When I turned twelve I bought my first shotgun. When I turned thirteen I had my first erection.

And it wasn’t until I turned fourteen that I realized my world was only this. 

Autumn is sixty-seven years old in my town. Five people died last week from starvation, nine people gave birth to sickling, and the mayor just croaked from diphtheria. The city becomes wickedly cold in the winter, and dries to death in the summer. This town isn’t ho-dunk, it’s not hillbilly. Charm in the brickroads, in the stoplights, in the shopfronts; I still feel this cold air brush my hair in autumn, but I can’t help but beckon the nearing extremes. I’ve seen what the cold and what the heat can do to these people. It is only bad every time. 

There aren’t many kids in my neighborhood who like to shoot guns, there aren’t many who get down to the same kicks that I do. In fact most of them rot away inside infront’ plastic screens and eat chips and liverwurst for dinner, day after day. 

I’d spent a summer with a kid from out of town. He’s who I have to blame for my attraction to sex and blood and women. I’d greeted his family of homeless people to stay in my backyard for a few weeks. This kid, and his poor family, came from out of town to work the annual festival. They’d pitch up here to make money, then shove off into the unknown to make more. They were strange in the face, had a taste for candy and a smell for the gold. In my opinion, they’d fit right in here in town. 

It was one cool autumn night that he stood in pajamas with me. We’d been shooting my gun for a few hours now. We’d spent the rest of his allowance on twelve gauge. We shot animals in the darkness of the forest. I remember the lighting. He had an eye for a dog's head, and the reaction time to send them to heaven. 

This girl from the neighbor’s trailer visited us that evening, as we shot, and admired my face. I never saw her look at my cheekbones, but I felt her do so. I was busy being a cowboy, pinching my eye between a prong-sight and pulling the trigger. 

So I would aim into whatever crawled in front, or rounded some tree, and I would shoot until it died. I got better at it with my circus friend. He taught me how to kill, he taught me how to be attracted. 

Eventually he left town, it broke my heart. He didn’t seem to care that we’d never see eachother again.

Kids like me get bored in the winter. I've always been bored of sitting around my house doing absolutely nothing. I’d look at magazines of beautiful women that I’d find in my dads clothing hampers, I’d toss rocks over my home, I’d yell at my five younger brothers. Nothing stuck to my mind like shooting dogs did. 

My dad worked hard to repair this small house back when his arm wasn’t gone. He hated when my mom looked at it – he was defeated after all, now sunken into a life of back-room drinking. 

I tried to give him sticks from the brush site, to tape to his arm-hole, but he hated me. He thought I was an unrealistic boy. 

He dripped water on my face when I slept. I caught him doing it. He really hated me. Even when I tried to help.

So I delved myself back into the shotgun thing. I stole some money from my mom, and I got hard. I found the spot my circus friend told me about, laid some IAMS around a metal bowl and waited for the dogs. 

I blasted and she came ‘round again. 

At this point I’d been admiring my kill. 

I licked blood off of my lips and watched from over my shoulder as she swooned. Smoke sizzled from my shotgun, carcass splattered across my chest. 

I took my billy knife from its sheath and skinned the head. I let her wear it for the evening.

 Rotten bone from the opening in my hand is starting to drive me wild with indescribable smells. I've been picking at my skin and the infectious red pulsing from my wrist for the latter half of the day now. The surrounding skin is turning brown, three hues lower than what I normally see it as. I’m abhorred. Frightened. My face is running white. 

I’ve already reassured myself that it wasn’t tanning. It's slowly dying.

I haven’t considered the detriment of losing this part of my body yet.  As the idea is almost unfathomable. So many things would cease in my life, so many things just gone. 

My right arm, severed from my body, would be an unmeasurable loss.

I've had a make-shift cast around my arm since my taxi cab collision. The whole fucking thing wasn’t my fault. He was drunk, I was drunk, and the turn of events just ended up being a wicked mess. 

Brooklyn

I’d landed only a few weeks ago to stay with the girl I’d been mailing postcards to. She promised some lavish stay on the south-side of 9th Street. I heard stories of my old country, New York. Stories that grant red tomato sauce conceptions upon my tongue and through my brain, of glorious two story submarine sandwiches for nickels on the dollar. All nine yards. The fastical night-walk paradise of New York now my playground and a dime of a woman I’ve seemed to have scored. 

I played in the day and dreamed in the night. Collecting stones and pennies along the roadways to gather scrap-booking evidence for a time completely unforgettable. I looked like a mess and a junkie, asking names, asking for historical significance, asking for pictures. I viewed myself as this nagging little thing with a devoted attachment to a small town far away from here. Like this was some sort of heaven for me, like I was doing this with no intention to return. 

I’d note the tourists I've seen around my parts. Smearing sun-tan lotions ‘cross their noses and hiking swimming pants high above the waist linings. Desperate to enjoy ninety-six some odd hours with precious gold that has been piling for a lifetime. I know for sure that I looked like that, I know for sure my weekly New York lay was getting sick of it. 

“You know, you’ll be back next summer to see it again. Won’t you?”

We’d gotten breakfast on Third Avenue when I finally came to some conclusion on my trip. 

She’d ordered the breakfast paella and I’d gotten the benedict with jam toast. She smoked cigarettes before and after her meals like some french girl and I’d sit and watch her cheekbones catch morning light. Checking the contrast between her face and the scaling brick buildings behind her, squaring the thirds, quartering the picture in my mind. 

I’d thought that we should break up for the remainder of my trip to New York. 

Deeply, I wanted the exact opposite, but I had to shake her before Thursday evening, which was my last day amongst the city. There were too many things I hadn’t done, too many little pictures I couldn’t take with the presence of this woman at my side. Numbers began crunching, puzzling pieces, and solemn heartbreaking schematics began. 

At first, on my walk away, I pictured her dead to ease my soul. But I immediately began missing her as I turned the corner on Second Avenue. The insides of my psyche began bringing me to the shallow waters of weird, then the deeper unromantic ones. The lost and alone floatation along a desperate sea of people I had to dig myself through, just to get where I needed to go. Hands no longer held, guidance throughout this big city was upon myself.

Immediately began the search for the New York woman. The one with the golden apple centerpiece and the cherry wine suede couch. All in reaction, all in repair to the shock of breaking the heart of someone so much less desirable.

Cornering shopfronts, cornering delis and parlors, I took extravagant pictures and bought crummy knick-knacks. A wild and fast-paced journey around New York’s center that I would have never been able to brace. I didn’t want to act local, I wanted to act strange. I wanted my desperation to spew from my eye sockets and out of my ears all over the bustling New York pavement and along the trousers of the passing businessmen. 

The sun fell out of the sky and I felt the brisk air of modernity strike me. I was ending this day with a drink in my hand and the sounds of street performers in my ears. Scarf and sweater donned, boots laced high, imagining that my life couldn’t be any better than it clearly wasn’t. 

From this view atop the Empire State building, another tourist looks down on me. I imagine. He looks down to see some modern man with a desperate sense of exploration, a taste for the world, and a savings no longer. He doesn’t see me like I see me. He notices the Nikon, the backpack, the little rituals. He thinks;

“Well there goes just another Floridian up for the autumn.” 

Yet I see, looking up, with bad decisions included, the spirit of adventure and a man with no attachment. A tourist of not just the city, of life itself. A man who busted his ass for this, a man who can do whatever he wants. This clarity is now upon me. 

He, up in the rafters is like me, a revenant of the new world. Except I sit on a cornerstone, low below, with thirty-six more hours of experience. 

When I look up towards the night sky, towards the silhouette of this couple standing in elegant grace before a sea of stars, I see the crash and burn of the man. I see him throwing the magazines from atop the table, shouting in hallowing selfishness at his unnecessary attachment. 

I hailed the yellow cab, and I have to admit, I did so in a drunken way. 

I sloppily stumbled into the back seat and poured a little bit of my booze along the ridges of the weather pads. I thought to myself about the great extent of this idea of manhood rivaling a world so contingent on taking it. As my eyes rock back behind my head, with every bump to this journey, I couldn’t help but think of home.

 I had dreams that I ran out of money. 

I had dreams that the woman I was sleeping with left me for Paris. 

I thought I was the second son of a senator a few years back, when the fruit was cheap, like I was in on some kind of deal. The ones you don’t see the poor offered. The clerk gives you a side-eye and nods for you to come forth, from the back of the line.  In some lawless America where people are born into something – and get to keep it. 

But then I wrote to the editor. In dreams of chasing fame and craving likeness from my peers. 

Being rotten and poor like the rest of them, junked on the populous, addicted to stardom. I decided to write to him like he owed me something. With no fear in my integrity to publish great work for the mad, skinny, and mentally ill. Like some disguised medicine tricking the sick to get better, then sick again. 

Harsh truth, sick truth is – The poor and bastardly I want to touch and hold like Jesus Christ would rather be dead. They’ll beat giant war drums when it all gets too bad, never heading a subtle warning downwards. Thus you have these radical types who rally bums and rats around like a circus, because everything around them is burned and gone. Anyone could get mad at that. 

Anyone with a voice could observe that. 

Communists brain dump on the idea that rallying homeless eaters and beggars could be rational, 

I assure you. That is wackjob.

So why write to a stupid trash person who beats women or a dirty subway-fareman. They who crave this equality to the rich, yet will never picket a day to save his life? Women who work retail and then throw the life they've been given away to Fridays under disco light. 

Why?

Because without publication or likeness, I am nothing.

 rage 

Hallowed words. Paying absolutely no mind to anything other than a paycheck. 

Conversation, one-handed driving, and a handshake to god. 

As I pass over the bridge in the break of dawn, the buck stares me down.  

Giggling on the phone. Riding some attraction to one another to the very edge, 

two lost girls and one lost boy mixed up in some giant equation. 

These words are haunting and I’d rather not blow them out into existence. 

“______ , this is a little unwarranted, I'm sorry. It's been a bit since we talked. I was thinking about church and everything a few months ago. I know you hate sappy, so I'll try to keep it short. I chose to leave early, not much keeping me here. but I wanted to say thank you.

I know it's all probably strange hearing this, but you taught me a lot about morality. being good. being original. it's been on my mind. I hope you and the family are well.”

I wrote under a full moon that night, four years ago, to a woman I’d never expected to hear from again. 

She writes,

“Good to know you didn’t actually regret ever meeting me.”

“You made me think everyone around me felt the same as you did and I wasn’t good enough to be anyone’s friend and that my “pretty face” covered an awful personality, but from that I learned to be more independent and reserved with who I consider to be a friend. It’s good that one of us benefited in the end and I wish you luck with your writing, bass, and California dreams.”

“Have fun Doc”

Anyways. Heartache and mistakes can be acknowledged. 

I’d like to win, or be in some sort of world where it all never happened. When leaves would tumble through the streets en masse and pumpkins glow on porches. When I’d roll up on your street in the cover of darkness and be up to no good with you. 

The wind howls as I vicariously envy the multidimensional me who made it with you. I can hear the rain, the sun, the orange and yellow of today that would introduce us to a future of any possibility.

The scary, ghastly part of it all is that I hear this wind and the wind-up box behind my ears, as I see you, but not you, before my eyes. In front of this writing, in front of the backdrop of the city. 

None of it will ever be true. 

And my reality is lonely and white. 

But beyond that, the steccato walls and the damn wind brush the drapes above wood paneled floors from the sixties. 

It’s all real somewhere else. I can feel it. 

So I choose to hate you because of the real circumstances. And the other one that didn't work out. And the next one. Maybe even the one before that. 

When I never answered your calls, when I called you a fat-whore-pig, and I left you for some other dim-witted woman. When I took utter advantage of your emotions and watched you from the train window of life passing you gone. 

I choose to spit at you in my mind. Watch you rot in homelessness on the sides of my streets. Watch you rot in a grave from an amalgamation of pill usage and party lifestyle. As I curse you from my bedroom. Because damnation is what you deserve.

So beg me if this makes sense to you?

 Let me please hate you for never giving me a third chance in our reality today and let me dance with you with lipstick and leather in some reality far away, tomorrow.

 I submitted this as an opinion editorial to the paper

on 10/5/24

I pledge my allegiance to evil. 

Im going ten over in a thirty. Laughing like a madman. With this new intelligence of these grand storms due to crash straight into my hometown. Five feet water walls. Storm Surge. Shortages in all walks. 

Fat people running around, finding out what will be next in line to eat. 

I laugh because it all hasn’t been great for me. That these terrible women who won’t share coffee with me or smoke cigarettes after five, will finally get what they deserve. 

Hopefully this hurricane’s eye will stare the truth out of them, for they repent for being so indecent to the world, and to me. 

I hope the wind rips heads clean off, destroying whatever meaningless object they hold closely. 

 Madness, my eyes staring at the walls. I’d imagined I would be in Rome by now. Perusing around the streets with my money, holding my head at the table, holding my breath behind the women. 

Basking in all the red from a beer sign.

The pinching sensation behind your eyes at five’s rising,

destined to do the melancholy. Grunt at lousy drivers, kick around a stone in a five story parking lot

Tied the tie. Ironed the trousers. Did all of that last night and God bless, it doesn’t feel like heaven.

I am mad at the instructor. Teaching such a stupid thing. Tying cherry stems around loops in your mouth as I stare at motivational posters. 

She doesn’t know how mad I am at the walls, and everything else. 

She doesn’t know how many cups of coffee I haven’t had this morning, 

How many divorces I've been through.

These corny people. Walking single-file down the alleys. Winning some big battle against anguish and despair,

They smile and rejoice at the grass growing. 

Shame it’s always been this way. 

Shame it always will be.

So at the end of the day – When she won’t call back, when I am fresh out of money

and the tire’s air ran low, or the branch that crushed my dog, and the ticket for going too fast, 

Bog my sorry ass down.

I look solemnly at some stop sign behind my car. Switching its reflection from yellow to red, as my turn signal gives it life in the dark wooded area it sits in, recalling some great metaphor, relating closely to how it’ll be when the lights turn out. How when it all is blackened, reminders of real world start to bleed in. Surrounding great darkness and some small stick, with aptitude to change in light, will be swallowed once again when the light goes away. 

I saw it, mourning my life, my choices, my failure.