Crisis of Faith

Crisis of Faith

Mark Coleman

  The moon fell out of the sky, so I broke it up, and divided it amongst my friends. Each of whom looked bitterly upon his childhood. Hiding in closets and staring at walls. Every imperfection realized early on. Claustrophobia before puberty and love. Struggling against undertows and red flags. Stooped by unwanted years and suicidal thoughts. Spending half of our lives in the ICU. The other half in the drunk tank. Alone behind bars with your phone calls going to voicemail. Panic attacks shoving you to the concrete floor. Sweaty fingerprints filed away.
  Too drunk to draw the blinds. Coming down off of coke and acid with work in a few hours. Playing with the idea of shooting something up for my nerves. Body, a deranged pharmacy. Eyes unable to focus. Hands unable to hold. Huffing and hyperventilating. Wishing that I had some white crosses. Afraid of what the day might bring.
  Trying to find normalcy in the apothecary. Eyes squinty and bloodshot. Starved from days of detox. Unable to keep down even water. In bed, with the hallucinations coming on. Sleeping thirty six hours in the hospital after a three month long meth binge. Passing the crack pipe with a thirteen year old whore, and the emaciated Vietnam vet who acts as her manager. Red beer in the strip club. A make-out session with an ex-girlfriend’s daughter in the champagne room.
  Cold water extraction. Gulping galloons of hydrocodone. In the McDonalds’ bathroom, tying off. Belt between the teeth. Tapping the vein. Needle in. Thoughts out. Popping Ritalin and grinning behind the steering wheel. Buying bath salts with exotic names from the head shop. Stealing hand sanitizer for a quick pick-me-up. Fucking tongue-pierced ravers on X. Trying to crawl out of K holes. Catatonic on bathroom floors. Porn store poppers done insolently in the parking lot. Psychotic nights of Nyquil and Triple C overindulgence.
  Asking the bartender out, over and over again, until she buckles. Blotto without a rain check in county. Pepper balled and fettered. Choking on a gag. Assholes parading out their GED aspirations. Pouring over Bible verses, and simple math equations. Coming out of a coma with a few visitors with tears in their eyes. Coffee table gash in my forehead and the beginning of a nic-fit. Flu symptoms in the absence of a virus. Alternating between The Big Book and The Bartender’s Guide.
  Taking a handful of shots and smoking a joint, so I can stay intent and alert during the A.A. and N.A. meetings. Leaving out-patient and heading to the bar. Sneaking vodka and Mad Dog in the sober house. Experiencing a crisis of faith that doesn’t end. Sitting in pews equating my own suffering to that of Jesus on the cross. St. Francis when the animals refused to talk to him because Kenneth Grahame’s son stepped out in front of a train.

Mortality

Mortality

Mark Coleman

   You can’t escape your own corpse. It will pursue you to the end. Begging alms and love with eyes running over with self-pitying tears. Opened up with every vital down the drain. Skinless but taut. Bones hollow but infused with spirit and want. The world beyond the two of you might as well not exist. Like lying down with a woman whose eyes act as mirrors. A moment that gives you back to yourself. No matter how much you might not want to spend time with that particular person. Stroking your cheek, and beseeching you not to leave too soon. Offering herself up as a security against your mortality. Hand on her breast. Eyes on her lips.
   The heartbeat that might as well be your own. The taste that is so distinctly of another. The days and nights wiled insatiate between the sheets. A busload of kids with cheeks hollowed by inexperienced kisses. Sack lunches full of bland sustenance. Field trips to hotels. Hours stolen away from chaperone eyes. Wounded by the remembrance of the days before her. Standing in the lobby, looking out across the street at a second run theater’s marquee. Its façade seems the most tender in the world.
   The promenades up and over the shopping districts. Filled with intricacy and meaning. The half full glasses in every pub and pig ‘n’ whistle. Sweating over the drinkers’ palms. The grave salutations to Venus. The slow dance of Salome. Out on the floor with a near death experience grinning from the bar. Coke through a straw cut with an old man’s pair of scissors. Mindless chatter with strangers with dime bags sewn into their suits.
   A revolving door cross at over-traffic reluctantly admitting a few more. Graceful as a cockroach in a broken elevator. Waterheaded with moist thoughts. Carnivals every which way you turn. Freak shows with people performing as well as in attendance. The big top and the topcoat striking up a friendship. Out of quarters, standing in front of a jukebox out of songs. Cigarettes furiously stubbed out. The butts frowned over and forgotten.
   The greatest man who ever lived waiting for someone to drop a dime in his Styrofoam cup. Fingers frozen stiff. Beard mottled with frost and age. A film over his eyes, and a dead tooth in his head. Bacon and eggs hastily eaten in a diner before an A.M. tryst with a sex kitten short on furs. Out with the drunks who navigate with all the ease of stilt walkers. Making their way in and out of city-buried bordellos. Cold and sick in bed with DT night terrors for nurses, and their bloat for sanctuary. Full of holes parked in gutters with one in ten tumors, and families that hate them.
   Her thighs sliding up your flanks. Her smile tearing you to pieces. Riding out of the casino with chips galore and escorts incognito. Winning Keno tickets stuffed into called corner pockets. Fangs in every mouth. Puncture marks on every neck. A slot handle fucked until the machine can’t come anymore. The seizure conquers. The dark overtakes. The plug is pulled.
   The croupier, with an apologetic smile, draws back the winnings. She closes her thighs, and hands you back your bottle which you proceed to empty. Falling on your face, breaking your nose and bleeding over a fresh pressed white shirt, you stumble back to old habits. Barfly with society’s unwanted. Your true and only friends.
   Mock-ups of human beings making cardboard signs outside of closed abortion clinics. Pinball logic beneath ash smeared foreheads. Sandwiches eaten in solitude on park benches that are barely within the park’s boundaries. Offices within offices within alcohol soaked back alleys. Pigeons pecking at bread crumbs that were tossed as an invitation to friendship by a fat lady with a shopping cart and a brimless hat. Newspaper cover bedding, and dumpster-diving. No matter how far down you go, it all seems to be garbage. A few chicken bones and a rubber bat from Halloween. Drunk and incoherent. Trying to explain what empathy is to a stoned fascist.

Cracking Up

Cracking Up

Mark Coleman

   I wake up, and see that my fingernails drew blood from having clenched my fists so tight in my sleep. I was swinging on phantoms again. Those who left me to lay here with no one to embrace. I get up and shake my way to the bottle. Take a few swigs, then go down to put on a pot of coffee. Go out back and smoke a few cigarettes. Sit there, in a chaise, staring at my bruised palms. Think of the bars out there. Bite the filter out of my third smoke. Toss it in a mug with a smattering of coffee. Then it’s back upstairs, and whiskey to top it all off. Wipe the sweat out of my eyes, and turn on the TV. Rapidly flip through the channels, some of which are still barking infomercial nonsense. Anticipating the twisting shiver that runs down my neck and back.   

  Equipped with booze and loneliness, I dash the remote against the wall, and bury my head in my hands. Try to stand and fall back in bed. Last night, smashing things and screaming. Broken glass covers the floor, making it hard to crawl. Letters from a friend in State wadded and bunched in a corner, sticky with spilt drink. Yarns of yard shankings. Barely a kid, half his face gone beneath the blade. A stoolie in an unmarked grave somewhere nearby with a family rotting halfway across town. The uneducated handwriting childish and simple. Peppered with words that take quite an effort to spell wrong.

  Word of an ex on the grape. Gone touring the south with a broke fence that chews toothpicks and carries a comb in his back pocket. Hear that she never looked so good in white. Way the books are running may end up wearing black, and chasing bulls instead of horses. Settle back with her family and watch a picador brother from the stands. With child. Still wearing too much mascara. Still likes her nails red, and her men green and growing. Lipstick in the cabinet by a lifeless cundrum. Her kiss behind my ear where she left it. Posing in a gown with the dust gathering.

  Penknife sitting open on the hotel dresser. A deck of marked cards in my pocket. A few bills in my wallet.  A beat-up old fedora and a flowered pillbox on the bedpost. Old lushes sharking the pool tables in a hall full of rich punks. Downtown alleys overflowing with teen tarts on the make. Left their youth with their ID’s in a nigger pimp’s hand. Felt the city in their veins, and surrendered their loins. Past the laundry fronts and church stoops spread-eagled with fuck on one pair of lips, the other pair drier than sandpaper. A father meeting his daughter and dropping a deuce for a night of curtained courtship.   

  Haggling over a cunt hair and a wrinkle. Breath hot. Words spit and slurred. Blood shot eyes. Yellow skin. A quiniela box and a racing forum. All laid in front of an HD at the bar. Smartly dressed with heart attack on the face. Gin and tonics slurped through bent swizzles. Big band on the juke. Ten galloon at a booth staring down a belle piece with atomized pussy. Batting her eyelashes and smiling with just the corners of her mouth. Already window shopping with her night’s winnings. One of the newer ones to the beat who hasn’t encountered a sadist’s punch or a ten man tag team.

  Lashed to unconsciousness and decapitated. Head gaping in shock from the dumpster out back. Teeth pulled and frozen in an industrial. Blowjobs from blitzed two-timers with shiny wedding rings. Husbands ducking in trenches surrounded by limbs and bloody mud. Forgetting their country when an arm lands in their lap. The stench of the vomit rising in the back of their throats making them choke on their own tongues. Handies doled out like losing lotto tickets in the bathroom. Soap for lubricant in the jerking fists. A senator reaming a five year old boy in one of the stalls. Can he count on your vote?

  The message puked out of the machine as you try to calm your unruly children. Pulling each other’s hair, and tattling on one another.  Bus leaves in fifteen minutes, and you’ve got a wine jug migraine. All you can do is shout, “Stop! Stop! Stop!” You can feel the hangover tingling in your toes and rattling your teeth. Father off banging his secretary in an office catty corner to the local bar where the winos seep into the cracked walls and disappear.