Poetry Book Release January 2010!
To Be Read Aloud: Spoken Word Poetry to Inspire Statistics
Published in UALR Writer's Network Quills and Pixels 2009
A Headrest for the Sleepless
Cracked leather, bursting at the seams, scratches my back as I press against the seat cushion of a white Cadillac splattered with acid-purple bird poop. I look down at the ashtray, crowded with squashed cigarette butts and Swisher filter tips. He holds the sandwich bag loosely between two fingers, letting it twist in the air.
I had met the guy at work, where he sat across the hall in his little cubicle, leaning back in a roller chair, staring at me. I had always smiled a little too much to let him know I liked the corny love notes he wrote me on his five-minute bathroom breaks. I made sure to linger after work just to watch him leave the parking lot in his new, shiny car; I liked him slumped low with one hand on the steering wheel. Often, I had pictured myself in the passenger’s seat.
Today, yesterday’s fantasy has become my horror. I hate myself as I look down at the baggy clinging to the cloudy white rock. As a child, I had often crouched down in a corner with my arms wrapped tightly around my knees, a beaten baby hoping to become invisible. I had watched my mother kill herself every day with a chunk of the same cloudy-white. She would take a piece, put it on a bent spoon, and light the fire beneath it. Our house looked like the doctor’s office that I hated to go to, with needles and Elmo Band-Aids. With a name like Crack, it’s no wonder it breaks apart families. Amazing how a rock the size of a dime can ruin so much.
The guy from work sitting next to me in the driver’s seat snips off pieces of his rock with a pair of orange-handled scissors.
Huh? That’s all it takes?
Because of Hollywood, I had always thought the weighing would be done on some grand scale by a naked row of Hispanics all sweaty in a basement. Instead, I learn to eye how much to give. It’s just that simple. Like how well the bed is made, it all depends on the day. Just don’t forget to smile while you do it – cheese for the candid camera. Always grin.
I clinch my teeth together to keep from crying, and we’re off to see his buyer. There is no yellow brick road leading the way, just hard, silent pavement.
I am listening, and I expect to hear a car roll up sneaky to the driver’s window. Mafia men, who hide behind tinted glass, are replaced by a man pedaling on a bike. He comes up to my window. The man’s jaws take rain checks because they don’t want to be here. His skin is covered with hollow pits full of a forbidden ooze. It reminds me of a cigarette ad from health class where a skeleton body is blackened by burns. The ad said, “If only the damage you did to the inside showed on the outside of your body, would you still smoke?” Suddenly, the answer is clearer to me than that day in high school when I had sat safe behind my wooden desk full of graffiti: “Kim Jacob Forever.”
This moment lasts forever as I wonder if the drug addict has raided pink piggy banks and patched the bottom back up with that sturdy kind of duct tape so his kid won’t know the difference. Uh oh! The guy on the bike is a little short on cash. I wonder if the dealer beside me will do him a favor this time, maybe put it on his tab. Perhaps, he’s good for it. The dealer says, “You owe me!” The guy on the bike reaches. He reaches past us, wanting more than we have to give. He can see his death, and he wants it; after all, it’s rightfully his. I see his arm going across my lap, and I try to climb inside the seat cushion. I just want to hide for this moment. I’m careful to be silent; I am afraid to speak. I watch. He grabs at the air with vain passion as his hands clasp around his treasure. They make an even trade, one soul for another. He grins and pedals away.
He had Beetlejuice teeth: at least that’s what I had always called them on my mother, with her cracked enamel. I turn to the demon sitting in the driver’s seat; I had called him my friend. I wanted to ask him some questions. I become a mother questioning her daughter’s killer.
I scream, “How could you do this?” The words spill out of my mouth; they are spoiled milk. Then I ask, “Why? Do you not feel guilty? At the very least, do you not hate yourself?”
I am speaking to my mother’s executioner, and I feel the power.
I am weak and unsatisfied. I want to kill him as he bows his head and mumbles, only saying, “Yeah.”
I stare at him, and I can’t see him. I see through him. I am sitting at the devil’s roundtable, and I still don’t understand. Does he not know he breaks apart families and turns good, loving moms and dads into promise breakers? Does he not know that he possesses some child’s heart in his hand? I wonder what money tastes like all soiled in blood anyhow.
Never mind. I feel guilty enough for the both of us. I am an accomplice, sitting in the passenger’s seat with my skull pressed against the headrest.
Copyright 2009 Roni Poet
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