Do Sheep Scream? by HJ Hampson 

THEY WERE shown to a table by the window which offered a bracing view of the misty, green field-scape that stretched to infinity. Against the gentle clatter of cutlery and crockery and the murmured conversations of the other guests, she smiled across the table at Will. “Gorgeous view isn’t it.” Still adjusting to being out of the city, he smiled thinly back.
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I knew the crime scene well. It had four corners tucked in neatly within which I thought I’d be the only swastika, pinned and flailing at key moments. I felt nothing, often. I once slung a phrase I’d seen on a top shelf. Exposed gazes were me running through receipts. I had been charged twice. The scar above his eye had dimensions I could trace to the nth degree.

the metric of a me-trick is the trick-me of hollow shadows
in the light of naïvety folding in upon an ocean,
tides silver in moonlight, the night cool

we stood here in the balance of youth and repetition that
becomes the daily life of life daily lived marriedly happy,
tranced, indecision passed for action to the kinder eye that makes
the judgments most feared or embraced as we seek to define

Maybe it's a little late to feel removedly sentimental; a displaced nostalgia, if you will. I've been reading Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid... for sometime now; no, not because I went to school in Oklahoma, more because I only peruse his tattered half-price-bookstore-bought pages at the beer hall where I lean and sit and absentmindedly ignore loud jawed regulars. The cover is unattached, leaving Wolfe to post against his big pink font letters in between the binding, rather than proudly promenading his white monkey suit publicly (and I wonder if he'd care anyhow). So as I said, I've been slowly rambling with the Pranksters through manila, moldy pages; visiting and revisiting towns, trees, waters and references that have squirmed their way into my vocabulary. Like phantom square-Wolfe puts it, talkin' Californian.