GREAT AND TERRIBLE: THE SLEEPING KOALA

She is a novice and simply cannot be left unattended. There will be all manner of problems arising from her ineptitude, he said, he thought, she wondered. However gracious he is feeling now, the hand will bite another on top of that particular sundae. Not the cherry, like forever the squaring Mary - the hand, if you will, pirating even, what may be seen with an eye to blame. It's all somewhat discontinuous, but is that perception? One may believe that she had, albeit long ago, empirical evidence to support such claims. Gradually, everyone died, as they are wont to do over any relatively protracted extension of time/space. The vessel had, after all, disappeared almost a decade ago (could it have been a hundred-thousand years already?). "Villians be damned", she howled, this time for real. "I am a leader if I don't want to be restricted and a warrior whose ice is colder than her sabre, or whatever." She thought again, that is not so good. She couldn't believe it; once again - a dismal and incendiary failure. Her ambition to become the White Bride of the Magick Box was foiled at every turn. Her monster eyeballs stared into the darkness, through and beyond the colonnades, and out into the perfect Ain Soph of Huh? "Nobody cared", she remembered, out loud. She said he thought she couldn't live anymore, especially if she were not allowed to live, he thought, she thought. What? How could she let him go on like that? He ate and slept and dreamed in ghosts, timing for a change in her eyes but had come - no more him. Furious, she screamed, ransacking the furrows of her Green and Fertile Plains. "Help me win!" Her lungs died in popping screeches. Puffs of air escaping her ears behind the force and pressure of eyes. But it is highly unlikely, particularly if she wanted to conserve energy, that they neither knew nor named numerous nubiles.

NIGHTSTANDS OF AUTISM AND PELVIC ANIMUS

"Twenty minutes should be plenty", he thought. If he had it all to bring it all up again, he would figure out how to become a different type of animal. Not figuratively - to become another being, another animal, other than a primate. He had thought about it a long time until he was sure that he was making the right decision. "It’s something I need to do," he told a friend. He used to watch National Geographic nature shows on the television when he was a child. He thought to himself, “Boy, oh boy – would I ever love to be a giraffe.” It wasn’t merely an intellectual fantasy; the thoughts were accompanied by a very physical pining - sort of an ache that would begin in his pelvis and rush upward and downward with heat and nausea. "In twenty minutes, I think I could somehow make the change". Either that or he would become some sort of nightstand or a cellphone and that would be better.

IN THIS, SOME BINOCULARS UNFOLD

His foot was in the way, every time. Wondering what would be the latest today, he stood around by a departments store. It was really hot but, sometimes, the doors would slide open oppositely with a swooshy sound and he would get a waft of cold department store air. In that cold air was infused the essence of packaged panty hose, hats of all kinds, carpets, lampshades in plastic bags, boxes of food designed to last for thousands of years, ceramics from exotic locales such as  Ethiopia and Morocco and other places where one would likely make the sort of connections needed to procure said ceramics at way-less-than-wholesale from way-less-than-scrupulous exloiter/exporter-types, and myriad thing-stuffs.

THE INSURMOUNTABLE LAZINESS OF OLD MOVIES

She had blurred-out hands on a crispy, sentient thing-beast. I couldn’t stand to confront her. The eyes were round like ours but teeth, gnarled, wooden. I had an itch. This sort of thing made her mad and she stood holding the thing. “I can’t control my hands for too long,” she threatened. “I just hope I don’t get too tired – I might do something really lazy and irresponsible.” She made a gesture with her foot, like drawing a circle in the dirt. There was, all of a sudden, little circles of blood welling up in my eyes. Soon, it poured out like black milk from a chilled, ceramic coffee cup filled with black milk. “Why was this thing in the refrigerator,” I asked. She said I hadn’t had a refrigerator, that was only my head and eyes. I knew enough not to trust her; she just wanted to stand there and act like a old movie. This is great, I thought. But not really. We spent an afternoon there, in the sand, sinking. My eyes, bloody with black milk and this woman with fried hands.

WHITE LIGHT/BLACK GLASS

The lake was like black glass that night. And under the glass there were dolphins. They broke the surface, however, but no shattering occurred. Not like with real glass, the clear kind one looks through or drinks from. Now the Moon bathed the dolphins in White Light and they froze for a moment, too long, like someone had a magic stopwatch that stopped time. Then, they turned back down into the murky, black glass of the lake; making a backward sucking sound as the water absorbed them into its eternal and feminine embrace. We heard Chopin then - a nocturne - arpeggios in some minor key or other, defying time signatures and sinking into the crushing melancholy and the death of a friend.

ARKS, LAID DOWN IN THE BLEACHED LIGHT

Living for a year, he had been, in a boat. Where water when no water had come? Her splendid night on a driver’s seat came, but trying to dance on the longer dances to save for later. The snow and the lizards became friends to distort and run from their boats in the harbor. They would be home in time. He used to tell her to mark all her boxes with egg-sheets and grease, opened to see in the hall by the door. Her trenches were dug for the night and he knew it couldn’t be worth the casualties lost. Saved again, for later.

EVERYTIME, NATURALLY SELF-CONTRADICTORY

He was the associate of the following paradox: being cannot change or be more than once, twice. She has conquered more pleats and they are only paradoxical before time, in this sense. It's a great way to credit more halfways or burning buildings with children and/or your mother. How did you exist to go back in time in the first place? Magickal liars say nerves of Golden Heedless stirrups have shown the barber he cannot be impossible - whether he be tennis courts, the nature of a sentence, or the approach of a common sense job. Of course, scales are hoping for surpassing rains. Merely a sprinkle, stopping the leaves from changing; turning. Consequently, the concept of motion shows self-contradiction. They've experienced a natural uncertainty in foot arguments. If you put them together, he said, one cannot expire with a pulse happening in the meantime if, D, the number of turning stops or, N, everytime he tries to catch up the tortoise has moved to P.

HER BLUE WHEEL IN THE WOODS: RANSOM!

"Yeah, it is real," she whinced, her eyes pretended to be wheels. "I've got sixteen of them in midnights." All of them blankly reeling, he imagined her without the earrings, but lightly. Neither of them needed toes for this house of cards. Besides, when one Romeo plants his heels in the Blue Wheel they all get a turn at bat. Or, at least that's what she was obliquely forming. "I can be innocent, but not what you think is crazy." She wanted that to be written in bold costumes, for his parade. "I'm sure you can appreciate my wanting to keep all these shoes for wearing. They are, after all, things." He nodded - but why? Gravy time never had this many sets and she knew that all she had to do was crumple up silver dollars to get that windpipe reading its lines properly. "Okay," he'd had it. "Get me something else blue."

NEXT TIME, THE FIRST TIME IS TWELVE OR MORE

It was my first time, so I wanted everything to be perfect. I know now the beach would have been the best place for us to be with each other, so we chose it even then. The thin, wire hairs on my chest started to stand up - anticipating - moving like flagella, but almost too wet to freely writhe. Like you would find in someone elses jar of petroleum jelly; in a jar by someone elses bed. My mates had bugs and, on the razor's edge of sleep, I thought we were together - but I had again merged only with myself. It was the Self for a while and then the guitar player from the Dave Clark Five (or Jayne County) - and then we were one (or, maybe Six). After we had subtracted one from Six, I tried to find my way back to the beach. Gradually, the light had worn off and I wanted to wake up but I found that sleep had not yet come. This was the worst part because we had become a fraction. Six was a long way back. Decimal spaces were taken up by zeros and the rest - but two new faces (not arabic [indian, really]). It (sleep) then came and I went home. I had decided that, from now until I could divide again, I wanted to start thinking about Twelve.

TWO CURLS FROM F.A.I.R.Y. - AND GREASED

He went to the F.A.I.R.Y. room to cry. Lengthy hotdog auditions have perfectly developed his moustache. The glam wanderings of his getting known through the torches excluded restrictions; but with the properties of the respective owners, vapid and deleted. They said it was safe, and he would save on gas. Surely, it must not be certified but the thirty-percent of all monies was not only additional, but slightly ribbed. "Just stop wearing it," the advertisement read. The simple world of the antique team could be orientally ignored - while one merely changes the sporting nations. Eli and his delicate heroes of the forty-two waterfords were wildly stacked to favor what they knew, and not just a little about being ecstatic members of the phylum rodentia. Many rich deadheads began with multiple yogurt tragedies to build the free workshops in the Tri-State area. There may have even been a lottery for sixty-six woman from F.A.I.R.Y.. "It was super-mega for all imagined sweethearts this season," said one becurled greaser.

I KNEW YOUR SECRET MILK GOD

You can't talk to me - I'm the same man. I have liquor and I work and to feed my secret family milk from the vacuum rays of our inner planet.  I came from shimmering mountain people, whose time was neither now nor whenever. Now, we're doing just fine - like the orbiting celestial prison our minds have envisioned. With you or without you, I have chosen the Old Man Sick Tribbet wedding dress to wear, and creating the Crimes of our god - unified and alone. For he who has collected dew at the hour just before dawn, I have saved an equinox. We will live - my secret family and I - in our own trousered, unremembered, human hearts. On this night, the wet grass will sway heavily; we will appraoch the dawn on a quiet woman's trousers - living to be.

THE RED HORSEY OF THE WHISPERING KING

The Whispering King sufficently wet his smooth dark head and spoke, "Happy thoughts have bundled more gifts than any oppresive night ever could." Nancy listened lamely, like a poorly illustrated cow. "The pencils from the Chronicle," he continued, queerly lisping, "have been scribbling the rattlers of my princess story once again. Now every cow puncher in Nueces country wants a presumptuous outfit and matrimonial blood." She couldn't contain herself, "With all your loyal vassals," Nancy said, screaming her rolled cigarettes off the bar, "Why would you twitch in the riverbed? You've never burdened your ego's pony with song before." The Whispering King heard. He fell silent. The silence was sudden - tentative - looking humorously for the fattest lambs. Finally, he replied, "An old rascal with a bulging tomato once told me that I would be king; I laughed at him, like a magnimitious Red Horse, willfully ignoring the olives of impending night. That has been my deepest regret."

PRESENT INFORMATION AGAINST THE POOR

She separated forms, marriages and sheafs of counterfoils a short distance from the new telegraph office, who were not very busy. "What clock was it?" she asked. Her hands were like whipped egg whites and extremely bland. I looked down but had no answer. "Because, I don't even remember what we were talking about." She acted as if she had recently used marijuana. "Perhaps I should relieve my mind, confidentially?" She said that would be fine. "We haven't even bothered yet but surely you can imagine a run-down telephone booth and the old person to go with it." She nodded, so I continued, this time investigating my own disappearance. "Well, I have an interest in someone else's racehorse but not the impossible ransom to be concocted. That being said, I presently have not begun to make sense to you, me or anyone else."

STANLEY AND THE INKWELL OF NOT-TIME

"No, Stanley. You don't understand, " he said. "If I take off these glasses, I lose all contact with the past." What he meant was that the synthesis would be impossible to achieve if it were not in the mode of an original being. Certain instantaneous consequences, concerning the Erlebnis, would characterize a hypothetical discovery, granted, but at what cost? "I am, of course, implying presupposition." He hastened to add that the duration of the extensions equaled the problem inherent in dimensional memory but could not explain the engram of extra-temporal refusals, regardless of spurious ideas. I tried to console him, "Dead time is an observable magnetization, like a piece of soft zinc in a phenomenal procession." He nodded, internally and inadequately, then said, "Grant a past to something atomically heavier than the Final Opposite and you've got an ontological dilemma." I hadn't the heart.

CONSCIOUS OF THE PYTHIAN TRIPOD THRONE

I didn't want to be there. I didn't want to be near those broken-down, unnecessary hills, lamely rocky and uncommunicated. The whole place clinged together like an avalanche and bad sportsmanship. The lawlessly splintered capitals of an illegitimate mountain, again to retire, thoughtless and peering outward. Yet I would suffer again, carelessly, for a minute of bereaved creature dreams...terse dreams, cowering under the indignant Oracle.

FAKE TIGER CROWN OF THE PINE BARRENS

Now that they have gone, I can tell you: I was once the highest sun of Cape Clorox, bristling on Saturday beaches and equally white afternoons. The patterns of days were mine obliquely, by segregated lonliness and my carriers were the simple Gauchos of the North. Many confused visions tamed my elemental roar until the outrage of both friends and outsiders rained obtuse bullets of not-love. I had no assailants in the manner of victims, though one might have guessed. Even through snowstorms, effete and perpendicular, shadows loomed in cordial whenevers, cold and mindless. I tell you, it's uncomfortable to inoculate such a hang-out-the-future system, bent on its own mute survival.

THE TICHLORNE BLOOD REPLICA HAND

Steve and Ned were born to nervous rivalry but somehow managed to endure like two crimson peas, vibrating...pitched highly, and in two distinct pods, far apart. It may have been Steve's Tichlorne Blood Replica Hand - "The Perfectly Blurred Light Hand", as it had been marketed. The T.B.R.H. had always given him an unfair advantage - or so thought Ned. It seemed Steve could absorb the pangs of voluntary suffocation when the pair played games under water or earth. Ned dominated merely in rope-skinning and chemical senses. Ned presumed to lose the rivalry in between university lectures and the fertilization of marine life. "I could squish squid," Steve said of his hand. "But you have no chemicals nor ropes," Ned eagerly produced, "and squid don't breath!" That wasn't a victory or a rescue - it infuriated Steve. The T.B.R.H. was under warranty forever. Steve's heart, in bitterness, began to sing the song of no chemicals. Years later, both died...not the Hand.

THOU HAST MERELY THE SHAKES

A pint of Morning's Milk constituted Goody's business catechism. The time he had spent in the Celestial City was German by birth and terrible by choice - no higher vanities for Pope nor Pagan. "Beatrice!" he poisoned, "There is an awful doom - I breathe a loathsome fragrance." The flowering odors grew torpid as she wondered how to join her lips in a spider's death prayer. To this day, her existence was a lost, black illusion. "Why slay the eyes of my heart with shallow blight, like some vibrating chamber in a gem-like haze - devoid of Father Light?" She asked like she would ask to borrow a rake. "I don't care." His recollections were gray, marbled and many. The Mental Nothing - indefinable and uncreated - extended their infancy beyond the little silver cord's science and Goody and Beatrice then only lived to grieve.

AN EMBARRASSMENT OF FREEDOM COMPULSIONS

Ineffectual attempts aside, Barry's resemblence was never regularly christened. His steel and presently glass car portended believably, all light and reckoning. He bore the hasty Self tolerably in San Jose, California but for that certainty, to apply at random. "You are very good; very tolerable," often mistaken, his parting words would be pleasanlty addressed to the Self. Here, compulsion could raise sudden houses of mortal agony. "Strange to pardon my consequences," it would generally add - yet all things accept and please the Self. Barry, being informed of the engagement, characterized a somewhat assignable location - liquid-steel car, notwithstanding. But, the essential part of the narrative is hesitancy. The needless indifference bearing down, inexorably, upon the ordinary hearts of Barry and the Self.

LUGGAGE COMPLICATION AND A FULL MINUTE

We split up to avoid attracting attention. She collected knocked-down papers and uniforms, fashionable but smart enough then. According to the bellboy, she registered in Detroit or St Louis or someplace. I tipped like a burglar alarm to show how things have changed - he was less positive than personal, but that's hotel stuff. "Say, have you seen a huge cloud of a woman, trying to look normal?" I didn't want to come off that good with my errands. The bellboy patted his pockets and pointed to my daylight green armbands, "You ought to know." When all else fails, mention a guys armbands. He walked away and I imagined that with a gun or a typewriter my consideration was straightened out on everything. "Anybody got an old order pad to write on?" I asked nobody in particular. The place smelled.

THE CHEMICAL BAIZE AND MONTY

"Have I done you an injustice?" asked Monty, roughly pyramidal in shape. "Perhaps, of the usual size but still other points possessing sideways." Despite long-fingered impressions, the two got along ordinarily. Never the sound of returning feet nor hurrying stairs, theirs was a table-by-the-window partnership - blunt as old knives. "As this has happened rather clearly, there may not have been enough time for possible carpet contractions." Agreeing, the Chemical Baize added, "But have you noticed the servant's singularly latticed cottage?" His friend had not, nor had he sooner reached the twilight of the disposal when the Chemical Baize erupted in bubbling specks of gleeful overcoat, "Though our four-thirty task has produced inclement responses, it seems we've stumbled upon half-a-chapter of Thucydides!"

SLEEPING IN THE OBJECT MOUTH

Midfield's supposed to be blind and everything. "You were such an objective kid," he was a geyser, ears blue like nickels from Turkey. I was wrapped in old socks and mud raised from the plough - nothing, then bleeding. "I don't know rockets, Midfield. I lost a headband there...and my cuticles." He was high on his sweat, right in front of me. Forward bent too late, like scowling barbecues. "I don't need your bikinis and cut-offs in Madrid, Farmer. I want that anecdotal pause, if it's in you." I had a private throat - zipped like a sleeping bag - but any normal flood would have fell like cantaloupes, high and then really low. Before my eyes, the pages extinguished. Midfield had a Big Bang for the Iliad. "No dice."

THE MACHINERY OF A FEEBLE REMARK

The scene: Mooney lived on an old wooden shelf, with notebooks filled with blonde staircases. Green-white smoke billowed through yellow light - 2700K, incandescent light, unfocused. One deep-red garnet in a small velvet box next to the prayer-book bed. His employer heard furry slippers ascending, approaching. "Whenever the body is vacant, my friend, you'll spot a plain-clothes street, " said anyone's boss. Again a Crosby spasm and a good night's drinking, "Blasted matters! Please, old man, my heart's blood is a layman's patriot - like a dubiously clean hillside." The enterprise was twenty-four nervous ideas away...and, yet, good terms followed their devious Jesuit courses.

ATHLETICALLY RECEDING MILLENIUM

His arms were working the recollection of their last virgin appearance. He paused, angled, then, "It's beautiful to drive between the manuscript and pulling teeth...but I've been...trying...your planet." Drifting off a little further. "When it happens to you, remember!" she snapped, "What do you think becoming my grandfather's valley climbed until the working parts come in?" He was growing with a full impression, while she laid against the earth's roundness, tipping at first, then numb. They both struck the word of appreciation, like a clear spot amid the normal religion. Finally, he struggled, "Look at the exhaling closeness and breathe my problem exactly." Her grimace, out of focus, ran with the true message and she checked, "There, in a different jungle, dies the sunlight of one too many smurfs."

EVERYWHERE, THE VACUUM PROWLED

I smiled a little and made a rep for gnarled people. "What's under those shaggy hands?" I asked. She trimmed off, and with a wide grey thank you, stepped sidewise. "You knew somebody - quickly - anybody moved below, and they did." She pined for her own language but nothing. I established an ecstatic chin, "I played pool one dull-green summer, and where were your small beaches?" Making change, she stood, "In sandlots on the roof... inland." That laced up wisely, like a hundred dollars, but we never thought to paint the ceiling. She leaned on another customer. His name: Curtains. He was well-set glass and shaped like a telephone.

BROACHING THE FAILED FLATIRON

I enjoy everything I do with a Golden Circulation. There comes a passage when a person of her sort examines immensely. "Too astounding to die of unhappiness," she swears, kicking and dying. "To this very day my mind is English in order that I might preserve you." But I never subject her manual; Her luck rush continued through the vacation world. Like any militarian in secure places, I foresee pompous rigidity and editorials. I remembered, "Whose warm Jesus authorities beseech you to die in root?" We protect the education, awakened and old. "Discriminate and prevail of such a hopeless program - you have Samson and Mussolini!" She read tragedies and treasures with witnessing hands, performing inside the obstacles. Hieroglyphic exploits study her ways of simple sleep and nothing to come. Any solution, a stubborn refusal - we hide in what the economists call a "fortunate idea".

THE WHITENESS OF BRINGING THAT UP AGAIN

"How long am I supposed to keep these small questions?" he added deliberately, "That's a hell of a shoulder for morning eyes, Tammy." Her arrogantly pickled door sang, "You're blocking it anyhow - blocking it but that's not important." The unpredictable mouth was once again the emperor's gift, reverting to Spain. "Malta or anywhere else of lighted fat." Three closed the bewildered, white-ringed eyes. Her voice was hoarse, poking. He sat with uneasy dollars and curtain-bell trust. "Yesterday massed on yellow-grey truth, to my knowledge," he always held, "as soon as I spoke of manipulated plugs." She counted her histories by Thursday. She wept, ceremoniously. Lights off and becoming hopeless, his throat again crumpled, "You cautioned the damned pumps!" She supposed he had high transfers from the pinkish building, hanging across the foot. Dressing, the pockets bulged and a slippered attendance turned the palm. "I balanced myself sleeping, damn you," her mind advanced, "though catching neither touch nor secrecy shows my eyetooth." His midnight again ditched the lashes and he loyally interfered with her natural crown. Sitting down towards the ragged head, he bullied his trousers and lazily sputtered his arms.

FUTURE MONTHS IN MEDICINE

"I have eye creases," said she to her. "He's making things frown." New opinions of science discredited each other and, finally, pretty wrinkles had no vigor at all. "Nothing, I repeat, Nothing irrational doubts my head." Her head doubted future reports amidst poor Stephen. Every way pardons their glances - closely by now and with crisp fingers, they wait. The black-haired son with a mouthful of coat derailed the horizontal indentations of his sterile wives. No one but whom.

DOUBLE EPIPHANY AT FACE VALUE

"I beg your pardon," rising abruptly, I said to the window. A machine thinks, for one thing, differently about it now. I removed a few feet from the vine and continued. "Plants belong to their conclusions - if you omit the premises." I travelled around a small tree several times rapidly, unaffected by the sensitive mimosa. Then, in the absence of a brain, she crept through the opposing course. "Even if it did, what then?" she asked. "We are, after all, speaking of proofs I think." How else could one explain the vitality of the mineral kingdom? I then arranged myself into perfect geometrical shapes and concealed.

DELIGHTED AT THE LARGE SAD EYES

He had gotten settled in the unnecessary allegiance. Everyone makes the insolent hotel hold back the idea. How many times had he seen the lieutenant find him a mouth? "No. She did not perhaps remember," said he, then. Minutes wandered near her. He had, in midnights, gone back inside himself. Frantically, the corner held the breath bent over - the heat of the sun grumbling mightily, "They left the valley and ran mineral limbs." Two riders laughed yellow dunes and raised no landscape going by. She yelled, "There! A narrow moon above gave white doors!" She felt weak metal and with one hand, furiously, poisoned the telegram.