Walter left for Brunswick Bowl as the rain fell. “Knives.”
And then, “Daggers? Stilettos? A thousand pointy diamonds dropped on rubber, or some hoof-plunk patter,
some bubble-wrap plop. No. No.” It was counterintuitive to be thinking,
comparing, placing nouns around. Help recurred, left him stranded at the bus
station, no lettuce to go with his bread. It was just to get back, that’s all.
Another shift in territory, odious and remote, to return but never stay.
What’s left of the drizzle is car tires skidding over damp
cement. Permeable motion, a thistle’s prickly bract, and were it not for a
top-heavy equilibrium we’d all be plunging likewise. No. Not close.
The dark longs for more dark. Also, Walter’s brains got
junked, scrapped, sold for spare parts. This was after the lanes closed, and,
then, there was nowhere to leave for, or go to, or be from.
The potted plants. Sam The Guy. Walter getting needled by
the kids, again. Fish decomposing in the topsoil. “Brace somebody else.” Arrows
evidently pointing to closer objects, and, “Behaving like a plainclothes dope, like
in the midst of being whipped by Orion’s belt, like spitting towards the
gutter, like chewing tea leaves, like undeniable parameters of not being just
competent and content with it.” Sam The Guy. Yes. And. And. Yes, the potted
plants, how they grew and failed too. The tilt and flush of Walter’s busy
getting-by ways.
“Now I’ve got plenty of names to call myself.”
There were traffic stops to manage. Nouns to mispronounce.
Metal alloys had it made because of carbon, because of aluminum and iron,
because of composites, and because of rising temperatures and harder times. To
not belong was the newest way to beat the evens, like even in the dampest
drizzliest November of the soul too. Walter tried to say:
“We used to walk on beaches all the time, you know? There
was splashing stiffed with taped-down plastic ruffling in some mild wind. And,
that old terrible night. And, of course, that. Too, a clasping, a rig of surf
tapered with invasion’s lilt. Traipses not yet set, in the funding. Another
type of mailman, not on his way, early, and then young or under the kitchen
table, guitar-less, and the shoes, those too, and the On Switch flicked to
Always.
“What was it that we did? Whiffing, and then the coolness
came. That’s right. And about the other, in that order, questions of
obtuseness, subjunctive and moody, fluttered in the, what, corner. That’s it.
Round and toward the light, now. At difficulty, laboring with ease. Soda blue
in the rummy matters of those most not usual and sure. My love, it’s such a
random thing.
“What? Showing on, and off, in the routine’s unoccupied use.
Oil spreads the most pillow-less parts, tiny. The shells’ cut to the toe’s
forgiveness, wrong? It is impossible to relate. The ratings are for suckers and
off-duty potato-chip cops. Curt and somebody else’s everybody, or thing.
Sorry’s not calling anymore, now.
“And? My fish is a mother. Tell me that from a few kitchens
away, so. Dreamed to pastures fouler than these. Or the right that’s rigging,
and more than ever now, that is modern and wrong, all, and, all. My fish. My
love. The water’s gone uphill.
“Chisel my dreams into the tree trunks, still? It is ravioli
time. Or the dance might be ending without me. I am, grit, not so holy anymore.
Buy me breakfast so I can chase down the whole deal. The, Pontiac thunders,
balmy, into is gone. Lying beneath it, hunting Missouri’s moon still, open the
up, still, still. Lie. It pours done through a fist. Lots and little, without’s
holding court. Sun’s glassed in. Don’t give up on the snow. Drift a little,
small, on the radar’s blip, Glendale, and with it the silent-film stars talking
it over, over plain plans of bagel-less nows. My mouth’s where words go to die.
And so? And so the rest of us live, for a bit, and then go on to merry-less
ways, demure.
“Was it old timey cowboy songs? The rage of rest is ruined
with doves, with, too, grade-school charm and circling the living room’s
pasture. Pitted. Let’s rosebush the column to sleep roused in other places. Top
of the telephone wires to it all. My way’s all scruffy and mussed. I am not
that same monster, now, or, anymore. What is that that never that you’re never
supposed to do? Supposed to do. The second’s not the song, yet.
“What’ll we not do? Rail the way. Two not left. I haven’t
been around. Not so much. A new haircut, same old point of view. In the trying,
it all gets us, and time’s jogging around me, tilled to tissue, last the
remaining and then get on without it. Any slide will do. Court the wild, recall
the normal of this to the quaint of then. Minneapolis is raining for me. A
mansion flooded with waiting. It’s best to, not never to, run to, rather than
from. Or just not to be ever adored. Spiders on the wall. Robots on the pot.
Open to no west’s east, closed for all the norths of any old south.
“There it is, you, but this is, the looking, correct? Aside,
but from all that, like handholds dangling down from the grab rail of a subway,
just like little nooses. Is it passable, this what, to get in of it, out to
ruses and roses, also? This room’s inhabited by strange customers. Not working
around the job, and could the went tell? No ships leaving for in. Though the
coffee sippers are on strike, for worse. And there are no minds in the found
and lost collection. Mine’s unmade for good.
“Brush off to brushed, fumed lit to exhaustion that kicks
in, or the effects of little-missed berating, consolation the cure for offices
of the undergoing plain wilted crush of plumbed shallows. In restraint the
offer’s under the hedgerow, the tallest of all correspondence gone dull,
steady, cool. In near harrumphing, go. I don’t choose much, and the list is
common, worn above the heart, that one through six last, it is believed, so,
possible and run to be given out, in, for the very same miniscule amount of
trouble. Let’s pretend that we’re brave, at most, and push a shopping cart
through it all. Even the radio-selected come rooting home in the television’s
roar.”
Then Walter said, “Call me Isaiah, or Shirley if you will.
I’m not below it, but certainly not above it. Perhaps close to nipple-high with
it, is all.
“But shit, there I just go, on and off, taking up the rear
in funeral processions and methodically knocking people’s hats off again.
“And so it comes to this:
“A coldwater flat with a bottle opener beneath the bathroom
sink. This is what happens. There’s no window screen, ten floors up, and the
heat’s scrambling in with the flies and the moths. The stink of it all is
tremendous. Night comes on fast, and the streetlights pop up like a thousand
sparks of flint, and I’m alone with, which is fine. The guy next door’s having
a contest with some other poor sap to see who can talk the loudest. It’s all
politics and showmanship and bullshit. I race the brake lights of the traffic fouling
up the street below with my eyes. It’s something to be doing. I’m running out
of ways to be me.
“A Pepsi-cola smile ribs at my baser instincts. And
believing’s just another way to not get by very well at all. Figueroa’s asleep
with the lights on. 7th street is on the make. And we’re all
anything but bashful around here. Prop me up at the door and get the money from
me, sure. The girls are colder than my freezer, and my insides are drowned
trout. The night’s lounging around with a smirk clipped from The Personals. I
get it. I do. I’m ruled out, thumbed to death, and broke to top it all off. For
the record, most everything else is broken too, even the Do Not Disturb sign.
Hell, the heater’s the only thing that works right.
“Worm in to it, buddy. Let’s forget our laughs and trouble
the ceiling for a light. I don’t rust so well in the gut. Over the sun and
lying low beneath nobody’s moon. Whatever chases and doesn’t stick around.
Where the rain don’t go, that’s a place that keeps showing up and off for the
likes of one last sucker dangling from a street sign, just like me. Burning
holes through what we used to be, it is rare and chancy, and it gets along just
so alright. The echoes in this place are about enough to drive anyone to
madness.
“The Hollywood sign like un-struck matches in the distance,
as the smog bellows in on mediocre dog feet, and I’m willing away my demons
with a paper cup of whisky. The helicopter noise is the same as always. The
children yip and the ruined houses rot, and the music of the street ricochets
and rackets its way through a few stiff ones. The Chinese food I had for
breakfast put up a good fight in my gut, but it didn’t end well for it, or for
me. I know she’d’a smoked the lights out of this place, if it’d do. All the
pleases have left the dark on again. And we’re wired with money for better
things not up ahead. You can’t see it, so, here’s the deal, or there it isn’t.
In the pleading, everything lies close. Do not stiff-arm my instincts for
self-destruction just yet. Hell, here we don’t go. Not just yet.
“Testing out the hardest parts of loss, checking for worth
beneath the pillow. It is sunnier to be leering at dead neon signs. Often is
the wonder of now.
“It’s all a load of old socks. Let the antelope hunters go
bill the vets for stuffing. It’s not instinctual, basically, to sit beneath
wall-mounted elk horns twisted into each other like leaf-less tree branches. It
is something that is just done. Not so that you’d pick apart the Max Capacity
signs. For if the music keeps this up, well, the neat business-suit happiness
will still reign, but something’s still far from lacking. The polished
silverware shine of black, it, though helping, dictates chilled-vodka
smoothness to the flashing beachfront news. I am only hardly found out, in
typewritten testaments, in wonder’s gall, a simple ache gone squashed to a
whine.
“Rise and sin. It seems every time I check somebody’s
yelling, ‘All aboard!’ Or that’s where goes gone on to. Compassion’s gotten
somewhat musty, here. The mirror makes up its own music, but nobody’s dancing
back to it. The brunt of the hammering’s been done. To us? For us? Or would
that be from? What matters is that it doesn’t.
“There is an earring in my mustard soup.”
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