Are you lonesome tonight? Well,
that’s being crabby. Don’t go in for it. Raised into this, you can help it,
still. Rile the curtains closed with drawled verses. The chorus will cling to
you.
I learned somewhere along the line
to ditch people who were too normal, too tied to the hooks of society’s tune. I
make hay with the poorest and looniest of folks, those who don’t need a
computer to know it’s raining outside. Running with the absurdist of
characters, tracing faces in the windshield of a junked car. Almost not there.
Can you not hear it yet?
Palms out, up, and not ready still.
Counting away the ways you won’t have any of it. Spurn the best of me for the
worst I’ll never let on about to sudden strangers. Suddenly not so familiar at
all.
(ad for drug to relieve Jerk
Syndrome)
There are capsules of gelatin and
silver that’ll make your heart go crazy with togetherness. The bruised,
slighted sighs of just getting by will leave. You will for the first time feel
as if you are not a mistake, that your life is being lived with purpose, for a
reason, and that reason will be pellucid to you through all the drudgery of
your past. You will feel empathy and compassion for others, and you will come
to see that other people are there to help each other, and that this includes
you— being helped and aiding as well. A marching band of hope will encompass you.
A slight trickle of joy tinged with euphoria will sop up your worries. You will
no longer seek the appreciation of others but instead will come to find a new appreciation
for them. Appearing desperate or sad will no longer matter to you. You will be
genuine at all times. This effect will last 4-6 hours. Afterwards you will go
back to being ordinary, but with a vague notion that at some point you experienced
something worthwhile, though not sure of exactly what that something was.
Still, after it started and
stopped, all this on-again/off-again hassling around held truer. The take it
took: people walking pigs around instead of dogs, half around the corner to
here. The names it takes give off more than a pulling would. Take one. Take
another. Rise with the slope, shabby or not, until the dirt chokes and the
mandrake’s pulled.
Find an older way to drink. A way
to put yourself to sleep. A way to slowly waste away. A way to rove more
aimlessly and sincere. A way to put it all away.
Horses believe the year. Another
not is put away for a to’s have. A spit of rain brings back the susurrations of years
bought off too soon now. Places that tell, “Dying is nothing compared to all
that life you get to live before it.” A rapt rejoinder to what commandeered a
smile left boiling points undeniably and invariably unwilling to get known. We
played with snails and salt. The diving board broke a few noses and then the
moon came up.
Yes. The winter steered through
coffee shops to machine shops to robot factories to relapses in fundamental
flaws through bone-density scans and empty sugar packets. We filmed each other
in the red and gold light, mouthing through some stuff’s rough, and there were
no locks on the darkroom doors. To put it smashingly, “Perhaps you will come to
know what to like about me, or what it is about me that is there to be liked at
least, in the barbershop weather or stiletto light of shaping down what’s not
there to be liked, or in the taillights of passing you’ll find me shooing cigar
lighters away to ululating why-nots. But if we’d both stoop up— better yet,
side-to-side—maybe the days will crash on us instead of crush us.”
No. It is something like, “If I
could count the ways I miss you, babe, I’d never count again. If the wind’s
will were mine to keep, I‘d lose my hat and grin. If we were poor with syrup,
babe, it’d be all we need. If you’d come around still and darn my dreams, because
they’re weak at the seams, babe. We could stay up late and eat chow mein, watch
the latest shows they’ve got, and still miss each other the whole while.
“If I could rant without a rave
about the busses. If you’d say, ‘They always all go the other way.’ If this were
just something to sing, babe. We’d sing it all up into no ever’s down.
“If we had whistles to blow at
cops, if we used old t-shirts for mops, if we had none of tip and a bit of tap,
if we mooned Texas, if even just on a map.
“But hell, I’m getting so tired of
this dead-end life. Why don’t we go to Reno, babe, and I’ll make you my wife.”
There are tenants who live below street
level. A walk-down place with a sentimental fugue leaking from the window frames.
Relapse into boredom. Really, there’s no better sake than for the devil. And we’re
slaked with it, of course— in a place where the commercials know you better
than you know yourself. There was another “Ha” there for us. Probably a stupid
scheme to rhyme luck with something, but the shares of us were sold too low. I
last only to lie around and think about that girl two flights below, the one
who stole my mail. I slip a note beneath her door: “I’m taking my ‘like’ back.
You don’t deserve it. Trip over a railroad tie. Call the wolves back from
dessert. Don’t rise down too slow. Irrelevant truth aside. Take my leave,
please. Take two of these and text me in the morning. Rule it all in. We are
mistakes in the slide. A smoother grade to slip down. I’ve long been of the
belief that there are more details between the details than in them. And, also,
by the way, I think maybe it’s not too good to give too much of oneself away at
once. Anyway, I think there is plenty enough there to know plenty enough about
me without knowing me at all yet as it is. Later. And later still.”
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