Philip Marlowe’s Last Goodbye
Conniving’s got
the best of me.
Yeah, that’s right. I write poetry. What the fuck do you do,
Sissy Pants?
Sure, people pay me attention. But for all the wrong
reasons.
In a rush for patience, Thursday yearns for Friday’s best.
Nothing but junk and ribbons in my mailbox.
There’s no fragrance of success, there is only the stink of
raw shame, which resembles manure dolloped with rancid coleslaw.
I’m as fake as they come, and never present.
Sorry, the coffee’s just not doing the job this morning.
A scratch of beard whisking blood. Too much thoughtlessness
in a time of overwrought thought. I need a reminder that I'm no good. And for
now, the walls are growing nothing but mold.
In a pinch the cemetery will do. So many things to wait for;
so little time to wait.
Reel and rock. Duck and roll. Served to stir no trouble at
all.
I live here in an annihilated room of somebody else’s past.
Shake me awake just to dance away with yesterday’s bride.
Her smile’s my favorite thing she owns.
It’s a tossup, really. I just do what I can and don’t what I
cannot.
There’s a fire in garbage alley. There always is.
The movies have gone mum on me, and the windows won’t talk.
My brains are just dead cigarettes, raw and beat to hell, mashed
and shredded with cranky rot.
Walk without it.
Go ahead.
The motion isn’t unique.
Me?
I’m crushed like a cockroach who once thought himself king
of the kitchen crumbs.
I’m nobody’s somebody.
I could use a hug.
Rescued and rehabilitated, here, for what?
For the rabid dogs to sink their teeth into. To harvest lice
and mollify tipsy winged insects. For beach-less days. For crooked toes. For
mice who are never far enough away.
I breathe. I cower. I spit brandy at pigeons on the fire
escape.
Tell me to take the sewage river’s bend and get;
Ophelia’s no longer a swimmer.
And don’t worry,
I won’t be around to bother any of you anymore…
Trigger sad and closing up shop,
Marlowe
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