The Measure of a Man

Tweaking in the next room sat Todd. Todd had hooted half a bottle of a substance unfamiliar to me. The population of the room declined as Todd's jitters increased. The acidic feeling in my stomach became turbid. The pills crackled lucratively through his system, noisily releasing guttural giggles and nonsensical din from his throat. "Woohooo!" he raged. The fruits of his persistent snorting came to full fruition.  "Candy! Eeeheee! Candy! Candy!" he geeked terrets-like, sniffling forcibly. Mortality is a vulnerable thing. His exterior galvanized pathetically, savagely unruly. He was harbored by his palisade of powder, hiding from the manic swings that wracked his demeanor daily.

The innocuous geiser upstairs hacked forcefully. Sirens wailed somewhere in the distance. "Pretty colors!" Todd exclaimed jerkily. Powder cleared the passage of my nose smoothly. "Eeeeehee!" he sniffled. The room's sharpness increased slightly. My acuity blossomed to the point of blatant lucidity, like an infant naturally encompassing the novel thing we call breath. It felt right. I felt alive. A sultry country singer crooned in the seedy lamp-lit room.

"Candy! Candy!" Todd replied to his concerned girlfriend's queries, then spoke a full three sentences with effortless clarity. The house's reality quivered. I sniffled furiously. Goddamn! Goddamn. I swiftly cracked my neck and stretched my fingers. Todd whimpered in the next room. I heard his i.d. tapping, flawlessly cutting lines in a formation echoing that of the most dulcet and well-behaved choir boys. Non-existent sounds haunted the adjacent room's occupants. My leg bounced.

The innocuous geiser upstairs hacked forcefully. Sirens wailed somewhere, someplace. Michelle's empty eyes looked on.

Tap, tap, tap, went the stiff plastic on the porcelain. His breaths came sporadically, thickly. He gulped down saliva loudly, scraped, scraped, scraped, and coughed harshly from his chest. The cough became dull and muted, lost and muffled within the labrynth of his lungs. He gasped. The music seemed louder. Todd staggered crookedly, croaking like a masquerading corspe on his way to the shower. I heard him chattering frantically to himself. "He's going to die! He's going to die!" I screamed soundlessly. Michelle blinked slowly, and wandered into the water with him.

Paranoia permeated the air, penetrating the lethargic atmosphere with something skittish. It lent a misleading aura of cognizance to an intangible dimension. My stomach biles churned. I heard Michelle's lids slide slowly shut and open in a furrowed, infantile fashion. A bitter taste invaded my throat, oozing phlegmatically down my esophagus. My stomach gurgled. Todd's extremities awkwardly kneaded the air in a mode that vaguely resembled walking. My taste buds exacted a putrid flavor at the base of my throat as my heart palpitated, subsequently. Justin rambled incessantly from the moth-devoured armchair behind me.

His chattering agitated me, antagonizing a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach as I muttered, "yep," distractedly, scratching ink across immaculate pages.

The innocuous geiser upstairs hacked forcefully. A siren wailed intravenously, I swore. The wallowing unrequited shit howled vigorously in the next room. A fit erupted from somewhere from the nadir of Todd's psyche loudly and crudely. He littered a climaxing, non-existent spat with expletives. His beer-tainted breath left a lingering stench of sugar and rotten carbon-monoxide, soaked with his sickly syrupy fervor. Michelle blinked twice, vapidly. "Tell Justin to quit following you like a puppy. Todd agrees. Tell him you need space!" She spit the last word adamantly. Her words were all vacant replicas of Todd's liturgies. "Next year, if you're still around," she said with restrained earnestness, "I'll buy you a bracelet so you can go on rides all day long at the fair!" She finished on a climatic exclamatory note of triumph. Her motives were purely magnanimous, lacking the capabilities to be anything besides, moreover, her malice towards Justin was causeless; provoked by the overheard, barely contained via prescription, daily rantings of Todd. Her trite mind had been spoiled.

"EEEeeee!" Todd gasped with squeaky zeal from some far-reaching depth of his wavering mind. "I'VE DONE IT BEFORE!" He barked. My pen clattered nervously from the desk and clanged dully, bouncing twice on the compressed carpet. "CANDY!" He shrieked, tweaking diabolically, consuming more of the indeterminate substances. Justin rattled with his infinite prattle, engrossed in his own plan to evade jail with a sincere plea for help correcting his addictive behavior in a facility. "If my pee comes up dirty, that's my plan," he confided in me.

The tap, tap, tap from the ceramic plate in the next room filled me with trepidation. I think I'm being stood up by an irritation somewhere in a parking lot, perched harmlessly as a pedestrian on the curb...

The innocuous geiser upstairs hacked forcefully. The walls were wailing, blue and lurid tones flashed in an immaculately rhythmic paradigm. It smelled of fallen leaves. My breath tasted medicinal. I accosted a virgin pen violently, severing the mechanisms for my own use. I fondled it gently, like the barrel of a gun, carefully, gently, with a firm vigor in my eye. We're pals, this hollowed pen and I, in the thick of an ambiguous, poignant snippet of eternity.

"Fuck you dick!" Todd bellowed snippily, finding solace in the furious release. "Eeeeee hee hee hee," he snickered rabidly.

Justin jibbered on sincerely. It sickened me, really. I tried to make a reassuring sound. I could not tell if he was speaking or not any longer. I felt something like silence penetrate me to my marrow. It's wasn't silence. It was isolation. I became reacquainted with The Nothing in this frenzy for the first time in ages. That fucking hacking geiser! Discover Dextromethorphan and Nicorette you fuck! My lip quivered abruptly in compassion as Todd screeched. I whimpered. HE'D DONE IT BEFORE! I assured myself. A giggle escaped from an unidentifiable corner, pervading the folds of my brain callously. Ricochets inside my skull muffled the next wracking hack and a numb balmy film settled over my conscience. The vista became agitated, the air palpitated. Oxygen bewinged flew swimmingly through my seemingly cavernous lungs. A motley of molten oscillations clashed frantically between my ears. The garish red and blue lights were nearer. They raced around the pallid walls in some tawdry depraved horse race run by undead jockeys with a crazed gleam in their eyes.

The innocuous geiser upstairs hacked forcefully, discordant squeals sounded clamorously. I was saturated in reverent revelry. I soaked in the havoc like a fix. My biles bubbled turbulently. Silence penetrated the atmosphere, haltingly hideously serene and saccharine. The yelps cut off abruptly. I drowned in the wailing of the lights, a panic rising acidically through my pharynx. Todd had gone still. Justin had gone silent.  Michelle stared insipidly on.

Men pulled a stretcher from the cavern of the vehicle, a cacoon-like womb, the stretcher a newfangled idea to my speeding numb brain. Michelle whimpered. This is it! I'd known!!!! I'd known! Damnit. My heart fluttered like a broken-winged bird in failed attempt in flight, an effort in futility to work as it once had. I felt strangely surreal. Goosebumps skimmed the cream of my arms and settled scintillatingly along the length of my spine. There was a harsh knocking on the door. They'd come for him! I'd known! I thought, sinking to some undisclosed, to even myself, location. I enveloped myself in a distant place, alone, wrapped within my acuity, an atomic fireball cotton-candy like scene. I escaped into the beauty...

The hacking had stopped. Todd said, "Serves him right. He had the cops come in here once," his measure of a man visible.

The geiser upstairs had died. We sat in the room watching the one channel accessible on the smallest of T.V.s.

Stranger things have happened still.

Take Only What You Need From it

Nostalgic stories and saccharine seconds of eternity,
so aesthetic.
In a crackling cold,
barely veiled concrete basement
whippets and cigarettes
cloak the "potpourri" and dank scents.
Bath salt sparks
tinge reality with a synthetic synergy
stimulating the Ohio atmosphere
into a frenzied, elation-filled, intermediary
point of poignancy.
Peachy keen emotions of golden
mellowed friendship, ripened to the point
of flawless comfort.
Robo trip stories
and hard drug tales end in
Narcotic binges,
falling in and out of others...
Methadone hangovers and wet whiskey dreams,
sour patch straw jager-filled candies
POP you in the brain-
cerebral awakenings.
Ring-shaped puffs waft,
buzz apparatus',
flavored exhausts.
Smoke art is destroyed
in pursed lips and hot breath streaming forth.
Transversality runs rampant
and Rorschach whisks inkblots
into poisoned butterflies and moving pictures
with a nebulous, ambiguous quality.
Barbed wire nights of High Life
and Rolling Rock,
losing acuity in 151
with helium voices echoing
through laughs lost in the twilight.
Carbonation fizzles
slippery and wet
down your throat and
sizzles within your veins.
The contours of perception are amorphous
and sagacity is gained.