The Electric Wheelchair Demon

There’s this old coot speeding through a car park on his electric wheelchair, 90 years old going 91 miles per hour with no destination in mind, I can dig that. The carrot fell off the stick long ago but you were never in it for that, you just want ceaseless action. A hipflask full of whisky, a vehicle to propel yourself, and a cyanide pill just in case the fuckers catch up with you. Drink deep in it, my skeletal elder, make it so that even the crows shun your corpse. You 91 mile per hour son-of-a-bitch.

You probably had a ‘her’, maybe you still have a ‘her’. Does she have eyes or a bottle cap? Are your wrinkled hands fitted for another’s or are your knuckles taut from wall-to-wall living? You’re probably the type that has both, one hand for a hand and the other for a face. I bet she was beautiful, regardless of whether she was animate or not. If she’s a living thing, she had to have been something out of this world because loving someone that’s out of this world, someone with which you share a telepathy, is like nitrous for a vintage car. Your body is fucked beyond repair but that ‘her’, whether she lives or not, is a rationale for your unacceptable behaviour.

I want in on that flight, but fear keeps me from the cockpit. Don’t ask me to pilot a Boeing for the joyful damned, just reserve me a seat. I’m not qualified for the job, that’s why I, we, need people like you. A 91 mile per hour son, baptised with holy water, wrapped in a blanket, and left to dry in front of Satan’s fireplace. If life is for living, then you’re living for the sake of life, whatever that’s supposed to entail.

You’re a creature, a snarling beast with venom dripping from false teeth. You’re the guitar, you’re the bottle, you’re the euphoria of codeine sunshine. Beaten down by time but still beating the clock. That crippled body doesn’t need a dose of morphine, it just needs movement and ferocity. You’ll drive that motorized wheelchair all the way up the mouth of the volcano and you’ll muster up a ball of phlegm just to spit into it.

By god it was magnificent seeing you there, you could have mowed down a baby in your haste and you probably would have reversed over the little fucker just for the sake of closure. You’re the 91 mile per hour bastard of society and there’s a fraction of you in all of us. I don’t have a name for you, I never will, but I’ll know your headstone by its wreaths of human flesh.