Manager says I’m banned from open mic night till I agree to stop using a Glock as a drumstick. He says a gun in a club, even an unloaded one, poses a safety risk. I say that’s the point. He says the music’s not even any good. I say it’s performance art. He says why not use nunchucks. I ask if he’s ever licked paint or anything like that.

The genius of the piece—that’s not my word; that’s the word of an underground zine edited by a nonbinary goth freelance makeup artist—is that the ever-increasing frequency of the beat can mean something different on any given night. The meaning can change even over the course of the piece, which lasts about nineteen minutes, depending on how slow I start.

The beat can be the ticking of mortality’s clock. The litany of lives lost to senseless gun violence. The sound of a shrinking universe, reversing its outward push after billions of years of reckless expansion, closing in faster and more excitingly now toward that final, violent, ecstatic Big Crunch.

I just think, Jesus. If you can’t confront this stuff in art.

After a few nights I called the manager and told him fine I’ll try the nunchucks. They bring the house down. Nine-and-a-half-minute standing O. My leg falls asleep before the crowd’s finished.

Funniest thing I’ve ever seen, says a guy in a denim jacket with Pepé Le Pew patches to me afterwards as I’m in the alley smoking my American Spirits. It started funny then stopped being funny then started being funny again, he says. Like the rakes, he says.

I repeat that phrase to myself the whole grimy fluorescent bus ride home. Like the rakes, like the rakes. I try to find the poetry in the words, like I’m always trying to do with words.

I think I’m getting close to achieving nirvana when the brakes squeal. The metallic crunch that followed will live in my head forever, or at least the imagined version I’m constantly newly creating will.

The guy had apparently been trying to take a right on red where you can’t take a right on red. Killed on impact. “Atomized,” I heard a police officer describe it later as. The bus driver swore in court he’d never seen him, even after he felt the impact. Which feels impossible until you consider how adrenaline impacts a person’s perceptive abilities. There are accounts of shark attack victims who swear for the rest of their lives they’ve never seen a shark.

We all had to stay on the bus for more than ninety minutes while the police came and a report was drawn up and statements were taken. Then the driver had to be escorted away—I saw his shoulders shaking—and a new driver had to be quickly groomed and installed.

This whole time that phrase remained looping in my head: like the rakes, like the rakes. Rather than bonding with my fellow passengers, who all around me now were holding each other and dabbing at their eyes with balled-up Kleenexes and breathing into McDonald’s bags, instead I found myself repeating quietly those few words, like the rakes, like the rakes, worrying them over my teeth and tongue like prayer balls. As the bus got up to speed and the pneumatic air brakes spat out angry hisses into the night air and the sticky scent of motor oil filled my nostrils, it felt increasingly and inexplicably urgent that I find every available variation and nuance of those three syllables. I had the sense—or maybe fear more like—that if I could just express them enough times in enough different ways before I reached my destination, I could get them to… Well, not make sense, but…