FAIRFAX

The crescent moon pours blood over the streets of West Hollywood

I’m standing knee deep in it, wolfing down a falafel at Eat a Pita

The chick peas turn into glass in my stomach

And I puke the fossil fuel of future generations

It’s been an exceedingly poor day

I break into the back of a dead store on Fairfax and heat up a load of despair in my cooker

I tie off with the chains of my own conditioning

And mainline my loneliness in a terrific rush of anguish

Then I go hunting out on the street

Stalking citizens I can roll for their hope

There’s a black-and-white parked in front of the Largo

I want to run up to it and jump up and down on the hood screaming,

“Take me away, you mother fuckers! Can’t you see that I don’t belong out here?

You’re mandated to protect and to serve. Do your fucking duty!

Protect the public by locking me up.

Serve my feeling of isolation and imprisonment by making it real.”

I don’t want to be relieved of the bondage of self,

I want my still beating heart torn from my chest and offered up to the god of the sun

I suppress my urge to rattle the cage of officers Toody and Muldoon

Instead I float down the Fairfax gutter with the spit and styrofoam

I slither in to Molly Malone’s

Seeking solace in the bottom of a glass, or the top of a pair of legs

On stage is a band named “Ganglia”

They have no bodies

Only naked nervous systems

Their synapses snapping to the beat of the over-amped music

In the back they’re slaughtering groupies for tomorrow’s lunch meat

No comfort here, so I return to my squalid room

I ask Jesus to come into my heart,

But I can’t get my toe inside the trigger guard

I go to hang myself with a string of last season’s Christmas lights,

But the image is a little too cheerful, and I begin to laugh

A giggle at first, but quickly growing deeper and louder

Each expiration larger than the last, like a fuel-air explosive

I laugh so hard I can’t inhale, and I start to choke on my own spit

I tear the paint off the walls with my fingernails as I desperately clutch for a single inspiration

My eyes are popping out of their sockets

The realization that I’m about to die laughing sobers me up

I get a grip on myself

My chest muscles relax, and as I fill my lungs with air and dust

I start to regain my usual cheery disposition

Ordinarily I’m a happy-go-lucky fellow

But I can get into a funk like anyone else

I cruise up to Canter’s deli

Suicide always makes me hungry

The waitress comes over to the table for my order

I’ve seen her before, in one of those Tibetan paintings

She’s The Devouring Mother, with ten arms

Wearing necklaces made of human skulls

Standing on one foot and sucking the world up into her cunt

Her eyes heal the rift in my soul

A brilliant, multi-hued aura is pouring out of her body

Filling the restaurant, and spilling out into the street

Drying the blood from the crescent moon

I give her my most becoming smile as I order eggs



Sunny side up