When I Woke Up 1

1. I Need

I need to find an unattached brick made of fluorescent pine cones so I can make a fish.

I need a barrel of pajamas to teach me to play the mango.

I need an automatic disposable language flinger to brandish a gothic olive in the direction of the nearest unfitted nasal twinge.

I need to climb to the top of the next available kitten ranch so that the continent of South America will be on time for its appointment with a bucket of perforated steam shovels.

My life can be a little complicated.

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2. My Mirror is a Stargazer

My mirror is a stargazer. At night you can find it on my roof, gazing upwards, as though searching for I know not what. What does it see in the lofty depths of the universe? By morning, it has reclaimed its place over my bathroom sink and shows me to myself, a galaxy of one. I have to imagine the contrast is interesting. On the one hand, you have the fullness of the night sky with its million pinpricks, and on the other hand you have my face. In the end, it's all speculation; my mirror doesn't like to talk about it. When I ask it, it just gets that faraway look of my reflection blurring and says nothing.

I used to imagine that if you lay a mirror down on the ground with its face to the sky, you could dive into it as though it were a pool and find yourself swimming in a reflected sky. So, flying, really. I would dip and soar and eventually fly out into space and become a star myself. Then my mirror would go out on the roof after I've gone to bed and see me twinkling on high.

My mirror is searching for me.

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3. Violence Towards Coffee

Violence towards coffee is the subject of our next review, and everything means something to someone. The spoken word performance will take place in the future; preparation is the breakfast of the hesitant. When I approach a subject, I try to be sure of the outcome. I was fairly certain. I was walking on a sea of dimes. I was wringing out that bankroll honey, contemplating the well-dressed elite.

Afterwards, I smoked a cigar. The intervening hours are like a farce to me now; I am not time's bitch. I went to sleep thinking about what I would wake up thinking about. There was no surprise. No dream. No poison. No subtlety. No sickness. So what was there? Violins, for a start. An unrelated absence nevertheless noted. Baloney sandwiches and graham crackers.

What do you do when a kangaroo tells you there are no pickles in the gin? I mixed a green martini and hopped around in the hopes that it would seem congenial. I got into the habit of getting my way, particularly when I felt I was right. It always worked before. And so it becomes a matter of out-hopping the kangaroo. Oh, the insufferable conceit of such a venture!

I have this feeling, though, that a big black beetle will tear down my small house and build a rutabaga warehouse. What then? Where shall I store my minuscule trophy collection? Where shall I put my collection of exotic hats? Where once stood my ideas of four walls and a roof, farmers will be storing their rutabagas. Damn that big black beetle.

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4. Meaningless Absence

There isn't much to say. Hampered with a lack of material, the author struggles on in the face of meaningless absence. If meaningless absence were a rodent, it would be a squirrel. Jumping around, darting here and there on the hunt for its next nut, without a care for those observing-- unless they get too close. Then zoom, it flees. You can't put your finger on it.

A shame, really, since what you most want to do is hold it, hug it, turn it into something tangible in the hopes that the transition from absence to presence will at the same time render it meaningful.

Let's try another metaphor.

Imagine someone ripped out one of your teeth for no reason. Then you would know the pain of a meaningless absence. A meaningless absence can really drive your actions. You'd spend some time chasing the lunatic who took your tooth out of your head, but he'd outrun you. They always do. Then you'd spend some time at the dentist getting a bridge and stuff. Time and money, baby. Time and money.

Maybe it's worth it. But then, maybe it isn't. And what then?

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5. Flow

I want to hold it in my hands. I want to press my fingers around it and feel it living beneath my touch. I want it against me so I can feel the blood moving through the capillaries that nestle just below the surface of the smooth soft skin.

Capillaries are so small that the red blood cells move through them in single file. When I was in school, they showed a movie about the circulatory system that had footage of this happening-- the little torus-y objects shuffling through the tiny, tiny tubes like kids in an amusement park line.

That's what I want to feel happening beneath my fingers, in your skin, in your body, as I hold you, touch you, listen to your heart, test your pulses, give you orgasms.

Everything is about flow. The wind, rivers, your blood, time, diffusion, electricity, sexual secretions, life, thought. It's all about flow.

What poisons have we peddled to make it seem otherwise?

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6. The Downstairs Couch

Matilda, Heather, Sara, and Gertrude are in the room at the top of the stairs. I don't know what they're doing up there, but it sounds like they're having fun, and I'm downstairs, separate, apart, alone.

Perhaps they're solving the world's problems. Maybe they're discovering the joys of homosexual sex. Perhaps they're phoning their analysts. It could be that they are making a quilt using the fur of various small rodents. Chipmunks, squirrels, rats, mice, moles, shrews. Needle and thread. Stab and wrap, placement and precision. They might be performing dark rituals and summoning demons to come and bake them casseroles. They could be surfing the web. They could be building a replica. They could be shaving the furniture. They could be bleeding the monkey.

The point is, I don't know what they're doing. And if I don't accept my ignorance, I'll become insane. Mad, I tell you. Or at least a bit troubled, as though I had a run in my tapestry. I pace in a circle at the foot of the stairs. I hear their voices, muffled by the closed door, rising and falling. Outside, it's rain mixed with snow.

In the end, I go to the couch and park my hips. The cushions yield, as ever they should. It feels like new money. It feels like a well-oiled baseball glove. It's my couch, and I am secure in its embrace. Everyone else can only borrow time from it. I give them my permission to do so.

The women in my upstairs room will have their time apart, and nothing will change that. Fortunately, I have a couch. I bask in the adequate luxury of sufficiency.

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7. And So You Sit There

And so you sit there amidst the detritus of your rantings and ravings, your haystack needles, your singing perverted bluster. You spend your time opening shutters. Your pimples leak self-important pus. Your poor technique is no match for the mighty electric fists of death. Go ahead, care.

Plight. Consideration. Grief. Bemusement. Surrender. Defiance. Toilet seat covers. Blankets. Lamps. Full bookcases, teeming with tomes. Pages and pages of haughty fluff, destined merely to distract. Skin creams and flattering garments. The furniture of inexorable failure. A couple of decent rooms and a bath. Decay.

And you bleed your eventual demise all over the joint, more of it coming every day. Everyone is sick of everyone else's. And we keep at it, like rats make shit. Everyone wants to be the voice in the wilderness.

And what if there were another way? What if the jukebox took cake instead of bread? What if they sold guillotines from behind the bar? Where then the toothless, blithering epitaphs? Where then the literal-minded, faceless sinister?

There is nothing that can be said. No message of hope except that which you carry with you. No words of peace save those you tattoo on an antelope. Let it go and watch that motherfucker run.

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8. You Can't Go It Alone

You can't go it alone. You'll never make it. And you should know that. But somewhere along the line, being stupid became romanticized. The result? An endless parade of legless runners, wingless fleas, and blind accountants. A freakshow of scandalized linens. A postcard from tomorrow's broken incisors.

When you smile, I can see your teeth. It makes me wonder what you've been sinking them into.

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9. No Pants

I don't have any pants. I wonder whether I will ever again have pants, or if I will have to go through life without fitted coverings for my legs and lower torso. I can see you are curious as to the details of my plight, so I shall tell you the full story.

It was an otherwise uneventful day. I had just sat down and started in on a leisurely evening of ironing frogs when I heard a sudden commotion coming from the bedroom. I rushed to investigate, and discovered that my dresser was rocking madly back and forth as though it were being shaken from within.

And then suddenly a drawer shot out and landed with a crash at the foot of the dresser. It was my pants drawer. The dresser itself fell still immediately. Also immediately, all of my pants leapt from the drawer and began walking about the room as though they were clothing invisible people.

To be quite frank, I had no idea how to proceed. It's not every day your trousers become animated and start rummaging around in your bedroom. Tentatively, I cleared my throat. Almost as one, the pants turned to face me. It may have only been my imagination, but the temperature of the room seemed to drop a few degrees as my pants regarded me coldly.

Then, as if by some hidden signal, they fell upon me. The fury of their attack knocked me to the floor, and I was rendered unconscious soon after.

I awoke in a hospital. I was to spend the next seven days there; such were the extent of my injuries. I inquired after my attackers, but as you can imagine, I didn't make a lot of headway. Everyone assumed it was my beating that had befuddled me into thinking that I had been attacked by my pants. I began to doubt it myself. That is, until I got home to a ransacked house and an empty pants drawer.

What can one do when one's pants go bad? I went to the mall and bought replacement pants, optimistic that this time it would be different.

Unfortunately, I was wrong. After a few weeks, a similar uprising took place. This time, I was in the hospital for twelve days.

Since my recovery, I've been dressing in traditional Scottish garb. The kilts are comfy and on some days I don't even miss my wayward trousers. I do get some stares, but I'll take that over getting kicked nearly to death by turncoat pants.

Perhaps someday I will muster the courage to buy a pair of pants and see how it goes. Until then, I must face life with the knowledge that I don't, and can perhaps never, have any pants.

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10. I Want

I want. I want. I want. No-one knows. Call it a clerical error and move on.

When I was young, I made a song. Then I heard it somewhere else. When I was older, I made another song, but I heard that one somewhere else too. I made other songs, though, that I didn't hear elsewhere. I was diligent and purposeful. It all worked out in a way that I could live with. But oh! That slowly unfolding insect! That trembling tapestry of locomotion!

Incarnate. Bigger than mountains but with pinpoint accuracy. I focused like a laser. But I was too polite. Too sensitive. Too big. Too incarnate. I could have explained that I wanted her in that way, and demonstrated, played her body like a cello. But it isn't about her. I learned that love is not enough.

Later, I learned that it is enough.

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11. Behind the Wheel

Behind the wheel. The road is a hiss and hum somewhere under you, moving fast enough to scrape you clean. Your hands move the machine to and fro, here and there. If you wanted to, you could roll the fucker. Sometimes you can't tell if you want to or not. But you don't do it, because it simply isn't done. Too much of that and the entire system would fracture, and who knows what would fall through the cracks.

The windshield wipers swipe and splat, pushing life this way and that, left, then down. You peer through the glass, the wet streets made luminescent by the streetlights that delimit your progress. Some asshole passes you illegally and attracts the attention of a cop. You smile. There is an intricate web of social conventions and customs and myth about all of it.

And the roads themselves? Just another web, spun first in the minds of the purposeful and then rendered so cunningly from the very bowels of the earth itself. It is upon the bones of the ancients that we cover ground.

Journeys large and small. Movement. The chore of navigation and the watchful solitude of the pilot. Hands and feet. Eyes on the road. Understand that you are weaving a blanket made of cultural destiny. It smells like suffocation, breathes like tomorrow, stings like splendour, covers the earth and sky. Snuggle it.

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12. The Silence Is Tragic

The silence is tragic and soul-destroying. It's like reading Henry James.

Where are all the thieves? They have sprouted wings of your creation and flown. Now they soar while you trudge. The moral? Don't give. Make yourself available for exploitation and rail against the exploiters. Then blame yourself.

It's your fault the poison burns. Your fault the children are afraid. Your fault the birthing mother growls. Your fault the bullets tear open the bellies of the innocent. Your fault the revelers tickle the genitals of complacency. Your fault the sun sets and plunges the world into darkness.

I've taken steps, like anyone else, but I don't expect you to know. If I can wring a squeak from this damp rag of souls, there will be food in the morning. Oh, glorious morning! It's for the sunrise that we strive. Vitamin D and essential parts of this balanced breakfast. When I was young, I stared at the sun. I can't do it anymore.

Can you make a difference? Of course. Ask the fuckers who are stealing your wings. Never mind; it won't last. Even immortality dies eventually. Swipe what comfort you can, cram it into your pockets, and make for the door. It's not your fault.

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13. I Can Explain Everything

I can explain everything. I can eat an entire raw cow in one sitting. I can stretch my fingers into a rudimentary sling with which to cradle the next incarnation of Christ. My teeth will turn into birds and fly to freedom of a morning.

I'm married to Serendipity, but I'm fucking Pretense on the side.

I eat black coffee three meals a day. When I play games, I win. When I teach bricks to fly, the sky is thick with masonry.

I walk in borrowed shoes. I keep my debt at the red line at all times; it's the only way I have to define my boundless success.

I am hardly ever ashamed or afraid. When it does happen, that's how I know it's time to get puking drunk. In the morning, I wake up screaming from a dream I can't remember.

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14. Tribe

Tribe. Association of individuals. Familial. Ideological. Geographical. Propinquant. There is a universal longing for brethren near to hand. To huddle close for warmth and to face the long dark night together. To create community with one's very hands. In toil with one another we grow horizontally and vertically until our colors blanket the globe. It is inevitable.

I can craft a thousand soldiers from the dirt. I can call forth the thundercloud in the summer night. With these arms, I can gather a bouquet of mighty oaks a thousand generations grown. I can court the goddess of the winter.

But I cannot die alone.

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15. Robotic Pet

Clenched fist holds pumping heart hostage. I want a robotic pet. I want to forget to feed it and watch it not starve. I want not to put its stiff corpse in a ziplock and toss it in the dumpster behind the building. As though it were a sofa.

I want to get home from a hard day's struggle and be greeted by my robotic pet holding my slippers and a plan for world domination. I smoke a pipe while I read the newspaper and prop my feet on my robotic pet.

When I have a bone to pick. When I want to chew the fat. When I droop the lean. Coiled around the trunk in the garden, my robotic pet breathes. Too obvious? Get your own goddamn robotic pet.

On Saturdays, I shave my robotic pet. I take the trimmings and make a forthright virgin. The underbelly seams. Clicking and squirming in clockwork synchronicity, my robotic pet slathers its chops and glistens like the path not taken.

It wags its tail with the force of an exploding refrigerator. It freezes the sun with its glass-eyed biological jellybean stare. It goes walkies at the crack of dawn. It howls at the moon with the voice of ten thousand years. While you sleep, it waits.

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16. A Walk to the Store

I took a walk to the store. They were selling home-made ice cream. I bought some and ate it on a bench outside the store. Very refreshing.

But then, suddenly, I felt a disturbance in my stomach and I knew that something was very wrong. My fears were confirmed when a circular saw blade erupted from my abdomen in a fountain of blood and frothy ice cream. I stopped paying attention at that point. My head went back and the world took on that washed-out dreamy quality that indicates you're going into shock. In a detached sort of way, I felt the blade sawing me in half horizontally. You wouldn't believe what having your own spinal column sawed in two sounds like.

When the cutting was through, my upper body toppled to the side and rolled off of the bench, flopping onto the pavement like a sack of meat. In my semi-conscious state, I looked up at my legs and lower torso, which looked for all the world as though nothing were amiss. That is, if you didn't move your eyes up too far.

A small sphere with a saw arm attached to it floated up out of my lower body, dripping blood and ice cream. A gleaming red eye regarded me.

Then I died.

What, you wanted a point? You're not alone. I mean, someone mixed a disassembled robot in with some ice cream that I ate, thus allowing the robot, once unfrozen, to reassemble itself and saw its way to freedom, killing me in the process. Talk about your meaningless deaths.

So how am I telling you this? The author is well within his rights to claim artistic license, but that's not the case here. I was fortunate in that a roving band of dwarf hamster mechanics was in the area and heard the commotion. Commotion, incidentally, that was created not only by my bisection but also by the shotgun blast that tore the robot apart mere seconds after my passing. Apparently someone at the store had an outdoorsy bent and had a stocked gun rack in their vehicle. The robot was blown to smithereens.

A few moments after that, the dwarf hamster mechanics arrived and were able to reassemble and resuscitate me. In gratitude, I hosted a hamster party at my apartment that weekend. It was really fun.

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17. The Compelling Abomination

It's neither man nor woman nor of woman borne. All you know is you want to fuck it. You want the distinction of who fucks who to be blurred. You want its wire-like tentacles to bite into your flesh until the sting makes you want to scream. But you don't scream, do you? You'd rather die than give it the satisfaction. So you pull the wires tighter instead, spitting blood and broken teeth in defiance and outrage as your every orifice burns and bleeds with the frenzy of its onslaught.