Pain Grin Again

I hope this works tonight, I tried it earlier, but that’s the way the mop flops, baby. There’s no way of getting around trying to compose anything of true worth right now. Because I’m waiting for my unemployment funds to start back up, I couldn’t afford my meds for eighteen days. For the last week, maybe more, I’ve felt like a guy shoved into a bathtub full of water about every twenty minutes. I can guzzle ibufrofin if needed, but its the bipolar meds that sent me to crazy town. I started back on the meds yesterday, so tonight I at least have my nose above water. The double-aughts are gone, I made it to a new decade. We all did. This will be my seventh, as I was born 9/9/59. And I’m still insane enough to see the shadow of my arm as I finger-type and momentarily think it is an animal of some kind. Its the bipolar meds working, the ones that cost me $29.00 for seven tablets, buy ‘em by the week, thank you Pfizer very much. Please come again. Lamictal, shuffling my senses to their proper places, for now leaving my brain unprotected, like Bruce Willis’s character in 12 MONKEYS. Sorry for the rant, on with the show that y’all paid good money to see.

I’m reading PAIN GRIN on YouTube, just to do it. 100 seconds each. PAIN GRIN is a chapbook illustrated by Harry Fassl, rest his soul. The actually idea comes from a line from “Suicide Is Painless”, the theme from Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H. The sword of time will pierce our skin, it doesn’t hurt when it begins, but as it works its way on in, the pain grows stronger, watch it grin. Gang, I still feel like shit. No getting around it, but at least I’m back to the dog-paddling with my nose above water. I bite that piece of skin between your thumb and forefinger. I revel in the sight of two fingers typing, though it makes my back feel like there is are shovels under my shoulder blades and the bastard who created me is pressing down on both shovels, like my bones and tendons are graveyard dirt.

My hair is growing out, but it curls in the back. This is because my head flops back so often that the skin in my neck folds. I’ve checked on that and I can feel where the hair would normally lay straight. When I was younger, my Frankenstein head would swivel to the right, and I never realized how hideous I looked until I saw videos of panels I was on at a convention in Nashville, 1991. Now it falls straight back, I feel like one of those monkeys on a plastic stand, remember those? You press the bottom of the stand and the various monkey parts move around, you can see the strings that connect the body move. Arms wide, head back cursing his creator. No, wait. That’s me. I’d rather be a Frankenstein string puppet. Press the bottom and the arms move like the Monster Me is trying to wave away the flames of the fiends by torchlight. And the only way to do that is for the Monster Me to jump into that water that doesn’t ice over in winter. Bubbly Creek, my salvation. Sleep with the rendered flesh a century old. Or I could just stomp the string puppet to pieces. More lines from M*A*S*H, these a bit butchered. A wise man once requested me, to answer questions that are deep, is this to be or not to be, and I replied oh why ask me? I suppose that’s me grimacing the words as I stare at the ceiling uncontrollably, string monkey Monster Me popping in and out and up, entertainment for the coming decade. Somebody please stomp on the puppet.