TWINE TIME

Divine is pregnant and baking up the legs of her revenue...More


lines in the carpet of what really sucks and makes change a noisy

coin to swallow...An over heated gush of prose is untouched

around the room that feigns wall paper ears and shy, shredded

geraniums...Every time a commercial comes on, the cockatiels

panic into song, as though they're elated that something's fated

to become the string that drags across the sidewalk and snaps

around the corner disappearing into a gloveless, digital

fist...Where Divine was waiting is a pot where she cooks the

books...Vacations are a burden, old coast lines and paper hats.



In just a day, I might think of pages of things that need no

introduction...Was it so long ago you said that you'd rather be

sick on the rug rather that suck the staff and relish the tang of

the misplaced seed?... Divine has a job that really sucked,

vacuuming floors in a year she meant to make a clean sweep of

things...I am looking at a bag full of hamster mix...Where were

we wet when warned?...Any day forth coming, there will be pages

of hands, un-retouched contact sheets, whatever it was we were

talking about...



Divine circles "K" for thrift and gas pain… Ten years old

resentments trying on just one shoe, the other falls, both feet

are missing and with out milk...Another play rudely based on the

passage of a small, diamond blessed trickle of saliva that spans

from a fork to a fat lower lip...Suddenly awake next to a man you

smiled at so many years from now...I go looking for my paper

slippers in a hospital hall in between thoughts of mumbling some

thing about Divine’s Dad, who is out like lights in a movie

house..."All your wallpaper appears to be as pasted as you are..."







Through bare need and obvious disregard of the interior

designers' advice, Divine tosses another canto into the pot....I

often drum by bottom lip with a guitar pick and wonder about the

visibility on the bottom of Lake Erie...Your bodies of water

don't scare me, Aquaman... Cockatiels in panic song for food,

someone to talk to, the morning of the eighth anniversary of my

mother's death when she said FUCK IT!! and left town, I was glad

someone took the pennies from her eyes...



The hamster mix

vanished, but there's a trail of saw dust in the fringe of the

pile rug, it's getting harder to have a seat, and then it's me

again, the exact fact, sweeping up...Such a tidy little home

deserves a sign that says 'BUY ME...At every point in the

conversation, Divine was speaking of her resume, about what she'd

like to resume after the swelling goes down...”



Peering at snapshots when he was caught stealing a glance at the

accident that took the attention away from him...Someone named

Bob is getting autobiographical to extents that cause typists to

lose sleep until the end of the century and axes to sweep through

rain forests that are becoming the moonscape of

imagination...Huck Finn discovers grenades and lobs one into the

school cafeteria...Divine takes the pan from the oven...Every

night there's smoke...



Glowing reviews in embers of log fires on her lap, the asking of

"will you marry me"" buries the stab of pain, the gain of the Del

Mar track that's high at the gate and it's too hard to get

started horsing around when the house we have is only paper and

promises, it's too hard after urgings and purgings after the

drinks, where is she?...



The wall paper is a disaster, all I want is art, thought I was

framed, the cheap diamond ring, the intoning pun...He breaks into

the moans of ancient blues shards during the long walks home when

the streets are clear of opinion and he could corner the market

of pain with the husky croon of a stranger's voice, using all of

it as though he it were really his, or saying "AS THOUGH" as if

it meant something...A grand tradition of one man relating to

another man's wallet and wife...



WHERE IS SHE?



Gimmmeeeee a goddamned pigfoot and a bottle of beer...Sweeping up

the trail of dead ants who died over night on the white ceramic

tile...Ambulances, frightened children, minicams, a microphone

in your face...Divine's spike hair cut almost put Bob's eye

out...Okay, you did it, you made the world's largest, meatiest,

sloppiest steak sandwich (Now what?)...



Never run the sucking machine over the white ceramic tile, the

dirt just runs for it's life...Damp, dirty, depressed dialectical

deli's ....In a manner of speaking, it's all a manner of

speaking, such as the bulge and billow of vapor one creates on

cold mornings when you're scoring debate points over the sink

filled with last night's dishes and there's nothing left to try

but tap thee hot air reserve before the servitude doors

unlock...That's right, all our last names are the same,

Bumstead...



WHO ATE THE COLD PIZZA I WAS SAVING FOR THE WEDDING RECEPTION?



Divine gets ready for bed...ashes to ashes, the cigarette burns,

flakes are left in a condominium garage where there used to be

trees and layered dreams of rail road stakes, commerce to the end

of time, Mom dreams forever where blurring is an improvement on

the evidence of things seen and felt...We go on drinking until

the clocks are set in 6/8 time...



Shambling the rambling stretch of grape wine, all roads lead to

the arch of nose bent in the cranny of everybody's business,

filling hankies, awarding testimony, expelling, Divine...



Flanked by a trio of hoods after he'd gotten taking a leak in

the alley behind the theater, Jake zipped his fly, poked a

cigarette between his lips, and asked them what they thought of

the show.



Divine wakes up in the middle of the night, a kicking in her

belly, now she knows where all the money went



"Let's not do this ever again ..."



Let's ask Bob what that is between his legs that was kneeling as

though preying on a losing horse. ..



A harmonica blows the facts of over-described rain into the

cadences of lyrics carried around for maybe weeks that texture a

series of exact moments in time that have nothing to do with

being a dime short for the price of lunch, a fish taco just out

of biting range...



Crucial mastiff at my heels, big black dog, no death, some gain

said wisdom is eliding the data gone sterna or Jack Daniels, the

reek of the dumpster; at least it's not me looking for lunch

I don't feel, feed me the staff of life, I hunger for your

thirst, stereo hard bop vernacular of pulse given integers of

caressing your nuts on a slow elevator, some facts remain, some

one smells a rat, train stations all have the same abused

lavatory signs,



WHERE IS SHE?



Have you ever felt that there's something gone you couldn't get

your hands, like water sliding through the rage of your white

knuckled fist?..



It's a boy, a him they'll sing to, a lyric they've written...



LOOK AT ALL THE PRETTY LIGHTS!...



The wallet that's worshipped is dragged along the side walk,

tied to a string, pulled by hands animated by need...



Listen to what I'm telling you!



Toss another beer into the stew, a Hooverville of shopping carts...

ONE LAST QUESTION: Hello?



The night the city dissolved backstage while high beams shot up

the pant legs of snoring police...Today Divine plans a long bus

ride to the end of the county..."Wasn't God just kidding about

the ways of Mammon?"...Hello?...We are in a room with a cake, a

screaming child, rough, gelled globs on the wall where the paper

shreds and the flowers are abstracted by fingerprints that tell

the cycle of raids on the pantry...



Into each light a little life must fail...Bob smoothes the creases

of his pant leg, checks out his haircut (it's Marine moderne), HE

FEELS LIGHT HEADED...The snoring goes on all night, in dreams, he

is clearing his throat, making sense...It was on his way thought

the Grape Vine, the long knot of road, a final beer and toke from

the pipe and Steve Miller eight track tape that had been on deck

since they spun out of the sod of Turlock WHEN THAT WALL APPEARED

from the dark, the pick up high beams scouring and confirming the

density of the grain of the cement...



The guy who was driving had a pinky on the steering wheel while

he loaded a pipe, the shooting by was constant, the wall, thick

as cattle, got closer, the black was constant, there was hardly a

difference to be discerned...



From her seat on the bus, Divine looks over the swamp to see the

Del Mar race track, from across the bridge she sees showers of

streaking sparks, and then it's gone, the stench and the

commotion, rags and gasoline...The secret society that worshipped

the square declarations of white ceramic tile has a meeting in

the highest vacant office suite in the city and announces that

everything's gonna be alright...Alvin Cash breaks the meditation

of treadless tires gripping Grapevine asphalt for miles and

announces, in the recess of radio static and the slippery scurry

of bald tires in slick rain, that it's "TWINE TIME"...



Twiddling thumbs is an inappropriate response to hearing a

confession of life time wrongs...Is there anything in the pantry

that's not my fault?...Hamster mix is leaking to the floor, even

our ants march by it, there are no hamsters in sight, and no one is

ever that hungry, but dumpsters are a cornucopia, yes, yes,

yesssss, a sound of them chewing what was started, give us

what god gave you, yessssss, dump it all right here...Divine left

the vacuum cleaner by the door...smoke mars the sight of the home

entertainment center, the only meaning we agree on...Bob offers a

spoon of food to an irritable baby who's already seen too

much...A thin microphone wire is wrapped around the announcer's

neck...



THE TRAFFIC LIGHTS ARE WINKING AT ME!...



"Twine Time." repeats Mick the driver,

"WHY THE FUCK DIDN'T YOU

SAY SO??"

and then moves is smallest linger on the wheel just so, the wall coming upon us goes speeding by, Mick pops the eight

track back into the player, Steve Miller can't stop crooning

about wild mountain honey...



Build a fire on your lap and go on slurping the straw that's

deliverance in a pipe. fitted motion of get down from the cloud

the wall the bottle rocket snickering its anonymous explosions

where each sound is a punctuation mark and each sentence an

explosion in a bar at the end of the road where all your jokes

bomb, THAT IS, Bob is thinking too much again, did he lock all

the doors, did the baby get enough sleep, how would Divine drop

everything and start fresh as a slab of dead malarkey on a

cutting board if there was a trend to discern????? These matters

worry him greatly, he can't see and breathing is a problem, like

it was in the Laser Dome seconds before he cut off the tip of

his thumb grabbing his buck knife, whose unforgiving glint in the

rage of cigarette cherries delivered he and the carnival horde

from death in the folds of duct tape and latex...



Maybe the cockatiels will eat the hamster mix and mutate into

winged things that will fly in place forever... Nine years later,

and the tears still come; now and then something is hallowed

from the place he lives...



At the edge of the swamp, just a outside the race track, after

the carnival was closed, a horror of bare chested ride- jocks

furnish bottle rockets and a zillion Bic Lighters and launch

attacks on the Sky Wheel, The Zipper, every two-stick center

joint that pays the flat buck of fuck off, I am standing here,

from time to time as the images twine looking across the swamp

to the bridge and the highway, seeing headlights crawl North and

South, I wonder who's leaving town or coming home and I wonder if

there's some notion of me in any of those car seats, and then I

stare again at the midway, bombs bursting against everything

worth a fortune on paper, and then there's a fire in the

distance, plumes of smoke blacker than even the sea around the

obscured moon, the Laser Dome is hit, the bag sags, and the rockets

go screaming across the sky...



Jake had seen the movie five times already, and was going to

recite some lines of dialogue verbatim to the hoods, but the

biggest goon grabbed him by the collar and lifted him like a rag

doll and told him that his reviews were no good around here...



Where is she? ...



Give a goddamn leg up, what are you laughing at? YOU BASTARD,

COME BACK HERE!!





"If you're so funny, why do you remind me of the black strip on

the back of my ATM card??"



(Born under the terms of disease, but who deserves monikers when

they're tykes under orbs that effect tides and moods that swing

like battle axes?) ..



Where .......... is ............. she ........? ..



Hello? Yes, I would answer the phone, but first, what does it

want to know?...Just think, somewhere on this block in the city,

someone is standing naked in front of the mirror muttering "I

don't wanna, you can't make me”...



I was too drunk to go home, so I broke into the service area

behind the dryers in the laundry room to make believe that I

never happened to anyone...Bob at the end of the bar in a new

punk rock hair cut, he tells the lady next to him he’s sorry

for all the future tragedies...



Where the birds dance on the perch is the lurch of human pride

that says there is something better on the way and it certainly

isn't mail...



Half way down the wall, strips of curled wallpaper and curdled

paste reveal what was disguised, more geraniums riddled with

bullet holes, a whole other set of stories from another batch of

canceled checks …