Hot concrete alleyways. The reek of stale piss. Potholes and pitfalls. Destruction buffered by neon orange barrels. Barricades blinking caution. Fresh spilled asphalt and naked construction ringing named neighborhoods once historic in nature. The ones now desperately trying to make all the old things back new again.
The Capital City.
Its face familiar to me since those early summertime drives. But strangely foreign to me now that I’ve seen it through the bendered lens of an empty bottle’s bottom.
Strange vibrations tangle unsteady feet. Green glass lies echo everywhere. Ugly graffiti, sprayed with the rattle can of memory, howls. Because no matter how many times it gets power-washed under high-proof pours, traces still linger undefined.
Another sleepless night. A fresh spring giving birth to more stillborn ghosts. Ones that silently judge–run, fool, run. Run the fuck away from those expectations. And the poisoned potential of yet another blank page.
I can’t keep throwing my soul down on paper without ever getting anything back. Because that leaves an inequity that no bottle…or pill… or interim vagina could ever balance. The predictable consequence of an entire lifetime spent living like a selfish dick.
Those temptations are at best just a stall. At worst, another obligation. Because there is always that next addiction. Where you trip and fall into more bad decisions. Disappointing everyone. Again. By pushing the needle a little too deep. Or tightening that noose a little too much. Just to feel something as you taunt the familiar embrace of another bruising rock’s bottom.
In the blink of bloodshot eyes, knees skinned on the playground are swapped for broken marriages. Simple schoolyard kisses pinball into adult complications. Responsibility metastasizes into an indiscriminate pedigree of hurt.
Because it all goes by so fucking fast. And not all ouchies are so easily kissed away.
So hearts get damaged. Lines blur. Potential expires. Things you swore you would never do suddenly appear in the embarrassing rearview of recent memory. Because you actually did them. No matter how many boos were fucking hooed.
Life falls apart far quicker than it can ever be built. Foundations constantly splinter. Suburban empires crumble from the underlying rot. Emotional floodwalls, built by the cheapest bidder, buckle and give way under the hot rush of temptation. Because though constantly cautioned against it, fingering that dyke was just too fucking tempting to resist.
And it’s nearly last call, pal. Panicked time is bleeding out. Friends and gentle strangers no longer have the patience required to tolerate the shaky outline of a man who once had so much potential. That wandering bad boy writer who squandered it all for a pocketful of pretty words. And the whispered promises of women who could never really love him back.
So it’s back to running feral through the streets.
Too old to start over again with nothing; too young to be feeling this old. Too broken to be much good to anyone; too drunk to really give a fuck about anyone right back.
This gritty rust belt town is the only mistress I touch. Even though she is impossible to love. Because I never really fucking belonged.
But I will most likely die here, a counterfeit shadow dissipating under her towering regrets. Emotionally bankrupt; morally exhausted. Torn and splintered from too many years spent carrying too many memories and secrets. The ones forever hiding inside all that broken Clinton County corn.
It’s getting dark. Too dark to see.
But it’s not even heaven’s door getting that knock. Because I never once knew what it was to stand on the side of more gentle angels.
Mine has been a life perforated with more damaging demons. And the burden of weighted memory from having witnessed the death of far too many beautiful things.
So I am left condemned to wander this squalid city. The one with sidewalks sparkled with shattered glass; the one with too many broken roads. The broken roads all leading me exactly nowhere.
I can only blame her myself.
