::Handlebar

I’ve been a poor citizen.  Empty December.  No entries.  TV tuned to a dead channel.  Static squealing at midnight on an AM radio when you’re driving in the cold, lost on a country road.  Stars and moonlight on the snow and flakes drifting across the road, hypnotic just like the twist and snap of the empty airwaves.  Wondering if anyone would miss you, if you didn’t find your way home.  Buried yourself in a snowbank to wait for spring.

There is blood under my nails, gravedirt and splinters.  They keep trying to bury me… and I keep letting them.  And eventually I hear an echo, down here in the dark.  It’s not snow.  The worms are getting frustrated.  I always start digging Just In Time.  Punching away at the earth, biting at stones.  Leaking from the mud and moss like so much bilious white mush.  Reassembling, trying to remember bones for hanging legs on, and wings and fire.

What am I, really?  What have I done?  What have I made?  I have no great glories to show you.  I’ve never led a charge or burned a heretic or fought a duel or stopped a rape or held a recital or brought the thunder.  Can you forgive me for this?  Can I forgive myself?  Can I stop gnawing at my knuckles and enjoy the life I have?  Stop wanting secrets and jasmine and firewine and intrigue and larceny and seduction and wrath?  

My only recourse this winter has been to adopt a moustache.  I went down to the shelter and found the most darling, bedraggled thing.  I have let him grow under my nose for these last few weeks.  My beard seems to be getting along with him well enough, although they never touch – each to his own space.  He’s playful.  When I eat, he likes to tickle.  That’s new this week.  He’s growing.  Astonishing, considering I haven’t even fed him.  Maybe he’s snatching bits from my spoon.  Clever thing.

Did you know you have to wax a moustache, if you want to look like anything other than a walrus?  I didn’t at first, but I do now.  It’s still barely passable.  Delightfully scruffy, given the weather here – biting cold and a foot of snow on the ground, daring me to shovel it.  I want two weeks of a dapper, curled-at-the-ends handlebar.  Then I’ll decide whether to release him in the wild or keep him long-term.  I know, what an irresponsible owner I am.  

I ought to name him. 

I dearly hate New Year’s resolutions, but I think I am going to make a couple of them.  There’s a gym opening around the corner this month.  If I take a tour and they’re passable, I’ll join up and go twice a week.  I’m wobbly and breathless, despite my tree-trunk legs and parapet shoulders.  This can’t last, and it has to.  Has to.

And writing.  Oh, FUCK YOU, writing.  Sitting there on the shelf, taunting me.  How the fuck does soulless dreck like Twilight or 50 Shades of Grey get published, and I’m sitting here naked in my basement, picking my nose and lamenting about that chortling cunt of a Muse that likes to drunk-dial me on Tuesday nights when I’m in a sound sleep?  I had the power once, and I’m going to dig it up again.  Beat at the gravestone until it comes wailing forth demanding blood and souls, and I’m going to whip it’s ass good and proper.  "You’re mine," I’ll say.  "And you will bend the knee."

And she will.  I will conquer the world.  Groupies, book tours, movie treatments, free drinks and blowjobs.  Effigy burnings and changes of government and sermons against at churches and rallies for at college campuses.  You will hear my name.  You will read my words.  You have no choice.

See?  It’s already begun.