A red truck speeds down the road with its hood all the way up.
My neighbor wishes the driver ill and calls him a nigger. “No, really, he is and I hope there’s no more,”
and then the mexican staggers off.
I was hoping nigger close your hood,
but instead there were shouts
and the truck tears ass in reverse
back down the road
being chased by a blue car.
Murdered corpses pack the voids where your mind is afraid to go.
But they are lollypops and puppies and the first days of school.
The sun inches above the highway into the kitchen. Yellow stained curtains diffuse its golden light on to the back wall. From the darkened hallway emerges an ally who, when passing into the light, explodes in blinding radiance.
From the edge where haze meets shadow a hand appears reaching for the window. Outside below in the courtyard a giant bonsai grows gnarled and blackened with disease. A wind kicks up and scents the kitchen with cantaloupe and scripture, a daisy in a green glass vase on a cream tablecloth. The glasses are aluminum and the water is cold. This kitchen smells like the blissful instant that explodes out of reach when you have seen your uncle for the last time.
Miniature sharks with rusty sheet metal teeth tear tendons from your toe joints, puffs of blood dissipate into the air as fragments of bone sink into the carpet.
You attempt to escape though an infinite field of sea urchins. Each defeated step crushing screams. Chunks of your flesh dangle rotting from acidic barbs. You struggle for your last breath as the men of war approach.
but that’s just illusion
the truth is your foot is broken. That throbbing is all the blood rushing out through the flap of meat you ripped apart on the metal leg. Remember you are meditating, in a pool of your own blood. That warm frigid filling is your foot bleeding you to death. But don’t let that bother you
the more important thing to pay attention to right now is how you didn’t notice when you were thrown into rot. A mountain of sickly sweet ketchup coagulates over the cast off carpet half buried in a greasy loam of plastic chips, metal filings, broken glass, and cat litter. This is the stench of territory. Tribes of feral skeletons glare at you from behind infinite overflowing dumpsters. As a treat the mothers bring their kittens to lap at the dripping blood from garbage bags. Here in a community dump in the middle of a trailer park in the unbreathable heat of the hottest summer in history and there are human vultures, a family, digging through the stench and the rot and the despair
but that’s just illusion
the more important thing to keep in mind is that a million years from now, when it is uncovered by some great upheaval, an ally will discover your decrypted broken and diseased toe, and will raise it as a monument to agony.
Any moment now that old guy at the other end of the counter could run up, slam down his coffee mug, and shout “you don’t know it yet” … and he’d be right.
The sage can, at a glance at range, disentangle and decipher all those mad quirks that make you so special. With a wink he can bare them to the world.
He generally doesn’t bother.
