Sitting on the old Raggedy Ann inspired ripped brown leather couch I got from somewhere, some alley or some side street or maybe even some sideshow...foam coming out of the arms like a teddy bear chewed up by a pit bull, but it’s comfortable...what do I care...replace it when somebody puts a better one at the curb...maybe...utterly bored and I need something to take my mind of this boredom...look over at the real fake wood shelf, an unopened bottle of scotch that some old girlfriend gave me a few holidays ago...I’m not a scotch drinker, she should of known that, maybe that’s why she’s an old girlfriend...hope the scotch has aged better than she has...I don’t mean to be mean but she’s looking pretty rough these days...amphetamines will do that...no other choice of alcohol...no gin, no vodka, no beer, no bartender to mix something up...no nothing but that scotch so that’ll have to do...need a drink or two and a new point of view...pick up the bottle, wipe the dust off the beautiful brown glass and open it...I take a swig and we are introduced to each other..and she looks real good to me...the beginning of a beautiful relationship...now I know that there are a hundred reasons why I shouldn’t drink anymore, but I can’t think of one right now...the sun’s going down now, shadows on the wall bleed into darkness...I should just relax but I can’t for my generation is a suspicious one, suspicious of the future, suspicious of the past, suspicious of the coming generations as the generations before us were of us and I’m suspicious that something is coming but I don’t know what and that makes me suspicious...I just know that I’m suspicious...put it aside I tell myself, all I know is I got this bottle of scotch and the evening has just improved...the phone rings and it’s the kind of ring that just sounds unimportant and I should answer it but I don’t, I just let it ring and ring and ring...there’s nobody I want to talk to anyway...leave me alone...it's sticky hot and the windows barely open in this studio I call my humble abode and you can’t get much more humble than this...the fan is going in circles like I do most of the time...it’s depressing and dirty but there’s nowhere to go...writing poetry sure ain’t a first class ticket to anywhere...but there’s nobody to blame but me...I try to blame my mother, my father, my sister, my friends...but that wouldn’t be the truth and I know it...Shakespeare wrote; cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once, of all the wonders that I yet have heard, it seems to me most strange that men should fear; seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come...I have no idea why the hell that came to me just now or why I remember that but there’s that...so here it is on Sunday night and I look around and see the fishbowl on the table...I feel sorry for that fish and sometimes I feel imprisoned like he must feel...just floating around aimlessly confined to that little bowl with no place to go...I’d get him a playmate but his kind just attack other fish, even if they’re the same species...I wonder if it has dreams, longs for a big ocean to swim in...yeah, I felt sorry for him but if he was in that ocean he’d probably be just some other fishes breakfast so maybe it’s better this way...so it’s my couch, my scotch, and my fish for the rest of the night.
