Revolution on Canvas, Volume 2 Page 7
“It’s not your fault. I’m sorry I hogged up that booth for so long.”
“Oh, no worries,” she said. “If it wasn’t you it’d just be some art dork reading The Bell Jar or something.”
“Not sure I’m much better.” He smiled, holding up his Batman book.
“Oh, I’d say you’re a hell of a lot better.”
“Really? You into comics?”
“A little bit.”
From under the front counter she presented a small black handbag with a lone, metal pin attached. It was The Punisher logo.
“Wow, very cool. Yeah, I love The Punisher stuff.”
“Guy’ll fuck you up for real.” She smiled. “You go to Hopkins?”
“Yeah. You?” Nick realized that this was going past the point of friendly register banter. Her smile seemed genuine, nervous.
“No, MICA.” She rolled her eyes, referring to the city’s art institute and pointed both thumbs inward. “Art dork.”
Nick chuckled as she leaned back against the counter behind her, brought her shoulders up high, and sighed.
“So, I told myself if you came in here today that … that I would tell you about what’s going on at The Charles tonight.”
He didn’t know what to make of all this but suddenly his ears weren’t ringing and his skin wasn’t so sticky inside his dress shirt, the universe slowing down again.
The girls who worked at the Veg Edge didn’t seem like the types who would have any interest in a guy like him. They dyed their hair and wore cool clothes, listened to bands he’d never heard of, hung out in clubs he’d never been to. But there she was, smiling right at him in a yellow track jacket. On her hips he could see matching tattoos, disappearing down into her beat-up jeans. Thick, dark hair piled atop her head in a rush of a ponytail. She was the kind of girl that Kathryn would have dismissed as a freak, but leaning there against that counter, chewing on the corner of her lip, she seemed to be about the most interesting thing Nick had seen in forever.
“Why, what’s going on at The Charles?” he asked. The urgency of the sun falling and the pawnshop closing growing duller by the second, softening its grip. It felt like someone was lifting a concrete slab from his chest.
“Well, you know they have midnight movies on some Fridays, right?”
“No, actually I’m pretty clueless when it comes to what’s going on around here. “The Charles was the city’s independent movie theater, and in all his years in town, Nick had not been there once.
“Oh, man, the midnight movies are great and tonight they’re having two!”
“Yeah? What are they showing?”
“They are showing,” she paused dramatically, “Kill Bill parts one AND two. I mean, c’mon, you gotta love those movies, right?”
“Yeah, totally. I think Tarantino’s great and, actually, I’ve only seen the first part, so … Midnight tonight, huh, and you’re … you’re going?”
“Sure am, me and a big bucket of popcorn.”
It was a strange sensation, smiling and not being able to stop. He could feel it stretching across a face that hadn’t felt so out of control in months.
“And c’mon, if you think about it, you really kind of need to see the second part.”
“It’s true,” he said. “And oddly enough my schedule just so happens to be wide open between twelve and four tonight.”
She laughed hard, it was a great laugh and already Nick couldn’t wait to hear it again.
“Yeah, that sounds really fun,” he added. “I’d … I’d like to go see those tonight.”
“OK, great.” She smiled, swinging an invisible sword into an invisible foe. “Wanna meet in the lobby around a quarter ’til?”
“Sounds good, I’ll be there,” he said. “What’s your name anyway? I’m Nick.”
“I’m Tanner,” she replied as a party of five came through the front door.
“All right, well, I’ll let you get back to work and, um … I’ll definitely see you down there at a quarter of.”
“Very cool, I’ll see you later, Nick,” she said and came around the counter to seat the customers.
Out in the street the cool summer air flung its arms around his neck. He forgot about the pawnshop all together and turned left to head home. As he passed by a pair of Eminem look-alikes, propped up on the back of a bus stop bench, he defied his every instinct and chose to look right into their bored and soulless eyes.
“Evening boys,” he offered, brightly.
The first kid, maybe fifteen, cocked his head in disbelief.
“The fuck you say to me, faggot,” he sneered, with a sickening accent.
“Come on back here and I’ll whoop yo’ muthafuckin’ ass,” the other shouted at Nick’s back.
He would deal with them some other time. Tonight he had a grin that would not fade as he floated on down the Avenue, into the endless possibilities, beneath a thousand blinking stars.
RYAN HUNTER
Envy on the Coast
Auditions with Our Heavenly Father
Dear Mother,
I heard the news … Father told me it was true.
Stage 1..........................................3,343 Questions
What retribution do you owe? Purity, honesty, and charity fashion your bones. This cancerous but temporary plague is lacking a simple sense of reason. I picture you, before the altar, face towards the crucifix screaming “treason.”
Stage 2.......................................................Theory
Prayer gives way to postulation and it seems clear … you are a candidate; the meager explanation, in which the cancer sought to permeate. Though there shall be tests, trials, and tribulations, your mercy requites with viscous patience.
Stage 3....................Understanding hallucination
Now I’m lost in your eyes, as you’re engulfed in a sea of white linens in a hospital bed; a young, angelic presence steadily hovers above your bed. She is the heavenly scout, surveying your incessant compassion, just observing that your heart still has portions left to ration.
Stage 4..........................................The procedure
Now I hold your tears as a ransom … within the palm of my hand. Your trepidation loses vigor as you begin to understand. We live in wicked, mundane waiting rooms, but the destinations barely compare; though you comprehend the purpose, I catch you basking in despair. Not to worry; for I shall stand beside you always. Mother, I’ll stand beside you always. Blessed are you … the very first to ever care.
Stage 5.......................................................Her smile
Broadcasted from a hospital bed … this was only a test.
This was only a test.
Love,
Your Son
SAL BOSSIO
Envy on the Coast
My heart is pounding the whole way there.
I arrive in disbelief and can only stare at those buried eyes as you scream, “it’s not fair!”
As I walk further in, you come running towards the stairs.
Our shoulders touch, I reach across my fingers through your hair.
Everyone is scattered all dressed in black.
His sister starts to shout, “I want him back, I want him back!”
Your eyelids shut, you place your head upon me in distress.
Adrienne, I just can’t stand to see you like this.
Allow my collar be the place where you let your tears rest.
Please don’t worry girl; you know god only takes the best.
Goodbye, Goodbye. I owe you this much, I’ll be your medication
Goodbye, Goodbye. I own you this much; I’m a safe addiction.
PETER WENTZ
Fall Out Boy
Tonight we lie in a city that doesn’t belong to either of us. From the penthouse it looks like a movie set. The grays are too perfect.
It feels lit for a camera. The moon is too yellow and perfect.
Babygirl, with pupils the size of baby worlds.
>
She said, “I just want you to know that I never do things like this.”
But only people who always ‘do things like this’ say lines like that.
I reply, “There are cobwebs on the zippers of all my jeans.”
And I’m thinking God must be a hack for writing such shitty dialogue like that.
And I’m thinking it’s lines like that which set you free. They are your alibi.
They are your ‘get out of jail free’ card.
We are clumsy as we make our moves.
Moonlight makes for fools.
The best offense is a good defense, or is it the other way around? Either way, we’re both checking the Scoreboard in a hazy kind of way.
I’d invade a country for the small of your back.
Fingertip lover.
When we were young we spent our nights sleeping on hardwood floors,
spitting on lottery tickets, and throwing away collectors items.
We didn’t have to dodge flashes or try to sleep through worry.
It’s funny the things that cross your mind as she fumbles with your belt.
“Why do you write like sex and love are the only things that make your heart beat?”
I work her buckle.
“Because you’ve got it all backwards, they are the only things that make my heart stop.”
Her blond hair hangs on her eyes. The headlines would call her a bombshell.
But it hangs like a black cloud over my head when I lie under her. I almost slip and tell her.
“And friends, sex, love, regret, and revenge are all in the perfect proportions. They’ve always got my head swimming. It’s gonna end the world.”
Had a fling with second chances, but it wasn’t my thing. Spent the last ten years throwing up, lovesick in sinks.
To the gutters were always heaving, out the doors were always leaving.
My mind quickly turns to excuses and alibis. How could you be upset, I am on a mirror for a ruined culture, but I settle on kissing her forehead. Sometimes you gotta play it safe.
“Potions for foxes” is whispering in our ears. Stuff a towel under the door to keep out the rumors. I’m supposed to be somewhere else with someone else, so is she.
Your petals bloom on my skin and something changes in me. I want to be better and different—to have my body belong to you, not memories and the dirt of this ruined planet.
“When I’m deep over my head, there doesn’t feel like there is much of a difference between fucking and a fistfight.”
A one-night standoff.
Kind of safe inside the green zone of a love affair.
But the stagecoach always turns back into a pumpkin in the light of day.
No one gives a fuck about eyes that keep leaking.
Always hushing the headboard on beds that keep creaking.
“If I wasn’t writing words and singing into microphones, I’m pretty sure I would make a good divorce lawyer or mercy killer.”
I tell her I have to get up at 6 to go back to work.
“But this is my work. Trashing people’s emotions. Cataloging our dreams and hopes. Putting our faith in a can, sealing it for freshness, and selling it off. I turn a profit every single time.”
My alarm goes off at 5:30. But we are both still awake.
She has a plane. I have words.
“I am an examiner. I am an outsider. I am inside the clock trying to figure out how all of the pulleys and levers work.”
“I am the feeling in Dorothy’s house right before the tornado picked it up and dropped in on the Witch. I am the buzzing and humming.
The dog barking. The lady screaming.”
We get in cars with the windows tinted jet black. At the corner she turns left and I turn right.
My head moves too fast. Don’t bother, try and keep up.
I turn right again. And then again, back in front of my hotel I walk up the stairs and into my room. I am asleep by 6:00 AM.
It’s summertime 15 floors up.
Heat waves don’t got shit on me.
I sweat this one out. Asleep. With the phone off the hook.
The truth will do that to you.
“I’d love to take all the best storytellers, the greatest lovers and
liars and lock them underground. Suffocate them all.”
I love you in a holding your hair back kind of way.
I’m up to my hips in dreams, crying crocodile tears into a swamp in this town.
And you, you couldn’t like me but I think you could love me.
“Then with them all blue and dead, I would be the best.”
CHINA SOUL
Minor Celebration
Dramatic Monologue
Call it.
“I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean,” I told him
and clicked the light switch off and then on again
and he tap, tap, tapped on the empty glass
that stood on the empty table.
I said “maybe I’ll just leave and get on a boat or something.”
He told me “don’t be stupid, you hate the ocean.”
I asked him how he knew and that maybe I had changed my
mind
He said he just did.
He just did.
That’s when he looked at me and I looked at him
and I told him one ear looked higher than the other;
that I had never noticed before.
He said it was because half his head was down in the ground
and the other was somewhere else
I asked him where and he said he didn’t quite know
that maybe it was back there
way back there.
Maybe he left it on some coatrack that
slouched down, sick from its own antiquity
in that gentlemen’s lounge he used to go to
when he was feeling lonely
I asked him what lonely was and he shook his head
he said it’s when you can’t think of anything else to call yourself
I told him that I could think of lots of things to call him
he shook his again
just like that.
And everything was falling
I closed my eyes and counted to ten in my head
I saw the sea and its waves and decided it wasn’t so bad
the next time we met he was looking up at the sky
and recited to me each animal he saw in the clouds
I said I couldn’t see them and he seemed mad
when I got up to leave he asked me why
because, I said, I love the sea.
MATTHEW ROSKOWSKI
Delilah in the Calm
Roll Up My Sympathy
There’s a spindle in the middle of the town rolling up the scenery. It spins and spins until it’s just the concrete and me. In the morning it unfolds like a tapestry through the parks and the city streets. And there we stand, just like we’ve always been. It’s you and me until the bitter end.
MATTHEW CLEGG
Caitlin Going and the All the way’s
Which Way?
The Sky pierces them, only the sky. Orange, gray, purple, red; none could force its way through. The tall one old, the small one new. Wailing sound, dust and will power, tracing the screen with the blue light tool. The case fell to the bed. Late. He wasn’t accustomed to his own hands. It’s just one of those days, the snow glides down. How will I charge through the walls, the shores, the cellophane around the fruit? Is there redemption in citrus?
MARK ROSE
Spitalfield
Vocals/Guitar
May I step out of character?
Or is it unlike me to do that?
Tell me.
Sometimes I forget what I am like in real life.
STEVEN LEFEBVRE
Sophia
feeding bob potter
Dreamer, Dreamer
Do you know what’s in store?
I hold back
Long
walk back through poverty and hatred
In my golden sandals, what a long walk back it was
Murder, was it me who held the gun?
Sinners, and we didn’t even know it
I don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t draw your blood
The Church is bricked in gold and the children are so hungry
My hands, my hands my greedy hands
The eye is getting smaller, the needle has stopped threading
My hands, my hands my greedy hands
I don’t want my heart to want this way
I will follow you
Through the eye of the needle
CHI CHENG
Deftones
The Death of a Family Guilt
Exhibit a she was sexually molested by her stepfather For years—and when she finally came clean—about it—her mother made her testify to a court—that she lied so they could continue to be a family—at least for another couple years—
Exhibit b He was pistol-whipped in front of his brothers and sisters by his father and when his mother couldn’t get the old manto lay off and asked him why—he said it was because the boy had his eyes
Exhibit c she hadn’t spoken to her father in years because when she was youngher and her father’s best friend were having relations—and when she told him about it—he called her A liar and wrote her off—continuing on with his pal to this day
Exhibit d he contracted HIV in the early ’90s from being monogamous to his girlfriend—who had been raped while they were dating
Exhibit a she tried to overdose on pills in front of their son—telling him that she was going to be with god—and would watch over him before she lay down beside him—on the living room floor
Exhibit b he got to take the day off school—when he was 13—because his father had shot his dog and he woke up with her in a Glad trash bag—and needing to be buried
Exhibit c she was raped and beaten by an ex-boyfriend—who used to give her panties to other women he was fucking—then shit on her clothes—when shetried—to
leave—
Exhibit d he used to have to massage his father’s back and feet—after being—beaten
Exhibit e her husband used to beat her so soundly—the children would watch her—mop up her own blood when he was done