might as well drop a rent check on a drum machine

you are considerably older than they are. your leg has begun, with startle, seemingly without any impetus, its perversion of form. your mind having begun this long ago. you wonder in fact if ever there were a time when your mind was not in an activity of disfigurement.

they watch you from across the room. you are engaged in conversation with others. you are gesturing liberally. you are smiling and nodding. they think you are telling lies, which you are, and they are embarrassed for you, by you. they are also there with you, cannot be there, anywhere, without you. you know they are watching you and know they are naked beneath their clothing. you know of the stomach fur, low along waistline. you know of the displeasure they feel from your touch. you know that all of your workings do not at all work on them. that there is no work with them or for them, that work is not part of the atmosphere. they are embarrassed by you and for you and you too are embarrassed. that is why you have accepted the job. that is why you ask them for their presence. which they will not give you. which they will only occasionally offer up in brief glimpse. enough for you to know of their fur. their displeasure. enough for them to be embarrassed. enough for them to always be with you.

your leg is perverting itself to that of old. that of cripple. that of incapable. the muscle atop the knee is too tight in its wasting. the knee pains you constantly. it is loose in its wasting. the lymph inside you has slowed to a trickle. a stagnancy. a stinking green waterway in a city’d Summer, littered through with shopping carts and guns.

they do not respond to you so you pass time watching someone who does not know how to properly use common phrases. they touch a wall in a lock of the Panama Canal and say, “i will never wash this hand”. as though they have touched something holy. they are well into their thirties and yet have never before eaten an omelet. you watch them as they order an omelet, eat an omelet, remark over an omelet as though it were the rarest of birds. they wear a small microphone clipped to the inside of their shirt so as to be heard while talking. in doing so they also amplify the sounds of their eating. the chewing and the swallowing. so much necessary spit.

you suppose you are doing this because you enjoy it. you acknowledge you do this as it brings you embarrassment. the last time you were alone with them you watched thick ropes of saliva web from their mouth. you could not bring them even a moment of pleasure. your every attempt another proof for embarrassment. you both knew you would never not be together. just the same as the last one. and the last one. and the last one before that. each one just the same.

they watch you from across the room, having not come here with you, having no intention to leave from here with you. they watch you as you gesture near-wildly. they know you are telling mostly lies. your leg in its early perversions. your mind having started so long ago.