living well is the best revenge

never was on time
yes, I once was mine
well, that was long ago
and darling, I don’t mind.
yeah, they were just two fucks in lust
baby, that just don’t mean much
you trained me not to love
after you taught me what it was.

one.

New cities are positively disorienting. Here he is, 40 years old. From a city whose half-millenia old streets are so naturally convoluted yet he can’t figure out the goddamn Chicago subway. Even longer before than when those Boston streets were first beaten into ground, he, a man, is a natural navigator.

There are two Western stops on this fucking Blue Line, he mutters to himself.

As if it could understand the expletives eeking out of his mouth, his baby starts crying foul. The woman holding him forces a factual edit. Their baby starts crying foul.

A baby herself, she was now in charge of their one-year old, a product of his penchant for booze, their bad decisions and her B-cups. Though to be fair, they are larger now, C maybe, thanks to the frustrated little prince in her lap.

The newborn is the primary reason they took the redeye into Chicago in the first place. The reason they are silently racing alongside the equally silent highway the train runs besides.  Why they are the sole passengers on the train besides the sleeping homeless person sitting as far from them as is humanly possible. (Her Cambridge prep school background rearing its uppity head).

The baby’s cries slice through the previously quiet L car. It wakes the beast.

He smells absolutely awful, a putrid combination of lazy sweat, cheap scotch and active ignorance of modern societal acceptances. He doesn’t even know why they let them on the trains.

Sure they fill the T platforms back home, but they don’t ride the trains. Where do they have to go? Why shouldn’t he ignore the facts that the T platforms are underground and protected from the elements and that, especially on this day, it is warmer to just ride the trains back and forth? No, this man doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. He is a failure and his punishment is his existence as a sub-human class.

The homeless man wakes up and begins to walk over to them. He can feel his wife tensing up by the step. His nine-year-old (not theirs) behind him has found the homeless man’s approach scared enough to be distracted from his crime-glorification in the form of a video game.

The smell of the man. The look of him. His outfit could not be intentionally reproduced by any sound individual. A parka jacket hides his amalgam of stained sweatshirts over painters pants and shoes that are more holes than shoes. They are much too distracting.

Too distracting for them all to focus on the train slowing.

Too distracting to kill another hooker for 500 points to buy virtual coke.

Too distracting to shush a swearing husband.

Too distracting for the lost man, a full man with a full life, to hear…

“This is the Western you’re looking for, sir,” before he exits the train car.

Whip it real hard. Whip it. Whip it real hard.

I am at total loss. It’s one in the morning and I’m walking in the wrong direction to wait for a bus that isn’t scheduled to come. I had something to tell you. But I am without words. Without the ability to put thoughts into words.

I walk slowly to the end of the street to catch my breath in every way. What I had to say was time-sensitive. But time and sensitivity are of no importance in my current state. This is whiplash. You are the cause. The effect that which I am feeling spreads and my muscles tighten.

I run my fingers over my lips trying to gather the remnants of your kiss before it evaporates forever.  But it is soon gone and all I’m left with is whiplash. The feeling spreads to seeming incompletion, filling an everlastingly increasing space. It hurts and I hope it will until I see you again.

Whip it real hard. Whip it. Whip it real hard.

GC

classics

first, there was hepburn. second, doris day. and now, grace kelly. 

the hell with chronology.

white flag

You are very patient for someone who doesn’t claim to be. But your patience wears thinner by the day. I am slipping from your formal conscious. I’m falling off the front page and into the more mundane sections, the glossed-over menial noise that fills the portions of our life uninteresting.

Steadily the number of potentially positive end games is decreasing and I feel a final defeat coming. It is the worst feeling, a purgatory not for heaven, but for hell.

What’s worse is that there has been no final verdict, nothing to cope from or brace for just yet. My heart twists the sliver of a chance I might have into an insanity rationale that creates immense senses of hope and possibility. So great is this feeling, that I’m falling harder now for you than I would have if I played my hand straight. I’m hurtling faster in the wall that will, by most likelihoods and predictions, destroy me.

The scariest part of it all is this.

I’m not sure if I could stop myself, I would.

GC

when i met you i broke the mold
i fell apart and combed my hair
whiskey shakes for ten whole days
stay off the streets at night for weeks

i don’t wanna be your catholic pagan now that you’re here
we’re counting on each other for love, survival, and everything else

please don’t padlock your parents’ bomb shelter
or fill her up with dust and ash
a landfill mecca for burnouts
and listless adolescent sour mash

i’m not saying that i’ve earned love
but i could really use it now
so turn out the lights over and over and over
we’ll figure out the rest somehow

the ability to converse is underrated. engaging and insightful dialogue that remains in the realm of natural and effortless? that’s sex with the lights on. 

there’s more there now. more to compute and comprehend. but even with influx of new data, the processes seem easier. rather than complex, it is paradoxically more simple. you can see more clearly now the moving pieces. how can that development not make everything better? 

so talk first. then fuck. then talk and fuck if that’s something you’re into. 

the beauty of great conversation is that when the lips finally stop moving, they don’t stop moving.

GC