No Sleep Haiku

Mutherfucker
I been up for two days
The cricket, he weep

Both Versions Are Angry With Me Now

There is a statue of my grandfather in the park,
across the street from my apartment.
When I am drunk he looks quite angry.
When I am drunk he brandishes his gun at me.
This is why I have to get drunk only in the kitchen,
which has no windows overlooking the park.

I have, on occasion, come to an abrupt consciousness
standing in the park yelling obscene things at this statue.
This has never happened
with the version of my grandfather that is not made out of metal,
with the version that is made out of skin.
I have never yelled at that one.

Nor have I ever been arrested
for shooting at the fleshy version of my grandfather
with a riffle
from the rooftop of my apartment building.

Radio Man

The man had a simple mind. He was not a good man and in his best moments, in his very brightest moments, he knew it. But, of course, this knowledge served only as more fuel for the fear which was the foundation of his simplicity. Was the agar from which his foul vitriol did spring. He had been cowering since childhood and so cultivated a sense of bitter and smug cynicism which he used to mask his crippling inadequacies. As a young man he had been wholly unremarkable, mediocre. In college he did poorly because he had little desire to learn or to think critically or deeply. Bizarrely he acted as though superior to his peers. Those who knew him and disliked him found him to be oppressively smug and somewhat allergic to reason. If ever an opinion was expressed in his presence which did not immediately appeal to his base fears, which did not engage his malformed id, he reacted with blunt incredulity. Those similarly crippled by fear and without a desire to think too much found him magnetic and even charming. They listened to him spout his uninformed opinions night and day. Drunk on their admiration he managed to talk his way into a radio show on the college station. His audience grew, beginning to fill a void inside of him. When he flunked out of college a local radio-station stood ready and waiting to continue broadcasting his brand of fear-based anit-thought, which had already won favor with the local lemmings. In a few short years his listener-base had expanded to include almost every frightened, thought-starved person in the country. He soothed his listeners by whispering to them hatred of the other on their way home from work each evening. He numbed the masses in an increasingly desperate attempt to numb himself. For with each passing year a voice in his head which whispered but one word grew increasingly louder. Fraud. Fraud. Fraud. He got meaner. Fraud. He grew more cynical. Fraud. He grew more frightened. Fraud. He started to slip into desperate self-parody. The voice roared. Fraud, fraud, fraud. When his own voice could no longer drown it out he turned to drugs and when they found out about the drugs and made him stop he just grew decidedly simpler. Unconsciously he broke his mind, ridding it of any critical thought. The voice grew faint again. He found that the more he dumbed down his words the easier it was to sleep. And so he continued to whisper hate into the hearts of his listeners, slowly, steadily, grinding his brain to a halt.

meet me at the vanishing point

http://mmatvp.blogspot.com

A longer story I'm putting up

Song of Emma And Me

Probably the biggest mistake we made was joining the circus, but there were plenty of others-- mistakes that is. Maybe I should start at the beginning. Maybe.

1.

It wasn’t raining the day they told us he was dead. I remember that. And it was quite sunny when our mother disappeared. The morning they put us in the custody of our uncle, there was a beautiful sunrise. Emma woke me up to watch.
He didn’t have poor intentions, our uncle. He was nice. They kind of guy we liked to spend a day with. Not a parent. Not a parent, at all.
And so we left. We left our home of seven and thirteen years. We left our beds, unmade. We left our uncle unaware. We left a note. I think.

2.

Our father spent his youth on the coast in California. He had buried a shoebox on beach there, we knew that much. We didn’t know what was in the box. My sister, Emma, said we needed to have an adventure. She said our world needed saving. As my older sister, I would have followed her to the crater of an active volcano. I followed her into the back yard.

3.

We walked west, away from the sunrise. We found a bag full of dead squirrels. We were lost. We came to the stream running along the back of our subdivision. Emma turned to me the early morning sun bright on her face and said, “well, here we go.” And there we went. Straight into the water. Our journey westward begun.

4.

His first words to us were inaudible.
Emma asked him his name and he said Hector. He was in his forties, mulleted, mustachioed. He was working on his car and humming the national anthem.
“Where you kids going this time of morning in the summer?”
Emma answered: “California.”
“Well it’s going to take you a while on foot.”
“Yes it is.”
“I can get you kids as far as Canada.”
“That is no where near the right direction.”
“It’s where I’m going. At least you’ll be moving.”

5.

We went with Hector to Canada because he was right, we needed to keep moving and Emma said we needed to learn when to yes to people who were trying to be our friends.
I at least knew when to give up control.
Hector told us we should join the circus because it traveled and we could ride on elephants.
So we did.
And it was a mistake.

6.

The ringleader of the circus was called E. Alfred. We worked thirty six hour days. He had a special clock. It was madness. There were freaks and animals and strong men. We were small. We were lost. We were trapped. We were kept awake constantly. Any time we had a break we were placed in a small pit with hungry tigers, to keep us alert. When we finally fell asleep, I think it was a year later, we woke up in Mexico in the backseat of a cab. Hector was driving and apologizing. For the circus.
“But you have to admit, you are now much closer to California.”
“We are we going?”
“Away from him.” Hector gestured backwards.”
We turned around and saw we were being pursued by E. Alfred. He was riding a galloping elephant. He was bearing down on us. The world was getting hotter all the time. The cab was going three hundred miles an hour. I noticed it was on fire. But we were committed. This was do or die, probably both.
And then, just like that, we crossed the border. We were in California and Hector was downshifting like mad. The border patrol had commandeered Veil’s elephant and were using it to hose down their bicycles.
Hector pointed towards the beach our father had buried the box on. Well he said it was behind the hill he was pointing at.

7.

Behind the hill was a subdivision. the houses went right up to the ocean. Our father buried that shoebox in 1976. For all we knew it was either excavated in the building of this place, or it was now a part of someone's foundation.
We walked towards the ocean, beaten, beleaguered. We immersed ourselves in the water. I looked at Emma and she looked at me and somehow we both knew what the other was thinking.

NOTE: I wrote this as a rush assignment for class based on a much more detailed Idea, so yes, sketches.

Pictorial