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short 2To Kurt Lee's previous piece


urchin's reflection

I had gotten fired from the gas station for giving away booze to anyone who asked. Obviously immature, but a memory for the rocking chair. The gas from my last paycheck sneering down the bright cars passing through the lean trees snoring and wheezing. I went over to High’s door and tapped listening to music. He answered. The bitch slump in the corner like a little girl sitting in a pile of dirty leaves. Marine Vernon sat in the lazy boy’s hot high plump biceps in the worn summer window hands falling over turning wisps of dust. I sat down eyes veiled with kamikaze vexations and gossamer drawn curtains cyan. High had a small pile of yellow and pink crack rocks on his bureau under a smoke faded picture of his children, faded like his membranches of them still staring caught in emotion from the mirror. I gave him $80 and we bought a gram from some saw-toothed bulldog outside a fishmarket. A protestant church plugged the hill like an insect’s eyeball. We returned, and the short alcoholic Fib awaited us with the other two, and lounging marlboro man falling apart could have gotten me heroin if I would have waited. We sat in his cool high bedroom.

"It’s an art

Smoke bilious in the sun, slow hiss of cigarette lighters down the tarnished hollow air gauge, hissing rigid snake inside the moist rag. Rock of Rock inhumed out of hunger, lust, and hateful goring fingers that reenacted your youth with shadow puppets on the frail wall of the empty out of pride, youth gone, and no innocence permitting no more colors, swallows, and laughters like petals blowing into the tea on the unhinged summed wind. Hateful fingers the memory of fingers once loving clutching our listless bodies together away from the cash registers, highways, 4am shivering, minimum wages, and white legged virgins snickering at glowering eye spectres making faces at the sidewalk and peering on occasion at the sky.

I left, having smoked about one and three quarters a gram the last in my pocket. The sun fell on my vibrous high body like warm breath on my neck.

I saw him again, marauding over fog draped hills in hooded february, gasping, eyes black like jade marbles at the bottom of a shallow river pissing away time dow crapulous ohio wayfare, looking, looking for his children, looking, looking, looking for death, looking for love, looking for his love behind trees, maybe hiding, looking, looking for the taste of friendly winds going.


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