In this world of noise, give yourself the opportunity to fine tune, to pick which noises you can pay attention to. If you listen to snoring, at least you know someone is breathing.

If you listen to the refrigerator, you know it is is fridging.

How about your breathing? Is it worth paying attention to?

I want to tell him that, the way he holds his pen, when he writes, is the same as the way I hold mine when I write.

I want him to ponder that similarity, savor it, make him sit up and take profound notice over it.

But he just responds with, “Oh really?” Without looking up at me. He continues signing my check. I’m glad the check is mine.

These are existential questions:
Do old people have regrets. I mean, old, old, old people. In their nineties.

Of course they have regrets. Okay, so what are they?

No will ask them. We’re afraid of the answers. Do they worry at all? Death being near,  sometimes just around the corner?

I’ll be afraid if they say really don’t think about it. Actually,I’ll be really pissed if they don’t think about it at all. And I won’t believe them. I also won’t believe them when they say death keep them up all night.

They never have trouble sleeping. They sleep a lot. They take naps.. Insomniac nonagenarians don’t exist.

I won’t be satisfied with any of their answers.

I am human. So far. I was born one and have stayed one. To stay human you need the following: (answers question, How to Stay Human in a world gone mad with machines

1. A good sense of fairydom. Knowing of fairies but not being friends of fairies means that your imagination is keen. The creation of concepts, scenarios, and  reveling in them, like secret pieces of candy, will set you apart from the current hullabaloo of machinery buzzing about you.
2. Fear. Ah, Fear. Delightful fear. Friend, fear. Doom dispels the need to contort onself, with no real feasible action required. Human can rest assured that any action at this point of emotion can go in many directions. No directive is safe. But it is human.
3. Desire. A desire for fear and fairydom. Wanting something so badly that you are willing to plead a desperate case. Pleading with word, thought and deed. More contorting than fear. Thinking things through, like a robot, but with an added twist. Well, an actual twist, of your body, clenched jaw, stiff muscles, shivering. Seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Just short of death. This is human.

There is a sense of doom in the morning isn’t there? You wake up and you feel it, but can’t name it right away. Doom dingles its way in, bowlegged and silly.

But its sexier cohort gloom pairs up with it and pulls at your ankles as you make your way out of bed and across the floor. 

What do you want? You ask them both.

Doom says, “I don’t know.”

Gloom says, “You are wasting your life.”

Gloom says it like it is. And Gloom does more. It takes off its clothes, rubs calamine lotion on its sexier parts and says “Pink me.”

PInk me? You repeat

You cannot make Gloom stop saying anything. But your secret weapon is a shower and coffee. Gloom hates this and cowers from these things. For awhile.

It will come back. But you’ve bought yourself some time.

There seems to be no way but to choose. Inside there is there is pink, outside are many colors, resting along, bleeding into each other, capable of turning new, ceasing their concern for hues and tinges.

Inside me is the color of love. Which has no color. So of course I must be speaking of odd feelings When in fact, its a color that has yet been seen.

I know what it feels like. I just can’t see it yet.

Disclosed from the weightlifting is the manner of such brawn the likes of which made me swoon. I relished not in the musculature, the venation, or the drips of sweat

It was weights themselves, their number and variety. both shiny and rusty. The utility of them, a singular one at first glance. And yet, with some imagination, they could back a door, crush a foot, herniate a disc.

But for me it was their true job that awed me. For changing the look of another person.

Rosemary is pissed. She is a spice. She really is.

She is sprinkled on the soil of happiness where my roses grow.

Rosemary wants to assimilate with the others, to find common ground. But she is met with thorny propositions, earthworm salespeople–all who claim to glow at night.

The moles promise truth. Oh we do too, the others say, agreeing.

Rosemary knows she is not welcome.  She packs herself up, leaf by leaf. But long after she’s gone the garden remembers her.

She becomes an urban legend, for no reason other than to add color to the backyard. She is never forgotten. The soil is now covered in Corporation. Men and women in suits strain for ideas but only find strange scents with no source.

But we know the source.

I will not. You can’t make me.

I’m fifty-one. That means no. Forty meant  maybe. Anything meant trouble.

So I won’t. No matter what.

What? Get out of here. Seriously, ask someone else.

Look. Over there is someon else.

Stop it. Leave me alone. Hey,where are you going? Not over there, surely.

Certainly not here but not over there.

Try there.

What? Leave me alone.

I meant to grab the money and run. As the dollar bills landed in my hand, I felt a twinge, a farting noise it made. The face of Andrew Jackson squinted.
Dollars don’t fart, claimed the bank teller.
Listen, I instructed him. He rolled his eyes. The volume of the bank’s interior suddenly rose and so he wasn’t able to hear the gurgle, brap, frap! of the bills. I shrugged, decided to argue about things and then just stuck them in my pocket.
My wallet warbled. I tried to embarrass my wallet, to be quiet.
Wallets are teenagers. It’s impossible to embarrass them other than with other wallets. So I grabbed more wallets. The alpha wallet roared, shutting up the the lesser wallets.
Only noise, only threat. Not farting.