It used to matter what you said. How you said it. Dead language. Caught in the threshold of a thresher shaking its head like a pit bull. Left to right motion_less eyes wander paths unveiled in dreams not meant for people. Art-official. The tail slaps the narrative Machiavellianism. I see it. You're under the influence of multiple addictions, complacency traded for your needle-junkie fix of social media hypertension.
Ride into the last waves of this concrete jungle curl. Sunset. Bright orange pearl. Cresting the whirl-duh. Exhaustion. Riding back and forth between the hustle and the restaurant. It used to be. A makeshift shop now, selling fuck-ups and missed payments. That's all a storage unit is. Asbestos. Cancerous and parasitic. The bottom of the bottom, but down here is where the real faces are. No mask can cover the scars of the real visage of America.
I rot down here amongst them. Out of choice, not choices made that were wrong. I build myself up to a self-sabotage and fall back into the roach motel on highway 231. Actually, it's not bad. You can smell the chlorine in the lobby, and the swimming pool burns your eyes, but red•dead•full of life is a better face to stare into than a plastic surgeon's masterpiece of lies. I make a few tries with the key card and return to the front. Another try before I can sit back and relax in a falsified existence.
On the bed, my mind drifts to chaos. One day, they all look up and say, "Hey, where are the stars?" In your breath, every inhale is like a cigarette. All these dreams. Failures. All these minds. Voyeuristic. Hunting for that next high on the Segway to Paradise. A philanthropist on a mission to save goats and neuter eggplants. But where does it all end? I'll tell you where. Six inches from the sore throat of a smoker in Tijuana after a late night out with your lawyer and a Camaro. Those are the days. How fast time flies, opening your eyelids through stitches. A bloody mess, but written raw, it's something you can really wrap your eyes around. Talkin' murder and mayhem with a robot fucking a corpse.
But this is no journey for the weaker link. This is that fuel to the promised land on the red goat you rent from that shifty salesman in Puerto Rico. Looking for your shark. Your beloved great white. Buffalo. Jaws of the phoenix. A burning sensation lost to the torrent of narratives. Can the tongue do what whiskey dick cannot? Oh, fuck yes it can. So, where are you? Let's trade secrets under the neon glow. Yours for mine.
Drinking a sud at the pub in East Germany. Flown in from Calcutta and on your way to Montreal, but first, you have to squeeze the tip in through the anal appendix of Denmark. She is tight. Spit fixes everything. Drug mules to the African Sahara. The nun near you has this side-eye that says she knows too much. But you keep quiet. Real quiet. Strangling her with your shoelaces.
My friend Joey jacks the money from the charity jar. "Leave a goddamn quarter! The fuck's wrong with you, Joey?"
Kids these days. Blow the priest away with a twelve-gauge and face-fuck his altar boy with a pistol. Time to get out of Dodge. Caravan across the safari. Land in Brazil and mail your way up to Northern Mexico. The border patrol is hot and heavy with a tire iron, but they don't expect your U-F-O. Remote control, but if one has never seen it on TV, it is a mindfuck to behold.
The U-F-O hums a tune only stray dogs and broken men can hear. A low, gut-rumble of shattered atmosphere. The border patrol agents just stand there, statues of disbelief melting in the Chihuahuan heat, their tire irons collecting dust before they even hit the ground. This is a full-blown epistemological crisis delivered at Mach 2.
Up, up, and away, leaving the terrestrial drama for the worms. From this height, the whole chaotic marble makes a twisted kind of sense. The lights of Tijuana are a smear of cheap glitter. The ghost of that Camaro is probably still wrapped around a telephone pole, a monument to bad decisions and good times. Brazil is a memory, Denmark a scar, and the nun_well, the nun is a problem for gravity to solve.
Joey is in the back, hot-wiring the saucer's comms system to an intergalactic sportsbook, trying to place a bet on a snail race in a nebula he can't pronounce. "It's a sure thing," he mutters, spit-shining the stolen quarters. "The favorite has psychic antennae."
The remote control is slick in your hand. That red goat from Puerto Rico has nothing on this beast. This is the real fuel. You can feel it pushing. Every star in the void looks back, not with cold indifference, but with the hungry eyes of a shark. Your shark. Your great white buffalo. They're all up here. They never left. The static on the radio clears for a moment, and a voice, smooth as whiskey over velvet, cuts through the hiss. It's not coming from a broadcast tower. It's coming from inside the cabin.
"Next stop," it says, "is for the philanthropist. I hear the eggplants have unionized."
"Dental," you grunt. "They're probably demanding dental."
Joey doesn't look up from his jury-rigged comms. "Fuckin' bullshit," he spits, smacking the console. The stolen quarters rattle in his pocket. "The Zorpian Racing Commission just disqualified my snail. Said its precognitive slime trail gave it an unfair advantage. It's a biological function! You can't penalize biology!"
You ignore him. You're used to ignoring Joey. It's a survival trait, like knowing which alleyways have the best dumpsters for a nap. The U-F-O shudders with intention. Outside the viewport, the starfield folds. Space becomes a t-shirt being ripped off by a drunk, and you punch through the hole into somewhere else.
Below, a sea of violent purple stretches to the horizon. A whole world of eggplants. Millions of them. And they are, indeed, very much on strike. They have formed picket lines, their little calyx hats bobbing in unison. Their picket signs, written in some kind of seeping, vegetative script, are stuck into the soil before them. One, clearer than the rest, simply reads: "No Emoji, we aren't dicks."
The philanthropist, who you'd forgotten was even on board, strapped into a crash couch in the back, begins to weep. "But_but the mission," he says, completely oblivious to the fact you don't give a shit.
The voice returns, a slow pour of auditory molasses. "Seems negotiations have broken down. They've taken hostages." The view screen zooms in. There, tied to a massive, pulsating vine at the center of the eggplant collective, are the goats. They look confused, chewing lazily on their bindings.
This is it. Another hit. Another stop on the chaotic pilgrimage. You look at the purple masses, the terrified goats, the crying philanthropist, Joey trying to find a loophole in intergalactic snail racing bylaws. It's all so goddamn stupid. A joke without a punchline. And yet_in the defiant glare of the lead eggplant, a big bastard the color of a fresh bruise, you see it. Just for a second. A flicker of that same mindless, predatory hunger you've been chasing. That single-minded, all-consuming drive.
The shark has breached the ocean; best to snipe it mid-air. Aim for the pupil.
You smile. It feels like cracking open a velociraptor fossil with an onion. "Joey, hand me your laces."
"My shoelaces? What for?"
Unstrapping and walking towards the airlock, you say, "The nun had a point; spit fixes everything. But sometimes, you just gotta choke the vegetable." It springs open. You jump with no parachute, snapping your goggles on during the descent.
The wind of a world that never knew a Neil Armstrong howls a Prince song, all purple and paisley, as you plummet. The goggles are fused to your face by the sheer velocity of your own ignorant idea. Below, the picket lines of pissed-off Solanaceae are a sprawling, violet Rorschach test. You see a screaming skull. You behold a busted butterfly. You gaze upon the universal cosmic symbol for "You Are Fucked."
The big one, the bruiser-colored lead eggplant, turns its entire body towards you. It has no face, but you feel its glare. It's the same look the bouncer at a dive bar in Minsk gives you right before he remembers he owes you money. A choir begins to build from the assembled eggplant mob, the collective sound of a horde of refrigerators about to die.
You begin to play a cat's cradle, your fingers weaving meaningless patterns with the laces, movements nimble from rolling questionable cigarettes and picking locks_leave that one alone. You're making a Jacob's Ladder, but it comes out looking more like a hangman's noose for a ghost. "Alright, motherfucker, let's bounce!"
What unfolds is a scene acceptable only for high-velocity cinema, not in your favor, ending with you on the ground, leg broken, covered in purple goop. A dad joke_the best kind.
You're clutching something, a doll, a synapse with weight made from the slick, stolen shoelace. Its button eyes are the flashback of the nun's, wide as you pulled them tight. Surrender to the light? That cheap fluorescent bulb humming over a stained motel toilet? Fuck the light. Burrow into the darkness, a place coiled deep with shadows.
Back to reality. Another daydream with no purpose. But the television never had to come on. I write my stories. My narratives. And I write to make the world better, no matter the cost of my societal image or popularity. I put words on paper for you, a poet of a very unusual class. I'm worth reading and listening to_entertaining and very extreme_but at the end of the day, I am more real than you. That, my friends, is where our story begins.