The wall now painted over

 Certainty my uniform
Iron my flat hesitation
Buttons on every doubt 
The ones you dare not press

You'll never see me calculating
Never read words before they leave my mouth
My tone and vocabulary measured
Every response you surface memorized

Laugh when the joke has died down
Shake hands with your sense of humour
You won't read the truth on my face
Which version of myself I've spilled out

I'll never let your conclusion catch me
Everything is left open even when the door closes
Practising the predictable that gets me through
Another evening of being guessed about

I will turn my aloofness into anecdotes
Make every failure sound like an accident
Tell you I randomly ended up where I am
A piece of me want sto claim credit

I'll never let you see the machinery
Grinding beneath the plain surface
You will call it fitting in or camouflaging
Go on with that assumption

Au Pâturage

 The coffee maker au pâturage

Beyond the landfill twins were playing in the grass. Just in front of the tall pines. Where Mr Barker their father told them they couldn’t go.
Mr Barker had a huge amount of trash to clear from the bed of his truck.
So he said the twins could go down to the meadow beside the landfill.
Mr Barker knew they would need to use up some of their energy otherwise they’d easily get themselves into some trouble around the unsafe waste. He had just cut himself picking up some of the trash so he could get his truck in.
The twins could see the truck from where they were, but they couldn’t see their father.
Their giggling was constant and rose and fell like birdcalls.
In the middle of the small meadow there was a saw horse and on it sat a french coffee machine.
The coffee machine was working but both of the twins could see it wasn’t plugged in.
They slowly walked closer and closer until their giggling fell into silence.
They looked under the saw horse, a bald patch of earth surrounded by the over abundant super green grass surrounding it, hiding it almost.
The coffee machine gurgled, the smell of coffee became obvious.
Adernaid the boy said to his sister Sarah jar. “Sarah lets get back to the truck, this is weird.”
Sarah Jar looked at Adernaid, they both started walking back, feeling that void inside their throats and chest where their own giggling had been stolen by the strange discovery of the working coffee machine.

Sarah Jar pulled on Adernaid’s hand. And pointed up into the pines. A crow sat up in one of the branches barely visible, but Sarah caught it.
She was unsettled by being observed by the thing.
“No don’t.” Sarah said as Adernaid position himself to hurl a stone. He listened to her and dropped it. Perhaps if they hadn’t been twins, he could have thrown it. But the twin dynamic gave them both a kind of internal overlap of respect from one another.

Adernaid pulled Sarah Jar along, but took a rapid glance back at the coffee plunger bubbling away in the machine.
The crow crowed like a lunchbreak bell at a factory.
The kids walked faster.
They got to the truck and their father Old Mister Barker was brooming off the last of the dust fragments from the truck bed. He lifted the twins onto the back of the truck. Pointing out to the mountains and mountains of trash.
“Hey Dad we found a..” Adernaid was cut off by his sister.
“A crow” Sarah Jar said. In a tone that was both awkward and comic to their father.
He turned to both of them.
“Yes there are a lot of crows here. They also like to scavenge.”
He lifted each of them down and told them to get into the cab.
He jumped down, put the sides up and clicked them into place.
Got into the driver’s seat, turned on the radio and the ignition. Barely aware of the twin’s silence on the way home. Their chatter and giggling that would go on for days, was now completely silent. They just watched the road as if they were able to control the vehicle with their thoughts.
Every few minutes they would whisper to each other.
Mr Barker noticed that. Not the whispering, but how they did it. As if the information was dangerous.
He told himself it was jus another one of their games. As they had many and some did bamboozle him.
Something scratched the top of the windscreen on Mr barker’s side of the wind shield.
He looked in the rearview.
“There’s your crow!” Mr Barker said, bringing back a smile to his face.
On the twin’s side a streak of brown liquid resembling coffee leaked down.
Adernaid wanted to express it all, just about blurting it out. Sarah Jar put her forefinger to her lips in a gesture.
And all might have been forgotten, had Mister Barker not seen that gesture.

Bad social engineering

 Climbing up the flimsy structure
Loose frame, vines and rotten boards
Reach the top everything is unstable
Catch balance walk carefully

God cloudman the like
Said step by step son
Now you are here
just focus on those small movements

The human structrure is rotten boy
Stick to the vines and their aerial roots
So I listened to to God cloudman the like
Good advice from that Old fella

Maybe everything wouldn't fall through the way I thought
Cats and dogs and human pets clinging to the surface
looking for a sign that their fate would change

Motorbike delivery life

 The motorcycle held a few hours of deliveries
A sleeping sun in the side car
Up into the hill side tenements
A few revs from stalling

A small mini mall
with cheap knick knacks
Local food that would test your stomach
And the kind of shopkeeper that would guilt trip you in

He stopped behind the stalls and offloaded some boxes
The owner licked then thumbed some bills
Gave him a little extra for something off the books
And for the little one who had just woken up

As if the motion of the vehicle kept him sleeping
Man checked rolling his own thumbs threw
mouth extended a centimeter
Brow lightened

He rubbed his son's forehead
Got back on the bike and sped off to the next job

The habituation of dentists and couples

 This woman crosses the room to her wardrobe,
careful not to scratch the door with those long nails
The observer watched from inside the bedroom door.
Its blood tipped tooth stuck in the carpeted floor.
She thinks she's figured it out, but can't help but shirk,
somewhere in the shadows the answer lurks.

A shirt was pulled from the clean clothes.
Hands ruffled then smoothed the material like truth into lie.
A perfectionist's drive the elegant woman breaks and cries.
A formal dress she stepped into beside the bed.
As the mirror swallows the tears, the working hour nears,
drawing them upward in strange sliding smears.

Her man unconsciously opened the bedroom door.
She searched for care on his face, her eyes bore.
His eyes were routine his body language between.
One task and another with an anxiety felt but unseen.
That dried her eyes and the stairs down toward the business.
His footsteps continued behind her, for she couldn't convince,
climbing one step at a time toward the home office.

The mirror caught another tear all sorts of panic all sorts of fear.
Had she not pretended enough, how emotions impair... signs?
Another blood tipped tooth and unpaid fine.
She looked down to check the damage.
frown compounded patience ended fast.
then looked back to her feelings in the glass.

Reuben the tallest

 The bar started to fill up with rich local patrons.
One of which had an entourage his name was Reuben.
He towered almost seven feet looking down at everyone.
Not looking down just because he had the height advantage.
He looked down on each one of us on purpose.
His glare a lazer of nausea.
His friends jeering and goading gutless prospect thugs.
They were overbearing, hovering, badgering and bothering us all.

Blond ginger hair nand a grin that said the opposite
A redness to the skin like that of a man rubbed up the wrong way.
Sporting some sort of socially acceptable opinion.
He'd squeezed the best of himself out in boarding school.
What he couldn't achieve in intimidating the whole bar,
his friends finished easily.
On their second beers the volume went up.
How tall the man stood, the bravado the guy transmitted.
Their obtuseness became a sculpture piece under exhibtion light.

That night i checked behind the bar we had enough guns.
We just didn't have a coffin big enough for Reuben.

Her bathroom habit

 She heard his key clicking in the lock downstairs
swept the powder with slender hand from the glass
Wiping the counter clinging to new hype in her temples
hiding the rolled note inside her handbag

At dinner she watched his hands across the table
His wedding ring catching the apartment light
He asked whether she had followed the plan
Lifted her glass gave him the anticipated answer 

He went to bed she locked the bathroom door
Opened the handbag beneath the sink pop the baggie
Small white line beside her paler reflection
In several seconds she curves and snorts

Chemical syrup slides down the nasal to the throat
Whatever she was before is not what she is now
Unraveling the hundred and licking the residue
Thoughts move, heart jumps a sharper brighter reality

twenty minutes later the world is a drain
vampire of her essence
dawn is rockbottom
flavorless