Library, Shades of Gray

It seemed like most everyone was stuck in the library while the rain pelted silently away in the courtyard.  The thick hushing of the ventilation system drowned out its patter.
A girl in a blue sweatshirt leaned over a table, curled into her physics book looking for equations that would explain what the hell was going on.  Who really knew? She wondered.  Newton only got so close.
Tap- taps of typing, occasional coughs, pencil scratches broke the air like little jolts of electricity running through the stillness.  With its constant yellow light, its perpetual, recirculating atmosphere, the library was suspended like a Jello mold (only wobbling once in a while when someone new came in and dropped their bags of priorities).
Now the girl was in a groove, calculating and after every problem sipping on a can of Arizona iced tea.  Outside, twilight arrived in stealth- the rain clouds concealing the change of light, dampening the ray's intrusions.  The girl looked up.  A boy with a bloated backpack was approaching but still miles away in the stacks.  She looked back down; she'd be able to solve this one equation before he arrived.
Attention... the intercom spoke.  The circulation desk will be...  No problem- thought the girl- I won't be checking out.  The boy sat down and pulled out a candy bar.  What chapter are you on?  23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
The world outside was a black patter-patter and inside was stale cramped necks and detachment.

The Hand- an early beginning I found, which is better?

Red fingertips and red blood- falling    drip    drip   onto the carpet, absorbing the splash with the silence of a snowfall. The pinky, striaght, suspended off the edge of the dresser where the rest of the hand lay. Elegance in the curl of the palm, the manicure, the mahogony and white carpet equaled beautiful disaster.
The sunrise slanted in, lit up empty space.

Months before, the hand belonged to a body, that of Elmira Ramirez. Heels echoing down the laboratory hallway, she carried a vial of serum to the incubation room.

the Letter a

aface
any face
ame
whatever me you please

your face disgrace
as my me
looks for
a

a is missing
a is mysterious
anonymity
a washout but

a is also a substrate
binding
to the others and
unwinding any
mean
ing

amean amy
ameanface
apocalyptic
anarchy

is what a is all about
amess
a
disaster
always comes first
aface always before
aword amouth

we all know
a

Renegade Bench Drag

Aren't you smarter than that? Said a passerby with a tote bag, to The Renegade relaxing on a bench and following slow drag with slow drag. He looks at her without malice and does not respond. Adjusts his arm on the back of the bench as she walks away.

A man comes up, he's in that ambiguous 30s age range, with a short sleeve button-up (plaid) mostly tucked into jeans, and New Balance's in an unassuming gray. He's like an amorphous clay ball that has already started baking a little on the windowsill. He sits down on the bench next to The Renegade. Says, “Smoking?” where his voice changes pitch two and half times in the word, like he started out scolding and realized that and changed his mind and wanted to be conversational and then just wasn't sure in the end. You know, “Smoking?”

The Renegade, he coughs phlemy, allergic, turns his head to face the man then says, “Well because I have this cold anyway, I may as well smoke.” Coughs, drags. Coughs. Glances unhurriedly across the grass. “You know it cancelled out the coffee breath, sort of. Ha-ha.” Ha degenerates to cough and he continues the thought, while ashing the cigarette, “There's a classic combination- coffee and cigarettes.”

The man is picking out a position while he listens, settles for hands on knees and a slight incline towards The Renegade. Is unaware of the tiny furrow in his brow.

The Renegade continues, “The inside of my mouth- maybe now it tastes like Such a poetry slam.”

The man responds. “That would be the pretty- romantic?- version.”

The Renegade had been taking a drag while the man spoke, exhaled with his face turned away but not his eyes, and then said, “Ok, or a truck stop then.”

Quick, is the man, with, “Hey I wasn't judging, wasn't judging” and his words trail while he nods. Both of them look out from the bench, together on the bench surveying the grass. The Renegade lights another cigarette.

“We all die anyway, right?” says the man, and at this, the smoker, The Renegade, he looks at the man who can't decide if he's old or feels old or what- and if he wasn't The Renegade he might have sighed- but he just looks a moment and gets up and hold out his hand with the cigarette.

“You want?”

He walks away when the man takes the cigarette (and the man is smushing it now, a little bit, between his fingers) and, in a couple of seconds when he looks back at the man on the bench he sees a smoky aura rising. And sees him put the cigarette out.

Bathroom Story

The day outside is so bright that the colors of the grass, trees, etc. fluoresce. Ah, springtime.

A girl who is inside sits in a toilet stall. She leans forward to adjust and the motion sensor sets off a flush. She is not done and still thinking about this annoyance when, a few seconds later, the whole thing repeats and she learns- a-ha!- this is the exact motion that does it. She rocks now back and forth and back and flush and flush and flush- if you saw her, heard her, you'd think something was wrong, but you're not in the bathroom- and she is holding the sides of the stall now and she stops rocking because nothing is wrong. It's just that she's angry, trapped in this bathroom and this stall made of synthetic materials. She does not want to leave and have to stay in this building all day when the outside exists.

She washes her hands and takes a controlled breath over the sink, makes eye contact with the reflection. She notes the splotchy affects of the sun on dim skin that fluctuates from more to less here in the bathroom's tube lights.

There are no windows in the bathroom, but there are in the hall and she thinks she could go look, she could go outside and disappear there, not here. But she only thinks this for two and a half seconds and stops. Picks up her bag, it is time to return to that room. Before she steps, in the moment when she is about to tell her muscles to step, the toilet flushes again.

No clouds filter the brilliance outside yet, but they are coming.

Truth

Schoolhouse

The 7th grade teacher (who also taught 1st grade reading),
Scrubbing off my grafitti tatoos,
I watched her go here herself, grow up, come back, but when she was older
She was different, she used to sit under my awning, in the shade
Out back in the heat and I knew
She was dreaming of ice skating, tracing
Figure 8's with the end of her cigarette.

I always liked the winter too, the sheen the
Wet mittens and how the ground
Creeped up my sides.

Cody picked noisy fights outside &
Silent ones within, when he showed up, which was mostly
At night in through the gym window that never shut right.
He'd sit on the bleachers and smoke pot and sometimes
Shoot hoops by himself in the shade-light
Moon-lite echoes were his words and he filled up the space so that
I don't think he even missed the basketball team (he was on it until he
Got cut for not showing up). But some folks just seem to be
More present at night, day-ghosts.

The children were gone long before
I became a killer.
A beam in that same gymnasium
Fell, crashing in on a man so loud that
The crows flew out of the old school bus beside me
On cinderblocks.
It's good the twister took me; they would have razed me anyway.

Gator

There is something inside me
Like a gator maybe
It wants out


Its snout and jaws are
Climbing up my brainstem and
Cramped in my skull
(lined up so one eye can only see
out of half my socket)
Its hard sharp teeth
Jaws clamped vice chomping on
My language center
My visual cortex
Wanting me to sense its scales
To cry gator tears
To bleed its reptile infection


Catching in my throat
Catching
The creature swallows inside
My swallow
Out of sync
Throat in a throat


it is probably a yellow monster


The scaly stomach is deflated
To fit in mine
It is so hungry
I can eat and eat
But the gator starves
It's yellow anger
Rumbles through my limbs
Makes me pace the creature's
dissatisfaction


The hulk limbs
and mine compete
to run, jump
peddle up a mountain
The tail must be
curled around my organs
or doubling up in my backside
There is no room for that tail
or place to swing and slap
curve through water
the part that is a snake,
No room to hiss


This monster yellow of a
healing bruise
of jaundice, fever


i'm relieved now that i'm aware
That I know about the gator
that
i must only be
looking for a swamp.

Lady Liberty

Saint Leila Remix!

Carlos

Old Carlos was waiting on a bench, with his walker right next to the bench that was accidently polka-dotted gray where the red paint was chipping off slowly. He was wrinkly, his shirt was not tucked in and his glasses were wide and gold, and it took him a moment to turn sideways when young Carlos plopped onto the bench next to him, scratched knees on short legs swinging, punctuating the air with his red sneakers.

“Now those are sneakers!” said old Carlos, and young Carlos scrunched up his whole face so his eyes were squinting to make a big toothy face. It was barred teeth really, but he kept swinging his feet and the other Carlos was old so maybe he didn't notice or care and he made an old-person snorting laugh sound. The kind you can't tell if it's through the nose or the mouth.

Geninne was watching this from across the street. She was wearing a velour sweatsuit and watering the plants on her front porch and being very nosy.

Young Carlos was smacking gum, said through the saliva, “Wanna piece?” Old Carlos made that sound again and just said “I used to blow bubblegum at school. Wasn't allowed it at home.” Young Carlos had turned his attention to the walker, was standing on the bench to look at it. The old man stood, shakily, and gestured with both hands like a waiter showing the dessert spread, “You like my ride?”

Carlos is going to hurt himself, Geninne said to her cat, if he's not careful.

“Yes!” said young Carlos, and he jumped off the bench into the walker, catching himself like a gymanst between the two bars, holding himself up and swinging those short legs.
Old Carlos laughed loudly.
The metal squeeked, unprepared to bounce.

On Geninne's side of the street, The Renegade was walking up the sidewalk. He stopped in front of her house to light a cigarette. “'Afternoon” he said, and Geninne was about to scold but he locked eyes with her and the words melted in her mouth like butter.

Now young Carlos was monkeying and making faces up at old Carlos, dancing in circles around him, hiding behind the bench and popping up, and old Carlos was hunched with his hands on his knees, bending more than he had in a while making faces back at him, moving as fast as he could to turn round and keep up. A bell rang from up the street a bit and at the same time a voice down the street the opposite way called out, Caarrrlos! They each looked in opposite directions.

“It's time to go,” said old Carlos, and then he sighed. “Got-to-go,” said the young one.
“I wish you could stay.”

Smoke lingered in front of Geninne's house, where she was just standing, done with watering plants. The cat yawwwned.
“Carlos, he's always late for dinner!” she chided. “Stays out so long...”
A bus stopped in front of the bench, and she looked up the sidewalk, watched The Renegade getting smaller for a moment. The bus pulled away and Geninne blinked, seeing the bench empty. In the fading rumble of the bus, the fading smoke, the street was quiet and vacant and she was alone; she looked up and down one more time and the cat got up, walked inside, dismissed her.

Fast on a bike

Speed Makes a Disconnect, and Makes me small.

I was so incredibly jealous

that you were so fast

you were yourself

so angry was my frustration

being at the stoplight on my bike next to you

thought i'd get a head start by breaking the law and going through the red

but there was no way anyway and I knew it

you looked at me through your helmet visor and jetted off

so fucking fast

like I had no idea you could go that fast.

Before I blinked

before I had time to make a word you were gone around the corner and I was left in the middle of the street

on my bike

pedeling is

the road is long

why can't I go that fast?

Why don't I have a motorcycle?

If I did it would just be me and the night

and i'd leave you behind.