[don't think I don't know]

From the mall parking lot he jumped the iron guardrail and ran crashing through the heavy brush down the steep bank to the river's edge. The blue sphere followed him, casting the leaves, the crumbling earth, and finally the low dark water in its luminescent glow. A dark narrow shape like a curving blade swirled within center of the sphere, apparently controlling the vehicle's trajectory and momentum.

3 Bass Ales and 2 shots of Cuervo
rounded out his fee at the bar. The month
was November. It was Thursday night, after a bleak
day full of cold drizzle.

The shoe trade that day
was slow. Or maybe it had picked up. He didn't know
and didn't care. He left the bar only because it would be wrong
to become truly drunk at work. He stepped outside the mall entrance
and smoked a cigarette. It tasted terrible, wrong. Huffing dry and hot,
toxic lint.

On TVs everywhere all over the world that night,
the ultimate surreal impossibility of their arrival
had finally come true
and was being broadcast.
Just like in the movies. Yeh.
The aliens had arrived. Undeniably.

he stands
feeling a sheet of invisible frost on his face
emanating from his eyes

I make a certain gesture of the hand
and the mall parking lot transforms into a moat
of wine

is what he said to her as they stood
smoking outside

she gave him a narrow look
(she worked in perfumes)

then he said,
few turn to a seller of shoes for answers
that's why he sits baked in the back
among the boxes and shelves

you don't have to try so hard to creep me out,
was her rejoinder

when it comes to you so naturally

he blurted

what time you get off you wanna get a drink after work?

she flicked her butt the white filter of which was plum with lipstick
away toward the curb

weird is what she then said and went back inside

he then flashed to a vision of him stalking
the shoe floor with a
katana

blank I drew upon rituals scorched of meaning
rare my methodologies and so backward
did I rule

I drew blanks upon scorched rituals, meanings
so rare and so backward that this methodology
became my rule

I got nowhere to go but here
I got nowhere
I got nowhere to go