The city’s cuticles needed some pushing back, in a slued rip
in the fabric of chance, that is. And we performed any miracles that we could,
less the wiser than we’d been, coughing into the play of sunlight on dust motes
across hallways. Hard-to-not-look-at temples, airy witnesses in the hangar’s
foyer, we harvested. It gets to the point where you don’t trust yourself in the
bathroom alone. There are boll weevils in the works.
I got used to saying, “Any famous last words, Mr. Moth?”
before I clapped my hands to scare away the pigeons.
The rueful line cook shouted, “Hot ziggetty-damn!”
Most of the marigolds were moon-less behind the steel sashes
of beef-jerky tinted opaque windows.
A joke was made, unwittingly, by a sandcastle barterer:
“Well, let me tell you. There’s room for one less in Cher’s maternity dress.”
Then, “I’d kill my computer but it’s got all of my memories on it.”
Her hair smelled like campfire and her lips tasted of
dandelion stems. She’d plant a gas can and up would sprout a gas station.
Betty Ford didn’t have a thing on her Total-with-a-capital-T
ways. Not a thing. Trust me. The elevator operators and funeral directors all
knew her name.
I told her, “You’re my go-to gal.”
She told me: “I’d rather watch an intentional walk than look
at you. Going around begging for high fives. It reeks of quince and mortar.”
She was never done washing the campfire and diesel out of
her hair. We got around to some unusual business, at first, and then it was all
down-in-the-ground stuff after that. Somehow I thought, ‘No more dipsomaniac
nightmares for this guy.’
In the cantilevered silence an almost booming voice lay down
to the occasion by saying, “The class that won’t fight for itself remains
watered down and sulking.”
I thought, ‘Me? What do I do? I just get drunk and sit by my
window all day, watching stupid people do even stupider things in the world
outside.’
An indentation waited patiently for the glass-bubble-topped
spaceship to come home to roost before it started any of this sentence-making
business. Gaffs and strutting of glib stuff were left to the asphalt thieves
who wrote homilies in still-wet sidewalk squares instead of names. (Things such
as: “Cut the serifs off of all that shit.” “Don’t worry. Nobody’s going to find
me. I’ve got my cow shoes on.” “Get a little runt of silvery glazed-eyed
who-didn’t-it in the placard’s sense of, ‘Look! Or, don’t.’” “Clasp to it and
hear where it don’t get you.” “I am not made of gorgonzola or henna.” “Dump a
cask of corpse-flower juice into the mixture.” “Evade the hopes and the hurt of
the matter.”)
Music was ruined by one final hurrah.
The song went something like, “Everybody cares about nobody.
Nobody cares about it all. Livelier plants do the dirty work, and Mondays keep
coming around.” It was just catchy enough to succeed for a day or so. Then most
of the darners of socks got tired of being kept sewers, and the tread of the
weeks became too worn to leave a mark. All was perfumed rubber gloves and
Siamese gophers who screamed things at window-buying tourists like, “Keep my
canvas clean!”
Sun jostled and soldered its shadow-casting way through
ray-less speckles of spangled, chipper-than-thou appetites. Questions like,
“Did I run in the wrong direction?” were not asked. Also, beside most of the
points were slogans like, “We’re All Only Human Here.” And, “It Doesn’t Matter
If It Does.”
I made a milquetoast ray gun out of graying matter-of-fact
statements.
I pointed it at a sycamore and yelled, “Move! You are not
bored enough. Go ahead. Leaf! Get bored. I single dare you.”
The song didn’t cease. It went blubbering on, again, and
sometimes yet again.
“She screams Do you love me? back in the bowery and we’ve
heard all this a few times before.
Would you lie low love in all time’s hunched love under the
weight of your fear?
Even the rats are going all bats for the way that you stand
in the shower.
Deal me the face cards Try all the race cards Keep the lids
in your eyes.
Right the ship’s wrongs in all of these songs that move you
to be just like them.
Come close my longing under the awning of truth spread
thinner with wine.
We’ve got more to chance and a pawn left to dance in the
dreary hours that we’re left in to behave.
Trade me a dime for all of the times that could’ve been
would’ve been back then.
She sings Would you care? in the back of her lair with
horn-rimmed sights on her nights.
Will the time come love when all of our laments love will
get us a buyback on being tired?
The kids are not friendly to those come a lately into the
lone winces of now.
A full-body fling to the bastard machines lets those up
above know our kind.
Be not a waiting in all hesitating in worries and rushes of
song.
We’ve got our places to fill in the spaces that keep running
out of ourselves.
She whispers so concretely in another’s arms so completely
What’ve we got left to win?
I tell her it’s rain and the evening’s insane and the moats
of my love have run dry.”
And then it’s on to bathrooms by the ocean, the ones that
stink of briny urine and camphor with a whiff of sour B.O. and suntan lotion.
The pungent breath of it all, standing still, there, sand clogging the drain of
the coldest shower in the world. That certain taste in the mouth like sea
urchin mixed with hay and coal tar. And then it’s off to other wondering, other
pickaxes of worry that slice through that sea-won calm that’s managed to stick
for only as long as the sand lasts on skin. Everyone’s laughing. All of the
gravy-stained clouds huddled up above like dead soldiers awaiting a proper
burial. There is no “you” here. So the walk’s long is the miler’s short in the
wake of crushed soda cans and Ruffles and Doritos bags. The walk’s uphill too.
It gets rougher the farther it goes.
And to think, me, with that big crooked grin, laughing at
the cigarettes gone dead in the breeze. And to think. Or, perhaps, not.
Posts
