Learn To Breathe Fire In Five Easy Steps

Smile for the money shot!  Yes, because snapping always works, for summoning the hypnotized and for waking the bored and for applauding the poetic.  But what does it do, for trying to make the over-educated and under-fucked get over themselves?  Bitch please, nothing (and no one, no where, and at no time); it does not a fucking thing, 'cause our types can't hear it, on account of our tinnitus, which we acquired by standing too close to some IED somewhere far away, in the Helmand provinces of our mid-century kitchen's imagination.

No, shrapnel does not a good earwax make. "But the colors so pretty," whines our inner pyro, who always loved nothing more than setting fire to flames, to smell the chemistry, to hear the hiss, to scorch our thoughts; to make us hard or wet over the graceful arches that push back the night, to get us into trouble, for playing with fire.

Sure, I could say that it is the combustion that takes my breath away (and that wouldn't be a lie) but it is more like that the ignition knocks the wind out of me, a kind of blowback if you catch my backdraft drift, whatever kind of word you like that means the thing that causes all the sick feelings we get from too much or not enough oxygen, which seem to sneak up, come creeping all around us like an incoming tide.

Lucky bitch at John Peter Smith, my brain is dead, too, but I ain't got no advanced directives, only a precis of past precepts, penned on papyrus.  And it, too, is falling apart, worn at the creases and folds from one hundred hundred thousand times of my mind opening it, reading it, re-folding it, and burying it back into my back pocket.  The more effort I put into trying to keep the peaces together, the more they crumble, and I know even less than I did before about where all the pieces fit, if they ever did have a jigsaw rightness, I can't really say that I recall.  Puzzles are his thing and remembering is not mine. 

Fucked, Rubik's-style, and scared, but maybe not as much as I should be, about: what it means to not be able to make sense of your past or of your present, about how to make them cohere, to follow, one square right after the other, about how to make it seamless, so that I never have to see the guy wires keeping them weakly staked in the shifting sand.  And even more about: what it means to look always and in every place and in everyone for patterns, and about how, when I find them, I can never trust that the rows and columns or the alternating colors actually exist somewhere other than as a pretty little needlepoint my mind has stitched together for its own satisfaction.

Hm.  If I thought you were half-crazy, would you want me to half-tell you?  He says, "would you like for me to stomp your other foot, so this one hurts less?  'Cause I can."  Symmetry arguments notwithstanding, I shake my head no, keep my eyes on my cripple, and leave my mouth closed.  Uzis: pull down and to the left, lying eyes: up and to the right, and he, always.


But here is one funny thing.  When I looked up IED, which I do all the time, look shit up, idk why I do, I'm just a looker-upper, call it an optimist if you want but we both know what I mean.  Anyway, when I did, Wikipedia said IED was not to be confused with IUD, on the disambiguation page.  Uh.  I may not know up from left or down from right but even I know better than to use an IED as a contraceptive.  Oh, Wiki.  You so cray cray.  Maybe that's why I love you so bad.

He walked into the room and out in three strides and I broke my neck, just trying to watch him.  He made a face at me and I said, "Wha???" and he said, "your face."  No wait, he said, "that face."  Definitely, it is time to go find some war footage that will get me off, so that I can get some sleep, so that he can snuggle up to his coozie and take his medicine.