Doll Face (audio)

Somewhere out there and yet frighteningly close by, the idea of forever rolls around in the back of your heart but can never seem to find anything to hold on to. People come and people go and you keep writing in the hopes it will mean something when all is said and done, but there are no guarantees. The human mind is a strange and tricky thing to manage. We want the things which will make us feel most alive even if they will no doubt ultimately destroy us either all at once or bit by invisible bit as time collapses and inverts in ways we cannot even possibly fathom. As I collect my thoughts in order only to spill them all over the first page of the first day of the last month of this year which in all honesty has felt like just another shit show of a sequel to the year before that, a train rumbles by off in the distance like heavy thunder which lasts for a bit too long. Snow is coming and its promise clutches cold claws into the crisp wide air. People are dying in the streets every single day, you learn this as you listen to the news on your ride into the office where the smiles are as stale as the coffee you make in any case. The dawn of a new day feels like a faded photo of a past lover you keep in your wallet for nostalgia’s sake. The little shops which managed to stay afloat despite rampant disease are affixing strings of holiday lights to their hopeful front windows. You can see your aging face reflected in the glass as you take in the scene, and try to process everything it means to cheat death, to make a decent living, to have any clue what living is supposed to mean. The window display in the store on the corner selling old stuff in the hopes somebody will take it home and make it new is a creepy collection of plastic dolls, doll heads and arms and parts, cracked worn out shoes, naked mannequins with sassy bobbed wigs, and strollers all rusted, busted, and scratched. But the scent of fresh biscuits and breads coming out of the oven at the bakery by the river smells like heaven and makes you glad you know what it feels like to hunger for something to fill your belly so your imagination doesn’t shrivel up into nothing less than a bitter pill to have to swallow indeed.