“Eat, and get the story from all mobile web. Off with the warm covers and into the cool, easy day. Start light and fast, sugar-free grains, all morning. It is a positive-grip with coffee and friends, mid-day, all day. Toilet used periodically to diminish discomfort. Thinking too hard on the can? Get the story from all mobile web—how to read the news. Kiss on the cheeks of your children. Kiss on the cheeks of your lover. Kiss even on the cheeks of your poochie, ‘Come here Plauto!’ Here are lots of smiles. Here snaps not anger.

“Take the time for caring, driver, when you approach work. All hate traffic too. To help with jams: get the story from all mobile web—keeping the boring bunch out of your situation. Boss asks, ‘Why?’ All laugh after. Empty recycle bin; mail check; refresh. Check the news, and slowly the task moves. Work super, and get the story from all mobile web—keeping healthy the arduous event.

“Take the time for caring, too, when you approach home. All tired too. Swing in some quick food for children, lover, and even poochie, ‘Down now Plauto!’ Children giggle sincere. Tooth brushing, off to bed. Spacious bed, lover slumbers, you are awake. ‘Things are a great tragedy for the world,’ thinks you. Difficult sleep in great tragedy. Ease the heart hurt: get the story from all mobile web. Tragedy behind, sleep beautiful.

“For it, and all too, get the story from all mobile web.”

The bus stop was a small muddybrown thing, etched with indecipherable gang hieroglyphics, erected on the topside of an overpass by the college. Waiting there any day one could see sparrows giddily hop from concrete perches and glide into the tunnel. They had no doubts about it. They, being so natural with weight-free bones and well adorned with specked feathers, made mockery of suicidal heights. They would peck at dutiful ants and—when the mood fit them, or the pickings became slim—jump. In the street were the remains of a crow that had been struck by some heady vehicle an indeterminable number of hours or days ago. A winged thing without the glee, or was it luck, of the sparrows. It had flattened out, being eroded by the tons of pressure of countless tires—brief, but pinpointed, blasts of weight. In fact the only discernible difference between the crow and the asphalt surrounding it was a subtle change in texture. The feathers’ black and bloody sheen emphasized by morning light in what would otherwise be a matte field of pavement. And another car passes.

Ethan was there earlier than usual, and as a result the usual person who silently accompanied him in his waiting—an Asian girl with a rotund face and bubbly pink tennis shoes which would often become the resting point of his near dawn, unawakened, soft-gaze—was absent. There was instead a boy, or rather, an apparition of a boy. An entity with all of the silhouetted appearances of a boy, but notably empty of any adolescent radiance that one might expect. He—the boy, no older than ten—was hunched in a way that exuded angst that he should not have known for some years, but the reasons for this became apparent immediately when he turned to scan the street for a bus. Scratches all down his arms, but too deep and red and swollen to be caused by an animal, and a bruised eye. A bruised eye on a face that had more rubbery, baby fat than muscle. A bruised eye with shot blood and wincing laziness.

Ethan thought he should say something, but what was there that could be said?

“What happened?”

“Are you okay?”

“Do you want me to call someone?”

“Where are you going?”

“I am so, so sorry.”

Ethan thought about many things that he could say or do, he thought about—in a moment of romantic imagination—hugging the boy and through this action absolving him, but ultimately did nothing. He just examined the boy, petrified.

Ethan’s bus arrived and he got on and fumbled in his pocket for change, clanging his keys stupidly and holding up the commute of all aboard. The driver said, “You already paid, go sit down man.” So Ethan sat down.

We reached the point where the trail branched

and, virulently, spread

Do the hundred capillaries carry?

Nebuchadnezzar said,

“This looks quite like the End”

Drudgery!

I’ll have at you with sharpened graphite bits,

with metal bedpost shivs,

with battered thuggish fists,

Prepare for me!

sunlight makes your face into blistering clay

until savior winds come to erode it away.

guess that makes us headless.