Scrawln

Upon the walls of my apartment were characters of an unknown alphabet. They'd been shaped by what appeared to be elementary forces.  It looked rather like childish scrawls emblazoned on the walls.  When I shut my eyes, only the characters remained as white impressions. Open my eyes, and there the legend lingered, haunting my view. Shut my eyes tight, and the message seared across my vision in white. Opened them again, and my wall appeared a bit more faded than the last time I looked. The black sentence remained. I knew that's what it was--a sentence--because the indecipherable phrasing ended in a period. The more I stared at the period, the larger it got. The larger it became, the more I noticed flaws in its composure. The more white space in between the black crayon markings emerged. Soon it enveloped my vision, swimming up like the cross section of a magnified bacteria. The white in-between spots loosely connected in a protoplasmic manner. I rubbed my knuckles into my eyes, and this protozoic punctuation mark grew brighter and lingered before me, until I opened my eyes again. The illegible sentence remained on my wall scrawled in black crayon. I had written it there the night before. Only I knew it wasn't really me that wrote it. It was the microscopic creatures living inside me that did it. How they managed to do that, I had no idea. Perhaps they were able to directly control my brain through telepathic hypnosis. Maybe they all pooled their efforts together to try and reach me. To try and control my hand. To make it reach out and seek my box of Crayolas. To manipulate the thumb and forefinger of my right hand to reach in and select the short, stubbier black crayon. To seize it between those pincers, and to scrawl the legend across my wall. The message I had drawn. The words I had scrawln.

Identifiction

A familiarity with words and a remorse so strong it liquifies things
which approved of our having trains run toward the western mountain sun
sets over a time period the sole motivator in a situation whose disapproval
of would cause the bravest to drown within the least traveled areas of all
the renowned twisted interpenetrating worlds of slowly gearing up
shockwaves expanding into a shivered hide stretched on the solar flux
hurtling into withinity while the electrocuted transform into psalm

—a world of incalculable value heaping upon the tides
of expansive destruction in crest upon wave of demented disorder
in rifle scopes and surplus routes and drone attacks under satellite
surveillance in the dead of night gone gathering flowers
for penetrating towers collapsing through thermite dust
well it shows up on the furrowed brows of legion among
the many in the process of forgetting the reasons score
upon score quite perfectly seasoned have quieted from—

with regards to language their trade-off was for a utility belt
by which to measure each succeeding term as an identification key
in return for their terse sorrow to be packed away unbecoming
for examination in the attic on a winter's simple morning along
with the wooden case of marbles with the inlaid lid of tiles
fired so long ago in a blue collar kiln it might as well be fog
collected in a harbor where the waves roll in to lap our shore
as a stray dog at his water bowl does when the sun light arrives
through window glass for the first time in the morning.