People
around here just keep voting against their best interest. Something moneyed
folks tell ‘em they need. But they don’t. Not ever.
People
around here stink of feebleness. Mushy crackers. That’s what they’re made of.
They don’t get married on a whim to somebody they hardly know. They don’t rant
about trash night. They tumble into the ordinary with low expectations.
I
was writing The New Twilight Zone episodes when I was eight years old. “The
owner of yellow streak so vivid it
could be slathered on a hot dog, crazy as a soup sandwich,” and all that sort
of stuff. I might make my vileness better known than most, but the sprawl of
nighttime’s neon twizzle spin is not less than what’ll dance up happy with the
harshest tidbit of my person.
People
react. They dive in and swim shallow. I hope there’ll be deliverance in my
name, somehow, in the costume-party delving of stooped guards. There’s not much
breath to hold, though. Not around here. There’s drain cleaner in the tap
water. I swat flies and never remember their names. Nothing ever happens.
Listen.
Somebody is singing.
We are not arguments
We are not made of fancy clothes
The bouquet’s gone bad
And there are no more holes to fill in the lineup
It is today lastly
What’s better off being last
We are stitched together with death and cigarettes
I’m
the best time waster on the planet. Give me a way to put something off until a
day that never comes and I’ll take it and make it my own and then some. Paint
the dogs blue and call ‘em Who’s Who. There must be wine in the toilet water.
Get the busiest part of you down to Town Hall and make a Rule Of Pinky about it
all. People around here keep their mouths open too damn much.
Buddy
Holly is dead.
I
really need to start looking in the mirror before I go out into the world.
I
am suffering false awakenings from the nightmare of my history. The
electrocutioner’s at the door: the pickiest guy there ever were. Mark me “For
Lease” please. I don’t need my mother to dress me funny; I do a damn fine job
of it myself.
Rectify.
Splice. Still the difference in palm wine. That’s what I keep telling myself.
Use the hardened coir of your existence to build doormats for your messiest
thoughts’ shoes. Stuff like this gets me cuts in line for
anti-existential-angst pills, and in the end I’m mumbling something like, “It
don’t matter.”
Traits
of what I’m not about, at all: a steady temperature; getting everyday girls to
like me; rising to the occasion; setting up shop on the roof of a tall
building; pampering; sailing; affecting the lives of others; squeezing limes in
my hair; paper pianos; law; bickering with the ceiling.
It was an unsettling glib taste of air,
crisper than most, that did it, finally. Volume control notwithstanding, I can
be lured into trouble without much trouble. Paste me to the sky with it; I’m
shapeless.
Somebody is at the door. Of course. Somebody is always, always at the door. I’ll just sit here. I’ll be still. Get them to go away, perhaps. Or-- shit--
maybe not.
So.
This
guy, he comes Fosbury Flopping in here like he’s reinventing the bait and hook
business model, and I’m off guard a little, but not caught, well, not really,
so, we’re rolling through workflow mockups and the likes, and he’s January
Standing in April’s mustiest stuff. I am not taken aback at all. I rumble along
with it. Integrated marketing be damned, I like big noses and glasses on my
gal, you know? There is just not time for sweeping. We’re stuck on Baltimore
chopping our way through mountains of fluff. It’s no way to get surceasing
without rasped bewilderment at the sitch we seem to find ourselves bending
soulfully under. But the moves we make get noticed. I don’t make unnecessary
eye contact. Like when Lennon would get drunk and scream, “Yoko!” over and over
while they carried him away. Carried away. Shit. That’s where we were all
heading. Demanding limes for our tomato juice wasn’t enough. I knew we’d have
to get no-nonsense silly to get even close to even. In the maundering séances
in lit-low bathrooms, well, we placed often enough for time to tell us we were
not as chosen as we’d formerly wanted to believe. Taking flying fucks was more
than plenty to get us off that particular rocker. Calling all dumbfucks, you
know?
Well,
it’s Treats Time in office supply warehouses. Were it not for ice-in-your-drink
meanwhiles, I’d have less to do than a retired umpire. Challenge is, you’ve got
to harness everybody else’s willpower for them, and, at some opportune moment,
wish it all away from yourself. Does it suck sometimes? Sure. But I rumble
along with it, of course, as is my fucking wont. Business is business. Away on
business. Business as usual. It’s the climb that gets them, snags them as they
rung-by-rung go by-- up or down, or sideways, it doesn’t matter. Peaks of gold
trim rise higher while we never sleep. Tell my boss I’m late for a practice
test of supper. There’s amending to get to while I can still muster my means
for it. Let’s tell on ourselves before nobody else cares to, you know?
This
fishy bastard, who’s like swimming upstream with feverish dead-eyed abandon, is
just about three flails away from me taking his neck beneath my armpit and
getting an old-fashioned noogie. It’s waiting that gets them, and he’s all
hyped about some new systematic way to erase bloopers from cheat sheets, and
it’s frustrating as hell for him to be netted before he’s rollicked himself at
least midway to the higher sparkle of it. I understand. Been here; done this.
You know?
Now,
I’m of the belief that if you use profanity, you should make it count. Don’t
just slather it like cheap mustard on any old hot dog that comes by. Save it
for those rare times when its puissance will make you king of horseshit in a
toilet-paper world. Most of these here denizens in these here parts know at
least this about me. Maybe I make it known. I don’t know, you know? Is it
really that difficult to be subtle about dying? Maybe I just don’t get anything
anymore-- not a thing.
Fuck
it. I’m running for Assistant To The Mayor’s Assistant. There’s garlic powder
in my oatmeal. And, for this timeout’s time being, I haven’t hit that
proverbial wall just yet. Glory days, you know? Just, just down behind. I know.
But things are frustrating for this boilerbreaker of a guy. Things are glum
with ample stereoscopic visions available to most in the automatic garage door
business. “Take a break,” I’d tell myself; but I don’t. And this guy brings a
stink with him like God just titty-fucked the ocean. I can taste fucking sea
urchin every time I swallow. It’s a hard sell and a harder buy. So, I push and
lean into the decaying mold of the whole rotten sitch. This guy’d vote against
himself to prove nothing. About always he’s leaning back in his chair, and so I
can’t help but wondering what it’d take to spill him-- just a soft tip and he’s
through, you know? I don’t want to be the boss of the whole ordeal here, but
hell, what’s what is whatever is, right?
This
fucking chewed-gum of a guy, he comes in swaddled with bad ideas. After a while
he starts to reek of camphor and piss. I moan audibly about the breaks nobody
should ever get. I kid myself that I’m wasting somebody else’s time and not my
own. We argue about the weather and make worthless artifacts out of justifying
our own idealistic approach to curing coworker retaliation during
take-fifteens. If there might be something to this guy it’s really beyond me
what that something is. It occurs to me that willed resilience is only borrowed
hope, and it don’t last for the remainder of my patience’s lapse. Fuck all of
it. I’m tossing this corroded-innards asshole out on his last ass, and if he
gets out, well, he gets whatever’s there. Out. Gone. Humped by the starved
bulls of winter. And you want to know what I think about it all? Shit. I don’t
give a mule’s privates about it. I really don’t.
So,
it seems it’s Barbara Day in Kenneth Town. I don’t want jumpstarts of coddling
prancers. I don’t want fist bumps from psyched PBA fans. Open my eyes just so I
can look away, you know? Blink. Twitch. Nod.
Fuck.
All of you are really inconsiderate of my emotional state, the things I might
need from you, not just the other way around. Well, vice my fucking versa. I
want blowhard thieves leading petty-cash lives. I don’t know why people feel
the need to be mean to me, to belittle whatever it is I’m feigning to be at the
moment-- proselytizing home-cooked morality at me like Ann Landers and her damn
twin sister. Shit. I just want to be left together. Bail me in, composed with
heartache and heart attacks; coolly paler in the tunnels of my limestone-lined
past; riddled with hamper-stuffed demotions, blurry red-eyed cocktails, and
just the sad-old pomegranate-colored, defeated anachronism of typewritten
rejection notes. Well, call me Maria Gaetana Agnesi and throw my pillow in the
fire. I’m outside-in with banal ideas. It is so dark here. It is just so
dark.
A
great light has gone out.
Posts
