The Food Network: last exit on the interstate before morbidly bored

Today I walked 20 blocks in the sweltering to pick up meds. The sweat was ridiculous. I kept averting my eyes from every passer-by because there were giant pools forming underneath my exhausted boobies and there was no way in Hell they weren't looking.

Kept walking and thought it was a mirage it was so gross but no a man was peeing in a trashcan. Don’t know why he didn't just pee in an alley or on a bush, as there was an over abundance of such conveniences. The stank was like a missile launched straight into my tear ducts and I was not sweating, but crying. I don’t agree with the “If it’s yellow let it mellow” philosophy simply because the sharp stench of urine gets my fucking goat more than the dull wafting of doo-doo brown.

A perfect segue into Memorial Day. 2-Live Crew filled the streets. I turned a corner and nearly collided with a group of 5 year olds doing the stanky leg whilst sipping from little hugs. I’m pretty sure the only thing I did to celebrate, personally, was cashing in on some free hotdogs with my dad outside the Bank of America in Narberth. Christina made BBQ wings that night and we hit the bong and watched “Chopped” for two hours, waiting for them to cook. We ate them and thought they were bad because we were brainwashed into  expecting a surplus of rosemary; or maybe it was just that we couldn't quite feel or know the subtle honey undertones, they were just simply there.

The night ended with Cha-Cha music and spinning in circles, crumbling to the rug and rolling myself into bed, too lazy to even look up the weather for tomorrow.

Call Me Near the Salted Meadow

There were half baked attempts at communication.  Here in the city of blank where you loved the totality of street nothing.  Crossing rooms to the not dance--a kitchen or borrowing four dollars for a little while.  We would carve memories out of the dust surrounding probably mistakes.  I felt heavy and underneath the false mat.  Even in memories I keep asking questions about where we are.  When I know exactly the place of the whole time: just me and walls and that friend I cry over trusting.  I promise to never do anything irrational unless it costs money.  You echo absorption but mostly have no idea that this speech is only because you made me alive.  Sometimes I say that living is a choice.  But brother--my living is your choice.  Ignore my synthetic bandage.  And keep doing that.  Keep telling me that poetry needs tiny words and prose needs big words.  Because prose is like conversation.  And we're all hiding in conversation.

Some friends don't make it because they can't evolve.  And you don't know if it's a flaw in the world or a flaw in the friend.  The calculus is too ugly to perform.  But maybe fading into the pan is the prettiest way to show what we mean.  And maybe we deserve beauty.  You and me and the storm after the porch.  I'm mawkish and alone.  Only an invisible enemy would hate me for that.  Make your presence known and I'll show you what these tear drops are about.  Only trust turns my blood red or maybe just makes it known.  But trust is what I can give you.  Trust and this.  The timelessness of actual speaking.  

When You Can't Sleep You're Staring at the Sun

It's 4:12 AM and I'm going about 90 miles per hour on a stretch of highway that has just gotten very wet very quickly.  I'm very scared and very lonely.  The fear is keeping me awake so I don't try and resist it.  I don't seem to be able to do anything about the loneliness so it's there too.  There's no light on the highway at all except for what's coming from my headlamps and that's getting refracted by the rain to the point where its more a visual queue of a place to look than a useful tool.  The light looks like a serrated haze because the rain is so prolific and swift.  I look down at my wristwatch more to vary my movements and keep me awake than to determine the time which I both know and find essentially irrelevant.  My wristwatch is two minutes slower than the digital clock on the center consul of my sedan.  More likely it's two and half minutes slow.  This thought upsets me.  There's something about having a mistake attached to my body that I can't ignore and I want nothing more than to stop the car correct the wristwatch to the world clock on my phone drive through the median and take my gray Nissan sedan PA tags Golf Tango Echo four-eight-niner-one to a job that I enjoy the challenge of and know I'm capable of doing well.  That's out of the question though.  The wristwatch is also bothering me because I think I must have set it to the world clock already.  That seems like something I'd do right after first getting the watch.  This thought is upsetting for two reasons.  One because it means that my memory is flawed and two because it means that the watch may be flawed as well.  That it's been under some kind of elongated degradation.  The minutiae of such a degradation bothering me to such a high degree is something I don't analyze at the moment for some reason that I don't analyze either.

It's 4:14 AM and I have to change lanes because there's roadwork ahead and the right lane is closed for it.  I'm going around a bend in the road and slow the sedan to about 80 miles per hour.  I see a binary set of lights in the mirror after the turn.  Now it's closer and I can see that it's a UPS double-loaded big rig.  That's 36 wheels.  It must be going faster than I am which seems unlikely.  We are converging on the point where there just isn't any more right lane and the big rig is still going faster than me.  The cabin passes me and I realize that I've still got close to 100 feet before the entire vehicle has passed me.  Maybe another 50 after that until it can get into my lane.  It looks like there's about 200 feet before the right lane is completely closed.  Residual spray from the big rig is pelting my window though pelting is probably the wrong word because its more like a mohair screen that won't go away even with the wipers on high.  I realize that if I apply the breaks I will swerve and perhaps die.  This isn't the way I wanted to die.  I don't really want to die though I have fantasized about getting hit in the head with a stray bullet many times.  Dying that way seems both potentially painless and guiltless.  And beyond that would represent the need for gun restrictions and how pervasive a problem gun violence is.  I look down at my wristwatch and see that it says 4:12 AM.  The big rig is getting closer and I wonder why the driver is being so aggressive.  Truckers always struck me as probably the loneliest people with a union and I don't know why but I figure that would make them nicer to the little guys on the road.  Evidently not and I'm actually frightened for my life.  I can't help but thinking that in 24 hours there are two nights and one day.  

It's 4:15 AM and I see the shape of a road crew worker shimmering from the illuminating tape on his coveralls.  There's a little glowing orb where his head should be and I can tell that it's his headlamp.  He's walking over to

The Sun

I woke up at nine this morning and paced around my apartment for a long time, embracing something. There was a sip left in the energy drink I put in the fridge last night. I took the sip and then slowly paid my electric bill and my internet bill.

I stood in front of the kitchen window. They put a fan in it a couple of days ago but the morning air was cold and the fan was off. It seemed ornamental, sitting there on the sill, meaning to conjure memories of other fans in use. I pretended for a moment that I was beginning to understand the confines/barriers/limits/whatever of my physical body.

I've been trying to do things very slowly and deliberately. Caution seems necessary. Balance is difficult to find. No sudden movements.

Ex: sitting down at a table. Still standing, I put everything in my hands on to the table first. Then I shudder into the chair, ideally using some sort of grounded handhold.

For the first time in a while, I can see that there is a right way to do things and a wrong way to do things. Every decision is rooted in circumstance but what's important is having confidence in your ability to decide.

I'm spending periods of time, minutes or hours, thinking in platitudes, like an alcoholic.

And above all, I'm pretty embarrassed. Mostly by the fact that I can't stop projecting my emotions onto other people's potential opinions of them. My sincerity feels ostentatious.

"Staring at the sun."

You said that, right Harry?

I'm not sure I want to.

hooker ghosts of a.c. an excerpt

The Golden Key  is $20 a night. This rate applies to one person. The rate for two people is $40 a night and the rate for three is somewhere upwards of that. The driver checks in with the skirt and tells the tube top to sneak in afterwards. She waits in the pick-up for 15 minutes listening to the radio and “Laffy Taffy” by D4L is playing on every station. The Taffy  is $15 a night but last she heard they were nearly always filled by permanent residents: sad folks washed ashore when the asylums closed around the beach towns and left the only option of shacking up for good alone in a love motel.
The skirt unlocks the door to room #7 and she and the driver start sipping Coor’s Light and bumping coke. The tube top sneaks in after her 15 minutes are up and the room is dank with cigarette smoke and heat and mold. It smells really good and she gets hot. They all start beating on the 30-rack and the eight ball and blasting the radio where all the sexiness seeps from the song “I’m ‘n Luv (Wit a Stripper)” by T-Pain and the girls start grinding with the air. A Genie and a Mermaid, glowing sensual lava lamps of purple and orange and sea-foam green. He watches and drinks, he refrains from ripping their clothes off or touching them he just sits on the radiator and looks at them while they get wasted and dance. The tube top starts pulling her thong straps out from her JNCO jeans and lets them hang out high above her hip bones. The skirt lines up a line across her tit and tempts the driver but he refuses and stares into the circular motion of her coke-covered nipple like he is mesmerized by something so far from it, not even of this world or bodily function, he is disillusioned by her trashy prowess and focused on the cosmos of years beyond 2006, beyond her gyrating body projected against the TV that does not get HBO despite as advertised on the billboard in the parking lot. The radio changes mood suddenly and starts playing “You’re Beautiful” by James Blunt.
“Jesus I hate this motherfucker!!!” The skirt screams.
“Yaa me too fuck this pussy,” The tube top sighs.
“Well you two ladies are beautiful shouldn’t ya know it anyway,” the driver whispers seductively from a zillion miles away and starts to caress the ladies into a sleeper-hold. The tube top crumbles to the carpeting, stops breathing, soils herself. The skirt begins to lose consciousness and has the slightest look of terror across her sparkling powdered face and manages to croak “honestly fuck you but seriously I’m just so goddamn PO’d I went to this fuckin’ pussy-ass song, this annoying song, this fuckin’ bitch-ass song that sucks and is always on the radio ” as she dies.

Allergy Season

cellophane candy and fish sauce keep me company.  the dogs can't stay away.

stop

breath the cream of life 

twice through a balloon.

sit there not drinking, ashamed of your weak body.

sniffling always

rubbing your life on the subway

works like the evil eye ⚈

TJ

We're all afraid in the dark.  Everything that glints seems wrong for it.  I mean cinderblocks and anonymous trash parts.  Boldness in disrepair from months of neglect.  Heaps of August in foreign parts of the body.  What an odd use these things have.

I've made another person the opposite of a nightmare for so long and now I'm afraid to sleep because of it.  By which I mean I can't because nightmares don't count as sleep.  Every time you cry it's only confusion that pulls the tears out.  When she cries on the phone to me I'm usually drunk enough to believe that it has nothing to do with me being the person she's crying to.  I talk about it a lot.  Mostly to myself and to Toby.  Thank God for Toby.

Luxury Housing Compound

She got home late from dance class and tossed the keys to the Saab on to the marble countertop of the kitchen island. She took a wine glass out of the wine glass cabinet and set it down next to the keys. She poured a small glass of Chablis and left it there, pulling off her sweater as she walked into the living room. She sat down on the couch and opened up her Macbook. On her Macbook, she opened up a fresh Google Drive document and typed:

“Jane got home late from a hip-hop dance class, something she was trying out, a suggestion from her therapist. She tossed the keys to the Volvo on to the large, oak, dining room table and winced at the sound.”

She stopped typing and thought:

“Jane?”

She closed the Macbook and picked up a Lorrie Moore collection from the coffee table and opened it to page 81. She stared at a sentence:

“If it’s meaningless, write meaningless across the top of every page.”

She continued to look at the book for a while, attributing this time to “reading” but really she just kept staring at page 81. She thought about her little brothers, Shawn and Kevin. They were in college now. When she thought about her brothers, she could only think the phrase:

“In college now.”

She closed the book and set it back on the coffee table. She got up and walked back into the kitchen. She picked up the glass of Chablis from the marble countertop and drank it in one graceful gulp. She set the glass back down. It made a sound but she didn’t wince. She walked over to the front door, just off the dining nook, and armed the alarm. The alarm beeped. She turned out the kitchen light and walked into the dark bedroom.