Friday, September 21, 2012

strangle all the x-mas carolers


  
            It’s vodka and soda water out of paper cups these nights. I lie stupefied until some simulacrum of sleep wafts over me. I found a tangerine in my coat pocket today. I didn’t wonder what it meant at all. I tossed it to a beggar with a mesh hat on reading: “Time’s Wasting Time.” I didn’t think too hard on that either. It doesn’t pay to invest too much thought in these things, I find.
            We’re not talking; we’re writing letters to each other almost every day though.
            The damn postman wakes me from the deepest of sleep. I bring in a package with a note affixed to it reading, “This is not a disclaimer.” The package goes in the closet, along with the snail shells and the girly magazines. I am running out of places to put things-- and, also, ways to put them.  
            Barely, if it were an at-all, you can’t make a horse drink its own piss, but you can be the sort of person who grabs at her own face when she’s tired. Me? I get what’s coming to me. Plenty and then some. Do not worry about the classier confines of my pecks at normalcy. Hardly a Noah’s Ark of a place to do your plangent bidding in. Flip all the quarters you’ve got; I’ll still come to my senses head-down and out. Miffed is becoming my natural state. I tell myself, “Don’t worry about the tomatoes. Just keep the ketchup to yourself.” It adds a stylish bowsprit to my ways at least, and that’s more than I can say for my means. Who knows? I might be fooling a clodhopper version of myself into retribution. That’d do for a cheat’s perspective, if learning were curved in the direction of hot-hot-hot, but likelier stories aren’t getting told just yet. Mediocrity’s stiffed me again. I’m left with frozen toes and blurry eyes, and my heart’s a can of corn in the outfield of my regret. Just as well. I’m run over and dragged around by the usual and commonplace-- something that’s beginning to suit me more and more with each passing drink. 
            In pursuit-- that’s a killer-- of chased long ways out, though shorter still than placing blame in the crispness of fall air. If a shuffle would do for a costume, an alias at that, I’d navigate towards chancier shores. But being unrealistic as always, I fail to chump it up to some walk-of-the-mill handiwork and lose touch with distant relations to myself in the process. Pigeons turn to rabbits. I become emotionally attached to the bricks of old churches. Woe? Not me. Definitely not.
            The favorite colors of fist shakers are listed on a scrap torn from a Chinese-restaurant receipt: red, Indian-war-paint red, stop-sign red, gazpacho red, fire-truck red, redeye red, burgundy.                    
            So, I’m running to the law instead of from it, and in a pinch I could masquerade as a non-potable water drinker, unquenchable in my traditionalist beliefs. They make models for lesser squares in the drastic compassion of honeymooners and Jacuzzi waders. I have a lot of reservations but not a table to my name. ‘Frown more,’ the gulls seem to be squawking at me. ‘Tarnish your image. Verify your address in the bathroom mirror 14 times an hour. Hint and squint and move. And move. And move.’ I do not completely trust them.
            Less is my lease on gaining ground when it comes to cashing a royalty check for $7.43. I go around hunting for something I can buy with my earnings. A pair of silver chopsticks? No. Only the bamboo ones. Perhaps a ball of twine, or the charred blue-tinged remains of a hotel lamppost. A signed photograph of Ollie North? So many disparate decisions to consider. Maybe I’ll just take in a matinee at the Prospero auditorium. No popcorn, and just a sip from the water fountain.
            What would I have done? What resilience could I have mustered in the name of being peripherally sober long enough to care about such things as what I’d made or was making of myself? Instead I repaired to the shelter of a bottle and its promise of dreamless enterprises. My skin crawls with invisible ants.
            “Shop to it!” Somebody screams on the street outside my window. “Get your ready self made!” It must be time for lunch.
            Shred my past and tickertape the sky with it. My spirits are on loan to the cloud scraps littered motionless above. Humphrey has become my middle name. I’m trouble, and I don’t know why, in and out of my mind. Forget what the newspapers are all saying. I’m rolled and floored and chattered to death. Over the blinds’ pull, under the never-saids, right behind what’s too scared to smile. I hide. I hide. The room’s bitter and darkening. Nowhere’s the place where I’m from. I’ve said it all, jerks. I’ve done more than a dip-shit’s share. Now the flags are down and all the causes are just-because, just because.
            “Still, we’re what’s missed, still.”
            I hear something in the drainpipes. It only calls what isn’t my name.
            “All the saints I know are dressed in rags covered by holy raincoats, kid. Let’s not mistake generals for hairdressers.”
            Soon it is time to run the garbage disposal. There will be love pounding the walls, and my neighbor is making his demands in the vacuum’s roar. In the mood to talk to strangers, maybe, until the night shoulders through the sun-dappled freight of me, until the jacks are all coming up aces. Before all the hullabaloo gets to starting I better be getting back to my paper cup. Who knows what dementia sundown might be riding into town on?
            Tossing baby carrots at the window, and then out the window, I am soon being hassled by some doofus in plaid who’s yodel-screaming up at me, “My head’s not for this! Stop your drops. Be still in your ammunition. I can’t be a target for blindness.” I close the window. I can still hear him, but it’s muffled. He’s much more easy to take this way, but I do miss tossing the tiny carrots.
            I cannot for the life-and-or-death of me find a coaster in this damn place. I’m just wincing over where to put my cup down. The rug will have to do.
            The colonel let’s his pleasure dictate his whereabouts. The smokestacks of love fill his emptiness with a raw wonder, and he drills imaginary soldiers in his boxers. Wherever the safest spree is he kills it. We are not as close as we once were, when the airplanes chucked bombs at innocent mountains and roads, when the cops were hunting chickens, when nobody needed a waitress or a shoeblack, when the wind called you names, when we stretched rubber bands until they snapped. It is not like it was; it never is.
            Cooperate. My senses are not with me. Insensate. Per the chance it took.
            In irons we soared. The air would hold us as we were. Swimming’s nothing without water. We didn’t believe it. Touched or laughed at just the same. Pale is never the only shade of light around. Airplanes droning and the rush of wind through leafless trees. We had rhino-skin prayers. We had intolerable destinies to contend with. Guards? They threw us out with the bronze and the hammers. I had dreams of writing my name in wet cement, and then other names, and then still others too. We tuckered out before noon. Now my country’s a bottle. My dreams are at the bottom of a paper cup. Don’t tell me what’s wrong. I’ve already got enough to wash away. And all this? All this is is wrecked. Usher me away. I won’t forget the stakes. And here, well, I think it’ll all oddly even out in the middle.
            My best suit’s gathering mold on the back of a chair I never use for sitting. I’m better off windswept these days. It’s what’ll do until my best arrives, maybe through the mail slot. Who knows? Until then, I’ll take my chances with what’s left in the bottle. And then some. And then some more.






Monday, September 17, 2012

misanthropic dipsomaniacs



            “Something like this: Don’t argue with me. I’ve just had a heart attack.”
            “Sure. And the guy says to me, ‘This job’s killed greater men than I.’ And I tell him, ‘Well, that’s not so great,’ you know?”
            “Yep. You know, like, worry about it, why don’t you? Go ahead. Worry!”
            “Plan ahead to fall behind. It gets the ruckus started, pretty close to right.”
            “Volatile suppositions go down drowned and exposed. I might make more rights on reds than most. Over that, well, I’m felled to be finished.”
            “And then she says, ‘I’m all out of lipstick.’ Right?”
            “Lord save the devils. Put my name in a hat and toss your glass in the air. I’m altered, and I’m alright.”           
            “Can’t a man just be happy without all these accusations being hurled at him?”
            “The kind of nonsense we talk should be patented.”
            “All the breaks, all the walked hurrying, all the push-and-peep deliverance, all the harkening, all the vouching. We’re such weasels in with rats. I bet this whorl of crumby luck is done, just like us. Or would that be to us?”
            “Nothing is worse. Better’s junked. A lot of crud, if you make me an answer of it.”
            “Decline between the lines.”
            “Fellow tipplers, unite!”
            “Topers. It’s topers, fuck nut.”
            “I don’t care. I don’t care. I just…me? I just don’t care no more.”
            “Play to place.”
            “I’m up on blocks lately. I’m in dispose. I’m jealous of windows. That’s another round, boys. Once more around.”
            “Rye whisky, rye whisky. If I don’t get rye whisky I think I might die.”
            “Or if you do you’ll drink yourself to it. The dying, that is.”
            “Per…burp…haps.”
            “Plain as night. 
             “Other people. Shit. They go around ordering their own disasters. Dessert is not served, damn it! I am groveling for pennies and unsalted peanuts. Shit.”
            “Work around it. Pat your own front. I’m dishing out plates to the spoon-and-fork crowd.”
            “The mice have come for your morsels.”
            “Yikes. I mean, jiminy x-mas.”
            “Victory is our all’s nothing.”
            “With me, well, it’s all tiptoe or tornado. I opt for unlikely resources. A better pull at this here bottle in front of me. Everything gets on to being relevant at some point.”
            “Just ask God when she’s drunk.”
            “Better down than out. I rent my time by the bottle. Gasoline makes us all sadder campers. Just the fumes. Just the spume.”
            “Remarkable. Your playing your own funeral, and it’s a sellout. Can’t get a ticket anywhere, new or old.”
            “It’s a tough song to end. You’ve just got to know when to pull the plug.”
            “That’s just the ice in your drink talking.”
            “Sure. I’m all bells and cop sirens. Take me less than a serious man would. Splash out my dreams on the cold concrete. Nobody’s around to hear.”
            “Some girl says hi, asks how you’re doing as you try to squeeze by a crowded deli counter. And you scratch at your neck and try to remember who she is and how the hell she knows you. And you say that you’re doing just fine.”
            “Another one or three down the hatch.”
            “That’s a dollar to somebody else’s name.”
            “Strange pensioners giving the weak arm to stranger strangers than us.”
            “Tell ‘em all I said farewell.”
            “Wilt and whine. Shrink and moan. I’m dreary. I’m picked apart by trying. If the streetlights were wearing shirts they’d have a few buttons undone about now. And I’m sitting here memorizing the names of lakes. By golly, though. Nobody knows her alibis by heart the way I do.”
            “Who?”
            “The rain.”
            “Oh.”
            “The 24-hour diners are all filled up with lunatic insomniacs, dress-rehearsal dropouts, ex-candy-bar salesmen, scarf-and-bolo wearing hooligans, and the crankiest janitors east of Minneapolis. I give in, but not out.”
            “I am overwhelmed by holy dismissiveness. Color me in with Colorado. Cut the skin from all the apples. I’m giving out church keys to all the beggars. Let’s trump up the charges and stroll without the moolah. Nothing will cut our ties for us. Nothing.”
            “Only they don’t go around giving out medals to chumps like us.”
            “Better dangerous than sorry that you’re getting too soft.”
            “My Russian don’t stumble when it’s walking itself home. My China’s on the fritz. All my Ethiopias are dressed up in courage. Don’t relate my Mexico to yours. I’m feeling festive in the window’s neon. And my Frances are driving on the wrong side of the road.”
            “Guess. I’m all for it. Guess, guess, guess.”
            “Do you see these hands clapping?”
            “Bluffs that call themselves. I get it.”
            “Bats! Look out! Duck! Bats!”
            “That’ll cave in what I don’t get into what I forget to feel like having too long ago to repeat. You, uh, dropped something there.”
            “I’ve been picking myself up off the floor for too long now. Forget it. I’m all out and in at the same time.”
            “Better off out than in. We keep ourselves up at night with jumpy plunderings of the past.”
            “Sha Na Na Na. Lah. Lah. Lah!”
            “This here bar’s holding me up like it’s my only friend. All I got in this miserable old world.”
            “Nobody brings anything small into a bar….”
            “Around here. Yep. Bad old Jamie Stewart on the lam. Gesticulating for the mob.”
            “I can’t sleep at night.”
            “The day?”
            “Nah. That’s for drinking away the maudlin dreams I’m too scared to let myself have.”
            “The older we get…”
            “The more we need this.”
            “Crash on the levee, baby. This old ship’s a gonna wreck just right before it gets to shore.”
            “The more we need of this. The more it needs of us.”
            “Sha Lah Lah…Lah lah lah…”
            “All we are is what time’s made us.”
            “Washed out to the sea too drunk to swim.”
            “Sha Na Na. Lah. Lah! Lah!”
            “And we’re reckless now, getting smashed before breakfast with ruffians.”
            “Never mind my shyness. Just, never mind.”
            “A winze for the more temperamental of us to connect with our inner selves. I am in charge of nothing.”
            “Blasted.”
            “Rats.”
            “There’ll be or they’ll be?”
            “Both. In any or all cases, loafing gets me by. By the way, this here edge is not very easy to take off.”
            “I’ve noticed. Quick, recite The Declaration of Independence while imbibing this here glass of beer.”            
            “That’ll help. The shakes are coming for me. Best to get a head start.”
            “Even Thomas Jefferson…”
            “Yep. Even him. The king of the nickel.”
            “Not so much like other people. A crusader of the bummest deals. Not one adolescent in detention would ever guess what that’s worth. Not even an act of vandalism to my name. Hold the fort. I gotta wrangle with the pisser.”
            “General Mao’s gone north for the winter. Okay. Go get your tinkle on.”
            “You can’t talk to me like that. We’re attempting to be adults here, remember?”
            “Oh, well, shit. All the bartenders from here to tiramisu keep their noses clean with busyness. I’d advise opportunity to ring instead of knocking. I’d advise you to do the same, if I could.”
            “Anything’d be reassuring at this point. Hallelujah. Day by day. I shall be back.”
            “In or through the course of events we come to a steeple of fingers and a home made of paper, rock, and scissors. We might attempt a hijacking of our stilted ways. We might make dominos out of nude pictures of 3rd-rate movie stars. Over my own admonishment. Over my quibbles with insecurity’s blessed walls. I’d be stabbing back if I could. Don’t you know all my best friends are from Queens? Ah. The flush. There it is. The hallowed sound of water’s downward dance. A crepitant jangle in the lights. The gusty hooverings of the hand dryer. I want to watch trees go about their day. This song reminds me of 1948. Claire De Lune? Or would that be near-to-highly inappropriate for me to say out loud? Piano music is an old pal of mine, so there’s that.”
            “Mumbling will get you everywhere except where you want most to go.”
            “Some highbrow philosophizing went on in the john there, I see.”
            “And to whom would that remark be intended for? I’m all ears, here. Really.”
            “Say that again. Did you fly when you were a kid?”
            “All the time.”
            “Figurines. It does and it does and it does. Doesn’t it?”
            “Got to. Cranks of fortune lend awful dimes to anachronistic machines. We hotel our destinations. We chase quarters into the gutter. The bells are all out of tolls. Abate! That’s what I say. Abate!”
            “Greasy hunky-dory satisfaction takes root. That’s all I’m seeing here. Smug stops of stationary devices. Me? I bridle optimism in hopes of remaining humble.”
            “Conning yourself? It’s a cheapskate’s ruse. I own the mercenary plash in the surroundings. Get taken with it or be took. It’s me winking at the trunk instead of the hood.”
            “I own the rights to my anger. I drink to or with it, but never to my health.”
            “Gather your belongings. The party’s not attended. We need to damage our remorse some before outwitting errand-takers.”
            “I believe in peonies with rubber stems.” 
            “Nobody’s in the business of placing blame, as they said back in other Novembers, other recharged accounts, and in the hassle of crummy weather. The breath it takes is never quite away enough.”
            “There are raisins in my rum. And every day I’m a little more dumb.”
            “Playing the scales up and down while the other kids got to run around and roughhouse. Look at me now. I’m a stiff collar for the world to pull at. Reconsider the dust.”
            “You don’t say!”
            “I do.”
            “Well, pop my corn and punch all my jokes. I eat earwigs for breakfast and small-time despots for dessert.”
            “And for all of our hereafters?”
            “Cry toasts in the loveless midnight. Arrest graffiti chiselers for scabbing the bar doors with phrases like, ‘She’s a walrus and she don’t like black.’ Misrepresent my necktie in a wrapping contest. Choose no side. Ophelia works only as a bouncer and a radio thief in these skewered times we find ourselves counting along with. These months have the loneliest sounding names.”
            “Beat back the breakers, mama. This whole here show’s never gonna hit the road.”
            “I’ve said my peace through shards of war. Oh holiest of shit, I’m murkier now in throes of photographed wonder than the past’d ever know.”
            “Some gladder afternoon than this. I’ll flay away. I’ll flay away. And then. And then. Flay, flay, flay away.”
            “Sadder still. Sad and sadder, and sadder still.”
            “As long as the whisky pours true, and it is so warm and strong going down. Tingle my palms and elate my brain. I’m off to nab cat burglars in the act of asleep-and-drunk-in-their-boots penance.”
            “So says who?”
            “So says the father’s mother and the son’s holiest of poltergeists.”
            “How many points do I get for missing?”
            “Only as much as it takes for it to be all that you do.”
            “How much?”
            “Deal. Just, fucking, deal.”
            “One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. All the goddamn Mississippis in the world. Okay, I’m rivered out.”
            “Good enough, and, also, just not quite that good.”



             

Saturday, September 15, 2012

untested notes of binaural audition (answer key)



            Q:

            A: It’s when the turbulence hits, hanging in midair, or more like the preparing to endure the sensation that I know is going to like literally quake my whole being. It’s something irrational that just takes over, and there’s really nothing I can do about it. Something flawed and scarred in my own estimate of terror, something that wells up and stays heavy no matter what I do. I just can’t shake it. It’s not acrophobia or vertigo, really, either. I can be in high places, no problem. And it’s not like I get dizzy or confused or lightheaded. It’s more like a combination of anxiety and some sort of deathly fear ingrained in my subconscious that grabs my sense of who I am and rattles it until I’m sweating and panicky and completely locked inside of this space that keeps squashing me in like a garbage compactor. 

            Q:

            A: No. I’m not sure about that.

            Q:

            A: Well, it’s hard to say. One moment you are like totally invincible. And the next?

            Q:

            A: Yeah. That’s true. But I don’t believe it myself. At least I don’t, or wouldn’t like to, think so.

            Q:

            A: Because it’d get too hard to be rational, in that particular case. You’d lose your sense of perspective on what it means to be you. You know? It’s hard to explain, I guess. It gets hard to, at least.

            Q:

            A: Steamed broccoli.

            Q:

            A: Of course! That goes without mentioning. There’s the rumble, that distinct tremor of dread that snaps me like an electric shock into…what would be the total opposite of oblivion?
           
            Q:
           
            A: Yes. There’s a certain peculiar sense of…I don’t know, the absolute loss of control over what’s happening to me. I can’t get outside of it. It’s like being bubble-wrapped in anxiety, force-fed this needles-and-pins dread that usurps my normal means to functionality.

            Q:

            A: No. Definitely not. That’d just make it worse, you know?

            Q:

            A: Well, think about it. It’s kind of like saying, “The Wild Wild East.” It just doesn’t cut it. My mustard’s white. My temper’s tin-foiled. Let’s keep this on the down and up. I don’t want to get snuckered into all this…
           
            Q:

            A: Yeah. Snuckered. Like a portmanteau of snicker and fucker. Snucker.

            Q:

            A: Ha. Not really. Never thought about that. But, yeah, it’s like everything gets ratcheted up. The pressure-- and no, I just had a drifter about cabin pressure there, so, well, no…anyway-- the pressure, it gets so intense it’s like I could never scream it away. It’s over and above and beyond any loudness in the world. For all intentional circumstances there’s no habitual renderings going on, you know?

            Q:

            A: True. But still. One must, you know, get by. And for the most part I’m terrified of being, well, terrified. That’s more telling, I guess. That’s more of a here-I-am-rock-me-like-a-hurricane situation. At least that’s what I keep telling myself.

            Q:

            A: In what way?

            Q:
           
            A: Oh. I get it. Tell the girl she’s got potential and then let her drift on away and do whatever it is that she’s going to do. Real uplifting message. I’d change it to something like, “Don’t forget your sunglasses, Little Red. There’s a wolf who’s not quite as hungry as you’d think hiding somewhere beyond reason and sense. Make a break for insanity if you can.” Or something at least more spirit-raising than some moldy diatribe of wishy-washy sentimentality. Boo-motherfucking-hoo, you know?

            Q:

            A: Sure. And while I’m at it, don’t you maybe, just maybe, inside of that potboiler head of yours, think that I might have more guts than you give me credit for? I mean, look at it. I’m going against every fiber of my fucking being just going on these flights, bucking every instinct-- no matter how bogus those instincts seem on the surface, and below too-- just to wrangle myself into a seat, which I pray to God is a window seat (this somehow assuages the fear somewhat, being able to look down and see some scraps of land below me, tiny rectangles of cordoned off green and brown, or just the wing sometimes), buckle myself in and sit there next to a complete stranger who is usually so involved in her own magazine and/or head-phoned music to even bother a nanosecond about some misconceptualized fear residing deep and deadly in the most primordial places of the heart in the person sitting to her immediate left. And I sit there, for hours, falling further down this inescapable rabbit hole, gritting my teeth, nails digging into my palms so hard it looks like my hands have been attacked by a woodpecker.

            Q:

            A: Okay, well if my hands were wood. A skinpecker then. Does that make you happy? Fuck. I’m just…

            Q:

            A: Oh, bull manure chunks. “I want to be stereotyped. I want to be classified.” See? Well, she-says-Jesus. Anyway. So, what I’m trying to convey here is the complete full-throttle antagonism of my struggle. It’s almost like I’m fighting against myself fighting against myself. Wow. That sounds so absurd. But, hell, that’s just how it feels.

            Q:

            A: Oh. Yeah. That’s another thing. You’ve kind of gone and clubbed the proverbial baby seal on the head with that one. Very apposite, Deary.

            Q:

            A: Fuck you.

            Q:

            A: I know. Sorry. It’s just the squealing shoot-at-first-sight nature of these things. I get it. So, well, anyway, like I was saying...

            Q:

            A: As I was saying, there’s really no perpetualty about it when I back-tab to the previous browser of my mind’s screen. I’m open to suggestions. It’s just that it’s really hard for me to believe that any other person could possibly understand what it’s like to be in that frame of mind. I can’t understand it myself when I’m not in it. That doesn’t help. It just doesn’t. The trap that I set for myself is inescapable. I guess that’s my own fault. I make sure I can’t possibly get out of it, of course without consciously knowing that I’m setting the trap. How could someone else come up with a solution to something I’ve carefully crafted-- though unknowingly so-- to outwit myself? It doesn’t seem that likely to me.

            Q:

            A: Could be.

            Q:

            A: Excuse me?

            Q:

            A: Sure. Sure it does. That makes like absolutely zero cents in the cash bag. I want to be warm, just like everyone else does. Just not too warm, or too cold. Thriving in optimal conditions. Something…shit. Something like that.

            Q:

            A: Just because. That’s all. Just because. Steam open all my mail. Guess the Crown back in Royal. Mohair on the seat of my pants, and I sneeze and I sneeze, and that’s all there is to know. Guesses are as close as you’ll ever get to it.

            Q:

            A: If it were that easy we’d all be billionaires of the mind. No. I don’t accept that. The route least or most taken. It doesn’t matter. We’re strutting around with ideals stuck in our hats. We’re affectionate without knowing it. The places we take for granted when we aren’t in them take us for all we’re worth.

            Q:

            A: No. More like, “War in.”

            Q:

            A: Wilder. More free than that. A partition in oblivion. A muskier scent of being lost, alone, disenfranchised by disenchantment, the edges…it’s in the edges that we construct a meager escape. I don’t care about delayed copouts and battalions of unsaintly rovers mismanaging the resources of the world. I am this horribly frightened creature staring life into its deepest corners, a curled ball of trembling and wide-eyed, inchoate nightmares. It’s not worth even attacking, this anxiously hyperaware state. It won’t go away. There’s nowhere for it to go.     

            Q:

            A: No. Definitely not.

            Q:

            A: Something felt. The wavering shadows of tree branches like monstrous tendrils in a steamed-up window. A memory caught in a shape’s sense. More than a whispering ease to put you to bed with. A streetlight’s pumpkin-orange glow shrouded in fog. A shambled plod through grains of knowing, and it’s crowded, pulled too close for anything even resembling comfort. The disregarded mulch of an over-stewed life. Something unable to be stirred. I kiss my memories goodbye on each cheek and kill mosquitoes with a tennis racket. It is disquiet at its most refined and absurd.

            Q:

            A: It doesn’t matter. Nobody dreams of me.

            Q:

            A: I guess so. One never knows, now does one?

            Q:

            A: What’s the frequency?

            Q:

            A: That’ll do. They both have their fine side, their reverse gear, and what’s surprising is how little was apparently lost in the whole scheme of most folks’ lives when all was over for both of those guys. It’s all some sick schmooze fest now. And I will have none of it. The closed-door clutter of nostalgia and trend hopping and the mopiest kids on the planet to boot. Fuck that. Seriously. It all sucks the mighty big one.

            Q:

            A: Not if I can help it.

            Q:

            A: Circumnavigating the loneliness of what’s stretching so vast and eerily across the account of things I’ll now never get the chance to know, to have the experience of going through. In a nutshell? I’m doomed by my own inhibition.

            Q:

            A: Yes.

            Q:

            A: A highfalutin wrong and nobody’s right. Insincerity is the highest form of flattery, at least in a place where I’d never claim to be from. I’m taking my middle name with me to the grave. That ought to put a dull sheen on the price of gold for the next couple of generations. But there’s always a lot of “ought” to things in general. As deep-sea shrimp vomit bioluminescence, “ought” leaves a lot of room for loss to grow tentacles and find more victims to strangle in their sleep.  

            Q:

            A: Oh, I know. You’re right…but still…

            Q:

            A: Yeah. The seedier, the better. I’m miffed about it for the most part, still. Things that used to add up are starting to divide and multiply, and at the worst of times, subtract.

            Q:

            A: Dictated by the swinging catastrophes of moods. Simplified, rendered into neutral slumber, and it’s me who’s mistaking devils for G-rated companions with cute little bifurcated tails and kid-friendly pitchforks. I am completely absorbed and annihilated by the dread of turbulence, and when that rollicking starts? Oh, brother. It’s like my whole personality is shoved candy-over-apple into the briar patch.

            Q:

            A: The short of the long of it? It’s just like…well, acting a certain way to fool others follows suit, and then, unbeknownst to even yourself, you become that way, that fool you’ve created to lure others off the scent. The act of acting a certain way becomes a way of behaving, and you do it naturally and unaffected at last, with maybe a subconscious wink at your true-blue…well, personality. And, in the end’s only start, we are nothing but it. Our personality? It is everything about who we are, who we appear to be, and if it gets slain or maimed or tortured or dragged through the streets until it burns and writhes in agony? Well, let’s just say that we won’t be making any appearances, public or private, except maybe in this redoubt we’ve carved out with trepidation and distress in the craggiest caves of our mind, this temporary vestibule of our trembling willpower that locks us up unsteady yet somehow strangely…safe.

            Q:

            A: Safe. Yeah. That’s the odd thing. It’s like my mind’s gone into disaster mode, sensing the direness of the circumstances. It takes my personality and flees with it to some distant chamber where it can be…well, safe. Even though it is a place so scary and horrifying and downright scaphism-awful that I’d rather not even contemplate what it’s like from the outside looking in for fear of getting trapped right back in there again. Is this what it’s like to see yourself slowly going insane? It’s such a helpless feeling, really. I never would’ve guessed.
                       
            Q:

            A: A prisoner who’s locked herself up. Selfish, really, you know? But there’s no way out. I’m steeling myself in a constant forage of miniscule bits of logic that I hope will keep me sane, always just a blink away from losing it, from falling forever down, down, down into the abyss.
           
            Q:
           
            A: I fly.

             Q:

            A: Doesn’t she talk about the fear of being late coinciding with the fear of death? On a purely anthropological level it stems, or one would be led to grope, from the bisecting of fortitude with guilt-riddled chance. The valise of her gist-- the argument sours too, you know, around heady stop-and-slow traffic jams of derisive facetiousness-- is that we’d all be better off staring down from the high dive…which is really fucking absurd, at least in the opinion of this pell-mell operator.

            Q:

            A: I’m not sure it does. Ever. Scuttle and plow. Reap and bow. Just not so grimly. I used to think I could stave off my clashes with “the horror” by manipulating its outward manifestations. But it’s, well, it’s like being upset with somebody who doesn’t exist. Targets are hard to come by, and for the most part I’m all out of arrows.

            Q:

            A: Indefinite extenuating terms of suffering. It’d pacify a humbler sort, this call to usurpation that only maybe in a creepy Ayn-Rand sense would work anything close to wonders. Okay. So let’s strip the fucker down to its bare-boney essence. Complete deconstruction and compartmentalizing. The rearrangement of reason.

            Q:

            A: Taking maybe as an answer?

            Q:

            A: Yep. Sure. And you miss the seven-in-the-morning sunlight, the way trees used to genuflect in the sheen of it, the dewy air, the glide and swoosh of cars going by, the quiet rising of another day. An image that keeps getting blurrier as you pull farther and farther away. So, well, the moon shines its pate for another go around, and here we are stuck in the time it takes to wish it all away.

            Q:

            A: I succumb.

            Q:

            A: Weary but unable to rest. Perpetually imitating motion. It’s the desultory nature of an over-scratched mental itch that leaps from sheep to sheep in the space between dreams. I flag down what I can from the humdrum and hang-dried, hoping, at least, to catch a glimpse of casual boredom-- something I can use against myself, something to control and fence-in the junkyard of my trepidation. But the tabetic swirls of moment-to-moment fright cling too strong and overpower any useful sock-it-to-‘em that I can come up with. Everything’s just some meager improvisation, and I freeze up, mind blank, and ride woe shuddering towards quiver-town. Up stream and past all “prefab” means of escape.

            Q:

            A: I know. But that’s blasting sand with a squirt gun. I don’t have a choice in the matter. Giving in? Or up? It never even gets to that point. It’s not like, “I am woman! Hear me…well, whimper.” No. That’s bullshit. That’s not it at all. It’s outside of…of…everything.

            Q:

            A: In the fine print, the boilerplate of reality’s lost grip, the nutant sway of yawing deceit that chaffs and coils and regurgitates what it least resembles, all askew and raw and needling over and over a single reoccurring bĂªte noire that’s affixed so firmly to skeins of disastrous mind-churnings that I can hardly distill any temper or guise from it, ever, to use against…well…against myself.

            Q:

            A: The apples of me are falling farther and farther from the tree.

            Q:

            A: Close enough. Freud would’ve coughed into his hand, taken a drag of his cigar, done a quick snort of blow, and then promptly shuffled off to his own demise. Jung might take a bath. Me? I coddle the curdled aspect of worn-out bliss in the softest part of my personality, and then whiff and moan, taking just enough smoke breaks to mind what’s left of my manners.

            Q:

            A: Well, shit. My hands are not so small these days, let me tell you.

            Q:

            A: Thanks. You too. It’s been…well…something. Definitely something.




Wednesday, September 12, 2012

forget the handbasket; just go straight to hell


  
            I tipped the piano man at the hotel bar to play Love Me Tender and then I went back to my room aching for bed but I couldn’t get her off my mind so I opted for whisky instead. I drained about half the bottle while I lay in bed, singing, “I get a crick out of you,” to the wallpaper. Finally, after about 4 rounds through the melody, the liquor’s burst of euphoria wore off and I got drowsy enough to let sleep intrude on my mind’s churning. The last I saw of the clock’s red blur was somewhere around 3:30, though my eyes were mostly useless by that point.
            Kid Ory was blaring on the radio when I woke up. It was awful. I kept my eyes closed as long as I could. But the damn radio wouldn’t shut up, so I thrashed around a bit, chucked the radio against the wall, and made my way to the bathroom. There was probably a more miserable way to be feeling, but I couldn’t think of one.
              I splashed some tepid water on my mug and made a few faces in the mirror, trying to convince myself that it was good to be alive. The smell of loathing was still clinging to what was left of my attire, that and cigarette smoke tinged with dried beer. I found it suitable, just then, and shuffled and dragged my aching self back into the room.
            The bed was a disaster of thrown sheets and a wayward comforter that looked as if somebody’d danced on it all night with muddy shoes and then chucked it into the ceiling fan where it got mangled and tossed around and back down where it lay in a heap along with everything else, including my pants and a half-smoked cigarette that seemed to have been doused out with either water or whisky. The clock’s red digits told me it was 12:12, and that seemed suitable. Just as good a time as any to be standing around in a wrecked hotel room with a hangover the size of Kentucky on my breath and a miserable iota of willpower in my fading constitution. A fly buzzed around the bed for a bit, and then gave up and died. I felt about the same.
           
            The neon’s dead in the sign’s rusted shell. My gut’s rusted too, and I’ve got about five bucks to my name, ambling about with a noticeable limp, about a week from a shave, and ravaged by a slight case of the DTs along with the crazed rumblings of a much more than mild bout of borborgymus. The sidewalk is not my friend. 
            A picket fence comes around, white as chalk, and I kick at it, futilely, and then find myself KO’d with the dead leaves and the bugs. It’s a bad time all around, and I’m having the most of it. Everything aches. It smells like fall.
            Very much later the day starts getting more shade to it, and I find my time splashed with reverence and holy deceit. Walking is less of a struggle somehow. I plod along on sidewalk-side grass. I start to think that I’m really going places. Really making it. But that, of course, doesn’t last. Soon I’m talking to telephone poles, saying things like, “I don’t want to eat lobster on the beach while the fat boys hide their hangovers beneath sunglasses.” A cop car rolls by. I pretend to be punching myself in the face. It keeps going. So many things go unnoticed. I develop a limp in my left leg, then switch to the right. It’s a little hobble of a thing, a wavering klutzy yaw of my person. After a while it gets more stylish. I begin to wonder how to walk without it. A bee clips my ear and I almost tumble over. But I don’t. I keep moving right along. The pebbles of my existence are squandered in my shoes. Woe is my middle name.
            The last bastion of steam wafting from sewer grates, increased collusion, intrepid and beastly too, I call change like I hear it, and my listening can do me in too, but it’s rather inglorious to be hunky-dory about it, at least while the wagons are squaring pissed wonder like a blind shop steward of a Tuesday morning. Guesses are as good as gone, likely in a huff as I would be too if it’d taken less than a purpose-wielding crowd to wear me out. In a stillness and steadier changing of the guards of my heart’s stash, well, I cuss under the audience’s roar and stab gray at the sky. If it doesn’t suit me? Well, that’s a hurt that won’t change for just any old quaking or standoffish load of my less-than-horrible half. Let us run wild in our nightmares so we can dare to dream a bit better. 
            Ambling does what it can to dispel bad news on the horizon, with or without a noticeable limp. When you get to wearing the same colors too often for too long there are erasures that you get to making out of habit from the locale of milling thoughts, insolvent parameters, and the expression of riled assumptions like cockatiel crests gone amok. Other than that? I’m done for in the midst.
            Slithering along like some electric eel on vacation, there’s less of a mosey in my step, and I trade in my shuffle for a shabbier title. Maybe Volkswagen Vic or Dipshit Ron. I don’t know. I’m scruffy around the frontal lobe. It pays to be broke when the moon’s dealing out aces to the weather. Repair. Duck inside a church to stay warm. Pray for marshmallow pie. This here caboose has never left the station.
           
            “Let me tell you a story.”
            “Fuck you.”
            “Well, then.”
           
            A braver man would’ve held his tongue. But me, being a sap and a pusillanimous bastard, of course I had to go and destroy my reputation with these drunken ramblings. I’m a real sucker for gut punching. It was a gruff beginning to things, a stalled start that botched itself like a manure truck stuck in traffic. I wimped out of moving on, and so was left piddling around in the past, jilted and bored with my own sensibilities. God’s running out of patience with me. I am orphaned by a pesky sense of wonder. Yep, that about does it.
           
            I strolled as best I could down to where the water meets the shoreline. The horizon was tucking in some bleakness behind its brown-ringed collar. Holding up my end of the bargain was getting to be more of a hassle than it was worth. We are suckered with blame, or at least it was starting to seem that way to me. The sand was cold and hard, and I didn’t want anything to do with it. Some crows scared off a passel of scrawny, molting pigeons. I was fed up with disasters. I lay down in the wet sand and closed my eyes.
            A black-and-white scene flitted foggy across my misbehaving vision. Gulls squawked into the colorless sorrow. My limbs were useless weight, taking up space instead of moving through it. Something was wrong with my brain. Everything seemed chancy and out of proportion with what was taking place in my skull. A baboon swallowed a dove. Mosquitoes breakfasted on cold ham slices. A voice rang out, “I want to be my own jury! I am peerless!” I tried to pretend that I was just a retired scarecrow. It didn’t take. I lay there in that muddy terrain and cried made-up tears. When I got bored of that I got up, brushing my clothes off the best I could, and walked back to the beach parking lot up over the concrete pillars where the crows had gathered to enjoy the view. It was better there. Less sandy and deranged.

            I was still a bit legendary in some circles, or at least that’s what I was figuring. Enough so, maybe, that I could weasel my way into the Can’t Make Her Think Club’s Leading Horticulture meeting. I thought that perhaps just mentioning Dorothy Parker to the doorman might do the trick. I’d been lucky before in such situations. Why not now? The difference was in perspective, in hindsight, and now that makes less sense than it did then, if that makes any sense.
            A guy with a bowtie announced my arrival. It was later than usual. Nobody looked. A piece of napkin with possible names for my firstborn scrawled on it fell from my vest pocket to the floor. Under any other circumstances I would’ve been let off rough. But in this case I just threw my hat on the piano and got on with it.
            Nothing worked out. I fell down, again and again, in my attempts to be an upright citizen.               
            “Are you of any value? To anyone? Huh? Are you?”
            “I’m not paid to answer question like that…those, I mean.”
            “What are you paid to do?”
            “Beats me. But I look the part, so I might as well act the part, you know?”
            “Shit.”
            The tables were full. I was counted out, and then tried to force my way in. That’s about it. The door was shown to me in quite a forceful way, and so I found it.
            Cool air rushed to find me. It found me stricken with a sneeze, and then bowled over down some concrete stairs, and then wobbly and spun towards some grass, where it turns out the sprinklers were plying their trade at the moment. I slipped and trampled my way down the walkway and finally on to the sidewalk. People were staring. I felt rather refined, noble even, in my vain attempts at maintaining balance and valor under these dire circumstances. I felt like giving the finger to the moon. But I didn’t. Instead I drafted up a declaration of independent dipsomania in my head and wandered due east, a direction in stark contrast with the one taken by my ancestors who spent their lives matriculating in a steady drift towards the pacific ocean. This made be feel grand and princely, which was the best I’d felt in a long stretch. It’d do.
            I am not gifted, let’s say, in the ways of most candy asses. I am no sage of any Baltimore. The heady waft of terror that stupefies crowds and elicits screams from flophouse to mansion is nothing more than a parlor trick of mirrored smoke. I could tell myself that. I really could. Who’d care? Not this here sack of anemones. Not this cardiovascular mishap. Not this plug-cut toaster of a guy. Let me, well, just tell you that. Okay?
            Trouncing popcorn makers and counting hubcaps on parked cars until the sewer stink of it all got to me, not tearing up at all while I was at it, also. So be it? Sure. Sure. We are the ones who weep over tinkling nocturnes and olive pits. And yes, we too are the ones who sail paper ships down gasoline gutters. An arabesque for your Mussolini pie? Not quite. It’s forgivable to be clawing towards your destiny one frozen entrĂ©e at a time. Trust me. I am made of chrome thumbtacks and licorice rubber bands. Steering comes naturally to me, and there are no question marks left in the smashed-chandelier-littered hallways of my woozy head. Backward and downward I go.     
            It takes all kinds, I guess. But sometimes I just wish it didn’t. Like in the present state of torpor that claws for shadows in tacky x-mas tree light, like that, if one could ponder a name and come up with a solution, a story to go with it, an out and an alibi, well…Chartreuse was a real gas. She’d shoot her own grandmother in the back and then take bets on which we she’s going to fall. A lose-tie situation, that one. And her real name was Marbelle Lyler. Resisting rest and arrest as always, she’d place herself in harms way and go for broke. Always champing at the bit for a little more time. Give it to her and she’ll just run away with a little more. Scrimmaging with high-tide hooligans and Sharpie whiffers, rummaging around for a hook to sink you with while you polished your heart’s anchor and pined for darker glass. Somehow I cannot envision myself violently. Somehow I can be punched blue without color. Get a grip of Chartreuse’s motivation and sink, sink, sink. That’s a bet’s loss, a had’s grip on what’s gone, and, in the end, a scramble for somebody else’s cracked eggs. Just to need direct contact with somebody who gives a shit isn’t enough. Even Chartreuse herself could’ve told you that. And me? I’m all out of hinting.
            There was a voice. It told me this: “Abrogate those dark imaginings. All is drafty and befuddled. Chalk it up to pleasing touch with sight. Storm if you must. But be pleasant about it, at least. That’s it. Tell your stepsons I says hello.”
            I wasn’t hearing things. I was listening to things. I missed a bus and caught a cold. “Figures.” That wasn’t a who-said-that situation. Trust me. Or don’t. It might not matter.
            Suddenly, upon further introspection, I discovered that I was reeling with an overdone sense of facial recognition. I was seeing faces in the strangest places: knots in wood boards, hellos, badly placed guardrails, telephone booth windows, sidewalk weeds, crumpled newspapers, roped off areas, entablature shadows from church lights, trails of ants, rocks, plastic carrots and peas, shredded pages of lost library books, trashcans, mossy archivolts, the discarded covers of dirty magazines. I gave up. I ruined my own understanding of myself.      
            Upon no dowsing or evidence to the contrary I came to a door and knocked and knocked. Somebody who wasn’t home wouldn’t answer. It didn’t matter. A face was there in the door’s stiles and rails. I figured it was never or now.                           
            “I miss you even though I hardly know you. Does that sound possible?”
            “Yes. Too much. And, of course, not enough.”
            “Thank you. That will be all.”
            The door went away, and so did I.




Monday, September 3, 2012

I Cry Paris In My Sleep (and other things drawn in the margins of my life)


                                  
The finger I use for scooping out coffee grounds from the grinder is black under the nail. If it’s Tuesday then it’s August. The usefulness of a rationale that doesn’t figure. Bee ties. Pigeon cameras. A lamprey in the bathtub. It’s a musical washbox that never gets scrubbed. Cast-iron jealousy hooked to a crane. Piddled away attention. The come-and-go charm of TV. The noisiest gum on the block. I’m mustering some third-generation Cadillac-Coupe-De-Ville courage. Desperately seeking a bologna sandwich, and the moon’s out hunting Michigan again. Talking loud so strangers will hear and be impressed. A shagreen purse and a crepe paper smile, carrying on and repointing the bricks of the past with hard-fought wonder. Casked to sell? It’s a deceitful plan, perhaps, but the mind’s conniving gets laden with grandfathered clauses. Asking starts to question itself. A dab of duck fat behind each ear makes my personality a confit of redundant charm. I brush my hair with castor oil and use rusty nails as toothpicks. Let’s make a deal to make no more wishes, to put the stars back to sleep when this is all through, and to wreck havoc on Tuesday’s blues with a few of Friday night’s neon letters. For now the Chinese Godfather’s sitting next to me on this termite-infested bench while I feed ice cream sandwiches to pigeons and tell the time by church bells. All my nightmares are made of corroded chromosomes, plugged pennies, and 15-minute lunch breaks, and they’re stitched up cheap with broken cello strings. In the last place, well, there’s a terror there that weeps sleep from boredom. Hunting Michigan with the moon when it makes the least sense. And when the girls around here get to stomping around it’s like there’s a 5.8 rambling through town. My record player skips all the best songs, and the microwave doesn’t even got enough left in it to make popcorn. Let me tell you, it gets rudimentary and mortgaged and hard up to be alive when your racing form’s all filled up with circled losers. The coffee boos me in the morning, and I sneak love from the truth peddlers. Nobody’s going to want my organs when I’m gone. You see, on this side of Palookaville there are still upsets in the making and more considerations to consider, as I shuffle the depths and swing slim from the banisters. The lady who waits on me at the drugstore is wearing a Have A Nice Day pin in her lapel. I walk outside in the blinding sun and stare up at a glass behemoth skyscraper that’s reflecting other buildings in its cascading cerulean dance of windows, and I flounder around and dance by the empty place where a bus station used to go. Tomorrow’s a dropped hat and a duel of fingers. Tosspot’s grow ragged and rig their hearts with safety-pin sadness. Sing me champagne and sweep the gutters with swizzle-stick brooms. It’s a crumb to toss to party crashers and melee evacuees. Trust the judgment of wizened crows and the cracked crossbeams in the rafters of your soul. My heart’s shattered china. I waste all my wishes on the bottles behind the bar, and I miss what the sun’s got left to make of me. I dance in movie theatres and cut my own hair. But my windows, they still stay lit all through the night.