‘Anywhere, But Everywhere’
By Matt Staff
My socks don’t match anymore.
One sock is robin blue, and just a few shades south of her eyes.
Fuck those eyes something proper, I couldn’t look at them, they blinded as if they were the early afternoon sun.
Foolish to look at those eyes, foolish to look at that sun; still looked at both.
Always was, still am a damn fool.
The other sock is white, and blank, and angering like the page that stares back at me when I’ve yet to distill thoughts into words into sense, sometime past 4am, when sleep isn’t rest-resisted, it’s death welcomed.
The bottoms of my pockets are littered with wasted half-struck matches, and two stubs that smell like the smoke of serendipitous creative liberation.
Always was hard to summon a flame from a match when the winds of change did everything but leave me, and my spirit be.
I’m thinking about last night; I fought Goliath in a blind drunken frenzy in an alleyway where piss was rivers, and dumpster’s were homes.
I swung left, ducked, staggered, swung right, kicked out, bruised my forlorn face unrecognizable, and excreted profanity.
David intervened, implored Goliath and I to consider pacifistic insanity.
Goliath and I made amends, hugged hatred, and cried confused brotherly love afterwards.
I remember though, yes I remember; Goliath, he socked me fiercely saddened sober, and then we exchanged smokes, laughed at the absurdity of it all. We smoked our lives down to the stubs.
Then, we dispatched with more fighting. As if we were fighting to feel something, pain was a welcomed sort of pleasant.
You know, like the pain that shocks you awake, a glacial shower first thing in the morning; burns icily cold, freezes lethargy.
I bid David and Goliath farewells, told them I’d meet them in hell for a late brunch. Satan’s mistress was in town, the wicked wench could prepare a mean egg’s benedict, and she spat Tabasco.
I started walking, then stumbling, then running nowhere with a heart looking for somewhere.
I was stuck in an existence that was anywhere but everywhere.
Where was I? Where am I today?
I gave the physical exertion pause, and allowed for my lungs to inhale the night and all its delirious, blanketed mystery. Then I noticed him.
There he was, a man with a face wrinkled old, dressed in black slacks and overcoat, chestnut brown, suede boots, and piercing jet-toned spectacles.
He was leaned back against a pillar painted pitch black, looking out upon a red square at a generation caught up in anything but looking. He was blinking disappointment.
He shook his head, uttered hushed condemnations I couldn’t quite make out over the echoes of imagined conversation closing in all around me with rising fervor.
I’m surrounded, fucking surrounded by thoughts — with none my own to give. I write. I scream. I cry dust.
Echoes of the imagined laughter provoked me lamentable over my inability to follow suit, the echoes stoke a burning sense of unrest over where I am in life, where I was yesterday, and where I’ll be tomorrow.
Where am I?
Where am I going?
Where have I been?
Silence answers.