Irving Park Nights

 

           I was resting my insanity inside the mouth of the Lyon. The underbelly of the backroom evening rotted with the sounds of a simple FM bloodlust that wrapped around my liver & started a slow burn. Not unlike the slow leak of life that haunts my delusional paranoia & stings my memory sense with the dull blade of unforesaken insecurity & white trash desolation, but the burn of age & the forgotten loss & how it turns my stomach in knots, putting my sobriety through the ringer as I swim, a humiliating dog paddle, in deep deep amber currents who’s under toe, I can now feel, begins to pull me under with laughter & hatred & my mind became fueled with fictional teardrops & rabid conspiracies of my own man kind.

 

           “O haunting death,” I shouted into the liquid night, toasting my shot high above my intentions, “let thy sting be bittersweet, like the goodbye kiss of youth!”

 

            “Amen to that!” responded the old man at the end of the bar as he proceeded to stagger to the urinal, bumping his shouldering left arm into the jukebox, which displayed a nice game, but really had nothing to say on this shallow eve.

             I downed the shot. The soothing afterglow cooled my burning insides, my fragile being & my weakened conscious. The cluttering noise intruding from the bowls of the Lyon became over intolerable & I stood, with a weary presence, raising my last sip, again, stretchingly towards my dusty thoughts of love, hate, abandonment, betrayal & blatant mediocrity.

 

              “To all ye sinners. How I adore thee.” & I slugged the remains down deep into my gullet, buttoned up my farewells & marched out into the cold, unoffering arms of Lady Irving & her moonlit caress that paved more miles that I had wished to travel. But, I trailed her spine, touchingly, like a sad old poem, ghostwritten for a girl with eyes like a deserted interstate in which her heart, resembling a roadside diner, was closed.

 

                 & I was so God damn hungry.