Tangled Wires Quotes

The people we love get under our skin and crawl through our veins and fine their way into our heart. They choke up our blood flow and mess up our breathing and tangle themselves through our bodies like wire. Like razors, like fire. We remember them even when we don't remember them. We try and forget, but it's pointless. Even amnesia. Even comas and brain damage and traumatic shock. Whatever makes us not remember, we still remember. Our minds flounder like fish but our bodies... Our bodies remember.

I watched the people passing below, each of them a story, each story part of somebody else's, all of it connected to the big story of the world. People weren't islands, so far as I was concerned. How could they be, when their stories kept getting tangled up in everybody else's?

When he put the old-fashioned mechanical toy on her palm, she stopped breathing. It was a tiny representation of an atom, complete with colored ball bearings standing in for neutrons, protons, and on the outside, arranged on arcs of fine wire, electrons. Turning the key on the side made the electrons move, what she’d thought were ball bearings actually finely crafted spheres of glass that sparked with color. A brilliant, thoughtful, wonderful gift for a physics major. “Why magnesium?” she asked, identifying the atomic number of the light metal. His hand on her jaw, his mouth on her own. “Because it’s beautifully explosive, just like my X.

We’re all just a collection of wires pulled tight, charged beyond capacity—a tangle of plugs and valves, waiting for a surge to take down the whole system.

Maybe there’s a heaven, like they say, a place where everything we’ve ever done is noted and recorded, weighed on big karma scales. Maybe not. Maybe this whole thing is just a giant experiment run by aliens who find out human hijinks amusing. Or maybe we’re an abandoned project started by a deity who checked out a long time ago, but we’re still hard-wired to believe, to try to make meaning out of the seemingly random. Maybe we’re all part of the same unconscious stew, dreaming the same dreams, hoping the same hopes, needing the same connection, trying to find it, missing, trying again—each of us playing our parts in the other’s plotlines, just one big ball of human yarn tangled up together. Maybe this is it.

Eager to please, Trying to be what they need But I'm so very tired I've stopped trying to find Any peace in my mind Because it tangles the wires

It was dead contrary to the common experience of such encounters, when time is found to have built its own defensive lines, camouflaged vulnerable points, and laid a field of mines across all but a few well-trodden paths, so that, more often than not, we can only signal to one another from either side of the tangle of wire.

After all, it was a fine line between love and hate, and our line was officially all tangled up in barbed wire.

Animals. Let them burn, then. Let the streets be filled with the smell of their sacrifice. Let this place be called racca, ichabod, wormwood. Flex And power transformers atop lightpoles bloomed into nacreous purple light, spitting catherine-wheel sparks. High-tension wires fell into the streets in pick-up-sticks tangles...

His hand was a claw, sharp enough to open her. She would be like all the others—Ruta Badowski, in her broken dancing shoes. Tommy Duffy, still with the dirt of his last baseball game under his nails. Gabriel Johnson, taken on the best day of his life. Or even Mary White, holding out for a future that never arrived. She’d be like all those beautiful, shining boys marching off to war, rifles at their hips and promises on their lips to their best girls that they’d be home in time for Christmas, the excitement of the game showing in their bright faces. They’d come home men, heroes with adventures to tell about, how they’d walloped the enemy and put the world right side up again, funneled it into neat lines of yes and no. Black and white. Right and wrong. Here and there. Us and them. Instead, they had died tangled in barbed wire in Flanders, hollowed by influenza along the Western Front, blown apart in no-man’s-land, writhing in trenches with those smiles still in place, courtesy of the phosgene, chlorine, or mustard gas. Some had come home shell-shocked and blinking, hands shaking, mumbling to themselves, following orders in some private war still taking place in their minds. Or, like James, they’d simply vanished, relegated to history books no one bothered to read, medals put in cupboards kept closed. Just a bunch of chess pieces moved about by unseen hands in a universe bored with itself.

It would stay with him always as everything you ever did stayed with you, every horse you ever saddled, every morning he awoke with Maria Luisa beside him, and every slap of the paten on fresh paper, every time he had thrown open the shutters in the Betancort house, and his captain dying under his hands, always there like a tangle of telegraph wires in the brain where no dispatch was ever lost, what an odd thing, an odd thing.

I never see you now,’ she said. ‘I never seem to see anyone I like. I don’t know why.’ But she spoke as though it were a matter of weeks rather than of years; as though, too, before our parting we had been firm friends. It was dead contrary to the common experience of such encounters, when time is found to have built its own defensive lines, camouflaged vulnerable points, and laid a field of mines across all but a few well-trodden paths, so that, more often than not, we can only signal to one another from either side of the tangle of wire.

But she spoke as though it were a matter of weeks rather than of years; as though, too, before our parting we had been firm friends. It was dead contrary to the common experience of such encounters, when time is found to have built its own defensive lines, camouflaged vulnerable points, and laid a field of mines across all but a few well-trodden paths, so that, more often than not, we can only signal to one another from either side of the tangle of wire. Here she and I, who were never friends before, met on terms of long and unbroken intimacy.

Many of the younger generation know my name in a vague way and connect it with grotesque inventions, but don't believe that I ever existed as a person. They think I am a nonperson, just a name that signifies a tangled web of pipes or wires or strings that suggest machinery. My name to them is like a spiral staircase, veal cutlets, barber's itch—terms that give you an immediate picture of what they mean.

From some infinite distance, ten thousand twists of light are suddenly projected into your eyes. You watch as they shimmer and tighten together like the hooks of metal in a tangle of barbed wire. More and more of them appear, filling in the gaps one by one, and soon you are conscious of nothing else. What would the sky be like if there was nothing to see but stars? You know that you will not experience anything so beautiful again.

Being with her was like being backstage during an amateurish, ridiculous play. From in front, the stupid lines and grotesque situations would have made him squirm with annoyance, but because he saw the perspiring stagehands and the wires that held up the tawdry summerhouse with its tangle of paper flowers, he accepted everything and was anxious for it to succeed.

There was a huge wire fence that ran along the length of the house and turned in at the top, extending further along in either direction, further than she could possibly see. The fence was very high, higher even than the house they were standing in, and there were huge wooden posts, like telegraph poles, dotted along it, holding it up. At the top of the fence enormous bales of barbed wire were tangled in spirals, and Gretel felt an unexpected pain inside her as she looked at the sharp spikes sticking out all the way round it.

Inside the house there was no sound save the ticking of the mantel clock in the front room. He went out and shut the door. "Dark and cold and no wind and a thin gray reef beginning along the eastern rim of the world. He walked out on the prairie and stood holding his hat like some supplicant to the darkness over them all and he stood there for a long time. "As he turned to go he heard the train. He stopped and waited for it. He could feel it under his feet. It came boring out of the east like some ribald satellite of the coming sun howling and bellowing in the distance and the long light of the headlamp running through the tangled mesquite brakes and creating out of the night the endless fenceline down the dead straight right of way and sucking it back again wire and post mile on mile into the darkness after where the boilersmoke disbanded slowly along the faint new horizon and the sound came lagging and he stood still holding his hat in his hands in the passing ground-shudder watching it till it was gone. Then he turned and went back to the house.

We cut three telegraph wires, and fastened the free ends to the saddles of six riding-camels of the Howeitat. The astonished team struggled far into the eastern valleys with the growing weight of twanging, tangling wire and the bursting poles dragging after them. At last they could no longer move. So we cut them loose and rode laughing after the caravan.

It was dead contrary to the common experience of such encounters, when time is found to have built its own defensive lines, camouflaged vulnerable points, and laid a field of mines across all but a few well-trodden paths, so that, more often than not, we can only signal to one another from either side of the tangle of wire. Here she and I, who were never friends before, met on terms of long and unbroken intimacy

What I remember from Ruskin is the phrase the cursed animosity of inanimate objects, which I mutter under my breath when I get in a tangle of wire coat hangers. I also wonder if there is any such thing as an inanimate object.

The people we love get under our skin and crawl through out veins and find their way into our heart. They choke up our blood flow and mess up our breathing and tangle themselves through out bodies like wire. Like razors, like fire.

A permanent dull ache spread from my belly to my chest. I thought I could feel pinpricks of loneliness in the pads of my fingers, taste it in the back of my mouth. Clara Miller must have been lonely too, longing to be touched. One day as she sat before her metal tub filled to the rim with sweet corn, she reached behind her head and unpinned her silver hair. It tumbled down her back like creamy lace cloak. She hiked her skirts to her knees and I could see she had removed her stockings. Her legs were heavy and milk white, solid as columns. She hiked her skirts higher, until they bunched in her lap. When I kissed the back of her neck she quivered, like the dying peasant I’d shot and killed a week before. Her silver hair smelled like smoke. Clara and I tangled together like the bale of wire resting beside the unrepaired chicken coop. We were shameless, falling to the ground, wading into the creek, making our way to her bed.

Konstance is old enough to understand that Father’s farm is unlike the other three: those spaces are tidy and systematic, while Farm 4 is a tangle of wires and sensors, grow-racks skewed at every angle, individual trays crowded with different species, creeping thyme beside radishes beside carrots. Long white hairs sprout from Father’s ears; he’s at least two decades older than the other children’s fathers; he’s always growing inedible flowers just to see what they look like and muttering in his funny accent about compost tea. He claims he can taste whether a lettuce has lived a happy life; he says one sniff of a properly grown chickpea can whisk him three zillion kilometers back to the fields who grew up in Scheria.

Tingle, ting-le, tang-le toes, she’s a good fisherman, catches hens, puts ’em inna pens…wire blier, limber lock, three geese inna flock…one flew east, one flew west, one flew over the cuckoo’s nest…O-U-T spells out…goose swoops down and plucks you out.

... all sorts of wonderful things got washed up on the beach – crates of clothes and cutlery and children’s toys, boxes of engine parts and television screens and electrical wires like tangled snakes in the water. I found them fascinating, like relics from a distant time, even though I knew it was us who lived in the past.

Ultimately, what helped me understand addiction and how I came to be ensnared was first realizing that we all suffer some degree of addiction. While not all of us give our lives over to it as much as I did, or get tangled up in chemical addictions, the fact remains that all humans suffer, all look outside themselves to manage that suffering, and all get stuck in feedback loops that run through the same wiring in our brain that alcohol addiction runs through. The second thing that helped me pull apart my own addiction, and thus understand how to approach it and overcome it, was breaking it up into two distinct parts: the root causes, or the things that drive us out of ourselves to cope, and the cycle of addiction, or what happens to us biologically, spiritually, socially, and psychologically over time when we use an effective but addictive substance or behavior in an attempt to regulate ourselves. I call it the Two-Part Problem, and in order to heal, we need to address both parts.

At night, a few lights marked port and starboard of these gargantuan industrial forms, and I filled them with loneliness. I listened to these dark shapes as if they were black spaces in music, a musician learning the silences of a piece. I felt this was my truth. That my life could not be stored in any language but only in silence; the moment I looked into the room and took in only what was visible, not vanished. The moment I failed to see Bella had disappeared. But I did not know how to seek by way of silence. So I lived a breath apart, a touch-typist who holds his hands above the keys slightly in the wrong place, the words coming out meaningless, garbled. Bella and I inches apart, the wall between us. I thought of writing poems this way, in code, every letter askew, so that loss would wreck the language, become the language. If one could isolate that space, that damaged chromosome in words, in an image, then perhaps one could restore order by naming. Otherwise history is a tangle of wires.

To give up a marriage - someone unmarried might imagine it's like giving up a seat in a theater, or sacrificing a trick in bridge for the possibility of better, later. But it is harsher than anyone could realize: a hot invisible fire, burning pieces of hope and fantasy, and charred bits of the past. It had to go, however, if something were to be built in its place. So I stood there and gave Buzz advice, and all I could think of were the automatons we had seen at Playland, moving beautifully in the wind, and the children who were taken behind the scenes on a tour and shown, to their surprise, the vast tangle of wires and switches that would be so hard to undo, and even worse, once undone, to bring to life again.

Would you change that bulb, then?" He held out a fresh bulb from the drawer beside him. It was a perfect glass bubble with a tangle of fine wire inside. Thaniel took it and felt unqualified to be doing anything with it. "Why can't you?" "I'd have to stand on the desk." He shifted. "I'm afraid of heights." "And you can't even stand on a desk?" "Shall we not dwell on it?" Mori said, at a slightly higher pitch then usual.

But she spoke as though it were a matter of weeks rather than of years; as though, too, before our parting we had been firm friends. It was dead contrary to the common experience of such encounters, when time is found to have built its own defensive lines, camouflaged vulnerable points, and laid a field of mines across all but a few well-trodden paths, so that, more often than not, we can only signal to one another from either side of the tangle of wire.

But she spoke as though it were a matter of weeks rather than of years; as though, too, before our parting we had been firm friends. It was dead contrary to the common experience of such encounters, when time is found to have built its own defensive lines, camouflaged vulnerable points, and laid a field of mines across all but a few well-trodden paths, so that, more often than not, we can only signal to one another from either side of the tangle of wire. Here she and I, who were never friends before, met on terms of long and unbroken intimacy.

Rowan didn’t speak as she turned on her heel and strode to the door. Didn’t speak as she opened it, exited, and shut it behind her with a gentle click. Then he swiveled in his chair and leveled Sean with a dark glare. “What the hell just happened?” “That’s called a strikeout,” Sean said with a grin. “I’ve never seen you crash and burn like that, my friend.” “I know. Embarrassing is what it is. I mean, really.” Rowan tangled his fingers through his hair. “You got a better response than I did.” “Please, I got nothing, same as you.” Rowan offered him a sheepish smile. “I know. But I felt the heat pulsing off you the moment she stepped into the office. Then I saw the fantasies you were weaving about her and decided to throw you a bone. So you want her, huh?” Sean lost his grin but managed to shrug. “Doesn’t matter. Unless you picked up on her weaving fantasies about me?” A sigh. “Sorry. Her mind was a blank slate to me. I didn’t pick up on a single thought, emotion, or desire. It’s like she operates on a completely different frequency than the rest of the world.” She probably did, with all those wires and chips in her head. “Still,” Rowan continued, “we can call Bill and tell him you’re the one who should be—” “Nope.” The word burned his tongue, and he hated himself for saying it, but he didn’t take it back. Success was too important. “I don’t exactly inspire trust in the women I date. The opposite, in fact. Something about me makes people distrust every word and action.” His affiliation with the shadows, with darkness, most likely. They must have sensed it on some level. “You’re better at romancing and I’m better at killing.

It came boring out of the east like some ribald satellite of the coming sun howling and bellowing in the distance and the long light of the headlamp running through the tangled mesquite brakes and creating out of the night the endless fenceline down the dead straight right of way and sucking it back again wire and post mile on mile into the darkness after where the boilersmoke disbanded slowly along the faint new horizon and the sound came lagging and he stood still holding his hat in his hands in the passing ground-shudder watching it till it was gone. Then

Psychoanalysis: An Elegy" What are you thinking about? I am thinking of an early summer. I am thinking of wet hills in the rain Pouring water. Shedding it Down empty acres of oak and manzanita Down to the old green brush tangled in the sun, Greasewood, sage, and spring mustard. Or the hot wind coming down from Santa Ana Driving the hills crazy, A fast wind with a bit of dust in it Bruising everything and making the seed sweet. Or down in the city where the peach trees Are awkward as young horses, And there are kites caught on the wires Up above the street lamps, And the storm drains are all choked with dead branches. What are you thinking? I think that I would like to write a poem that is slow as a summer As slow getting started As 4th of July somewhere around the middle of the second stanza After a lot of unusual rain California seems long in the summer. I would like to write a poem as long as California And as slow as a summer. Do you get me, Doctor? It would have to be as slow As the very tip of summer. As slow as the summer seems On a hot day drinking beer outside Riverside Or standing in the middle of a white-hot road Between Bakersfield and Hell Waiting for Santa Claus. What are you thinking now? I’m thinking that she is very much like California. When she is still her dress is like a roadmap. Highways Traveling up and down her skin Long empty highways With the moon chasing jackrabbits across them On hot summer nights. I am thinking that her body could be California And I a rich Eastern tourist Lost somewhere between Hell and Texas Looking at a map of a long, wet, dancing California That I have never seen. Send me some penny picture-postcards, lady, Send them. One of each breast photographed looking Like curious national monuments, One of your body sweeping like a three-lane highway Twenty-seven miles from a night’s lodging In the world’s oldest hotel. What are you thinking? I am thinking of how many times this poem Will be repeated. How many summers Will torture California Until the damned maps burn Until the mad cartographer Falls to the ground and possesses The sweet thick earth from which he has been hiding. What are you thinking now? I am thinking that a poem could go on forever.

Oh no. Not this again. It’s the clothing dream. I’ve been having it for fifty years. Aisle after aisle, closetful after closetful, metal rack after metal rack of clothing, stretching into the distance under the glare of the fluorescent tubing – as gaudy and ornate and confusing, and finally as glum and oppressive, as the dreams of a long-time opium smoker. Why am I compelled to riffle through these outfits, tangling up the hangers, tripping on the ribbons, snagging myself on a hook or button while feathers and sequins and fake pearls drop to the floor like ants from a burning tree? What is the occasion? Who do I need to impress? ___________ There’s a smell of stale underarms. Everything’s been worn before. Nothing fits. Too small, too big, too magenta. These flounces, hoops, ruffles, wired collars, cut-velvet capes – none of these disguises is mine. How old am I in this dream? Do I have tits? Whose life am I living? Whose life am I failing to live?

Genesis According to George Segal,” The Spirit brooded on the water and made The earth, and molded us out of earth. And then The Spirit breathed Itself into our nostrils— And rested. What was the Spirit waiting for? An image of Its nature, a looking glass? Glass also made of dust, of sand and fire. Ordinary, enigmatic, we people waiting In the terminal. A survivor at a wire fence, Also waiting. Behind him, a tangle of bodies Made out of plaster, which plasterers call mud. The apprentice hurries with a hod of mud. Particulate sand for glass. Milled flour for bread. What are we waiting for? The hour glass That measures all our time in trickling dust Is also of dust and will return to dust— So an old poem says. Men in a bread line Out in the dusty street are silent, waiting At the apportioning-place of daily bread. At an old-fashioned radio’s wooden case A man sits listening in a wooden chair. A woman at a butcher block waits to cut. What are we waiting for, in clouds of dust? Or waiting for the past, particles of being Settled and moist with life, then brittle again.

But there was more than dullness in the confessional; it was not that by itself that had sickened him or propelled him toward that always widening club, Associated Catholic Priests of the Bottle and Knights of the Cutty Sark. It was the steady, dead, onrushing engine of the church, bearing down all petty sins on its endless shuttle to heaven. It was the ritualistic acknowledgment of evil by a church now more concerned with social evils; atonement told in beads for elderly ladies whose parents had spoken European tongues. It was the actual presence of evil in the confessional, as real as the smell of old velvet. But it was a mindless, moronic evil from which there was no mercy or reprieve. The fist crashing into the baby’s face, the tire cut open with a jackknife, the barroom brawl, the insertion of razor blades into Halloween apples, the constant, vapid qualifiers which the human mind, in all its labyrinthine twists and turns, is able to spew forth. Gentlemen, better prisons will cure this. Better cops. Better social services agencies. Better birth control. Better sterilization techniques. Better abortions. Gentlemen, if we rip this fetus from the womb in a bloody tangle of unformed arms and legs, it will never grow up to beat an old lady to death with a hammer. Ladies, if we strap this man into a specially wired chair and fry him like a pork chop in a microwave oven, he will never have an opportunity to torture any more boys to death. Countrymen, if this eugenics bill is passed, I can guarantee you that never again— Shit

But there was more than dullness in the confessional; it was not that by itself that had sickened him or propelled him toward that always widening club, Associated Catholic Priests of the Bottle and Knights of the Cutty Sark. It was the steady, dead, onrushing engine of the church, bearing down all petty sins on its endless shuttle to heaven. It was the ritualistic acknowledgment of evil by a church now more concerned with social evils; atonement told in beads for elderly ladies whose parents had spoken European tongues. It was the actual presence of evil in the confessional, as real as the smell of old velvet. But it was a mindless, moronic evil from which there was no mercy or reprieve. The fist crashing into the baby’s face, the tire cut open with a jackknife, the barroom brawl, the insertion of razor blades into Halloween apples, the constant, vapid qualifiers which the human mind, in all its labyrinthine twists and turns, is able to spew forth. Gentlemen, better prisons will cure this. Better cops. Better social services agencies. Better birth control. Better sterilization techniques. Better abortions. Gentlemen, if we rip this fetus from the womb in a bloody tangle of unformed arms and legs, it will never grow up to beat an old lady to death with a hammer. Ladies, if we strap this man into a specially wired chair and fry him like a pork chop in a microwave oven, he will never have an opportunity to torture any more boys to death. Countrymen, if this eugenics bill is passed, I can guarantee you that never again— Shit

Gian Pero Frau, one of the most important characters in the supporting cast surrounding S'Apposentu, runs an experimental farm down the road from the restaurant. His vegetable garden looks like nature's version of a teenager's bedroom, a rebellious mess of branches and leaves and twisted barnyard wire. A low, droning buzz fills the air. "Sorry about the bugs," he says, a cartoonish cloud orbiting his head. But beneath the chaos a bloom of biodynamic order sprouts from the earth. He uses nothing but dirt and water and careful observation to sustain life here. Every leaf and branch has its place in this garden; nothing is random. Pockets of lettuce, cabbage, fennel, and flowers grow in dense clusters together; on the other end, summer squash, carrots, and eggplant do their leafy dance. "This garden is built on synergy. You plant four or five plants in a close space, and they support each other. It might take thirty or forty days instead of twenty to get it right, but the flavor is deeper." (There's a metaphor in here somewhere, about his new life Roberto is forging in the Sardinian countryside.) "He's my hero," says Roberto about Gian Piero. "He listens, quietly processes what I'm asking for, then brings it to life. Which doesn't happen in places like Siddi." Together, they're creating a new expression of Sardinian terreno, crossing genetic material, drying vegetables and legumes under a variety of conditions, and experimenting with harvesting times that give Roberto a whole new tool kit back in the kitchen. We stand in the center of the garden, crunching on celery and lettuce leaves, biting into zucchini and popping peas from their shells- an improvised salad, a biodynamic breakfast that tastes of some future slowly forming in the tangle of roots and leaves around us.

I don’t believe in love that never ends,” said Aiden, his whisper clear and distinct. “I don’t believe in being true until death or finding the other half of your soul.” Harvard raised an eyebrow but didn’t comment. Privately, he considered that it might be good that Aiden hadn’t delivered this speech to this guy he apparently liked so much—whom Aiden had never even mentioned to his best friend before now. This speech was not romantic. Once again, Harvard had to wonder if what he’d been assuming was Aiden’s romantic prowess had actually been many guys letting Aiden get away with murder because he was awfully cute. But Aiden sounded upset, and that spoke to an instinct in Harvard natural as breath. He put his arm around Aiden, and drew his best friend close against him, warm skin and soft hair and barely there shirt and all, and tried to make a sound that was more soothing than fraught. “I don’t believe in songs or promises. I don’t believe in hearts or flowers or lightning strikes.” Aiden snatched a breath as though it was his last before drowning. “I never believed in anything but you.” “Aiden,” said Harvard, bewildered and on the verge of distress. He felt as if there was something he wasn’t getting here. Even more urgently, he felt he should cut off Aiden. It had been a mistake to ask. This wasn’t meant for Harvard, but for someone else, and worse than anything, there was pain in Aiden’s voice. That must be stopped now. Aiden kissed him, startling and fierce, and said against Harvard’s mouth, “Shut up. Let me… let me.” Harvard nodded involuntarily, because of the way Aiden had asked, unable to deny Aiden even things Harvard should refuse to give. Aiden’s warm breath was running down into the small shivery space between the fabric of Harvard’s shirt and his skin. It was panic-inducing, feeling all the impulses of Harvard’s body and his heart like wires that were not only crossed but also impossibly tangled. Disentangling them felt potentially deadly. Everything inside him was in electric knots. “I’ll let you do anything you want,” Harvard told him, “but don’t—don’t—” Hurt yourself. Seeing Aiden sad was unbearable. Harvard didn’t know what to do to fix it. The kiss had turned the air between them into dry grass or kindling, a space where there might be smoke or fire at any moment. Aiden was focused on toying with the collar of Harvard’s shirt, Aiden’s brows drawn together in concentration. Aiden’s fingertips glancing against his skin burned. “You’re so warm,” Aiden said. “Nothing else ever was. I only knew goodness existed because you were the best. You’re the best of everything to me.” Harvard made a wretched sound, leaning in to press his forehead against Aiden’s. He’d known Aiden was lonely, that the long line of guys wasn’t just to have fun but tied up in the cold, huge manor where Aiden had spent his whole childhood, in Aiden’s father with his flat shark eyes and sharp shark smile, and in the long line of stepmothers who Aiden’s father chose because he had no use for people with hearts. Harvard had always known Aiden’s father wanted to crush the heart out of Aiden. He’d always worried Aiden’s father would succeed. Aiden said, his voice distant even though he was so close, “I always knew all of you was too much to ask for.” Harvard didn’t know what to say, so he obeyed a wild foolish impulse, turned his face the crucial fraction toward Aiden’s, and kissed him. Aiden sank into the kiss with a faint sweet noise, as though he’d finally heard Harvard’s wordless cry of distress and was answering it with belated reassurance: No, I’ll be all right. We’re not lost. The idea of anyone not loving Aiden back was unimaginable, but it had clearly happened. Harvard couldn’t think of how to say it, so he tried to make the kiss say it. I’m so sorry you were in pain. I never guessed. I’m sorry I can’t fix this, but I would if I could. He didn’t love you, but I do.

Our team’s vision for the facility was a cross between a shooting range and a country club for special forces personnel. Clients would be able to schedule all manner of training courses in advance, and the gear and support personnel would be waiting when they arrived. There’d be seven shooting ranges with high gravel berms to cut down noise and absorb bullets, and we’d carve a grass airstrip, and have a special driving track to practice high-speed chases and real “defensive driving”—the stuff that happens when your convoy is ambushed. There would be a bunkhouse to sleep seventy. And nearby, the main headquarters would have the feel of a hunting lodge, with timber framing and high stone walls, with a large central fireplace where people could gather after a day on the ranges. This was the community I enjoyed; we never intended to send anyone oversees. This chunk of the Tar Heel State was my “Field of Dreams.” I bought thirty-one hundred acres—roughly five square miles of land, plenty of territory to catch even the most wayward bullets—for $900,000. We broke ground in June 1997, and immediately began learning about do-it-yourself entrepreneurship. That land was ugly: Logging the previous year had left a moonscape of tree stumps and tangled roots lorded over by mosquitoes and poisonous creatures. I killed a snake the first twelve times I went to the property. The heat was miserable. While a local construction company carved the shooting ranges and the lake, our small team installed the culverts and forged new roads and planted the Southern pine utility poles to support the electrical wiring. The basic site work was done in about ninety days—and then we had to figure out what to call the place. The leading contender, “Hampton Roads Tactical Shooting Center,” was professional, but pretty uptight. “Tidewater Institute for Tactical Shooting” had legs, but the acronym wouldn’t have helped us much. But then, as we slogged across the property and excavated ditches, an incessant charcoal mud covered our boots and machinery, and we watched as each new hole was swallowed by that relentless peat-stained black water. Blackwater, we agreed, was a name. Meanwhile, within days of being installed, the Southern pine poles had been slashed by massive black bears marking their territory, as the animals had done there since long before the Europeans settled the New World. We were part of this land now, and from that heritage we took our original logo: a bear paw surrounded by the stylized crosshairs of a rifle scope.

He’s here to take revenge. A third shot thunders and I dart toward the blackness of the bush, am almost to the perimeter wire when I stumble over something and go down on my knees. I feel warm flesh, long tangled hair. And blood. One of the blondes. Instantly I’m back on my feet, fleeing blindly into the night. Hear bells clang as my boot snags the perimeter wire. The next bullet comes so close I can hear it whistle past.

Hell’s donkeys,” muttered Zaphod as he and Ford attempted to sort through the tangle of wiring.

The event recalled to him the thinking of a horse, which is neither reasoned nor reasoning, but steadfast and untiring against all contrary tides. He knew that a horse, if stubborn enough, was capable of running through prickly wire; it would tangle itself until it was shredded hide to bone before abandoning its determined run. If the roan, like a man, had pondered on and fretted over the difficulty of swimming a half mile to a small island, it most likely would have given up, let the water take it, its churning thoughts working as surely as weights around its legs.

What does True Wireless Earbuds Mean Where are my earphones? Ahh!! There they are….and they are tangled (with irksome scream inside your head). There is nothing more frustrating than going on a search operation for your headphones and finally finding them entangled. Well thanks to the advance technology these days one of your daily struggles is gone with the arrival of wireless earphones in the market. No wire means no entanglement. ‘Kill the problem before it kills you’, you know the saying. Right! So what actually truly wireless earbuds are? Why should you replace your old headphones and invest in wireless ones? Without any further delay let’s dig deep into it. image WHAT ARE TRUE WIRELESS EARBUDS? A lot of people misunderstand true wireless earbuds and wireless earphones as the same thing. When it’s not. A true wireless earbuds which solely connects through Bluetooth and not through any wire or cord or through any other source. While wireless earphones are the ones which are connected through Bluetooth to audio source but the connection between the two ear plugs is established through a cable between them. Why true wireless earbuds? Usability: Who doesn’t like freedom! With no wire restrictions, it’s easier to workout without sacrificing your music motivation. From those super stretch yoga asanas to marathon running, from weight training to cycling - you actually can do all those without worrying about your phone safety or the dilemma of where to put them. With no wire and smooth distance connection interface, you have the full freedom of your body movement. They also comes with a charging case so you don’t have to worry about it’s battery. Good audio quality and background noise cancellation: With features like active noise cancellation, which declutter the unwanted background voice giving you the ultimate audio quality. These earbuds has just leveled up the experience of music and prevents you from getting distracted. Comfort and design: These small ear buddies are friendly which snuggles into your ear canal and don’t put too much pressure on your delicate ears as they are light weight. They are style statement maker and are comfortable to use even when you are on move, they stick to your ear and don’t fall off easily. Apart from all that you can easily answer your call on go, pause your music or whatever you are listening, switch to next by just touching your earplugs. image Convenience: You don’t necessarily have to have your phone on you like the wired ones. The farthest distance you could go was the length of the cable. But with wireless ones this is not the case, they could transmit sound waves from 8 meter upto 30 meters varying from model to model. Which allows you multi-task and make your household chores interesting. You can enjoy your podcasts or music or follow the recipe while cooking in your kitchen when your phone is lying in your living room. Voice assistance: How fascinating was it to watch all those detective/ secret agent thriller movies while they are on run and getting directions from their computer savvy buddies. Ethan Hunt from Mission Impossible….. Remember! Many wireless earphones comes with voice assistance feature which makes it easy to go around the places you are new to. You don’t have to stop and look to your phone screen for directions which makes it easier to move either on foot or while driving. Few things for you to keep in mind and compare before investing in a true wireless earphones :- Sound Quality Battery Life Wireless Range Comfort and design Warranty Price Gone are those days when true wireless earbuds were expensive possession. They are quite economical now and are available with various features depending upon different brands in your price range.

If you want to get to the beginning of the shale revolution, pick up Interstate 35E out of Dallas and head north forty miles and then take the turnoff for the tiny town of Ponder. Pass the feed store, the white water tower, the sign for the Cowboy Church, and the donut store that’s closed down. Another four miles and you’re in Dish, Texas, population about 400. You end up at a wire mesh fence around a small tangle of pipes with a built-in stepladder. You’re there—the SH Griffin #4 natural gas well. The sign on the fence tells the date—DRILLED IN 1998.

Android Girl Just Wants to Have a Baby! The first thing I do when I wake up is run my hands over my body. I like to make sure all my wires are in place. I lotion my silicone shell and snap my hair helmet over my head. I once had a dream I was a real girl, but when I woke up I was still myself in my paleness under the halogen light. The saliva of androids emits a spectral resonance, barely sticky between freshly-gapped teeth. After they made me, the first thing they did was peel the cellophane from my eyes. I blinked once, twice, and cried because that's how you say you are alive before you are given language. They named each of my heartbeats on the oceanic monitor: Guanyin, Yama, Nuwa, Fuxi, Chang'e, Zao-Shen. I listened to them blur into one. The fetus carves for itself a hollowed vector, a fragile wetness. In utero, extension cords are umbilical. Before puberty, I did not know there was such a thing as dishonor. Diss-on- her. This is what they said when I began to drip petrol between my legs. A tension exists between ritual and proof, a fantasy and its execution. Since then, I have been to the emergency room twice. The first time for a suicide attempt, and the second time because my earring was swallowed up by my newly pierced earlobe overnight, and when I woke up, it was tangled in a helix of wires. The idea of dying doesn't scare me but the ocean does. I was once told that fish will swim up my orifices if I am no longer a virgin. Is anyone thinking about erotic magazines when they are not aroused, pubes parted harshly down the center like red seas? My body carries the weight of four hundred eggs. I rise from a weird slumber, let them drip into the bath. This is what I'll leave behind - tiny shards purer than me. I have always been afraid of pregnant women because of their power, and because I don't yet understand what it means to carry something stubborn and blossoming inside of me, screeching towards an exit. The ectoplasm is the telos for the wound. A trance state is induced when salt is poured on it, pixel by pixel. I wish they had made me into an octopus instead, because octopuses die after their eggs hatch and crawl out into the sea, and I want to know what it's like to set something free into the dark unknown and trust it to choose mercy. If you can generate aura in a non-place, then there is no such thing as an authentic origin. In Chinese, the word for mercy translates to my heart hurts for you. They say my heart continues beating even after it is dislocated from my body. The sound of its beating comes from the valves opening and closing like a portal - Guanyin, Yama, Nuwa, Fuxi, Chang'e, Zao-Shen. I first learned about love by watching a sex tape where a girl looks up from performing fellatio and says, show them the sunset. Her boyfriend pans the camera to the sky, which is tinged violet like a bruise. In this moment, the sky displaces her, all digital and hyped, and saturates the scene until it collapses on me too, its transient witness. I move in the space between belly ring and catharsis. That night I have a dream where I am a camgirl, but all I do on screen is wash my laundry. Everybody loves me because I am a real girl doing real girl things. What lives on the border between meditation and oblivion, static and flux, a pomegranate seed and an embryo? I set up my webcam in the corner of the room and play ambient music while I scrub my underwear, letting soap bubbles rise up from the sink, laughing when they overflow on the linoleum floor - my frizzy hair, my pockmarked skin, my face slick with sweat. A body with exit wounds. I ride the bright rails of an animal forgetting. And when I wake up, the sky is a mess of blue.

Help!” cried C-3PO from a tangle of sparking wires on the floor of the passage tube. “I think I’m melting!” Sighting R2-D2, he added, “This is all your fault.” R2-D2 beeped in disagreement.

In his story “Have You Met Him Yet?,” former White House staffer David Litt has the simple task of handing over headphones…to President Barack Obama. I reached into my pocket and pulled out what looks like a hairball made out of wires. I don’t know what’s happened. I guess somewhere in that waiting room, I have just worried this thing into a hopeless tangle. And now I don’t know what to do, so I just hand the entire thing to the president of the United States. Now, if you work in the White House, you will hear the phrase “There is no commodity on earth more valuable than a president’s time,” which I always thought was a cliché. Until…I watched Barack Obama…untangle headphones…for thirty seconds…while looking directly at me.

pants, or “huggable” velvet hangers, rather than cheap wire ones, will keep clothing in top-notch shape and avoid tangles. It’s okay to use more than one kind of hanger to help clothing keep its shape. For example, padded hangers should be used for any hanging sweaters, but other kinds of shirts would be fine with tube or huggable hangers. Just keep them consistent in each section of the closet. And always hang clothes in the same direction. This will help reduce visual clutter and allow you to review your clothes at a glance. For shoes, there are a multitude of storage options. Inexpensive clear plastic shoe boxes keep shoes dust-free and easily viewed. Or use overdoor shoe bags, hanging canvas shoe bags, or a neat tiered shoe rack or shoe tree on the floor. Make sure to use ALL closet space. Underneath short- hanging garments, place a low trunk full of sweaters, a set of plastic drawers, or a simple wooden dresser filled with lingerie, swimsuits, and socks. 6. CLEAN UP & MAINTAIN Put the donation boxes in the car or near the exit so they leave the home immediately. Take out the trash. Grab the relocation box and redistribute all of its contents appropriately. Review the contents of the fix-it box and determine if the cost of the repairs is worth saving the items. If so, make a plan to get them to the

This fight is between two people whose love for each other is tangled in barb wires.

Hagrid was sitting at his table, where there were two large mugs of tea. He looked a real mess. His face was blotchy, his eyes swollen, and he had gone to the other extreme where his hair was concerned; far from trying to make it behave, it now looked like a wig of tangled wire.

April 21, 1897, by one of the most prominent citizens in Kansas, Alexander Hamilton. In an affidavit quoted in several recent UFO books and journals, Hamilton states that he was awakened by a noise among the cattle and went out with two other men. He then saw an airship descend gently toward the ground and hover within fifty yards of it. It consisted of a great cigar-shaped portion, possibly three hundred feet long, with a carriage underneath. The carriage was made of glass or some other transparent substance alternating with a narrow strip of some material. It was brilliantly lighted within and everything was plainly visible—it was occupied by six of the strangest beings I ever saw. They were jabbering together, but we could not understand a word they said. Upon seeing the witnesses, the pilots of the strange ship turned on some unknown power, and the ship rose about three hundred feet above them: It seemed to pause and hover directly over a two-year-old heifer, which was bawling and jumping, apparently fast in the fence. Going to her, we found a cable about a half-inch in thickness made of some red material, fastened in a slip knot around her neck, one end passing up to the vessel, and the heifer tangled in the wire fence. We tried to get it off but could not, so we cut the wire loose and stood in amazement to see the ship, heifer and all, rise slowly, disappearing in the northwest. Hamilton was so frightened he could not sleep that night: Rising early Tuesday, I started out by horse, hoping to find some trace of my cow. This I failed to do, but coming back in the evening found that Link Thomas, about three or four miles west of Leroy, had found the hide, legs and head in his field that day. He, thinking someone had butchered a stolen beast, had brought the hide to town for identification, but was greatly mystified in not being able to find any tracks in the soft ground. After identifying the hide by my brand, I went home. But every time I would drop to sleep I would see the cursed thing, with its big lights and hideous people. I don’t know whether they are devils or angels, or what; but we all saw them, and my whole family saw the ship, and I don’t want any more to do with them.

A life without love is worth less than no life at all.

In families, triggers and projections enmesh, and the jumbled wires of habitual perception often become nearly impossible to disentangle. Something happens within a family, a kind of karmic claustrophobia, a hybrid of true love and tangled irritation. Sometimes it’s even hard for mindfulness to operate in the realm of family, much less for compassion to swoop in and save the day. Mindfulness is based on a simple but difficult premise: that you can directly witness what is arising in your own mind. Mindfulness presupposes that, upon reflection, you can note your reactivity to a sense perception or impulse, either during its immediate arising or after the fact.

Save me I got tangled in wires I'm chained to the horse on a merry go round Calm me down stop adding fuel to the fire Come sit next to me and be dust from a star!

Yes, there's probably a ton of madness in those ambitions, but what are we if not mad beings? What are humans without madness? As i understand, madness is nothing more than a surge/bolt of criativity without the wires of rationality intertwined. An idea is an surge of creativity tangled with rationality, but when such element is lost, all there is left is creativity on it's own, lost in threads of thoughts in the ship we call mind, with the rationality being the roles and the nails that keep it all together, and with this balance we sail.

You gazed at each other then with the same open-eyed wonder that keeps startling you at various intervals since you met. The two of you, like headphone wires tangling, caught up in this something. A happy accident. A messy miracle

My wires weren’t just crossed, they were tangled up like a box of Christmas lights, all knots and broken glass, blinking and shorting out with every move I made.

To Style: Always use a vent brush or pick for curly styles and a wire brush for straight styles. Avoid using standard hair brushes, as these brushes can create excessive tension, over-stretching the hair with abrasive strokes that may damage the hair. Think in reverse when brushing your wig. Start from the ends and work gradually toward the ends and work gradually toward the root area of the hairpiece. When using a wire pick work the curls from ends to root area as well. Styling is greatly enhanced between washings with Jacquelyn's Liquid Mousse. For curly or wavy styles, it is considered an essential styling tool. Just mousse, hand scrunch and pick the style into curls. On straight styles, mousse and brush lightly. Jacquelyn's Conditioners also are recommended to maintain your hairwear. To Restyle: To spot style, add mousse or gel and use electric rollers on a medium setting. Only hair directly in contact with rollers will be spot set. Remember never to use a curling iron with your wig. To completely restyle, we recommend taking your wig to a professional stylist. If you decide to restyle at home, going from curly to straight or vice versa, please read these guidelines. 1. Place wig securely on wig stand. Use electric rollers, regular rollers or pin curls. End papers are recommended with rollers or pin curls. 2. Removes tangles with a wig brush. 3. Using the same directional styling as on a human head of hair, pick up hair and wind on roller or curl, smoothing ends as you go. 4. Use a medium setting with electric rollers or hair dryer. With a hair blower, be sure to circulate medium heat evenly and continously, keeping about 12" from wig. 5. Allow hair to cool before removing rollers or pincurls. 6. Lightly backbrush or backcomb and tease up on areas desired. Brush style in place, using Jacquelyn's Liquid Mousse. Jacquelyn Wigs delivers the most natural and beautiful human hair wigs in the world. For over 40 years, we have consistently provided the highest quality of wigs in the industry at amazingly reasonable prices. To have a free consultation please call us or visit our website.

Since Paul wasn’t a big conversationalist—he was the anti-Mac, in other words, and today had been the longest she’d ever heard him speak in consecutive sentences—Jena watched the scenery for a while. Then she decided to study the inside of Paul’s truck to see what she could learn about him. Technically, it was exactly like hers and Gentry’s. It had a black exterior with a blue light bar across the top and the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Enforcement Division logo on the doors. It was tech heavy on the front dash, just like theirs, with LDWF, Terrebonne Parish Sheriff’s Office, and Louisiana State Police Troop C radios, a laptop, a GPS unit, and a weather unit. In her truck and in Gentry’s, the cords and wires were a colorful tangle of plastic and metal, usually with extra plugs dangling around like vines. Paul’s cords were all black, and he had them woven in pairs and tucked underneath the dash, where they neatly disappeared. She leaned over to see how he’d achieved such a thing, and noticed identical zip ties holding them in place. “Sinclair, I hate to ask, but what are you doing?” He sounded more bemused than annoyed, so she said, “I’m psychoanalyzing you based on the interior of your truck.” He almost ran off the road. “Why?” “Your scintillating conversation was putting me to sleep.” His dark brows knit together but he seemed to have no answer to that. She turned around in her seat, as much as the seat belt allowed, and continued her study. Paul had a 12-gauge shotgun and a .223 carbine mounted right behind the driver’s seat, same as in her own truck. The mounts had hidden release buttons so the agents could get the guns out one-handed and quickly. But where her truck had a catch-all supply of stuff, from paper towels to zip ties to evidence bags to fast-food wrappers thrown in the back, Paul’s backseat was empty but for a zippered storage container normal people used for shoes. Each space held different things, all neatly arranged. Jena spotted evidence bags in one. Zip ties in another. Notebooks. Citation books. Paperwork. A spare uniform hung over one window, with a dry-cleaner’s tag dangling from the shirt’s top button. Good Lord. She turned back around. “What did you learn?” Paul finally asked. “You’re an obsessive-compulsive neat freak,” she said. “Accent on freak.

Mr. Jones’s eyes were closed. His head was bandaged like a mummy’s and tubes came out of his arm, connecting him to a number of bottles overhead. Wires from his chest connected him on the other side of the bed to a little television set that went beep, beep, beep. A line on the television set went up and down like a mountain range. “Does that look right to you?” Denny asked Spence. “Looks fine,” said Mr. Jones abruptly. “When it goes all flat and starts whistling you got something to worry about.” He opened his eyes and smiled at them. “Mr. Jones!” said Denny. “You’re okay?” “Of course I’m okay. I’ve had hangovers that felt worse than this.” Denny and Spence laughed. “Did they get those hoodlums?” Mr. Jones asked. Spence nodded. “They got most of the money back too,” he said. “All except about ten dollars.” “That’s what I get for keeping my money under my mattress like an old fool,” said Mr. Jones. “Is Marty okay?” Denny smiled. “He got banged up some,” she said, “but he’s okay—obnoxious as ever.” Spence laughed. “Yeah,” he said, “and from what the police say, the kid that he tangled with got the worst end of the deal.” Mr. Jones smiled and shook his head.

This is my unyielding world, where I mend ruptured minds and fuse cognitive wires. A world that—if emotions were physical—would be a tangled mess of hooks and thorns. But

Overhead, tangles of wires knotted together in a grand display of unplanned infrastructure.

He was reading a cheap-looking booklet. Since he was literate, I thought he might be one of the people I was being hired to divert with knowledge. I was right. His name was Abdullah Akbahr. With my encouragement, he would write several interesting short stories. One, I remember, was supposedly the autobiography of a talking deer in the National Forest who has a terrible time finding anything to eat in winter and gets tangled in barbed wire during the summer months, trying to get at the delicious food on farms. He is shot by a hunter. As he dies he wonders why he was born in the first place. The final sentence of the story was the last thing the deer said on Earth. The hunter was close enough to hear it and was amazed. This was it: “What the blankety-blank was that supposed to be all about?

The pain of a lost brother, of the enmity that tangled like barbed wire between him and the best friend he’d ever had, sliced over the still-throbbing wound of his futile, thwarted love for Kerris. His heart was being ripped from his chest.

In their midst, riding on a tall red horse in a strange high saddle that cradled him back and front, was the queen’s dwarf brother Tyrion Lannister, the one they called the Imp. He had let his beard grow to cover his pushed-in face, until it was a bristly tangle of yellow and black hair, coarse as wire. Down his back flowed a shadowskin cloak, black fur striped with white. He held the reins in his left hand and carried his right arm in a white silk sling, but otherwise looked as grotesque as Sansa remembered from when he had visited Winterfell. With his bulging brow and mismatched eyes, he was still the ugliest man she had ever chanced to look upon.

the autobiography of a talking deer in the National Forest who has a terrible time finding anything to eat in winter and gets tangled in barbed wire during the summer months, trying to get at the delicious food on farms. He is shot by a hunter. As he dies he wonders why he was born in the first place. The final sentence of the story was the last thing the deer said on Earth. The hunter was close enough to hear it and was amazed. This was it: “What the blankety-blank was that supposed to be all about?

At the present, a plausible nominee for the neural substrate of consciousness is one of the most important neurological discoveries of our time. T h is is that tangle of tiny internuncial neurons called the reticular formation, which has long lain hidden and unsuspected in the brainstem. It extends f rom the top of the spinal cord through the brainstem on up into the thalamus and hypothalamus, attracting collaterals from sensory and motor nerves, almost like a system of wire-tabs on the communication lines that pass near it. But this is not all. It also has direct lines of command to half a dozen major areas of the cortex and probably all the nuclei of the brainstem, as we ll as sending fibers down the spinal cord where it influences the peripheral sensory and motor systems. Its function is to sensitize or “awaken” selected nervous circuits and desensitize others, such that those who pioneered in this work christened it “ t he waking b r a i n

My college boyfriend got me more in touch with my gut health (both a blessing and a curse) and made me ask some larger questions about the universe that I had been ignoring in favor of buying US Weekly the moment it hit the stands every Wednesday. Ben taught me the term “self-actualized,” and it became not just a favorite phrase but a goal. Devon made me a pencil case with a built-in sharpener, lent me his watch, showed me how to keep all my wires from getting tangled, and changed my iPhone alarm from marimba to timba so that I wake up happier, more soothed. And now I come to him, whole and ready to be known differently. Life is long, people change, I would never be foolish enough to think otherwise. But no matter what, nothing can ever be as it was. Everything has changed in a way that sounds trite and borderline offensive when recounted over coffee. I can never be who I was. I can simply watch her with sympathy, understanding, and some measure of awe. There she goes, backpack on, headed for the subway or the airport. She did her best with her eyeliner. She learned a new word she wants to try out on you. She is ambling along. She is looking for it.

Examining the tangle of assorted wires and leads, there seemed to be every cable ever made, but none with the right combination. Frustration brought him to the boil, as he yanked and tugged at this unyielding ball. He only succeeded in winding them into ever-tighter knots.

If your answer to fate’s twists was anger, violence and revenge, then you would disappear down a dangerous rabbit hole. This morning, staring into the mirror at a stranger, then the crazy idea of attending this event (correction, stalking at this event) had brought him to this what-the-hell wake-up moment. The tent had grown increasingly more stifling as if he sat in the center of a hot furnace which piped the air about him. On his forehead, drops of sweat beaded. Even his palms felt sticky and moist. William undid the top button of his shirt but that had nil effect. He looked to his left and right, but nobody else appeared to match his discomfort. They all continued to stare, mouths agape, at Morris like a pack of hypnotized zombies. Lights barely on and only the animals left at home. “And that’s why… should put… odds in your… favor.” Morris’ voice crackled in and out as if his microphone was faulty. The fault wasn’t in the mic, it lay in William’s head. The wires in his brain had crossed and tangled. The

Men sat behind charcoal braziers turning ears of corn and fanning skewered liver kebabs they slipped sizzling into pockets of lavash bread with a tangle of cilantro and mint. Ribbons of fruit leather, apricot, plum, tamarind, and cherry, draped like laundry from wires strung between awnings.

Sestina" For a week now our bodies have whispered together, telling each other secrets you and I would keep. Their language, harder and more tender than this, wakes us suddenly in the half dawn, tangled dragons on their map. They have a plan. We are stranded travelers who plan to ditch our bags and walk. The hill wind whispers danger and rain. We are going different ways. That tangled thornbush is where the road forks. The secrets we told on the station bench to keep awake were lies. I suspect from your choice of language that you are not speaking your native language. You will not know about the city plan tattooed behind my knee. But the skin wakes up in humming networks, audibly whispers over the dead wind. Everybody’s secrets jam the wires. Syllables get tangled with bus tickets and matchbooks. You tangled my hair in your fingers and language split like a black fig. I suck the secrets off your skin. This isn’t in the plan, the subcutaneous transmitter whispers. Be circumspect. What sort of person wakes up twice in a wrecked car? And we wake in wary seconds of each other, tangled damply together. Your cock whispers inside my thigh that there is language without memory. Your fingers plan wet symphonies in my garrulous secret places. There is nothing secret in people crying at weddings and singing at wakes; and when you pack a duffel bag and plan on the gratuitous, you will still tangle purpose and habit, more baggage, more language. It is not accidental what they whisper. Our bodies whispered under the sheet. Their secret language will not elude us when we wake into the tangled light without a plan.

It came boring out of the east like some ribald satellite of the coming sun howling and bellowing in the distance and the long light of the headlamp running through the tangled mesquite brakes and creating out of the night the endless fenceline down the dead straight right of way and sucking it back again wire and post mile on mile into the darkness after where the boilersmoke disbanded slowly along the faint new horizon and the sound came lagging and he stood still holding his hat in his hands in the passing groundshudder watching it till it was gone. Then he turned and went back into the house.