I got blisters on my fingers

Velvet Overlay for an
Addict Named Derrick In a
Discordant Downword Direction

banging on a piano with fingers blistered by hot grease at my job as the cook in a local barroom is not rare the way late roses are rare (early roses rarer still)—in just the same way walking streets at night is always suspect, so they did not expect me at all, ever.

no other comprehensible course than sleep, because I don’t have trouble sleeping, it’s the waking up that’s hard, like being a killer cop in the fuzzillo 88. it was not that he said he did not give a shit, it was the way he said it that troubled us, it sounded like many men's choirs gathered together, chanting penitential psalms licensed to the local cemetery where your forebears may or may not have happened on a strange peacefulness they remain too eager to share with you.

every time the phone rings my stomach curls in knots. i do not want to answer another call for help. isn’t it plain that I’ve been thrown to earth, a cancerous lech, a carnivorous apocalyptic riding out a rainstorm before the hunt resumes: isn’t it? I am nature’s thwarted rhythm, a green field of time that prays to be written. call on me, lour eed, oh lordee ooh lord.

comparative polarities deuced up with diplomas, stark and savage, like lurid men and women peeing in public lots, peeing, lots, all recorded by the police and pbs, so people can discourse openly about the constitution in a way that is at once enervated and annulled. did newton live quietly, or was he fitfully rendered in
fatalistic laws of motion, mellifluous cog of masculinity raised over the heads of unblinking roman regiments searching for the unceasing body of christ?

still, too early for roses. mid-april. trees are white and yellow puffs, insubstantial as bad marriages. even as a child I heard the loneliest of sounds, a piano never played, fingers never marked red by a heat that bubbles surfaces before it bores downword and whose oceans of blood and salt remain nearby vistas never
traversed, all dead seeds of a latinate urania, every one a maternal minuet, and nothing’s petrichorial prospects borne again and always on the unceasing rains of sameness and defeat.