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'SELECTED PROSE'
by Wayne Wolfson

'AGASTORA'

My conception of you, your wounds. You had to have known what I was doing.

I used to say it over and over as I time travelled on a pile of old photographs and saved concert programs. It was only myself I was fooling.

You will be the girl in my song. I owe you that, it’s what I made of all this.

That night. No, you will just stay here awhile, alone. The bar was not full up, but there were enough people there to make you fight for self control. Not to allow me the potential pleasure of seeing head in hands, a veil of fingers.

There were tears though. The same bar light I had always looked good in also did an adequate job of mostly hiding them.

I left. You had been silent, but there had still been eyes upon me.

I went across the street under the awning of Pepe’s. I had planned on catching you as you left. The air would also do me some good.

I got caught up in reading the posted menu, if I could, what would I have had?

Who knows what you saw as you exited. Was I already on the entrance? I think that I knew it was too late.

Night time fights were always worse, it was the absence of light which hid how absurd it must all have appeared. The too, there would be the silence. The laying there, the body, mute evidence, back to back.

At least during the day there was always potential for escape in a walk.

No, I could not go home now. I decided on a dessert and left. That night was spent betting all my money on Siberian Chess.

When I finally found my way home you were gone. A day later and still no sign.

Despite your constant threats in the past, I did not worry. I cooked eggs, worked and perfected my lone bishop gambit.

I was about a month into it when your sister came by to get your things. She was all smirks, Siamese cat on the bed.

Two treats. She had worked it all out before volunteering this errand. A final stab at me, when I asked about you. And even better, a future smack at you, banked until she needed it.

The currency of fuck.

I knew her. Knew her and her games and could not be bothered. She half heartedly tried though, starting by telling me that you no longer pronounced the ‘t’ in your name.

Did I care?

It just was no fun for her.

Asking if I was going to be around she came back with a bottle. She drank like a kid, it was cheap and sweet.

Somewhere in Saint Petersburg the problem of the white queen is being dealt with.

We had some drinks. She took her shirt off. Braless, her skin an off white, imitation marble icons sold to the tourists.

This act. Even in this she was thwarted. She came too hard and fast. Quicker than me. Afterwards there could be no victory, achieved with a bad review.

I could have kicked her out, the little slap that says good bye, but I did not want to risk bringing them closer through a shared hatred.

Kind indifference. This caught her off guard, and for me that was enough.

With a blush, which I gauged as sincere, she gave me the address of her new job. It was a family of waitresses.

I am playing a club down the street. Down the street from my new place. For now it is just a trio, which has always worked for me. A few standards. My conception of you, the blues.

During the move I had thrown out lots of stuff. I looked at some of it first.

It was like watching a movie I had, had no part in, except as that of an audience.

For you I am sure it is still different, all distortions and hatreds of the tiny things which no longer matter.

What do I care?

The last picture I had looked at was a candid one of you walking down some street.

Now I know, I should have done much more, or less.

© Wayne Wolfson
Reproduced with permission

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'YEANNE'

Starve stars.

Starve.

Everyday use of different words and phrases, just to keep things interesting. Also much like movement it gave the illusion of accomplishment.

For example, doing any type of chemical on a night that ended in muscle contractions and an exchange of fluids I always referred to as “Going to Jarkata”.

I didn’t really know a lot about there. The name though. It seemed exotic, almost to the point of being alien.

If you went and didn’t act the part of the typical tourist, more like that of a pilgrim then there was something to be had.

I’ll go to Jarkata.

Lines begin to waver. The pilgrim becomes smoke, becomes part of an alien landscape, the price paid for knowledge.

From behind closed eyes I see it all. All the images have a rhythm I have yet to learn.

How had I gotten here?

It was the sweet smoke which burns the throat and cracks the lip.

The ticket.

I’ll go.

Monkeys run up and down the beach crushing abandoned sunglasses and laughing knowingly.

Now I’m in a marketplace.

I’ll go.

Female statues float down the narrow alleyways made by rows of kiosks. Someone has graffittied a prayer over a faded Coca-Cola sign.

I’ll go.

Now I’m smoke.

She is kissing me.

Pyramids of fruit. Oranges being the biggest, crowned by a nest of wasps.

I’ll go.

I see her.

My autumn friend. Autumn is right before winter and snow is always death.

So, what now? This is important. It should all be written down in case I change back.

There is a noise.

I wake up. It’s morning. As fast as the hour allows I grab my pen. I don’t remember where I got it, but I use a wooden crate for my night table. Sometimes for lack of paper I write right on it. Poems and coffee cup rings, my literary leopard.

Too late. All is forgotten. All I have left is the odd monkey scream and a vague feeling, again that place I’m not to be.

There’s the noise.

I go to the window. It’s the kid. He is bending down looking for another pebble to throw. Next to him is a battered case, sleeping horn.

I don’t know what he thought I could teach him. Nothing, sometimes he just wanted to hang out and talk about women.

I leaned out, he looked up.

“You can come up, but bring a couple of sandwiches and some coffee.”

He grabbed up his case and quickly turned on his heels. I had to whistle twice to get him to turn around again.

“And a pack of Fatimas.”

He knew better than to start before I had time to wake up. He watched my sandwich slowly disappear and I knew he was calculating how much longer it would be.

I tried to be clean, but that didn’t stop my room from being stuffy. We decided to go grab some drinks.

I had to find my keys.

Eyes slow crawled the room in a lopsided waltz tempo.

On the dresser a wavering line of empty bottles. Dark glass marimba that makes visitors frown.

Still nothing. While thinking of where I had last put them I absent mindly itched my chin with the front gate key. And we were off.

The bar was just right. Enough people to give me something to watch, not enough to take my seat.

After a while the kid had to go. That was all right, he still hadn’t learned to pace himself and could sometimes get overly excited.

Across the floor I saw Nikola. After every fuck turned into the treaty of Versailles. Stay, stay five minutes more. This would be repeated when the five minutes were up. What was she expecting to happen in five minutes?

I wasn’t having any of that today.

I pretend not to see her. First, from across the room, then as she circles, by the bar. Evasive eyes upturned. Again the icon stare. She was getting ready to say something.

I turn to the stranger next to me.

“They call it jazz, but I call it American classical.”

He nods approvingly, pushes his glass forward and leaves an empty space.

© Wayne Wolfson
Reproduced with permission

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'SCORCHED BY THE SUN'

Can the morning be like a kiss? As always it’s a matter of appetite and ambition.

The morning is like a kiss. unpleasant in its growing heat. Conquering, scorching.

The rag man said never leave an open bottle unattended and don’t trust tin.

All I could think of for tin were the toy soldiers I had gotten one Christmas, a lifetime ago. I gave them to the first girl I kissed. She gave me her earrings, they were clip on. We were young, had been young.

Who cares. Everything is often remembered wrong. Chelsea, her purple dress. I think I had tried. Memories waver like a dream in the heat. Sometimes I’m the villain, sometimes I’m not even in the picture. As I said, it’s all remembered wrong.

The girl behind the counter looks bored. The boredom is the only thing that could potentially betray her youth. Well fed and untouched. I would like to fuck her, see her under me, still looking bored?

“A pack of Fatimas and...”

Wine or something stronger? I liked the hard stuff but wine was cheaper. I just got the horn out of hawk and had to watch my spending until the next case.

I could kill time cheaply by practicing. Embrocheure. I had new neighbors below and should make sure first that they weren’t the complaining types. First things first.

The smokes I pocketed, the rest went into a brown bag which I would later tattoo with doodles.

“I’ll be back” I mumbled.

Home again. Hidden among the factories. The big old houses whose corpses have been cut up to birth a series of uneven apartments. Home.

I sit by the window and light up. Even with no money, what a luxury to just sit and do nothing.

I blow smoke against the window pane. Shadow puppets too weak to stand on their own.

At this hour the streets are always empty. Every day is dying, little murders sealed with a kiss.

© Wayne Wolfson
Reproduced with permission

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'BLANK BANQUET'

Everyone is alone. Besides distraction, that too forms a song.

Ah, I've heard it all before. Let the piano sleep under its pile of coats in the foyer of Coco's. It was a song that had originally brought us together. Now, it's a song that's stilled. I'm deconstructed. A years work, turned into a small pile of pages. I feel like a phony. Of course I'm not. No matter the number of pages, it's a river of blood, an ocean of tears. A drowning, my dear.

I had only set out to find and create one true word. The last three made everybody cry. It's true, but there is still the sickness that comes from deconstruction. No one would understand and to explain would only further the process.

The last time I saw Coco, where there should have been pain was blank. The war was going badly. I had gotten involved. Again, it was self interest. although this time indirectly. Coco had a crush on my wife. She waited for the "Go ahead" signal from me.

I am all superstition. I only referred to Helen as "Her" or sometimes "She". So, no matter where they lead all signs were vague.

For me, I liked the complications, the drama accompanied by the animal roar of the crowd. I didn't mind either way.

The dynamics were ever changing. Wednesdays I made my noodles. I'd put everything on the table before calling them to dinner. That way no one was offended by not being served first. It's usually after everything is over that the power struggles seem silly. There were outside forces at work though. As I said the war was going bad.

The last time I saw Coco. We sat on the couch. she looked terrible, I needed a shave. I tried to make her feel better with what was left of the whiskey and chocolate.

As I got the last two clean glasses I hummed a song from our grandparents time. I noticed cracks in the wall. Thin gray lines on a white wall. Maps of a river that emptied out onto the floor.

I noticed I was alone. The bathroom door was open.

Hands cupped over the sink, she stood there quietly crying. I watched her for a moment.

"I borrowed your nail clippers."

She stifled a sob. A tear which had been resting on her cheek vibrated, shaking its tiny rainbow until it was again free to roam.

Do I hold her? What of comfort? The timing was bad. My writing had taken on a new economy and I just didn't have the words to spare.

We had one more drink. At the door we stared into each other’s eyes. I heard her whistling as the elevator brought her down.

Once I saw her picture in the paper, part of a crowd at some protest. We had all gone after our own deals. Now and then I make up stories of her final fate. They change depending on my mood.

Ask me again tomorrow, I'll tell you a sad one.

© Wayne Wolfson
Reproduced with permission

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'SHANGRAH LA'

For H.P Tinker

It was a nickname from the small notepad I always kept in my pocket.

“Detective...”

I needed my head for business, the stories went here. Besides, the cloth of the pocket stretching over it was a comfort.

The stories gave me license to do what ever I wanted. Truth be told, the crimes came before the motive almost always.

For all of us, whether we realize it or not, all is appetite. If it can be turned into art, then all the better, then all is allowed.

I was pointed to the table closest to the bar. It was that way on purpose, so when things got too sad there wouldn’t be much walking involved.

I was the last to arrive. It had to be that way. Her friends were common with a dullness that was fatiguing. Not common like you, but common in a way that can occur only when the pretentious aim for arty.

I had seen it all, so the Bulgarian resistance fighter turned ballerina and the one armed lion tamer did nothing for me.

My finger tips brushed the bulge of the pad and then tapped my watch three times for luck and to magically make time fly.

All the parties, they blur together into a wait. Time slowed down, way down, an hour being added for every body that entered the room.

I cleared my throat.

“Hey detective...”

Every time, I swore to myself. This was it, the last martini.

All the parties, the bad poetry she would insist on reading me from the flower speckled notebooks before I could touch her.

Sabbath was crazy and angry at the world, but this equation added up to a bedroom very few could enter, even fewer could leave intact.

What was it someone had once said? Paris is worth a mass.

All is appetite.

Now that I was here someone snapped their fingers and a lit cake was wheeled out. I noticed they had spelled her name wrong.

“Happy Birthday.”

I waited until people started talking into their cups to really look around.

At the bar a horn player, my favorite. As a child he had asthma. His parents bought him a saxophone so he could learn breath control. Now there was a bit of that dying in every note he played. My favorite.

“I’ll be right back, I see someone.”

I bought him two drinks before he’d look at me.

“Look at those long lashes you got, like a ladies. Let me have some to put in my pocket, mine are all gone.”

He was already gone by the time I thought to ask him to play.

I headed out to the pool. The chairs all had nothing to do, I sat down debating whether to remove my shoes.

After the despair of the lounge’s coolness the heat felt delicious. A breeze so soft that I didn’t believe it was there slowly knocked the dry husks of the palms against itself.

Castanets played more for habit than seduction. The pool’s surface was a mirror whose spell could easily be broken by any stray leaf’s descent.

The whole thing, a poem I had no desire to share.

When I felt I could sleep I got up and went back in.

She used that sharp tongue to shear a frosting flower from the cake’s surface. The whole thing disappeared in a soft bite to the applause of the crowd.

More sickening than the sugary sweetness would be her after party commentary. But no one would hear that, no one but me.

I was once again at her side. She squeezed my arm in a signal I didn’t understand. More of her secret alphabet.

I felt out of sorts and realized that the pad had fallen out of my pocket. Probably when I was reclining on the chair.

Again, “I’ll be right back”

A fat man in suspenders stood by the pool. He was holding the pad up to the light and licking his finger with every turn of the page.

“Fame is a lot like pussy. How it tastes largely depends on how you come by it.”

I head back inside for that last martini, the castanets finishing their song alone.

© Wayne Wolfson
Reproduced with permission

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WAYNE’S TOP 5 CD’S

Click to listen to sound clips or purchase on Amazon

1. Mahler - Symphony #1 (Michael Tilson Thomas/San Francisco Symphony) - HERE

2. John Coltrane - The Heavyweight Champion boxed set - HERE

3. Mozart - Cosi Fan Tutti (Rene Jacobs/Concerto Koln) - HERE

4. Thelonious Monk - Thelonious In Action - HERE

5. Paris Combo (anything with Bell Du Berry singing) - HERE

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