Bunny Embers

A melody ponytail, a middle-name smile, an old-fashioned jig with the neighbors. A wipe of the windscreen, sunscreen. Gimme the Carter, the Marlowe, the town protector, the well-breakfasted, the special ones who spit
This soil, this lonesome steak. The smokers steak. The cold song dance speakers
I don’t like it but it doesn’t bother me

(Not yet, not yet)

This spitting paradise, do you recognize it? Is it harder to breathe in here or out there? So many buried in this catacombic maze, filled with jokes, zoological marriages, spitting hyenas, eagerly emoting grizzlies, a fellow with frosting and respect

Do you remember me? Remember the shit? The boogie? The excuse-me and the neighborhood that roared?

Quit these closed hour towns, the emergency hellos to strangers in flower petal millinery

Gentlemen are not always gentle though some carry rosebuds for sweethearts or mothers. Mothers with daily soup salad, roasted and boiled meat, beets. Enough food to ride to California and sit beside a woman with flesh and squabble.

One bite for mommy one bite for bunny

These are bunny embers
We stare at the dead and try to understand space
We stare at the dead and try to understand the space between us

Thirty or thirteen, does it matter?
Is there gas at the top of the mountain
Available parking?

Junkheap, E. 7th St., Ave. B & C, 1983 photograph by Philip Pocock. — Junkheap, E. 7th St., Ave. B & C, 1983 photograph by Philip Pocock

Did you like it, kid? Did you like the picture, kid? Take care of your head, kid. Place your coat on the table, kid. I like it, kid, and I didn’t like it – the wine, the sourdough toast, the taste of burnt coffee, the shambolic and the sham, these shaming shadows, heaving-me-overboard headaches, the behind me space, the emerald space, the moneyed space. Sometimes I forget to match necklace and ears, I don’t recognize diagonals, the willing soul, and the reluctant one bite for mommy, one bite for crazy

I mean it, they set up jazz for you. Charm? Charm me mommy
Set me up. I want to be crazy. I want to watch movies and believe
I want a coat to wear in the dark, thank you, you are polite
Thank you. I like vines more than yards

I hear the music of the “it”, smoking melody like a diseased Monroe
Where there is whiskey, there is water.
Where there is water there is honey and touchscreen

There are ballerinas who need holding, who require music to move.
There are mice, museum curators, fish that blow away puff puff in the wind.

I cannot speak. There is one last bite for mommy, there is further endurance and sickness discovered more in health than in appetite.

What is it this? Everything smiling, distant traffic, normality bonanza.

I have to go. I am waiting for myself to come home

Today I am lovely, not fluffy. I drive very fast and then I drink very hard and it’s not much to go on and it’s not right and I don’t raise drinks to the unknown quite enough. Sometimes loveliness is pathetic. I’ve been breathing since I was twelve, I have been drinking since I was twelve. I’m terrific, I’m lovely I’m…I’m rare. I have a feeling it is late, fantastic, beautiful, beat-up ooh ooh wonderment association.

I’m five foot six and burning

My throat is full of throat

Come on, you bastards.

Let’s go to lunch

We have hours and hours to kill

These glad-rag dusting thoughts.

-Jane Ormerod

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Bunny Embers

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