{Formerly Titled “Halloween Special” and or “A Corny Island Of The Mind”}

“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.”

Franz Kafka

Your paper skeleton lays in the wet grass like a snake’s skin. My own outer layers are sprawled about the office floor like a cadaver. It has been nearly one year of shuffling memories like a chess board. And the coffee from a cheap mug screams at the fillings in my molars. I think I have a loose tooth, or a popcorn shard. Is there a there there? There are artifacts in my breath, so it seems.

There is no view from nowhere. When you have white walls—it is easy to spot the insects (Kafka). Some mornings dash a pink sky will appear dash and remind you of the cold car drive coffee thermos days of the rural carrier academy comma or the reflection of the sky on the hood of an old car comma leaking radiator fluid through the vents. Possibly.

My mind here is a tooth coming loose—or improperly grind. There is a loose dog in the neighborhood. Haven’t you seen the earth falling on the leaves—and the core of the apple trees? People call, friends don’t. The remote works but I can never find it. If your house is dirty—turn the lights off. We will all politely pause now to write our poems on toilet paper and flush them down the potty. Coffee has that effect on me.

Nowadays—I don’t write—I assemble words like a dumpster puzzle. The sentences and paragraphs are placed together in a sticky—soggy sort of way. I collect words like a lint roller. I am become candy corn—a dumpster dweller.

I had a dream about snakes where I made parallels between life events, various forms of venom, and the way snakes seemingly move without effort. I thought the dream was pretty cool. But when I woke up, I forgot the major points—only the image of the cobra remained.

Maybe the road was the snake—devouring its way through thick wooded areas and cornfields—moving in a serpentine pattern over hills—past quiet barns and farmhouses—shimmering like a mirage. Maybe I was the snake and I contained some sort of venom—some sort of neurotoxin—seeping out of my eyeballs and affecting anyone whom which my gaze fell upon. Now I’m sounding like Kafka—sans the roach legs (white walls). One should not take pride in sounding like Kafka.

Like a snake, I will shed my skin and it will lay in the vestibule like a cadaver. Yes, maybe I am the snake—or I am simply a dream.

Tonight I will eat from an orange pale, full of orange wrappers, sitting in an orange chair—glaring at an orange sky.

The stars have aligned.

Is it a synchronicity—or simply a coincidence? Maybe the synchronicity is waking from the dream?

People write novels just to make a single sentence.