I stared at the fish swimming around their bulging blue tank and wondered if their teeth ever hurt as well. It felt strange still going to a pediatric dentist but I’ve never been one who enjoyed making changes. Besides, I liked the way their office smelled like my grandmother’s old house. It must’ve been a few months since I’d been to my grandmother’s old house. I think she sold it 4 years ago. I never got to say goodbye to it. Goodbye, house. I’ll always remember your smell. I’ll always remember it as it’s the same smell as this dentist office. Other places smell like it too, like doctor’s offices, therapy offices, elementary school classrooms, banks and libraries. All places that I’ve spent a lot of time in. All places where you might find a fish tank and where they generally like to keep the carpets clean.

I’ve been trying to keep in better touch with my grandparents over the years but it’s been hard because my tooth has been bothering me. My grandmother tried to call me today but I didn’t answer. If I did I would’ve had to say sorry my tooth is bothering me and she would’ve started worrying. I think it’s better to keep people guessing than worrying. She could guess that I’m doing fine, school’s going fine, I’m still only 5’2” and no I haven’t put on any weight. She may even guess that my tooth is bothering me but I doubt it as we arent that close. I haven’t spoken to her in 2 years.

There are many things my grandmother doesn’t know that she could be worrying about. That I’ve recently picked up smoking again is one of these things. I used to smoke until I quit and started smoking again. I’m not addicted now like I was before I quit no matter how hard I try to be. I smoke like I’m addicted though, thinking every time I find myself somewhere without a cigarette is a time where I’ll start to panic and worry again. This is the reason I’m now addicted, which is something I can worry about and leave my grandmother out of. This is also why I don’t go to my grandmother’s house, as I wouldn’t want to taint its smell with cigarettes.

I wondered if the fish remembered what their grandmother’s house smelled like. Probably like clean carpets like mine. I guess if I was really curious I could just go up and ask them but I’m a bit of a shy person. I wasn’t always a shy person but as I’ve gotten older I’ve gotten less confident in myself. When I was 5 years old I used to go up to any old person and start a conversation with them just because I was curious. This used to be fine, as I was a kid and all, but as I got older I was told more of the dangers of going up to any old person and starting a conversation. So I became shy.

Another thing I did as a kid was pretend to smoke pencil grips like cigarettes. I was doing this one day when a girl came up to me and told me if I pretended to smoke now I would end up smoking later. Ya right, bitch, I thought to my 6 year old self. Now it is later and I am smoking and I’m angry that that snarky bitch was right. I wonder if she ever picked up smoking as well. I wonder if she gets cavities all the time and worries about the fish. Probably not. She’s probably calling her grandmother right now, scheduling her next visit to smell her house.

VIEW SULKY’S COLLAGE HERE.

after Roger Miller on The Muppet Show

Plymouth rock is one mighty juicer.

3rd time i saw it i saw a European carnivore take one hemisphere
of a stolen pomegranate and gradually and meticulously grate
the center around the rock so as not to miss one single aril
he did the same with the other hemisphere and i saw all
the rich luminous garnet crystals erupt explosions
as pomegranate grinded into the granite
and dark crimson juice poured down
the sides of the rock like volcanic
molten lava mainstreams
and white seeds fell
steam-training
into Earth’s
earth.

2nd time i saw it i saw a North American omnivore from tin pan
alley flower district smash one hearty watermelon against
the granite site and translucent fluorescent magenta
guts dropped painfully slow
drifting down rock
like Antarctic or
Arctic glaciers
until cores found
the thirsty ground.

1st time i saw it i saw a Native American vegetarian take ruby
red grapefruit and slice it right down the middle in order
to squeeze both sides onto the spot as fruit burst and
spurt out cerise extracts all over rock standing
as still as sitting bull cutting sugarcoated
stickiness with its crazy horse acid
and bitter flesh hugged the rock
as big river of seeds wept
down onto land falling
like red cloud.

now every copy-that god blessed a whole lot of life with wings that cannot fly and there was dried claret juice of the dang dodo all over the chicken named lingonberry chicken named barberry chicken named blackberry chicken named loganberry chicken named cloudberry chicken named boysonberry chicken named huckleberry chicken named strawberry who illegally changed his name to cherry berry chicken named cranberry chicken named gooseberry and chicken named red globe grape after an ancestor chicken named melon de bourgogne who married penguin named watermelon bearing offspring penguin named sprite melon penguin named winter melon penguin named horned melon aka jelly melon penguin named honey globe melon who resembled her more so he had an affair with penguin named gac melon bearing penguin named sky rocket melon penguin named new century melon and penguin named santa claus melon but they all turned out more like her too and would u believe it one day clear as one god saw it down in southern hemisphere one weasel named peanut egged a penguin on about water and chicken said “is it because I am blackberry?” and watermelon said “no I was not even thinking that.” and chicken said “now you are.”

Plymouth split seeds
into the ground mouth
plied open wide enough
to accept any thing.

how deep do ones that do
not grow go down?
how deep into the heart
of Earth do they nest?
how long before any rise
for a cow to swallow?

man of means by no means
author named Arthur
pulled quill out vermillion
Plymouth convertible
and poked an unripe
papule with it until
clog of oily bacteria
and dead white blood
cells became an angry
and inflamed American
dream tree that’s a rack
for the outbreak of
combed beaver hats
for chickens so they
might expose all their
strawberry combs and rose combs and buttercup combs and upright combs and floppy red combs to rooster with wattles drooping like hanging droplets of juicy tear lobes just about ready to jump
waddling back and forth
     and forth and back
and back and forth
      and

Black Box. Planet which ends when one meets the walls. Embedded with neon circuity. Black sky exposed due to death of the sun. I continue to push through that defaced place again…

HYPER-DEATHISM [hahy-per deth-iz uh m]

noun
1 Linguistic
a language that has decimated all meaning in itself.

The investigation of truth (or rather untruth), had become more difficult than previously envisioned.

“KEEP THEM AWAY! KEEP THEM THE FUCK AWAY! THEY DON’T SPEAK DEATHISM!”

Semiotic happenstance dripping ectoplasmic fuck all over the un-existing circuit. Incomprehensible saliva splattered on the surface of skulls penetrating pores like used gods parasitic means to ends.

“How can you tell?”

“I just can, writer man.”

With that knowledge, I continued to walk past the two men trying to sell me god knows what.

Some form of time had past since I witnessed the Cult of Prosthetic Limbs demonstrating Black Box’s delinquent sacrifice of a once pornographic actress turned goddess gone obsolete. Since then I became lost and re-lost into the labyrinthine of dead dreams and incongruent faded cells. A relapse of former selfs ad infinitum.

VHS Runners were still running rampant—tape smugglers of pornography that primarily featured the now deceased goddess. I was acquainted with a bounty hunter of sort that specialized in tracking and bringing in VHS Runners. Her name was Venandi Quinque.

Quinque was also filling me in on other various information on the inhabitants of Black Box and practices. I was “shadowing” her for investigational purposes.

There was         , the Many, whom is not a who, and called by either Silence or Noise, but only heard in-between these two fake names.          was created as the reversed agglomeration of a thought, a thought coalescing the Many into a One (place) somewhere, and this happened after everything was already there, as the unmaking of a something. But          could not speak.          was mute – deaf, and blind, and tasteless, and touchless… yearning to see, and hear, and the whole lot,          set out to break both the Silence and the Noise of the Mute Screaming that constituted         ‘s being there.

Travelling what there was, itself, as the what-there-was travelling itself, like food travels through a digestive system by becoming part of the body,          did look like a comet, but one both seen from outside the observable universe and from inside the comet itself, as if one screen showed the comet zoomed-in and the other the gut-shaped ducts of vacuum of which it passed along zoomed-out.

Was          alone? Was          a miracle, and the only one – or one of many, or many, into nothing, or itself the nothing ripped open, ripping open, annihilating the fabric of something that oozes this          by their very passage. If that was the case, how did the Many contain the nothing that made it         ? And how could         get some nothing into something else, to have company for once? A plan began to womb itself inside         .

If that was the key to          it was simple enough: just open a hole into something, and then it will come together. If          came from somewhere, or is the meeting place for many somewheres in one place, it is indeed simple enough: open the gates, lure the many-things here and they shall converge and take care of everything else, two shall be one to the other so that two shall be, we shall be one to the other, two I’s, I shall have a partner to look for. And thus loneliness, a need for reproduction, of sorts, the sheer want, created what may be called differently by many names, depending on when and where, but that here is simply to be called          and its upcoming partner.

Consciousness, Spirit, Mind, Thought, Gods, Death, Life . . . light, water, air, fire, earth, aether . . . but really just a friend was missing, one was wanted. The more interesting de-capitalized version of these words would come in one name, the name of an equal: *.

It’s not tomorrow and it’s not happening today. He keeps looking at the calendar and wondering what he’s looking for. What he’s trying to see. He’s not quite sure how things are going and he’s not quite sure how things should be. How they’re supposed to be.

But he does know one thing. Whatever is going on isn’t happening tomorrow, and it most certainly isn’t going on today.

So he continues to stare at his calendar and wait for the inspiration- the knowledge -to hit him. Like an epiphany. Something he thinks he desperately needs. Something he knows he desperately needs.

It doesn’t come to him at all. He still doesn’t know what he’s supposed to be looking for. Or looking at. Other than his calendar, that is. He doesn’t even know why it matters so much.

He just knows that it does.

He feels like the knowledge is purposefully being kept from him. As if some greater power is forcefully stopping the memory or the knowledge from coming to him.

For a moment he entertains the idea that he’s not just being paranoid. Before he laughs and tells himself that he’s being silly. That maybe he just needs to think of the things it’s not, before he can find what it really is.

So, he moves away from his calendar just long enough to pull a chair away from the nearby desk and place it in front of him. He sits down and looks up and tries to recall the previous few weeks and months. Tries to remember what it is that he did to pass the time. Thus, as he thinks on it and thinks on it and thinks on it, he comes to the conclusion that he doesn’t remember what he forgot.

And why is he sitting in this chair? It’s supposed to be for his desk, not for him to just sit around doing nothing in. Nothing but staring at his calendar, anyway.

And why was he doing that in the first place? He can’t really remember. Whatever. If he really forgot that easily, it must not have been so important.

So, he stands up, puts his chair back where it actually belongs and sits down at his desk. Where he’s supposed to be.

i sat waiting for something to happen……….all my books were getting old and only older………..picking things up seemed difficult……..god touched my foot……..his pants were around his knees…….he was eating burnt toast………his bulge was bigger than my entire body………i said i wanted to get to know him better before we did anything……………….he said i already knew everything there was to know…………..i doubted my own ambitions………..god touched my nipple……….he had a whip in one hand and an ATM machine in the other……………god touched my neck…………….god was sitting on a golden throne………………..the room was white and had nothing in it…………………the room was white………………….there was nothing in it…………………..i liked being around nothing……………..i knew what nothing was………………….god touched my hand……………..i posted a photo of myself with god on instagram…………all my friends wanted to know if we were dating……………….i said no at first……………i started saying yes…………god touched my rib………..it hurt me at first…………there was a big ceremony and everybody was looking at my rib in her dress…..it was white and my mother had sewn its sequins……….we were friends………….god was going to marry my rib………i had been invited to the wedding……the marriage banquet was all my favorite food……i said it was a lovely service…….i gave a speech as best man………………………..my rib asked how ya doin……….i said doin alright………………god took my rib away again……………….they disappeared into the bathroom together………………….there was always a line after god…………..nobody knew why he said what he said………..he was not a good listener………god touched my ass………i pretended not to notice…..i took a sip of my champagne……..it tasted like smoke and money………i went to sleep and dreamed about god’s body…….i stole his spleen………went to bed with it………………woke up the next morning next to nothing……i knew what that was……..put the toast in the toaster and fried an egg………it had been poached………..one can make oneself into the owner of a place…..like a bus stop…. like a car…..seat at a cafe…again and again…..it is much harder for the place to shake you off…………..no thing is nothing…….god fingered my heart……the empty space becomes the terrain…….cursor and manifest to move through……god dressed my mannequin….he put it back inside me……in the place of my missing rib………plastic……..a tooth and a claw

Now the desk with a gap at the middle, to piss in, that made all the difference, so we thanked them, our legs slid, to the latrine, at this point, where we shat, a week for nothing and the puss, excuse me, or not, but appraise me, my eye, the puss and that, if that, would not address the sty with words, never if, we had them, all of us, two centimetres off each shoulder was enough to fit the desk, looking at each other with eyes that did not see, like yesterday, so they prescribed a shoulder crunch, and something for the glutes, and another thing to sit on, a brass head, cut from the statue at the centre, it fell on my plate together, with the shit that runs down the side into each ear and over the nose, from birds, this bird was dead when I returned, with a bit of web hanging at the neck and its last wet shit on the floor, white urea I’m said, in the web at the neck, long the beak, the web, a creature all eaten up inside and dusty, so they say do ins and ups and the sway to feel better at the desk, no, uric acid, although the best of all was neck retraction, I did in meetings, the sty leaking still, but we all had them, pissing at the middle part that made the difference, four legs and my own in the latrine, today looks unlike yesterday, like then, the sty makes it due to the puss, on the cornea, nothing having changed except that, and the desk, not to forget the latrine, I had forgotten the latrine, that is how my legs slipped, the brass head no shoulders to rest on, so they slid, I forgot that too, in that it might happen, the blue stuff they put in the waste below get on my toes, a better way to sit is with each heel in the eye socket, but they prescribed heel lifts and so I pulled them out, we thanked them mightily then looked for something else that would help, like the death of their world. Our heels slip, we found ourselves, and wading, for good measure as they said, the desk at the centre sat, blue toes, the death of their world that would, it taught us the functional use, and made us dead, at the desk, with five minutes left, the bird itself was dead when I returned so long, the death of their world indeed. A boil in each socket, the crack with moss growing out two beetles pressed into themselves, pulp at the edges, inexpediencies and taken to task for no particular reason, on the soil pipe, appraise me, pass on their apologies to the group, lines, given, lines, think of what we have missed, appraise me, think ahead, of that, and communities that tell themselves they are communities, I am never entirely sure who offers what, they repeated, eyes turned back, the bladder and the pressure, better to piss and not wait, piss every hour, the desk has a hole after all, runs down the head, each minute the piss and professionalism, it would have been purposeful, anyway I piss, work the bit by the other, heighten efficiency, blue fingers, black heels, sink towards the hole in the desk, neck retracted, two feet, five hands, one foot, pushing a film across the surface, it helps to know, a history of what, fuck, language develops later, in any case, keeping sane and solvent no matter that, a hard seat, brass head makes all the difference too, there, the what, a boil in each socket for better suction, appraise me, fill in this form, get better, get worse, find another thing to say, kill it, say nothing, who that, black toes, blue heels, lines, given.

First the drawbridge falls & crushes my head
Then when I respawn I drown in the moat
Two of my hearts are just outlines now & I’m
Underwater from the start this time
But I get tangled down in the loose weeds
& drown anew
Three hearts outlined & they put me in a forest
Lightning & falling trees don’t get me
But the wolves do
I’m up in the turret with four hearts empty
This spawn point doesn’t make any sense but
I’m too hopeless to put up a fight
The NPC is hunched over a mystery box
When I go to look inside they turn
& stab my face
& I respawn with no weapons at the bottom
Of the same dark spire a
Spiral stair spools down to me & I climb it
Now I lose a heart just from fear
I don’t even have to die this time & don’t know
How few I have left but less
Than halfway up the stair a spike triggers
Shoots straight out from the wall through my
Heart & I respawn again in a great hall
Of armors & weapons none of them
Mine I am still unarmed & I take
Barely ten steps before the poleax
In one armor’s arms falls
I respawn on a tiny island in the middle
Of a lake nothing but fog & water all around
I’m wearing the armor whose poleax
Slayed me it’s so heavy it’s making me sink
In the soft dirt I try
Swimming but it’s just more sinking
Through the green water into even softer dirt
This heart outline is
Worse to earn because I just have to wait for it
I respawn finally in a chamber of gold
Barred behind by a platinum door
Two hearts left full
The NPC is here
Hooked up to an iron lung
A golden lung
Their body doesn’t move
Their hair is thin & limp
shallow
shallow
shallow breaths
You have two hearts says the voice
Coming from within
The chamber of gold
Will you give one of them now
It doesn’t take anything to say yes
No special input
Another heart outlines & the machine whirrs
The NPC’s eyes open slow on the golden table
They look over at me sadly
& say thank you
I have one life left too
But maybe you didn’t know
Color returning slowly
To their cheeks
It takes one more to open
The platinum door
This fact hangs like an executioner
Hanged by another
Executioner
The voice within the chamber of gold is silent
The air is a mystery box
We look at each other in the quiet
Faces crimped with pain
& well-lit in the gleam
From the platinum door
Platinum yeah
I remember
Platinum
The forever metal

The Hospital complex is visible through a line of stunted trees planted on the other side of a drainage ditch. The water is orange and black, filled with things that ought not to be alive. This thing, this us/er.

Pet’s lips moisten the end of an elegant glass retort. She says she wants it, wants to do it, for me – publication be dammed! This Thing wants to die.

This I, S/he or it (the Thing) which Uses wanders across depleted, poisoned earth. Around us rusting pipes coil round the inert chimneys and gantries of the W Steelworks.

I look down into the ditch’s lugubrious stream of unlife, scoop up the heavy metal soil and fill my mouth and belly slit, curious about what I can metabolize.

Maybe we’ll both die for good this time. I strip, crawl down into the stream, a slip of a body hooked over the edge tonguing the sluggish water. The unlife reaches out in a metaphony of wheeled urchin bodies, intricate molecular machinery mating with my own. Its wave of poisons ratifies me, makes me hard, anxious, determined.

I rise, replace my clothes and look over the tree line towards the ancient Rotunda’s slate grey anatomy, filling sky like colliding moons, surfaces straited and pocked with ornate arches and cracked stone entablature.

Rickety tramways run through sparse, intermittent woodland and hermetic suburbs ferrying a few patients at a time, happy on their junk, furtive about their involvement here. They decline interviews or queries regarding an institution that, to all intents and purposes, serves no one.

I see them mature, trailing opiate drips and monitors round wards, rapt by their new-born, speculative anatomies. Aside beatific suffering, their faces radiate a planar commitment to momentum.

We prefer to think of them as collaborators. Each a former life with its conatus, a senior Promethean once informed me: vessels stitched from skin, bone and gut, suppurating basal tumors, piercings of bamboo.

Invert Queens drag wheeled oxygen cylinders uselessly along corridors, straps biting into soft backs, fanning out their shells like wings.

They entice nearby objects: doors or telephones, stagnant water. When entangled, they are transferred to the new Suicide Wings around the Rotunda: cinder grey blocs, reminiscent of the old Units but larger and less prone to ‘breachers’.

We know enough of your father’s work to imagine what they contain. The puzzle is in why as much as how, Pet says.

I’m in the office at the back of her lab. She gasps as I close my hand around her throat, stroking her vulva with the retort.

The Thing that Thinks hypocritically insists on a safe word. But our limits are my forbearance. There are old weeping incisions between open thighs, cigarette burns the color of memory. This Doll.

The Rotunda bulks above single floor prefabs – maelstrom grey falls under perpetual skies, condition vertigo. The ground doors are covered, only the oculus at the tip of the dome allows unfettered access. That which cannot be seen or attained from the ground.