Salinger & The New Age Dipsomaniacs

Diary: Any body that reads this without permission
will drop dead in 24 hours
or get sick.

She had tied Polaroids of herself
to a mobile hanging from the ceiling.
Funny girl. Blurry clouds! He doesn't
care if it thunders every night because
not everybody's made out of iron.
He looks at her fingers.
She's been biting around the nails
since she was a kid.
They're bloody, their tips misshapen,
but strong. They are a damaged part of her,
a painter. He looks around the room at everything
they've created, hanging from the walls, not
a carpenter in sight. Cleverness! His wooden leg.
From one limping artist to another,
be courteous and kind. He kisses
the broken skin on each finger.

A genuine war is needed,
to fight, to stitch a real conflict into the plot.
Enemies! He's been long-impaled on
bayonets of memory, soldiers
coming up and over the trench walls with
faces he has tried to forget.

Soupy Peggy and her love
of how the boy stood at the chalkboard.
Surrounded by her paints and oils,
he still is not really using his own poetry
for the occasion. She straddled him on the couch,
pulled at his hair as they kissed. He's shaking.
He refuses to write under the pressure
of dead-weight beauty, The Brain,
The Brain, pounding on the window of a
restaurant on a dark street. Running from one
and into another. He had things
on his mind, needed pruning shears
to remove them.

Drinking, sober, drinking.
I'll come over Christmas Eve. I'll trim the tree for ya.
Plead with steel blue eyes, say nothing.

Without his glasses,
he couldn't see what was coming. She's seen quite
a few bananafish in her day. He is not well-
versed. That terrible fever, it's nearly all poetry. Do you know
what that means? Poor Uncle Wiggily,
she said over and over again.

A worn paperback copy of Franny & Zooey sat in two
pieces on her coffee table. He tried to put it back together,
but the pages were old and bent, the spine dissolved.

Later, as he lay on the pillow,
inches from her face, he wanted that suave serum,
the one mixed from William Powell’s
old cigarette case and Fred Astaire’s
old top hat. Something that would allow him
to capture the high, rosy cheekbones,
the large eyes that, upon seeing him,
bent small lips into a smile
before heavy eyelids slowly slid shut,
her nose touching his.
He heard about a ski resort that had opened
on her shoulder. With the slightest of hesitations,
his index and middle fingers
were the first on the slopes,
a touch and yet
not a touch.
Slalom between small hairs,
then a slow lift back to the summit.

I don’t really have a good reason for taking myself out of the third person,
but let's assume I wrote some of this and borrowed the rest for my own
selfish purposes. The next bits are sadder, I think.

He had been repeating a girl's name ceaselessly
under his breath for so long
that it echoed closely behind every heartbeat,
swam through his veins, and
when she was gone, his blood thinned,
slowed. To restore the proper
heart-cadence, he had to find another name.
Frightful, new medicine.
Either the Pilgrim has been repeating the wrong
name or his God does
not exist.

She can't spit, she can't even sit still,
her fingers entangled with his, a threnody
of laced, white skin. Empty ritual,
a hollow chamber he tried to fill
with music or rainwater. He knows
something is wrong, but does not
know where.

This play, if she asked,
Nicht fertig
yet.

When he got home he wasn't sure who he missed more,
her or
her.
He was supposed to leave something beautiful
after he got off the page and everything,
but it only came out as something stolen, Ray Ford,
ending on something about how he felt around her, ending how
he wanted it to begin:

Not a wasteland, but a great inverted forest
with all the foliage underground.