Speeding Ticket
Cold tires and chicken wings. Dinosaurs and dice.
I have a dream-catcher the size of a bicycle wheel and it’s clogged with nightmares now.
The thing looks like a pizza. It drips and stinks and moans. I need some metaphysical Drano. I need some care-bear blood to throw through the cat’s cradle of the first-nation strings, something to melt the caught dreams like sulphuric acid splashed on the face of someone who owes a lot of money to bad people.
I have throwing stars with badly-drawn portraits of a smirking David Duchovny etched on them. I have a phone book filled with the names of people that have been accidentally erased from time. I have a magnifying glass that shows a different world on the other side.
I have a little hand-mirror that shows me, only me, as someone else. It’s very disconcerting. I won all these from a millionaire with sunglasses and a beard in a poker game in Nevada. I also won his bar and his wife.
I drank so much in those days that I don’t even remember why I burnt the bar to the ground. The wife ran off. I remember feeling just fine about both events. I remember that bar fire gusting high when the roof caved in, lighting up the Reno desert outskirts like all the jack-o-lanterns from every porch laughing.
I keep thinking about how that millionaire never took his sunglasses off. That’s not unusual for a poker game but there were a few times, while he smoked his cigar, that I thought I saw smoke come out from behind those sunglasses.
Like maybe his eye sockets were empty and the cigar smoke was somehow coming out of them. Good reason for glasses but not really human, y’know?
I have an extra finger on my right hand. It’s amazing how many people never notice that. That showed up one morning along with a streak of white in my hair and a lost week. I didn’t ask questions and I considered myself lucky.
I own houses in most states. They are all in disrepair. I am a vagabond with money. There are homeless people living in all of my run-down houses. When I show up, I have dinner with them and use swear words and listen to their stories and hang out. They do their drugs or have their episodes. I don’t judge. They don’t know that I own the place.
Somewhere along the way, every day for me became a mixture of Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. A window from twenty years ago looped back with a bright fist and remembered me. I am a string puppet being manipulated by my future self. I am a raffle ticket on a fishhook.
I am an orange peel remembering summer on the tree.
Cold pizza and angel wings. Flying cars and rice.
tags
I have a dream-catcher the size of a bicycle wheel and it’s clogged with nightmares now.
The thing looks like a pizza. It drips and stinks and moans. I need some metaphysical Drano. I need some care-bear blood to throw through the cat’s cradle of the first-nation strings, something to melt the caught dreams like sulphuric acid splashed on the face of someone who owes a lot of money to bad people.
I have throwing stars with badly-drawn portraits of a smirking David Duchovny etched on them. I have a phone book filled with the names of people that have been accidentally erased from time. I have a magnifying glass that shows a different world on the other side.
I have a little hand-mirror that shows me, only me, as someone else. It’s very disconcerting. I won all these from a millionaire with sunglasses and a beard in a poker game in Nevada. I also won his bar and his wife.
I drank so much in those days that I don’t even remember why I burnt the bar to the ground. The wife ran off. I remember feeling just fine about both events. I remember that bar fire gusting high when the roof caved in, lighting up the Reno desert outskirts like all the jack-o-lanterns from every porch laughing.
I keep thinking about how that millionaire never took his sunglasses off. That’s not unusual for a poker game but there were a few times, while he smoked his cigar, that I thought I saw smoke come out from behind those sunglasses.
Like maybe his eye sockets were empty and the cigar smoke was somehow coming out of them. Good reason for glasses but not really human, y’know?
I have an extra finger on my right hand. It’s amazing how many people never notice that. That showed up one morning along with a streak of white in my hair and a lost week. I didn’t ask questions and I considered myself lucky.
I own houses in most states. They are all in disrepair. I am a vagabond with money. There are homeless people living in all of my run-down houses. When I show up, I have dinner with them and use swear words and listen to their stories and hang out. They do their drugs or have their episodes. I don’t judge. They don’t know that I own the place.
Somewhere along the way, every day for me became a mixture of Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. A window from twenty years ago looped back with a bright fist and remembered me. I am a string puppet being manipulated by my future self. I am a raffle ticket on a fishhook.
I am an orange peel remembering summer on the tree.
Cold pizza and angel wings. Flying cars and rice.
tags