Moving to the straightened arrow

Try to manage complaints on an empty stomach.

"Just answer the question about the cat!"

Now, he didn't have to say when to show up. We already knew this was a Nazi-evil bastard, a damn brat kid wearing a black hunting cap, likely for squirrel
(to contrast out of season).

And what can the spring say upon your nasty return?
That we didn't know how much like typing with your left hand this would be. Wow.
Who's going to hit the space bar next month?

Just wipe your tonsils in the sink, of formaldehyde they stink.

Bitter alone, in a cage of sorts, caring for children, Claire strikes us as haggard.

Her fleeing now is immanent. Against scraggly old hair a lovely sheen--not dormant but certainly nothing overt, the kids won't be hurt. She can go.

The schoolyard cackles a coyote, the kids come back.
Not always for the noise...of a triangle struck just once, meaning: get back here, I see one.
Their hearing it is just fine.

So easy to miss, no one ever did. But first I gotta hear it, me apart. An incredibly dense and lush song:
The Good Life
by
Weezer.

Sure, you'll need headphones for the whole dose. Somehow easy to miss so much.... in the ears is that anger, having to have a chorus--and the conclusion is three or four vicious, heavily ironic crashes.

Your goddamn younger brother keeps popping up on Facebook, I have no time to add this kid.

Speak when

Dedicate your sacred moment each day to my bad news, and you shall repair.

This stuff makes me itch.

Would you like to borrow a lighter?

Shake it in the wind--but not too much!

smallish pub

There was a small hole I could peak through--to see what I was up to.

It was a matter of faith. For years I had practiced the life of a faith-based person, full of fear, wanting revenge on the flesh, craving in a tragically backwards fashion my own redemption. It had turned morbid long before my quitting the religion could make it stale.

Fishing around for compliments at a local pub, I heard the Mountain Journal people cavorting at a table near where I had sat before laying my arm on something sticky. Their topic: Vietnam vets residing too close to an old blown-out dynamite factory with no potential for repair.

Stories were shared, memories skewered by the resident critic of the Journal, the same who sketched what the artist later rendered full in color and dimension. The subject of homemade whiskey was dropped when the bitter local sap dripped from the interlocutor's palette.

They moved on to textual questions while nodding intonations toward my corner of the pub.

Not to suggest they knew of my proclivity with a pen....but it did seem I was a candidate, especially if their conversation were suddenly to lag. Do not imagine the old bookish hick, dear reader, unless somehow you've an historical understanding of the following:

That any manner of strength could go into felling and stripping trees into logs and directing them down the local creek system towards the Allegheny river; that this could be managed by strong poets and muscular husbands alike, each for himself interested in personal or familial well-being. I ask that you consider these diverse white heroes of a hilly new economy for the sake of a story that has no intention of developing. But to regroup: the lumber industry had its ramifications, they cannot be reduced to the necessities of the brute.

My thread was canceled, or should I say transferred, before Last Call.