One Summer evening a few years back, within August's fiery hearth, red glowering heat illumined a pink-pastel horizon, while off in the distance; freight cars rattled helplessly down long narrow railway tracks, and for those no longer living, this is where it all ends.
I sat at a local counter next to a pleasant looking older lady seeking employment at Kellogg's warehouse, mumbling in deluded apathy to herself and whoever may listen "just a nine to five shift is all I need damn-you" shaking her fist at the barkeep, wiping her painted-violet nails on a balled up bev-nap. We sat at a far end of the tavern beside a unisex bathroom, as the door swayed out and in from trafficking locals; routinely pushing methadone and amphetamine.
A rural city outskirt town assumes its own borderline personalities once you've stayed long enough. Enduring pointless mindsets between onslaught seasons of dissipated failure, myself included being flagged from this establishment many times for threatening behavior.
A dated jukebox dinned uselessly in a dim smoke-filled background, probably repeating some contemporary country song about heartache:
"Don't break it................ youuu jusssst......... may lose it, come on shake it I jusss.... cannnt... refuse it................"
Earlier that day, cement sidewalk lines blazed in sparkling noontime, below sky-vast chambers of ultraviolet sunbeams, embedded footprints enveloped a Main st. bus-stop perimeter, prior to grey evening clouds creeping in at a later hour when nothing matters.
We all walked the neighborhood plank before, blind folded, bleary-eyed, knowing not love nor empathy in barroom hearsay, only lies of lust-filled encounters and deceitful anecdotes. Tongue-tied, tormented and blistered- feel death drawing you in long enough, you almost start welcoming it.
Staggering homeward one dawn, mental confusion began rearing its futile engine, countless promenades down this dirty alleyway feeling busted, disgusted and entrusting strangers to personal treasures we gather together in vacant dreamworlds.
One late Tuesday amid happy hour, sometime during the fall, I recall leaves of auburn boughs oscillating downward gradually, descending silently off rows of wooded maple, resting lavishly upon gritty street clefts of a cul-de-sac near my apartment building.
later that night toward closing-time, I couldn't help
noticing a petite younger-looking woman sitting solely at a booth across the bar. Appearing comfortably at ease to me; an unsuspecting aura about her, portraying someone,somehow, immediately unaffected by the pressing urgency of the situation. We all have it coming, for most of us sooner,
for her maybe later.
I, a degenerate patron out-of work; strung-out on dope; down on luck, cash and food-stamps, seeing her I didn't care about any of that. A familiar euphoria pervaded my hollow psyche, due to apprehending this beautiful lady before, perhaps in a prior existence we sat amid golden cornfields at dusk below a crescent moon, enduring lunar cycles of each other, as soft steady gales blew in off the cool atlantic, whirling seagulls glided above an off-season boardwalk, as early mist rose from white-crested foam of a hypnotic ocean. On the browned warm dunes we sat indian-style passing a whiskey flask,
glaring into each others pupils, exchanging subliminal treacheries. I yearned deliriously for intimacy with this lovely creature sipping low-shelf bourbon-manhattans in her work clothes, (always an extra cherry)
I nodded into another opiated daze:
Seasonal pastures, behind our adolescent farmhouse, a towering grey silo formidably representing paternal abandonment not far beside us, husks of lemon-yellow sunflower stalks swayed to steady breezes. Hedged grasslands growing dewy frost in winter whiteness, intermittent thunderstorms rolling in off the northern coast of Maine. Our youthful hours dwindled as heaping sand between pallid fingers, sultry afternoons beside a running brook and you in a two piece violet bathing suit. Your rosy complexion glistened before me as never-ending rainbows materialized way-down our irreproachable timeline, its was like our existence never began until that moment,
probably looking intoxicating,
I approached her casually,
sat my ass down right beside her
and asked her to dance....
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