- I'd gotten tired of peoples' expectations, which is to say everyone expected me to get over it, and none of them would have settled for my dirty shoes on a bet. They're soiled; they're venal. I'm white napkins on spiffy tables. And I know they want to railroad me.
“Deal with it,” she says,
and he eyes are all gethsemane, e.g. don't pass this cup under me,
Dad.
I grow weary of explaining these
things.
Bustling multitudes of walking,
phlegm-blasting, yellowjacket casualties ghost over the desert and
beat on Jerusalem's door. They're carted off to well-wishing and tea
on 18-wheel hearses of sad glory and obligatory fish fountains.
She readjusts her interchangeable
coiff and that makes her blonde this week. She likes being a blonde.
She excels at being a blonde.
The bodies stink around her, but
even in the puke-and-piss-mired nightfall she retains a kind of
infernal, unflagging stature. She'll burn all the bridges she must to
get her heap of flapjacks. All others be damned, she is the
Quintessential Entropy Device.
(Here it should be noted my
Better looks over my shoulder and prods me, reminding me of the
danger involved when one objectifies an individual as a “Device”.
I hawk an erudite loogie and continue)
She rides in state among the
festering carnage, trying to be subtle as she pulls up a stocking.
- There are too many Bathroom Gods wielding ball peen hammers to impress the compulsions of the weak. We need renovations.
Give me strange dogs, a la
Bunuel and Dali. Throw it all out in the open. Give me the primal
play of a baby's eye. Give me nails and tacks in technicolor.
Give me irresponsible rhetoric and
action—only through unreasonable maneuvers can one hope to subvert
the zeitgeist.
Give me a piss-and-vinegar outlook
and a mask, a cap and a burlap bag so I might be a burglar of th
latent mind. Give me actions above and beyond the deadweight of conscience and consequence.
Give me a horrific effigy god
with a blunt barbecue tree stump snout. This deity will be the last
word in terror. So terrible that he causes mean-spirited little men
to weep in supplication and reconsider their paths in life.
Give me a crew of soaked
miscreants too get drunk, ridiculous and sentimental with while
oldsters in traditional lederhosen honk on alpine horns and batter
accordions with percussive, padded cell furor.
Give me the raw of the movie
stripped past the mind's vain distinctions of time and place, revert
personage back to archetype, subtle aberrations of nuance and
characterization to the most base level of grunting moral and
skeletal campfire yarn.
Give me a life without
apologies, a clear, uncut conscience not hampered by the nervous
tremors of Should.
Give me a premature,
hereditary widow's peak. Give me the best thighs on the regional
poetry scene after she gets done fucking his image off her body. Give
me the knife of her words to twist hard. It's the only defense I have
left.
Give me a quaint
coastal town, the platonist dream, the dullard standard of a
writer's paradise, to strafe and raze and obliterate along with its
entire population of fishermen, franco-american blue collar yobbos
and yuppie tranquility fiends. What sane scribe can write in
paradise?
Give me the ability to
piss on a tiara and get past all of this.
'96 or '97, early days
in Fayetteville, I think. Never published.
Copyright 2020, C.F.
Roberts/Molotov Editions
