old notebooks pt. 2: hood rat

my mind bends and splashes like water would. it's empty, like water seems when viewed at from up above but in all actuality it's fraught with action, the water in a pond or a river that is.

my mind is like that, i'd like to think. though to be fair, i am arrogant, a lion, a creature who lives in a region mostly devoid of it, or i am thinking of something else.

i go constructing little links via electric synapse or microtubule. there's water, it seems, in all sorts of places in your body: cut it up and see for yourself. all six-segmented me with a shiny spinal core, i am a fragmented apple.


close your eyes and see red in the sunlight. i learned colours doing the kindergarten clock dash across my mother's floor, leaning back in my precarious chair, leaving half-circle moons in the hardwood. the stairs up to the attic were very narrow i remember, only room for half of one of my four year old feet. there wasn't much to see up there; our family isn't much for memory.

we had marmalade summers and kept up cozy winters. i remember building snowmans alone on the goodbye street, the one where dad would leave forever for work until night--snowmen all sad and grey from the grime on the pavement. the snowman was more gravel than snow, man.


with giddy orbits i would venture into the forest and drink with cupped palms from fetid pools of still water. with giddy orbits all the weird creatures would trace sick circles in my stomach and i would throw up in the middle of tick-tock park.


they made voices at night and one mean evening they toppled down to get me.


those plaid cobblestones were ingrained in my memory as the place where i did things with a lifelong significance unbefitting to such a small person. there were two; they were bad things.

those nights spoke monobone creatures like stick insects, they were all one bone, resting in the knots of trees they meld with the trees, bone on bark and i'm sure they feel real smug in their safety. underneath the tree barrow they hide teeth bared and eyes aglow with a thirsty light, like they want to drink up the moon and never stop drinking until the moon is all gone, the marrow out of it, and the tree is bone too: the bugs were bone, the road is bone and i am bone, everything is bone, everything might as well be one bone.