"Very brave," a harsh, gravelly voice came from behind the two hulking Mustachios. A tall, slight man dressed in a deep blue double-breasted seemed to glide through his colleagues toward the grave and its soon-to-be occupant. 

The juxtaposition of the well-dressed man in front of the heaving and filthy boy became more pronounced as they stood almost nose-to-nose now. A breath could have pushed the boy into the pit. He knew he was defenseless. They were playing with their food before they ate it. He was shaking involuntarily but he kept his eyes steady, locked into the dead silver eyes of the man they called "The Machine". It was the worst punishment the Mustachios had, so it seemed that he’d hit a nerve. The Machine pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and mopped up the sweat on his brow, never removing his calculating stare from the boy. The heat beat down on them and the cicadas whined faintly in the distance.

“Wherishe!” He choked out, coughing and out of breath from spending the whole day in the heat without any water.

“Pardon?” The man smirked, knowing that the boy was very close to collapsing.

“Torr…” He burst into another coughing fit and gave up trying to tell them what they already knew.

The Machine waited until he was done retching to say, “I should have known you’d go looking for Torrence. Ahh I always found brotherly love to be so touching.” His wide, sinister smile made the situation seem surreal.

“Alive…” The boy mumbled, sinking to his knees, “Is he?”

“Not sure to be quite honest. That’s not my department,” The Machine shrugged, nonplussed, “But I do have a job offer for you, my friend.” He extended his hand in what could be surmised as a benevolent gesture.

The boy stayed on the ground, muddy brown clashing with pure silver until The Machine sighed, “Well, you have two choices. Take the job. Or I push you into this lovely pit you made and bury you alive.”

“Go fuck yourself,” The boy managed to sputter out before he began to retch again.

The Machine's lips split apart cruelly.

"A thousand crystal tambourines /

wounded the dawn."

wow. now THAT'S how you describe the stars. jeeeeeeeeeeeeeeez

Here is a link to the full poem: http://old.aprweb.org/poem/sleepwalk-ballad

so you waited

with your arms out tenderly

and they rendered you a tragedy

the next time

you sharpened the blade

and cut down the ones 

that made minor mistakes

now you're alone

with a bitter peacefulness

I wish journals showed up on the mobile site 

Her real name was Charm. Most people who knew her real name wondered why she bothered with a stage name. But she preferred to be called Charisma. It had more character than most stripper names and no matter how many people made fun of her real name, she couldn't bear to change it or use it for her work. Her mother had given her the name and she wouldn't let it be sullied by her life choices.

Her face was okay looking, framed with long, straw-coloured hair and centered with dark brown eyes. Nobody cared about her eyes though. Her body seemed to keep people's gaze below her neck. Most men spoke only to her chest. She supposed it was fair since she spoke only to their wallets. She had filled out at 13 and had always had some kind of boyfriend taking care of her and buying her whatever she needed. She had only started stripping recently when the last guy she moved in with had gotten violent with her after a night of drinking. She figured, at 25, she needed to make some of her own money, at least to buy a house of her own. She'd dropped out of school at 16 so her career options were dismal. Her car was still paid for by Beau, a long-standing casual lover. He liked to call her Charmaine, but other than that he was alright.

He was supposed to pick her up tonight, but so far she had stood shivering outside in her tight yellow tube dress for about half an hour. She could go inside and wait but Donny would try to make her work a couple more dances. "Come on, sweetheart, you didn't even break a sweat. Just one more dance for the nice man, be a doll." And so on and so forth.

A gleaming red mercedes, a newer kind, pulled up in front of the club and stopped in front of her. She immediately walked over to the door and opened it, not bothering to try to peer through the tinted glass. She started to complain about his lateness as she slid into the cream-coloured leather seats, but she stopped short when she noticed the handsome man with xray blue eyes and dark hair gazing at her with an amused expression on his face.

"You're not Beau," was all she could say to break the silence. 

"A harsh thing to say to a Frenchman," he smiled. "But I'm sure I can change your mind," he said as he merged back into the busy traffic of the main street. 

She could have stopped him, or even jumped out of the car at that point. But there was a deep curiousity that kept her from stopping the progressing events. She buckled her seatbelt and stared at him, but he looked only at the road ahead with a confident grin.

His palms were chapped and aching as he continued with the relentless tempo of his shovel cracking open the earth and displacing it next to the growing chasm. He didn’t dare slow down for fear of the grim-eyed Moustachios doing more than staring through him.

They were creatively referred to as Moustachios because of their penchant for scraggly handlebar moustaches and the pistachio shells they littered everywhere, even at their crime scenes. The cops thought they were funny at first, but they soon had their hands full with the disappearances and bodies cycling through the city. All they had to go on was the pistachio shells, but it was hard to incriminate any single one of them. When the heat got on one of them, he skipped town and another identical Moustachio would take over his corner. Nobody knew anything, that’s what the cops heard all day. The truth was that nobody wanted to know anything and people strove to be as oblivious as possible. Store clerks would argue viciously that any theft of arms and ammunition was an accounting mishap and that their stores had always been fiery, bullet-riddled ruins.

But he wasn’t a mustachio. He was somebody who made the mistake of knowing, of breaking the status quo of mutual oblivion. He didn’t want their drugs, money, or women. He wanted to go back to a time where cartoon villains weren’t making people disappear and people didn’t purposefully ignore the disappearances of their closest friends and relatives out of fear, or greed, or both. He knew what had happened to his brother. And he knew what would happen if he rigged the pistachio delivery truck with the fireworks he had stolen from Don Carismo’s shed. And he also knew that people would be too scared to even look at the colourful explosives.

All he had done was wreck a van and delay their delivery of pistachios for a day.

And now he was digging his own grave. He wondered if Torrence had dug his own grave, too. He wondered if he had used the same shovel and had the same two Moustachios watch him unearth his eternal resting place. Was he close-by? He supposed it didn’t matter as he heaved himself out of the pit. His blond hair was matted with sweat and dirt and his face was burnt red from the sun. The expression on his face as he stood in front of the Moustachios was one of delirious grief.

He was ready. 

Before dawn, she crept near the fireplace trying to control her jagged breathing. She struggled to calm her nerves as she watched her captor’s chest rise and fall peacefully, unaware of the inner turmoil she was facing now. The hearth had long since gone cold and the blue light of early morning only amplified the chill in the air.

She knew they were somewhere in the mountains, but that’s about all she knew. She had been unconscious most of the way to the suspiciously homey cabin where they currently resided. She had a feeling that they were squatting on someone’s timeshare, but she hadn’t had the chance to ask too many questions. It had been easy enough to get out of the rope tying her hands and feet. She supposed he had expected her to be out for much longer from whatever he had injected her with. Heroin addiction hadn’t done her much good in life, but it had given her a high resistance to tranquilizers. Now all she had to do was move past the bulbous, hairy man and out the door without making a single sound. The nightmare that had not yet begun would be over. She wasn’t naïve enough to think that this man had anywhere close to pure intentions and she knew she would rather go down fighting than probably raped to death in the Coloradan wilderness.

With grim determination, she carefully rose to her feet, begging her joints not to crack. The floor seemed to moan in protest with each step she took, but the bear-like man did not stir. She eased open the latch on the rustic door and inch by inch pried the door away from the frame, flinching as the hinges squealed. Without daring to look back, she maintained her quietude until she had made her way across the porch and onto the solid ground of her freedom. She began to run. There was no telling when he would wake up and she was not about to kidnapped a second time in the same weekend, at least not by the same guy.

Her life had never been the same since she had let herself nod off that first time in Billy’s basement. His mom had been a junkie, and worst of all, a junkie with money. She received enough alimony from Billy’s dad and with the house paid off, all she had to do was not overdose. A junkie’s dream and a son’s worst nightmare. With Billy and his mom, things had been good for a while. She had thought that was what heroin addiction was like. Not so bad, right? Free heroin and safe place to do it. Until Billy’s mom got a bad batch. Luckily and unluckily they hadn’t been there with her when she used it.  

The alimony stopped coming in and his dad had no desire to support another two junkies, especially without the court’s mandate. She and Billy had tried to make it work, but he got caught working as a drug mule for some local gang members and he had no choice but to take the rap. She had visited every weekend at first, but eventually she knew that 30 years was too long to love someone through a piece of safety glass. Without Billy or his family’s support, there was nowhere for her to go except the streets. And with the streets came danger and each passing day wore down her claim to dignity. Even being abducted wasn’t the worst thing that happened to her that week.

She ran until she was out of breath and then walked for what felt like hours until she saw the main road, but she knew that a filthy-looking junkie wouldn’t attract the safest attention.

There was a boy, who, as many boys before him, believed he was destined for something more important than the petty needs of the people around him. This attitude stemmed from the youthful notion that there was a certain benchmark for happiness that everyone someday achieved. He would find out soon enough, like all the rest of the boys before him, that there is no point in any life where any man can be satisfied with his lot.

This is not supposed to be a nihilistic sort of idea. Instead, it is the acknowledgement of the sincerest root of motivation. If one had all the time in the world to live life and no end to muse over, would anything be of real importance? Death is an impersonal necessity.

As people get older, they realize that life is nothing more than the meaningless moments billowing together until a storm brews,  peaks, and fades away. Ignoring the details means disappearing into the fog of metaphysical reality where fools delve in order to feel superior. What benefit is there to superiority when there is only one fatality?

There is no time like the future and no end like the past. The present is the culmination of a breath and a sigh. All the poets and all the priests kneel in front of the same muse but are ignored like all the rest. To sing is to scream gently as to sleep is to dream fiercely. There is no greater power than weakness invoking strength and no greater loss than strength inspiring weakness.

There was a boy and then there was a man and then there was a boy and then there was a man and maybe one of these days they'll figure it out before it's too late