by Tomorrow's Man
What if you drank me down like a warm bottle of deep red wine, flavor of my tannins and a throaty topnote giving a teen-aged nuclear burn to your belly, what if you drank me down once, then smiled like the vixen you are, alive on the top floor of a west coast castle, then swallowed me down again, and again?
Would you let me buzz your blood and brain?
Road Notes: Minneapolis, MN.
9:42AM, CST
It took some convincing of this tired Aryan barkeep, but he finally came 'round to my way of thinking and prepared me the traditional Irish breakfast of a cool 20oz. Guinness served with a floating egg poached in (a different) Guinness; brown the overall sight may be, but I dare you to waggle better browned protein at these hungry eyes today --
Happy Thanksgiving, indeed!
I had that queasy feeling through me tonight, the one that occurs when I'm standing in the frozen food section of the grocery store watching dozens of seemingly normal people -- many of them blessed with the almighty responsibilities of voting and procreation -- as they clamor for hundreds of dead, frozen turkeys.
Then, my inner sight shifts voutward, and my other eye telescopes above the scene in the middle of which I stand: Hundreds of people clawing their ways through the deli department, their mouths watering and bellies a-rumble as they fantasize about the literal tons of packaged animal being tossed into carts with the dead slap of plastic on grated metal, tons and tons of animal dead since not a one of these people knows when, and I shudder, walk away, and can't even think about putting a screaming salad into my mouth tonight.
Has anyone else noticed that aluminum cans are thinner than before? Either I've gotten so strong I could crush a planet like a christmas ornament, or the soda companies have cheaped out on their packaging.
This was an aside while the real word was running away. It seems to be back now, so I will be done with my can rambling.
Round 17 with this calendar, and I'm still on its feet, pinning those 12 crazy toes to a trampoline of time, happy to be two inches shorter than the last time I checked my erection; or maybe it's two inches longer...? I'll have to ask the calendar, just as soon as November says, "Uncle."
You know, if you find yourself in a hot tub outside in November when it
is 23 degrees and the lake is just beginning to ice up and the
waterfall is shouting a bossa nova death rattle, the sound of a car
door crashing can confuse the greatest of intentions left to the
cooling soil and a lily frozen and dipped in a freshwater prayer by
someone who grasped a graven figurine of a long lost hope that meant
everything to them.
27,000,000 times removed from the hot water I'm in where amoebas feel
Rio and Vegas and Mardi Gras all jocularly rolled up into a single
salsa experience, who said single cells don't feel what the rest of
them do!
There's a grey ocean that has a glint and a smile reserved for the jewel of your heart; and somewhere inside you, as your legs open to the idea and your flesh cools with winter-brewed bedroom air, the larceny you know will bring a barren cave and cold blood poetry still now thrills you from brimming drink top to empty glass shattered.
Every pore dreams woodsmoke. A dream of burnt sugar claiming me in a fast cancer, and I'm dead before I can laugh at regret.
There are movies falling out of my mind, point A to point B how did he live why did he die stories of sadness and tragic gunsmoke.
This dream was woodsmoke, cordite free and leaking from my every pore. Sniffing it, I thought of waffles.
So I reek burnt sugar, cancer on my knees and laughing at one Sun, as every pore I try to plug bleeds woodsmoke.
Deaths can be warm deaths.
Chapter Three: Riding the Woolite Wind to Victory
Lint the Great would soon discover that his final escape was as yet dubious. Though he had survived the icky clutches of the Hairball of Evil, one of the more powerful minions of Dooky, Joe's Cat of Great Evil, Lint the Great now found himself wafted into ever more treacherous peril -- he landed upon the Sock of Death.
The Sock of Death had been removed from Joe's foot not an hour before, after having been forced to ensconce the Stinking Appendage of Joe within a layer of cheap, unbreathing faux-leather Doc Marten knock-offs for well over 30 hours. Lint the Great could smell the fury of the Sock of Death, and knew that if he did not act, he would be doomed.
In a bold move (the kind that could only ever be taken by a being as great as Lint the Great) Lint the Great, feeling a building breeze, lifted into the air and daringly rode upon the back of Dooky the Evil himself -- the Overlord and Creator of the Hairballs of Evil. (At that epiphanous moment, Lint the Great realized why his brethren chose to call him Mu'ad Dib.)
Dooky -- being of Evil mind and Evil body -- sensed the Greatness of Lint the Great. In a skin-crawling display of just how evil and not humorous at all from the point of view of Lint the Great despite what humans think were the actions of Dooky's back-fur, Dooky's fur began moving as a seething army, twitching and writhing in an attempt to unseat Lint the Great; and with a strange, chilling cry to battle -- "mew" it was -- Dooky twisted his body and in one motion licked Lint the Great from his fur with his barbed, dragon-like tongue, a tongue pink with evil.
Lint the Great felt the first inkling that he may have been done for. Not only was he caught again by Dooky the Evil, but this time Dooky seemed set not on swallowing him whole, but on first rending Lint the Great to pieces within his gaping, gnashing maw. And even if Lint the Great had been a human like Joe Eggfondle, he was sure he would not have been laughing like a loon the way Joe was at Dooky looking crazy (with evil) while waggling his head back and forth and trying to masticate the ephermeral (yet Great) mass of Lint the Great and falling over in a pile of Humiliated Cat Evil in the proccess.
Lint the Great, damp with the Cat Spit of Evil, suddenly found himself out of the frying pan and in the fire -- he had survived Dooky the Evil once, and felt he could again; but when Joe stormed over to the battle of Great Lint Good and Great Cat Evil and lifted Lint the Great from Dooky's mouth, Lint the Great knew the battle had been lost.
It would take a miracle for Lint to survive to Chapter Four.
Stay Tuned for Chapter Four: Joe Gets a CD in the Mail: "The Miracle" by Queen with that Really Bad 'Radio Ga Ga' Song.
This morning I was devoured by Alien Shark People. You would never know it by looking at them -- since they are alien shark people -- but they have beautiful singing voices.
Chapter Two: The Hairball Resurrection
Lint the Great awoke wet, twisted, and matted into a sickly amalgam of hair and Friskies. In fact, something under his linty left armpit made him this that, perhaps, Rob Eggfondle's cat should probably eat more fiber.
Lint the Great lay for hours, drying on the bed pillow where Eggfondle's cat had deposited him. He lay for a nearly inexorable time, made worse by the courtroom dramas blaring from the kitchen. At long last, in the fading afternoon light and just before Judge Joe Brown called a tall Southern gentleman "a pawcks awn soh-sah-ty" whatever that was, Lint the Great, with great effort and great determination, caught a Zephyr of Freedom -- obviously delivered by the Excellent Gods of The Most Excellent World of Kenmore Dryers and Cling Free Sheets (a planet in the Tumble Dry Universe, just past Alpha Centauri), and prized himself from the hairball, wafting to emancipation upon the floor below.
"Now," thought Lint the Great, "Now to grow some Legs."
Coming Soon: Chapter Three: Riding the Woolite Wind to Victory
This disintegration process begins well, in fact; the bubbles, the warm head, fading with a smile despite the tears.
But it does get rocky, quickly; the lapses in fear, the bouts of reality, the prayers that sneak into screams.
At least it feels like it could end soon. At least winter is coming to slow down the moon, and create a silent black shadow where this disintegration had been, silent and moving slowly across the sky, cold, and always moving.
11.11
11.12
11.13...ticks by, these could be seconds or minutes or days but they all mean the same, the skin of my arms cold because my hands can't cover enough of me that needs to feel warm, needs to feel held, needs to feel something other than my own needy grab day to day, minute to minute, and even second to second.
I miss my velvety moods, my days when I felt like port wine in the throat of a red-haired siren, I miss hours spent in a film of happy solitude and sudden irreverence at the mercy of a woman's spidery grasp, I miss knowing I am loved drop to drop, drip to drip, and beat to beat as I live to serenade someone so worthy.
She said, You're a river with an alibi, and you'd never have lasted in this town. She said, It's not the water calling you, it's the motion; the west coast is just a pin-ball bumper.
No one knows I've decided to move to San Francisco, I told her.
She said, It doesn't matter -- everyone knows. She said, it is why you're never loved where you land; you're too bright for those kind of eyes.
She said, You're meant to stun as motion. No one wants to see you standing still -- it reminds them too much of how where they're standing is likely where they will die.
Aloud she said, "You're meant to be seen as a contrail."
I said.
I said nothing; and quietly taped together another box.
"The voice inside her said, 'The whole damn world is the same. There are no winners in this game.'"
"Still, the vodka hangover was better than wondering what might happen without it."
"Rising, the sun burned."
My life smells like smoke, the scarred result of burning for far too long, a thirty-foot Christmas tree reduced to ashes in the mouths of the dead.
If I fit nowhere, how can I go anywhere?
Chapter One: Birth in Flurg
There was a town, Flurg, that nestled in the gentle boomerang elbow of the Booghagagoog River, just outside the mystical ancient city of Cincinnati. Flurg was nearly as important during the golden age of 1987 as was Canada; for, though Canada delivered Brian Adams, Flurg was the birthplace of none other than Lint the Great.
Lint the Great was not expected to survive his tumultous birth. Tossed about in the whilring creation of his world inside the pocket of Rob Eggfondle's jeans as they turned and tossed (about) and twisted in the aging Sears dryer that drowned out most Browns games so Rob never did laundry on Sundays, Lint the Great came to life in a big bang similar to that of the universe itself (minus the tube socks and Truckers Do It on the Road tee-shirts (Rob owned three))!
As Rob removed the warm jeans from the dryer, Lint the Great felt the cool air of his new domain, his Earth, his creation, his universe! For verily, had any of it existed before Lint the Great? The dryer? The Cleveland Browns? Nay, life itself, in the form of Rob?? Not as far as Lint the Great was concerned. And as Rob removed Lint the Great from his jeans pocket -- along with the small wad of previously chewed gum upon which Lint the Great had been reclining -- Lint the Great just knew it was so Rob could revere his new God.
Lint the Great drew in a cobby breath, preparing to ask Rob to bow down and worship at the linty wad who had now deemed himself the Ultimately Holy and Mighty Lint the Great -- but was caught off guard when Rob, with what Lint the Great could only assume was terror that froze his face into such a rictus of boredom -- dropped Lint the Great to the floor.
Lint the Great prepared to exhibit upon Rob all of his Ultimately Holy and Mighty Fury, but Lint the Great was suddenly devoured by Rob's cat, Shytfo' Bryns.
And then...Rob ate the gum.
Stay tuned for Chapter Two: The Hairball Resurrection
Inspired by a poodle with an attitude problem although it may have been a schnauser with a poodle problem.
NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM
13 original colonies.
13 signers of the Declaration of Independence.
13 stripes on our flag.
13 steps on the dollar's Pyramid, and 13 letters in the Latin above; also on the dollar, 13 letters in "E PLURIBUS UNUM," 13 stars above the Eagle, 13 plumes of feathers on each span of the Eagle's wing, 13 bars on that shield, 13 leaves on the olive branch, 13 fruits, and 13 gripped arrows (signifying our readiness for war).
The strange history of two 13th Amendments to the Constitution -- one ending slavery, and the other with its chilling application today.
Who said it's an unlucky number?
There's no more poetry, the rainbow is hyperextended, a hard curve of striated, pulled muscle, there's a ripping at the cells at the seams, the kind of sound that helps you feel fear, it's gone made everything quiet, under ground quiet, under Earth, where airless there isn't a letter left for poetry or a final scream.
When was the last time you caught stardust in a sparrow's song sneaking a peek 'round the front of the backyard fence, over past that lush green vale trapped by whitewashed picked-at teeth, where upon it sits a dotted red bird with nothing to say except that stardust is falling your way?
Coffin Talk: Sunshine states it has a way to change hate to gold, imagine, oh imagine how rich we'd all be.