Moonless Fade

The night wind cuts hard as diamond

in through the corner of his eye,

bleeding salty tears warmer

than anything the evening offers.

-----

The streets spill into a squalid beauty

past hungry shadows hiding from themselves,

the lost who cast forlorn reflections

off sightless puddles in surrender.

-----

He stumbles bent by this rain swept congregation

in damp and damaged spastic kicks,

enslaved to the madness pouring out from within,

down past cavalcades of vanity and steel -

-----

with their ragged jacked current coursing through his aspirations,

with their ragged jacked current ungrounded through his short hairs,

with their ragged jacked current draining his best intentions,

with their ragged jacked current now blown only for him.

-----

Cold now.

Quiet.

Then it's gone into one last diamond point of light,

leaving only the moonless fade.

The Outcome

Autumn has shed its skin

to winter's dark embrace again;

oblivious to the seasonal myopathy,

I contemplate her absence stretched to perpetuity.

The Philadelphia evenings fester

as daylight drains to ebony.

Boathouse Row shimmers like endless Christmas

reflecting damp off the Schuylkill, absorbed by the sick of me.

I stagger down Bainbridge, numb

to South Street's Saturday revelry.

Their faces enraptured, so happy in the moment

and so utterly alien to all I'll ever be.

I feel the outcome, as certain as yesterday's rage,

as grim as an undertaker gone to seed.

I inhabit the outcome and then simply wait.

To go.

To be gone.

Really, really gone.

Daddy-o.

Freed.

Ketchup on Champagne (Last Year's Fever Dream)

I am floating on a giant pair of scissors, cutting smoothly through a boiling ocean of Listerine. I didn't realize scissors were buoyant but damn it they are in this adventure through the looking glass.

How, you might ask, do I know I am navigating through mouthwash (and how in particular am I certain it is Listerine and not, say, Scope)? It's a good question. All I can tell you is that in this dream the substance and brand are givens, as sure as the air we breathe. Several of my shipmates, it should be noted, are regularly dunking little cups into the antiseptic waves as they crest across the scissor blades, gargling with the stuff before spitting it back into the deep.

I am clearly captain of this fine vessel and I have the best crew you could hope for. Well ... not exactly ... My USS Scissors is manned with an odd assortment of team mascots (Phillie Phanatic and San Diego Chicken), Krofft characters of yore (H.R. Pufnsuf and Sigmund the Sea Monster) and Sesame Street regulars (Big Bird and Snuffleupagus).

This felt-heavy menagerie is fortified by the addition of Sally Struthers, a gaggle of Christian Children's Fund (CCF) kids (presumably tagging along with Ms. 'Gloria' Ginormasaur), and Rob Reiner, his Meathead 'stache glued to his upper lip and 70's wig covering his chrome dome. Archie Bunker's chair is tied down to one of the scissor handles for some reason but no Archie or Carroll O'Connor accompanies it.

Maybe the CCF kids are mine. I've been sponsoring them for some time now (no thanks to Ms. Struthers and her voracious appetite; in fact, visions of her grinning girth among the starving almost made me renege on my pledge, suspicious that at least a portion of my monthly offering went to feed her Pizza Hut jones). Mainly, that kindly grandpa looking guy in the TV spots shamed me into it. And I wanted to prove that some of us non-Christians can nevertheless sometimes act more in line with the teachings of that lean clean Nazarene than the supposed true believers.


Anyway, back to the nightmare recap, already in progress ....

The dream started out pleasant enough, as we sailed through the boiling mouthwash under clear skies and relatively calm seas. We were all singing ABBA's Fernando and eating from apple and pear trees that rise just above the tops of the gingivitis-fighting waves. I kept having to slap Sally's hands away as she repeatedly attempted to steal fruit the CCF kids had already picked and gathered for themselves. Get off your fat ass, reach out and pick your own, lady! But all-in-all, things were going "swimmingly" (in fact, the Phanatic was a bit drunk having swallowed too much Listerine during a brief anchorage taken to let the gang dive into the "wash" for a few laps around the scissors, mainly to rinse the stink off their hides).

But then the skies darkened and the seas grew rough, the clouds arrived blood red and the driving rain a blindingly bright day-glo yellow.

And now we are no longer alone in this aquatic wonderland.

Now there are wild Pterodactyl-style prehistoric birds of prey filling the hemorrhaging sky as they circle our craft, shiny from the banana-hued sheets of rain hammering down on us from the heavens. The mascots, Ms. Stivic, her CCF toddlers, the Meathead and I sit back on the scissor handles, raising our blades up into the sky to stab at them, opening the spears and cutting them shut as those filthy birds move in for the kill, dive-bomb style. We clip off a wing here, a head there - blood splashing into the Listerine like ketchup on champagne. (There's a picture - but that's the analogy my crew keeps muttering over and over: "like ketchup on champagne.")

Sally/Gloria loses an arm in this bird/scissor battle before it's all over and Rob/Meathead is stabbed in the eye by a Pterodactyl beak, knocking him back into Archie's chair. The San Diego Chicken is taken by the neck and spirited away, up into the clouds, never to be seen again.

Then suddenly, in the midst of this maelstrom, the bubbly greenish clear ocean turns thick and brown. A horrific smell slowly arises from its depths and permeates my nasal passages, finally enveloping my entire being. Listerine has morphed into shit. I take a whiff and get sick. And then I wake up, sick.

I make it to the bathroom, thankfully, and greet the porcelain receptacle with an early morning technicolor yawn. I often pine for the times I'm able to make regular and "productive" visits to my favorite "reading chair" given my increasingly severe "blockage"; however, it's a different cheek resting on the cold white ring with the flu 'round my throat. Nobody I know wants that (apologies to any bulimics reading this who might take offense; your company is excepted).

For a long time thereafter, I tried and failed to shake the dream. No tidy ending, no resolution, no reason for being.

It just was.

A Toilet of Beauty

My father grows old in the toilet,

a desolate room

with the air thick as mold.

----

He works life there in perpetual sweat,

a captain of industry

building factories of sick.

----

Little bits of wonder found in claustrophobic vistas

often linger in his melancholy,

kissing the linoleum.

(even when repugnant to his hesitant eye -

even as the porcelain drains his dreams bone dry.)

----

The mirror blissfully out of reach,

my father hugs his friend,

wrapping his arms 'round the cold white wet.

----

Yes, my father grows old in the toilet

amidst his softly sour splatter,

the holy cracking plaster,

and half finished caulking consecrating his divine.

----

So many contemplations,

so many toilets of my own

since a childhood spent listening to my father pray.

The eternally pungent confessional,

with a compassion beyond religion,

kneeling, catharsis, release ...

Until a trembling tug of the handle

flushes the misery for a moment from his mind.

And from mine.

Watercolor Oil

She reveals herself in water color

dripping off the faucet -

As for me, I look away

bent shaking broken naked.

She's brushing rushing sidelong

through the throng bug eyed nightly -

As for me, I find my gaze

drawn downward weakly, softly sadly.

She lives serenely in the moment;

there is no time for her but now -

As for me, I see 'now' rarely;

revisionist schisms consuming all my doldrums.

She dines at fashionable notable eateries -

I lick clean the floorboards of dive bars and state stores -

She's snow light dancing madly aching,

drunk with wit at Prince and Thompson -

As for me, I sit in silence

afraid of going comically melding mad into television.

Or, in the end, is it television off its rails

melding headlong into me?