On This Day, Your Throat Will Become A Tomb

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.