REDEMPTION

“The sea can wash away all human ills.” —Euripides

SLEEPING WITH JANIS

 

Janis growled and scrunched. Covers  clawed tighter. Jack Daniels Black, old smoke, sweat, and musk. Geez, how did I get here? Damn, this world is small and dark. The electronic squeal, the pneumatic thump in the ‘throne just before the wail of the D, C, G, A pattern brings me down on her and up with 30,000 others in the dark outside her light. Nah, that was then not now. Now it’s the air–thick with images–raw, animal, consummation in absentia ex post facto.

Cry, Baby, the Benz didn’t happen, but I’m always lookin’ at the rain. Cold, soiled soul listening to gray scrunched sheets obscuring the ball and chain of time. Forever tryin’ a little bit harder to give her a piece of my heart but always slippin’ away to look for home. Ah, “home” I hope she has found it.

Exiled in my home, I don’t sleep much anymore ; dawn always a long time coming as I hear her virginal voice shatter the faded darkness, over and over and over; eternally pleading for someone to warm the small dark world.

 

Dry Emotion

“Let us understand we live in Carthage.

Let us understand our sacrifices.

It is the fourth year of an eight-year drought.”

—-Andrew Hudgins, “The Fourth Year of an Eight-Year Drought”