The conversation:

([Set to the static hum of the withered tape commingling with the monotonous droll and squeak of the lop-sided ceiling fan that spins just above their invisible heads among other less definable clicks and buzzes that infiltrate the impossible space from which the voices must arise from:]

Unknown: He has slipped into unconsciousness; it is only a matter of time.

Dr. Talloway: Yes. It is out of my hands.

[…]

Unknown: His wife?

[Liquid slurped from a cup.]

Unknown: His Wife?

Dr. Talloway: … Bury him. We will continue testing tomorrow.

Unknown: With who?

[cough]

[Tape cuts to a shrill static squeal before shutting off with a crack])

—all that remains recognizable and intact—brought to the dump, buried and forgotten under a layer of Soda Cans, Banana Peels, Used Condoms, torn and discarded Clothing, Bills, half-filled out Tax Forms, Social Security Numbers, half-nude Photographs dated on the back (1999), Prescription Bottles, Junk Mail, Television Sets (15 years obsolete), Magazine Pages, Shit, Piss and Blood—buried and forgotten.

Astrophysics

He had tried, like others, several times before to unlatch the gate. But this time, as heavy sleet rippled through the soft dark air refracting the beams of speeding headlights and a nearby streetlamp and modulating the pewter bars to an insidious shade of black like melting wax, Barlow, kicking at the paltry rusted chain link that had kept the grounds beyond untouched for nearly six generations of uncommon dithery—Horace Lumbago had had the gates shut in compliance with what was, for the most part, a successful act of extortion which, among other diabolical stipulations, demanded that the Lumbago estate be abandoned and locked up indefinitely and without question and to which demand Horace eagerly responded by throwing out every tenant, every maid, every cook, and every other tender hollow that resounded with the beat of a heart and slamming the gate shut for what certainly seemed like eternity, leaving what remained to wallow in an endless pit of noxious self deprival while his heirs lingered on the outskirts (hiding under beds, peeking beyond corners and curtains) and watched a once symbiotic pillar of uninhibited pride and greatness ever-so-slowly crumble to the ground—kicking with a ferocity and an insoluble tendency towards absolute depravity, shattered the link which had stood as the monarchical ruler of a generation and sending it plummeting towards the ground and landing, not with the crash and earth shaking grumble he had expected, but instead with a meager plunk into a shallow puddle that had all the while been accumulating just beneath his feet.

Barlow flung open the gate and stared deep into blackness that lie ahead of him—a blackness that seemed to reach deeper than any he had experienced before; a blackness that, as he entered, did not merely surround him but instead seemed to swallow him as if by an infinite sordid chasm of metaphysical muck. Undeterred, he trudged his way onward in the dark, panting, as would a fiend, as rain sloshed against his non-existent being. It began to rain harder and the static roar that it produced became nearly insufferable. It cast forth voices that moaned in the night and Barlow, distraught but as yet still undeterred, screamed back at them. He demanded these voices relent, but as he yelled he soon perceived that he made no noise. Despite his efforts to speak, his words would not take form neither in his head nor in the external world to which he wished to present them. There he collapsed on the ground as the static continued to build and engulf Barlow in its rich and omnipotent droll.

Until finally it stopped and Barlow found himself lying in utter silence. Still in absolute darkness, the setting was somehow different. The air was thinner and emitted an odd musk. The ground was not wet as he had thought but merely cold and made of a smooth foundation of stone and concrete. In the distance (the distance?) he thought he saw something (a light?) faintly buzzing which unquestionably drew him as would a moth to your patio lamp in the heat of the summer. And from that point on his goal, his wish, his entire existence depended on it: causing all memory and history to vanish in its languid counter-textual glance.

Two Poems

Millhouse Decay

foster run
millhouse decay—
slumbering in the attic with a chair
resting in its resting place

hollowed out beams—
in the night
like a turbid dance—
sit heavy on your swollen walls

and even there there is something
spoiled if not
revamped trickling
down the spine of your heart and eye and into the corner stained clear with that insipid grin


"--"

tolls
the whole
way down

and not once
in this case
have I found you

lying
in the leaves
your bantering

tongue wrapped
around a tree
you sweltering

talariaoftime
buried
you tristesse

taketurns
taking turns
and give up

The Machine

What it was is that I thought I had found the way.

“Ladies and Gentlemen.” That’s how I started off, just to lure them in; just to get them going. Isn’t that how all great presentations begin? A brief and subtle allusion to their humanity before wisping them away on the phonetic piecings of a plan—and this was it, the master plan if you will.

And Glorvina, who had been in the audience—a lady, one of them—Glorvina standing up on her chair shrieking in earth-shattering plumes and blue eyes that burned with some kind of hatred.

Aghast, I watched as she was carried away and presumably shot.

“Ladies and Gentlemen. What is it we’ve been sent here to do? to say? We’ve been sent here against our will to carry out orders that have little matter in our lives.”

Of course this was a lie. What could matter more than this? True, they will die. We all will die. Horribly. Perhaps Glorvina chose the easier path. At this point she is little more than a smoldering carcass in the alley beside the putrid dumpster, that’s how I imagined it anyway. For what?

“Stay with me people,” I said.

I said, “Tomorrow morning you will wake up. You will rise from your sleeping places—where ever they may be—early, very early—and you will be led to a machine.”

Outside it was beginning to snow. The wind was howling and whipping up against a windowpane behind me—there must have been a loose piece of vinyl because soon there was a violently subdued creak intermingling with the vibrato and cracking of the windowpane.

“Do not be alarmed—this machine has a function, it serves a purpose. And when you get down to the bottom of the hill, you will strip your clothes and bury your name and your face and your wife and child deep down in the mud. You’ll respond to its achy squeal with pride and dignity. You are not dogs! –Do not act like them…”

Here I paused. They needed to soak that in; try to anyway—they’re not very bright. The room was silent. I watched a man’s gaping face expand and contract with the noiseless creak that permeating his deaf ears—all of their dead ears. I watched—as his face began to melt—his deformed fervent lips pucker together and then pop propelling through the room an ancient utterance like a noiseless and omnipotent whisper submerged and echoing across a pitch black lake: “Why?”

“Stay with me people.”

Happy New Year!

Pulled like spars into an intangible bed
Faded into a motionlessback ground deprived of the sorrows of life
I fell down into the untouchable shallows of an empty camera
Only to float back up into you

Inside of dreams a swollen reptile waits to pluck
You from yourself
He has no eyes but smells you tainting
Up the aisles in your insidious sheath

You are nothing but
Falling
Ashes in an abandoned
Fire
You are everything