"You're right," I say, taking another sip of Tecate. Ian Curtis' voice repeats, ghostly and, well... sad. I find a chunk of lime with the tip of my tounge and burst it between canine teeth.

"Is that the last beer?" asks my friend. The overhead light is out and a bluish sort of morning light is coming in from the living room windows, mottled with shadows of raindrops. There is a palpable tension and weariness in the room. We're all sick of ourselves and each other. The world outside is scary. Last night a convenience store down the block got robbed and the clerk got shot... a lot. He used to give us free sodas. Everyone is touchy and drunk. I feel like a dried out scab. I feel sick, like I've been crying all night.

I throw on my wooly gray coat and head outside, a cold raindrop hitting me in the part of hy hair, soaking into my greasy, unwashed scalp. I take a breath and think about what I would do with my life if maybe I had a lot of money. I'd probably go to another country where no one knows me and end up getting murdered, or worse, just bored and lonely.

Across the street a muddy irish wolfhound stares at me with greenish eyes.

I'm halfway to the store when I am stopped by a crying black prostitute (I guess) in a raincoat. She's trying to tell me something, but I can't understand her. I feel like I'm underwater, I don't remember walking to that point. I just remember listening to Closer and drinking beer. She points at my stomach. I wonder if she's mute. She points at my solar plexus with a bright orange lee-press on nail and suddenly there is a spark of pain there. I look down and there is a gaping bullet hole in me, gushing blood and soaking my shirt and pants black-red. I look back upwards, aghast as sound returns and the hooker melts into Han Solo frozen in carbonite. I stumble and brace myself against a bike rack, screaming low and hoarse. Han Solo explodes and is replaced by some sort of yellow tear in the fabric of space-time (I know this is what it is because I can hear Anthony Perkins say so.. he must have been behind me the whole time.. maybe we could have had coffee together or something, but now I'm shot and there is a space-time portal in front of me so I guess that precludes us becoming friends. Maybe the bullet that hit me came from WWI fired by a French Leigonaire... Maybe Stalin really wanted to invent and market his own line of feminine hygiene products but thought it would make him look silly). A shape is solidifying inside the portal... Why...

It's Frank Sinatra.. but...

He's covered in some sort of robot-armor... It has racing stripes and all sorts of guns and pointy-things bristling from its surface.

"I'm here to tell you a story that will heal that bullet wound, kiddo, and then I'm off to go join the Beatles on their Magical Mystery Tour, dig?"

"I dig, Frankie," I gurgle.

YOU CAN RIDE THE HALLOWEEN CANDY TRAIN INTO THE SCARY TUNNEL

The cold is coming down in a palpable cloud of phone conversations going nowhere,

plastic and milk...

She said she spent autumn alone and I'm inclined to believe her.

A man stalked through the bar with a hefty garbage sack, navigating through drunken cheers and swinging maces of meaty arms and beer mugs. The man's face was pallid and etched with what I guess was fear. A beer mug swung into him fast and busted through the double-ply of the garbage bags, letting out a deafening waterfall

of icecubes

and frozen human heads, rolling out like medicine balls in pea-gravel and murkey gray-red water. The bar slowly freezes from the cold and the man runs out before anyone has the thought to stop him. The heads stare up at the drunkards with similarly shocked looks on their distorted frozen-meat faces.

"I'll be goddamned if that ain't a fuckin' head," comes a whisper. "A whole mess of... heads," creaks another.

"Also, the ukulele ('jumping flea') was closely patterned after the cavaquinho, a Portuguese stringed folk instrument," adds a final voice.

The cat that had been sleeping on the air-conditioner leapt down to investigate. The bartender threw a peanut at it to keep it at distance, a hurt look on its sleek black face.

Hey! It's halloween! Let's all go trick-or-treating! MAKING SURE TO WEDGE HER HEAD ON SO IT WOULD NOT FALL OFF

I miss you. I miss your face, your smile, the weight of your body, the solidity of flesh, texture of skin, smell of clean neutral sweat. I want your forehead pressed almost painfully against mine. I want to look too close into your eyes, mutated and warped and soft as underwater

IT'S HALLOWEEN! HALLOWEEN IS FUN! CONSTUMES ARE FUN! CANDY IS GOOD!

I pull my weight back from the window and drag the scenery inside with me, it bends and makes me sick, I crumple, attached to the colors, stretching like a wad of silly putty. The empty space inside me gets filled with trash, I explode, I asked for it.

TONIGHT WE ARE GOING TO HAVE A VERY FUN HALLOWEEN PARTY! EVERYONE IS INVITED AND WE WILL PLAY FUN GAMES LIKE PIN THE TAIL ON THE DONKEY, BOB FOR APPLES, AND THE SPOOKY GREEN GHOST GAME! THERE WILL ALSO BE GOOD HALLOWEEN FOOD AND TREATS AND PRIZES FOR THE BEST COSTUMES!

I have to wake up quickly, shower, shave, clean up things a bit, find work, only hours pass and I'm still asleep, twitching inside. An endless loop of waking in horror as my aorta explodes. The rapid fire thump - a machine gun in the breast as a million hearts explode out of each other like a bloody infinity of Chinese boxes made from blooming meat roses and sparks shoot from my eyes as I bite off my tongue.

Once upon a time there was a big monster pirate who was made out of dead unicorns that flexed and rot like scabby white muscles on the giant pirate-y frame. "Yo-ho-ho," the pirate said, flapping two dead unicorns together like lips. Inside the pirate's "mouth" were rows of unicorn horns that he used for teeth, they looked like twisted white needles. The pirate had an elementary school for an eyepatch and a ball of dead elementary school children for an eye. His other eye was made out of a giant Tesla coil or something because it shot electricity and he used it to blow up boats at sea.

THERE WILL ALSO BE A VERY SCARY HAUNTED HOUSE WITH WITCHES AND SPIDERS AND VAMPIRES.

Generator.

Warping.

YOU CAN RIDE THE HALLOWEEN CANDY TRAIN INTO THE SCARY TUNNEL

Billions upon billions of seagreen nylon flowers I never put on grandmother's grave teem with insects. The world waits for them to decompose. It rains, falling leaves cover me to hide twisted awkward limbs.

YOU CAN ALSO PLAY IN THE BIG PILES OF LEAVES THAT WE HAVE MADE. THEY ARE REALLY BIG!

Vitamins and blood have replaced cigarettes and sex. Across the street you can buy a gun to kill yourself, otherwise stop whining. No one understands you. I don't mean that in some dramatic way, I mean you're unintelligible. The only difference between you and a lunatic is you know when to shut up. You're dropping body-parts all over the carpet as well.

WE WILL PLAY AND SING HALLOWEEN SONGS WHICH ARE SOMETIMES FUNNY OR SCARY.

Swimming as a child is the soul of chlorine sex concrete and new, menacing sky. Overbearing smell of pulverized granite and clean skin. Sunscreen. Fear of big dogs. Fear of everything. Never fully formed. Existence precedes essence... I'm scared of what I may really be. There are more ways you can die than physically.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN EVERYBODY. WE LOVE YOU.

I have no face.

[Image]

To have your head pulled back and a drop of rain hit you directly in the pupil. Form ceases. Words (HALLELUJAH) cease. Thought ceases.

Who is speaking to who, who kisses who, who hits who? A palm on a palm or a hand pressed against a mirror?

The nausea of self-imposed stupidity and shame. Trying to derive nutrition from soft-drinks and little else. Skin boils, mind atrophies. Try and carry on a conversation with someone new and I'm astounded by a fountain of mephitic diarrhea that flows from my dead mouth. Hand gestures do little to atone for filling someone's lap with shit.

Just go back to sleep. Why not. There's no reason to even be alive today.

The cold is coming down in a palpable cloud of phone conversations going nowhere, plastic and milk..

I GUESS HE DIDN'T GET ENOUGH HUGS AS A CHILD (LAUGH)