“Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, / At incredible speed, traveling day and night, / Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes. / But will he know where to find you, / Recognize you when he sees you, / Give you the thing he has for you?”
-John Ashbery, “At North Farm”
If life is a videogame, then my funky aura that makes hysterical invalids sneeze is just a cloud of pixelated signaletics.
the Yellow Hand is beaming. giving another crowded night at planet fitness a thumbs up. so many people with memberships. they come to lift heavy objects. shifting between pews of workout equipment, hoping not to set off the Lunk Alarm. others walk, run, jog in place. or dig their knees into purple yoga mats. their strained sweat covered faces don’t suggest enjoyment. though maybe some are having a good time.
Customer XX waits patiently on me and kills time by analyzing which anime characters he recognizes as miniature keychains on the top part of the glass counter that separates him from me. His tongue slides from the left side of his lips to the right side as my boxcutter slits open a package from Japan. It’s sick, seeing him like this, but I please him anyway because he’s willing to spend big bucks,
Puberty caught up and knuckled me under, file sharing necrophile fan club pics and preteen snuff footage circulated by clandestine bourgeois cults online, security cam footage of girls crushed under locomotives. One sailed out of her socks and skin and I was mentally on the tracks, mating with her shivering halves in a three-way before the next impending train. Around then, I chose to take a furlough from my dick.