangos, to live.

I find the land replenished and every clock crumbles and blows away.

It's snowing - finally. The sky is pale and soft as a fetal pig. The heaters clank. I've taken out my winter sweater. I've salted the sidewalks and my pillow. The snow hides things. The cold hides things. I know they're there, but the surface is so damn pretty. I fly over islands in my dreams - green and blue and hot white sand. I am a crane. Schools of red-yellow fish burst like fireworks across the shorelines. Clouds moisten my eyes. The sun bakes my skin and the soles of my feet. Bronzed, hardened by the heat, softened by the hanging fruits. Fat waves curl and fizz and throw themselves at the devouring shore like Buddha from a cliff to feed a starving lion. What more could I want here?

This island is deserted.

I wake and so is my bed... Something's gone missing. Something's fading out and uncovering an artifact that I am terrified of. A beautiful carsophogus opens. I can barely see what's inside...romance, drama, acrobatics - one, two three. One, two, three, like a dance back and forth over thousands of miles. But it all melts away. It's a movie. I'm in a theater and the film has gotten stuck on one frame that just burns through and melts away right there in the middle of the scene.

Illusions are made by artists and magicians and a certain desperation. This island is deserted.

My body has turned on itself. My stomach is a small furnace. The burning is starting to overcome me. I wake up from the pain several times each night. Nothing quenches the thirst of the fire. Antacids, water, enzymes, vitamins, herbs, prescriptions, acupuncture, diet changes, and exercise have all failed. I’ve even raised the head of my bed to cooperate with gravity. I never cared much for physics; that could explain the vigor with which my stomach, that rebel organ, attempts to defy Newton’s law. Come children, gather at my torso and stay warm.
I got high on my visit to the gastroenterologist. Not at first though. I sat on the faux-leather examination table in a lovely blue paper ensemble. The nurse stuck things attached to wires to several strategic (and conveniently, hairy) places on my chest. My heart began to race. I’d never been knocked out before. The doctor walked in, a friend of the family, and pretended not to notice my nipple piercings. My father, (who has colitis) plays poker and golf with the same man that drugs him and sticks tubes, instruments, and hands up his asshole. I told him he could get the same treatment much cheaper at The Cock in New York. He was not amused. Fortunately for me, I was there to get drugged and have tubes shoved down my throat and esophagus instead.
The first shot did nothing. “I’m still awake!” I proclaimed.
The second shot did nothing. “Nope.” I said. The doctor looked at me, puzzled.
Finally he shot me up with enough drugs to take down a linebacker and everything went black. I remember an instrument being placed in my mouth to hold my jaw open. According to the doctor I stuck my tongue out through it and laughed at him. I also remember a bad pain in my stomach as they took a biopsy of the tissue. Other than that, I can only recall being driven home. My father claims that about a half hour after the procedure, I sat straight up on my cot and said with a Texas accent, “let’s high tail it out of here!” while tearing at my IV lines frantically.
I took a purple pill every day for 2 years. The gelatin capsules were made from boiled hooves, tendons, cartilage, and skin. The side effects were unknown. The long-term affects were unknown. I weaned myself off of them. The burning immediately returned. If I could make use of this excessive acid it would be great. I could learn to projectile vomit at will and take to the streets fighting crime. 

I had a nervous breakdown when I was six. Mrs. Baker told us that outer space went on forever and ever. I fell backwards out of my chair and onto the floor where I stared, bug-eyed, mouth in the shape of a small 'o', at the ceiling. I pictured traveling through and across and never stopping. This made me nauseous. I would eventually let my mind find some sort of wall so I could sleep. I knew there was no wall - and if there were one, it would mean that it had another side. I had a second breakdown the next year during mathematics. I was determined to find out what the last number was. I counted out-loud for an entire day until I was tranquilized. The drugs made me think weird. I realized that one could count backwards into the negatives. They upped the dosage. This sort of thing went on for a few years. My older sister's severe fear of vomiting rubbed off on me and by the age of fifteen I'd been to four psychologists and psychiatrists. The first one I went to did nothing but play Stratego with me. Another thought it was amusing that I contemplated infinity rather than what new He-Man figure I wanted. The truth is, I wanted She-Ra. For my seventh birthday party at the Burger King with an indoor carousel and slide, I told every single one of my friends to get her for me (but not to tell their parents). I ended up with eight She-Ras. My parents were baffled and I denied everything. Boys aren't supposed to play with pretty dolls that come in pink boxes - even if they are the strongest blonde in all of Eternia.

It's grey in midtown. The coulds drop so low that the skyscrapers are beheaded. The rain is cold and hard. People scurry around under umbrellas with steam bursting from between their lips. I always imagine that when it rains, the layers of grime will be washed away. We all shove orange peels up our noses at this little cafe near 72nd street. I hear that the citric acid is supposed to clear the sinuses. We don't look to clever though, sipping tea like this and snorting.

I am nocturnal now. It feels like I'm living inside-out. My nine-to-five is the evil twin of yours - (between you and me though, I think both twins are rather evil).

Times Square at four in the morning can not hide how ridiculous it is. Bling (yawn) bling. Imagine a Las Vegas show girl, decked out in her most fabulous get-up performing without music, without much of an audience - someone sweeping the aisle... someone sleeping in the back corner. But for christ's sake, she's giving it her all. She can't stop. Times square is a beaming sore without the crowds and the noise to drown it out. Without the double-decker buses filled with europeans, and chain restaurants spilling over with mid-westerners who came to New York to eat processed beef-food at a McDonalds that looks like a christmas tree on steroids. It is architectural neurosis. The spectacular billboards look simply ridiculous and ugly. They are 24-hour salesmen on acid. Huge faces of newscasters smile at the concrete. At me, alone. They are monsters. They could easily eat me.

Who leaves all these lights on? This inescapable orgasm of lights that just perpetually bursts and bursts with the same vigor and inensity as ever? Is Times Square an obsessed athlete? And idiot savant? A mad scientist? God almighty, is it you?

I am so tired. This pornographer doesn't care that leaves are changing only forty minutes north of it. That animals are preparing for hybernation. And while all of nature prepares for a long nap, Times Square keeps screaming "Fuck me, baby! Fuck me!"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Goddess by Joshua Katcher (collage and marker)

Read This With Your Eyes Closed

The phone rings twice. Ignore it. I am going to lead you into this slowly. Imagine an unknown depth. Enter it. There is a deafening sound. Sirens, computer keys clicking, horns, radio voices, music, a trumpet screams. Like out of a projector, you see a portrait of your senior year in high school. It starts to get quieter. You can make out some recognizable songs, some familiar voices. Pause. Flash. Now a picture of your father holding you against his chest when you were two. You were asleep in his arms. Now you hear only a mumbling static. It fills you, then fades to nothing. You hear the high-pitched hum of your own nervous system. The soft patting of your heart. Now there is silence. Do you think we can hear each inside this place? There are no more echoes. Flash. A still from your mother’s sweet sixteen. You begin to feel as if you’re moving - either rising or falling. There is no orientation inside. Flash. A small, cracked and yellow photo of your great grandfather overlooking a large property. His eyes are dark and serious. His skin is almost illuminated. Flash. Now you see a tattered black and white photograph of a man standing still among walking blurs in a city street. A light goes out. A wire falls. A compass cracks. You are moving in space. You have forgotten something. Imagine blackness. You see a woodcut print in your mind of some colonists purchasing Africans, then the slaughtering of natives – then a renaissance painting with women and babies and carefully placed halos. There are piles of dead bodies. Small stone homes surround a castle. There is a crucifix. A geisha. An African mask. A samurai completing seppuku. Huge kingdoms in the desert. Gold. Jaguar skins. Go further back. There are clay jugs with gladiators. Relief portraits of dog-headed men entombed. A telescope falls from your hand. Maps erase themselves. Buildings collapse into the ground. All the Pyramids across the earth implode. Rows of corn sink back into the soil. Several animals regain their genetic cleanliness and morph into leaner, stronger, and faster creatures before your eyes. They run away from you despite your arrows. Numbers and letters and strange symbols begin to fall away from you in a flurry. Now it’s like a blizzard. They are gone. You have forgotten something. Dolls and sculptures turn to dirt in your hands. Now there are bison and men with spears on cave walls. You blow ink through a grass straw over your hand and onto the wall where it leaves a negative handprint. You are moving more rapidly. Now there are lines in the dirt. Stop. Where are you? What do you see? A creek. A tree. They have no names though. A bird flies overhead. You remember something you never really knew.

Now you can come back. It’s all fake, of course. Textbooks and lectures. Paintings and photographs.

You don’t really know any of it. It is one great sculpture, a movement of rapture where every single thing that has ever happened occurs at once, and then vanishes.

There are common mannerisms that suddenly become frightening as if i hadn't noticed them before - as if they were some strange, horrifying language. The sound of hands slapping together to show approval or enthusiasm - that hollow or sharp impact (depending on the size of the hands slamming into each other) echos like misaimed gunshots into my skull. What is this collision of ones limbs?

A high-pitch shriek escaped the mouth of some woman on a prime-time game-show and i nearly cried. She became some sort or screeching parrot, all colorful and feathery in her stage make-up and prom-like dress.

If New York had a soul it would be as dark and rotten as a root-canal. If New York had a heart, it would be large enough to hold all the oil, piss, and spit that spill into its chest every time it rains. There isn’t enough rain in the northern hemisphere to wash away the grime of New York City. I’ve never felt so contaminated before.

My love for this asphalt and concrete, pimpled with chewing gum, brimming with rats and cockroaches, is real. I love it like I love the certainty of death - a repeated and astounding daily revelation. Sadness and love move closer together, they blur into one another like Siamese twins, and I wonder if they were ever separate in the first place, or if I was simply looking from the wrong angle.

I took him to the water at the edge of Brooklyn. We watched the city as it smeared into itself, a single, jagged silhouette dotted with carnival lights. It whispered to us from across the East River. It breathed heavily in and out through the tunnels, out into the streets, and up – finally.

I can now understand why people cry at the sight of the mythical western landscapes. Our love for it is sadness. It is a complete submission to our failure to grasp its entirety.

Holland. It's flat here. Highways full of small cars and lined with short, clean buildings, soccer fields, neatly squared and irrigated plots of muddy farmland roamed over by dirty puffs of sheep. It should be three in the morning but it’s eleven. Even the garbage trucks are clean and modest. Rows of houses with pyramid roofs and smoking chimneys are warming the Dutch families. Hundreds or more sheep pockmark the green and grey fields, chewing and growing their wool. I can't understand the graffiti here anymore than I can in America. There is harsh modern architecture set against the damp softness. The metro is a two-story, yellow train that travels quietly. There is moss on everything.

There's a woman in a fur coat standing around like some rich barbarian peddling her class. The coat is thick and tan with occasional tufts of brown and white sticking outwards, riding the air currents. She contemplates a breakfast danish in the basement of Grand Central Station. The beasts, whose misfortune has them sewn around the ugly woman, are hugging her from ankle to neck. The warm skins that once hugged their own bodies cannot thaw her. She catches me staring and shoots me a look of sheer granite.

They are so carefully killed - the fur must not be damaged. A life in a cage - a paw, half gnawed off, in the trap - a quick snap of the neck - an electric rod up the anus - a holocaust shower room - a heavy foot on the lung so hags can drag their weighty pretense up and down and through midtown.

She must be thinking how dare I judge her. How dare I take one look and have it settled. Alright. Maybe she does know. Maybe she's realized that her bulky gorilla cape did not simply materialize. Fine. She's considered it's history, it's lack of necessity, it's waste. But she's also considered it's meaning. It's symbol. Like a unlimited, round-trip ticket to stuffy shiraz and brie parties - an all access pass to the Plaza hotel - a barrier between not only the body and the cold, but the haves and the have-nots.

I suddenly want to rip it... dump my tea on it... something. She'd only buy a new one though, and with a vengence. She has her human justifications. The coat is more real than her warmth or her ignorance.

Flesh and blood. concrete. How often we meet. My sister's neighbor smashed his skull wide open the other night. The blood bloomed around his head like a sad, steamy-warm merlot melting the ice. Six feet down. I imagine it making a hollow sound that echoed off the brick and stone of the buildings on 5th street - a small bit of steam curling around his upper lip, dissipating past the snowflakes, the freezing rain.

On second thought, it may have looked like full head of red hair burst from his zenith, or that his veins crept out of the hole and into the cracks of the ice and the sidewalk - running from his heart - coagulating, freezing, then sleeping. He is dead now. I didn't know him, but I saw him once. My sister said he didn't own anything aside from a bench press, a couch, and a small white television.

I am tired of this game. My headache tastes like alkaline. It’s one in the morning and I am still in my pajamas from last night. I am picking at my skin. I see blood. Neurotic. The cat is curled like a thumbprint on my bed - black, intricate, and still. I see him breathing softly. His small belly rises and falls. There is a general lack of inflection. Decisions have to be made. Coke or Pepsi? McDonald’s or Burger King? Vanilla or chocolate? Mary-Kate or Ashley? VHS or DVD? I get the point. I sail through the variables into a cliché with the logic of a computer program. There are always two possibilities. One, rejected, the other embraced. Never look back. Nike or Adidas? Boy or girl? The truth is that none of these things are equal opposing forces. Apples and oranges simply buckle under the weight of my desire to have them meet head to head in some sort of cosmic battle. It is my nature. Crest or Colgate? When I was in elementary school I discovered that one could actually write (with a pencil) upon the surface of an eraser. It totally blew my mind. Rain or shine? Brittany or Christina? I had a dream that a large, white wolf descended a foggish-blue hill and nuzzled my hand. Jesus or Satan? The notion of infinity, spatially or conceptually, awakened a terrible fear of vomiting in my early childhood. Beef or chicken? I stopped eating animals after I watched a cow’s throat get slit from ear to ear, then hang upside down, bleeding to death, licking the air for anything.