misanthropic dipsomaniacs

            “Something like this: Don’t argue with me. I’ve just had a heart attack.”

            “Sure. And the guy says to me, ‘This job’s killed greater men than I.’ And I tell him, ‘Well, that’s not so great,’ you know?”

            “Yep. You know, like, worry about it, why don’t you? Go ahead. Worry!”

            “Plan ahead to fall behind. It gets the ruckus started, pretty close to right.”

            “Volatile suppositions go down drowned and exposed. I might make more rights on reds than most. Over that, well, I’m felled to be finished.”

            “And then she says, ‘I’m all out of lipstick.’ Right?”

            “Lord save the devils. Put my name in a hat and toss your glass in the air. I’m altered, and I’m alright.”           

            “Can’t a man just be happy without all these accusations being hurled at him?”

            “The kind of nonsense we talk should be patented.”

            “All the breaks, all the walked hurrying, all the push-and-peep deliverance, all the harkening, all the vouching. We’re such weasels in with rats. I bet this whorl of crumby luck is done, just like us. Or would that be to us?”

            “Nothing is worse. Better’s junked. A lot of crud, if you make me an answer of it.”

            “Decline between the lines.”

            “Fellow tipplers, unite!”

            “Topers. It’s topers, fuck nut.”

            “I don’t care. I don’t care. I just…me? I just don’t care no more.”

            “Play to place.”

            “I’m up on blocks lately. I’m in dispose. I’m jealous of windows. That’s another round, boys. Once more around.”

            “Rye whisky, rye whisky. If I don’t get rye whisky I think I might die.”

            “Or if you do you’ll drink yourself to it. The dying, that is.”

            “Per…burp…haps.”

            “Plain as night. 

             “Other people. Shit. They go around ordering their own disasters. Dessert is not served, damn it! I am groveling for pennies and unsalted peanuts. Shit.”

            “Work around it. Pat your own front. I’m dishing out plates to the spoon-and-fork crowd.”

            “The mice have come for your morsels.”

            “Yikes. I mean, jiminy x-mas.”

            “Victory is our all’s nothing.”

            “With me, well, it’s all tiptoe or tornado. I opt for unlikely resources. A better pull at this here bottle in front of me. Everything gets on to being relevant at some point.”

            “Just ask God when she’s drunk.”

            “Better down than out. I rent my time by the bottle. Gasoline makes us all sadder campers. Just the fumes. Just the spume.”

            “Remarkable. Your playing your own funeral, and it’s a sellout. Can’t get a ticket anywhere, new or old.”

            “It’s a tough song to end. You’ve just got to know when to pull the plug.”

            “That’s just the ice in your drink talking.”

            “Sure. I’m all bells and cop sirens. Take me less than a serious man would. Splash out my dreams on the cold concrete. Nobody’s around to hear.”

            “Some girl says hi, asks how you’re doing as you try to squeeze by a crowded deli counter. And you scratch at your neck and try to remember who she is and how the hell she knows you. And you say that you’re doing just fine.”

            “Another one or three down the hatch.”

            “That’s a dollar to somebody else’s name.”

            “Strange pensioners giving the weak arm to stranger strangers than us.”

            “Tell ‘em all I said farewell.”

            “Wilt and whine. Shrink and moan. I’m dreary. I’m picked apart by trying. If the streetlights were wearing shirts they’d have a few buttons undone about now. And I’m sitting here memorizing the names of lakes. By golly, though. Nobody knows her alibis by heart the way I do.”

            “Who?”

            “The rain.”

            “Oh.”

            “The 24-hour diners are all filled up with lunatic insomniacs, dress-rehearsal dropouts, ex-candy-bar salesmen, scarf-and-bolo wearing hooligans, and the crankiest janitors east of Minneapolis. I give in, but not out.”

            “I am overwhelmed by holy dismissiveness. Color me in with Colorado. Cut the skin from all the apples. I’m giving out church keys to all the beggars. Let’s trump up the charges and stroll without the moolah. Nothing will cut our ties for us. Nothing.”

            “Only they don’t go around giving out medals to chumps like us.”

            “Better dangerous than sorry that you’re getting too soft.”

            “My Russian don’t stumble when it’s walking itself home. My China’s on the fritz. All my Ethiopias are dressed up in courage. Don’t relate my Mexico to yours. I’m feeling festive in the window’s neon. And my Frances are driving on the wrong side of the road.”

            “Guess. I’m all for it. Guess, guess, guess.”

            “Do you see these hands clapping?”

            “Bluffs that call themselves. I get it.”

            “Bats! Look out! Duck! Bats!”

            “That’ll cave in what I don’t get into what I forget to feel like having too long ago to repeat. You, uh, dropped something there.”

            “I’ve been picking myself up off the floor for too long now. Forget it. I’m all out and in at the same time.”

            “Better off out than in. We keep ourselves up at night with jumpy plunderings of the past.”

            “Sha Na Na Na. Lah. Lah. Lah!”

            “This here bar’s holding me up like it’s my only friend. All I got in this miserable old world.”

            “Nobody brings anything small into a bar….”

            “Around here. Yep. Bad old Jamie Stewart on the lam. Gesticulating for the mob.”

            “I can’t sleep at night.”

            “The day?”

            “Nah. That’s for drinking away the maudlin dreams I’m too scared to let myself have.”

            “The older we get…”

            “The more we need this.”

            “Crash on the levee, baby. This old ship’s a gonna wreck just right before it gets to shore.”

            “The more we need of this. The more it needs of us.”

            “Sha Lah Lah…Lah lah lah…”

            “All we are is what time’s made us.”

            “Washed out to the sea too drunk to swim.”

            “Sha Na Na. Lah. Lah! Lah!”

            “And we’re reckless now, getting smashed before breakfast with ruffians.”

            “Never mind my shyness. Just, never mind.”

            “A winze for the more temperamental of us to connect with our inner selves. I am in charge of nothing.”

            “Blasted.”

            “Rats.”

            “There’ll be or they’ll be?”

            “Both. In any or all cases, loafing gets me by. By the way, this here edge is not very easy to take off.”

            “I’ve noticed. Quick, recite The Declaration of Independence while imbibing this here glass of beer.”            

            “That’ll help. The shakes are coming for me. Best to get a head start.”

            “Even Thomas Jefferson…”

            “Yep. Even him. The king of the nickel.”

            “Not so much like other people. A crusader of the bummest deals. Not one adolescent in detention would ever guess what that’s worth. Not even an act of vandalism to my name. Hold the fort. I gotta wrangle with the pisser.”

            “General Mao’s gone north for the winter. Okay. Go get your tinkle on.”

            “You can’t talk to me like that. We’re attempting to be adults here, remember?”

            “Oh, well, shit. All the bartenders from here to tiramisu keep their noses clean with busyness. I’d advise opportunity to ring instead of knocking. I’d advise you to do the same, if I could.”

            “Anything’d be reassuring at this point. Hallelujah. Day by day. I shall be back.”

            “In or through the course of events we come to a steeple of fingers and a home made of paper, rock, and scissors. We might attempt a hijacking of our stilted ways. We might make dominos out of nude pictures of 3^rd-rate movie stars. Over my own admonishment. Over my quibbles with insecurity’s blessed walls. I’d be stabbing back if I could. Don’t you know all my best friends are from Queens? Ah. The flush. There it is. The hallowed sound of water’s downward dance. A crepitant jangle in the lights. The gusty hooverings of the hand dryer. I want to watch trees go about their day. This song reminds me of 1948. Claire De Lune? Or would that be near-to-highly inappropriate for me to say out loud? Piano music is an old pal of mine, so there’s that.”

            “Mumbling will get you everywhere except where you want most to go.”

            “Some highbrow philosophizing went on in the john there, I see.”

            “And to whom would that remark be intended for? I’m all ears, here. Really.”

            “Say that again. Did you fly when you were a kid?”

            “All the time.”

            “Figurines. It does and it does and it does. Doesn’t it?”

            “Got to. Cranks of fortune lend awful dimes to anachronistic machines. We hotel our destinations. We chase quarters into the gutter. The bells are all out of tolls. Abate! That’s what I say. Abate!”

            “Greasy hunky-dory satisfaction takes root. That’s all I’m seeing here. Smug stops of stationary devices. Me? I bridle optimism in hopes of remaining humble.”

            “Conning yourself? It’s a cheapskate’s ruse. I own the mercenary plash in the surroundings. Get taken with it or be took. It’s me winking at the trunk instead of the hood.”

            “I own the rights to my anger. I drink to or with it, but never to my health.”

            “Gather your belongings. The party’s not attended. We need to damage our remorse some before outwitting errand-takers.”

            “I believe in peonies with rubber stems.” 

            “Nobody’s in the business of placing blame, as they said back in other Novembers, other recharged accounts, and in the hassle of crummy weather. The breath it takes is never quite away enough.”

            “There are raisins in my rum. And every day I’m a little more dumb.”

            “Playing the scales up and down while the other kids got to run around and roughhouse. Look at me now. I’m a stiff collar for the world to pull at. Reconsider the dust.”

            “You don’t say!”

            “I do.”

            “Well, pop my corn and punch all my jokes. I eat earwigs for breakfast and small-time despots for dessert.”

            “And for all of our hereafters?”

            “Cry toasts in the loveless midnight. Arrest graffiti chiselers for scabbing the bar doors with phrases like, ‘She’s a walrus and she don’t like black.’ Misrepresent my necktie in a wrapping contest. Choose no side. Ophelia works only as a bouncer and a radio thief in these skewered times we find ourselves counting along with. These months have the loneliest sounding names.”

            “Beat back the breakers, mama. This whole here show’s never gonna hit the road.”

            “I’ve said my peace through shards of war. Oh holiest of shit, I’m murkier now in throes of photographed wonder than the past’d ever know.”

            “Some gladder afternoon than this. I’ll flay away. I’ll flay away. And then. And then. Flay, flay, flay away.”

            “Sadder still. Sad and sadder, and sadder still.”

            “As long as the whisky pours true, and it is so warm and strong going down. Tingle my palms and elate my brain. I’m off to nab cat burglars in the act of asleep-and-drunk-in-their-boots penance.”

            “So says who?”

            “So says the father’s mother and the son’s holiest of poltergeists.”

            “How many points do I get for missing?”

            “Only as much as it takes for it to be all that you do.”

            “How much?”

            “Deal. Just, fucking, deal.”

            “One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. All the goddamn Mississippis in the world. Okay, I’m rivered out.”

            “Good enough, and, also, just not quite that good.”

             

untested notes of binaural audition (answer key)

            Q:

            A: It’s when the turbulence hits, hanging in midair, or more like the preparing to endure the sensation that I know is going to like literally quake my whole being. It’s something irrational that just takes over, and there’s really nothing I can do about it. Something flawed and scarred in my own estimate of terror, something that wells up and stays heavy no matter what I do. I just can’t shake it. It’s not acrophobia or vertigo, really, either. I can be in high places, no problem. And it’s not like I get dizzy or confused or lightheaded. It’s more like a combination of anxiety and some sort of deathly fear ingrained in my subconscious that grabs my sense of who I am and rattles it until I’m sweating and panicky and completely locked inside of this space that keeps squashing me in like a garbage compactor. 

            Q:

            A: No. I’m not sure about that.

            Q:

            A: Well, it’s hard to say. One moment you are like totally invincible. And the next?

            Q:

            A: Yeah. That’s true. But I don’t believe it myself. At least I don’t, or wouldn’t like to, think so.

            Q:

            A: Because it’d get too hard to be rational, in that particular case. You’d lose your sense of perspective on what it means to be you. You know? It’s hard to explain, I guess. It gets hard to, at least.

            Q:

            A: Steamed broccoli.

            Q:

            A: Of course! That goes without mentioning. There’s the rumble, that distinct tremor of dread that snaps me like an electric shock into…what would be the total opposite of oblivion?

           

            Q:

           

            A: Yes. There’s a certain peculiar sense of…I don’t know, the absolute loss of control over what’s happening to me. I can’t get outside of it. It’s like being bubble-wrapped in anxiety, force-fed this needles-and-pins dread that usurps my normal means to functionality.

            Q:

            A: No. Definitely not. That’d just make it worse, you know?

            Q:

            A: Well, think about it. It’s kind of like saying, “The Wild Wild East.” It just doesn’t cut it. My mustard’s white. My temper’s tin-foiled. Let’s keep this on the down and up. I don’t want to get snuckered into all this…

           

            Q:

            A: Yeah. Snuckered. Like a portmanteau of snicker and fucker. Snucker.

            Q:

            A: Ha. Not really. Never thought about that. But, yeah, it’s like everything gets ratcheted up. The pressure-- and no, I just had a drifter about cabin pressure there, so, well, no…anyway-- the pressure, it gets so intense it’s like I could never scream it away. It’s over and above and beyond any loudness in the world. For all intentional circumstances there’s no habitual renderings going on, you know?

            Q:

            A: True. But still. One must, you know, get by. And for the most part I’m terrified of being, well, terrified. That’s more telling, I guess. That’s more of a here-I-am-rock-me-like-a-hurricane situation. At least that’s what I keep telling myself.

            Q:

            A: In what way?

            Q:

           

            A: Oh. I get it. Tell the girl she’s got potential and then let her drift on away and do whatever it is that she’s going to do. Real uplifting message. I’d change it to something like, “Don’t forget your sunglasses, Little Red. There’s a wolf who’s not quite as hungry as you’d think hiding somewhere beyond reason and sense. Make a break for insanity if you can.” Or something at least more spirit-raising than some moldy diatribe of wishy-washy sentimentality. Boo-motherfucking-hoo, you know?

            Q:

            A: Sure. And while I’m at it, don’t you maybe, just maybe, inside of that potboiler head of yours, think that I might have more guts than you give me credit for? I mean, look at it. I’m going against every fiber of my fucking being just going on these flights, bucking every instinct-- no matter how bogus those instincts seem on the surface, and below too-- just to wrangle myself into a seat, which I pray to God is a window seat (this somehow assuages the fear somewhat, being able to look down and see some scraps of land below me, tiny rectangles of cordoned off green and brown, or just the wing sometimes), buckle myself in and sit there next to a complete stranger who is usually so involved in her own magazine and/or head-phoned music to even bother a nanosecond about some misconceptualized fear residing deep and deadly in the most primordial places of the heart in the person sitting to her immediate left. And I sit there, for hours, falling further down this inescapable rabbit hole, gritting my teeth, nails digging into my palms so hard it looks like my hands have been attacked by a woodpecker.

            Q:

            A: Okay, well if my hands were wood. A skinpecker then. Does that make you happy? Fuck. I’m just…

            Q:

            A: Oh, bull manure chunks. “I want to be stereotyped. I want to be classified.” See? Well, she-says-Jesus. Anyway. So, what I’m trying to convey here is the complete full-throttle antagonism of my struggle. It’s almost like I’m fighting against myself fighting against myself. Wow. That sounds so absurd. But, hell, that’s just how it feels.

            Q:

            A: Oh. Yeah. That’s another thing. You’ve kind of gone and clubbed the proverbial baby seal on the head with that one. Very apposite, Deary.

            Q:

            A: Fuck you.

            Q:

            A: I know. Sorry. It’s just the squealing shoot-at-first-sight nature of these things. I get it. So, well, anyway, like I was saying...

            Q:

            A: As I was saying, there’s really no perpetualty about it when I back-tab to the previous browser of my mind’s screen. I’m open to suggestions. It’s just that it’s really hard for me to believe that any other person could possibly understand what it’s like to be in that frame of mind. I can’t understand it myself when I’m not in it. That doesn’t help. It just doesn’t. The trap that I set for myself is inescapable. I guess that’s my own fault. I make sure I can’t possibly get out of it, of course without consciously knowing that I’m setting the trap. How could someone else come up with a solution to something I’ve carefully crafted-- though unknowingly so-- to outwit myself? It doesn’t seem that likely to me.

            Q:

            A: Could be.

            Q:

            A: Excuse me?

            Q:

            A: Sure. Sure it does. That makes like absolutely zero cents in the cash bag. I want to be warm, just like everyone else does. Just not too warm, or too cold. Thriving in optimal conditions. Something…shit. Something like that.

            Q:

            A: Just because. That’s all. Just because. Steam open all my mail. Guess the Crown back in Royal. Mohair on the seat of my pants, and I sneeze and I sneeze, and that’s all there is to know. Guesses are as close as you’ll ever get to it.

            Q:

            A: If it were that easy we’d all be billionaires of the mind. No. I don’t accept that. The route least or most taken. It doesn’t matter. We’re strutting around with ideals stuck in our hats. We’re affectionate without knowing it. The places we take for granted when we aren’t in them take us for all we’re worth.

            Q:

            A: No. More like, “War in.”

            Q:

            A: Wilder. More free than that. A partition in oblivion. A muskier scent of being lost, alone, disenfranchised by disenchantment, the edges…it’s in the edges that we construct a meager escape. I don’t care about delayed copouts and battalions of unsaintly rovers mismanaging the resources of the world. I am this horribly frightened creature staring life into its deepest corners, a curled ball of trembling and wide-eyed, inchoate nightmares. It’s not worth even attacking, this anxiously hyperaware state. It won’t go away. There’s nowhere for it to go.     

            Q:

            A: No. Definitely not.

            Q:

            A: Something felt. The wavering shadows of tree branches like monstrous tendrils in a steamed-up window. A memory caught in a shape’s sense. More than a whispering ease to put you to bed with. A streetlight’s pumpkin-orange glow shrouded in fog. A shambled plod through grains of knowing, and it’s crowded, pulled too close for anything even resembling comfort. The disregarded mulch of an over-stewed life. Something unable to be stirred. I kiss my memories goodbye on each cheek and kill mosquitoes with a tennis racket. It is disquiet at its most refined and absurd.

            Q:

            A: It doesn’t matter. Nobody dreams of me.

            Q:

            A: I guess so. One never knows, now does one?

            Q:

            A: What’s the frequency?

            Q:

            A: That’ll do. They both have their fine side, their reverse gear, and what’s surprising is how little was apparently lost in the whole scheme of most folks’ lives when all was over for both of those guys. It’s all some sick schmooze fest now. And I will have none of it. The closed-door clutter of nostalgia and trend hopping and the mopiest kids on the planet to boot. Fuck that. Seriously. It all sucks the mighty big one.

            Q:

            A: Not if I can help it.

            Q:

            A: Circumnavigating the loneliness of what’s stretching so vast and eerily across the account of things I’ll now never get the chance to know, to have the experience of going through. In a nutshell? I’m doomed by my own inhibition.

            Q:

            A: Yes.

            Q:

            A: A highfalutin wrong and nobody’s right. Insincerity is the highest form of flattery, at least in a place where I’d never claim to be from. I’m taking my middle name with me to the grave. That ought to put a dull sheen on the price of gold for the next couple of generations. But there’s always a lot of “ought” to things in general. As deep-sea shrimp vomit bioluminescence, “ought” leaves a lot of room for loss to grow tentacles and find more victims to strangle in their sleep.  

            Q:

            A: Oh, I know. You’re right…but still…

            Q:

            A: Yeah. The seedier, the better. I’m miffed about it for the most part, still. Things that used to add up are starting to divide and multiply, and at the worst of times, subtract.

            Q:

            A: Dictated by the swinging catastrophes of moods. Simplified, rendered into neutral slumber, and it’s me who’s mistaking devils for G-rated companions with cute little bifurcated tails and kid-friendly pitchforks. I am completely absorbed and annihilated by the dread of turbulence, and when that rollicking starts? Oh, brother. It’s like my whole personality is shoved candy-over-apple into the briar patch.

            Q:

            A: The short of the long of it? It’s just like…well, acting a certain way to fool others follows suit, and then, unbeknownst to even yourself, you become that way, that fool you’ve created to lure others off the scent. The act of acting a certain way becomes a way of behaving, and you do it naturally and unaffected at last, with maybe a subconscious wink at your true-blue…well, personality. And, in the end’s only start, we are nothing but it. Our personality? It is everything about who we are, who we appear to be, and if it gets slain or maimed or tortured or dragged through the streets until it burns and writhes in agony? Well, let’s just say that we won’t be making any appearances, public or private, except maybe in this redoubt we’ve carved out with trepidation and distress in the craggiest caves of our mind, this temporary vestibule of our trembling willpower that locks us up unsteady yet somehow strangely…safe.

            Q:

            A: Safe. Yeah. That’s the odd thing. It’s like my mind’s gone into disaster mode, sensing the direness of the circumstances. It takes my personality and flees with it to some distant chamber where it can be…well, safe. Even though it is a place so scary and horrifying and downright scaphism-awful that I’d rather not even contemplate what it’s like from the outside looking in for fear of getting trapped right back in there again. Is this what it’s like to see yourself slowly going insane? It’s such a helpless feeling, really. I never would’ve guessed.

                       

            Q:

            A: A prisoner who’s locked herself up. Selfish, really, you know? But there’s no way out. I’m steeling myself in a constant forage of miniscule bits of logic that I hope will keep me sane, always just a blink away from losing it, from falling forever down, down, down into the abyss.

           

            Q:

           

            A: I fly.

             Q:

            A: Doesn’t she talk about the fear of being late coinciding with the fear of death? On a purely anthropological level it stems, or one would be led to grope, from the bisecting of fortitude with guilt-riddled chance. The valise of her gist-- the argument sours too, you know, around heady stop-and-slow traffic jams of derisive facetiousness-- is that we’d all be better off staring down from the high dive…which is really fucking absurd, at least in the opinion of this pell-mell operator.

            Q:

            A: I’m not sure it does. Ever. Scuttle and plow. Reap and bow. Just not so grimly. I used to think I could stave off my clashes with “the horror” by manipulating its outward manifestations. But it’s, well, it’s like being upset with somebody who doesn’t exist. Targets are hard to come by, and for the most part I’m all out of arrows.

            Q:

            A: Indefinite extenuating terms of suffering. It’d pacify a humbler sort, this call to usurpation that only maybe in a creepy Ayn-Rand sense would work anything close to wonders. Okay. So let’s strip the fucker down to its bare-boney essence. Complete deconstruction and compartmentalizing. The rearrangement of reason.

            Q:

            A: Taking maybe as an answer?

            Q:

            A: Yep. Sure. And you miss the seven-in-the-morning sunlight, the way trees used to genuflect in the sheen of it, the dewy air, the glide and swoosh of cars going by, the quiet rising of another day. An image that keeps getting blurrier as you pull farther and farther away. So, well, the moon shines its pate for another go around, and here we are stuck in the time it takes to wish it all away.

            Q:

            A: I succumb.

            Q:

            A: Weary but unable to rest. Perpetually imitating motion. It’s the desultory nature of an over-scratched mental itch that leaps from sheep to sheep in the space between dreams. I flag down what I can from the humdrum and hang-dried, hoping, at least, to catch a glimpse of casual boredom-- something I can use against myself, something to control and fence-in the junkyard of my trepidation. But the tabetic swirls of moment-to-moment fright cling too strong and overpower any useful sock-it-to-‘em that I can come up with. Everything’s just some meager improvisation, and I freeze up, mind blank, and ride woe shuddering towards quiver-town. Up stream and past all “prefab” means of escape.

            Q:

            A: I know. But that’s blasting sand with a squirt gun. I don’t have a choice in the matter. Giving in? Or up? It never even gets to that point. It’s not like, “I am woman! Hear me…well, whimper.” No. That’s bullshit. That’s not it at all. It’s outside of…of…everything.

            Q:

            A: In the fine print, the boilerplate of reality’s lost grip, the nutant sway of yawing deceit that chaffs and coils and regurgitates what it least resembles, all askew and raw and needling over and over a single reoccurring bête noire that’s affixed so firmly to skeins of disastrous mind-churnings that I can hardly distill any temper or guise from it, ever, to use against…well…against myself.

            Q:

            A: The apples of me are falling farther and farther from the tree.

            Q:

            A: Close enough. Freud would’ve coughed into his hand, taken a drag of his cigar, done a quick snort of blow, and then promptly shuffled off to his own demise. Jung might take a bath. Me? I coddle the curdled aspect of worn-out bliss in the softest part of my personality, and then whiff and moan, taking just enough smoke breaks to mind what’s left of my manners.

            Q:

            A: Well, shit. My hands are not so small these days, let me tell you.

            Q:

            A: Thanks. You too. It’s been…well…something. Definitely something.

forget the handbasket; just go straight to hell

  

            I tipped the piano man at the hotel bar to play Love Me Tender and then I went back to my room aching for bed but I couldn’t get her off my mind so I opted for whisky instead. I drained about half the bottle while I lay in bed, singing, “I get a crick out of you,” to the wallpaper. Finally, after about 4 rounds through the melody, the liquor’s burst of euphoria wore off and I got drowsy enough to let sleep intrude on my mind’s churning. The last I saw of the clock’s red blur was somewhere around 3:30, though my eyes were mostly useless by that point.

            Kid Ory was blaring on the radio when I woke up. It was awful. I kept my eyes closed as long as I could. But the damn radio wouldn’t shut up, so I thrashed around a bit, chucked the radio against the wall, and made my way to the bathroom. There was probably a more miserable way to be feeling, but I couldn’t think of one.

              I splashed some tepid water on my mug and made a few faces in the mirror, trying to convince myself that it was good to be alive. The smell of loathing was still clinging to what was left of my attire, that and cigarette smoke tinged with dried beer. I found it suitable, just then, and shuffled and dragged my aching self back into the room.

            The bed was a disaster of thrown sheets and a wayward comforter that looked as if somebody’d danced on it all night with muddy shoes and then chucked it into the ceiling fan where it got mangled and tossed around and back down where it lay in a heap along with everything else, including my pants and a half-smoked cigarette that seemed to have been doused out with either water or whisky. The clock’s red digits told me it was 12:12, and that seemed suitable. Just as good a time as any to be standing around in a wrecked hotel room with a hangover the size of Kentucky on my breath and a miserable iota of willpower in my fading constitution. A fly buzzed around the bed for a bit, and then gave up and died. I felt about the same.

           

            The neon’s dead in the sign’s rusted shell. My gut’s rusted too, and I’ve got about five bucks to my name, ambling about with a noticeable limp, about a week from a shave, and ravaged by a slight case of the DTs along with the crazed rumblings of a much more than mild bout of borborgymus. The sidewalk is not my friend. 

            A picket fence comes around, white as chalk, and I kick at it, futilely, and then find myself KO’d with the dead leaves and the bugs. It’s a bad time all around, and I’m having the most of it. Everything aches. It smells like fall.

            Very much later the day starts getting more shade to it, and I find my time splashed with reverence and holy deceit. Walking is less of a struggle somehow. I plod along on sidewalk-side grass. I start to think that I’m really going places. Really making it. But that, of course, doesn’t last. Soon I’m talking to telephone poles, saying things like, “I don’t want to eat lobster on the beach while the fat boys hide their hangovers beneath sunglasses.” A cop car rolls by. I pretend to be punching myself in the face. It keeps going. So many things go unnoticed. I develop a limp in my left leg, then switch to the right. It’s a little hobble of a thing, a wavering klutzy yaw of my person. After a while it gets more stylish. I begin to wonder how to walk without it. A bee clips my ear and I almost tumble over. But I don’t. I keep moving right along. The pebbles of my existence are squandered in my shoes. Woe is my middle name.

            The last bastion of steam wafting from sewer grates, increased collusion, intrepid and beastly too, I call change like I hear it, and my listening can do me in too, but it’s rather inglorious to be hunky-dory about it, at least while the wagons are squaring pissed wonder like a blind shop steward of a Tuesday morning. Guesses are as good as gone, likely in a huff as I would be too if it’d taken less than a purpose-wielding crowd to wear me out. In a stillness and steadier changing of the guards of my heart’s stash, well, I cuss under the audience’s roar and stab gray at the sky. If it doesn’t suit me? Well, that’s a hurt that won’t change for just any old quaking or standoffish load of my less-than-horrible half. Let us run wild in our nightmares so we can dare to dream a bit better. 

            Ambling does what it can to dispel bad news on the horizon, with or without a noticeable limp. When you get to wearing the same colors too often for too long there are erasures that you get to making out of habit from the locale of milling thoughts, insolvent parameters, and the expression of riled assumptions like cockatiel crests gone amok. Other than that? I’m done for in the midst.

            Slithering along like some electric eel on vacation, there’s less of a mosey in my step, and I trade in my shuffle for a shabbier title. Maybe Volkswagen Vic or Dipshit Ron. I don’t know. I’m scruffy around the frontal lobe. It pays to be broke when the moon’s dealing out aces to the weather. Repair. Duck inside a church to stay warm. Pray for marshmallow pie. This here caboose has never left the station.

           

            “Let me tell you a story.”

            “Fuck you.”

            “Well, then.”

           

            A braver man would’ve held his tongue. But me, being a sap and a pusillanimous bastard, of course I had to go and destroy my reputation with these drunken ramblings. I’m a real sucker for gut punching. It was a gruff beginning to things, a stalled start that botched itself like a manure truck stuck in traffic. I wimped out of moving on, and so was left piddling around in the past, jilted and bored with my own sensibilities. God’s running out of patience with me. I am orphaned by a pesky sense of wonder. Yep, that about does it.

           

            I strolled as best I could down to where the water meets the shoreline. The horizon was tucking in some bleakness behind its brown-ringed collar. Holding up my end of the bargain was getting to be more of a hassle than it was worth. We are suckered with blame, or at least it was starting to seem that way to me. The sand was cold and hard, and I didn’t want anything to do with it. Some crows scared off a passel of scrawny, molting pigeons. I was fed up with disasters. I lay down in the wet sand and closed my eyes.

            A black-and-white scene flitted foggy across my misbehaving vision. Gulls squawked into the colorless sorrow. My limbs were useless weight, taking up space instead of moving through it. Something was wrong with my brain. Everything seemed chancy and out of proportion with what was taking place in my skull. A baboon swallowed a dove. Mosquitoes breakfasted on cold ham slices. A voice rang out, “I want to be my own jury! I am peerless!” I tried to pretend that I was just a retired scarecrow. It didn’t take. I lay there in that muddy terrain and cried made-up tears. When I got bored of that I got up, brushing my clothes off the best I could, and walked back to the beach parking lot up over the concrete pillars where the crows had gathered to enjoy the view. It was better there. Less sandy and deranged.

            I was still a bit legendary in some circles, or at least that’s what I was figuring. Enough so, maybe, that I could weasel my way into the Can’t Make Her Think Club’s Leading Horticulture meeting. I thought that perhaps just mentioning Dorothy Parker to the doorman might do the trick. I’d been lucky before in such situations. Why not now? The difference was in perspective, in hindsight, and now that makes less sense than it did then, if that makes any sense.

            A guy with a bowtie announced my arrival. It was later than usual. Nobody looked. A piece of napkin with possible names for my firstborn scrawled on it fell from my vest pocket to the floor. Under any other circumstances I would’ve been let off rough. But in this case I just threw my hat on the piano and got on with it.

            Nothing worked out. I fell down, again and again, in my attempts to be an upright citizen.               

            “Are you of any value? To anyone? Huh? Are you?”

            “I’m not paid to answer question like that…those, I mean.”

            “What are you paid to do?”

            “Beats me. But I look the part, so I might as well act the part, you know?”

            “Shit.”

            The tables were full. I was counted out, and then tried to force my way in. That’s about it. The door was shown to me in quite a forceful way, and so I found it.

            Cool air rushed to find me. It found me stricken with a sneeze, and then bowled over down some concrete stairs, and then wobbly and spun towards some grass, where it turns out the sprinklers were plying their trade at the moment. I slipped and trampled my way down the walkway and finally on to the sidewalk. People were staring. I felt rather refined, noble even, in my vain attempts at maintaining balance and valor under these dire circumstances. I felt like giving the finger to the moon. But I didn’t. Instead I drafted up a declaration of independent dipsomania in my head and wandered due east, a direction in stark contrast with the one taken by my ancestors who spent their lives matriculating in a steady drift towards the pacific ocean. This made be feel grand and princely, which was the best I’d felt in a long stretch. It’d do.

            I am not gifted, let’s say, in the ways of most candy asses. I am no sage of any Baltimore. The heady waft of terror that stupefies crowds and elicits screams from flophouse to mansion is nothing more than a parlor trick of mirrored smoke. I could tell myself that. I really could. Who’d care? Not this here sack of anemones. Not this cardiovascular mishap. Not this plug-cut toaster of a guy. Let me, well, just tell you that. Okay?

            Trouncing popcorn makers and counting hubcaps on parked cars until the sewer stink of it all got to me, not tearing up at all while I was at it, also. So be it? Sure. Sure. We are the ones who weep over tinkling nocturnes and olive pits. And yes, we too are the ones who sail paper ships down gasoline gutters. An arabesque for your Mussolini pie? Not quite. It’s forgivable to be clawing towards your destiny one frozen entrée at a time. Trust me. I am made of chrome thumbtacks and licorice rubber bands. Steering comes naturally to me, and there are no question marks left in the smashed-chandelier-littered hallways of my woozy head. Backward and downward I go.     

            It takes all kinds, I guess. But sometimes I just wish it didn’t. Like in the present state of torpor that claws for shadows in tacky x-mas tree light, like that, if one could ponder a name and come up with a solution, a story to go with it, an out and an alibi, well…Chartreuse was a real gas. She’d shoot her own grandmother in the back and then take bets on which we she’s going to fall. A lose-tie situation, that one. And her real name was Marbelle Lyler. Resisting rest and arrest as always, she’d place herself in harms way and go for broke. Always champing at the bit for a little more time. Give it to her and she’ll just run away with a little more. Scrimmaging with high-tide hooligans and Sharpie whiffers, rummaging around for a hook to sink you with while you polished your heart’s anchor and pined for darker glass. Somehow I cannot envision myself violently. Somehow I can be punched blue without color. Get a grip of Chartreuse’s motivation and sink, sink, sink. That’s a bet’s loss, a had’s grip on what’s gone, and, in the end, a scramble for somebody else’s cracked eggs. Just to need direct contact with somebody who gives a shit isn’t enough. Even Chartreuse herself could’ve told you that. And me? I’m all out of hinting.

            There was a voice. It told me this: “Abrogate those dark imaginings. All is drafty and befuddled. Chalk it up to pleasing touch with sight. Storm if you must. But be pleasant about it, at least. That’s it. Tell your stepsons I says hello.”

            I wasn’t hearing things. I was listening to things. I missed a bus and caught a cold. “Figures.” That wasn’t a who-said-that situation. Trust me. Or don’t. It might not matter.

            Suddenly, upon further introspection, I discovered that I was reeling with an overdone sense of facial recognition. I was seeing faces in the strangest places: knots in wood boards, hellos, badly placed guardrails, telephone booth windows, sidewalk weeds, crumpled newspapers, roped off areas, entablature shadows from church lights, trails of ants, rocks, plastic carrots and peas, shredded pages of lost library books, trashcans, mossy archivolts, the discarded covers of dirty magazines. I gave up. I ruined my own understanding of myself.      

            Upon no dowsing or evidence to the contrary I came to a door and knocked and knocked. Somebody who wasn’t home wouldn’t answer. It didn’t matter. A face was there in the door’s stiles and rails. I figured it was never or now.                           

            “I miss you even though I hardly know you. Does that sound possible?”

            “Yes. Too much. And, of course, not enough.”

            “Thank you. That will be all.”

            The door went away, and so did I.

I Cry Paris In My Sleep (and other things drawn in the margins of my life)

                                  

The finger I use for scooping out coffee grounds from the grinder is black under the nail. If it’s Tuesday then it’s August. The usefulness of a rationale that doesn’t figure. Bee ties. Pigeon cameras. A lamprey in the bathtub. It’s a musical washbox that never gets scrubbed. Cast-iron jealousy hooked to a crane. Piddled away attention. The come-and-go charm of TV. The noisiest gum on the block. I’m mustering some third-generation Cadillac-Coupe-De-Ville courage. Desperately seeking a bologna sandwich, and the moon’s out hunting Michigan again. Talking loud so strangers will hear and be impressed. A shagreen purse and a crepe paper smile, carrying on and repointing the bricks of the past with hard-fought wonder. Casked to sell? It’s a deceitful plan, perhaps, but the mind’s conniving gets laden with grandfathered clauses. Asking starts to question itself. A dab of duck fat behind each ear makes my personality a confit of redundant charm. I brush my hair with castor oil and use rusty nails as toothpicks. Let’s make a deal to make no more wishes, to put the stars back to sleep when this is all through, and to wreck havoc on Tuesday’s blues with a few of Friday night’s neon letters. For now the Chinese Godfather’s sitting next to me on this termite-infested bench while I feed ice cream sandwiches to pigeons and tell the time by church bells. All my nightmares are made of corroded chromosomes, plugged pennies, and 15-minute lunch breaks, and they’re stitched up cheap with broken cello strings. In the last place, well, there’s a terror there that weeps sleep from boredom. Hunting Michigan with the moon when it makes the least sense. And when the girls around here get to stomping around it’s like there’s a 5.8 rambling through town. My record player skips all the best songs, and the microwave doesn’t even got enough left in it to make popcorn. Let me tell you, it gets rudimentary and mortgaged and hard up to be alive when your racing form’s all filled up with circled losers. The coffee boos me in the morning, and I sneak love from the truth peddlers. Nobody’s going to want my organs when I’m gone. You see, on this side of Palookaville there are still upsets in the making and more considerations to consider, as I shuffle the depths and swing slim from the banisters. The lady who waits on me at the drugstore is wearing a Have A Nice Day pin in her lapel. I walk outside in the blinding sun and stare up at a glass behemoth skyscraper that’s reflecting other buildings in its cascading cerulean dance of windows, and I flounder around and dance by the empty place where a bus station used to go. Tomorrow’s a dropped hat and a duel of fingers. Tosspot’s grow ragged and rig their hearts with safety-pin sadness. Sing me champagne and sweep the gutters with swizzle-stick brooms. It’s a crumb to toss to party crashers and melee evacuees. Trust the judgment of wizened crows and the cracked crossbeams in the rafters of your soul. My heart’s shattered china. I waste all my wishes on the bottles behind the bar, and I miss what the sun’s got left to make of me. I dance in movie theatres and cut my own hair. But my windows, they still stay lit all through the night.   

The Sad Tale Of Harrison And The Flamingo

            Harrison spent his afternoons sitting on a bench at the zoo by the flamingos. The stink of it was something he came to call mudwart. Feces and the sour-mash reek of standing water. The flamingos were white and pink, some with dark black feathers in their tail, and their legs were like crazy straws that bent backwards as they squatted or puttered about. A dozen or so of them lived in the small enclosed space, with a swamp and some mud around the edges. There was a chest-high fence around them, and it seemed ridiculous, watching them, that they couldn’t just leap right over it and be free. But they couldn’t. They just plodded around in circles and pecked at the ground. Harrison enjoyed this fact immensely.

            The kids would gather and run amok, their parents chasing them around, and then they’d get lifted up and away to another exhibit. Harrison was always glad when they left. He enjoyed being alone with just the flamingos.

            “Hey, Juicy Fruit. Why don’t you get out of my sun, huh?”

            It was the tallest flamingo, and it was directing its query at Harrison.

            Harrison just sat there, his arms outstretched on the bench’s back, his hands dangling, his head at a contemplative angle. He looked up at the sky’s litter-- the dull clouds of an overcast afternoon milling about, a speck of sun grimacing behind them, the whole thing like a murky urine-soaked rag-- and he wondered about the dust that gathers on flowers.

            The flamingo barked, “Hey. You! Dick lips! I’m talking to you.”

            Harrison pretended to be lost in a reverie, staring skyward, tapping his feet to the tune of When Johnny Comes Marching Home. A few stray white feathers floated by on a soft gust of wind, and Harrison swiped at them with an absent-minded swipe. He was contemplating dinner at his favorite seafood restaurant, the one where he could sit at a table by the large front windows that filled with moonlight and watch pedestrians go by. It made his lips form a slight smile.

            “Hello? Fuck nuts? Get the Shinola out of my sunshine, Dippy. Don’t make me come over there and do it myself. You will not like me on that side of the fence. I promise.”

            The flamingo was now bobbing its way over towards where Harrison was sitting. It came to the fence, stopped, turned around a few times, shook its head, spread its wings and made some feeble attempts at flapping them, and then turned its head to gaze at what Harrison seemed to be gazing at in the sky.

            “Um. Oh, well, sure is shitty out, huh?”

            “Yep.” Harrison mumbled over a weak burp.

            “What the hell sticks are you looking at up there? Seriously. It’s just a bunch of fucking gray clouds, and, well, look at that, will you! There’s some sun up there, see?”

            Harrison did see. He wondered how he could be in the way of it. It was so far above them, so obscenely far away. It was impossible that a little dot of a thing like him could get in its way.

            The flamingo ruffled its feathers. “Gawk, gawk, gawk. You silly fucking nut job. That’s all you do. You come here and gawk the fuck away at us. And we just stand here like idiots, a gaggle of us…”

            “A gaggle?”

            “Oh, fuck. Whatever. A flamboyance, a flurry, a stand, a regiment. A fucking bunch of us, okay?”

            “Okay.” Harrison cracked his neck a few times and yawned for effect.

            “And what do we do? Nothing. We can’t do shit. We just stand around and nibble at the mud, take dumps in the water, have staring contests. It’s not the most exciting of lives to be living, let me tell you, Suck Pants.”

            “You got a mouth on you, don’t you?”

            “Shit. If this beak could...oh, fuck you. I get it.”

            Harrison laughed and mussed his own hair with both hands.

            “Bet you’d rather I never piped up, huh? You’d like it if I just shut up and kept minding my own, like always. Putting up with all the savages who come here and rattle the fence and shoot spitballs at us. Fucking gawkers. Fucking savage gawking motherfuckers.”

            Harrison stood up. “You know what?” Harrison wasn’t sure whom he was addressing. “You’re kind of a dick.”

            The flamingo kicked its weird little rubber-like feet at the dirt, turned around, and wobbled its way back to the water. It dunked its head beneath the water and stayed like that.

            Harrison kicked at the pebbles and dead leaves and food wrappers on the cement, turned around, and skipped off towards the zoo’s carousel. He had two dollars in his pocket-- just enough for a ride.

as the bus turns

            As the bus turns I find I am not writing it down. Something akin to, “The unimportance of this phone call is tremendous. We had a cabin, perhaps, somewhere in the mountains. The terrain bubbly with grief and joy. The fairness of it all, what happiness happened, it all jumps beyond me still. There it is if it is we who should shoulder a bench to sit on and watch the rain, the scent of which I can’t quite remember properly. Rock walls. Or was it logs? Just as all things could be cabined, here there goes another vanishing hold on what only live violets know-- or knew, as it were. My computer no longer knows what time it is. My head deals in rock salt and vinegar, peppermint, and what names will come for my firstborn. The weather is now under us.”  

            You can blame me for the construction of unknowns. I build them out of bastard parts. A sparse willingness curbs the bus, and we nod onward without moving. It isn’t daylight that strips me of the power to care. I don’t know what it is. A cause on loan from the bishop factory. Something cussed with a briny flavor. Something clarified in the butter of justice. A weeping that isn’t slight.

            A skim of wheels, brought into the world blighted and sizzling, sings Glory Be Thy Name, Tupperware. It is selfish to be flighty in stucco claims to infamy. We are all holders of our own spirit, vessels of suspect carapace. A cheek to turn. Over worn and grown thin. Here are my worst habits. Take them from me and drown them with the rats. Foreign cucumbers grow their own tongues, you know, and then they speak something almost like this: “V! Crack a LMNO for all the peas everywhere. Don’t gush, tubas! I am braver than a whisk. Egg me and I’ll scramble. Loot the weathervanes from all the rooftops. We can have nakedness while we can’t have peace. Star-rock sea dragons sleep in the sidewalk. I called! I swear it! Don’t mope through my wailing. I’ve got it almost all, and I would put it all almost everywhere. Equal equals we are in the rinse of streetlamp light. Make my water with dirt-flavored lemonade. I don’t grow like that anymore. See to it, then. See to it! Blasé!”

            A microbe picker stopped in on the way to Jerusalem and hitched a halo ride from a bell-tower watcher. He owned up to wondering aloud, “Is there nothing really left to misuse?” It briefly figured. Then it didn’t.

            What is love?

            So, this shorty pants guy comes into The Store. He’s bought off. I can tell. So, he’s sailed too far in his gaseous explorations of what was happening on his ceiling, or in it. He says to or with me, “It is pincers, man. Justification of a grand for a dollar’s worth. I’m up to it in shrill mistakes. I’m down for it all, anyway. Take my hat, please. Get it? Party pooping is the way. We all just walk along with it, or on it, or in it. I got this brother-in-law, hell, he deals in stamps and pork-and-beans logic. That’s a fucking shored milieu of crap, if you get me on one of my sunnier days. He’s a horse shooter, really. Puts it all out to pasture. Creeps most folks out. Shit. I stay close to cordoned off about that stuff. And here I am blabbing on about it. Shit. I get tired, and, well, the weather round here gets to me. The crust of the afternoon sinking in. The blown smoke of it all. I’m dusty with rearranging my own deeds, and deed-nots, really. Groggy and slow to rise, I get what’s cooking for the most. Take what’s what and fall right up the stairs with it. Shit. That’s a meddling that I’d rather go on without. And then I got me a nephew. Kid named Linus, for Christ’s sake. And he bowls you over with his schemes. Hatching stuff on a daily basis, that kid. Venus flytraps in his room and shit. He’s a nut, that one. Hoping the flying saucers lift him out into his true home out there in space, you know? That kind of shit. Well, I do what I can. Here’s another truth for you.”

             Slammed with crowds. Everyone gets up at some point. Everyone leaves. The driver’s reading yesterday’s paper. We are all coiling for one last bar-happy day. Passengers don’t get breaks. It’s all spilled together and running away. A music-box tilt of joy creaks through. We learn to stay awake by standing up sometimes.

              “The garter snakes are loose in a battle for your legs. Pressure’s off. The keys are snuck. Things are mostly what they seem. Coffee and sandwiches. Cold ham and warm pickles. It’s what it ain’t, just pools and swings, and holidays in Plymouth testing out a supersonic parachute.”

            She smiled at him and licked her lips, roving eyes concealed behind dark sunglasses, lizard-skin purse lazily strung over a shoulder, while tilting her head to the side and sticking out her chin.

            “I wouldn’t know.”

            “I know.”

            A twitchy scrunch to her zygomata, a tell of a sort, that gave credence to his belief that she was just in it for kicks, just for a light thrill and then it’d be done for good. She’d move on and away, not even a postcard between them again. And it was something he knew but couldn’t admit, or wouldn’t, if there were a difference. For now it was just holding onto what he could before it all went and slipped away on him. Life was just a stupid routine to mold yourself into. It was just a drag, something to be pulled along, and he’d had enough of futilely struggling against it. Instead he messed around with her hair and ran his hands through her clothes, tangling himself up in what he could of what still remained his to hold.

            (insert happy beginning here, along with the hint of a sadder end)

            Words lumped together, oatmeal on the breath, and it’s trying not to rain. Nobody believes in going outside anymore. It’s all beached. Stay in. Watch the weather work itself out. You’ve got your own solar system, and it’s over there, too far to get to know. Throw a tarp over it. Leave the rest to dreamy afternoons, and let the planets go their own way. Fast, staying tuned to scoop selfless helpings, turn it over and let the twine unravel all across the floor.

            On the stop, blur train travel into a broom-swept dust. Vacate the bus station bar where the dropouts lounge around and stare at strangers. Given to orders, and what we’ll never let on about. Just the sip that goes down sour, that quench that never is. Only a costly wish-you-were-here-or-there, and then it is a done’s last deal.

            “I remember you alright at the Fairmont Hotel. Your drinking of Scorpion Bowls was a legend.”

            “This cross, well, it just ain’t doing the job no more. Not like it used to could.”

            “We had none of it, and were having it all.”

            “My love, I leave it hanging from the window for all the world to see.”

            “It’s all dirty dishes to me.”

            The poof of gray above those pinball eyes staring through the bars of her living-room window as if she were in jail. The TV’s blaring behind her. A skuzzy lilt to her features. A roach-like ambivalence. A tender touch of woe escaping between the bars of her self-made jail. The children going by are unmistakably happier than any luck she’s ever known. She stares and stares as day folds into night. There is nothing else to do.

             The fog’s thick teeth in all this, gnawing on the world’s woodwork, hiding the degenerates and the bums who stalk the night with ragged ideals and a hankering for trouble. Increasingly on the dole, checking out all the cashiers sashaying through it with a few after-work drinks in their step, hanging their hat on a tree branch, getting decorous with their dreams and lost-cause ambition. It sparks a light from a not so steady retreat, and the heavy wet slops through everybody’s hair. 

            The sound of tires skimming over a wet spot in the road is bacon’s frying-pan sizzle. I am not writing this down. The bus loses its trolley poles. There is a collective groan from within. The driver swings open the clear plastic door that separates him from the passengers, puts on a yellow safety vest and thick gloves, and climbs down the front steps to go out and put the poles back on. There is nothing to do but wait. Behind us the other bus comes up, and then passes us, streaking by with a buzz and a whirr, rattling away on up ahead. Much clanging and clattering and banging around can be heard, as the driver pulls on heavy ropes attached to the poles, trying to realign the slots in the ends with the cords above. He seems a bit like a puppeteer, artfully toying with the slackened bight of rope in his hands, making the poles dance and swing back to the lines. Finally, the lights in the bus come back on and the engine springs back to life, and a slight sigh of relief comes whispering out of the passengers as the driver hops back on board. Motion comes again, and we are off. I write nothing.            

            There is no blunder that’s blurring what’s wrong with hellos. Batter down. It’ll prove little or insistent in the description of two human beings scurrying towards distance. All that not said, get loose or stay put.

            A little welt of euphoria swelling up in a carved-out nook in the back of your brain. “Tell the neighbors we’re rigging our house for a flying prize. I have acquired a book of knots, maybe.” Something of that nature. Or when the cage of your emotional makeup is no longer enough to contain the looks she’s giving. A punch to her eyes that swipes chicory notes from tame decisions. It yaps its own yelling. If you can imagine it then it won’t ever happen. Such is the stuff of negating positive effects in dream logic, or the vices of diversion, or unwilling hallucinatory madcaps of painting the dullest of pictures bright. It is contrary to every indication of real-time wakefulness to be drawn ineptly into the mushy confines of imaginings. At least that’s what the footsloggers are spelling out with their shore-leave spending.

            The morning’s rushed with blame. She takes her time with sugaring. She winks when it is necessary, softer and sipped out of coffee. Rising where it is not funneled to worse or better off things. She’d sweep a kiss to the stars and sponge dry a licked stamp if that’d matter to you. A certain crooked tilt to her closed mouth, her lips swim synchronized. The blowsy trees can’t give away her shape. Only the matters that matter form the frieze of her gestures. She’d hint, “A lanyard for your fishhooks,” but never put it aloud.

            “If we had kids.”                 

            “Then.”

            “No. If.”

            “Then we’d pray for something. Then what? Love?”

            “Somewhere. Then. Maybe.”

            The spark and wheeze of hydraulics, the spinning chortle of thrust, and then there is the silence of stoplights. There is nothing so quiet as being on an idling electric bus. If nobody on the bus is making any noise, there is no sound, and the moment can be almost beatific in its purity.

            And then comes trouble? Maybe just a Great Curassow greeting newcomers into old haunts, divvying up the feed best it can. A sea dragon carved into a shedding eucalyptus trunk with a butcher knife. It is awful to be constantly aware of the presence of mosquitoes. Keep you up until morning’s first. Generic rights to triviality lie mortified in suspense for the duration of time-lapse lives.      

            Put a photograph of the moon in your back pocket. Keep a hydrangea in your buttonhole. Make flour go sooty with cocoa powder. Peel a tomato. Seek honor in the beaks of giant crows gliding close to the beach sand. Be hostile and happy. Love will smuggle itself beneath the doormat.