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| One thing I’m still alive for is Scott strumming the guitar, fumbling through Lua, all sharp and flat, the way it sounds best.
Can’t seem to find the right medium this morning, or hold a thought for long. I pace rooms. I raise window shades. I sit listening to Modest Mouse and Bright Eyes, Elliot Smith and Neutral Milk Hotel, music I loved alongside Gus and Jake. We spent the dark nights behind headlights with cigarettes and Baba O’Riley. We were sacred then.
But after that? After they stepped out for a smoke never to return? Do they wait for me there? It feels like peace, but it also feels like nothing sometimes.
The numb calculating finality that stretches on and on…
It bumps in the night and peeks when I blink.
But the memories are warm and red, and they whisper in my ear. We will meet again. We must. Aren’t they still apart of what could be, what’s been — part of this thing that’s been happening for a while now and will keep happening for a while until It maybe decides to stop one rainy afternoon? Maybe I’m just tired. It peeks when I blink
Glimpse like a vapor
Soft and sideways
Daylight breaking
It speaks when I sleep
Beats like a kick drum
Heavy when my heart skips
Absent but listening | | |
| 2:16 a.m.
I think of you as I arrive home and shimmy into the tiny parking space between Jaun's truck and the trash cans. A cat flickers twice, once for each headlight, then disappears down the path under the tiny fruit tree toward the Guatemalan's house. I shut off my quiet Scion and sigh.
As I pad up the backstairs I have the vaguest notion that our homeless friend has returned. Sometimes she sleeps under there. Other times she washes her naked butt in the front yard with our garden hose. We usually hide it now. I decide not to take any chances. I step lightly. I am quiet. Mortgage or no, dreams ought not be stirred by the thoughtless Big Mac footfalls of beguiled Midwestern yokels.
At the top of the stairs I push lightly on the back-door -- a door locked at the knob, but askew of the jam -- an impotent door... or is it the lock? Either way, something isn't working properly.
Glum thoughts are tired -- I'm feeling tired myself. I think of you and replay the day as I kick off my shoes and flop into bed. I fall asleep, but not before several tosses and turns and bumps in the night. That black and white movie feeling creeps through the room again, and Hollywood starlets wink and giggle then give way to the darkness.
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| Back in the days before my friends were either emoticons or dead, we used to sit side by side and watch the daybreak orange, infantile and gray. We spoke audibly and acted funny, farting and sweating and smiling through human flesh.
now we are emoticons and tombstones and jpgs -- hits swallowed up by the blog-o-sphere, disappearing into the smart hum that is what became of modern man.
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| His throat tickled familiar. Then the soft cough, subtle at first, but growing into a fit.
“I need a drink,” he clucked to himself.
The closet was poorly lit in the damp trailer, as he rummaged. His mouth was dry. He could taste cigarette on the walls of his dry mouth. He hadn’t smoked in 3 days. Now he was getting to feel irritated again, that hot feeling at the end of his nose. His thoughts were starting to race again.
“Fuck.”
He breathed hard. He was getting hot.
“These fuckin’ pants,” he growled, shifting hard and tugging on his pant leg.
“Dammit.”
A bead of sweat welled right there at that searing hot place on his nose. It dangled, tickling for a moment, then dropped. He watched it drop and disappear into the black abyss of the dark closet.
A helmet. A moldy stuffed animal. A lamp.
“Dammit. I need a drink,” he thought once more, then ducked out of the closet and turned to face the blinding threadbare green sheet stretched across the window. It dampened only the straightest rays of the sun, infecting the room with a greenish hue, like late afternoon just before a summer storm, when the sky gets sick yellow and everything looks fake dipped in strange light. And the conversations turn strange and unmemorable.
He stood yellow and black, glowing in the eerie green-white of the makeshift curtain, huge against the shitty wainscot walls of the trailer. He was going to die.
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| He was 13 minutes late and sporting a new pair of white deck shoes as
he passed the crack in the church behind the Darby's. "No time to
think these days," Shelby thought, as he raced up Brookhurst toward
Kinney, and the wide schoolhouse waiting quietly at the top of the
lane. Rounding the corner he came upon a downed jogger, bent to
tie her shoe. Making a wide arch to avoid the fit human, Shelby
ventured out into the street and into the path of a speeding four door
sedan containing one surgeon and one surgeon's wife. The surgeon
tried to patch up the mess that ensued, but found himself ill equiped
(He'd been on his way to a brunch.). He and his wife moved to
Kennybunkport to forget the
whole damn'd thing. His wife developed a drinking problem and an
online affair. The surgeon excelled at golf.
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