Boy Meets Girl

Boy meets girl.

Boy asks girl for a date.

Boy    seduces girl.

Boy and girl participate in

undone-undie,

under the cover,    

   unadulterated,

      unprotected    sex.

Boy oh boy.

Boy and girl have sex again.   

And again.

Repeat.     Repeat.    Repeat.

Boy and girl are mighty damn frisky,

   if you get my    meaning.

Boy somehow manages to impregnate girl.

Boy does the right thing.

Boy pauses and thinks to himself,

“Who the hell come up with that phrase

‘Does the right thing’?”

Boy figures, “Alright,   fine.

Such is my lot in life, and

there’s not a damn thing I can do about it,

um… ‘cept ponder whether

   the person who coined

“Such is my lot in life” is the

same pecker-head who came up with

the guilt inducing sentence of

   “Do the right thing.”

Okay, now hold on!

This whole morality play of words

is obviously from a

male’s pointy head of view.

That’s not romance.

Let’s let a woman tell the story.

Um… Girl meets boy at bowling alley.

Girl finds boy cute in a

whimpering puppy what needs

a bit of cuddle    sort of way.

Hey!    I ain’t tellin’ the story.    

She is.     She found him cute.     

Go figure.

They spoon.

They swoon.

They croon.

They serenade beneath the moon.

They    swap    some     spit.

He asks if he might be able

to see her the following night.

Giddy with anticipation,

she says “Oh, yes.”

And there that following night

he picks her up and right off the bat

asks if it’s okay to go back to his place.

Rewind.        Re-roll.

Giddy with anticipation,    “Oh, yes.”

Now wait a second.

In chapter three, page sixty-two,

sub-paragraph four of

the woman’s field manual on

sexual relations with a male homo sapiens,

doesn’t it openly state that you are

never suppose to go to the fella’s pad

   on the very first date?

I guess her copy had a few pages ripped out.

Girl meets boy.

Girl ends up on boys couch.

Someone’s tongue ends up

in someone else’s mouth.

Don’t know whose.

Hey. She’s telling this story.

Not me.

He interrupts their   moment of passion

and excuses himself to the kitchen.

From where she’s sitting on the couch

she can see him digging around

   in the refrigerator.

Shortly, he closes the door

and vanishes down a hallway

to pass into view through an adjacent door

before disappearing into his bathroom.

And he’s in there a long time.

A    very long time.

She studies the ceiling;

the wallpaper;    the curtains;

the watermarks on the coffee table.

Presently the door opens

and he strolls across the carpet

to plop down beside her and

ease into her embrace

as if he’d never left.

And there again,

just as their passion reaches its crescendo,

he stands, pardons himself

and heads for the kitchen.

There again, his head in the fridge.

There again, the walk down the hall.

There again the open, close and click

   of the bathroom’s latch.

To her utter amazement,

she once more finds herself

alone on the couch

rearranging her disheveled clothes.

And this time,

he is locked away in the toilet

for a good twenty minutes or more.

She’s at the point of slumping down

into the cushions for a nap

when she hears the door unlatch again.

Stepping from the toilet,

his eyes meet hers and she can instantly tell

there’s something very different.

Indeed, that which is there,

spreads from pupils,

outward to eye sockets and further,

   to overwhelm his entire face.

In quick transition, a look of shock;

a look of fright;   a look of      anger.

And there from those lips

which had just been pressed against hers

come the following words: “Who are you?!

How the hell did you get into my house?!”

To this she starts to giggle and mutter a quizzical,

“er… What?” to his somewhat inappropriate joke,

when he overrides her with “Who the hell are you?!

How the fuck did you get in here?!”

And here she comes to realize

that there’s nothing funny

about his current ill-romantic demeanor.

Again she tries to utter a response of “What?”

but here is voice gets shrill and ever more frantic.

“I’m calling the police!

You better get the hell outta here, ‘cause…”

And here she suddenly hears

her own voice overriding his.

“What’s going on here?

Why are you acting like this?

I’m your date, god damn it!

Don’t you remember you and I

just now sitting on this couch?!”

It’s at this point she recalls his face

   altering yet again.

Its mutating from extreme anger

   to that of utmost pain.

And he    begins to sob.

Not just cry, but   sob.

He wanders over to the couch,

sits down, buries his head in hands

   and truly breaks down.

And yo! If there’s anything

that pushes a woman’s buttons

it’s when the man she finds worthy of sex

turns into the man she wants to kick in the groin,

but then quickly transitions

to the man she wants to

hold to her naked breast and nurse.

A maelstrom of manic emotion.

A macabre and malignant mix

of malnourished masculinity.

A magmatic magnum of mother’s milk,

primed for manly mammary mastication.

Madness.   Madness.   Madness.

I think it was right around

this point in the story

when those of us on the

outside of the asylum’s gates

decided to phone in an observation.

“So… um…

You got the fuck outta there, right?”

And here a serene smile forms upon her face.

“No.    Actually,

we’ve got another date this coming Friday.”

Ah…

The mysteries of amour.

Boy meets girl.

Girl meets boy.

Someone’s forehead meets

   a meat-cleaver.

Not saying who.    ‘Cause

    you know…

Romance is always best when unpredictable.

Ah heck!

Who’s foolin’ who?

Doesn’t the boy

always

get the girl

in the end?

©2010 Jack Hubbell

  Combustion

That cars explode

whilst suspended mid-air

is an absolute given fact.

Drive one through a barrier

and over a cliff   and

you just know it is going to be

enveloped in flames

before it hits the ground there below.

How do I know this?

Well hell… I’ve

seen it in the movies.

All I know is that if I launch my car

off a 500 foot drop, I’m

gonna open that door

and step out into the sky

‘cause I   

sure don’t want to get burned.  No.

Best wait ‘til everything reaches the ground

before I climb back in for

a nice   clean    painless mortality.

You know, I find myself trying to think

of all the cars I’ve ever been in that

spontaneously burst into a ball of flames,

   and I can’t even think of one.

Don’t remember a non-spontaneous combustion either.

It may come down to my always having managed

   to buy a good quality blast-free car.

Either that or I’ve lucked out and

the industrial mechanic for

every purchase I’ve made

forgot to install the airborne detonator.

Then again,

(and this is important)

I don’t know that I’ve ever managed to get

all four wheels off the ground at once.

I suppose it’s extra motivation

to slow down around speed bumps.

Might explain why my wife always screams

when I approach one at high speed.

I may be using a strained logic here

but I figure that all those exploding cars

that you see in the movies

were obviously sitting in

close proximity to a speed bump.

Those CGI guys just use some special affect to

mask out that bump at a later date.

I’m thinking that in an effort to save money on

pyrotechnics in all those Schwarzenegger films,

they probably shot them in

ever so anal residential areas.

ka-‘Burbs.   ka-Bumps.   ka-Bounce.   ka-Boom.

I was once in my car

traveling down the A1-M motorway in England

towards the sprawling city of Milton Keynes.

My destination was a cinema multiplex

where they were showing a

new action flick with Arnold in it.

It was just at dusk and

I was heading into a sunset.

What was curious was that I was driving South.

So    adding up sunsets—

the one in front of me and

the one off my shoulder to the right—

I came to the eerie equation of one sunset too many.

A mile further on and I noticed that

my Southern-most sunset was producing

a vast plume of inky black smoke.

This was either a new solar phenomenon

or confirmation that my rumored lack

of deductive reasoning was indeed sadly true.

At this point on the motorway,

the Southbound lanes were three across

and there just ahead of me,

a multitude of glowing brake-lights

competed with the glow of my polar solar fate.

A half-mile further on and

the chaos of competing red

split into two separate columns

as all the cars diverged

into the far left or right lanes.

There in the center lane

and facing us,    stood a man.

A man silhouetted by a blazing sun

which threatened to engulf us all.

This man…

This man had driven his car

   into the Sun.

Well no.

That’s not necessarily true.

His car was the sun.

No. Again, I’m misleading you.

This man’s car had burst into flames

there in the absolute center of the motorway,

and he, having escaped the inferno,

had wandered a hundred yards

up the middle of the

three lane expanse of road

to face the oncoming traffic

as it veered left and right in a

frantic effort to avoid him.

And there as I drove by

in what appeared to be

a certain cinematic slow motion,

I noticed the look in his eyes.

He was not looking at us. No.

He was in the midst of  trauma;

of horror; of visual overload;

of that proverbial thousand yard stare.

Zero to sixty.    Sixty to zero.

Step out before you hit the ground…

   and survive.

The cerebral shred

of a fuel injected head.

And cars continue to swerve.

And tires continue to screech.

And this is all the action you could ever hope for.

But we have not a second to spare.

No time to pause in mutual PTSD consolation.

Why?

‘Cause we’ve got a date with Swarzenegger.

Oh, the brutal excitement!

The anticipation of all that pending violence!      

The destruction. The decimation.

The deto…nation.

We get to see Arnold kick some doors down.

Snap some bones.    Fracture some teeth.

We get to see him pump high-caliber lead

into the chest of a wide-eyed man who

really really really needs to die.

Hell.     If we’re lucky,

we might even get to see some

   cars blow up.

©2010 Jack Hubbell

  Nantucket Number Nine

It had been a day of killing.

A day of     death.

A day of small lead masses

passing through flesh.

Projectiles careening off shattered bone

to penetrate piped organs

of non-musical note.

High velocity enforced deceleration

by way of visceral viscous   entropy.

And as he loads their lifeless bodies

into the bed of his waiting truck,

he vaguely notices how their

core temperatures match that which

radiates from the blued metal

of his spent shotgun.

It is only a moment

but as in entropy itself,

that too soon wanes.

And there in his gunmetal eyes

the reflection of a lead-shot sky

shifts from grey to black.

And soon he exists as solo entity,

   for here in the dark

there is nothing beyond himself.

Indeed, nothing exists which

cannot be seen at the end of a barrel.

His aim is to define

and there in the steel silhouette

   of his lead bead sight,

      they are game.

And what does the game define

if not him    in return?

Man holds dominion over the animal kingdom.

He sort of liked the sound of that.

Made him feel…  special.

Kind of like he was the chosen one.

King Dumb and his holy scepter

give unto that of wing, hoof and claw

   the gift   of light.

Successive bursts of ill lumination

via a spasm orgasm of twelve-gauge blasts.

Yes, well… here in the dark,

everything is black,

and what is your point of aim

if not the whole of blackness itself?

And here his eyes have grown dim

   for his vision is that of man,

and man has held court for far too long

   beside the luminous flame

there at the mouth of his cave.

From that flicker cast

across bison and elk, stampeding

there on his soot-stained ceiling,

to that which now emanates

from the mystic rectangle which

glows upon far distant wall.

Does man fear the dark?

Does he fear all those

undefined creatures

creeping forward from their

feral realm of sunless sanctuary?

Why… He is man, and

what is man if not   incandescent!

They with their puny brains…

What is man if not electric?

What is man if not cathode, anode

and that spark which arcs in between?

And he fills the need to flow; to stream.

To leave his mark upon the Earth.

Brass teeth part before his groin

and passing through, he

emerges from dark into dark in

    an arc of fluid release.

And there in that arc, he is a  sensation.

A sensation of    self. 

A brutal self-realization of what he

as man has unleashed upon this Earth.

And he drops to his knees in a

momentary genuflection to that

which he cannot    comprehend.

And he collapses to ground and

curls into a fetal position while

urine continues to spread from his loins.

There… There in the outer dark,

small irises open wide as

creatures   edge forth and  

bear witness to the fact that

man   does indeed    know pain.

Pain.

God made Man and Man made   barbed wire.

And Man said to himself,

“You know, that was pretty good,

but I think I can do   better.”

Man is subject to himself

   and all that he creates.

Enveloped    within darkness,

my father once mistakenly pissed

across    an electric fence.

Oh, I would like to think

it was a    somewhat appropriate

   religious    experience.    

©2010 Jack Hubbell

~~~Tapestry
That a honed edge of steel
might pass between the weave
of weft and warp is
no doubt a significant event.
That its extraction might leave a
residual smear of blood that
gathers upon fabric and
stains the surrounding fiber
is nothing if not equally traumatic.

And here I must ask, does it
really matter that poor Polonius
lies wide-eyed and dying in the dark
there on the far side of some
perverse perforation?
In the scheme of centuries,
does his over-dramatic death
truly resonate as lore worthy of
thespian regurgitation via
iambic pentameter?

“Oh, there is Uncle Claudius.
He is hiding behind the curtain.
Why is he hiding behind the curtain?
Shall I stab him?
What fun it would be
to stab him through the curtain.”

Who wrote that crap?
Wouldest thou shake-a-speared Polonius
and maketh him rise anon?
Poor poor sanguinary Polonius.
Thine spittle laden exhalation
growith most putrid and foul
with each dying breath.
Woe and alas but this meddlesome mind
doth ebb and give exit with a
gruesome grimace.
I mean really!
Who gives a rat’s bung-hole about palooka Polonius
or some hammy Hamlet’s bloodlet-o-rama?
Yorick this. Yorick that.
Your rectum alas o’ sin sensitive one.

There are those who would say that
something is rotten
in the state of Denmark.
Yes, well… it is Scandinavia.
Just look at the quality of food they eat there.
No real wonder at the fact that
all their carpets are soaked with vomit.
Oh, I hate to be critical, but in truth
the intrinsic décor of Danish dwellings
is in a very sad state of affairs.
Not a throw pillow in sight and I mean,
is it just me or does not
every other hanging tapestry
have some huge gaping gouge in it?

Please.
You think Martha Stewart runs around
hacking up the draperies?
No. Of coarse not.
Ya don’t clip yer toenails at the coffee table
and you don’t randomly stab
ornate wall hangings in search
of hidden adversaries.
Indeed, you would think that
every single Dane was in need of a
big ol’ Freudian timeout
with his nose jammed in the corner.

And there just now,
most rancid, most pungent, most
putrescent Polonius has died.
His visceral nature oozing forth to
spread across stone and
inch its way toward the ruin of
relic both radiant and regal.

Is Hamlet going to snap out of his
rapacious rapier rapture long enough
to move the freakin’ rug?
Just what is it with all this rabid disregard
of décor decorum?
Don’t they have the Antiques Roadshow in
rotten ol’ Denmark?
I mean, that shit’s gonna be worth a
wad o’ money some day.

Want to know why the Danish Kroner is
currently a tits-up croakin’?
Damaged goods. That’s why.
There’s not a single quality tapestry that some
doomed idiot didn’t choose to hide behind.
Caught screwing the neighbor’s wife
when her brutish husband
walks through the front door?
Well for the love of woven weft and warp,
don’t hide behind the damn wall hanging.
Whether you’re hiding there or not,
that is the first place
he’s gonna repeatedly skewer
with his stainless-steel stiletto.

I mean sheez!
If Hamlet only had the sensibility
of a certain Norman Bates,
you might still have a nation of
homicidal maniacs,
but the upside would be that
bloody shower curtains are
easily ripped down
and tossed into a dumpster.

Indeed, shower curtains,
as in Danish royalty,
are pretty much dime a dozen, but
a fine quality woven tapestry…?
Ah, now that…

Well what is that if
not to die for?

©2010 Jack Hubbell

~~~Beneath My Soul
That soldiers might die
alongside that of ants
really did not mean too much.
Death was death.
There was no privileged hierarchy.
Well, okay…
I suppose that since the ants
were actually alive to start with,
they should have counted
for a little something extra.
Oh, not that the soldiers were expendable.
No. I imagine I had spent a
good weeks allowance on them.
Yes, it’s true that each little action figure
had its own intrinsic value,
but since they were all made out of plastic
and came a couple hundred to a packet,
I really didn’t care when I
lost a handful now and then.
Indeed, like the beaches of Normandy
or the forests of Ardennes,
my back yard was literally sown with
the lawn-mown remnants of
little plastic army men.

I suppose you are wondering how
so many soldiers came to be lost
in these battles I waged.
Well to be honest,
more than fifty percent of those
which went missing were
due to the use of high explosives.
The remainder can likely be attributed
to my indifference.
I mean hell.
Soldiers were pretty darn cheap.
You just knew there was
a machine out there somewhere
perpetually reproducing them.
It’s almost as if the guy with
his finger on the plastic extrusion button
figured there was going to be some inherent loss,
so he just duct taped the switch
and left the war machine to
run at full tilt.
Fodder for the Fatherland.

The American soldier was almost always green.
Olive green.
This way you knew who the good guys were,
but in reality, they died just as easily as
any other hunk of colored plastic.
The bad guys were generally yellow to brown
or some shade in between.
I’d like to think that this choice of color
was some random selection of ink that
an early technician arbitrarily threw into the vat,
but another part of me understands that
yellow plastic equates to
something else yellow that
we were supposed to be hating at that time.
I can even remember getting
a couple of bags of plastic soldiers
where all the bad guys were red,
and I can only assume
that this was an attempt to
program and indoctrinate
us fine young patriots as to the
need to gun down and eradicate
the evil scourge of the red Chinese
and their heathen Soviet brethren.
Brain wash in full spin cycle?
Reverse Manchurian candidates?
Die! Die! Die! You commie bastards!

Yes, well…
Unfortunately, in my full capacity as
backyard supreme being,
there was a minor programming disconnect,
‘cause I mowed everyone down equally.
For what was I if not an
equal opportunity destroyer?

High explosives?
Well to a mere ant, a
fire-cracker is a pretty big bang.
Oh, and a thumb amputating M80?
It’s da ‘F’ Bomb thermo nuclear
mushroom o’ doom boom boom.
But now don’t blame me.
Blame it on the South Pacific.
Blame it on the Japanese.
Blame it on Iwo Jima.
Blame it on John Wayne.
Blame it on the fact that anthills
look a lot like sandy beaches.

And I imagine those ants
looking up to this mighty being
looming there in the sky above
and saying,
“Why are you doing this?
Why have you chosen we must die?”

Ah…
“Now I am become death,
the destroyer of worlds.”
Now I am become Vishnu.
Now Krishna.
Now Shiva.
Now J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Now one small boy
kneeling over an ant-mound
with a glowing punk in his hand.

I am not proud.
I have regrets.
But now listen: This was war.
And in war there’s this thing called
“collateral damage”.
Civilians die.
Ants die.
But I mean really…
How can you expect the minute mind
of a mere insect to comprehend the
intricate cognitive gyrations of a higher life form?
Perhaps you sympathizers out there
somehow attribute a group-mind of
synapse solidarity to these lowly ants.
Perhaps you envision them
looking up in mental-mass to see
nothing but the malicious intent
of a cruel heartless child.
And perhaps you imagine the ants themselves
holding cruel dominion over
all those tiny mindless microbes
existing beneath them.
Indeed, there’s a conceivable chance
that this entire spinning globe is
under the thumb of some vast
cruel and indifferent entity of whose actions
we will never be able to comprehend.

But consider this:
That boy has grown to the
man who stands before you now.
He has matured.
He has learned regret.
Why just the other day as he was
walking down the sidewalk,
he observed an ant crossing the void
into the path of this man’s next footfall.
And though it required a conscious effort
to alter a sole’s trajectory
by a mere few inches,
this he did.

Yes. No matter our original inclination,
it would appear we have some
innate capability for compassion.

One might even say there’s hope.

©2010 Jack Hubbell

~~~All’s Hollow Days
At the time it never occurred to her
that she might have been on holiday.
Oh, but this is not to say
that she wasn’t paying attention, for
with events such as these,
there are somewhat obvious indicators.
For one, calendar dates of such significance
always appear in red.
Red relative to an ulterior reality
forever rendered black and bleak.
Indeed, what was black if not life revealed
as a continuous loop of normality?
A perpetual scroll of numbered squares
which there exist both before and long after red.
But if perchance your mind had wandered
whilst black days blurred into a
certain grey nothingness,
there were always other ways of telling.

For instance, the awaited day might arrive
and the décor of your four-walled confine
would come to be adorned with
someone else’s ornamentation.
Doomed plants invade the home.
Suspect food of dubious origin
appears there upon your plate.
Ribbon wrapped boxes are gifted via relationships
which may or may not have warranted any
act of kindness whatsoever.
It was a phenomena which forever puzzled her,
but since the dividends were somewhat beneficial,
she never bothered to question them.

There were nights of visual violence
in which everything about her
exploded in a significant flash of light.
Again and again.
Shimmering chrysanthemums
which abruptly transformed
into massive black spiders that
hovered there in her waning sky
of ever dramatic dénouement.
She always preferred the dread haze
of a lingering spider to
any transient joy of spent illumination.

Then there were holidays in which
macabre costumes were donned.
Days where masked relationships
are further obscured via some
false façade which hangs before your
current visage du jour.

Such were these red-letter days.
Day after day after give and take
and take and take.
And soon holidays dissolve and meld
into hollow days.
All hollow days.
One after one into one.
Every day a mono-manic-indulgence.
Every day a celebration of selfishness.
Her friends. Her family.
Her mother and father.
They were her cake and she
would consume them all.

Hers became a life of
perpetual holiday a la cart.
Red: a gratuitous gala of she.
Red: a festival of self-infatuation.
Red: a commemoration of her
own rapt adoration.

That is, right up until the day
her parents told her to go.
Right up until the eventful moment
that all her days returned
to their original shade of black.
Right up until that day
she heard the door’s latch
snap home behind her back.

That black day her forever holiday
came to pass, and an
inconvenient existence which we
have come to know as “life”
met her there at the edge of the curb.

©2010 Jack Hubbell