Rumblings

 Rumblings

Mark Coleman

 

  Find a lipstick smeared refry in a parking lot, and imagine that you're kissing the woman who discarded it. Lonely without a red cent in your filth caked pocket. Staring at the asses of the girls who pass, regardless of whether or not they're with their man. Sleeping in the rain. A torrential slumber. On church doorsteps, corrugated coffee shop chairs, and cement inclines covered in fast food paper cups and wrappers.

  Waking up with bus bench, trash can moire prints woven into your aching back. Everyone is talking too loud, especially the niggers, who all think they're pimps and thugs. They slurp the soup with  unidentifiable chunks of carrion in it. Eat their feed as though it was served in troughs. Everything falls apart or drowns in the drool of an angry male nurse.
  It's more unnerving than the incessant, parable singing during a Catholic communion. Standing with one minute breaks to sit in the hard pews with people better dressed than you after walking day in and day out. Consecrating faith after the priest gives the okay with gilded bibles and solid gold crosses. Peeping a married woman through a bloodshot squint. She's been throwing glancing at you. You wouldn't mind at all.

  An Ethiopian in a skull cap crumples up grocery bags with a few bloodied belongings in them. Pants with the knees ripped out. Shirt unbuttoned to show the too white curls tufted on the starless night that is his skin. Hair bedraggled, umbrella folded, eyes jaundice yellow, nose strangely aquiline.

  The noise of the human race makes you want to put a gun in your mouth. You have no plugs so you stuff dampened wads of shit paper in your ears. You still can't block out the mad, living cacophony. You think about throwing yourself in front of a bus. Nothing comes of anything. Your half baked plans to do yourself in are absorbed into that noise.

  Spent so much time in the pursuit of knowledge just to have it wiped out by television in the sober house. Hocking yourself to the bone. The little clicks on the man's typewriter start to drive you insane. You can count on one every two seconds. People won't stay in their fucking rooms. Don't know how to not slam their doors.

  She laughs too loud as she checks in the guests. The cackle makes gooseflesh. The maids push their little carts back and forth over the marble floor. The phone keeps ringing. No one thinks to answer it. You feel like some legless creeper just crawled over your grave.

  Picnicing in the cemetery with the only woman you ever loved in the ground beneath you. Drinking Peppermint Schnapps with an MIT graduate going streetwise. Make out with a whore who's missing her son.
   Full of rum and snipe smoke. Warm and cold at the same time. The wind goes through you. You try to get to the park early enough to reserve a leeward space. You have neither coat nor blanket. Just a short sleeve shirt you try to take refuge in. 

  Sit and watch the fountain that spits as much as the tubercular Mexican hobos. You don't have a TB card. You don't win the lottery. The clothes room isn't open yet. A spade coughs in your face and your coffee. An old racist cracker does the same thing as you turn the corner.

  You've only changed your clothes once in a week. The ball of manager rolls from office to counter and back again. Rattles dimes and nickels. Counts bills. You sign up for day labor then go outside and pass out on the sidewalk with the lightning splitting the sky in half. Further off towards the disgusting skyscrapers it quarters.
  Call an ambulance on yourself in detox. They won't do anything until you're blowing zeros. They throw you in a jail cell to scream it out. Eat the pharmaceutical diamonds they give you in Dixie cups dancing with flowers. You'd never cheek something so important to your well being. Not like when you were on a hold in the mental hospital. Try to get sleeping pills with whiskey stealing the course from your blood.
  Kid won't stop jacking barbeque covers in lieu of the real thing. Gets hit with brass knuckles in the back of the head. Takes off his hat and starts gushing. Tries to make a bandanna out of a pair of faded jeans. Cracks a few jokes then goes and lies on the heat grate with a stolen bottle.
  Your backpack goes missing when you're out. Sleeping in pot plumes and vodka fog. Drinking Skoal when you're released and sharing cigs with a 23 year old boy and a 51 year old woman at a bus stop. Both of whom lost their children because a circle jerk judge decided they were unfit parents. A lady gets set on fire by the river. You can't find a burned patch of grass down there.
  Hole up for a few hours until you're 86'ed. Everyone is out of cigarettes. Everyone has cigarettes except for you. You panhandle twenty one cents and buy a tootsie roll. The clerk gives you a slice of pepperoni pizza on the house. You grease up the application you're filling out. The pen keeps sliding out of your slippery mitt. You keep missing the homeless lunch truck at the capitol. You walk fast but things keep passing you by. You puke up a shelter meal in the bushes. The cactus grows crooked. Its spikes branch into your brain.
  The doorman demands a dollar for a smoke. You go around the corner where they won't even accept your poor, proffered payment. Starvation is in the near future for everyone without a picture I.D. Hunger is a thing only the truly privileged know. The pangs make fools out of anyone who lets them in. Your writing distends.
 The weeping willow refuses to weep for you. You are rewarded for your self medicated depression with month long trips to rehab. You eat a meal under Christ's sagging body. You turn more into a nihilist. A toothless vet with Nam tours spinning sidewise in his mind is convinced the city is going to break out in war between the haves and the have-nots. A hooker blows you in a Porta Potty with the steam still rising from the shit in its bowels.
  The stripper thinks you're a gentleman during a touch, all nude lap dance. She has you massage her breasts, twist her nipples, grab her ass. Her auburn hair tickles your neck. Your paunch of stomach growls. Your dick hardly hardens. Human forms float out of the mist. Fat men in wheelchairs sneer at you with all their corpulence.
  The clouds overrun the heavens like the black cockroaches that you heard someone refer to as poor man's bubble wrap. They blot out every star in the sky. They hate their shine. Most people that know you know that you hate most people. The bars are the only time that you can stand them.
  Termites eat away the sun. The exterminator never comes. The piranhas go crazy. You wait all day for the cable guy, watching the snow on the set as the snow outside takes the lives of young bums. They were already dying. You're dying. Inside of you there are earthquakes along unsightly fault lines. You take yourself into the world and try not to look the part. You put on your best clothes and shop around for part-time work.
  You spend whole nights looking at the menus in restaurant windows. A mob catches up with you and holds you to the ground. Their heels grind into your skull. Your arms and legs are pinned down. No one answers the telephone. It just rings and rings. Even the voicemail shuns you.
  You crouch on your heels with it held between your head and shoulder. Lie in bed with it and stare at the ceiling. The cradle is too far to reach. There is never anybody there. There is no one outside. No one in here with you as much as you wish and pray for it.
  There's not a single neon orange crumb in the chip bag. The slice of hamburger is mildewing. The mustard on the hot dog is turning pus. Still no one answers the phone. You just want to hear her voice. Hear an utterance of some form of reassurance. Be told that all is not in vain. That you still have it. Whatever "it" might be.
  You're afraid you've gone Hemingway, and lost your raison d'etre. That it's all disappearing far too quickly like hair from a prematurely balding teenager's head. The girls already shun him. He can't even pick up his friends' scraps. He wanders the streets, digging through trashcans, hoping to find a doggy bag.
  They walk by him as though they've been raised on platforms with their high heels echoing along the street and down the alleys. Heads held high. Eyes somewhere/anywhere other than on his face. A whole day's shopping in crook of arm and hand. Find half of a shooter. Down it and feel absolutely nothing. The gulf inside of you just yawns that much wider. There are worse things than going hungry.