2008-10-11

children without names

Self-appointed caretakers are cooked alive by the rising sun. The apartment house is empty by 10 am. Except for me. I linger in green shadows of my studio, studying the wiring of my wrist. I capture radio transmissions from an invisible airbase in the Nevada desert. They play anti-government propaganda and 1960's surf rock. And I recall hiding my pale skin in Santa Cruz record stores, searching for obscure LPs and trying not to think about my brushes with shark attack. Back in those days, my father assisted with surgery and had drinks with the hospital file clerks in the bowling alley cocktail lounge. And my mother studied religious tracts and ran the vacuum cleaner. My older sisters were faceless and off somewhere getting fucked in suburban bedrooms. I ate dinner alone and lost myself in LP cover art and wrote short stories about the chainlink fence of my school yard penitentiary. I was twelve years old when I started drinking with the bums in the park well past nightfall and got blowjobs from forty-year old toothless women behind the cover of trees. At such a young age I was already nostalgic for an earlier time when I was six years old and wearing a red suit in a hot afternoon of August, waiting at the bus station, watching Greyhound taking people away, waiting for a silver bus to take me away. Hoping to make it to the Stockton airport in time for dinner before my flight to cities without names.