cell

the other day serotonin leaked from my brain and a woman was found hanging from the ceiling of a Texas jail cell. i walked six blocks to buy a lamp. the store was open and a man stood outside with his dick in one hand and in the other hand he held a top hat full of plastic dinosaurs. i walked inside the store to find a lamp. the woman hung from the ceiling by the stretch of a garbage bag. the population of the world is willing to live only and completely on its eczema. a face means nothing but the store’s exit sign was broken and someone had to fix it so we could continue our awareness of the terrible and mute state of nature. the average cremation takes two hours and the parts of the body left at the very end are the hipbones, the spine, the skull, and part of the brain. i touched all the lamps. some sticky. i unscrewed a lightblub from one lamp and screwed it into the next lamp. i tested lamps at the testing station plugging their plugs in to a wall socket and turning them on, and off. a few men looked at me. one man with a keyboard asked if he could share the outlet and he played notes on the keyboard as i lit up the corner. we had ourselves a private theatre. i wondered how many things for sale inside the store were found in the pockets of the deceased. i wondered if the man playing the keyboard could see the unseen as clearly as i could from the light of my sticky lamps. reading the news of the dead woman made my head feel as heavy as a horse and the crown of my days fell down the sewer to the bowels of a gut made of lava and trash. i asked the man with the keyboard if he wanted to pound the evening and he unplugged and walked away with his answer. i had to decide between a 75 or 100 watt bulb. i could not. i walked the lamp home. i heard violins playing in the air and birds dying somewhere and the smell of masa and murder coming from the corner taqueria. language is dust and dust is weightless. her death shattered time into shards of mirrored horror felt by the tendons of her angelic neck and a nation chopping prayers from young trees. i sat in my room with the broken fireplace and a bulb less lamp looking pristine and a guide to the weather that i never read. i sat on the floor and wailed as my lamp sat silent. the black stone structure of a cell awash in slaughter was only hours away.