some more from "The Breakneck Speed of Time Present"

At least I can blow my nose with impunity around here. These arrestingly red and mousy brown shapes keep yesterday’s makeup in check, like lipstick on the sip-spout of a coffee-cup lid, always there, attaining something, getting rid of circumstances, minding business, or splitting the difference between preciousness and endearing charm. A reprobate who wonders aloud about the condition of what he dons from the hurricane of clothes on his floor. That’s clingy and self probing. You made yourself think stochastically in the résumé style of fathers without sons. Last New Year’s Eve I screamed custard to the cicadas. Got away with it too. Playing the horn now. It’s bed posts made of glory, blindingly high, sofa’d to myself, crossed out with permanet marker, in a bind and worn with pride. Organ music in the shadows weeping towards light. Attaining is crucial to being rid. Gold and gray. Rust dripping from clouds that are like mashed thumbprints smudged on the dishwater sky. All the peasants were busy buying houses while the rich drank their souls for aperitifs. I don’t blame the poor for income gaps, and we’ve got discount retailers to keep in mind. Fair enough to the weather, at least. Bluffy overtures blinding a tincture of horizon that sponges and kicks dirt. A distressed algal bloom. We make pies out of pieces of American bones. Let me get finished. There. It’s a moving time that we spend dressed in letters. Troughing through thoughtlessness in the bristling chill of winter’s worst. Make-shifting the campered homes of born-again loyalists and hardened pamphleteers. I am comforted by ill will. Advertisers are buying space in my dreams. Slow in getting up, the flowers cotton-candy pink and drooping, referential rain spoiling the taste in my mouth and underhanding pebbles at my knees. I’m calling bluffs and wheeling mercy-first into the slow lane. We’re just people, and we’ve only got so much space to loiter around in or linger out into. A reach for something that’s long gone. Mornings were for motorcycles and garbage men. Showerings of petals swarming and sailing in spirals like some lavish Busby Berkely dance number. Best were the least lonely times. We must’ve strained the last of whatever mercy was left. It’s soppy and brisk. The days were dummy bullets shot from an air gun into the non-existent face of good cheer. Freedom faced itself in the mirror and promptly passed out. We held tight to restive motions, badly recorded happenstances, and the cured air of sliced rhubarb pie. A grappling hand set itself into a weaving gesticulation that seemed off and somehow disappointed. Overhead we overheard a private conversation between God and a used car salesman. I copied their instincts down on the back of a supermarket receipt. I instructed myself to see beyond the spell of tomorrow’s stench. The boys all spill their guts to the girls with a toetap of Morse code. A plainclothes elevator operator made eyes at a few secretaries on their way to an oyster bar for lunch. Mansions sank. Let’s move to a spaceship and live in outer space. I believe that champagne has the ability to laugh. The grass in my head is greener than green. Lend me a courtship and I’ll kiss the gravel in your voice. Curls of spit hung like bougainvillas in your heart, too. Just a strange urge to exchange moods with the shorter haired among us. The glass spills out cloudy moonlight. Safes break and crack themselves. I muster the hassle to hunker down once again, until the rain comes. It’s not just one thing, and it’s not just wrong, and it doesn’t belong only to you. A blown call comes down through the wires, and we all pass in the slow lane sometimes. Fly back home. An ingression. Good enough to be home. Walking home alone in the rain. Homely stakes that pay off only when you’ve left for good, and then it doesn’t matter, ugly enough for now, and the moon’s iris is open for business as long as the sailors pick up the tab. Nobody’s bad at everything. Broken windows show what remains.

**********

The rearview was bent crookedly, and it dangled a Polaroid of two scruffy women in cowboy hats. They looked worn and tired. Dents and scuffs and scratches pocked the dash’s PVC surface. The red leather seats were shoddy, sporting wens and blebs, rips and tears stitched up like wounds with white thread. Into the brown tufted carpet fibers of the floor mat were engraved the rubber white letters: S O B. The girl liked how it felt to trace the letters with her shoe’s welt. There was a smoothness to it, something that ran counter to most of what was left of what she had to feel or know now. A crack was spiderwebbing out from a stray rock’s pit in the windshield’s glass. The radio was playing Drivin’ Nails In My Coffin by Ernest Tubb. The man driving was not paying any attention to the music, or the windshield’s crack, or the floor mat, or the girl in the passenger seat. He was giving all of his attention to the road, which snaked and whipped and skidded the tires of his pickup something rare and complex as he loosely handled the wheel from the bottom at about 7 and 4. He thumbed the radio’s knob until it quit making noise. The chassis plunked and bucked along with a steady vibration that never really quite started or stopped. He flicked the vents down, and they trickled a sickly whine as bugs kept up their constant assault, one by one splattering their bodies onto the glass. The small pickup drove on.

*************

The smell of melted plastic bags, dried nacho cheese dip, a few burnt-out scented candles (of the Cire Trudon variety: tuberose and orange blossom), day-old cereal mush (Frosted Flakes gone soggy in sour milk), wood rot, rancid beef in crusted stiff noodles, a whiff of mildew and musk, mush-imploded apples, old board games, a trashcan overflowing with snot-caked wads of toilet paper. I move with a pebbled texture. It’s like those building-facade squares carved beneath tinted yellow-orange windows you’d see in a lot of 70s-style architecture. That’s really the only way to describe it. I’m moving gingerly. I’m sliding here and there and being slick about my motion. It’s grainy though, as I’ve said, and I’m doing it out of respect for the living. The pungent sting of foot odor: a thick, cheesy vinegar-- almost ammonia-like. Creeping around, but doing it smoothly, as the task requires, careful not to disturb the contents or occupants of the place. Telling time by the quality of the shadows smothering the kitchen wall where grease splats and oil marks abound, pocking the painted-over-too-many-times surface like a Mark Tobey. Listening is also essential here, so I am trying to hear. It’s not as quiet as I would’ve expected. Hoses going somewhere, a sizzle in the wires outside, pattering feet skipping by on the sidewalk too, and in here it’s rumblings from above. Somebody upstairs with a dog that likes to scamper back and forth, trapped in a small studio apartment. Juice containers popping in the fridge. I am kidding myself still that I can do this. It’s my battle against ennui, drowsiness, lack of motivation. My feet will not shuffle; they will smoothly slide instead of skid. The hallway’s carpet’s gray-pink, neat, tiny, hard spirals littered with fingernail clippings, crumbs, dust. I scramble up against the wall there. I try to blend in, make myself a one-dimensional shadow, a thin ghost who does not really exist; not here; not this here where I am. It doesn’t work. I am going. I am going. Nowhere. Nowhere. Look. This is my expression. I am wearing it. I am losing it. I am standing here in what’s left of myself. Worn away. And out. Look. Look away. To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow’s still today. Still. Sometimes it’s more suitable to be clever than wise.

******************

The leaves of the potted plants, ferns perhaps, were fluttering in a slight breeze coming through the propped-open door of the Chinese restaurant. Henry was dining alone there. He was sipping his tea, poking at a piece of soy sauce-soaked broccoli with one chopstick, and staring absently at nothing with his head slightly cocked to the side like somebody in the throes of deep concentration or study. But Henry wasn’t thinking about anything. He was just staring. The waitress swooshed by delivering dumplings to another table where two violently old men were lunching. A certain character of puce was tasseling from the table edge in a deliberate swirl, and the chairs, which were a stiff violet and hearty, reflected skips and horns of light from their silver legs. Corncob yellows were pestering the grease and shoe scuff of the floor’s morganite pink ceramic tiles in splintering arrays of dyadic clumps and lilt-bent streaks. Settling into one of the potted plant’s dirt was a very large fly, which was almost the size of a june bug, and Henry watched it bounding about, its wings’ sound an electric motor’s pule. Barely audible, Henry mumbled not quite to himself, "Everything about my life is humdrum." This thought was shortly scuttled, tossed into the deep airy place he’d carved out of his soul to bury such things. He rubbed a hand over his flattop, thinking of how it had a similar texture to a toothbrush’s soft bristles, thinking this and then not thinking it, again, and just intuiting it, the thinking of it, in a way that didn’t involve thought, which process almost guaranteed more thoughts to come that would help him think his way out of this and start not thinking once again, therein producing more thoughts and thoughts about those thoughts delivering unto him ways to hold off thinking for what he now could conceive of as being a thoughtless state, though such a state would doubtless be something he’d be contemplating while he was in it, as if spying it from the outside of his brain; the impossibility of which would tangle and grind his thought patterns to a fine dust of dullness.

A crab in a fish tank at the back of the place was up on its hind legs, dancing and waving its claws to the x-mas music cranking out over the restaurant’s speakers. Henry was sitting there (one of three persons eating at the establishment), now sipping some tea (jasmine green) and staring at the pictures of birds, winged emperors, and the thin spindling-out tree branches on the wall next to him. Across the way was a wall all of mirrors, which was smudged up high, strangely enough, and he wondered how somebody’d got up there to smudge it. Henry thought about how the owner of the place was a slick type. The guy must’ve really thought he was foxy. He had white hair and a big pink smile, a well-ironed stiff-collared button-down white shirt, pressed black pants, pointy bowling ball-black shined shoes. He knew what he was doing. He took orders and bossed people around. It wasn’t a bad gig. Henry was not slick or foxy. He thought of himself as being, well, humdrum and lazy.

“There must be certain restrictions on freedom lest people become too free and therefore unable to make decisions which paradoxically will leave them less free. Nobody wants to be forced to do anything, but also, it turns out, they wouldn’t want to be forced to make a decision on what it is they want to be free to do, which inversely affects they ways in which they’d opt to be free, mainly from or of, whatever it is they’ve now got way too much freedom, and too many ways, to choose.”

He wasn’t exactly speaking. More like puffing words softly, to nobody. His tongue lumpy and thick, expression blank, eyes like saucers. Everything in his persona was deliberate, done only after much forethought about the matter; even the tilt of his head was planned meticulously in advance. Struggles ensued with shelving items one at a time, in the orderly way he did it.

“Most people want to be liked so much by others that they overdo it, this act they put on to make others like them, and therefore are always disappointed in who they are, this “self” that they put on like a clown suit, around other people. It’s almost like they have to lie to themselves that they’re not doing this in order to trick themselves into being okay with doing it, as if that thing they become around others is really just an extension of who they really are on the inside, when in reality, if they really noodled about it, they’d see that this is most absurdly not the case.”

The tiles on the ceiling were keeping Henry entertained enough. There were red mazes inside of blue and yellow circles, and some intaglioed fancy stuff glittering like rhinestones. He hadn’t been able to find a newspaper available for purchase nearby, so had been reduced to this feeble state of staring at the objects around him while he attempted to stab the broccoli and lift fried rice to his mouth: a forest of hardback chairs growing wild around the plates and napkined chopsticks of empty tables, fish tanks of thick-lipped fish producing burp-like gurgles, a dusty old fan teetering on its last legs back and forth, a waitress scribbling numbers in Sudoku squares by the back desk, the thick maroon hair of dust-deviled rugs covering various oval spots on the floor.

Gushed to a glaze’s spasm, almost bent to shape, there, and so he burped a change into the guilloche of plasmal considerings lured to an understanding that was hedged at best (he knew it; like always). The situation worried itself out, and Henry, who was still engaged in a fencing duel with the épée-less broccoli, now was, for some reason that eluded his understanding and powers of explanation, imagining his brain as a Jack-in-the-Pulpit producing poisonous thoughts for berries, all enclosed in a spathe of tedium browning towards worry. He couldn’t stop eating the berries.

*********************

“If I had the chops to like guess at what was porridging up in that head of hers there, well, that’d take a better kind of guy than I’ve ever been willing to be. That’s not, well, that’s not saying that, like, I don’t care or have a inkling to it as well, but, or, well, if I could like count on my instincts for things of this nature it’d, well, it’d make a clown out of my emotional being, that who-it-is that gets to tell me that who-I-am for the time I’m allotted here for being this person that I guess I’ve sort of like grown into being. That guy? This guy? He’s an asshole. He’s a pussy.”

*******************

The days carried sun along with them for bit, shopping around for decisions with a basket of leaves and migraines toted too for what representationally at least could be called living, or would be if it weren’t for marginal stakes in the blurted suddenness of things. Why weren’t more people capable of showing love to each other? It wasn’t bad. It was this longitudinal error in the murky loot of what wasn’t being stashed or stowed away for days less bright and burgeoning as this one that seemed to heft the tragedy of closeness and arranged (though borrowed) togetherness of the lasting (for spurts) sort. Oracles told bees to shut the hell up and get on with honeymaking. A red and gold plaid suit was rended to shreds by two line cooks who were having an argument over who’d make a better Best Man for one of their buddy’s wedding. Mist was all over the place in the mornings. Strange moods were occurring over breakfast. People began taking longer showers. Phones rang only twice before triggering to voicemail. Conceiving of other people apart from one’s own perspective of who those people were became ordinary. Politeness fadded through various styles and phases. Awaysickness dumped childishness like rubble from a CAT excavator’s claw. More chumps; less change. Walls of ketchup-red. A man leaning against his bicycle which was leaning against a cement wall told a cop, “The rhetorical device of telling somebody, ‘Don’t take this personally,’ rarely means that, and in fact usually means the exact opposite.” The cop, whose mother had been The Bearded Lady in a circus sideshow, was not offended at all. Disappearing into one’s own sloth, carreled in lazy filth, not reading, unable to dial the phone, customarily deadened to the world, liable for wasting the day’s light, all accounts unbalanced. Two-night stands went on for a week, and sleeping was no longer an option. Trouble-shoot through an inevitable happenstance, with small talk and unaccountability and a freedom to be wrong more.

********************

Calamity Jane, the Heroine Of The Plains. That’s what was going on in her head. She was singing it. In her head. Singsong. That would describe it. The rhyme helped. It swam undulant through her mishmashed thoughts, shredding tumbling breakers of thoughtless foam, and she skimmed over the surface of the opaque, aquamarine-tinted glass of a memory that was willing itself up from a muffled roar stowed somewhere indistinct, lost, and closer than comfortable all at once. She was nauseated. Not nauseous. She knew the difference. It wasn’t what made you sick to your stomach; it was the feeling of being sick to your stomach. It didn’t do any good though. Knowing things like this. It wouldn’t help that horrible feeling to go away. It’d stay stuck in her gut no matter what she called it. She started humming the song aloud, or maybe it was more like muttering the song, just a tiny light drawl of a voice barely above a cantor-like whisper. Calamity Jane, come heal my pain. It was almost a canticle. Something to soothe her, to make the darkness a tad more light, a temporary joist to keep disaster’s ceiling from crumbling, allowing the soot and scattered mess of her temblored past to come raining down on her as she lay lost in the minutiae, the unalterable fact of being aware of the smallest precise details of every last thing happening around her, even in the spheres of dust molecules that could be like galaxy-sized things to some creatures, for all she knew, and didn’t know for that matter, about such less-than-microscopic events. Something in the realms of M-theory, perhaps, might mitigate the current situation allusively peening around the inside of her skull, tinged, as it were, with the dust of forgotten moments like the gaps made by fallen or somehow disintegrated sections of a bridge, a crossing she wasn’t quite prepared to make anyhow, like this, shaky and uncertain, though one it seemed as if she were always now in a constant state of preparing for, if that made any sense. Come steal away the rain, Calamity Jane.

They both were born on the same day, Beltane, and also it was something in the cognomen that made her identify with this lady sharpshooter of the Wild West who may or may not have been romantically involved with Wild Bill Hickok at some point just before he became a decedent one fateful night at a poker game in Deadwood, S Dakota. It had something to do with Jane’s homeliness, an aspect of her character that was dirty, tawdry even, the rough and tumble sort, if you will, and it was all packaged in a tidy carefully cultivated persona of a tomboyish scrapper who wouldn’t back down to any old anybody ever. It made her happy to hold Miss Calamity, or at least the idea of who this lady might have been, in her thoughts. She thought of Calamity Jane as a crusader for wildness and freedom, and against slogging through the rote banausic day-to-day doings of life. Everything about her was heroic and large on the grandest scale, reigning across the planes, Calamity Jane, almost in a cartoonish way, to the girl, she rode through the country in search of adventure, kind of how the girl envisioned herself, a modern-day adventurer, saddled to a dream, bucking trends and spurning conformity, hopping trains and hitchhiking, leaving a trail of wrecked lives in her path; though hers, at times, included in the wake too--of being wrecked, that is.

A speed bump or pothole, something to disturb the delicate balance between awareness and that away feeling she’d get that meant she wasn’t quite part and parcel of this body, a renter and not an owner, and which she’d think of as “hovering”--such a state that was rare and unique and that she never wanted to think about too deeply lest it fall apart and never return. It was like those times during Social Studies when her head felt limp and light, and she’d nod off at her desk, chin on the glazed fake-wood surface, hair pulled over her face, a carefully placed elbow set to impede the teacher’s sight and make it seem, at a glance, as if the girl were taking studious notes with her head very close to the open notebook next to it. It was as alone and as safe as she could ever remember feeling, outside of everything, the teacher’s voice just a blur like in The Peanuts cartoons, all the pencil-on-paper scratchings and scrunchy movements of kids fidgeting around in their desks, the purr and drift of the air conditioner, the feel of the institutional fluorescents glaring from above with a slight buzz and hum that was in some strange eerie way comforting. The girl took great pleasure in being able to return to this state, though it was becoming more difficult now to make the transition, as if the further she got from it the more abstruse and hard to connect with it became. Well, it seemed, now that she’d re-emerged into wakefulness, that they were in the bumpy rattling process of being shepherded through a carwash. The splash of water from sprinklers, the thwack of rotating robotic arms brushing the windows, foaming and soapy, as the swoosh of the mitter patters by, the obstreperous grind of the conveyor track below squeezing the wheels, and the surprise plunk of the high-pressure nozzles’ spray. It was all rather like being thrashed awake in the sudden throes of the pandemonium of a war zone. The girl didn’t feel well.

*************************

I would walk around then wondering constantly about what I should be doing in my adult life. What was being an adult? What should an adult be doing with his time? I had no idea what it felt like to conceive of myself as an adult; I’d never seen myself in this way: as a grownup, a responsible citizen, a person who was a working part or cog in the valued estimate of adult society. I was more of a malfunctioning child, or had a childish attitude at least, and the general conception of my worldview could be summed up as being juvenile and abstractly vague. I felt what I did had little effect on who I was, or maybe it was more like how I was seen by others was of more concern to me than the way, or how, I saw myself. Everything about the way I was living was unsustainable: working just enough to make rent, using safety pins to hold my clothes together, stringing along girls in ways I knew wouldn’t make them last long, and drinking heavily almost every night and a lot of the days too. None of it would last. I didn’t care. At least not enough to make any decision that was capable of changing anything about the way I was floundering through life. Just gambling along wherever chance might take me. That’s all I let myself be capable of, and being severely underslept and hungover most of the time didn’t help my prospects of having even the most meager amount of energy to do anything useful with myself. I just wanted to crawl back into the womb, warm and cozy and safe, and stay there gorging on junk food, bathed in the light of TV. Everything was beyond my control.

I’d often find myself lazing on a bench on afternoons when the weather held some warmth in it still. The afternoons almost killed me most days, and I tried to sleep them away as a bloated orange sun exacerbated my self-absorbed and enervated condition. They’d come on slow and burn away any ambition I might still have to do something with myself, which I had very little of anyway, and I’d get to feeling that life-deadening malaise that pins your soul to the ground until you’re forced to give up, to give in, and nothing you could ever do seems to matter at all. You’re free to do whatever you want but it’s just that you don’t want to, and you maybe are too free in this sense, in that all’s allowed yet nothing ever happens.

Being the kind of guy who’d break up a marriage? No. No way. That wasn’t going to be me. With my expired credit card and my heart with rue laden. I hadn’t even mastered the art of bagging groceries. There were lessons to be learned, sure, but was I going to get anything out of that? No. The vultures were circling.

*************************

“There can’t be quality enhancements at this stage. We craft these fuckers from snowmelt. Give ‘em the old crush and weld, that’s ‘bout it. Nothing special. We understand lasting. We know what it means to scratch livings out from the rusted clunk of dreadful experiences. Believe me. It’s taken into account. Immediate results. Besting you at it still. Sliding along on the slubbed silk of it. We pay attention to what we want to pay attention to. That’s our meager conception of it. Turn the channel, you know? Turn the volume up. Go ahead. Weed out some umbrella-sedge. Give a rat’s ass. Why not?”

***********************

“You’ve got a bad case of l'esprit de l'escalier, huh? I can tell.”

His hands were not being kept to himself.

“Lest we forget…”

The girl strummed the air vents in the dashboard with a few fingers. If she did it fast enough it sounded like baseball cards in the spokes of a bicycle, like she used to do, she used to, do.

“Give up.” His smile was like something etched into hard plastic, something permanent and completely devoid of emotion. “And the dust gathers…”

Her eyes shaped the swerve of the road, the white dashes streaming by, blurred and streaking into each other, and the monster-head polygonals of the road signs and the clear white letters on big flat rectangles of green and the next-gas-forty-miles and the mile-counters like hogtied scarecrows, and she heard the hushed hustle of the wind speaking to closed windows as she bit a big-knuckled finger harder than she’d ever bit anything.

The man screamed like a little girl. It made the girl laugh. The man slapped his hand around and screamed and called her all the usual, ordinary, and to-be-expected names the situation called for. ‘Originality is sorely lacking in this individual,’ thought the girl.

“Young love. I make you out to be indifferent, but I’m a bullshit machine.” The man was crying. “I was paying attention and distracted at the same time. You didn’t notice. You never notice. I could immolate over here and you’d just keep going about your business. Look, we’ve got starts, stoppings too, I guess, and then there’s all that stuff stuffed in the midst of things. It’s time now that we took a leap in there and started flailing around in it, together. Don’t you think? From these shores. From this perspective. This seeing. Well, don’t you? Don’t you ever, think?”

The girl rolled the window down all the way. She stuck her head outside. The stars were getting all over everything up in the sky’s sludge, runny slugs of sparkle and dipped flashes whirlpooling into and out of and all around each other, blips and beeps gone pulsatilla in fast, tight circles, without edges or separation, more like a thousand tiny stirrings in a vast pool of mud, sight’s tremolo on the grandest of scales. They were all that mattered, and her eyes gushed towards tears in the gusty assault on her face as she spun her head and looked directly up, her hair gone Bride-Of-Frankenstein wild to the side. Nothing else was happening. This was all there was. There were no hands on her legs or middle, nothing pulling her back inside, no panicked hook and weave of the vehicle she was now hanging almost all the way out of, but for something holding her, gripping her as tight as it could, hands, a body in there, a thing, in there, a place that wasn’t warm or safe at all, not like out here, in the wind, something vibrant in the sky, in the stars, out here, alone. No. She’d just stay here. She’d just stay. It wasn’t hard at all. ‘I have this,’ she thought. ‘This is what I have.’ It rattled around like a crushed beer can in her head.

from "The Breakneck Speed Of Time Present"

It seems the girl was immersed in the inchoate feathers of a nap’s fugue-like temper when the yawing of the car’s wind-beaten ways woke her, and she culled the just-out-the-window landscape for recognizable features, trying not to whinge or work herself up into a swivet of back-to-reality plunging that she just knew would leave her with skin pebblings, red jumpy eyes, and a chronic wince. Crust-lidded, groggy, diverted to the dullness of what was playing ordinary with the dream melt still dripping into her rattle-to-consciousness, the girl, whose forehead had been mashed against the window for the last 10-15 mins leaving her bangs sweat-stuck crooked and misaligned, was now in the hand-dye-slow process of glossing over and then looting the outside world (the one outside the window’s glass) for clues as to her current circumstances in this place she happened to be now residing in (a place for which she was for now unsure of why she’d come to be in or obviously where that place was in the now extant realms of a reality, hers or an objective one, that was for some reason eluding all attempted nabs at.)

The sky curdled with messy throngs of soap-sud clouds. They passed small towns where the buildings’ bricks’ soot glistened and got scrubbed gold by escaped flecks of custard sun, and there was traffic here and there huddled, massed, honking and weaving too, and the girl washed her eyes in this newfound lightness, this calm trespass into the fields of now. Everything felt suffused with emptiness, and she too was part of this emptiness, and she felt alive, simple, and brushed with a wonderful and joy-encased emptiness.

“You sleepin’ there, shit-for-brains?”

“…”

The car hit a rather obnoxious pothole and the two people inside of the car, a male and female human, had their respective asses lifted for a sec and then plopped back down where they’d been. The girl’s elbow conked the window roller. A sharp twinge of pain. She held her breath.

“Huh?”

Mosquitoes were unavoidably part of the air you had to keep breathing all the time you had to breathe because well now you just had to suck in air even if you were juggling cans of beans or whatever it was just something you had to do and those damn mosquitoes wouldn’t leave you alone in the dark it seemed worse and that buzzing always by your ear almost mechanical or like a windup toy and if you could slap one away or smash it crushed blood-splatted in your palm like a cranberry stain then that would be something but there were always more and what could you do anyway just being you and having only this one body and being this one person who couldn’t fight against all of them even in their all-at-once-but-one-at-a-time way of fighting?

Eat more limes.

A distraction. There is nothing boring. An escape is what is always there, something that’s followed so habitually that it is never seen. Keep an eye out, peel it if you can, for TV, for sirens, for chatter in the airwaves, market reports, hangings, the last of the typewriter repairmen. Youth kicks its own ass for missing out on being young only once, and you’ve got a hairline to worry about, the weather’s charm, and then socks to put on and pants to try to wear. Ablating thoughts that go before they arrive. Let’s work with an inflated excess of glyphic pre-tax kindness here while we can.

The man was rubbing her knee, just below the frazzled threads of scissor-cut jean shorts, and the girl didn’t quite know what the feeling was that she should be having so she made one up, and it seemed to suit. It was a vacant place she could occupy without actually having to bother to be anywhere.

There was always more emptiness available to her, and with the window rolled down just a tad she could let her brain rumble and starve full with repetition’s endless burrs. A rocking. Not a gentle soothing, but still a soothe of a sort nonetheless, though its grainy skein was replete with nicknames and horticultural terms and the names of dead first ladies. Her mind could glean from innumerable gold pots, flit and find furrows any old place therein. Comic books, the Harvard Classics, The Anatomy Of Melancholy, F.W. Murnau movies, dental records of rock stars, transcripts of famous trials, recipes that call for mandarin oranges, flow-charts for assembling various Rube Goldberg-type contraptions, the seasons of lawns, classic one-liners from sitcoms and standups, pre-election polls during Reconstruction, lives lost at various WWI battles, uses for various and diverse chemical substances such as lignon liquor and cashew-nutshell oil. She knows a few things about some stuff.

Her knee was no longer part of the picture. She was setting out for other disconnected pastures, and there was something there, in all that emptiness, that kept her the best company she’d ever get to know. Being disentangled from the her that others knew, or could touch, was how she came to know it. Or, also, not being smeared with the stuff of others. It was thinking herself away, and the fantasy was better than the truth. The girl internalized this, and it became a large part of who she was as a person, inflicted in this way with a fractured sense of what it was to be, well, the girl in this story, which was her story, of course, and one she couldn’t wish her way out of, but the trying in that was something she often failed at for the most part so it was hunky-dory for her way of thinking, though it unfortunately couldn’t be applied to her flossing habits.

A scalped swipe was the wind’s scream. The girl applied for a passport out, decided it was unnecessary, and got to know the gravel road very personally for a few scary seconds, scratching and tumbling her way away from the desperately unlocked and then pushed open door of the place where she’d formerly been biding her time. It was quick but lasted forever. The lights bashed and leaked and went in and out of fuzzy blurrings that were pink-orange-yellow spins like tracers but more opaque and wavering, that were there and then not there all at once and then back in almost circles that were never done completing but always churning and spilling the split of their difference, carouseling as she barreled over, bit the pavement and spit blood without knowing it, praying for the condition of her teeth as with flayed arms and a rock-battered head she limply somersaulted like a rag doll. One of her shoes had gone AWOL. Stunned, dazed, epidermis completely annihilated, eyes clenched shut in this new sudden all-over pain. There was nothing fun about any of it. A sharp gust of desert wind scratched across her limbs. She rolled on her side and let go a trickling laugh.

When she was in her pre-teens she’d found, for reasons never specified or explained properly, a Gloria Estefan cassette tape in her x-mas stocking. She had know idea who Gloria Estefan was or what this particular music was supposed to be, except that it was something that seemed tinged with adulthood for some reason, a possibly off-limits things, but not quite. She’d played the tape constantly, sometimes at a very high volume, as she lay in her bed and listened to the strange sounds. She played the tape over and over, so much so that she knew ever drum fill and precisely how long the gaps between songs were. Dancing to it was beyond her, but she grew to love the music blasting from her stereo’s speakers. It did somehow happen though that after much over-listening to this same cassette she came to develop a bit of a neurosis, which then turned into a fevered anxiety attack, and the girl was, on one cold afternoon, found in her bed crying, cover-pulled-over-head frantic, by her older sister who immediately attempted to yank said covers off of her younger sib, but was met with much resistance. The older sister, who was wise beyond her years in matters of pop culture as she was an avid reader of Teen Beat and 16 among other less-well known fad fan mags of the 1980s, continued tugging away at the covers as she was trying to attain what the matter was with this obviously delirious child. The older sister eventually proved victorious in this effort, and revealed the tear-laced face of a scared and shaky little girl. The girl kept muttering something about, “it’s going to get me,” which soon turned into a fearful scream of, “Stop! It’s going to get me!” The older sister inquired as to what the younger girl believed was going to get her, to which the girl exclaimed, “The Rhythm! The Rhythm’s going to get me!” The older sister began a laughing fit which didn’t stop until she’d left the room. From then on the girl had always imagined this Rhythm as being an abominable snowman-type creature with very wooly hair all over it and sharp saber-toothed cat teeth and with claws like scythes slicing through anything in its path. She was convinced, someday, that The Rhythm was going to get her.

The cartoon on TV was about a bull being shoved out of an open window by a team of mice wearing orange construction vests and white hardhats. The mice were struggling. A lot of heavy breathing and exaggerated grunts. The bull was calm. It had the stem of a white rose in its mouth and appeared to be smiling. The girl supposed she should be giggling, but she wasn’t. Instead she was on the verge of tears (her mother would say, “Aren’t you always?”)

A fly wasn’t a thing to be afraid of. So she ran. She ran away. There were lights out there somewhere brighter than any she’d ever known. She just knew it. Swat. Shoo. Get away. Be gone. Like things. Love others. Try not to hate yourself. A woman might walk on the moon. Get out.

The carpet was coarse, its thick curls the color of cooked ground beef, and stained more than it wasn’t in various colors and shades and shapes of dropped substances. The girl sat barefoot on it in Indian position, picking at her toenails, riveted to the TV, pretzeling her legs a bit, eye bugged, head malted with snack food. The ceiling was cottage cheese. Behind her lay a glum fat man snoring on the couch. A yeasty stale beer stench hung about him like that dusty cloud that followed Pig-Pen around. This is how the girl imagined it. A dust storm that stunk. His snores were a volcano sputtering up its guts, a dinosaur choking on a lively hamster. The girl wished and wished, but the man would not just go away like she wished he would.

“Us worriers got to keep away from things that’ll make us worry. If something's bound to make me worry, well, I just gotta forget it exists, if I can.”

A slice of baked and slim light snuck through the slits in the billboard, skittering and wrapping around the bends and breaks in some abandoned furniture set down by the roadside. The girl was seeing everything as smushed. The sofa and armchair tandem was puffed and distorted in a trash-compactor way, as if they were built for a family of skinny midgets. Something was off with her eyes. The taste of blood would not leave her tongue alone. She spit into the dirt and it was a deep brandy-colored slug. Things spun and her head felt lighter than those balloons they let go outside of Raferty’s General on the first day of summer. An itch was scampering around her legs, hopping from one place to the next without warning. The more she thought about scratching it the worse it got, and every time she scratched at it to try to catch it mid-leap it would just leap away anyway and go on itching and itching. She gave up and lay down in the dirt.

A defending principle as to the cause and rebar of the situation was that he was too far away from it to be apart of anything and therefore the logic of it was you see that whatever he did it was his own business and what’s that to you thanks a lot yep.

*

Having the urge to urinate was not something he could ever pinpoint. It would just come on with the thought of it, which might have had more than a lot to do with the actual urge itself, the thought that is, than any real physical urge. But it was there either way, the urge, and he had to deal with it. Once it arrived nothing would make it leave. He couldn’t think it away the same way it had come. That was useless. There was nothing to do except piss it away, so to speak, once it came on. Sometimes he’d try to think about Bill Mazeroski instead. But it didn’t help. Nothing would distract his attention from the urge. It was all-consuming. It took over his attention and drained it of all else but thoughts of having to pee.

He knew where every public bathroom was in the city, any place he could sneak into for a quick piss. Department stores, hotels, libraries, Starbucks (if they were crowded and you were slick about it), Office Depot, Safeway, The Women’s Building (even if you were a man), and many other lesser known spots for the emptying of one’s bladder. It was a good safety net for him to have. It made him feel more assured out there in the world, a place he was usually at least somewhat uncomfortable in. Every time he went into a new place he always had to make sure he found out right away where the bathroom was. He always had an eye out for who had gone in there and if there were a line. It was a compulsion. If the line for the john grew too long sometimes he’d join it even though he didn’t even have to go yet, just in case the urge came on and he was caught five or six people back, and who knew how long those people were going to take in there, especially if it was a solo-john with a lock. Some guy gets in there and starts taking a dump, forget about it; he was screwed. Standing there doing the potty dance, tapping his toes, hopping from one foot to the next, his face gone squeamish and strained. It wasn’t a thing he wanted to have to endure. It was better to be prepared.

“It’s hard. You’ve got to have bathroom etiquette, but also there’s bathroom rapport to think of too.” He was talking to a group of humans afflicted with Teaspoon Bladder Syndrome. “You’ve got to watch yourself. This goes for guys the most, I think. We’ve got to deal with the conundrum of the urinal situation. You’re standing there, like you’re at an ATM or something, and this other guy, who is most likely a complete stranger to you, is standing like less than an arm’s length from you, and you’ve both got your respective privates out there, zippers down, draining the main vein, so to speak, and the sound of the piss waterfalling down the back of the urinal, the stream’s steady babble and hiss. It’s close quarters. Elbow to elbow almost. But nobody’s saying shit. You’re both just supposed to stand there and take care of business, zip up, and we’d all like to hope, make your zipped-up way to the sink to wash your hands. No looking. Of course. Now, that’s obvious. Official business only. No lollygagging. No peeking. Well, let me tell you, except once I wandered into a gay bar because the urge just came on and I hadn’t checked the proper signage to see what the hell kind of a place I was heading into, as you know, that’s the last thing you’re thinking at a time like that, when you just gotta go.” A collective yawn of understanding went through the group, nodding in empathy with the speaker. “Yeah. We’ve all been there. So, I find myself trying to negotiate a trough situation with a few other burly dudes hanging out there already.” A collective groan from the audience. “Yeah. And I’m worried, as I’m pretty shy about these things in general, but there’s no way out. I’ve gotta go bad, and it’s coming one way or another. So, I squeeze in there between these two hairy specimens, who, I might add, are both wearing some sort of leather undergarments that I am like way not familiar with at all, and their jeans are pulled down past butt level too, something I rarely witness in male bathroom situations. Normally it’s just a downed zipper or a front pull, not the whole damn shebang like they’ve half-dropped trou or something. Anyway, I settle in as best as I can between these two meaty bastards, and they’ve both got quite a strong stream going, plashing at the bottom of the tub in an almost fire-hose type way, very yellow and bright too. Think they both took their B vitamins every day. And I’m unzipping, feeling totally unnatural and way far from my personal comfort zone, but it’s too late, and I’m trying to just test out the waters, so to speak, and am kind of letting it trickle a little at first. I’m nervous. It’s hard for me to focus on my own doings. These two dudes are actually like rubbing shoulders with me. It was insane. So, eventually, I get myself to start into the job, and get a decent stream going. Nothing like the two bears, but pretty okay for me. I’ve never had that strong of a stream. Then I look up for some reason. Just to have somewhere to look I guess. To distract myself from the current circumstances of my life, and what do I see but this fucking giant mirror that’s like totally angled to reflect the happenings down below, namely these two burly leather daddies and me whizzing into this bathtub-like trough. And they’re like both smiling at me in the mirror with their things hanging out there like deflated 260 balloons. I didn’t know what to do. It was horrifying. Should I smile back? What was the etiquette here? Would waving at them with my free hand be a faux pas? I couldn’t handle it. I looked away. I looked straight down. I pissed as fast as I could. Nothing much happened. They both remained there after I’d left, not laughing or anything, just standing there mumbling about something. It’s kind of a blur. I came out shell-shocked and disheveled. But, you see? This is part of it. I mean, this etiquette’s one thing. But what about the rapport? What if I’m up at a urinal and my buddy walks in and starts unzipping right next to me? Do we nod? Say hello? Have a little chat while averting our eyes? It depends I guess. Every situation is different. You’ve got bathroom rapport with some people while with others it’s no go.” The Teaspoon Bladder Afflicted murmured and hushed. A small man in a maroon Clippers baseball cap passed a packet of Eclipse Winterfrost gum to a Golden-Girls aged woman with Elizabeth-Taylor sunglasses on. Somebody sneezed three times in rapid succession. “I am an only child. This has nothing to do with anything except that I figured I might as well go on ahead and mention it just in case it deserves any type of mid-level scrutiny as to my whereabouts in the scale of rapport I’m getting more than a little ready to detail for you folks here. As they say, in the interest of full disclosure. They say things like this I’m told.” An obese lady farted audibly. It was vaguely reminiscent of the sound the Wheel Of Fortune wheel makes when it’s spun by a contestant. Nobody seemed to care or even notice. “So, well, I guess there are some people you can talk to in these situations. Chit chat. Shoot the breeze. And others you’ve got to just kind of do that hi/nod thing and stare straight ahead and pretend that both of you are not really there. But this is merely urinal stuff, and in the Men’s room. Don’t rightly know how you women folk do under these types of conditions. How could I? But stalls? That’s a ballgame played in a whole different arena. It’s like going from grass and outdoors to AstroTurf and a dome. Tough transition for some. But really, it’s a lot more of a dichotomy than even that if you squat right down and ponder it. That’s for sure. The stink is one thing, well, and the sound too. All that plopping and grunting going on in there, well, it’ll get uncomfortable, for certain if the stalls are connected by a dividing wall, a partition that doesn’t go far enough down, so you can see your compatriots pants and underwear down around his shoes right there next to yours. Imagine a conversation with one of your besties while straining to squeeze out a stubborn turd, and then think of the wafting essence of human feces emanating from you both as you sit there and have a little tête-à-tête around The SF Giants post mortem or whatever it is you find to rap about from your respective Cubicles Of Crap. Sometimes you can gumflap about stuff and not care about whatever the hell else is going on. Maybe there are some, and I’ve found this to be true for me with a few special fellows, that we both can’t stop laughing, and it goes on for quite a while like this, two lunatics cracking up while they crap. Shit. I feel sorry for the others in the place who are just trying to go about their business and all, but it can’t be helped, well, when you find yourself a bit too comfortable with somebody in one of these…situations. Maybe one of you females would like to get up here and relate the womanly side of these things?” All the female humans in the room recoiled and started wishing that nobody were looking at them or expecting anything from them, but at the same time did feel that all the attention was suddenly focused on their own very unique person and wanted to run, all at once, to the bathroom to “freshen up” a bit. Instead they all sat there trying to go very unnoticed and to not make even the tiniest gesture that could possibly be seen as a sign that this person who they were wanted to get up on stage and launch into an oration about chatting on the pot. The man who had previously been speaking stepped down from the stage awkwardly and sat back down in the audience.

nobody's pluperfect

Johnny was hanging out the window again. We’d tried to warn him not to do it, that it’d be bad for business, but apparently he’d failed to read the memo. It was bullshit as far as we were concerned. Now there was nothing we could do about it. A slim chance for rescuing a moment from his clutches. We looked up and shook our collective heads at his dangling feet. Maybe he saw us down there on the sidewalk craning our necks. I doubt it though.

“Bastard's got it made up there.”

“Yep. He’s up there. What are we doing? We’re down here. What are we doing down here?”

“Don’t know. Standing around. Looking up.”

“Between things.”

“I’m going to eat a banana.”

“Got to do something.”

“Yep.”

Johnny was in my living room. He got down on one knee. I noticed that he was staring very intently at the electronic equipment below my TV.

He said, “That’s not a DVD player. It’s got a rewind button.”

It was true.

His index finger was covered in dust. I told him to quit snooping around. He left shortly afterwards. They found him the next morning asleep on my lawn. The pirates had their man.

The counter of the luncheonette was jammed with insomniacs and dipsos and retired boxers. I was drinking goose milk from an ice-cold glass. The guy next to me had a lumpy, bee-stung nose. I was just hanging on to dovetailing threads of the past, mortise-and-tenoned to a mood that wouldn’t leave me alone. My nose hairs were out of place. The newspaper wasn’t telling me anything I wanted to hear. I hardly knew what to think next. Dissipation was my only occupation, and it was getting harder and harder to find a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Rain was my only friend. Courage wiped its ass on my shoes. Somehow the cars told their stories with sopping conviction as I wandered wired and diminished from one place to the next, just west of limitless-ways-to-hang-your-head. Differing in the ways one can hope, in the true classless testimony of delinquents and stool pigeons, claimed screams kinging plastic smiles, pastured out of time, later than now. Being home seemed mysteriously outlawed. The doors were all busted. People vomited coins. Fresh air wasn’t going to help anything. I glared at shoes and wished windows away.

Johnny lost a game of marbles to the butcher. They were playing for gives. A ventriloquist stopped by and said nothing. Men were fed to cows. The butcher told Johnny about marbles that could predict your past, and he also recounted, in his elegant raconteur-like way, how he had achieved thirstiness at a very young age. Johnny was pleased by this. He filled his pockets with all the marbles that had even a hint of green in them.

The werewolves are wise to me. They follow my mudprints. They institute bans on silver. On the moonless nights it’s like The Hanging Gardens of Babylon out there. Lucite reflects the noise I make in here, and I tongue click with my eyes closed for a glimpse of echolocation’s merits. Captain Crunch whistles to steal long-distance phone calls. Tin clasps. Worried envelopes. The skeletons of vipers. All by candlelight. It’s baby-making weather, something in the air, the sound of strollers, the aroma of diapers, a revolt of worry that lifts the hamper lid to let sadness out of time’s just nicking. I carry a tire iron in my back pocket.

Johnny slipped on a peach pit. He isn’t fit for days like these. The super’s been on him lately. Something to do with trash duty. Mars watches over us at night. Johnny told me recently that he’s lost his marbles. I have to admit, the green is gone from his grin. And every day he hibernates a little more, but, thank the lord, baseball season is coming soon.

I was writing an episode of the American sitcom The Office with my girlfriend when Johnny rang the doorbell and came inside our apartment before we answered. We had neglected to lock the door. This was anathema to our lifestyle. A clay figurine of Paul Reubens was knocked to the linoleum; dazzling lamplight pinned us in; a cockroach was sliced in two; I dropped my pen. Johnny had lost his job. He wanted a new job. There were no jobs for him. I asked him if he wanted to write a sitcom with us. He didn’t say anything. I had just written a great line for Dwight, and so was in high spirits, and I told Johnny to, “Come on over here and chat your brains out a teeny bit.” Johnny just stood there, thundering slightly, and his face looked like mother of pearl.

We’ve been referring to Johnny, around these parts, as Juddering Johnny. This name might have sticking power. It fits under most conditional qualifications. Something will surely keep him coming around, and this might as well be that something. Arrogating the name to him in this manner brings special and delightful--though fragile too--benefits to his role as a person. When it comes to me, well, I view myself as an apparition in the nature of our environment.

As American as Coca-Cola, that is how I would describe Johnny; and it would be a vast description, a taking into account of all pockets sewed into the fabric of his personality. He is the type of individual who would test out a new pair of gloves by slapping his own face with them multiple times before he put them on. I spotted him once using a bicycle pump to cool off some hardboiled eggs. Obviously there is something sneaky to his character. Asking him questions is like swimming in a drained pool. When it comes to muckraking facts about Johnny’s private matters, I refrain. Bad timing comes in handy though, gregarious as whole/initial concepts may be in the “Johnny discussion,” there really is not room for improvement. Sometimes I belittle him by calling him a frustrated fiend. There is little room for error in this area. Johnny knows this, and he never laughs at my cracks about his surreptitiousness. Sometimes he sings, in a deep, rich, and vibrant baritone, “Lonely! Lonely as I! Loooooooooo-en-a-lee!” There is never a reason for him to do this.

Intercepting all communications was first on the to-do list for the many who’d stuck around. Johnny was standing on one leg on the hood of a parked police car with no police inside of it. We surrounded him with movie projectors. Somebody shouted, “Roll it!” and we aimed for his carefully balanced body. The lights made him lively. It was soon clear that we should’ve respected him more. It had gotten to the point where now he had it in for us. I whispered to my buddy, “Consider my eyes peeled.” He thanked me. Johnny became worn-out, and he lay on the police car’s hood breathing heavily. I didn’t blame him. The boss had gone home.

“Do your silliest. End up clothespinned to a bag of nuts.” This was quickly becoming Johnny’s mantra. We mistook it for banter, which, as you might suspect, was the apex of dumb. Johnny would run in squares around tiny things, like missing buttons and horoscopes.

I asked Johnny, “What do you do to do this particular doing of yours?”

He looked at me. He was standing in the street. His eyebrows were diminished by starlight. “It’s the kind of thing you would put in your pocket, a thing to save, a thing to get out of the way, to remove from the landscape of the world and put into your safe keeping. I don’t want to plant. I want to grow.”

“That’s universal,” I told him. “There’s a connection, always, between your brain and the world brain. To see things through instead of with it. That’s a neat thought.”

Johnny gave me the look of absolute unadulterated boredom. It was worth watching. It was barely distinguishable from the look of complete and utter wild-abandon enjoyment. Actually, I’m not sure if there should be a different look for those two states.

Johnny recited some things: “Connect the dashes. Hurt with joy. Smell the sound that supermarkets make. Take no-thanks.”

A plane purred overhead. Things became mushy. A chorus of gophers sang a different new song, but they were out of tune. My mind was unmade. “Johnny. Johnny. Why do you hang so low?”

“My feet are untouchable around these parts. I am higher than trees.” His voice was just serious enough to not be funny. “Look at me.” I remembered gazing up at his shoe bottoms while he was hanging out the window. They were highlighter yellow. “I hang on. I hang here. I hang around. As the windowsill is slipping from my gripping, miss me. My name was Johnny.”

I told him to go down instead of up this time. He said dropping would involve an inbent spiral climbing towards a pale king of terrors. That was when I saw him last.

What I should be doing and what I am doing keep not being the same thing. There’s an involvement there, a gluing of me to the mobility of others, and it’s high time I started believing in my silence; but all anyone does is make noise. Johnny is up there again, hanging out of the window. His shoe bottoms are black this time. He is smoking a cigarette while he hangs there. Sure cool of him. I can only see him with my own eyes, think about him with my own brain. Seeing him in this small way of mine is all I can do. When it comes to being human there are certain limits; often these restrictions go unnoticed. The ash grows and grows from his lips. When will it droop and fall to the ground or be carried away by wind? We all look up at him hanging there. It’s still bullshit, only now it’s a different kind of bullshit, and we all agree, down here on the ground, that his is another in a long line of splendid failures to do the impossible. No joke will do. It’s a hanging, and we’re all uninvited, but we are here anyway, ogling Johnny’s shoe bottoms, not talking amongst ourselves. Hang. Hang on. Johnny. We have lifted our spirits for the likes of you. Drink our breathing through a story’s straw. Wear our closet clothes. The days are not the same. Hang out the window, Johnny. Hang. Don’t worry. We are nobody. Hang on.

yelling timber

Child: Would the streets of a paper city be paved with cardboard?

Benito Mussolini: I don’t respond well to questions.

Child: As if the day of the week, all dandy-fancy, were capable of being told.

Leonard Susskind: Extrapolating has its kind side. There. I said it.

Child: If I am movie-mad?

Slavoj Žižek: Movies are mad and therefore we target them…individually.

Child: I want my journey to consist of three-point plays and untested excuses.

Lawyer: Please remain silent, or neutral at least.

Loved One: Pshaw.

Child: Pamper me, please.

Loved One: No.

Benito Mussolini: Somebody put me on a train. For Jesus, the sake of.

Child: Blocks. Offensive Rebounds. Trailing the break. Holding for the last shot. Dribble drives. Giving a smooch to each bicep for the crowd. These things? Yeah. These things.

Dom DiMaggio: Chances that you give, if they don’t get taken, come back, in the mix of it all, to haunt your streakiness.

Child: Agreed.

Mother Of Loved One: Sweep west, young man. Sweep west.

Loved One: She knows some of what of where she speaks of.

Rosie The Riveter: There’s a whole world out there filled with people doing things to make your life easier…for very little money.

Leonard Susskind: Don’t refill your cup too soon, buck-o.

Patti Smith: Darn crooked. Somebody toss one of them veggie patties on the grill for me.

The Count: Lord help me. Yes sir, I will.

Child: Getting better, soon.

Loved One: Still?

Morrissey: How soon is it?

Child: Not quite now.

Slavoj Žižek: Putting off the inevitable, are we not? Basic manipulation of mise-en-scène, drawbacks of iris-like styles, holes in the bucket, and we get the heart of the matter to bleed through to us in the bright CinemaScope of celluloid. Lavishly darning the unstitched ends of consciousness; that is more like us.

Johann Sebastian Bach: I think I left my heart in the gutter. Anybody seen a sewer drain around here?

Jonathan Livingston Seagull: Get bent.

Child: My tolerance for nitwits is plunging.

Paul Verlaine: I’d paint your fence for just about nothing.

Tom Verlaine: I’d do it just for fun.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens: Well, that’s good of you both. But is that a flag I smell burning?

Roger Clemens: No. It’s my loins.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens: Oh. When’s recess?

Child: That’s what we’re all wondering.

Lawyer: Play fair or go home.

Child: Is that right?

Lawyer: Well, according to my records everybody’s got a right to fight…or was that…? Let’s see….was that to…to…to party?

Dee Snider: I want a rock.

John Donne: I want an island. And a bell.

Joyce Carol Oates: You would.

Child: Within the first 5 minutes of talking to somebody I can usually tell if I ever want to talk to them again.

Sigmund Freud: You should use that mouth to kiss your mother.

Child: Only if my loneliness increases exponentially. Just existing, now, here, is enough.

Ringo Starr: Okay everybody. Now, I don’t want any of you to lend me your ear. Okay?

Mother Of Loved One: I would say, “Play it again Sam,” but you haven’t played it yet.

The Count: In among the trees again, are we?

Methuselah: Somebody leave me out of this.

Child: As if that were ever fine by me. At least we’ve found out what you’re no good for, at last.

Mark Fidrych: If we don’t know you by now…

Thales of Miletus: I give you all the digitus impudicus.

Child: I guess hate conquers some.

Benito Mussolini: Quiet down. I can’t hear the TV.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Ouch! My back.

Snoopy: Sorry. I was marching on a dime. Sorry.

Child: If I were only empty inside there’d be a reason for all this, but I’ve tasted what’s sweetest around the block and back again, so there must be an exception to make as far as my sanity is concerned.

Father: Shut your mouth or I’ll shut it for you.

Loved One: That’s more like it.

David Foster Wallace: Escaping towards a better way of life; the difference between what I want and what I need--the confusion too, between the two. Knuckle-biting about not writing, essentially stuttering….erase, erase, add, erase. Just footnotes to my dreams.

Arlo Guthrie: All the dogs to me are killed until they’re dead.

Warren Gamaliel Harding: Weird.

Joan Crawford: Hounding seems thunderous at times, to me, and as long as we’re fantailing o’re the kiddies, well, let’s holster our civility and just be.

Child: Like, so, how? How so?

Voltairine de Cleyre: He’s a brat. Give ‘em to me. I’ll make a mouse of him.

Child: Give? Who says?

Billie Holiday: I died with seventy cents in the bank, and was arrested as I lay dying. Who needs to say? Who?

William Faulkner: Shit.

Child: I might be who, but who is that who? And to whom is my sense of self given? And who is giving it? Shall it be I? Who am I? Who is who?

Ruth Joan Bader Ginsburg: Recess.

Carol Burnett: Ghosting around has left us dull in the middle. Let’s do this shit up right, or why do it at all?

Steve Ignorant: After this I’m going to owe all of you a living.

Child: Naivety is sort of blissful, you know?

Margaret Thatcher: Isn’t it though?

The Count: Huh?

Child: There’s room for my love in a battered old suitcase, in a crossword puzzle’s starred clues, in an unlocked safe labeled For Jane’s Use Only, in a moonrise, in a few glasses of beer, in sign-language lessons, in the pleasant way cars shine their headlights through mist in the early morning, in well-timed smiles, in the bashful tuck of a kitten’s paw, in the rocks’ spit at a semi’s mudflaps, in the scrublands of crowberry and vervain and leycesteria and cotoneaster and silverbell and firethorn, in the president’s spittle, in the whore’s made bed, in songs to sing while drinking, in useless hours spent waiting out the rain, in love, in protest banners, in 12-hour shifts in a windowless factory, in the companionship of a bottle of cheap rye whisky, in untended lawns, in bones that break and heads that hang, in a calendar’s x’d out squares, in a cricket’s dreams, in throat lumps, in card games and baseballs and Morningbirds and lazy bartenders, and in you too, in you, and me, and all of us, at last, yes, all of us, at long last, in us all.

Lazarus: Yeah. But who’s counting?

a burin that chisels a flower’s brain

you’ve got to admit, helen’s a rather odd name for a young girl. well, either way, it seems i’ve got a bit of the old cruel & unusual crawling around in me today. i don’t know, something to do with germanium-crystal skinned spaceships flying close to mercury. or maybe it's the goddamn rain. goes to show you though, partnering with premium idols is bussing a lost cause to shams of look-at-me withdrawal. i was talking real funny this week. it worked as an allure, part & parcel of my charm, and people kept mistaking me for jack kennedy. i could’ve made a fortune if only i wouldn’t a been stuck all day in a factory making doll shoes. but my ears hint that there’ll be some remittance coming yet, at least that’s what keeps me chummy through the days’ piled-up hair. plus, i have never been outsourced. but i’ll also admit that i’ve never been a structuralist, and when the cars slop and slush through the streets on rainy days, well, i make ashtrays and spindles and motorcarts for the wind-chilled. it’s my lot, and i cringe through it with style. telling myself another whopper as the windows cry with raindrops, as the gray buildings smoke white puffs, as i grow cranky and used to, and by, the things that make up a life. helen cheers and jeers with the sound of my name, and i’ve been patted on the back enough, and spit on, too, for that matter, to know when i’m being taken advantage of, sold out, or pushed into the pool, so to speak. there’s a top spot in my heart for failures still. mostly it’s the lacking in the capacity to make a big deal out of one’s self. incurable, am i, in the horror-shop ways of dealing with what’s misconstrued and chucked at my wishy-washy ways. the rain putters and lifts, and bone-strong it comes down pounding again, without wind, and i’m calling sunup a liar, and i’m moody at best, and the hickory smells like cactus today. nothing ever happens. in the frozen-toed here & now that i’m apprehensively taking part in, always fashioning a new way to be late, nobody’s reciprocating. the sunsets have turned to mauve, and the bananas have mushed to brown. my face turns a certain color, too, when i give helen one of my expressions. i have multiple looks to choose from now. it is something i’ve been working on, preparing my face to gaze in indirect ways with a directness only i can achieve. carve off a slice of your life and feed it to the graying eagles among us. i’m fooling around with her money now, shortchanging myself, falling down in the crapper at the track, and i’m treasuring the ways of my escape. colder, not quite as wise, bumming time from the lampposts, downshifting through the weeks with the emergency brake on. the weather won’t make up its mind. it’s the buildings, their certain shine at sunset, the fading advertisements melting down their worn-brick sides, the rain-slick facades crumbling peels of paint, plaster of paris antlers over the entryway, smokestacks & water towers & sad graffitied droopy faces & lilts of white pillars, the sag of weather-beaten years plopping the ceiling, gravel pooled thin on the roof. my eyes create their own diversions. sometimes credit gets me by. but then again, well, i’ve gone and lost interest in most things that interest most people. my bookie says maybe i’ll win a prize. in the meanest of times, here, gut-shooting myself might make up for lost time, but i still think of ogling as my occupation, and my condition. helen is grieving over my motivation, or lack thereof, as it’ll be recorded in the annals. and so here i go again living my life in roll-over patterns. no small getaways. no bananas to split. driving with no radio, windshield wipers ripped off too by some cross-eyed kid with a vendetta against buicks. i’m too unkind to even dabble in caring about these things. if i ever could’ve thought a thought out it’d make me sweller to be around, that’s pretty for sure. maybe put me in touch with the lord. maybe. helen apes my blues, coerces a croon from my patchwork of winks & dangerous lip curls & and the swish of my hip swayings, and i give her a tabula rasa to scratch out her dreams on. barely fair, if you ask me, baldly, what i think. but it’s a captious question, if you ask me, and nobody here’s going to go on ruminating about it, or take my picture for the cover of some glossy magazine cover. i’ve built up enough resistance to the sentimentalities of the world to cover my ass. toss me a stradivarius and blow smoke at the rain. what’s the difference what i do here huddled within my indefatigable smallness? sure, i oboe the line between safe and scared, but the hurt’s what’s keeping sure-enough sweeps of tectonic change from catapulting me into an abysmal crevice, and you tend to stick a bit closer to home once you’ve taught yourself to run away. you can’t keep throwing spaghetti on the wall all the time. as helen is so fond of telling me, listening is now optional. the tonal flush of pinks, lost in a violet spin, check their bags in the wayward cuts of a shadow’s bloom. don’t blame me for the shortcomings of ambition. there’s a whole stew of otherness that calls the kettle a pot, and that should be enough. if we can get the hours to agree with us, and mostly they won't, helen won’t, by any stretch, get muscled out of the attack position. i’ve been out-of-line for a promotion anyway. more’s gone on behind the scenes for us to ever have anything to say about it anymore. i may dress like a session man but nobody’s going to make this shirt tuck. my bookie calls and tells me he’s on to something, that he’s got a feeling about something, and that it’ll scamper my soul off to the races just to be near his giddy breath. i have my doubts, as per usual. apparently i am becoming quite the absurdist to him, though that doesn’t keep him from pulling the old waterworks out on me when he really needs some advice, or dough. but it suits him. i let him go on in his hobbled ramble, digesting nothing except the occasional minty aftertaste, which sunnies my future a tad, and leaves me less enervated than usual, and even, sometimes, pirating my way to a new form of reasonableness. he hangs up on me four out of five times. i prefer it that way. it enables me to feel more victimized, more at risk, and, therefore, more able to cope with the isolated stuffiness that some like to call the comfortable & boring rote of life. i say yes just about as much as i say no. capability? i’m lacking in enough already. so, yes. and as long as i’m considering the sparks-without-gas stove of what needs i’m not “capable” of satisfying yet, well, i might as well curate the trove of my bad-luck cures. i can’t help but injure myself partaking in the most routine of things. pigeons are not cooing for the likes of me. i sleep to the sound of car alarms. blondes come and blonde they go. commercials are my only friends. distinctions? beats the heaven out of me. leaves me drooling on the pillow for another cheap christ substitute to wonder my way towards. hefting crosses is my lot, barely, and if i get tied down to back floating through it all, staring up at a hundred half-dollar moons spotting my skies, depending on mirrors for my self esteem, vesting ideas with their share of my head’s refinanced mortgage, well, i want to take something back, something to have, something that would be real in this hopped-up world of imaginary circumstances. when the weather gets dreamy like this i still get upset. omaha’s off limits, and the playground’s littered with failed heroes. helen’s dancing in the kitchen to the drummings of mice behind the drywall. it’s not that odd. we used to fight about the strangest things. the heater’s kicked on, and now all i can smell is burning dust. after giving some harmonical advice to the church bells, i flump onto the bed, lie there with the blanket pulled up to my chin, and dream of sheep who count me. the air is plenty and too little. i’m moving to mars.

it gets loneliest at night

a: but she’s fucking gorgeous.

b: but the parkinson’s?

a: yeah. the p-fucking-d.

b: crazy. parkinson’s. shit. that’s some serious point scoring with the world though, you know?

a: damn straight. that’s part of it too. that’s like what i’m kind of trying to relate in this fucking situation. i was like all up on this chick and shit, you know? we were going vertical with the horizontal, and this parkinson’s, fuck, the parkinson’s made it like fucking crazy. all those random jittery shakes and shit. it was fucking amazing.

b: fuck. parkinson’s. the pd. that’s some serious shit man. fucking parkinson’s.

a: that’s right. fucking parkinson’s, like michael j. fox. and i was so like taken by her too. something about her just drove me pit-over-pendulum wild.

b: ain’t that about’a bitch.

a: let’s think strategically for a sec.

b: got it. i see. let’s make the course fucking clear here. um…

a: yeah. there’s a hump in the street down there, you know, on bush, for drainage i guess, and all the lanes, you know when there’s no parking on the street, like during rush hour, and it seems, i don’t know, kind of clear, clean even. nothing but the sweeping gush and swish of traffic. i sit outside of that sandwich shop there and look at that damn humped street and listen to the sound of cars going by, people on cell phones, the footsteps of peds xing, you know, just stupid shit like that.

b: teriyaki beef. kimchi sub. kalbi. crab. fried egg sandwich. bad rap music and a tube tv. cute japanese girls slicing bread.

a: yep. that’s the place.

b: rattrap.

a: sure. that’s why i fucking sit outside.

b: sure.

a: so i’m sitting out there one day, checking out the street’s hump as usual, trying to muster up some serious getter done.

b: gotta.

a: yeah. and i’m like tossing around the possibility, you know, because i see this chick walking towards me, and i can tell something’s up.

b: all systems are not quite go.

a: but she’s smoking hot.

b: nice.

a: and so i’m giving my eyes a little pleasure cruise.

b: who wouldn’t?

a: and i’m working up a nudge into my disposition, wondering if i can at least catch a smile off of her, maybe do a flyby, scope out the sitch.

b: caught in the bitch of being between things.

a: always. fucking always. anyway. i’m sketching snappy plans in my head, just spur-of-the-moment shit, like whoops, I dropped my phone, or whatever. something better than your ordinary do-you-got-the-time bullcrap.

b: hatching a snare.

a: what?

b: you know, like…i don’t know. you know.

a: whatever. so, she’s wobbling and jerking her way towards me, elbows and knees jutting out, legs like rubber, kind of like a robot gone berserk.

b: awesome. like robot theater on laugh in.

a: what the fuck are you talking about?

b: it was a show in the 60s with goldie hawn.

a: goldie hawn. shit. she was hot.

b: i know.

a: nobody knows what the hell that show is, you moron. shit. just shut the fuck up and listen.

b: but…

a: so, this chick comes hobbling by. and she doesn’t have a cane or a walker or anything. she’s just gyrating on about her way, and she seems to be pretty deft at it, at maneuvering her way about and not bumping into things and like injuring herself or others. it seemed dangerous, you know, to be strutting around all wild and out of control like that. could’ve broke a window with a flying elbow or something, or scratched a cornea with an unbridled finger. but there’s this strange sense of her body’s movements that she seems to have. like she knows just how far her flailing limbs are going out from her, and how to swing her hips around so as to never give the whack to anything around her. it’s kind of amazing. i’m not talking anosognosia. no. it’s more like she’s got an extremely high level of proprioception.

b: like a woman with windmill arms.

a: what? no. not like that at all. that doesn’t even make sense. could you can it for a minute and listen?

b:

a: so she works her quaking way up to me, and i’m just kind of lying back, pretending to be all aloof and not paying any mind to much. cool and unconcerned. all iceberg-slim style. and i can sense her likely getting near. so, in a moment of spontaneity, i stick out my foot a bit, just knowing, somehow, what would happen. and sure enough, slamm’a jamm’a, she steps on my shoe.

b: wow. taking some serious chances there.

a: sure. but it works. she’s like so apologetic. and i’m milking it a bit too.

b: bastard.

a: whatever. it did kind of hurt. anyway, i’m faking a little losing my breakfast there before i’ve even got my lunch in me. it’s quite possible i shed a tear.

b: son of a bitch.

a: Well, lick a stamp and send me off to the races. you have not the slightest fucking idea of what the fuck you speak. just shut it and listen. you might learn yourself something.

b:

a: so i’m doing a little play acting there, grabbing at my toes and wincing and all the likes, and she’s like, ‘i’m so sorry, oh my god,’ and all those likes. i’m dosing her with dabs of woe-is-me, and she’s soaking it up and like exuding fucking pity for me.

b: you’re like one of those guys who calls shin guards “greaves” or “jambeaux.”

a: you going to pipe down and let me finish? or am i gonna have to plug your pie hole for you?

b:

a: well, i’m going all lump-in-the-throat tongue-tied and all the likes, faking it though, you know? and she’s buying it ham hock and all. but then i’m like, of course, not blaming her at all, and am like being very forgiving, and we’re both caught up in this it’s-not-your-fault-it’s-mine thing, but i’m discovering some very interesting things about her figure. she’s built, this chick. all rolling soft hills and slender curves of leg. an ass that you could set your drink down on all night without spilling a drop, hips you just want to grab a hold of and never let go, and the neck of an egyptian goddess. i’m stuffing my head with fantasies of what she’s going to be like naked, and it’s making me more than a lot glad. but there’s this palmist place next door. you know. one of those places where they perform chiromancy and shit. tell you your future by looking at the wrinkles in your palm. and i’d been checking out the sign out front, these purple and yellow bent neon tubes spelling out, “Palms Read. Tarot Cards,” and stuff like that, wondering about what’d happen if i did something like that. never done something like that before. let some fat old lady in a cloak run her hand over mine. shit. i don’t know. i was just pedaling it around in my head a little. and this idea just like sprouts, and soon i’m like telling her we should get our palms read at this place.

b: just out of fucking nowhere?

a: well, no. there’s more to it. we started chatting about the window display for some reason. there are a couple of busts of caesar in there, and a plaster of paris hand, kind of like that hamburger helper hand character, with all the markings of different astral signs or some shit on the palm. also there are these what i guess were tarot cards or something positioned among giant candles with gold crosses, the cards were bearing like religious pictures of like the virgin mary praying or something, and there’s your usual assortment of potion bottles and a chart of the chakras scattered around in the window plants there. but i’ve got to leave some shit out, you know, or else we’ll be here until fucking xmas. can’t tell you every little scrap of conversation between us. shit. let’s just say it was a fairly easy veer point.

b: okay. get on with it.

a: so she’s like feeling all sorry for me. this girl with parkinson’s, you know. and i feel kind of guilty but, it’s not a big deal. i figure i can swing my way out of it. i’m not really positive about the parkinson’s yet anyway. i knew something was wrong, but wasn’t quite sure exactly what kind of beast i was dealing with. so, after a bit more jabbering and are-you-okaying, she decides, sure, why not? and we stride on in to the palmistry place, both us kind of limping, mind you. her in her way. me in my faking way. we must have been a little bit of a sight. but the chiromancer’s pretty chill about it. she’s this old bag in a veil. she’s maybe middle eastern or something. i don’t know. but we sit down at her table in the low light, and we’re both kind of nervous, and the parkinson’s girl’s making a little bit of a racket clattering around, you know, with the parkinson’s and all, but we settle in and get started. there’s a small genie-type lamp on the table, tarot cards lying around, the aroma of scented candles, the whole bit. i’m decorating my head with delusional visions, as per usual, and sitting rather close to she of the parkinson’s and curvaceous figure, endowed with all of the pleasantries the more-superficial man holds in high regard. her knee knocks into mine every so often, and she’s very apologetic about it. i don’t mind it of course. whatever brings her closer on over to me is right as rain. but i’m way the fuck out of my element, to say the least. sitting next to miss parkinson’s, who i don’t even really know at all, in a palm reader’s den. shit. what’s next, you know? and i’m still feigning nursing a sore toe.

b: it’s not like she had stilettos on or something, right?

a: well, whatever. i’m just trying to extract a bit more sympathy without really appearing to be trying to. it’s a very delicate operation. you’ve got to play it very carefully. not overdo it.

b: sounds stupid.

a: i don’t disagree. but once you start in with something like that…well, anyway, i’m sitting there and the room’s pretty dark and this chick with the parkinson’s is right next to me, and i’m thinking, this is great, you know? this is prime territory to start making inroads to a coup d'éta of her undergarments. you know, it’s dark, candlelight, strange old lady in a silk robe, hands being held. i was thinking this all seemed very auspicious to a romantic affair. i can tell looks, you know? she was giving looks. i could feel her looks. and what i was feeling was like hop on the wagon and get this hayride started right. even accounting for the mercurial nature of people’s looks, well, even then i still felt i had that feeling that you get maybe when like a girl whom you’re like majorly crushing on says your name for the first time. there’s nothing like that feeling, and i was flush with something akin to it. i just knew.

b: you sensed it. maybe you’re the one with esp. maybe you should’ve been doing the palm reading.

a: a fly. a fuck. so maybe i’ll just go have lunch with your mom in the rain tomorrow. can’t you nix the interruptions for even a minute?

b:

a: so we’re laying our hands out on the table, palms up, and this old lady is like chanting this divination-like shit at us, and i’m hoping my palms aren’t too sweaty to be read, you know, because i’ve always got sweaty palms. i wasn’t sure if this would like skew the reading or something. like maybe the clamminess would foul things up. i don’t know. there’s a lot of i-don’t-know about these astrological matters. anyway, i’m starting to wonder if there’s a chance on mars that i’m going to actually get into this parkinson’s chick’s groovier parts at some point in the not-too distant future. you always start to weigh those things at some point, you know, like if the risk is worth the reward. but nothing was too bad yet. the whole vibe situation was seeming alright. interstellar connections were being made. i hooked wise to a chance and held my ground. the palm-reader lady was rather lumpy and creased, and her fingers were swelled with all kinds of rings. she had a musky, sour-milk odor to her and seemed to be wearing a cape of some sort, though it was rather dark and being in a strange environment like that one was making my head dull to subtle differences in the fabric of things. but i’m pretty sure it was a cape. i remember how chubby her fingers were, how massive and bloated her hands were, and as she took my limp, scrawny hand in hers i kept thinking about that mike wells’ picture. you know, the one where that beef-jerky skinned, emaciated ugandan’s hand is juxtaposed with that much larger well-fed white hand like black twigs on a pillow. it was that dramatic of a dichotomy. i don’t know, maybe i felt a sort of uxorious tug there, or just an emasculated jab at my efforts, thrown in to bop me back to the reality and not just the, you know, quote-unquote aura of the situation. a large, odiferous, bovine-like woman with a swath of curtain for a dress and wearing what could quite possibly be a felt cape, well, it was just so strange, with my small delicately thin fingers lying spread in her chunky paw, and i can’t quit the feeling that she’s got this eerie power over me, like i’m under her control almost. part of me, though, i think, was actually enjoying this. something submissive rousting about in my unconscious that maybe desired to be controlled and therefore, you know, free of any blame or care, like, you know, somebody else is doing all the decision making and all you’ve got to do is sit back and watch it all happen and be carried away like a feather on the wings of wind.

b: something like that.

a: so she’s starting in with the jumbo and the mumbo, and i’m just playing along, and sharing a few looks with my newfound friend with parkinson’s there sitting next to me, kind of clanking her legs around a bit, but mostly pretty calm and still. and i’m a little nervous so i’m making dumb small talk and wiggling around a little. telling her that this is my first time and that i’ll always remember it and that it’ll never be just like this again, and the fortune teller lady is kind of liking it and kind of over it too, you know, as she probably hears this kind of shtick all the time. but we’re getting going there, and i make a few cracks about my sweaty palms and shit, and the plump clairvoyant starts in on the palm digging. and she’s going over the heart and the head line, the life line, the girdle of venus, the whole ninety-nine yards. and it kind of tickles and is nice. i like it, which surprises me. this fat madame rue’s got a soft touch.

b: she does do this for a living.

a: yeah. and so this parkinson’s girl is like leaning in close with her elbow on the table, and she’s trembling a bit, but not too bad, and she’s nodding some with her chin cupped in a hand, almost like she’s going, ‘yes, yes, uh huh, yes,’ with an eager interest in the goings on. neither of us was worried about a thing.

b: what?

a: it’s just the way it was. i don’t know.

b: what?

a: i don’t know. anyway. i ain’t no miracle worker. i ain’t no miracle man, you know?

b: no. i don’t. what the fuck are you…?

a: no, no, no, no, no…don’t you…can’t you see what i’m saying? don’t you know what i’m telling you? don’t you? huh? huh?

b:

a: i’m just me. i do what i can. i don’t control things. i just go along.

b:

a: anyway. so i’m shipping up and shaping out, and i’m getting dizzying with omens and harbingers and prophecies of what’ll be surely, she says, coming on up ahead for me, waiting for me like a dream/nightmare i’ve yet to have. she’s perspicaciously going on about how the convergence of my life and my love will derail my destiny with mothballs and origami wings, and she tells me that i’m a loner but not a rebel, and that i’d better strangle the demons of my past with somebody else’s hands. it’s all a blur from there on out. my hands were soaked with sweat and i kept apologizing under my breath, and my fingers were squirming around, and miss parkinson’s is kind of laughing at and with me at the same time, and the palm-reader lady is being polite and nonchalant about it, and she like takes some gauzy fabric from her sleeve and wipes down my hand a few times, assuring me that this is normal, that this happens to everyone. her smile is very comforting and reassuring. it makes me feel like i’m in good hands.

b: that’s one way to put it.

a: and this parkinson’s girl. she’s leaning in real close. she’s interested. she’s quirky and unabashed. the walls melt. i’m stealing signs. the whole shebang’s gonna blow. but i can’t move. i’m just sitting there letting it all happen. and somewhere there are heads of various flora gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek.

b: what?

a: it hasn’t happened yet. come tax day you’ll come to know these things. a bloom, a dusty cloud, an open door. i will heave forward and wretch back. give me a gas mask and a lead jacket. curtail my desire to just drift. skew lines in a sky the color of canted rust.

b: harmonize with me.

a: no. it’s a loose-leafed instinct. i was entertaining the thought of going insane, actually. but that soon became irrelevant.

b: thoughts like that come and go and go and go and come again but then they go and then….then….well, um, you know.

a: i wasn’t crying or anything like that. but parkinson’s chick was copious in her grief. parkinson’s miss was blowing an oboe of sorrow for all the dead birds. there were things we’d still have to learn. under certain suspicions we withheld our honor and spit into kleenex.

b: not that we’d have to expect…

a: no. that’s not…well, you see, well…i was hangnailing some boldness there, and there were mistakes i knew i’d never get to make if i didn’t, you know, act fast, while supplies last, you know, and i phoned in my weakness, and it was all a mess.

b: so. what happened next? what’s next? and then, and then, and then…you know.

a: i was fucking sapped. parkinson’s was clinging to me and laughing and smiling and it felt like i was on the cover of that bob dylan album freewheelin’. but inside i was torn to bits. there’s a matter of bragging and keeping it all safe on the inside. shit. like slamming the car door on jealousy’s fingers. it didn’t do any damn good in the long of the short of it. everything’s a coincidence.

b: i was born under the sign of come-closer-or-don’t-come-at-all.

a: we can count now. so, i was…one, two, three…shy enough at the time…four, five…up a tree…six…

b: shouldn’t we be counting down?

a: doesn’t matter. that girl and me, well, we ran away from it all and back again, and we went all over and around. we clasped hands. we kissed. her lips were a flurry of soft, wet, quivering frisson. she shimmied and shook in my arms. it was like being electrocuted, like dancing without even trying. wild spikes of energy pinballing through us. it just happened and there was nothing we could do about it. i don’t know if it was the parkinson’s or what but it was like hitching a ride on a lightning bolt, and we flopped all around and twisted and jangled our way down the block, almost running too, hand in hand, missing everything except each other. it was all the thrill of being alive without any of the worry. and then it was like, well, blue my past and mint the gold of now. past the liquor store, past the parking garage, the smell of gasoline and cigarettes and the sewer, past the video store, and the scent of bacon from the sandwich shop is long gone now. she’s whistling a captain beefheart tune. i’m doing my best bill-cosby two-step. something about it breaks my heart. it doesn’t matter. it doesn’t. we keep dancing. the sidewalk’s sparkling silver. we keep dancing. we keep dancing.

b: strychnine is good. i like the taste. that kind of thing?

a: well, i don’t know. i pray in my spare time. i tinker around with necessity. my doorbell sings to me all through the daylight. under the right set of wrongs, well, i just might allow for a song to keep me warm at night.

b: and then, and then, and then…seven, eight…come on. you know.

a: nine. okay. so i peeped into my future a teeny bit. so what?

b: ten.

a: is that it?

b: guess so.

a: blam?

b: yep.

a: but i was just getting started…but i…

b: doesn’t matter. time don’t care.

a: and then you drop your fork and the whole place shivers with the threat of a falling-out over things to come. and then? and then, well, i guess you’re left with nothing to depend on.

b: but that’s okay. but that’s okay. but that’s okay. walking in the rain. nothing left but pain. it’s okay. it’s…okay.

a: everything will be alright. everything will be…

b: so what now?

a: now? well, i’m a violent and a tender man. the ways of seclusion stain my days. a hurried occupation kicks in the water, and i float and float and float. cardboard soles on my shoes, a richter-scale needle jabbing at my heart, and an empty picture frame where her face used to be. more and more each day i am coming to appreciate the simple fact of being alive, but it’s also becoming something that i am scared less and less to lose.

b: we’re different now.

a: yes. we’ve come to know things we’d only heard about before. a more direct way to beg, borrow, and steal away the days.

b: god. i’m getting choosy lately. i run towards green lights and wonder about hiroshima. i want to do something for myself but keep not doing it. hey. you’ve lost count. you forgot an and-then.

a: there’s stability in being lost and forgotten. everybody’s misunderstood. we all need, we all need, we all need…

b: a little bit o’ soul to put you right, to see you through.

a: with the right kind of eyes, well…fuck it. let’s count backwards from ten.

b: fads of being, looks of seeing, a better way to laugh…ten, nine…

a: the locals are going native…eight…scoundrels are having their moments…seven…

b: savages.

a: there’s a crook in her back, and she’s straining, it’s unbecoming, and i’m clock-less and twenty hours behind as always.

b: six, five…

a: i’ve lost my fingerprints.

b: four.

a: i want a national silence…three….falling down, and then, and then, and then it’s all over and begun.

b: the good guys. the bad guys. we’re all wearing bandanas on our faces these days.

a: two. messed up pretty good, huh?

b: yeah. can’t help it. and then…?

a: there was…one. that’s that.

b: good. i was starting to think….

the worst Valentine’s Day that Harland Sanders ever had

I have, you see, confessions to make. I do make things like that. Yes, I can make things, too, besides coffins, like the one I made for the fat kid who fell down the stairs. I use my hands to shape things. There a various ways of making yourself content, well, some would say happy, but that doesn’t make sense anymore. The plumbers had problems getting in the door. Insulation serves me well, though, occasionally, it doesn’t.

Confessions, like my original 11 herbs and spices, get watered down over the years, and you can piss away what’s left into the slop trough as far as I’m concerned. I’m not one who’s willing to get down and dirty over it. So, well, there’s that.

I ran away from home before I knew how to read or ride a bike. There’s, when you get mushy, like a violin without its strings, some things you do out of needing to do them, when you’re getting beat up all the time and you’re just a little kid, so you split and that’s that. Maybe you join the army. Maybe you get mauled by a wild dog. Could be you end up starving and alone in a ditch somewhere. Eventually you open up shop across the way from a cheap hotel, invent knew ways of frying chicken, get a wife, and spend a lot of time trying to keep her from hating you.

Well, I deep-fried my soul in that damn kitchen, among other things. Skedaddling was an art form I never had much luck with. Sticking around is about all I’ve ever done. Promised in lucky strutting. That’ll be the day.

Get grown…damn flowers. I’m less sturdy now. Bum ankles topple me. Empty vases. Flares unforgiving in the flashed temperance that just hardens to a mold with time. Crusty, pebbled, briefly unstoppable, cut with dull diamonds, coolly stable. There are fasts that never end with or without the borders of love to keep their promises. I am a broken man. Some walks wile away a suitable shade of what I’d hope to become, while dreaming of course, small, hurried, non-union, almost awake enough to care. Church bound on a Wednesday night, then, old indifference, there I am sitting in a pew, bored, gazing beyond all the other gazes, holding my hands palm to palm in my lap. Busted, copping a purpose, out to lunch for a year, glued to sapped strength, half lurid and mostly held in contempt of an imaginary court.

Gunned down. The length of bluebells. One of these days my head will explode. The oil bubbling to burn a hand not deft enough yet to outmaneuver a grease splash. I get glued up with busyness. I steam through the grill all day, and nights are smoked out before they get started. A soiled deal all around. Sure, but who’s asking? Never the right person. Enough sputters into enough. I’m all out of baking soda.

A movie was playing at the Beulah Land Theatre: The Lonely Ones. Silence hadn’t become quite golden yet, or maybe it’d just hinted towards rusting, pieced and prodded and persuading itself to leave. Greta and I had an opportunity there to steer our way towards it, wheel around beneath the stars on unlit dirt roads, find our way, maybe, sped on through the heart of things, dressed ruminatively in the falling of weather towards ice and chains. Pragmatism wasn’t going to win out. I was mostly dropping lucky pennies all over town in those days anyway, so it wasn’t so much as a few dandruff flakes off my scalp, at the time, at least, that’s what I was convinced of. Could be that looking back’s just a better way to fake yourself out. Fall wears itself out, and you end up longing after what you’ve once had but somehow, as hibernation lures you and stunts your efforts, feel you never had enough of for long enough. And so, even as my cohorts amass vats of sludge for the masses, I still make my own gravy from scratch. Long and hard is the well-worth-it way.

The soundtrack to my dreams was cutting Greta’s hair in a cheap hotel room, the strands of lopped off hair all over the bathroom tiles: sea-colored squares littered with swirls of black curls. I was wounded with worry over insubstantial mania, and it was all cinders and ash to me, but I was clamming up, sorting out what purpose I might have in the keel of my existence, speculating, ordering takeout from supermarket deli counters, and finishing Greta’s sentences for her. I got used to saying in my head, “Just another one of my numerous doomed romances.” Talking about the weather was reserved for phone calls. I had to use other-tinted motivation to corral her attention. Beans and rice. Beans and rice. That was more like it.

A put-up-with-it attitude was getting me nowhere. The movie was going to start soon. I fiddled with the radio dials. Greta held her breath and puffed out her cheeks. Her eyes were bulging. I said, “Welcome to your life. There’s no turning back.” I’m not sure if I said it out loud. I’m not sure it would’ve mattered. Greta had a fingertip in each ear. The walls turned into wind.

I was bullying myself. The hotel room’s carpet was burlap, and my hair smelled like electricity. Out the window, between the thick pulled curtains, over the parking lot, in the light of the freeway, I spotted a butler. He was shaggy and green, and he was smoking a clove cigarette, and he had on rhinestone-studded wingtips. As a passing semi flashed its brights on his gray face the butler snarled at me. I grew furious with all butlers and all things butlers do and don’t do. Greta let her breath out.

Somewhere between the pipes of a dream, in the corner of charred cemetery leaves, beyond losing and leaving, in the farewell of an all-aboard, last times come up in footprints, in the water gone from bathtubs, in made-up names and the sound of clacking wooden spoons, in the waiting for trains on barstools and inking in the squares of crossword puzzles on the bar. Tell me my name and I’ll change it for a song.

Samantha-toothed, beguiled by disguises of same same same same…cooks all the time….he wills away the bad press in the decibels of hurt, and we manage, and the sky’s still hanging in there okay. Provoked, Cadillac-ward, in heat-lamp bliss…generally. Step on over here. Step away. It’s a lode to be savvy to, this gleaming thin through the mattress, and at a payout of cents to the intractable galaxies of nightmares, more comeuppance to come, low-beam high and sweating out the impurities, luckiest me there is to be.

A stoplight is charging me with infatuated insanity. Is there a crime to mewl my way out of? I orchestrate the pulling of teeth. Insinuations fly. A boiling sound is matriculating through yellow wallpaper. Abbreviations turn the lights low and then turn out the dark.

The Lonely Ones shoot toothbrushes from air guns. Their prey are nuns and insurance investigators. While engaged in warfare with their enemies-- clad in leather jackets with white spray-painted letters on the back proclaiming: “The Lonely Ones, Don’t Crowd Us Out!”-- they spread out and muffle the pain of their surroundings. Sometimes they assert themselves with aggressive dance moves, usually involving their black-jeaned posteriors, which they use to divert others from their course. To them this is merely a conceptual bit of maneuvering, and they will say, “We may gyrate, but only to our own internal rhythms.” It is not foolish or cute, and it does not betray any signs of personal-space issues. These boys hide daggers in their boots. One should try at all costs to avoid The Lonely Ones on attack. It is dangerous and derivative and beyond all counseling solutions. I am giving myself away.

Cool it. Cursive writes your will on take-out buckets. Fingers get licked. Crunchiness loses its charm. There’s a heart painted on a gas station’s bathroom wall. It’s bloated and pink and riddled with holes. Can it. A toilet flushes. It’s a Hobson’s choice, and then the stall door slams leaving you cleaner than a frog’s armpit. Everything goes mushy. Everything’s gone Katy bar the door. Helped out by long-in-the-tooth tiles that don’t listen too well anymore. Think. Think. Damn it. I’m going to go and ruin everything.

“Help the shower run. It’s on low. Some powder bugs got in the dynamite.”

“There’s pleasure and drama lurking in and behind my funny faces.”

“Come Valentine’s Day they’ll be hunting us down. The blades of helicopters and brightness of search lights will find us out.”

“We’ll be lazy. We’ll kidnap ourselves.”

“Moving around won’t take up our time.”

“Keep your voice.”

“Make pajamas my uniform. There.”

“There.”

“No. There.”

“There?”

“There!”

“Oh. There. There. There.”

“We have faces so people can recognize us.”

The pinnacle of playing hookey. Unreachable. Paved and minty. Slammed open. Where even the horses have wings. Put a dish of honey out for the bees. The airplanes of our tomorrows will all crash into flying time. Be the first to flee. An antidote for being shy and nervous. A cog in the jammed gears running the sad machinery of spring. This way around. Over here. Over here.

Gobs of sunlight jellying through and frying the plate glass, and I’m yellow-gold soaked, in a crispy mood that oils satisfaction’s motor and spots checks-in-the-mail famuli their last rites. The meanness, shattered to splinters, deeply undone, gasoline on the tongue, madness in the family. Values packed through snowed-in starlight. She said don’t betray me, don’t delay me, get the music to move in time. She said she’s opening a restaurant in a tree. Hairpieces caught in branches, floating on a sea of leaves. Sporks stuck in the trunk. Patrons wearing hardhats while they dine. She said hold your head against my hand, she said, she said, she said things like trace my shadow on the sidewalk outside. Crawl through pine needles. Never enough time in the morning, and we covet the lives that detectives lead. Brown my sugar and muddy my eyes. Valor is not the rarest ingredient, but this batch of remorse has grown cranky underneath the bloodshot moon. I will build the butler a brand new sky.