Elaine had been waiting for her husband to return from work since 5:00 in the afternoon. It was getting dark and the chicken was rotting in the oven. Even the cat seemed restless, Elaine thought, though this could not possibly be true. Everything was at rest, and clean, and she sat still in her seat. Elaine, the house, felt a rush of air in her belly, the cavernous room made of windows. She had opened a window to her internal organs one day and it got stuck like that. It didn't feel like much, being a hopelessly drafty room, listless, dark; with windows wide open, but blinds (letting in every gust of wind) that were not so welcoming to light. It never felt quite like inside, nor like 'outside', and people had to repeat themselves quite often because she found it very hard to understand things over the wind, and their voices could easily go in one window and out the other in a turn of the breeze.
Marooned again
Underwater boat lumps over the sunk ship
Slowly buzzing outisde down trees over a swarm of bees
Lost my keys in the swamp
The water's out and about
Hovering over the glider
Wandering clouds over the highway
Didn't see a rider
Not blind enough though he could not see
Lost his ears it's been years
Down in a hat smiles now he's overhead
Hitting me over and over again
Ominous glimmer open a black binding box
See people yelling
Smiling widely at the open sea
Chitter chatter teeth pitter patter at the dock
Seven o'clock stones floating
Rock on the dining table
Hollow pumpkin sinking at the bottom
Blinkless fish bobbing upside down
Loose scales rattle and gleam in the sun
Gray rays cast ships away
Wave amplitude lines muddying the water
Seaweed tree acesending downward
Bubble boring into a bottle
Angular split divisions
Bleeding sea lions emptying their intestines
Seagulls eating bugs in the water
Brimming cups spilling overboard
Wood mold starting on the open seams
Nails loosening in the dirt
Yawn at the gutter
Paper scrape a hundred times
Cat claws at the matchbox
Chips clink against the glass
Sectarian musk dries over air
Tripitych trips over the subject
Spolied butter in the fridge
Hair stiffens at the roots
Perpendicular chops at fifteen after the hour
Drops turning sour gleaming on
Oily tongues covered in bumps
Serpentine growels over the object
Giant humps from overhead
Leaving their bed now dead
Hungry chamber getting fed
Don't devour halfway in the ground
Stuck listening to groaning sound
Pull strings out of the air
Pretend I care
Open rooms sharing dust
Rust creeping down the hallway
Orange mist puffs turning brown
Horrible envelopes
Lick until it's leaking
Peeking through cracks at the ground
Pouuds of sound in a mound
Open box spinning around
Changing water onto chalk surface
Powder dissolving in stream
Cast in unspoken scream
Crackle and wither around litter
Jangling stones
Smooth rocks at the bottom on the pond
Browning salamander ozzing from cracks
Stomach churning
Molten bugs
Grotesque eggs squeezing from pores
Fleshy and swollen
Messianic zeal peels away from the fruit
Rotting on the basalt in the searing sun
Blisters emerging on the surface of the meat
Scorching heat
Kneeling convict scraping his knees
Gaping mouth consumes the body alive
Emptying chambers
Tongue slicks over distented lips
Solar eclipse
Slipping over air dripping with despair
Masses spinning with intoxication
Banana peels seeping contamination
Whole pig on a plate
millie from biblical tales
4. Millie Smith, housewife. Her husband's at work again and the neighbors at church, but she gave up on God a long time ago. She's sitting there thinking about the last moment. She had just returned from her hourly shopping excursion with a bag full of fascinating new trinkets and objects; gemstones and diamonds and a clairvoyance-machine; but she tossed them all aside and the crystal ball shattered and filled the room with black fog---she pulled out the most exciting object of all, multi-colored popcorn seeds. Dancing nymphs erupted from the stove and she placed her finest metal bowl above them. She poured them in. The multi-colored popcorn seeds. She sat in wait, staring ahead as though spellbound by the spiral impasto in her commercially painted walls but really deep in the deepest corner of thought, gazing out from the peripherals of her mind into yonder lands; trees covered in iridescent dust and wind forming visible spirals of foam and sand and the popcorn, which was in all shades of blue and orange and red, like the kernels.
4.2 Millie went to check on her popcorn and saw white. Then she saw white. Her vision faded in rage and she grabbed at the pot (charring her hands in the process) looking for a single one in the shades she'd seen in her vision, but there was nothing but white, corn, consternation, and she stumbled and fell in yet another attack of hysteria. She reached to phone her psychoanalyst but she passed out before she could dial two numbers. Unconscious, she was transported to the land beyond she saw before. She walked around the impossible trees crying and her tears floated off her face and evaporated into the wind; she sobbed and sobbed until the disturbed wind, collecting around her hair, formed a tornado and swept her up to the top of the atmosphere, where she saw the sun get caught in the spiral and fling God's light all around to the darkest corners of the world and enflame everything at once with His resplendence. Where before was darkness Millie saw demons and amalgamations of discarded flesh, trisected quadrapedes and strange worms recoiling from the light, and she felt herself drawn to them and away from the light. She realized, that the light of God was the radiance of an atomic bomb pulsing down from the heavens and leaving everything in its wake skinned and burning, the hair on her body and the skin on her spine. The colored popcorn was nowhere and not for her to see, nor for the creatures that lurk in the recesses of heaven and hell and her mind, and she realized that God must be absolutely hostile to her.
4.3 Millie woke up feeling more lucid than ever before, as though she had removed the eyes that elevated her like a cockroach with a pen, and could finally see with the flesh and veins that lay underneath. Her eyes, she felt, or touched, were a distraction from the true sense. She pulled out her finest metal spoon and felt around her eye socket, carefully, pushing deeper and deeper until she took the plunge and scooped out her eyes at once, and scraped away all the flesh that remained in the sockets. The world was dark, but it was the most beautiful darkness, and she laid on the ground and laughed, and laughed, and laughed, feeling heaven in her hands and she squished and stroked the gouged-out flesh and for the first time, truly felt.
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