Shovels & Rope

BLACK BART: Triple or everything, I’ll give it like I take it. It is moronic to idolize the famous. Swimming pools say more.  

IDA TARBELL: Trite. Convalescing. Out of it spins to in. There goes that 90-proof dame again, on the nowhere wagon to everywhere.

BLACK BART: But suspects line down the boulevard.

IDA TARBELL: Up it.

BLACK BART: Oh, that too. Bewildered, they haunt the long-gone rose gardens, they turn mugwort eyes on the fiasco and chew on egg rolls in the early AM.

IDA TARBELL: I know the shape of his shadow by liver, by spleen, by kidney and ileocecal valve. There are no escapes, only more entrances, more condiments and dressings.

BLACK BART: Suspicions that never rise much above the hips.

IDA TARBELL: Arise, my un-esteemed colleague. Tap that payment card at any pay station but mine, Sally old gal.

BLACK BART: There will be no credit cards in heaven. It’ll be a cash-only affair. I’m ordering my valet to bury me with my watch on. I think angels will vie for my attention if I glimmer and shine.

IDA TARBELL: The ants are beckoning. The yaks are becoming supper. Me? Don’t worry about me. I’m not going to live through any of this.

BLACK BART: Thought so. That’s analogous to chintzy querulous patterns of wimps ducking out of battles and confrontations. It is situational, no? There are more socks to wear than you’ll ever own. Get out in the sunlight and be you.

IDA TARBELL: Pale is my only accoutrement. Pasty and bland is my mise en scène. Look out above. I’m quite ready to not jump.

BLACK BART: I fought the yuppies and the yuppies won.

IDA TARBELL: The untold story of an unknown stranger’s life. Yes. That makes your eyes teary. That ruptures your little rapturous moment there, doesn’t it?

BLACK BART: If it’s Wednesday in the parched confines of another shoddy week’s work, then the Tasers are all set to Kill, and this while the beaten-to-death lie prone and proud on the asphalt.

IDA TARBELL: Muck it. Really. Muck all of it.

BLACK BART: Doesn’t have the same effect.

IDA TARBELL: No. But listening’s useless, there and then, and I’ve got hopscotch to play with the pleasantly and most willfully discharged marines you’d ever know, or not know for that matter.

BLACK BART: Don’t get to the point. Rile the faithful. I know the 100-proof smile you’ll be messing around with soon. Breath like a topped-off gas tank. Moods that reinvent themselves forty times a day. I don’t want powdered milk in my Cocoa Puffs. Breathe. Go ahead. Try it. Breathe. That’ll do.

IDA TARBELL: And the heart’s song is tuned to goodbye.

BLACK BART: Yes. Let’s wait for some accompaniment.

IDA TARBELL: The dash of hesitation that’s palling around with unrequited distance is a both-feet-forward kind of thing.

BLACK BART: I do, and I do not.

IDA TARBELL: Because of where we go and where we don’t. I am unlisted in hell’s phone directory. Dial M for missed.

BLACK BART: Nuts.

IDA TARBELL: We are only what we think.

BLACK BART: Just a gull’s dream foraging for favor in the spray of _____, the mist of _____, or in droplets of ____ __ _____.

IDA TARBELL: _______!

BLACK BART: Damn.

IDA TARBELL: Please do not cross the yellow line. Do not bother the operator. Do not wish anything away. The fools are in the details. The roof’s about to collapse. It’s all steam and Moroccan scent on the way to getting away, on my way. If it were. If I could. Okay. I’ll stop singing someday.

BLACK BART: You’d know best. The stupidest among us rule with a plastic hammer and a blow-up fist.

IDA TARBELL: A cure for bad dreams, but not nightmares.

BLACK BART: A hypnotist’s cloak worn inside-out for none of the world to see. Demanding less, the sunsets flicker off into the wattle of the world. And me? I’m going for Shyest Guy On The Planet honors.

IDA TARBELL: The records we won’t set.  

BLACK BART: I’ve been settling for so long. I’ve forgotten how to be serious. Nothing goes together or stays apart very well. 

IDA TARBELL: Yes, we can’t. As I die and wheeze. Cool. Cool. Huh?

BLACK BART: Sure fired on Uneasy without a dot of distance blipped between them. Who was it who lay then, there, in the lying of whom, up before down, as it weren’t, sleeping, only?

IDA TARBELL: Who?

BLACK BART: That’s not a direction. Nobody’s taking or following orders. Go on and rope off all the unclaimed territory, used as ever, in the potbelly of your eyes.

IDA TARBELL: Ditched, and tabulated in all loaded accounts of this is the wherewithal to not muster the Biff-Loman supporters to rally but to only cry.

BLACK BART: It’s all scratched and folded into my vocal cords. I say differently the same things with no difference in the casual lullaby’s passing. But we were all less than happier then.

IDA TARBELL: And it was all included in the framework, scars and cracks and wreckage and rubble and all. And my hands are no longer as lovely as they used to be.

BLACK BART: Just for a long while less. 

IDA TARBELL: The leaves here are more golden than we let on, more worthy of letting go.

BLACK BART: The Queen Of Ravioli is on the make, and I’m foxtrotting with demure savages in high-rise multiplex ballrooms. Here, there is so much gone and so much left.

IDA TARBELL: The way we weren’t, it tells the same story through and through.   

BLACK BART: And so other people are somehow supposed to know what the recently deceased would have wanted me to do? Hell, I don’t expect anything from anybody after I die. I won’t be around to know anyhow. You just do what you can and must and will, and you do it almost as well as you shouldn't.

IDA TARBELL: The past comes and goes. Let’s get some dark on the object. And run errands for the sappy in the big unjust. I haven’t become completely insulated from the elements as of late, yet, but then again, or now, I just want to read upside-out.

BLACK BART: Well, get his then. Something from Jackie’s limo ride in Texas-- “I have his brains in my hands. Jack, what have they done? Jack. I love you. This is terrible, Jack. I love you. Jack. I love you.”

IDA TARBELL: Something not of the sort, I mostly don’t see; and all of this while the tattoos of toothier goobers lose perceived value in the contextual confines of emulation’s choppy contractual obligations that are oh-so limited by supply’s demand. But me? I’m confirmed in my resignation’s desperation.

BLACK BART: Fucking tattletale.

IDA TARBELL: Who are you, who is anyone else to tell me what I need? I don’t need a damn thing. Not a damn thing at all. New York’s not on the skyline anymore. I’m rushing out of slowing down, and the moon’s new-penny bright scythe is slicing a spotlight out of the pitch in night’s blue-black felt skin. That’s all.

BLACK BART: It is, mostly, and then it is not too, mostly.

IDA TARBELL: Make it on your own. Or don’t. It gets lonelier here all the time.

BLACK BART: Slim up and fatten down. Ham. Ham. Ham. That’s about all I’m good for, or bad for not.

IDA TARBELL: Wish none of it here, but away to a cornfield like a Jack-in-the-box with a human head. Anyway, spring is for wussies. Fall is for the real standup-sitdown gals.  

BLACK BART: Every then and now we keep getting dry from distilling our souls too close to home in the alembic of hard, cold fictions.

IDA TARBELL: I bet we’ll touch on it before we die, though. Just a dab, a slight fingertip’s brush, a fallen smile, and then it’ll all be done.

BLACK BART: Be joyful, you fine-haired sons of bitches.

IDA TARBELL: Yup.