stereo raze you don't think much about how useful it is to hear out of both ears until you can't anymore. peanut oil used to cure what ails the asshole of an organ on the right side of my head. now it takes what i want to be rid of and shoves it so far down the vestibular highway nothing can reach it. i've never slept in this city, but it's where i've come to be mended. a man with the little finger of his left hand torn open bleeds all over the floor. someone with no wounds i can see gives up his seat so i can have it. says he's tired of sitting anyway. a little girl with pigtails picks her nose and eats it when her mother's back is turned. we'll play a word game to pass the time. build a beginning from the end of what came before. nimrod becomes defect, becomes tarantula, becomes artifice, becomes edification. i keep looking for the face of someone i know. i'm fooled a time or two when i take my glasses off. the woman who calls my name is the one to give back what squalene and dead skin cells stole from me. she holds a steel syringe that looks like something a liquid meal might come out of a hundred years from now. she fills it with warm water. tells me to raise my hand if i feel any pain. after twenty seconds of hissing, the sound of the world i know returns, hard-panned and urgent, and all i can do is smile. even the ugly things sound sweet to me. 240302 what's it to you? who go blather from