Hair As a Function of the Future

It began, as all aberrant things must, in art class.  With a stick of charcoal, I was trying to conjure on the blank paper before me an image of the cardboard boxes stacked at the center of the room.  Boring, bored cardboard boxes.  Empty heads with huge open mouths and nothing to say.  As I stared at the boxes, I could feel the hair on my arms stirring, stretching, pushing out, each curl curving ever farther away from my body.  I remembered the words of Archduke Franz Ferdinand: I knew the beast would sing about the beast.  As soon as the drawing class ended, I went home and shaved both arms.  Swept the floor and collected all the shorn hairs, which seemed to be still growing, and placed them in an envelope.  I mailed the hairs to my future address, where I now reside.  I’m still waiting for that envelope’s arrival, so I can implant those hairs into the soft flesh of an overripe clementine.  And listen as that furry globe tells me, Leave, leave this unfinished world behind.

Dangerous Words (An Incomplete Compendium)

Ant opera.  Barbed-wire liver.  Battery-powered rose.  Circular ladder.  Defecating doughnut.  Edible sleep.  Epistolary eel.  Gasoline sandwich.  Glass lips.  Graveyard gravy.  Hallucinatory ink.  Invisible Norwegian.  Levitating pancake.  Licorice zebra.  Liquid gravity.  Mandible manifesto.  The moon with all its pockets sewn shut.  Oreo with 100% authentic starling filling.  Patagonian punctuation panic.  Perspiring shoelace.  Prostate police.  Potato radio.  Prosthetic peace.  Rectangular cucumber.  Red radioactive suspenders.  Roots growing from a listless rat.  Sandflea symphony.  Sasquatch earwax.  Sleepwalking parakeet.  Three-in-one: shotgun-vacuum cleaner-enema.  Titanium hair.  Triangular tongue.  Volcanic vowel.  Zen lice.