I’ve been to critique groups with Marilyn, they all smell of dust and the boredom of spare time. She has hobbies now and actively participates in her community. I believe she even votes Democratic. She is always happy has a husband and a 401k, flowery vacations to romantic isles she has a hobby to write a novel about. There is dust in her eyes; she may be pre-glaucomic but her hobby warms her, married to a 60-year-old stiff in Lacombe finally taking his ’69 Chevy – clean and well-polished – for a cruise round the ‘burbs.
I was crawling the sidewalk with my head slow-bulldozing the way when I met Marilyn beneath a bus stop bench. She said Hello and asked me for change. Marilyn high school drop-out runaway queen in rags. She squatted foreclosed houses on the eastside, showered at the shelters, burrowed underground with some kids I knew from the local Infoshop. Her hair always looked wet. Marilyn on bingers weeklong would drag her innards ‘cross the asphalt, perpetually roadburned on this bleeding bliss. She once broke her leg attempting a 3-story suicide. I lived in her throat and she in my chest until the duplex burned down. I watched her eat the ashes of her manuscripts.
Marilyn now enunciates poetic flourish speaking about personal short-comings and beauty of vulnerability. Marilyn can be found browsing antiques on Nassau Street, Princeton. She is visiting boutiques in Montclair, avoids Jersey City and skips to Brooklyn for galas and readings, matrons of the arts, is that (expensive clothing)? She found it in Ixchituan, she just loves the vibrancy and the energy she feels from it. How is her novel going? Wonderful, she has a friend from St. John’s – an English professor, tenured – giving her notes. She hopes she is able to convey Sentimental Beauty Soul about… I’ve lost interest.
I had to hit Marilyn. I was her number two every few months and she’d put gashes in my cheeks and Marilyn fucked the world into her purple veins eating pages of prose – raw and uncooked – because fuck buying food. I found Marilyn and she made me mad with life, dragged me naked into city-centers just to make me hit her. This was her high – self-destruction self-negation, abuse me she be the tool that digs under the highways and sears roadkill beneath the bridges. We were married for three weeks.
Four weeks ago we were married for three weeks. I’ve been evicted spent my rent on molly and dub-step and here I am, again looking for Marilyn. But my copies of The Wasteland and Ginsberg were repossessed into the dumpster and Marilyn is 60 with an accountant to hump her. Marilyn with an MFA from Seton Hall gathering grants for a flower-worded novel four senior citizens and five English PhD’s will read to warm their good-faith hearts. I am dispossessed of this modern lack of movement. I want my Marilyn back.
Mick's Neon Fog 