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.