the INLAID EAR

“Pinstriped skin? You want pinstriped skin?” So, needlessly, you repeat it. “Okay, okay. The Pinstripe Kid.” He’s old. He fetches his needles and a jar of powdered black ink. “Take a couple months. At least weeks, you know.” Yes, you know. The man slakes the ink from a cracking teapot. Though chilly, you take off your slacks. “So what’s up?” he asks. “You pissed off at your mother?” But when he asks, it’s at the back wall, an aside. So you don’t say anything.   “Fuck,” he barks, laughs or coughs.  What?   “Hell. Stripes. You know? Never mind. You ready?” You are. Each etching stroke feels like bursting across a finish line. More Andrew Goldfarb awesomeness including art, music and performance at The Slow Poisoner www.theslowpoisoner.com  and www.ognerstump.com

What happens as I watch a spider’s web over a small stream: after many hours, a wave of bugs on an advancing wind washes over the spot. “It’s the spider’s fortune,” I think watching several wing pairs stick and tangle. Only then do I hear the approaching rustle behind the swarm. It’s a woman in hiking boots, long hair, and a bikini, swinging, like Occam’s Razor, a broad stick to de-web her way. “Hi.” She could be Goddess in human form. “Ya’ll having a party over at Bonne’s?” “It’s a retreat.” Her hips shift and she seems to give, by repetition, a koan: “Ya’ll having a party?” I don’t know. Her weedy pubes spin out thick and uncontained. When she blazes on, the spider web’s gone. Visit Livia Stein's website to see more of her work.

Italics are the crab talking (I think). We’re out of control, and cocktail sauce Destined to boil, that crab (I imagine) sees me, seeing it. You make a bitter familiar, tied to the harsh schedule in your prison. Both of us will be better come dinnertime. I’m not hungry. My pain won’t be mellowed by hot buttered spider. My wrists ache—plus all this lack of control. I’m too nervous to wield the shell cracker. I wish you’d climb out of there and side-stroll out the door, through town and to the ocean. We’re underwater. We just gotta roll— even if it’s California. The banks closed on the seabed, but I’ve got my whole life ahead of me. So what? I got tanked. Too late? Too early? Here is here is here is here is where I am with claws and shanks. Adapt. Bubble. Crawl—and then an arm yanks.

Discharge Sitting in the back of a Greyhound bus, you find out who you are without orders. Without family meeting you there to fuss, you get dismissed last. At o dark thirty you might sleep, but you can’t, and there’s no rush. Two hundred miles to Brookings. Forty more to Cairn Station. And then you walk a mile to the house and whoever you find there, strapped for cash, fast asleep and unable to meet you, hug you, tell you where to toss your reeking, desert-dusted duffel bag. You drive to McDonalds, and then you give the orders: Big Mac, Coke, side of Kabul. You’ve choppered, jeeped, flown, bussed, walked and driven for two all-beef patties in the free world, and in the world, water-tight as a sieve, gonna have to figure out how to live.

       "I'm a wearer of the dark. I have a dark suit." —Dave Thomas Despite the violent oscillation of our heads, some of us punks were able to half-wonder: what will become of us? That caricature motto, “No Future,” begs certain questions in the aftermaths. Crocus Behemoth blew our minds often, mad head warbling a la climaxing teen; and better than those sound-scrapes, his bitter perspective conveyed diagonally convinced us of our own foresight as punks. But bands split up. A crash time-stopped D. Boon. Pop culture punks bit the dust on drugs (yawn) while other artists coupled and had kids, went to sew the sutures of middle age… Crocus took up the accordion, whined on about himself, swimming past his art and the girlfriends that came and went with it. by Lauren Ari