Romper Stomper

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He stomped space with a drunken toe, suddenly tired from the taste of the melancholy found at the bottom of a bottle.

“No need to worry,” he slurred at the contents, as he swished and swirled them around, before slurping them down. Apparently, he hadn’t had his fill of the same bland taste from the same bland existence of nine-to-five followed by a six-pack in front of the TV every night. Everything he consumed had the same consistency as a cloudy day, with a sharp aftertaste that made him want to die.

He watched the news while smiling sarcastically as some soon-to-be-forgotten celebrity bragged about the things he wished he’d done. But he’d learned to accept the rectangles he’d drawn around himself, because he was smart enough to know that life wasn’t about what we choose, but what we accept.

Everything he had accepted was out of desperation. Certainly that’s how he ended up married to the grey-faced specter who sat across the room in flickering shadows hovering. Few meaningful words had ever passed between their petrified and passionless tongues. He’d called an old girlfriend in search of new flavors for his senses to savor, but their intercourse tasted like the telephone, and their conversation was perfumed in plastic-coated pleasantries.

Sex had become redundant. Even lusty kisses between strangers in strange places were no longer filled with myriad sweet sensations that pulverized him into sweet submission. Joy awaited at the bottom of the bottle amid the essence of his own decaying distress.

He looked at his wife and she glanced through him. There was nothing to say, not even “goodnight,” as he stumbled to the refrigerator for another brew.

Evolution

Temple monkeys sprawl in the sun, unaware of anything but the growling of bellies and the chirping of their broods. A quick jolt of fear by something stirring nearby dissipates as the search for carnal needs takes hold. They do not know that right now, abused kids around the world cry in corners and bleed, models starve in Paris fashion houses to fit into the latest throwaway trends, while in America, teenage girls are either lusting or loathing Edward Cullen while popping pimples and dreaming. Instead, they eat fallen fruit on forest floors in the warmth of ancient temple climbs.

From forest floors to boardrooms and windswept prairie plains, we have not grasped this elemental truth; we are not plastic. We may occasionally be slightly psychotically metallic; unfeeling things, without the ability to realize that there is something better, than what we so easily accept.

Lorena does not smile as crowds of ideas fight for supremacy in her consciousness. In a corner of the street she walks down every day, an old man hums drunkenly. She thinks of joining him, but doesn’t recognize his tune. It is not something she recognizes from the radio. She would ask him, but there is no point. She knows she will not take the time to learn. Instead, she will come up with excuses to forget him and his music. Instead, she will lose herself in the shop windows she passes, without realizing that the painted smiles of mannequins are the only smiles she’s received today.

We are sometimes reptilian, crawling on our bellies without pride or knowledge of legs, following the crowd that follows the crowd before it. Our feet might have lead us to thoughts, but we walked away too soon for them to take hold.

Temple monkeys do not care, as they stand guard over eternity. They live, breathe, birth and die on the same spot, beside the same temple that generations of their kind have occupied since its construction. That is the only crowd they follow. While we rush to go nowhere, blindly accepting half lived lives as reality or fate.

Lorena tries not to care that she hasn’t been invited to the office party. She tells herself that it was an oversight as she listens to the laughter of her coworkers echoing down the corridor. It is fine. It is good, she tells herself. She will show them all someday. She will be something more than she is now, though she has no idea what that could be. She thinks all this, while leafing through a copy of a photography magazine detailing the lives of primitives and primates, to make herself feel superior.

Godiva Undone

To hear my reading of "Godiva" go to the Readings page.

She echoed these words to herself as she lay dying in want of something more; something exciting like a ride through Coventry. “I cannot pretend to be a box of chocolates. I cannot pretend I am capable of love. Shouldn't you have awakened as well,” she asked looking at the sleeping form beside her.

"Those who dream that they are Cleopatra awaken to find black booted reality stomping upon their crystalline fancies." This would be her explanation for the shattered glass upon the floor. If only the shag carpet was able to hungrily swallow each shard of unhinged mirror like a Bedouin in search of one drop of liquid sustenance. But no, reality is not as kind as dreams.

Her old dreams hung upon her brow like beads of sweat, trickling down where they were happily caught on her tongue. She delighted in their salty-sweet-haziness as she silently cleaned up the floor.

“That is all that remains of who I was in murky hoped for memory,” she thought, remembering the poems she’d written and tossed aside like trash. “My memory and I are long lost friends. She and I may have been writing you on those thrown away scraps, so much like these shards. Would you recognize our hands in spite of the blood? In spite of what time has taken from them?”

She looked at her hands. They were no longer beautiful and smooth as they’d been when he’d wrapped her fingers in platinum and gold sealing her as his own. Even their stones had lost their enticing gleam. Her hands ached under the weight of wifely obligations.

Once her hands ached from writing. She remembered in college, how her pen hummed happily; hungry for words, these children of its unholy union with wanton paper and thought. She believed the day would come when she would write them all; delighting in each syllable and phrase. 

Words weren’t dangerous in those days before her husband told her to “hush” whenever she tried to speak. Ideas flowed freely unhindered, and safety hadn’t been their aim. Smoke wasn't the signal of her anger and repression, which she exhaled in explosive bursts.

It had finally come. It had come. The day. This day had come, and now surrender rose on the horizon beckoning her to accept that as the definition of her life. And she smiled in the knowing that this step was not the final one, but the first of many towards oblivion.

This story grew from this poem, "Godiva."

The Conversation

To hear my reading of "The Conversation" go to the Readings page.

Once upon a time, in the land of America, in a place called Brooklyn, two women attempted to have a conversation.

“What a day I had!” said Sylvia, a recent graduate of the ‘Barbizon School for Pretentious Females Over Forty,’ to her companion, Maureen, a manicurist and graduate of the “Billing’s House of Upper-Lip Bleaching.’ “First, as I was perambulating the circumference of my environs, a blitzkrieg of ebony miscreants assaulted me with a glow of amplifiers until my aural cavities, which are much accustomed to more discriminating reverberations, converted themselves into a great void of nothingness.”

“Huh?” said Maureen.

“While I wuz wawkin’ ‘round de block dis mornin’, a bunch of black kids wuz playin’ dere music so loud I couldn’t hear nuthin’!”

“Oh,” said Maureen, while chewing her gum. “Oh my gawd.”

“Yeah,” said Sylvia, “I almost regurgitated my cock-crow victuals all over de place!”

Maureen stopped mid-chew, with her mouth open wide enough to see its’ contents. “Yeah, I hoid of dat happenin’ on de news last night. Good thing dat lady called 9-1-1 or she woulda lost her house.”

Sylvia looked at Maureen, then at the ceiling, which often substituted for God, before continuing her discourse.

“Then this afternoon, because of the idiosyncrasy of my chronometer, I was unpunctual at the conveyance transference locality and was forced to ambulate to the province of my vocation.”

“Huh?” said Maureen.

“My watch wuz slow, so I missed de bus and had to walk to woik.”

“Oh! Oh my gawd. Don’t cha just hate dat?”

“Yeah,” said Sylvia, “if I don’t submerge my pinions in some thermogenic aqua pura, I’m gonna die.”

Maureen raised one perfectly plucked eyebrow, and then slowly let it fall. “Uh yeah,” she said, “didn’t Julia Roberts get an Oscar for playin’ someone who had dat? Gawd, I love her, she’s such a good actress.”

Sylvia became more intimately involved with the ceiling. This time however, it was a nice country lane where happy little bunnies hopped and played over the rotting remains of Maureen. She sighed, contented and refreshed before continuing to speak.

“So after leave-taking the province of my vocation and discerning that it was an unaccountably agreeable day, I determined to promenade to my habitation.”

Maureen swallowed her gum.

“On the way I passed by a pander of pornographers, which was beside a lech of dirty old men with protruding obscenities in their nether regions.”

She looked at Maureen, “you get what I’m sayin’ heah?”

“Uh, I think so,” said Maureen. “Oh my gawd.”

“Well dere wuz dis guy, I mean, this rogue. Well his posterior wuz seized so tightly in his raven cow-hide breeches that I virtually oozed solvent all over my lips and down my chin.”

“Oh my gawd.” said Maureen. “Is dat good?”

“Oh yeah it is!” said Sylvia, “After a quick hello, we wuz like a lubricity of nymphomaniacs, a rut of satyrs, a concatenation of orgiasts!”

“Huh?”

“We wuz doin’ it like rabbits all over de place!”

“Oh my gawd!”

“Yeah, it wuz wonderful.”

They both looked dreamily off into the distance.

“An’ I’ll tell ya somethin’,” said Sylvia almost forgetting herself, “I don’t think I’ll be able to perambulate the circumference of my environs or anyplace else for a coupla days.”

“Well,” said Maureen, “not unless you use lots of hairspray.”