Longshanks Bill Reaches The End Of The World.
The buggy swerved into the drive all hell to skelter, driven from hell to somewhere hotter and with miles to go before they sleep, these motherless sons of whores that plague me. I popped my head from the window, mind the glass, and yelled at them to mind their business, didn’t they know what time it was?
They did not know what time it was, the gutless whore-begotten bastards, each and every one of them all. They cry peace at me, as if I knew not what it was and didn’t fight for it, for them, in my time. If I had known, so very different it would be, I’ll say it again.
“Mind your noise, you bastards!” I call them.
Rackets ensue and on deaf ears I fall, on my sword of words and uselessness.
It’s night time in the valley, the valley of the shadow and it’s as calamitous as the inner city, inside the city as it was, not in my day. I cry that I should live to see this, when all could be made better, not left to rot and fester like the dead are all around.
I palm the door and it hisses for me, lisps at me like mock. But open it does, and stays that way, for a wonder, and I pass. I pass through. The night air, I did say it was night, is cool, for another wonder, they may never cease, though they will, as sure as eggs. It make a change, like a dollar in the market, and I say thank you for it. Thank you surely.
Some would be calmed, becalmed, by the light and cool caress of the breeze, with its scent of cactus milk and coyote pine, even though the exhaust lies all through like pisses in a stream, but I am not some. I am one; even though just this one, small and frail and forgotten.
Fucksake and sure to plenty, they have done it once more. If I could foretell through clairvoyance I would win moneys and some else by staking my own balls on certainties and eventualities that seem obvious to me and invisible to all else, witless and titless and those who walk blind, may they trip and fall.
My goddamned fencing, ramshackle and staggered as it may be, has fallen prey to those feebleminded and fatherless hogs yet again, once more. No mind to what’s not theirs; I shall befall them tonight and they shall rue. They shall rue my intervention and live to tell a tale of it.
I stride. Yes, though years have caught me up, and some passed me, I stride. I was a motherfucker too, in the time, more than you can say. If your mother came home late, out of her breath and done up wrong like a rush and she would not say, could not say, what she had thought of her night out on the town, then she may have had Longshanks up and over her like the tide on a beach and she would have cried havoc for more and got it too. So, I stride, and I’ll slap you for contrary, see if I don’t.
“Open this door, you fuckhounds!” I call. “Open up and see what the hell is up out here!” I rap the door like thunders, two and three, and it opens before the four and stands before me a whelp, a shit eater of 12 years or some and I’d like to lay my boot on his arse for old time’s but I’m a-starting slow these days and that’s as may be, like or not. “You whoreson fuckers have rued me one time too far, more’s the pity and I’m like to gain some recompense, don’t you see?”
The face of a dumb bird he has, an eating bird for the Sunday plate, and I change my mind, for my boot would like to lay here more than on his arse, if I could tell the difference in this failed light and with my eyes.
“Whassat?” he says, the wisest utterance of his own 12 years give or take and like as not the last, had I my way, God fuck him.
“You done fucked my fencing once too many, none the richer, son,” I says, “You and your gaggle of tom fool, jackassholes do make me mad, and I stand here to say so.”
He makes a smile with teeth like a drawer full of a country mother’s best cutlery, Sunday best, and he smile at me and say old time motherfucker, you got your balls.
They pour out now and over and I’m tit to tea kettle and thinking I done gone about this a wrong way, sure enough. It’s boots and shoes and hard knocks like school time and I swear to mother-loving Jesus some young bastard is kicking me to death in his flippin’ and floppin’ flip-flops, fuck me a-plenty. They make ‘em tough today, so they do. And I’m old and gone and that’s okay. Coulda been worse and nearly was a few times and more.
And I think, or my brain does, it’s away without me and no good, that I should have followed the boys to the elevator that time. Lived my time up there on the blue moon, but they left me alone. That might have been good, second place or third maybe, a job for life and with a third the gravity, bounce in your step and money in your pocket. And hear tell that the women have tits as perky as ever was, not even bras to fumble. One third the gravity, hallelujah.
I can see now, before the curtain calls, banks of fluffy in the sky, blue as it was when I was but puppy, and that sky hook majestic there and all, flinging men and women into the yonder, and I not one of them. Too scared, I see, motherfucker or no, to go. Too anxious to stay in an elevator for nigh on a seven-day into the heaven for a job better than mine and a life of something other than that which I done.
Balls to it, even though. Makes your choice, and lie in it. It was not to be, for whatever and why and that’s the end of it all.
My compose is shattered as lifted high I undergo, up and over and then down, old friend gravity once more, three thirds and I feel it each and every one as I tumble through my own fence, scattered like ten pins, strike or spare. Those filthy shitbirds done hurled me to my yard to piss me the more to anger. I roll and smooth out and lie sky up and above, the stars like glittered sands a canopy for me to see. Peruse I do, I can not move. Broken summat, like as not, those bastards. As well my fence, God damned to Thursday; may it rest in piece.
But the sky makes okay of a blanket, had worse and more. And there, from side one to another goes a ship, a gleam of light in the night, a flight from here to there, flung out into the void, no avoiding it, brave folk one and true.
Away you, one and all. Leave us here, the broken and the lost, the misbegot. Make a new world; for all of me, make two. Abandon us as objects of the past, we broken fucked up and remnants all.
We do not glitter and shine, and create and make anew. We shit and breathe dust, make new dust and new shit and over again. Make us the eggshell, sustenance for brief use and expire. I, old and once proud motherfucker; and they, young and with use not one, trail behind. Cut loose, us baggage and bound to ground.
I slip from conscious, and the morning will be bruised, but I was a man once and I could have done more than this. In my fence I lie, no word of a lie, and the young have had fun and laughs and next time I shall mind of my mouth, no spaceman I, bravery passed me by.
Fuckin’ Nora, them shit heathens done broken my leg, I say.
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