American Yarnprose>Gring (The Smile)

MishegasMaster Note: This particular yarnprose poem was the first prose poem I wrote in what I have now referred to as my "Orson Welles Writing Period," on July 31, 1994, back in West Lafayette, Indiana, the city I lived in before returning home to the Chicago-area to began anew.

Gring (The Smile)

Smoke filled the room. I watched as her gaze met mine in the giggles upon giggles of storefronts meant for others. A fly gnawed happily at the discarded men’s magazine, but I suspected that it was more interested in the coffee stains left behind by a greedy yuppie and his less than adequate liberal-minded girlfriend.

The air smelled of comedy. At last the perfect setting. The final frontier. The place where I knew I had it coming if I tried to smoke that last big joint long enough. I didn’t know where I was headed, what I was thinking, what I was breathing. It was those eyes, staring blankly in the darkness. I could only sketch the outer features of her face, yes, such a lovely face. I could only imagine what was sculpted below, the gift of creation, the luck of the drawing, painted by DaVinci, no doubt.

I was drinking in the wonder, the passage of adventure. It came closer, dancing round my head, like the barnacled snake in the basket serenaded by the strange man blowing his reed for a few American dollars.

The cigarette smoke shrieked from her mouth as if to make a statement. A ghost in the human machine, an orange peeled by graying hands and yellowed fingernails, whatever the cause, I didn’t know the reason. She must have thought the scene was happenin’, the scene was so fuckin’ there, so ready, so ripe, so waiting to explode like that cheap dime store novel rediscovered by a whole new generation of tiny tots, too young to remember what it meant to be "fab" but old enough to know that Nirvana was just another liquid monster poured down the throats of those willing to swallow their poison.

I gringed to her. She gringed back. I watched the fly make lazy circles around the head of a gorgeous man in the men’s magazine, as if to make a statement, but then I was probably too intent on figuring out what it all meant. What if for one fleeting moment the fly was right and I was wrong? Was it worth it, just a few seconds ago, to gring at that chick?

I scratched at my sheepskin, so soft and velvety. The winded conversations were getting down right stupid now and you could tell that most of the guys and women in the room had their minds tuned to one thing and one thing only...


sex.

How in the world, they thought, would they get that buxom chick or handsome man home and in bed with them? "Hi, my name is Annie and I’m a Leo, I wanted to be a writer, but instead I
pick flowers and raise baby flies for a living." I didn’t think that the old "what’s your name, what’s your sign and what one does for a living" would work here and yet, that’s what I imagined the chick across the way would say to me. But she didn’t look as if she fit here. The noise lingered on, the beer-swilling yuppies sang off-key, and the politicos (mostly young Republican-types) argued about the latest Rush Limbaugh idiosyncrasy. The wallflowers bloomed here and even the misfits had a good time. I looked around again and saw she was gone, disappeared in the masses of humandom in this seething room. I was saddened, but knew the gring had meant something, even if for only a few seconds our eyes had met and the smoke had pierced my thoughts and left me with an imprint that holds me close and intact for times left unspoken in the weeded sand dunes of undiscovered modern Midwestern mentality.