shon

so priss and i graduated high school, high-schooled (pot blends with undergrowth knots, and boy was Nine rife) but soundly educated, and went our separate ways. she split to ivy leagues, away from corn hell and the limber stalks it hid; i went nowhere of importance but Nine. drifting, listing, always stern-bound by the seas lagging the rest of life's loafer-crew. we ran her ship terribly and harangued society's worse. merchant plunderers by day, forest scavengers at moonrise. but we didn't scavenge sustenance; we scavenged for sustainable places, locales fit for lingering in the moon-coat mists that swept across fertile floors. every oak a ship, every leaf a sail. chipper winds of change, tomorrow's echoing siren call. up on a bark-mast one saw all, from the rolling golf-hills, where priss presented her gifts, to the salt-colored pillar, paint-palette blank, at the flotilla's center. sweeping, swooping canopy, left to right: a panorama fit for universal studios. intrinsic beauty: Nine's best distraction. if one saw all Nine presented, one didn't see what i did.

Nine didn't like us. 

that's why we scampered. 

that's why shon found moe.

a few weeks of survival, baptized in night summer, unveiled Nine's true colors. Nine's tenacious ability to hunt should not go understated. Nine kicked us, the pirate-bums, into working shape, and pulled all others under. starlit nights heralded Nine's release and remained the cut-off point for ship boarding sessions. we all arrived port-side at different times from the surrounding towns, told more about ourselves through tree-branch movements than any office monkey desk chatter deduced. grimy feet, the goat-veterans of night-Nine, began tracks over fresh mud early as 6. others, those opportunist wolf-snatchers, didn't trundle in until 7. at 8 sharp rushed all the larks: bird-brains, quack-heads, beak-buzzers, nutsos in flight. they snatched patches fastest, took to roost squawking. seagulls in a sultry land, vivacious wood erect at their light patting up and over. out poured others: buck-does pairs clopping out bushes (a pang to wisp-errs, mistakes last time mitigated), peacocks prance-looked but piss-prepped (nobody fully took in what Nine threatened anyway), and our worst output: red-tape, red-assed baboon buffoonery. jolts, familiar neck-tingles and hair-pointing paired with a growing constraint of Nine's velvet atmosphere, motivated us instinctuals on deck, but no, those monkey-fucks -couldn't- mar their grubby thumb-paws with our musk. instead, on went the prattling, on went the foraging, on went their brief, knuckled-up exposure to Nine's nighttime dirt and grime.

then the moon rose right and our alarms all buzzed for 9's arrival.

there isn't a much cornier movement besides that into a 2nd person. 

well, you wouldn't know that with what corn-errs cut you there. 

ghastly. an adjective summed up by the rest. what followed for the gorillas, proud of what chimp-imitation of man's domination they brought forth for a moment on Nine's glob-gut. what followed your visions, to hell and too far back, glimpsing through pandemonium. the few to my crew (kodiak, swallow, and arctic snarler), they all said they gazed into the abyss, into lathered umbra left as existential excess. i failed to fall fool. you would too, if you looked close and took note of how no black spot stayed static. how dark thoughts slunk, sank and sizzled but never stopped. snap! and a man-beast, cut off, dove low again. SLASH proceeded harbor vandalism, fingernails left ingrained in sap as another ape flailed through bush. snip, some slushy twirling shlopped tangled bone-column knots onto our mast-main. another sentence couldn't do Nine's justice, couldn't make visible what savaged those poor desk-draggers. yelps, tears, even faintly human pleads dissolved into cicada chirp, washed out across the blossoming buzz of deck talk, as Nine's night tore on.

we enjoyed our sacrifice. 

uneased, but at ease. 

filthy land-lubbers.

no ungainly parts littered the shore as Nine's wildlife stripped down, brought au naturale groundward out of its nightly repression. everyone, every time afterwards, wondered what ravaged our bay with unmatched consistency. theories abounded, crawling out person to person, eager infection under truthful masquerade. our quarantine kept it kosher.

"devils. devils, i'm positivo. not demons," kodiak motioned at the tranquility, "because demons'd have swallowed err'one yesterday. them devils, they're lawyer-types. only exert claim on this ground, at this date, and ain't ever late. Nine ain't ever late. ain't ever miss a spot, neither."

arctic snarler did his namesake. "who saw shit up there in our treehouses? how we know these aren't people on the ground? people like us? in three weeks, three weeks since the first night, everybody's comfortable in branches. what could three years do to us? what if they're us...exposed to age?"

and the swallow, who sprouted into (and burst out of) my mind as shon, swallowed hard, missed by coincidence. flick, went your captain's vision. a pale moon-head craned starboard, then vanished to night star-board. blips of static leading off a tell.

an exception to daytime 'panzees.

worth future investigation.

soon.

but exemption doesn't do much besides screw us on fate's weaving board. my good reader, you wouldn't make it out alive. not you, not any baboon-beast. that's all the better. these comments don't stem from disrespect. no mockeries adhere to Nine's jungle-book visitation. all those baboon-loons kept their positions at one world in mind: that "real" one, that place so mired in miming as to mimic itself meaningless. that place that told hu(bris)man they were themselves. that place which embraced a genesis of genetic invigoration, of scientific, God-given objectivity. that place that ignored and ignores Nine, that pretends its existence doesn't rejoin their divisions.

shon kept his head at two...

...and ended up worse split.

developments

succinct.

brief.

triads.

my deliverance to you, the audience. four, five, six times? or maybe less. or maybe more. who's to say for sure? the man who sets the lure, who finds the cure. who knows exactly what it's for: us? or TV? or KO? so many malignancies. such potent patients. stable care wavers on the ledge keeping "unstable" minds in stabled places, helps alleviate the frustration brought by steel bars imposed on blue heaven. solid are our buoys built to handle human waves, most foul and vicious of all the ocean's offerings. yet our field remains overrun by quack-doctors, sons of Hypocrates, who do not concern themselves calming the waters. their prominence disturbs, distresses, churns, compresses. not relating to myself, really (because i don't, in desperation, grasp to insane notions of survival after contact), but relating to others plagued, plaguing others. suffering numerous afflictions; mental boils, soul-less snot, body rots. oh, theirs are the ways of He, then, so tumbled through vile mire! well, they're not my ways. our diagnosis isn't matched; our examinations don't mirror. such flagrant abuses of privilege cannot go unchallenged.

and i say i'm here to return to course. 

discourse, of course, is the best force for going anywhere but where necessary. 

that ends today.

there's a pattern present in the present-past. lurking in history's annals, its excrement, the actions and people processed before rendered unconscious to life's light, but not its process. a development, to grant it label- no, -the- development, or one-half anyway. the other loops together, clutches to the subtext, hangs on from an angle not yet visible. this catalyst for madness, for absolute, pure-bred insanity, exists in the stablest folk. my contemporaries, as much as i can call those more popular and illustrious than myself peers, have a knack for heading the same way. normalcy, uneasiness, total functional shutdown, then a plunge under solitude's icy capillary. a single kick sets it off: our just-as-concentrated friend TV. or KO. or even GM (although its prominence in military minds holds no weight for those unfamiliar with the Great Dismal). quite a few two-bit stand-ins take the "ration" out of "rationality" and leave -mans' heads all itty. tiny, all minis culled. a small frame, holding small landscape. no human connection besides the observer's. it's maddening, to dissect portraits without people, to see an sea's speckles and no sea-boats. an endless vista, and nothing for context. watercolors abyss, abound on every surface. ensure your people protect your truths.

that's what pulled priss roof-ward.

shingled verandas. rarity even in the south, like shingles boosters. to roost, her legs took her places - secrets revealed in that soul-spot previously elaborated. unconsciously, priss always said, tugging at half-placed strings, every movement jostling into the next. like a musician's rhythmic fingers, a writer's witty pen, she snapped into her motion, filing out the voided outline noticed by her vision. at first, no reasons for the changes, at least, no reasons she felt i needed knowing. not that i dug too deep. with aging comes a bell curve of superficial appreciation, and at that time my incline only ascended as her mounds sprung out. we split off a while after middle school started, in that old seaman/egg farmer fashion, but she cut off further than the rest and kept close to Nine's vest. i couldn't really stay away from her, though. follicle will-o-wisps and all that. i think we both knew what challenge she presented. as guarded as the forest's undergrowth, with matched vivacious under-growth. an avatar of life, of mama earth's succulent premium; smooth boulder pairs with cut plateaus intersecting. by the time we started high school, all i saw at the peak was us joined, rocking at the hips, magma dribbling out her lips. crude, certainly, but what else is expected from a frothing imagination? too late does that amorous mountain-love end; too early do peaks weather into craggy knolls. a homely reflection dissuades a young man, but keeps his elder intact, for gazing on images not yet fully eroded makes their memory all the sweeter. an idea leading to the ideal.

youthful experience prioritized.

but shingled verandas kept her above TV, above forest guarding, and her legs knew better than she did, so she always found herself hovering at its precipice, the tip of Nine's tit. that's how i found her the first time, on the first day of junior summer, ready to escape away. cornered, auburn glistening over auburns whistling in the wind, eyes brimming with resolve. life-sap conviction, one of her unique traits. i can't say she spilled a drop of blood until the last days when she broke par and i broke pardons, but that sap coagulated all kinds of hurt before her four holes in one. she stared in my direction then, one heel perched precarious off green slate, the other's toes steady as grecian pillars. her eyes swept past mine, though. took interest in something beyond my plateau-shoulders, took her pupils, dilated, to a concentrated blackness. so clueless of Nine's vulgarities, i found reason for action in her supposed desperation. her hand cupped air, soul-murmurs slipping life out her lips in every mist-tinted pant. before her daze cracked, my fingers matched her own, my lips picked up the excess spirit leaking away. suckled from the wellspring.

only later did she say that TV's endless tubes enclosed us in our touch.

our, we: time together

yesterday goes, comes, sticks around with jello-viscosity. a manufactured mental flubber, gumming up our present view. hard to chew through. harder still to sink in.

what priss represented, what she held, her weld, the sun-fire stickiness coating her vivacious bark (pale skin, gale sound), slips away, stolen off by the habitual sunrise, in morning, every morning. old one-eye, you orange propagator, how vicious do you treat your daughters! what did priss inflict that drives you to stir such agonizing presence in my mind? every morning, through the black-bar criss-cross squares of clarity holding tree branches back, you ascend and align that iris on my prone figure, ignite lids until my pupil, wrenched parallel to yours, waters to keep itself afloat in the flood of light through with devouring your own. Sun, i just want sleep. Sun, there's nothing more worldly that matters to Moe than beds, springs and cotton imprinted with portions of the afterlife. soft box mattresses hold limbo peaks, or maybe a slice of heaven, tucked deep inside the seam-work; rock-hard futons shimmer in their dullness, usher to the highest rung in the drolL life's ladder. and my fluff, my sprawling king-sized nimbostratus, bristles iciness, a fitting Ninth of what I don't deserve: that circle of satisfied matching. threes set like trees, tethered to their earth. chomped to its roots.

Sun, you can't blame Moe for that grey mishap. that concrete stain on Nine's slick surface.

it's not something i'm built to handle. pfft. as if i'm built to handle anything. this job (evaporated), this useless blog (my last lifeline), this coincidental play-of-events (all going to plan) unraveling reversed. from the end we hark to begin anew; so completes the circle true. silly rhymes, rhyming silly - motion matched, match-motion; story of new death, story of new life, stuck between each type. one, two, three. a delay of weeks. it's obvious the few who still follow this are starstruck at my shift of fortunes. 'but Moe,' they say, 'how could such an esteemed and trustworthy corporation as The Coca Cola Company™ amputate one of their loyalest members? lop off such a hard-working pipe facilitating fluid bureaucratic-bowels movement?'

it comes back to priss. gaia's curving boner. (apologies for vulgarity.)

Nine absconded with our unfamiliarity far before we ever adultly knew each other. when we remained new, each other look, half-sighted through the undergrowth's thicket, in our summer-times fostered a rapport unlike anything else my life ever felt. maybe her fiery mane, her crimson conflagration, helped, burned something deep inside, branded us both. i know it's what i returned to whenever we later went to adultly know the other, the will-o-wisps tumbling through my fingers while the trees leaned in to better view our nudeness. the post-coital glow, brought alive by dead follicles, in the clearing where soil and soul intermingled, where earth and heaven conjoined forever. for her, my back held prominence. she ran her hands through every groove and niche present, tickled my spinal column and all its discs between my ass and my brain, matching our eyes, chin on my chest.

and we talked.

"why now?"

"why now?"

"why chase after TV? TV's gone. TV's over. TV came, saw, left us barely alive. if you can call this that."

"TV left before its time."

  

"what? how do you know its schedule? trying to lure it back is fruitless-"

"nothing's fruitless when the effort's there."

"what effort? an effort to get yourself killed? an effort to bring he...whatever it is back to our place?"

"it's TV's too..."

"i won't let it get you again, priss. i won't let you go up and try to hop off a housetop."

"...they're all his. please, Moe, please...let's not talk about this. now. just give me a reprieve."

her mumbling.

our bumbling.

and the forest drew ever closer.

priss

when we discuss priss, we start with:

amiss

adrift

assist

added to the prior three.

no, wait, scratch each's first. i found my place when it stayed, erased by Nine's bladed waste; she found hers when i undented the shingles and kept Nine away. we'll disregard that, though, since our end came and went and we only began yesterday. for now, all you should know is that our beginning rushes towards the end we await, that the circle comes complete through the Internet's 0 and 1. spiraling, spiraling, spiraling, yet rooted to a seat. story of life, in a sense. story of observers and bards, of tales and wails, of the same laughs and cries and whines repeated across the planet, all caught in parabolic motion tethered at a point. places work similarly, in loops that dip outwards in periphery then swing back forefront. our tracks, too, forever persist, but our parallels don't always match. zero, one

two foot-pairs
placating unruly Nine
with their presence.

when we start with priss, we must discuss her weight and our balance on the scales. that's not to say priss held big bones (well, she did hold -mine-, but that's besides the point) with her body-skin - on the contrary, her willowed frame barely clung to her past cover, a tan-sheen soft as raindrops. rain is a heavy liquid, though, the sky's sadness and anger brought to earth, and everything poured in her vessel convinced me she descended from perspiration. her movements, malleable but perservering even in the tortured gale; her observations, poignant as cloud-shapes structured by our thoughts. she'd pierce to the center of folks, men, women, children, puncture sheets, aerate their carbon dioxides with her supplementary energy. pull all the untouched secrets out, awaiting a catalyst, and turn them substantive. create a product with their boiling heat.

like a tree.

our story, it's clearing up.

she always liked trees.



we met in Nine as children world-wide do, driven by an endless search for knowledge. of ourselves, of our people, of our habitat. where we were put, why we were put there. simple things. die-rected. little wordplay involved...more, play with words. experiments, in hand and eye; circles made with one, imposed over the other, our fingers imagination's swiss army tools telescoping the world. we tested Nine's mossy waters for others like ourselves, dragging heart-pumped thermometers that sometimes showed red at outward sight, kept blue for personal view, across green landscapes hiding brown sludge. but when we touched, we never dug that deep. the surface tickled enough, fancy as a bug, clicking and buzzed. always a buzz. that's where priss ended, with the buzz in the clearing.

so she began.

last of all us.

rooted to the end.

update

i persist. the next entry is simply taking time.

my apologies to the viewership.

patchwork

inoculation.

induction.

ignorance.

more steps-verses-re, winding times back to before the suffering.

welcome back, viewers, to my living twilight, where that pivotal beginning comes second to its end. hours to hour powers extend out, touch the sun's fading horizon, as this old fern withers into dust. to a forest i go and to a forest i return, yet each only embody this journey's crescendos. what requires in-depth perusal is kinetics, combustion, radiation, all the small rays earth's sphere abundantly offers. our body-builds rest on sunlit foundations thrown out on rigid axises, rigged to refracted wave-points like tracked dollies swerving in a crystal mineshaft. deeper and deeper does the path extend, drive on into dirt, drill through dampness, dink across diamonds, and deeper still does the cart go, loaded with its luscious cargo, invisible motivation. even if tracing its path proves impossible at first, our energy runs straight in the end, guided by universal management and unalterable dictates.

unfortunately, its end isn't ours.

the dolly must reel back.

the administration accepts no substitutes for its content.

one-one trades.

equivalence.

business as usual.

my surfacing was to come with screeched wheels and train blows from a man you all know.

Nine was swallowed by it, black as the sputtering stars, and the dark between the leaves surged backwards as i sprinted down the path. too bright, too hot, too visible. it invoked the white haze of knowledge. bunches, cracks, trees impede escape, veiny hedges and coagulated sap muddying all-too familiar surface space. crunches, creaks, snaps left in my wake, left in sum-autumn breezeways, half-gold clearings opaqued with red drizzle. trip! a half-wail, clogged by adrenaline that kicks me up with a horse hind-leg whumf and shoots me out again, sleek, pumping vitality, an inadequate imitation of what forces me onward. dirt roads littered with trash, flotsam vestiges catching my step- but i couldn't afford to consider them. the treehouse door bumped forward-back to my left-right-no sight, distraction opening an avenue of opportunity in two eye flutters for it to twist the world and arrive ahead, nine paces off.

cracks colors and shifts places.

deja vu.

y tu, John?

split off, blitz another way, pretending not to notice. pretending that thoughts of spiriting myself away rested deep in my mind's sleep, in subtexts that parlayed hints held only by morpheus. pretending the panic was momentary, checked by primal eddies, never truly comprehended. crack, crack, crack. whispering winds give no answers to its placement, but it never lingers. never without reason. huff, huff, huff. a squished sun held reign above my head as i careened onto a orange-red stretch of dirty essence, earth-stuff splattered all over, kept moving even though my legs begged to rest. -blink- precludes the next step. abdominal gurgling at the sight, an urge to unclench clogged bowels. blue chills grip, a pressure clamped down on my toes, unwinds me upward, unhinges what control remains. to keep it contained is maddening and to keep it maddening contained, a conundrum of conflict i couldn't address.

stumble, stumble, stumble.

falls come quick.

somehow it had gotten hold.

it drew me up and out, as wide as the sky yet still linked to soils at the edge. black spread out and only widened sight. searing tones of Nine's abscesses clumped with inky knots from Nine's recesses, but no white lasted besides its floppy oval. thousands upon thousands of its parts and pieces quivered with delight, wormed and wriggled and slunk down and across, perused Nine's fractures, suckled Nine's nutrients gleefully, spat at one-another, considered my capture. i observed none of them. i wept without regret, too terrified for shame, too prostrate to change, at it. investigating my essence with doctoral sterility, it unites our appendages, as if urging me to deduce what monstrosity lays beneath the humanoid veil. i can't tell it, i can't, that it wasn't for me, but for her. suspended in Nine's organic miasma, a choking cloud of the forest's all-colored virility, i await its schism.

starting at the end, though, has its perks.

those watchful appreciate my handiwork.

the Almighty.

my dome-self collapses, suddenly, to Nine's foundation, and Nine's tints blend again. a suitable aroma greeted my rise: charred musk, dried blood, condensed dusk swirling in 70 degree moonshine. it's what he held in his hand, chugged, as he watched my work shoes struggle to embed the grassy patch newly spawned by it. his suit? a crisp beige, signifying an armani epidermis. his shoes? a slick black, unmarred by mortal dirt. his importance? my once-current boss. a grin nearly leapt off his face when our eyes met, and i knew he knew why my pupils stayed dilated. his black skin showed no perspiration. golden shine breached the vessel of his mind, poured out through the pitcher of his eyes. to his suit's right, two small letters, string text embroidered red and white.

KO.

an outstretched hand takes my only touch of apotheosis.

"Hello, Moe. We've taken interest."

([{<click>}])

here ends guides, signs, and the fateless life of Moe Nunbady.
now the real work commences.

doors

seven is the lucky number.

eight, the remains of familiarity.

Nine is two fores in one. 

Nine carries two holes, two flags, two embedded picks, surrounded by red Georgian soil.
Nine holds four white orbs thumping to stillness in their sculpted holes, slipping in and out of focus with the sunlit leaves and their darkness.

Nine grips to my memory with its raw tendrils, slick and sticky, pocked with the writhed-in rocks and life's too-prevalent scent.
Nine pushes from the feet, expels its content up, up, up for the gawking world to witness.

Nine is where KO began, where KO and I joined as one, where KO will cease.
Nine remains, even after Shon was swallowed by the soft-stone that clasped together with awful haste, even after Priss' laughter sundered the world.

my world.

our world.

its end started with a puzzle like my own.

you see, this sieve let the nuggets slip. fulfilled its duty to mean nothing, though it said much. the jutting outlines of my thoughts scribbled down, copied over, bottled up, chucked seaward, built to snag corneas with their luster. polish a rock enough and you'll sell it for more than fifty year's toil, more than the star-bound mass of adult and child evaporating in existence (i know from experience). a sacrifice as necessary as any other; we all aren't entitled to dream houses (again, i know from experience). so now that the attention's secured, the audience will rally in awe of the sparkles and come to know the powders behind them, what grime sticks on faces, constricts windpipes, lockjaws mashers (i'm sure you know i know from experience). that's not to say this blog enterprise is wholly non-sequitur. we'll return to it later. but since KO lies dormant and vacation days linger, my chance to extrapolate on these provided clues presently presents itself.

what is KO? what drives its repetition? what brought me to The Coca-Cola Company's doorstep?

We must take three three-steps back to pinpoint where each of those questions' answers lies. slide back the first set paces - un, dos, tres, out from solid, adhesive umbra into Nine's center courtyard.

observe Nine's mighty protector, a bark behemoth born to earth's embrace by the weight of its roots. they slink in the clumpy soil, take more than their fill demands, demand constant filling. you can see it in the leaf colors: startling crimson, popped against blank white, supporting a navy sky.

al Bino, the south's white pillar. a trifecta of american shades holding up Nine's bloated brown dirt. literal testament to KO-given miracles (at the time, I thought God did all; now I know better!).

its presence pumped the fleshy foreign blood that kept Nine panting, sent the verdant dough to the grounds-keepers dedicated to delayed renovation, preferably mother earth's. green for green, bark back to bark (in a circuitous way): so the forest encroached.

fools fail to preserve their environment.

but they only hastened Nine's last ten days.

its puzzles got us all.


tomorrow we'll step again.
six, five, four.