the fool’s back pocket…

You’d think it would be easier to breathe in here. I swallowed the whole tale, barbs included and started laughing like a fiend. I saw colors and other things I didn’t understand like tie dyed shirts over electric blue jogging shorts. In the middle of a walk around the neighborhood with the funky colored cars and motorcycles leaning at precarious angles threatening to fall over and wake up the neighbors is the sound of a dog barking that echoes across a man made pond. The whole story is unknowable, and I only saw the middle of the movie. What I can tell you is just the bare bones recollections captured during flights of fancy down the stairs of a dive bar with old ripped up fliers still clinging to the walls and a greasy handrail that’s seen more hands than the average book at the public library.

Like I was saying, you’d think it would be easier to breathe in here. Raw-clothed tables holding up candles lighting rooms bouncing back to the hands and lips and shoulders and hair that is under or around those ears that I’d hope could hear the song that was playing in the background. I played it just for you my dear with a thought towards getting you to say yes to a question that’s mostly an assumption about the things you said you’d do if the situation were reversed. I can’t help it I’m a fool who’s bag of tricks consists mainly of movable type and occasional misspellings, some kind of disjointed chemistry and the under-appreciated history of conquest in the midst of the most vile conditions that fail to arouse the finest hint of come hither in your eyes. It ought to be easy to breathe but I’m gasping rubbing together red hot dirty lungs that taste like soot in this small room.

Outside, I can breathe like a man, shit, I can pretend a lot of things in the clear air cleaned by rain that fell after waiting for almost three months spent suspended above this town. Maybe someone found the spigot or maybe it was just the right time for a three day storm to clear the debris from air and push the pathogens down to a level of exceptional excitement. Far from my original thoughts on the subject of rescue it still appears to the unaided eye as a miracle cure awaiting verification from the usual suspects. When we question the verdict they reply in mere words, as if something so technical could ever capture the magic of transferrance, like passing along a memory over a large geographical distance. I can only see the flags destined for collection in the Boy Scout bin at the local grocery store as waving proudly strapped to a tall pole. You could see them for miles on a clear day.

Lately poetry is outstripping the prose I’m trying to compile and generally ensuring nobody is having much of a time. There is the concomitant swings in value as exchange rates mitigate the peace that was slow growth and steady love. The issue as a whole needs more study, and not that collegiate reductionist bullshit kind of phallic interlude, but real thought, the kind that comes from the cistern of the mind; saved for drought like conditions when things are dry and the mind gets stale from under-use. All of the folks I already miss, and they’ve really only been gone for a few hours. This summer night caught me off guard, all those demanding questions and equally laborious answers; all those lyrics to interpret and remark upon; the hellacious desire to see some good come from what feels so bad.

I was hoping it was going to get easier to breathe by now. After the clearing of the smoke and the flame from the source of the combustible material, shouldn’t we see some tangible gains in the rates of exchange and the pace of respiration? When I’m looking into a two dimensional mirror that reflects the lights in the bathroom and waiting for a sign from someone wiser than myself, which truthfully isn’t very wise to begin with, I’m really desperately demanding the release of information relating to why the night sky is in a solo mood on a night as vibrant as this; then the fallacies of the evening knock on the front door and demand to be let into the house. They’re going to come in whether I OK it or not, so the door is of course opened and a bunch of lies walk in like prostitutes dancing on a street-corner. I appreciate the movement after all of this slow burning, but can tell by the looks in their eyes that they just need a place to recharge before heading back out and doing it all over again tomorrow.

Those twiggy little sentences don’t even have the energy to turn a trick or two, they just came to be safe here and now from whatever it is they ain’t safe from out there. The couch is crowded with all them cute little pixie dust angels and the ashtray is full of smoldering butts from hands that were too tired to crush them right and with proper feeling. I have to hide my scissors (because somethings you have to keep for yourself) in case the carload of lies tries to lift them for an easy way out somewhere way down the line. I couldn’t testify to the effectiveness of these lies, even if I wanted to, and I don’t. Somewhere, during one of those introspective interrogations, I decided to let the bastard bleed out but then later changed my mind and relieved him of any and all responsibility for the mess he’d caused. With not inconsiderable sadness, I swept up the room and cleaned off all the fingerprints to ensure a clean getaway. I must have missed one, or we wouldn’t be here having this chat.

Right?

Anyway, I can’t disentangle the singular event from its pool of string and yarn and felt; we’re left holding the remains of a waking dream pushed by until now unquestioned loyalty and patriotism for the cause. “All in the greater good!” you scream in your orgasm voice. For a moment fear turns to anger turns to laughter turns to high comedic concepts like falling down over and over and Abbot & Costello and old time things from when I was a kid. Locked in my remains long before the event in question, it would be a bad joke or maybe just some cultural value that stops the scratches from spreading to the other arm.

And then I’m healed in the image of incandescent waves of light; they reassure the child in me that we are far from harm and soothe the younger man’s memories of the night we went drinking and you stole plant off of your neighbors front porch. The joke was just a joke. The plant was just a plant, and now they’re stuck here waiting on a punchline that might not come, or worse, might not be very funny.

The whole issue is settled in the brief instant that all this has taken place during. I can catch my breath on the hope that underneath all the complexity and permutations of what might have gone wrong is the more basic premise that for a short period of time, something went right. The sliding timescale style of assiduous thought isn’t against the law…yet. There’s been hands that slap or tickle, depending on what we wanted at the time or what we thought we deserved from those daft provocations. I’ll never scream like that again except when I really mean it. All of the tinsel wrapped veneer sparkles and blasts the light back at your smile that’s broken only by the laughter over my shoulder in the mirror. For whatever time is just long enough, I’ll know I’ll be forgiven my frailties and still have my hunger for what you have to offer satiated.

The room clears easily like blood flowing from an open wound. Now I’m breathing again. No torture quite like holding it in for as long as you can…until the exquisite jewel of letting it all out. Tranquility wrapped up in skin and bones and cut-off jeans. I can breath just fine, thank you very much.

Everything tastes like a bad joke. It’s living on donuts and a pair of scissors as dirty and dull as you please, just waiting for something to happen. The frustration is a growth, like a cancer that eats away at the healthy flesh just for the fun of destroying something useful. In such a mindless landscape is the answer to your deepest prayers. It must be, or why else bother keeping on to keep on, as the saying goes. The signs and symbols and portents are all waylaid information; wrong place, new name, that sort of thing. Personally, I gave up trying to follow them with any degree of interest, but the few I do manage to glimpse are pretty unintelligible. I can’t imagine someone out there riding around and changing the lettering or altering the symbols, but the eyes don’t lie. It gets this way when I know what answer I hope to receive but can’t figure out the question to ask.

More arguments. More fights. More hysterical anger colored walls that just keep on holding up the roof no matter how hard you run into them or what you throw at them. Besides, this is not a house filled with weapons, nor would I want it to be. This used to be such a calm room. Whether or not a resurrection is to follow some final sin, I cant be sure. It makes me want to claw out my eyes, but that wouldn’t change anything relevant. Fight, fight, fight, for what in the fucking world? For something at all? Is this payment due? Every word just drips with blatant unkindness; so repellent. Each antecedent rolls off the back of a duck swimming under a bridge. I’m just the asshole on the bridge, watching it all go by. So what if the tears are unexplained? Does it really matter that the world moves on somnambulist? Fight, fight, fight, tired, tired, tired, same, same, same. A daily mantra? Or simply my chance to put my foot down and give up on the whole damn thing?

Lately I’ve been using my left hip as an alarm clock, letting the pain build up while sleeping until the joint begins to feel like a recently detonated bomb. Then I wake up. It takes between three and five hours (more or less) for the alarm to sound. At that point, I am kindly informed that no matter my own level of exhaustion, sleep will not be tolerated. Fuck me, I can’t even metaphorically throw the clock against a wall, as much as I’d like to. Other ideas are needed. More doctors consulted. Maybe add in another lawyer or two; fuck, spare no expense to protect the insurance folk from ever having to make good on their own promised policy for treatment. I can wait. I’m not real good at it, but I’m learning. There’s nothing else to do, and I’m not one to stop learning anyway. Fight, fight, fight, but there has to be some spoils. Ethereal knowledge will just have to do. For now.

My pillow hears all of my whispers when the lights go out. A great listener as long as you don’t require advice. By now, the pillow has it down by heart, from the insults to the complaints. From the guilt to the shame, as it were. Fight, fight, fight, with this one, with that one, over this, over that, over nothing at all or over shit we know nothing about. Do you see what I’m saying? I’m dead tired, and sick of the fight. A little calm silence is all I’m taking, and if it is a character flaw to reject compromise, then add it to the list and worry about it later.

For a short amount of stolen time and space, it is quiet and still. This is not a time to be careful with what you wish for. As long as it’s small and doesn’t hurt anyone, there’s no problem on my side of the ledger. Silence. The smallest of the jack-off fantasies, widely anticipated here on the concrete foredeck. What with that frightening feeling that something important is broken, silence at the least will allow for introspection. I’ll tell the pillow. He won’t tell a soul. Then, maybe, if we’re lucky enough, no more verbal fistfights. No more of the incessant fight, fight, fight. Just silence. Just trying to stay calm and deal without inciting anger. Just the silence that lets you sleep peacefully, righteous under the covers and not anything but kind and, dare I say it…loved.

Forgiveness is a bitch.