Twinkle, Twinkle

Twinkle, Twinkle

Mark Coleman

  The moment passed. She walked one way, and I walked the other. Towards the flashing 24. Took a seat. Ordered a drink. The lights dancing at the bottom of the glass. Schools of neon fish behind the bar. Grabbed a ponytail and pulled back a head. Question marks in the eyes. Exclamations gathering. A weak laugh. Put it back where I found it, and step out.

  The flame twisting away. Avoiding the tip. Toss it in the gutter, and head towards the end of the block. An alley looking enticing but unsure in the gaits it swallows. Go down it. Legs everywhere. Down the middle and up the sides. Race to the other end. Hunched over with the breath choking out. Get the pack back out, this one lights. Saunter. Headlights closing in. Staring straight at me. Malicious as Hell. Buy a newspaper. The words come twisting out, snapping and snarling.

  A little Classified boat, and a hot dog cart spilling mustard. Make my way to it. Screaming Armenian throwing relish. Children crying. Panic. Headlines deny solace. Almost lose my footing. Castors spinning out. Hands in pockets. Head further down. Radulae scaling the lampposts. Skinned cats hanging from balcony windows. Saucers shattered underneath. Rivulets of milk running like spilt seed down a catamite’s back.

  Try to find relief on a stranger’s shoulder. Fedora shadow creeping down the ridges to the toothy smile. Words splash out. Start planting their flags and proclaiming victory. Tears turning yellow and flowing back. Pouts sitting defiant. Swinging at a prick below the belt. Catch it on the nose. But fail to knock its block off. Grin caught up skirts decorating the missing person posters.

   Knife and fork fighting it out over a steak bleeding out on a lusterless platter. Staining the tablecloth. Silver napkin rings with cocks pushed through them. Needle play from a collared harlot with a sewing basket at her side. Blanket over her legs. Calico in her lap. Rocking chair scowling. Varnish bubbling. Pustules on whore’s tongues that are marionettes in Sunday cabarets for venomous looking tykes.

  Pot shots taken at pot bellies. Run. Gnarled hands sneaking their way between barred windows. Index finger curling. Fiery pinwheel lollipops. Tossed off the roller coaster. Drowning. Vats of fat kicked into the street. Liposuction machines sucking like cheap streetwalkers. Head bobbing up and down. Hair slithering on the thighs. Fangs at a vein. Confusion.

  Walking down the aisle with a flashlight flickering. Romantic gibber gabber on the screen. Projector making strange noises. Discovering the butter greased handjobs. Squinty ching chong blowjobs. Popcorn bucket tricks. Heads swaying. Mouths receiving. Cunts snaking fists. Twizzler straws up anus and urethra alike. Sugary secretions puddling. Dykes fellating top heavy dildos. Slapping dicks pocketed in cheeks. Trying to force two down a gullet. Twinks twinkling. Batting eyelashes.

  Usher with nightmares reflected in his inky pupils. Brained with a fire extinguisher, and dragged out the exit. Cut wide open. Stuffing ripped out, and used for on-set snow. Director bullhorning festive cheer. Jesus boning Magdalene. Wolves baring foam and too many teeth. Tethered up. Awaiting snuff stuff for the discerning viewer.

  Hollywood sign rotting away. Green dripping. Dreams stabbed repeatedly after a cramped trip in a trunk to the hills where they’ve been finding severed heads. Break out successes in the back rooms that reek of charred flesh. Fucked like a star but denied a spot in the constellation. Just dust off a moth. Beating against the lampshade. A bulb on a wire in an unfinished basement.

  Birds with their asses hanging out of their shorts making bulges in little boy’s pants. Birds in cages shocked. Dragged through electrified water. Birds in nests pecking through freshly laid eggs. Feathers floating down. Man on corner. Cigar in mouth. Puffing away. Shades and a wide brimmed hat. Birds with their beaks snipped off still stupidly trying to wing it to the top.

  

In the Cold

In the Cold

Mark Coleman

  The rain washes away what remains of the child’s smile, and all that’s left behind is the man. Bent over. Catching bits of the past in his pockets. Straightening up to meet the woman whose eyes seek to console, but whose heart beats in time to another.

  The kindred under the neon “Jesus Saves’.” Standing in bread lines. Palming crumbs for the long days ahead. Army coats soiled and muddied. Bedraggled strands of hair splitting vision in two. Beards sloppily slapped on. Tin cups shaking blind dimes together. The street musician rusting. The guitar begging. The chords lost.

  An ambulance’s lights going out as it turns the corner after cutting off a few cars. Leaning in a doorway. Locking lips. Hand running through her locks. The perfume you can taste.  Her gloss glittering your lips on contact. Walking past a park transformed and enchanted in the twilight. Swings like phantom limbs reaching back to schoolyard romances. Innocence and that chest pain that did not signal cardiac arrest.

  A bed disheveled, and losing corporeal form after prolonged bouts of lovemaking. Candied pillowcases with an auburn wisp or two left behind to compete in magnificence with the few rays of sunlight that manage to force their way through the blinds. A bottle on the dresser losing its volume. A book laying open to a page with a passage you had read to her. Underlined by passion.

  Booths in the back of restaurants where the waiters let you be. Flash bulbs at the scene when flashed forward, but here only mood lighting. Excruciatingly slow Mondays in the office with the calendar like a game of Tic-Tac-Toe. The X’s leading to the O’s. The dance floor like a beached whale. Jonah finding a flute to pass the three. Trying to paste back the shorn hair. More stubble on the cheek.

  On the corner with a tinny cricket in the branch drooped over the fence. The stop sign at the end of the road far too red. Dripping on the sidewalk. Applying pressure to the wound. Traffic lights too quick to change. Puddles too quick to reflect. A boot coming down, and wiping away the wearied face with the same eyes as you. Heavy hearted. Hands limped and dwarfing.

  Loneliness turning to a sob in the throat. Trouts thrown back, but unable to find the river. The sundress clinging and changing colors. Whimsical kaleidoscoping. Whispering in one another’s ears. Biting the lobes occasionally. An earring taken between the teeth which playfully tug. Tip of the tongue sliding along the loop. Scent of Chanel and her sex. The throbbing that synchronizes.

  Lying there, staring at the ceiling, fancying that you can see the sky beyond. Toes curled up under the covers. Resting hand in hand. Pining for someone in your arms. A waltz with delirium and the sister of a friend. Trembling lips that lack the courage to consummate. Wanting nothing more than to kiss her.

   Her absence knifing at your heart. Ailing intermissions. Interrupted. Fracturing out. Broken ashtrays. Mirrors hung as crooked on the walls as your dreams on the crescent up there among the stars.

  Kids out hopscotching beneath parental umbrellas. Marbles and Hula-hoops. Saturn with its rings grown wider and further apart. A doorbell forgetting its function. The inhabitants unaware that someone stands in the shelter of the porch. The boards all warped. Bowlegged and unwanted. Tie with a sloppy knot. Or maybe just a clip-on. Pants with a wiped-out crease. Nothing much to look at. The yawn excusing the arm around the shoulders. Mindful of the popcorn bucket.

 Exhaustion in the back seat. Fogged windows. Perspiration clinging to the brow. Parked up the hill with the city spread out below. Lit up like a Christmas tree. The advent chocolates half melted in the moonlight.  The weeping willows hiding feral cats, and pianos with missing teeth. The heat waves streaking desert asphault in the morning. Compulsive daytrip. Odds seeming good.

  Socials forcing adolescent backs up against the wall. Spiked punch bowls bleeding into soup kitchens. Courageous girls grabbing a boy here and there. Whores in the homeless bar drinking away their fathers. Winos in the library waiting for the storm to pass. But the clouds keep gathering. Piling on top of one another. A man taking a deep breath as his foot leaves the curb. The bus swerving, but not missing. 

Banquet

  Banquet

Mark Coleman

  The banquet was laid. An ocean of morsels with head and tail intact. From across the table, she darted glances at me. But she had been tainted. Her every move carried with it an acknowledgement of having taken another’s seed in a moment of desperation. Tainted solace grown into a guilty conscience.

   She knew that I was through pursuing her. Any urge to connect, even in the most superficial of ways was abruptly obliterated. I imagined the new avenues this unshackling would allow me to pursue. The brutal alley fucks. The faces and bodies without names or meaning. No more wishing wells, just toilet bowls in which to unleash my primal urges.

  Dried up. Champagne flute in hand. Tasting lips that my eyes had not even had the pleasure of taking in yet. I saw the nipples through the sheer cloth. The bodies in postures of begging. The eyes filled with a longing that did not extend beyond the sensual. Hopeless, bestial unions started on the innocuous barstools and ending in the grim, infested boudoirs.

  Bulbs on chains with their knowing arches. Surrealistic rhythmic beats to sway to, and bugger out. The chicken wire ceilings serving as a voyeuristic specter’s perch. The nonexistent eyes that everyone can feel penetrating them to the very marrow. The chill that runs along your spine, and makes you jolt in the middle of orgasm. Interrupted half-buck. Holding on to the pommel. Marble white knuckles.  

The knowledge that what you seek to empty into the saddle depends on the utmost mental acuity. 

  The cogs in your head going haywire. No moorings. Spinning in every direction. Eyes in meltdown trying to grasp all the room has to offer from the broken woman beneath you to the spider eggs aching to burst, and send all their eight-legged monstrosities to web out across the light fixtures and sockets. Down the dresser in a veritable waterfall of eyes. Pupils dilating with terror and understanding. Life in all its horrible manifestations taking hold of you. Slamming the skull so haphazardly buried beneath the fat into the filth-caked floor.

  Splinters of it sticking here and there like coffin nails sealing the rotting plant fodder. The flowers will continually bloom. Continually sweat petals of putrescence and rot into the merciless, insatiable soil. Soil that extends its mouth like an ear gradually losing its hearing to the insignificant beating in your chest that you mistake for your humanity.

  Floods of carcasses that shed their skin in acid baths of reckoning. The wind blowing out the calcareous flutes as the tackle blew out the jock’s knee. Keratin reeds at the end of the tarnished brass necks shooting out abattoir buds that hide the face whose counterpart screams out its agony below.

  The light refusing to go out. Ceaselessly reasserting itself. Making sure that the self sees the destruction wrought upon it. The limbs collapsing, and going wolf-wise. The pods exploding in showers of worthless dross. The rapier ribs sharded into tumorous organs. Pus leaking out of sockets, and running down mildewed cheekbones that once were just the foundation for the place parents directed their blows.

  Weeping in a crib. Taken out, raped, tortured, broken, and sold to the circus where you watched the pinwheels and paper funneled cotton candy corollas gripped so guardedly in tiny, pink fists that one day would violate the cunts of prepubescent girls as they squealed halfway between horror and delight. The Ferris wheel going up again. From its apex, gobs of spit rained down on bellies fattened by little monsters whose faces shine through their carrier’s flesh as though the spittle were streams from a water pistol in a wet t-shirt contest. Incubated in wombs diseased with hope. The world without sharpening its claws and waiting. Anticipating the moment it raids the market, indentures with its familial tether, and drags the screaming beast home to sheer and cloth itself with.

A Laugh or Two

A Laugh or Two

Mark Coleman

  It wasn't really a joyful countenance that she put on. Something more akin to the legerdemain shine of a No mask. The tilt-a-whirl of a would-be smile. Pouring out a few fingers of brandy into the snifter and lighting a Slim, glanced around the room as if expecting a guest to materialize out of the wall or pour djinn-wise out of the vase. Silver platter on table set with carnival oddity hors d'oeuvres. Dragging and inhaling deep then out the nostrils or through the barely parted, carefully painted, glossy lips. 

  Shadows in the corners beckoning a yesterday several years removed. The lamp with the crimson shade going burgundy there. A splash of cologne and a swish of rouge. Out the window. Beating the rug. "Hello's" enunciated unnaturally. Street urchin dish pitch. Organ grinder gramophone. Monkey up, and off with the hat. Mustard on a lip. Rip in a slip. Spit in an eye. Toasted. Baked Alaska divvied up. 

  Lushed out, and losing your footing. Trucks speeding by somewhere. Out there. Traffic lights winking out of the ice. Mufflered poodle walkers tsk-tsking your prostate state. Librarians stamping insert cards with a coquettish flash above the bifocal. Imagining them with their hair down, and their breasts bared. Breath going winter. Eyes on a decked out department store window. Faux Christmas tree encircled by wrapped UPS boxes full of stones. 

  A creaking slipshod bridge over a frozen lake. Hands in the pockets of an old army coat. Feet in a worn down pair of brogues. Sitting in an empty park gazebo at midnight across from a closed pizzeria watching a hook-and-ladder slide into the firehouse. A squad car full of grimaces and blanch with the streetlights flickering on the light bar. Leaning back on the bench with a struck match to a butt, and a quick nip from the whiskey pint. 

  Streetwalkers that are just an ass and a pair of legs beneath a lowered sedan window. The synchronization of the bars closing, and the crack dealers appearing on every corner. The arcade at the back with the floors that want to peel the soles off your shoes. Peep show on a lifted roll of quarters. Behind the glass the tongue curling back onto the tip of the nose. The playful pout as the shutter goes down. The dance floor gyrations. Heady beer choppy. Unfit for sailing. Over the glass rim.

  Ebony stripper giving you the okay to slide a few fingers down her G-string. A pack of smokes, and a hotel room looking down on chess players and a taco stand. A wash basin full of ice and bottles of import. Bottomless mimosas in the morning and shots of tequila at night. Greasy spoons and court dates. Sink clogged with vomit in a downtown dive. A friendly chat at the urinal. A line of coke in the stall. "Salud's" and "Manana's." Braving the cold for a bit of mead, and a laugh or two.

Pall

Pall

Mark Coleman

  I sat there nodding agreement to I know not what in my drunkenness. My chin would drop to my chest then the whole works would shoot upright again. Like a marionette controlled by a palsied hand, I struggled to retain consciousness. The banter that flowed from one end of the barroom to the other staggered me in its wake. My slanted eyes would struggle to make out an accusation or invitation before the lids would again descend to pall a troubled dream.

  A nameless old-timer approached the perch on which I contemplated the endless night within. I jostled up and out at him. A moment of lucidity that nevertheless barred words. How could one explain the starless void in which I swam, however intermittently?  His gray eyes communicated something vaguely akin to concern. They sent a few tracers down my spine, and I strove fruitlessly to readjust my frameless glasses somewhat further up my nose. My index finger slid up and down it as though rubbing away an itch, unable to find and hook its target.

  I’m sure all this would seem rather comical in one of those blasé dives where youths rendezvous out of boredom rather than desperation. Here there was finality to even the most platitudinous of the regulars’ movements and occasional bits of broken speech. This was an end-of-the-road sort of establishment. A place in which to drink until you keeled over, and the Devil came with his ice wagon and an order for collection rather than delivery.

  The wizened barfly stood in front of me with his mottled flesh losing its fight with gravity. He stooped so far into his glass of ale that you thought he’d drop in like a quarter, and never surface. His lips drew back from his rotted teeth in some simian attempt at humanity. “Shot,” he barked out as much to me as the bartender. It was not a question, but an unquestionable demand. The man thus addressed finished a few drinks as spiked as iron maidens for patrons at the bar proper before retrieving the spigot-less well. The nonchalance with which I threw back my shot convinced the man of some sort of mettle and right, and he moved on. His eyes trailing behind him like smoke.

  The nod resumed in earnest. Disappearing at every sign of the glimmering of a fish’s scales. Back up, each time, with nothing but a lingering aftertaste in the beak. French-inhales and German billows dividing the room in two. A warring of nationality and ideas. Here where the bucolic meets the bacchant in lackadaisical droop. The bleating and the whines everywhere at once.  A massive evisceration. The insides spread out like a lifetime of passed-down china, polished and prepared for entertainment purposes. The guests with their breath fogging over glasses of mirthful self-destruction. Eyes lowered to the head that sits in eager anticipation, clouding the gold beneath. Duckweed floating over everything, webbing vision and dragging mind.

  A cackle from the adjacent table. A middle aged cad pondering the gem his hands had fallen upon. Up the skirt where they found no resistance. The moan in mid-sentence from a pair of dreary, painted lips that part with the creak of those floorboards in haunted mansions and their suburban models. Hangings and stabbings and shootings and screaming cancers that eat away facial features and youthful beauty. Bed ridden patients with portacaths and photo albums that seem better than mirrors given the circumstances. Patched over bullet holes in bathroom ceilings and plastic pints in water tanks.

  Meandering staircases often mistaken for Jacob’s Ladders in the anxiousness to reconnect. Dreams not just un-realized but wholly forgotten beneath the weight of sorrow and the never ending funeral preparations, some of which are for those still technically alive. Bar stools with casters for the valetudinary tipplers and dipsos. Cherubs strangulated with their own haloes, asphyxiated by their twice-earned wreaths of laurel. There are tears of blood on the cheeks of the statue of the Mother Mary.

  Leaning on the oak and looking for reflections where there are only deflections. Barkeeps with one good eye out of two to take in your sulking, pathetic form as you draw the bones out for the bottle. Genies on hiatus and sprites weeping over each other’s bodies in the thickset brush of forest and restive, tender rugs of sward. Black processions that suck the color from the already fair complexions within them. Skullcaps solemnly worn and night caps hastily taken.

  Anxiously surveying the dwindling alcohol supply. The wrenching pains beginning in the stomach, throwing their contortions to the face. Not enough for the night. Not enough for the morning. And then there are the days beyond. They stand with their impish grins and sharpened pitchforks. Their tails laid out at your feet like red carpets to Hell.

Somnambulant

Somnambulant

Mark Coleman

 

  The storm can seem so far away, when you’ve got other things on your mind. The clouds can gather and gather but they cannot negate their nonexistence. The lightning and thunder is less than nil. But thoughts are like jackhammers behind your eyes. The stark ones bending introspection back into limbo. Wandering through the vaulted pasts with a hand firm on the taxi’s back. Totaling up the fare as you skirt around actualization. Deceiving yourself as you twiddle drunk in the backseat. The stop blurring off into the distance with a woman out, pursing her lips and clutching her handbag as tight as she can.

  Making eyes at the back of your toddling head as you take the corner. The wheels like stones skipped across a lake. Always trying for the opposite shore. Where they all throw their shoulders back and stand up straight in their youth. The band taking itself out and the night with it. Downtown where they blink their way home. Thumbs hooked over pockets and mascara smearing perfection. Legs heavy with drink and smoke. Through marshes that send up their vegetation to make the wayfarers stagger and trip.

  Up with the cigarette pasted in a collaged face. Making rings that have no place in proposals but kind of seem like haloes in the right light. Laurelling the muse. Hand in hers, belting out lyrics and sonnets. Pouring the bottle into the tub, and diving in with one eye leveled at the skirt that clothes inspiration. Fireflies taking the first step into the gloaming. Wings caught up in mason jars with the light dimming. Running back through the arcade with pinball machines on every corner. Silver balls bouncing like bells down a jester.

  Swaying through the motions. Martini olives surveying the room. Stuck and bleeding to the bottom of the glass. The crock of an arm processing signals. Hooked and taken through the swinging doors. Carried over the threshold and into conjugation. Sleep disturbed by solemn memories, and frosty old inns where the hearth fights every advance. Flinging back the scarf, and heading out to pursue sheep. Gigot of mutton hanging over barstools in country taverns. Sheparding drowsiness, but stepping over the inert forms of closure.

  Hair a whiskey brown. Eyes an absinthe green. Sitting there in a frame, caught for one eternity: still and peaceful. Sending off jingles and small flashes that make the blanket freeze. Trying to mold the pillow into enough of a shape that it can be slept with. Arms aching with the years left back there across the ocean. An unborn child creating the divide. Eventually, it will find its way without the assistance of you.   

  The ships in port and the sailor’s musculature. Matrimonial beds defiled by procreation. Tattoos running off into the belly to start a commissioned piece. Death knells for the un-tampered skin. Flowers on graves that just look like dirt no matter how long you stare at them. Restful on one side. Tiresome on the other.

  The serenades falling into their plots with crumpled letters and broken mementos. Day trippers with bouquets to shame your own. Making a show about their placement. Leaning over, spreading the flowers a little wider. Apologetic towards you, but unaffected by grief. The reek of duty and obligation.

  Smiling out the month with tender caresses running across the brow. Her lips candied with your taste. Bringing you closer to her heartbeat, and making you understand where it comes from. Lashes still long and coquettish. Lids going up and down like uncertain shutters. Counting the losses like holes in the ceiling. Sitting up in bed with a mouth burnt by ashes and happy hour shots. Finding a crack in the wall and following it to the mirror. Spend the night wondering at the aged reflection.

Give and Take

Give and Take

Mark Coleman

  It’s the first rain of June, and I feel like I’m running away. The train behind the elms, the most desirable and inviting means of conveyance and escape. Slouching there, down the rungs from a suite whose extravagance is toasted with gilded glass. Chewing the remaining flesh from a cool cherry pit. Hair dipping down to touch my brow. You can cross your eyes up at it all you like, but all you’ll see is rustling leaves working up the courage to make the leap.

  Loose matches in my pocket ruminating flame. Trouts coming up to watch my crossing. The flashing of fins and eyes in a confused mass of knowing. A pencil stub behind my ear. Picking a few winning lotto numbers. Losing the rest to anniversaries. That magic drizzle that children dream about when no one’s looking. The sky dazzled and dazzling. A sniffle, then a long weep into the dirt and mud. Catching twigs, and sailing them halfway across their world. Bobbing along to the strain of the melodious calliope. The accordion ancient in its squint. The estrogen pumped violin awaiting the wisdom drop.

  Rainbows started then aborted. Left unfinished after just a few strokes on an ultra-azure canvas. Prepped with the proper amount of precipitation. Greased up with a broken fuel line. Hatched with imposing lampposts straight up, driven like stakes into the clouds. Stippled with harbinger crows out the sides. Gone off on the rails to start again somewhere with a beach, and a dress code so lax that you could wear your birthday suit to a wedding reception. Frizzy, platinum blonde hair worn au naturel to the altar. Carnations thrown into the hotel pool, and left to bleed out in streams. The moon making floating on a ripple look so easy and effortless.

  Paddling out to the middle of the lake, and launching bottle rockets astern. Setting fire to the reflections of you and me. Years turning ember, and gliding away. Softly trailing over to the misty horizon where they kaleidoscopically merge with the colors of the setting sun. Ashes puddling and powdering your gaiters. Belief thrown out with your dirty socks and knotted fishing lines.

  Up the mountain, through the gullies, and into the too perfect shade. Picnics romantic and innocent when the honeymoon still had a heartbeat. Taking you beneath the willow as gently as a man like I can. My arms enlaced alternately behind your neck and back. Trying to make you as comfortable as possible.
   Adverse to the slightest sign of pain on your face. Fingers in your golden tresses or brushing a spot of earth from your cheek. Deflowered on a bed of pine needles that find their way into the cups of your bra and strings of your hair. Working the more difficult ones out with friction and persistence.

  The tinny sounds of crickets playing to the crescent swimming up there with half his foot gone beneath a deep purple cover. Swatting mosquitos from your bare legs. The taste of which all of nature seems to appreciate and revel in. Your eyes capturing the stars and robbing them of their light years. It’s a measurement of distance, not time. Once, you were so near that I didn’t have to search for you in every movement that failed to compliment my own.