Many moons ago while falling down St. Philips in New Orleans, my dear friend Ricky hooked me with some mushroom tea. We wandered across the street to a vacant parking lot, where we each took a great big sip. And something went wrong. Anyway, the mayhem inherent to Mardi Gras reminded me of something I thought the next morning. Went something like this...
The cup of sewage grew nails and hair, a thrashing arthropod with some sort of vermin madcow disease running across the street in fishnet and heels too high. I couldn't keep up, falling down between the parking lot and the door. When I woke up, I was wrapped in white paper and covered in brownish yellow nicotine stains, like unwashed underwear, wounds seeping rat poison onto the sidewalk. Neon. Flash, and the transsexual across the room spontaneously combusts, plastic hair expanding through the air like fireworks across July, chasing her words toward the back. Everything has to fall. Lighter fluid and a lemon, cane sugar, and the compass needle won't sit still, jumping between the junkie's fingers as another vein decompresses. The man is beautiful, telling me about the girl he met, whose drink I spilled, whose name I forgot, but that didn't matter either. None of it did. The seraphim with latex wings, cockring halo and a twisted bow strung from the hair of cupid's dead lover. Rotted pumpkins underfoot, shrinking drink me and I'm bouncing between the sidewalks like walls in a hallway eat me and the queen wants my head, she wants all of our heads, candy apples and spits, cinder and stick to leave our witness glowing with the incandescence of a tealight candle on the tongue. Bent straws jut from the ice in the glass like rose stems, but somebody ate the flowers. Mistook them for something else, anything could have happened between the first word and the door closing, shoelace argument and broken elastic, crab egg. The Spanish couple can't decide which way to go and people are driving down Bourbon Street, breaking laws and protocol. The mob won't have any part of it, dismantling the vehicle faster than a proficient child. They will wreak their vengeance, woman driver dangling on the cross of the balcony. Her breasts hang down in disappointment, vanishing under the glacial beads as the tourists applaud her demise. "It doesn't make sense," I mutter. "It's not supposed to," he tells me. "Don't look down," he tells me. I listen to every word he says, the silverback gorilla next to me who needs a light and I'm crawling on the floor, flint knees praying for steel, something anything to light on fire, show me where I am, where's the mirror, the door where the hookers make change and stamp hands. Everybody has to pay. Of course. Walking through the battlefield, carnage of shattered cars and torn vinyl. The coroner has poor taste, arranging the bodies in lurid positions. Decapitated pommade. Disinterested missionary. Still raining and the money's gone and the guy at the cornerstore didn't see anything.
He's afraid to tell the truth.
Aren't we all.
Ignore the name painted on in the picture