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(I live in tubes. I am there inside them, moving through. (I am sick within a sea of deleted items.) I see the sun on glass. It shines there. It moves around and goes somewhere. I go to where I'm going.
(I am never there).)
•
(I follow lines. They take me from tubes to other tubes
(Straight. Angled. Perpendicular. Parallel).
I paint cylindrical stripes with my pupil(s) along them.
Inside them, I suspend myself with rubber cord(s). (I hang hung.)
The line(s) end at an edge or edges formed out of the ordinary. I step inside the edge to a space inside two lines. I stand and count (two-three-four) horizontal planes.
(I gauge a scale.) I see people in other planes diverging from my common point.
(Within my level lie common lines and limits.)
(This is where I stay.
This is my nexus.
(This is mine).))
•
((I scrape along the road-line, side-walking.) My toes are tongues. I taste. I count. (Degrees. Minutes. Seconds.)) I read, twelve degrees, ten minutes and thirty seconds on a toothbrush billboard. ((I am in the city.) I have been there for thirty days, numbering problems from my slanted angles only.) I see buildings making cement tubes, turning sharply in different directions. There are hollow whispers. (Upstream and outward.) I hear people in outside places. They scratch brick(s) with their finger(s).
I climb wall(s). I claw my cell(s).
(I wait.) I don't move.
(I want to have something.
(I want to).))
•
I am a figure so formed. (I feel my weight. (I feel.))
•
(I count the clock crosswise (crossing my eyes (crossways) (crisscrossed).)) I am underground beneath the city, dipped dank in halogen beams. I follow the sloping light with vertical tracery. The air sticks to the gum-stained ground. There is the smell of fish. (The swimming aroma of it pines my architecture.) I make marks or strokes long in proportion to my breadth with pens, pencils, and tools on all surface(s), down the middle of tile and cubicle formations, to (and into) other people (in tubes) spinning in my head.)
•
(Something assembles along a line between city streets and me.
(A row. A series.) A line of green trees sprouting wrinkled wooden piping, waiting their turns at or for something, queued without span or thickness.
(Then a fracture.
(Then a forest. Long, needled-shaped leaves of sprout (then brood).)
I am stratified by tubes of timber trunks. I create coniferous maps in my mind, listing northbound routes with evergreen pigments, dotting paths with turpentine and tar. I travel these lanes with steamships, trolleys, and taxis.)
(I bathe in their resinous sap).))
•
(My head transplants my chest. My blood pumps plum. My esophagus twists crook.)
There is a fence and I follow. The barrier encloses in a gradual bend, flanking color(s) with the barbed flow of wire and wood, preventing entrance or escape. I invert to another form, my ribs collapsing into my cage. (I have been warded away.
(I have been confined.)
I have been).))
•
(This building is my building. Mine. There are walls on my eyes. (A continuous surface (without doors or windows) where thickness exceeds length.) I hear voices in the rampart. (Footsteps. People (animals singing) dangling keys and chain(s). Bleeding from the undersides of veins. Hanging by their feet (by their organ(s)) from ceilings, folding into one another.)
((I go to the wall.
(I go and put myself in.))
(I go).))
Adam Moorad's writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming in 3 A.M. Magazine, H_ngm_n, Mud Luscious, Storyglossia, and Underground Voices. His story "Star-Spangled Enterprise" is/was a nominee for Best of the Net 2009. He is the author of an ebook, The Nurse and The Patient (Pangur Ban Party, 2009). He lives in Brooklyn and works in publishing. Visit him here: adamadamadamadamadam.blogspot.com.