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.
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