Puppets

Hunched over i can sense it spinning just off to the left by the wall.
hes telling me all these things and by the time he touches my shoulder
im on the edge. i want to take his head and smash it against the wall
over and over until the body doesnt move anymore. then i take his mouth
and pull the top with one hand and the bottom with the other, splitting
the jaw into so that he cant talk anymore. when he touched me i tense
up and i can feel my fist clenching. i have to focus on breathing before 
i do something really really bad.

out of the room
out the door 
across the lawn
down the street
into the field

wind on my face, the sound of the egrets calling out as they fly to 
another part of the baseball diamond, disturbed by my running in the dark.
panting at the fence, i throw up dinner in 3 streams of sour shitwater.

A woman is standing on a chair. 
her head is touching the lightbulb above..
its smoking.

she says-

How do we sleep at night?
how can we ignore everything around us?
When you hear that gunshot down the street are you reassured because it
wasnt fired on your block? Do you feel safe because you trust the people
in your home? DO you really know them? does every sewer and gutter lead 
to that river of shit that flows beneath us all night and all day? what is
really down there? what is really in our brains, behind the words and tofu and
electricity? Do we ever go out to check who or what was shot that night?
Do we ever open every single manhole to make sure whats under our own houses?

a fly passes through the smoke from the womans hair, leaving small wisps
of spinning air like miniature hurricanes terrorizing a microscopic ocean.
the fly is out the window as the cats ears tweak left, hearing the wings pass.
it dies in midair for no reason and falls into a grating on the street next to
a pipe. the pipe runs down under the houses into an impossible network of lines
branching out from every water main, bypassing septic tanks overloaded with raw
waste to finally reach the river of shit.
drinking from the river of shit is a small mouse that is killed by the long lost
brother of the cat that heard the fly pass. there are places down there.
some stuff that goes on for hundreds of feet. miles. 
the tunnel is getting smaller and you have to use your elbows to inch forward.
the sides and top of the pipe are spotted with condensation and the smell isnt 
improving. HUGE spider web in the tunnel. WITH SPIDER. 
use the flashlight to knock it aside. it scurries right at me as if enraged that
i just thrashed its web. WHAM. spider is toast, but yeah.. for a second there
it was kinda scary.

the tunnel becomes even tighter. i should stop. go back. this is bad shit.
No way. Im inching forward now by oscillating like a worm going about negative
.4 mph. the tunnel arcs down like 60%. humans were not meant to go down that.
humans were not meant to go even this far. Suddenly i hear it. that sound..
And i sense it stop spinning.. and the hand on my shoulder isn't burning anymore. 
Chemicals in my brain balance out.. and Somewhere far down below me in that
darkness i can hear water running.. like a river and i smile knowing that it is there.


-L0cke                                         Feb 03 / 2001