Sunglasses, hiding your bags above the drop down ceiling. Jumping the steps into the street with that bounce I have. Mobility. Long walks pushing 10 miles a day. I disappear.

One week in the books with no hiccups. No back pain, no sullied trash cans, no unanswered questions. Being clean, never felt so dirty.

That's the thing about cleaning up your act. Once the trash is in the dumpster you have to do something about the stench. Then when the smell is ionized, you have to wonder what you left that still reeks. Then you start the process again hoping that the filament holds out with all the extra wattage.

I wish I could say that I have been more productive with my time this winter. I've turned some corners only to pit fight larger looming demons. Gutshot and hamstrung. Scraping my knees down Scranton, and crawling up Queen.

I picture a fit man walking proudly; displaying the calculated persona of someone who, when faced with danger, smites it. An aire of the untouchable, yet a wiff of repent. In meeting with a future partner he declares: I'm glad you met me.

Upon receiving this opening, I wouldn't call it a barrage, perhaps a volley; she responds in kind. Admitting that she'd noticed him while demurely bluffing what he believes to be pocket Aces.

Ah courting. The perilous dance of the overconfident and the easily attainable, matching wits like a game of Memory. Swiftly parried strikes, swashed to entertain are met with a malleable counteroffensive stance.

Dialogue ensues, conversational tones imbued with saturated nonchalance. They've been there before poised to strike and if the tone hardens their shields will raise and grasps will quiver precariously over the handles of broad swords.
As time passes.

They have reaped their decadence numerous times. Now. The sweat soaking panting fulfillment their genitals retreat. Sharing covers and glancing about in the tar stained crepuscule, smoking film foisted post coital Camels, their sighs belie the orgasms. Thev've been together since their first talk and knowing that all they wish now is that they could.

They rarely share a mourning together. Their distance dictated by work schedules and different directions. She vacates the sheets leaving him placated and gluttonous, empty of his need. She's lacking a connection, a full circuit as she dials up the car stereo and her phone. Physically satiated and with that mental hunger searching for old connections; she plots old conquests into conciliatory viewpoints and uses their affirmations to restock the armory.

He roles over hard. He rolls over hard with last nite and coughs a congrats to the room. New boxers and a bite ta eat, before it happens again, he figures. Before it happens again he figures and stretching to the fridge he feels a flick he's ignored before. Cold leftovers then to the bathroom and he scrubs the bicuspids, mollifying molars he answers his inquiring incisors.

One month in and everlasting.

He'd gotten sick before, be he ached this time. A spine. A spine climbing bother that could only be assuaged one way. Decadence had become a daily cadence sung, or rather a run of the mill repast like breaking a fast. Without that bite he felt the edge. He suffered, putting more into self destruction than he did repletion. Now when his coffers were stoked, which they rarely were, the billows were indiscriminate.

She'd perched, talons groping the last inevitable battle, like a buzzard tying its bib for some carrion. She'd sharpened her claws upon a whetstone that rolled forever forward. Razor sharp her senses. Her senses honed, she waited: Stropping her blade continuously.

When the digital sickles emerged they argued for death but cut for a stalemate. Caught unaware, groping for a weapon of his own, he recoiled and retreated. White flag tucked neatly like severance package inside the manilla, licking his wounds like the envelope, he was eviscerated.

I picture a man wiping up after the trauma. Mop soaked then wrung out in routine, another casual onlooker upon the demise of a unit. Whistling whilst restocking the shelves, adding elbow grease to the coagulate where necessary, he notices a nurse. As he steals a quick glance in the stainless and inquires about her day, her pulse quickens and her guard evaporates.

Not so much a happenstance as a happening. Geared up, with your addictions placated; your hollows stuffed with straw. Insulated, pedantic in execution, follow my path, don your gloves, doff your cap. Plastered living, akin to plastic thinking, these are motions gone through automatically. I ventured through the applause and garnered what was natural. Gleaning and skinning hyperbole and extracting what I was due. I've been left mouth breathing and freezing at the corner having finished a days work. And I've still been hungry. Feeding on excess, consuming and depositing. Finagling and dominating a social structure that wasn't carved for me. I'm dressed up. I am at your meeting. I've held my own and I have exhaled; and with that breath comes the head turning stench of a halitosis that can't be brushed or scraped. It very well may be normalcy, and what is so wrong with that?

What happens when your Shangri-La freezes and even your Florida keys won't turn the lock? Ice picks, snow shovels, lanais and pink flamingos. I plan to embrace my besotted common law wife, known to readers as Winter, give her a sloppy wet kiss and a pat on the ass and declare:
Let's get on with it.
How will I ever know if this relationship can work if I don't give it exactly 82 percent of everything I have? I have lanced her boils and sat through her potentially malignant, cloudy mammograms. I have consoled, cajoled, cornered, and caught her; red handed and overcast laying waste to drive and want. I have erased her phone number and then spent the following week waiting for her call and, when she has,
I've answered.
I should dote more, maybe, and hold her handbag. Do the dishes and the linen, learn hospital corners for the bedspread and put a daisy next to the burnt toast for breakfast. Separate, desperate lives not working, I should revel in her months and feed like a remora upon whatever slices of sunlight she throws my way. I should feel lucky that I am used to it. Those poor suckers down south are only being raped, and when she leaves them windburned and chapped lip, they'll be glad to see her go.
She ain't much but she's mines and for as much as I have forsaken her she always returns to put me in my place. Lucid thoughts filtered through the rocks at Trunk River, black ice hiding so you'd better be wary. Rock salt can't win the battle, shovels breaking, souls cursing:
You're a right twat winter, and you should fuck off out of it.
After a nite on the couch you're back in the big bed the next day. She forgives you, which is rare because it normally your act of contrition, and you begrudgingly smile. That fat whore maybe be ugly, but she'll always give you a shot a the title.
And that's enough of a reason to love.

Settling into a long drive in an old car with no cruise control, my foot curled like an ampersand, barefoot over the accelerator I pondered my direction. I figured that, more than likely, I'd arrive in the bEast pining for a respite only to find a vacant stage. Wearing the death mask of my 20s drunk and pillaged, the giggles of the room erupting like Pompeii scatter the ash of my shitty mood. The history of the wood paneled wall thick with a new coat of primer, the paintings of my past sightly askew. I settle into the chair. Rejuvenated. The scabs of the Cape peel pink, my rancor assuaged. My old friends knead my fresh wounds and tight thoughts malleable and mold them into a combined experience. Rekindling the fire and sipping from a fresh drink, I sense a genuine happiness that I had left for dead.

Bound up, directionless by opiates, I opined. Sweat and in the clear my bowels of hell let loose in a public place. Scrub pines of the coast capturing the creatures that lay stagnant on this isthmus catching glimpses of woodland creatures trying to hitchhike to salvation.

Tap your foot to this beat jagged rocks of jetties jutting out make me stumble. Skulking slothlike milking the landscape of its solace and perhaps placing more emphasis than is needed on winning a seasonal fight that can only be battled to a draw.

Now, we wouldn't even catch each others eye. Divided as we are now by a moral and economic apartheid. When movers and shakers meet, the settled, the fakers.

Resilience the backbone.

March 22, 2005

I stroll about with incontinent brain functions, meager hopes and self described squalid surroundings. I smell remnants of old sex in body odor on public transportation and keep my boots ready for the thaw and the inevitable sickly-sweet manure to spread out upon the land scraped from the horizons of my window. I have lost myself in bottles and searched for the youth in half pints, pressing only my will to plant my feet on the ground the next day. Heel down on thumb tacks, future indefinite defying the prospects of the Spring with self motivational speeches petering out in mumbles. Hope in substances its subjective to the reader. Its reminiscent of the time you go to the ATM and forget the PIN although you never really had to think about it before it seemingly disappeared . Amongst the numbers on the pad the combinations innumerable. So here I sit tryin to decipher decode and protract from the shambles a semblance and with the Spring placin her head upon the block, winters feet swinging from the gallows, I await summer's head to be revealed from the mask of the executioner. Its merely a cautionary tale of the seasonally depressed, I lose friends and direction in the cold months, a ocean man expatriated to the banks of the Connecticut River feeling sorry for myself because I lack the courage to explore. So this expatriate expatiates, attempting to do what I have to do every year. It could be ameliorated by Zoloft, Paxil, or the like, but my grey day struggles enable me to wear shorts in 40 degree weather and not bitch about a rainy day in May. I am one out of many that suffers from this affliction and yet I never stop worrying about my friends, the people who are there for me and the ones that I figured always would be. Granted this writing is one sided and face to face conversations alleviate verbosity with eye contact, but its all that I have left in some cases in one case one night and into another bottle the next, I'll genuflect to the people who have no one because they some how fuck it up of their own accord at every corner and with every chance they get. If I was only half as dirty as they say I am at times, I'd be them ten fold. Its still bad in the mornings, slightly better by noon, and by the time its dark I'm ready to take on the world as it sleeps. When most people do sleep, I dote on my liver and have conversations with myself making lines of demarcation with every drinking straw that I snip down to size. Then I proceed to bump my head straight for the next fifteen minutes tryin to eye out an imaginary finish line... in a metric world, I still give out pounds to those with their hoodies up in the fray. I grew up in Bugle Boy fashions in a land of Gaps and trying to fill them has all but plum tuckered me out. Ashing my butt with audible taps, I've got nothing else to do but put a period. The geese came back today.

KandK for life, Dave

Riddled with guilt over not being who I should've been, my back revolts. Lower lumbar throw down your tools. Mobility goes on strike and his union brothers in the renal system won't cross the lines. Kidneys stop your filtering. Let's make a fuckin point to this guy once and for all.

YOUR A CLICHE. Let's face it. the bottom line is. at the end of the day. all we can do is put one foot in front of the other. give it one hundred and ten percent. leave it all out in the open. and. hope for the best.

The works shut down, I hobble to the office and have no shroud of secrecy not one sliver left of what endeared you to me in the first place. The veneer having been scraped off, the patina dulled.

You harbored your illusions. Ignored the mess and tried to string together this messy marionette called me. You got frustrated bailed and I never failed to mention it all along.

This my dear is not an affliction, this is my life. I don't suffer from, I suffer in. Without a vice I'd eat a gun and suicide is not a good habit to get into.

Plastic prefab melting into molds I don't know you. Good on you though.

The best trick a psycho ever played was convincing the world she wasn't a bitch.

Nestled in the warmth of my office with time to reflect on the past three months.

In the summer I drink clear booze and smoke cigarettes on patios. I take sizeable amounts of other peoples perscription medication, fall down drunk at least twice, and sleep on the beach at least once. Bathing suits and flipflops. My hair is short and my face is shaved. My skin is tan.

In the fall I drink dark booze and pack lips the size of horseshoes. I try and clean up my act and I have more time to come to the office and think. Its pouring down with rain, the drops trampoline off car roofs and storefronts. I wear insulated cargo pants, wool sweaters, and grow what I can of a beard. I stew and invent reasons for unhappiness. I grow tired of inventing reasons and then make other people unhappy. Some times I get hit by a car to break the monotony.

In the summer I spellcheck. And care about starting sentences with prepositions. But not in the fall.

Should I stay open year round or be a seasonal restauraunt? PLay HArd in the summer, horde and gather then shut the gates? Or let the people venture through in December, barstools lined up and inviting muddled thoughts to stew and marinate. I have the feeling Ima like it here. Woodstoves piping, hottoddie sipping, black ice slipping.

I have a work meeting at two fifteen, I should Don Draper a fresh shirt from the drawer and prepare with three fingers of Powers. But its been three days dry now and if my hands stop shaking I should make it a week. Make it a weak meeting. Clammy handshakes and comb overs. Blackberries and power lunches. Rented condos and colonoscopies. Imminent divorce and legal fees. Ulcers.