It is the numbered steps taken in a dark house. Ten minutes taken outside for a cigarette is far too long. I’ve been a desperate person for quite some time now that I no longer gamble. I am lost for hours it seems between the eyes of two people muddy with memory in dream. Everything I say could be kept short. Why has it taken more than a year to string a handful of things. Marionettes are entertaining for just as long.
I sat respectably with my legs crossed, dug both my hands into the damp dessert sand, and waited patiently for instruction from black heaven. The breeze began whimpering, waving in circles and shapes around my body, forming mystery and symbols with each dot of sand collected. I closed my eyes and centered myself. I began breathing from my mouth and reminding myself of my birth name. Letter by letter. A cry rang out. A wounded cry from an animal of some sort. A black mare was approaching a few hundred feet away. Dragging pain, it screamed with every step closer. Fear began to settle. I felt exposed to the moon as I caved into my gut like a dieing star falls into itself. The horse began barking and cackling, forming every grunt into understandable words. My name. Character by character. This unholy beast is not earthbound. Its ribcage exposed and as pearl as the moon shine. It was hungry and unaware of us both. It was now within territory. As tall as a billboard and as long as train tracks. It fell onto its belly and slung its head into the sand, panting huge bursts of sand-clouds from its mouth. “When will this dessert end? When when when when?” It began panting and coughing. Thrashing in place struggling to get back up on its hind legs. “I once was a wooomann” it slithered, “Beautiful and fair.”
———
Whiskey on the rocks. Eggs over easy. World news on the tube and song-birds over breakfast. Rents due last week and Sharon’s left the car on empty again. I poke at my belly and hum the commercial jingles while Sharon snoozes the alarm clock for the dozenth time. I’m dazed and drunk on coffee and meds. Another seizable opportunity to sigh and reminisce. The only tangible moments an old man can call his own with full control. Sharon was older than I when I first met her. Hatred disgust and love at first-sight. Now we’re one in the same when both our youth’s ran from us somewhere in the middle. We used to kill time in-between our love-making with child’s play and baby-talk.
Just perfect.
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I’m not going
to let anybody see
you.
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he’s
in there.
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody’s asleep.
I say, I know that you’re there,
so don’t be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he’s singing a little
in there, I haven’t quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it’s nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don’t
weep, do
you?
-Charles Bukowski
I’m going crazy in this cell. Thats impossible if I’m already crazy like the others. They confescated my work clothes and put me in one of theirs. A manic-depressive painter brushing away at a white wall. The ceiling bulb is green like dark snot and everything here smells sour. I twiddle invisible quarters around my fingers and keep my cardio-routine to walking circles, occasionally on my hands. This room is fucking crazy and does nothing but make crazy. I wanted to be left alone. Alone then and now. But people are fucking persistent. Peresistent religious arrogant condescending trite and fucking neglegent. Such two-faced happiness has the arms of an octupus. Suction cups, teeth and all. I ducked beneath that bus stop already waiting on rain hoping for sleep before the cold set in. But there came that shining samaritan. A fucking parade of human compassion.
“Theres room in the back. In the bed. Just push over the tarp and copper rolls.”
I shook in place. My first words came as vomit and now I shook on the ground. I awoke with the night sky rolling above me like a marble. Every light passing on that carousel of stars.
She phoned again this morning, crying that the world was pressing hard. That there was no place left wild for a crazy fucking girl to run and sleep. I helped weep. Cried that you truely are crazy, but not crazier than me. Do not make me go out there. She smelled beer through the wire and said long distance calls can be used more productively. We rekindled old sex tales by choosing our words carefully, reassuring those old tones with silk and RRRRrrrraaassspp. Shes lost her period in a town with too many vowels and has bites and marks to prove so. Oh how this woman spits and coughs. How she laughs amongst the vultures that scream black hurricanes.
“I ran off with Robert. My tenant. We wanted to travel, ya’ know, just wanted to keep it going. But now im stuck in some motel wih cheap bamboo drapes, and somethings making me itch in this dump.”
“Did you fuck him?”
“We fucked each other. And that is none of your business.”
“Why don’t you go fuck yourself and call me when you’re here to fuck me and abandone me and start all this goddamn bullshit from the beginning again.”
A long pause centered between us before she sighed.
“I think I’m pregnant. And for real this time.”
I hung up the phone. Smashed it silent.
How such a simple creature can wander through this ugly city. The simplest kinds that need no prejudice, need no thoughtful intentions, but are placed with the only means of discovery. Such tiny declarations come smooth and quietly. That hair shivers back and forth in place. The way those eyes radiate, as the fresh morning sun rises in through the milky midnight silver. Thick eyebrows teasing every new thought. Every whisper falling soft like smokey cursive to my ears.
3 a.m. oldies swoon into the black moon horizon. This is my favorite time of day to be at odds with the world. I drive dangerously over the speed limit and chain-smoke with my free-hand. My thoughts take the stage and find tragic comfort in the silent dessert streets. The dark city district approaches and feeds off the motel lights so that the street lines are not completely cavernous. I approach one of the roach motels that’s name is only left to a spray-painted symbol.
BLACK CLOUD
Inside, a royal red carpet guides me in deeper, and each hall turned is drowning in wooden doors. I put my ear to one slightly opened and hear a man and a woman reciting bad poetry to each other in their pretentious predatory voices.
The carpet is getting brighter with each passing light. The doors are becoming only few. Until finally there is no more road , but one last slightly opened wooden door. There is no poetry inside, no voices or love-making sounds, only darkness. At the end of the black-hole I see a tiny stretch of light come from beneath a door. I take small steps, and slowly place every foot. Something in there begins to laugh and sing. Something beastly. Something feminine.
