by Zack Scholl

“I loafe and invite my soul”
-Walt Whitman

My idle hands:
the plaything
of Nothing,
Beelzebub
even having judged them
Useless.

When the siren’s song of the creek becomes a muted sneeze, when triviality slaughters every written word in abject triumph, when the signifier begets no signified, when my drowsy, wheezing cock lays indifferent and my incisors fall out, camouflaged in egg-shell bedsheets stained with sweat and tiramisu, when all that keeps the clippers from my scalp is entropy and my old high school locker combination, when the light at the end of the tunnel takes the shape of a laptop screen, when the pen is a wet bar of soap, when the grooves of the record fill up with tar and the needle slips off, when the cat is but a transient flash of grey light in the corner of my eye, when the itch is too asinine to necessitate a scratch, when the stubble on my chin meanders the endless path of 4 days of negligence, when the best thing on television is the puffy shirt episode of Seinfeld I’ve seen 14 times since I was a kid, when it’s taken me 3 hours and 17 odd minutes to realize I’ve lost my cell phone, when the tips of my fingers and my eyelashes and forehead scream for release unearned, when the kaleidoscope is filled with one glass piece, when the journey is no longer a journey…

I loafe
and invite my soul

I breathe
and Be