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David Bates |
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A Non-Encounter you park the car between a pick up truck & a lime Beetle pocketing your keys & adjusting your jacket when the hood of your car rises and a beautiful woman emerges from the engine her perfect complexion marred only by a slip of grease under her left eye she ignores you shutting the hood as if she were a gas-jock checking your fluid levels she adjusts her blouse and begins walking away in the opposite direction Longhaul you're a truck driver drunk in a motel room in Pennsylvania you go out to your rig & tell the CB you have $300 and want to buy a gun what'er ya gonna do w/it the CB asks and you say you're gonna shoot your head the CB goes quiet for a very long time and eventually you fall asleep in the bunk the next afternoon the motel clerk apologizes says you missed check-out & you'll have to pay for one more day you walk the gears out of town w/some unnamable part of you staying in that room to get its $'s worth 1st Gray Hair monday morning 10AM half dozen Miller tall-boys gone & Warren Z: finding things to do when yer dead gonna have to go back to the mart for more nothing left to do but put your sun glasses on can't find your keys but they'll show up soon enough you remember calling someone on the telephone and wonder who it was those mean wet things you said invisible and misspelled now in your memory the keys appear suddenly on the stereo speaker where you left them something stirs beneath the kitchen sink and is quiet again you refuse to investigate you've fallen for that one too many times Kodak Moments smashing a small spider into the wall with a loose photograph- the first thing I grabbed- the one of you in your torn jeans drinking a glass of bourbon- holding it as if you had been practicing in a mirror & smiling the way you've learned to smile when a smile seems appropriate but uninspired- the spider sticks flatly then expands slightly then nothing |