Would she sell herself to the red slave trade

and wither away in booze and ocean spray?

Thanks to Frank for the kind words and the linkage over at his Frankipedia.org -- a commendium of knowledge about all things Franklin.

your last name is hope.

I think I only have three emotions.

New Sitcom

"The Fetus & Marie"

Most Places

You saw him most places you went.

He was always there, coincidentally maybe, and he saw you. He knew you saw him and you knew he saw you but neither of you ever acknowledged the other and neither of you ever acknowledged that neither of you ever acknowledged the other either. But you saw him, yes you did, and you better believe he saw you. He always saw you.

See, his mouth was a rose that bloomed in fear. His eyes were great black bees trapped behind glass, darting this way and that searching somewhere, anywhere, for that sticky and bloody nectar they needed so desperately to survive. His hair was a burning forest, full of black brambles and charred white branches that burned and shook as he moved, which his tiny little hat did so incredibly little to ever extinguish. The hat simply sat and the hair blazed around it with that strange depth of burning wilderness.

His brain, well his brain was a goddamn landfill. Nothing but rotting junk, burning rust, and discarded memories. And it all came tumbling out of that little rose mouth whenever it bloomed: car parts and scrap iron, used diapers and dismembered dolls just dropping out and hitting the floor, making little piles of rubbish. When he spoke it was with the weight of a hundred dead white men charting Indian rivers for the first time and believing themselves and only themselves to be the very first human beings ever to float upon its green waters or walk upon the sweet flesh of the shores.

He twitched and moved, like a muscle, like bonepowder, like a frightened tongue on jelly or paper. He shook when he sat in immobile motion and he stared, he stared right at you, those huge roving bees coming right for you, stingers poised to poison your eyes.

He was something like a man, but not quite.

"How do you do?" says you, one tired and quiet day, breaking the rules, breaking the taxing wax seal off the silence and awkardness. There was no going back, from now on you would have to acknowledge him each and every place you went, he'd always be there, watching waiting wondering when you were going to acknowledge him, when he could start in on you and suck you for human nourishment. Was that really something you'd wanted to do? I understand politeness just fine, but this ... well, this looked like a mistake.

"I'm starving," he says, rose blooming as cobwebbed fingers pat his round little belly which had never once, not even on long wet days spent in caverns and toolsheds, never once, not once!, known true hunger. But that wasn't quite what he meant and you both knew it.

"I'm starving," he said again with a smile and looked you again dead in the eyes.

Send the wire with love.

The wilderness gets stolen. Tree by tree.

you are the raven of your time.

Horses.

And then he saw horses. Half-glimpsed in the black white night, sheltered and hidden by the high hand of elder trees. They were black and sleek, steel and onyx as they weathered the world in quiet fright. But they were strong too, strong but scared, and they walked with one another, pausing occasionally to sniff the ground, to trace a picture of angels and gods in the wet dirt beneath gold-plated, fingered hooves. And he watched as they spoke to one another and ran and fled like ghosts through the trees so tall and old, so fallen and bold, that they stood like black and silver spines on the devil's backbone.

The horses remembered, oh yes they remembered, they remembered a time when the fields were an endless sprawl stopped only by the broad but gentle hand of the sea; they remembered when the sun was a beacon of painful joy, when the mountains kept moving upward with no peak in sight like sharp fingers reaching for heaven. They remembered when they had once walked like men and spoke like waves, when the noise and the tears were so far behind the skin of their faces that it hurt just to imagine them tearing free, so bloody and free, and pouring forth in great salted strands of cloudy mist for all to see. But those days were done, oh, those days were long dead and gone along with all the silent children who had once wept on swingsets and slept in amber grass while the horses watched over them.

And then he saw horses. He saw them run and wheel. Blinding through the trees, like sparks, like soldiers, like wheels of lights that sped and fled leaving arches traced behind them glowing in the inhuman night, twisting steel and speaking sparks in a wordless mumbling otherworldly choir.

They were everything he wanted to be, wild and carefree, but burdened with memory, pained by knowledge and by loss, but still gloriously alive, still running after all these years, still obscured by elder trees in the deep dark heart of the wood. Still happy, despite the sorrow. Still powerful and kind despite the age they now lived in. He saw through fogs, saw what they used to be and what they would one day become: pharaohs in monstrous chrome castles who ate the flesh of the weak and trod upon utopian graveyards with a bloodless stench of innocence lost. He saw them speak and he saw them walk on two legs, once again.

He knew them not as they wished to be seen but as they truly were.

And then he saw horses.

Fearlessness

you can sing anything if you just sing it with passion.

you can say absolutely anything if you just say it with conviction. nonsense becomes a poetry when you speak like it has some kind of meaning only you know.

fearlessness is the thing.

fearlessness is the key.

they live with the black sea of nothingness hovering above them. the sensation of falling upwards is so great they lie clutching the burnt-bread ground in sharp chalky terror.

Zimmerman and Associates

Somewhere along the way I realize I just needed to lose myself in the meaningless of it all. It was the only way to find some porcelain type of meaning to such brackish time, minutes of my life slipping way into the ether. On my deathbed I knew I would wish I could swap out this time, replace it, relive it, use it to extend my living time just a last few desperate breaths, to spill my guts to my last remaining friend, a golden-headed stranger of a nurse.

Tell her all the gnarled secrets that had been building up my whole life: how I had a crush on Susan Holmberg in the third grade and never told her; how I had been the one to rip the pages out of Steve Garland's book in an act of petty revenge; how I had poured bleach on my neighbor's car when I was moving out because I was too much of a coward to tell him what a revolting burn-out I thought he was during the two years I lived there in silent hatred; how I had refused my uncle that loan and spread lies about him after he had helped my parents support me through school; all the spilt milk and sex dreams I never had; about how when my father would speak to me I always wanted to fall asleep in the middle, not because I was ever that tired that I couldn't keep my eyes open, but just because I wanted to as a kind of statement; how I had never bothered to have the children who should have been taking care of me right now and listening to this lifetime of regrets and triumphs because I was afraid and too self-absorbed to give the little runts any of my time or my youth, because I was afraid I might end up secretly hating them, or worse yet, because I was afraid I'd end up as emotionally distant and bitterly judgmental a father as my own was after years of setting his skin alight under a torch-lit sea.

Yes, I would surely want these minutes back, but here I was none the less--my wrinkled future-self struggling, desperate, weak-kneed and ocean-eyed, reaching his china fingers back through the stacks to demand an exchange of time, precious time--and the only thing to do was to lose myself in the passing of every velvet second.

The computer crashed, I lost all the work I had been doing. At first I was angry, until I realized it didn't matter anyway. If I had completed this tower of papers, quivering like a heart attack above me, they would just give me another, in which case I would just have to begin again anyways. What matter was it if it was this stack or that stack? Losing my work meant nothing because progress did not exist. It was futile, empty, pointless, boring, Zen, nirvana, ahistorical, never-ending, unchanging, soul-numbing, repetitious fucking nonsense, nonsense, idiotic nonsense...

I closed my eyes, tasted the air full and long, and began again with no anger.

I would have no extra breaths on that coming final day, those death drums finally pounding out my name from distant black hills. A task, like a life, has no meaning if it has no end.

Passenger

…and there was the city, that fucking city, laid out like a string of fat, glittering pearls in the darkness of mankind. Perfectly aligned, perfectly designed, grid-like and heavenly mathematical, this city that looked so dazzling bright. All the scum, all the dirt, the derelicts, tramps, well-dressed reptiles, and whores had been washed away by a simple act of distance. What had seemed so distasteful from a dog’s sight, all covered in vomit and roaming the streets for days with a half-decayed belly and homicidal thoughts, now contained a primitive, inhuman beauty. From the eye of the sun, god had imposed a kind of incomprehensible order atop the writhing humanity of the city, those fat pearls quivering like a galaxy, like a circuit board, humming in perfect alignment through streets and buildings, towers and castles, homesteads, brownstones, and fortresses. It throbbed and it moved like sculpture, it danced while steady perfectly still, it was completing a task, a thousand trillion computation a second, each person a little electron zooming on its way to complete some heavenly circuit it had absolutely no idea about. Each little car zooming along covered in viscous blood and racing to return to the heart, to pick up more oxygen so this perfect construct, this heavenly grid, this living mathematical organism could fill its lungs again, so it could breath and consume and continue to live, so it could keep acting out the puny, oblivious lives and tiny horrors that existed down, way down, at that same old familiar street corner that looked so ugly each and every day.

Tub wave

I don’t write much anymore. It used to be something I enjoyed quite a bit. From earliest elementary school I would sit with pad and pencil, unraveling the hidden plotlines inside myself--engaging in little journeys of self-discovery while other kids wasted their time with basketball. But I don’t write much anymore. Like a great love I’ve lost my passion for: the sinewy lines, shadowy curves, and half-glimpsed folds seem all-too familiar. It all seems so mechanical and distant these days: no longer a desperate passionate fumbling for unknown pleasures in darkened rooms, it now feels more like sitting isolated before a window watching the pleasure of others.

I once heard a saying, “if you’re bored then you must be boring too,” and I am most definitely bored. There may not be a larger sin in a modern Ameri-tainment culture than being boring.

So there I am: a bored sinner, yawning at my own transgressions.

One morning in a typical stupor—eyes all baggy, hair a mess, and breath atrocious—I ran the tub. The bathroom was filthy, just like it was yesterday. Unwilling to muster the energy to clean it, I simply ran the tub and blamed whoever my roommate might have been at the time. How dare they force me to live in my own filth. I ran the tub until the water almost touched the ceramic lip and then threw in some Mr. Bubbles just for Grape-flavored kicks. Now tiny mountains built out of bubbles and clouds were stacked high above the top of the tub, the edge of this little soapy world I had created.

The roommate was gone so I quickly ran out to my room wrapped in a towel and threw on an old-time hits album of ‘Motown greats’ Martha and the Vandellas. I dropped the needle on the second to last track. Hearing that glorious pop and crackle, I quickly ran back to the bathroom leaving the door open so I could listen to “Heat Wave” in the tub. It made me happy sometimes. I dove in, smashing that tranquil soapy mountain-scape to bits and spilling warm water over the edge of the world. I wait patiently for a lesser song to finish. As soon as I heard the opening piano shuffle I smiled a little and hummed the tune, doing a naked little dance in the tub with a trail of bubbles hanging off my face like Lincoln’s soapy beard. But as the music sped up and Martha reached new heights of excitement, I slowed down. By this time I should have been sloshing back and forth in gleeful surrender, pouring water all over the filthy bathroom, but instead I slowly came to a stop and stared at my feet rubbing on the dirty faucet in the too-small tub.

The song had never failed to cheer me up, a least a little. It seemed that now the happier the song got, the more alienated I felt. Oh Martha baby, can you tell me what’s wrong with me? I continued staring at my own feet peaking out from the water and softly mouthed the line, “Is this the way love’s supposed to be?”

Martha had shouted it in a passionate frenzy, like a heatwave of course, but my voice just echoed softly in the tiled bathroom. The needle lifted as the song ended and I was left alone again. Sitting in a soapy tub--in a dirty bathroom, in an empty apartment where I spent far too much of my time seeing if Martha could cheer me up--I asked the question again, “Is this the way love’s supposed to be?” All I got back was an echo.

I ducked my head under the water and its warmth enveloped me. I stayed down as long as I could before I ran out of breath. I tried again. This time I opened my eyes, and saw only my face reverse-reflected on the underside of the water. The reflection was surrounded by intangible white fluffs that above looked like bubble mountains but down here just looked like magic. I looking at myself inverted and I wondered if this was what my reflection felt like staring at me from out of the bathroom mirror.

I noticed a faint hum buzzing in my ears that I had never heard before. It may have been a leftover from the rather boring concert I had attended alone three days before; or maybe it had always been hiding there in my ears and I’d just never allowed myself to be so quiet that I could hear it. It was a constant steady tone, definitely hitting a sustained note. Due to my lack of knowledge, I just made it up … C-flat maybe? Sure, that sounds good, my rippling reflection seemed to nod at me.

As I continued to listen to the unnatural hum in my ears, it began to get louder and louder, filling up my entire sensory field until it seemed to be all that existed. Was I going deaf? Was I going blind? All I could see or hear or feel was this ever-expanding C-flat. But then I realized I could hear something else as well. Deep below the hum was a constant thump, a steady rhythm. It was my heart beating and it too seemed to get louder and more intense the longer I focused on it. I suddenly realized what was happening, what I was listening to: I had a swelling and contracting note and an endless life-giving rhythm. My body was making ambient music. Brian Eno would be so proud of me.

I thought to myself, This must be what it’s like in the womb. Perfectly enveloped. I tried to imagine how much more interesting the bodymusic would be inside a mother, with two hums harmonizing against and around each other and two heartbeats cutting across each other, providing constantly sychopated polyrhythms. It could be beautiful. I repeated the question in my mind, “Is this the way love’s supposed to be?” I still received no answer, but there no echo this time either.

I realized I hadn’t come up for air in quite a while. My lungs began to burn. The music sped up violently, unexpectedly jolted from 33 rpm’s to 45. My mirror self looked panicked and in desperation I tried to merge with him, pushing my head up and through his. I left my artificial womb in a sick kind of birth and came up gasping for air. My face was grey. I dove back down and tried to find it again but it was all wrong, the tone wasn’t loud enough, the rhythm was too fast, the tub too small, and the reflection looked ashen and ghostly. I wondered what it was that I had seen … or felt, or whatever it was that happened to me. I had no answer, it was just some rare undiscovered area of beauty hidden inside myself--something that had always been inside me and probably still was. I just couldn’t ever find it again.

I’ve attempted to explain it, preserve it in print. It’s a poor substitute though, and as I said, I don’t write much anymore.

gunboats look like symmetry, passing in the twilight.

Judy from Burrito Beach

Judy was a villain who came from the coast, spilling sand and eating empires as she traveled on a truly enormous, crawling old spider that she had saddled like a horse. She kept her hair fashioned in the style of moguls and matadors, swept up and away like white doves under northeastern winds, prepared for the worst at any possible second. She held herself aloft but concerned, like an emptyhanded philanthropist, a selfish Florence Nightingale, who spoke of Roman noblemen like old friends long buried instead of the unconfirmed legends they really were.

She wore a broach of amber and silkstring filament which held a tiny fly forever trapped inside, buzzing and groping, pushing and flying--its entire world consisted of a decorative bubble pinned to Judy's chest from which there was no escape.

Framing her left ankle was a bright blue scar, a "souvenir of the war" she called it. There had not been a war in 150 years and there would not be another in either of our lifetimes.

In the saddlebags of that enourmous old dragging spider were picture postcards of painters and tiny oriental statues of elegant orphans that she had collected along her way, each one fashioned from the remains of someone she meant to keep tightly in her pocket, someone she was determined to never let go of, much like the fly buzzing in its pretty little coffin. They were not mementos, they were totems, small monuments to a life once lived free and now experienced only under the strictest control, and they grinned with an ugly defeat. She kept whips and candlewax, tattoos and horse-maps from every place she had been and every place she meant one day to be. The poor spider--which she had named Ivan the Terrible (after "the only man who could ever possess me, a shame he should pass 425 years too early")--could barely hold up as she weighed it down with the plans and delights, damages and games of an entire evening's wicked life. Ivan's back bent in a low arch, a reverse camel, and his henpecked old belly dragged comically against the seashell sand of the coastal shores they were fleeing.

But still he trugged on, carrying poor, tiny Judy as she fled from crimescene to crimescene, from witness to victim, breaking beauty and burying sentimental hearts, spilling sand and eating empires all the while. She never slowed down, she never looked for a home.

Judy was a villain who came from the coast and planned to never return.

there is sunshine at the end of the world.