Ian M. McCarty – (mccarty)


Ian M. McCarty

from I Woke Up Early the Morning After the End of the World


A’s insomnia is temporarily ended by the temporary end of night. He lays still in bed swaddled only by a pressure of oxygen and nitrogen and trace percentages of other gases, gases including argon and carbon dioxide and some water vapor, gases ironed into the skin by the vacuum pressure of an overly square room with an overly square window, the blinds of which angle down at the precisely improper angle to funnel a low easterly sunshine off the greasy sheen of an angled saw-horse-style desk, fumbling through the twists and folds and arm-bars and choke- holds of a home-sewn maroon cotton duvet, button holes too large for a motley assortment of loose-bin buttons, fumbling with alacrity in an attempt to muzzle the breaking of the alarm’s electronic static language riding the stale gases of the overly square room like an aether, a jello propagation, and slapping in the face a cruel red and black honesty of the late morning hour, though its dots of colon and curves of zero are unsatisfactory metonymies for the punched out pupils and wet sack eyes that most deserve a slapping by the hand shot out of the maroon duvet and into the squarish block of air like a horror-movie advert, if the sheets were uprooted sod and the non-existent headboard an existent headstone, fumbling through the twists and uncoordination and clicking of a watch overwound, of waking inertia, the electronic static language the snarl of stripping gears, unsatisfactory particularly considering the uselessness of a waking signal for the always awake, the unbroken lines of blinks and winces and signs that cannot be sufficiently additive, but intensive, are always equally intensive as the intense strain of tense sleep going around, diseased and communicable, blinks and winces are bulk properties like density and hardness, are equally porous and on the same rung of the Mohs Scale of Mineral Hardness, consistently scratched by Apatite, Apatite the major component of tooth enamel and growls, fumbling through the bedclothes borborygmus, a name like a Greek myth monster but only an onomatopoeia for a rumbling tummy, fumbling through a premature digestion and gastronomic half-nelson, in an attempt to silence the useless waking signal for the always awake, signaling useless as semaphore in a pennant race, useless signaling as a Morse Code Aldis lamp in a paparazzi throng, fumbling through the clutching cocoon of rough-tongued boa decor, the blood-red complacent straightjacket peignoir and the dark encroachment feel without even a little dreaming, fumbling through the bear-hug of fourteen point six-nine-six pounds per square inch of atmosphere on exposed skin, a miles high smother, fumbling through a figure-4-to-the-head of pressing air, a pin that if released would boil blood and expand the skin, heart and eyes, the electronic static language the hiss of puncturing lead, lead for drawing and lead for shooting and lead balloons in the front in the lead, the uselessness of a waking signal for the always awake, the always aware, the always wide, the storm drains, the rugs for sweeps, the walls caked with latex layers and oil and lead and print and paper, the always tuned, the forked, the bifurcated, the always plucked and vibrating, strummed by plectrum shrapnel of the consistently outputting calendar day revolution creation collection and recollection, plectrum shrapnel of Gatling fiber optics and galloping delivery systems, predawn milkmen lecherous with claymores and the open sores of windows and underpasses begging for infection, for a filling up like snow drifts, soft numb blanket particulates each with unique methods to ban friction, to carpet over, plush and burning and dancing with static, to rug, all that glitters cold and biting with equal pressure solstice to solstice and solely unsated, rides unstated and pillages undeclared, covers its tracks with another dump, the uselessness of a waking signal for the always snowed in, unsatisfactory particularly considering the uselessness of a shovel for the always full hands, unsatisfactory metonymies for punched out pupils and wet sack eyes particularly considering the cruel red and black numbered late morning hour’s irrefutable advancing progression, all numbers’ dynamic abhorrence of stasis and freeze, ludicrous innocence from the insomniac sin of stationary perpetuation, numbered hours’ irrefutable progression laced with a nonsense poison of circulation, arsenic of drain spinning, event horizon hemlock, 12-hour clock restart loop addiction, irrefutable progression from fiftysix to fiftyseven to fiftyeight to fiftynine to zero, the irrefutable progression from nine to ten to eleven to twelve to one to two, the indefatigable sweeping and transmogrification of form to form to form, b-boy LEDs numerical digits promise locked with temporality and popping quick through the legs of sight, popping from angle to rail to corner to faux curve and ersatz ellipse counterfeited with rods and Lincoln Logs, flitting as insects and cartooning en masse to sculpt shapes in air, indefatigably caching a history of forms like a jiffy pop graveyard, repeated forms of only ten Hindu-Arabic glyphs increasingly winding tense, a wind of forms accreting gangbusters ascending apexed knolls of noons and midmornings, creaking wheezing lifthills overburdened with passengers, irrefutable progression to the indefatigable plummeting along geometric crashes articulated fine, undertaker and watchmaker measured, geometric crashes pendulum smooth and reversing polarity, pulling Gs inside out and granting weightlessness, these metonymies, irrefutably progress and shimmer unsatisfactory for the punched out pupils, full black pupils, black an absence of light, black an abundance of pigment, the twinning of absence and presence, and wet sack eyes, distension a result of pushing to or beyond the limits of tensile strength, distension a result of the inability to resume an original state, a perish of elasticity, punched out pupils and wet sack eyes and slapping hands that will never cobble rest from the extended eyeblinks, the extended fades, dissolving out and dissolving in, the protracted black between scenes, the extended stopping down of apertures, apertures coordinating the largest numbers and with the smallest openings, will never cobble rest from the extended waking eyeblinks dragged out by exhaustion or frustration or being dumbfounded and fed up, dragged out by the depletion of energy in music box coils, time between notes dragged uncomfortable nauseous aching anticipating pricked tickled antsy squirreled itching baited out, time dragged behind a train until dead, dragged out by a maintenance negligence, a disposable mindset, dragged out by exhaustion, exhaustion of springs and tail pipes and itsy-bitsy lungs and corners of mouths and muscles that shrug, exhaustion of tweeters and woofers and megaphones and jumbotrons and claptraps and pieholes, dragged out by frustration of showering with a moist towelette, of sopping up lakes and rivers with a Water-and-Gro sponge dinosaur, frustration of threading a sensible needle with a slim pickin’ rocket of coagulated quotidian ordinance, frustration of hell’s angels dancing on the head of a pin, of pinball attention, of alleyless bowling, of neatly packing the national archives in a knapsack, dragged out by frustration of unplugging trinities—observe, analyze, synthesize, look, listen, learn, stop, drop, roll, don’t succeed, try, try again, lather, rinse, repeat—dragged out by being dumbfounded, discovered silent, dug-up and missing tongue, steamrolled unconscious technical knockout, gameshow sleepover challenge of enunciation through mouthfuls of marshmallow and marbles and matrices of signification, dragged out by being fed up, trough intubations, forcing seven seas into three point four distended liters of gut, stomach staple chase, unbypassed, dragged out by floating teeth in a melting bog of one pot stew and simmer, rolling boils, blister packs, and seals and gaskets barking, corrosion around the lip, chafing and chapping, dragged out and dished out and swallowed in a gasp or a gaze or a shot glance, the reload of extended eyeblinks dragged out by exhaustion and frustration and being dumfounded and fed up, cannot alternate the indefatigable direct current of blood from heart through throat to brain to fingertips that sizzle and consume themselves when sentenced with nothing to dance with, dance on, dance upon, burn holes in their fleshy pads like money in pockets, curled up charred matchsticks, with these always awake digits silences the buzzing of time only to shake the screened-in nest of hornets, negatively charged hornets massless and invisible all the better to painlessly pierce you with, my dear, negatively charged effectively massless stings inside the chamber of the CRT, shakes them with a press of a button, with the fingers that only know how to press buttons, that yearn to press buttons, that ache to press buttons when asked to caress the velvet of a dark horizontality, assuage the suede of a slow, even night-breathing, fingers that only know how to strike a jackhammer of letters atop the overly square desk

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