And the Night of the Stampede

20,000 kisses. One for the boys who never looked out for me, but promised and then broke their promises, rocking back and forth to the music, rocking back and forth in the pale blueness of the concert lights. I wanted, for a moment, to let the crowd take me, to trample me into pulpy, squirming bits of light pink and beige, to rip the skin from my cheeks and expose it, beet-red, to the alcohol-scented crowd, the weed smell like burning shit in the backdrop, and the drunk girls smothering kisses unto their boyfriends’ faces, gnawing the rubbery ear. And in the end we are all alone. We are all simply alone, however hard we try to deny this truth, with text messaging and facebook and phone calls that last an hour only because we talk about everything we did that day, from washing the dishes to brushing our teeth to shitting in the toilet. I floated in the pale blueness, the lights bright and blinding, the lyrics stabbed to death with curse words, three-edged curse words, sharp and hurting against my tender flesh, and I miss those days, of flawless pink cheeks and a pure, pure heart, a pure heart like almonds whose meat is smooth and white.

the top one was what I intended
the bottom is what the internet thinks it is in CMYK

Plump, watery

Breezy July, lavender tears (plump, watery) nostalgia crept where prisoners slept (liquid transactions, bathroom tiles colored with blood, urine, remorse). Why can't we unknow what makes us stiff, serious, stuffy? I want to look upon life with the same dreaminess, hopefulness and loveliness as I did before.

The breasty, German woman’s doll-faced daughter pooped in her underwear, wriggling out of her trousers in order to liberate the smelly lump. She complicated our efforts to find peace, toying with the delicate afternoon atmosphere as if it were one of her pot-bellied four year old friends. She paraded through the garden where posh British families dined on lemon tarts more yellow than their hair and less sour than their expressions. Oblivious, the German doll tottered by, her squeals threatening to shred their conversations of parties, politics and Paris. I watched in amusement as the plump, shiny-faced dissenter refused to conform, sloshing water, milk and coffee, so that each liquid uncurled like my curiosity, temporarily staining skirts and shoes, permanently staining our reputations--this motley crew of four--who never could, and never would, stride through the ostentatious door of showy social gatherings--where verbal exchange occurs less between people and more between their expensive commodities.

I remember the quiet garden where the rabbits slept. A dying tree’s slow decay attracted swirls of summer flies--plump and iridescent like the black cherries on which they often feasted. The rotting-water smell provoked my Discomfort, until he finally snapped open two yellow-pink eyes and growled awake. While circling the garden--bare-footed and barren-minded--I sometimes was awoken from my thick, liquid trances by a pale thread of sunlight. The light, so foreign to a garden shrouded completely in an unctuous shade, extracted my sympathy, and I once even invited it to soothe my naked shoulders, which were roughened by several hundred goose-bumps. Within the sunlight’s silver womb I uncovered my dreams. They fluttered forth, colorful and bright-eyed, their lips cracked with widening smiles while I grimly acknowledged their presence. After all, they rekindled in me the same robust, scarlet fire that long ago nourished my graying health…I could never forgive myself for once letting them go, for once commanding them to leave.