"THERE IS NO GRAVITY, THIS WORLD SUCKS"
This must’ve been my 11th tat or so.
We headed into the parlor at 2ish in the A.M.,
place bare, fluorescent white light,
flickering on and
off and
on to the country western on the radio, except
far off time.
-
I was flipping through books
with my free hand, (the other,
gripping my hipflask tightly,
filled with Drops vodka –
“antifreeze chic,”
old Jame-o used to say;
he was standing by me now,
pointing to polaroids of tattoos
in places mothers haven’t seen
in many years).
-
The pages were claustrophobic with clichés and pricetags:
Dancing Skeleton $35
Night Flyer $48
Iron Cross $26
everything something someone else already had,
but the spreads of our skin were as
bare and naïve as our journals’ pages,
so we hungered for definition, or
in this case, synonym.
-
Albuquerque was on fire in those days;
Jame-o said the ABQ was like a BBQ pit
in the way it could turn the immolation of bodies
slowly into something digestible, celebratory,
and family-friendly,
after you’ve seen the dead pig enough times.
-
Before picking Pixie to chisel into my forearm,
Jame-o pointed out the current customer:
-
he laid back pale on the recycled barber’s chair,
the boy’s flesh took the ink like
milk took chocolate; whatever he was getting
he was meant to have.
We inched closer, angling our eyes
to see his public secret.
-
Across his chest was written:
-
THERE IS NO GRAVITY, THIS WORLD SUCKS
-
Jame-o pssst the kid, and asked him what it meant.
His voice was mocking, but soft,
like the onlookers in the crowd when Nietzche said that
God was dead, he sniggered in awe.
-
The young man looked over,
eyes looking through him,
supernova-ing in the cheap pureness
the low-grade lighting exhaled.
-
“It’s something I heard in heaven,” he whispered,
“and laugh, I know, it’s hilarious,
isn't it? But it’s true,” he chuckled slowly,
and sighed, “oh, stranger, it’s true.”
-
He rested his head back to idle,
eyes to the ceiling, curiously cocking his head
to the fractals and all-meaning abstracts
his synapses and spinal cord were wrecking
themselves to conjure.
-
His older brother stood aside him,
flicking the dead ash off a cigarette,
onto the off-cream floor. He sniffed:
“Don’t mind him, guys, he’s just on some pretty
heavy acid.”
He brushed off his brother’s prophecies as magnificent nonsense,
as he struggled to keep his
own twitches in check.
We smiled, nodded, sighed,
and ordered our once-interesting Pixie
and Skull With Knife designs.
-
We glanced over every few minutes
to peer at the boy; he laid there,
taking in the needle to his chest
like shark takes a lamprey;
sucking up the pain in his sternum for
the dark disinfectant the thing
below it was determined to bear.
-
After all was said and set in skin,
we left the parlor, tore off the bandages
and struck each others’ fresh sketchings.
We spoke shit about that kid inside,
and were charmed by the omnipotent ignorance
of a youth set free by LSD –
we all felt the same way he was
some unimaginable months ago,
and now we here we were:
the smirking,
head-shaking,
ever-respectable elders.
And all the better for it.
-
The boy and his brother joined us
in the parking lot, announced by the
bright chirps of the parlor’s bell.
The both sat on the curb,
crossed their legs,
and lit cigarettes,
facing away from the city’s brilliant glow
to the bleak plateaus beyond
the passing highway.
-
We asked them what they were doing:
“Waiting,” the boy nodded, “waiting for tomorrow,
When we’ll wake up sober,
and we’ll be better people.”
-
Jame-o guffawed as he finished his flask:
“Daybreak doesn’t baptize you like that, little buddy.
I must’ve seen a dozen thousand suns go up,
and I’ve still got a glutton’s heart. How can you tell
you won’t fall back again?”
-
The boy tilted a knowing smile,
“Fall? No…” he stated, self-assured,
and smacked his chest with two heavy hits.
“Because there is no gravity –”
but
before he could finish, he was interrupted
by his own shaking squeal
as the pain from his new tattoo dawned on him,
and he clutched his arms across himself,
shaming a safe shell to console the pain
his body refused to process earlier.
-
As we all slapped our knees and sucked
our cigarettes, his eyes lost their veneer and
became dark and grounded
as he sipped the spit around his tongue, and wheezed:
“and this world sucks.”