Sunken Dreamers' Almanac: Tornado Warning

 

 

M settles down on his usual bar stool & orders a round of twisters, on the verge of quitting an unrequited marriage marred by emotional flat lines & a heart from Mars. Since the doctor delivered his news, the stranger in his wife's skin has taken over, usurped her body & pumped her brain full of acid. Ever since intimacy has been foreign planet, her alien alphabet its mother-tongue. On his seventh shot he thinks: the lonely gears that grind a man's heart cannot be unwound. Around the bar there are several holes to fill the hole, but tonight the gutters have teeth & there are devils everywhere. Dust flickers through night's blue arc as M crawls into his truck, drums the door with his fingers & accepts his handsome cage. Twists the machine alive, too lost to know how lost he really is.