An incendiary peal of church-bells in chorale – Sunday morning in the junk-room of a scotched country-side. We are near a line of tropic – and today, hitchhiker worshippers flock the heat blizzards of winter for sakes of charities. Piety hangs like rags on flags poles of cheap hotels; somewhere a city miser yawns after a night of binges with trailer park hoodlums and highway prostitutes. The fun is worship here; virgins know a rewards of heaven dick bound – reveling in farm foolery with drunken truck-drivers.
We are nearing a praetorian town – a signpost carved in grim letters that destined my past schooling: SETTLERS – an ink-blot on a map to tatters; a former reformatory, agricultural landscape. I pubed incarcerated there for 2 stolid years – boarded with louts and troubled clans from my arrested age. Young and initiated into cotton-picking and animal husbandry. A shiver of recollections. I recall riding those crop strewn plains with my father after gambling bouts in some austere resort slots – listening to Maria Callas – loses quelled by the night’s staccato silences and inaudible sights. Star tails of white stripes crushed by fugitive wheels – those were ritual dare-devil moves swerved around gravel roads and straight, yet narrow.
The normative radio dawns from far-off casinos, belched fed with machine diets from 24 hour parlors – dead foods and coolers from a sea of bleeping souls. I lived a phantom then, memories layered in cinder of conquered ambitions. Metallic anguish of a pot-hole jerked automobile jolts me from the reverie and soon I glut my mind upon tales yet to foretell my sojourn among those I left five years prior. And now that the pervasive hooting of another ghetto idiom, languished prints of concealed nostalgia takes tide beneath the excrescences on my taut skin. Selfishly I realize I love that penitentiary, but age betrays often such many of memoirs. Once near the purple blossoms clogging drains – at those street crossings of a friendlier city, I adorn my archives with the light of inquisitive fingers nibbling my soiled soul.
Inevitably, the black of pennilessness will assail me still – in the glare of new millipede street havoc. Every newcomer does eventually loll along with freaks of this wild rhythm toned by dry-bread hoarse intestines and the languid burn of fresh water on an empty tripe. Yet, I have returned to these fangled left-over visages of this mannequin city – waging my raw war like a draft in that geography of earthbound, stolid faces painting each day’s wake bloody. I am here, bilious with uncertainty and groped into a labyrinth of my uncontrollable tomorrows – at thirty, wishing that I in wretched penury would have died at birth, than to traverse the silted cobble of life’s famished paths.
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