With Dreams, With Drugs, With Waking Nightmares

May 24th, 2018

  Another fucking dope dream last night

  Setting: Deformed offspring of the Chinese place where Maple meets Wethersfield and the Top Kat laundry near Sisson and Farm Ave

  Immigrant workers keep their faces in profile as the Minotaur, unwanted bastard offspring of institutionalized oppression and the bull of Wall St., roams freely through the maze of utopian menu item photos and Greek tragic chorus washers whirring out a commentary to my existence

  Devouring the GDP of a million drawn and quartered families alongside 35$ bodega pawn shop streetcorner transactions, and excreting pebbles not too different from sea salt and a soft brown powder that slides out of the wrapper as if craving union with spoon, foil, or paper

  My man slides through the cracked glass door with a wisp of frozen air, an aggregation of a hundred of similar faces, each eager to be the final stop in a Mussolini timetabled daily journey that, etched across a map, reveals a decade long criminal record

  He may be unreal, but his gestures are being acted out by thousands of pneumatic repo men at the very moment you read this:

      The coiled stride marking his station above the trap jawed bottom feeders lining every entrance to the outer darkness

      The smile purpose built to belie how every gift is really careful consideration regarding the fiscal returns brought to the city each day in a trembling Impala pockmarked with the blows of bats, tire irons, and C Town bags stuffed full of bolts and visions of ascension

      The shifting of hands and a tightly bound blue bundle is cradled within, that old jostling motion to stop the sweat of my palms from soaking through

  I do not head for the nearest blinking light on an internal atlas that could, even a year out of the game, lead me unerringly to the closest unlocked and monitored bathroom from anywhere in Hartford

  I suppose that’s some progress

  But neither do I follow the urging of my great retinue of therapists, doctors, probation officers and other such sting leavers and prison guards at the impenetrable gateway beyond this abyss, and dispose of my precious treasure

  I simply clutch my waxpaper aegis and mill about aimlessly until trumpets of warning announce the new waking day

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Originally published at Anti-Heroin Chic