Living in a slow Hell

You will find yourself with a mouthful of tongue, her hips grinding against your crotch and the de ja vu will hit you like a steel plated backhand. Same theme club a few months earlier, ditto on the tall and blond, minus the tattoos and you--much more passionately--mugging down this time. You will notice two of the same tube top bartenders and they will gaze at you with tabloid eyes. Snap. In the moment you will be THAT GUY. You will always be THAT GUY.

No one will want to get to know you. One drunken fuck up and you’re out.

I thought you were funnier she will say and you will reply that you can’t always be ON all the time, that you’re not Robin Williams except on paper and then only sometimes. So you drink more to be ON more and soon you are ON less and less.

You will call and the phone will grow cold; icicles on the antenna. Reality will mesh with fantasy. They will confuse you for who they want you to be, the guy in the words, your words, the persons you create. The God you always wanted to be. You really will start wearing Burmese Jungle boots and you will brawl and you will drink so that you can live up to a someone that was never even born, their someone, the one with words for eyes.

You will come to find yourself wandering amongst these words; lost. You will reach out and they will stomp your fingers and watch you slide off the edge of a paragraph down into the open pages of a dictionary. More and more you will identify with the words-- flesh melding with ink. Soon you will be nothing but words and a sneer.

You will most definitely come to know that you will die but it’s something you’ve been putting off because you’re not sure if you’re alive anymore. You pinch yourself to make sure you’re still there and what you grab will feel like the pages of a book and you will get your first tattoo and it will be your name, just like you would sign on a dust jacket at a book signing…