The Hotseat

You're living in a small town and your friends decide to rob a bank.

Who are these friends? They’re fellow guards at the vault. Their names: Dan and Earl. 

What made them who they are? They were in training together. 

Was it bad? Yes. We were low-paid, miserable, specially chosen janitors, and we were offered top secret raises. We thought it would lead to a better life, as our superiors continually programmed their minds about the hard work and strength of character that it requires. 

Did you help them? No, I just let it happen. I'm not very demanding, and I'm easygoing. 

So you feel bad? Yes. 

What's this bank like? It's long with a t section in the middle. Each of the deposit boxes is small and electronic. This is so their owners can get in the back way to their storage. They have this important system because they’re all a part of a fake government cover-up community. These safes hold the rarest elements of the world--all newly discovered and have to be researched to figure out their benefits for the country and their disadvantages that may only benefit a rival country with different ideologies, such as China.

In fact, one has been identified to favor (this policy which Americans/capitalists dislike). This policy will decide why the friends turn one another, which will decide what originally brings them together and what will insure their clash.

The Best Man Wins

It will make a fine table someday.

From the 2nd story balcony, the vision of an oblong body--that of a palm tree--dominates a sidewalk. It's head is manicured, like a second-grade haircut with an 80's out-of-style, hop-heavy bush. Doctor Seuss would be inspired to note that his imaginary world may be permeating the culture.

There is a stable for it, below. It's a front yard, filled with cigarettes. If the tree hesitated, letting her focus settle, she'd notice the layers of ominous cigarette butts, slowly piling, soon to combust upon her root-laces. The nicotine had long absorbed into the soil, however, and her attention span grows shorter by the day.

Shrubs will one day tell a fable of the tall mistress of the yard. She has her doubts as the sun rises and sets faster and faster--as the whispers of Hollywood Boulevard reach her naked, scaled leaves, and she begins to discover that the shrubs are indeed the "more favorable" progeny of the purple-flowered Jacaranda.

Your Number Called "Shortly"

Towers afloat,
dial glowing,
lake below,
Two men--alive, and growing.

A foot planted,
water rising;
One still stuck,
Wingless--unsure, for trying.

We're home.

Thirsty, dry, 

Unquenchable Failure, unleashes

stabs of suffering.

Apple-neck on a Cycle ride to the Promontory 

of flame, wherein coals, hot coals,

Beneath a cat-scratch wall;

Rising cancer 

Love me while

immobility ensconces hell.

Dropping Stones

Red boy and June girlie,

formulaic of living;

Dead herb and a posy,

calamitous, a-healing.

Enter, the drive-in

For wide is the exit,

Lips parted, a canyon,

For keeps nor rejected.

Ride ominous carriage,

together, toll-tilling;

Two pigeons with message:

Espousal, kid-killing.

Zipper God

Over and over again, the pleasure is earned through drudgery, with no promise to secure it but moody faith of a higher degree.

Irritating, it is, as Hebrew nomenclature rounds the sphere of reach, a short route from midtown.

One does not fear green pastures.
One does not dear brief attainment.
One does not sheer the savory scent of urban legends.

A cushion is stabbed with needles for meditation upon the design of our holy cloth.

Sunya jala-sunya

It's a surplus of nothingness, chasing you to a delusion on display. Your right arm falls numb as your left's pointer finger turns evaluative. While swimming, you hold your breath and you reject what your eyes tell you, and your ears elaborate stories of elegance upon the surface. Others, frienenemies, follow you and grant approval. Your mental maze of organization, a beginning intent, evolves into Neptune's labyrinth. The void which once was a glass doorway to enlightenment is now locked with bile, and it leaks from your nostrils, suffocating, wherein drowning is your reality, and a twitch reveals you to the children during their visit to this aquarium. They turn. You violently tap glass. You burn eternally as the setting boils, bubbling with torment, until your being dissolves due to the caustic pity of nature's evaporation.

Look around. The thoughts outside of your own are your own. They humanize you as Being-in-the-world. Although, not without the often slow, reptilian shedding of pain--the sea turtle and the transitory shell.

Praising Machiavelli

Beware, for a beaten lion, thrashing behind steel bones of constriction, is my serenade of refrains. This repartee is a common, obstinate response, quickly dispatched by wolves.

You make a conjecture through striking visuals, that in fact, I am a futile dreamer, pupating while roaring at mice, and suddenly, smoke billows to dampen one's bright star of possibility. Squeaking of vermin, while longing to belong, places a heavy weight upon the truculent chase for cheddar.

"A fanciful nocturne," I giggle, and my feet patter to the circle of confusion. 

"It's Chopin-Pin-pin, pin, and merry I am, since your banal attacks are presumingly thin." You are a multitudinous crowd; therefore, you are general. A lion need not prove his prowess.

This jejune red herring--it reveals a fox after all. And must one be, during a seminary, clever, while capacious. The smug mind is an appalling tool of procession, while meek at the core, resembling the Western effigy to what we know as a scholar.

Why does my waking body require sleep while my dreams tell me to 'wake? 

Because the question, "Who I am?", is eternal, suspended.

"...But, has this sheep no reprieves?"

Pooh Bear

"This drink is called Honey Badger."
"Then order it, if you want AIDS."

Dean sneered intently, his powerful glare passing through Marlon to outside the bar, ending at a stoplight at a small intersection. His drink was already half-empty, but Marlon had failed to notice it. A menu lay between their elbows, though it had been dormant for over ten minutes since the alcoholic beverage composed of Jack Daniel's honey whiskey and cider had arrived.

"In your eyes, I see selfishness and conceit."

Marlon looked over his shoulder and slightly lifted his outstretched hand off the bar to brush away the criticism. His focus returned to a waitress, 36-26-36. As she served a table of four guests, her personality gleamed through a luminescent smile--not your average plastics.

Dean, small as his temper, grew resentful toward his friend. The feelings were confusing, yet unavoidable, and squeezed down his throat like a log through a drain pipe.

"Why don't you go speak to her, dude?"

This didn't end here. Marlon had transgressed his privledges before.

Champions

The ground, littered with leaves and cigarette buds, was bumpy in texture and grey with little white spots of wear. People of all backgrounds chattered while blinding white kino lights loomed overhead to tar the abysmal sky beyond. To the left, porter-potties were aligned atop a wheeled trailer. Two small trailers blocked the north and west corners of the plaza. Ahead, a red wall--a bar beyond an urban wooden door--completes the circle of truth. It was, of course, a situation of false pretenses. This dynamic area was fueled by the lies of the Hollywood machine.

A woman, petite with sharp facial features and a brunette, shoulder-length cascade of hair, glanced to her two trendy friends and back to her cell phone.

To save her would be tragic, though liberating for the savior.

Alas, the herald of woe is heard through his sonorous device.

Listen, and learn, but in protest.

Hai

Dust of dank summer
Riddle my bedroom clothing
As it slips, eager

OH THE MIND.

To spit words of weakness while gaunt in appearance
Mind is pale; body is pale—reverse ne'er true
While awake enough not seemingly carrying sleep
Cough, cough… the sickness will ensue.
A word gleams or does it glimmer to offer strength without spring
A word to be or not does it callously waver;
As it should, always, with the weight of favor,
For the heart beats perpetually, in theory, do all minds contort.

Maplesmith

     Through my fingers, the sand will sift.
     My feet are planted. But they inure to the pot which drifts along like the winds, carrying mere hollow laughs through its passings of the gallows. It's my doing, as the brotherly gardener in the hangman's yard, for I shrewdly gaze as both pawn and perpetrator.
     At moments the loose grains beneath will rise and roll with the airborne water--a realistic ripple reflecting sallow sunsets or moonlighted monsoons. And I repent: These waves are fleeting as the seasons. It's my doing, as the resolute raker of Naive Spring.
     "How long?" you ask tempestuously.
     "It is eternal," replied in a quiver, because your embrace is a touch of penury.
     Our seedling is grounded, soon to be uprooted. It has... so many sides, so many angles, so many details... to protract. Your sweet navel reverberates the California Everlasting, so dulcify our temporal midst.
     This tryst of interchanging is a promise: We'll celebrate rosy cheeks, everthus perennial to the passionate and periodical to the sense of drought. The rose's point is, in fact, the lover's quarrel.
     Willed... wilting...

---

Post-Script

Crippled by experience, though persevering through utilization of this malady. 
Going to get a better grip on allusion, but they're useful in masking deviant concepts.

Harlot of 'Cane



     The act of crying is clandestine during the storms. The weather, when the world is most cruel to mankind, hides shame and balances the conceit of man. All is equal.
    Walter holds the taffrail of Jezebel tightly, looking out to sea. The old schooner knows days like this and wears them as scars upon the belligerent. With her, and with her troubles, Walter knows freedom.
    The crew is gone. Below deck, their minds reeve to each other but their shrouds are frayed. Pared fruit skins emit sour encouragement; though stoic, these men forsake themselves.
     "Dem seen no reaper."
     Muddy boots remain foul as waves barrage the deck.
     Bloodshot eyes close just enough to shield from water.
     Jezebel raptures a soul, aft the stern aft the rudder, concurrent from bow.

Presupposition

As the day dwindled down, I looked out the window to the street, pensive as the pedestrians. My mind—and my heart—throbbed in syncopation with their steps. I considered about my next saccharine meal: Would it lift me up, or would it bring me down? I wondered. With night approaching and my day coming to an end, I simply longed for rest and relief from decisions.

Below the bar rested a plastic pannikin filled with cleared, dirty dishes. It was half full, but another customer may or may not enter for a final order. I collated between one of the most important decisions of the day—to risk a smutty hand and another rinse before dinner, or to procure efficiency. Perhaps I really preferred the boredom.

Then, the pungent ketchup and shrimp tails were overcome by a foreign aroma. It was sweet and alluring. It suggested the presence of a woman, and I felt instant vivification. But this was a misrepresentation of my society.

Penelope, another bartender beside myself, was an abject proletarian—a victim of a black and white conviction, who focused only upon the negative aspects of life instead of the multifarious possibilities that a moral being could allow. Her physical appearance was representative, with her protuberant gut which seemed to cause her eyes to bulge, and a derisive outfit that her world outlook could hardly rectify. Her stubby, yet aquiline snout gasped for air during interminable work shifts, as if some train toted a cumbersome load and prepared for an exuberant protraction of steam.

My instincts urged me to turn to her, but my brain repressed this longing, filling a sexual stead with egotistical logic: Her boyfriend, Tim, already has his hands full with this bleeping robot.

My thoughts destabilized upon the zippy sound of her pen scribbles. Instead of wasting paper, she repetitively wrote--erasing and overlapping--her notes on one messy palimpsest. I had no doubt that she rarely considered anything green (exclusive of colored icing)--much less the environment. This was laziness, not economy; this was placing ease in closer proximity than considerate thrift.

I dare say that a philogynist would convert to a misogynist. No man would incur such toil.

Then, Tim entered and sat at the bar, and he gently smiled at her in the dim light of a paraffin lamp. I cringed as Penelope's happy squeal clumsily escaped through a larynx compacted by the intrusive yellow fat among her innards. My eyes warily darted to observe the strident creature and to try to stay cleared of its path.

Her mobile expressions were nearly insulting as they bubbled and shifted. She flopped around briskly, like a fish out of water, coming to rest her legs as close as they could come to a single spot.

But I couldn’t figure him out. This bald man was an enema for hemorrhoids. His soft, mid-aged features—much older than hers—created the most beautiful symmetry between two people that I’d ever witnessed. I concluded that anyone can find happiness, even the more wretched characters of the world.

I, on the other hand, was much closer to an ideal. While single, I don’t fret—my soul mate will find me.