Puke Poetry

Heart like a hand grenade, fully-automatic weapon for a mind.

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

A new porch.

I breathe in.
I take everything from the air that I can.
I breathe out.
I give it back to the world.

I sit on a small wooden table, painted a few times too many. This table serves a dual purpose beyond being a junk piece of furniture abandoned by a former tenant at a borderline junk piece of property. It holds open the broken front screen door on the enclosed front porch on the boarding house turned apartment buildling I now call home. And right now, it's serving as a seat.
It's a Sunday morning, though barely.
11:30am.

I'm still in sweats and yesterdays t-shirt with a second-hand sweatshirt pulled over. My feet are bare and I find myself wishing that they weren't. I'm hungover; my brain feels swollen, my eyes feel too heavy to keep in my sockets, I'm insatiably thirsty, my muscles ache, and my stomach lining feels freeze dried.

It is absolutely pouring outside. I'm watching from my seat on the porch with a cigarette clamped between my fingers. I bring the filter to my lips, suck in the smoke, move the cigarette back down to waist level, let the smoke begin to curl out of my mouth and inhale it back in through my nose. Exhale.
A french inhale. French.
I do this now without thinking. I learned how while lying in a twin sized bed one night with a guy I don't talk to anymore.

Repeat, repeat.

I'm staring out, into the street and across it. A senator lives in the gray house. It's nice and modest enough. I bet she doesn't do her own yard work though.

The water draining through our aged and rusty gutters is falling rapidly to the front steps in thick columns. There's not enough time to focus on one strain before it's broken and another one has taken its place.
Gray skies, cold breeze.

An internal debate on the merits of a beer for a hangover cure; it might work, and I'm generally a fan of beer, but the idea of beer in my angry, empty stomach makes the nerves in my arms cringe.
And Jesus Christ does my back ever hurt. I need a massage.
I need a baked potato. I want someone to make me a huge breakfast. Fried eggs and bacon. And hashbrowns. And vat of orange juice. Finish with coffee.
I'm thinking about hollendaise sauce, eggs benedict, asparagus. Mother's Day. And Hi-Fi. And Webb's Benedict, though a cheesy bastadization - still delicious.

Inhale. Release. Inhale more.
Full exhale.
I fucking hate Camel Lights.

I'm inwardly grateful that I don't have to work today, but not because I don't like my job.
Because I don't want to bike or walk in the rain. I don't want to scrounge up bus fare. And I'm hungover.

Cigarettes never last long enough, especially when you're trying to quit. I flick the butt out the door and it drowns upon contact with the sidewalk.

I think about someone for half a minute.
I miss them. A lot.

I have a book to read and a baked potato to cook and eat.

Nothing really happens here.
This is just the first fifteen minutes after I regain consciousness.