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
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