Clean Through

Reverse Court

the day came when // 
i realized 
i had apologized to everyone but you
for the things i said and the 
time i was wasting and the
cuts i had deepened //

i knew i was ready and
when you came to visit
we went for a walk, like always 
i did
my best to say what needed
saying // and you regarded me
with // cautious appreciation

later // i thought
there, that wasn’t so hard
 
then i remembered it had
taken me // six years

Flee Market

Pop quiz: You’re the head of a crack squad of talented, attractive, low-life twenty somethings charged with surviving the violent meltdown of free-market suburbia. The enduring moral and economic hypocrisies of global capitalism have energized an international conspiracy of disenfranchised zealots with only two things in common: They are pissed, and they want to fucking kill everyone. Now, they have gone mobile. The populace is terrified, confused, inconsolable. They want answers. They hammer the channel selectors on their remote controls, but MSNBCSPAN is dead. Their satellite radios bleat unhelpfully, like lost sheep with azure diode eyelights. The batteries on their panoramic widescreen organically backlit mobile utility devices are drained, and their USB 6.0 wall outlets are puffing smoke rings. More importantly, their feet are cold, and the inductive heaters beneath their hardwood floors are not doing their fucking jobs. They begin to burn old books that nobody reads for heat: Mark Twain, JD Salinger, Toni Morrison, Jean Auel. The lights of their fires attract the zealots, who put rifle butts through their sound-attenuating offset double pane windows and whoop like marauding apes as they pump round after round into soft, slow-moving targets with their Chinese AK knock-offs. The populace is being bled, one conveniently isolated objectivist compound at a time. Meanwhile, other zealots are carting off the scrap metal that used to be your neighborhood utilities to build bigger, uglier weapons and armor. You escaped the initial wave of attacks, but you’re not out of danger yet. The zealots are patrolling the streets and parks in your area; they’re bound to find you sooner or later. You need a safehouse: somewhere to hoard supplies, tend to your wounded, and organize the resistance. Where can you lead your party to safety? Where, when the annals of forsaken history have upended their tombs and returned to avenge five hundred years of accumulated injustices against their bearers; when the ambitions of a proud, greedy nation have run so far afoul that its multitudes of abused and exploited victims are frothing to cut it down to size; when the keys to understanding the disaster at hand are obscure annotations, discarded sidenotes of a monstruous discourse erected to defend the most pompous, inimical societal premise ever conceived? Where will no one but you think to hide, to reflect, to fight back? 

“The Library! That’s totally it!”

Keep pulling—like that. Grab a hold of whatever you can: doorknobs, drawer handles, cords, chains, zippers, out-turned pockets, unkempt hair. Drag yourself. A few inches further. Now a few more. This was easier upright—right? Well, no use lamenting what you aren’t any longer. Your fingers will get stronger, knuckle by knuckle. Your wrists, too, and then slowly the rest of the your arms. You will not be this slug-like. You will discover a swiftness you cannot yet imagine.