schwerverletzt

Kevin Cole
April 2012

you will be lonely. i miss your body doing very human things to mine. i miss you and silent pauses standing on a rock outside my bedroom window finishing a cigarette. i want to be a cigarette the one you never finish. itd be nice to be more than carefully selected words and occasional digital reassurances raking across your skin.

disinterest of the cloud spotters. today i want to burn into the quiet corners of the earth, be extinguished by rain showers of such little significance even the most devout of weather-watchers doesnt bother report. i want to feel in my bones and their marrow the slow hiss of a cigarette put out in a puddle.

i'm not dysfunctional but there are broken parts inside of me. the mechanism thats supposed to cry for the dead is cross-wired to certain melodic tones and i never seem to remember, when you say to forget. my dreamer only seems to work after 2am and then it re-rolls the same 15 minute film. look it doesnt matter i can stay this way and that will be alright. im not saying im a machine just that a synapse and a circuit can both misfire.

the world in instagram. my world is separated into hundreds of squares with our stomachs pressed against the trampoline's nylon strange mixtures of water vapor and sunlight refracted are creating instagram filters damn, you look good in instagram we are so flirting you are so rolling on-top of me i think we kissed. wait, was that... that was rain. shit, it's raining. we are listening to all raindrops in the world and that world is cut up in squares looking out the screen of your bedroom window. encr yption. i'm leaving the single blank page of the letter you sent me in my window my hope that the sun browns your ciphers, revealing your belief in me. untitled. my breath exhales the ceaseless promise of future and i wont be able to inhale until im landlocked with you again

crash landing of the vimana pilot (flash fiction). this morning i woke up at 7:30, brushed my teeth, and walked to my bus stop. at 8:38 i arrived at stuttgarts central train station, and climbed a flight of stairs to reach the underground foyer where i buy a baked good to eat each morning. as soon as my head peeked over the stairs, i saw a dark skinned, indian looking man standing by one of the large metallic ashtray/trashcan combos that act as the central point from which a five meter (invisible) radius makes up individual smoking zones. i am not an expert on the ethnic minorities of india, but there are certainly different phenotypes. this man possessed the bad-ass bollywood star phenotypes. this charisma was certainly exaggerated by the silver and gold foil space blanket which he was donning like a turban. as he stood with a cigarette in his right hand, he talked at a furious pace with a woman who was sharing his smoking circle. i tried to suppress a smile which floated up from some dormant organ, but it burst regardless as it reached my facial musculature. i bought a schinken/kse croissant and walked to work. at 7:30 in the evening I was once again in stuttgarts main station. i now found myself standing in an annoyingly long line for customer service regarding the regions public transport service. while staring at my shoes and contemplating the odd patterns that had dried onto them after their exposure to snow (and likely road salt), my conspiracy theorist turned guru made an impressive return. he ran to the crowd of impatient (and mostly disgruntled) commuters who were waiting to resolve their various issues, and began to chant nonsense (or maybe hindi) while wiggling his hands and fingers over our heads. I was able to make out a single word, which he repeated with some frequency: maharajah. all the while he was also releasing intense, bellowing laughs. the kind of laughs that are always genuine and cant be faked. the chanter promptly stopped his display and ran out of the rear of the station, into a large public garden. at 8:05 i was seated in the regional train to tbingen, which was stopped shortly at stuttgarts bad cannstatt station (just one stop from the central station). i looked up from my knees, and turned slightly to look out of the window. poking out from the stairwell leading to the platform was the turbanite. although unlikely, he spotted me from his position on the platform, and began to laugh and wiggle his hands in my direction. at this point i could no longer control my roused organs, and i began to laugh and smile and to mimic his gestures back through the window. the trains braking system hissed and my spiritual guide waved calmly good bye, finishing with a sweeping, shooing pantomime.

german words that make me feel something. unverbindlich (adj) non-binding. when i hear this word, i remember the movie AI: Artificial Intelligence and it makes me sad. schwerverletzt (adj) critically injured. as part of my job i have to read stuttgart's two main newspapers everyday, and this word comes up basically daily. even though this is not the meaning of the word, i feel like it's the perfect sounds to describe some days when i don't feel like i am a truly functioning human being. geistige behinderung (n) mental retardation / handicap. this word makes me feel like a hairline fracture in the glass case of a museum housing religious items, the kind of things both life-long traditionalists and overweight tourists come to visit.

April 28 th , 1945 (flash fiction). An old, whisper-thin man gets on the bus. he is wrapped in a trench coat which so completely overwhelms his wasted frame that I think, he is entrenched in his coat. He sits down by a middleaged woman, after nearly falling when the bus lurches back into transit. The lady is overweight, and her bundled sides encroach on the rightful seat-territory of the fading man. He is so far progressed in his disassembly that he only occupies a tiny slice of his seat. He begins to speak to his seat-mate in Italian. She doesnt understand Italian, but she repeats the word s. She keeps repeating it: 5 times, 10 times, 13 times. This translucent Italian is rambling on with typical gusto about his discontent at being unable to cleanse his bowels with the regularity of his youth. All that I think is: I bet this man wailed on Mussolinis hanging corpse. Ill bet he spit on the mans wife, her unfortunate flesh-mass swinging with the momentum of the antagonizing forces of punches coming from all sides. I see this crumbling human history when he was young, emptying his bowels without the smallest note of effort. Smearing his feces on his fallen dictator and being looked upon by admiring young women in black and white. In his animated relating of geriatric jeremiad, the pencil-stached (former) defecator hits the Haltewunsch button. The bus jumps violently with the ensuing down-shift, and the doors open. No one exits. I stand up and walk down onto the sidewalk to spare the flamboyant storyteller a stern word from our notoriously explosive bus driver, and walk an extra 15 minutes home.

Or we will also say that we lived in a golden fleece, in an iridescent net, in a cocoon like a cloud that hung from a branch in a galactic tree. And that this net was woven of signs: hieroglyphs for the eye and the ear, rings of love. And the sound resonated on the inside engraving us in time, in the twitching, the fluttering, the gurgling of our language. Czeslaw Milosz's Tidings, Spring 1973.