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Movie Life

Danny's women didn't sit on wooden benches. And why should they. They were--well none of them were lawyers or doctors, but they routinely set cloth napkins in their laps, eating the same fabled meats. And they drove to places that Danny had seen only on TV. But this never worried him… Because Danny's Women huddled like white knuckles inside, concerned for the sweetness of his promise.. not his inability to con rent money out of an 8th grade education—that too was an inelegant equation: one part cloudy white, officiousorial parchment and two parts wagered nonsense.

Danny’s women expected him to share their fish bowl, and they expected Danny to make their drifting, catered bodies relinquish a decent amount of sweat. Danny the Wanton. Of Luckesbury Manor. Via Inglewood Prep. PhDEFG—HIJK—LMNO—He wasn’t hired to mend any postures and didn’t believe in the sanctity of candid propositions. But that was exactly what was required. He wasn’t supposed to let them drift off into that other world that carefully matched the animate with the inanimate… because they would feel like flowers abandoned by their clothing stems.

And for clean shaven seltzer bubbles like Danny, buried alive in champagne-poured tombs, fatigue became rather a habit.. Greenish glass with its slickened, transparent sides reminded him of wayward words—an accomplice—often eulogies posing as nervous questions, marked by the same beginnings—"If I…" and "I’ve never…" and "Will you…" and "Why…" These words poured a heavy atmosphere into Danny’s ears. From a brown paper bag guarding a colorful embarrassed bottle, down his throat, threatening to teach his lungs a lesson in aquatic poetry. Danny, during his entire four year swan song, could never figure out how to remind his mouth of any distinct memory connected to these sharp flavors. He’d look, like a leering animal, right through the bottle’s window and see hypnotic light-entrailed holes struggling to escape from a portable five dollar version of the River Styx. He was somewhat relieved to note that these tiny dead things were required to float toward the surface. This told him that he too might float. A smear of men prepared to hoist themselves though a placid invitation in the bourbon's skin, waiting for the atmosphere's joust-ready shoulders. He imagined they were his army—General Bubble & Co.

And in their busy souls he saw other intoxications—Size being the trophy. Vigor being the Shepherd. It hardly mattered anymore where Vigor hid itself in young senseless legs. Dope hid itself in arms. Suggestions trick-or-treated as favors. Danny didn’t see much of a difference. Because Surrender, as a quiet infliction of married life or marred life, sedimented Danny’s body, a body that seldom paid attention to its enemies during the day. And an insistent coalition of Humility with names like Child, Dentist, and Transient threatened it like a midwife anxious to bring tears into the world through the succulent ferocity of someone else’s pain.

Somtimes Danny’s consideration dangled from a helpful distance in front of the mounting collection of Why-eyed women weeping together like flour and water and eggs and making a runny batter. But how many cashmere sleeves and stuffed pink necks and self-annointed starstuck eyes could understand that Danny wasn't about to compete with any living room furniture no matter how lavish the house's embrace. Tables had legs—he had legs. That’s where the similarities ended and the quiet turn of the door knob began. He never really went home, he just… found a way out.

Discouraged by his callous departures at night and encouraged by his smell on the pillows in the morning, Danny’s women often tried to bargain over the phone for the memory of his strong, cunning, impatient hands to reappear and resolve the temporary momentum of their loins. He signed the contracts of his promised evenings in uncertain legal nuances of kissing and disappearance. They felt always promised, always abandoned… Alive and dying…. Bargains. Danny knew a good bargain, even if he had to pay for it.

She—Samantha—died for several calendar pages of days while everything around her lived. In the season of Danny’s departure, other hearts never seemed to stop beating even after they stopped calling. Everything continued to thrive. Except Samantha. Her unwanted habits had grown polyps where life's questionable habits typically grew disguises. She grew older while the kernel of life smothered underneath her angry heel stubbornly refused to quit. Instead, it grew sideways, attempting to reach the sun any way it could.

Danny lit a match. Smoking brought him delicate lungs and infrequent ease. But that didn't hinder his ability to stir her with seasoned short-order cook strength, wiping his work on the outside of a proud, messy apron of tangled blond hair. His poetically described mating urges translated into tight brown abdominal care.. Because Samantha usually looked before she leaped. And Danny knew this. And she saw what she could love before she would consider love. And Danny knew she would regret this.

“You want to plan a life ?” He couldn’t spare any of them at least a little lesson in laughter. “Let me make this as arbitrary as possible to suit your taste—you long-haired mosaics hustle around the city in a cross-legged trance of sad warmth, hard independence, rubbery thick skin, (yes, it’s rubbery, I should know) watching from an anxious curse of femininity that urges you onto your tippy toes, trying to see everything at once. But seeing yourself in a white lab coat hunched over a microscope, looking at airplane and movie ticket stubs is your reward. Samantha, you sit there holding a long played poker hand of photographs, handwritten letters, and extra large button-down shirts. When are you gonna realize our game is finished—this is your life sentence.. the frivolous investigation of the century begins every time you pause for breath. Not only has the criminal committed his quiet profession and left unhurried, but now he’s disappeared into another woman‘s nest.. laying down on a couch watching the window. He dives in and out of a newspaper while preparing lines in an upcoming speech from a crisp lettuce head of sacred estrogen-laced words. But not for you. They’re for Hope. For Faith. For Deborah. But not for you, not for Samantha.”

And there she sat... still trying to imagine the horrors associated with each questionably rooted tooth pulled from her life. Danny decayed, day after day, right in her head. The train wreck that must have gone through his mind... That obviously didn't.

Harmony's piecrust faced Danny with the distraction of coagulating sugary sums. Over chirping blueberries voices. Just as stacks of corrugated cardboard boxes fit into each other's arms by disappearing into one uniform marriage, groove against groove. Everything added up to some comfortable distance. Hence, the competitive sport of distance-- coaxing brand name women out of brand name jeans from the other side of the room, though the holes in the fence, distilling distance down to a science via a boundary of privy silken? rituals.

Danny and his women eyed each other with agricultural silence during the days they spent apart.. no closer than arm's length from the discovery of terrifying secrets that were armed with brave ambition but ended in a hysterical need for empathy. The women touting their tolerance and Danny tolerating the holes in their idealistic touting. His women planned to accept everything, everyone. Relative love looked like the dark end of a chrome barrel belonging to some large caliber weapon nicknamed, Samantha. Danny wanted nothing to do with the destination of his indentured servants. He rode in the same ships, but never as cargo. Samantha was a crumbling flake of this human cereal, topped off by a tablespoon of sugar sprinkled civilities. She hurt no more than a nagging splinter... Although natural law dictated her ultimate demise, Danny came close enough to fill the shoes of gravity around her neck.

If you asked him, he usually shrugged. What was there to say. Remembering Samantha was like recalling an hour on any given day. Danny found it almost impossible to give an explanation—why ignoring the persistent nagging of seasonal things extinguished the taste of everything.

Except an occasional cigarette. And an occasional invitation from some apartment sunlight thrown at the shutters over his boarded up eyes. Wake up, Darling Danny. Wake up.




After Life

I like the mornings outside your house when the birds are out with a bare littering of chirps between decision ..and the sun's up but behind the trees at 11 or 10 a.m. .. And it's .. the city built on sand, tides, and slight expressions of exhaustion .. everyone has Tom Sawyer allergies to manual labor-- everyone an imaginary financial plantificating artistanal retireent Crayola-drawn profession, so you're not too concerned about your safety or your overwhelming lack of Monopoly (tm) experience.. and the streets are empty of hand gestures and exploratory eye contact and other subtlely scarring intrusions except for cars with sun roofs and key chain alarm systems. And neatly trimmed trees drink the fresh air like kids licking syrup from their fingers. And there's a coffee house nearby that doesn't tug on your eyes like the absurd announcement of McDonald's color-filled architectural blister.. And $3 for cream flavored platnium served in paper somehow sounds reasonable because wisdom is the last thing on your mind.. Everyone is at work.. at care.. under the tireless bloodshot guard of conscience and necessity.
But.
Here.
I am...
And my work consists of ritual longing and slingshot wishing.. and the value of this work is intangible because it runs deep in the monastic vein like the result of the right combination of blue sky and white cloud on the stagnant trophy waters of a particular heart, stirring them into a white churning river hiding the presence of its love beneath a dusty porch skin.

And nobody can afford to pay me because the aggressive nature of this work rots the legs of cities down into heaping piles of human icing. NObody will pay a pair of runaway scissors to haunt an evenly landscaped playground with a threatening vocation distinguished by its production of self-portrait paper doll armies, beating furious paper hearts that are obviously angered by the tardy calibration of eraser marks out on a stroll rather than a hand-wringing quarantine.

But I work away like a raging brush fire kept in a bottle. I stand side by side next to the height of raising children, the width of purchases and exchanges, and the length of saving bodies from oncoming and sudden.. age.. earning little more than a stay of execution.. Not to die, not to wilt, not to give up, not to succumb to the indecisive teeth poised in blank pages.. staring at writers like Sicilian Getwell cards.

But yeah.. it's not bad outside your house.. in the late morning ..







































































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