Right now I’m surviving off my desperate urge to burn every doorway I’ve ever walked through. Ever since the echo of all the words I never spoke had an affair with my wife, that’s the only thing I’ve wanted to do and I have yet to come up with a plan. How does one go about erasing his mistakes without erasing valuable parts of his life and himself?
If I had been born an eraser, perhaps things would have turned out differently.
For the better?
Maybe.
All they do is give until they’re just a pile of shavings someone brushes off the table.
I wish I could sell my body to the cold so that others could be warmer, if only minimally. Maybe then they would give me my own folk anthem.
I can’t drive in cars anymore. Every time I do the branches of roadside trees tickle like long, knobby fingers. They make fast knocking sounds as though they want in. What they really want is to steal my kidneys.
Routine, with its emotional insincerity and unfortunately real inevitability is something I’m constantly striving to avoid.
Yet every couple hundred thousand seconds I find myself thinking of the exact stage of decay the corpses of all the famous people I can think of who have died in the past eighteen years must be at, and for some reason I’m unsure of or perhaps just too afraid to face and truly understand, coveting them.
I remember wandering through that dusty garage (there’s no use dressing it up and calling it something it’s not, that’s what it was and that’s how it is) and admiring the giant tires that stood twice my size and looked like caves, as you stood at the counter talking with the red headed clerk about how you still might have your left foot if only that card game had gone a different way. Not that you missed it or anything, you were always a good sport, just not the best card player.
I bet you didn’t know this, and I regret being the one to have to tell you, but when a pterodactyl dies their long wings dig themselves into the earth; their bodies decompose on top of it. Eventually their skeletal carcass becomes a hill. If the wings fail to plant themselves into the ground, they float up into the air, since many of these holistic creatures predate gravity. This is why there are so many islands in the sky.
And this is where I find myself now: on top of a mountain above the clouds, contemplating just what the opposites of shadows are. The smell of lilacs fill the air, but I know this can’t be true because there can’t be lilacs up here. No life could survive this altitude. Or perhaps I’ve reached the depths of a different planet.
My hands don’t work. Everything seems to be falling from them.