The Call

 

Somewhere along the line I lost myself…between the hum and strum of the ballad —the bullshit and harrowing in the harmony—I faded with trembling into an oblivious breath, an exhaling of existential death with cackling and tears, each of them seethinng and holding a version of me forever echoing in Nietschean nonsense, subsiding slightly with droning choirs: my summoning in the interim. I have hands of a man who’s lived a charmed life, but I assure you, charmed it has been not. Well, maybe a little. I’ve had my fill of the frill and a dire derailing of the darkling  thrush—a rambler who stopped rambling, a gambler who found himself mumbling—at the pandemic hour of four in the morning, mourning not but relishing proudly in the pause—a rebel heart bleeding without any gauze.

 

 

And my hands are twin Medusas clamoring before the deer of the dawn…hovering through the dew of the sunrise…as golden strands break and dance through the branches and shimmer through green and yellow grass blades each one longing for a crack in the sky…for Zeus to answer…

 

The keys of the typewriters ticking and a taw.

 

Ticking and a taw.

 

Tomorrow I will mount my motorcycle and mangle what inexorable demons try and torment, what demons tempt to shred me and rend me limb from limb, cowboy boots inches from the blurring asphalt, through and past the heat of Bakersfield, California…where outlaws die, where mediocrity sighs, where the broken bleed and fail to  succeed and sometimes move away to make another home and sigh once they’re fat and old no longer bold where music labels tell them what they’re told, and women is the end of their story from the days of old, where men dig slowly their own graves, where women lose themselves in waves of demanding beauty bars in one too many a stage, and secretly in all this I pray to be the prey of an angry disillusioned freeway snake to batter, butcher, crave and crush of my bouncing body into carcass—what a rush…

 

There are no little old ladies in Valhalla.

 

But for now I’ll sit on my bed against the wall, tumid and tired with a mild headache of it all. Stare at my overgrown belly then my bicycle in the hall. And my wrangler hat by the book case slim and tall. I’m craving food that kills me and struggling off the sauce. Well, I think I’ll take a shower and quite convincingly but wisely, as the sun rises past the oil rigs, ignore the fatal goddamned call.

 

∞