Every television channel is blank. Static
bursts from the speakers in mosquito swarm. Your neighbors all have eight legs. They listen to bad pop music and cliched country songs, stand in grocery aisles for too long, read the pages of People magazine as though they were holy texts. You write their names over and over until the letters become illegible. They spit soft silk from dry mouths. You spool it by hand, wrap it around spark plugs and other engine parts you don't fully understand. College debt howls at the moon. You pull all of your notebooks from their place on the bookshelf, arrange them alphabetically according to the last word. Ignore everything but the dates that made you smile, destroy every good day you experienced until each one is a china plate scraped clean with silver teeth. Form a paintbrush of rattlesnake fangs. The color scheme is unimportant. What matters is that all the negative space is gone.
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William JamesWilliam James writes poems and listens to punk rock - not always in that order. He's an editor at Drunk In A Midnight Choir and a two-time Pushcart nominee whose poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Misfit Magazine, Word Riot, The Misanthropy, Words Dance, DM du Jour, and Potluck Magazine, among others. His first full length collection "Rebel Hearts & Restless Ghosts" is forthcoming from Timber Mouse Publishing. |