We are all oxytocin junkies on an infinite dopamine loop
with everywhere to run to while hiding at the same time. It’s a getting that is
almost like an intoxicated yawn.
Eat my shorts.
Dangle me like a misplaced modifier over the train-wreck
sentence of my past.
Don’t get long with me.
Along, and properly, only, harried to the chase. Don’t think
about it, adult.
The stakes are, unbelievably, higher than you’d never think.
Drop a quarter. Go ahead. I’m definite that the moon’s only silver on loan from
the sun’s glint. I won’t pick it up. I Doublemint promise.
Drink your Gatorade.
Whatever’s drunk is drunk. Thimbles of wishes gone
rummaging, shambling south, and the whiff of perfume kills it, us, whoever.
Let us forget.
Sure. There are cases we could unmake.
Such as?
Cold-water flats and lunatic fringes, people on the verge of
desperation. The cacophony of trashcan lids. The gesticulations of war through
a hassle-filled night. I’m sawing my nightmares in two and letting the
morning’s coffee put them back together again. A chopped-off pinky finger
haunts my waking dreams. Who can eat at times like these?
My last three meals: caterpillar with tomato sauce, iguana
with rice and beans, steamed pumpkin leaves with sprinkled paprika.
What else?
I’m really good at washing my hands, and I punctuate with my
gut. Don’t get me finished. At a rust-around-the-edges point in a lessening of
assumptions, or whatever. Still, billiards is the only game I can’t play
well.
The walls of the asylum have grown heavy with barbwire.
There is no escape for a runaway crook. It is a look that never keeps from
running. And everything is away.
Beer for the gnats. Wine for the flies. Cigarettes for any
mosquitoes that have survived. We are, my companion, both plagued by boons to
our worst nature. Drift and harangue. Blowhard and get winded.
Let’s eat and be miserable, drink and be sad.
And by the time we clink glasses and wake up from all this
harrumphing, well, most folks will be on lunch.
Well, most folks ain’t like us. They don’t make geezers like
us no more. No they surely don’t.
That’s a relief. A dying breed of lonely assholes.
Henry Ford was an asshole. His kid Edsel got the worst of
it.
Not now. Listen. I got chalk on my back and a water pistol
at my side. Nobody’s taking names, especially not mine. It’s forgiveness
weather out. It’s a sweeter pill than most, but we all chew instead of swallow.
It measures distance by height and swoops the lens from seeing. I am not
sensible at all. We’ve got more planks to walk than’ll ever be made. The spaces
we get are gone one final time, right? The horror we witness is chiming in
closer all the while. You got the time? Hell, I don’t even own a watch. There
are too many cigarettes tucked away in the fireplace’s flue. Trust the money
you haven’t yet made; it’ll all odd out before the beginning. I’ve seen more style
in monkeys in hard-up places where everybody’s laid up for good, or worse. To
be the fluent badgering test of nobody-in-their-wrong-mind’s mettle. Truer
tests are not softer to lose. But we do. And, well, we don’t too. What’s gone’s
already begun. Also, people with mustaches should not have mustaches.
No. No. We’ve all got to keep dreaming better and better
every night.
I am special. I am delicate.
And cannibals only eat their enemies. Yes. It is all myth.
All of it. And we’ve got to prepare ourselves for the worst and the best and
the mediocre too. It remains a gamble just to pass gas or swat at a winged
insect.
It should be a source of great pride that we are who we are,
who we remain after all the pestilence and soul-crushing battery we’ve been
through.
Who are we?
Less than you’d suspect but more than you’d ever dare to
nightmare.
Perchance to.
We are foibles of our own loss’s moiety. We are reconfigured
rough drafts of inconsiderate mocking. The welkin’s striped with strips of that
same old damn silver that just might not be there in the wink of the man in the
moon’s cheese-wheel eye. But who are we to notice stuff like this? We’re busy
moaning over the sound of air raid sirens and ducking under tables for fun.
Keep the little kids out of the street. Choke up when life’s
got two strikes on you. Shorten up. Go the other way. Bunt and make a mad dash
for it. Never use cliché phrases like, “It’s a slippery slope,” when trying to
help somebody. Nothing’s as good or as horrible as you think. Give yourself the
time of night, even if nobody else will.
Like I was saying…
Cantankerous grumps like us weed the roses from the garden
with each breath. Clickers in a world of indefatigable clicking, endless clicks
leading to more clicks, links to other links, connections disseminating worry’s
over-stimulation to both cerebral hemispheres equally. All things to other
things to other things to yet other other things. Panic addicts. Lords of
minutiae’s ruins. Nobody even has time to forget, let alone remember
anything.
What?
Exactly.
So, there’s this guy, you see? And his name is, well, let’s
just say his name is Banjo, okay?
Got it.
So, maybe, perhaps, I’m just biding time, you know, as is my
wont, sitting around my office, right by the window by the street, and I’m
sitting there at my desk mostly just watching the sky change its clothes,
gawking at traffic lights and pedestrians, ruminating rather pleasantly about
the current condition of my less-than-honorable state of mind and place in the
world.
Let’s just say it’s so.
And so, this guy Banjo comes in thwacking away at stuff with
gripes and minty breath too, but, well, you don’t see me getting all sodden and
sentimental about any of it. It grows likes like ready-to-drop leaves. And
Banjo’s got not enough on his mind. Let’s just say that the duplex of his days
is getting shoddy and moan-worn. It’s no way to feel, but he does. Let’s not
face it at all; he’s groomed for worse things. But the sky is so clear that
it’s raining airplanes. How aren’t you? You know? It’s something doing for
nothing. And so Banjo goes and leaps all together, and it becomes foggy that
he’s down for somebody else’s count. Things for him are getting
down-to-your-last-pair-of-underwear bad, and the Laundromats in his head are
all closing up shop. I tell him, perhaps, “Banjo, keep it apart. You’re just
not what you don’t got.” And maybe it helps more than I’d intended it to. It
sops up what wasn’t left of his moldy aspirations. You see, the cloth Banjo’s
cut from is moth-eaten and raw-weather rough. His chair’s higher up than most.
The kind of guy whom you want to make soup for, you know? It must but it won’t.
It will but it don’t. Close it up. The tighter it doesn’t get, well, it might
get just as well. But what the hell are you going to do with a guy like that?
Banjo. Banjo. It sweeps the shivers from your coldest nights and spreads
ketchup over the rest of it. Pleading or not, it seems suitable enough for any
occasion that comes on around. Plus or running in. The eagle’s got a grin.
Don’t go having yourself a good day, now. You see?
Sure. Who couldn’t?
But most people don’t speak in overtures. Let’s smoke-signal
the masses with dashing dots of residual algorithms lost in the memories of a
payphone graveyard.
Or we could sit here and just smoke. There’s some notice
still left in these pixel-scarred eyes. We could be windless if we would.
If we would.
The convergence of all matter-- metaphysical or
astrophysical or geometrical or microbiological or nanotechnological, thought
or seen or felt, gray or chatoyant as it may or might not be-- is shrinking and
expanding at all times, all the time, over and over. And we are just part of
it. Nothing more or less. This has all happened already, an infinite amount of
times, and it has all yet to happen, also, an infinite amount of times again,
and also, again. There is no difference.
Whatever.
And you find yourself fleeing shapely hunches in whatever’s
begging to be you around 6:53 PM on a Saturday, alone except for music and
vodka.
Now you’re talking. Where’s my drink? Where’s the music?
Where’d all of my good times run on off to?
Nowhere. Nowhere at all.
You mean everywhere, right?
Of course.
Good. That-- at long last-- at least that, my fellow
asshole, is a damn good thing.
Yes. Yes, it is.
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