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An ellipsis.
And it’s two men playing soccer in the heat of the summer of my life henceforth; the shirtless one smoking, the other envying the beautiful vice. A sweet melancholy for death and the enjoyment of life like all the pleasures in modern times. Somewhere a churchbell rings out and tells me that there is something removed from all of this, all of us, and it keeps me from crying or dying or whatever I normally do.
I quit the walk on the path and leave for the silly city blocks that circle me round. I pass the old stickball yard and the streetlights with nazi symbolism and graffiti and flick FLASH bang—picture—and walk. Silly old man walking his dog and whispering to himself or the lady across the street who stands, leaning over fence, laughing and half watching me, the criminal, the insane, the halfbody.
The Bosnian in the alley, disassembling his car for the stash he’s smuggled from Iowa—both car seats are upright and facing the spectacle and he stands, shirt off, beertolips, unawares. The mother on the porch ushers her children from one side to the other and back again and they have weary foreign eyes on all that rolls through the street in front of them.
The slow roll of the wheelchair and the shuffle of the man behind it are lulling. I drop my cigarette in the easy twirl daze of queasy hurl days and I think of Bob Hope—“mind pitted against mind—I had the pit, he had the mind”. All the mistakes henceforth have brought me to this summer pit stop, as the sun plummets in to a pink miasma of car exhalations and lostspirit exaltations—my hind legs itch to peel around the track again.
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"You don't die enough to cry." - Kerouac
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