DuPont Circle Station

Washington D.C. 

BROKEN EMPIRE HEART

He glanced at the capitol rotunda then walked all the way to Adams Morgan where there was less chance of encountering a trash can bomb or a politician.  He looked for a suitable tavern along the way where Patsy Cline was on the jukebox but was unsuccessful.  Welcome to Washington D.C. he thought, Okie bumpkin!   

He wandered into a bar called The Russia House because he liked the neon cocktail sign in the window.  The bartender said people don’t wear cowboy boots in The Russia House.  So to ease the bartender’s qualified mind he ordered a plate of borscht, red caviar and no fewer than three top shelf vodka martinis, thinking about the highway he’d been traveling.  Broken in places, most of the good things gone.  Route 66 perhaps, passing through Sapulpa towards the western prairie.  Scratching his words in gray pavement with a bloody fingernail, one letter at a time.  1400 miles to Santa Monica and the rest of his life.    

He thought about how flawed he’d become in the world he was part of most of the time.  The world of making things happen.  The world of impressions.  His life a chain of collusions, leaving his soul a black stone.  But his flaws seemed different when he left the world of making things happen to a place where his soul was boundless like the wind under the wings of birds.            

Oblivion comes easy in Washington D.C. even in the week before Christmas.  A prepster with a Trump hat made a twenty-foot bypass around a wailing woman with no legs.  Gravid was her suffering.  Thick as the scent of grease and oil in the subway, as snow falling on a city with hardened underground arteries flowing to the center of a broken empire heart. 

12/22/17  

Kuwait City  

 

The Russia House

Washington D.C. 

“I seem to want to be hurt a little . . . Night of small revelations, night of odd comfort.  Starting to love this distance.  Starting to feel how present you are in it.”

            -from the poem “Summer Nocturne” by Stephen Dunn

Subway

Washington D.C. 

“The only people whom I hate are the hypocrites – pickled hyenas in heavy syrup.  I would like to lie under the knives of all the surgeons in the world, be hunchbacked, blind, suffer all kinds of diseases, wounds and scars, be a victim of war, or a sweeper of cigarette butts, just so a filthy microbe of superiority doesn’t creep inside . . . and I would like happiness, but not at the expense of the unhappy, and I would like freedom, but not at the expense of the unfree.”

            -from the poem “I Would Like” by Yevgeny Yevtushenko