I kegeled my piss and flexed my clit when at the door someone hit the doorbell I so wiped and flushed then washed my hands, feeling slightly flushed. The mirror was misty from hot water so I licked it to make it wetter. I smiled because it tasted like honey so I licked more to make it feel better. I went to the kitchen to let the elephant out and for breakfast I had some lemon-pepper tile layered with some chocolate grout. The doorbell rang again out loud which was funny and I was proud because there ain't no dayum doorbell at my place, so I ignored it and after breakfast put a scrambled egg mud mask on my face.
Jail seemed like a raw deal till he tried the meatloaf and taters, and he called collect but the bell wouldn't ring so he just did time, and time did him, and it was all good.
On the outside a siding crew hung scaffold and fake redwood panels on the only building out the only window under the only stars when wrestling was on and the inmates traded bread and crackers, got in fights and he was such a panzy he just cowered in the corner and watched.
He knew he'd be back in the story before long but for now a cache of sugar and a burrito smuggled in by the lads was good enough.
" I damn near went off the road in the ice this morning, Squidlips."
He said kick off your shoes, wriggle your toes and tuck them under my thighs so I did. Cozy? Yeah! I woke up with the dog lying on my feet and my head burning. Fever. I need a drink of something long and cold, maybe a shower.
Wake me up next week when the sun's shining again, please.
He's warm and has a long tongue. He and you and we take his faithfulness for granted. Damn dog. I'd tickle your feet and we'd see who'd squirm more...
It's sick how that dog can lick. Sick, damn dog, anyway.
It's the same view through that window over the sink
every morning
temepered by weather still.
same view
like looking in your own eyes every morning and watching yourself grow old
trees fall, brush takes over, things blur at the seams
he hated that view
he wanted to look out and see fucking
beautiful women, a river, something moving for christ sake
not reptition
his life was repition
one breath after another
eat sleep drink
bathe shave piss
little moments of joy
or insight
music and drink and sex
but there in the yard
decay and rebirth
he thought about painting all the windows black
and decided they'd find him insane
How come it's ok to buy oil from tyrants and use it to fund a war that's destroying a country where the oil-selling tyrant doesn't even live anymore, but it's not ok to buy oil from tyrants to give food and medicine to children in the countries where oil-selling tyrants are the alleged cause of a war that prevents children from getting food and medicine? Huh? Splain that Little Ricky.
And put your shirt on. It's cold out and time to drive. Again.
he lifted the bottle to his lips, no attempt made to hide it...
scotch...he was making a good living being a bum
maybe i should retire
" It's been going on since the begining of time..and will always go on...it's just the way of things"
another swallow
" if you let the sadness in it rides you, it puts lead around your heart and you start to slump over with the weight of it"
I looked up...he was staring ahead watching children try and get a kite to lift in cold october air.
fur framed faces and jets of frosted breath , and the blur of blue cordory legs and the high schwee schwee of ski pants
he turned his eyes to me and looked at me
with power
his eyes
filmed with sadness but pointed
lasers
you couldnt look at them
like a an eclipse
i looked back at the children
i felt i was in church
i felt i was hearing a gospel
i felt myself on a mountain top in india
something was opening in my chest and i tried to hide it
" that statue...with the 12 arms and all the swords...thats a god...thats the truth"
he leaned closer
" god makes, god kills, god doesnt explain'
he laughed and stood up
" and when you die god takes you in...and explains the joke and you know what??.....you laugh right along.....it's all nonsense"
we both watched the children for a bit
" they know what to do while the world is ending" he said' Fly a kite"
To scan the crowd for a slightly less wooden specimen in the gallery of cardboard characters that ogled back at her every damn Friday night was really not her cup of tea. But she was more of a frappuchino kinda girl anyway, and she knew she could bring joy to the world in some holistic way and a little smile on the male facade of some oh so lucky fucker, and she kinda liked the idea of being a ten minute deity now and then. Or five, or two. Beggars can't be choosers, and she had yet to tune that radar right.
the blue car fishtailed across the teardrop spot of lawn where plastic Wise Men stood above swaddling fallen apples all dusted in snow. Overcorrection brought them close to splashing into the building.
"homina homina homina, we made it."
"next time just keep it in the middle squid, take off that wig and carry the groceries up. Its damned beautiful out aint it?"
"yes it is, shall we walk the tracks, cut down to the river?"
" Ah squid, cant believe you are using a spatula to scrape the ice off the car, here lemme pour coffee on that windshield." Laughing boy in a tailored longcoat.
Ten years floats lost like wayward sunrise snowbands, repetitious as frozen eyebrows melting like the rivers tears across glasses all fogged and vague.
"Hit the wipers Squint, clear the slate. Its getting late."
More than ten years. Seventeen and I wasn't young then either. Maybe never. What did I have for lunch yesterday--oh, that megaloaf sammy, but that fades and seventeen years minus 30 hours. I couldn't sleep and the iv drip did nothing until Nana came to the bedside and said Women do this every day Chavala, and her gone then fourteen years. Time rolled up like a ball of yearn, mismatched pieces all knotted together and wound, wound around something that still beats underneath. Seventeen years and every piece unraveled and rewound changing shape, staying essential. Boy. Man. But always, always love. Clarity and love.
Don't tell me how it is, 'cause I know what's around me. I'm IN this scene, fucker, in it from boots to no-dyed roots. I'm in it from the gas station to your house to the everlovin' bar. I see all and know all. I am invincible, hard of body, strict of mind. and a little lonely, too.
Like this:
A gas station is capital letters that sit at eye level, donuts like diamonds (man, it says 'gems' on the package, don't it?), hot dogs are cheap (taste like shit, but you can live on 'em), the coffee's a shift old and the gatorade is FIERCE like fireflies struggling through the cold, blinking and blinking like turn signals on the cars that pass by me on the street.
turn signals. Fuck them, too. SIGNAL YOUR TURN, LOOK BOTH WAYS BEFORE CROSSING YOUR HEART AND HOPING TO DIE, "Never is a promise" and you can't ask me not to fucking try.
Like this:
I tried to love you the best way I knew how and it turned out to be little more than selfish bullshit. Yeah, I'm invincible, etc, etc, but what I'm getting at, the metaphor I'm driving for (so to speak) is that Superman could've been an asshole. Do you get it? I'm talking about separation of body and mind, church and state, staying up late to walk for miles in the cold without a hat on, just to make yourself that much stronger, that much harder, so it's easier to forget the eyes. the morning eyes that smiled and said I love you before you ever opened your mouth. What I am saying is that I am emotionally weak.
Like this:
So I tried to love you and failing that, I'm trying to get by with 'goodbye' tattooed on my heart. Going along to get along, abstinence making the heart grow fonder, the dick grow harder (ha-ha, that's got two meanings. You figure it out.) and the eyes grow wetter. What I'm saying is I miss the lines of your body that I read like God's own poetry, with reverent hands and all my soul, and it's hard to be an American in this fucking town, Squid, so don't you tell me about what it's like, or how it is, just order me another fuckin stout and don't think I was talking about you when I said I missed the lines of Your body. She is my goddess, and I speak to her when I speak to the air and I need to re-dye my hair, remind me tomorrow, and fuck if my boot isn't untied.
Back at the county the ice hung blue off the Constantina wire and Mario was 2 days and a wake up so he gave away his meatloaf and tiny bags of sugar while the Miami kid, in on the sawed off shotgun beef, facing federal time, pinched his jail gut and and the Irish kid put shaving cream on Little Rickey's doorhandle and the Mutt came in and said "Anybody for Bible Study?"
Tangerine was the color on the motionless, "nah, chief, but we will take some magazines."
Ring the phone off the hook, man, can't never keep up with greenwich mean time, anyhow. Six hours ahead, six hours behind, half a world away, and does anyone know what day it is, or how this hangover got here?
"You bought it last night," Man, the furniture's talking, again, but it just sits there. No passion, with furniture. At least you can turn on a light, y'know? And who kills themself by sticking their head in the oven, anyway? that's fucking abuse.
It's all got meaning, that's the story been circumnavigating my awareness. What is it? Doorknobs? Cheesecake?
The receiver receives and the deciever......haha, fooled you, the deceiver lies down to sleep it off.
The twin in the victim got caught gassing himself in the flat above the Chinese grocery as the produce man made early deliveries. He lit a match and the ambulance blew into the bay and tomatoes and bell peppers and heads of lettuce landed like flying fish in a squall blown inland where the wildhousecats woke up under the cookhouse and nobody believed it really rained grunion
till they saw the fat bellies on those sleeping kitties.
Look, do you think I just say this stuff for my health? A doctor a day? Apples? Oranges? You can't compare . You can't have one without the other. You can't tell me that you never looked deep into a woman's eyes and said, "sure, baby, I'm the guy." Can you? Do you? Will you? Should you? I am. I do. At least, I think I remember it well. But I could be wrong. But it ain't bloody likely.
She didnt plow her driveway and the middling stripe was tall and scuffed the bluecar in the underpinning on the way out to the bigger road over the ice patch and then its all a go. Barreling south leaning on the darkest ocean and bearings seem easy to come by as Dogwoods and Magnolias and the wildest Azalea like runway lights stretch out from winter to winter as the sun comes north I pass it and wink.
Sometimes I think I'd like to take all the insensitve, greedy, hurtful, selfcentered bastards in the world, put them in a rubber dingy, tow them out to the middle of the ocean and put a bullet hole in the raft and watch them slowly sink into the depths as I puffed a cigar and drank a brandy.
Then I realize, I wouldn't have time to enjoy the cigar or brandy, because having been such an insensitive, hurtful bastard myself I'd be forced to join them myself, and the raft would be sinking to quick for me to finish.
So I think instead of a bullet hole, it might have to be a pin prick. I plan on smoking a big cigar and swilling a large brandy before I go down.
A large Black Spruce fell 3 steps left in high winds and I dodged the fall but heard the popgun crack and the cry in the woods was
"widowmaker."
So much for that shortcut.
" You look a tad disheveled squid, more dreams i suppose."
Covered with Balsam needles and Camphor memories, Pine pitch fingers and Gardenia essence, I let myself in.
"Got any crackers?"
Winterlong the walks were many, the resolved shrug above traveling boots, the season with halfstrides split between dayshift and sleepy graveyard night occupation.
"Kick your boots off Terence and stay awhile. I missed you mate."
Hickory slickery cock! She swaggered in at just over five foot six, and she was thirty-one, though I don't think anyone bothered to mention the fact to her ass, which was drawing stares and sweet little circles in the air as she sacheted (Oh, she smelled like slow-roasted heaven-simmering angels and spicy cherub-kebabs).
all the pain of playing a piano whose keys are laced with tacks swam lazy halos behind her eyebrows, yeah, little smoke circles that hadn't decided to drift away, just yet, and I was incensed at the thought that I'd go home with my hands in my pockets and my eyes in hers. But there I stood, fucked up from boots to roots, tore up from the floor up, wavering and wobbling and trying to find the floor, man, where'd it go, I need to lay down and someone was playing a harmonica, but I didn't mind, why did everything have to move so fast, where's my keys, I can't drive, I need a towel and being hammered at the bar is the best kind of camouflage I could come up with, coming up in the world and moving down the social ladder by chopping through each rung with joe's jangling jawbone, who the fuck is joe and why is he driving my car?
She had her shoes in her hands and her bare feet were pinked from the cold floor and it felt young, looking at her appleheels. a sweet turn of the seasons.
she had a curious turqois bird on a leash and he ponies up the stairs behind her riding some ostrich with such aplomb, and sure as hell if he didnt kick the same dusty stack of books to the ground, as seemed to happen with regularity. Squid got pissy, but what else is new? And that ostrich aint no cakewalk to manuever, certifications or not, I declare.
"Now youv'e set the land speed record for destroying the place."
"Do you have any ice?"
"Dirty Wanker, get you own bloody ice."
the turquios bird hid under the dried out christmas tree, doing fine, till the cat woke up to the smell of bacon and toast.