"the password here is chingent...

...which makes me think chiggins."

Send Blood

So he wakes up in a small room with brown walls and forest green trim. The brown walls are the color of walnuts, the outside, the shell. Forest green, if you're not aware, doesn't look good with any other color. It doesn't remind anyone of the forest.

So he wakes up, and he's smells the mattress. It's as though his sense of smell has flipped a switch as his mind becomes aware of consciousness and although he doesn't mean to he smells the bare mattress and it smells kind of like watercress and mint but also soap, old soap scum and a little hint of broccoli and of course sweat. And pee.
Not urine.
Too adult.
Pee.

So he wakes up, and what do you know? It's awful. The sun is coming through the window, poking him in the eyes, first through one slit eyelid, then the other. Then the other again. And he's sweating. And the radiator is hissing. And his underwear seems loose and damp and his legs are tied up in the sheets, which are flannel, but it's May and the flannel is overkill now.

So he wakes up, and he fumbles for the alarm clock. Except it's a phone. Except they stopped making alarm clocks. Except when he turns it off he is greeted by his daily calendar.

So he wakes up, and the first thought that is driven into his head is sitting there, waiting, in his alarm-clock-calendar-phone-email inbox. It reads: SEND BLOOD.

So he opens it up. Crunched into a tiny screen, the email seems longer than it is, at four words per line.

Please Sir/Madam,
My name is Ouri
and I wanted to
Beg of you sir
to send blood to
the troops fighting
We are willing
to exchange
Viagra and persc
ription medicines
Free tattoo remova
l and find your true
Love. Please
click
this link.
one two
one two

And an attachment.

Do they make viruses for phones yet?

The name I choose to give to the pit in my stomach

Stage it in a forest

Place it in the barks, and the saps, and the folded twining limbs, scooping at the fog

stage it in a forest under a thrown blanket spent of 

leaves

and soot

ashes and poplars, willows, weeping willows dry whips

The papers peeling from the backs of the basket trees

Birches and pines

Mine is this song, steeped deep black

For days, sullen

Soots in meadows and warm compost

Bury, burying my feet into dark earth

dominant

But terrified

String in some sun

pulled through a sheet like cross stitch

pinpoints and pricks of light leaking through the gaps of the leaves yet 

to fall

Into my eyes

so

i squint

Bring me back there

I am cold and rub my hands to my biceps

Rub my hands down the elbows

Rub my hands on the front of my jeans and I shiver

I am transformed

Back into a little boy

as I walk home from school and see my first fall and my smile lights up

And I still smiled so my teeth shone

And I was happy

And I took the bus, and I rode in those old plastic seats and peered over the edges, through the windows, through the alleys

bicycle paths

birds

singing songs, sitting next to my sister

And we were still untouched

Stage it in a forest, alone

My body deep deep in the frozen earth

As the cool trickle of a handful of the stuff

Pours onto my right shoulder, right below the collarbone

And fills that gap, seven seven seven

Handfuls of the stuff and now my arm won't move.

I look across, up, down. Searching for landmarks and there are none

I am now stung

And it burns little coals in my eyes

Hot little cloth wrapped tight and put in those dark holes

Cheese cloth marred sienna brown small, rooted in those pits

Sit down

Sit down

And my head begins to spin and I lay down and the crackle

cradles my head and 

I stare into the light gray and fall asleep