The dumpster flautist agreed to remove my neutrons.
The gnawing of matter had become indistinguishable from waking.
While the parking garage stood in escrow for crumpled dollar bills and forged documents,
I stared awefully at a gilded frame spit-shined to distinction.
I had brought a neural pathway, and he a scalpel,
and how brightly his shone...


We spoke fleetingly, sputteringly,
and he washed his phantom limbs up to the elbows as I untied my shoelaces.
“How long have you been awake?” he asked.
“Only when I am asleep,” I said, and I smirked to keep from drooling on myself.
The shadows were growing longer, and I settled into a 1950s dentist chair -
the feeling was much like singing karaoke in a dive bar of a foreign country.
No one in particular shivered slightly at the thought, as I counted backwards from ten.
I wiggled my toes until there was a true drugless sleep
without virtue
without the desire for the Good
without mania and paranoia and memories and weltschmertz.


I awoke in this waiting room fully impassioned.
I tested my voice in intervals, step-wising each better judgment,
and burned a copy of the New Yorker for security blanket countenance -
fuck man, Egyptian cotton it burned so bright.
I slid out into the night air and breathed the smell of ozone as loud as the thunderclapped sky could bear.
We kissed.
The stars spun.
And no one was awake to hear the biochemical magical realism
I can only pity so long before I fall back to sleep. Sleep well, darling.

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