The Insatiables

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Vulture Children

Vulture Children

Mark Coleman

His voice is so gravelly. You’d think that he ate handfuls of sand. It developed early, when he was ruthlessly beaten by his father. Standing there, shaking on a paint can in the garage, as his father rummaged around for something to change it up. Ten years of heavy drinking, and dreams of going out to sea. Trade winds that carry the past far away.

She slept on a bus bench. Cried herself right to sleep. The john she was with last night had so brutally raped her that she can’t breath. She imagines that the blood that had stained the sheets must still be flooding her mouth. She used to pour over the illustrations in the children’s books and dream of being a princess. Now, she bites the door handle while cops do the thing that they do before they let her go.

Always stifling cries. Occasionally smashing everything in a motel room, and going off in cuffs. If only they didn’t take his belt away in county. Robbery went south, and the gun just seemed to go off by itself. He hadn’t meant for it to happen, but the judge knew him. He remembers playing soldiers. The barely perceptible little smile turns to laughter.

She’s gone when he gets back. He tries to wake her up, but can’t. God knows that he’s seen his share of dead bodies, but it never gets easier. Each one carries its own peculiar knife twist. He was going out to score. She was so junk sick, when he had left. The smell of sex dispels any uncertainty. He gently closes the door, and walks until his feet won’t carry him anymore. Stares up at the sky, wishing that he were there.

He always thought that widow’s peaks were ridiculous. But he couldn’t keep his hair from receding. His wife’s eyes shine with a different emotion than they used to. He’s noticed the glances at the barbeque that fuck and hold hands afterwards. He doesn’t let on. He just drafts his will, and paces with old public access romances playing beneath the handyman front.

Courage fails him. He keeps trying to jump. With how cold the water is, he’s surprised that his toe keeps breaking through the ice. Someone shoves him. The lifeguards are chatting among themselves, and he nearly drowns. When you’re that young, it’s easy to forget to make peace. Someone finally pulls him out, and he’s reborn at six.

He rereads what he wrote over his twelfth cigarette of the day. The bargain bin wine is too sweet, but it does the trick. The crickets didn’t retreat with the night. They’re still at it. There’s always white noise, after all. Even if everything else about the air is dead.

Way Back

Way Back

Mark Coleman

Addictions that aren’t so much detriments as they are minor character flaws. More a bit of friendly fire than a shot aimed at Sumter. Some will paint you pictures of Irish coffee enemas, and harpoons that will launch out of the ocean when the tongue tickles the clitoris.

But they’re just so many poor man’s Bosch’s left to pick up the fragments of someone else’s stream of consciousness. Streams that flow into the Sappho urinal, or trickle down the back of a dumpster fetus. Aborted with the utmost sincerity in wadded tissue balls by the cockroach-ridden hampers.

Kitchen floors that look like D-Day due to how many virgins have been broken in on the counter. With their screams which have yet to be formed into demands. The tongues just beginning to learn the true value of a flicker. Dirty negligees, pink slips, and rejection letters. Panty raids at the pre-school. Tetherballs to the face, sending them howling to the nurse’s office with crooked noses and fattened lips. Oh, so and so and so. Wah, fucking, wah.

Make the school grounds look like the palatial stomping grounds of Vlad the Impaler. Cops aren’t around. Gun it. I want to hit this speed bump doing ninety. Hell to the shock. It’s about the euphoria. Everything in the cabin airborne. For a rushed eternity, it’s zero g.

Reach in and grab a Pocket Shot. Christ in High Heaven, that’s some low rent vodka. Crushing menthols in a coffee cup. The designated ashtray. Lean back and close the eyes against a Quaalude and another day at The Nightmare Grindstone. Change the line of work, and dampen the mattress with the help of some whore that will do anything.

Fire and brim. Preachers and poachers. Cauldrons and warts. Heartache and heart attack. It’s all the same, really. Trap addled souls and keep them like Chinese cricket. Lady Luck the coffer. Sell to the highest bidder or cash in at the ticket desk?

Yeah, let’s go with the Power Play. And the winning numbers are…. not yours. They’re making fun of you. Right to your face. It really gets your goat. So out the door, and through the lobby rippling as decadently as a rank Turkish bath. Sanitized smells. Ugly faces. Crippled and corpulent bodies. Overwhelming and nauseating. Stale as Grindhouse popcorn.

Hot dogs turning round and round. Some foreigner screaming at you because you ripped off the sign that read, “PAYING CUSTOMERS ONLY!” and went right on in. Throw the crumpled piece of paper in his face, and tell him to shove it up his nigger ass. He reaches under the counter, and you bolt. Just on the off chance.

One of those working class joints that’s been open since five or six in the morning. Pull out a pack of Tarot and read them leisurely at the bar.

“It’s right here in the cards that you owe me a drink. “

“Like Hell, I do.” Stern, severe, bloodshot eyes.

“Alright.” Pull a fistful of ones out of your pocket, and dump them on the bar. Start smoothing them out.

“A shot of well tequila and a Bitburger Drive, please.” Then explain how you’re trying to cut back. After about twenty rounds (more than half of which are charged to a nicked card), you stumble out. Spend ages swerving in and out of traffic, taking detours down alleys forgotten by all but society’s dregs. The crackhead vets wheeling impatiently up and down waiting to connect, alternately gnawing on their lips and cursing God down off His throne, the spade city kids packing their older brothers’ gats with half a register roll’s worth of history, dreaming of the day that they’ll finally be beat in, the drag queens with come and blood matted in their bobbed wigs, pulling on their skirts and reaching up under to yank at the panties that are strangling their cocks. And you? You’re just trying to find your way back.

2012 Days

2012 Days

Mark Coleman

Lloyd Price is informing me that he’s standing on the corner a la beat juke. I’m giving the bar a workout with all the shot glasses that I keep slamming down. The walls are yellow from when Mama let you smoke at your leisure. I’d bang that tattoo artist if she wasn’t with her boyfriend. Such a nice, tight ass. I’ll just end up sleeping in a ditch, and pissing on a church’s doormat. Sorry Jesus, but they shouldn’t have crucified you on a big “t.” To a sex addict, it’s only a few letters away from “twat.”

Happy Easter though, man. Burned through too much green. Can you pull your old water to wine trick? Let you have a glass or two. See what you really think about all these fucking Christians. I appreciate what you did down here. But if you send me to Hell, I might change my mind. Your pops knows what a son of a bitch, I can be.

Asking if I want a tattoo. Shit. Who wants a permanent reminder of your hack art? Stabbing at over conceptualized pop, and quickly scrolling Chinese characters. If you come at me with a needle, it better have more than a drop of ink in it.

Friends dropping off the planet. So many heartbroken Lenny Bruce’s. Self medicating till all that’s left is the whites of their eyes. So much puke on the bathroom walls that you’d have to go at it with a buzz saw. Can I get you a drink? Occupado. They’re unclogging needles in there.

Coke binges at the end of the world. Opium and meteors. Hashish and people screaming with hatchets in their heads. Laughing at junkies that I’d give my left arm to remain friends with. But what else would you expect of a Teabagger who can’t spell his own name, and constantly confuses his own Carver suffering with Big-Money-Corporate-Rand-Boners. Trump erection haloes that will talk your hair off.

Wakes and bakes a 4/20 one. Passes out with one of Abbie’s Steals as a nightmare block. Piss tests and books. Former screaming “out-dated.” Latter just screaming for recognition. Libraries built out of bones that are losing their marrow.

They’re eating their own dogs somewhere. Leeches on the eyelids beat what drops by, when they droop. Dancing with a hippy chick with such prominent labia that I come without thrusting. Out in the street with stained jeans. Deciding that this is where I want to lie down. So many wheels speeding towards my head. Friend breaking my date with destiny.

A fridge full of half drank beers, and a rotting apple pipe jammed with burnt, mildewing skunk. Trying to find my way back to a smile. But her lips only pucker or frown at the sight of me, anymore. Hearts that are china cabinets breaking way too often. Rain and beds that bust the teeth in your head. Cement, enamel, and a ruined apology. Thunder halving. Wondering if the world would be a different place if I started bee lining. But the stumble is so godly.

Impotency

Impotency

Mark Coleman

He was an old timer. Sold everything but his belt. Which, when he wasn’t tied off, served as a sort of bandolier for syringes from the needle program. Constantly making off with unattended patio spoons. Which he’d reuse at the soup kitchen.

Hocking silver every which way. To be melted into The Man’s chalice or the beggars’ teeth. Every time that he tried for the wagon; it was at capacity. So he’d just slink down in its shadow, and have himself a nod.

Cold turkey means cold sweats. Counting sheep with fangs. Sawing logs full of splinters. They hadn’t bothered to save him a dream of the kind that the women love to steal. Not even a red light coupon remained.

Curled down beneath a dumpster quilt. Imagining that it was something more human. The bugs running over him, thinking that it was a race. Sad truth is, even with insecticide, you can’t kill what’s not there. Until the methadone clinic opened, he’d have to do without so much as a cigarette butt in a cup of coffee.

Drinking

Mark Coleman

Working my way past the funeral. Drunk in the local coffee house, building castles out of creamers that could never be. Smoking joints in the parking lot, bitching about women who sighed before giving us the time of day. Rolled their eyes at a suicide that was yet to be actuated. Didn’t know that he was Jewish, till they all gathered, and threw their clods.

A closed door junk addiction. Sealed the deal in locked bathrooms with blacks. Tarred up veins, and scheming eyes in Hal revulsion. Mailbox baseball fatalities, and porn collages forced into towel racks. Rotten smiles. Crack yellow, and scentless. Sneaking into the graveyard with tears in our eyes, and spades in our hearts. Trying to shower in the fucking sprinklers. Desperate, hot whiskey breath. Bed-less woman on my arm, and a crook in my back.

Broken hearted, but not quite broke. Know of a bar where the keeps listen to all your hard luck stories. And man, their ears are big. Slouched and half-gone, with nothing in my pocket, but a moral compass, matches, and a pack of chewed-up dime store cigs.

Something, trying real hard to pass as human, approaches. And you feel bad, so the drink is on you. The kick quota for the dog hasn’t been met. But Hell, you went out to forget about those things. And the Statue of Liberty ain’t but an absinthe jump away from a Paris café. Where they don’t care who or what you’re drinking to.