Nick Twemlow

Never instead put the bales in the bounty, resize the type to provide ALLURE. Look how the picture seems to tell a story. Mother, I’m all dolled up in HOPE. My breastplate hinge needs a little oil, I’m hobbling along to kick your crutch. Mother, I’m all doped up with DESIRE. I’ve cleaned the machine with delicate hand, scrubbed the data within an inch of its life. Mother, I’m all diary today, feeling PENSIVE. The returns keep disappearing, I can’t get my hands around even one. I keep clicking through the channels, the links, little vortex displays all the characteristics of a MOTIVE, Mother, but someone’s just reported that the election has been made OFFICIAL. The results seem promising. In one version you get to keep the crown. The twin diamonds sparkling your eyes sparkle harder, the LIGHT takes on a decadence like that of old snow. In the other, your garland consumes itself, your hair falls out like nuclear, your elisions lisp the windows shut, breaking the view in half. Your face becomes but a VAGARY and there are no backups in storage. I AM a cosmos if I am still breathing. Wind breaks at my neck and spells your name acrostically. Spells your name like my BELOVED. Repetition of facts and figures keeps me apprised. Dogs mass in the streets, shaking bones, slurping scrap lifted from the MALFEASANCE of silver plates hung to dry from row house clotheslines, the tread’s worn down on the spires sagging from the GLORIOUS peaks of this great sky! Can you hear the clicking through the air vents? Did you notice the picture twitch on the bedroom wall? Leaves turn pink and blue, SUPERNATURAL is not dead, is rippling through me, I can feel my toes, I can see you staring at my nape, I can see you vivid in the dark corner of the day, taking your damask gown off one strap at a time, as if I were watching. I have a MANDATE. Nobody else would bother to see you this way.

Slight whiff of toner, or is it White-Out? Brief heat of manuscript lifted from the printer, against my face. What is it about the new hire that has everybody talking? Her newness, perhaps, her éclat cutting through each of us, like a sword through wet bamboo; it’s a graceful violation. And then the water breaks, and then a darkening sky rolls over the lake, and then a meeting is called to introduce her, to make her understand, to allow her to share in our delights! Here is the coffee machine, there are the filters. You may store your lunch in the communal refrigerator, but please remember to empty yourself, all of you. Feel free to decorate your cubicle with pictures, tack up a view of the lake behind you to remind you of the lake behind you. Don’t listen to those of us who are certain of the small death each photo you tack up represents. Familiarity breeds intent, intent signals purpose, purpose is a proposition you make to those who observe, quantify and assess you; and use as many legal pads as you like. And the retractable pencils, they’re all yours. Marigolds. Sunflowers. Black-Eyed Susans. Just keep it yellow. Paper cuts will happen. Band-Aids are in the top left drawer in the kitchen, next to the cake-cutting knife we pull out for anniversaries, birthdays, retirements, record days, or the first time you see all of us converge on the conference room, leaving you alone in your cube.

Topeka, half the moon is rotten with shadows pooling in the Sea of Topeka. Topeka, where first I wet my brain with a 40oz bottle of Topeka. Topeka, is place name, is damn shame, is a mirror made of sand & Topeka. Topeka, you are substandard. I am not. Yet I’m the one on my hands & knees, searching for the lost keys in the prairie grass, ripped on acid, loving the fallacy that the black keys equal melancholy, the black keys being Topeka. Topeka, miscast capital, you’re no more political than a handshake with your dream-self upon waking, in my case dream-self lives & dies in Topeka. Topeka, the sickness cannot be cured of Topeka. Topeka, tigers laze about the yards, a man with a box balanced on his head, his possessions stuffed to brimming, trots down Topeka Ave. Topeka, the sickness will go unnoticed. The vaccine is composed of rare sentiments, the kind that love & hate with equal abandon, love & hate, love & hate, love & hate. Topeka. Topeka, there was a night when the moon didn’t appear but it appeared everywhere else in the world, what happened that night? Topeka? Topeka, I fear for your life, the intersection of 29th & California is a portal to Hell. I died there twenty times in my youth. Today, driving through, I toss a bouquet of roses to mark my third death, the one that had a soundtrack I can’t shake free. My sister sings it from the shower every morning. Forecast calls for occasional showers, with the possibility of late-morning sleet, in Topeka. Topeka, cast off the reliquaries! Call your men to war! Me?  I’ll be tugging one last hit from the bong I fashioned out of the shrapnel of Topeka. Topeka, pop. rarely exceeds one, as in each trip home happens in rewind, stepping back across the creek, bird in hand throwing up the worm, further back, unbreaking  its wing, bird flying off as if resurrected but from among the living, there I am, eight years old, seven, six, now a slug of semen sucked back into my father, now, as the waters roll back across the plains toward the river, a dog coughs up water, lifts its head, sees nothing, puts its head back down, this, Topeka, is your history, although it never happened.

Bring the oncoming train into focus. Tell me your theory of the market. Pupils dilate, trees fall, I practice transference in my downtime. Think of my mother watering plants. Is everybody really watching? Blog me. Add to my Wiki entry. Date me. Reply to my electronic flirt. My mother told me she’d nominate me for that award, if she could bear the proxy. Show me your tits. I shaved my balls. I took out a second mortgage. Motherhood frightens the elms, carves its sorry initials into the sky’s prolapsed anus. Each sadness passes through me like a gallstone. My valve leaks an amniotic canopy over the bar I’m fragging. I’m a fragment, a tender button. I saw my first beetle in the periphery. Lake Shore Drive against the ruins, the stain of lake-effect snow a special effect, the only weather exhibiting any real affect.