windshields

Not right now, can't. Sorry there's this cookie crumble layer of ice, under the snow on the windshield. There's this, not cookie, it doesn't cookie, it's not sugary sweet. There's this brittle candy, hard-tack layer of ice under the snow on the windshield. On the side windows. Across the expanse of the whole vehicle.

Not right now. There's nothing like consensual ignorance to lighten up the weight pressing on the brain. There's a limited amount of surface area there. You could argue that it's fractal, that really it's unlimited, that surface area. But either way it's all contained in that same small volume of fluidity, floating there, yet resting solid against that stem.

The soda can sprayed its contents all over. The thing was less than half full at the time, and just pulled itself through my hand to smack, hard, on the surface of the desk. Contents on my sleeve, on the screen, on the trackball. Didn't tip over, just shot skyward and failed to reach whatever goal it probably had in mind. Such is the life of a beverage, caught forever in a composite can, forever until the light comes in after that piercing hiss of the opening tab. Then it works together to find a way to pull the can to the surface, hard, attack the thing like a bomb, exploding out in a groundless faith. A beverage won't ever reach the sky that way, not in a billion trillion lifetimes, but no drink can know that, there is no proof.

Not right now, just this. The damp sleeve wants some closure. This cassette came in the mail with this Edward Gray on it, and in the ice or snow or. The tubes that deposit the liquid onto the windhshield are disconnected from the wipers, both of them. The mist from the surface being torn away and left to land on countless windshields just sticks there, all morning, and the liquid in those tubes launches wild away from the direction of travel. A small section of clean but a larger section of worse-for-it, so I'm hunched over peering just above the wheel never seeing potholes that jump from the surface and try to tear the suspension out from underneath me. Hold me down under near freezing water's surface and I won't drown, the cold lowers the heart rate the brain really doesn't need oxygen in absolute zero. Finite surface or no there're worlds afloat in that amniosis.

He sang near falsetto some lines about small consolations. There are scraps of paper in the envelope, too much tape. I scratched and pulled until it all spilled out to play me isolation beneath the opacity of the crusted, cracked windshield. How my fingers twitch


and twist the string around the insides of that car. Anything spectral, any sequence accepted. You could have an infinity of patterns of movement of one point starting anywhere inside there and proceeding in steps to only other adjoining points. Yet that infinity is smaller than another.

On the sides of the highway are hazard lights flashing and men with fists pounding glass, frustrated that they cannot see to move ahead. The air freezes anything on the surface upon which it lands. We stay still and frozen and watching one another working our way through never repeating patterns but always ending up in the same place.

The soda is flat now in that can, having expended all of its energy in that pitiful attempt to escape gravity.

ice

what happened to everyone?
beneath the ice,
the hearts stopped
no melting
the cold covering cases
sloughing off faces in this
this winter abomination
decimated pieces of whatever it was.

I'm living as if ninety-five percent of my time is past
leaves very little left to display
amateur self-pity and observation:
All this time spent yesterday leaves nothing for today

where is everyone
covered in ice
body temperature dropped to match surroundings
nothing shows up on the screen anymore
no radar blip
maybe a skittering shadow
drags me back to some stupid thing
that happened ten years ago
that's somehow magnified to a thousand times its size
an encroaching form set to devour what's left of me

what's left of me
these fidgeting fantasies
burying truth
beneath a crispy white outside cold
that all this stuff is just a symptom
obvious to everyone but deniable
to anyone on the inside

an old brass light socket
stripped of its light
stripped of its bulb
stripped of its wire
laying on its side amidst similar opaque pieces
this isn't important
everyone can see but me

there's a mound under that
smooth flat surface of white
that scatters the globelight there or here
but never both
would be clear what it is --
a basketball, a rock, a dead animal
any other time
but under that anonymizing blanket
it could be my own head
noticing how the light can't get through

Butter tastes better.

Dudley Spooky Westchester Pontiac Christmas:

It's just been too long a time since we've had a mippage alike to that, and now that I'm having seeinged it (that isn't the word "singed," nor is it pronounced as such in the hindquarters,) I'm just feeling like really there's no excuse for why there hasn't been some sort of flashbangery coming from these quarters for. Sometime, I mean. I have an excuse, not to be too lie about it, there's always an excuse, just not really an excusably recognizable one, that is to say one that would voluntarily up and ship itself off to the front in order that otters might live. Chipmunks, squirrels, that might be different. But fucking otters. Can't be bothered.

Then again: watching your news broadcast from the headinglands of Egypt, where Tony Blair recently sat on an earthquake monsoon with his family picture show so that he could expostulate upon George W. Butt's exceptional facial control, I was rung into this already started nude year by a startling oragami of sawed-off grass and a heap of trouble. Where DID we get our notion that this is a run of the hill mip year, and not some cosmically altered, perf-ect because it's-now and HERE timeframe that only we are priveleged enough to have come upon? That is to say, though I didn't said it, that is to have said something about how your newscast rang a bell in my batfry and I nearly impaled myself on an ice-cream scooper. It's common knowledge that I can't eat it.

That's not all, though. Those excuses I wouldn't have excused only a moment ago are playing in my belly like hotsauce. I love to eat lemons whole, without even biting down. I've had a some sort of sick for some week, and prior to that I didn't even wanted to say anything ever, and still. I'm meaning something here, I thought, but then it's not being meant, so what the fuck do I know about it? You've been in Dubai smoking Hong Kong while I'm over here trying to calm his brother King down before he knocks over another fucking building. The old boy's a perv, too, likes to reach into the windows where women brush their hairs and pull them out into the air and listen to them squeal. Can't say as I blame 'im: if I were that big I'd probably throw people around, too, and it'd be all I could do not to hump the side of a sky-scraper while I were doing it. Fuck bananas, they're tiny compared to towering apes. What he needs is to eat a fucking tree.

But there's no cheese sauce that large, and I've got other delicious news to not talk about. I've got a DVD burner now, I'm very energetic to say, having researched and read my way into my usual stupor of "oh fuck it I have no idea what the fuck to do let's just go to the store," and having there picked the one device, out of the seven or so they had, about which I hadn't read a thing, by some company I hadn't heard of, which was in fact nearly the most expensive one. Digital Research something-or-other. It's a fast one, or so it tells me, with some kind of 8x DVD +R burning, not that I'd be able to really test that as all the blanks DVDSsses they had at the shoppe only rate at 4x and so I wouldn't want to waste my sex. I already used the one that came with the burner but I didn't pay attention to what speed it was set to.

Spooky "fancy-new-fake-looking-address-designed-to-confuse-us-about-who-you-really-aren't," you might be now be be now asking yourself just where in this mip this whole mip went wrong. Was it the part about King's brother Hong, or before that? From the very get-go, you might be saying, yes, from the very start this thing was such a fucking catastrophe that it probably would've made more sense for me to have buried my fucking pants beneath this heap of used facial tissues which SHOULD by all rights be called nasal tissues but never are to the best of my mench, instead of getting right in here and rambling on about some goddamn gibberish that was doomed to failure before I even woke up this morning.

Now all that's left is for me to figure out what pieces I need to buy for a different computer altogether, whether or not to buy one of those little fuckers that will hold barely a card, but which I'm just enamored of, about, or, or to just replace some of the bare basicallies of this one and see where my fucking membrane errodes away the shore. Yon shore, yes, it is the day. Oh, we've come so far and here are to be defeated by a well-placed parking meter, as we've brought no coins with which to fill it, and a ticket from the meter maids of this new land, with this annoyingly small shore, would be enough to have us locked away for the rest of our lives, or at least for the rest of this evening, as we've not a fold ot spindle with. It's time then for me to turn this fucker around and see if I can't find myself a bag.

- Elgin Pee, from his fifth letter to the Gumdrop Kid