6954. TURN TO PENNY BUNKUM

TURN TO PENNY BUNKUM

She's really a great lady, my favorite kind, the

one I love most, the daughter of mine. Though

I never had one. Always wanted. Life is a

cumbersome life-raft, somehow both pulling you

down as you wear it (it wears you) yet saving

you as well, keeping it all afloat. Otherwise,

what is there anywhere? A Qwik-Smart roadside

stand, an attraction of sodas and malted, a queer

qwid on the edge of his/her own disaster. God,

I can't stand people who can't make up their minds.

-

I have a ginger-felt hat that I wear; the brim is too

long for the subway; takes up two seats. Plus, I

probably look like some stupid montanero with it

on, singing putrid songs about some highland

farmland, the lass who got away, and the fine,

fresh water of the River Leewon. So, now I

sit next to the electric meters at the side of some

crude cinder-block building dispensing refreshments

in the hundred-degree heat. How has it come to this,

that the State will dispense refreshments for free

to its minions. And who am I? The geek with the

brownie shirt was just making fun of me for

drinking hot coffee. His point seemed to be that,

on a day like today, everything should be cold.

Pretty much like I was to him. Foolscap

head-dress upon all his motivations.

-

'Wanna' watch a movie? I got one in my car. It's

about a love match between this criminal from Mars  -  

but no one knows that, of course  -  and a lady he meets

at the library. They fall in  a sort of love and he winds

up in bed with her daughter. Unbeknownst to everyone

anyway, in another time-zone layer, he's already her father

in another family and they raise astral sheep that graze on

the surfaces of hard-stone planets peopled (though you

can't really say 'peopled') or inhabited anyway, by chimerical

beings who want to be present but are not, and cannot be.

It is only vicariously, through imaginings, that they can 

exist at all. Something like a dream in our own sleep, but 

one which doesn't disappear and you can remember always.

-

By the time I get around to answering that guy, he's back

in his car with the windows down and the movie is already

playing (I think) on the back of the driver's seat, and, on the 

back seat, two kids are intently watching it as he drives away.

While I turn back to Penny Bunkum again; 

the daughter I never had.