A predator acts the way the prey doesn’t expect, he smiles slanted, nods at all the periods, forgoes candor
And I was taking on these characteristics just being here like a Discovery Channel documentary
On outfoxing the foxes or the personality effects of mind control, I felt personality drip off me
The sweat an acid fiend rolling over my skin & pulling away the characteristics you’d find in a personal ad
Single white male (I’ve still got that going for me) likes short sales engagements & laughter
Long walks through convention center hallways & free product samples, no smoking unless
I was walking around a room & the alpha male needed to draw blood, I swore I saw a fawn crunch & crumble
Fangs disappearing into the meaty flesh until the white was gone, a strange high pitch yelp
There would be enough to feed us for days until the next drought, I would learn to kill to if I had to
I had to look at my name tag to remember my name & thought it was “Hello”

“Now listen up, boss, God hates combovers. Doesn’t care one bit for spray-on hair, either.”
This was the conversation I was to mimic in it’s sentence structure, punchline & ramble
I began to say “propagation” & “exponential” without their social or mathematical meanings
“Value proposition” doesn’t make any fucking sense when you think about it because value is defined
Proposition would be the blackmail mutterings of my colleagues in a cheap ass strip club
Where woman with stage names similar to their real names, conjunction of country’s folk charm
Like Sallie Anne pay the high price of gasoline with 43 one dollar bills & they say the thrill is gone
Reno has two streets, really, one where they live & one where they dance & all I could do was
Say things like “volatile” & “comp chart” instead of “get the fuck out of this town”
I ordered another drink on the corporate tab, making it a triple play to last all night

Reno is “The Biggest Little Town” or some shit like that
It’s on the signs I saw from the airport shuttle heading out of town on the 395
And it’s in the eyes of the little girl who’s watching her mother’s cigarette burn until the yellowed knuckles
The little boy with seven Band-Aids I counted playing in the sand of a deserted lot making a new city of rocks
My lips had dried out completely forming little still white waves of dead skin over the crest of new lips
I had to leave my Chapstick back in the room because of its fear of flying
And I didn’t even know where the heart of Reno was, had never seen downtown, just down
In the painful pushing thrush of transformation unintended, The Professor became Hyde, mad at surfaces
Dismissing the underground blood pushing it’s way through the Nevada desert unseen
It took disaster to undo the Industrial Revolution but Reno wasn’t much for revolution it seems
© Adam Bresson

On August 14, 2009, I read at Rapp Saloon, a reading at the hostel in Santa Monica, CA. I read two pieces: “I was falling in Reno, falling over, falling down & falling into…” and “I asked her, ‘Who will get the bullet & who will get the blank?’…” Please visit www.adambresson.org for more poetry and writing. Hope you enjoy!