SUCKSTARS

I am a lost dog I am terrible rash all over your house i could hold a wishbone upside down and empty it i wish I could learn a lesson from you but really only rain you were too excited to come and see me i was too excited to be loved by you i will open my eyes and light up the earth oh I have lost it i have torn myself down my breezy bad mind tonight for show and tell there is someone who cannot keep singing and it is me

“She sat down on the steps and laid her head on her knees. She went into the inside room. With her it was like there was two places- the inside room and the outside room. School and family and the things that happened every day were in the outside room. Mister Singer was in both rooms. Foreign countries and plans and music were in the inside room. The songs she thought about were there. And the symphony. When she was by herself in this inside room the music she had heard that night after the party would come back to her. This symphony grew slow like a big flower in her mind. During the day sometimes, or when she had just waked up in the morning, a new part of the symphony would suddenly come to her. Then she would have to go into the inside room and listen to it many times and try to join it into the parts of the symphony she remembered. The inside room was a very private place. She could be in the middle of the house full of people and still feel like she was locked up by herself.” 

“If he stayed at home he restlessly walked the floor. He sat on the edge of the unmade bed and gnawed savagely at the broken, dirty ends of his fingernails. The sharp taste of grime lingered in his mouth. The loneliness in him was so keen that he was filled with terror. Usually he had a pint of bootleg white lightning. He drank the raw liquor and by daylight he was warm and relaxed. At five o’clock the whistles from the mills blew for the first shift. The whistles made lost, eerie echoes, and he could never sleep until after they had sounded.”

He hardened himself so that each muscle in his body was rigid and strained. He did not listen or look at anything around him. He sat in a corner like a man who is blind and dumb. Soon they went in to the supper table and the old man said grace. But Doctor Copeland did not eat. When Highboy brought out a pint bottle of gin, and they laughed and passed the bottle from mouth to mouth, he refused that also. He sat in rigid silence, and at last he picked up his hat and left the house without a farewell. If he could not speak the whole truth no other word would come to him.”