“I put it between my teeth like a dead mouse and let the blood drip down my chin.” - Gerald Stern

I Get Wet

Ferocious and feral? I’m peripheral. On the exterior of my own dreams, a starving vagrant outside of a baker’s window.

His patrons like to pretend I’m not there. Disheveled and tattered, an unsightly distraction. Salivation, as opposed to salvation, dribbles like a slow-mo Spaulding off cracked lips as that spit abets hunger’s codependency to hope, a delusion born of desperation.

For the price of a cup of coffee a day, I could be filled with an unspecified elation called bliss. No money for such a beverage makes for a hackneyed voyeur on the outside looking in, while the idealized occupants of fantasy still gaze away.

Disgust and revulsion disguised as mock pity hangs like spectacles on their alabaster countenances. They don’t want me to know that they loathe me.

Such a revelation is kept quite hush-hush and far away from the beggar or vagabond safely beyond the glass. Those who have attained what I want fear revolution constantly.

So as an actor on their screen, I have to bring the drama to them. To make them care, aware of the misfortunes of those still laboring in the mines of mediocrity.

First, I present the blade, one I forged out of my own self-righteousness. Bestowing it as an offering, as tribute.

Second, a ceremonial sword dance commences. All the trappings of tradition must be observed, because what would we be without it?

A spin here, a plié there and heads begin to turn. No need to make a sound, they can’t hear me. The long and hard straight edges of the saber strike out into the cobblestone night, eviscerating oxygen molecules like the kiss of a cool death blow.

End then bow, some begin to cheer. At that moment, I pull the shark sharpness of this killing bow across my fretless neck and bathe in my own arterial spray. My finale, my ta-da! My life for the corneal spotlights of those here in the present.