Dead Flowers

By David White

In the first book, "Dead Flowers", everything in the world is made of Dead Flowers.
In the second book, "Coffin Music", everywhere we go we hear death's music.
In the third book, "Stardust Warehouse", our bodies are depositories for stardust.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664186828

David White

David White was born on 30 October 1967 in Manchester, England. A former professional footballer, he played as a forward from 1986 to 1997. He is best remembered for his eight-year spell at Manchester City. He also played for Leeds and Sheffield United, and was capped once by England.

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Copyright © 2021 by David White.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 07/27/2021

Xlibris

844-714-8691

www.Xlibris.com

827212

CONTENTS

Dead Flowers

Coffin Music

Stardust Warehouse

DEAD

FLOWERS

Temples. Tree shadows, purple yards, twilight stars, yellow guns.

Street car shadows… still branches.

A car turns. a dog sniffs, there’s a face in a stain, a discarded bun, penumbras by post office columns near a courthouse with dirty windows. A homeless sleeper leans on a bus bench. a tree is still. odor comes from a restaurant, a hat is caught, a cup leaks, dry bread wait behind a bench, a one-way street sign is stuck in concrete. A cushion resists idiotic winds. Traffic flashes.

Rocks are in pockets. Sweltering heat sleeps. someone is eating grapes, there are unusual dreams of loved ones, planes flying upside-down, circles of architecture in sky.

Africa is calling.

Rusty plumbing. Cracks in walls. a lighthouse. calling out, falling, Berkeley reject, sex-party smiles, bent wrists, cell phones on sidewalks. Struck June. Everyone with hair… Out of sorts.

My life to this point.

A pink light from a fire station. silhouettes in windows, soft evening walls. High light. a yellow smile.

Dead flowers.

Mr. Green-nickel. a crumpled napkin in a parking lot, Samba music heard, burning mouths seen and red tears, xylophone notes heard, shines on car seats seen, TV screens, a boy in a green shirt.

Mr. Green-Nickel?

Ahora…

Gentle breezes felt, a reflection of a van in a window seen, a lamp hanging (sad, drunk and dark reddish-brown), a fig tree in a pot with sad dry leaves seen, a hat on a chair, a painting of sunflowers.

SALSA BAR, the sign said.

I’m not hungry. But he was… under a white beard, a smiling face (hers), fat with television. He took his green shirt off, a wheel spun behind a boy talking to silence. A girl wiggled, her neck long. a wheelchair. a walker. mirror-like shine on painted floors. a kid with a straw in a drink cup.

No composting.

She looked down, innocently. a girl w/ a long nose & shaggy blonde hair, dry. (she had a face with a heart).

Dark lines crossed windows,

black lines cut through white squares on a ceiling.

A boy waved his arms. he looked as if he was ice skating. A kid held a paper as if burning.

Push for me, said the yellow barrier, a sound seat. a smiling girl. a silhouette in a night window. Bars across skylights. Michael Crabtree. Shoes by a sofa. Tattooed cherry blossoms.

hands holding plastic buckets.

Refreshments, in green. Blueberry Pomegranate Smoothie. 99 cents.

(a scream)

A pink dress, a chrome light fixture.

ATHENA Starr. head-ache. air vent. Children playing, a floor bouncing.

Photo of a leaf. her foot inside an oversized shoe…

Girls jumping onto leaps of faith. pushing buttons. a 3 o’ clock Box, 11 kids.

She had no humor. Pepsi’s got a lot to give. Closed Monday, shadow of an old woman, a large red truck blocking a parking lot staring into space. A cartoon rocket in cartoon clouds… Shadows on a wall.

She sang along with a song on a radio, pushing buttons and laughing.

Hair dyed black.

She was guilty. She was happy…

Spackles of light & dark were spread on sidewalks near a post office.

An inflated hand was bloated & bleached white. There was a shadow on a door, a penumbra, & yellow bumps of plastic on a crosswalk,

black pants staring straight ahead.

Photogenics, a sign said. A radio moaned, a top-hat painted ghost-silver, a cabin in the woods, fires in the air, a white table cloth.

Hurt my heart, the song said.

I know it’s dark… It’s through dying. Cue the rain." Gravity pulls the Beatle, a license plate on a V.W. bug, great poems lost…

Judge a lake.

A tumbled down cottage with sagging doors, dust window sills, refrigerators unplugged.

A flattened cup blows down an alley. Revolutions start from my pillow…

A toothpick in a crack in a road next to rotting bread (with blue mold), people in trucks with engines running…

Come on thieves, said Mr. Dreary-Time-For-for-rain.

An urban net,

red in a puddle. All Sales Final. A boy in an oversized red shirt. east bound.

His target… kisses.

Rocky! said a man in black, out of step.

Way out west there was a shiny bumper. She smiled under straight blonde, wheat-colored hair. Tufts buy an angel. A boy’s hair is up in back.

Spirals in an afternoon. Ghosts before breakfast.

Blue eyes are unperturbed at what she’s seeing. She’s walking quickly on squirming feet toward the children’s home. Some of them are smoked.

Tell baby to stop. Moving pictures.

Turn the volume up. Before you, a weathered house. w/ startled Chevys… and a Red fence. Dead flowers.

The top of a weasel to you.

I stand in a window looking at clouds over an ocean.

Cushions, a thimble, a candle holder with no candle in it, a sock, a hat, a dish w/ something blue stuck to it, a dead (stuffed) bird, a painting of an ear on a wall, a yellow kitchen on Page Street…

Her window looked out on someone’s backyard. There was fall grass & pale dead weeds, a rusty weather vane (a rooster, I think), a clock registering air pressure hanging on an old cabinet, one part for rain, another for wind, sun, moisture, the wood of cabinets grey (used to be brown).

On the kitchen wall, a flight of metal birds (left by a previous tenant).

She found them in a hall closet, liked them, put them on a wall above the kitchen table by tapping in small nails using a brick she found in the back yard in wet grass.

She liked them at first but now she wasn’t sure!

When she looked really close she could see their eyes were glazed over with a metallic, serene look she didn’t like.

All is fair, said love and war.

The Monkey House was out of order.

Lines in the street crossed. Some parallel.

A squirrel chewed a hole into a neighbor’s house. dried leaves were blowing, making scraping sounds on sidewalks. I heard sound from back of a brake pedal. When a foot was taken off the accelerator to use the brake, instead of clearing the brake the top of the foot hit the back of the pedal & made a thunk or shudder sound (or both at the same time).

Natalie Wood ran up the concrete steps. She saw her parents who had come to visit her at the asylum where they’d put her in, Splendor in the Grass.

A disturbing black & white photo showed a pretty blonde girl of 3, a bullet hole in the middle of her forehead, her eyes dead-looking eyes, open & blue, staring into emptiness (not seeing anything. nothing registered).

A malfunction in the monkey house.

The rain came. The outhouse door had a crescent moon in it and was tipped over into the dust in Bodie, California in high desert.

Gone to Lunch, a sign said in a cracked store window… (but really they’d gone gold-hunting). A rusty 1929 truck looked north-east toward loveless hills, stars all night long spinning overhead to make me dizzy…

Loveless hills…

Red valley. her hair blowing into my mouth, gulping words. A dead tree leaned left, tall weeds growing on the side of the road. A

closed restaurant, white teeth (shining in dark), intense eyes, a camera in a ceiling, a microphone. dark. A silhouette moving in front windows expressing wedge-shaped light and shadows. A white stripe on a lawn.

5 spokes.

Cartoon bells. music saying: I think you’ll like it… You’ll really like it. a grey-haired lady reacted… O, yes I like it…

Something we lost… (sweet innocence).

A tiger’s shining yellow head heard a child’s laugh. Twelve-forty, someone noted. blue berries on TV. Greasy stains (two) next to each other on a sidewalk w/ an unusual red curb.

A Girl (or young boy) laughed like a demon. a mannequin wore a wedding dress. It didn’t have a head. A black man smiled at me as I took the picture. He kept walking…

Careful. A white car pulled out from a tire store parking lot.

Hello Gent, a boy on a bike said to me.

The sun set. A white building leaned over from an alley. A

man, limping on one side (from a stroke) walked by a window with a cane & looked at me. Did I notice him? he seemed to ask.

Yes. even though there was no profit in it…

Callitrots, he said in a hesitating voice.

A dying bird stood in a penumbra on a hot day on asphalt & concrete. His sincere eyes pleaded with me to help it (it wanted a miracle).

(dead flowers…)

It was not dirty or filthy. It was a thing to be analyzed.

Certainly young girls were cruel & selfish but they also loved without calculation & because of this we called them angels…

He was rotting with apples in the ground.

Temporary light shined at night through naked limbs of a tree, making its shape high up on a midnight wall across Court Street for a just a few seconds…

Later

Shadows of leaves in streetlights trembled. A car light continued toward a destination. Its spray of light disappeared. The silhouette of the tree blended into the general & vague blackness of shadows, just like it was before the car left the parking.

Dead flowers.

A guitar solo repeated in an empty hair cutting establishment (flowers made of dead plastic).

Children screamed in an empty pool. Dryers & washing machines were silent & quiet… I stand in a hot day, thinking of water.

OUTRAGEOUS PRIVACY.

High on a wall, light disappears, a wall filled by dark blue

A pale white

mousy mustache. Glasses dangle from the neck of a T-shirt. Guns fire, baby goats drink milk, a man wears false eye glasses. He’s polite but the audience is unsure. Sternly they disapprove of what they do not understand, conservative with pinched mouths.

They don’t like the light fixtures.

They laugh (even if they pee their panties a little).

Interview the audience and find out! Some are funny. some come off pinched & cruel, bitter, selfish & out for revenge with masked eyes and twisted mouths that want to smile but can’t (moisture rings on a table top made by a cup look like a skull vomiting… w/ empty eyes).

An upper wall is blood red, the lower part ocher.

She left her purse in a booth. A janitor found it. Is this yours? during a blizzard on September 19th.

Spirals on staircases.

A small packet of sand from a sand castle… a miniature car for an ant (trees are restless in the wind). A tent in a backyard, a lion’s head in discoloration on a sidewalk, bird shit splattered on a sidewalk shaped like a supernova or the shadow of a girl.

Shadows of flags flap on the ground near a low crease in a fast food parking lot, place for rain to drain.

Late afternoon shines shockingly bright off the back hump of a shiny ceramic tiger waiting calmly & staring north ready for the children to arrive… 4 electronic Basketball players shoot for a basket.

A boy wanted food but was too shy to ask. It’s 107 outside, hot but not unendurably so but almost…

There is a bright line of chrome. (she cleaned grass clippings off her seat with a grey rag then smiled at me).

Someone left them there… grass clippings on the seat.

Most transactions (communications) between people are in code. What this exchange really said was: There is a mess here but I didn’t make it!"

Her smile also said (a smile as suppressed aggression), "My smile may or may not suggest I am friendly and affable. You are old so I probably would NOT sleep with you however because I am somewhat a plain-looking woman, I might consider it. I must stop here for now because a further comment on my part might be considered flirtation. My smile though keeps open the possibility of me saying ‘yes’ later on while also giving me the opportunity to look you over so I can make a final determination as to whether or not I will consider sleeping with you and it will also will give you a chance to look me over, to speak to me to determine whether or not you are interested in me… It gives me a chance to note your flaws and your good points, your erotic qualities…

"You and I might continue our connection by pretending YOU have placed the lawn clippings on MY seat (probably not but we can pretend can’t we?). This way we can extend our exchange which might lead nowhere but which then again might lead somewhere as well…

"This way we will have further chances to examine each other and consider various possibilities!…

"Your smile, though ironic may be hiding plans of seducing me but also there is another, perhaps deeper idea being communicated which is that you are a clown, a joker (and also maybe just a lonely old man looking for a little attention…

A deeper possibility is dead flowers… (mortality in general)

Two people look into each other’s eyes to find out what may be there… (there’s always something isn’t there?... Even emptiness contains something!).

A line in the dirt. Grey black hair on tile, eye-glasses on a table.

(a woman showed me her breasts on Easter morning… dead flowers).

Feathers of dead parakeets were blowing in the air-conditioning. There was a mole on the calf of her left leg, a boy in a purple shirt, a fat girl with a purple-pink line across top of her chest (I noticed this as she talked on her cell phone).

A baby said, Bye… Bye… Bye, over & over again.

Freedom is what I want.

Veins stuck out of an old woman’s sagging arm which ended in a hand that clutched the top rounded head of her cane. A tall lanky fellow w/ pointed beard stared straight ahead (his eye Blue? Brown?), his look determined.

Sheep gratification on campus, grateful death of Radio-Shack’s open ended music investigation of a cheerful party. An insistent chair by a table. Upstairs at the Shadow Inn where a stroke took her interesting son in a propelled baby-cry. They took her to Federal Investigation Hospital to open her up.

What did you do with the sun, Dr. Pane? she asked. The examining glass was close & the CIA was filled w/ bees (the building contained a giant bee-hive).

Land, an underwear pressure suit, sometimes sterile, a lamp shade of human skin.

A fire broke out at Vacaville. down near the lake of worship, temples and a purple wall, set up for a pre-war game of pre-war. (off-duty fiction). We never had a chance, said a young girl in a rare contribution.

Wind pressure was a problem.

(He smiled & said It’s alright).

Sure. In the evening.

Speakers fight. The council links.

She’s a very special beauty Queen, a mechanical pain, has steady spokes, works for the HB set-up. She’s a wonton trigger for 289 dollars a month, has 2 nephews and will revise it." (a Bell-jar too…).

A fly crosses slowly a brown table top, through striped sun & shadow caused by window blinds, sun hanging over North East street… in the North edge of town near empty fields with large white tanks, Food Producer’s Inc. on the sides. Shades of Suicide.

From here on we have skin.

Police were arrested for being intoxicated. A banner blew in nameless numberless wind, a white smear of a car passing, light & dark patterns on tree trunks (slowly at first, shadows gaining the upper hand. It was profound. Trees sank into shade behind buildings and houses). A black car moves slowly, its front brakes scraping.

Sometimes my Heart… a song sings with a plucky beat. He walked around under a baseball hat.

Lights from passing cars shined onto ceilings, a soft moving light which was summer, silent & brief music.

(Children screamed too loud. The boy wearing the baseball hat suppressed his disgust and injury. He didn’t want anyone to know…).

It’s my right to not be disturbed. But I refuse to become the angry father who yells, STOP SCREAMING!"

STOP SCREAMING!

A girl with a leopard skin collar swept up…

I’m not going to ride you, a song said. A boy wore camouflage fatigue shorts. A man wore a blue shirt, a flag on the front.

a black man wore a black hat.

An Hispanic girl wore white gloves. What’s the deal? Watcha doing over there? I’m looking for a notary.

I don’t think that’s a good idea.

A pole shadow was fuzzy at the top, stretched & blue while crossing a sun-white sidewalk, June heat not quite July… Hooks dangled from the sun, a gold and white blaring sun.

I didn’t know you were organizing…

My eyes were off.

Details on thighs, stains on a table top (emerald green) looking like hands reaching up to catch something (or perhaps they had just thrown something). Without dimples girls smile (wondering what men see in them).

I’m here to shop for stuffed birds.

No. A surreal world is a dream world. She smiled just above kind fats (that jigged up and down in summer joy).

Thin reeds shot purple shadows onto a sidewalk. An old blind woman stared at her blindness, waiting for a bus she did not want to ride. Girls at the liquor store stare out of magazines… defiant, ecstatic, naked.

Elephants weren’t anywhere… Everywhere I look, I fail to see an elephant (unless grey empty spaces are elephants).

A yellow plastic sign top of a blue taxicab.

A flag pole shadow slowly speared across an asphalt road to a place just to the right of a shaggy tree trunk. A dutiful sun made its slow way down the blue-grey stage of sky…

Seen any good movies lately?

The Afro-pup, in gloomy highland details…

We have so many things at our house for you to play with… (seven year old toys & a pool…). You can shoot a rocket at the house… a plastic toy rocket. We have a pool. It’s one of our favorite movies…

A boy with a soda. He searched through yellow papers then drove off…

Suddenly, there are cousins in windows.

He (or was she a she? I couldn’t see) turned to my left, went down a slight incline of asphalt. This area could have held 4 large houses or grown a half to a ¾ acre of plant life. But…

Instead it is a paved monstrosity & in summer, burning sun burns it down to become a barren & shadeless dead space, absolutely HOT AS HELL… ! (with nauseating heat waves radiating up to burn your feet, scorch your knees & fill your lungs with shortness of breath.

Candy in the paper aisle. a haze of curtains on a purple tree. Joan Crawford in The Dancing Lady…

The Green Dairy is closed. Michael Owens.

Could it be? girls were pretty at weddings.

Who? ‘Flower’ girls?

No. The Brides’ maids…

My skin! yelled skeletons. "It’s been burnt off! I’m raw vegetation. The sun burned right into me like an x-ray to see my soul (it looked like a small burned shoe)…

"I want to sleep for a day in rain (each drop with a number on it).

A fly walked the top of a wood-back chair.

A man sat in the chair, his sunglasses tilted up onto his shaved head. He talked to two other portly men who looked like him. Man 2 & 3 had very short hair but were not shaved.

A woman in a short skirt (with a jazzy pattern) walked by, her feet pointing outwards.

She was looking for someone…

A fat girl sat at the next table. She smiled at me a few times. I was a little embarrassed. I was afraid to smile back. Her friend finally arrived… another young fat girl, this one with a pugged nose. She wore a sweater-blouse, black with white narrow stripes on it.

It was a little tattered…

Blue boy appeared (a six year-old boy, skinny in an oversized T-shirt, blue with some sort of complicated design on the front I couldn’t quite make out - his arms were in front of it).

A 45 year old blonde woman walked by (actually her hair was dyed white). She frowned slightly, a serious, I mean business sort of expression on her face… I think she must have been a smoker. Her face was made of dry, wrinkled skin, the type of skin smokers have…

I saw gum on a sidewalk. It started out pink, became white then black. It became flatter & flatter after being stepped on fifty and then a hundred times.

3 boys pulled up & got out, dead flowers locked safely in their trunk.

Before that, another boy back-blew his golden horn of death (in a spray of air & eternal dust into which our fathers were raped).

I am lost in window reflections, in lights in a restaurant, the back side of a beer sign turned off hanging against white snow sky, eye-level with the backs of soft upholstered seats, some in shadow, some in light made by the impassioned & imprisoned sun (it had been on a quiz show… The face of the sun was a clock face w/out numbers on it because it is eternal and was always pressing against windows trying to get in… creating wedges angling in to make shadow & light.

The windows also reflected light fixtures dangling from upper dark ceilings. (from upper non-space).

Nowhere do I see people shapes, but I see parked cars reflected in glass, waiting for owners to return to them, to place keys in locks, to sit inside & start motors, to push in clutches to make the vehicle move (eventually all the vehicles will be gone…).

Some will go home.

Some will go to a liquor store. Some will visit friends in hospitals after stopping at a florist to buy dead flowers.

What did you tell them?

5 flights to Canada, every day…

I never did get everything down. A leg I found in the Grapian Hills.

a boy pulled a girl (fat) by her hand around the side of a building… She wore a red top & yellow pants (thin) & I think a red baseball cap.

I looked away then looked back & saw they were gone.

They disappeared (forever? possibly!).

Foreign silver. Deep fluid. So. Who borrowed the car? A heartache by the sea. She stood holding my hand (I was terrified of her). She didn’t want to see my kisses. or my dried flowers.

She’d give me gifts (but only small ones. A large gift was a contract. She knew that).

Mr. Pilcham was lying down near the casino sign… not far from a vineyard.

It was a lovely afternoon, the sun burning its own molten metal face…

I don’t want you to think I’m complaining just to get out of paying the check.

What is truth? Is it valuable?

Shine on silverware (made of steel & we put it in our mouths).

Dan Dureyea died.

It was a merry world, of increased smoke, a periglottis in a bush. Staged echoes.

Mommy. I’m cold. She’d been licking an ice cream cone.

Mommy wants some.

Trees have powers, scissor-sharp shadows on side-walks, flat grey, burning bright light of early summer. Hold onto your gifts.

10 and 8.

Fighting ice. Flowers tremble by the pool. There’s a small rippling pond, straight lines rippling crooked as water dissolves the real world (& waters the flowers).

Wind pushes a beach ball (containing laughter of children).

9.20 when filled with oxygen…

Tow truck number 5. a car from Arkansas. Bruise on her right leg below the knee on the calf.

Feathers from a pillow.

Shine on faucets.

Shine on knuckles. We don’t sweep the corners. Shadow of a lamp on a wall. 99 cents written on paper glued to a window…

Caution, an A frame sign said.

5 with a large round circle around it.

She talked about her son’s carbolic acid. Insofar as water washes us home.

She’s talking.

A moderate pastel.

A finition. Waterfall over a concrete curb.

The fourth tire…

(on Fuscia Boulevard – butterflies breed in my hair). A baseball game today, on a bull-ride luxury…

Is it true what he was saying? Cognitive photography… a full beer.

That business is error on stilts. single-issue choices.

Hey! Jo-lene. Come and stamp this!

Crap Haven (for all your toilet needs). We even have dead flowers… for your outdoor toilet.

Let us camp by the fading light of the sea…

He walked along behind a flag on the landing with his head down. It was drizzling rain… I saw Moses… in a perfect purple light.

A blue whale has broken teeth in a small & reasonable digital clock.

At night… bears on pontoons…

Two pebbles & a stick for a smile that made a face on a sidewalk.

Near the door a stain on the floor… (put there in 1911, a year before the Titanic sank).

Dead flowers.

She had no teeth (but still she smiled). She remembered cattle orchards locked out of main street. one-hundred brigades.

She stepped over a shadow on a sidewalk. Her small son stared at a reflection in a puddle of water (not much more than a stain).

Departure for the shadow is 11:20…

In Greece they make shadows for chair-loops.

And now, on a serious note. The audience scrats…

Yearning tree branches shadow. A bottle cap is shiny like a coin, has a boat sail on it.

A yellow fire hydrant has a slate-grey shadow behind it.

$19.99 Foot Spa.

A small streak of sunlight made its way across the shaded front (the side facing south toward Main Street) of the Dutch Bros. #7 outlet façade in shadow.

Everybody knows it’s all right, the song says…

It happened on Main Street.

Insipid music. She wore pink sandals made of plastic. a little girl.

Rushing about

looking for a

game to play…

screaming.

Actors will act for you…

A wedge of sunlight on a yellow wall. A Flamboyant yellow flower reflected in the front window of a house.

Another front window – reflection of a white car’s hood. Reflection of 104 reflected backwards from the house across the way.

A basketball hoop (actually the hoop is missing but the backstop is still there), supported by a metal pole painted with alternating colors (red & white), a grey, flat metal round shape below the backstop for the hoop.

A pirates chest. A cartoon skull behind glass.

She peeked around a wall because what her boys were doing was what she’s doing (not far from the post office, maybe a block or two).

My turn.

No. My turn.

A tattoo of what looks like an ostrich on her left shoulder blade.

The boys are evidence of mother’s sensuality…

Bury the harpoon! right in the sunny toth…

Under the mural of a hill, a woman with shaggy dark hair scowled with Asian insanity on her face. She squatted

Over a table and underneath there were shadows &

lost echoes.

What did you keep. What did you throw away?

Hey! You know how to fix scissors?

I won’t go. It’s a better ranch (including bruises). Art (artifice) succeeds & fails. A Christmas in Africa. A

breath of asphalt air (catch your breath of life before it goes away).

Paula Riley! Come here. ice especially. Go after it. On Camelot Street the houses are run down & people who live there are crazy, drunk & go outside to yell at you on hot days. (also stabbings).

I’m sorry, honey. It’ll be better when the rains come.

(Look through an empty sign & see sky. high on a wall there is a framed word, now gone… some sort of garage or smog repair shop).

You want me to stay awhile?

It’s too bad you missed it. The party was great last night.

This tree is dry and is not getting enough water. It’s going to die.

Is there someone living in the upstairs apartment?

19.99 Foot Spa.

They don’t have eleven spaces.

I’m no lover.

Still. It’s superlative.

You know how I used to know? (Dead flowers).

I’m not ugly. I’m real.

You don’t want ghosts, Alan Ghast?

Lily. I never worry. Not morning time when junk is coming…

You’ll never get that rocking horse in here…

Stay there, post-raid broccoli.

You’d better pug this real estate night time. I think of terror in the parking lot where I was buried… looking up at swirling stars. One more young girl coughed.

We tried it.

A dark trailer was parked next to my car. Beatings will continue until morale improves. A young baby (a week old) whimpered & cried. What is this pain, this heat this cold, these messages cells send to my brain? How am I supposed to interpret all this information & order shrimp cocktails too?... Read faces, learn language, get into a good school?

All these motives. All these agendas! An Asian man in a red apron laughs. Plastic flowers in vases don’t move.

People behind me don’t talk quietly…

If push comes to shove, we could open a fire shop.

That’s hard to swallow… lottery news.

It’s Earth day, again. April 20th somewhere in a discarded camera. Tomorrow we will be discarded. And helpless babies will be reborn.

Cry out real loud in a jungle… So someone can find me. I pull her hair.

Ow! she says.

99 servings of selfishness.

Trains twirl overhead. He sat on a curb clutching his blonde girlfriend. Ever since she dyed her hair, she’s gotten a lot of dates…

The

sill below the window is getting darker & thicker. Stores are still closed.

The tar pit throws up mosquitoes like firework bursts… Red flowers are the deadest. The tar pit (graphic in the grass by two small slender dog turds on a sidewalk covered in flies who have thousands of fly eyes & translucent wings w/ tinges of green.

I’ll call the cops. I’m serious even if I carry a bag with 3 deflated beach-balls inside.

"I’m in the enemy camp. I understand the bottom of the sea is coated with (of course) expired coupons, some of them going back hundreds of years before the gilded age & the machine…

She’s a hot piece of cheese, & has trouble inside swollen jeans…

"Parts of midnight are airtight. I’m going to start naming flies (they are intimate but have no names. The least they can do is introduce themselves like in the movies).

In love w/ dung… These flies are on a sacred mission from god.

(they found her skeleton half buried in sand). She went from movie star to a skull buried in dust… (she was about the right age & height).

Be sure to catch the beaver (that was 40" high).

Everyone wanted to be everyone else’s fantasy… (not really)

She had a small red pimple, near the collar bone of her left shoulder… a friendly kind smile, dirty blonde hair, a camouflage hat (black & pale green in camouflage pattern), light green top, dark blue shorts, large nose (if I can remember correctly. Her face was turned away slightly so I do not have an accurate memory of her profile).

The schizophrenic woman arrived, laughing at her own jokes. She’d had her hair done & imagined a man will fall in love with her as long as she continues to act pleasant & cheerful…

For a crazy person she was surprisingly bourgeois.

A dreadnaught tuba. (she held one).

A crack in a sidewalk. (a boy jumped up & down, clapping his hands trying to get a girl to smile).

Some laughs are examples.

53 buttered tumbrills.

"The sidewalk was stained where dead flowers had been dropped.

‘A funeral on Sunday? In the rain’?"

You can’t plan these things. (she had five fingers)

Lightning reflected on the table top. A circus tent was about to blow down, filling with wind instead of an audience… The wind was being rude.

A feather on a sidewalk inched toward a crack… dark grey, almost black, sort of a dark ‘slate’ grey color. The schizophrenic girl laughed again (her inner voices amused her…)

A shadow moved into a pool. The waters were chilly. In springtime the water would be warmer.

Straight away, light & shadow chiseled wedges into windows, scattering on evening wall(s). People arrived then left with plans, walk past a ladder. Evening was being contemplated but was not yet prepared… A reflection in the pool broke the fence pattern into playful (horrendous?) distortions, hard white painted metal being reformed without care at all, furthering its own water miracle.

(light showed us auto wrecks & birthday parties with equal care).

You don’t know what’s going on in the world? and you think you’re smart & proud to be that way…

(are daisies stupid?)

Down steps she goes, rapid fire, to check on her laundry (or maybe she’d left something she needed in her car).