Dangling Above the River Thames

It’s Thursday and I walk to Wagner’s on my lunch hour for a Val’s favorite, cherry coke, and a pint of Gentleman for the card table after supper with Donny Cornflake and the lotion boys because the new body suit was finally delivered and I blink the cigarillo smoke from my eyes (mango flavor) on my way out the door and wave to Ms. Lorraine and her kids (who look like elves) and watch a girl in tight yellow pants ride by on a cruiser with hoop earrings and Janis Joplin glasses and when she rings her bell a tingle crawls up my spine like spindly piano fingers and my own Bobby McGee goes to half-mast like a dog and I shake the paper cup of mostly ice now to answer her but also to get the ice away from the straw so I can suck the last drops of near-frozen pop down and it reminds me of the guy down the hall in the apartment I had back in Minneapolis with his maracas. He had so many maracas, shakers, tambourines and ball gags of all kinds and was always saying you bet it sure is cold  out there don’t you know and at night I would get a cast iron pot of water boiling just to heat up the place to masturbate in comfort and I think about what to cook and now I’m Iost in pictures of you when you ate nothing, suspended in a box over that great river as they tempted you with food, throwing hamburgers and taunts as you just sat firm and erect in conviction and lost a quarter of your body weight, never shat and nearly died of starvation or so they say but I know that truly it was love.