Wednesday Morning Dream

It was my birthday. I was over at my best friends house. We were all just sitting around bullshiting and what not when he suddenly remembers my gift. He hands me a shoe box. I go to shake it but he warns me not to do that. I open it up and inside is a huge fucking pistol.
"It's Billy the Kids gun!" He tells me. I laugh at this but he shoots me a look that says he's not fucking around. I lift it up and it looks more like a .357 Magnum but with strange red symbols carved into a pearl handle. I look closely at the symbols and they're flowing into each other becoming new symbols that melt and reform again.
"You can never miss with this gun, Rob, even if you wanted to. But you can only use it once."
"Once?"
And he leans in close, looking a little scary truth be told and he says with all seriousness:
"That's right 'once'. So don't go wasting it on zombies!"
I put the gun back in the box. I'm on the train going home. I'm paranoid that'll I lose it, leave it on the Southbound or have some idiot friend of mine 'borrow' it when i'm not looking. I'm home. A different home. I'm in my old room from Lauderdale. I hide the gun from my parents because I know how they feel about firearms. I put the gun under my pillow and go to sleep. Have you ever gone to sleep in a dream before? This was a first for me, it was like reintegrating with my normal sleep, if that makes sense? I woke up in real life to the alarm shriek.
I checked under the pillow instinctively. No gun. I grab a pen and write as much as I can remember on the back of a bank receipt. Then I hit the snooze button, lay back down and wondered what the fuck that was all about?

"Pictures of me"

And some days you spit blood in a sink that ain't been washed in three years. You pluck a loose tooth out of your mouth. Clumsy with bad nerves you fumble the shattered mollar and it falls into the drain, giving off a tiny metalic echo before it disappears forever. The buzz is gone and the hangovers here and now you can feel the pain that asshole was trying to pound into you. But the pain is good. It means you're still not too old to take a punch and still young enough to give a few back. And you smile at the car wreck of a face and listen to a strange woman snore in your bed and you pick up the toothbrush like a knife and somehow you find the strength to do it all over again.

I'm listening to the Man in Black. His voice pours all the regret in the world out of my speakers. In front of the mirror I flex a small bicep and suck in my gut. Everyday I fight the fat, fight the crap, fight all the shit inside me. Upstairs the girls are fighting. Sour love stomping angry words through the ceiling. I look up like I can see them. Their dog is barking. One of them screams at it to shut up and the other is sobbing. I light a cigarette and turn Johnny down. I sit on the bed listening to words fall down around me, words so true I know i'll never write them down.

A used condom floats in the shitter. I stand there hovering above the bowl watching it drift like an abandoned life raft. The truth is I just don't have the heart to flush it down. It might be the only thing i'll ever have left of her. The rest will fade. The scratches she mapped across my back will heal slowly back into the skin. The name will vanish one vowel at a time, then the face will slowly become a mask of shadows. Then the act itself will disappear. Gone for good or gone for bad, but gone never the less. I nod at this sad fact and flush the toliet anyway.

The phone pleads the fifth. No one wants to know. Hell I don't want to know but I'm the one guy I can't ditch. I pour cheap wine into a chipped glass. Another quiet night. I read the dead men of genius. Some deserve that title, while most sadly do not. I close my eyes and pretend my works in there. I see dull teenage faces staring vacantly as a middle aged man, who has long abandoned ambition, writes my name on a chalk board and dolefully informs the class of who I was. I open my eyes and one of the cockroaches is feeling brave. It is making a suicide run for my wine. I admire his guts, but that doesn't stop me from squashing him with the bottle. Then I wonder if this is how the powers that be really feel about us? I wonder if this is how the presidents and prime ministers of the world feel, or more likely the guys who sign their checks: "Nice try kid. You fought hard for your utopia but in the end i'm afraid i'm just gonna crush you with it!" Then the phone rings. I answer it. Someone is shouting in spanish at me. The wrong number at just the right time.