The Strange Town - JLG Clift

There’s a child chasing change into the strange of the midnight moonlight town where the clowns strip their smiles with their tears and tell their fears to the Sisters smuggling G-strings and G cups beneath their peeling habits shedding as red lights go on maggots writhing on their beds in their bread meds managing their meta-morphed minds to make time seem faster to make life less lasting as the men lament into their loins sympathy by the hour dead flowers in a homemade vase on the sill practically pettleless the boy staring through the stems still waiting for those bills to come down from the black of the sky like a swarm of dry leaves died mint green but he doesn’t think they ever will. They’re gone.



Between the thorns fornication begins torn linen sheets housing bodies flailing like fish out of water someone’s son someone’s daughter now ruins rutting in a rented room fumes from Camels rising into the dampened ceiling sexual healing blaring from the strip club across the street Mother Moon casting down a cruel crimson heat that makes the boy imagine his feet are sealed to the spot like he’s standing on a road wide soldering iron left on by mistake the sensation rising up his legs into his gut he’s sweaty he’s fused to the concrete the Sister and her patron glistening like chunks of cooling solder smoldering in the sweaty sheets.



And then they’re gone, and the next man comes in this one losing his lunch and his boxers to the bin skid marks dark against the faded white he cums and goes like the last his shallow shadow follows slowly in the dullness of the Sister’s light. More enter and exit just as fast until the last man leaves in the sunrise his priest collar tight against the skin propping the double of his chin up.



The boy watched it all through that musty screen of glass pinned to the wall. His mother called but he was hypnotized by the sights horror reaching up like a virtual virus clawing like a vulture greasy talons blunting in the hollows of his gut and his mind binding him to the spot; seeing pious preachers giving in to sin put a whole new spin on right and wrong for him and now he’s changed.



All of the holy rollers roll out with the sideshow clowns and boy follows the no-muss-no-fuss exodus from the strange of the town but what he’s seen doesn’t leave him. His shadow has sticky stains running through it thick chords like oil slicks pulsing on the pavement in the waves of the darkened heat. In the sun the money in a swarm continues to run but starts to tire and starts to rain across the land in the strain of the wind it spreads.



The scene in the window with its curtains closed reminds passers-by of a TV thick quilts of steel wool blanket look like sputtering static dead air nothing left to scare the boy anymore until the watershed begins again when the sun goes down and once again the strange town tends to open like clockwork and goes on to drive the minds of men and the mouths of busy body mothers’ berserk.



A 50 hits the curb at the city limits and looks around and sees that the world is limited to it. There’s nothing but sky and grass and trees and leaves and life beyond buildings ahead and the thought makes the note crinkle in disgust and in a gust of wind it rides back to the world it always wins in where gas goes through chrome chimneys that glisten like tin so bright they eclipse the sunset. They’ll all be back to the set to get their kicks soon now that night’s looming. Or blooming, depending on where you stand.