The Wake

Two women exchange names and inanities in the room adjacent. They chuckle and giggle; yet I can’t feel their laughter. The table where I sit appears to be oak, finely stained- illuminating the deep and thick grooves of the wood. The smell of coffee and cigarettes permeates through the cafe. The music is drowned only by the clinking and clanking of the glasses in the next room; this nagging white noise. Outside, students amble the streets, zigzagging, exchanging subtle nods and polite observations of the weather.

A man sits and sips his coffee, starring aimlessly at the page. His eyes grow blank, and the alabaster skin blanches. His piercing slits of vision wander over the words, while a demolition derby rages inside his mind. His sanity teeters and tots over the brink. He taps the ash off his cigarette, glances through the haze of smoke, and brings his hand–wielding the tobacco roll–to his lips. Smoke billows inside his lungs, and finally out of his mouth and nostrils. With a content shrug of shoulders, he reads on.

A blonde little thing in the next room is mouthing the words of the effervescent song–the music is now blaring. She fiddles with her book resting on her thighs, angled consciously, laying in the sunlight that beams through the pane. She swirls her mug, surfacing sugar from the bottom. She takes a sip of this insipid concoction; her cheeks and lips scrunch and pucker–a compulsive reflex to force the bitter taste down–and it seeps through her.

I am alone in this place. Beyond these walls of solitary comfort, the world is spinning wildly out of control- a demolition derby rages inside his mind. I sit now in the black eye of entropy, where the entire gaffe has settled to a slow, rotating vortex. I have become inured to this rotation. As I turn, images of moments passed and opportunities not seized are salient from the swinish rest, then they are drawn back into the violently spiraling chaos. All just outside these walls.

It is a heinous black mass swaying with the music. Scenes surface themselves from this dark body and rescind back into the madness. One is that of wild and drunken revelry. A Girl, scantily clad, throws herself upon a male who is swilling beers and standing on a bending table: the ringleader of this demonic circus. Another is contorting her body into some anatomically impossible position around the torso of another of the ringleader’s stripe. The next is a Woman is holding her baby. She rocks him back and forth, forth and back, to assuage his crying. “I’ll love you always,” she lies. Another is seen. A lout is sitting at the bar. Sweat pours profusely from his brow; he downs his drink, and continues to chain smoke Parliaments. A scuffle takes place when Blue in Green emanates from the jukebox. “Miles Davis is a no-talent nigger,” he screams in a slurred manner- the fumbled rhythm of a drunk. Bar Time is called. He struggles from his stool, mutters an obscenity disconcertingly out of phrase, and ambles out of the bar. This prosaic man, this over-indulgent fool, this loon, this odious swine. It is all this degenerate madness.

This hellish merry-go-round settles its pace, and finds you.

No nuance between your hair and skin: black as night and goose white. Your bracing eyes gaze through me, confronting me in a moment of human honesty. They are concentric circles, streaming with every hue of blue. The chaotic shades hone themselves to a middle. Hollow and black. I see myself inside your eyes. I am home in this chaos.