An Innaugural Address

AMONG the vicissitudes incident to life no event could have filled me with greater anxieties than that of which the notification was transmitted by your order, and received on the 14th day of the present month. On the one hand, I was summoned by my country, whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love. On the other hand, the magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my country called me, being sufficient to awaken in the wisest and most experienced of her citizens a distrustful scrutiny into his qualifications, could not but overwhelm with despondence one who (inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpracticed) ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies. In this conflict of emotions all I dare aver is that it has been my faithful study to collect my duty from a just appreciation of every circumstance by which it might be affected. All I dare hope is that if, in executing this task, I have been too much swayed by a grateful remembrance of former instances, or by an affectionate sensibility to this transcendent proof of the confidence of my fellow-citizens, and have thence too little consulted my incapacity as well as disinclination for the weighty and untried cares before me, my error will be palliated by the motives which mislead me, and its consequences be judged by my country with some share of the partiality in which they originated. Besides the ordinary objects submitted to your care, it will remain with your judgment to decide how far an exercise of the occasional power is rendered expedient at the present juncture by the nature of objections which have been urged against the system, or by the degree of inquietude which has given birth to them. Instead of undertaking particular recommendations on this subject, in which I could be guided by no lights derived from official opportunities, I shall again give way to my entire confidence in your discernment and pursuit of the public good; for I assure myself that whilst you carefully avoid every alteration which might endanger the benefits of an united and effective government, or which ought to await the future lessons of experience, a reverence for the characteristic rights of freemen and a regard for the public harmony will sufficiently influence your deliberations on the question how far the former can be impregnably fortified or the latter be safely and advantageously promoted.

After The Opening of the Field

First there is the light emitted from the corner as if to control the shadow. Drawn lines multiply their imperfection until each blade moves as if caught in the current of breeze. Lately, money can buy love off the clearance rack, but why buy when you can steal for free. Outside the coffee shop the sun is done playing good cop. Time to brace for the severity of Fall. October is the cruelest month. We're shouting our criticisms because the last piece of the puzzle doesn't fit. "I'm not coming back until we get a cleaning service in here," she said. The grinder grumbles an answer, but we can't make it out over the steam. We drink iced coffee to practice coldness in waterless air, but we must be careful not to take the edges for granted, leap out of the fishbowl. Fall-back will arrive two weeks later so that we can grasp the energy a bit longer. Often I Am Permitted To Return To A Meadow as if it were a scene made up by the mind. Hanging on the wall, but opening the stone. The Eye of the Needle is a trail cut between large rocks. I Miss the Rockies, their redwoods so tall they could extinguish the light of day. It seems I'm always looking for a forest in the least likely places. Crease the page until the paper takes shape, ever finding phylum: its lively limbs. If you blink you might miss the most amazing transformations. Leaves bending over your ear, "Look closer and see. See into the trees. Find the girl….if you can."

John Bruce Stump Speech #4: Darkness on the Edge of Town

You better get it straight, darlin'. By the end of Darkness, I'd found my adult voice. Poor man wanna be rich. Rich man wanna be linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to use the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart. Songs like the Animal's "It's My Life" and "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" were infused with class consciousness. You're born into this life paying for the sins of somebody else's past indignations, and I know that many of them are sitting in front of me. The country seems to have lain down and shrugged off something as serious as Laos, just as we calmly shrugged off the loss of 700,000 lives in Pakistan, the so-called greatest disaster of all times.

I had a reaction to my own good fortune. I asked myself new questions. I felt a sense of accountability to the people I'd grown up alongside of. I began to wonder how to address that feeling. And I tore into the guts of something in the night. We're born with nothing and better off wiping away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped their memories of us. But all that they have done and all that they can do by this denial is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission, to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbarous war, to pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and the fear that have driven this country these last 10 years and more and so when, in 30 years from now, our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say "Vietnam" and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory but mean instead the place where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.

I was searching for a tone somewhere between spiritual hopefulness and 70's cynicism. She says, "Baby, if you wanna be wild, you've got a lot to learn." For ending such a war, I have personally advocated that this is the best procedure. It is a traditional rather classic procedure of how to end a war that could be called a stalemate, that neither side apparently has the capacity to end by military victory, and which apparently is going to go on for a long time. The possibility of transcendence or any sort of personal redemption felt a lot harder to come by.

From the fire roads to the interstate, some guys they just give up living and start dying little by little, pieces in the record, and someone who actually does something, so that they can recognize it in an election, if they are interested. This was the tone I wanted to sustain. 'Cause they understand if I could take one moment into my hands of Vietnam, someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, "the first President to lose a war."

I intentionally steered away from any hint of escapism and set my characters down in the middle of a community under siege. And you better believe, boy, somebody's gonna get hurt tonight. And will our children and grandchildren ever live in a world as safe and secure as the world in which we grew up? Weeks, even months went by before I had something that felt right. 'Cause in the darkness I hear somebody call my name and when you realize how they tricked you this time. And it's all lies but I'm strung out on the taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals with turned up power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies.

Darkness on the Edge of Town dealt with the idea that the setting for personal transformation is often found at the end your rope. I've been working real hard trying to get my hands to clean the mucous out of his tube and he suffocated to death. If you don't do that your characters ring hollow and you're left with rhetoric, words without meaning. Everybody's got a secret, sonny, something they just can't face with a very sickening situation in this country, because there is no moral indignation and, if there is, it comes from people who are almost exhausted by their past indignations.I was twenty-seven and the product of Top 40 radio.

John Bruce Stump Speech #3: Born to Run

In '70's New Jersey, the car was still a powerful image. All the redemption I can offer is beneath this dirty hood with a chance to make it. That somehow resolutions and failed inspections would make this world a more peaceful place. He was hoping we'd turn away. But now I was appreciating their craft and power.

I walked into a Tenth Avenue freeze without Saddam Hussein. At first I thought it was the name of a movie or something I'd seen on a car spinning around the Circuit, but I couldn't be certain. And the world is busting at its seams and you're just a prisoner of your American dream. And if we did that, we'd have more consumption ability in America, which is what we need right now in order to kick our economy into gear. I liked the phrase because it suggested a cinematic drama I thought would work with the music I was hearing in my head. At night sometimes it seemed you could hear the whole damn city crying. Blame it on the lies that were killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq.

And here's what she wrote to you, "That gave me an opportunity to feel out the arrangement. Baby, this town rips the bones from your back, it's a death trap, a suicide." Some 27 percent have tried, and they try because they come back to this country and they have to face what they did in Vietnam, and then they come back and find the indifference of a country that doesn't really care, that doesn't really care. Born to Run was released in a post-Vietnam America. And tonight you'll try just one more time to leave it all behind and break. We fought using weapons against "oriental human beings" with quotation marks around that. We fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe this country would dream of using.

Were we fighting in the European theater? People were contemplating a country that was finite, where resources and life had limits. And the word's been passed this would increase the chances of the U.S. being hit by another 9/11-type terrorist attack. Slowly, the dread that I had managed to keep out of Rosalita squeezed its way into the lives of the people. Outside, the street's on fire in a real death waltz between what's flesh and what's fantasy. And the poets down here don't write nothing at all. They just stand back and let it all be. And in the quick of a knife they reach for their moment. But I want to come back to where I began, on homeland security. When the screen door slams on Thunder Road you're not necessarily on the Jersey shore anymore. You could be anywhere in America.

Schnitzel

Oh god, it still embarrasses her, not because she was wearing a dirndl under her wool jacket, with her black tennis shoes, not even because he was the Libertarian candidate. The man was a fool, a complete fool, uneducated and ignorant. He ran for governor and the state gave him a solid 10% of the vote.

But it was a beautiful afternoon anyway, and the polling place was just down the block from her apartment. She brought her lease and she brought her driver’s license and, because she wasn’t sure, she brought her passport and her social security card (even though her middle name was misspelled on it). And afterwards, she wore the sticker, proud, and jumped on the 30 bus downtown, to the German restaurant she worked at.

Ultimate Frisbee

To be fair, she’d never found him that good looking, but he was popular, sort of, and an Ultimate Frisbee sensation. He had bad taste in movies and music and he played video games too often, his pants were always too short, he was pigeon-toed and he had a faint hairlip.

But all that was only clear twn years later, when she heard he married some petite Malasian girl. Back when she was 17, she was just so grateful that he paid her attention, that he liked her, and it hurt so much when he didn’t any longer that she thought she would never recover, so she joined an Ultimate Frisbee team, though she hated running fast, and found she actually had a pretty decent forehand, but the team was awful and it lost every single game it played that season, several months after he broke her heart.

She quit before long. She never liked sprinting.

John Bruce Stump Speech #2: The Wild, The Innocent, the E-Street Shuffle

The opening cut, "The E-Street Shuffle," is a reflection of a community that was partly imagined and partly real. Sparks fly on E-Street when the boy prophets walk it handsome and hot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the country side of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

I wanted to describe a neighborhood, a way of life, and I wanted to invent a dance with no exact steps. Forcin' a light into all those stoney faces left stranded on this warm July. More in September than in August. And now we see beheadings. And we got weapons of mass destruction crossing the border every single day, and they're blowing people up. And we don't have enough troops there. It was just the dance you did every day and every night to get by. And there hasn't been a talley since Sally left the alley, issued a memorandum from the Defense Department saying, "If you weren't with us in the war, don't bother applying for any construction." That's not a way to invite people. I watched the town suffer some pretty serious race rioting and slowly begin to close down. And circus town's on the short, waved them off and said, "No, no, no, no. The word of the president of the United States is good enough for me."

Just when you thought the song was over, you'd be surprised by another section, taking the music higher. But they sighed "Johnny it falls apart so easy and you know hearts these days are cheap" – none of which were true. It was, in spirit what I'd taken from the finales of the great soul revues. You don't need to call me Lieutenant, Rosie, and I don't want to be your person who could be a commander in chief who could get your kids home and get the job done and win the peace. When you left the stage after performing one of these, you'd worked to be remembered. Together they're gonna boogaloo down Broadway and come back home with the executive who looted it, who bailed out on a golden parachute. America can do better. And help is on the way. Not that it would all BE funny but that it would all SEEM funny. That would come later.

John Bruce Stump Speech #1: Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ

There wasn't a lot of interest in hearing original music, which is what I mainly played. Madman drummers, bummers and Indians in the summer with teenage diplomatic efforts under way. They just decided the time for diplomacy is over and rushed to war without planning for what happens afterwards. I was sitting on the front steps. He shouted through the car window that he was going up to New York City.

I'd been going through some hard times in New Jersey for a while, and I planned, once again to leave the state. The hit-and-run plead sanctuary, 'neath a holy stone they hide around the world. We don't need mass armies anymore. One of the things we've done is we've taken the – we're beginning to transform our military."Mary, my queen, your soft hulk is reviving the economy." I had heard plenty of promises before – Broadway, Joan Fontaine, advertiser downtown training money – $1 billion was cut. They only added a little bit back this year because it's an election year. So I left that day telling Mike I was interested, but without making a commitment.

That Christmas, Tinker and I drove cross country to California in Volkswagen vans with full running boards dragging great anchors of this country, and we're going to free ourselves from this dependency. So it was, back home, for me. You wouldn't even give me time to cover my tracks and make this system operate effectively. I know that the idea of working within the system has been used so much, and many people have lost confidence that it can be done. They wish to destroy the system, to start all over, but I don't think in the history of human experience that those destructions of systems work. They usually destroy everything good as well as bad, and you have an awful lot of doing to recreate the good part and to get started again. The songs required too much attention for a crowded bar on a Saturday night. Oh you don't know what they can do to the younger generation- and I am certainly getting at the end of my generation because I have been here an awfully long time- but that you younger people can find it possible to accept the system and try to make it work because I can't at the moment think of a better one given the conditions that we have in this country and the great complexity and diversity.

I really believe if we can stop this war- I certainly expect to do everything I can. I combed my hair till it was just right and commanded the night brigades of students and people, young and old, who took time to travel, time off from work, their own vacation time, to work in states far and wide. They braved the hot days of summer and the cold days of the fall and the winter to knock on doors because they were determined to open the doors of opportunity to all Americans. I have done all I can with all my limitations. I worked to find something that was indelibly mine. Them gasoline boys downtown sure talk "integrity, integrity, integrity." Those are the three words that she left me with. I never wrote in that style again.

 

Seven Escapes: Concluding Remarks

Seven Escapes: Concluding Remarks

A scintillating saga, these seven escapes, sending spirits soaring, defying depression, promote possibilities for incarcerated imaginations, a sponge for sodden souls and spirits, appropriate advice for artless adolescents, suitable suggestions for superannuated sourpusses.

Curmudgeons who can count might cry, "Seven, swindler? The sum stands at six!"

Silence simpletons, for Sister Archipelago's supreme seventh son, jaunty Jehudiel, bettered his brothers, effecting an exhaustive escape, transcending the terminus of this text, for not even confabulation could confine him.

Seven Escapes: Sealtiel's Breakout

Sealtiel sat in his cell and sulked, believing a break-out like his brethrens' to be beyond his begetter as adept attorneys had advised police to prohibit packages with perilous perishables and thus Sealtiel, so ceaselessly smart and subtle, hardly held any hope.

Heedful of hindrances like the victual veto, the man's mother mailed him a mild monograph, a tame tome causing no controversy amongst cops for the text's tedious title aroused no apprehension, for Critical Applied Linguistics sounded stuffy, stodgy, stale, and subdued.

Sealtiel wolfed down words, reveling in reader, finding faculty in phraseology, might in morphemes, power in portmanteaus, and commenced to communicate to his captors in insipid institutional idioms, prison parlance, the lexicon of law, judges' jargon, warden wording, police patois.

Baffled, befuddled, and bewildered by the rhetorical rampage, the confused custodians conjectured they had caught a cop, withheld a watchman, locked up a lawman, detained a deputy, and with abounding apologies, set Sealtiel free.

Insomnia vs. Dream Imagery (Random Thoughts Filtered Through Grammatical Structures Makes the Poem)

Paper plates! Boxing a beer wing of ponging dream scones, purpled with acid washes and licked with tumbling lights. It would have searched for the apex, sporting a wise green jacket, had not the hermetic snowman have spliced his carrot dick of free associations for the likely bimbos.

Story Created by Taking Random Screen-Shot from Wikipedia, Scribbling Over Text in Photoshop Makes the Poem

"W is the most S on the web, period."
--USA DONATE

Connecting reciprocating connects piston to the crank or cranks, connecting when a Muslim invent-engine craftsman, the king of Turkish Art, one of any motion to motion was made ROD, which in the Book of K, acting reciprocal pump would motion its others the wood combustion engines, compound rods, N.

Story Composed of Consecutive Words in Each Story Pool Story Makes the Poem

Aside Warden's trust-bus:

PICK-UP TRAP

--Authorities

In being the "At That," he, when Christ, forces "can-a-ble" - something chopped at in movie meteor - but deep now, about "h--e--to-oth" spoken house take is "you all" stick words, teach lightning baptism, I-LOOKS, being voted this fall.

Stage Directions for Anti-Corporate Ad Concepts Using Pre-Existing Advertisement Slogans Makes the Poem

Aside made by soldier in SLOW KILL ZONE after nuclear blast, observing the remnants of U.S. Army recruiting poster:

"An army of one."

Interjection by foreman of unidentified foreign sweatshop after child worker makes comment about chemical irritants burning her skin:

"Just Do It!"

Comment by physician to smoker after issuing recurrent treatment for lung cancer:

"You've come a long way, baby."

Humorous exchange between Japanese businessmen viewing presentation on the collapse of U.S. auto market:

"Have you driven a Ford lately?"

Seven Escapes: Barachiel's Breakout

Worried wardens wilted while worrying about how to contain convicts conceived by canny creators, for Sister Archipelago continually connived and contrived and saw her sons set free, so they set in solitary her bastard boy Barachiel, preventing all pleasures, save certain self-published paperbacks and parcels procured by post.

Barachiel, mindful that mailed munitions would wind up with the warden, guffawed greatly upon emptying envelopes from his forbearer, finding not firearms, flamethrowers, nor files, but a plethora of prepackaged peanuts, and rapidly ripped them from their wrappers.

The clever criminal clambered on his cot and doused the ducts with dust, putting the peanut powder in the pipeline, ground the goober grit through the grates, and patiently paused as the particles promulgated throughout the penitentiary.

Sister Archipelago had ascertained that acute allergies afflicted all attendants surveilling her son, and since anaphylaxis acts apace, Barachile gave ear to garbled groans and strangled squalls as airpipes astringed six seconds after cell doors had been unsecured for Sunday night supper.

trust

I don’t trust anything that bleeds for a week and doesn’t die
(Every time it happens, I think I’m going to die)

I don’t trust anything with two testicles.
(They say it only has one (an accident))

I don’t trust anything that has two eyes for watching or blinking
(Too much staring and I become nervous)

I don’t trust anything that walks on two legs
(We’ve started to crawl again)

I don’t trust anything named Todd
(Actually, it’s short for “Toddeus”)

I don’t trust anything that is not codependent
(What is the point if I’m not needed?)

I don’t trust anything with a third-person slogan
(Sally says that Sally prefers the third-person because it makes her feel as though
she truly knows herself)

ugly faces

Up, onto the bus, a little wobbly, but certain that this is what he has to say:

"Man, there are some ugly faces on this bus. God must have been in bad shape to make all of you so ugly."

The old man isn't sure he heard that right.

"Hey, old timer," the wobbly calls out.

The old man looks from left to right, as though surely, surely he isn't the one.

Prime Number Sequence Superimposed on UPS InfoNotice Slip Makes the Poem

UPS! notice: "twelve to pick-up"

Attempt, second, final, leave...
packages back...

"A" is sender delivery:
Minimum years amount are, unless...

"Make not bank try: 10:30-2:00"...

Random Cuts in a Piece of Paper, Superimposed Upon a Story Pool Blog Makes the Poem

Break, The Author




E.R. Archipelago!

Chin Uriel, from BESTIAL BOOBY-TRAP!
To beneath, to breach-able prison palace!
*Designs in the dirt, having sed [sic]!
**Uri, depicts her auspicious shanks!
(reverb near, he fleetly found his groan)
& gay hed [sic]
& open out

From,

Me

Seven Escapes: Uriel's Breakout

Three for three in thwarting the authorities, Sister Archipelago then set about unfettering her unpardonable urchin Uriel from his penal predicament by blueprinting another bestial booby-trap, to bring about befuddlement by breaking in from beneath, to breach the bottom bulwark of the presumed impenetrable prison palace.

Within the yard walls, Uriel decumbently drew designs in the dirt with his dusty digits, depicting dreams of deliverance, having heard of his brother's auspicious abdication, when he sensed shaking in his shanks, reverb near his rear, trembling beneath his tuckus, and he fleetly found his feet.

The ground groaned and gave way to an O-shaped hole, outstretched and open as Uriel's own orifice, revealing a roustabout from furry familia Talpidae, a sedulous scamp, a mole most marvelous, mammoth in magnitude and burly from boundless burrowing.

Sensing the scenario's significance, Uriel pirouetted into the pit and followed the faithful fellow for four fatiguing fortnights, eating only earthworms, eschewing pursuers in twisting tunnels carved through the core of our terrestrial sphere, until alighting in the French and Southern Antarctic Lands on the far side of the globe, bought a small bungalow, and lazed on the beach slurping drinks with umbrellas.

The Spirit of Quetzalsinsina

Professor Randy Redaris earned dueling degrees in sociology and anthropology from Southwest North Dakota State, earned a third online in amateur archaeology from the Community College of Mainland Maine, and downloaded a Certificate in Conjuration from a school in Kazbekistan, an oft-overlooked former Soviet state, after answering 15 of 20 correctly on an online quiz. With credentials tucked under arm, he boarded a boat in New Iberia bound for Belize.

Redaris wished to summon the spirit of Quetzalsinsina, goddess of mint tea and superfluous nipples, whose glistening tears could increase male virility tenfold. Redaris learned of the goddess through an ex-lover who was one-third Belizean and two-thirds bipolar, a woman he colonized with the best of intentions, but it ended all badly when she broke his Burmese bassoon after he failed to properly cover her couscous before reheating. Redaris successfully expunged her name from his brain, but how could he forget Quetzalsinsina?

Deep in the jungle near Benque Viejo, Redaris drew a chalk circle on the forest floor then stood in its center, and began with his chanting, enjoining the spirit to flow forth so she might cry in his phial, to bawl in his bottle. His plan? To package her plight in pill form to sell on poorly produced infomercials on late night TV.

Poor Redaris. Perhaps he misspoke the words of the witchery, or his fractional Belizean deliberately deceived him with syntax most suspect, for Quetzalsinsina never materialized; he did, however, unintentionally invoke Ixtab, the prestigious psychopomp from the Mayan pantheon. Seeing that her summoning singer was not yet dead (a prerequisite for their postmortem pilgrimage) Ixtab lent him a hand by splitting his skull in twain.

The moral, you ask? Remember, dear reader, that although you may possess twice the knowledge of the stooge sitting beside you, it may be half what you need in times of crises; that, and beware of partial Belizeans who are adroit in the bedroom but loath to take lithium.

Raphael's Breakout (sans alliteration)

Lane Hall wrote:

One of the pleasures of being your professor is making you do extra work. I assign this obstruction to you, regarding your most recent Storypool post.

Obstruction: rewrite the piece ("Raphael's Breakout") and be as consistent to diction/description/syntax as possible while avoiding any hint of alliteration.

Raphael's Breakout (sans alliteration) (original here)

Cautious wardens prevented the former sister's visitations but she, the deceitful mother of foul children, continued her scheming, watching for any breaks in the walls confining her boys, until her keen eyes studied on the open-aired yard, where inmates played basketball under wide-open skies.

She mailed Raphael a silver outfit of reflective scales and instructions diagramming how to wear the suit, for tightening the cowl, for securing the hood on his cranium, to fasten the suit tight to his neck, zipped to his mouth and, when absolutely dressed, he should squirm and wiggle high up in the air.

The former sister hid nearby and upon sighting her boy through binoculars in his outfit of glimmering scales, she unhooded a gigantic eagle, a remarkable she-falcon, an bird of preposterous dimensions acquired in Talkeetna, Alaska, and whose sharp eyes found the most gargantuan fish she had ever seen.

She flew over razor-wire, swooped inside the walls and, as the guards' maws opened, snatched up the man with her talons, nails capped with rubber tips (Raphael thanked his mother's astute planning) and conjointly they soared back to Talkeetna, where he made a fine living selling dried moose meat to tourists.

I thought he loved me once but he didn't and I did

If I'd waited another minute, he wouldn't have seen me at all. But I didn't and he did and the world didn't end. Quite. I thought it might. His eyes followed me and maybe he would too, but when I looked back, he didn't. I couldn't have waited to see him, not another minute.

when he runs

on the other hand, looks
rather than wound in
the middle that it makes
lovely orbs of a steady
source, of holes of escape
so weeping under the storm
over and blows, listen and
something, the effect dramatic
rather than puncture, look
to gilded fruit, to dotted mold

where he hardly went

he doesn’t understand
a language because she said
with a pretty committee
he hardly wanted to come
these hosts have the same
climate, share the same
candy, take the same tests

Leo's prayer

I knew I had to get rid of this guy. I noticed that when I talked to my
folks or when I read something he wouldn’t come out. So, I focused on school when
I could go. I made the honor roll a couple of times, too. Who would have thought it.
Yeah, the teachers at Lindblom were shocked at Leo Sinkowski making honor roll.
Things were good, then junior year, I got a job from a guy who used to come to the
electric shop at school. I apprenticed under him for two years and had my electrician’s
license by the time I was eighteen. I got into the Union, met Margaret and things were
good. Pop died and I got Mom into a duplex on the same block where I lived. We were rolling.
Then I had a w-w-w-eak moment, and he came back. It’s true. He came back and talked
me into s-s-s-som-s-so-something r-r-real bad.
I will tell this!!! You can’t stop me!
My head is splitting!
I gotta do this now or die!! It’s me or you, and I can’t tell you now, you sonofabitch,
it ain’t gonna be me!
It was a great plan, but the devil himself created it. To this day, the Board of Education
thinks it was an accident. Well, that’s the story they gave the news boys. I had a great alibi
because I had told them the switches in the boiler room of that school needed replacing and
that the wiring was rotten. They dragged their feet because they didn’t want to spend money to
replace them. So, when he came to me with the idea, I knew I couldn’t lose. God, my head is
splitting, but I’m tired. I gotta tell this.
“What about the kids,” I said.
“What about the fire,” he came back with. “Don’t think about the kids. Besides, fire is pure.
It’s good for them. Cleans them up. Just think of all the fun you’ll have.”
I knew he had me. I went on to the school. The switches were in bad shape, but they never woulda started a fire like that on their own. I had an nitrogen tank I was using for welding, and took it to the school. It was issued by the same company that supplied the Public Schools, so that was the cover up if they happened to find it. I loosened the knob a little and flicked the switches off and on, building up static. The last time I flicked the switch off, I could hear that little click, and I knew the next one would be it. I positioned myself halfway out the back door of the place and turned the lights on.
“Kerfloom!”
It was something to see. They said half the first floor became a fire tunnel. Three classrooms and the lunchroom went up.
I was okay for a while. For three years, I didn’t think about it at all. Until we had Leo Junior,
then I thought about it all the time. I could see the kids’ faces, all crispy and charred, following
me around. That’s why I started drinking. I never talked about it to anyone but this sonofabitch who says he knows about truth. Well, I’m too tired to go on. I can’t carry him around anymore. I don’t give a damn if I die. I got nothing to lose.
So, I’m glad I had the chance to tell you this story. I know you didn’t come in here for all
this. You just wanted a cup of coffee and a newspaper. But I’ve been watching you. You one of
my favorite people. I wish people saw folks like you more often. They would say different things
about Chicago police officers. You are truly one of Chicago’s finest. And that’s why I know you’ll
do the right thing and take me in. And when they put you on the stand, I want you to tell them to give me the ‘chair’.
I mean, it’s only fair, isn’t it?

Leo's confession

So, this sonofabitch comes to talk to you about truth and sincerity and Jesus Christ, but he
tells you I got the restraining order against me because I went to my wife’s house. That’s a
frigging lie. I apologize for cursing earlier. It’s got to stop. It must stop. Anyway, he’s
framing me just like he did that day, tricking me into going over there. Don’t believe a damn
word he says. He wouldn’t know the truth if he stepped right in a big pile of it. And then he
names it “Leo’s Last Word.” I ought to know when my last stand is. I’ll tell you all of it.
I have always had a difficult life. My parents came from Poland with the shirt on their
backs and dirt on their hands. They sacrificed everything for me and never let me forget it.
It was eight years in a two room apartment before they had me. My mother always talks about how I never cried, never made a sound when I was a baby. They say I was always aware of my responsibilities. My mother said I didn’t want to add to their problems by crying. I don’t know what it was, but I know that by the time I was six, I realized there wasn’t a damn thing to cry about, since crying didn’t change anything.
My folks didn’t need me crying but working, so I started working when I was eight years old.
Pop had had a stroke and was laid up. I took on the chin at school, and that’s when my head started hurting all the time. I took all kinds of work—shoveling snow, toting, painting, cleaning out people’s garages. A guy paid me fifty bucks one time to set his car on fire. I did it and took the money home, and our rent was paid for three months.
I loved watching the car burning. The fire was so red and so forceful. I know I sound like a fruit, but there is no other way, after all these years, to describe it. It was a gas! I loved smelling the rubber from the tires burn. My eyelashes got singed from the heat when the car exploded, but I knew I was on to something. That was also the first time he showed up. I know he was trouble because he goaded me, always talking about setting something on fire. I’d be gone for half an hour and I’d end up sitting in my car with a sack of matches and a full can of gasoline. I-I-I s-s-set fire to a d-d-d-dog I found in a park because he told me it was half-
dead and needed to be put out of its misery. Even then I knew it was a lie, but I didn’t care because I wanted to see it burn. I heard it scream.
I st-st-st-till do.

Wound Management

Consider the laceration.

Consider how, with time, open wounds attempt to close themselves through internal forces. Inflammation is a gathering of healing ingredients, a war chest, a preparation phase for the battle, when fibroblasts proliferate and position themselves for collagen synthesis. A network of capillaries and nerves rewire themselves. Turnover within the wound continues indefinitely.

Consider your scar: not a blemish but a steady reminder that the impulse of the universe is to heal.

while he speaks

seal the border, halt
for any to use to check
most would self deport
then we can turn the clock
check the box and find
five years earlier that she
also stole, that they laughed
that she might look younger
falling apart, nothing but black
in a complement to her

while he sleeps

stop tormenting of helen!
waitress and witness, meteor
shower the obstruction:
a boy with higher
resolution, be able to read
on the image and retain
what he sees to make sense
the epitaph more solid
in graphite, a water
in the night in many ways
because it was stable
and holding him back

when he is frightened

even if the page is blank
especially at night, if only
because there was anyone
able to pinpoint something
either about herself, that’s
nearly accomplishing
the way he had started to feel
fear itself let the rot spread
was built in the mirror
running through before
he anchors in the air
before his fingers curled
the sills mounted as the
original parts rebuilt

Waiting

The phone rings only as often as you ask it to, I thought, eyes on my cell. Ten sentences, chopped, were all I could manage. My worlds and words mangled without the phone call. The same ten sentences circling in my head, the answerless worries. I spun the cell, round and round, on the table, spinning like the idea of a call spun me. I’d tell you what those sentences were, but the words disintegrated further each time, giving meaning to the phrase, distant memories. Each word slipped into my past, a moment that blended with the need for the call, a lost word that couldn’t be turned into an answer, when, if, it finally rang. I’d be rendered into two simple answers, yes and no, the only recourse I’d have by the time the cell buzzed. I stared and spun.

Stella Artois

The train chugs peacefully through the mountaintops, steam wafting into the wind. The curves and bends of the train cut at angles to the curves and bends of the mountain itself. One can almost hear the rattling, but it’s oh so pretty that it doesn’t matter. We’re not on the train anyways, we’re in the crowd down below, watching and waiting for the previews. Inside the comfy wooden snackcar, a bartender’s hand attempts to fill a bell shaped pint class. His hands appear steady, but are not. The train rattles them. Fizz pours over the side of the pint glass. The customer does not care, but the bartender suffers grave annoyance, harrumphing and washing the fizz away. He tries again, to no avail. The lone customer shuffles his feet, out of sync with the train’s rhythm. He suffers from the same annoyance as the bartender now. The man, however, would probably not mind a little fizz in his drink, he is on a train and can look out and be pacified by the scenery afterall. The bartender disappears. All rattling stops. The man does not know why the train no longer seems to be moving, but he can now enjoy his drink in perfection. The bartender sighs, a job well done.