This music has my hips bumming tangos off the sink. I should paint with yellow or anything that grabs a laugh. Own a crazed shanty on the end of a wharf. All baubled with glass floats and starfish freckles. Stacks of lobster traps and fork twirls of nautical rope. You can’t find the entrance to a place like that. Well, anyway, the roof leaks and you’d be humming with improvements. So just imagine what colors excite my flute of charming buckets. Look at how you listen to the tune of their drips. You held it within you all along. You were only snooping my magical yard for your quick mystery. A bread bowl chowder and a green striped ferry and…
…I should live inland with a sliver-view of the sea. Blue reason for my defiant pink dump elbowing turnkey bulkhead mansions. Gray, gray, gray—thump, thump, thump. I wouldn’t even have enough shelf space to board their hoarded oxygen. I’m gaudy behind my crocheted chain-link web of course. Soft-snaring rabbits to join me for tea. Think I don’t grab at everything? Ask the opossum in my palm too cozy to close its eyes for dead. Tonight I think that’s better than some patented city cheesecake. A compact parking space. A soured man barking fuck you to his somebody. Friday night risk looks good on you but I’m not going near it. Let’s play flashlights under bat sonar clicks. Meet me in the middle. Pull up to my blanket and eat ironic cheeses. Let’s look at how we feel when we squeak a yellow curd. Let’s ear to the ocean where memories clink cavern floors like crystals giving way from the dome. They’re diamonds now, all charcoal and penniless. Taking light like greed. Shine up. Shine up for a minute…
…Do you ever watch that tiny light inching across the evening sky? Do you ever nudge an argument into a shoulder that it’s a satellite? Or an airplane? One hundred and sixty seats stifling red-eye sneezes and punishing delete keys. Anyway, do you ever look up at their freedom? Call it possibilities lined up in a tin can? Look at them wishing you could get strapped in to such getting away? From being chased by that nagging feeling you deserve another inch on either side. Oh, me too much of the time. But nudge a little closer. It’s something about this night music and tartan plaid. Because granted a wish for a day, I’d want to be a sweetheart. Just living and handing it out by the bucketful and nothing will ever run out.
Bradley David‘s poetry, fiction, and essays appear in Terrain, Allium, Exacting Clam, Stone of Madness, Anti-Heroin Chic, Fatal Flaw, Unstamatic, and others. His work can be found at chillsubs.com/user/BradleyDavid, on Twitter @StrangeCamera, and on Instagram @mystrangecamera. He lives in Southern California by way of the rural Great Lakes Midwest.