it was an equal rights protest, nonviolent as many i've seen thru the years. but the signs and chants were malicious. those gathered felt very strongly about this issue, and i doubt they would clear out until a resolution was reached. "INTERSPECIES MARRIAGE FOR ALL AMERICANS!" one protestor kept shouting. "PIGS ARE PEOPLE TOO!" cried another.

the petals wilt and dehydrate and the hungry earth spits back acid. it is trodding the milky soil by night, attuned to innate senses, scanning the horizon to navigate towards the magnetic pull... and setting up camp at the darkest minute thickest silence and noiseless barren, it does not normally settle to me this way nor sit with me properly without causing upheaval in the very core of the breast at my bore. it was a guilty attraction of poles. trying to chase a wink though, we were nauts of the frigid and serene north heading norther. wordless journeys, many introspective walks where collective sighs polluted doldrums about us, gray quiet... the vegetation was browning again. sparse scarce and pregnant atmosphere looming with ever-uncatchable destination slipping time like a fish flopping and tripping and spanning out long wastelands of thought and breathing frosty nostril bite of ceaseless abandon and ruining bodies in the snow. and as even my essence soaks into soil beneath thin cloth... pathetic fragile shadows posing uncomfortably in humble shivering pods lost in foreign cacophonous and interminable wake, and woozy out soggy constellations, piercing those dots the air-holes for dreams to seep slowly sink across, by alpha centauri refuses to fizzle glinting star of horus thru eyelids, puffed and black without sleep. in is in spanning my vigilance a clattered set of nerves instilled its insomnia along with the phantoms of faltering lazy muscles, languishing orientation sputtering machines suffering individuals caught up and hobbled. along with my 4 companions, the internal drives thru our dirty footprints and the raw rashy paws of our canine, trooping tundra in anguish with our rusty tools and miserable.

new types

Life is not when you balance snare drums on your eyelids like young men think of it. Rather, a new side of your heart to hold open your sickened-puppy experiences (or types of that nature), where we shudder to think about rascists or misogynists fueling our mouths with dollars, turning the car on so we can go, allowing us out of our boundaries but within theirs, just to get from point A to point B. These are the policitians we see on TV and our bosses at work, grinding gears around your ankles and teaching you how Jesus thought. Feeling pride in this system is just a way to get you to eat your meatloaf. Yet you're sitting under your desk eating rat poison, blueprints (documents) strewn out across your office. Come stains on the floor, ceiling tiles falling out and cracking like the hair on your head. Engineered and destroyed, you are driven in shackles as a tool for them and their unnatural rhythms. Their gasoline products, meant for you to consume, keep every square on the grid the same shade of light blue, yet in reality, every point on the graph is glaring red--red like the blood of everyone you know. Down the mountain, through the hole, you end up in hell. They require a credit of health class for all high school graduates, for the same reason that they put spraypaint and skateboards on shirts at the mall. But the only mind-altering substances come when they try, try harder than you, to know you better than you know yourself. Because you believe in the person they've made you. I believe in everyone. It's just that everyone's the same.

gosling

Everywhere I go there's a Caution Wet Floor sign, and I can't slip on the soapy vomit from all the feverish addicts, there are holes in my skin like the life of a conservative Catholic, I try to flip channels but I see statues being vandalized and bathroom stalls with pamphlets clogging the drains in the urinals, and the custodians grew up in rich neighborhoods with healthy grandfathers who played gleaming shiny fucking grand pianos, joined cults and orchestrated feasts for fish, they swam upstream with yellow spraypaint seeping from their bloody mouths, they swim through sewers and they reach the pipes, they swim up sewage systems and up into the light, finding themselves in toilets, fish staring up at the mall security in blue suits with brushed hair and a radio in his car, a secret cannibal that sees this graffiti scrawled in the parks by suburban ladies, Western morals, devil's music and the color black, a dripping marker, a flickering computer monitor, an investigation led by an agnostic deputy high-school graduate, above the peer pressure he now sits on a gnarled wooden desk, feels the urge to piss, so he stands, leaving the open case file, and goes into the bathroom stall through a series of violin strings he realized the dripping mockery of Jericho, that is the religion of this vandal--a diabetic, peering into a dark forest the cop is forced to follow, chasing the kid through purgatory and stumbling on ferns to reach their mothers, both scared, and finally they know what they've been running from and God is a gosling with a backpack, hat and black bandanna, standing still.

"a christless killer that steps on my stomach"

The girl in the hard hat stood, watching rain flow into the gutter. A man with a saxophone was beside her. She had asked him to play the final dirge for her raindrop. Her raindrop had always existed, and would always exist. "It's almost here," she said. The man, Case, began to warm up, playing scales softly. They stood and waiting in the gray morning. All of a sudden, the girl with the hard hat started jumping excitedly up and down. "It's here! It's here!" she cried. Then she laid face up on the ground and folded her hands on her chest, murmuring the speech she had written. Case began to play a very sad song. A few seconds passed, the song ended, and the girl stood up. She said, "Goodbye, raindrop." They walked home in silence.

The girl with the hard hat sat on her stool, writing a letter. She remembered seeing the crucifiction, when cola dripped from his tail, struggling to hold his head up. She was writing to her raindrop, telling the raindrop of the event. The crucifiction. She thought her raindrop would be interested to know about it. Maybe the raindrop had even been to that same spot, once. She told her raindrop about how a few years ago, she was playing baseball, and she had fallen down and cut her toes. It was an embarassing day. She told her raindrop about when her brother had been born, on the boat. Her brother, with the golden mane. She wrote her raindrop about the first day of his life, and the last, and about how they had always had fun, playing games and singing songs. Her raindrop was dead for now; it had gone into the gutter. But soon it would be back, somewhere else. She wrote that she wished her brother could have been alive to meet her raindrop.

She went to the racetrack that afternoon and bet on her usual horse, Flower. Flower did alright, but never won the race. Today, Flower came finished in fourth place, but it had been a close one. The horse could probably have come in third, but had an injury on its leg today. The girl with the hard hat was dissapointed that her favorite horse had come in last, but she thought Flower would heal and be able to race again. She was wrong, though. After the race, she met her friend Case, the horse's jockey. "Hello, Case," she said. "Bad luck today." Case looked sadly at her. "Yes, my horse is in a lot of pain. I think by racing her today, I made it worse. I need to put Flower to sleep." By that, he meant he needed to kill his lame horse. This upset the girl with the hard hat. She shook the jockey. "You can't! I can make him better! You'll see!" She was near hysterical with grief, and quite angry with her friend.

Then it began to snow. Snow was the same as rain, but the girl liked rain better. Snow meant cold. So it snowed at the racetrack, and afer all the other horses and jockeys had left, she was there, on all fours, screaming into the white nothingness.

The next morning, when Case went downstairs to get breakfast, he saw that Flower was gone. He walked all around the yard calling the horse's name, but she never appeared. Case thought Flower might have tried to run away, but he didn't know why. Flower would never do something like this.