Your brain's like 100 million hornets in a Campbell's Soup can,
so where's the axe to split it open?
Speaking of can openers, what is it about midnight that makes
your spine shake like the hand of a holy roller
shooting craps against a back alley curb?
Click, click, click—snake eyes, and all your pretty dresses
lie in tatters, Ave Maria and her butternut squash.
Why do some days seem like factory work and others like a picnic
at the beach? What's in the picnic basket—fried chicken?
Is that the same chicken nesting in your throat, with her
tambourine and Old Testament phlegm? Glory
be to God in the highest. Roll over Rover, let Jimi take over.
How can your heart be as hard as the face of Teddy Roosevelt
on Mount Rushmore and as soft as the stomach
of the fat boy on the bus, crust of chocolate around his mouth?
And where did you get your nasty mouth? In that pile of body parts
behind the morgue?
Götterdämmerung, girlfriend, are you speaking in tongues—is that why
you dream about running away to Mexico? Do you want
to blame your mental riot on not speaking Spanish?
Si, si señora, remember when you were first married, and every time
you wore a loose shirt, someone would squeal,
“Are you going to have a baby?” Did you have to say,
“I'd love to, but their heads are so big and my vagina's so small?”
How did you sharpen your tongue? With that missing ax,
or did you use a matchbook from the Pair-o-Dice Lounge?
Remember the years you walked down that blind alley?
There's no scrapbook to hold those photos.
Why do sex and hex rhyme? What about Tex-Mex? Cerebral cortex?
Why is sex like eating at a Mexican restaurant—beans and rice,
tequila, habañeros—¡Ay, caramba!
O my darling mumbojumbologist, who is the architect of your double talk?
Who made you from her bones and bread?
Will you never stop missing your mother's voice?
Did you know that Hindus believe we are God experiencing himself?
Does that make you a holy chalice or a holy chassis?
O Chevy Vishnu, Studebaker Jesus. O Buick Bodhisattva
of the Bebop-a-lou.
Why does luck make you feel like you're in front of a firing squad,
looking down the barrels of 14 rifles? You think
you're Dostoevsky, don't you?
That reminds me, why are you so in love with Prince Myshkin? Don't you
remember he lost his mind? Do you want to lose your mind?
Don't you wish it were that easy?
If you could go back in time, who would you save—Keats? Marlowe?
Carole Lombard? Okay, so you could talk Lombard out of getting
on that plane, ditto Buddy Holly and Otis Redding, but how
would you get the penicillin back to Keats? And how good
would a sissy girl like you be in a knife fight?
Remember that Tootsie Roll you ate when you were 12? You should.
It's still on your left hip.
So why do you bother to get out of bed in morning?
Because last time you checked your name wasn't Marcel Proust.
Because like Samuel Beckett, you've been waiting all your life
to be old.
Because a nickel will get you a shoe shine, but a penny will get
you the nothing that is so something else.
Because there's no business like show business.
Because being an animal is so shambolic.
Because you're stuck here like a cluck-mad chicken on the wrong
side of the road, Tom Joad on amphetamines, high queen
of spleen, trying to outfox your ultra-sneaky archenemy
that teetotaling Mr. T, two-timing Time