Adam Moorad

Sympathomimetic

It's morning - or you don't know. You're in a house eating beetle eggs smacking your lips and making grinding noises with your ankles and moving your arms around like horse flies. You think you're communicating something to someone in a covert parrot language and a voice tells you to go on a dangerous mission to infiltrate buildings on the road by the stadium. You worry about the pain you must be feeling and hope that after five scratch-tickets you can lie down and swallow your spaghetti arms and legs and it bothers you the neighbors are watching, practicing genetic experiments on a blond child on a miniature Weber grille. You look at the kid and wonder if it's murder and how nutritious it must taste then you ensure yourself that everything happens for a reason. You think you press the gas pedal against the floorboard with your legs flailing and see yourself riding a flying bicycle made out of antique feline skeletons. You count the ribs and jaws and wonder how many political assassinations made this ride possible. When you worry you worry the world won't stop looking wiry with insect wings and you spray a can of RAID wishing you knew something about Buddhism to control your senses. You try to stay awake watching a group of scientists dissect a desert tortoise and you look at them and they see you from the operating table on the ceiling. Then you go outside and check and see if there's maggots on your roof shaking a baby in an Indian headdress by the thorax and you see them and you think there's more than one and there is and you realize the porch light is attracting them from far away places and you shut your door and lock it then turn off all the lamps and hide them in the closets. Eventually you fall asleep near a chair and you wake up and look around and look around and wonder why you ate so many toothpicks when the weather's so hot and you think you can remove them later like a maintenance man who changes light bulbs on an airport runway. You lock yourself in the bathroom with a blanket tucked under the door so things can't crawl inside and you don't know why but you're convinced this will happen. You watch your fingers move and become green halogen cylinders and you think there's wood inside them so you punch the bathmat with your chin and make a hole in the world and the planet says, "You're Welcome." Then you catch a dog chewing on the ceiling fan so you hold it down and pry its mouth open to see what's inside and you smell pizza and gag and jerk your head from side to side and dig your fingers in the animal's fur for a while then put your mouth on the carpet and lick your tongue on sandpaper then foam from the corners of your lips and think you have rabies again but you believe you're immune and invincible like you can put anything in your mouth since you have a skull made of dead cicada shells. You touch your scrotum then move it with the bathmat from the crack in the door but you think someone else put it there and you wonder how someone found it and you begin to worry and start looking for your ashtray because you forgot you're not smoking but you still smell things incinerating and feel nasal congestion and sense the bungee cord inside your chest will snap if you move another inch. You check your shoelaces to make sure they are tied but you're not convinced. You recognize your feet because they look like canned tunas then you hear a chicken doing something in the ocean with a whistle and feel familiar tasting things between your teeth and you're pretty sure you have reptiles in your gums when the dog starts sniffing your paws in the light of a plastic killing machine that reminds you of a church steeple. The neighbors are looking at you from behind a mirror behind an analogue set telling you to use coasters with your cups and you smell expired mayonnaise and see a countertop covered in hardboiled eggs rotting and rolling off newspaper into an astronaut helmet full of cat litter. When you look outside then around the room you picture your daughter with no teeth in a Starter jacket braiding Garter snakes then you see your reflection through a window watching you watching a television watching you watching it wondering when it will be safe to close your eyes again.









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