Lance Jaffe
The Hair of the Dog
While spinning wildly around
for the last fast time on the
wino-merry-go-round,
no songbirds were singing.
The blue flamingo flies
belly-up side by side
to the skies, sailing through
the plush hoops of a smokey
pink moon.
Neon lights split the night.
He moves from place to place
whispering to the world of space
that everything will be alright
as he enters a lush forest
with a light as dark as the deep night
at the end of it that almost swallows
him up.
His frosty breath mingles and hangs
in the air with the snow in his hair.
He’s down to his last bent cigarette.
The trees are trembling.
He reflects against the currents of
a frozen waterfall.
“I must have done something good
during my wicked childhood,”
he mused, perplexed like
the disciple of nobody’s child
holding onto a lonesome flower.
The simple truth about life is
that you will forget most of it.
“So much time to think about
oneself . . . ” he rambled on.
He made a lot of mistakes
in his mind.
He saw a phantom mist quivering,
creeping upon the ground.
A divine spirit.
The full moon was in his
eyes and he felt like getting
high, strung out on heroin,
tumbling around
on the outskirts of a
topsy-turvy town.
He’s got to go down to see
the River Man.
A black pool
opened up, and
he dove right in.
Scattered like broken sea-shells
on an eroding beach,
after the high tide,
were needles everywhere
as far as his eyes could see.
Empty syringes,
useless like rusted nails,
raw and worthless,
as dead as snails.
The rivers were freezing
over the branches,
moving roughly
in the windswept breezes.
“It’s just I have been losing
for so long. I haven’t forgotten.”
Time waits for no one
as the future recedes before us.
The biting cold
hit him in the face.
Now he rots with the rest
whose lives are lonely too,
and thinks a lot about the
things he forgot to do
and all the times he had
the chance to.
Nobody knows
what’s going to happen to anybody
was his philosophy.
“Can you hear me calling?”
He bellows into the swirling snow
as the wind blows his words around.
“I’m so down I don’t know
if I can come up at all.”
The gulls were circling endlessly,
floating in and out
of the edges of melting
marshmallow clouds,
high above the fog shrouded
mountain’s rugged wooded ridges
where there was a ravine filled
with lost lambs grazing on the
narcotics of ghost orchids,
asleep where the willows weep.
Time flies, innocence dies.
After the glow fades away
from a flaming red sunset,
the park is dark.
The carousel is lifeless.
It won’t even blink.
He pushes down hard on the
mechanical lever with all his might
hoping to bring the whirling machine
back to life.
To make it spin again.
To make it go around.
Just taking his fun
where it could be found.
But there would be no more
merry-go-rounding no matter
which way the rivers flow.
The only sound came from
his weathered leather boots
digging in and pushing against
the squeaking snow.
A shivering note reverberates
up the mountainous slopes.
Adrift and landlocked,
he looks upward for some kind
of a sign as he is swiftly
blanketed by a silent foot of fleece
from some freshly shorn sheep,
their sheer translucent bushels
as white as snow
covering him from head to toe
till there was nothing left to be
seen. The River Man was right.
The pain is gone.
There was no right or wrong.
Just a melancholy lullaby’s
surprise reprise
tucked inside
at the end of a
sad song.
Lance Jaffe is a native New Yorker. Born in the Bronx, the dreaminess of movies is the most influential on his writing style.