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Dating Tips for Heathens (w/ Gabe Ricard, Therese Elaine)

by V. Blake

This part of the world has been known
to turn into the kind of riot where everyone
is just waiting until the sun gets its lazy act together.
After that they head back to their families and long streets
that have their own weird concepts of time and space.

Don't fall over. Don't buy a round for every one of your moods
just because you can afford it. Don't show up out of the blue
to find out if the love of your life is either working
the middle of a three-story whorehouse that overlooks
the Atlantic and Pacific from each other or just tears tickets
for that one madhouse with the four live shows every evening.

You haven't played the odds in years.
There's a very good chance that you'll ask
the wrong sideshow stargazer for directions
after getting hopelessly lost in one of those old parking garages.

And of course
it'll be the one that can't decide whether to be a flea market
or just the kind of museum that comes out of nowhere
to break you in two.

This kind of a place has seen
more reincarnations than better days,
dressed up in the kind of poor relation hand-me-down splendour
and enough neon to give everyone that kind of tubercular pallor,
and the floor now has a kind of slow-motion warp that happens when feet are constantly grinding in accidental spills and emotional detritus.
The support beams are sticky with the residue of cigarette smoke, forgotten first names and all the hours
that didn't fall under the auspices of 'happy.'
If you put your ear to the bar you'll hear
the mumbled prayers of saints and sinners alike
and you'll know that no one gets out of here alive.

And you can't really tell anymore what kind of a place this is
because it's covered in ambivalence and has the everyman syndrome.
You could be anywhere. In fact, you know that it's pretty likely
you're in the last place you'd expect to be,
but it's the only one that's open to you anymore.

Some places just aren't meant to be frequented,
and sometimes losing yourself isn't as easy as you want it to be.

And even then,
let's just say disappearing tends to get romanticized by folks who haven't done it yet.

The last thing I remember is thinking that the owners lifted the "Please Seat Yourself" sign
from the gates of hell, and shred every evidence of irony in the act
by laughably managing to increase the malice of the damned thing
when they hung it over the curtains that serve as the portal to the lounge.

The floor, like so many other floors on this side of the umbra,
is littered with empty bottles of the town's ubiquitous soul bleach,
whose usage instructions would have seemed better suited to prophets than whores
if either crew could be bothered to read them,
or if there were contrasts beyond those of uniforms
to be made between the two.

Even presuming such disparities,
the place didn't really attract more of one than the other--
I think most of us just wandered in one day, fell through a crack,
and decided to stay down there forever.
At least that would explain the constantly claustrophobic crowds
in a place with an entrance door that no one remembers using
and an exit door that we all suspect can be opened...

but we're all too damn scared to find out we're wrong.

01/31/2011

Author's Note:
It's a consistently challenging and uniquely wonderful experience to work with Gabe Ricard.
Although this was my first time writing with Therese, it became quickly obvious that she is just as impossible to keep up with.

Posted on 01/31/2011
Copyright © 2024 V. Blake

Member Comments on this Poem
Posted by Therese Elaine on 02/01/11 at 12:02 AM

You guys make it a piece of cake to make with the wordplay...having worked with Gabe and being so familiar with your writing, I knew I'd be hard-pressed to keep up, but I think the three of us did something pretty special here!

Posted by Paul Lastovica on 02/01/11 at 01:44 AM

hotdamn - you don't get to see a three-some of poets duking it out for supremecy only find themselves all on level ground - there's no chance i can pick out who did what in this; a perfectly decadent harmony.

Posted by Johnny Crimson on 02/01/11 at 02:10 AM

I want in on this. This is more than special.

Posted by Ken Harnisch on 02/01/11 at 10:47 PM

an absolutely awwesone and unfair collaboration! the rest of us, struggling to play catch-up, are doomed..:)

Posted by Gregory O'Neill on 02/10/11 at 08:47 AM

Whoa, facsinating three-way. Impressive. Thanks.

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