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missed updates, 4/27

maybe some more of these whenever this hell-mouth of a semester ends...


where marshall put the dicks
Phenoarbital and a twist of lime;
we'll talk about this another time
when we've boarded ship so we can fuck
with our hearts and come with our minds.
Horizontal wooden planks
to crucify, we give our thanks -
a blade that adds a suffix to our name
that causes minor pains and aches.
Now Nikes let them walk in place
on treadmills made of outer space
where Marshall put the dicks
after he wiped his face.

merengue
Smothered in moonlight but I still taste the sun
Mouthful of moisture and lemon puckering my tongue
And the moon won't rise until the job is done,
or I am done, either one.
It's the shine of the rays and the dawn's floral mist
that reddens the skin from the rope on my wrists
It never mattered if I insist,
because she insists I'm Aussie-kissed.

final indulgence to spotted angel
Your subjects land to evoke the same wish uttered years ago.
But I am star dust on Heaven's shelf, on a scrapbook of Christ in adolescence.
A once-glowing fruit now stomped, from a cigarette turned upside down
As close to tasting your spit as I'll ever be again.
I whistle it off my hand and assure my eyes there are drier days to come.

lyricing, 12/16

eskimo pie
midriff lined in fur, saw-teeth cut fashion fringe
dotted lines connecting hips, skull and crossbones over pierced navel
and a shaven X looked like pelvic brows along the hemline.
a prostitute's courage shows in winter
although her flowers cower.
whispering in inuit, she shows me her igloo.
or was it a frozen scab?
john was a spear fisherman.

ernest scared shitless (revised)
i collapsed in cody's arms
as helpless as i'd ever been
wishing i could be the great redneck hope
impenetrable to bullets like my dreams.
he had a place for sympathy
but there was trash as far as the eye could see.
he shed a tear, but not for me.

1954
i'd hoped for motown in the spring.
foggy windows in the chevy
and a taste of mist passion fruit or grenadine,
violent tongues raising hell in the sanctuary.
but my mouth is full of gauze.

thick glasses
how i wondered if you'd fly the city
i watched you horizontally.
a girl so shiny should never trail the eclipse
you've a million years to burn.

rudy & elle 2

“I used to pretend I was Jasmine when I was little,” she reminisced while waiting in line for a chance to spin in circles aboard a teacup. “I would take Mom’s curtains off the window and wrap myself in them, then try to ride Rocky’s back around the house like he were Rajah.” Rudy laughed, imagining his girlfriend trying to saddle up on the aging canine mix with only a couple of good years left in him.

“I had this little kettle, and I’d rub it to make Genie come out. I’d rub and rub and rub, hoping he’d grant me three wishes.”

“What’d you wish for?” Rudy asked, smiling.

“A Barbie convertible. And pretty jewelry so Mommy wouldn’t get mad at me for wearing hers,” she giggled, shoving her hands into the back pockets of her jeans.

“Didn’t the genie give three wishes?” Rudy wondered aloud.

“Yep!” Elle chirped. “My third wish was for a million more wishes!”

Rudy nodded and cocked a grin, taking a few paces forward as the line started to move again. “Which one would you have been?” Elle asked, wanting a little more insight to Rudy’s relatively quiet childhood.

“Easy,” he responded blankly, void of emotion. “Scrooge McDuck. If you don’t want to dive into an indoor pool of money, you must be brain dead.”

“You probably would be after your head hit a bunch of gold coins,” she mused.

They balanced one another out with exchanges of rational versus irrational. When one head was in the clouds, the other was glued to the neck. Elle laughed as Rudy hip-checked her into the railing. Her counter was a perfectly placed rib tickle in the sweet spot just below the nipple. Some looked on with smiles, others questioned their age, and the guy portraying Goofy exchanged changing-area banter about the crazy loon who put him on his ass that day in a fit of excitement. If Disney World were less than a vile exploitation paradise, there’d be no way that these two collegiate “celebrities” would come out of it more in love than the had ever been.

The night sky was no match for the parade of color that marched down the streets surrounding Cinderella’s castle. All of the characters of Walt’s universe that they had met earlier that day danced and waved atop twenty thousand-dollar floats wearing two thousand-dollar costumes. Rudy’s chin was perched on Elle’s shoulder, holding her close around her belly with fingers pinned by the palms of her hands. She reveled in the display of pageantry while his mind wandered in anticipation of the future. They’d be back in this very spot at some point in time, watching this same show, arms in the same position. What will they have made of themselves five years from now? Would his rocket to other dimensions be complete? How a mind who yearns for the absolute truth in the most uncertain of questions felt like it would collapse before time would reveal the answers.

The sight of the blue mustachioed giant in the distance was enough to deter him. A balloon rose out of the open end of a lamp ten feet tall, its smirk was unmistakable as the float grew closer. Elle nuzzled her cheek against Rudy’s as the cast aboard tossed candy to their audience. Dressed in curtains of cerulean, the Princess of Arabia waved as if she had been crowned Miss Universe. Her peasant prince guided his palm against the surface of the large antique as the balloon inflated once more, the Genie ready to do his duty.

The future lay in Rudy’s front pocket, and as he freed his hand to reach inside for that future purchased with a heavy advance on a student loan...

She thinks she missed the train to Mars, she’s out back counting stars…

Rudy opened his eyes and reached for his cell phone laying on the nightstand beside his bed in the Comfort Inn Kissimmee. Matt Talbot’s somber voice over the twinkling of guitar immediately registered her name in his head.

Elle.

Silencing the phone with a press of his thumb, he turned to the opposite side and exhaled. It hadn’t exactly been their most pleasant of good-byes as he hopped the cab to the airport alone. It was the battle of rational versus irrational, and she could not see the point in missing an exam for another appearance. While he couldn’t justify being upset at her for something she couldn’t help (apparently celebrity status falls upon deaf ears when it came to Calculus professors,) he couldn’t help but feel abandoned by her lack of commitment. The two of them would have to charge headstrong into Mickey Mouse some other time.

Needless to say, the Comfort Inn wasn’t nearly as comfortable without her.

charley

He had been beaten, whipped, tread upon, and undergone the most immense brands of torture. One thing was a testament to his will, though: Charley shed no tears. As much as the waterworks begged to leak from his eyes, he would never give in. He bottled it, corked the top, and threw it out to sea – even in the most intimate of settings such as this. Leyla and Charley embraced on the couch and this defeated boy had poured out his heart through the course of the evening without so much as a sob.

He didn’t need to. She was crying enough for the both of them.

rudy & elle

Flat on their backs, the fleece beneath them provided adequate comfort from the pine straw that littered the ground. It was a rare cloudless night just off campus, and the wind chill slightly lowered the mercury reading, staying consistent at just somewhere between 47-49. The edge of the park's forested area was just dark enough to give a spectacular view of the astral plane above their heads.

"King Cepheus."

Elle adjusted, putting a white snowflake-pattern mitten hand over her ear, forming a right angle with her elbow. Her pink woolen hunter's cap pulled tightly over her platinum blond hair, revealing three inches that peeked curiously out of the back. Her cheekbones dimpled and pink from the fall weather was such a contradiction...they only seemed to make her smile warmer. Rudy did not notice, as his gaze still remained upward. Mathematical equations that turned the gears in his brain were engaging in battle with the remarkability of the infinite sky. He sometimes wished that he weren't so smart, that the only thing he knew about a solar flare were the fantastic splashes of color that it brought. Lifting his hand, he traced the pattern of the gaseous matter over and over, whether or not his blanket neighbor was paying him attention was the furthest from his mind.

"He was married to Cassiopeia, ruled over Aethiopia. He had to put up his daughter for Poseidon’s sacrifice." Elle moved her pupil up, half-nodding with feigned interest. The use of her pet name always made her heart flutter whenever Rudy would utter it.

She sighed, wondering why such a usually romantic activity amongst "normal" couples had to be so complicated with the two of them. It had only been up until recently where she had insisted that he not bring along the telescope, thinking that it would deter his endless curiosity so they could spend a little more time nestled in each other’s arms under the splendor of nature. As odd as she considered herself, Rudy was truly the one whose head was in the clouds. There was no room to complain, however, as that's precisely why she loved him. Scrunching closer and draping her arm over his tummy, she kissed him on the cheek.

"How’d he become king?" she asked.

Rudy fell silent, face remaining expressionless, as he became lost in thought. He knew that to her, there were no components...she was a big-picture type of person in her simplicity. Rudy saw these stars as working parts of a fully functional universe, and that Earth was the smallest sprocket in the schema. Humoring her, however, was one of his finer works of engineering.

"It's a funny story, actually. You see, legend has it that..."

Elle squeezed him closer as he trailed off into a fable that he constructed as he went along. She pretended to listen with intent, letting her mind wander as she examined the splashes of color that made up the side of his face.

It all started with an easel and a canvas, and a decision to take the long way back to the parking lot through the front lawn. Several of the art students were out that day, as midterm progress reports were coming up and portfolios needed to be filled with their best work. With backpack hunched over one shoulder, he paced through the grass with his hands tucked inside the pocket of his blue hooded sweatshirt. Rudy had only looked up once during his stroll, and that’s when he saw the piece that she was touching up. It was a gallant painting of the very lawn they were standing on, of course…but with an interesting little twist on reality.

She had just happened to turn around and notice Rudy taking a gander at the picture. A visible blush and a smile complimented the take, and Rudy returned it with a sheepish grin of his own.

He had only made it ten steps past her when he saw the smile once more…clear as the Cerulean Sea…rippling over his thoughts. He desperately found himself wanting to wade in her lips and splash in the fluoride-treated teeth that reflected the shine of Polaris on a clear summer night. Rudy was not normally a kid who could be taken aback by such a bolt of lightning – the variables never quite lined up correctly in his head to ever grant him the courage to acquire the nerve. Her pull, however, was like a black hole in the wake of a thriving galaxy. Before he even reapproached her to speak, he wanted nothing more than to be soaked into her event horizon. She smelled of citrus and her skin looked as smooth as Neptune’s icy surface. Frantically, he tried to think of something to say…something cool…something she’d been dying to hear her entire life…a compliment even more worthy than Andromeda herself.

“…and that’s why he was forever immortalized in the sky, coming out on nights like these so boyfriends can impress their girlfriends with his tale. Thanks to Cepheus, millions of star-watching males across every galaxy coax women into sleeping with them every autumn night.”

Elle shifted her weight on top of Rudy, dangling the fringe of her scarf on his nose and cupping his cheek with her hand.

They kissed as they had a thousand times before, with this same scenario occurring more times than a Saved by the Bell rerun on TBS. The only regret that Rudy had over falling head over heels for this amazing woman was the ruin of the work he’d spent years trying to create. A blueprint of the machine that would harness the perfect amount of kinetic energy to take him far away from this planet that lacked the potential to make a proper home. A rocket ship to end all rocket ships that was completely flawless in design. A true scientific masterpiece was deleted from his hard drive only nights prior to this one…

He’d never thought he’d need room for two.

jack

Jack gazed out at the spackle covering the moon, a paste so white that the reflection vomited into the Atlantic and left a mess that Poseidon hadn’t bothered to clean up. Ice cold palm clutching a quarter-full bottle of Old Crow tucked snugly into its brown bag; Jack made no sound as to better hear the crashing of the sea into the wooden poles holding the pier.

He swigged it for the same reasons any man down on his luck would: each swallow either made the memories easier to cope with or easier to forget. Now all that seemed left was that smart alecky kid on the bus ride down and the way Suzanne could melt his heart into a puddle of goo. Jack assumed there was a God listening to his thoughts, and he silently prayed that the blond-haired traveler was the next to go once the last drops of whiskey had tumbled down his esophagus. He was numb to the breeze, and his legs congealed into gelatin as he climbed on top of the railing for a clearer view of the beyond.

“Here’s lookin’ at you, Dickhead.”

Jack flung the bottle as hard as he could, watching it soar for a second as it reached its highest point of the arc. A second, much larger splash was right behind the first when the container finally hit the water. The salty detergent cleansed the spots of mud on the worn out jacket, and in minutes, the bottle was the only object to maintain its buoyancy.