Three people walking through a door at once.

1.

A man wearing a tan blazer and jeans steps off a bus. His head sags to the right in an attempt to hold his cellphone between his jaw and collar bone. The bus's right front tire jolts up and the door closes with a metallic thud. A child rubs his hands on the window, drawing stick figures and dogs with skinny legs. His mother draws a stick of gum from her purse and shoves it into her mouth without unwrapping the piece.

As the bus pulls away, the man shuffles onto the sidewalk and stands next to me. He's furious. His voice is drawn out, low like the dieseling tick of the bus that's now at the next stoplight. 

"FUCK YOU! WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU!?" 

He takes two small steps towards me. The man is now close enough that I can hear his cheek stubble grate against the number pad on his phone. I bend down and pull my Parkplace Fabrics tote closer to me. The man's clumsy dress shoes were dirtying the straps. Swearing continued. Spit flying from his lips. People around us began to sigh in discomfort and pick at their hands or dig through their shopping bags for receipts.

Another bus comes a few minutes later, this one covered in a large M&Ms advertisement. The man closes his phone, continuing to mumble fuck or shit every few seconds.

2. 

Two brothers walk out of a Meijer with a cart filled with grilling supplies. Jerry, the taller brother, counts his wad of singles and shoves it into the side pocket of his shorts. Maurice runs his fingers across a bag of Kingsford and looks up at a sagging gray cloud hanging almost low enough to touch the roof atop the strip mall.  

Maurice pulls his cell phone out of his pocket.

"11:43. We need to get home before the Ravens game is on. They're televising warm-ups today. Dad wants to watch Ray Lewis."

Jerry rips the side of a bag of Kingsford and rubs two pieces of charcoal together. The air smells like his backyard. His fingertips are black.

"Dad needs to stop yelling on the phone. He sounds like such an asshole. What was he even yelling about?"

Maurice drops the tailgate of his Silverado and pulls a rubber mat towards the end of the bed.

"I don't even know. He was pissed when I told him his barbecue sauce wasn't in the store. It's like he can't eat ribs without it. What an asshole."

Jerry and Maurice shoveled the bags of meat and charcoal and plastic cutlery into the bed of the truck. Blood seeped through the white bags, turning the rough black on Jerry's fingertips into a greasy paste.

"Dad just gets shitty every time he's between jobs." Jerry closes the tailgate and removes his cap. 

On their way home, Maurice calls his dad's phone a half-dozen times He's downstairs in the pantry chugging a warm bottle of Full Sail. The blazer is slung over a barstool with his cell phone vibrating against his garage door opener.

"You better not be calling to tell me to stop."

Chapbook

I'm currently working on a new chapbook. It'll have 12 poems in it. I should be done with the layout in the next week or so and have it printed up by the end of the month. I'm not sure how many copies I'm going to make as of right now. The first run will probably be between 15 and 20.

It's tenatively titled The Things CGI Can't Recreate.

I'll have a teaser for the cover soon.

Explaining weather.

Something is happening outside,
maybe it's raining.
Please bring a raincoat
and rubber shoes.
And if you're on a plane,
don't look out the window.
Unless, three miles below you
through the gray sheets
and tree canopies and birds
preening their wings
is a kid standing in the raincoat
and rubber shoes I asked for you to bring
watching raindrops spin around the brim of his hat.

For some people, like me, this is my job

I'm at work right now, staring at a man
pressing his bifocals to the bridge of his nose.
He copies the same black and white page
of a wife over and over again
on paper that's too small for the image.
Every couple of minutes, he looks over the counter
and watches me write this poem.
He probably thinks I'm writing an important
business e-mail to a client at Churchill Downs.

The man is using a highlighter now,
drawing circles on one of the copies.
Yellow swirl marks around eyes
like a chirrosis raccoon. This could be
the way he sees his wife.

Now the man is pacing around the table,
eyeing stacks of paper and dog-earing
the edges. He asks if the music playing
from my iPod that's plugged into an
individual speaker is John Coltrane
and I say yes. He walks closer to the counter,
resting his weight on his elbows and
pats his hand in rhythm with
John Coltrane's saxaphone.

A fire truck drives by with its siren on.
I look outisde and cars start darting
into the grass. Passengers inside
bob up and down like a boat
that's in the ocean all by itself.
I hope the man thanks me
when he's done making his copies,
and asks another question about music.

Electric Wizard

Woah, that's a tough name. Right? Definitely. Think about it literally. If you saw an electric wizard, you'd be scared, but interested, too. It'd be shooting sparks everywhere, catching the floppy canvas tip of his hat on fire. He won't notice because he's too busy shooting electricity everywhere and being omnipotent. That's what wizards do!

All of this is natural to wizards. So would it be natural for a band named 'Electric Wizard' to shoot electricity from their instruments and the vocalist to sing about potions and summoning demons? Probably. Electric Wizard is a great band. What I like about their music is that the first time you listen to it, you'll always come across a great surprise. Like the rhythm's repetition getting sidetracked for two seconds by a cool blusey riff that can't help but remind you about the first time you listened to Paranoid by Black Sabbath.

And I don't bother looking up the lyrics, because I'd imagine the things they sing about would cause me great anxiety. I mean, I KNOW what they sing about, but I just don't want any visual conformation.

Oh, side note. I found one of my favorite professor's websites. You can find it here. He's a fantastic teacher who loves to give students handouts. I like handouts, especially when they aren't just "busy" handouts. He writes a lot, too.

Ray Something is a make-believe man. Ray Something is destiny.

I want you to think of the musicians you listen to as your brain and its memories. You'll experience songs by an artist named Ray Something who you'll forget twenty minutes after listening to his whole discography. You'll forget his hairstyle and his strumming the coarse strings of his guitar with a thumbnail, but you'll remember the way his voice sounded like pennies in a blender. 

And his interviews. Ray Something gave great interviews. "Ohio!" he screams, "Ohio is the best state in the Union! Everyone makes music in Ohio!" This excites you because somebody else refers to our country as a Union. Ray Something reminds you of marriage because he said "union" and marriage is a union. Ray Something always mentions, in some sly garble of words, that he's single. He probably dates women who look good in sun dresses. Their arms are pale and thin, Free from marriage. You imagine a sickly thin guy whose arms are covered in blotchy freckles and a tattoo of a Saab-Scania emblem looking towards a the lighting system hanging above his head in a studio. He might grabs the tail of his jacket and what he's about to say will speak to you.

"FREE DRINKS! HA... THEY'RE ON ME!" 

Then somebody pops the cap off a domestic microbrew and the cap slides down the side of the bottle into a small pile of other bottles from other domestics. The person conducting the interview is refreshed. You want to be refreshed. You reach your hand towards the speaker and hope Ray Something is generous.

He's generous and you're soon drunk. Brown bottles with red labels clutter your feet and Ray Something will soon be a memory that you can't remember. But not yet. Towards the end of the interview, the microphone falls to the floor, sending a dense slash of feedback through the speaker. Your ears hurt and you cover them and duck your head into your knees, as if you were anticipating a car crash from the back seat. Ray's voice gets quiet: a song on the radio fading into an advertisement. A deer's hooves crushing the layer of dead leaves on a path near the front of a cave.

Ray Something talks about a deal he made with someone for something. "There's something in it for everyone." You hear him moving back and forth in his seat. You hear his weight moving and squashing the clasps on the bottom of the cushion. People are walking around and the interview is ending. 

"Hey, give me that directory. I'm going to order everyone some drinks and they'll be on the house."

Welcome to Dog Island

I'm working on a short story and a poem. It's the first time I've had more than one thing to work on since the summer started. Hopefully I'll have them done by the end of the week. This has been a busy week at work, but it's actually went by pretty fast already. Starting today, I'm officially at the 3rd and Central store, as opposed to splitting my time at the Highland store and the 3rd and Central store.

Although, one of my managers asked me to work at the Highland store on Sunday for 6 or 7 hours. I can't say no to overtime.

And please... buy this album.

What people in Louisville care about.

To some people in Louisville, horses are a big deal.

There's a man who comes into my work

dressed in slacks

with a crease that goes from thigh to ankle,

and a white shirt with the top two buttons undone.

He unrolls a large piece of paper, and starts pointing

to the names of horses and the word, "sire."

"This is where horses come from," he explains.

This is a horse family tree.

I think it looks like the map

to a blood cell.

When I was younger, my dad had a horse

and the horse never seemed happy. I'd walk back

to the pond where he'd stand in water

half way up his legs and drink.

Sometimes he would start swatting his tail

to get flies away from his rear, and it'd make

the sound that lightning makes right before it

strikes a barren asphalt road.

The horse always seemed happiest 

right before it rained. There was a patch of

nothing in his field, and when invisible hands

rolled the clouds together

like kneaded dough, he'd roll around in the dirt

until the patch of dirt was mud

and mud became the only thing in the field

besides the pond.

Grass lay down flat like a green ribbon

on a head of brown hair and the chestnut horse

kept rolling, not caring he is swallowing mouthfuls of mud.

I'm sitting in the loft of a barn reading German for Beginners,

occasionally looking up to see exactly where horses come from.

Good vs. Evil

I went to the drive-in last night with Brianne and two of our friends to see The Dark Knight and Hancock. Both were pretty good. With my work schedule finally solidifying itself, I've found it a lot harder to find time to write. Most of the time, I'll get free time and spend it on going to flea markets 

I've been thinking a lot lately about things I haven't done.  I've never finished a Rubix Cube. That seems like something that shouldn't be too hard. I've never punched a bee out of the air while it flies around my head. I haven't seen the Cubs win a World Series or know what it feels like for an athlete to get traded to a new team. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine walking into work one day, and having your boss say, "Hey, we've really like your time and effort that you've put into being a chef, but we're going to trade you to the hospital. You're a nurse, now." That'd be bull shit.

Sometimes thinking is bad. Or at the very least, the way you think about things can be bad. 

Total fucking bad asses.