The bus had to walk back home because I stop running at midnight. At 2 a.m. my dorm found me wandering around the parking lot so I let it in and cooked a t.v. dinner on my record player. I tried to choke that food but it managed to swallow me so I gave it a belly ache instead.

My television picked up the phone and called the radio station. "Request?" Yeah- play that Alice in Chains song, the one the band listened to the crowd sing at Sandstone last summer. Yeah, that's the one- those bastards made 'em sing it a capella, did you know that? Oh yeah, forgot you were a d.j. Call me later, bro."

Yesterday I'll wake up my alarm clock and teach some old prof how to add two and two to get the battle of Hastings. That man asked my textbook to look up an answer in my hair. Good thing I washed the shampoo bottle that morning, because I was laughing like a sorority girl at a klu klux klan rally. I gave him an F for the day and brought the library to my desk. The chairs sat around on me for a while, eating corn flakes and wondering where in the hell the books would look for them if they had to show the bathroom the best way to the front desk. But I wasn't scared. I told them, you guys should start a band, you could let the sick puppies throw musical instruments at you until a meaningful chord sprang from your forehead, from your nose where your brother beat the crap out of you last summer. They laughed. They always laugh. I laughed back.

I was teaching boredom how to dance and she kept stepping in my shoes, so I dialed O for cemetery, called to where my mom ate a ham sandwich and watched me bury the burly priest. She was mad when the ham sandwich dropped her on a small drip of mustard, but she forgave me. That priest. His clothes attacked him everyday, held his neck rigid and made him smile so no one would know how they had to share him with the same bottle my mom strangled to death in the bathroom. A great big ant tried to step on my head but his shoes were too big and he got my whole body. I was safe- the ground made the rain all mushy and the mud crawled back between my feelers and left me alone for a little bit.

I sharpened my nails and drew blood on the coldness, licking the wince it made as I felt it up and gave it a dollar. A great idea jumped in my back pocket but it needed a haircut. Somebody- I think it was an old woman that I reminded of my aunt- asked me directions to the nearest barber and thankfully, I forgot what I said. She stumbled away, legs not moving, staring through my eyes at herself and thinking out loud so loud it could make the dead go back to sleep: "problems." One old woman in shining knight's armor, carrying on her back a pure white horse and firmly pushing away the battering rams that would enter her dark gates, that's all I wanted to see so I opened my eyes and let the pockets in my fruit eat me, one wedge at a time.

My chin dribbled juice all over the oranges and the hands that fed them. I told my brother there was a barber shop in the bathroom, did he have a quarter or a nail. I smirked at him and asked him to go very far away, until he was so far away he was right next to me borrowing my pencils and letting me see his girlfriend naked. She generated electricity and sold it to the power company, she paid them everyday and sometimes when my brother wasn't around and I was sure I was sound asleep I would plug a lamp or a toaster into her eyes and watch her turn on, eyes glowed like coals and she was butter and jelly, sourdough toast. She never took more than two bites out of me.

I told the barber I would use him to rip the hair out of his scissors, if only I found it in myself to allow the bathroom time enough to tidy itself up, to put the dispenser back in the soap, to put the dispenser in the square of paper towels, to close the toilet lid and put it back in the cupboard. His head nodded him. Oh, my hands, they covered the juice, they were thick on it, the juice was itching to escape from veins and so I washed the soap, I dried off the paper towels, and I let the toilet sit on me. I was cold to it. I told it not to smoke, I wouldn't let it bend it's knees because I was too small for that room to relax.

But before awhile the barber got nervous and worried that I might hate him for making me wait. I hit the door with my head, on purpose but it missed accidentally and I was glad. I am always glad when it is expected like that. I told the barber he should have his hair dull the scissors until they were the same size. He kept nodding his head and telling me I was an Italian. But that's a cliche. Right in the middle of it a can of coke sat in his lap and told him a story. But the can ignored me until a ten dollar bill gave me to the bartender, and I put the man in its pocket.

The can drove a bus with me until campus floated down from the clouds. I asked the clouds if they remembered that joke they told me, the one that chose my mom as their favorite. Who would be their favorite now? Our front door knocked on the joke until it opened up and let the house out to play. Sometimes at night. Their joke will go something like this: a bar goes into a man and the bartender says to him, "Shoot tequila twelve times for it is the antichrist and must die." Weird. So the guy puts the bar right on top of twelve shots and they go running out the door, one, two, three. Then I stopped them, I said, "Where are you going so fast? and the bartender said, "You'd be a shot of tequila too if you were a bartender like him." The guy got scared. "What are you?" he said and I told him, "About eighty cents."

That joke was my mom's best friend and some nights my phone would call her up and listen to her tell it for hours and hours. The computer center was looking at me, and I gave it an idea, so it built an extra wall around me and a computer put its keyboard in my nose. I let my eyes close me and watched the screen. I pushed on the earth, and pushed on it as hard as I could, 175 lbs. My mom killed 33.8 oz every day three times. She was a murderer. Triple homocider The computer played with my haircut and finally it got bored. So I told it. She tried to kill you every 27.6 days. You died once a month. And I did.

My dorm room gave me the keys to its car but I was out of gas and the car didn't have anymore bus tokens so I let him in to use the bathroom. The coke drank some of the bathroom and then my telephone played my brother's favorite record, so I spit on him. He didn't understand. I kicked my room into the hall. A girl was whipping her brush with her hair and I tried not to sit next to her combs and barrettes and creams and brains and ovaries. She said did you ever write catcher in the rye. I said my t.v read it to my mom when I was an old man. I gave her ten dollars. I picked up some tears and weepings from the carpet and ran them up my cheeks so she would help me sit down so I could walk to the elevator. The elevator was a very nice man, and he gave me my money back.

My shoes got tired of listening to the ceiling creak and they left me on the corner. I watched them walk away, probably to do drugs in nightclubs and write poetry. Then my shirt got hungry enough to do cartwheels and it ran away from me and bought a ticket to New York City to become a slave. My pants were first. They said, we have to do this, and the street loaned them some peanuts and they fed the elephants. I put the crank in the road and wound it towards me. The city dragged it back and that's how my brother's apartment caught me, lurking in the lights and ignoring the shadows because that's where laser beams play.

The door smacked me in the head, right hook, left jab. It used to be a boxer when it was a little kid, a little door in somebody's dollhouse. I dodged a body blow but accidentally hit the referee in his toes and the door bowed in acquiescence. Hamburger wrappers and pizza boxes ordered bits and pieces of my brother and used the walls and floor to keep him warm. When we were little kids we gave birth to our mom together, and we taught her how to drink, how to get picked up in bars and supermarkets by cheap cigarettes, how to arm wrestle lipstick until it gave in and let her do it's hair. I told my brother how his girlfriend was putting the state prison back on the go-go stage and maybe he and I should let a couple of old men give us some new eggbeaters. He told me to fuck off.

The night cleaned it's ears with my hair and slept on my back, pushing stars and moons and planets the size of your house into my back. But my vertebras went out for pizza and didn't come back until before the left. The windows kept opening and closing my brother's face and hands and stomach. Fifteen gyms paid him to use his stomach muscles make them stronger, and he never smiled until they were happy. I asked his stomach if his girlfriend would rather eat a sunset than race sportcars and that's when he got mad. Then mom got a train drunk and let it jump in front of her as she watched the taverns stagger away into the night. I let my brother clean the apartment everyday so he could come over and let me forgive him, but I never did. But everyday or week since next summer the pizza boxes threw me back and the empty milk carton filled him with dust and poked him in the eye. He always said fuck off, but it used to be Fuck Off.