by Ken Poyner
I’ve got no place to go. The party is shut down. All the slots are made for dollars and I’ve got nothing but weaselly quarters. This lobby you would think would serve more variety.
Everywhere I go the flowers wilt. Service dogs see me coming and head for the cartoon dark stored beneath tables. My hands in the pure air are pistol blue heresy. I can fold back the lapel of my jacket all day, but I am not well dressed. I think I shall stand out.
The busboy thinks I am a pylon. Round and round me he moves in wide baby faced arcs, like a pack of oboists about a wounded pregnancy. I watch him so as to make him know I watch him. The veins in his neck remind me of last night’s pornography. I imagine those veins undulating, locked knees and cement fists: certain, sure, absolute, innocent, pointless.
I tire of being the oddity in the lobby and head out into the night’s tyrannical air. I am having my difficulty breathing. My chest is the history of a thousand steam baths. Passers by hope I am not catching, inspect surreptitiously the subtle lavender haze hovering around me as though seeking a wedding ring after it has passed through a horse. My glow has its subspecies, and, if I could control it, I could panhandle the ever abundant gullible.
I am beginning to hallucinate and it is a good thing. Hello, blue fairies. Hello, yellow octopus. All of you have been my only best friends and I say, any of you want a drink? I left a woman at the bar who will soon want to meet you. I left her there when her fake-purity pale skin began to crackle and crawl with the Curies of my presence, and she suspected I had both a hand and a purpose in it. The weaker my legs become, the more it seems hers might have been able to crush stone, squeeze the life out of cement fists.
Friends, I have no purpose.
My blood is at the edge of my skin and I can tell you the cold when you start coming inside out is not to be beaten back by one thin dress jacket. No. The starving armies of temperature obey a physics we only think we know, have only considered from a point of view with no real vampires or trolls or serviceable fairies. Why has it taken this event for my understanding to be thrown open?
But to hell with it. I am going to go back into the lobby with my friend the groping octopus and have one wheelbarrow of a night with all those unsuspecting guests: their running noses and watering eyes feeding me like a virgin is fed with a fetish of hoof thundering penetration.
Look, I am amongst you. I make your air crackle with a black ordinary. My eight armed friend, imaginary or not, will give you one oatmeal bowl of a show. When he reaches over and pulls out my hair by the scotch glass full, you will applaud in spite of yourselves. When my skin rises in unremarkable blisters, you will swim in the hiss of your own breath. We will end the night loving each other, briefly.
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Ken Poyner has published during the last forty years perhaps three hundred poems in sixty or so venues, with his latest chapbook being Sciences, Social. He also is doing a bit of short fiction these days. Most recently, he has appeared in Eclectica, Blue Unicorn, Poet Lore, Frigg, Blue Collar Review, Adirondack Review, Medulla Review, Dogzplot and elsewhere. He lives with his world class power lifter wife and a collection of rescue cats in the bottom far right hand stretch of Virginia.
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