Literary Whore

Literary Whore

Mark Coleman

  There’s nothing but full stops in the book you’re reading. Blackout, coke-fueled stop, stop, stops. Alcoholic MVP brain dead from lack of intellectual stimulation. You’re having some sort of panic attack. Spasms wrack your body. Can’t open the bathroom door. Can’t get off your boots. You know you need to relax. Sitting there flinching. Disappointment and tortured thinking. Overly masochistic self-depreciation.

   You need a drink, and some form of companionship. Wishing that you had gone to school for journalism. Sickened by your observational death. A girl in the lobby cowered by a suitcase. Ask if she needs help then immediately regret it. There is a great sadness in her eyes. A sadness that seems tired of itself.

  Meet a few stragglers from a wedding after party. A couple pour out a little less than half a can of beer from their two combined tipples for you. Smoke six cigarettes and some of their pot. They take a picture with you. A shit bored disposable camera. Meet the girls. The wedding crasher is sleeping in their bed. Straight from prison.

  Picking up road kill missed by a chain gang. The wind kicks up, and the lighter refuses its light. If it was a Pez dispenser, how much easier it would be to get what you need. Rub blow residue from a pocket mirror on your gums.

   The back of it shuns its Chinese character. The original owner was a sweetheart. You were on the verge of proposal when the romantic fissure took place. She’s gone now, and it’s all she left. Excepting a hole in your chest, and the tingle of a year and a half long embrace. The ghost of her body’s warmth haunts you.

  Madras eyes underlined by the violet half moons of sleeplessness. The full moon in the sky has its own hand in their creation. The week is dissolving in the rhinestone of remembrance. The ice keeps melting, and so you keep beast of burdening it to the ice machine down the hall. The room’s nice but no one visits you. Strangers treat you both as an old friend and a pariah.

  You lust after girls a decade younger than you. You continually sleep alone. If only a Salinger elevator operator would lend his hand. A steady intake of booze to keep the fire inside of you. Your fate is chilled. Depression eats away the segments of your spine. Loneliness refuses to be ignored. It wants your life. You contemplate handing it over.

  It’s always been rough going. You’ve been holed up in your room. A one nightstand might keep your heart from falling apart. You desire something less alienating but this absence of any form of tenderness is going to land you in the madhouse.

  Your entire shocked being needs a boost. The bump rushes up the quarter of straw. It helps. You take out your soul and look at it. It’s been making love to your misery. They make a cute couple but you wish they’d break up.

  The whore with the missing sock who will blow you but not kiss you. Saying that you don’t know where her mouth has been. Your longing doesn’t care but she turns her head away. Fell for you, and looked for you in the bars. The bartenders would inform you of her constant presence. Just narrowly missed her again.
  Maybe she just wanted to keep the promise of a birthday present in line with her trade. There doesn’t seem to be much help for people like you and her. Even in one another’s arms there would still be that unrelenting gulf. All the lights in the picture house have gone out. You didn’t like what they were showing anyway.

Melancholic Motel

Melancholic Motel

Mark Coleman

 Some mornings you wake up and your heart’s broken. Some mornings it’s not even there. There’s just a dull ache where a beat should be. Other days the sun discovers it on the nightstand where you left it beside a pack of smokes. A few crumpled dollars. A couple of quarters and nickels. Not many pennies.

  You can feel the previous night in your head. Rust fills your mouth and coats your tongue. Your saliva’s brine and motor oil. The spark plug is missing. You probably lost it in a pint glass. Your forehead’s stippled. You think of Bukowski, and remember reciting one of his poems in speech class.

  You wrote a song about her but never sang it. She never heard or even saw it.  The lyrics fell apart. Dissolved in sulfuric forgetfulness where most your valuables go. You might still love her but it’s hard to say if it’s not just mime histrionics. There’s an inscription in every book on the shelf that you wrote yourself.

  Your lusterless eyes just take in the pattern of the motel room carpet most of the time. Little mice squares litter. The yellow that the green pushes up. The lamp on the desk is curious about something. What that might be is anyone’s guess. The desk’s legs taper. Daggering into the floor.

  Your suitcase has exploded. There’s dirty laundry everywhere. The laundry machines hunger for your change. Just as the television hungers for your finger to touch the remote’s clitoral power button. The volume buttons care nothing about their state of disrepair. You hear the other sets and sex in the adjacent rooms. A crying baby somewhere.

  You’re sure there are tears but you can’t feel them. In the matchbox there remains a solitary fire-tipped splinter of wood. You drink the rest of a bottle of beer with a cigarette butt in it. You sigh and go to the bathroom. Sitting there with your head in your hands.

  There seems to be a little death everywhere in the room. It’s not the little death of a pair of lovers. Something seems to be taken away from you with every passing second. You wonder how much the prostitutes go for around here. You wouldn’t even mind if she were venereal. You just want to get away from yourself for a while.

  Time refuses to pass. The hands on the clock always seem to be in the same position. It’s as though their existence is solely for amusement. The pen is out of ink. The perforations on the notepad are dazed. It’s hard to say what’s written on the ones in the wastebasket. It wasn’t inspiration. Whatever it was the termite weeks have eaten it away.

  Your soul is desiccated. You don’t miss the moisture. Sometimes, there’s a drizzle outside. The rain mists. It gently dots the shingles. The flotillas of cloud on some exploratory excursion. The gold against their prows. The cottony mastheads against the tender blue. The gossamer thin hulls. There’s no saying how long their maiden voyage will last.

  There’s rot in your bones. Your tibia’s holding on by a thread. Your teeth have gone un-drilled for too long. There’s a Russian doll echo inside of you. The round burns too slow. Everything lengthens. Then recedes for a bit into the exhausted grey background.
  There is no expectation. This is all there is. A bed you don’t sleep in but just sit on the edge of. There are too many pillows. Not enough sheets. The air conditioner is broken. There’s a torrential sweat on your face. Maybe all those beads are really the tears you can’t feel. You’re still pretty sure that sometimes you cry.

Love Clots

Love Clots

Mark Coleman

  The metaphysical terror that comes with falling in love. Waking up with hunger pangs. A parch for her very being. The horrors come with their cold sweats and tremors. Your mind goes berserk with adversaries. There’s a conspiracy against your bliss and blithe. You see it in every eye that caresses her.

  The co-worker that has the audacity to share a joke that you’re not in on with her. Her pearly whites and his porcelain caps forming a forbidden union. The shop clerk who takes a little too long over her. Helping her select the perfect dress. (Never mind, he’s probably a fag.) An affectionate water cooler touch on the shoulder over some perfectly benign banter. The shoulder that you had just kissed, last night. Whispering sweet nothings.

  You just keep hitting the call button so you can bask in the radiance of the nurse who looks like the greatest red carpet starlet. Her heart and shine is what you really want to buy a share in. This is a world where everyone is so busy fucking each other that no one stops long enough to make love.

   Holding hands in Palisades Park. Eating gobs from the same blob of cotton candy. That sharing of pink confectionary floss almost a kiss in itself. Broken down at the top of the Ferris wheel. The passenger car swaying as you rock yourselves merrily. No fear in it. Just a glitch in a lover’s afternoon.

  Maybe, a bit of necking. Or just a tiny, teasing peck. And sometimes it’s the Gravitron. The floor drops out and you’re stuck to opposite walls. There are times the Gravitron never stops. Some children enjoy this who have never known the slightest tenderness or affection.

  The arching amateur paint strokes on your hospital gown. The raised hatch on the hideous yellow socks. The “Fall Risk” police line on your wrist. You step on the floor and an alarm goes off. Its pig squeal echoing through your head.

  They strap you down because you wouldn’t stay in bed. You don’t bother to writhe. The television that you watch and watch without the least comprehension of what’s happening on it. The morphine that brings a moment of euphoria. You stare at the ceiling. They give you a couple more shots during the night, and the world almost seems like a place worth being in.

  Then, they take you out of the audience and turn you into the human pincushion. The pinheads laugh and dance. Their chonmages making them look even stupider. The barkers there are all full of jolly and good spirit with their promises of monstrosities. But just as in Browning’s film, the midget is humiliated and heartbroken.

  The almshouse is quickly approaching. It’s façade higher than any cathedral in the world. Icarus will always fall. I will always fall. Sometimes it’s in love. More often it’s into month long drinking binges. Trekking through a blizzard, half frostbitten, for the handle I so desperately need.

  The hurricane comes, and the fishing boats descend to the depths of sea and time. Where the fish have corkscrewing flashlights on their heads, and some maniacal king, who cares nothing for you, rules. His scepter is so bejeweled that it is the envy of all the angels. (The fallen one cries his lot into the flames of damnation.)
  His throne is so golden that God wouldn’t sit His fat ass on it. The women bow down to his maleficence and power. They wrought their own chains and they are proud of them. The clot in your hand breaks into smaller clots but it still hurts. The IV’s are out, and you can smoke. But something still seems wrong.