Tom has appeared here before. He is a latter day beat poet, brimming with energy, searching for regeneracy, self-defense, and self-destruction. This is one of his shorter works. Tom is a magic, mystical free spirit. His writing reflects that.
I grew up in a southern town. My cat
meows at the bathroom door. He meows and he meows but I won’t let
him through, because he wants to eat the paint that’s chipping off
the wall. The paint is chipping off the wall, because I shower in hot
water and the hot water seeps into the skin of the walls. There’s
no internal fan in my apartment. I have a portable one, but it isn’t
plugged in. I use it in the summer, when the days are too hot and the
air eats at your skin like old age or hydrochloric acid.
I grew up in the south of the city of
Detroit and the air was molten lava, maybe that’s just what I
wanted it to be. I’ve seen some terrible things. I’ve done bad
things. I’ve seen the end of the world in the eyes of hopeless
people drifting off to sleep in their little dune buggies in space;
their little dune buggies that ran away from the molten lava faces. I
guess I pre-ambled a bit; it was only because of my inherent
negativity. I wish that I could be more uplifting, like a carnival
wheel that keeps on spinning, spinning on through the effervescent
night.
I killed a small fortune of aliens
from mars. No I am not, as some would call, crazy. I am an overweight
butterfly, floating across the great expanse of the ocean. The ocean
is wild like the butterfly but it is inherently capricious like a
power hungry lover, drifting in the mire of discontent. I want to
guarantee to everyone that the product that I am selling is worth
buying.
I collected the words from the
thoughts from the migrations of the birds from the supercilious men
with their political smirks. I told them what to think. I made it
clear to them that I was a diversion. I would help them run away from
who they were, by being me. I was the mess that coagulated like too
much fat from a cheeseburger, or the way my cat licks water loudly
and my refrigerators hums like an overweight maid with haemorrhoids.
