Monday, July 31, 2017

Process

"What's your writing process like?"

Here are some notes toward things that'll be in Demon City eventually. I have no idea in what form, but I'm someone convinced each has an idea in there somewhere...

She’d been drinking the expensive stuff long enough that she was now back to the cheap stuff.

The cracks in it had cracks in them.

view of a dead section of roof

It looked like the kind of modern art you’d need explained to you.

There was something going on with the clouds, like they were in on it.

There was a tile there

He was drinking coca-cola out of one of those patterned paper cups you get in a mid-range hotel room.

It was a fifteen or a sixteen—the number was rubbed off as if anyone would have a reason to molest a printed number.

There isn’t any crime here. I mean—there is but there isn’t.

The lawn—the whole yard—smelled like it’d just come out of a dishwasher.

The booth had little tin-skinned smiling-face balloons all over it and under the chairs.

It was the kind of meal you get at the kind of place you get it at when you’re trying to enjoy your first three-figure check in months.

They played an entire Leonard Cohen album in between the boarding announcement. In Tallahassee.

He’s a family man—you go to pop him he’ll be walking out of A Bug’s Life with his daughter and like 8 guys.

I mean she’s at that age. But I guess what we need to know is was he?

It’s like a mural of a beard guy with rocks—it’s allegorical, is that the word, allegorical? Anyway meet me.

She finally found a corner store that didn't take EBT

rectangle reflections

something wrapped in insulation so much that  it isn’t a known shape any more
  
noises, the king of unknown noises machines, air conditionings, cars, unknown machines. a hum

fighting for control of the city of reality

the crackling open bar

the poor quality of chocolate in this country

trans fats

lone men walking where walking why

in the googled streets

towns without centers or reasons for being

streets lined with some kind of trees

bleak, distant, unreflected amber

gas station displays snaked and locked displays

spider-legs of white light

the familiar taste of sugar

angled roads 

filler construction where nothing is made,

slow death

garage and rubber burning gasoline

kind befuddled men who have seen the worst things, cruel loud young men who have seen nothing

on a colored carpet where the chip bags piled up like carp mouths on the colored and grey carpet, like plan As, like gaping out at numbered, unopened doors, hiding lives or nothing.

Get a new phone case. Pass the time, this space seems to say. Pass the time and stay alive.

noises
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2 comments:

Unknown said...

It's like if Bukowski lived in a David Lynch film.

Anonymous said...

It was the type of urban precinct that reminded you that cities had to evolve: they can't be planned