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.