In the Meantime...

It is highly likely that I would take a perverse pleasure in splattering droplets of my grey matter onto my car window on the head of a bullet.

Being chained into this constipated artery of America, swimming in eye-corroding exhaust fumes on one's way to bury his or her face in the asses of executives at the behest of a boss getting his cock sucked in New Kingston will do that to a person.

My heart is getting squeezed and wrung through a meat grinder, and I would howl my discontent to the sky full of deaf gods if I weren't aware of the futility of doing so fromm the confines of my fibreglass-plastic-foam-stuffed torture chamber.

What, really, was keeping me from busting out?

Opening the door right there and walking away?

Walking away from the mess, turpentining what had been smeared over my future, strolling right back up the artery while the suckers looked on and burned in green fire?

What would I do?

What would my plan be?

I'm still young. I could start a revolution; don my seven-pointed crown and set the city on fire with my torch. It would start with graffiti on the sides of corporate buildings and leaflets pinned to telephone poles. Following in the steps of Savio, I would give rousing speeches, not from university steps but from car roofs and in a halo of trash can fire. Stirring speeches than ran whisks and hot pokers through the hearts of listeners. We would gather in musty apartments and the back rooms of cafés to burn relaxation into our lungs, talk politics and plot the perfect way to sweep the system's legs, priding ourselves on our unique position in history and our having broken out of all the churches. We would beat sense into skulls at concerts and spoken word festivals and muster an irrestistable army. We would be in all the papers and bloggers would lend us their support.

In the course of our little uprising, I would meet someone; a gorgeous man or woman. We would just be acquaintances at first, but would blaze into something much more significant, making us into porcelain figureheads in a heated flurry of beautiful clichés. We would spend our days starting riots, leading sit-ins and screaming passionately into magaphones at picket lines, maybe even be thrown in jail a couple of times, which would give us perspective. Our nights would be spent playing at poetry and copulating with youthful fury, melting into each other like two pieces of caramel under a blowtorch.

The fire in the city would, of course be rained out with time. The army would fall out, basking in the bittersweet afterglow of crumpled causes and fading friendships swaddled in nostalgia.

Some of us would probably head west. Some to San Francisco, the refuge of waning hippies everywhere. She and I, or he and I, would head to Seattle, settling down in a house we built ourselves nestled in some trees overlooking the sea.

We would go to Zen centres together, dissolve into everything and recoagulate into nothing. We would write poems and drizzle the landscape onto paper together; art that we love to share but could never sell, especially not to those hipsters who will believe with earnest that they "get it" moreso than we do.

Spending our summers at umbrella-shaded tables outside coffee shops would introduce us to college students who recognise us when baristas call out our names. They would want to sit with us and we would oblige, burning relaxation into our lungs (a little less than we used to), offer some to the open-skulled scholars if they would have it, talk politics and reminisce about our good old days of hellraising. When they ask why we stopped, we tell them it fades with age and that we learned more civilised methods. 

Sometimes we'll run into one or two of our old soldiers and do the same.

The years will pass and eventually the college students will stop coming, as will the soldiers and that will be alright, because we will be tired and all things must fade away.

We too, wil fade away, living into our ninties while fresher generations stress-ulcer, eat and work themselves to ungainly and unsightly ends.

We will dissolve into everything one last time, getting carried of on the sunset, like vikings aboard their hungry funeral ships, while it pays its silent respects.

A horn honks behind me, its serrated complaint burrowing into my head.

I roll foreward one inch and sigh.