warm wind forgot its keys
left a bag the TSA wanted no part or
ring-a-ding phone rings
the cloud having lost its hands
refused to answer
Tag Archives: Ohio River Valley Lit
on [rocks have the softest shadows] by Barton Smock
I’m late on this one and rightly offer apologies. Bart’s got a few books out and you should go find them. Go here. A conversation with him is going to feature on an upcoming episode o my peripatically published indie publishing Podcast, THE SLUDGE REVIEW.
"god's been gone nine months and all this talk he's done of being stabbed in a dollhouse struggles to fill a baby (do animals have songs"
all this talk / see / and what is they’re showing
this moment all soaked in mock rock urine dried
like young ageless sea sand gritting tween the toes
clenched and chaffing raw
blue is / not safe: more on process [imagination]

“Men need some kind of external activity, because they are active within. Contrarily, if they are active within, they do not care to be dragged out of themselves; it disturbs and impedes their thoughts in a way that it often most ruinous to them.” – Schopenhauer
trying to write with a gel pen feels diuretic / the way I pick the pens I write with is based on how scratchy the tip is against the paper that kinetic feel of the tip to the page. This explains my preference for fountain pens and – when I’m traveling or on the jobby job – Extra Fine Point Sharpies or a Pilot Precise V5 / I favor blue inks except when I’m on the jobby job / then I tend towards black ink : not a deliberate choice on my part / it rose out of the murkiness of imagination maybe it’s the fact that most official paperwork used to require black ink for official signatures and my deep emnity for officious institutions is well-known to anyone who knows me / beyond that
just murk murk murky
wrapped in the murk is a giant glass eye it’s the size of 10,000 suns / sometimes it focuses light into a fine laser sometimes it fractures it into a billion different stars // the giant glass eye does the same to dark matter
my first cat was a long-haired black cat named Blue / I named him Blue because blue is safe — but blue is also not safe / Blue is also the color of Carlos Santana’s guitar pulsing through a high fidelity speaker in the back room of a house buried in the eastern country of southern Ohio where I took acid one New Year’s Eve / that same night I watched the floor turn into maggots and the entire house turned to ice kept melting and refreezing simultaneously
the world is still like that sometimes
still melting and still freezing and everything reverberates in shades of blue
jobby jobs fracture black / sometimes they focus into a high power laser the same color
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