Poisonous Blue Sky

Ha ha. Poisonous blue sky, so bright so clear. Old white men gather around the table and talk about the kids, the rotten no good kids, busting lights and keying cars. Do they ask why? Why are the kids doing this? No. They pronounce the verdict, “crazy” the kids are crazy, “there’s something wrong with her.” A thirteen year old girl that takes scissors and rakes them across BMWs. Do I hear them say three or four times that she is Chinese, as if that may be part of the problem? How easy to sit around this table together and make our pronouncements. Not like us. Crazy.
Not like you. If you were any older, your spirits any more decrepit, you’d have your coffins parked outside not your BMWs. Four old white corpses gathered around a table. They aren’t even drinking coffee or tea or eating cake. They have come into this café to meet for this conversation, this weary pep rally to assure them of their supremacy. They will wait until later to feed. After the grim reaper comes to collect them they will feast on the worms that crawl from their cavernous heads before laying back down in their expensive stone mausoleum together, taking turns scratching each others’ backs before taking their respite. The flaking old flesh is raked off beneath their talons, for the white hair and finger and toenails continue to grow, even after they accepted death’s putrid favors.
These undead gangsters of the All American, with their cell phones laying out on the table or clipped to their leather belts. Crisp white work shirts whether they still have jobs or not. Sweater vests to complete the look. Now the bitter grapes are made into bitter wine. They discuss, with raspy voices like the sound of dry leaves rattling down empty streets, the beggars who make $400 dollars a day waiting in busy intersections with cardboard signs. Mashing the sour fruits of their hearts with their brittle fists, they hold their mouths open at the edge of the table to catch the elixir as it overflows. This is all they need. One little sip of envy, and disgust. “Not like us. Lazy. There’s something wrong with her.”
Their own children, because they have pulses, are alien to these old patrons of the crypt who lie down to die before they could come alive, like good Americans.
Is it America? Is it the world? Where is the factory that churns out these creatures of the crypt, these rotting vestiges of capitalist idealism. They will take dollar bills with their worms latter, spreading the wrigglies over the greenbacks like caviar over a cracker. That was all it took to lure them into premature death. The reaper stood in the mausoleum doorway with a plate of crackers bearing the faces of Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin , other old dead white men, and these four came crawling, drooling from the corners of their mouths. The dream that wrapped her ephemeral fingers round their throats like a collar with a leash and pulled them towards her master. It was a dream of supremacy, of comfort, of power and prestige.
Are you comfortable in your velvet lined coffins, talking about your pension funds and how much Ed Davis brought home last year? Blurting out precise figures like a litany, holding your dark mass under poisonous blue skies in the center of a brightly lit café. Making grim pronouncements of “Not like us. Crazy. There’s something wrong with…” and hiding under the gray robes of your precious dream while she grips you each tightly by the throat. Then, suddenly in accordance with the laws of the eternal day born in the age of industry, she gives them a jerk and they fly up from the table like a murder of crows. It’s back to the graveyard she leads them, back to her master in the black cloak with the scythe, holding out his plate of green crackers.
In they’ll go still rumbling their litany, safe within their four walls of stone, safe with their keepers, while out there somewhere the kids are running wild, propelled by the life that surges through their rebellious spirits. Out there in the rainbow jungle the kids are smashing lights and scratching Mercedes and BMWs with sharp scissors and pan handling and fucking and getting high while their fathers are finishing their bedtime snacks and reclining inside of boxes within boxes. Poisonous blue sky, so bright, so clear, illuminates the day, spreads over the empty table where four old white men lapped the bitter wine of their hearts, over the graveyards where they continue to murmur their unhallowed prayers, over the thirteen year old Chinese girls smiling with their scissors at the ready, over grisly faced pan handlers and over me. Ha ha. Poisonous blue sky.