American Yarnprose>Checkmate

Checkmate

I lean over to taste the fruit of tomorrow that I want so much but would rather let it rot in the opportunistic ritualistic timeframe just as happy couples are giggling over coffee and conversation at Starbucks. I pretend that I am sad, but realize in the world in which I must live, I must also create, spawn and die.

The fates, which I hold in my fingertips often, freeze me out from the reality of the locomotive timetable that huffs and puffs its way down the train tracks of veins, nerves and molecules.

In becoming the man that I am, I have chosen to live a semi-righteous path filled with shadows, skeletons, bones and crafted words pouring like flames from a rooftop in the wee hours of night.

The need becomes a hunger and the hunger becomes a lust and the lust becomes a pain and the pain becomes a desire and the desire becomes a love, a love which I have no cure for, like slaughtered caresses dripping the finalities high and dry.

I think of those quiet boyhood moments which are more or less gone, gone in the way of the milkman and the young newspaper delivery boy I once was.

My new age strikes a resemble to a scared child facing his first time alone and away from his parents. Details are sketchy and sometimes I think I don’t want to remember those times, as they are too painful to recall and too embarrassing to speak of.

A long time ago, I went rolling down the street talking to myself and sipping wine, hoping I would be noticed, but alas, I was a poor muttering bum in the nostalgic alleyways of the gone and forgotten. So many of us this time of year. How pathetic it seems and yet it is all true. Never a home for us. Perpetually roaming the streets and alleys in our minds hoping to find a heart and a little tender love.

Well. I guess what is said is true. I don’t say much here. I just watch and observe the madness all around me. Madness in the hall. Madness in the toilet. Madness in the closet. Madness in my bedroom. Madness on the telephone. Madness in America. The list goes on and on, but you get the picture.

My birth, a symbol of the furtive state of humankind, discriminatory chooses to protest against women, children, spacemen, Indians, cripples, coffee mugs, pills, poems, songs, pencils, records, teabags, newspapers scattered and piled high like corned beef on rye, sports, snobs, dust, fat cells, breathless teenagers, Christmas, Easter, St. Pat’s Day, fireworks, soldiers, politicians, Texas, Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and above all, Indiana, world capital of the lunatic bible-thumping Quaker-crunching, KKK- stumping, and basketball worship humping lowlife.

I once knew a man so deep he was drowned. Sex was his savior. He wanted it so bad; he could taste its fingertips in his mouth. No faith, no glory tells your sad, sad story.

Checkmate.