...withheld.

This is about my stunted visual radius. My inability to see to look to be more than five feet in front of my eyes at any time. My prison or my shelter? - wellfuckyoutoo either way you look at it I’m trapped inside be it voluntary or voluntary’s comparatively evil antonym brothersister.

I’ve no key to relieve myself, no lock to pick, no door to open or close. I’ve no control at all as existence passes me up as life and years and others and the Others slide on by I will miss my boat I’m sure andthen-where-will-I-the fuck be?

Stuck? Still whining about my sensory retardation? Boat slides by boat takes off boat is the fuck gone and I’m the fuck unaware that it’s even ever left me here in my prison in my pit in my piss ridden effluvium soaked den of fivefuckingfeet I’m waiting sitting pacing for something to fucking happen I deserve that much for fucksake just a taste, at the bottom least, of what it’s like to be a regular decent job-holding bloke. I am owed, at the basement least, a tongue lick of goodness before I spend another night blah hour blah minute blah instant in this, this, this... In-CAR-cer-A-t-ION!!!

...

And I don’t mean to get so pissy you know? I don’t mean to push and pull and pummel you with my woes but I sweartothefuckingalmighty it’s the truth - not one word a bastards lie I swear unto you I’m full of truth about my “fuck-you-very-much-god” handicaps and scorns. I trust you bloke. You isn’t like the others the Others. I mean, five fucking feet! I’m reduced. An invalid. IN VALID. How am I supposed to get along when I can’t see where I’m off to when I don’t know where I’m the fuck going?

Piss. It was the others the Others that did this to me I swear it. The others the Others have it in for me want me to drown in this fucking fog so they get god to stunt my peepers. I bet you knew this though, cause you’re not like the others the Others at all. They’re just trying to pull me down, crack me some twenty odd more times but I bet you got the real goods on their god scheme conspiracy...

I mean, I bet you know what it’s like to be fourteen.

Gangly fleshy bits of penis creep past her lips, slip over her teeth, rest on her tongue. Sleep. Stay in her for the warmth. Rest. When she bites down I’m awake and I move further. Past her uvula, dodging her tonsils, navigating the thin corridor of her esophagus...

I’m a probe. Dick probe. Pushing. Sensing her gag I crawl slower, take my time. Penetrating her... Deeper...

Deeper. “Swallow me.” She can’t scream but her attempt sends shivers over my length – sends shivers through my skin - echoes of her apparent discomfort. I’m in her stomach. Pushing through her past through her digested past. Hurried...

Hurried now because I’m uncomfortable. Hurried because I don’t want her to don’t need her to show me what she is who she is... What she’s done. I can feel dicks, the broken shafts of dicks of other men dead and limp inside of her stomach. Dicks she’s chewed off. She bites. Here is where she bites. Either that or the men aren’t ever long enough to reach further, to see any further...

For now, her stomach is frightening to me. I find a sphincter and gently push through. Push my way out. I’m snaking through her intestine. Further...

Further now into twenty-four feet of shit that her and I now share. We’re both coated in whom she has swallowed, whomever she has sucked down. Twenty-four feet of who she is in full, although often mistakes as the repulsive and as the sum of who she is not...

The plunge... The colon. Slide through. Slide past the detail, the painful knowledge of what she’s done, what, or rather whom she might prefer. Dodge past the reality, the substance and hurry into her anus...

I’m choking.

Sliding past another portal, another sphincter I dash into, and soon out of her last exit. Out of her ass. My dick pushes, breaks apart her final tight, rusted door. Air. Release. Breathe...

I breathe. My urethra breathes... Then, as I take time away, outside of her, reflecting on the horrors of her past, I slide back, smoothly reentering her colon, more ready than before to deal with her shit.

His dick was hard. His mind was empty. He wanted to stroke off. He was stroking off. He didn’t want to think. He wasn’t thinking…

Twenty-four. 8,760 nights had slipped past him. Some of those nights he’d spent fucking girls. Fucking for real. Not this fake internet shit. His dick would get hard and some drunken hole would tell him to slide into her wet pussy and all that shit you want and read about in smut magazines. Only the hole never got off. He knew this even without it telling him. But they’d seem to come back anyway so it didn’t really matter if it came or not. He came. He’d shoot his jam all up inside some pussy canal just before passing out.

“Just get the pussy drunk enough,” he thought. “Drunk enough so it wouldn’t be thinking.”

…

Disassociated. Twenty-four years old. A man. An american man. Born white, brought up safe from crack and hookers and guns and most any bizarre form of tyranny and/or unmediated existence characteristic to the heathen ghettos and slums of the hidden american third world. Poverty? Brown people had poverty. Trashy people on tv from weird foreign lands more akin to mars than the ol’ red white and blue were starving and killing each other.

Not here.

Not in america.

Not in “tv land” where reality is the dictate of a cycloptic corner appliance. Where perceptions of the real world are the filtered fiction censored and regurgitated through 500 regulated channels of sitcoms and talk shows and soaps and sports and rupert murdoch and blah blah blah. Where reality is so disassociated from its perceiver that it has become distasteful to distinguish between a pixilated fuck and the real thing, girl and all.

Where sex is a simulated event no longer special or sacred. And not because sex doesn’t feel much better, but because we can hardly tell the difference anymore. Locked away inside of our minds and our imaginations and fantasies we can hardly distinguish between what’s real and what’s illusory.

Between the simulation of life and our actual participation in it.

…

His dick was hard. The seventeen-year-old girl was loose. He didn’t care. He wanted to spray his cum all over her face and tits.

And… Oh…

He’d always have to wipe cum off of his monitor.

…

For the first year he was an oblivious infant swaddled by a lonely but loving mother over-eager to nurture him. He fed from her breast and grew strong and firm from her natural milk.

In his third year he was aware of his father, aware of a man who would pass his eyes as a silhouette, a ship sliding past a ship in a dense fog of memories and dreams. For four years after his realization the son would wonder about his father, about where his father would leave to every early morning and return from every late night. He wondered who his father was, but it would not be until he learned what his father was that the son would loose his memories and his dreams completely.

…

His breathing was short and he could never draw enough breath to satisfy his strained lungs.

…

Seven more years would pass. Seven years and a blur of schoolhouses and games and childhood would slip past him unnoticed. He’d try to live out his youth but it never quite registered it never quite registered and he slipped more and slipped completely into his father’s experience into his father’s shoes into his father’s job into his father…

Father’s hands worked a twenty-eight year routine pulling abstract bulk, welding coarse metals, tightening obstinate black bolts, and cursing with the same old friends who all performed the same difficult industrial dance as he and his ancestors. Twenty-eight years of industrial labor, which his hands could show every scar and painful minute of.

…

On his retinas were etched the fire and glow of an acetylene torch and when he closed them he could still see a bright teardrop of blue light.

…

When father was four he would hear his father curse. Hear his father beating his mother and tear off in the car to work. For another seven years father’s father would wake up and scream at him and his mother for his pain. Scream and drink against his nothinglife… Against the industry, against the bills, against the food that he had to work for about the effort and the strain of his life and his aging wife and weak child and always, without saying it, at father’s father’s father for raising him in the shadow of this monotonous industry.

Two years slid by and the screaming kept up until father’s father slipped and fell from a four-story scaffolding and broke his back. For a year the industry would pay the medical bills but wouldn’t buy his liquor and father’s father’s body went into shock and he would shake and scream and want and it was better sooner than later that he would...

That he did...

And he did die.

Father didn’t weep or grieve this nothingloss; rather he became the next familial incarnation of this perfect division to total a redundant, routine, and static sum of experiential waste.

At twenty-eight father had worked for 4 + 7 + 2 + 1 years and been married the sum of this figure to a wife who had borne their fourteen year old son who, like his father’s father’s father before him, was just preparing to enter the industry. A son who’s mother would feed him her milk and love for a year + 2 + 4 + 7 + 14 = 28.

There wasn’t any view from his room. Two stories above an empty street that looked off, that led off into nothing.

Alone on a mattress, midnight and on, he cried. Twisting around, pulling square blankets over himself a hundred times and each time they didn’t quite fit, didn’t quite keep him warm enough. He’d shiver. His stomach muscles would tense up; strain against his whole body as he sobbed.

He’d sob... Sob until he had nothing left inside of him. Until all of his loneliness had overwhelmed him, stolen his energy, and left him dry.

Exhausted, curled up into a tight ball, he’d finally begin to sleep.

To dream...

...about his potential. His eyes would open, and in his mind he could see the beauty, the wonders of his world. His imagination would bend around; configure a plethora of shapes and colors he did not know, but was thirsty to watch, to see. Hundreds of permutations, variations of themes, ideas, concepts both absurd and consistent, both useful and useless would play themselves out inside of him, within him, gratifying his mindless satisfaction.

His mind would project his lack, all that he did lack along the inner walls of his skull. Like a theater with only one seat with only one chair with only one single view without any relation without any perspective other than his own inner voice. He wouldn’t talk he’d only listen and the movies kept playing but he never spoke and he never made comment he’d only observe these things around him without participating in his life in this life in his own life his only life.

Four walls. Confined inside of four cold, gray walls for three years. Days, weeks, months and now these years had passed and he hadn’t moved from his confines. He’d work listless jobs that he never kept for long, meet people that he didn’t like, share nothing of himself and his life with anyone. Just lock himself away, hurt and alone, dying slowly inside of four walls, and four cold, gray walls without any view of anything other than the insides of his atrophied imagination.

His alarm shocked him into day, into another day. A day bright with windows, with opportunity...

...but his eyes were looking inward at the darkness and not towards the open sky, splendid and warm.

…They pass through him.

Held against the light, the light doesn’t seem to take any notice of him. The light takes no notice, and neither does he. Passing through this life like question after question after empty, unheard question…

A parade, and the parade’s a suicide.

…

She holds his head in her lap. His arms wrap around her waist. He breathes:

In…

Out:

He hears her cry, he cries.

In:

He doesn’t know why he’s crying. She cries, he cries. Nothing passes without his immediate, parody response. Nothing that she does goes without his immediate, emotional rip-off reply.

A mimic.

Out…

Her body shifts, her tears stop. Her fingers slowly trace his spine, etching an outline of each vertebra with her long, unpainted nails.

He moves. His eyes clear up. He stares sideways, out towards the wall. A blank and empty expression canopies his façade. His direction hides his vapid gaze from her, obscures his total lack of being anything real or honest.

“I love you,” she whispers.

Starring at the wall, face filled with nothing:

“Ditto,” he says.

She laughs.

And,

She shouldn’t.

…

It all passes through him, unhindered, unchecked. Concepts are like particles, traveling through, available to see, but his eyes were closed.

His eyes are closed.

And even though her emotion, her want is so plain, so obvious, it slips past him and into oblivion.

Her voice is a falling tree in a forgotten forest that nobody ever visits, nobody ever hears…

…

She gently twists out from under him. Pulls him toward her pillow, to lie evenly and to gaze into his eyes…

“I’ll miss you,” her voice calm, but still choked, sadness still apparent.

“She’ll miss me?” he thinks to himself. Is he going somewhere? He looks past her, at a calendar and realizes that he is due back in school the next day. That he had to leave today. That he did not live here, but four hundred miles south. That today was Sunday, and that class started on Monday. That he needed to travel south in order to get home and sleep and wake and attend class.

It’s already late in the afternoon, and he won’t be home till early morning.

His blank, idiot’s expression melts into an anxious worry. Paradoxically, this empty movement makes her smile, makes her think that he feels it too. Confirms her love, while memories of him begin sinking deep inside of her, deep into the recesses of her sentiment…

He faintly wished she would let go of him, as he still needed to pack.

She held him tighter. Held him close to her. He held her back. He matched his breathing with hers,

In.

Numb.

Out.

Numb.

Gently, eyes filled with tears, heart and mind racing forward towards this voice, this conscious mind, this man with whom she would gladly melt and share and empty herself into…

In one breath, her eyes closed, she confesses:

“I love you.”

In one breath, his eyes closed, he echoes:

“I love you.”

…

She has a long night ahead of her. A long night for someone who paints herself inside someone else, looses that someone else, and can only dream and hope to see them, to see herself again…

Whereas,

He has a long drive ahead of him. A long drive for someone with nothing to think about…

…

“Fucking nigger piece of shit.”

1/2Man takes a long, drawn out breath, than continues his dialogue:

“I’m guessin’ ya’ll didn’t notice our proper white cross in the front yard?”

“Mmmpffff” replied the bound and gagged book salesman, a black man, a university student, maybe twenty-two years old. He is tied to a chair in a basement. The american national anthem plays quietly, burdened by static, from a small radio.

“Stupid shit sells books and he can’t even talk right! Ain’t that the funniest shit ya’ll been seein’ Gitch?”

Gitch, tall white skinhead, a mechanic with a fourth grade education and five remaining teeth is 1/2Man’s “associate,” nods and grunts over enthusiastically to express his approval.

“Shut up Gitch, you sound almost as stupid as the nigger.”

Gitch quiets down.

“Almost as stupid…” says 1/2Man.

Gitch gets excited.

Stop.

Held tight, so tight no air could ever enter his lungs.

Start.

1/2Man clears his throat, than soliloquies: “So you didn’t see our proper cross didja, stupid coon shit? Well that cross, had ya’ seen it, would’ve told ya’ll that we don’t fuckin’ care much fer niggers and shit roun’ ere’. Maybe, if you’s wasn’t so fuckin’ stoopid yall’d of recognized our swastika and wouldn’t have shown yer monkey fuckin’ face at our god fearin’ doorstoop.”

Desperate and afraid, the student, a man named Thomas, screams “Mmmppppffffff!!!!”

He is crying. He is terrified.

He should be.

1/2Man punches Thomas in the face. The chair falls back against a wall; the electrical tape muffles the student’s screams, but does nothing to shield the pain.

“Don’tcha fuckin’ be interuptin’ me or I’ll cut off yer dick and feed it to Gitch!” 1/2Man screams, than clears his throat: “as I was sayin’, you done trespassed in my holy land, my domicile, and I ain’t gonna fuckin’ be too tolerant o’ you bringin’ nigger cooties and shit all over gods country.”

Stop.

Hate.

Start.

“You’re gonna have to pay for yer wrongs nigger.”

Stop.

Held tight, so tight no air could ever enter his lungs.

Start.

Outside. Somewhere in some Appalachian forest you can hear a muffled scream, surrounded by an empty laughter. 1/2Man and Gitch break both of Thomas’s legs, crush three ribs, and smash his testicles with a hammer. They lay down a tattered, blood stained american flag, place Thomas in the center, and drag him over to their truck, whereupon they tie his shattered legs together...

“So you’s probably askin’ yerself ‘why these two white folk tying me to the back of this here tailgate?’ Stupid nigger would ask a dumb question like that.”

1/2Man leans in close; so Thomas can here every word, smell 1/2Man’s toxic breath:

“Well you stupid fuck I’ll tell you why we’re tying ya’ll up, this is my lesson to ya’ll: you committed a crime against us and now we’re gonna’ exact a divine retribution. We’re sending ya’ll to hell along with the rest of yer ugly fuckin’ shit for skin race. Along with all the other coon slaves our rebel brothers killed. Hell, we’re sendin’ ya’ll to burn you fuckin’ nigger.”

1/2Man clears his throat, than continues:

“But before we send you ta hell, we’re gonna drive along this here gravel road with you danglin’ about behind our truck like a fish on lure, only, we ain’t gonna reel ya’ll in and skin you… We’ll let the road tear you up. Let the road shred off your nigger skin and let your white bones shine through.”

Directly into Thomas’s tear streaked face, calmly, ambivalently staring into his bloodstained eyes:

“See, I got’s me this theory that all niggers would be white if not for their dirty skin. God just wants us white folks to carve you fuckers up and get inside, to your bones, and expose you as our white brothers. Really, I’m doing ya’ll a favor. Maybe you’ll be able to get into heaven with me and Gitch because when we’re done with ya’ll ain’t no one gonna know you’s was a nigger. They’ll think you’re a used tampon or some bitch’s blood rag.”

“See, ‘hate’ don’t begin to describe it nigger coon. Hate’s just a word. Fuck, anyone can hate, and what I got is not just what anyone else’s got. Other people hate and never do shit about it, but I’m gonna kill you nigger. I’m gonna take my hate and kill you with it.”

1/2Man breathes: “god gave me a beautiful feelin’ and I’m gonna learn it to you.”

Stop.

Held tight, so tight no air could ever enter his lungs. This is the 1/2Man:

permanently

Flexed.

Against an army

of no one.

Start.

Police find a pile of wet, white bones, bound up in a tattered, bloodstained american flag, tied to a telephone pole. An autopsy will later document the words “My lesson to ya’ll” crudely etched into the skull of a former student, valedictorian, and black, posthumously identified by his dental records as “Thomas.”

His “christian” name.

Stop.

A dead thing...

She’s sitting at her manual potters wheel. Her hands trace the contours of the earth, and as she increases the velocity of the centrifuge, the wheel spins faster and the clay’s figure, now being forced to life by gravity, begins to compromise against her concentrated touch. She shapes the malleable consistency of her medium, this dead thing, to be a figure, a form, a tool consistent within her personal aesthetic associations with “clay” and beauty.

She chooses a material, decides upon a shape, and manipulates the material until it resembles her original vision.

Though,

Who chooses her original vision?

And,

Who manipulates her?

She is,

Or is she not,

A figure, a form, a tool:

A dead thing.

He’s sitting behind his desk, which projects out in front of him like the deck of a super carrier. Collecting papers, mounds of trivial bureaucracy, landing, refueling, than departing his desk only to land, refuel, and leave someone else’s state of the art, redwood topped, war desk.

The time is slowly ticking by, while “Boredom” sits alone in his air-conditioned office, sucking down a diet coke, flipping around between ebay and porn sites.

He’s got a degree in “communications.” Though, the only time “Boredom” ever has to communicate anything to anybody other than his twenty something secretary is at the water cooler during his five-minute breaks.

Occasionally, “Boredom” dreams of bending this twenty something secretary over his massive desk, lifting up her requisite skirt, and fucking her in the ass, listening to her scream his name while he spanks her white skin. Taking his dick out of her before he cums and shooting all over her back and hair.

Show her who’s the boss.

Show that bitch tool what a cock is for…

“Mr. ______, are you awake in there?”

(In…)

It was my secretary.

“Oh good, Mr. ______, A Mr. Boswell, the man who called yesterday… The man who spoke kinda funny, kinda raspy, is here to see you.”

God she looked sexy.

“Thank you. Send him in, Ms. ______.”

“He’ll be right with you.”

Yeah, I’ll show you what daddy’s dick is for you little schoolgirl bitch…

“Hello Mr. ______, my name is Mr. Boswell.”

He shuts the door, takes a seat in front of me. Mr. Boswell is an average looking man who is extremely well dressed, holding a suitcase, which he sets down on his lap and precedes to open. His hand disappears into the suitcase, than reappears with a tape recorder, which he sets down on the edge of my big desk. He hits record, than sits back in his chair.

From here, he looks very small.

“I will cut the pleasantry, and offer you an explanation for why I’m here. Brevity has always been an advocate of mine at meetings such as these.”

“And what sort of meeting is this?” I ask, dryly, disinterested.

He pauses. Stares directly at me for a moment, than speaks:

“It has come to my superiors attention that you’re not a very happy man Mr. _____.”

I don’t respond immediately, I just stare back at him. After a while of neither of us saying anything, I get uncomfortable. To mask my discomfort, I take a sip from my diet coke. He continues to stare at me, though, and my hands begin to shake.

I set down my diet coke. I begin to hum.

“I do hope that you’re listening Mr. ______. It would be most unfortunate for you to disregard what I’m here to say, as it is to your benefit to hear me out.”

“I’m listening, it’s just, you know… late in the day and I’m tired and, well, not disinterested, just tired and…” I blurt out.

“That’s enough of an explanation. Perhaps we should complete this later?”

“No.” I say too quickly.

He pauses.

“Than ‘now’ will be acceptable?” He queries.

I pause.

“Yes.” Uncertain.

“Excellent.”

“Yes.” Resolved.

He pauses, than speaks:

“Mr. _____, do you know who I am? Do you know whom I work for?”

“No, but… fuck. Wait. For some reason. Hold on…” I stammer. I do remember meeting him before. I remember meeting his superiors as well, although the context completely escapes me.

Much of my life before this job, after my graduation, has escaped me.

“I represent the men that had you killed, Mr. _____.”

White out.

…A face above me… Smiling… Loving me through her eyes… My beautiful mother. She sings a lullaby… So beautiful… The tune, so pure… So real…

(To fulfill…)

…I’m at a table. Candles burn atop a cake while my friends… My friends are singing to me… “Happy birthday…” My mother takes a picture… I’m smiling… I remember that picture. Smiling…

(…my social…)

…Up on a stage… My father sings Neil Young songs to a small audience… I’m listening… We’re all listening… Hearing this voice, my father, these echoes… I cry… Being so proud of my father… I cry… To be his son…

(…responsibility…)

…There is a girl. We’re in a field. Together. Laughing, playing, passionately kissing each other… I hear her say my name. So beautiful. We’re in her bedroom. We’re making love… I smell her; taste her, feel her warmth and our bodies melt together…

(…I am expected to…)

…A small bar… I’m in college… Playing music with my little jazz quartet on Friday nights… it’s my solo, and I feel something… Fall into the music, and the crowd and everyone disappears… It’s just me, singing through my guitar…

(…fade away.)

Work. Routine. Pressures from my boss pressures from my client’s pressures from my coworkers from my landlord from my parents from the government from the tax bureau from the army from my doctor from ikea from the media from the lies that I’ve lived from the people that I’ve cheated from the god that I’ve wanted from the deep insatiable me that will never be satisfied…

I’ve become a great big vacuous hole of nobody.

“Mr. _____?” It’s Mr. Boswell. I’m staring up at him from what feels to be a horizontal position. I must’ve fallen over because my coworkers are crowded around me and they seem taller than usual.

From where I am, I can see up my secretary’s skirt.

And,

I start to get a hard on.

“GO AWAY!!!”

He hates it when the bats catch up to him...

...

Ten years old, spooning paste into his mouth. Sticking his fingers into his nostrils, catching ants and eating them. School boys and school girls laughing, little jimmy pisses in his pants during recess.

But,

Little jimmy, for all his social troubles, has an awful big personal burden to carry.

...

Listen:

Little jimmy had a flesh mommy for the first year of his life, but this mother slipped into a coma after a suicide attempt only three days prior her failed attempt to abort jimmy’s now defunct biological brother, “kevin.”

Kevin, who would have had one of the worst cases of Down syndrome in medical history, was five months into his little womb life when his symbiotic matron decided to off him. Having failed to remove the unwanted embryo and child within her, mother returned to what she did best: topped off a couple of needles and blew wads of black tar through her bloodstream and into hers and little kevin’s brain and heart.

Boom!

The results: one hospitalized vegetable mother, costing an unaffordable thousands of dollars in doctors bills and lawyer fees, and one toasted fetus, extra crispy.

Dad was a pimp. He dealt in smack and pussy for a whole block of american tragedy. Little jimmy’s birth was an accident, but dad was a catholic, and giving the coat hanger to one of his unborn’s would have been, for him, a free ride to hell, w/out a sack lunch.

Ergo, the abortion had been his wife’s idea. It was a big secret, but when he found out about this, he laced her junk with 60 % adulterated bleach crystals, which was like pumping chernobyl nuclear waste right into her heart.

Boom!

Just like chernobyl, Boom!

...

“SCREEECCCHHH!!!!”

“LEAVE ME ALONE!!!”

The bats fangs bite deep into little jimmy’s flesh.

...

One year previous to little kevin’s brain freeze, mother was trying the same thing on little jimmy. Only she never overtly attempted to abort little jimmy, she instead shot a steady stream of H over a number of months, hoping to miscarriage him. The result: little jimmy hasn’t got enough cortex left to ever learn how to tie his shoes, let alone live any sort of a normal life.

More importantly, however, little jimmy was born horribly addicted to heroin.

...

“SCREEECCCHHH!!!!”

The fangs...

...

Dad was crucified and hung up on the apartment wall with his tongue cut out so he couldn’t scream. He’d been killed over some spat with a hooker and her rival loyalties. Little jimmy had been in the closet at the time, and two days later police would find him alive but covered in his own feces and urine and vomit. He was taken into custody and after half a year in a hospital jimmy was adopted by some middle class family in Everett, Seattle.

Little jimmy was one and a half years old and moving on to sitcom america.

What a happy ending

...

“SCREEECCHHH!!!!”

“please...........”

The bats would overbear him, taking turns sucking on his veins and he would cry...

...

Little jimmy had no track marks, he was only ten years old, sitting on the floor, eating paste, picking his nose, and pissing his pants. He had all of the signs of physical exertion common to an addict because little jimmy was born “chasing the dragon.”