Scotch and Chicken Paprikash

“The time is currently 2 o’clock in the morning. I’m Nick Mickelson and you’re listening to WPSV, channel 830 AM, on August 1st, where it’s currently 90 degrees outside. Tomorrow’s looking extremely uncomfortable. There will be horrible temperatures in the one hundreds during the day and in the high 80’s at night. Expect clear skies and relentless humidity,” the Meteorologist said.
The weatherman was right. He’s never right in the winter. Only in the summer does he seem to get it right. The sultry months of Indiana’s summer were at their worst. This was time when death occurred. The forgotten elderly, dogs in cars, and drunken, shirtless drivers all had unfavorable odds against them.
Theft is usually up during the hellish heat-waves that ravish sweltering neighborhoods. Home insurance catapults up and people stay in bars and malls to stay cool. Smashed skunks on the road leave unspeakable stenches. Much like spoiled beef stew or rotten sour kraut. My fingers smell like chicken paprirkash and my breath reeks of scotch. Hoosiers of European decent feast and famine along with factories, cultural areas, and the future. The Euchre deck will be cut and dealt in the empty evening.
Buzz Aldrin was on the radio after the weather man finished his potentially fatal news. He said that he’d never saw a UFO or aliens while in space. Some people believe that he and Neil Armstrong never landed on the moon, let alone walked and bounced on it. I wasn’t there. The suit’s too heavy. The helmet could snap necks like dry spaghetti.
A man named Manny told me that a “volunteer” was going to go to the moon and live there for about five to six years. Water, food, and other supplies would be delivered
at the first of every third month. This “volunteer” was supposed to set up weather balloons and missile defense systems that the Russians couldn’t penetrate. He wasn’t allowed porn of any kind.
“It was going to be like what Australia was to England. A dumping station. We were going to put nonviolent criminals on moon stations, if they survived, to do tests on the surface and atmosphere. Experts originally thought that these men would not be able to survive more than two years in space,” Manny said. “Monkeys only lasted two months. Donkeys ate all the wiring and had to be shot towards Juniper.”
I had heard others tell similar stories about fake moon landings and the nonexistence of dinosaurs. Maybe I’m too cynical, but I don’t believe that these people are right. Like I said, I wasn’t there, but so what. I never witnessed Jesus crucified, Shakespeare write a play, or woolly mammoths roam the Earth, but I think that they could’ve happened. Probably the same thing is being said about people like me.
I have seen heroin be cooked on spoon stolen from Denny’s, shot in a woman’s vein, and witnessed her glorious overdose. I’ve seen the Pacific Ocean from a Mexican shore. I have never, however, witnessed a miracle of faith. Nor have I ever witnessed a miracle of the supernatural.
The mother Mary pushed Christ into the straw and loved him right away. Just remember, little Jesus, to the old saying, “no one loves you but you’re momma, but she might be jiving too.”

Scarecrow

One more drink won’t kill him. He’s good for another thirty years or so. Crazy how it all ended up this way. Vodka in Gatorade. Replenish those carbohydrates and electrolytes. Rehydrate the system thoroughly to ensure a positive morning experience. No aspirin here. No sir, just scotch and coffee accompanied by a doughnut or two every morning.

As I wait, I notice a vein on the left side of my nose pounding. Its pulsation brushes against my eyelashes; in tempo with an old Madonna tune. Maybe “Get into the Groove.” Clapping hands never felt so good. Skin melts with the friction. I’m scared.

An errant chicken fucker fled another scene. The scent of iron penetrated my nostrils. Chicken anal blood lies dormant on the dirt. Mr. Simmons claims to have fired two shots from hand-me-down .22 at the perpetrator. “I’ll follow the blood. Gut him to the beauty of Jerry Lee Lewis. Feed him parts of his body for lunch and dinner,” Mr. Simmons informed the neighborhood after thirteen longnecks. The adults wouldn’t let the elementary kids near the boisterous commotion. The wife and I told our children to get the poodle and go hunt for clues.

They searched the cemetery and wound up with Dylan’s “Tombstone Blues,” but nothing more. It rained on them. Well, so they said. Their sweat and pounding hearts wanted to reveal more. Their mother coddled them. They drank hot chocolate and ate gummy bears. I had to find the dog and pretend to clean up her shit.

When I opened the front door to my house the news informed our small town of a bellybutton infection that had reached epidemic proportions. I quickly grabbed cotton balls (soaked in rubbing alcohol) and stuffed my family’s umbilical cord scares. It tickled and they laughed. My wife forgot the video camera.

The authorities finally apprehended the suspect in the Gordonski’s corn field. He’s in his fifties. “He was naked and masturbating by the scarecrow,” Mrs. Eaton gossiped. “Well I never,” our neighbor Mrs. Perkins said.

“Well now you did,” a crow screeched.

The Shuffle

On a large military scale the masses are feeble, weak,
tender, oppressed, misrepresentative, and picky.
I can’t hear your bitching and moaning.

You don’t recognize my constitutional acknowledgements, but I’m particularly hype to a false precinct.

Bleeding eyes are completely etched out with micro-tear reactions
molesting sentiments of the clotting-blue-vein bunch that explode frantically like Fuchsias falling to the dirt.

A summer’s eve.

I heard that there’ll be a Monday-morning-brunch-hunch.
It could take care of the unknown.
It could make the present muffled.

Immense majorities’ voices drown in Bureaucratic desires that
slash the very freedom that blesses this atrocity.

My balls burn and I’m pissed!

Ah, shit. My cable bill is due.
Not enough channels to subdue this post-psychological avenue.
Children’s jubilance sprang and sprung daisies,
orchids, and poison lilies.

I’m out of cigarettes and out of my mind.

Stripped

There’s a heavenly oasis placed in Nevada.
Some would say two. Some would say none.

Within a squinting distance resides Los Angeles.
One can smell the stench of plastic and silicone.

I feel no shelter, no one’s values nor control.
Dwell in a motel for a few weeks. Check out the odds.

The splashes of 5,000 quarters rattle around.
Geriatric women tell me how proud my mother is.

My lover works. Entertains with nipples and bush.
How could I be the last to know?

I stopped in for a drink; female bodies spiraling.
Crotches thrusting at us like flying carpets.

The harsh reality sanded away hope and trust.
No keycard unlocks this boarded up mess.

It’s time to head back to the flatlands and woodlands.
The sorrow grows and grovels like a wart.

Out the Frame You Traveled.

She got out of bed teary eyed. Depressed and hung-over.
Her eyes locked onto my warm, dehydrated body. A missile
launch of pain, dejection, and Margaret Atwood. My
armpits drench cotton. The smell of last night.

I was mostly responsible for an innocence and purity annihilation. Terrible confusion,
you had to end. Disconnected the umbilical cord and headed by to
your womb in the country. Eat at a golf course. Stare at the river.

Out the frame you traveled. I didn’t even have my glasses on.
“That’s the shit that makes living fun.”
A loaded old man with denim cut-offs and a tie-dyed tank top said.
We were drinking at the sanitation station.
“It can’t get any better than that,” he said.
My breath smelled like baboon knuckles.
My heart sank to my left foot.

Might As Well Jump

I don’t know how it happened. It just did.
The shit was random, original. Life changing.

David Lee Roth needed a ride to his storage shed.
It was off of Ironwood Rd. He gave directions.
High kicks and screeches like my dad’s Impala
highlighted the way. His cellophane pants melted.

We survived on Dramamine, oranges, and flat Coke in a plastic cup.
The cup reminded me of kegs and fights.
Mr. Roth said, “I’m quitting these someday.”
He lit a Marlboro. The cerulean smoke
rose from the cherry. It was starving.
It swallowed him whole without regards for the seatbelt.

Points within the Gulf of Mexico

Propositions on Bonita Ave. left
Kenny $35 lighter in his duct tape wallet.
Slick and cold. Novel birthday present from the guys.

The darkened corner of Crawling Turtle Rd.
and Swamp Stink Blvd. brings
sunshine to the eyes.

Young and old women. Lost sisters and mothers.
Men dressed as women. Heavy makeup.
Suicide of the Adam’s apple.

Off to other corner
slouch shrimp.
They came up from New Orleans. Troubled crustaceans

dipped in the wrong sauce. Prematurely
removed from the ice platter.

“Let’s head to Tampa! I know some crabs,” one of them said.
“I’ll learn to roll cigars,” said another. “They do it in Ybor City.”
“My cousin went their and got run over by the trolley car,” said one in the back.
“In Ybor?”
“No. In Frisco.”

They’re not going to the Everglades.
Can’t live there. Evacuation of humans is

necessary for natural selected survival.
The raccoons talk to the pigs, and they chat with the ostriches,
and to crocs and gators, from a distance. They’d like to figure

out how to navigate boats with
giant fans on the back of them.

Blowing memories like exhaust.
Hot air spiriting from open wounds.