Pauly's Days in Cinema

He's stepping heavily, a humbled canting his course in random lines
down Mission St,
a grave heat on.
It's the photographs again, their captured time fingered
once too often and now spun to pique,
never settling in the same dudgeon twice.
And never mind what's taking hits in the abstruse deeps
of his belly.

Baja drifts peevishly in him now, its memory jabbing at his nerve
like a wayward crank inclined to correct strangers.
Pity him. He craves the vacuous shoulder, a female he can treat like a stooge and pitch his tales of woe to. Pity him,
and you'll have a hell of a load on your hands—
a hell of a load.

In the last week alone he's seen a rage collect hard in the pith of him,
lift a hundred pound desk over his scrawny, rummy-wan frame
and swing down, smashing the fucker to kindling right in the middle of the street,
the neighbors stopping their varied business to gape at what might come next.

Meanwhile, Hope's on the line from Seattle. She's worried, she says,
her voice itching with years of untenable kinship.
My brother, she says, fashions himself after some kind of Tarrantino
cowboy, she says.
Yeah, well, Pauly hates the phone. Ask anybody.

Countless blinks later, he says he wasn't quite sure. Something
just broke and washed over him as though the body had suddenly
addressed its own uncanny agenda.
So weighted, and lately a man who falters on his heels and disassembles altogether quite a bit, Pauly picks himself one hand, one knee,
one foot at a time, stripped of the controlled badass who waves away phantom help under the hazy line of street lamps
burning coal-like and suspended
through the boulevard.

That's quite a frame when he takes that critical left turn into the bar,
where the solace of the peopled din is soon lost
once the quick glimpse of Her
strikes.

(He's doodling misery by knife point and candlelight again; pissing in jars alone in the basement, no less)