Alcoholics by Appointment

Tectonic plates nimbly moving between the two of us — threads separated by upsetting intertitles.  I understood wanting — the fist unfoldings like investigating what I wanted from life.

A propensity for unrelated stretches of boredom respectively interspersed with terror and subterfuge — a disenchanted evening of critical extensions of ourselves.  

We’d escaped the stultifying and mundane confines of the American dream. We marveled at the nothingness in every direction. 

Alcoholics by appointment, short on doorways and long on crashes. What are you doing on the floor, you said.

I’m a new admirer of your ruthless cankles, I said. 

You remind me of that pendejo from the capitol flanks, you said.

I really have grown to dislike your flans, I said. They fill me with buttermilk inertia.

Your voice tips up two octaves, little mermaid-style.

I’ve grown to love your threats of leaving me —  the dynamic prompting an existential jump in my gonads. 

Our lives chatter across that echo divide — the poles galvanized — our fists — threats arising in unison strands, like unspooled dice, and popcorn ceilings estranged.  

Your brasses and my ramen noodles forever spiced with the peppery taste of hickory paste on fire. Here, though, the motifs relate loosely on symbolic resonances of iterative knock-knock logic. 

I’ll forge your signature on my birth certificate, despite your roundabout glares and slight variations of tonal displeasure.

We’ve grown accustomed to get what we deserve.

What I’m Reading:

Why don’t you drive & arrive up here
In your reversing Lochinvarish Chrysler Reliant
I’ve got my period & bleed in my Plymouth Horizon
Like when we went to the cave in your Volkswagen bus

— Bernadette Mayer / “A Catskill Eagle”