Skin rituals and pills, snow shaking out like a salt shaker.  One day an outline of snow will circle this city like a bullseye target for Zeus’ mighty arrow.  How he will hurl space satellites at this crater, terminating all of our worthless jobs.  Hail, hail Freedonia!

A bell sounds in my spleen. I punch holes in the walls and sing Irish drinking songs to my long lost security deposit. Inside collapsing buildings, inside collapsing bodies. A collapsing culture, and future. Up, up and away to … Mars!

_{Shadow puppets. There is a cutup art painting sculpture on the wall. The rotary phone dial counts tonight’s seconds by and an angular handset sleeps in the cradle. All the horrors of the world are thrown together to form a shadow over the sculpture. The shadow is a woman’s figure, her head covered in a fur hat and her collar turned up against the cold. The candle trembles her, shivering on this snowy night, and the phone rests in her mind, unringing. Will someone call her and warm her up? Who has the number? What is imagination’s area code? If there is a woman for every man, then there is a man for every woman, and if there is a phone number for every home then her soul has one, and only her soul mate knows it. Yet he never calls. I pass by this wall six million times per day. Whoever is playing hard to get better get it together!}

_{Tremulous. It means to tremble in voice or emotion or both. To mean what you say so much your voice cracks. To shake with rage, regret or revulsion. I’ve done this for so long to anonymous memories. Nails bitten and pounded into the walls. You can’t build an alter in a collapsing structure. Hear that, Compassionate Conservative!}

My insanity is I imagine myself impressing trembling girls from my high school.  I shake the cosmos with my time traveling, and they all know I’m the man-boy who has become a boy-man.  Bits of memory fall from my past like boulders from a rockslide.  I put them together as Stony the Rock Person, a carrot for a nose.  He’s my bass player.  We act out fantasies in D minor.  I’m a modernist.  I build.  Caveat emptor!