Tasty Top Parking Lot

tightropes & tripwires

I walk facing traffic, and mull over the fact that while god's eyes rests warmly on a few tonight, the devil had set a toothy voracious worm on some unlucky other.

There was a banging on the front door.

It turns near to midnight, and if I were in Europe then the sky would be setting down a wintery kiss to my fingers and cheeks that is close to nothing.

Door was made unlocked, and there were heavy footfalls on the stairs.

Weighing the sight of the rotary I gauge that I can clear your cities limits within the hour.

There was the pounding on your bedroom door, and you pretend to sleep in the dark.

Cars pass me in twos and threes, and I chide myself because I am not sharp enough to figure out a quicker way home.

The door was opened, lights were set to on, and the dog slinked out wearing eyes to the ground.

I cross the over the section of road were last centuries train tracks have dug their selves from an asphalt grave. Counting my fingers, I note, to myself, for future divination that your dog had been whining in its sleep for a half an hour.

The boy who stood in the light and spoke: making demands on my departure, insisting he had maps of cities that were no longer accessible, he wanted five minutes alone with you to negotiate.

And there you are, on the sidewalk, missing your glasses and crying in the dark.

I pulled my belt buckle closed as you spoke my name from under the quilt.

You say my name and block my seven-mile walk out of Easthampton.

The boy ran my name over his lips, just once, as if he had just learned a noun in German, and wasn't sure he was going to be able to pronounce it again.

"I can't image what you think of me", she says.

I asked you what it is you wanted watching your iris bleed in the full light and inked out whatever gray there was left.

"Are you okay?" I ask.

"It's okay. Let me talk to him." You said to me before I left.

In the dark you shake your head, before you bend forward and begin to cry through an open mouth, two arms out, splaying all your fingers.


Be warned. The journal functionality breaks if you go back any farther.

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Stuff I do

I never could finish the MRL story. I didn't want to write about The Man from Senegal. I did want to write, that he goes home to have dinner and chokes on a chicken bone. A bone that had been attached to a thigh that was seasoned just right with white pepper and lemon grass. I wanted to write about the directions that his legs jerked in and how that long tall body careened as he lurched out the doorway of his house. I so desired to find the correct words to describe the blue of suffocation that would bloom under his dark skin. I wanted to write about the people who pass him by, as he plucks with such long fingers at the the bone caught in his throat. How they are my own personal heros, looking away to check the time or what it was lodged under their fingernails, as he tumbled to the ground. I wanted to write about the dust that clings to the front and backside of that beautiful shirt of his, as he turns over in the street.

In the end I was not that person and that was not how the story ended.

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