It’s Quiet in Back

Rubber bracelets fund the outrage in the back of the bar. It’s a hole and a trench rolled into one dark, mustard-yellow escapade of dirt and dust and you and me.

It’s the kind of adventure you need to be bored with to really write about in any human detail. But that only comes later at the altar of toilet and teeth; never in the moment of.

All our wheels were broken so we had to make it the rest of the way limping for gas.
It’s not an excuse, it’s more of an alibi in case anyone with authority bothers to ask. We left the car by a clearing and a carefully humming electric fence put up by some paranoid dairy farmer: Pennsylvania’s pride and joy.

Adjoining scene: a close clump of cows, a gathering of black, white and brown bovine mystics; they release the kind of sonic radiation you read about in physics textbooks.
The music of a dense and frightening black hole in the center of the Milky Way.

An incredible distance of space and solid frozen slick dust and years beyond my bones; your bones, our bones; everybody’s bones. That’s the playing field. We define it for real as terror but keep lurking behind all the big old oak trees in the Great Big Yard like children.

Back in the real world it’s humid and everything smells of musty old books and bad pipes and ruined duct tape. We’re in the Milky Way but none of it’s in us; not enough to count. Not in the words we use or the way we love or in the hours we spend alive.

Alex is a journalist with a degree in graphic design. Originally from Ukraine, he's lived in the U.S. for over 15 years. Alex writes with a blend of dream logic and naturalism; empathy is everything. Gregory Corso, Bob Kaufman, Jack Kerouac and Lou Reed are among many of his influences.