Up and down along the road I go. The same road. Yellow strips the only thing protecting one car from another. A hopeful calculus for the anxious. A misery for a mightnight rider belly-packed with beer. Past the coffee — wicked, bitter grounds fine as fog, an...

There’s a mirror in the bed with glassy, fragile breasts like ferrofluid sacks. Aye, the wizard sits on high with spells of unrelenting electromagnetism, sending waves of the invisible stuff through the air and into the small puddle of obsidian trapped within each...

Welcome to actual hell. I can see here the truck, pulling up a new thumping, clacking blue body to exorcise into its open back. The crush of tin and glass plays on a steel cage. Sometimes at night. Sometimes at day. Sometimes at dusk but never in that perfect golden...

Reminds me of herself. The campus is lit with little auras of tungsten-yellow that hang overhead. Halos between lightposts are always almost close enough to touch. But that would cause the atom to split, so they stay well enough apart. We decide to take a...

I watched the fan again, but just for a little because watching the fan is boring. It spun on the ceiling, as it is made to do. Confirmed. But the fan is more intriguing than it lets on. You see, it doesn’t push the air around. It sucks it up or something. It pulls it...

His mouth is covered, but I can still hear him. I only know it’s covered because it sounds covered. He may have his hand over it, so I don’t see his teeth. He doesn’t know I can’t see him at all. Or maybe he does. “You know that you slice and dice, right?...

The grip of every last computer driven by the coalescing scent of punchout silicone. I am guarded. I know it. You know it. So why belay the righteous fact of life in which we pull asunder our recognition of the world we live in? Curly hair bounces in the seam,...

She cries when she shits — right after, rather — to warn me that she’ll be pawing at the litterbox for the next ten minutes in a vain attempt to make it disappear. The apartment complex must be rife with predators: a condor here, a komodo dragon slinking along just...

The wriggling is a natural assumption. We can feel him in the folds of a coil like a mobius strip that ends at some point — right when our lifeline gets cut by the dull scissors of fate. And at the holy end I can hear the man in leather fighting with his Zippo. I walk...

There’s this movement of the little leaves that bristle when the AC turns on. They brush up to hug the blinds. They crinkle like rainwater hitting the window through the screen — this little scream. Fortuitous, maybe, in the throes of some moving agony that they can’t...

How vindicating to have known it was coming all along but still discovering glee at being there to herald its arrival. (Subject) has revived (concept) insomuch as it de-vived it, providing a sort of negative charge to the things we so love about things being brought...

Welcome to the digital age. It’s full of Crumb Brulee and other weird dustbunny hoarding. The internet strings that you put into the wall go into the computer, which turns mushy signals into music and pornography. Science hasn’t discovered how it does that, but we are...

This whole idea is of frogs. And I mean the whole of it. Everything in the idea is related to the little bulbous eyes, the froggy, muscly legs. I can’t escape that the core of the idea — the heart of the thing — is that heart of a frog, the kind that goes “Cruk” and...

The guy is self-aware, which is something that I respect despite how grotesque he is. You see, every morning, Joe Risquik gets up and takes a big, coagulating wad of last night’s jizz, sticks a bike pump in it, and inflates it for about thirty-eight minutes, if not...

A metro high, the bilge rat that squeaks his way through the aether of sewer miasma finds his reflection in the growing green mist. I found it too. I’ve found everything, lately. All the things I haven’t looked for. All the faces we were avoiding. All the shadows that...

Hello again, I want to fucking scream. Or hit something. Not someone. Trust me. Just trust me. But I want to hit something. It’s gotta be inanimate. Maybe I won’t hit it at all. Is that too white of me? To want to hit a wall or a thing that I can’t actually...

The whole flimping idea was to have Marcellus come out to the discotheque and then faint on the floor and then I’d shout at the bartender for help and I’d go behind the bar and suck all the vodka out of a bottle into my third stomach and then puke it back out into...

A tangy yellow sun weaves warm tendrils around the umbrella of oak leaves, spreading a glaze of daylight on the sidewalks and homes in my new neighborhood. I get out of my car to check the mail. As I’m heading back toward the front door, a guy biking with his baby kid...

Way back, back when I was just a little guy, a little guy with a severe depression and a desire to see myself die over and over, over and over in different ways, I mean, I was walking to the Dairy Queen just down the road from where I lived and was stopped by a...

The screeching is always loud, especially when you get close to the end of the tunnel, where the sun is so bright outside that it sears your blood-bitten retinae like warm buffet ahi. Everyone’s here, laughing at the cruelty of the survival instinct. We’re vacillating...

When the door close, the gale blow and scrunch the knob against thy weakened fingie-tits. Back home from hard learn’n, you is. Back home from Emelie, the slapping ho, who you took to the boy’s bathroom and showed how to eat a urinal cake. You’ll be slap free soon...

My fingernails don’t end. Even though I pull them off. I take hold with my thumb and forefinger. I pull a nail off my finger and it just keeps coming like a magician’s handkerchief from his breast pocket or a clown’s handkerchief from his throat....

When I shave, there is already some nostalgia for the beard. There is some future and present regret for having removed it from my face. What once looked like a pubic mound with eyes and a mouth is now just a face again. A face in an army of faces, swimming in the...

Imagine myself a fortune cookie broken up by an unsuspecting fat boy who has crammed so much Chinese buffet food into his throat that it’s actually piled high to the end of his esophagus. I have sat there on the table well past when the young Asian woman placed a...

he fridge is a fucking mess. You clean it. Your cousin comes by, a wicked tornado, and moves the cream cheese. He moves the chicken breast. He puts the honey mustard on the top shelf and horizontally orients the milk on the bottom, even though there’s plenty of space...

Things are bad. My pre-frontal cortex has reached such miserable spectral mass that my head can’t even contain it. There are ghosts coming out of my ears and tear ducts at all hours of the day. One of them rings a bell in the corner of my room. Another one, at night,...

Here is the stone of the philosopher. If you rub it, your ribs will enlarge and you’ll look like some kind of human cage. You’ll also understand pretty much everything and have answers to life’s most difficult questions like, “What should I wear today that will...

Mania’s coming. Schizoid, schizoid, schizoid. Here’s three of me. Here they are at a carnival, all pretending to be ducks at the shooting gallery. They want to die. Here they are at the top of the Empire State Building, throwing pennies off and trying to assassinate...

My hand and wrist are so small that it looks like I’m 1/40 Cabbage Patch Kid. The hand is little and fat and feels like fabric and the fingers are stitched together. My forearm goes from regular flesh and starts tapering down until it’s this thin little...

Must be a syndrome. I get up, hit the wall until there’s a hole in it, and then do some other stuff before going back to sleep. I’m conscious of it. It’s not like I’m sleep walking. I’m just really, really compelled to do it. I make the wall holes five times a night,...

Take pill. Eat breakfast. Take pill. Thomas is in the playground again, doing loop-de-loops on the swing set and projectile vomiting into a trashcan. He calls it puke-basket. It is a game. Also, he’s got a serious talent for it. If it were a sport, he’d be...

Here is a picture of me. It is from the future, but it is old. It’s old because the picture itself was taken at a time before the time at which the picture was given to me. It was thus given to me in the picture’s future. I don’t know how it got to me, I just...

Hologram Joe steps up to the plate. He lifts his nail-bat off the mound, wet clay gathered around the top like red smegma. It is what they refer to as “The Top of the Seventh Circle,” a reference to our long dead poet laureate Alighieri-bot, who was tasked with...

I fell off the bed today. I fell off yesterday, too. I fall off every day, nowadays. I fall off and usually hit my head on the cherry wood bedside table. I always hit it in the exact same place every time and now there’s a pointy lump on my head. There’s some bone...

Ido push-ups. I am not good at them but I do them anyway. I can only do like 6 in a row before my arms start to buckle like a house held up by balsa wood. I do them anyway. I may not be good at them, but sometimes when my arms are on the verge of disintegration, I can...

I am a flying Trappist monk. I’m in charge of brewing beer while hanging on very thin ropes. It is not necessary for me to hang on them, but then I wouldn’t be “The Flying Trappist Monk” if I didn’t, and I’d be out of a job. I don’t get paid, but I do get housing and...

One arm of sinew and fat lifts a stick with an insanely heavy sphere on each side. If you tried to lift them, you’d lose your hand and your ability to do simple arithmetic. But me? I’m a strong man. I do it all the time because it’s my job. I don’t get much money from...

I heard that, to make laugh tracks sound like people actually laughing at vapid jokes, they put lightning rods on the backs of giants that walk along the floor of our universe and — when they catch a rare interstellar bolt of black lightning (not body wash for black...

It could have been a tin can but it was most likely someone crossing the street. I probably couldn’t see them because they were cloaked with nightfall. I look into the rear-view mirror, barely having felt a thing. Tin can? Person? Tin Can? Person. It was a person. I...

I’m not sure exactly how it works, but apparently there exists a mesh of hemp that is waterproof but see through. It is a window made of a plant. And if I were to talk about it on the corner of Mills and Colonial, someone might turn to me and say, “Yeah, man, that...

Today, I am nervous. I have probably contracted a form of superleprosy that makes everything decay until there is nothing left of me. I pull the blinds aside with my weak fingers, staring into the empty street outside my house. I wonder who wiggled a diseased, remote...

It is Friday. Friday is beer day. I get a bunch of beers and I tell myself that I will only drink one. Then I drink six. All beers are gone by the end of Friday. That is why I don’t buy beers often. When I open up my pantry, I see bread. It has many forms. Bread...

I wake up without one eye. It is not just the absence of an eye, though. There is also just nothing there. It is a perfectly round hole. I look in the mirror and, with the eye that’s still there, I can see some gray gelatin wiggling around inside the hole. It is dark...

I've got a theory. I think that, maybe, in the middle of the night, a small, nearly undetectable earthquake shook the acoustic guitar off the stand. That’s when the guitar must have fallen face-first onto the beige tiled floor, the tensile explosion blasting the...

I’m only floating in the pastel pastiche of 90s neon pink and teal telephones with chords still attached. Graham takes a long, loud breath, oxygen-thieving, and lays down next to me. He was just dancing to something I didn’t recognize, probably one of his weird...

If you are tough and put your lips to the grindstone, you are almost guaranteed to make it in some way. It’s all about perspective. Jimone, that guy works all day and night and swears he’s going to be an artist. He will die in a fatal fender bender that sends him...

I like to cruise the streets sometimes, because I am a teenager and I feel compelled to do it. It’s not that I like the action of getting in my car and wasting gas money and wandering around this town aimlessly; I like the way that it feels to do something I’m...

"You can run, but you can’t hide,” sayeth Jameson while he drags his net through the brackish waters of the Floridian estuary, hoping to catch a whole manatee. You see, if he had a whole manatee, he wouldn’t have to crawl through the back aisles of Publix, sticking...

I have the feeling that everyone at every moment is always watching me, even when I can’t see anybody for miles and miles. Is it narcissism? Is it paranoia? Who knows. All I do know is that I end up doing tricks for them like this one: a backflip where I land wrong...

An old man came up to me today while I was working at my desk and started rubbing my love handles with his bony fingers. I’m not sure how he got into my house, but since I keep the doors locked because I’m afraid of getting raped and murdered, he had to have found...

We sweep litter off the bed almost every night. It sticks to the bottoms of our ever-moist feet and follows me into bed. We sweep it into the crack between the bed and the wall. It will bind and, one day, I think, form a wall of its own. We won’t even notice it, as if...