Originally Posted by
renholder
I am a published poet, as well!
Here's something that hasn't been published.
Tonight, in Brighton
Davey sniffs too much oxycontin after slipping from his
skateboard on Beacon and slamming his shoulder into
that fence that divides the inbound and outbound tracks
of the C line. I poke at the bruising flesh pretending to
know what I’m doing when really I’ve never even seen
a broken bone. He squirms; I tell him to go to the hospital
but his health insurance ran out last June, and besides, they’ll
know he’s high and start asking questions. He can’t feel
his left arm anymore. Still, it’s not a pretty sight and he asks
me if I can take it off and put it in the freezer for later so
I throw a fleece blanket over him and his pinhole eyes
roll back in his head, that big goofy smile comes over his
face and he tells me he always wanted to be a marine biologist.
“You hate fish,” I tell him, “and you can’t even swim.” His
grin turns into something manic, subhuman, animal even
and he says the only way to love something is to understand it,
then Davey gets real serious and in hushed whispers starts
telling me that before the infection in his shoulder spreads
and he dies of gangrene he just needs somebody to know
where to find his life’s work. I retrieve the laptop from
his bedroom, navigate at his instruction to discover a folder
filled with everything Sarah Larkin ever posted on the internet.
“Jesus, Davey,” I say, taking note of the meticulously
arranged system of subfolders, dated and labeled, going
back over a decade. I tell him high school’s been over a long time
and this is crazy and he needs professional help but he waves
his good hand to dismiss the notion and says “No, no, it’s not like that.”
I ask Davey what it is like.
He says that all matter in the known universe shares a single
point of origin and swears all of the hang-ups he’s experienced
in his adult life come down to his inability to accept the indisputable
truth that he and Sarah are both parts of the same eternal, infinite being;
that when she cheated on him with Kevin Morrissey in 11th grade she
was simply expressing the dualistic nature of Davey’s own humanity,
acting on the very same electrical impulses that drove him to love her
comprehensively. I open up Sarah’s Facebook page and ask Davey if her career
and husband and two children were all born out of the same
electrical impulses that drive him to ingest so many pharmaceuticals.
His response is a wild cackle, like a wounded hyena
in a nature documentary where the lions are clearly portrayed
as the protagonists. “Hush, Davey,” I say, “you’ll wake your neighbors.”
He coughs a bit on his own laughter and quiets down, looks me dead
in the eyes and asks if I think there’s a market for narwhal erotica.
I shut his computer and tell him to sleep on his side so he doesn’t choke.
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