All-Night Lingo Tango

Ode to Fear

Ode to Fear Dear friend, how many dark alleys have you kept me from, how many bubbling potions, witches’ brews with brown foam have you stopped me from chugging like an over-amped frat boy at a keg party on Saturday night, game lost that afternoon to unranked Clemson while his powerhouse number-one school choked again in double overtime ? Or think of the doors you have locked, the deadbolts turned when I was too drunk to walk, talk, but not sing.You churned inside me like Barry Manilow riding a wave atWaimea or Maria Callas as a slave girl yodeling for her prince or poor LanaTurner, her fingerprints all over the gun but her sweater snug, while the DA struggled to make her admit her boyfriend hadn’t done it alone. Remember the first time I had sex? I used three kinds of birth control, wished I’d had four.Thanks for making it so much fun for me, and the boy, too—where did you pick him up?What a spree that was, though I did rededicate my life to George Eliot. How many times must a girl forage her way through Middlemarch before she is free to make her own decisions? More than twenty?Why don’t we skate past that one?Ted Bundy was living on the next block, so your rules probably saved my hide, and I’m in hock to you for a hundred thousand “no’s” that just tripped off my tongue like broken teeth after a fight. I was tough because of you, though I looked like a powder puff, 65 all pink and sweet.Thanks for hiding me when the slavers were scouring my village, for making me quiver in the shadows while my girlfriends walked the plank in white lace, for making me tremble before every damned flight, for the Friday and Saturday nights I didn’t waste at the Pastime chatting up bores. John Keats was my date and OscarWilde and that paranoid hipster Ginsberg, who taught me to rant like Job.Thanks for the giant surge of adrenaline every night before sleep can chew a hole in my mind, and while I play peekaboo with death, you hold my hand.That’s sweet, a bit of soft-shoe before the ax falls, because we’re all living on the Rue Morgue, so come to mama, you big bad grizzly bear, you. 66 ...