And A Ring Made Out Of A Spoon

“I just can’t believe somebody like you’d like the company of somebody like me. There must be something god-awful wrong with you.”

 “Hey, leave the Groucho Marx jokes to me, will you?”

“I’m just a hangnail without you, Baby.”

“I tells you. You’re a lot to look at. Really, you are.”

"Pass the skunk, please, you stinking spotted weasel.”

"Somehow it’s not better, you, you, you-- like singing, sort of. The hog-nosed dreams of better den-aloners. Tasks not awaiting your completion, on to other dawns.”

“A little tad tiny bit of schadenfreude for you, there. You see, it’s not copious enough to be weaned from spinach dip like this. You’ve got to make the worst of it before better things just go popup and like appear right on up ahead. Besides, a comedian is only funny in public.”

“To know things is to not know things. I halved an apple for us. And don’t worry about serpents or anything like that. Really. I put things where they go. It’s habitual, really. Really.”

“I’m rapt by it all.”

“Wrapped up in it all, more like. So’s that’s the force, perforce, that jets, that books it, that scrams for the lie’s only truth. We’re just lounging around for meddling purposes only. The cause rends the garments from the naked will of try. But you already guessed at that, I’m sure.”

 “Oh, so here we don’t go again. Wearing a hole in the mat at death’s door. There must be other boulevards of discontent to ruin ourselves on.”

 “Capitulate. Go for it. I won’t hold either of us back, or forward, for all that, or for what matters, most or least. I need a fucking bib, damn it. What a way to be finishing up this here business of living. From four to two to three. Shit. I need more than any drink’ll do.”

 “From the glistening edges of survival, the ponderosas calling, the cheap-labor smiles, the curtain makers, the snouted and ill hung; and of note, too, the roustabout nature of all this kittening around the outskirts of reneged philosophies. Sense? Sense is not ours to make do with, or without. The rain’s running out of right, right out of time, lessening the dull impact of your brain, of your mettle’s charm and besotted charisma; and lastly, too—all apostrophes aside—the curvature of brand-name sadness o’er fields of copper-lit bullshit.”

“Why are we all such assholes?”

 “The eternally posed question. Perhaps some doing-unto-others stuff about it. We are who we project, not who we wish to be. And if it’s just a ho-hum distraction to keep ourselves fooled about what’s really ticking all sourly patched together in our little own personal upstairs. But, then again, I, like anybody else, have my moments.”     

 “Pouter.”

 “Well, so that just spanks the gee whiz right out of me. So long Marianne. I’m off to the war. Be back later than supper’ll last.”

 “What’s it all for?”

 “Experience. Gravitas. The boners of circumstance. We check our flagrancy at the coat rack upon arrival. Nothing to get or be gotten by. The air’s washed with dead wishes. Let’s floor it. I’m pooped.”

“We’re all commercial addicts. Anyway you’ll never look at it. Disgust is ours alone by nature. And the shadows about these pieces aren’t as lugubrious as you’d think.”

 
“Pieces of shit-- we are, that is.”

“It’s cereal time in America. But us? We’re all getting soggier and soggier by the minute. Just a sour, rank odor wafting its way through the warped façade of getting up to face the day again, and again, and, yes, we should hope, many more agains—if we’re lucky.”

“Soldier on through it, compeer. I can see the ice cream written on the sky, and it is dripping down to us at more than a trickle. Let’s get it while it’s cold. Go ahead, lick. Don’t be so damn brave that you can’t supplicate yourself to something, something that is, of course, larger than any ‘you’ that you’d ever imagine.”

“Hit CAPS LOCK for me. I’m in the mood for being loud and bold—at least in appearances.”

“But still lazy in the direct action of actual accomplishment. Okay. I get it. I’m not wrong, and I’m not correct. I stand wronged and corrected, though. I really very much do.”

“Better than lying, still.”

 “So it’s so. But I’m really not that kind of gal. I do want to go in for all that jazzy schmoozing. I really do. There’s something livable about that sort of glamour and fakery: a tucked away joy, maybe, something that wraps presents for strangers and plays hooky from real life. I don’t know. I ain’t rightly what you’d call a disciple of gilded sorrow. My stupid haughtiness betrays me every time.”

 “You. You. You. It’s something that won’t twist so well on its own. A splash of it? Maybe. Or a dash-sized dollop. A wheelie done for nobody to notice. Ah, forget it. No blooms around these parts. Just gutter water and flesh wounds. Just me and these here banana trees. The shade give me what I need: a respite from wonder.”

 “A wisp of blind courage too, perhaps?”

 "There’s no telling, only saying.”

 “In too shallow. The take’s what gets you, in the middle, or around it.”

 
“Throw a paperclip at your partner; watch the world not go around. Huff and rampage. Get distressed over the most picayune of little things, or just enjoy the tiny nice ones that don’t come around nearly often enough when they do happen to dance on your shoulder’s chip. Being unhappy is not a team sport. Let’s moon a hummingbird. Drop a deuce in the garden and vamoose. This thinly wattled together world of ideas only dabbles wry coats of splendor with crannies and fissures of self-indulgent moans. I, myself, am a sty on the environment’s eye, forever wishing for more than I should ever want, or get.”

 "Passengers saying goodbye to the ships of their present, we ride softly in the dutiful light of the bronzy moon. Away. Away. But to dreamland? Nope. We’re better than that, then, right?”

 “You’d be a prima donna not to learn from your rights and wrongs. Just go have fun in the big, tiny, fat, thin circus of it all. Strive to be generous and kind in all strokes of happiness and health. Or just take the elevator. The stairs’ll still be there in the morning, you know? And you’ll be less light in the headlamps of what’s roving around for your soul’s capacity to make pie out of mashed murk and grated doom.”

“For? Or ‘in,’ as in ‘of’?”

“Blight. Nothing but blight as far as the eye won’t see. Caving-in esteem crumbled to bounty’s unnecessary necessity. Paw tentatively at the ruling structures of all these geopolitical landscapes all you’d like. The odd thing about your fecklessness will be your puissance to bow to it, to give in and up to whatever bickering it’s got itself caught up in for the night.”

“I’m a roving orbital satellite to all of your copycat fashion sense. So. Let’s call it a morning and stiff-arm some pedestrians while we ransack the honeycombed lives of the moderately well-to-do. Raze the condos. Make way for the raised fists of jubilant suckers out to outdo the do-gooders’ no-good sense of entitlement. Coyly holy, as it were, we are merely racketeers in the meager flash and hurry of DON’T WALK signs.”

“Lah is my only di-dah.”

“Recoup whatever difference it won’t make. Not that 'ever' is a place to travel beyond, sadly, as it were, in the janky washed-out rub spin-cycling time’s honey, slower than sweet, as it were— or were not.”

 “Laughing’s for the dogs. Or was that Gods? Either which of ways, we’ve got the equivalent of kindergarten diplomas and are hunkered down with beware’s bad taste. Drop it. Seriously. Drop it like it’s cold.”

“And if we lunge together, if we scrape the marble from the countertop, grease up our elbows and slide headfirst into bashful appetites, and what the crows don’t know the feathers will show. So, put up your dukes, Mr. Rogers et al., I’m punched free from the paper bag of luckier hardships than anybody’d guess. I am the ‘at’ to all of your ‘where.’”

“Double-handedly wrung from the clothesline, you’re dripping all the good stuff—the gooey and rich and wonderful stuff of somersaulting through bitter restraint’s pumping iron and rat-a-tat-tat.”

“So what? I’m warm blooded enough to get the chills. You’re the ship-jumper anyway.”

 “Tell all the others whom you hold in your arms that some one-day I’ll never come back for you. Down we go to an icy grave. Down. Down. Down to the deep’s deepest deep.”

“Shall we part then? Shall we shrivel down to size and retract all correspondence from the record?”

“Busted.”

 “Ha!”

 “Guitars weren’t made for bastards like us. We’re too serious and we’re too silly too. The wind stinks with the gruel of self-satisfied plops in a penny-less well of who we never could face being, what we’ve always been without letting on about to the rest of the patricians with whom we ate carrots and flowers.”

“Practice and practice and practice. Love’s for the rat catchers and the right fielders. Hats on to it. That’s what you’ll never catch me saying. That’s not that, right?”

 “Left.”

"Fuck you.”

 “Thank you. Finally. Some sense to make up with.”

 “Oh, oh, oh, uh-oh, oh, uh, um, um…oh?”

 “The fish don’t got eyes for it. The ocean won’t swim this way. Moon’s on the make. City lights grown dim. A hue never had. A mask’s cover. The ashes spill. The world’s tilt. I know nothing about any of it. Crown me with the craziest hair on the planet. I’m in love, fuckers. What’re you going do about it? Huh?”

“Nothing. Not a thing. Not one single ‘nope’ or harried carry away while my fingers crush what’s left of a little life I’ve known way too well. Up until now. Down about then. Yes. I mean, ‘What?’”

“That’s that.”

 “A wrap?”
 
“Something like it, sure. Something. Nothing will keep us from something. Pewter’s my only cover, like some paladin utensil groping for the stars but getting only soggy granola and rust. I’ll either give up or give up trying.”
 
“Kudos, ass munch. I’m tuba’d to remorse for you. Play sweeter things, shinier things with the squeamish notes of long’s got.”

“Shinier. Yes. Nothing here is bright enough.”

 
“Spoon me out of it. One. One. One, two, three, four. One. Spoons are for chumps like us. But it’s not up to us to care. Spoon away, motherfuckers. I’m not only done, I’m never finished.”
 
“…”