The Curdled Cat
I stand at Toilet, piss on the seat and drink orange juice from the carton. The cycles of reincarnation. Drip on my toes and so cement me. I haven’t done my push-ups, managed wake-ups in the nick of luck. Don’t look at any reflection just yet. I scratch chest like lotto and try to feel, muscle bone beat. I feel one shoulder then the next, and then ‘ceps and ol’ forearm. I pull my calves up to my to my lower back, pissing all over the bathmat. Bootstrap. The juice carton goes in the plastic trash bin and the toothbrush goes in to fight the orangey. Mirror give a guy a break. I feel my chest again, trying to pinch ribs and casually keep count. Hold still you buggers. In the shower before I know it. Shower learns me that I’m in. The hot water falling down, I grab my sides again, now sure that there aren’t matching hearts and clubs, no suits for I-and-I this heyday. The shampoo goes in my hair; piss reeks up from the mat as steam turns to smoke. Maybe only it’s that I’m not standing up so straight. I stretch more in the shower, huffing, trying to open my chest. What is that. Vicks? Next shaving. One side of my face there is scratchier and more leather-gnawed. Is this penance for push-ups? I cut identical rifts with the razor, rubbing in the aftershave until I’m mended symmetry. Shaving without mirror. I lean all the way back onto my tailbone until the skin is stretched taut against my stomach, niggling at fat. Two sides of the hip are not at about-face, cannot dialogue like chums. Standing up very, very straight my hands drop to my sides and I feel for pockets in my thighs, equivalent places to put the hands so I can see if they are the same length. No standard can be achieved, no weights and measures. I wish. I am a-jangles. Throwing on clothes I think I could do twelve push-ups, to atone instead of ten. But push-ups are before shower, and that’s writ. Apartment a loose collection, no guiding principle. Man and woman but girl and boy when clinic comes between. Me that guy, that guy, that guy, the couch, stoned at all hours, drunk even upon waking, drove my car into the porch last week, oblivious or impervious to abortion and why shouldn’t? Not mine, but was my friend before my hips clenched out of align and hers clenched out of: “MEMPHIS TENNESSEE.” Who are we us these people? Radio always, doesn’t have to be coming from anywhere. No lights on, radio, radio, lights: no. Girl there all sprawled out on the couch, wombless what a first, cat curdled nearby, boy gets the bed tonight I see, one of these days someone will ask for my room. Bed hunches your spine a fair piece down the road, can’t recommend. Not thinking that way. No car so bus stop. Good lord what a fucking hall of ghosts. Each room modeled after somebody else’s vision, past life of people whose lives aren’t even anymore, not even present lives, bunch of squatters are we, merry roving band this part of the country. Friend started building baby’s room without telling, guest room or some shit excuse, room for baby that is a word that no one can say, me only the third wheel, couch-bound car wreck. “WHAT WOULD YOU DO FOR $111?” Want to yank that voice but got no clue, direction a non. Another thing that nobody turned on. Apartment got ghosts like fleas, no spook, just hateful. A place no one can get out of but everyone is gone. No discussion of how we came, such a universe of used-to-be-friends, liable to wake up anywhere, any old place, hope you wake up all shipshape, cuz if not. Shitshape. Okay, so the bus. But at waiting I am called. Yeah, Phony Baloney RigaTony, be by in a jiff if the bus. We rollin’ this day? I have thrown on clothes; loose, loose, loose keep from seeing my ruin. Don’t seem to hobble, subtle hunchback at this point of morning, bleak form in sweatpants and jersey. Bus has come and gone, town square waiting, in the lurch and not even noon. Sip a chocolate milk, summer a’coming. Motorcycles scoot by, deliveries of smut to the general store, and chocolate milk. What jersey am I wearing anyway this June, but don’t look, accentuate spine fuck, drove car into the porch what a goddamn-it. Sip with a straw so fewer spittle. Cheeks sliced like pears, aftershave burn real good. Sun eyes me logy, sees me there tryin’a’ keep cool, just you wait boy, sweat noon soon. You bake pears this part of Mississippi or Tennessee? Pay them $111 sooner or later if bake ‘em good. Milk rotten like a dime store porn mag, don’t hold off. Dog days early onset, be want to die by two, no ice cream do you any good. Cell phone, beat box ringtone Saturday on the airwaves, ice cream rin’d too, on the street sidewalk dirt on the basketball summer days, browsing, downloading like a hornet, just give me everything onto my storage and then I’ll have it and when it rings, BOOM BA DOOM BOOM BOOM. What would you do for $111? Aloney Zamboni, speak good clear Queen’s this time around. Road trip, no telling where tomorrow, get you out of that hole you’ve been driving whose porch into. The Queen’s English, no doubt. Your wheels? I am wheels, no worry. So swing by. Hella day for hard labor, not in mind, hope not to foresee it. Don’t break your back, hero. I gag. He knows. I’m broken in two-by-four. Can’t let on. Yeah, good. Here I am. Pick me up. Got nowhere but for here to wait until us is. Be seein’ ya. Think of the roommates, like is there a tipping point or if it just gets worse and worse and worse. People basically wrecked, don’t know if that’s saying anything. Place a sinkhole, pull down ships if they go too near, killed its own baby if you ask, nothing new birthed from there, cat barely more than mange, no manger, motley better off than no one. Watch them hobble. Radio in the store some kiddie reading rainbow, girls and woods and hoods and bread crumbs and scarecrows and gum drop ovens the better to cook and eat and ask three riddles to you with, drink this chocolate milk before hot cocoa unseasonable ice skating in winter wonderland with more girls in hoods and the Loch Ness circling underfoot and the woods are deeper there, in Sweden, Swedes in Spades, where the ponds are frozen if that’s what we dwell on, and who knows what lives beyond the thicket. Do things heading out to die seek out the already dead or to be alone instead. The Tibetan and the Egyptian Book of the Dead might spar for us, if given reign. And then knowledge. Old, old, hobble, cigarettes tucked in breast pocket, blue with factory-sewn name above the heart, Shawn, Cullin, Morty, shirts sagged like my real chest on this splendid morn. If somebody doesn’t turn off that radio. And then Goldilocks asked the frog man if he’d like a kiss and he said no a wish and she said eat your porridge or I’ll have the Sultan string you up with a noose of hair and you’ll dangle from the parapet until your friends roll by in a Saturn and shout, hey dick wad get in we’re rollin’. That’s me getting in, squeezed into bitch in the back seat, no doubt, now finally at liberty to blare n’ roll into the speakers. Feel a twitch, need to manage to never return to that apartment. Turn that music up. Toll man: turn that music down. But where are we, who’s got a dollar, who’s idea, you have any idea how hot it’s s’posta get? Grandparents’ homes ring the city. Inner part all flophouse, cock and flopdooble, rush of souls of a weekend, slurp down on the bars and gobble molecules till they’re good and fucked and can swoop again into the week where no one’s got a name and shuffles right through the noon hour, morning to night, shuffle paper the souls do in the city. Keep finding quarters at the bottom of shot glasses, booby trap from petty haunters lived there before us, want sucking metal think that’s funny. Grandparent land, pay-per-preview of us and fate, a date, for two, may I take your order dear sir or madam. To whom it may concern. Drive, drive, drive, boom-boom-shackalack, you know the band wiseguy, Drive. With miles and miles under the car, sun starts to make good, no vague boast, with my head at my knees I will keep my head still. Stare at the cornfields as they get cycled through, repeat with variation, learn and learn and still not get anyplace, same old country, these eyes are the eyes of the old and I am draped in a jersey and hunched like a claw but otherwise am dad. Not dead. So now too bright. No one worry, free men today, no paper to shuffle, there isn’t a number you can call the pay phone. Four other guys in that car, all variations on Tony, Toby, like any old anyone could find you sitting next to, in some locality. Me in the middle keep faltering for left or right window, just corn neither way, neck a grinding halt, a jumblee from the land of men who went to sea in a sieve. See that damn baby out there in that sieve, listening to the radio underwater. Bring it back all sopping for the roommate, wrap in a towel or piss bathmat for the girl and then they can get married and move out, and me too. Ever having used to know anyone is a funny tale. If anyone survives. Classic refrain right, no-brainer, everybody hurts. Milk in stomach like cat on couch, curled. $111. $110: fridge; $1: milk / porn. Haven’t been seeing while driving for a long spell. Tony in the cockpit at the gears, drunk drive like gangbusters, mason jar this way comes, neck crack, click-clack, tick-tick, tock, radio mentions the clock and I oh no, dream within a within a within a within a within a, but no, that’s high school passé. This is a me within a car within a mason jar. And neck crack and glug and then oh but sweetness follows. Tunnel vision. Straight and narrow to our destination, place away from dead things for a lone chunk. Curiosity killed the cat but for a while I was a suspect. Past tense gnomic voice. One thing I know. Prince Caspian of the scrolls and the wishy-wash, spread them over this Saturn window light show corn epic, and step from X-marked spot to the next, to a T. Roll across gravel strewn tundra, speed scrape and then none. Kill the engine, first dead thing, unless dead heat so two, but nonsense isn’t new to me. The Killing Fields. Golden sun, golden corn, golden horn. Wander ‘mongst the blades, hey there stranger, you gonna share your smokes there or what. Make an Iroquois circle hidden in the ticks’ thrive, and smoke. Dead stoned and stone drunk half the time on that couch, God’s level best worse off the other halftime. Cousins come traipsing through apt. past my puddle of gloom on the carpet, piss on the bathmat like Sandinistas and take their place for the evening, care not about who’s no longer with us, Ignoreland. They hypnotized the summer, 1979…cool kids never have the time. Like a live wire, jumped across the street. Tony, yo Riga’, take your fuckin’ hit. Yo sorry hey. Mellow in the dead spring, but that dead heat’s been counted. Scott free. Pack another, another pack but I quit. You and whose army. And then evening onward rolls, fuck me kitten, the couch the cat the girl the baby, but no, ‘twas his. No death in this field of amber waves and Goldy Locks. But enough = enough. Ticks have thrived and more on less. But still. Sick. Not in that car backward get. Who’d know the way. Test legs. Stand straight to a T. A tunnel cuts one way not two. Shan’t chocolate milk in the cool evening smutty another ever more chug. Yo Tony, see me for a minute here. Left leg a fork, right a spork, a sprocket, a spring, Toad the Wet. Toe’d the wet grass in time for Monopoly, Twenty-one, Checkers and Chess. [Yeah-yeah yeah yeah]. Broke into a run. Suck air easy for won’t be needing it. Suck it all, go back there a damper, radio-free Europe from now on. Friends watch in Tony-stupor, can’t see rightly, field an easy mile-circuit, no sense in census, don’t count and be sure. I book it, clamoring and clattering and going to pieces, a prescient body listen, how else to respond. This is motor, some small town paper scoop it up. Tell ‘em what back home? Easy. Mr. Andy Kaufman’s gone wrestling. Clatter crack and crumble, leg gropes for ground until finally by knowing can let go. I forgot my shirt by the water’s edge, and the moon is low tonight. A lessen before dying, please radio I’ve heard you, now these things they go away, replaced by every day. A mile in a minute. That’s what. Can do it if you’re not to go home, all chips on the table. What you see is you: I though I knew you; you I cannot judge. Unraveling of balls of words; The Morning has to be one morning so this morning. Wake up and see it, smell the napalm of which whose smell you allegedly love. Now I know, say I’m sorry to them but lie, their cat to brood over, not to return and admit of my children. But find them underwater, the man who went to sea in a sieve. Name him Tony. I don’t think all these people understand. Now floating in Finnegans pond they casket my Olympic leg mess. And leave to bobble toward the conduits of water bodies until we are one. They set out backward, watch the road and memorize. Simple: I have got to find the river. Closer now than lightyears to go. *** To leave the dead and pay the toll on the highway for midnight snack and the whir of soul-molecules is easy into a town that dies and lies and wakes again, a car crash porch abortion is no Ides in no book; smut and ten dimes for a dollar. Stick shift no longer a chore. Stop for a drink: a truck stop instead of St. Peter’s. Rolling funerary down the corn promenade:
[Automatic for the People].
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