Thursday, July 28, 2011

1987



Behind a garage someone is sleeping with the candy wrappers and empty cans. I try and think of the earth finally giving up its secrets in moments when there's nothing on the mind except panic.
In a kitchen a girl drops the coffee pot while her father reaches for a belt, whether one to take or one to strap on she doesn't know. I have slept in a dumpster on a night when none of the coffee worked
and I was wearing the legacy  
of dirt that are any man's bed to make.

Any man's bed to sleep in when it's a house that's been burning because pet food is historically cheaper than grub shaped to your tastes and because 
 the price of laundry is the erasure of the past that's
looking over the back yard fence when you're looking at the contorted swing set 
 and its uneven lengths of chain, dreaming of a higher class of bad luck, rotten wood decks, sliding swimming pools, gardens that get baked under desert winds,  wife swapping in the Seventies.

I crack my knuckles in a rustle of joints and light another Camel in the dark of another August afternoon. There is only traffic going to bars and homes and somewhere a cat is yowling at an empty dish,
somewhere dog scratches at a screen door, some times instinct is all I know and that's not even thinking, it's hunger on the naked face. The culture of the beach buries itself in the foam caused by Asian Freighters.

There's a table full of  friends 
 every winter night who blow smoke rings at the moon that makes its hesitant escape.  There are days you can't give away in laundry mats when there's a homeless man leaning against the spin cycle who won't explain why there the cut across his forehead but does reveal hours of banter as he deconstructs the meanings of the lives he says he's been because there are no year books for the liars club.

All our agendas are face down in the dirt; we see the surface of the soil, ants carrying ten times their weight, too much free time~ on loose change in our lives. A young girl leaves her kitchen to talk to her brother in the living room where he watches literature curl up and die as the screen writhes in a spasm of images from all over the globe to seduce the vision of one pair of eyes that hasn't learned to imagine the face of God or blue coat  calvary and their horses in the banks of clouds that are over him every day of his life.

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