Novelistic Fragments

I found an old one of these, and then wrote a couple more. They're not connected, and they don't mean anything, mostly, and there's a lot of things I think of as placeholders, but, well, it's writing, and it feels nice, doesn't it.

1.
Carl said they found the man.
He had locked his knees in
with a kryptonite lock, I'd like to tell you.
I'd like to pretend they froze
the metal with nitrogen and broke
it and his legs with a sledgehammer.

Carl said the man was sleeping.
He hadn't locked anything
anywhere. He was waiting.
He pled guilty. There was no point
in telling anything but the truth
he said. Carl told me

all of this on the train. We followed
the lightning that night from Colorado to
Illinois and slept in the lounge car.
Carl stop, I said, when he whispered
more to me while I rested. Carl never
knows when to shut up.

2.
I could eliminate this mental palsy,
its attendant shivers in my speech,
perhaps, if I were to recall
Emma’s face when she told us
she would stay. It held itself,
credible. Hold my head, would you?
And push it from want to will.

3.
While we boomeranged the carob pods at each other
and called them banana beans, Todd and Jake would hide
from us on opposite sides of the garage
behind fallen window screens or our piled-up bikes.
I’m glad I wore glasses even then, so I could see them,
beans and boys, coming.
The lenses protected me from what I couldn’t dodge.