to be deleted.

 1.  Feet slung into the air of the living room, bones drunk on equanimity, beer gracefully in hand, God knew something he didn't say. His furry mouth, sweat soaked, the breath like chewed green grapes, and his eyes closed, he would have practically no earthly basis of reason why his life then was to become undone then. Clear-drunk, the high that seems to ease not merely the possibility of damage received, but the fact it had ever been. Warm confidence and purpose in his happy gut, gentle love streaming through his veins, arteries, nerves. Every cell within purged of the trespasses and defilements that he'd been charged with during the centuries and millennia of his strange, agile, balanced and unbalanced existence.  The Great City steamed in the abbreviated winter, sparsely occupied subways more like runaway dogs unguided in their destinations than transporters of any sort of person at all.  The television in God's living room played an ad "paid ...

"Easy Answers are Scared Answers," President Seward Dance addressed us, "and it is our duty as people and a nation to not fall victim to their crippling sway." This was on January 20th, 2032. It was to be the first in a projected tradition for generations to come. "We are a civilized people. We are a community. We, the noble America, must strive higher than ordinary, complacent appeasers who refuse to accept their charges in this world. That way leads to selfish compromise, to anarchy, to corruption of the soul." He had a way with words. Or at least his speechwriters did. "And trying times light the path for trying people. That is, to persevere  through the dramatic charade of this fragile, sinful existence, we extend ourselves to God, Father of all Creation, and surrender ourselves to Judgement in that mysterious hope of Salvation." He was 68-years-old. His calcified skin and matching reptilian-gray eyes and thin hair radiated every year of them...

My mother was always saying how  children don't come with instruction manuals.  Not that I was rebellious or arrogant as a child, or  that I suffered from any rare or extraordinary diseases  burdening her as a parent. It was just something like  buying Mother's Day cards, going to church, or proclaiming  without ever citing an example that all politicians were crooks.  Spare yourself from discerning the link between those three,  by the way: there is none. They were, and are, as flippant and  arbitrary as her efforts to raise me were flippant and arbitrary,  each act containing as much follow-through as wild bears  maintaining diets of porridge....  I think I overestimated her talents when I was short and stupid.  I thought she had the patience and discipline to do better.  In my early-20s I was often depressed, consumed with anomie.  I'd tell her voluntarily about thinking about suicide. She'd confess  a la...

My new job has me living near the mall,  so about once a week I go over there  whether I really need anything or not.  Usually it's Tuesday for some reason.  It's not high art by any real standard,  but you're bound to find something interesting  if you walk around for more than a minute.  Last week there were some high school girls  who'd invented a new form of protest,  wearing skateboarder's clothes and sexy eye-liner,  holding signs that demanded Resurrect Janis Joplin !  Or you'll see two kids playing catch with a smoke grenade  while their dads, sentimental and leisurely, go shopping  for chainsaws and new sneakers and coffeemachines.  Modern living definitely has its advantages. There are  no more children under ten being packed into factories  and breathing awful air to polish shellcasings. In another  hundred years they might eradicate disease entirely.  You have to visualize the future. I...

Pressure had a way of finding him without support  of any certainty at all. It moved up from  a personal darkness, consuming half of everything  he consumed.  He had a running-headstart from it, his last  year of high school, he thought. Someone  had randomly gifted him the scant leftovers  of a prescription (Vicodin, he thought, afterwards)  and in their deep, intoxicating calm, he heard a voice  he dearly wanted to be his own.  There, of course, would be the predictable addiction to drugs.  Spending time with the ne'er-do-wells.  Bored thoughts. Empty chatter. The endless  want for something steady or complete.  He did that rare thing that is fall madly in love  with a beautiful, sexy, relentless woman  in his mid-twenties.  She had the same pursuits that he had:  speed, painkillers, marijuana, cheap wine and booze;  no powders, no needles.  They lived off the system for just over a yea...

Dark ages of the world can't account for their superstitions.  What demonic nightmares they entertained  surely found some purchase and  root in the structure and bones  of the commonplace.  Mischievous by-products defiled the flag of good sense. While the lie was severed  from the equation, the doubt lingered  to reinvestigate the normal, the established,  the unspurious.  And those who have and should  know better feebly surrender to  hallucinations that are in fact  quite real.  But then the gravity of permanence  has pages and blessings, too. And  with keen, careful fingers every  slur and mispronunciation should  be heard for what they communicate.  **** 

Kathleen moved the faucet-arm for cold water and refilled her vase glass through a lens of sangfroid insomnia. Moths and various nocturnal creatures, lifeforms skipped and fluttered within the porchlight outside the kitchen window and beyond into the yard, and the modest acres of land that yielded vegetables and give or take a dozen herbs and the salvaged barn that housed their animals for milk and eggs and slaughter. She took a sip from the glass and hoped for a thought she couldn't find. Her rumination gently endured her interrogations and pleading. It edged itself like a smell of burning rubber and her heart gripped itself with bird-like terror as she wished to God she'd never see 1 A.M. like this ever again, though humbly accepting such a depth of resignation could only be pried from the confusion and internecine loathing of her own fragile heart. Her heart nagged at something caught mutely in the ephemeral oscillations of synapses that originated from everywhere and yet de...