sometimes, before I have my coffee, I am a time traveler as I type away. I change my queries to extract the numbers I need as I sit in a classroom in 1994, listening to the radiator hiss by the open window, smelling whatever it is that makes the smell of old radiators, perhaps old silvery paint, or maybe just the age of its body and waters.

I am newly 6 and I wish for snow from the overcast white-grey skies as mind idles while my teacher reads from some book, and I am listening to the trucks go by outside. what is attention? I do not yet know the word "daydreamer", but I am daydreaming.

I wish I could make something as beautiful as fugazi's 13 songs.

dune

he called it one of the best novels ever, so naturally I have never read it and now, twenty years down the line, I still haven't; we haven't exchanged a word in nineteen.

I bought him some other pulp for his thirteenth birthday and we left it at that.

slippery

just 30 after midnight, a stray bullet came through the window and left the woman dead in a pool of blood and broken glass for her son to find.

this was my neighborhood, this could've been my window. it could've been my mother or someone else's aunt. people left flowers behind the fence, beneath her window, and they are all mostly dried up and withered now, only the plastic the same.

I walk by, think how her window was only steps from mine, and how any night, if I walk by my window to get a glass of water, that might be me.

disgusting

my knee is old in a way that makes me wish I could pop it open with a flathead screwdriver, clean the gunk, oil the joint, pop the cap back on, good as new except for that light discoloration, old bone beige