Douglas Dandy

The burden of the world is that you’re in it squirming around like a treasure chest full of snakes. I may have bit the pit but at least I spit it out. I saw you swallow it whole, then I saw you swallow a mouse. Maybe the salt was put down to melt the snow. You made snow devils of white, entire snowmen out of coal. I gave you my heart; you returned it in two and then acted like I owed you a “Thank you.” Maybe it’s the air of the coffin in which you sleep, but where I’m from you don’t trade love for bathtub gin. I once saw a child cry over a crushed caterpillar. I once saw you care, but it was just a nightmare where you genuinely cried only because you were dying.

I wrote the world  into a little notebook and discovered that water smears the ink. Now my friends and family and all the strangers on the street have messed up faces, real horrifying countenances to see. I can’t understand them when they talk. It’s a Pablo Picasso nightmare, except this isn’t a museum  and I’m not asleep.

The street lights were all bright and the dogs where all howling and the murderers were repenting and the children were all sinning with one another. There was nowhere to hide and my bride was left bawling with no ring and my father was left with apologetic mumbling and my future was crumbling like a dry cake. The coffee was burnt  and the diner’s booth was cold and the expensive eggs were undercooked and the end of my life was just another painful birth. I ate all my eggs and I gulped down my coffee and I paid with a twenty and I forgot my change.

Hell broke loose like a gimlet, a drill spinning spinning, Motherfucker. Let us remember birds chirruping  in the grass, squirrels skittering up and down the trees, the neighbor lady’s laundry drying on the line. Wave hello to the portal to Hell that opened wide and hungry in the powder blue sky. It is a mouth, an “O” into a belly made to digest and defecate out a plump, fertile rock where everything can be renewed. Hello salvation. Hello Hell.  Hello all the holes of my body. I hope you die well.

even his long, long absences 

  Although, in all honesty, it was just a peck on her mouth. I know I kept her late, but really, it was my last move.

Sometime after we broke up I took a girl home and nothing happened. And you were mad. . .at the nothing that happened on your bed. But where are you? In Japan. But in whose bed? Not your own, sweetheart. Not your own. You left that here.

I think I like to write about characters and construct mendacities around their lives. Things they must face. Raw events that can leave them stripped of dignity; or, even life. But, what is left is the exploration of an idea through that fictitious life. This presentation of idea is and of itself the only pedantic scratch of chalk on the blackboard of literature. You can better yourself as an artist with the writing act. Yet neither the act nor the writing itself serve as moral ajudicators. The writing is sometimes bigger and more inquisitive than the writer.

Remember when we ate the world up, like fucking was going out of style? Sure. I found a note where you wrote: “You’re the one.” And I wonder, how could you treat the right one so wrong?

He compliments my kisses. Yellow sticky note of a good morning good-bye.