Lovely Red Herrings

Im so proud of my dearest Pash; she has been awarded a top honor in her class, and she owes it all to her devotion to the party. She is lovely... She can make a grown man cry...

Bombshell in Furs

I oft wonder how this feisty little commie bombshell found her way into my life, but together we most certainly are. Our days are filled with tummy rubs, agility training runs and quiet evenings on which we both work on our respective manuscripts and/or manifestos.

Things for me to ask, and you to answer…

- If babies didn’t cry, would it still be fun to spank them?

- Why is sex more fun when it’s in a public place,
instead of at home by your self?

- What did Helen Keller name her cat?

- Why are all the people on street signs black?

- What if people on airplanes wore barf hats?

- Why doesn’t Oprah just read the books she likes and just shut the fuck up?

- Why would you not vote for Christopher Walken?
http://www.walken2008.com/index.html

Plastic Faces and Rubber Hands

Colette looked particularly exhausted this evening, and with good reason. The hospital was overstuffed with the sick and infirm. Every isle revealed another atrocity in the making, a headline or piece of legislation in progress. Every bed was a fine example of a textbook ailment that stretched over a human face and frail body. This is her world just as much as burgers and fry sacks became the world of her little sister; and in all of this she found refuge in standing above those broken bodies and proclaiming her will to survive. She did not consider it a virtue to attend these fallen victims of living; instead a triumph.

She would think to herself in the midst of her small breaks about the poor bodies she encounters every moment. She reflects to herself on the harsh lack of funding, on the old equipment and short supplies. This is all a conversation in her mind, and maybe more of just taking notes and recalling all the ways that people don’t have to suffer. Sometimes still she imagines this as her refuge from it all, the knowledge that her foresight can prevent some of the mess altogether.

Its back to the floor, and it seems a senile dementia patient just tried to walk out the front door. It would have worked flawlessly if he hadn’t been hit by the ambulance. Colette runs with the frantic crowd, them grabbing up any useful machinery in the passing; crutches, gurneys; a flash out the door to red white wailing lights and a still body below.

“Who was on his watch?” Screams a twisted face to a sea of white smocks.

Turn’s out nobody was on his watch; he slipped through the cracks, barely a chart on the wall. Is anybody to blame; we will have a revision committee to find some blame. You can bet your watch on that.

She watches a few minutes later, getting some cold water from the fountain, he’s wheeled in on a bed. Code red, I think he shattered his spine; thinks Colette, hating this place for another uncountable time tonight. It’s a place of uncomfortable beds and tragic moments exploding left and right.

She wanted to go to grad school to upgrade the nursing degree a bit. Hell, she could hand out pills and take the measurements, change any size diaper and initiate a code; but damn if she didn’t want to feel a little more helpful.

“Being here is like being part of a slow machine.” She once recounted to her mother on the telephone. “You abide by it’s pace, and it chugs along as people curl up and die all around you.”

“Well honey, the system works that way for a reason…”

That’s all mom could say? Wasn’t she listening when she talked about needle shortages and medicine rationing? Did mom forget the stories about botched watch schedules and now that old man that died from having his torso shattered by a white and red meat wagon?

No, it doesn’t have to be like this. She talked to herself and recounted enough grisly details to make her feel right again, justified.

Mom doesn’t know what people go through; she is a goddamn secretary. She keeps this talk up, building an inferno out of maternal misunderstanding until it becomes tiring enough to drown out her consciousness on the living room couch.

The watch says five in the morning and it’s some re-run of ER on the television that has been on for hours. George Clooney is checking up on a rather difficult patient with autism. This happens too; special needs and special circumstances. Sometimes an injured person in shock and with a mental deficiency can be a dangerous situation; it happens time and again. Sure the kid can handle a little abuse before he figures out what is going on, but now he is embarrassed, bleeding all over the checkup bed, looking dizzy and showing the blood pressure of a serious concussion, and nobody can get him down long enough to get an IV in him. MRI’s are out; he doesn’t like the dark.

The elderly come in by the dozens, though many in fact do not venture out again. Sometimes they come in just for some routine irrigation and a glucose check and end up leaving with heart failure. For the second, you do not use the front door. Sometimes its broken hips and femurs waiting to explode into gangrene, or it crippling arthritis, or a plethora of new cancers metastasizing from old worn blood.

Within a moment of introspection, Colette passed her eyes through the glass of the waiting room in survey of the timid faces. She sees beyond the needy looks and broken figures, instead her own face and family in a dense crowd of onlookers. It became difficult to discern them as the tears began.

Please eat; you beg the little old man who lays torpid in his elevated bed. His eyes fix with a glassy countenance on the television screen as it methodically scans the first five seconds of each channel. Some screens are just gray dust and static noise, but his eyes are unrelenting pivots. They were bloodshot; they reminded her of wet marbles trustingly flecked in gold.

A buzzer ignites in the uncomfortable silence between an immobile body and its keeper. Colette’s soft hand brushes over his forehead, wiping away the sweat from his straining with a light cotton cloth and then lifting a small sincere smile to his glaring face before rushing into the hallway.

She found the door open, and inside the harshly lit quarters dwelled a mass of plain clothed folk around the tiny bed. One grappled with a handful of deep rouge balloons that bounced gleefully at the low ceiling. Colette shoved her way through the bodies and found the six-year-old resident of the bed sitting with her bandaged legs crossed and a two tired cake upon her lap. Another push through the flanks of birthday goers and it’s the wide bed of a terminal leukemia patient. The monitors are stable; the morphine drip keeps his groggy body asleep even through the tremors of birthday songs. It wasn’t his buzzer; she is furious.

“Nurse?” one of the guests beckons her towards the celebration, ignorant of the dying boy in the periphery of the room. “We though we could buzz you for some plates or napkins?”

Collete’s first reaction pulled the curtain closed around the sick boy, his purple and punctured arm disappearing behind the zip of a white curtain. Her arm quickly found a guests elbow and spun his spindly figure around to meet her eyes. One push and he was out the door, the other side of the hallway and holding steadily the silver lift bar between the supply doors.

Instinct, and she looked back to the impenetrable cloth wall. Barely above a whisper she commanded every onlooker out the door along the path of her pointed finger. Her lip quivered and her voice shook as the giant cake was lifted out of a little girls lap and the relatives left with angry grunts and disappointed sighs. A few expensive gifts laid about the meal table, but it was again empty and quiet aside from the snobbish mother consoling her sobbing child and the automated breathing of the sick boy in the corner.

Death followed everywhere, and through careful metaphors it even sat in the corner of the room as an inconsiderate birthday celebration was carried out. It garnished precious gifts for a coming of age six-year-old, and Colette had to wonder how that money might save a little boy of death from leukemia.

Night came quick tonight, and the nurses made their rounds closing the curtains for the front side of the building. The streetlights glared with such a sodium luminance from the parking lot that without the thick dark drapes, the throb of Incandescent might trouble the sleep of every facing window.

Colette went again to the room of the little old man, and though with a start, greeted her co-worker as she stood over his bed. Colette noticed the unsure look in her eyes, perhaps even a distended silence. She was barely to speak, when Emily’s eyes lifted to hers and confirmed her suspicions. “I think he has passed”.

Colette reached over again to touch the spongy forehead that she not an hour ago wiped of perspiration. It was now cold and moist flesh, loosely hung as the muscles began their atrophy and decline.

Her fingers sunk into some of the fascia of his face, her fingers tracing a path down the ridge of his nose and across the edge of a lip. Her hand brushed the eyes, closing one lid and leaving the other open to glare dryly at the overhead light.

Emily laughed uncomfortably, her hands in a knot in front of her. She wrung her fingers in a neurotic fashion, losing control of the situation. She almost pleaded out loud for Colette to quit her antics, but lacked the resolve and in possessing the curiosity for this lifeless body, she watched.

Fingers and limbs still flexed in the dead and in the subtle decline of flexibility they become rigid and freeze with every pose. Fingers curled back into the palm give strongly poised middle fingers. His gaping mouth shut by the pressure of a strong palm, only to pop open slowly and toss the top denture onto his bare chest. His eyes loll deeply into the back of the head, face contorted by small girlish hands both mortified and fascinated with a fledgling corpse.

Colette stayed the bathroom, scrubbing her hands and pulling invisible phantom flesh from the undersides of her nails. Hot water revived her face, her eyes raw from the stinging chlorine and the residue of soap.

On the phone her mother asked another unconvincing spate of questions unleashed for the name of small talk. Colette was daydreaming about the springy bones and dry eyes of corpses that now littered her sleep.

Each day was an exercise of staying alive and passing the baton. Sometimes you could sneak out of the fate of a sufferer by seeing what they did wrong in spite of their illness. Sometimes still, it was just a matter of time. Old blood and broken bones; teeth spilled out like a giant pearl pathway to heaven…

The Decline of Antiques in Western Society

Today I found a message in a bottle. It was wrapped in green and gray and tumbled down the wayside into approaching traffic. It was a burden along the hot tar; people watch from the sides of their glasses in hopes of hearing the satisfying crunch of it under wheels. They don’t know what I know.

I chase it down a rolling half block of roadside apartment buildings; nobody leaves their sets to inquire about the chatter of plastic down pavement. I keep up with a quiet pace of a drunk following his mistress home.

My hands are in my pockets as I see the opalescent bottle finally break into a rest upon the lip of a storm drain. I jog.

Now a hundred doors seem to open around me. Every piercing eye catches my limbs flailing in a running dance. A woman lugging an oxygen tank rears upon me with her morning paper in hand, startled by my fretful breaths. I ponder a hit from her tank…

I stop in the field of people, hands on my knees, my goal just out of sight.

Folks stand with jaws agape and eyes fixed, I’m paralyzed like in a dream. I see through open doors into homes and into lives. I realize that there will be no antiques left in the coming centuries aside from movie posters and photo albums. Photo albums that we buy of dead families to scour the past for what we are missing in the present. A timeless hobby.

I recollect myself and stalk the bottle like a curious cat. That bottle of opal green and gray with a hint of effervescent fluid and of which I am certain contains a message. I imagine these old fools are cheering me on. I grab its soft neck and twist like the murderer of chickens…

“Please play again.”

Feminists like Porn too!

Hey, I’ll be the first to admit it; occasionally I will pen a column with a title or subject matter that goes over like the proverbial turd in the punchbowl.

Jesus appears even on the main page, and if not being blamed for single handedly bumping off the Kennedy family, he is being pictured in the act of breastfeeding. The pope is revealed as a pathetic old man, god is demoted to a fictional yet self-righteous booze fiend, and the entire concept of religiousness is played off as a haughty psychological ailment akin to misogyny. Some people really attach themselves to this shit, so I guess I understand the complaints.

Within these pages, you can also peruse the nature of love and romance in accordance to yours truly. You may be supplied with a poem about a lover’s infidelity, the fallibility of modern romance, or a fresh page from the scrapbook of my personal bedroom anthologies. All those contents wherein might also be offensive to viewers squeamish about their bodily parts or who uphold some romantic ideal about modern love as anything other than a societal breeding strategy.

So do I hate love and religion?

I detest the marching of a million feet who protest for all of us to hear, that they understand the nature of love. This is absurd. Your love is found for money; and generally in some boorish hovel with an underage sex slave. Your concept of love is habitual co-dependence and ritualistic co-habitation with intent on negating certain daily cravings and to see to the bifurcation of household chores.

I do hate religion though. For anybody who wants to complain more about that; please make up another universal being and assign him the role of caring. I don’t care two inches of a bowel movement about how you came up with your inane ideas, or what life crisis made you weak enough to crack. Go peddle your wares elsewhere; or else look into the blinding light of my home-churned literature.

So yes, I would have to say that even with a small percent of stubborn and ideologically anal-retentive viewers, life is good. Some of you have even spent the time to tell me your human stories of life love and the absence of the afterlife. I encourage this practice, and with a few more of those excellent stories I’m pondering the task to bring in a guest writer to assist me in offending and humiliating the general consensus. Imagine a deep heartfelt conversation empowered by two lunatics instead of one…

So that’s my plan… More letters, more life, more heresy and deconstruction of society. Keep sending those letters folks, even if you’re one of the aforementioned complainers. It’s just good to know that I’m getting my job done…

my demands

My expectations from poetry,

Are that; from careful sonnets,

Exhumed from the living body,

There might be some tangible transaction,

Made to course between the tracts of time,

And the alien wastes of human understanding.