Weird to see our nation's capitol building for the first time, from the sixteenth floor of an apartment complex over across the Potomac and through a lens of rain and howling wind. Weird to be laying my head on a fresh pillow less than a block from the Pentagon.
In that moon-dome I think Dr. Obama sits in a great golden clockwork throne, pulling steam-punk levers and twisting dials and looking at me through a crystal telescope. And I'm walking Arlington streets in the rain, head down and soaking wet, and that mean little Persian sold me soggy chicken wings and a seven-year-old pack of non-filtered Pall Malls that I did not specifically ask for, but that I did not specifically not ask for. But I smoke them on cold wet Arlington streets where the rain moves in strange waves across fancy cobblestone like a bourgeois joke to my tired Vans sneakers and my damp thrift store jeans, faded to a cheap gray but now saturated and black like this weird DC skyline that is screaming at us through fourth-floor sliding glass doors.
Henry tells me that the proper way to smoke these filterless Pall Malls is by burning the end with the little stamp, thereby destroying the evidence of our allegiance before the Nazis find us out. And I'm afraid I just stepped in dog shit.
They fed us bucketloads of shitty beer tonight, and I berated the football fans through dirty prosaic choruses and hid in a tiny hut or silo of corrugated metal, glowering and chain-smoking and wishing I was wherever you are. My brain stumbles with its eyes to the sidewalk cracks, around gray corners down gray alleys that dead-end in gray brick walls that I've built long ago in a past life, gray like nervous systems, shivering pink on the edges, with my spit the mortar and my bones the sand. My heart is pumping saliva these days, nothing more. When did I become such a misanthrope?
No comments:
Post a Comment