basin of thought, edges well-worn

for the past three decades
i've been erasing every word
that drips from my soaking fingers
out of spite, perhaps,
or a twisted sense of
purpose.

i ask myself,
"if they are writers,
then what am i?
what is I?"
and i have never found
a solution
though i have inverted myself
and my hypothermic fingers,
waterlogged with crooked pursuits
at a resolution.

so i can safely assume that the answer
is still out there
waiting to find me
with quiet eyes
and wet, wet fingers.

it must've been a mirage

I may ask you who he is, but I don't think I really want to know. He reminds me that you're the one driving. I'm just looking out the window at passing cities.

Sometimes I frame pictures in my head, I tell you, but I can never take them at home. My family doesn't see the starving artist inside me, dying from lack of art.

You take your hands from the wheel to write something heartbreaking, and I read it seven times before noticing that we've stopped. You are lying on the sidewalk in this desert, carving your name on every tree in the forest.

I remember why I agreed to be your passenger.

I roll down my window. All I see in mirrors are my eyes, and their colors. That is why. You smile, knowing the question.

The horizon will always be there to drive towards.

feet planted, hands soaring

Tonight my eyes are big with the souls of the crushed. The torrents of pain are beating at my windows, and I am ready to break loose, to pour forth. But a ghost of a hand stops me, reaching up from my chest to quiet the clouds.

Tonight anger is hanging heavy from my ears like fruit before the harvest. Insects flutter back and forth, searching for their sustenance. I can only swat at them, hoping they will grow weary and falter.

Tonight is a night of emotions. Emotions like the smell of the ocean, layer upon layer. I could lay back and twitch my nose for hours, trying to unravel the ball of yarn in my neck. I have scribbled shades of blue and frustration across my forehead before, and nothing has changed. I can feel words forming deep inside me, clawing their wretched way up the spiral staircase behind my stomach, tingling with power and space. Each letter shows its face, whether snarling or singing, and they join hands in an attempt to say something, anything. Anything.

We are all selfish, I scream to her in my head. That's why I can't tell you. Because I am selfish and you are selfish and they are selfish and there's nothing we can do to avoid it. We're just fools, laughing our way through this joke of existence.

And she stares back, like I always knew she would. Her reply stings like iodine.

But of course we are. That's what was always wrong with me and you. That's why we're here.

Or rather, why you're here. I'm not here at all.

With a wink and half a smile, she fades into what she always was to me, in my selfishness.

This isn't how it was supposed to be.

a dog with a grin

He dropped the ball and ran towards me, a dog-smile quickening his rolling pace.

"Stop! Heel!" came the cry, disregarded. I was a stranger, I had to be assessed.

He plunged his nose into my hand, then jumped at my face, gauging my reaction. I smiled and let him carry out his inspection.

She hurried over, reprimanding him (as if he understood English). Bending to grab him by the collar, she looked up at me, all fluster and flame.

"Sorry about that," she said (as if she really cared).

"No problem." I stared at her face for a moment. I felt something building inside me, some radical statement, something huge and illogical and heart-throbbing, something to tell the grandkids about someday.

I opened my boiling mouth.

"He's a nice dog," I offered.

She smiled. I knew I'd won.

As if she could've.

Easter's vengeance

When things ran out, there were the dregs, the junk that settled to the bottom.

It's all you have left, but is it worth it?

She looked down at the twin remnants that sat on her desk. Mocking her. Side by side, they whispered to her. She'd hate finishing them off, she would, but she couldn't just leave them!

All her other options were exhausted, but she still resisted. She stared at them for a long while, hating them as she always had. What cruel force had thrown them to her, anyhow? She certainly hadn't asked for them.

Call it fate. Call it luck. Call it probability. Call it God.

Whatever. They were there.

She stared.

I really, really hate apple Jolly Ranchers.

the lint of boredom

I spent the entire afternoon like that, staring at the ceiling from my bed.

Outside, I could hear Dad yelling for the dog to come home. She had run away again. It wasn't that she hated it here, she was just adventurous. Maybe I was the only one who understood that. Maybe I felt like that myself sometimes.

Every time, we would get her back, and every time Dad would threaten to get rid of her. He never meant it. I think he loved her just as much as the rest of us. He just got frustrated.

The sky was the mottled gray of a dirty sidewalk, and I wondered if the seaplanes that buzzed over the house had wheels on top so they could roll off the clouds, clattering over pebbles.

I hated the noncommittal sky. I wished it would just rain, or shine. All this compromise was getting to me. Nature isn't supposed to be political.

Books littered the floor, but I wasn't able to keep my eyes on anything. I just drifted to the asylum-green walls or the wire frame of my glasses. I kept thinking about inner turmoil, and emotion, and these blizzards of consciousness that swirled inside my stomach, and I wondered if there were any warm cabins, lit by tea and company, where I could find a moment's peace from the frozen crystals of silence that peppered my face.

At some point, I was seized with the maddening desire to steal my parents' station wagon and just drive, find some state where no one knew me, no one hated me, no one understood me, and simply start over. Find some place where I could let go and try to be something real.

The desire passed when I got to thinking about finances and plausibility and the government, but the whispers and echoes it had left fluttered around still.

I decided that someday I'd have to grow up.

post-ides? post ideas!

That was the day Jeremy woke up.

That was all he ever did, it seemed.

Sometimes he did it without falling asleep. Now there was a phenomenon. He'd snap up and glaze his mind in a sleek fuzz, listening to the radio static for consistency.

It wasn't difficult to find a sheet of paper near him with the same three or four words repeated on it in his disjointed handwriting. Black ink. Always black ink on white college ruled notebook paper. It was safe.

Every afternoon Jeremy stood at the picture window and watched the rush hours throw sad, sad humans past. It would've made him smile, but he couldn't see their faces. Just hubcaps and briefcases.

Although Jeremy wore clothes, no one could ever remember what they were. Few people even remembered Jeremy. He, of all people, forgot himself from time to time.

It was on these rare occasions of extroversion that Jeremy found his front door open and his feet pulling him through. On those days it was almost always sunny, and Jeremy was able to feel an odd sort of peace, as though the grass would always grow, no matter how many times Mr. Meminger cut it, sweating and burning between his lips.

On the strangest day of Jeremy's life, it was not sunny. It was raining like the inside of a marble. Jeremy woke up, as he was prone to doing, and found his door open. His hands itched to swing at his sides, and he closed the door on the way out.

Feeling the creeping intruders on his scalp, he wondered about a world where water comes from the sky and humans try to stop the grass from growing.

The water from the sky met the water in his eyes and made the light bend and shake in Jeremy's mind. For the first time in a long time, he wanted to laugh. He didn't. No one did. How could they?

The next day it was sunny. Mr. Meminger went out to cut the grass. He put out his cigarette when he saw Officer O'Donnell approaching.

"You know this boy?" asked O'Donnell, a towering silhouette.

James P. Meminger, aged 64, examined the photograph carefully. A sunken-faced, sallow, sad young man didn't stare back. The eyes were wet and closed, and Mr. Meminger knew they wouldn't wake up again.

"Never seen him," he replied.

O'Donnell left. They still didn't know who the car hit.

Mr. Meminger cut the grass.

That was all he ever did, it seemed.

Today, however, he did something different. He looked at the house next door. It was empty, as it always had been. The picture window in the front was dirty, and the front door was a chipped, ugly beige.

Mr. Meminger went home to his nagging wife and never again did he think about the house or the man who lived there, if it could be called living.

Three days later, the radio in the house met its end in a faulty bit of wiring.

No one really missed the static.

postcard, reverse

Dear Sophia,

   The tower you see in the picture is like a god. He stands over all of us, and we lead our little lives in his shadow. I hope I don't have to stay here long. I think about the tower falling and destroying those who keep its ground, and then I wake up shivering and crying.
   But you don't want to hear about my puerile tremors. I have much more to tell you. More important things to draw in inklines.
   I always expect to see you around every corner, in the coffeeshops and bookstores, like our younger days. Before I became an idealist. I know you're an ocean and a half away, but it's just water. We're made of oceans. Aren't we?
   I sound like I doubt myself. Sounds are true. I doubt myself so much these days, days no different from the rest of my life. I'm traveling, I'm crying, I'm writing, just as always. Even when I couldn't travel, I'd do so when no one was looking. I'd fly away on magic carpets woven in a neuron mesh and feel the wind of my throat whip past my ears.
   I don't know where I'm going, I don't even think I know why I'm going. It's very much like a vacation. You sleep in late just to feel like you can. I have to know that I can still move my joints, that I'm not just a tinman too tired.
   Lately I can only read about the murderers, the incurably criminal, and the depraved. I hope literature isn't a mirror. I hope it's more of a magnifying glass.
   Who says literature is made of light? Lighterature.
   I hope to dream of you soon.

Thomas "Ever-Since" Street