The Chop Shop

I saw Donald Revell today.
Greer Garson in a bed as a child, washing her bed sheets shot out of the dark clock. Sitting on eggs, teeth on edge, Sal Mineo shoulders Dorothy Wordsworth heating murderous- no, monstrous, erasures like wings on a bicycle that his son owns.
Pandemonium is not the way. Instead, climb into the head of a boy, torn apart by women and wine, and rivers cross you. There is no grey area here. A draining thoughtfulness is all out the pipes, is all out the night, the night itself. Greer Garson is chatted about incessantly on a walk on Walden Pond. My own best friend came over the following day, to talk about, to dream about the envy of my personal erasure.
I laugh and chisel. Arcady, again, in Revell and my life. My adam’s apple bobs in time to the man in front of me, slumped over by the crescent shape of his wife’s berating eyes. Bounce to the woman in the corner, chatty cell-phone catty-eyed dancer that was never there. Bounce to the buoyant blonde behind me; her freckled-lemonade complexion sparkles those whatdyacallit flames framing the outline of a face, placed next to mine in a latticework photo album. Greer Garson had the right idea, the book smarts, the clear-headed sense of the word “expression”. I had bronchitis once, but Garson had pneumonia. That’s “pneumonia” with a “p”.
God save the man not what his utter displaced mutters complain in vain incessantly about, but whether it is in a way. I can’t be as vibrant as Thomas Traherne, or wear purple shirts like Galway Kinnell did, but I can carry a pretty good tune out of sync with God; that, without pride, I can carry a tune, in a way.
Revell carries a torch of limelight that sheds stones on his audience; he reminds me of John Denver and Jesus. My best friend, full of piss and mythology, a bibliophile, a cell biology dissenter, gets the Orpheus Bachhae stuff that we grew up on. What a great day it will be, if we should allow it. My health, like Greer Garson’s, is all shallow breathing and disastrous marriages.