Algid imposter A.U. connected with sodden skin in a marriage of antiquated modernity. He became himself anew. Awakening his eyelids for work, sat up with his hands at his side for support of weighted shoulders. Dreads home abandoned, leaving a vacancy no tenant found suited to hole up. Limb ends laden of mortar balanced the chiffon mechanism of him with a crown of air. He could not shake off what had no roots planted. As if his movements were not his own, the body directed itself in an upward position and with the autonomy of another, the man stood present, canvassed blues desert dry.

Leafless trees bearing blank buds hung outstretched overhead. Barren woods of no man’s land forfeited kingship to its sole inhabitant. He didn’t care to take stock of his court, not realizing the depleted soil and grassless meadows cried his name, vibrations resonated from within earthless foliage enunciating as sunken footsteps in cronish woods.

He was indifferent to it all, not without care, but lacking even a semblance of bother. A few moments earlier all precision to detail was directed towards the rightful acquisition of his watch but now that moment has passed and with it his vigilance. Out of habit he walked on. First meandering like a child’s head on clouds then with the convictions of a man wronged. He felt his gut before anything else, the white hot gurgle of unwarranted anger was awakening. Now his body returned to him, recognizing only the seething pit inside him forking upwards like dendritic lighting. There was no reasonable query to justify the anger embedded deep inside but he was a man of answers, forgoing all questions, leaving them for the sages or cons. Much did not concern this man. Buzzers buzzed, honkers honked without little of a head turn from him. The most dangerous of men are those with hatred in their bowels for no apparent reason other than the sun had made its home in the sky. Moving on, his feet led gallant towards anything but his shadow. Anger from anger fueled his passage; hunger for nothing in particular fired his coals. The sort of hunger spurned by an internal void unrecognised to itself multiplied over and over reflecting and multiplying at a rate more rapid than symbiosis. Food did not exist; nourishment to be more specific. There was no offerings on the path he walked. No fruited trees or seeded brush; but intent did not knock at his stomach. It was the kind of hunger that gnawed incessantly at every cell in his being. His fibers tightened in anticipation of what was not and could not be known to any physicality​ of this world. Abruptly the reticent man’s vocals reverberated in his throat producing an obnoxious caw ungraceful as unrecognizable to his ears.

What for?

He heard the question back at himself as if posed by another party on his road to roads.

Flat land of afterbirth stretched forward and backward giving no reprieve to the ocular station locked on screen. North or south made no difference the only option was straight, for behind was the prehistoric pool he had arose from and not being amphibious in biology, onward seemed to be the most logical of choices. He measured time’s movement in cycles of thought. The sun helped none for it seemed fixed on high noon in the sky and clouds stayed hidden from blue. To say cycles of thought Is a bit much, there were but three bullets to his brain.

What for?

Repeating with no real care.

What time is it?

Directed at his busted watch that ticked on one minute then back the next; suspending him indefinitely between his pressured inhalation and exhalation.

Lastly the white heat.

Why white?

Tripping backwards and then forward his limbs caught a net. One not dissimilar to that used for catching fish to be fashioned into bouquets for beauties. Fish flowers for lovers. The ground dropped out. There had never been any ground. Substance crumbled forcing skin away, replacing epidermis with wax. Cheap store bought Sabbath candle wax, a by product of the oil business. Crude slick kerosene glided over the waxy waning body lubricating the man to be forcefully inserted into the earth through a gopher hole. Ass first he succumbed to the place of ten thousand graves, parallel to the black sky, he swallowed his swallows and swallowed and swallowed. Salt blocks shifted as minerals in traffic jams excusing no new entries into the games they played. The man rolled sideways in semi-circles down, lower than red Indian clay, below him his fingernails paved the way. They separated themselves from him, now a person all their own, digging in procession, building sand castles under earth, leaving his fleshy bulbous fingertips smothered stubs of peni. His fingers now eels, ten eels totaling 21 appendages, with no control over a single one. They writhed South, eschewing the face for the soul until almost insulted the man stook all ten in his mouth, bit down bringing uppers to lowers, imbibing the slime phalluses all at once. He could feel the crowd of underwater dwellers now fighting for the lead down his throat into his white hot gullet. When the last eel dropped in he rolled clockwise once more through the net’s cross hatched gates into his own boots under the sky.

Climbing on air, dropping each one of his hundred legs down one after the other, the feeling of having a dinner plate set out just for him took precedence in his mind. Drab curtains of dying tree limbs sealed their fate and crumbled into the sea before him. Wild onions, browning, emitted such a sickly sweet scent that it flew through the flat oxygen, finding reprieve in the back of his throat. Saccharined stickiness glued white then brown, changing static channels of mildew as each second turned into a year. Repeating white, brown,black,brown,white,white,brown then finally black. Black strapped to his esophageal lining, it planted lilies with rosemary gardens, dug white picket fences keeping out while shielding in. The blackstrap submitted its forwarding address to the proper channels of being, hung its cast iron skillet above the man’s uvula, positioned its ugly afghan blankets overhead and flipped up the red mailbox flag.

There was home to be.