By PAUL LIMA
Return to Creative Writing


Friday night. I sip and write.
Cheap wine to nurse my appetite
and bleed my ulcer dry. 
Painful regurgitations distract my imagination. 
My bent fingers slither across dusty computer keys
as if taunting an Ouija board.

They strike, pause, strike.
Tap out interrogations.

I who once presumed to fly
how is it now I barely crawl?

Good question.
To which there is no answer.
And so I dawdle. Clear my throat.
Wipe clean my screen of grimy fingerprints.
Pick my nose. Scratch my crotch.
Sip another sip. Listen to my belly gurgle.
And watch my flashing cursor flash.

Oh flashing cursor
are you the role I assume today?

Hark the herald, muttering obscenities
beneath his wheezing breath.
An old man with burnt-out eyes who reveals himself
to children playing in the park.
(Yes officer, frantic mothers say,
you would recognize him anywhere.
Such a limp, such a shrivelled thing.)

Indeed. There is nothing here to fear.
Not this earthy vestige of impropriety.
There is no poison in my sting.
For no sting exists without bite.
(To think that once I munched on apples.)

Shall I gum a peach to death?
Let the juice dribble down my chin?

Oh devolution. Oh bitter defanged hiss.
From this petty life of grime is there no absolution?

Move closer love who art in heaven,
or wherever thou may be. 
Examine this ghostly image.
Has-been I have become.
Never-was I've been.
Sluggish snake shedding yet another skin.

Oh cold cruel cross where is thy redemption?

Your suffering. . . it was in vain.
Your curtain-call revealed a fraud medieval.
The heavy stone, eternal burden, remains in place.
Unsaved, we suffer still. Uncomforted.

Oh modern age
you bear Caduceus boldly into battle.
Debunk miraculous misconceptions.
Transplant the heart.
What does it matter?
You feed the world as well as you
resolve the ancient riddle of the soul.

My vegetable love, uncultivated,
withers on the vine. 
I gag on wonder bread and acerbic wine.
The king is dead. Without successor named.
Sex, drugs 'n rock & roll become
yet another empty stadium refrain.

See how my skin has yellowed, love.
Watch the layers flake away.
Like faded memories distorted.
Unexpiated lives discarded.

Send me a crust. A crumb. A morsel
that I may ingest more than indigestion.
Or send a dog to lick these wounds.

I am in search of paws to scratch a match, 
so I may smoke an illicit cigarette.

Nothing refreshes any more.
Not even reflections upon your lips
or neck or breasts. Glorious nipples
that I could suck and chew.
Satiated child, I burrowed deeper, 
deeper still, into the cavity of you.
Until all was still, except for shallow breath.
Proof that life existed in the desert.

Oh milk and honey. Oh promised land.
Oh bloody turd. Oh cold bed pan.

On my belly dare I crawl through
silver needle's squinting eye?
I am not a rich man.
Then why to you did I become
As obnoxious as foul camel dung?

Decomposing I rehearse for bon
voyage in royal hearse. Or on an ass.
Hey, hosanna. Who hosanna?
Will there be throngs to greet me 
as I arrive at journey's end?

Will there be you?

Or will their be but final jeopardy?
A question posed:

Just where have all the flowers gone?

As if they once had been.

And in the end, a rubric I request.
A modest epitaph.

MEMOIRS.

That will not do. 
Pretentious. Dull.
And so untrue.

FOREVER YOUNG.

Oh red-eyed psychedelic fantasy.
Makes my ulcer sing discordant harmony.

I toss the dog my final bone:

RAMBLINGS.

It has connotations of the rose,
and yet...
We choose to like the sentiment.
The dithering implications:

A senile rolling stone,
I gather moss. Attract flies.
Am something my landlady can despise.

Oh how we used to rock and roll.
But now the flame it flickers oh so low.

Fingers poised. About to strike.
Instead, slither into hibernation.
Even though it's almost spring.
the only song I hear
now that crows have died and flowers withered:
A note of pain and agony and fear
From blotted belly that has learned to sing.

Bitter child, I confess.
No longer sweet. No longer dear.
What cowardice? What abject fear?
Keeps me bolted. Confines me here.

Are these questions not rhetorical?
Or are they rather allegorical?
Like two divided once by three
the answer is eternity: The beast.

Yes. It's Friday night and all that means.
Or used to mean. It's all so mean.

It was so cruel of you to leave.
With me, divorced from any semblance of reality.

Ah, the crux. The crux.
The crucifix.

Unshaven still. And unforgiving.
What does it matter.
Mad as a hatter.
The cross is vacant. Bloody still.
As if there had been a saviour once.

Before whom shall I make amends?
For what now shall I make amends?
With whom shall I lay me down to sleep?

The answer, it is in the making.
Or is it in the undertaking?

How late the hour grows. The hour it grows late.
And after the winding down of real-time clocks,
what whispers of immortality remain?

My oracle is silent now. After predicting
endings so predictable from the start,
there is nothing more for me to view.
And even less for me to do.

My tongue is dry. My tongue is dry.
I am too tired to ever try.
But there was a day when this parched tongue
could make you sing:
Oh joyous rapture!

Oh beauteous one.
Breath of life cannot too soon
be taken from your lips.
Life of breath
You have removed from mine.

Tragedy. In the severed union.
Served so swiftly après communion.
Leaving me with all that isn't and is.

A curtain call. A final wiz. 

Allow me, love, to ingest another part.
To hit one last note. To lick the crumbs.
To toss this barb, a final dart:

Dust, my love is where you end.
Dust, my love, is where I start.