UNKEPT

If I disclose any of my party of clowns they will drown me in a pool of ping pong balls.

Somewhere, lodged like a tumor in the back of my mind, was a baseball play-by-play Announcer, and a voice of his time. 

Someplace there was a ruckus, I don’t know where the pummeling came from, but I heard them throughout. And someone was getting pummeled.

 Apparently I clung to life, long enough to hang on. 

Not conscious of breathing…or conscious of reality, It was a ghostly mystery to me, phasing in and out, and with each nod, a new mystery.

The clowns visit me at night and pummel me with pool noodles. A thousand lashes…never more. As a result, I drift into a comma.

The nurses call it “nodding off”...

(Drug-induced…at eternity’s ledge…but we’ll call it  - “dozing” – for billing purposes).  

 But, I'm gonna call it "Noodling off."

 

OH LORD! 

“…if I should die before I wake I pray the Lord knows his mistake.”

 

 

V

In Her Proximity

 

 

Diane on the other hand had different ideas. She’d related stories of coming back. Not that anyone believed her, but it still gave them room to bounce the thought around and ruminate on what that might include. 

Just when they thought she was in Toledo, she’d show up 3 miles away, downtown in a bar, then be gone by morning before sunrise. So ‘the morning after’ does no one any good. Too late. She fled like fluid, ran with the current, and flowed downriver. 

The ache that comes with knowin’ her eventually leaves you numb from the sheer weight of her proximity. It passes, but not entirely, because it's always on "Pause".

 

V