gray white gray morning

        Gray, white, gray morning.  My mouth tastes awful and last night’s whiskey is seeping from my pores, leaving my skin feeling slightly sticky and the air behind me  slightly sweet and hanging, at least I imagine it lingering.  The morning fog makes the world feel no bigger than exactly where I am.  It separates me from everything.  I  don’t know why but mornings like this I always feel a sense of anticipation almost, its as though there is now and then there will be the time again when the fog is gone, overcast and sunny mornings don’t give me that same sense of division.  I feel confused about the night before, confused about the day in front of me, and anxious from the gray, white, gray fog.  I’ll just sit on the couch and decide what to do today, but I can’t.  I cant take just sitting here waiting for the fog to be burned off and for the next span of time to show up.  I pipe some music into my head, slap the top of the doorway as I walk through and wade through the foggy streets I’ve walked down a hundred times but they seem new.  This cigarette makes me want to throw up, I keep smoking, the music plays and I pay no attention. I use my hand like a squeegee to swipe the dew from the bench seat and it down, in the fog no buses are coming I just want to take a minute and decide what I am doing this early, this hung over, this confused, this way.  Blank mind, and smelly breath, then that song comes through the plastic in my ears and the air goes in and out so fast that I’m sure it doesn’t have time to give itself to my lungs, I light another smoke and try to settle my racing mind but am only half aware of the anxiety  in my hands, my legs and in my jaw,  I feel like Pavlov’s bitch,  I feel like a fool.  Change the song, think about that grafitti on the retaining wall across the street from me.  Blue, and orange and yellow mostly, fat and bold.  I can’t read what it says, but it looks so lively, and I know that someone must be proud of the artwork they fashioned in the middle of some night.  Below there is a scattering of garbage, papers, and wrappers, and a bus schedule, the remnants of passers-by, the convenience store type of people who eat microwave burritos and 99 cents bags of chips for at least one meal a day probably left it all here.  Those people piss me off. They seem to be perfectly fine with their sub standard lives.  They have so many problems and don’t seem to be bothered by them, I can’t keep the past, present and future all at once, all the time, from paralyzing me and even worse is that I can’t ever solve them. But then again, I guess I’m not sure what the questions are.  The song that is playing now is mostly instrumental and lets my mind wander into an early gray white gray fog morning dream. 
      I see myself on the bench and the splashes of color on the gray brown gray wall across from me through the gray white gray fog.  I have a bottle in a brown paper bag sitting on the ground next to my right leg, I reach down and take a pull from my malotov cocktail.  The fuel burns my mouth and makes my throat close tight but I swallow forcibly.  All of the little cuts and sores that I don’t ever notice in my mouth sting and burn so much that my eyes water a little bit.  The chemical burning feeling coats my throat, chest and makes my stomach tighten and clench.  I love it.  I keep drinking, there is some strange power within the decision to let go and I am obsessed with it. This power from letting go makes me feel cocky and lets me have the last word. I win.  Once the bottle is empty and I feel burning all through me, I reach into my pants pocket and pull out a rather worn book of matches from the bar I was at last night.  Pull two matches from it and put them in my gasoline soaked stinging mouth I tie them like two maraschino cherry stems.  The way girls do sometimes when they are on a date and are feeling coy and flirty.  I don’t feel coy or flirty and I don’t feel like they do. What would it look like if the matches lit, would the flames that came spewing from my mouth be as colorful and vibrant and impressive against the gray white gray morning as the grafitti is against the gray brown gray retaining wall.  I feel drunk with gasoline and the control I found from a wandering, daydreaming mind on this bench in the gray white fog all alone. Its going to be all for not because I know that once this morning is over it will all be burned off like the gray white gray fog.
         I snap out of my mind, and feel like the morning after last night has started to subside.  I make my way home and start to get ready to go to meet my friends for breakfast so we can laugh at eachother’s drunkenness last night.  I know that I won’t be able to tell them about my morning.  I think about how I used the gray white gray morning and how it seems so different from my friends’ mornings must have been as they woke up feeling confident and self-assured and don’t have to go for walks to try and escape their thoughts only to surrender to find themselves submitting whole heartedly to them.  I think about how I couldn’t read the writing on the wall and the way that I found it so attractive.  About how I only got irritated at the waste below it.  I’m strange.  I pull out my phone and know the victory was only short lived and I start to prepare myself for entering back into life,  where there is no room for contemplating writing on walls or letting go, only tightly adhered to social nuances and chitter chatter over a lovely breakfast that will make my stomach hurt for the better portion of the day.  I wonder what the writing on the wall says.




































.