never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that I’d find her there, my toothy turnkey, staring me in the face from behind the counter at the post office, her withered canines the ineffective tusks of the bulimic.
“Don’t mean to be forward,” I admitted to her, unrolling my signature harvest moon grin, an early crop gin grin, the grin of cigarette cartons one-click shopped off amazon, “but I think we might be a match.”
she rang up my stamps and then she left me, no, locked teeth with me; we spun together, freewheeling gyroscopes, into the musculature of love.
HE’S BACK
DID YOU HEAR
DID I HEAR
OUR INCARCERATED PATRIACH
OUR CORVINE CALUMNIATOR
IS HE MORE OR LESS CORVINE THAN WHEN HE LEFT
IN YOUR ESTIMATION
FROM
FROM THE URALS
FROM THE TUNDRAS
FROM THE COUCHES OF COQUETTAS
IS THE DESERT HOW IT’S DESCRIBED IN EXODUS
IN EARNEST
DID YOU BAKE CACTACEOUS BREADS ON THE BACKS OF ARMADILETTANTI
DID THE COURIER FIND YOU
DID HE KEEP IN TACT THE NOTES I TOOK
THE NOTES I TOOK WATCHING “ENEMY AT THE GATES”
WELL?
how to entice your high to favor you and not disarm you
smoke slowly. bring on your high with patience, like an old man studies his koran. do not smoke impatiently, like a fuckhead teenager bites his toenails. let your high find you, naked, sitting Indian-style in a mud hut, with your arms out to your sides and your palms upturned like teacups. do not seek out your high in the jungle that circumscribes your mud hut, for it is the cheetah you’ll chase, chase recklessly, aimlessly, the fauna biting and the flora thorned. you will chase the cheetah only to find yourself bitten and pricked and when you finally tired him, when he slows, when he is caught, you will know that you are alone with the cheetah in his jungle, where you can not see the light from the mud hut you’ve left for dead.
tell me, baby,
does my semen write you poetry
does it recline under olive trees
and scribble something sanskrit
into the oaken bark of canals
something something sanskrit like
“ah, to one of the shirtless boys
around the patio
with the drinks
with their fingers just touching
so close it was as if they were not touching
just touching
two fingers
the drinks
I would fall asleep were my mind able
to sit for anything longer than nothing
under olive trees, ah, ha, how could I
how could I dare leave?”
tell me, baby.
it’s anything you want
it’s everything you’ve seen;
situps until
I am no longer in control of my bowels
every treasured heirloom
I’ll watch you burn my grandmother’s broaches
my grandfather’s war medals
in the dustbin
just you and me
just tell it to me
and I'll the drinks
where the fuck did april go?
all-day sun shrivellin' my night eyes.
raisin brain.
where my uppers at?
dusted in charcoal from 1AM on.
catch exit 23 off the carpal tunnel.
"remember your weekend spent in review?
--that story's dead. sorry. no check for you."
"shunt it off on the kid."
just call me grunt.
"i know a swell place, gets rowdy at 4.
cheap drinks till 8, no-cover door."
(i've got the 4/20 blues)
MANY of our faithful readers have been writing incessantly to The Bulb’s editorial staff wanting to know just what exactly our “set-up” here at the The Bulb Building “is like.” Are we as zany as our features, you demand to know? As highbrow as our poets? Billy Jean Johannesburg from Joplin, Missouri, wants to know if The Bulb operates like a Willy Wonka Candy Factory mated with a Jurassic Park Dinoworld, whimsical and dangerous and cloying and ferocious.
UNFORTUNATELY, due to my overwhelming and sundry social, biological, and mineral neuroses, I must admit to never having left my own office, not once, not even for an instant! So I cannot comment as to the overall leitmotifs of The Bulb and its multitudinous workspaces.
HOWEVER, I can tell you about the snug, untainted, sterilized room that constitutes my world entire. Let’s take a look!
ENTER the thick, oak, arched double doors. They are difficult to pry open, no? Notice instantly the room’s six walls; my office is a geometrically perfect hexagon, as you must have surely guessed even before entering, must have guessed simply from reading my work, for are we not all but chambermaids in the great honeycomb?
EACH of the six walls, excepting the space occupied by the thick, hard to pry open doors houses a bookshelf that stretches from floor to vaulted ceiling. The bookshelves are lined with rare books from distant lands with brilliant spines, written in languages you’ve never heard of. Don’t linger with them; it does nobody any good. Notice next the blood red carpet. It is plush enough for lovemaking. Notice the candelabras suspended from the ceiling by gossamer. There are no windows in this place. Notice the three identical redwood lecterns forming a half circle near the far wall. They each support a weighty text. The texts are as follows: The Oxford English Dictionary, Grey’s Anatomy, Exotic Flora and Fauna of This World and The Next. These are my reference guides. I have visited and revisited their pages. “What an office!” you cannot help but whisper aloud. Your dainty whisper is swept away by the vast solitude of the room so quickly that you cannot remember if you ever spoke at all. And then, as if an afterthought, you’ll notice in one of the room’s many corners a whicker chair, it’s back caved in, pulled out from a tiny maple writing desk, a writing desk that would look uncomfortable in a children’s classroom, stifling at best and impossible at worst. Cramped, you think, this man must surely be cramped, and among all this space!
CRAMPED, dearest reader, cramped is the hand that loves you.
Androids.
What do we really know about them?
We know that they will exist in the near future. We know that later versions of the prototype will be coded with human nuance in such a way and to such a degree as to render them indistinguishable from Asperger’s sufferers, and that even later versions will be virtual facsimiles (notice I did not dub them “facsimilants”) that will, among other achievements, populate the earth with a real measure of exclusivity.
These are the cold, hard, machine facts.
“But are they interesting?” a child calls out, his voice soaring above the restless, pitchforked din of the tavern, which grows quiet, does the din of the tavern, tavern din that had been circulating rumors small and large about the ultimate undoing of the existence we’ve come to expect, if not enjoy, and it’s just the boy standing then in a dark space that hadn’t propped him up into the lamplight a moment ago, a space filled with the very night that gasps just outside the swinging tavern doors, doors latched with sturdy, perpendicular oak planks forming an unassailable X, planks that avow safekeeping from unknowable dangers lurking like tigers in the jungle mists of the night; but the planks have broken their promise; the night has found out the boy and the boy is unsure, a proper red blush starting in his toes and rising meteorically throughout his brittle, malnourished skin, until it has filled the flesh about his braincase.
The boy steps backwards into the arms of a mother who is so hesitant to receive him that she momentarily forgets the pain of parturition. Should the boy look up just then, he might notice it missing from her very eyes.
In your opinion: Is the boy an Android?
