talking alone at night…

After three attempts at sleep, I gave up and stopped making any more decisions. Of the piss poor timing of the whole thing, what can you do? Anything other than being dragged along by a discordant mix of upper case speed letters and cyclical hallucinations (self-administered of course) would be indifferent. Left to thoughts rasping and tunneling across what at first seems a barren landscape. Except it isn’t barren. If anything, there are too many of too much at work on everything, and nothing would be the inevitable result. It’s almost as if this had never occurred to a fair number of high minded individuals for all the attention it seemed to get. If enough small, rational decisions accrued into some larger pool can become enough to instigate rapid disintegration then what distinguishes reason from the superstition of ravaged minds when the lights are gone? That fucker really knows how to invert progress. What does the guy on your shoulder say?

In the acid heat of a pre-winter pre-morning everything is just preparation; even the spit on the ground speaks with a voice of a drifting master. In my imagination, everything is frosted in an early Pacific freeze. All the statues are really statues, vestiges of indeterminacy frequenting the dark alleys and perpetually waiting. The effect of the whole scene should cause some consternation, but it never does. Having signed over my rationale in support of a policy I couldn’t begin to articulate, there is nothing else to do but wait along with the frozen statues for whatever it is the comes next. If history is any guide, I’m guessing what comes next is a sun rise. But by then the acid heat of cold’s dominance over night will evaporate along with everything else. Does make record keeping a lot easier; I never fill out any form if IDK isn’t one of the pre-written answers. Like I said. Just easier that way.

At least there is enough music to keep the sound going. It’s gonna be a long wait and the transistors are all blown to shit. What used to look like poetry now comes so tangled as to be useless even to me. Luckily, there are medicines that can fix the whole mess without too much effort on my part. Tunneling back into to the fixative is the only way to go. I’ve got my razors out and ready for whatever it is that needs cutting but no flashlight to illuminate a target. I’m at the movies all alone, laughing about nothing. That’s just the way it is, and until something changes, I’ll just apply the agent myself, knowing full well that by the time I’m surrounded by reptilian grins, there won’t be anyone to light my cigarettes. Better grab an extra lighter. Matches are no use to shaking hands.

Resorting to such depths is less of a bother than explaining the plight of missing words; especially when you don’t know where it went. Rather than forcing out more toothpaste than the tube contains, I figure on sitting back until the cosmos is more accommodating to my particular style. This is, after all, the suburbs. Anything is possible living somewhere that doesn’t actually exist. It ain’t hard to fall for the illusion, but it’s damn near impossible to break. Problem is, once you start to see the illusion for what it is, all the blueberry smoke in the world can’t cover it back up. Sometimes it even matters.

By the time morning arrives and these slow hours are free to dissolve into what happened yesterday or the day before that, there is time for everything else to slide past the scenery. This isn’t cake batter; we ain’t waiting on the oven. Besides, the statues are calling out that the day has begun and it is time to move. I want to tell them how wrong they are, but I can’t talk and even if I could, there is nobody around to hear whatever comes out. The statues are all gone and in this alley
of steam bath proportions coldly cemented into place, I’m the only one who can’t move, or speak, or do much of anything more valuable than continue to exist.

Past all the old poems in stone, the words are no longer alive on a red tongue steaming in the cold. Knowing it is all coming around again doesn’t make it any easier to kill what’s left of this nightmare. Why bother? It will just pull a damn Lazarus act and come back to flesh the same time tomorrow? Shit, maybe instead it makes more sense to sit down and shake the hand with the most blood on it rather than the least? That’s no plan; anthropomorphic or not, those ice case ghost statues will be there to consider later. When you’ve screwed the pooch badly enough, there is always later. Yet another cosmic joke to be wary of. Everything ends in laughter, and for another night we are all safe. How the fuck does that keep happening?

Best not to question the laughter too deeply; you might end up with the wrong answer, or worse, it might not be sarcastically funny enough for that crowd. Well, better your chances than mine. Even if I could explain the whole thing, you’d probably just write it off as smokers delusion. I’d have to tell you “Baby, the lungs got nothing to do with it at all” and when I talk to you like that, you cry. Whoever said the truth shall set you free had no fucking clue. With the hot too cold to move; guess everyone is waiting along with the music and the light and everything else that goes into reformulating the morning from the wreckage of night. One of these nights we really have to stop this purposeless destruction. Just not yet. Nothing worse than the sound of a tear. Really bothers me, and I’m being serious here, despite assurances to the contrary. (Lots of laughter ensues and the smoke rises just a little higher.)