Shelf life of an onion slipping deep in the darkness

Although I'm not superstitious mostly, there are time gone where I've seen things that I can't explain. This is a story that had me thinking about things that blew me away...

Smoke permeates form a blue spreading everywhere within; something or someone turned a white hot light, another space danced in nowhere lines of something hungering forever, orange heat placates as faces touch. All is boundary and circle out of reach, machine gun souls in the night, tap dance; snake minds.

I ran past the face in the window, it was you, it was me. It was bitter all afternoon raining windows. I saw everybody’s face, some were crying, some laughing, one was screaming, I ran fast past that one, then came the café of sad dreams, so I sat in the dark alone and grew tired.

Strange thoughts come to me from nowhere as if a floodgate has been opened from some strange place that was always so well hidden before, but now hovering, threatening to become reality.

She started all this when I saw her sitting there in a room full of me one early morning, just watching me from her tree but before I could get to her she was gone.

I’ve taken to hanging around street corners and bars and other places I usually avoid. In one place I came to a girl stands at the bar, her white flesh midriff showing through black tee shirt under long blonde hair. She gets herself a beer. There is a ring in her nose which seems alright to me; meanwhile all the drunkards have gravitated into my quiet circle; maybe I’m attractive or maybe it is just the space around me is empty to be filled.

The dark ashtray of night absorbs the lapsed catholic with sweat trickling down his arms, and the pony soldier drawing my gaze talks to his brother as a girl fishes with her face, red lips painted on with a spray gun and then pulls out a present full of relatives from her shoulder bag that all survivalists seem to have.

Where she and her friends come from I don’t know, but absorbed they are with movement and a space that must have been set aside for them or maybe donated to them, yes I think they own it, that space nobody else can find, that only they can open, drinking whisky and chewing nuts and gum as smiles come over faces oozing sex and sensual abandon.
The girl at the bar looks at me then turns away to her friends and I watch every single strand of hair in her head crawl out and say: see you later. Dryden must have felt like this at the hard core talking, believe me this is really where I live, as he shot his way out of the two-way mirrors.

The girl from the bar attracts men by the score who all seem to think they know her, and perhaps they do. It’s funny how they want her so much but she doesn’t want them, and how much they have to say all the time, when there’s really nothing they could possibly have worth saying....

And then, later, in the vast ocean, I saw another side: their worn out tired old faces in the small place and the quiet time, shadows the only reminder of what went before; maybe they made it, no-one knows now or cares; words in books are all that’s left them. Their lives shone incandescent for a while, they were brighter than the stars, now they’ve nothing left to give. I see them sitting on their own, their eyes dim, lit only by some passing moment, so fleet it is lost; these lonely blues under the falling sky.

Waiting; waiting, and maudlin on top of the world with nothing beneath me but a blue bottle, and a red white flower sleeping out of a snooze. Two women leave, one had a coffee and one had liquor.

A female body drifts between the tables wrapped up in blonde hair, welded lipstick, patched jeans and a flowered shirt that does not hide her bumps.

A black man comes up from the bottom of a deep dark well and shakes a hand that belongs to a table of three designer hair and labels. They all leave sudden; prearranged. I think: maybe I’m in the wrong place at the right time. Maybe she’s an hour late. And why are all the windows taped up, there’s not been an explosion around here for a week?

I finish my beer and stumble out through the door into the pouring rain. The only street light still working pools its light over my car. I can’t find my keys. The holes have let in a gallon of water that sloshes around in my shoes. I bang the car roof. Lost my keys. I sit down, water dribbles down my neck. My hands are soaking wet, so is my seat. Water drips from my nose, flows to my thighs full of sighs. I watch the torrential drops beat upon the road.

There she is again, seen for a few short moments in her soup called life; this is the observer and she is the observed; one reaching out from recluse, the other a sleeping beauty, always at the edge of a filled space, only to be expected. And when I look up I always imagine her to be bending over me, trying to get in, but she never does; the space is full of wanting her.

This is an island and there is the crowd around the edges, so remote, untouchable, a sea of one’s drifting, congregating, like magnets to safety, all so small, all needing a security, even in their drowning.

And there is Marco polo wearing a hat, calling himself an Italian, living in a foreign country, looking like a surreal fish in murky water, drifting through the crowd as a charismatic soul; never drinks or smokes except at tables of excess, remote from bad luck; looking intelligent behind what’s seen in the mirror, but it’s alright, cats do it too, real only when they hunt.

And there’s always a point isn’t there, to be argued over, made up of brief moments of ecstasy, so called, over too soon, then on to the next one, but every next one is less than the last, until in the end you join the ocean, to wash over you, to become it, that vast ocean to be sailed over, finally knowing the feeling, that soundless feeling of being.

From the journals of the X-ray dog in his search for Miss Pretty.

Images from Pixabay

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dean-moriarty/e/B00BFMQT02/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_2?qid=1532531393&sr=1-2