Sunday, May 26, 2013

Day 27: Angels wear halos to keep their chins up…


 
 
Not having a beer on a day like today is being lost in a dithering lumber as you trundle down the parallel arteries of the neighborhood where you live wondering which hurts more, your heart (which resembles a nest of used tampons after Lilith fair) or your finances (how the phuck can you be this broke, you work all the time? All you do is work…) a still-life stagger swilled into the kilter and stride of your gait as you smoke,  as you walk, as the clouds slop into  a bulbous dirty parking lot ache overhead, a chandelier made out of used earl-grey tea bags, the vernal quilt of the golf course skiing into optical periphery like freshly snapped leprechaun linen— 

Not having a beer on a day like today is getting pissed off when you notice used syringes on the side of the street (This is West Peoria for fuck’s sake) right next to a SLOW CHILDREN AT PLAY sign sprouting out of the earth  like a willowed husk of corn in late-March.

Not having a beer on a day like today is feeling lonely on a moss-flavored day that looks like you are fumbling across the  optical periphery of time through goggles constructed out of old 7-up bottles.

Not having a beer on a day like today is thinking about the scene in Infinite Jest where David Foster Wallace pontificates, “Sometimes human beings just have to stay in one place and, like, hurt.”

Not having a beer on a day like today is getting a letter from a family member who misread something you composed nine years ago and hurting because you made someone you love and care about hurt.

Not having a beer on a day like today is when she tells you not to publically kiss her forehead on the distilled blankness of her facebook profile page because she has a boyfriend, but you kiss it anyway, a child pirouetting into the stream of a park faucet using only the tips of his toes for the first time.

Not having a beer is having I.M. text-sex with someone you just met, your fingers unbuttoning the powdery clasps of her corset in a snap of alphabetical thumbs and coital vowels.

Not having beer on a day like today is realizing you are out of smokes and that you don’t want to go get more because (for a terse moment) you say to hell with the voluntary 40-day drought  and feel that, since you’ve worked sixteen hours and are going back to work in another four, you more than entitled to    purchase a cheap  $1.29  24 oz. PBR and cracking it open and noticing how the fizz blossoms into a sudsy ovation before pressing the cylinder to your lips only you refrain because part of you knew from the outset that there would be days like this when you would have to refrain from chugging an emotionally  savior-sating beer on a day like today.

Not having a beer on a day like today is hearing her voice for the first time in eight months, calling her because you can feel her somehow and thinking how her voice sounds like a glass whisper kissing the back of your neck when you are asleep.

The sleep of childhood.

You ask if you can give her a hug over the phone.

Not having a beer on a day like today is getting into the company car and blasting out into the country,  even though you are supposed to drive only on work related assignments, you motor into the  gravel veins of desolate country roads,  the sight of a  bruised silo or a hunched over barn somehow giving you hope, barbed wire fences flanked on the side of the road reminiscent of  ledger lines on sheet music  void of notes, awaiting for music to be filled.

Not having a beer on a day like today is realizing that beer would save you. That it would make you feel very happy and relaxed. It would make you feel special and loved.

Not having a beer on a day like today is pulling your car to the side of the road somewhere outside Hanna City and just sitting on the hood and feeling hurt. Wishing there was some metaphysical epoxy you could apply to the metaphysical fissures of lost inside your chest so you don’t fucking hurt all the time.  

Not having a beer on a day like today is listening to the sprinkled gridlock-honk of geese nasally-harmonizing in the next  pasture over.

Not having a beer on a day like today is wishing you could cry because it feels like you’ve failed in every facet of your life. 

Not having a beer like today is looking down and noticing a feather planted near your feet  that you can almost swear wasn’t there when you were pensively staring down at the ground two minutes earlier.  The molted quill taupe-colored with shades of gray, almost the exact same color of the coffee cups they used to have a LUMS back in the day.

Not having a beer on a day like today is picking up the feather like an orchestral conductor and a wand and gently caressing the  stem of the quill where a talisman and somehow (even though it is bleak and grisly and wind-thrashing sullen outside) somehow for a moment, finding hope when you think about the article your read last week in a self-help book  about Psycho-Cybernetics which you wouldn’t be caught dead reading in public because fellow writers’ who recognize you would think you were intellectually flaccid and not well read. Not having a beer on a day like today is remembering the passage you read last week while holding the feather in front of you is remembering the passage you read last week about how a century ago, when the first aeronautical vessels were being created it was always thought that they needed to be build with wings that would flap, when the truth is an airplane doesn’t require wings to fly.

A vessel blasting and ricocheting through chasms of stratospheric arroyos and turbulent ravines of aerie nothingness does not require wings to transport and soar.

Angels don’t need wings to fly.

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