It's not that I'm actually sorry,
but a frenzied mutter of an apology
does seem like the kind of gesture
a desperate man would stutter for,
with the shovel still trying to shake
its viscious way out of his red raw grip.

And it's not like I think you'd listen.

You always were a little unreasonable.

And a bitch,
and a whore,
and a bad liar,
and a lousy cook,
and a terrible lay,
and a whiner to the end.

But mostly just unreasonable, to a fault.

I like to imagine I spent too long living
the pretence that it was just one of those little
things you put up with when you think
you're in love with a last ditch effort.

And it wasn't like you felt any different.

And you think my feelings will change
as I wend my wasteful way through life everlasting?
Well, I can be one hell of a whiner, and take it
way beyond the limit of your lavish stoicism.
That shovel carries class in spades--a symbol
striken with subdural subtlety.
But then, why engage that hypothetical imagination
when the blood is flowing thick and fast as poetry?
The great epinephrine escape--dig your own hole!

It's a once-in-my-lifetime experience
so make the most of it:
smack the bitch
screw the whore
strip the lies
slice the cook
lay it on the line
she can whine while I dine
on the ultimate release,
and bury the evidence
with the self same agent of apocalypse.

You know, this whole scenario
is actually making me feel
quite wet, in an absurdly political
sense of that semiotic irony.

Now that's what I'd call reasonable.
In an idealised version of hell,
you get to wallow in your wish,
assuming your conscience can keep a secret
long enough to hear me dry up.

Is that supposed to be some kind
of last minute threat of everything
you couldn't deliver through every
hour of pretending you were just
a step and a half-assed bad dream
away from really getting serious about
all those drugs you fucked around with
at some college you breezed through
under the charm of being the very best
cocksucker you could ever hope to be.

Or are you just teasing me a little bit?

Because I don't think it'll be much
of a stretch at this point to suggest
that your body's still warm enough
to fire something almost right to the heart
of closure or whatever the fuck that word is.

Ask me again, babycakes.

Go on.

Dare me.

Double dare me,
if you think you can still pull off
the schoolgirl voice with dirt in your mouth.

Would babycakes rise to such insensitivity?
Teasing the man for whom schoolgirls
and dirt are two inextricably linked concepts?
Not that your fantasies ever precluded
me talking with my mouth full.

It comes down to this:
some people like to feel at home,
be in control--sanitized surroundings, recursive routines,
familiar faces; so near, and yet the remote rules.
Well, home never cut it for me.
Call me old-fashioned, but I was always driven
by obsession, economy of opportunity,
maybe schoolgirl naiveté with a twist of fatalism...
Whatever, given the ghost of a choice
I'd favour sentience over sentencing,
whatever the fuck those words mean to you.

I guess what I failed to anticipate
was you having the last word.
But in the end, man created the word
and the word was good, and it was bound
to 'fuck'. Well, no surprises there. Just a limp
association with the myth of closure.

So--this redundant frenzy of analysis;
don't you realise it's all rather academic now?
While babycakes is choking on her doctorate
in rigor mortis, Cro-Magnon man struggles
to digest the importance of being earnest
in the wilderness beyond several degrees
of impotence. It's the same old alluring song--
can you hear the siren's ringtone?

The only fucking thing I'm going to hear when this is over
is the sound of nothing following me everywhere I go
just so it can remind me again and again and agoddamngain
that there's no way out and no use in praying to anything
beyond the bullshit statutes they toss into the center of town
and expect losers like me to fall over and feel grateful
that we even have an outcast job or a bitchwhore wife
or a car that won't even fucking start when it's loaded.

I'm going to devote a little time to the shit I wanna hear.

And obviously,
the shrill sound of a woman who was dead long before
I picked up a knife and decided to move this along,
is not going to be one of the things I'll be waking up to
day after day after endless lost days and stolen nights.

Even if you seem to be having a really difficult time
in just shutting the fuck up and doing me just that last
fucking courtesy of a little peace in the large-as-death
bullet hole mess you call a happy-ever-afterlife.

Which isn't really bothering me yet,
because I figure it's just one more temporary cross to bear.

Yeah, yeah--rewind shuffle, repeat.
But doesn't it seem just a little Socratic
that this volcano of suppressed injustice
is venting its implosive fury
on an island whose sole inhabitant
has already been dispatched
to a sanctuary beyond the realms
of recrimination and retribution?

You can wax satirical to your heart's discontent
but it's for your ears only.
I'm no longer obliged to feign insensitivity
or take tactical leave of my senses
to survive your self-destructive insecurity,
to escape the cataclysm of catechisms.
I'm past caring, beyond indifference,
and you are wasting precious time and space.
Evolution yawns and nothing changes.

And yet our intrepid victim, keen to cut a deal
for his post-medicated act of mercy-killing
valiantly strives to keep the perpetrator alive
long enough for a final futile gesture,
the delivery of his monologue in mitigation.

Well, this is your show now,
and you can script it
with all the shit you ever wanted to hear;
me--I'm merely an echo
of the uninvited guest you turned away,
a figment of your emancipation,
the evidence of mine.

And you act like that's a bad thing.

And you act like I want you to keep talking,
though you should know that if I really wanted
to hear you go on and on like your opinion
really matters anymore,
I would've just cut your arms and legs off
and left the string on your back pulling
eternity to a point that cried out
for some kind of give-a-fuck meaning.

Just once.

And anyway,
this service is taking too goddamned long,
and the last thing I need is the fucking neighbors
having one more fucking thing to talk about.

Or an excuse to call the piggies
away from the market.

So, if you'd kindly shut the fuck up,
I'll be on my way.

You know, I admire a man
who calls a knife a spade,
wielding it like it was
a double-edged sword
though we both know
that's just a play on words
for the benefit of illiterate neighbours
whispering in urbane legend undertones...

"That guy--was he shouting down a corpse?"
"Yeah - God knows what she must've put him through".

So, now you're done playing God
I'll be on my way. What you should be asking is:
will I ever be out of yours?

04/15/2014

Author's Note:

I hate unfinished business, but then recently I've found I hate the finished business too, which doesn't leave me much in the way of places to go, apart from the fabled (or dreaded, depending on your particular perspective) litany of 'stuff to hate'; like 'Author's Note:'s [punctuation meltdown], especially my own, though now I've grown to hate hating the stuff I hate almost as much as the stuff I hated in the first place, which is a lot of hate to stuff into another thing I hate above all others, namely the 'runaway sentence' which, unsurprisingly, was never an issue for my erstwhile co-author, being as he was a master of the overstated understatement with a degree in vernacular vivisection and complemented by an unparalleled ability to sabotage the most convincing conspiracy theory and leave it looking like a tea-party for two in Tiananmen Square, while the last listed item is a loathing for people who just never know when to stop--ever.

So there it rots: the runaway author's note, the author's runaway note or, as a time-wasting/space-saving exercise, the runaway author's runaway note.

Subject to some editing to stave off neural atrophy, remove all traces of poetic pretension, and humour my compulsion to rewrite history.
The invective effluent is untouched; my first responder's equipment was fried in the original fire.
Gabe obviously has better things to do right now, so I doubt he gives a shit what I've done with this one from way back whensome--not sure why I never posted it; probably 'cause it's so sickeningly sentimental.
And why Gabe didn't post it? Maybe he did, and it became a victim of the 'Great Pathetic Wars'
during which previous incarnations, together with their progeny, were struck from the annals of infectious hysteria.
Cautionary note: I have another of these tender two-tone tales lined up for assassination...nothing is sacred.

Posted on 04/15/2014
Copyright © 2024 Laura Doom