Thoughtless

Thoughtless

Mark Coleman

All the stupid fucking people, and all the stupid fucking things that they say and do is all that is left. They drag you into their worthless commercial-quoting world. Their profundities are read off the back of their slutty little pieces’ heads. They expect nothing more than for their shallowness to be reflected back to them by those they meet. Coddled and cockheld by all as valueless as they are. Self-fellating the scum residue that grows in their eyes, spreads back of throat, and barrels into the gut to come up over and over again. Throwing their backs and breaking their necks to lick their own assholes. Then dutifully reporting it to all passersby.

Wanting to stab myself in the neck, listening to their odious television parroted maxims. Walking tall and arrogant through a world of self-created desolation and waste. They pick and they pick. Half the time they don’t know if what they’re picking is a scab or a fight. But they continually pick, regardless. Even when they should be putting guns in their mouths, they blah blah blah.

Never grasping what is so pitiful and disgraceful in their every utterance and muscle twitch. They pride themselves on their pride, and gamecock it to the front of the golden shower queue, day in and day out. Then sit around and gab their shock at being pissed on. Pissed off that they could have allowed themselves to be taken in and raped in their short skirts. Misled to slaughterhouse destinies where the bolt gun does the henpecking.

Bits of brain and skull fragments stopping up the drain. The blood baked into the frocks. The helmets dented with spewed skeletal shrapnel. The cleavers howling downward in mincemeat greed. Neurotic butcher blocks in dervish fall. Down and out. In and out on the street corner with their cocks drip-dripping fluorescent green into overeager whore mouths. Bloated with St. Vitus’s Dance upon their disease ridden lips. Eyes dreidel spinning behind lids half closed by a pain so ecstatic that it can only be described as the greatest of pleasures.

Whipping it out at the first sign of a glory hole, and praying that an untrimmed mustache will tickle the base. The walls stutter-spattering semen with every exhalation. The force of a million stolen orgasms tearing the toilets from their bearings. Emptying their contents on the extreme day-trippers who compete to see who can catch the most sewage, and shove it into their freshly torn open cavities.

Where it will convulsionary fester and incubate while still being incipiently practiced. Tumoring and blowing out like ruptured ulcers through makeshift squawk boxes. Jaundicing exposure creating rotted persona non grata bookies and stabby rock peddlers. All paying lip service to a god who should have gone the Titanic route, long ago. I rip off the nearest bitch’s crucifix, shove it under her nose, and repeatedly scream in her face, “CAN YOU SMELL THAT? CAN YOU SMELL THAT?” Her nostrils rodent quiver, but nothing registers. Left to watch the shit tube pupils contract in astonishment until my eyes bleed, and my kiss parched lips seal over any thought left in my head.

Ignorance

Ignorance

Mark Coleman

He keeps folding the bill until it’s virtually non-existent. Stares hard at the bit that should carry some meaning. It’s simply not there. It’s gone into hiding. Flips the light switch a few times. Nothing happens that hasn’t happened a million times before. Puts the pan on the stove. Drizzles in a bit of grease. Knowing that it’ll stick, either way. Washes it out, and resumes the search for a bottle that’s not there.

Looking in places that a bottle would never be. Overturns the flowerpot, and nervously sifts the dirt with a malformed toe. (Rocking back and forth with his head in his trembling hands. Inwardly sobbing with unbearable desperation and dejection.) Drinks every open bottle and forgotten glass, in the hopes that something is secreted away in them. Takes apart the computer on the off chance that a shooter is wrapped up in one of its many wires.

The shakes take over his body again, and he doubles over. On the point of weeping, he wraps himself in a blanket. Trying to concentrate on the carpet he’s standing on, he bites his lip so hard that he draws blood. Shoves his hands into his pockets, and tries to force her image from his mind. It remains there, unclear but definite like everything he’s ever dreamt.

Wisps of her and the things she said adding gravity to the sweat running into his eyes. (The taste of her lips. How it felt to be inside of her. The flaxen hair brushing him into the awareness that everything was, and would remain, alright and harmonious.)

Repeatedly blinking. Head spinning. Vomit starts to fill his mouth. He doesn’t throw up in any kind of conventional sense. He just opens up over the sink, and a block of undigested food falls into the drain. His DT terrified mind causes it to sprout legs, and lunge at him. His legs buckle.

On the floor, unable to keep the refrigerator in focus, he hyperventilates. Every inch of his skin carries its own particular spasm and itch. He turns from side to side, wishing for nothing more than to remain undetected in his convex foxhole. Every strand of his hair seems to carry its own individual electrical current. Supercharged carving knives trying to negotiate the retreating tiles. It occurs to him that the only thing that is certain is that this will never end. (Stolen kisses that gave him life. The bounce it all brought to his step. The change in his demeanor. The lines erased. The pain negated. The pride of every moment spent in her embrace flowing into every other aspect of his life.)

His spine is being broken segment by segment by unseen forces. The very cones and rods of his eyes are exploding. The dust motes are begging recognition through impossibly high screams. His body no longer belongs to him. It belongs to a starving contortionist on the riverfront, who wants nothing more than to work up the courage to drown himself.

He has to find alternates to drinking bleach. If he attempts that, his misery will only be accelerated. The last thing he needs is a psychosomatic seizure. The triggers of the guns require too much extension. His fingers are neither long nor elastic enough to carry out that sort of wish fulfillment. (Holding her hand in his. Overflowing with feeling beyond the bounds of any knowable analysis. Her eyes and the quiet answers preciously encapsulated therein. Pregnant with understanding. Swollen with simpatico and something that love doesn’t even come close to describing.)

The thought of a bullet powder kegs him into visions of universal exit wounds. A hunk of bleeding Swiss cheese standing in for the thrifty, little, blue globe that stands on his desk. Even though he can’t see it, he knows that the inkwell is beginning to pustulate. He tries to slide over to it.

The fact that something of such importance is happening just beyond him momentarily makes him ignorant of the fact that the television is growing claws, that the toaster is ejaculating millions of sexed up serpents, that the radio is going to suck the marrow out of his bones. It won’t be long before he understands that he has lost. Checkmated by one and all.

Into the Night

Into the Night

Mark Coleman

Some people are spright in their rising. I slither and ooze out of bed. Sleepless. Postponing shooting myself another day. Staring at the blind filtered light with pure, unadulterated hatred. A stare cocked and aimed. Ready to become more than mere metaphor. End up in my mouth. Sit there on the dry roof beneath a screaming skull.

A mind diluted and half snuffed by the very act of trying to rise to meet a day that, I know, will be like all the rest. If anything, it’ll be a little worse. It snowballs. Sometimes it breaks apart, and drifts across the rest of your life. The fist wrapped around your heart is always there. Gradually tightening. Shards of ventricle glittering the ribs.

Broken bottles paving the road that leads forward and backward. But somehow, regardless, always dead-ends. Same thing happens to everything that you try to write. The keys staring up at you like faultless children. The bottom lip trembling as the hand comes down again and again. Not leaving any marks, but a page as blank as a junkie’s gaze. The pain that stinks.

Standing under the shower. But it’s deep, underneath the skin. In the veins. Taking over the body like a cancer in its terminal stages. Sitting on the toilet, trying to shit it out. But all that ends up in the bowl are cigarette filters, and half burnt, half torn pieces of paper. Tape unrolling from the register with unseen amounts totaled from years of credit line bull. Backtracking until existence ceases to exist, and a slightly pulsating darkness is all that remains. A pit that threateningly vibrates malice.

Trying to smooth out the creases in the blood money laundered with your pants. Fingers numb and clumsy. Shaking and gathering beads that slowly trickle and puddle on the counter. Wet shadows in the wet house. Everywhere the crusts of waterfalls that carry the stench of every sewer in the world. Cascades that claw your eyes and bite the small of your back.

Grinning in their flow as they edge you towards the balcony railing or garret window. The abattoir below takes you in, and begins to scintillate. Burgundy solar flares rotting a fuck-all-dime-store-nimbus. About to boil over. The Forever denying that anything will stick, but, aching, it unpeels itself and, screeching, slinkys down the wall.

Noodling in jellyfish infested waters. Coming up with stings the length of Colfax. Scabies that speed up the flesh. Evanescent. Heat wave specters. The telephone poles craning their stiff necks then snapping back into place with the buoyancy of a cock repeatedly going hard. Everything elastic, pulling apart the legs of the world. Thrusting in blind fuck rage. Raped by the jazzed up phantoms.

Palm fronds gnashing nipples and spitting on areola. Needles trailing blood and semen across sped up custodial records. The petticoats that dance and blockade. Hot, pink female ejaculate flung from mop buckets across rusted, ill-tempered chassis. Melting underdogs seersucker glued to roulette table felt. Bent and throbbing. Red. Black. Red. Red. No go. No color hit. No number hit.

Howling, nameless crapshooter faces, beating odds, forcing them up and out. Into the night. A night quilted with bargain bin shopper probability. Carts shoved over, and knives pulled. Lips pulled back from yellow canines. Rolling in the shit and garbage. Beneath a giant’s stiletto heels that decide to gore each. Pirouetting and rocketing star ward in a pair of precociously out-spangled ballet shoes. Stage one. Candy. Grinding. Gyrating. Nipples popped, plucked, tweeked, tweezed. Over sexualized dressing room banter. Masks pulled. Sucking greedily at the air beyond the rubber. That stale, smoke choked dross. And then the cat-of-nine welting, coddling. Safe words will not be used tonight. We have a birthday.

Rafter self-hanging. Squirting, bucking death throes. Ragamuffin dances in the blanched rain. Ash zebraed. Eyes crossed out by working man intersections and out-of-order stoplights. Corpulent beggar-less flashes. To the gills with formaldehyde and methadone. To the gills, and pulsing their mad life-death. Cunts stuffed with strobing vibrators. Pudenda rings inset with precious stones at the clit. Rosary beads and silver spoons. Porcelain dolls preposterous but malevolent, perched in antique windows. Watching the passer-bys with cerulean, pupil popping eyes. Their dark veins mapping out a river system for pervert seed.

The darlings presented with soiled gifts by their traveled cock-sucking fathers. Wrapped in butcher paper, and carefully tied into special, surprise screaming bows. Loved and held to chest, where they can better mainline their nightmare. The future already turning rancid without realization.

The Insatiables

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Vulture Children

Vulture Children

Mark Coleman

His voice is so gravelly. You’d think that he ate handfuls of sand. It developed early, when he was ruthlessly beaten by his father. Standing there, shaking on a paint can in the garage, as his father rummaged around for something to change it up. Ten years of heavy drinking, and dreams of going out to sea. Trade winds that carry the past far away.

She slept on a bus bench. Cried herself right to sleep. The john she was with last night had so brutally raped her that she can’t breath. She imagines that the blood that had stained the sheets must still be flooding her mouth. She used to pour over the illustrations in the children’s books and dream of being a princess. Now, she bites the door handle while cops do the thing that they do before they let her go.

Always stifling cries. Occasionally smashing everything in a motel room, and going off in cuffs. If only they didn’t take his belt away in county. Robbery went south, and the gun just seemed to go off by itself. He hadn’t meant for it to happen, but the judge knew him. He remembers playing soldiers. The barely perceptible little smile turns to laughter.

She’s gone when he gets back. He tries to wake her up, but can’t. God knows that he’s seen his share of dead bodies, but it never gets easier. Each one carries its own peculiar knife twist. He was going out to score. She was so junk sick, when he had left. The smell of sex dispels any uncertainty. He gently closes the door, and walks until his feet won’t carry him anymore. Stares up at the sky, wishing that he were there.

He always thought that widow’s peaks were ridiculous. But he couldn’t keep his hair from receding. His wife’s eyes shine with a different emotion than they used to. He’s noticed the glances at the barbeque that fuck and hold hands afterwards. He doesn’t let on. He just drafts his will, and paces with old public access romances playing beneath the handyman front.

Courage fails him. He keeps trying to jump. With how cold the water is, he’s surprised that his toe keeps breaking through the ice. Someone shoves him. The lifeguards are chatting among themselves, and he nearly drowns. When you’re that young, it’s easy to forget to make peace. Someone finally pulls him out, and he’s reborn at six.

He rereads what he wrote over his twelfth cigarette of the day. The bargain bin wine is too sweet, but it does the trick. The crickets didn’t retreat with the night. They’re still at it. There’s always white noise, after all. Even if everything else about the air is dead.

Way Back

Way Back

Mark Coleman

Addictions that aren’t so much detriments as they are minor character flaws. More a bit of friendly fire than a shot aimed at Sumter. Some will paint you pictures of Irish coffee enemas, and harpoons that will launch out of the ocean when the tongue tickles the clitoris.

But they’re just so many poor man’s Bosch’s left to pick up the fragments of someone else’s stream of consciousness. Streams that flow into the Sappho urinal, or trickle down the back of a dumpster fetus. Aborted with the utmost sincerity in wadded tissue balls by the cockroach-ridden hampers.

Kitchen floors that look like D-Day due to how many virgins have been broken in on the counter. With their screams which have yet to be formed into demands. The tongues just beginning to learn the true value of a flicker. Dirty negligees, pink slips, and rejection letters. Panty raids at the pre-school. Tetherballs to the face, sending them howling to the nurse’s office with crooked noses and fattened lips. Oh, so and so and so. Wah, fucking, wah.

Make the school grounds look like the palatial stomping grounds of Vlad the Impaler. Cops aren’t around. Gun it. I want to hit this speed bump doing ninety. Hell to the shock. It’s about the euphoria. Everything in the cabin airborne. For a rushed eternity, it’s zero g.

Reach in and grab a Pocket Shot. Christ in High Heaven, that’s some low rent vodka. Crushing menthols in a coffee cup. The designated ashtray. Lean back and close the eyes against a Quaalude and another day at The Nightmare Grindstone. Change the line of work, and dampen the mattress with the help of some whore that will do anything.

Fire and brim. Preachers and poachers. Cauldrons and warts. Heartache and heart attack. It’s all the same, really. Trap addled souls and keep them like Chinese cricket. Lady Luck the coffer. Sell to the highest bidder or cash in at the ticket desk?

Yeah, let’s go with the Power Play. And the winning numbers are…. not yours. They’re making fun of you. Right to your face. It really gets your goat. So out the door, and through the lobby rippling as decadently as a rank Turkish bath. Sanitized smells. Ugly faces. Crippled and corpulent bodies. Overwhelming and nauseating. Stale as Grindhouse popcorn.

Hot dogs turning round and round. Some foreigner screaming at you because you ripped off the sign that read, “PAYING CUSTOMERS ONLY!” and went right on in. Throw the crumpled piece of paper in his face, and tell him to shove it up his nigger ass. He reaches under the counter, and you bolt. Just on the off chance.

One of those working class joints that’s been open since five or six in the morning. Pull out a pack of Tarot and read them leisurely at the bar.

“It’s right here in the cards that you owe me a drink. “

“Like Hell, I do.” Stern, severe, bloodshot eyes.

“Alright.” Pull a fistful of ones out of your pocket, and dump them on the bar. Start smoothing them out.

“A shot of well tequila and a Bitburger Drive, please.” Then explain how you’re trying to cut back. After about twenty rounds (more than half of which are charged to a nicked card), you stumble out. Spend ages swerving in and out of traffic, taking detours down alleys forgotten by all but society’s dregs. The crackhead vets wheeling impatiently up and down waiting to connect, alternately gnawing on their lips and cursing God down off His throne, the spade city kids packing their older brothers’ gats with half a register roll’s worth of history, dreaming of the day that they’ll finally be beat in, the drag queens with come and blood matted in their bobbed wigs, pulling on their skirts and reaching up under to yank at the panties that are strangling their cocks. And you? You’re just trying to find your way back.

2012 Days

2012 Days

Mark Coleman

Lloyd Price is informing me that he’s standing on the corner a la beat juke. I’m giving the bar a workout with all the shot glasses that I keep slamming down. The walls are yellow from when Mama let you smoke at your leisure. I’d bang that tattoo artist if she wasn’t with her boyfriend. Such a nice, tight ass. I’ll just end up sleeping in a ditch, and pissing on a church’s doormat. Sorry Jesus, but they shouldn’t have crucified you on a big “t.” To a sex addict, it’s only a few letters away from “twat.”

Happy Easter though, man. Burned through too much green. Can you pull your old water to wine trick? Let you have a glass or two. See what you really think about all these fucking Christians. I appreciate what you did down here. But if you send me to Hell, I might change my mind. Your pops knows what a son of a bitch, I can be.

Asking if I want a tattoo. Shit. Who wants a permanent reminder of your hack art? Stabbing at over conceptualized pop, and quickly scrolling Chinese characters. If you come at me with a needle, it better have more than a drop of ink in it.

Friends dropping off the planet. So many heartbroken Lenny Bruce’s. Self medicating till all that’s left is the whites of their eyes. So much puke on the bathroom walls that you’d have to go at it with a buzz saw. Can I get you a drink? Occupado. They’re unclogging needles in there.

Coke binges at the end of the world. Opium and meteors. Hashish and people screaming with hatchets in their heads. Laughing at junkies that I’d give my left arm to remain friends with. But what else would you expect of a Teabagger who can’t spell his own name, and constantly confuses his own Carver suffering with Big-Money-Corporate-Rand-Boners. Trump erection haloes that will talk your hair off.

Wakes and bakes a 4/20 one. Passes out with one of Abbie’s Steals as a nightmare block. Piss tests and books. Former screaming “out-dated.” Latter just screaming for recognition. Libraries built out of bones that are losing their marrow.

They’re eating their own dogs somewhere. Leeches on the eyelids beat what drops by, when they droop. Dancing with a hippy chick with such prominent labia that I come without thrusting. Out in the street with stained jeans. Deciding that this is where I want to lie down. So many wheels speeding towards my head. Friend breaking my date with destiny.

A fridge full of half drank beers, and a rotting apple pipe jammed with burnt, mildewing skunk. Trying to find my way back to a smile. But her lips only pucker or frown at the sight of me, anymore. Hearts that are china cabinets breaking way too often. Rain and beds that bust the teeth in your head. Cement, enamel, and a ruined apology. Thunder halving. Wondering if the world would be a different place if I started bee lining. But the stumble is so godly.

Impotency

Impotency

Mark Coleman

He was an old timer. Sold everything but his belt. Which, when he wasn’t tied off, served as a sort of bandolier for syringes from the needle program. Constantly making off with unattended patio spoons. Which he’d reuse at the soup kitchen.

Hocking silver every which way. To be melted into The Man’s chalice or the beggars’ teeth. Every time that he tried for the wagon; it was at capacity. So he’d just slink down in its shadow, and have himself a nod.

Cold turkey means cold sweats. Counting sheep with fangs. Sawing logs full of splinters. They hadn’t bothered to save him a dream of the kind that the women love to steal. Not even a red light coupon remained.

Curled down beneath a dumpster quilt. Imagining that it was something more human. The bugs running over him, thinking that it was a race. Sad truth is, even with insecticide, you can’t kill what’s not there. Until the methadone clinic opened, he’d have to do without so much as a cigarette butt in a cup of coffee.

Drinking

Mark Coleman

Working my way past the funeral. Drunk in the local coffee house, building castles out of creamers that could never be. Smoking joints in the parking lot, bitching about women who sighed before giving us the time of day. Rolled their eyes at a suicide that was yet to be actuated. Didn’t know that he was Jewish, till they all gathered, and threw their clods.

A closed door junk addiction. Sealed the deal in locked bathrooms with blacks. Tarred up veins, and scheming eyes in Hal revulsion. Mailbox baseball fatalities, and porn collages forced into towel racks. Rotten smiles. Crack yellow, and scentless. Sneaking into the graveyard with tears in our eyes, and spades in our hearts. Trying to shower in the fucking sprinklers. Desperate, hot whiskey breath. Bed-less woman on my arm, and a crook in my back.

Broken hearted, but not quite broke. Know of a bar where the keeps listen to all your hard luck stories. And man, their ears are big. Slouched and half-gone, with nothing in my pocket, but a moral compass, matches, and a pack of chewed-up dime store cigs.

Something, trying real hard to pass as human, approaches. And you feel bad, so the drink is on you. The kick quota for the dog hasn’t been met. But Hell, you went out to forget about those things. And the Statue of Liberty ain’t but an absinthe jump away from a Paris café. Where they don’t care who or what you’re drinking to.

Art

Art

Mark Coleman

She gives me the slummer look, which is the average person’s yearly donation to charity. I don’t need your sympathy. I need the support of the bar that you’re supposedly tending. When you’re not fetching me a drink, I have about as much use for you as a bed sore. Zip the lip, and pour me your approximate misogynist breeding remedy. If that’s your idea of a drink, you’re making too much fucking money.

Shrugging you all off, when I fall down before the halfway point to the door. If I end up in the tank, at least, the pleasure was mine. Even if I funneled all my money down my gullet. It’s lonely, but I didn’t budget for a whore. HBO and XXX channels in a hotel room that’s bordered on every side by police tape. Staying awake as long as I can with a roll of toilet paper for insecticide. Surely, some sort of idiot savant exterminator extraordinaire?

I tried to show you a cig trick, but ended up breaking my smoke. Plantation shrapnel, and an inexcusable, unusable flaccidity. The rolling job of a talentless sideshow freak. Watching a Real Sex with an episode number equal to the number of dead who have come to visit me. Your soul is a suitcase full of trigger objects. And if you think that you can check in without a bag than you’re a goddamn fool. Repression is just a fancy word for denial. And denial is just a pseudonym for death.

The difference between you and me is that you drink because your past killed you, and I drink because I haven’t killed my past, yet. That’s not just me turning a phrase. Having heart-to-hearts is hard if your tongue’s all tied up by civility and ceremony. This is just backward rote. Learning to untie before tying.

Found floss beneath the bed. Probably wasn’t put to hygienic use. Despite its questionable history, I start making nooses for the mattress squatters. Going offense with catapults rigged with thimbles, toothpicks, coat seams, and flaming balls of cotton. Bloodsucking Lilliputians are gonna reap.

Run out an hour later, and extinguish my hair in the snow. Ditch out. Nowhere to go to. Feeling down, so drunkenly up the water tower. Measuring my destination star-ward from a glimmery porcelain-esque crow’s nest. Cursing under my breath, while shivering my timbers. I don’t think this was what Heinlein envisioned, when he wrote about The Bug War. Sitting next to water that’s rendered moot, not merely by its relative inacessability, but also by the lack of sugar, yeast, and fermentation.

Really wishing I had something to throw. Not in any endangering sense. Just something to make a palpable mess with that someone will have to mind if they don’t want to step in it. Then, I’d know that I’d finally made it, and could lie down and have a good night’s rest.