Here's One From the Lazy Days of Summer

My goodness. It seems like the day starts right before it starts to end. Where does it all go? Down a hole? Is there a reserve somewhere, and a stringent distributor? I always lie in bed at night, having pushed as far into the morning’s hours as my body allowed, with the taste in my mouth of not having enough drink to wash down a dry bite. Turn up the glass to get the last drop, concentrate the flow, swallow with steady force—and it’s still not enough. A cruel proximity to satiation. And then I drift off to sleep still dry-mouthed, I awake in the morning, sit down to a long wooden breakfast table at the other end of which is seated a man silently snickering behind the blind of a quivering newspaper, and the maid who refills my unwashed glass with the exact same amount of liquid as the day before seems only a little better at hiding her hilarity. I try bargaining, sometimes pleading with her for more, but she scurries off quickly, somehow embarrassed before my confused inquiries, her seams about to burst from the tension of her restraint. I swallow slowly, satisfaction escapes around the bend of an imperfect angle, and then—off to bed. That’s it. Nobody looks me in the eye. And I never get anything done.
Wake up, brush teeth, eat breakfast (an illogical order recognized here), book, store, home, lunch, phone a friend, regular exercise, lethargic languor, hazy words on the printed page, pitiful attempt at creativity, and then off to bed…still thirsty. And feeling like my day consisted merely of carrying out those dull daily prerequisites for experiencing life’s true substance. I’m perpetually preparing to live. A sigh is all that comes out when I pose for prayer, and my words haven’t had time to simmer to moist divinity. I spend a moment hoping that God knows what I mean, and then somnolence sneaks up from underneath and kicks me into the reflective waters. That was another day—and here I am, with two sad paragraphs and eight to ten fingers’ worth of alphabetical buttons.
And every night I’m revisited by the recurring dream of being blessed with insomnia.

Please

The arduous melody flees through the wind-tickled trees and the band players tremble in blushed intimidation at the well-fed notes being born of their horns. My steps transpire on the sidewalk’s surface as if on a coarse independent plane (a squarely sectionalized pathway to the absurd), my mind absorbs the tones and colors of my own psychological projections, dressed and deemed worthy of a fine play on words, and my eyes roam over this town which I’ve seen a thousand times, which I’ve never seen before.
And all of this in my mind. In reality I sit in a church office thinking about her, trying to decide how to die and with what style and which pants. The old people—old couples, sad men, quiet widows, all smelling like embalming fluid—that have been floating across the span of my open doorway for the past three days, here to have their pictures taken for a collage of everyone who hasn’t realized that someday they will die, talk always about their hair and ailments. Ironic, that they perpetually complain of illness and never really die. My God, is it impossible to have a purpose at that age?
My thoughts return to her, her as she stands there blinking into the silence, sits here laughing with that silly friend, her as, eyes gravity-stricken, she whispers to my confidant that she can’t tell who I am. I—I try to justify my jerkiness with cynical syllogisms and existential angst; I try to cry, but I only sneeze.
And every night I pray for hours. Isn’t that funny? I pray for hours and never talk to God. I wake up and spit sloppy insults, write contemptuous words about the sweet, if virtuously mediocre, old people sitting quietly in the folding chairs in the hallway, I refuse to let her into my mind (it’s so messy—I’ve just seen off a raucous band of criminals that ate my food and ignored me when I tried to entertain them at the breakfast table), and I don’t know how to respond when someone actually cares. Funny, right?
Yes, quite funny. I laugh it up in my dark psychotic basements or out in the streets as I burn down the edifices of innocence, drunk as hell.

Prayer

Let me forge these days as my weapon
And not let them merely fly by, raw material.

The earth spins over the years, you know—
Millions or billions, trend dependent—

But our work is to mold it.

Eight Lines at the Beach

The crustaceous arachnids crudely crawling
A slow scamper sideways across the rocks,
The beer-laden duo covered in sandy tattoos
With their illusory masculinity poorly mooring
Weak wills and weird fears,
The tide rises over the bobbing bodies
Of an anxious cluster necessitated by the raging waves,
And the naked girls’ blind butts outshine the seashells.