Thoughts In A Taxi At Night...Blind Babies Bazaar
Jann Burner
July 23, 2008
I have been sitting in the rear of Zim's restaurant for the past ten years wearing dark glasses and sucking up cups of coffee like they were spare galaxies and my mouth a ravenous black hole in deep space. In vain attempt at directed discovery I have dragged my soul carelessly through captured dreams.
Outside, above the late night oily slick Frisco pavement a large, dark bird shutters low over the horizon, while on the corner, across the street, waiting for the light to change, a taxi driver angrily chews on the scraps of a yellowed wing...
The air about me reeks of speed, sweat and stale wine. My own physical self smells like burnt sulfur. What a distracting scab! It is indeed unfortunate that they are still being issued to earthly dreamers like uniforms.
I am a mute. I sing for the entertainment of the deaf, the dumb and the blind. I am a vendor at the Blind Babies Bazaar. I sell rides to plump tourists from the outback.
I was once a good soldier, one of the walking dead. I often marched along within the neon plastic grooved rings of Mars on the lip of Aphrodite's visor like a summer moth through a screen door--silently. I was a noncommissioned officer in the army of the ages passing through Eternity...
Quantum foam, light-cone, wilderness home; I wield my thoughts like a tongue. Sometimes when I look in the mirror I see the fly-catcher lizard, and he is hungry. Other times I see the condemned prisoner politely requesting a doggie bag with his last meal. Descriptions and concepts are quickly passed around and about like hives of gold. My waitress approaches across the floor like a Seventh Day Adventist hustling Watch Tower Magazine on death row--slowly and without much conviction. She balances my short stack of hot-cakes before her, carefully. My Market Street Madonna with her jaunty waitress cap moves toward me like the fin of a shark through shallow water.
At one time I was quite a humorist. In those days my idea of a natural man was someone who had no further use for toilet paper. Times change. All I've ever really wanted was to keep myself amused and to have a good friend to bless me when I sneeze. And perhaps to be a national literary hero. To wear honor's helmet I would have been willing to go wide in the water. To wear the robes of grace I would have been willing to traverse the very retina of the mind's eye. At one time I would have gladly been an optimistic spirit; an igniter of stars...and the dead.
My food arrives. I slowly lift the syrup container and allow the strawberry-colored fluid to ease out and over my short stack. Beneath the neon glare the syrup flows smoothly over my pancakes--my plate; over my table, over my lap, down the rusty chrome chair leg and out and over the bright white tile floor. The tension spring at the top of the strawberry syrup dispenser seems to be broken.
Somewhere behind me, hovering in the dusk, a giant blue whale tugs gently at the strings of my mask threatening my anonymity. Will it be Captain Midnight or the Masked Outsider? The decaying scorpions all bloated with lust twist slowly on their trunks in order to view the strangeness and the strawberry syrup. The ragged ginseng smelling poet of the Blind Babies Bazaar is not concerned. To the beatific fluidity of one soul dreaming its own transformation it is ALL just so much strawberry syrup. When The Outsider is set free--so is The Captain.
I stand to leave and carefully place two shiny new quarters on the table. They both quickly sink from sight in the pool of strawberry fluid. At the door I hesitate and turn back towards my table, perhaps fifty cents was not sufficient. My Market Street Madonna glides past silently, unconcerned. Her soul dreams of its own transformation. On her chest, immediately above her left nipple, rides a hefty black plastic name tag: CYN CLITTON.
I close the door and step from the valley of darkness holding my breath, watching all the corners of the sudden light and at once step back for a moment's breath, a sigh, a whistle and then on I move, into the murky brightness of the neon town, trying to drown myself in the vapors of civilization.
I am a thirty-nine year old ecstasy addict strung out on peak experience singing for the entertainment of the deaf, the dumb and the blind. I am a vendor at the Blind Babies Bazaar, and sometimes, as I graze on the open wounds of realization that bite deeply into the furrows of my being I feel like God's own Angels are making pee-pee in my hair.
But then, what do I know? I am just a cab driver. My thoughts often get entangled in my mind´s hair like stale gum. What can I say except that I am involved. I am a prober of an emotional universe. I am involved because my pain is workable flesh. But it is not important. The beatific fluidity of one soul dreaming its own transformation is not concerned.
"It is all just so much strawberry syrup," say us vendors at the Blind Babies Bazaar.
Outside, above the late night oily slick Frisco pavement a large, dark bird shutters low over the horizon, while on the corner, across the street, waiting for the light to change, a taxi driver angrily chews on the scraps of a yellowed wing...
The air about me reeks of speed, sweat and stale wine. My own physical self smells like burnt sulfur. What a distracting scab! It is indeed unfortunate that they are still being issued to earthly dreamers like uniforms.
I am a mute. I sing for the entertainment of the deaf, the dumb and the blind. I am a vendor at the Blind Babies Bazaar. I sell rides to plump tourists from the outback.
I was once a good soldier, one of the walking dead. I often marched along within the neon plastic grooved rings of Mars on the lip of Aphrodite's visor like a summer moth through a screen door--silently. I was a noncommissioned officer in the army of the ages passing through Eternity...
Quantum foam, light-cone, wilderness home; I wield my thoughts like a tongue. Sometimes when I look in the mirror I see the fly-catcher lizard, and he is hungry. Other times I see the condemned prisoner politely requesting a doggie bag with his last meal. Descriptions and concepts are quickly passed around and about like hives of gold. My waitress approaches across the floor like a Seventh Day Adventist hustling Watch Tower Magazine on death row--slowly and without much conviction. She balances my short stack of hot-cakes before her, carefully. My Market Street Madonna with her jaunty waitress cap moves toward me like the fin of a shark through shallow water.
At one time I was quite a humorist. In those days my idea of a natural man was someone who had no further use for toilet paper. Times change. All I've ever really wanted was to keep myself amused and to have a good friend to bless me when I sneeze. And perhaps to be a national literary hero. To wear honor's helmet I would have been willing to go wide in the water. To wear the robes of grace I would have been willing to traverse the very retina of the mind's eye. At one time I would have gladly been an optimistic spirit; an igniter of stars...and the dead.
My food arrives. I slowly lift the syrup container and allow the strawberry-colored fluid to ease out and over my short stack. Beneath the neon glare the syrup flows smoothly over my pancakes--my plate; over my table, over my lap, down the rusty chrome chair leg and out and over the bright white tile floor. The tension spring at the top of the strawberry syrup dispenser seems to be broken.
Somewhere behind me, hovering in the dusk, a giant blue whale tugs gently at the strings of my mask threatening my anonymity. Will it be Captain Midnight or the Masked Outsider? The decaying scorpions all bloated with lust twist slowly on their trunks in order to view the strangeness and the strawberry syrup. The ragged ginseng smelling poet of the Blind Babies Bazaar is not concerned. To the beatific fluidity of one soul dreaming its own transformation it is ALL just so much strawberry syrup. When The Outsider is set free--so is The Captain.
I stand to leave and carefully place two shiny new quarters on the table. They both quickly sink from sight in the pool of strawberry fluid. At the door I hesitate and turn back towards my table, perhaps fifty cents was not sufficient. My Market Street Madonna glides past silently, unconcerned. Her soul dreams of its own transformation. On her chest, immediately above her left nipple, rides a hefty black plastic name tag: CYN CLITTON.
I close the door and step from the valley of darkness holding my breath, watching all the corners of the sudden light and at once step back for a moment's breath, a sigh, a whistle and then on I move, into the murky brightness of the neon town, trying to drown myself in the vapors of civilization.
I am a thirty-nine year old ecstasy addict strung out on peak experience singing for the entertainment of the deaf, the dumb and the blind. I am a vendor at the Blind Babies Bazaar, and sometimes, as I graze on the open wounds of realization that bite deeply into the furrows of my being I feel like God's own Angels are making pee-pee in my hair.
But then, what do I know? I am just a cab driver. My thoughts often get entangled in my mind´s hair like stale gum. What can I say except that I am involved. I am a prober of an emotional universe. I am involved because my pain is workable flesh. But it is not important. The beatific fluidity of one soul dreaming its own transformation is not concerned.
"It is all just so much strawberry syrup," say us vendors at the Blind Babies Bazaar.