This Is How We Live
This is how we live, like white people in the West's cream.
I have ancestral itches and I scratch them, lubricated by the hormonal ambrosia of reflexive acts. I may even pretend to aspire. I can dance, I can sing.
I peddle whatever in a luxuriant coat of anything, for a time.
I roll in feathers, leaves, high speed trains.
I garnish with abandon, channeling gluttony into guilt into gifts. I conduct machines to shop around for the best deals. I am regular.
We cough at shadows instead of cry because the movie wasn't that good. I volunteer my valuable hypnotized hours for bread and graft and juice. Everything burns.
I am a jealous mammal with a blunt sense of smell and opposable thumbs: this is how we live.
Long Weekend
There are mirrors everywhere, those closest crawling with fog from the bottom up. There is a little waterfall in the jacuzzi but it is razor hot, and I won't put my fingers in there again.
Outside: great grey boxes with gaily coloured signs, squiggled with letters I sometimes wish I didn't know, so they wouldn't talk to me through my eyes. Drapes are drawn.
This is a hotel room. We're naked, drinking red wine, smoking joints, listening to music from my laptop amplified through the wooden desk it sits on. The song is by Belle & Sebastian, and I tell her how the lyric caused me think up a story.
There is a rolled up towel stuffed along the bottom of the door.
"There sure are a lot of mirrors," she says. "I can see my fatness from every angle."
I pat my belly ruefully. "Yeah baby, me too."
"It's not as bad when they're steamed up."
"Agreed. We're pretty sexy as hazy blurs."
We slide deeper into the searing water, wincing, gasping. I slide my fingers along her inner thigh and play with the confluence of curves where buttocks meet labia. As she becomes wet I see her fluid subtly cloud the water between her legs. She leans back, the surface punctuated by only her face and breasts.
The jacuzzi jets make me feel buoyant. Some parts rise more than others.
The kids are somewhere else. Everybody else is somewhere else. We are free inside this cage. My credit card is melting but we don't care.
America
If the United States of America falls down but nobody is sound, does it make a noise?
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