Crunch

Maybe everything you
think
is bullshit
feel
is bullshit
maybe all this will
crunch
as quickly as it banged
so be in fear
that you tried to
improve
worked hard
avoided pleasure
persevered
did what they told you
& wasted your one chance
to do whatever the fuck you want
(within physical limitations)

FOR NOTHING.

Opossum

I’m opossum
in heat
scurrying to scavenge in alley
another opossum
impregnated me
I gave birth to
litter of three
didn’t smell right
so I ate them
then carried on
at dusk
walking along
looking for dead things
to eat on train track
I didn’t get away
in time
got hit by train
coyotes ate
my organs but left remains
rain, sleet, snow
fell
air got warmer
sun dried up
a lot of liquid
that was in my body
several trains
passed over me
and one time
small human
stepped on my body
told his friend later
it went crunch
like breakfast cereal.

Disillusionment, A Godsend: Part 2

Part 1 is here.

What is there to replace?
An alcoholic? Low cut shirt and a trip to the bar. I can just look in the mirror for that.
A narcissist? I can just look in the mirror for that.
The constant threat of being cheated on? Craigslist personals.
A big, flaccid dick? Pretty sure they sell those on Amazon.com. No drama attached. Free shipping.
The broken record that is you talking about how awesome you are? I’m drinking amnesia bleach.
Stumbling, idiotic tyrant, I don’t know what I saw in you.
I thought “boring” and “drama king” were antonymous. I thought a lot of things wrong.
Not sure how I conjured the delusion that you were exciting, or offered security.
I saw what I wanted to see.
Not anymore.
Thank God (/the Universe) I found you fucking your ex.
Illusion torn away.
Life saved.

Written April-June 2015

Disillusionment, A Godsend: Part 1

Not the fetish princess of your fantasy delusion,
not a pellirojo, not Asian, with a perfect
ass and body and tits and gaping dickhole mouth,
no vision of desire to you.

The snow floats down in a symphony onto frozen,
icy grass, dead crops, and sleeted roads where cars
swerve violently, driven by numb, clenched hands.

Nor am I what you want(ed)
and who said life was fair? Or that we all get
what we want? Or that we all even get
what we deserve?

Most don’t.
In sub-Saharan Africa, they don’t. In Haiti, they don’t. In China, they don’t.
Most of us, the general populace, are not royalty
and most women, the general populace, are not
porn queens.

On a white, mud-tracked carpet
unrolled beneath my feet, I ascended steps
& boarded a small airline, followed by a few other
passengers. I reached, stuffed my carry-on in the
overhead compartment, the Sasquatch of a Latino
flight attendant walked up, then down, the aisles,
and read the usual scripts about safety and how to
survive in case of a crash.

There was nothing particularly
attractive about her, in your eyes I simulated,
while she buckled her thick midsection
into the seat at the front of the cab,
and we all got ready for takeoff.

We reached peak velocity.
The ‘fasten seatbelt’ light turned off.
I went to the bathroom to cry at the pain
of wanting so badly but never being
good enough.

Walking down the aisle back to my seat, I saw
a plane full of women
all normal looking, none photoshopped
none porn/beauty queens.
none ogres.

All of us somber.
None of us good enough.

And that was the moment when I stopped giving a shit about your fucking delusion.

Written December 2013-June 2015

black & white

We admitted we were powerless over neurotransmitters
and that our lives had become unmanageable.

I’m a blackhole vacuuming
it all up into me & giving nothing back.

I formed when a star died.
I tried to get the star back.

But her bones were crushed
in the wasteland of my belly.

When I die, I’ll become a white hole,
pouring all I’ve swallowed back onto the world.

I didn’t want to be bipolar. No.
Habits emerged, I collapsed under their gravity.

You wouldn’t stand in the path of a black cat
so don’t cross my event horizon.

the Charmer

Huddled in sloppy grey slush, hunched upper back swaddled in oil-stained drapes,

homeless piss & stale cigarette aroma billowing off the skeleton of you,
exposure to frigid air scorches your goose bumps to cold hives.

 

Your teeth are shining perfect. What do you even eat?
Under the bridge, you breathe in noxious, nutritious car exhaust
or perhaps you feed on scrap metal, did you hunt down the junkyard dog?

 

I hired you from Craigslist for a legit job in my car shop,
you fixed cars OK but pissed off my customers by stinking up their Cadillacs & Crown Vics.
I adopted you, fed you a hot lunch everyday;
you broke half my tools & taught my dog to attack me.

 

If I let you sleep in my shed, will you hole up, agoraphobic, & keep to yourself? Please.
You wouldn’t settle for the shed, no, you wanted a church too.
So I built the church and erected wooden icons & hired a congregation
just to get you the fuck out of my life.

 

Every Sabbath, you’d stand at your podium and lead them all in sing-alongs
to your favorite songs—starting with country songs & moving onto the Blues.
You’d depress your entire congregation then be right there. Drunk.

 

Spouting new-agey regurgitated clichés, Eckart Toll type quack-talk,
webcam feeding your Narcissistic Supply, & people paid to see you
wasted & dirty, whiskey glass spilling with each dramatic hand gesture.

 

The crowd gluttonously consumed you with glitter in their wide eyes
as you led your glorious seminar on
positive thinking & the law of attraction & the power of now
& as you got more wasted, their cheers amplified,
filling Your Cathedral with your nonsensical awesomeness, your fallacious exuberance.

 

I knew. I knew what was coming when you wanted more land for your ceremonies.
I knew you’d clear the trees & dig the plots & auction them off online. You’d lead the procession of herd animals right to their own graves, paid for w/PayPal. 
Any traces of souls eaten with your shining perfect teeth.

Aliena Principio, Abrupta Finis

Strange Beginning, Abrupt Ending

In the beginning, the Aliens drafted blueprints of human civilization on paper & plaster models like sandcastles with Lego men & buildings like in dollhouses.

Up on their fluorescent blue flashing light floating platform hovering over the barren & desolate rock, they dropped down pellets of various colors that were encoded, like DNA, with specific instruction s on how to become an atmosphere & all the elements, then trees, water, earth, & pyramids. The pellets multiplied like cells & the Aliens zapped them with massive psychic energy, which emitted beta photons, to catalyze the process.

As their Petri dish incubated to fruition & they observed their creation, they did not smile but instead recorded & timed the first beings, archae, slouch toward life. They observed & recorded as archae turned to eukaryotes, then to sponges, then fish, then cyodonts, then squirrel-like mammals, then lemurs, then gibbons, then orangutans, then Neanderthals, then humans, then to consumerist fuck by-products. The Aliens watched as language was formed from guttural grunts, & agriculture began, & villages then cities were built, which marked the beginnings of the humans’ aspirations to cover the planet with their human anthill.

The humans (thought they) invented art. Their very existence was just the product of science as an art. Civilization was an experiment with controls (limited resources) & variables (“free will”). But humans thought they were divine, unique creations from a benevolent god &, based on this premise, each new empire that emerged tried to take as much space & as many resources from their neighbors as possible. They regularly performed genocide as a means of monoculture.

They were the special ones & “god” would protect them, bolster & uplift them, for their values were god’s values.

Said the Egyptians.
The Romans.
The Greeks.
The Dutch English.
“We’re the chosen ones.”
Chosen by whom?
“God.”

The Aliens observed, laughed amongst themselves, & ate alien popcorn with their minds up on their platform, nearby but hidden from humans by a dense layer in the space-time continuum. Humans knew about the layer but were too self-absorbed to succeed in navigating very far past the planet on which they resided. Their planet, a goddess. Humans were too busy obsessing over proving their points to realize the Truth that was obvious to the Aliens & unrelated to all the humans’ points.

Each of the humans saw his/her personal way as the best. Humans created hierarchies where some humans had access to most of the resources on Earth & others survived on the minimum. They chose their leaders arbitrarily, as if drawing names from a hat. But all of the paper slips in the hat were names of humans who originated from antecedents with the most resources, & with ownership over the most stuff. Imagine that—the humans thought they ‘owned’ things.

Humans even thought, at a time, that they ‘owned’ other humans. From the beginning of civilization, the Aliens watched as humans with penises displayed ownership over humans with vaginas. & penis-owning humans with skin containing lower concentrations of melanin violently displayed ownership over those with lots of melanin in their skin.

Eventually, the penis-owning low-chroma-skinned humans started blasting open the planet with explosives & pumping out decayed dinosaurs called oil. They burned oil to power all aspects of their society. They manufactured all sorts of stuff & transported themselves across the planet by burning oil.

By accruing the goods, they became reminiscent of their squirrel-like ancestors, who would brag about having the largest stockpile of acorns. The Aliens saw this similarity but the humans overlooked the comparison because they were beginning to believe that owning all the goods made them gods. The more dead dinosaurs they burned, the more god-like they felt, & the thicker the atmosphere of the planet became.

The rich humans kept getting more from the poor by taxing their wages, earned by manufacturing stuff the rich wanted. Rich humans manipulated less wealthy humans into sacrificing paper-that-could-be-exchanged-for-goods for them & convinced them it was for their own welfare.

The more goods humans accrued, the larger the volume of goods buried below the earth accumulated, heaping over in piles. Islands of the goods formed in the oceans. The chemicals humans made in labs were molded into goods that eventually where buried, underwent physicochemical reactions, & produced more chemicals, which leached out of the ground & into the water of the humans-with-less-goods. Lots of the humans that drank this water became sick, so they used other sickening chemicals to become less sick.

The chemicals they took went from stomach lining to blood stream across the blood-brain barrier & drove them insane. Their insanity/mania made them believe with even more conviction that they were gods. The gods started ending their lives with firearms & more chemicals.

The Aliens observed & recorded this. They sighed without emotion as they ionized the blunder with gamma ray lasers made of antimatter.

Positive Thinking

I don’t have any answers
to questions like
why am I here?
what am I doing?
what do I want?
And they aren’t just going
to miraculously land
in my lap.
I’ve waited long enough.
Been in this monotonous bubble
of confusion, angst, self-pity
& hopelessness long enough.
Now it’s time to randomly
& fearlessly
decide
then do
something
even if it’s not “right”.
And my life will get better.

Nomad

Abandon one shell & all its contents impulsively, while he’s comatose & can’t catch me in nylon mesh. I’m petrified. Still I crawl, naked, now shell-less, no heat—cold in sand at night, nothing to eat. Next time I’ll stockpile barnacles & snails for hunger so deep to the empty core, incomplete. Keep crawling shell to shell find a happy ending & home, seek safe place to burrow away from the sun’s deterministic rays, look outside myself. Still don’t find a solid shell, so I’m soft & driven by a dry hypothalamus. Parallel to the seashore, I crabwalk across the grains of this absurd beach where Meursault killed the Arab…just because.

Dancing under the stars w/ the boy of my dreams

Truth is, I’ve never slow-danced with anyone, which is why I wanna be a bride. Sobbing & captivated as you stared into me & sang & played “Night & Day” on piano, then “The Sound of Silence” on guitar. I got real applepiemoonshine-drunk midway into an ‘instant love’-locked-gazes-pupils-dilated-48hrs-straight encounter & we couldn’t part/we never parted. We got real. Deep. Fast.    Thrust-fault eruption the logical progression.   Cavernicolous by my genetic default; my fate settled over me like the brain-buzz of being flogged down w/ nightstick —a God’s Flood of inhibitory neurotransmitters. Then sleep. Wake up. Realize. Coaxed, shoved back to the sleep haze by reality-terrors. Then awoke, TV static via intravenous infusion, running me through the roof. But this can’t be real. Suction portal back to bed-body. No. Then TV static hum becomes blackhole back through the roof. Traffic sparse in early hours on Green St. Must be real. Then further: up through the gaseous atmosphere, up & out & can see dissociated Earth & keep shooting up through blackness to stars. At that point I wasn’t even moving anymore; the blackness rushed past me as I was still. The blackness, nothing, lack thereof: boy of my dreams.

The City I Built

"Psychological projection is a theory in psychology in which humans defend themselves against unpleasant impulses by denying their existence in themselves, while attributing them to others." -Wikipedia

"Psychobabble (n): language that is used by people who talk about mental and emotional problems and that is seen as silly or meaningless : psychological jargon" -Webster

Have I built this City between me & you?
A body, an outfit, coat, scarf, gloves, hat,
a desk, shelves, computer, phone, cubicle,
a maze of cubicles, an office, fluorescent lights above, carpet below,
6 flights up, 6 flights down to ground level, filling the massive expanse of not a
building but a fucking Business Center, surrounded by more just like it
(banks, schools, stores, warehouses, houses, landfills, shelters, churches, malls)
with electrical lines & skyscrapers & jets & planes & satellites tacked to the sky,
a wall of traffic, buses & cars & trains all lugging like a monolithic barge
over the feet & miles of impervious surfaces which mask a convoluted sewage system,
& a conglomerated glut of other structures I can’t think of.
Blue sky, which reflected grey at New Year's on the buildings & clusterfuck
reflects on the rooftops & concrete now
like my mind reflects/projects over top of everything I see:
psychobabble, intense then dispelled feelings, complicating & simplifying
to the point that I truly can never see absolute Truth.
If you even exist (or am I just talking to & praying & pleading at the sky?)
I can never truly see you, God.
Can’t even truly see others, or myself.
I have built this City between me & you.
I have built this City of Denial.

New Year

White, dimensionless sky reflected on
bland, white building rooftops.
Even all the reds, greens, & blues ,
the glitter, lights, & glorious Christmas bullshit
are concrete under this unicloud.

Driving 95 down a state road, I'm independent
just like my car's bolts & hinges revolt, rattling.
The Christmassy dots of the city turn to lines,
silence fills my soul w/ all answers,
& a New Year seems promising as this
erected middle finger rushes past it all.

My New Year’s resolution simply this:
no New Year’s kiss.
So I don’t have to think back
next New Year’s Eve
& remember stalemated fantasies of storybook
ending w/ someone who broke my heart
next year.

No. I’m perfectly content kissing
the midnight unicloud.

Freedom, Flower.

A love poem for myself

Written 02 Dec 2014

Feeling cold without a heaterbox, but
free
now, too.

I was anxious at first.
It was cold.
What would become of me in the future?

I’ve been here before:
there were flies buzzing ‘round my head in early hours of a late night
but now I’m really a sunflower, warm & brilliant inside, & alive.

Now it is the future
and apparently I’m just fine—
warm under blankets that were mom’s, are now mine.

Narrative of a Demonic Possession

Written August-December 2014

Possession of the Host

The latch on his chipped white picket fence jingled & a gust blew it open, overgrown vines on the door like moss on river stones. I walked through the fence, down the steps to the entrance of his underground house.

I stood breathless, shaking, disoriented, then shimmied sideways through ivy & sharp, prickly bushes to a window. W/ my sleeve I wiped a peephole in the dirt layer of the unscreened window pane.

Looking in, I saw him there. Only a single, yellow-stained lamp bulb revealed the figure in the shadow, & the neon blue of the screen reflected white on his focused grimace. In an overstuffed chair, he was cold & hypnotized by the the fluorescent figures coming from the screen who touched themselves, w/ red O’s taped to their faces like used car advertisements on telephone poles.

A plume of black smoke was emitted by the screen, wafting into his orifices, subtly, perhaps he didn’t even notice. I looked closer at the smoke & saw it moving in an unnaturally narrow line out of the images on the screen & through his face & hands & through the pores of the stone walls.

& out the window. I realized I was breathing in the smoke stream that was interspersed w/ bioluminescence.

Spread of the Parasite

Didn’t belong anywhere, so I hid in shadows in corners outside homes & w/ the lens of the internet, creeped. Unable to interact & invisible, I drifted around, a specter, a spectator watching other people live & watching unrequited loves love others. From the sidelines, life is a detective game, a sociological experiment of reading body language, grouping personalities. Standing on sidewalks looking into homes w/ families around fireplaces, I made stories up about how other people could possibly feel comfort & belonging when my only feeling is a hole in my chest, which grows daily, where a being lives which makes me question why I’m even still alive. “Alive”…relative to…dead? Really: nonexistence. The chest pains & clammy skin & split ends, although unpretty, are signs I’m still alive. Living? I’m a ghost in a flesh shell, still a ghost. People caught glances of me out of peripheral vision. They’d think they’d seen someone there, but looking straight on, it was…air.

Destruction of the Host

I carry a cumbersome body bag, overbearing shit pile containing the corpse of a young female, approximately 8 years old.

Managing my way through the waterlogged, clayey soil is proving difficult in four-inch pleather platform boots. I insisted on wearing them, even down stomping in the swamp, a stupid girl.

The boots are my new identity as a cold, living-dead demon whore who only knows sex & begging & screaming out in a shrill guttural howl but never truly being seen or heard or loved.

This isn't me.

This isn't my voice.

I was born into this world as something else.

But I killed & buried her a long time ago.

Someone incapable of loving, as an evil source of darkness, which only attracts more dark, broken, & lost betrayers, liars, & sexually depraved...demons.

The heels, too high, got snagged in some branches. W/ waning perseverance, I could no longer carry the armload of antiquated junk so I dumped it all upon the green ooze & lily pads, watching as brown swamp water creep & seep over it, & it sinks out of sight.

Episode

There's a question inside me & I long for the answer
to fill up the empty box.
The answer isn't in the mirror,
it isn't in this laptop,
it hasn't been seen on TV,
so far it doesn't appear to be
coming forth from inside me.
It's not on the Internet,
not in a book
or in my refrigerator, the cupboards, or in my car.
I've checked all those places.
It could be in a human sized hole in a graveyard in the ground
but I won't know that until...
It certainly isn't in my wallet, and isn't on the wall,
or at the gym, but it could be in a man.
(Their plan is to convince you they
have the answer then lead you on
til you're like an abandoned baby
who gives up.)
The answer might be locked inside the ping pong ball
bouncing chaotically back and forth in my chest.
But it's not locked inside my heart-shaped box,
it's nowhere I've traveled
but maybe I haven't looked thoroughly enough
or maybe I've been looking so hard, so long,
I've forgotten the question
or I'm seeing it all wrong.
Can God even hear me inside these concrete walls?

Libera Me

"Live or die, but don't poison everything." - Anne Sexton

The world (?) & I have brought the iron hammer down hard

on the nails in this cross, burden of self-lies, selfishness.

Permanent birthmark of beast tattooed

on skin & inside me & all my sins
diffuses through, poisoning everything (even you, now).

Surrender this life to the Iron Fist

plummeting apathetically (arbitrarily)

down from a laceration in the sky.

Let it smash   down   hard—libera me.

Life isn’t art, doesn’t have any heart:

doesn't want my art or my soul,

no way to rip it up & start again.

So when (the demons &) I go, burn the corpse.

Put the ashes in the charred pot of a dead plant

where they won’t contaminate anything else

or grow more volunteer plants you’ll mistakenly touch & eat,

eternal toxins embedded within, inexorcisable possession.

Things just went wrong too many times.

Gut Worms

Gut worms of fearful intuition

squirrel through the belly,

whisper words like witches,

hexing all who don’t listen.

Slipknots of thoughts twist around

wrapping and weaving themselves

so tightly the edges fuse together,

so they’ll never be untied:

The lies

settled like a cloud of nerve gas

on our perfect fucking fairy tale.

Costumed in facepaint to hide your

blemishes and scars, heart hidden

deep under a cheap superhero cape.

I knew you weren’t who you said you were—

the worms said told me by mouthing words

I couldn’t hear but instinctively knew.

Still I could read their lips

and the clues you left me

that I collected, but not your heart.

So I worked under a single light bulb

in the darkness at 4 am while you

were up: creeping, crawling.

I analyzed the evidence left,

and using binoculars to look half the world away

concluded that you were crawling, creeping.

When night turned to day,

all the clues evaporated. Confined to my mind as

immaterial, unsubstantiated “claims”.

My gut worms were invisible with you, inside you, saw the

dark soul beneath the cape & blemishes to your core.

Their squirming mouths told me I was right.

The lies twisted as roots supporting a hologram tree:

Off of which I picked hologram fruit,

never could get full, be satisfied.

Driven by hunger for more fruit,

something real, fleshy, and juicy, I took

my binoculars & deerstalker hat on a search.

The worms led me to the real you without costume

and as I realized this was definitely you, no lies,

they burrowed back into my gut.

Enlightenment

Joseph Roger Curd leaned back in his office chair, slackassedly typing up his last email of the day. One more refund request for a faulty thermostat cover. His heart pounded as he tediously filled in the form email rejecting the angry customer a refund for the unwarranted item. Joseph's mind raced between the tasks on the honey-do list left for him by his demanding bitch of a wife, Jennifer Rene Curd.

Jennifer the Bitch would gripe and moan until 1) the grocery list a mile long was purchased, 2) the lawn was mowed, and 3) the dog Kimmie, a 12 year old Labrador who only came when called, was walked. His hands shook as he anxiously sent out the last email. All Joseph wanted was a crisp Miller Lite as he plopped down in front of the big screen TV, which he had paid for in cash with money he scrimped and saved. For months, all the personal spending money Jennifer the Bitch graciously allotted him from his check was saved for the 50 inch, hi-def, flat screen television with surround sound.

He shuffled together his papers and stuffed them haphazardly in his briefcase, grabbed his lunch box, walked briskly down the long corridor of cubicles leading outside. He scanned his ID fob to exit through the heavy glass door, the July air like a hot bath after his day in that meat fridge of an office. His car was so hot it felt like burning in Hell. He turned the ignition and the car hotly coughed to a start, then he rolled down the window, lit a Pall Mall, and backed out of his designated parking space in the black tar desert. The air conditioner in the 2000 Toyota Corolla had long since croaked, so the heat engulfing him immediately made sweat drip from his bald head and stress lined forehead, and flowed like a river out his armpits, further exacerbating the staining on his once-white dress shirt.

But he liked the warmth. Sweat was a sign, he thought that, No, I wasn’t born into this world as a salty, dried up peanut shell to be tossed when its innards were consumed. I am a majestic hurricane, powerfully whirling through life, affecting those around me and destroying anything that stands in the way of my dreams. As he exited the parking lot, fighting and cursing his way into the far lane, he deeply sighed with relief from being free from that concentration camp of a workplace.

A thought crossed Joseph’s mind, What if I don’t get the groceries or mow the lawn or walk the dog?

So, instead of driving seven more blocks down the road to the grocery store, he cut through three lanes of traffic and made a spontaneous right turn. He pulled into the hardware store parking lot, got out of the car and removed his sweat-stained shirt which he wadded up and threw into the back seat. He went into the hardware store and made his purchases. Then he drove across the street to the gas station, where he bought six packs of Pall Malls and a Hustler magazine, then filled his car’s tank and a red, plastic two-gallon gas container. He normally used this canister to fill the mower.

He made his way back into traffic and onto the interstate, which he took 16 miles east to the suburb where he resided. He pulled into the garage, turned off the ignition, and sat for awhile in the sweltering heat of his metal box, sweating and smoking with a vague smile of calm contentment plastered on his face. He stubbed out the cigarette then gathered his purchases and locked the car. With the bags hung over his arm, he dug through the drawer of his garage tool cabinet and pulled out a drill, which he tucked under his arm with the bags so he could unlock the house with his free hand.

Upon entering the house, he dumped the heap of parcels, except the drill, onto the kitchen floor. Jennifer the Bitch wasn’t home from her daily shopping spree, funded by his servitude to Thermoplex Corporation for over 20 years. Every day for the past 20 years, she procured new clothing, jewelry, make-up, and other products meant to diminish her age and increase her appeal to the other men she was fucking, because she certainly wasn’t giving him any. Anyhow, Joseph lost his attraction to that shallow, demanding cunt a long time ago. It was hard to love her, since she only loved herself. She didn’t clean or cook or do errands; many tasks were left to Joseph himself, and the house remained in a state of disarray until the 70 year old cleaning lady came on Saturday mornings.

He placidly stalked from room to room, making sure the windows were locked. Check. Then, at the front door, he removed the screws from the door knob, shimmied it from its hole, and wiggled the new one in place. He drilled it in. He repeated this process on the back door and the patio doors. Check.

Joseph took several trash bags from the kitchen cupboard and went into the Bitch’s dressing room. Over the years, he had learned, from being held hostage by Jennifer the Bitch for her white-wine induced rants, which wardrobe pieces were the most expensive, treasured, and coveted by the other shallow wives in the neighborhood. Any with labels he recognized were thrown into the trash bags. Any with expensive fabrics or kept in garment bags were trashed. He filled the bags quickly, but it wasn’t enough, so he retrieved several more and continued purging Jennifer’s closet. When he was satisfied that every stitch of her over-priced fashion facade had been bagged up, he grabbed her jewelry boxes and the jewelry scattered about her vanity stand and threw it all in the last bag. Check.

He had gathered up 10, 40-gallon bags of clothes and jewelry. He carried the bags, five per hand downstairs and out the back door, adrenaline rushing to his muscles and offering extra strength. A couple of the neighbors were walking by, their meddlesome, penetrating eyes staring. Feeling their burning stares, he avoided eye contact, dumped the bags in a pile, and went back inside the house. He obtained the gas can and went back into the backyard. The neighbors were gone now and the only observers in sight were two standard poodles confined by an invisible fence down the block of backyards.

Joseph poured gasoline over the pile of trash. He lit a cigarette, and coolly puffed it while staring at the thin streaks of clouds. Then he tossed the butt onto the pile and it wooshed in flames. For a moment, he watched the flames cutting through the plastic bags. Then he went back into the house and turned the newly-changed lock on his way in.

He grabbed the Hustler, which had been his sole source of sexual gratification for 20 years, off of the kitchen floor and took it into the bathroom. He ritualistically rubbed one out as he did nearly every day. Then he washed his hands and dried them on his slacks.

Joseph whistled the dog over to accompany him as he cracked open a Miller Lite, plopped down on the couch, and flipped on the TV.