He is the kind of person who wears a Virgil mask when he has to fire an employee or tell his girl he's been two or nine -timing her. All the barbiturates began long strides of jealously, and a burst of tantrums billowed off the horizon. Time has no meaning in this place, it's just a refugee from a forgotten age, where the unionists wore suspenders and you can count on your neighbor's wife to be clean, or at least clean enough for one more. Mirrors, Jack, are necessary or so it seems in this life. I can't tell her anything about it. I can't imagine myself free. I can't. They won't. The tower of history publishes a fake map of its elevator systems, a series of parallels that one would only dare suppose in a dream-mare. The Eiffel tower, here, degenerates into a systematic tumor. Oh, humanity, what a beauty you've been. You've broke me heart man. You've broke my heart.

Landscaping as intention'�intention as landscaping-a small rebellion is launched by the middle man. His generals though are swarthy. They're the kind of people you'd trust with your dog or your blender but not your lawn-mower or daughter-in-law. 'Nice face,'� one says to the other, and the twilight receded. Stagflation on the cup cake; anger in the coffee. Laziness causes war more than it prevents it. In 2031, New Jersey will change its seal to a rectal thermometer. The Panama Canal is seldom worth it Jack, but where would we be without it? We'd have one less Jimmy Carter joke or one less herring in a bucket of Finnish ice cream suspended on a glacier crime scene in UP Michigan. A gypsy covers the polling station with sawdust from a bugled chariot. All the voters are wearing poor-leased potato sacks. Your perfection is a mistake. It's a misappropriation of all the trinkets in the temporal closet. You missed the floor for a fiver-what a pity. You broke my heart man. You broke my heart.

Shame is a big one for sure. It has a higher melting point than alienation or tantalum. The whiskers of her cat were caught in the squares of my negatives. I lamented the duplicity of photography and mathematics at the same bar drinking the same poor-man's drink. My power was ebbing, and I hadn't even ever read Ebbinghaus or negated his feces. They bought disc balls in Viennese graveyards out of pure market insanity. The future is suffering from a broken knee, and the past is wearing a 'Tanja Harding Tea Pot Ring'� T-Shirt. I remember what the cripple said back then, 'Take the money on the dresser, because the money on the TV is spoiled.'� He always liked to start the evening out by watching Blue Velvet. Pentagonal crystalline formation-bees as men in uniform. We were all killing each other, and the anarchists couldn't even light their camp fire with a flame-thrower. Perhaps, it was all a set-up, afterall, the flame-thrower said 'Made in St. Louis,'� on it. When your hero comes to you covered in blood is when you take a vow to quit reading and maybe have a chance of limboing home. You broke my heart man. You broke my heart.

Common history, shadows rumbling across the cocktail napkins. She sat down across from me of all people. Flames echoed in the reflections of the walls from either perspective. I talked to her like an insurgent. I reminded her of mortality with the geometry of my tone. I seldom threatened to improve her life. I wielded chemical-driven animation like a switchblade or a trophy. She stuck around. She said a few things, a few of them more atemporal or existential than normal. A quarter became lodged in that gutter, and the chandelier light all scowled to an off-green. Although the tunnel to her eyes was littered with dead bodies and broken glass, her eyes were free with feeling as they looked at me. I was a soldier of empirical crescendo. It was doubtful that a cheque or a bungalow was awaiting me at home. I looked at the stains on my bayonet-their shapes reminded me of Muppets or clouds of crème in coffee supplanting. The tunnel to my eyes was filled con-artists, tickets to Disneyland being used as door-stops to involuntary whore-houses, raging carnage, and other scenes of mighty delight. I inhaled silence-relaxation, clarity, stillness, true or false? A man I didn't know over at the pool table I called my twin. I looked into her eyes, and told her 'My watch is broken, perhaps you'd be best off to play pool.'� The lights buzzed outside and the nightsky was hidden. The gravel crunches like cereal under the feet. But you're not in your mother's kitchen eating cereal and watching TV. No, even your lawyer is drinking The Mason's Tonic. Posterity has downs syndrome. I broke my own heart. I did. And, my next step man, is to try and give it to you.
© Paul Smith 07/10/06 between 10:10 AM and 11:00AM MST
Written quite by accident. I got up at 9:40 thinking I had to be at work at 10:30; by 10:00 I knew I was wrong, and by 11:00, it was all over.

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