What I am about to say never happened, what I mean to say is that it
happened many years ago. I’d rented a tuxedo and, in my boxer shorts
& white-pressed shirt, was thinking seriously of putting it on where I
stood beneath the moon’s gaunt winter gape. As if by putting the tuxedo
on I might feel, yes, feel a flood of insurgency. Like that from a dull
lightning bolt or the dolt provided from an elephant gun’s recoil. But it
was getting late, or as monks might say early, and I doubted my given
knack to reach the Dogwood branch where the rented suit hung like the
lost albatross of my soul, high above a ladder’s reach, swaying ever so
gently. The moon was scantly visible, the faint sliver of a nickel entering
its cosmic slot. ‘Surely, it’s nothing a cow would jump over,’ I heard
myself mumble to the grapevine before taking a heavy pull from the boot-
legger’s cigar that, for reasons which still baffle me, I had been carrying
for some months. Moments passed while I allowed myself to choke on what
was a questionable aroma. Soon a cardinal began to sing of the Mona Lisa
while the wind whispered of the frailty of my life—the mind’s poor empty
pushcart, its sterile efforts to make light if not sense of the paper airplanes
which had crumpled to little balls, the whole kingdoms that had been crush-
ed by the ocean’s ugly command. ‘Was there no permanence,’ I recall saying
as, crying like a child lost in his sandbox, the high-rise of waves began to crash.
(CopyRight 2020; eh)
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