The Challenge, by Paul Corman-Roberts
Public Memorial, by Paul Corman-Roberts
Smooth Ride, by Paul Corman-Roberts
Guilt, by Mel Bosworth
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The Challenge
Paul Corman-Roberts
then as the committee has seen fit to manifest as an auto-suggestive targeting of your Tabula Rasa for the pro-active percepting of your own placental inner-space module mushrooming transcendent from the uterus out into the three dimensional bitch we fondly refer to over and under our yeast shit imbibifications as gravity.
And if we here at the committee are successful in the delivery of this dirty philosophical neutron bomb into the nether regions of your subconscious, then you too will likely attain the devilishly clever and inevitable position of membership upon the committee, god help you.
Rinse.
Repeat.
Public Memorial
Paul Corman-Roberts
Someone spray-painted “Jesus” on every Portajohn; hundreds of them ringing the Polo Fields; not one missed. Five hundred “Jesus”es blaring out to the throng; just so the heads wouldn’t forget which myth was being propagated here today. We wondered if it was one of the guys who helped unload the Portajohns bringing their eerie message to bear.
Then floating by the universal “Cash for your extra!”…at a free event. Spontaneous laughter drove away the previous four days tears and wailing. The simplest of successions beneath the image of the city’s son and he laughed too, beneath the California sun, all of us laughed as only the Dead are allowed to laugh.
And I wondered for a moment if all the best myths, you know the ones that endure for the cyclings of galaxies are the ones that are built on the laughter of strangers who still manage to recognize one another beneath the sun as though
laughter were shared through veils of time; through eons of gatherings to touch us here, where it counts, when it counts; as if laughter was not just ours but still it was.
Y’know? Just so we don’t forget which myths we’re propagating around here anyway.
Smooth Ride
Paul Corman-Roberts
Not so proud now public train ranger. OPD sits there, waiting- waiting for you to snap and make that violation of station regulation. They’re drooling for an excuse to slam your face up against the protective glass pane of the transit agency business counter, leaving saliva trail smears to remind the cute, sassy clerk whom you alternately wish to fuck and strangle, of the pathetic dignity you pissed away.
But you just gotta push it don’cha?
You just gotta stand up for the oh-so repressed civil rights you invoke with regularity, but which you have never learned apply only to those people who stay on the sidewalks.
Have no fear. OPD will always be happy to oblige your subconscious desire to have the shit beat out of you. You still wear it like a badge after all these years.
It still makes for great stories on rainy nights in panhandle shrub lair. You’ll share it with the socially retarded runaway that gravitates to your wing-nut aura like a demented, lonely moth, not so much with a gleam in his black, sexless eyes, but an exhausted body language that says:
“Hey, I recognize you. You’re one of us. But you’re different. I can’t tell how but you got that look; that look around your whole aura that says you got a plan. Yeah, I can tell you got a plan; even though I can’t come right out and say that ‘cause I’m this very really serious activist/musician so I can’t really look you full in the eyes and commit to a genuine emotion that isn’t related to street hustle but you look like you’ve got a plan and I...I...
...I really need a plan man.”
You never asked to be his target. You don’t shoo him away either. You don’t tell him you’re really straight. You don’t say one meaningful word to him ‘cause maybe between both of you there’s enough spare change to split one more forty in the shrub lair tonight.
And it’s better than being alone again. And it’s better than wondering where you’re going to be the next night and how you’re going to eat tomorrow or how you’re going to get there or
...but all that never happens anyway ‘cause you never really get there now do you?
You never really catch that train and...Jesus Christ! All you really wanted anyway was to catch that train; that bus; that semi; that hippie VW; that empty, windblown spot in the bed of some dope smokin’ rednecks four-by. All you ever wanted was to catch that easy, smooth ride.
Guilt
Mel Bosworth
Just before the baseball bat cracked my skull, it was like time jumped backward for a moment, and the action was a memory. I even saw it coming, from behind, as if suddenly equipped with 360 degree vision. Not that it mattered, this nanosecond of hindsight, I still dove headlong into the electrified waters of unconsciousness, but the odd serenity of being in that state of knowing seemed somehow significant, as if God existed in the compressed air between bat and head. I may have even smiled before the blow.
The black barrels burned hot, and the smell of sour garbage and melting rubber woke me from my slumber. Following a succession of blood-crusted blinks, I was able to focus on my immediate surroundings. The boots I saw first, ragged leather with no laces, inches from my face. The orange flicker from the barrels danced along gray concrete, split jagged down the middle like a fault line. The concrete was cool on my stomach and legs, the crack bottomless below my searching fingertips. As I struggled up on my elbows, my penis was pinched between the walls of the rift, and my foggy suspicions of being naked were confirmed. I calmly set myself back down.
“There is a chair just behind you,” a low voice said. I squinted. Although I couldn’t see the speaker, I knew it was the owner of the boots.
“I’m stuck,” I admitted. Then, to further clarify, “My dick is stuck in the crack.”
Laughter, old and dry. A hand touched my shoulder.
“Think of why you are here.”
The hand lingered, and I allowed myself to truly feel it. The palm was rough and calloused, the pads of the fingers microcosms of empty riverbeds, raised and spiraled. The voice itself was filled with the resonance of a tarnished trombone, the words long, familiar notes. The hand brushed off my shoulder, and the disconnected excitement of my penis subsided. I pushed myself to my knees, fully aware that my core was exposed. Despite this vulnerability, I felt no fear. I reached back for the chair.
“Good,” said the voice.
I sat, hands clasped between my knees, a flesh bridge. I stared down at the crack, realizing that we both straddled it in opposing chairs. I looked up, but his face was buried in layers of shadow. His hands, from which a single sensation still clung to my being, smoothed the front of a pinstriped jacket. I chose my words carefully, an unspoken chess match.
“Tell me more,” I said.
“I cannot.”
Then, sensing my desire, he cautioned me by crossing his legs. A boot slipped from his foot, exposing a cloven hoof. My erection jutted south, unfettered and unashamed.
“Tell me why you are here,” he said.
The gash on my head began to bubble, hot blood running into my eyes, a red blindfold. Ethereal thoughts boiled to the surface, a raping remembrance that broke my spine. I spilled from the chair, a tumbling pillar of pomposity and reckless indulgence. The toenails of his hoof scratched deep lines into my back, spelling a name I’d never uttered, but whose kin had kissed the bandages and then wielded the hard oak that sent me to my home.
Just after the baseball bat cracked my skull, it was like time jumped forward for a moment, and the action ushered prophesy.
“For love?” I asked.
My doubt swelled him with joy and madness, and the burning barrels were snuffed by a rank wind. My own earthly lunacy came at a high price, and as the trench in the concrete widened, I understood that this was neither God nor Devil, but a simple debt collector.
