A Productive Weekend

A man struggles through his time off work to write.

It's your second night without sleep. The sky, five o'clock dark and rain drizzle cloudy, lights dim like an algae filled aquarium with a bad bulb. You've drank some or all of everything in the house and you are so thirsty it's an emergency and the taste of cheap spirits and cheaper wines and watery beers makes you gag from the back of your tongue to your sphincter so you walk out onto the paint peeled wood plank front porch that creaks under your work boots to brave the four block world down an empty, fractured asphalt street past recession empty, boarded up houses to a two pump gas station that sells hope and resignation - lottery tickets and cigarettes.

You scratch a mosquito bite on your beard stubble cheek as you walk back to the cooler and open the glass doors. The air rolls out and cools the sweat under your untucked button down you've worn since you went to supper with her after work on Friday and you got drunk and started with politics and religion and ended with tears and accusations and distrust and loud, violent threats.

You grab a pint carton of one hundred percent white milk and drink it right there in front of the cooler with the doors open and the cold air pouring out like February. You fill your throat and mouth and you wash away the tired whiskey and the sharp gun oil and anymore thoughts you have for now about pulling the trigger but you know it will come again and one day you'll have the courage or cowardice to finish it and end the loneliness and the boredom and your inadequacies. You finish the milk and you close the carton and think it could not have been any sweeter had it came straight from the bucket or the udder or from the tender breast of a young and loving mother. You hold that thought, that last thought, for a minute more and you know that you will write about that because it is beautiful and you grab a half gallon jug of the cold milk to take home.

By the time you get to the counter your hunger seems insatiable and you grab two fistful of oatmeal cream pies and a red spiral bound notebook and two good pens and you pay for it all including the empty carton and you know that you must write today to get to the words that crawl around inside your head like the roly-poly bugs and spiders you find under a log.

You walk out of the station into the morning and it is raining and the sky is purple in the dawn. You see none of the decay and detritus around you. You've turned your brain over to the bugs and they line up in formation to flow from your fingers to construct grace and to grant you one more day to get it right.

Reviews

[Asia J]

Powerful words! I absolutely love how descriptive you were. Be sure to look out for run on sentences.
Other than that, it is absolutely perfect!!!

[minder]

i really like it
the story of the suicidal that was about to pull the trigger but did not dare too for what life had coming for him
(atleast that i what i think its about)

if you let me ill write a poem about that!

[Kevin Derr]

Yes, please and thank you for the kind words

[minder]

your welcome ;) (i cannot promise the poem will be good though im not very good ;) )