whisky in the sky with diamonds

Dock Boggs: You’ve got to draw the reader in.

Carl Perkins: But where’s the father in this story? Where’s he been?           

Dock Boggs: Up and down shit creek and all over Pissville. I want whatever love is falling out of, not some flimsy excuse for it.

Carl Perkins: In the mood for some genuine human interaction, I see.

Dock Boggs: Very the same as much so, really.

Carl Perkins: And the reader don’t care. She don’t care at all.

Dock Boggs: Precisely.

Carl Perkins: The Collected Works of Elvis Precisely, and all that, and et al, and those other etceteras to jumble around, but who’s reading?

Dock Boggs: Nobody. Nobody reads. The Dewey Decimal System’s gone out of style. I watch the porch for signs of light. Nothing. Just a big empty rattrap of nothing.

Carl Perkins: We can say whatever we want. Nobody’s listening.

Dock Boggs: If only we could sing. That’d be something. People would pay attention. People like music.

Carl Perkins: Sure. But I doubt it. You’ve got to win a couple popularity contests to even have a chance. And we are not so hip or cool, are we?

Dock Boggs: Not by a sword’s throw.

Carl Perkins: It’s shit like that that’s getting in the way. A bunch of self-absorbed assholes ain’t going to be looking to us for help.

Dock Boggs: If a voice cries in the wilderness and nobody is around to hear it cry, does that voice really cry?

Carl Perkins: More like whines in the wilderness. Creepy, huh?

Dock Boggs: Block it out. Keep trickling by unnoticed.

Carl Perkins: Lost in the alleyway, shuffled behind the cards, flummoxed with Cream-Of-Wheat sadness, we go angling dull hooks through the pawnshop window.

Dock Boggs: My tie’s been clipped!

Carl Perkins: Don’t worry. Nobody’ll notice. Nobody cares.

Dock Boggs: Now that I believe.

Carl Perkins: The moon’s slicing shiny streaks through the blinds. A grand old laugh sinks in. We are buried. We are chumps. 

Dock Boggs: I don’t believe it.

Carl Perkins: I’ll have to make you, then.

Dock Boggs: Just foam in my beer, my friend. Break a few legs trying, though.

Carl Perkins: Hold on. My theme song’s playing. I gotta go. Be back momentarily.

Dock Boggs: Lord.

Carl Perkins: You really are an ass-face Kimberly. Really.

Dock Boggs: Somebody opened up the sardines, spilled sardine juice all over the bathroom floor. The place, the whole place, it reeks like sardines. 

Carl Perkins: Five chilled-vodka shots, for your medicine. Likelihoods arising from unlikely emissaries, as these, aren’t potty trained enough to be left to their own devices. Not yet. Pyrcoslastic flow achieves the meanest of ends, for them, these, and those, or somebody’s other.

Dock Boggs: I must have been happy once, but I don’t remember it. Maybe it was on the 3^rd Tuesday of the month, or something. It is difficult to say. A lot of lolling between things. Substantial, yet meager.

Carl Perkins: It’s getting late. Do the dishes. The weather’s fair enough for enemies to pick sides.

Dock Boggs: Lowed and beholden to the sticky side of this Jack-Benny-heavy mess while the one-liners take cover-- or take off on a long vacation. I have a fear of never flying.

Carl Perkins: The reader’s bored. The reader’s dead. The reader’s out to brunch.

Dock Boggs: And yet we keep her in mind, always. We need her. We have to court her with our quirky, interesting little tale. Entertain her with our witty and caustic sense of humor. Woo her over and into the midst of our soundless fury.

Carl Perkins: She’s not listening. She’s off buying cosmetics and raffle tickets and an iPad. She’s talking back to the television. She’s microwaving popcorn. She’s falling in and out of love. Her status is forever neutral and indifferent. 

Dock Boggs: She’s drawn in by pictures, explosions, fart jokes, and cat memes. She’s only got like fifteen seconds to spare-- between the jumbled mesh of this barrage of distractions and spam-ideation-- to be serious about the way in which she’s living her life, or to be at least partially concerned with having to, what, sit down and really, well, think about it.

Carl Perkins: To be waited on by the union-backed figures of beauty, fixed out-of-time, socked in the jaw by life’s jest and fluff and jiving around.

Dock Boggs: And here, where the mockingbirds shoot themselves, the reader’s in too much company. The reader’s alone, lost in the crowd; that’s the long and short of it, really.    

Carl Perkins: Scattered over too many razed landscapes. There is not much hope, for her, is there?

Dock Boggs: Drawn away. Not even cognizant that there is a touch to be in.

Carl Perkins: But who are we to…to say what the proverbial reader needs, cares about, or should care about?

Dock Boggs: Nobody. We gripe. We don’t read. We don’t partake in the greasy handouts of life’s soup kitchen.

Carl Perkins: We must matter, right? Matter to somebody?

Dock Boggs: But who? The nights play havoc with these wishy-washy aspirations, these delusional waking dreams, and we wake or sleep, just the same, don’t we?

Carl Perkins: Stumbling through it all, falling in love with the wrong people. Yep. I guess so. Leading toilet-paper lives, to be used and flushed away.

Dock Boggs: And the music. It’s like Stephen Foster meets Stephen Hawking, or…sort of.

Carl Perkins: And the music. Oh yes. And then there’s the music. Ah, let’s forget it. I’m not dreaming well. They’re all about cocaine, sometimes with orange feathers growing in it, and, also, I seem to be writing suicide notes on a nightly basis.

Dock Boggs: Paced with a spell-- no a potion-- to crack rarely on the freezing sidewalk of the world.

Carl Perkins: If I (she or he, who cares?) could ever figure out stuff like this stuff.

Dock Boggs: Oh, it’s just that old, “Johnny, can I borrow that ring?” sort of stuff. You know, that kind of thing. That kind of stuff.

Carl Perkins: Pop the champagne for all of us. Me, you, her, him, them, and all the rest who read what’s not here nor there, but all over the place-- every-damn-where you could dream of.

Dock Boggs: The moon ain’t hitting my eye, though, is it?

Carl Perkins: Hell, how the fuck should I know?

Dock Boggs: We get crabby over petty differences in the circumspect bits of our cowardly nature. The reader’s not going to gamble away her time for something so lacking in pith. Grips should be gotten on ways to not only attract, but to keep attention.

Carl Perkins: We could hunt musquash in the perfumed sanity of it all. 

Dock Boggs: Sure, decreeing it a lost cause, and we make up usefulness to get by. 

Carl Perkins: Sure. Like Mel Blanc’s, “Sí.” Something that goes all kinds of further than it should. But that damn pesky reader. Shit. We’ve got to keep her with us, tagging along, giving up her free time for a trek into…into…

Dock Boggs: Yep. That’s what it comes down to. A journey that just don’t go nowhere. You buy the ticket, think you’re taking a ride, but instead get taken, get jumped by some derelict thugs who just see you as another obstacle to acquiring goods, to bettering themselves, and you are squashed, stepped on and over.

Carl Perkins: I, I, I, I, I’m not your stepping stone!

Dock Boggs: Walking around like you’re front-page news. Yep.

Carl Perkins: Whatever. It’s just psychotic hipness, the passé coming back into style.

Dock Boggs: Lord help us.

Carl Perkins: Don’t count on it. She’s busy. Just like the reader. Kind of has a lot going on. She’s consanguineous with the Hi-Def patter, the UltraMo splices, the pop-up-ad attitude, and the curvilinear structure of throwaway regularly scheduled programming. We are abandoned, left out here all on our own, craving salad dressing without even the hope of a salad.   

Dock Boggs: I’m disqualifying myself from any discussion of right or wrong. I’m all voilà without any of the razzle or the dazzle.

Carl Perkins: And we seem constant only when looked at over the long haul, maybe on a flow chart spanning thousands of years where the itsy-bitsy nature of our entire existence is but a single lure baited on one of billions upon billions of time’s hooks. Everything’s already occurred, buddy, long ere your grandsires had nails on their toes.

Dock Boggs: Ah. Oh. Gimme, gimme shock treatment. Pretty please?

Carl Perkins: Might as well not. It’s not like we’re the architects of our own spirit. What doesn’t count about nothing is all that nothing is-- something we can’t know because it is not-knowing in its purest form, and we are only creatures of substance, not the lack of it.

Dock Boggs: A mere pittance smeared on the glass slide of memory’s avalanche.

Carl Perkins: These pretzels are making me thirsty.

Dock Boggs: Yep. That’s the stuff. American Bandstanding. Sweetening the purse. Getting along properly with a reasonable amount of others. Never rocking when all the rest of them roll.

Carl Perkins: Based on my mercurial findings there is just not enough miner music playing in the hard heart of it all, and spanked awake, lumped into a sum that nothing adds up to. Um, thanks, Lord. A lot. Really.

Dock Boggs: But the pink flowers are back in bloom on the thorny far-away-eyes of sticks without stones. We take it. We spark a bloom’s last cramped blush. We inch away and away from it all. I am movement redefined inside of everybody else’s out.

Carl Perkins: The train is at the station. That’s all I’ve got to say.

Dock Boggs: But no one boards.

Carl Perkins: And, well, that’s as it should be. No father. No reader. Just the two of us counting invisible cars on a turnpike that’s a million miles from New Jersey.  

Dock Boggs: Grounds in my coffee. Grounds in my coffee.

Carl Perkins: Details, hunched over less-than-serious business, gamey and never quite hungry enough. Falling for the same tricks, buying into sanity for a chance at mediocrity, and we make plans, and if the best laid don’t pan out? Well, throw a candy bar in the dryer. Repeat, repeat, repeat, then repeat until desired results are unattainable, and then all worry goes the way of landlines.

Dock Boggs: We are the result of never being drawn in or swept away or beatified to the nth degree of impossible streamlined fittings-- um, things called, maybe, a soufflé of auscultation in the dust-mite infested realms of what borders the troposphere of all possible thought, which, of course, is limitless. Shouldn’t we be listening back?

Carl Perkins: Arranged, patterned, Montenegrin stitched into the same-old, same-old. So, what we’ve got here is, wait…just standing single-file in a corrupt line that weeds out the extraordinary? Is that all there is?

Dock Boggs: Skipping the proverbial stones of peace over war-torn lakes of fire. Nothing much, really. Necessity’s become abstract. We’ve lost more attention than we’ll ever have chance to gain.

Carl Perkins: I’m taking a leave of absence from my life. I’m putting my duty and my ambition on hold. I’m taking out a loan of risk-free loafing, and am quitting all of this dumb settling and ordering that bogs and clutters and scars.         

Dock Boggs: But the reader? Haven’t we forgotten her?

Carl Perkins: As long as I can spell my own name. As long as I…can…

Dock Boggs: It seems to me that she’s maybe gone out for cigarettes, and that it is surely possible that she’s never coming back home.

Carl Perkins: That’s more like it.