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Weathered or not you give a rats behind, we’re going forward, ” He yelled back at me, the walls of sodden wind smashing across his face and pulling back his beard and hair. And then, without waiting for my reply, he turned back to the peak and mounted another step. The raindrops swooped up at me on the updrafts and stabbed icily at my face and neck. I couldn’t leave him. I was alone, and inexperienced. I would never make it down in the storm. Without another option, I pulled my goggles down over my dry burning eyes, my scarf up against the warm damp of my heaving breath, and set myself windward, upslope and toward the razor peaks. Against the gale we raged, through the howling tempest, and I imagined God watching, laughing. Or perhaps stroking his beard in silent admiration at the courage or madness which he had invented.

Posted By mattlock On 02.21.2013 @ 6:56 am

He crossed the hills of the windy desert to the point where the dunes sunk into a pit. Inside the pit, tanned bearded men hauled buckets of white powder up from the black depths of the earth. As they did so they moaned hopelessly and lamented. He was there with a caravan, into which this line of brown thin men dumped the salt. And then they slunk back into the darkness of the mine and disappeared. The sun blazed furiously in the cloudless sky. A dry full wind trailed sand from the tips of the dunes and tossed it into the valleys. He waited under the cover of his personal caravan, sweating inside the folds of his robes. To the cities with his cargo, back across the heartless plains, to wealth and power flowing like an unstoppable river.

Posted By mattlock On 02.07.2013 @ 9:07 pm

Peers! I’ve seen you listening from the dulcet hills and not partaking, though you take too much from the ether, weightless and unsatisfying. Yet, strangely soothing. Like gluttons on cotton candy, you’ve eaten your weight–over a thousand years, it took–and are still hungry. After a time, that hunger makes you full. Ex peri ence. Latin for: “without the edges of suffering.” Or “suffering without edges.” Or “the very core of suffering.”

Posted By mattlock On 01.05.2013 @ 6:17 pm

years past, since the trapeze accident. Five long months of this insufferable terrestrial existence. Five years of wanting to leave the choking banality, the unbearable uniformity, the unceasing pressure pushing up the bottoms of my feet, and climb to the dizzying heights and swing like freedom itself on a big swooping arch, my own inverted parabola, and feel that pull in my guts grow stronger and stronger until it releases and I am weightless and untethered.

But every time my feet leave the ground, the first rung of the ladder, even an inch from the ground, a strangling feeling comes up into my head, my eyes water, my throat gets tight, and my memories all turn to that last weightless time. The time I felt weightless for just a bit too long. And I knew it was too long, but I didn’t care, I loved it so much. Floating there, free, in pure bliss. And then all pain and cracking feeling and sharp snap and waking in the hospital. From then on, freedom, levity, joy, were all mixed up with that feeling of that instant of black blind death. And I have not swung since. I have been tethered to this boredom, this suffering. Because better to suffer than die.

Posted By mattlock On 12.17.2012 @ 5:07 pm

A paradox. To move toward a goal without rest, perhaps. Which means to have set ones mind to a task, to an interpretation, to an end justifying the means. To have placed before you one thing that shall direct, and to thereby announce that that single thing holds more importance than all others. To be undeterred, as it were.

Yet, undeterred from what? Is it not the same to say that all the other things had focused you on your one? Is any event a singularity, apart from all influence? Of course not. It is a process of focusing, a reducing. Like a funnel in which you swirl, and would have headed in any of those lovely tangents, were it not for the walls. Which, to you, deterred. Plunk, down the middle, your mind.

Posted By mattlock On 12.13.2012 @ 5:11 am

Shingled as such, he never would have considered that the carpet upon which he walked was not, in fact, the most recent layer to be unearthed. Not even close, buckaroo. Even if it seems like a floor to you, what you’ve really got, underneath your there, is a rafter-nest. That’s right, your rocking chair rests on the point of a sloped rain cover, and you don’t even realize the thinness of the air, ’cause it’s just air to you. But it’s ozone, my friend, to all them what came before. All them that gazed out windows which, if gazed out of presently, would yield not but the blackest view of topsoil and clay. All them layers of sediment and dust (dust is made of discarded skin cells, you know) which, working steadily and sleeplessly, aim to bury everything on Earth. And them that’re buried, you’ll see, looking out from their past and through the present windows, wouldn’t see nothin’ but black. You too, buckaroo, looking out your own window. Think you see sky, ain’t seein’ nothing but the black dust a comin’.

Posted By mattlock On 12.06.2012 @ 9:58 pm

H.R. riding the striped beast, and wondering why a “g,” in certain contexts, mostly when in the company of “h” and his ilk, tends to be less useful than a whisper of air or an exhalation.

Posted By mattlock On 12.05.2012 @ 4:59 am

“…and I do, most vehemently, your honor!” The court room remained bleakly silent. The jurors rustled anxiously, waiting for the speech to continue. “In light of all evidence, in lieu of any hint of dignity on behalf of this court, with all saints and angels behind me, I must abso-lutely object to peanuts in ice cream. I mean, come on.”

Posted By mattlock On 12.02.2012 @ 6:25 pm

under, we go. Like a place, but not capitalized, because it’s no capital. Rather, it is the un-place. Place that we go when we’re not looking to be anywhere. When the thought of anywhere unsettles us, somewhat. There, under the table, under the earth, under the weather–but not sick, just under it. To that place where there is no pity, nor pride, and triumph and honor have no meaning. Rather, they are gaudy, useless things, under. Stupid things, because under, there are no eyes to witness victories. Only thought, and under standing.

Posted By mattlock On 11.28.2012 @ 12:50 am

Passively, he received the gift. But was it an active assent, to be granted the privilege? Or was he unable to comprehend that which he was given; was the possessing of the thing required to understand it? Was it such that he received a blank package, or thought it was another thing entirely? A gift which, until touched, until he placed his oily, wrinkled, disgusting hand upon it’s purity, was without form, for him who received and also the giver.

Posted By mattlock On 11.20.2012 @ 2:09 pm

He whispered, as he stepped out of the dark room and into the glaring spotlights. What did they give him in return? A slap on the back, and a “job well done!”

Posted By mattlock On 09.26.2012 @ 5:34 pm

A row of torches waiting patiently across the way, bobbing gently in boredom as they march closer, through intense and critical deliberation, in silence and righteous fear, to the final verdict. Even the young can participate, this being such an egalitarian event. A little boy hoisting a bent fork like a trident and a miniature flag like rocket-lit glory, stumbles in the street. He, in turn, is hoisted up by his shirt, himself the blowing pride at Iwo Jima (and other Jimas, the world over). Toward that which concensus has decreed as the crime for which this trial was created. Another man, without the utensils of nationhood, scrambling away from the shouting mob, but always within the witness box. Plead the 5th, friend. Don’t let them hear you scream.

Posted By mattlock On 09.22.2012 @ 9:41 am

Shakah, shakah, shakah, groaned the copier/printer, as it flashed strange lights and whirred with an internal mechanical hum and pushed out loose-leaf papers to the same rhythm. I took them from the copier, when the stack had reached sufficient height, and the plastic sliding and clicking had ground back to deathly silence. Taking the utmost care not to disturb their order–that order which so many had worked so long to create a machine to so carefully arrange for me–I took them past the hole punch, out the door, careful for the wind, to my passengers seat. I drove slowly and with the windows up, despite the heat, so that they would remain unrustled by motion or wind, to the edge of the vast churning sea. And from the tallest, most wind-blasted bluff I could find, I hurled them into space and watched a divine gust obliterate them into a gorgeous whirling cyclone of separated and liberated nonsense.

Posted By mattlock On 09.10.2012 @ 9:29 pm

An unusual thing, as soon as it happens and is observed to be unusual, is generally placed behind a glass wall (or some other such structure of protection and display) to preserve its uniqueness and observability. In this way, there can be no doubt that something has happened that cannot be explained–unexplainability being the essential characteristic of a miracle–because it is there and can be seen. A never-aging slice of meat, for example. Do we betray our prejudice for ignorance, then, as we ensure that, by dint of its segregation from the rest of the world, this unusual thing can never be explained? Do we segregate it to insulate it from destruction, or from understanding? Is there even a difference?

Posted By mattlock On 09.04.2012 @ 9:10 am

His eyes, like the wind, blew by me in a gentle rustle. Her hands, a rocking ocean, cool and deep and welcoming. His hair, gravel, which shredded my legs when I fell off my bike.

Posted By mattlock On 09.01.2012 @ 3:58 pm

From what? Seems a valid question in this situation, rather than “by whom.” To be lifted, drooling, from perdition, implies the perdition, itself. Rather, the idea that the higher plain waits to be reached, implies perdition upon the current. In all our dogged hopes to heaven, in all our canine drives, we’ve not discovered paradise, rather, created torment in the empty ringing of the treacherous bell.

Posted By mattlock On 08.29.2012 @ 8:26 pm

God, leather-jacketed, hair black back-slicked and thinning, wild madness lighting his eyes, had pushed his Cadillac forth from the darkness of the road, wound spooled across the concave cliffs, screaming, from the observation decks of his lungs, “Let there be flight!” And a rolling staccato roar blew backwards from the engine pipes, a jet-engine thrust and wings of angelic fire, burned toward the Morning Star, himself a greaser type–adopted the look, not native. Pale knuckles wound ’round the wheel, saddled akin, an equivalent armor of Detroit Steel, a rectangle of oblong forms, and a blasting furnace coughing like a machine gun, each hack pushing him forward another twenty feet. The distance between them narrowing like a long-ish blink.

“I got ‘im this time,” Satan said, retracting one arm from the wheel and sliding a comb through his hair. “I’ll kill the bastard!” hooted God, and he hooted more and more into a crazy scream. The two blew carbon from their exhaust pipes, like chrome birth canals.

The two wailing elemental fools, never doubting themselves or their opponent, intersected in a clamor that was not entirely unlike a train full of howler monkeys derailed by a grand piano. Carbon spilled out, was swept up in the waves of gasoline and spite, to wait for a billion years for its chance to repeat the same scene, ad naseum.

Posted By mattlock On 08.26.2012 @ 1:02 pm

Easily posed, they bind you, plain. Certain not, I deign, to say, strict the same as being reigned. As one implies the rider, vain and loud and heather-maned, who from his pulpit cockpit feigns his tyrant might in mighty cane. Laid it on your back, the pain! Out spite you spat his filthy name. And thrust upon him hateful blame. But he, who smirking in your vein, wriggling bane behind your brain, binds you fast to death’s refrain, reminds you, in an olden say’n': bodies, dust, insane is free, in the madness of our mind’s reply, bound to something’s all hope be.

Posted By mattlock On 08.25.2012 @ 6:57 pm

A binary choice has only two answers. Imagining that the world is binary compels one to choose. There is no middle of the road. There is only yes or no, etc. or not. Every day we choose to live or not. Or the choice is made for us.

Posted By mattlock On 08.23.2012 @ 10:35 pm

If not for you, what would we be? Nothing, of course. Interesting to note that Heaven is not a place devoid of want (at least to we Abrahamic folk), but rather a place where all wants are fulfilled. It is in this way that our personality (read: sole, sol, etc.) is allowed to remain intact, even when all instruments responsible for the maintenance of that personality have been destroyed. Hell, alternatively, is where none of our wants are fulfilled and, indeed, most of our “don’t wants” are manifest.

I would argue this interpretation. I think, rather, Hell is the abolition of desire. Where all things are equal. Friend and foe are alike. Our greatest love and our greatest fear are indistinguishable. Hope is impossible without a direction in which to hope.

Posted By mattlock On 08.14.2012 @ 9:11 pm

Heart absolutely pounding, or possibly cool as a frozen cucumber, he pulled the shining piece of, broad and heavy lumber, alloyed mechanics, turned to ash the prim, ER bound in thirtieths of seconds, to the floor, before, though, a howling sucking gush, pushed out all at once and makes a clattering–just one–and a clamoring spark of light, a spiraling spear-length Hessian stretched, sword-drawn, fullyn flight, need els, nigh, on lives and spite, or sticking glooping molasses smashed, undra table, right?

Posted By mattlock On 07.25.2012 @ 2:47 pm

Oh in the dark hallway he has descended, and I follow him, because I am him, but just in hindsight. Since I’d never really be doing such a thing. But I’ve got that little bit that burns against my ribs and drums on my heart like thudding on a barrel. That part with a little string reaching up my nose and pulling on my brain, pulling on my pinprick scared spot and someone else pulling it forward, and promising me lots of gooey great wads of mooooolah.

Posted By mattlock On 07.24.2012 @ 7:22 pm

If only life came with instructions, eh? Except that it does. They’re inscribed in cuneiform on your bones. And you don’t read them with the front of your eyes, while cross-legged on the floor in a mangled pile of cardboard. You read them with the back of your eyes, while full-striding through the grasslands, and a loud throbbing voice is screaming in clear Esperanto.

Posted By mattlock On 07.22.2012 @ 10:45 am

They rode the ridges of the mountainsides, encircled the basin below, peered in shifts their sullen eyes toward the outside lands of never no.

Posted By mattlock On 07.20.2012 @ 8:17 am

Rays of perceptive little fingers scurrying away away, running over everything and feeling it’s surface, and then getting bitten by a mass of object large enough to turn their tails and scuttle back to their base and sign frantically what they have not seen.

Posted By mattlock On 07.17.2012 @ 8:30 pm

“Dulce et decorum est….” and I can’t remember how the rest goes. Something about carts of eyeless bodies wheeled away by the pile-full, and the whizzing of fiery metals past your ears, and the acrid grasp of dead body stunk, which wriggles up inside your upper nasal passages and makes a fist around your medula. Hung up proudly along pillared halls walls of white silent immobile marble.

Posted By mattlock On 07.16.2012 @ 7:38 pm

The capsule fell, like almost in slow motion–it looked like–from out the black twinkly black, and, kindof, like, slowly grew this little plume of fire around it, which just, sort of, flared slowly up around the outsides–like a plastic bag hooked on a fence blowing in the breeze–as it floated and rotated and fell down into the blue whispy blue. And it would have fell nicely, I think, right into the ribbings of the atmosphere, had it not been for that s-unit, which decouple up there, and tumbled down in a ball of matches and poofed right up over Greenland.

Posted By mattlock On 07.15.2012 @ 8:27 pm

Of viscous liquids, the great mason jar of your mind. As if the bottom had ruptured and your soul poured out and swirled, like thick golden honey, to the abyssal floor below. And left would be you, or the image of you, full of tiny grooves.

Posted By mattlock On 06.04.2012 @ 8:17 pm

He waited by the side door and dared not peer through the glowing crack, even though the door was slowly creaking open, pushed by a heavy hot wind from the event inside. He only watched the light fall on the corners of the door frame, and inhaled deeply that light which bent around in the curious way that light does. What happened inside he did not know, for it was not his place to know, this he knew. His was only to be attendant, in the colder outside, until the rush inside spilled out.

Posted By mattlock On 04.02.2012 @ 4:26 pm

Paroxysms of incredible joy wracked his body and sent him shuddering, laughing in whimpers, to a contented pile on the ground. His mind opened outward into the breeze and was carried on upward gusts into the passing jet streams of the upper atmosphere. This was some months ago, and now, coiled and grimacing behind a slab of cold desktop, his wondrous mellifluous memories are simply a hazy residue on the back wall of his mind.

Posted By mattlock On 03.24.2012 @ 10:00 am