Dark Days Edited

(I wrote this almost four years ago.  Much has happened since then, but little did I know the piece was not about the past, but rather the future.  Maybe that’s the way all things worthwhile are meant to be.  So here we go, tripping into the future, with great hopes, with plenty of sand at our feet, with eyes and ears that we shut and fill with cotton, with the sounds of funeral processions in the rubble, with a denial of all that is happing, all around us.  We can’t bear the march of the dark-men days and I am the worst of all.  Duke) 

The days are like dark men, sitting in my bedroom.  They are asking for information; they want to know my most personal thoughts.  Who I’ve been fucking.  The truth in all its forms.  The price of tea in China, which is surprisingly relevant for me.  Yet, I refuse to tell these dark men anything about any of that.

I can see their shoes beneath the table sticking out.  The leather is scuffed and the soles are separating.  The glue and stitching of the shoes come from dead horses, bobbing about in large metal vats, and the process is managed by out of shape people with coke-bottle eyes. 

These dark-day men with the salaries of bureaucrats and indeed, they are bureaucrats, working in The Institute:  a nice little place with winding hallways that often lead nowhere, empty help desks, multiple screens on the walls showing dreams, silent rooms, large, open-air foyers, white noise coming out of 55-gallon barrels, escalators, elevators, stairways, exit doors, sliding doors, endless windows and muffled voices just beyond human hearing.  

In the basement are machines with hot gears, moving molten dirt.  Digging holes of heat.  Engineers and slaves dressed in second-hand clothing or no clothes at all, unhappy as they lean against my days.  The basement walls shifting between dark and darker still and from a place long ago, just there in the corner, I can hear the birthdays and holidays whimpering, wondering, riding the notes of sad music.     

The days are assassins, lining up outside my door.  They are talking to my neighbors, prying up the edges of my life, noting when Sally and Conrad go to work, when the old woman, without a name, staggers down the hall, mumbling about the garbage chute. 

The days know I don’t have a job.  It disappeared in a fire.  I don’t have a driver’s license.  I changed my name.  I never graduated.  No possibility of pensions.  I smoke pot all day and drink to excess.  I take the occasional mushroom or acid tab.  I dislike speed and coke.  My circadian rhythms are fucked enough.

I have two cats: Hot and Cold.

I try to keep the assassins out, but it is impossible and each day has a different name and feeling, a different hat … sometimes it’s a wet hat from a summer lake canoe, other times a soft hat, with the paws of a panther pacing about the interior band. 

The days are pulling me apart and I have taken to cutting myself with a surgical blade in order to get ahead of them.  It is a gift from a doomed doctor with a terminal illness. He has a wife and they smile a lot, but he is doomed.

I don’t want to give the days the satisfaction of telling me when I will die.  Calendars are important for the days.  They are so pushy, one after the other … Tuesday yelling at Wednesday.  Sunday forever conspiring to take over the other days, wanting to be the King of everything.

If I am to die, I want to do it on my schedule, with time like sweet cream, and so I draw my hot bath, and I lie in it for hours listening to music, and the steam rises, making thick jungle moisture, and it covers the tile and the mirror, little beads of water dripping down over the surfaces, tracing thoughts for me.  Someday, when the days have their way, I’ll be forced to leave the apartment and as they are wheeling me through the lobby, I’ll call to the management and express how wonderful the amenities have been and how friendly the thieves were, leaving little notes in the empty spaces where my art used to hang.     

I am so happy about all of this that I cry and my tears help to fill the bath and there is no one to call about my happiness and so I keep crying until I can cry no more.  Just outside my door, I can hear the days shuffling around, knocking quietly, and then I start to hum.  It’s a melody for people who know the terrible days … those days like cats scaling smooth legs, hanging on skin with organic, spiked flip flops.