|
Jim Peck |
|
Closing Time Our love, once a carnival of fatal attraction, has now become this dim lit bar down on the outskirts of oblivion. In my mind i dial dead phones with drunken fingers conducting your song, but all I get is a drawn out tone droning our last goodbye. You poured yourself slowly over my life and the stain has been hell to remove. Perfect "I want you to always be yourself" She says, smiling and I look down at my belly of beer rolling over pin striped boxers amused and wondering if I could ever become anything more than this. For Helen Dirty old man lived alone in a little house with a broken fence on the dead end street by the railroad tracks where I later lost my virginity. He was short and fat, almost spherical, cruising the town in an MG Midget with a jackass hat, a smartass smile, and a miniture bulldog named Pepi. You could find the old man in various places; spewing filthy jokes to the punks at The Square, pissing in an alley on a drunk afternoon, or parked at the point, sitting with Pepi, fantasizing sex with the teenage girls. On gray day Dirty old man grew tired of being dirty and old, so he hung himself softly from a pipe in the basement where he swayed like an empty balloon. His suicide became a sideshow attraction for which I paid a pound of innocence in order to see his cold corpse dangling in the grip of a lonely afternoon. Later found among his belongings, among the cans, the porn mags and clothes, were one hundred fifty three unmailed letters addressed to a woman named Helen. Full Moon/New Moon She gets up for a glass of water. I roll over. I watch her ass bathed in moonlight slowly swallowed up by the darkness in the hall. |