another birthday

Sit around and gab silently without anything worth hearing ever being said: tell them all just how you feel like it was a conversation between you and god ’cause that’s all it is: you and god. You find the whore walking down the aisle of a long set of cubicles and you think that’s gonna be good to fuck, but you always see in the end just how good she was to fuck as you’re lying on the ground from the best 1-2 punch you’ve ever seen: dead babies and the only good part of you gone with her as she’s slamming the door that you paid for right into your balls only to turn around and get on her knees to stuff that bigger new cock into her mouth without even a kiss goodbye. That’s the whore who you want to avoid and I want to steer as far away from tonight as I can. Problem is, it’s not their fault: they’re born into it just like the rest of us. They can’t stop their nature any more than a polar bear can be a vegetarian just because she fell in love with a seal. She’ll put on her boots right over her expensive silk stockings, throw your last cigarette between her lips and take the lighter right to the sheets you’re laying on and ignite the end of your last hope with the flames rising around your body, all the while confessing an undying love for you.

That’s when you turn 27. That’s when you stop counting and wondering just how long it will be until you can die, slipping into oblivion for the hope that the fire there doesn’t feel as cold as the one you’re in. But today I’m 32 and there are no spots left in my heart that have gone unscathed from the battles with laundry and the chores of love, so I don’t need to worry about what kind of whore I bring back from the bar tonight, or wait silently around covered in loneliness and desperate for distraction, hoping that sweet, kind whore comes back. Today I can take the rifle and fire love into my mouth; I can look around for those brown locks to wrap a noose around my neck; today I get to vomit into toilets reeking of my own piss and shit and look reflectively on the waters of my life before; merely memories that won’t agree with anyone else’s but that I refuse to label defective.

Of course, that’s when the counting stopped being useful, necessary to understanding – that’s when you realize you’re not made of the same stuff everyone else is and somehow you’re able to get in and so are they, but you can’t do it with your own kind and neither can they. At that point, it serves no purpose to keep count; after all, tomorrow is just wild speculation and yesterday is something you’re trying to forget, so you throw-up every morning and hope that somehow the dull ache of life will soon recede into one of those memories that you can finally label defective. Then you create lists to replace the counting years: The 5 worst moments in life, The 3 best fucks, The 10 darkest bars, The moment you knew you were dead. You label them and order them and play with them like they are your cock and you are determined to get something good out of them. And you sit; still as the lakes in Vermont in the summer, just before that first wind that brings the summer downpour. You get calm. And when everything is labeled just right, you sit back and enjoy all your spinelessness and take the beatings life has to offer, on the spot and without appeals; you feel each crack of the whip and each thud of the bat that crashes down into your skull. You go home with the fattest girl in the joint only because no one else will and you see she needs love, not like the rest of us do: seen it, lost it. No, she needs it or she’s gonna roll off her stool and die tonight right in front of everyone. You know the ambulance will show up and the cops demanding ID, and everything will get fucked up, so you amble over and say hello, just as interested as you can be and hope she won’t demand head or roll over on you.

That’s the beginning of death – how you know you’re in heaven; you get to make someone feel decent, even though it’s for only a moment. You smile and nod and let her say whatever it is she needs to say to god and you keep on drinking and lighting cigarette after cigarette and finally when you don’t think you can stand up, you lean and kiss her on the cheek ‘cause no one has ever kissed her there – not even her father. Then you tell her as matter-of-fact like as you can, that you’re not capable of love, so she ought to just accept your kiss for what it is, the recognition of something beautiful. They call last call and you order one more, just to make sure you’ll be sleeping soundly in the park tonight. She will ask you if you need a ride home, but you stick to your guns, “No. I can walk just fine: a line, a curve, even a funeral dirge.” She laughs and wanders off, knowing it’s not the end for her tonight. Then you walk down the street and find a car that’s open and climb in. Most nights it’s like that: cold and lonely and filled with love that you can’t touch or feel or even know is there. You do this a thousand times more, finding yourself looking for Cinderella at a yard sale, where the disco heels haven’t fit anyone you’ve presented them to so far. It’s been a hundred years and you don’t even know it. You’re dancing your dance with a wild abandon and then she shows up on the sidewalk; the cunt that’s going to ruin you and make you stop counting all over again. There she is, with a glow around her and a halo that you want to rip off because you can see where she’s going, you can see the future and you can’t take one more night renting a room by the hour in the hope that you’ll cum and she’ll love it because you know this one will. So, despite all the alarms going off and your common sense, dulled with the booze and razors edge of life, you demand to see her in those shoes, in those reams of holy enlightenment that beg your tongue out of your lips and down into the crevices of her soul, just to know how she would walk upon your being – but you already know and it’s more of an autonomic response to the right stimuli. Not a banana for a monkey or cheese for a rat, but the kind of carrot dangling at the end of a spiritual stick that stings like a mother-fucker when the hit comes down; when you see god and become something this world won’t spit upon and walk away from, realizing just what it was that you have never been – that the instructors for those schools of torture in the 3rd grade couldn’t even see, all the potential that you really are.

You grab her foot, in her Disco Cinderella slippers and the sky opens up for torrents to gush down and flood you, choking you, drowning you, suffocating you until you can’t take it anymore and you stuff her foot into your mouth with the abandon of a dying man and you pray to the god you saw, just a few moments before, that in these toes is a safe harbor to walk freely and without shame. In that instant, you come alive, just like the first time you found the world, too bright and filled with sounds that don’t make any sense; people staring and slapping at you, demanding something, anything, but what, you will never know, though it doesn’t stop the demands from coming, hundreds and millions and eventually, a wall of water from a dam that broke up a ways from here comes pouring down upon you and then you’ll understand what being born was. Then, as all that hits you with the weight of the gold in her soul, you’ll realize it’s time to find a new birthday, the one when you were last born.