All-Night Lingo Tango

All night I watch the worst movies—musicals of the Nazi blitz,
Zapruder films of my own assassination, the armada
battles between the hideous phiz of my Aunt Priscilla and my
young, beautiful mother, my bit part—sliding from the womb,
coming out, infant debutante, the radio my own personal haruspex
exorcising future devils hovering in the hospital room, out-of-sync
disaster lodged in my baby-soft skull like a stuttering misanthropic crow,
wild with rockabilly delusions of the coming years. Old
Everyman, Hamlet, says something apropos at the end of Act V:
“Venom, to thy work.” Claudius and everyone else is out of time,
for the news is always bad or haven’t you noticed? Mon dieu,
underestimate me, and you’ll be right on the money. Woof, woof
goes the lycanthropic late-night host or as sez dapper ghost Cary Grant,
Topper, here we are at the Kirby kennel, barking,
howling, and biting permissible. Biting a hunk from someone’s ass
seems so beautiful right now in my room at the Hate Hotel, which
is right next door to the Insomnia Inn. All I need is a ten-hour stupor,
ripe with technicolor dreams to turn me into Saint Francis, but as I
jump into a James Bond scene, I am blown to smithereens. Where’s my Q,
quick-draw disseminator of hidden weapons, because there’s O.J.
kicking up the dirt. “Kiss off, haole girl,” he says, snapping his whip.
Perhaps this is the end? No such luck, because as everyone knows luck
loves a loser, and miraculously reconstituted I ski off down the slopes—No-o-
o-o-o. That scene didn’t last long. They rarely do at the No-tell Motel
my dreams shack up in or the double-wide trailers of my nightmares. In
no time I’m back on a train hurtling though Bavaria, Herr Mayhem
nodding his crew-cut head on my shoulder, drooling on my silk blouse. I’m
Miss Popularity tonight. Everyone wants to be my friend, even
Orson Welles, sultan of lost sleds, squiring Rita Hayworth around Babel.
Lo, how the mighty have fallen into a vat of boiling oil, into
pots of yummy money, into tubs of KFC. Poor damaged Rita and her swank
kingpin of the long shot. Oh, to fill a dress the way she did, nuclear hip,
quantum belly, legs like your first dream of suicide; reminds me of Sgt. Maj.
John Hodiak flogging the conscripts into a tatterdemalion queue
right under the noses of the Japanese guards or was it German? World War II
invades the Right Bank of my left brain around four a.m., or as Homer
says, when the rosy-red finger of dawn pulls the trigger on another night. Oh,
here’s to the poppy and all her dreamy cousins once removed, the bastards,
too, Nyquil and Xanax, true blue in their gondola of swoon—going, going,
gone into last round of the final lap of the first breath, as Juliet
uncurls her fingers from Morpheus’s dark form, so do I bodysurf
from Haleiwa to Makapu, searching not for Romeo but Keanu,
vatic messiah of the Underworld, whose undertow has taken me
everywhere I’ve wanted to go. O Night—thief, petty crook, ganev
with a heart of iron—deliver me from this your diabolical bed,
descend on me like Hurricane Medusa and her demon peepshow,
exhume me, penetrate my bodice of yen, because I’m locked in your tantric
cage, filled like a bottle of sin, stuffed in your most celestial box,
your map of a hundred thousand dead ends. Dive bomb me, dream sahib,
blast this fortress of din, divide me until I disappear, give me my
Zen canoe, my Theravadan rescue from the burning bush, throw in amnesia,
a poison apple, a knife in the back. My kingdom for an nuclear gin fizz.

(first published in Boulevard)