human suffering 25.9

25.9

You are willingly perverse among the detours and the ditches as you walk and talk the temptations of this world. You are a committed sensualist constantly in pursuit of your prize. You come to me in armfuls of love and desire, shooting the alley cat out the hotel window. I get wooly and hard to live with as I drain another bottle of bourbon, a startling juxtaposition. I was dangling from the chandelier and you cut me down with your razor blade. You shook me from my slumber and forced me to see the shit in the world. We become thick-headed from our derailments and prohibitions. I was thinking of a new name for you, something from the elide- a thing that joins the present with the past. I gave you away in seed packets. I asked strangers to plant you. You were warm and green and had love in your pockets. Your smile is what kept me from dreaming of death. I am standing on your school of fish as I sell lemonade at the carnival. A Rhesus monkey taught me how to squeeze the lemons. There is a wino in the doorway smoking a menthol cigarette. He asked me for a dollar to buy some food. He had tired eyes that were tired of living. He wrote his love songs on little pieces of paper and then posted them on the internet when he could get access to a computer at the library. He told everybody that he was a poet, but no one believed him, they couldn’t see past the tatterdemalion. He lives in the American hotel and remembers the dinosaurs. He said it was important to not be too drunk around the dinosaurs. I am grinding the coffee beans to make a pot of coffee. The wino likes his coffee black, it reminds him of El Paso. He would come visit your hamburger stand and sing you his love songs. You put flowers between his buns. One day he robbed a jewelry store so that he could give you a birthday present. You told him that you only wanted the daydreams that escape from your windows. He ran out into the street with a butterfly net to catch them.