We sat together in the small margins that compose the quantum disreality of the here but not the now. Bukowski stood and leaned against a throne with a full glass of misery and poverty smiling back at him like a long-lost friend.
Me: Yo Jack, I never knew you had a daughter. What’s her name?
Rimbaud shouted from the corner of a room he had constructed by himself and owned as if it was the last planet in the last universe with the last vineyard still growing the only Bordeaux that King Louis XIV would drink, “Penelope…NO…PANDORA!”
Kerouac looked at him from afar with disdain and deep affection, “Wrong, on both counts.”
Me: Don’t mind him Jackie, he’s just bitter because women thought he smelled like a goat.
Bukowski: Not a goat, a cow.
Suddenly Rimbaud stood up from the ancient chair that held his pride so carefully, and yelled, “FUCK YOU CHARLES!” Then he fell back and nursed his wounds against a parade of landscapes, all drawn in blood by Van Gogh.
Bukowski: (still drinking from a jug of Sherry he stole from the cornershop at the end of Hope) I bet you say that to all the girls…
Morrison: You really think he thinks you’re a girl? You gotta be the ugliest girl I ever saw.
I looked around the room and it was empty, not of people but of confidence and dignity. They were the shadows of memories sewn together with worn out woolen patches made from destruction and necessity. The physical residue of a hurricane with a famous mother.
Me: Enough Jim. Chuck is a man, just like you, just like Ernest over there.
Morrison: Say’s you Flores…flores…what is that Spanish for piece of shit?
Hemingway: No, that would be the definition of every name in Ireland you fake.
Jim stood up, wobbled, then corrected himself. “How dare you EH after all the love I’ve sent your way!”
Then Jim grabbed his crotch before blowing Ernest a Marilyn-styled kiss.
(something he knew all about)
Hemingway just sat and surveyed the poetic disaster before him, then smiled that joyless discreet smile he reserved only for those who hated fishing.
“Go with God my son”, he said then took a deep draft from his cigar and blew it right in Jim’s beautiful mug.
Finally Sappho spoke up, against the objections of Stein, Parker and Dickinson (who preferred to just leave quietly).
“I’m bored”, she said, “You men are very boring.”
I laughed with Whitman and we shared a wink while Eliot said a quiet prayer for the sun to rise again.
“Time to eat!” cried Melville from the door to the kitchen where Poe chopped quail and onions while Stout played God Bless America on the harmonica. The first one to rise was Kafka, “I’m starving”, he said as he rushed to the door pulling up his threadbare hospital trousers.
“It doesn’t matter how much you eat Franz,” Marx chuckled, “you’ll always be starving.” He nodded to Nietzsche, who was fast asleep, and Freud before putting on his jacket, taking a last long drag from a Turkish cigarette he bummed off of a completely disinterested Plath, then left the room to nowhere.
I woke up with my cheek glued against the concrete
By the spit and hatred of my shame
Concrete on concrete is what I thought as I pulled my lip free
And broke out into song
“Mommas don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys…”
It was the first and only song I could think of that made any sense
Of the madness and chaos that had descended upon my soul.
Not the sleepin in my own vomit
Not the smell of piss that broke the air like a terrible perfume of
Man’s inadequacy
Waylon Jennings and his warning to all mothers that some men
Some broken men
Could never be relied upon except when they were leaving you behind…
It wasn’t long after that that the whole cosmic weight of my failure fell upon my mind and body and I became like a modern Atlas waiting and hoping for the god of thunder
To put me out of my misery.
“For Christ’s sake stop singing that damn song!” I told my head
Blistered and uneven
Shocked and forced into a state of unwanted sobriety.
All the while an old man whistled a broken elegy to his lost Samantha…
Samantha…I thought…sounds like my Sophia…
Sophia…
it was then the tragedy of all I had done and tried to forget played like a video on a loop
Over and over in my mind
Sophia…
the brilliant little star that had always shined so brightly through the infinite shadows that I had thought were my only friends…
Sophia…
the smile of Helen…poised and assured…that made me believe I could create something more than disappointment…
something full of love…and everlasting
Sophia…
What will she think of me?
The words limped across the darkness of my shattered mind only to find their way into the deep pool of my regret.
What will she think of me?
Sophia…
My little ‘fish’?
Where Smart People Go BOOM!
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