Part 1, Jack’s Letter
A riot in the gutters. A spirit in the bath. No more rules
to follow. No more afternoons. The sun’s in the bucket. There’s no rain in the
pail. No prayers for the day to last. Stacked and stuck, iron rusted to all
hell. In-between tempers. The water’s no good for diving into. The whole
ordeal’s left for the suckers and the saps. Under the spill.
When I’m famous nobody will care.
The oldest news on the planet. It wrecks on the cabbage
garden. It spots the deserting caretakers, the undercards, the waylaid and the
ego bruised. Spurred off and not left. All the horses left to race only
themselves. Fallen to the underbrush. Disdained in the moonlight. Caps on.
Deliveries to the side.
Who’s going to bring me barley and kale salad when I’m
famous?
Who’ll sneak me out away from the crowd?
When I’m famous, who will buy my shoes?
Neat, or next to it, beside all dullness and points, lying
smashed on the center divider of life’s avenue. Deserving or not, a lie’s
courtesy clamped to a fire hydrant’s chain. A bow too low. Into the ruled-out
once again, with fervor and lack. The warped planks of a dying piano’s last
song. Set the bait. Trap what’s not left.
In order to do away with due process, in order to step up
traffic stops, in order to scream, “I am not the phantom of any damn opera!”
Met with no care at all corners, in the dangerous haven of love’s overture to
dislike, on furious plains of farewell, in canned-mushroom awe, over the
kindest of cruelest years, of liens and loans and overstocked baronial
infatuation. It is well. It is never so good.
Quicker!
It’s so damn unlikely that the sway of us will do the job. I
faked sleep for the remainder of the morning. Not even wishing to ponder the
task of finding the bathroom light, I lay there, bound in the blankets, and I
worried about everything.
No suit. No tie. No service.
You are going to have to deal with some hard things, some
things that are difficult and upsetting. You are not as beloved as you think.
Nobody spends their time pining over you. There are no letters in the mailbox.
There’s only toilet paper in the trees. Wishes are bullshit. The world will not
stop and wait for me. Stick. Move. Let life whiz right on by. That’s it. Get to
it. The rain and the swallows and the prostitutes will not miss you.
Look. You are sensible enough to make sense. Look. Just look.
I’m having all of it. Cloudy or kicking up dust. Winter’s
hand-me-downs on loan for another summer. The loudest of all cares wins nothing
but a rotting stump of what it could never be. Hungrier, at last, then, as it
were, stumbling became the norm.
I enjoy the way you comport yourself. You’ve got a
winner-take-none personality. It suits the measly parts of you. It creates
advantages in the woodwork of what being yourself takes. The faucet’s got a
drip in it. Pharaoh’s blow smoke. It’s all a wash. All of it. Groping along by
the wayside, stifled and moaning for moaning’s sake. It is not the weariness
that behooves notice. It is ruled-out charm and copasetic wiggling. It is
under-priced solidity, vicious whispering, and a holy tone to all conversations.
Murderous eyes and a gloomy touch. The difference is not what a day makes. One
just never knows what other people are going to dislike.
(In the mood of someone missing at the table)
She vomited in the silence of redwoods. No cars were
passing. Moss was all over things, like fallen trees and their stumps. I was
feeling about as well as a wet dishrag. Things were not shaping up. The city
seemed as far away and as unlikely as love. There were some assorted vultures
doing some circling up above, near the tops of the ancient trees. Just
every-other-day people, we were alone.
The hurt’s hard to handle. We are disfigured by it,
internally. Wonderfully dull, we move on. And we leave the rest to the canaries
who’ve never even heard of a coalmine. Driving’s for the daisies.
I need to not need anyone.
There were sirens then. There were tirades and telescopic
fortunetellers. There were highly personal laughs in public, but never in
private. There were some of some things and a lot of other things.
I used The Force. I used The Force to bring her back to me.
We kissed on board a spaceship. We kissed under the sea. I used The Force to
force her back, and then I forced her on away.
Sitting here
with the curtains drawn a bit,
showing some street, a glitch of car, a hint of sidewalk,
a row of pigeons scoping out nothing,
skimpy tree branches bereft of leaves.
Salt on the windowsill.
Dust scrawled on my favorite shirt, floored.
The typewriter’s keys are obstacles to overcome
or be done with for good,
or worse.
Terrible times on the horizon’s murk.
I get a load of nothing.
Sitting here
in pajama bottoms and a dress shirt,
worriedly stomping and stalling through this.
Every other everywhere is not this here’s somewhere,
at least not quite yet.
There was no need to have an ending at first. But it became
apparent at some dutifully put standard of derivation between time and lapses
of it that one would need to occur: an ending. And so it was.
Call me anytime,
Jack!
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