Honey-Texas by David L O’Nan (short story/poetry)

photo by Glen Carrie (Unsplash)

Honey-Texas

Honey is
Dreaming the life of a millionaire
Born to a trailer park
She always felt lonely in her painted golden lawn chair.
Never to be a thief in her dreams.
Torn apart each night by the ghosts that lived inside her mind,
That cut away the demons living inside the skin of her meat.
Morons whistling by the windows each night,
While prowling through town
The personification of the creeps.

Will she ever feel like a princess?
Or even a woman again?
Honey, you’ll have to forget that you didn’t follow him down to Texas
He is just a memory to a gurgling beating heart.
As you cry into stale factory air pollution,
You are still stalking him,
With a poisonous tipped dart
The voodoo of the Spring Equinox.
And the clouds were pissing,
She awoke inside the tickling of the alarms
And then the whisper of a twister
Bound her to her sleep paralysis bed.
The clouds began laughing within her
It became that demonic orange-lit room.
Night sweats have deformed her bed into a fevered lake.
Bubbling up infestations of banshees.
Moments of lost lusting opportunities.
“Honey, you should have followed him down to Texas”
They say your energy fights your soul.
You are beginning to miss the medicine that he fed into your arms.

Your tall drink of water,
He’s bent over crippling with you and the junk clouding in your veins.
The tunnels of a morphine maze,
So, you decided to stay.
Stay to try and help your mother.
Texas couldn’t wait, for a renegade hobo.
Help your mother ignore your father for now.
Watch the bastard come home from the bars.
After factory work, he would bitch.
And throw his fists like a prairie boxer.
Cursing out your mother and threatening the whole Earth.
He’d attempt to fistfight his own shadow
Then collapse into the yellow curtain drapes.
And finally, spend another night crying from jail.
Watching him crumble into the arms of a toilet shadow.
So you put your family on pause.
When you met your own cowboy chewing jerky on the tracks.
Near the greasy pizza shack in the corner of Jefferson and Main.
He was surrounded by his drugstore starlets.
When you first looked into his eyes.
And you saw a burning heaven.
And you felt his naked touch.
He tipped his cowboy hat and offered you exotic sweat.
And you fell in love with all that came with the hissing snake.

“But honey, you didn’t follow him down to Texas”
On Repeat,
Robotic in your mind.
You believed you were his cure.
To saving all his ravaged purity.
You’re stuck in the harbors of crashing nerves.
Like the gunfire of a thunderclap.
On another night, paralyzed to your bed.
Enter the orange-lit room demons,
It felt like you were shooting –
A Colt Mustang into the eyes of a fading sunset.
Try to escape the holy spirit,
You thought you saw the Trinity in a funnel cloud.
So, why do you continue to follow him in circles,
Around the spinning rodeo in your head?
You don’t want to lose your Cult King Cowboy with –
The smile of a dust bowl grim reaper.
“Honey, you didn’t follow him down to Texas”
He packed his ropes in his muddy jeep.
With his cocaine concubines down in Denton,
Sucking the high off his lips.

In your mind he’s still a stolen kiss away.
Those burping heartbeats that you carve in the heartbreaker woods.
Little hearts into stumps
A breath and a fading sigh, until fainting from the power from his eyes.
A cigarette,
Quivering cool around your slender face.
Another night, another nightmare
Awakened by the sickle to your throat.
A shadow man begins fading into walls,
Leaving a caricature in the image of his face.
You lost your breath,
You begin to cough.
The cigarette smoke burns out from the blankets.
The windows begin to peel.
Paint chips to the heads of yesterday’s energetic cockroaches.
You shake out, convulse out all your pain.
Just grab a new blanket.
Wipe the sweaty make-up from your face.
The house glows like a green light on a busy street.
Then the tornado hit the Ohio Riverfront.
You barely faked a tear,
Then the river becomes a wall over your inflammation –
To the damns built in the corners of your eyes.
The river scars like lassos hitting skin.
The mosquitoes die off into the air.
They left nibbling tiny bites,
Over the swamp that is left on your thighs.
A whole body became one with the twister.
A whole inclination surrounded by the blisters.
Left by a violent whip in the shape of Texas.
The wind smashing in doublewides down like an anvil.
Honey, you didn’t follow him down to Texas.
Could you feel this gravely illness in your blood?
Don’t slice away your beauty,
That percolates in the cracks of the clouds