Saturday, June 22, 2013

Jesus Christ I Love You Yes I Do (Or, The Wreck of A Circus Train)


The stately alabaster tone of seriousness, a slab of strict sensibility cut from loaned piddling. The Pillars Of Heracles don’t got a thing on whatever corn-off-the-cob this melee makes itself out to be. Get the laundry in before the bed bugs don’t bite. Cue the TV. It is time, almost, to not begin. I, for another one, don’t really care for all of this wavering. 

We had the boats. We did. They wrestled the wind for a place in nobody else’s heart, but then we had shredders for what our hearts wouldn’t say, and, of course, never do, ever. The same old ways to die. Whatever they turned out to not be. From the brim of what perspective never shows or tells. That isn’t just not to speak, or eat what’s left of yesterday’s plum. To say, “I don’t,” to it all. My mouth’s an empty three-car garage without love.

Lousy, pitiful, greedy fears of man. It’s all we’ve got. You wouldn’t push through past me, past the butter of all passings, past the last table left for supper in hell, for tea at 4 a.m., for just a look and a rib. I am openly sinister. Pass the good deeds. I’ll pass.

Sorry. I think I’m going to find a high rooftop to leap from. It is time and it is not.

The shallower my reconstructions behave-- before, after, or during my past-- the more mistimed my first time’s get. That’s a breather I’m not allowing myself to have, in the jackhammer’s morning boom at least. By the light of stalled traffic, in the holy ruin of car wrecks, for the miserable and the lumpy throated, it is all bonhomie and raisins for the masses. And to think, Harry Dean Stanton is not even my father.    

I’m not married to anything or what have you because all the trees around here grow kale wings and never fly. The sea is not romantic at all. Drugs are wasted on the druggies. I have my suspicions about growing up. I have my internal tick-tock of white noise and gas. A dab of gasoline behind the ears and some olive oil under the arms. It measures up when it does not. I tell you.

The moon over the building tops is not splendid or silvery. The US flag ripples and gloats in a strong gust. I play hooky from my ambition in the park of my clunky head while warding off malice’s sparrows. Gesture to me. Go ahead, tilt the sky like a pinball machine, and let me fall from all the graces of the cathedral across the street. The path is too wide, today, and there is nowhere to not run to, or not enough. Place me just behind the slowest horse on the track. The caboose is not my friend. I am winded with distance.
 
To what’s not left.
To what was never there.
To there and farther away than that.
To yours and not mine.
To it all. To it all.

The tan lines of this world we’ve all inherited get more distinct the more I muddle through the wainscoting of my life. I rhymed asparagus with therapists the other day. Lord hurt me. It’s gotten that bad. Excuse me for a decade or so. My green beans have gone purple, and my plowshares are no longer with me. There is a For Sale sign on the lateral pass of my wits. The scenery’s mangled with too much mowing. I am considering a new motto: never attempt a thing. 

I was just about to say, “Goldenrod flowers like flying saucers flow vigorously through fertile fields of my most decent comportment,” when the wind picked up and took my sense of proportion with it. Smaller than infinite, I kept to others. A Showmen’s Rest of a place, really, is all it was, and I remembered, almost suddenly, that all of my heroes were drunks, outlaws, and circus performers. It was a happy memory. It got me through the burnt toast and cold coffee of another morning. I told myself, “Then there are also flowers, still, perfuming other avenues of horror, scenting blurry daylight’s doze with terror and shiftiness.” That about did it. And now? It might still. Other lazy louts have done less in this top-hatless world we’ve come to know and not know so well. Just to think, squeamish with fascination’s horded dog barks, ladled in-and-out with laud’s roar, humming with the drums of another, cast in to coast uphill for an eerie evening without even a moth around to swat at.

An accidental brushing up on flown away lives. A touch of hassle to make some of it worthwhile. A cornet blessing the crumb-covered kitchen floor with a dope-fueled serenade. There isn’t much left to have or take with or give away. The vagabondage of an oyster’s daring clips splats from my coldest moods.

We pulled in to Pokagon close to eleven. There were hanging oil lamps rattling with the fervor and restlessness of stunted, latent ideas. I chopped repetitiously at mistreated vegetables in the dining car. A few tropes like plastic plants cropped motionless in the machine shop of my thoughts. Tour groups came and went. I don’t know how close I was to not being drunk. The tin cups dangling from hooks above me were expanding with the weight of disarray and battled remonstrance. For me? I don’t know. I really don’t. There were chiggers in the fridge’s crisper. The time of day was up for grabs. A woman named Bubby held the weight of a musket of lyrebirds in the hem of her gown. Me? I held my breath and remained motionless for as long as I possibly could.
 
The crinkly fringes of necessity came calling, my hold on reality being sprayed around like milt, as it were, from the comportment of my low-tide surrender to it. The train. The train. The steel rails’ hum’s hold on it all was coming apart, and so was I. I was buckling, an innocent bystander of my own wreck. “Crack to it!” I screamed through the steam. It only tore apart what was already shredded to mistakes and failed understandings. I thought, ‘Holy, holy, holy, holy…still. Holy. Still.’

The volley of color: plights of pickled light, elated greens and bustling brown, the off-blue temper of a burgundy whiff, violet pins poked through sheets of blackest shale, cascading saffron bruises. “I am making distinctions,” I offered, “between tones and notes, rough stuff and weaker knees, the whole’s part of the part’s whole, and there is no dealer in what’s been handed down to us, here, in the thin of this place-- just deals.” More things to flash and spin by, noticed or not; and we’re bound by life’s fragility, rent checks, shoes and socks, and the curvature of the earth to be who we are. Nothing here sticks around. Move over and stay put. Ahead goes back to behind and then right smack back into the middle of it all again. Missing’s for the swallows. I’m putting up with it all, again, until home is back’s only far and the range’s only is back home once again.

*
Addendum

Dollar Bill’s Auto (an exercise in complacency) 
  
Putting it to less of a test, then, we get reverberations in the most minuscule of realms. We get tethered speech patterns worn in uncomfortable embraces, coin-operated restrooms, meal-ticket vacations, and scam cruises to unimaginable islands. There goes my nothing. It’s washing what can’t not be clean. But the better stiffs get the upper lip all the time. Be numb and nimble. Play all the hardwires until the swooners get soft with their own song. Burn the unpaid bills. Set the alarm for midnight and make a run for the pool. Take whatever shakes out. Adjust your atmosphere of digestion to it, if you can. There’s a cranberry-colored dress with your name penciled on the tag. We’ve got until next afternoon, at least, to make a go without this. Everybody’s waltzing the plank, and we’ve got no time for intruders. Let’s make it not matter. Let’s burn the butler’s street clothes. The palms are swaying with it; you know. And it is not love that we’re asking for in the tangerine light. Best let the cops sort it out, from here on out. But, still, I make the best ice in town. The sidewalk tells my tale. Don’t let them pave over my name on 6th avenue. And, you ask, “How’s it going?” Streaked with dried drops of gutter water. Lassoed with inhibitions. Trained to a tell by horoscopes. Missing the top bottom on my favorite jacket. It’s all hurt messed up with a little sorrow. It’s all a backed-up toilet of regret. It isn’t any of what I’ve got. Trains lost in fog and God. Messages left and never retrieved. We are run-over and too unkind. Or maybe that’s just you. Under less and over more. Sky’s the color of laundry. Moon’s like rust on a can opener. I am not rushing to have it all. I am not who you won’t ever think that I am not. Philadelphia is still so far away. And the grass? Hell, the lawn is married to me, at least until the sprinklers come on.