we talk around it all almost all the time. sure we had splinters. got them really, when they were there to get. i keep having to remind marvin that he’s not me. it’s useless. he’s unsure of his own personality. who does he want to be, really? me? well, go on ahead then. be my guest. i don’t let the botched crap of his whims get me all ensnared in a potpie lunch of take-it-or-take-it lunging. we’ll get through this bushmills inspired nightmare sooner or soon. some lunatic yammering, like, ‘you would.’ i will, sometimes, but mostly i don’t-- get it that is. what’s it to say something and go all over town with it, just the saying of it, and never get around to being anywhere, really? it’s bruised and unhealthy. well, you got me. marvin? he’s keeping it open-faced at least. i tell him to mind his own. he wants to mind mine too though. it’s a shit deal, the one we’re dealt here. the reality of faking it burps over what’s cranium bound in the first of all last places. well, boo-motherfucking-hoo, you know? marvin’s shitty with names. i tell him to stop using mine. sometimes it even works. go figure, huh? i say things like, ‘marvin, marvin, marvin. it’s not marv or vinny. it’s a secret nobody keeps. marvin, look here,’ and stuff and stuff like that too. but marvin’s so spastic really. it’s too little to ask. he calms down for you when he can, though, and i look the other way enough to show i care. marvin’s out of sorts. there’re times it’d take a penny to wish him down from where he’s not. you get bluer when the nights bless your sad sack of a soul with inky shit-stained how-don’t-you-doings. me? i’m cursed just the way i am. marvin’s given up chickening out for a month. it does him okay. it’s a way to go about breathing, just like any other. i’m keeping my drawers up and the window shades drawn. don’t ask me to go looking for an alibi. plenty of rest is not coming this way. sorest throat in the west, goddamn. lower than rising too late for lunch. is that me? i don’t know. six or two ways from laundering dirty thoughts, that does the worst of mostly good. we get concave about it, and this thing here, as sure as a bet against the long shot, gives better odds than i’m capable of passing over, for now. being flurried to incapable standards of giving the good old flex of the brain muscle to passersby, that gives all my goats away. for marvin it’s never the same thing. he goes twice around the block with everything. no debate about it. some people, well they just wanna go ahead and spill their guts to you about their personal problems, the story of their life, because maybe well they start in on believing you’re some kind of rump roast for their attention, and i span it most times, not like marvin does, but close, at least. we’ve got a nutshell to crack over it, fried about a rasher of bacon of it, tussled with the grit of it, yep. that’s a taker’s give if i’ve ever known such a thing. so i tell marvin, ‘stop faking it, man,’ or some crap as such, and he goes off kilter with it, and again, i’m the last guy who’ll ever stitch a lemon with barbwire, but this crass how-might-it-not-go questionnaire attitude’s getting no person any-old-where already. cop out of it already, you know? and then there are those reminders, those things i keep almost chanting, to nobody’s bad, like, ‘marvin, marvin, marvin, stop using my personality routine, ok?’ i practice at it, sure, but not so much that it matters. acting’s another schmo’s gig. we get too hung up, marvin and me, using each other as substitutes. my instincts are better. my memory’s classy. marvin’s got issues with the chicness of his own cool. he wears pajama bottoms to funerals. it’s stuff like this that’s going to take this here situation to the canary cage. i’d rather gargle motor oil than rewrite a copy of this guy’s shtick. let me be the last to tell you, it ain’t gonna do nothing but hinder you in the end. the cats are snoozing. i make the most of my car-alarm shrill indifference. blare with me, barely, and you’ll get some indecency stuck in your teeth, or pickle breath at the most. i’m not the forgiving type, but will dabble in it if i must here and there. claims are clamming up too low on the higher ground of being kicked over graveyards. hand me a hotdog with relish and i’ll button up about whatever it is for a few bun-lengths. gotta hand it to marvin though. he’s a real overachiever when it comes to angelic barstool poses. off and on the record, napkins have fewer uses over on this side of the rainbow. faring well? that’s not in my jurisdiction. i don’t know jack from squat about it. long’s the lord’s byways through these broken-down shivering strips of land. older crampings of shocked style crap out earlier, or we’ll get the baseboards’ opinion about the whole shaved onion of it. that’s certainly better than potatoing around watching marvin do bad imitations of somebody impersonating me. tender joy, i don’t get it, you know? watch the tv. let the years go by. we make ourselves into time-murdering slobs. it’s not most of a guess, a winged hostility gone rampant and plunged before it was ever flushed. under the hills and around the woods to some joker’s idea of a milked cow we go. the bottom of the world is plagued by weeds. and to top it all off? i’m rushed with more modern constructs of junk-mailed satisfaction than any sometimes-the-bear-eats-you well wishing. infernal machines of noisy reduction? shit. i mop up more distraction from the candy of marvin’s attention span than’d lure a whole busload of tykes from their tidy chambers of consumption. i tell marvin, ‘it’s me, not you.’ but he don’t listen as well as he should. a commonplace list of whatever goes over with the out crowd, that about does it for his depictions of what it means to be me. marvin’s lost though. nothing’ll get him found at this point. pull back the trigger. let the turtles sing. i’m not asking with an almost friendly grimace. greedy luck slumps backwards and stabs what’s tourniqueting the last lees of disappointed harmony peeking so longingly out from beneath the pink hues of formerly white undershirts. trained to be taught just enough to get by, marvin’s habitually peeling the layers of others off like skin in order to shape his own whims in the colors of stuff he’s mostly just too damn scared to dream of. me? i draw my own figures in sloggy boredom. call me cured of concealment. well, anyway, just call me. the full moon’s got a soup stain halo. that’s one thing. here’s another: we are creatures of our own creation. something maybe marvin thought of on one of those abysmal cold nights you get in mid-january when he couldn’t sleep, and, you know, that means he’s up stomping around bashing his head into the dollhouse again. i’m conversing with walls and ceilings myself most nights, so i know the goings of these ways. too hard to softly tell the plain sameness of differently aligned slogans, like dumbass number one or a dozen of ‘em; it’s all rutabagas to me. there certainly are things, though, that i don’t let on--or off--about to marvin, such as whose lips are less dangerous than a fortune teller’s assistant’s; and who’s frittering away this much on a day like this? somebody else. yep. gotta take it as it gets given out sometimes. especially on days when we’re all sipping from the same cup of piss, can’t hit for shit, and it’s breakup weather all over. shit. call off the cops and watch the diesel smoke out of my nose. marvin’s using my facial expressions to lure emus away from the metal fences, soft-boiled eggs be damned. it’s almost as terrible as being stuck in a room with a bunch of bad standup comedians--almost. there are certain things i can take only so much of, like people slurping soup, and then it’s blackjack-me-and-tie-me-to-the-railroad-tracks time. lord. i remember the dogs and how they woke me in the attic where i was spending my nights then, before marvin started in on his aping, if i remember anything at all those nights without hugs when the drain pipes rattled me to sleep. green and brown days are what we’re stuck with now, and it just so happens that we don’t aspire to be heaped with pannings. who would? maybe marvin, though i doubt it. he’s a sucker for attention. gets his lips puckered for any situation. always on call for that moment of concupiscent bliss, that marvin. and sometimes we get to ribbing the one-out-of-many king, the king of ice cream, in hopes of it’s-its for our prickliest thoughts. nobody pays to digest. it’s a fill’er-up attempt at magnanimity, if you’re asking this washed-out tammany hall dropout. shit. not even mr. tweed could’ve reeled in this balancing act of crusty-to-crumby botches and boots. strung up or out, it makes a songbird out of a cranky guyed mast. somewhere they’re singing in a pentatonic scale about mumbling us back to dust, and there are probably takers who’ll grab onto any bargain for a phony spree of shoplifted elation, liked to it about all you can, having it everybody else’s way, well, at least suckers are still being spanked to life by the bread losers there and here. got to figure in about fads of fashion, as v-neck sweaters are flying off the rack this time around, and, also, of course, my favorite brand of gum. we’re cracking. it’s inevitable. marvin’s getting more or less more alone all the time. hard-pressed, we take our time too, and the sun’s all glitter and gold and hunches of lost languages, and guildenstern lives through rosencrantz’s lost cheer and brain tossing, and heaven’s spying on us. but i tell marvin to get himself a new persona this time around. i tell him to stop gouging the right-of-ways that we’ve still got left. it’s tantamount to not giving a shit, that’s the way i put it. but nobody’s dashing enough to plummet my hopes of never becoming “one of those people” whom i keep swearing i’ll never turn out to be. so, as far as this dross with marvin goes, the graffiti’s in process. it’s all a done deal. we’ve been keeping the mayor employed long enough. i want to laugh at tourists again, go to bed early, get a bad haircut and brag about it, ride a roller coaster in the rain and vomit while upside down on the loop. marvin? marvin’s getting a crash course in abdominal pain, and then there’s the way he expectantly straddles a tipsy stretch of yawns with excitement. being gone is a pleasure we’ll cash in our chips for any new day, punch lines pulled, fingers uncrossed, lazy summer days swarming with throngs of winged insects and the oily mechanics in the trees’ geometry, something irked and chassised, something done with getting along well with others, a brandished plastic sword that’d be better suited to stirring a drink than slicing through this morass of junked luck. but the crux of the whole marvin situation, the begged opting we caress out of staying put, is that we’re here to deliver. but i’m bad at fair shares and mayonnaise soup’s not my thing and the bald eagles are all on rogaine and i’m famished after supper and bed’s a jukebox and home’s a trick without a treat and there’s a train getting smaller and smaller as it approaches, and marvin’s gone and lost his marbles, and his eyeballs are only fooling. the distortion of larger small talk gets in the way, sentenced to go like this. and, so as it all goes and goes, well, me? i just don’t get it. and, well, that’s really all there is to know.
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