Riot Heart

 

There's always a siren, sending you to shipwreck. - Radiohead song

There's no one here now, no kids crying or leaving toys and sippy cups scattered all across the damn floor like buffalo chips out on the prairie.

I look down at the kitchen island and let out a movie sigh. I know I'm letting it out, it'a not even natural. I let it out because I'm the star of my own movie and the sigh is premeditated, dude. It's not a lovely little sigh.

Fuck that.

This is a big fat fake sigh designed to get people to like me and I'm not even gonna lie because I don't eve give a damn: this sigh could potentially get me laid if I get it right. A sigh can get you laid, of course it can. Anything can get you laid if you look half-decent and exude a little confidence and you're not interrupting people all the time and you listen to the shit that people you might want to make-out with are saying to you. It isn't rocket science unless you pretend it is. But you start pretending that it is rocket science and then you're never gonna feel the feeling again, I know that much.

You have to take whatever it is that you might have within your reach, whatever little weapons of mass horniness that you might have picked up along you trail and you need to polish that shit with your best spit. And if you do that, if you feel as if you are coming across with good and clear messages about your desire to be desired, then you can use a sigh or a laugh or the way you thump your ash off of your burning cigarette at the exact moment that this one is looking at you/ and you can feel it in your bones/ and by the time the ash flakes down to the ground never to be seen or heard from again, you could have the whole thing sealed up like some kind of Frank Sinatra wearing a human skin mask, and it's your face, too. 

But whatever. I'm out of it this afternoon. Out of the game.

I sigh my artificial divorced single dad doing the best he can to make ends meet sigh just at the same time that I look down at the island and see those six or seven lightly faded magic marker lines that ain't ever coming out of the wood and I see my son Henry, the Magic Marker criminal, and I can feel a whoosh of hot air coming out behind me and blowing past me and heading out the front door.

That's my game and it's gone now, you see. I fucked it all up. I wasted one of my sighs when there was no one around. Whatever. You have to practice. You don't just blow people's minds with a sigh or whatever without practicing at home. That never happens, trust me.

The island again and I see what looks like a glump of pancake syrup drying up in this humidity (Violet). I see a note to myself that I wrote to myself to remind myself not to forget to pay somebody else some money I owe them.

I see the purple flowers I gave my daughter when she had her little kindergarten graduation last week. The petals are starting to fall off now, nothing's gonna stop that. The whole gang of them will be dead soon and I'll probably wait a day or two too long before I pull 'em out of the stinky water and chuck 'em in the garbage.

I need a smoke. But I want a little coffee to go with it so I figure I'll make that first.

No one can stop me. No one in the world is here right now but me and that little fact makes me smile for a sec. There's what, 87 billion fucking people jammed up on this planet? And there's only one of them standing inside this house at this exact moment in history and that's me. What are the damn odds? We take it for granted, but what are the odds that we're ever standing there alone in house?

I don't know.

Who gives a shit anyway?

--

Inside of my heart I think there is a city unfolding. It's been happening for years but I can feel them down there now picking up the pace. I have no idea how I know this, but I'm like ninety-percent certain. At night sometimes I put my hand on my side and right where other people have rib bones and cartilage and muscle, where other folks would look like a nice side of beef if you fileted them up nice with a sharp ass knife, I don't think I have much of that left.

My veins have been replaced with streets. It's a long process obviously and it's still going down, but I can feel it happening. My veins/streets. My heart, replaced with City Hall. It must be a beautiful building too, pink dogwoods all freaking out in the spring, office fuckers eating salads and tuna wraps from plastic deli containers under sparkling 12:40pm skies on a magical May day.

Kids ride bikes where my love used to hang out, right there in the shadow of what used to be my main pump.

Homeless dudes piss in the bushes that used to be this tractor trailer of hope I had parked out there at the loading docks to my soul.

Cops walk across my old spine. It's a sidewalk now. It's covered in old gum and dog shit smears and the dirt from a million kicks walking all over it.

I'd pay money to have a day and a night to explore the place, I swear to God. Who wouldn't? You'd have to be a real jackass to know that they're building an honest, upstart city down inside your body and not be curious about seeing it.

I'd ride the subway right through my old piss pipe. That'd be cool. I'd grab a slice or two downtown where I used to kick up a lot of hot jizz, wherever that is. I'm not even sure. I'm being serious. I guess my balls? Whatever. It doesn't matter. I'd hop in a taxi and act like I know where I'm going by talking real quick and with authority like all the other fake city people do.

"HeyGoodMorning,TakeMeCrossTownDownTownAndDriveRightOverMyOldBalls,WillYa?ThanksAlot!"

Sheep pastures and Golden Gate Bridges and skyscrapers and brownstones with sad pathetic secrets smeared all over their guts and leafy streets that lead out into grand boulevards and wine bars and designer boutiques and murder alleys and suicide stains and Vietnamese joints open all night and bands playing everywhere you listen and horses pulling tourists in carriages for money and trains and buses and long-haired young hipster school dudes walking to get an ice cream with their dad's new girlfriend and sirens blowing your fucking head off and straight-shot mid-town winds blowing your fucking head off and hordes of muggers with .38s lowering themselves down off of shadowy West Side Story rooftops just to step out of the darkness and blow your fucking head off, I've got all that going up and going down inside my body where I used to just be manufacturing the standard shit, the same old fluids and dreams and whatever that every other mortal bastard is sloshing around down in there.

"Hand's up, motherfucker! Don't move or I will shoot you in your face THREE TIMES, bitch! Give me everything you got. All of it. Don't hold nothing back from me because that just ain't right, you know."

That's you, by the way. I'm sorry but it is. That's you walking around acting all urbane and cultured and bullshitting yourself after a couple of overpriced microbrews in a local's only place in the cool hood.

You're an idiot, do you know that?

You know it now, don't you? Walking around down where my ribs used to be, trying to find a 'cool bar with bands' at 1 in the morning.

Guess what.

BOOM.

He shot you.

I'm so sorry.

You just got wasted under the gaze of a hundred tired pigeons shitting Purple Rain down where I used to dream of owning my own home and sharing our lives and blah blah blah.

Christ, man.

You are bleeding blackberry water ice syrup from inside your face all over my brand new sidewalks.

None of us saw this coming. But I've got a city inside me now, dude. A living breathing city. And these things are gonna happen. It ain't all art museums and glitzy galas, you know.

This is so whack/I'm really sorry.

Just close your eyes and remember the good times.

Just try and have a little dignity here if that's at all possible, alright?

Jesus. Be cool for once.

--

I keep imagining that somehow somebody's gonna find a way to replace my all my asshole blues with something grandiose and awesome. I want all my sadness replaced with a hubcap rolling off some Saturday night car movie-screeching 'round some ghetto corner.

Sometimes I feel like I want to die, you know. Don't patronize me. We all feel that way sometimes. If you've never ever felt that way I don't ever even want to meet you. I really don't. I don't even ever wanna walk past you on the sidewalk. We walk through separate galaxies. We're alien enemies and that never leads to anything good.

I'm the kind that has thought dark stuff. Like there can't be a way out of what seems so unforgiving and brutal right now. You close your eyes and you just picture stuff, picture the world without you, you know?

But I don't dare. I can't die. I'm too lazy to die. I'm too cool to die. I like living enough to keep things rolling. Hell, I've got these kids, bills piling up, 4th of July in two weeks. I got this sigh I'm perfecting. I've having my insides replaced with a major metropolitan city, whatever that means. I'm unkillable. I'm underneath every stupid shitty stone sleeping in the big park dirt.

I've got a Riot Heart.

I've got a Riot Heart.

I've got a Riot Heart.

Now move along. There's nothing here to see, people.

Go back to your hotels.

Go back to where you came from.

He's not dead, he's sighing.

It's just a guy sighing, people.

Everything will be okay.

Now go.

Taproom Hot Wings in the Shower

Standing in my shower is like standing still over in the corner of a jet plane loo. First off, there are no corners. The whole thing is so goddamn small that there are no corners. The whole thing is a corner. I'm standing naked in the steam and I'm cornered by the water, a gush of hot/wet heat slamming me in the face unless I use the two inches behind me to change my entire world by moving backwards so I'm taking it on the chin instead of up the nose.

I've been in good showers before.

I've had one or two decent ones in apartments from my past and back when my band played some shows with Nick Hornby, we stayed in some pretty spectacular boutique Euro hotels where the bathrooms were like big 'Fuck You's' to every shower I had ever taken up until that moment.

There is a shower somewhere in Stockholm that I almost slashed my wrists in once. I'm dead serious. It was a thing of beauty, all refurbished Nordic Viking ship wood and glass made out of frozen God tears. There were thin, sexy strips of spaceship stainless steel, too, and they were laid out in some kind of design all up and down the fucking vessel so that all I could do was begin to weep as the long burden of my endless, shit-hassle life came crashing down on me. You don't forget a shower like that. At least I don't. Christ, those sweet jets shot my body with rays of Happy Ending as I cracked the lid on a bottle of some kind of body wash way out of my league, something that smelled of centuries of lapping seas and endless forests and braided blondes hand-feeding me fresh fish chunks with the tips of their slender fingers.

Fuck it, I thought. I need to just kill myself here. Now. Just do it. You'll never pass this way again, you sad bastard. That was what happened to me, I swear to God. People always think that people who off themselves always do it in some sort of fit of depression or angst, but I'm not so sure. Maybe sometimes something so beautiful and wonderful can take you to a place where you just wanna freeze yourself in that moment forever and ever, you know? Life never lets you do that. Living sure as hell doesn't let you do that. But maybe if you die in the middle of some glorious moment, you've actually done it.

Anyway, who cares? I didn't do it. I didn't want to die yet. And I'm not telling you to kill yourself either, asshole. I'm just throwing some shit against the wall here.

I'm just tickling you with a lilac sprig, alright?

This shower of mine, I stand in there this morning and for some reason I'm thinking to myself, "Is this hard water or soft water?" It's a stupid thing to ask myself too, especially since I really look forward to the three minutes I get in here, escaping the kids in the other room, a final breath before I walk back in there and there's pancake jammed into the electrical outlets and people are crying and shitting in their pants and fighting viciously with each other over dumb shit like who saw Peppa fuckin' Pig walk across the flat screen first.

In here it's just me and my thoughts and evidently my thoughts are so stupid that I'm probably not even getting myself clean while I wonder about the whole hard/soft water thing this morning. I don't even know what hard water is. Is it actually hard? I kind of though all water was soft unless it was frozen, but what do I know? If they're talking about some kind of subtle velvety bullshit when it comes to the expensive hose water pounding your saggy ass while you stand in the shower then I guess I really don't give a damn, to be honest. I've never been able to understand certain differences in this world. I'm not made like that.

I'm wildly unrefined.

I'm a styrofoam box of 8 lukewarm hot wings from the taproom down the street.

I've got cigarette breath and bags under my eyes from I don't know what. I might be shooting dope by the looks of me. I have no recollection of any of this.

Every move I make in here triggers another move and that is a royal pain in my ass. I go to wrap my hands around the thing of shampoo, my elbow knocks into the cold water handle and I'm doused in punishment. I try to hang my four-month old two-dollar plastic bath sponge thing from Walmart back on the suction cup hook above my face, I back into the body wash dispenser and that thing cracks down on the cheap plastic floor of the prefab shower and it makes a sound like a rock hitting my windshield. It all unnerves me and pisses me off. And yet, you wanna know something?  I'm getting used to it in ways that are causing me to kind of dig it.

I mean, fuck it. This is MY shower, right? I could trade this son-of-a-bitch for a herd of goats or even for a wife or something in certain past of the world where people would be happy to step into my little place to clean up. If I could roll this shower in the rainforest or someplace like that, I guarantee you there are people who would want to have sex with me just for the chance to step into my thin/ridiculous shower tube. Either that or they might slit my throat with a sharpened jackyl fang just to take it away from me, but hey. That means it something worth having now, doesn't it?

Maybe I'm looking at it all wrong. Maybe I'm not seeing this shower for all it's worth.

It doesn't matter.

It's all I've got and I ain't giving it up and no one's asking me to and when that's what you realize about the basic elements of your unremarkable experience here living and breathing through a landslide of never-ending days and nights, well, then I see that as a mental breakthrough. I see seeing things like that as growing wiser, getting stronger in the head.

I pop the handles and the water quits. I drip for a sec, my face right at the shower curtain liner, and I can smell my own hot breath for a moment as I prepare for what comes next. The second I pull this curtain, I'm back onstage.

As these shower curtain rings slide and jingle, I will emerge back into the world in a haze of fleeting steam and that'll be the end of that. That'll be the end of me and my time alone for a long time, probably until tomorrow or whatever.

My own breath, breath that has seen the inside of my damaged lungs, breath that has been to a place so intimate to me but that I have never laid eyes on and probably never ever will, I let that exhalation hang there in the miniscule space between my lips and the curtain for a sec before i suck it back inside of me and swallow it back down to my lungs once again.

Because it's mine/Get back in there, bitch/You're my breath/And I still need you.Then I swipe the curtain back with one Hollywood flick of my wrist and I feel so alive for a minute, like a polar bear who just got laid.

It's all so fantastic sometimes, even if it only lasts a few seconds.

And that's it, I guess.

It's early in the morning and I'm on no one's mind as I hit this wide-open world smelling like straight Nivea, whatever the fuck that smells like.

The Walkin' Talkin' Hot Morning Piss Blues

Part of Max is in a box now, fucking ashes in a bag.

I stare at him on a Monday morning sitting there on my ex-wife's kitchen counter and I wonder what the hell he's up to. Used to be that he'd turn up  beside me as soon as he heard me moving around in the early hours of the day. I'd hear his jingling tags coming down the back steps and I'd dump the coffee down into the filter and I'd know what was up. He'd show up a few seconds later, the fresh hot piss in his body slamming up against the walls of his piss sacks, he'd stare a hole in my head just as soon as he spotted me in the same place he always spotted me right there by the coffee maker.

I'd let him out then, out the back door, him and Milo, out into the cool dawn of another day/out to piss a steaming laser onto the grass under the last minute stars/under the planets and the UFOs and the dead looking down at us getting ready to start another simple-minded day, another day running around trying to make money/trying to get people to pay attention to us/trying to get people to agree with us/trying to get laid or trying to stop thinking about getting laid. All the dead people up there peering down off their clouds and looking at me down here wishing I was thinner/moving through some random moment with toxic revenge boiling up in my guts/ the dead looking down on me, me getting the syrup out of the cabinet for the kids' breakfast when they came down.

I never watched the dogs take their pisses. I never cared. It's funny, I only cared about me and my day. And looking back now I'm sure the dead were laughing at me all the time, you know?

I'd change my ways if Max could live again. I seriously would. I'd walk out there with him in the dewy dark and I'd follow him around with snacks and some old sock rag and once he had his piss, you know what I'd do? I'd lean down in there and kiss his fat fucking head and I'd use my hand to move my rag so I could pat his little dog dick dry, soak up any of the tiny pee drops that might still be hanging out down there.

I would, dude.

I would do that shit now.

I would do anything to resurrect that dog and to have the chance to love on him again. But it's stupid and I know it. He's gone. I have no idea where he got to, what he does with his time, with his thick slice of eternity. He probably does the same shit, to be honest. He probably wakes up in some far off galaxy and wanders down out of some far-flung bedroom and starts staring at some other dead dude making coffee in the kitchen.

He needs the guy to let him out to piss.

"Let me out to piss."

Ha.

Beautiful.

Or maybe he's just a beam of energy streaking across the cosmos. Or maybe he's back on the planet, as a bird in China or some bug in the rainforest or as a human even. Maybe Max is alive and well and living inside a woman in Mexico. Maybe he's parked inside Bruce Jenner's soul. I have no idea what happens/where our dog ended up.

I only know that it must have sucked for him to spend the last year of his life with us watching us fall apart and separate and struggle with the jars of acid we poured all over our days each and every day for a long time there.

And I know I miss him bad, man. And that I'd wipe the dripping pisslets off his old man wang if I only could.

That's true love. I know it is.

--

Monica leaves for Boston with her boss on a work trip. She kisses the kids goodbye and tells them that she'll see them on Tuesday and then she gets in the guy's car and they back out of her driveway and head to the airport.

Fuck.

She didn't kiss me. She didn't kiss me goodbye. That's what I'm thinking with Charlie in my arms as they disappear down the road. I smell Charlie's crap and I know I need to change his damn diaper again, but I'll get to that. He doesn't care, trust me. He's fine. He can hang with a crap in his pants for a good twenty minutes or so before he starts to whiff his own stank.

Right now though, as I watch Violet and Henry pushing one of their local friends on the big rope swing out in my ex-wife's yard, I'm standing there feeling pissy that I didn't get a kiss. Shit, she didn't even really say goodbye to me now that I think of it. Hmph. Maybe I should have kissed her, huh? Maybe I should have been the aggressor, right there in front of her bosss. I could have just wandered over to her in front of him and been a man's man and wrapped my hand around the soft back of her neck, her hair all up in my fingers, Charlie looking at us, Charlie shitting himself in that very moment as I pulled her in and kissed her face like she was going off to war to probably die instead of Boston til Tuesday.

But no.

I lame out. I let things go the way they go and then she's gone and I have more kid shit to look at and wipe at and fold up neatly in the size 3 Huggie where it will remain like a body in tomb for God knows how long. I will toss it in a Walmart bag, chuck it in the garbage can out in her garage, and that will be the last I will know about it. The trash dudes will haul the thing away here in a couple of days and for all I know the whole messy affair will end up in the bottom of the ocean or shot out into outer space or buried in the North Jersey ground by the end of the work week we're living through right now.

Lost kisses and baby shits.

Welcome back  into my world, bitches.

--

Everyday I pick out some place in the sky and I pretend that it's the high-flying opening to Max's fucking sky cave and that he's just sitting there in the entrance to it staring down at my ass. I know he's rooting for me. I know that because I know it. That's how you know stuff in this whacked-out world, in this dream of life. You just know a thing, just decide that you pretty much know it and then you pretty much do.

Max roots for me. He pulls strings for me where he can, tries to cheat the system for me. He tries to throw me a bone, the fucking irony. I sense him when Monica and me are together. When we eat our dinner on her couch or avoid eyes first thing in the morning or talk hard/deep about the directions of our souls or about what to put on the pizza or about Instagram and the strange and curious people who live inside some pin dot galaxy of an app on our iPhones or about how one of our kids is making us laugh these days. I sense him when I look at the sky even though I don't even believe in anything in particular except the notion that he is deader than shit but that I know he is still looking at me all the goddamn time.

Look, man. I pass down through Gladiator fields, my Maximus hand drifting slow across the windswept wheat I'm cutting across and I get it that I don't get it, you dig? I have just a very basic kindergartner's comprehension of that thumping in my chest. I hear the blood blasting behind my face and I think it must be a train tearing back behind the mountain down the road. I see the sun shining in the sky and I think it's a sign for me to make a move, to move in for a kiss maybe. Or to dab piss off the ones I love, I dunno.

No one knows. No one knows what the fuck is happening here, but especially me, especially I don't know. I just make my cups of coffee and talk to my dead dog in the sky and watch my kids move across her yard while she plays with her phone, while she sips a cold Sierra Nevada in the spring twilight.

I am preparing myself for something.

But I have no idea what that thing might be.

I isolate certain sentences to maybe make them seem more important than the other sentences. Because I'm a douchebag, I guess. Whatever.

I make myself fucking laugh.

It feels so good.

It really really does.