Part 6

Sunday, recovering and denying our tomorrow selves of well rested dignity. Mimosas pour through the cigarette clouds that stretch through the brown filter of noon. There is no morning before this, pajama PBRs resting on the leaning tables of last night’s unstable songs replayed in strange contexts. The royal residence of golden couches and their weary threads, presiding over the forgotten dominions of the church commuters all sincere and full of passionate irresponsibility. Sunday. The bones of trees make morbid crosses and pagan gods of a leafless hour, scratching the windows of our dreams while cars spill seminal psalms into the blushing virginity of dawn. How could anything be so pink and distorted as your innocent denial of widely accepted bullshit? The collapsing apocalypse of beer cans scatters language into the thousand tongued mouth of humanity and pianos. I understood but couldn’t explain. I articulated what I couldn’t accept. I played the music I could never make. I have read the books I would never write. I have sealed the fate of prose with unwavering punctuation, abandoned page after page of potential and begged hormonally for forgiveness. I have rendered myself incapable of operating the heavy machinery of God. I have set about the business of jamming gears and salting the rim of my evenings. Those with sober convictions can carry their exalted texts and test pilot confidence. It was never my job to drive this damn thing, just to chronicle the moments leading up to the crash. Maybe someday, pulled from the wreckage, archaeologists unemployed and bored will set in permanence the narration of uncertainty to which I have bowed my fingers slightly in the blue light of false technology, and revise their histories accordingly. It’s Sunday, and Christ can’t pry my hands from free will and fate, or the crushing can of my own divination.

Part 5

It’s a city of old webs inhabited by the ghost of a spider. Why are we here, all arachnophobic and indifferently stuck?

Part 4

On a clear night in Richmond, as cliché and unusual as that may be, the buildings are propped like illuminated bookmarks between the transient pages of smokestacks and time in their holiday garb, in rigid conversation with themselves like suburbanites at an inadvertent bad sweater party, drinking from the rubber chalice of the Dominion Power Company, recklessly buzzed and generally unaffected. The southern scale megaliths are arranged flatly like cards against the unwashed grid of windows in the apartment, neither played nor interpreted by it’s cement box inhabitants, wearing their own indifference and stitched seasonal inflexibly. Decaying trees still dot the oversized windows of overstuffed condominiums staked in the riverside, blinking like battery powered broaches on the saggy tits of winter, stubbornly electrified and shedding needles into the receding carpet of January. Richmond always tells you that you’re wrong. It’s 60 degrees and raining on the discarded Christmas tree skirts, but the holidays aren’t over yet and your sweater is still on. How can you be expected to stay sober, waiting for a city to wake up on a hopeless Saturday night while the river swells slowly and goes somewhere more interesting or at least somewhere else? We had plans together, you whisper as your tires massage the atrophied thighs of the city and smoke climbs the suicide windows of dead offices and restaurants empty their bowels into the alleyways. You bet the polished coin of your weekend on the windowsill spread, chanting big money and beer. And Richmond tells you that you’re wrong.

Everyone here is Tom Waits without a record deal. Everyone here is escaping the in-laws of standard, the households of guilt, the anniversaries of nothing. Mailbox Moms insistent on computer illiteracy and tucked-in tops shake the inky finger of judgment from their frescoed morality and makeup mirrors while we asleep in our windows watch the sky shatter, pregnant with prophecy, empty of promise. The cars make serpents in the streets. The mailman delivers messiah. His hands are red with brake lights, his eyes are inevitable, his bags are full.

We do not write back.

We do not believe in the gods of our parents, the sacrament of postage and paystubs. Their savior is antiquated. Our scripture is electric. Hunched over the flattened scrolls of the lost book Synthesis, you tell the world you are different, you are serious, you are filled with the articulation of destiny, the intuition of progress, intimations of prophecy, tendencies of greatness. You tell yourself you will be heard. You tell yourself you will be right. And Richmond tells you that you’re wrong.