Pilgrimage

(it's up to me now to turn on the bright lights)

I lost my bike.

Oh, Laura, I hardly knew ya. My ass had only just begun polishing your torn vinyl seat.

I also lost my copy of Hawthorne’s The Metaphysical Railroad and Other Stories. I had carved my initials in its laminated cover with my fingernail.

They were my “real” initials--the ones I got for being born and the ones I’ll leave behind when I die.

This morning I came to on the tube with no idea of where I was or where I was going. It was rush hour so the train was crowded, but for some reason there was a seat free on either side of me. Whatever, I thought, hobbling over to the door. Everyone around me took a step back. A dark haired couple wearing sensible jackets whispered and stared. Their hair was perfectly styled. Her fat diamond ring glistened like in a magazine. It wasn’t until I got off and started wandering towards the metallic blue exit that I realized there was dried puke all over the right arm of my retro tweed blazer.

It was green and pink. Merry Xmas, wasters.

It turned out I was in Paddington Station. After a few wrong turns, I managed to make it outside, just as the last drops of a rainstorm were falling. A yellow glow lit up the bellies of the black clouds on the horizon. Oh, happy life, filled with such unexpected, but well-timed epiphanies. I bummed a Silk Cut from a startled Jamaican who had just watched me blow a string of brown snot into a nearby garbage can.

What was it that Snoop said, “The game is to be sold, not to be told”?

That’s the situation, baby.

Check me out, London, cuz I’m looking good. Hooded and heavy-lidded, I’m walking the blocks with a bop, eating pound cake out of a bag and checking the way the dappled sunlight falls across these white British sidewalks. I’ve got those eagle eyes you’ve been wanting. I circle miles high over the earth: I can always spot the tasty pink fleshed rabbit, whether I’m up for the kill or not.


miss you, raymi