Saturday, December 21, 2013

When Joe came up the stairs with the woman across his shoulders, the old man waited for him. Joe stood in front of him and looked into his face. It came to him to kill the man. The man sat in his wheelchair with his hands under a blanket, and returning Joe's stare, his lips cracked open and from his throat creaked the word yeah. What he was in agreement with not even he knew. It was something close to what a man's will whispers to him in his sleep, what bites at Joe's heels and writes the rules that men such as him operate in, like the wind that stomped the door against the frame until the men ascended from the basement and locked it against him.

Friday, December 20, 2013




 The suicide rate of the elderly is rising.
 The train passing over head. My body amid the vibrations of the train, of the people passing me in the street. I stand in the human highway.
 The girl in the cafe fidgets with the paper. She reads an article that she isn't really interested in, anyway. She looks nervous.
 I wonder if I couldn't ease her pain with my hands along her bare back. What she looks like when she is making love.
 Her friend shows up. She moves her coffee to her side and she spills some on her wrist. He does all the talking. He keeps the words coming, she keeps the kisses coming. When there is nothing left to say they sit there sipping coffee.
 There used to be an old couple who came in every day. The man still shows up. He looks the same.  He passed my gaze to the couple. The girl returned it to me there in the window.
 I do not ease her pain.

 There's a little Korean girl who comes to me in my dreams. I sleep perchance to talk to her again.
 Last night she sat beside me on a hill overlooking the city. The drones looked like bees.
 "You want to see her," she said.
 "I can't. She's gone."
 She looked at me. She said, "Yeah, but you still want to."
 "Yeah."
 A drone approached us on the hill. He hovered in front of us, his red opaque eye threatening to understand.
 "You can," she said. She showed me the prism. It looked like glass. I turned it in the sun. It didn't do what it was supposed to with the light.
 "No," she said. She took it and rotated it in front of her face. She looked through it at the city.
 The faces of the prism showed the city in different years of its past, the more you turned it the further back into the past it went.
 "When can I see her?"
 "You can see her next time. I have to find her."
 "You'll be here next time?"
 "Yeah."
 "Do they have those things in the Fukushima circle."
 "The drones? Yeah."
 "How do things look there?"
 "The same."
 "How's your mom?"
 "They come and check her every day."
 "Is it bad?"
 "Yeah."
 "Are they gonna pay you?"
 "I don't know. They didn't pay her for dad."
 "They gotta pay you something. If they pay people to live there, they gotta pay you something."
 She shrugged.
 "How is your sister?"
 "I don't know."
 "You can't count on her?"
 "No."