Got this turkey licked, this cracked customer of a knotty-pine partner. Who does he think he isn’t? Not a charmer by a long haul. So be
it. What this chunk of change will do for the chorus girls lining up to go
batty. What this ragged heart won’t put up with. A sheen that don’t shine no
more. Soda pop bottles and coffee mugs don’t get you far, as your agent gets
ten percent of grief, just like always. Hooch to wrestle your nightmares away
from you. A fugitive from a fireplace, patient and erudite, as alive as a head
cold. A genuinely talented article crawled out from under a bottle only to hit
it about as big as a boiled fish’s eye. Sappy and self-indulgent. Scotch and
sympathy. Battling a dummy for a place on the stage. Making it or making it up.
Just you and me. Novel enough for a ventriloquist, same new jokes. Playing it
like Greta Garbo. Nerves of gin. The next booking’s in the fireplace, never a
shill for attention, resigned out of self-respect. Bum cues. A locked trunk to
hold your dreams. A place in Kansas City, hopping a train or into a taxi,
licked at the source, run off for good just the same. Hearing nothings that are
never sweet. A girl to save you from yourself, so sudden, suddenly, and a
sandwich to keep you from being alone. A derelict’s laugh. A pace to never
hold. A wiser guy than this. Broken glasses and a heart to match. Satisfied
from the song of the same name. An old switcheroo, in the parlance of just
about no time left. And what’s left is forcing smiles all around. And I’m left
staring at grapefruit dangling from a tree. And the only one who’s not dumb
around here is the dummy.
I’m scuffling
nowadays, just a tamped puck of ground coffee bound to a chrome-and-brass
aesthetic. Pressing close to windows, clutching at small bits of peace with
unstable hands. Jellyfishing around in the wake of tugboat nightmares, I’m
drowning in my own ambition, coughing up blood for air. Don’t distinguish my
impudence from my indignant hasslings. The shallows of slights-and-barbs
suffering belie a better way to swim: along with the tide's ripped keel. But
gnawed bones of leftover change disinter my temper from the arid, windless
grounds of bad luck. If the landlord wants to break in here he’s going to need
a crowbar and an axe. My business is setting off burglar alarms and settling
debts with ice picks. I leave the day-to-day activities of normal life to the
mailmen and the knife sharpeners. For me it’s nothing but the unusually
customary events of longing and indecision. I make some haste. I spill ashtray
muck on linoleum. I rent trouble by the vat, with regimented lies, soy sauce
packets, and a composite of warble flies, limestone, and pulverized stereo
parts. There’s a coat in my closet with dead moths in all the pockets. I drink vanilla
extract by the bottle. Fuck it. I’m joining the circus.
There’s a stark, lazy charge in the air. Something freed
inside of its cage. Perhaps for the unloved. Perhaps a petal crushed by a
strange hand. A life to get back to the living of. A clown with no recollection
of being so. A chance disintegrated into a topple. A nameless thing with no
memory, just like this rusted gold safety pin slipped through my lapel.
The sum of remaining is squeaking by, kind of audible in a
tuned-out way, and it figures, somewhat in the blue of being me, what matters
still in the closed-down-television-repair-shop distance. Glass and filaments
and nickel tubes scattered and smashed. The hills are dead with the noise of
commercials. Getting it or not, what places mattering in the hands of
miscreants and do-no-gooders is a complacent shrug from the masses, and it is a
strained willingness to close our eyes to the lives of others that cheapens,
waters down, and plunders our personal stock of expendable energy. Driving Buicks
to a full moon by the sizzle of burning cigarettes, we step heavy, fart, and
play the stereo too loud. What’s curtailing the marl of me from livening up the
topsoil? It’s not a brave enough question.
All addressees have forwarded their souls to the next beer
bar, the taste of ashtrays and curdled dreams still thick on their tongues. I’m
not making myself out to be drearier than anybody else. I’m not halving
sheetrock nightmares for a few paychecks at a time. Us, the question takers and
absurd, we chew on tire and volcanic ash. Green’s not our gold. But there’s no
we here. Not now. It’s just a rented hall with nowhere to sit, and I’m sleeping
over smoking coals. Here, where flying’s for the cockroaches, I take my
temperature with a bradawl and boil live rattlesnakes on the stove. There’s a
stopping here that just goes and goes. Rest assured, not weary. That’s the
casing of what my insides are turning out to be. And, go figure, God might be
watching the rats as they drown, you know? Life turns out to be what you don’t
make of it, in the space between where you’ve been, where you’re headed, and
where you’ll never get to know. Gone away, finally to be sucker punched by
barbiturates. Finally to be bandaged and less brave in the arms of paramedics.
The kitchen floor is colder than you’d think.
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