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2007-10-27
Thursday, Friday, Happier Day


The sun works half a day. I send it on leave. I retreat to a service station on the edge of town. I drink the night in and monitor darkness for communications of light and noise. This moth signals a precursor to prolonged disturbance. I hum with the machines.

The crossword puzzle is a birds-eye view of an imaginary city. I feel so safe and far away in these concrete shadows. Humans are absent, but language is all around and within me. I possess a piece of biology proficient in hacking ATMs. I am very aware of my impermanence. Drink everything you can while you can: from the bottle and the sky. And the carpet and the radio. I monitor global events from my secret motel bunker. I am losing color, which is okay because I admire the drab ventilation shafts. Saturday night is a night of beef jerky and hyper-caffeinated colas from the vending machines in this palace of polished floors and isolation. My skills and knowledge are simple but obscure and thus in great demand. My kind are the blue-collar condo dwellers. Slip through the cracks of life's stranglehold, and you will be richly rewarded. There are no women but shapely bottles and the hourglass in my life. Walk down backroads of the Peninsula late at night with a bottle in my hand and a wallet full of money. My wallet breathes. These calm and magic streetlights. I drink with the snails and sniff the salt air riding in on the wind. This wind does not have a schedule. Not like loneliness has a schedule. I stay on schedule in forgotten hotel lounges. The vinyl upholstery smells just like the middle-aged bellhops and bartenders. And who burnt the street signs. I'm not afraid of hard places to sit when I'm so soft in the brain. Sometimes it takes so long to get home--or to that place you call home. That place in which you feel safe enough to close your eyes while darkness riots all around you. And wake up to a cold blue morning with headache piercing the way a church steeple pierces. Put on your best clothes and slither into a Sunday morning adult bookstore on the edge of town. And jack off in a dry canal, a drainage ditch a few feet from government-sanctioned barbed wire. Forget the trails we left in a night of empty parking lots and the breath we left in the air. Forget about rainy-day attics and noise fresh as bread. I read a book about becoming a disguise. I'll wear no costume and render myself invisible. So easier to be missed when I'm so readily seen. Without being noticed.

I'm so glad I'm not a prisoner of Hawaii.



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