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typer as adversary

grey skies, whining dogs, pouting wives, insistent children:
these elements of the waking day i can tolerate.
discordant telephones, obnoxious bill collectors,
dripping faucets:
these particulars i understand.
tweaking drug-bandits on the run, militant lesbians who only
wear black, hydrocephalic trailer court children with pencils
through their hands:
these characters make sense to me.
cats that can jump twenty feet, salamanders that can re-generate
body parts, spiders with abdomens like grapes:
these animals compute.
what doesn't correlate, what doesn't jive, what doesn't
interface with my daily scope and sequence
is a way to beat the typer at his insidious little game,
prevent him from worming his way into my psyche
and bouncing off the inside of my skull like a tennis ball
inside an empty wine vat.
certainly there are ways to appease the motherfucker:
type rambling shlock like this,
find a poem in the needle,
steal an idea from someone else,
write a letter home.
but it is never enough.  it is all just bad drugs.
the typer wants the BIG score, the award-winning words,
the fame and attention-grabbing phrases
to flow through his plastic veins.
he sits there in the back room, on the card table in front
of the window with the bullet hole in it, in front of the
duct-taped drapes--he sits there and throws out his tendrils
at me like a fisherman casting for eels.
he sits there--fat lump of molded polymer--like a
little dictator.
my hand on the crotch of the wishing tree "make me a great
novelist" is not good enough for him.
he wants hours,
days spent
stroking his keys,
inserting paper into his plasticized mandibles.
it is more than just a game.
it is a battle, sword drawn, wounds spilling blood
like crimson smiles.
the typer sits there, Cheshire sly, innocent
at the surface,
but inside, inside where the doors move on rusted hinges,
inside the mind of the man he torments,
the screams of a thousand souls
blister the paint and guide the frosted leaflets
to a floor that floats on air.

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