Home

Last call at Errol Flynn's house (w/ gabe)

by Laura Doom


It's taken me a long time to realize
that I didn't get where I am today.
Not that I'm complaining...
Life's too long as it is
without the analytic ruleset.


I dunno about you,
but that sounds an awful
lot like complaining to me.

Personally,
I don't think that's nearly
as bad as waking up
on your twenty-second birthday
to find gray hair and a sense
of nostalgia for the music
you were listening to just yesterday.

While finding out
that most of your graduating class
is getting into the business
of raising children and knocking
the retirement glass ceiling up to forty-five.

But you're right about one thing.

Life is entirely too long.

Any thoughts
on just what the hell
we can do about that?


Well, given that living in the past
is not the elixir vitae it once was
back in pre-genetic history
I suggest a variation on Groundhog Day.
The idea being to chase our own shadows
until the Angel of Death sees the light
and returns to the secular degeneration cull.

Meantime, is there more of this stuff?
I'm beginning to get flashbacks
of what tomorrow might look like.


I don't know.

But that's not really saying much.

There's a lot that I don't know,
either by choice or this night
on the town that's been going on
for about ten years at this point.

I do know that I've taken
to buying two of the same
day-to-day calendars
on the first of every new year.

Just so I can be sure.

Though the way the world's going,
and I know I've said this before,
it won't be long before I'll be able
to distinguish the tombstone block days
from how badly the sun happens to be bleeding.

It kind of makes me look like a jerk
when I start to talk about killing time
as though the body count is cause
for a celebration in and of itself.


So, maybe this is the happy-ever-afterlife
that everyone's dying to avoid,
the eternal dusking of days
spread between appetite and incontinence,
dogs bitching through a truce of attrition.
Just another day in the poetry workhouse
scrubbing romance from the hospital floor,
scraping tragedy off the farce of death.

Either way you look at this picture
it paints a thousand obscenities
and I swear I don't have
the palette for it any more.

I feel sick...probably this conversation
looking for a viable exit strategy.


You know,
I was gonna say the same thing.

Or rather,
niceshoeswannafuck?


You did - and the answer is
a resounding whatever...


Oh, come on now, baby.

There's no call for that.

Nonewhatsoever.

10/29/2003

Author's Note: No need to comment on this - it's been around for some time, somewhere in the depths of gabe's repository for dysfunctional unions - for some reason beyond lauralogical coherence, I've never posted it in my own.
More bittersweet memories scripted with the master of melancholia, Gabriel Ricard...

Posted on 12/28/2008
Copyright © 2024 Laura Doom

Member Comments on this Poem
Posted by Gabriel Ricard on 12/28/08 at 09:12 PM

It's too bad we're not alcoholic musicians, because I think we'd have a hell of a lot of fun on a duet. Thanks for making me remember this, and how much damn fun it was working on it with you.

Posted by A. Paige White on 12/29/08 at 01:07 AM

What a wonderful treat! Glad you reposted it, Laura. My favorite line:
"scraping tragedy off the farce of death." Can't believe I get to be first to clamor for another of these duets...

Return to the Previous Page
 

pathetic.org Version 7.3.2 May 2004 Terms and Conditions of Use 0 member(s) and 2 visitor(s) online
All works Copyright © 2024 their respective authors. Page Generated In 0 Second(s)