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.