you know how when you walk into a laundromat and the incandescent lights are as bright as the soul of a child – if you ever decided to open one up and take a look, that is – and all those loaded washing machines are spinning russian roulette gun chambers. spinning so that i hypnotize myself into thinking that maybe one day the world will stop this polygamy with the sun and decide to emancipate herself – or himself, if you want to be politically correct – from the black hole of doubt and lies and indecision...?
all i got to say is that there ain't a washing machine big enough to swallow the world. there ain't one big enough to swallow a human either. ever tried getting in one? ever tried to cleanse yourself inside and out, scrub yourself until your gall-bladder and your colon and your capillary arteries glitter like fake diamond wedding rings being tried on by a woman so in love that she could get stabbed in the heart and her love would seep into the wound and heal it like a miracle worker at a tent revival?
truth is, we've all been stabbed in the heart.
except, I'm the only one who can feel it because my love gland is dead.
romeo killed it.
the pain doesn't originate from my chest however. it starts at my toes and travels up through all those nerve endings making them flicker on and off like aging neon signs outside seedy motels prostituting themselves to the night. and twitching like men just graduated from being boys who saw too much in that last war and who really died, except not on the outside, and no just stand around in the streets. speaking of which, i can't see the sun anymore. it's all hazy and clouded up now by the pollution of all this dust, making our solar system's star look like the smoldering tip of God's cigar.
i think that HE built us without a self-destruct mechanism because HE knew that eventually, all of HIS children would have there insides spattered all over the globe, because there are too many tears in our pillows.
it's always raining in our synagogue.
and we kneel in this storm with our prayer rugs unrolled before us like the red carpet at a hollywood gala. we all kneel without shoes on, because they are waiting outside the door along with our sins.
doc,
give me a cesarean so i can give birth to all this hate.
sorry.
(+)
they are lying on the sidewalk, right where the executioners shot them, except that they aren't standing anymore. their hands are birds rescued from oceans of oil spills, all black and dead. you know, oil towers are nothing more than the needles of nurses at blood drives than anything else.
muhammed is giving O positive.
and a bunch of black girls are lying on the sidewalk while their prayers flutter around their heads like moths clustered around lamplight. while the doors of their church smile craggily, the same way homeless men on the side of the street do as they hold cardboard signs that say,
“i went to vietnam. i had shared a Snickers with a kid who had a bomb strapped to his chest. i need money now because whenever i see a kid with slanty eyes i have to check under his shirt for the same kind of thing that ate Dave's hand and ate my mind.”
they lie on the sidewalk, and momma's face (as black as the London skyline before a German bombing run) cries tears – more tears, godssakes – that are sopped up by the hair of the black girls, all in a row. their church is smoking. it's a spy with a last cigarette and a blindfold and it doesn't matter how much blood muhammed gives, because the four black girls on the sidewalk are still gonna see HIM today and all the world will say in response is
sorry.
+)
enola gay, mother of five, pried open the japanese sky like the lips of an oyster and dipped all those evil innocents in reflective paint, so that they glow in the dark. the same way my son's ceiling glows with fake constellations that we'll sometimes count for hours on his bed before he goes to sleep.
and then after we drop that particular baby down the chimney, the lace print on the dress of the girl who lives in the next town over gets a fresh tattoo that'll cause cancer to eat all her cells like the slanty-eyed boys who ate Dave's hand in ten years or so.
we hide the fact that we're monsters, like teenage boys hiding issues of Playboy under their mattresses from enola gay's eyes.
i like my toast crisp.
so do the japanese.
so we turned their souls to hot melted butter that runs in the streets and clogs our arteries and congeals in eistein's hair and enhances our mutual affinity towards toast.
sorry.
(+)
like i said, i have lost my faith in washing machines.
i've lost my faith in little kids with type O positive blood too.
becaue no matter how hard i try, i can't get his apology washed out of the wool-polyester blend of my soul. i scrub and i scrub and i scrub like like surgeons sanitizing their hands before they open up kids with incandescent insides. but. see, the word he spoke as he ran out into the street as i walked by and hugged my leg ate my hand - just like Dave's - and my mind. see, the word he spoke caused my eyes to lose feeling in their retinas and is as permenant now in my soul as a heart with intials inside of it carved into the hip of a tree.
before we both turned into sand and prayers given from the top of a minneret by an imam, he whispered up at me:
“sorry.”
