The wind blows tonight from out at sea, and the 20 something with the fake tits is not for you, but her outfit looks better even though they feel like sandbags and make teepees when she sleeps, and there’s the boy with the Gary Matthews problem (20 somethings only have too much time on their hands), and the sand is powder and fails to get hot even under this unfailing sun, and tomorrow the tide will not rise or fall and the frozen cocktails will not fade or melt, and we will walk down this beach again to some place named the Whale’s Tale or Jupiter Joe’s or some such thing, where we will have language struggles with the Slavic waitresses, with bleached blonde hair and bad acne scars, whom will not understand what our order but will think you look like her boyfriend, at home across another ocean, or just down the beach, we do not know, and we’ll pretend like life could be like this forever, and for better or worse we will wish such dreams, somewhere in this world, could possibly be true, at least for a few minutes...
Tonight I am shaving like my father, after the shower in my underwear, briefs to make the experience more authentic, or just because I refuse to wash clothes until the weekend. He asks me today if I can just accept that you are unhappy, to not want to change you, to realize that I am powerless with regards to your dilemma(s). So I play tennis, and sweat through my holy shirt that I have been wearing for days, the mosquitos are out and attack my ankles if I do not move quickly enough. My shin is scratched to a bloody mess, but I fixed my car myself, this weekend I will repair the garbage disposal and take out the trash and wash the counters. My shin will likely be healed by then, and maybe there will be rain, and I guess I will wash clothes, and I will buy more soap too. Before the shave, I walked across the dangerous tiles, naked and soaked, and retrieved the last bar from the bulk supply that I learned from you. I wish I could clean everything before my interest goes away. I always wanted to make you happy. There are things that cannot be cleaned. You will never remember to put a new bar in the shower until you are already in and...
Chocolate cream cheese muffins on Sunday mornings and baked good smells all other days, aging hippies and younger hipsters, and Bobby at the market and that place where all the initials are carved in the sidewalk’s concrete and the House of Nine Cats and the AA meetings at the Methodist Church, and runs around the park, and walks past the big houses bordering the park, and then the lady with the longhair cat, walking with it around her like a mink stole, and the trick or treating teenagers, and a house filled with ghosts, friendly and other, and the mural that the kids did, and festivals, and cyclists, and flowers, and the Jamaican man I gave too much money too, and the one in makeshift robes that I ran from the porch, and the crazy neighbors I know, and the crazier ones that I don’t know, and ground zero for heartbreak, and ground zero for coming into my own, and a place where too much money was spent, and too much time was wasted, and where my heart felt at peace so much, where I thought I could spend the rest of my life, I must leave you soon, as...
Tonight the ukulele cannot play latin tunes, the flamenco band has all bedded down in the third wheel, Chad coddles his daughter who cannot sleep for want of her mother, and Robert half-sleeps hoping the men will not come again to steal his money, and take his cigarettes. The ten dollars from earlier in the day has been used for one Big Mac, a regular fries, one bottle of Wild Irish Rose, and a new pack of cigarettes. The rest was given to a friend who seemed like he could put it to better use. All of the beer bottles are empty and the refrigerator can offer no more. There is nothing left to say so you and I sit across the kitchen table and stare at the wall behind each other’s head. On the answering machine awaits messages from strange men trying to take what’s left of the money. The moon seems full in the sky, even as it appears a sliver. The knives are all washed and tucked neatly away. When I was a child, on nights like this one, we would run naked through the woods and down to the little tributary full of crawfish, and even further through the briars, torn flesh flapping, down to the lake shore. The sliver of moon then, no matter how sad, would prove to me the night sky smiling at us. We never ran out of things to say back then, even if I don’t remember any of the conversations now. The quiet of that wilderness left no room for silence. Now my legs hurt too much to take...
It’s storming in Elijay, and in Antietam the blood still seeps into the ground, and in that stormy place the water will seep, once the storm abates. And out through my bladder, and further through the urethra, the chemical remnants of the medication will make it into this city’s water supply and it too will become null. You see, I am up to my old tricks again, falling apart for the night, wanting something that I cannot seem to provide myself. And there is no game I can play to bring me my heart’s desire, as its aching is for something otherworldly and indeterminate that I thought could be found in others. Alexander Graham Bell, creator of vexing things, beautiful things, things that bring bad news, frustration and such great joy. I am looking at myself in the mirror now where I find a stranger just as I did when I was 11 and first became estranged from myself. The battlefield was apparently muddy there, after days of rain followed by foot traffic, then the blood came and mixed with that rainwater, and medicinal salves for the wounds in the souls of men. I am trying to conjure spirits when they want to sleep. They speak to me long enough to beg for peace, and I try not to hear their pleas. I want those soldiers to rise up and pity me tonight, when I should find my way to tomorrow, when I should just let them have a well-deserved...
Veins of the world reach up to heavenThe weather forecast is ominous in this city tonight as the tornadoes are impending and the sky has given up its full moon. I have the windows open to either avoid the crashing of windows or to feel the storm come inside to become part of me. While the maelstrom boils my heart sits here, content finally, and wants nothing more than a kind word, if even that. I am a transparent eye through which all things do, or can, flow unimpeded. And I can feel the cleansing spirit of the night, or this time of the year, as I ask another questions without asking that question to you, and you do not hear the question or you do, but choose not to answer. Am I talking to myself? or is there an echo in this place where I sit alone. I look on the face of God tonight, the face of that full moon, and think of sacrificial stuffed-animal lambs, and even more, the spiritual awakening. A coming whole in the middle of a tempest in a teacup, as I want nothing more, and I want everything. My mind can pause as the blood pours over me. I become washed in that blood. I feel free. Tomorrow will be sunshine. I will flash this crooked smile upward toward you as you hover there glowing, beautiful, and...
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world… There is a juggler just down the boardwalk there and he has been doing it for six months or so now. Every day. Every day adding a new item: bowling ball, helium balloon, toaster, ping pong ball. How he keeps these things in motion. Always just one in the hand, the others in the air. How he keeps the birds above entertained, and the sandal-and-sock-wearing drunk old men, coming out of the casinos, so very enthralled. At night, when the juggler is home alone, in his attic appartment overlooking the alley where they filmed those fight scenes in Barfly, he sometimes dreams in an Irish accent of drunken perambulations around another city, another time. His hands finally rest. His arms can luxuriate in cotton, and springs, and sleep. He dreams of a girl distant and lost now, that once meant something to him, but he can’t remember what, can’t fully remember her. Not a mother, or a lover, just a girl, and a footprint, and a gale blowing up the face of a cliff. He dreams Hollywood car crash scenes on the rocks below. Or Holden standing there catching VW Squarebacks full of grade-school children. You would think his muscle memory would be such that even in his sleep he would juggle, but every day it is like learning it all over again. Learning the tricks, how to work the stilts, where to hide the canary. What is the sound of one...
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