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The Death of a Farmer
by Brian David Vass

My ass is cradled in an eternal resting place where there is no rest. My thumbprint is bathing in updated blood. A babble of tightly packed images suffer to throw themselves upon a crevice of my mind soaked in protein and plaque. Thread themselves, do these fucking thoughts, into my tear ducts. Salinity thus produced, they work their way from the back of my eyes to the back of my throat and down again to the base of my spine. Reverberating there at noxious speeds, I find, they ache less. Never a linear capitulation. Every word is accompanied by a genesis; the voyage of the image is the image. In this way, the arm of my chair undoes itself as does the sound of my toaster mundanely-orgasmically fucking off its finale; issuing, mechanically, the heated product within it; releasing bread to air. There is a moment when my singed slice lingers aloft, suspended, with every conceived law laboring to bring it down again. Popped it was, aired it remains, momentarily, and then the crushing descent.

There is a smell. Like rotten meat farted. Like World War II developed a cocaine addiction. Like a hand-dug basement ruptured a bowel. What congealing substance, and out of whose asshole? It passes. My up-to-the-minute thumbprint brushes the salty water from my cheeks.

I am living in the Prairies. Everything I own is dusty. I look out the window and see the only version of God that interests me. Endless skies, endless heat; endless seas of blond plants mingling innocently with the neutered form of commerce they uphold. A landscape that is both uplifted and lost in the depth of routine. Somewhere so much less supported by humanly buzz and the electric flare of newfound patterns it becomes possible to feel the throb of the earth without working overtime for it. Passions elongate like the shadows here, perspectives distort into blithe naiveté, reassurance is gained through breakfast and the stiffness of your joints. The High and the Deep and the Wide present themselves like barely veiled breasts and press you inside the inside, effortlessly. The things of nature and the nature of things grow gradually into one tree and under that tree Life grows richer and vastly shallower- moments become more and palpably less bearable. For now, the impaired sustainability of my consciousness is forefront, but I feel its dissipation. I am not a piece of wheat. I am not an intolerable affect carried by dry wind. I am not a slack husk, inexorably trapped in skin; a crudely enlivened grouping of tubes. I am not my thirst. I do not defy you, Lord. I am not what I see out my window. This is a meditation toward renewed sanity. A Prairie special.

I rise to retrieve my toast, with age against me and the particularity of my moth-brown carpet threatening to hypnotize and befuddle me. It is a swim, this day, across reams of subtle channels and unorthodox communiqué. I am wallowing in my youth, sinking into my sanguine middle years; remembering every lover- forgetting every lover. I am seeking coalesced crumbs.

There is an audial excrete, a lump of sound, on the kitchen counter, limning a block of postulate. That sound is my voice, quixotically de-familiarized in my final hour, and it is saying things I’ve never recognized.

----Where’s that frigging butter, now?