II

have you ever stargazed?

you can stay out there

pretending you're stoned

someone always says,

"you know they all died
like 5 million years ago,

the stars"

then everyone gets real deep

like kids that have been

singing in the dark

for 25 years,

off in murky yee-haw county,

out with the wildlife,

where its time for black clothes,

and big mouthed clouds from the south.

they're out in the field

with real slicked hair

laying in a circle,

'so its hard to keep on the right side,

nothing fucked up happened to you,

you just did something bad'

'and you have sinned'

'but we can talk it over, sweet boy'

i'll think that one over,

ill be in the metal works

with blackening sweat

and something made of steel

it reminds me of yesterday,

i was watching the athlete's foot spread,

i didnt know what it was

hong kong foot?

i stopped caring about stuff,

thought it might be nicer

its not really, though

maybe time for new shoes?

i'm a pretty dainty cat in these shoes though

i was the cat that walked from shelbyville

if i strolled on away,

if i stayed away from both kinds of fields,

and walked into town

just to bend my neck around,

i wouldnt say it was because i wasnt worried

but we really do have a good time

pretending its the end of the world

every couple of years or so

all of the villagers stood around in the dust

they gathered up their robes and shielded their eyes

and they could hear it, or feel it, coming on

they expected some noise but there was none

everyone listened and waited for the rumbling

I: PRETTY SOGGY HERE

I used to hang out with a bunch of dudes. They would come over to the house with beer in a cooler and we’d play some music on the speakers if the weather was good. Even if the weather wasn’t good we’d still chill, except under this blue tarp tent and without the speakers. On those days with the bad weather, there would still be enough light to come shining sickly down a little bit through the tarp and make the dudes’ look all blue, and I’d sit in this lawn chair.
The dudes come over to the house all the time, maybe every day, but I don’t know for sure. Sometimes we’d line up some cans out back and shoot them with the BB gun or find heavy things and see who could lift them up. I have been known to pick some really heavy stuff off the ground. Other times we’d just stand and look in different directions.

None of the stuff we did can be called important stuff, definitely not. But it was very definitely stuff, except its stuff that I can’t sift through, so all those days just lay in a lump with their colors running. Those days were all days of the serious afternoon beers and on the warm days just taking the truck to the river with like fifteen dudes riding in the bed and me in the cab driving. We’d probably stand up on this big rock and do some back-flips into the water or just swing back and forth on this rope-swing that was set up by dudes from long ago.

We swim in the rivers and the lakes and the pools all the time, whenever we can. I don’t know why this is the thing that we do all the time, maybe its because everybody I know secretly wants to drown themselves. But really, all this stuff we do is all good stuff, it only gets gross if you look for a long time. And one thing I’ve learned is that you should never look at anything for a long time.

Sometimes when the weather is shit and its raining while we’re standing under the blue tarp looking around, we don’t talk and you can see the dirt driveway in front of the house turning into a gross old pond with that color beige mixed with some red from the clay, and there are even ripples of white in it, all popping up and swirling around in the puddle before they disappear and the rain drops keep coming down. On those days I get the feeling that we might be bored and it really would just like to go somewhere and go to sleep, I know that’s the way I feel. But nobody ever says anything about that and we just chill.

II: WHAT DO YOU MEAN, CROCS?

The dudes are all right. Sometimes its nice to see them swimming around in the river or standing in the yard with their beers, but when it really comes down to it, I don’t think I would care if an afternoon came and went without the dudes showing up. I might sit in the driveway just throwing rocks at other rocks or something else.

But that would never happen because the dudes and myself are all working for the same cause. We hang through the days for a reason, you know. Everyone might get bored if we didn’t gather. And the House, my house, is the place that we gather. If the dudes didn’t gather here, would they have any place to gather at all? And if we didn’t gather nobody would ever go swimming or do anything at all.

I probably wouldn’t think about the possibility of the dudes not appearing one day if it wasn’t for Crocs, I probably wouldn’t think of anything at all if it wasn’t for Crocs. I guess that’s because Crocs isn’t here, where I am chilling with the dudes. And because she’s not around it reminds me that there’s other stuff past out where we chill and really that’s just annoying, but what can I do?

Crocs isn’t her real name, it’s a nickname that was given to her when she first moved here because she wore those shoes called Crocs, those dumb foam or rubber sandals, or maybe clogs. They look like something that you would use in the kitchen to wash a really dirty pan. Crocs had these terrible Crocs shoes. They were pink and dirty like a gross homeless baby. She had like sort of customized them with fur lining around where the foot goes into the Croc and there were all these little trinket or charm sort of things hanging off. They were really just the most horrible shoes of all time, I don’t know if she realized it or not.

Nobody ever really gave her a tough time for having these shoes, nobody ever jeered or anything. But she got the nickname from them, and in the opinion of yours truly, that is the worst thing. Once she realized that was her nickname she stopped wearing them.

But the nickname stayed on her; it was weird that she stopped wearing the Crocs once she realized everyone called her Crocs, but didn’t bother to tell people to stop calling her Crocs. I don’t know if the nickname made her realize that the clog things were stupid or if she decided to stop wearing them for other reasons. I guess its just that people care about different things for different reasons and its just stuff I shouldn’t bother thinking about, but I do sometimes.

So even though I’m hanging with the dudes for most of the days, I’m thinking about where that Crocs might be at. In the day she pops up from blank spots in my head and then goes away, at night she’s there all the time, sitting quiet and everything around her is totally black, no light at all, like its just Crocs and me hanging in Limbo, not saying a thing. When I wake up in the morning and remember how she was there sitting in my black dreams, my chest kind of hurts.

On most afternoons and evenings you might catch Crocs standing in front of her house with her arms hanging over the chain link fence. Behind her you might see some wispy, weird little plants with their heads getting blown around everywhere in her yard, which is a yard pretty much made of just that dust and those wispy plants. I’m always surprised when I see how dusty her yard is.

Her house is all dry looking too, like scraggly ranch house with the stucco all coming off and chipping, the place looks like one of those little castles in aquariums where the sad fishes go hide; just a kind of creepy spot.

Nobody in New Hampshire lives in a stucco house. But then again, I’ve never seen her back yard, and the woods go forever behind her house, so who knows what’s hidden back there.
She moved from Arizona with her Dad a while back. I understand that there are a lot of stucco houses in Arizona, so maybe her Dad picked the stucco house so that they wouldn’t feel so bad about having to leave Arizona. I don’t know why anyone would miss Arizona, why would anyone want to live in a place like that? I always have Arizona in my head as a place where everything is always hazy and like half on fire; a place with like one cracked out looking bird sitting on a midgetty tree in the desert, a landscape so fevered its like the place has been going crazy as long as its been around.

They definitely are all about their air conditioning there. There are probably people in Arizona who read magazines about different kinds of air conditioners. Once you get too old to swim everything is probably boring as hell and all you want to do is be cool and dry in the air conditioning.

Croc’s dad is basically my model for how I imagine Arizona people. I can imagine Crocs’ Dad wearing sunglasses, sitting underneath a shady spot and saying, “The drier a man, the better a man. The cooler a man, the fresher a man.”

But I’m not very good at making up saying for people from Arizona and I’ve never even really talked to Crocs’ Dad.

What I do know about Daddy Crocs that he is really dry and old as fuck. He wears huge sunglasses and sports some Crocodile skin boots that people definitely notice. Some people say he walks with a limp because he got hit by a car sometime long ago, but I’ve never seen him walking around so I couldn’t tell you.

I only catch him sometimes leaning on the hood of his crème-dirty sedan, dressed all in white clothes that are sort of yellowy-looking, arms folded, talking to Crocs while she leans on the fence. Nobody knows too much about Daddy Croc, he is a guy who mostly watches T.V. And that’s fine because it means he lets Crocs do her thing and he doesn’t give a shit because he’s inside his crème dusty house with M*A*S*H* and F-R-I-E-N-D-S or he just waiting for the summer to come so that he can turn on the air conditioning.

III: PEOPLE ALWAYS LIE ABOUT THEIR DATES

As for Crocs, she hangs out and she chills around but never really seems to do anything. You never hear about like, “Whoa, Crocs threw a beer bottle at a cop last weekend.” Or like, “Whoa, Crocs went to Denny’s with us latenight and got a damn pancake.” That’s the kind of stuff I mean by doing something, because usually if over the weekend someone does something you usually hear about it on Monday.

Not Crocs, she’s just sort of there, even more because she doesn’t wear her Crocs anymore and just has the nickname, and its like the name Crocs turned into something else, like the nickname never had anything to do with those shitty looking clog sandals and was about something else.

The only real story that goes around about Crocs comes from one dude that tried to take her out once. He took her water skiing on the lake because his Dad’s got a boat.

At first it seems weird that he decided to let her drive the boat. But when you add it up, Arizona probably doesn’t have any water, so it makes sense that she didn’t know how to water-ski, and to strap her in those water skis and watch the trouble, awkward as shit, that comes with just trying just to stand up and get going on the damn things would have been the worst date of all long history.

So then it sort of makes a kind of sense that he decided to let her drive the boat while he skied. This was probably a bad decision. I mean, it was probably just a shitty date in general but it turned into one worth telling about when she started to pull some serious shit behind the wheel of that boat.

It is said that she started out normal, sort of boringly chugging along like she was driving an old tug boat, while the dude was back there on his water skis, sort of sinking because they weren’t going that fast; both of them probably just thinking about how awkward and shitty of a date it was.

I mean seriously, the dude should know that its cool his dad has a boat and whatever, but how did he even plan to get the mack on when she’s way ahead on the boat and he’s dragging along back there wearing a poofy life-jacket? She’d look back and the dude would see and give a thumbs up like, “Yeah, this rules! Aren’t we having a time here or what?” Or something shitty like that that people do when they’re not having any fun but trying to pretend that they are.

Either way, this was going on for a little while and I’d guess that nobody was having much of a time at all, when after giving one of his thumbs ups the dude said she just gunned it, like put that boat going full speed cigarette boat from the 80’s in Miami type of velocity, while the dude was just dangling on with his white knuckles, grinding his teeth into the past, because he sure as hell didn’t see this kind of stuff coming from old Crocs.

So the boat is just mowing through the lake and leaving the water behind it torn up and bubbling like hot piss and when the dude gets himself together enough to open his eyes for a second he sees Crocs gunning it right towards a bunch of rocks sticking out of the water and he just closes his eyes again and just sort of says, “Oh fuck” or “Oh well.”

But then he feels himself jerk and opens his eyes again and sees that Crocs just yanking at the steering wheel like she’s sitting at the seat of an arcade game with no credits at all on it. He sees old Crocs’ hair spazzing around in the wind, her hair spazzing out like it was its own thing, totally apart from Crocs.

She's whipping the boat around in all sorts of ways that a boat should definitely not be whipped around in, and ends up trying, more than once, to make the boat do like a 90 degree turn at 100 mph .

The dude said that every time she did that he would go slingshotting out like someone snotting a booger and felt like his whole body was made of liquid boogers. He couldn’t explain why he didn’t just let go, but he didn’t, and Crocs kept going on her maniac spree for a while, shredding the boat around the lake until the whole thing was white hot and boiling over. Eventually the dude even stopped thinking it was such a big deal that Crocs was probably trying to kill him or both of them.

Eventually she must have started to feel the same way, because she just brought the boat back down to the slow chug and the dude sort of sunk on his water skis again.

But no hard feelings with stuff like that, you know? I heard that everyone there was laughing the whole time. Everyone was: the dude, his dog (who was sitting on the boat) and some old people that were under tiny umbrellas on the shore, no doubt drinking Coronas. As for Crocs, she was just having a regular old ball, regular attack of the giggles. But there are all sorts of different kinds of laughs.

And that was the date, or how it was told. I don’t even know if any of it is true.

IV: MY MADE UP FRIENDS

I don’t know if it was before or after I heard this story that I started asking her if she wanted rides in the Truck home after school. She didn’t live far from the house; I probably could have walked to hers, no problem via Truck. At first I would see her in the parking lot when school got out and I'd offer her a ride home in the Truck, because it was no problem, but she would just give me this Wal-Mart smile; a real fake smile.

But just a second before she whipped that smile out, her face had something else going on in it. It had a thing going on that reminded me of how some desert creature would look if you lifted up the rock that it was living under. So that is, sort of like its surprised and sort of like its glad that it just surprised you. Anyway, I’d rev the old engine and peel outta there but I’d look back at her through the rearview, where she was still standing in the parking lot.

And I’d drive away and put my hand out of the window so that I could slap the side of the truck and think about how much it would suck to have the only thing that anybody knew about you be that you had some shitty rubber clogs, now that’s got to be the most boring thing in the history of all time.

Damn that smile really sucked.

But still, anyone might consider steering the old Truck in that direction. Towards that person, I mean. Theres always something you can tell yourself that might make you think about going there. But that’s a bad idea and hopefully you’ll listen to that smart guy inside of you when he says to just rev the engine and peel on outta there.

V. I’VE SEEN THIS MANY CHEVYS BEFORE

So I’m standing outside of the house by myself and I’m looking to the right of the house, where there’s the freight yard, all rotted thorough and empty. I never really think about the freight yard until its being there gets me pissed off, like when a car rolls through latenight and blows its whistle and wakes me up. When that happens its always like I just hit my head on something, like when a guy in a movie gets woken up real fast and sits up in bed but something is there that just waps him in the dome.

But sometimes I’ll watch a train go by for a little while, but they just keep going forever and you get tired of looking at all of the cars. After you sit there for a while watching its just like, “What the fuck am I even looking at?” So you just sort of go look at something else and the train goes on wherever it’s going to next, which is, no doubt, a place pretty much the same as this one.

And then I’m looking to the left side of the house and there’s the woods. People say that they’re my woods when they talk about them. I don’t want to say they’re mine, they belong to my family though. They’ve been on our property since my great great great grand whatevers moved here, so that means that they’re ours.

But I’m not happy that people say that the woods are mine. Those woods are creepy as shit. It is a place of windy whispers; it is a place I never go. I imagine bad shit in there, shitty ruined stuff with haunting ghosts and unknowns, or just forgotten rusty things, shit covered in mold with squirmy grubs on the undersides.

So there I am out there in the universe, in the driveway, looking somewhere or throwing rocks at other rocks, when all the dudes start coming up in the trucks. And its just like, “Aw right, here they come.”

The dudes are always so excited to come rolling up the driveway; the dudes pump their fists out the window, if the dude is sitting in the passenger seat he’ll lean way out of the window and make the extreme face with the tongue out flailing crazy. What’s there to get excited about?

Well, I don’t know, there is plenty of time for certain kinds of imagination in these kinds of places where its green and bugs are buzzing gentle. So if a dude wants to stick his tongue out and shake his head while he’s coming up a driveway, that’s just fine.

And it really is pretty green out here. And that’s really nice, because usually New Hampshire isn’t as green as the rest of New England. New England is one of the greenest places of all time, I might guess. But New Hampshire has something else about it, like a weight that doesn’t let the real green come out like it does in Vermont or Maine; in New Hampshire it might seem kind of green but there’s always a kind of husky dustiness hanging over it, like someone just sneezed red dust over everything.

But around now all these flowers are peeking around in the grass and the sky is the romance-movie sweet ‘lilac’; a color that sad men drown themselves under and a color that I usually wouldn’t describe anything as in most cases, but it fit this time.

These good old clouds were hanging around in some places here and there. They were the clouds that go from blue-purple to a wise old sleepy blue, they stretched out past down past the tops of the trees in the woods.

The woods got some of the sky’s purple and a sort of hazy shine, like a dark moth’s wing. And the woods are still creepy but its all alright, like picturesque, the air feels full and moist and here come the dudes.

Ya, here come the dudes. Someone always tries to get cool and peel out in the dirt so I’m standing there and I hear whatever guy’s extreme noise like ‘whoop’ and then the sands of five hundred generations of bullshit billow up and get all in my eyes and nose.

VI: THE BACKYARD IS REALLY PRETTY GREEN

But I don’t know, that’s just that, that’s how it happens and the dudes all bring out the coolers and someone’s got a mini purple football with a tail that makes it whistle when you throw it. Someone says that it sucks that I don’t own a trampoline. I guess it does.

They’re all just hanging out in the backyard, some dudes by the washed out wooden fence with the creepy bush growing at the bottom of it are talking about something. And then over there on the saggy picnic table with the placemats that are covered in dead bugs a bunch of dudes are going on and saying something else.

Then there are some chicks scattered around, hanging out with lazy smiles, just living in the days of the heavy gel hair that got crunched up and put in a spiny wet bun ball on the top of the head, and the age of the terrible sad lady makeup under the eyes that glittered greasy like an oil spill reflecting a shitty night.

But I don’t even know how it happens or where these dudes come from, they just roll up and we hang. Then later they leave. Then there’s Crocs, too, who I’d never actually seen hanging amongst us in the back yard. She’s just sitting in this plastic lawn chair that has a broken arm and she’s got this red solo cup.

VII: THE WOODS, AND DECISIONS ABOUT DOING THINGS

And so we’re all sitting or standing or running around with that little purple football whistling and flying around while those bugs are droning and the air is feeling kind of wet. You can bet I’m not slamming Buds but chilling on a Bud. As is usual, I’m feeling pretty good because I do like me a Bud Heavy and I’m not feeling very bored at all because Crocs is here.

Now thats whats up!

But I tried to pretend like it was all the same, so I just chilled on my Bud and stood by this small grill that had three legs and sort of looked like an alien space ship.

The flock of dudes and chicks seemed alright, and out of the corner of my eye I could peep Crocs sitting in her chair twisting a little piece of grass around with her fingers. A couple of other people were talking about something to her but it seemed like they werent really getting anywhere, nobody was laughing or anything. Soon they stopped and just stood around in the same places, just looking at each other’s faces and then at the ground and at the sky, making grumbles. Crocs just kept sitting there watching and twisting her piece of grass around so that it looked like a tiny propeller.

Then the dudes and the chicks ambled over somewhere else and tried to chill with a different part of the flock but they sort of fell short, like nobody had anything to say. Like the silence had just spread, and soon it seemed like nobody had anything to say to anybody else so that the bugs were buzzing louder than ever and this one dude just had his mouth open and was sort of going, “uhhhh” like he was really close to having something to say but he just kept going, “uhhhh” for a really long time.

We hadn’t been bored in a pretty long time, but the dudes were bored now. Its weird when boring pops up, its not like anything special ‘triggers’ it or anything. I don’t think so, at least. Sometimes we want to be bored so that we have an excuse to do something. Other times it just sort of nods friendly to us like a rascally uncle and says, “You’re bored son, you know that you are bored, its time to go swimming or something.” Other times boredom never lets us know we’re bored at all, so we just keep doing the things that are boring without even knowing that we’re bored.

But it’s the worst when you can see it coming. When we see it coming its like a baby just started screaming and its getting louder and louder, so loud you cant take it, and we start to quietly panic while we’re trying to figure out how to make it go away.

So the whole flock of dudes, all looking sort of blue or purple in the darkening light, starts trying to cook up some sort of thing to do, somewhere to go, something to think about. Most dudes really try their best in these emergencies, trying to see what’s good. But things are looking grim; things are looking pretty dry.

Nobody wants to go swimming because its getting kind of dark and it isn’t really that warm out. Everyone just sort of looks around and down at their cell phones, scrolling around through all the people that they know. Crocs is still doing what she was doing before, I see. I’m kind of glad that it seems hopeless, because if we couldnt find shit to do we’d probably just stay in the yard and that would give me a little while longer to watch Crocs twirl her grass thing and hold her red solo cup.
But then that dude who was making the ‘uhhhh’ face pipes up out of nowhere and starts talking about this ‘natural spring’ that he heard about. The dude said that the place was supposed to be almost like a cave, and there were a whole bunch of different ‘natural pools’ (that’s what he said, like a nature fag) that formed out of the rocks and these pools were wicked warm because they were from underground mineral deposits or some shit.

Most of the dudes turn to me to see what I’ll say because they’re my goddamn woods, like I had to give them permission to go in there. I didnt say anything, but for one, It sounded like bull to me. For two, I just didn’t really want to go, I didnt want to keep going on these little trips or try to have fun, because sometimes I’m goddamn tired and I’d rather just stay in one place and let what happens happen; I’m not trying to force anything.

Plus those woods; just really a place that I don’t want to go at this time in the eve. I imagined us, the whole damn gang, beating through the dark brush. I imagined feeling sticky things with thorns brushing my legs and spiderwebs getting in my mouth. All the dudes flanking me, hacking through the undergrowth with sticks, while Crocs walks along with us and picks slowly but not too carefully, through the broken sticks and ferns, and that thing where you get wapped in the face because the person in front of you pushed back a branch never happens to her.

I imagine the dudes getting nabbed up one by one by things that come out of the ground or drop out of the trees, grabbing a dude and then falling back in the blackness before the dude can even scream. I can see Crocs kicking around lazy in the endless black of the undergrowth, facing away from me, looking bored, while I’m just waving my arms around and sinking in some sneaky pool of quicksand that I tripped into like a dumbass.

But the whole flock of dudes is nodding and looking hopeful about the bullshit natural spring. Everyone, is just like, “Ya cool. Lets do it.”

But nobody moves and I’m just grippin this Bud and grippin this little black grill with my other hand.

And I see Crocs out of the sly corner of my eye sitting in her chair with her red solo cup but no piece of grass and some of her hair had fallen over her face in a way that was so correct it looked fake. Everyone’s just flipping their shit and she just looks easy and calm. She doesn’t know that I don’t want to go in the woods, why should she?

She’ll probably go in there with them. It would be better if she didn’t though, for me. I think I would like that, it would give me a good feeling, like I won something, I guess Crocs in this case, without having to do anything. And that’s a kind of scumbaggy thought, but it doesn’t matter because where she was gonna go was up to her.

I didn’t know what she was going to choose, or if she was going to choose anything at all. I definitely couldn’t make her choose anything, it just wouldn’t seem right. I feel like if I pulled some big romance guy kind of move, I’d end up being a lot less of like Bruce Springsteen (the Boss) than like old ass goofy Rod Stewart.

I should feel okay about the woods, I should go running in there with Crocs and every single one of the dudes behind me, all of us running real fast and feeling really jacked on everything. But I don’t know.

And the dudes and the chicks look at me like whats up and I just say straight up that I’m gonna chill, everyone looks bothered by that; sort of shifty, or grossed out, just because someone, anyone, who happened at this time to be me, had said 'no' to going somewhere. Its like the dudes just didn’t get it, how somebody could stay and just hang in the backyard when it was obvious as hell that boredom was afoot.

Everyone standing around in the back yard is quiet and they look at each other and around in different directions, at the trees waving in the distance, at the blue purple light of the spring sky, at the grass, the very green grass. And the dudes wait like they still haven’t decided all the way. We’re breathing in that air that feels a little bit wet and its quiet, until someone else says,

“Yeah, I heard that theres mad hippy old dudes there

that dose up and get naked. Funny shit, lets do it.”

I can’t deny it. Sounds straight. Nobody can pass up on that.

Or they couldn't if it existed. But it definitely did not exist. Even though I never go in those woods, they sure as hell belong to me, or my family at least, and I would have heard about some hippy commune if there was one. And I'll say it again, there’s no way in ice cold and watery Hell that I’m going along to look for any 'natural spring' in those woods.

Some of the dudes were like, “What’s gonna happen man? Nothing bad, maybe not shit even.”

But I was just like, nah.

So there they go, the whole herd of dudes goes extreme into the forest and I watch them trot along, looking really bulky, really powerful. They go crashing through the edges of dead grass around the woods. Then they all disappear. I could occasionally hear an extreme woop of not being bored come barking out of the woods’ void.

And all the empty trucks were in the driveway, parked crooked with the windows halfway down and the yard looks much more purple than green now, with the grass crushed down where the dudes were, some empty plastic lawn chairs and crushed up cans here or there and I stand there looking at the woods with my legs feeling kind of cottony

VIII: DON'T TELL ME ABOUT NATURE SHIT

After they had gone into the woods I couldn’t hear them anymore. The sky’s blue was darker and the mosquitos were starting to wake up. The moon was kind of hanging shy, not ready to come out but sort of peeking. It was just an awful time to go anywhere, I thought.

The freight yard was gray, turning into a thick crusty looking gray at this time. No trains would be coming through. I looked around at things and I was glad that all of the dudes had gone away, but I imagined Crocs out there in that nasty buzzing dark place with them all. I imagined them all perishing one by one in pockets of danger in the trees, except for Crocs. I would save her somehow, or she would just come back out. And nobody would know where they had all gone, the dudes. I wouldn’t even tell anybody what happened.

I was pretty sweaty for reasons I did not know. I walked around and picked up some of the beer cans lying in the back yard and threw them away, then I went up to my room and went into my bed.

I was lying there for a little while, trying to decide if I should turn the light on or not, looking at blue shapes that the light was making on the walls, when I heard the door open and I saw Crocs peeping in.

She didn’t even ask or say shit, just moused on across the floor and got under the covers sneaky with me. And that’s great. That’s real awesome. Cuz there’s Crocs and I got no idea what shes doing or how she got here, like there are black holes everywhere in how I understand things, but this is still what’s going on.

And I’m looking out of the corner of my eye at that lady lying on her side with her face pointing the other way with her hair so giant and kind of getting in my face and her legs curled up a little, and the first thing that I think is that good lord is it giving me a hell of a time figuring out how to live.

Crocs just lying there in the bed. Like what the total fuck, I’m just puzzled off my ass. But who wants to look too deep into anything, probably better just to let sleeping Crocs lie. But she’s probably only pretending to sleep because its been like 14 seconds and nobody I know falls asleep that fast.

Its weird that she’s here. Like whats the idea? She’s always making me make things up, making me ask questions. Her face points towards the whole wide room, mine faces towards the wall, her butt facing me, I’m lying on my back.

I can see the skin of her neck is really clean, white and shiny like when you peel an onion, like an egg, her hair loose and ragged, creeping around all over. And even though she’s facing away from me, I can see part of her face, the shape of the bones in her face is weird from this angle. She’s got a sort of long ear too. I wonder, how did she get up here? Did she go in the woods and then come back, or did she not go in at all?

It seemed like it would be the best just to have Crocs just stay with me and just stay still for a while, not even be pretending to do anything. And that’s what we’re doing now in my too small bed, and its messed up because all I want to do now is tell her to get lost because now that she’s here its only a matter of time before she goes somewhere else.

Now, I don’t want to just sit around waiting for that to happen, so I feel like all I can do is just tell her to hit the road, take a hike, go jump in a lake. Or I could just tell her it’s a nice eve, chit-chat about the weather, but something had to go down, you know?

I’m looking at Crocs out of the corner of my eye, wondering if I should say anything, when I notice that she’s totally drenched, like she had just been caught in a terrible rainstorm, or like she had just gone swimming; like she had gone swimming with all the dudes at that stupid secret spring and then ran on back, to come to my room and cover my bed in water. And then I looked closer and I saw there was like way too much water on her, like it was less on her than coming out of her, like she was melting.

And she was melting, or dissolving, all of her colors were running and swirling around together, then flowing down the sides of her body, pooling all down on my sheets, with parts of her and her colors seeping onto me and on my clothes. I tried to say something to her but it just wasn't happening, I wanted to ask her where she was off to in such a rush. I could be like, “Hey, whats the hurry, cool your jets for a minute.” But there she goes, melting away. Oh hell, what a shit storm, I thought.

I rolled onto my back and put my arm over my face so that I couldn’t see anything. I could feel her melting more and more, cold parts of Crocs gathering around me and pooling deeper.

When I took my arm off of my face Crocs was gone and I was just lying in the pool of her colors, a pretty deep pool too. The colors all looked dark blue, just like a pond does at night, but if I could really see them they would be reddish or like milky swirly white clay. Either way, I was all by myself in this crap ‘natural spring’ made of Crocs. And I’m just wondering, what the hell am I even going to do. Not even particularly now, just in general. Nobody is around to help?

If I just kept laying there, I would feel worse and probably get sick. It was already cold in that Crocs pool. It seemed a little unfair that even in my bed all of this could still feel gross and terrible. So I turned on my side and curled up, if you were looking at me from up above I would probably look like one of those nasty ass pictures of the fetuses in the goo. I closed my eyes and felt some of the stuff from the pool going into my mouth and then into my nose and it got hard to breathe and my heart was kind of lumbering around in my chest.

I had a dream about being a Dad. It was some nice ass weather and I was just cruising along a road, probably the straightest road that was ever built for cruising. And cruising I was, in a real fine Truck, crankin the Tom Petty and just feeling great. And in some weird way I could feel that Crocs was around again, but I couldn’t see her. There were some great kids, like my kids, riding in the truck with me too. Those kids were shouting and flailing like great kids should. This is the zone, I thought. But then I noticed that every time I looked over at the kids they were always facing the other way and then when I looked out the window everything was black, solid black with no sheen, and I wondered why I had thought it was sunny.

I guess I woke up or something, it was like officially night and it was raining a little bit. My bed was dry and I was all by myself, so I tell myself that its just one of those nightmares, or if not a nightmare just one of those weird dreams. Its sometimes hard to tell the difference. I listened to see if Mom or Dad was home, moving around in the kitchen or something, but I couldn’t hear shit. Even though it was raining the moon was still coming in pretty bright through the window, everything looked sort of thin and blue and this whole ordeal spelled S-H-I-T-T-Y because now I’m not going to be able to go back to sleep and I’m going to nod out in school tomorrow.

I got up and looked out of the window, all of the trucks were gone. I wondered which truck Crocs had ridden in. Then I head back to my bed and I just look at the wall, where I got this poster of Jeff Gordon even though I don’t give a shit about NASCAR. So I sometimes think that things might be allright without the dudes, or if I never went swimming, or if I never did anything at all; if I just stayed in bed.

But there’s always something that’s gonna follow you to bed and its easy to drown

even there. But really, when you think about it, whose fault is that?

I

what?


this dunkin donuts has no drive thru?
then things have indeed gone poorly here


i hate the morning cig
it tastes like im in high school,
7 o clock am

gravel and sand looks greasy,
i always like to hang my hand
out the window

its not a very cool time here

its early summer morning rage,
it wells up like steaming oils,
its august toes should be licked

morning like a shitty creamsicle
spittle on the leaves of plants
from those nasty bugs
or maybe thats because

i just spit on them

fuck that question


'im not a philosophy student
just a guy with a weird boner


or sometimes just a flacid guy'

the song of morning irritation
where the cream rays of the sun
itch me like a bathing suit with a liner

theres gotta be a place

where i can lay it down
with a gun and a big dog
and spend those long ones


thinking of heroes

with the car in P

who are your heroes?
we should think about that more often
theyre free for the picking now


i can turn myself inside out
without spilling a drop,

call that heroism

i never trust the insides,
when i finally figure it out,

ill be dangling,

and the strands will be

orange and yellow

in the morning

II

the old accidental magician

was like 'ta-da'

o wait

'no, not that time either'

i've got a lot of things to do anyway

the world of pretty girls shivering in blankets,

the world as curse that nobody meant to cast

if we feel like our backs are too straight,

just put on a funny hat at the office party

'look how silly i am'

'i got me this martini and a viking hat'

'no, i messed up again'

'there it is'

i got sweaty and worried
that sometime ago i might have done something
that permanently fucked me up
and today has me working on 'becoming bed'
but i cant really remember;

dude was on the phone,

"mom,

i'm high

can you come get me?"

III

lets get slimed and remember
when everything was extreme

a neon childhood and beyond

its all in the IMPACT letters
on the little purple football

with the aerodynamic tail

and the whistles on it

so it goes wailing

until we snag it

"fuck yeah"

jagged, my man

I GREW UP

ON BLACK AND GREEN ROLLER BLADES

but things change,

there are:

chicks i know,

sent from my blackberry mobile device

with glittery shit and weed

with pretty fingers and stickers

i probably gave .5 shits when

she got drunk and tripped on her high heels

when she feels like the coast is clear she says to me,
"id like to die a few times, so i could see what everyone does
and then i'd come right back and forgive them or send them to hell"

i'm bored to good heavens with our grim reap

i'll go do something else

i'll go do keg stands underwater

but you already told me with tears in your eyes
the story of your tender and tragic field trip

"when i was a little girl we went on a field trip to boston

i bought some fake blood pellets from a joke shit store

and took them all

i lay on the Commons pretending to be dead"

i'm going to go wear baggy pants and eat cadbury eggs

i'm mad as shit and i'm trapped on facebook

well go on now and let me have it

i deserve some staples in my face too:

"ugh, jamie's in his room with some feelings again"

"oh man, jamie's still trying to figure out how socks work"

"ya, jamie's going to the louvre and making an italian tourist

take a picture of him giving the mona lisa the finger."

IV

Fred Neil had the boat readied
a day or two in advance

it stayed along the river

in the reeds and the grass

Fred and his lady came down
in the middle of a dusky night
and on the shore the lady and fred
thought out over the water

the boat was built
for the wise old nights,
the blacks and smoky reds

the boat was built for two
so the lady and Fred
just rowed on away

i'd like to join
but i'll stay on the shore


won't see fred neil again
hes singing low
and rowing towards



if i saw that guy again i'd hope i'd have a real crook by then
we'd be out in the canyon letting the feathers all get dry,

"fred, i'd rather not let go of the things,
i'm letting the heart do its soggy deathly boogie


"fred, i'm gonna be the hapless for a while,
i'm smoking all sorts of wacky desert spirits

"i think it might be best if they didnt let me be

what if those lined up ladies all dispersed somewhere?
i worry about the babes on the other side of the wall

dont let 'em leave me here man

i feel a little bad,
like i got them all sick

i can hear them coughing from this side

i'm clearing my throat too,
theres some mean alien shit boiling in there

does it still get dusky and red out there?
do you wonder where's that lady now, fred?



so i'll say
to the shepherd of the grizzled fleece



he shifts his crook
and says to me,

"listen friend,
i've walked in those fields before
and i've come forth with my hands up
while the whole flock has fled before me

i've gasped in the heavy breeze
i've seen bad greens in the grass




"keep your old heart on the mesas
with the scraggly crow and the little tree

but can't tell no one, can't tell no one

"its good for ya"

you just gotta hope for a good sidekick
some dude who will notice
when your face looks grim in the campfire light
and then you can peel on outta there"

V

When I took all the pills

At the New Jersey House Party

I wove a high fish
or tall tale
or fish story
or whatever:



"I got lost in the desert
All I had to eat was my Crocs

And that's what I BBM'd my father,
just like, 'get me outta here dad'
He sent back a sketchy emoticon
and was just like,
'sa-yo-na-ra son'


I had never seen a spring
more black or more yellow

but i got outta there
with my head in piece
in some senses at least"

good silence while
the boys just look towards
Pyramid Coors,
the light for us all

and its sweet to know that
I've been well understood


But songs that I think are going to get the party hoppin’
Never do

At the New Jersey House Party


the busses do not run all night
on these kinds of nights

i usually forget

my dear bindle stick

my heart wont stop partying










Whats that little cloak that Peruvians wear?
Its definitely not a chinampa.

Of small importance,
I'll carry it away in its papoose

I ought to get back to my native beach
Where you don’t have to talk at all


Just so I can hit around a
Little volley ball
On one of those poles

Such was ghostfacekilla's
valentines day advice;
We should always listen to Ghost

we're out in the country cabin,
he and i

i'll say,
"Goodnight wee mouselet,
come morning,
We’ll have a sip of gin
together"

Self assured,
no ghosts in my face
I can probably rest safe

While Ghostface Killah is downstairs
sitting on the window sill
thinking of aliases

"The Wallabee Kingpin"

Its early morning
with the sweet blue light

down from the mountains
















Gah gah gah
what gracious weather we're having
On this fine May Day
where the medieval girlies
swing around the May Pole

but you wouldnt know the 'deets'
you were in the public bathroom
spitting blood into the sink
with me