Dream #8 (The Monocle)

I was sitting down cross-legged on
the living room carpet stiff and
itchy and the colour of wet moss
there was pro wrestling on the TV,
a tag-team tournament of some sort
for a mid-card title no one but the
most hardened marks and message
board warriors truly cared about

I held a beige bass guitar in my lap
it had a hilarious number of strings, frets
increasingly fanned and lopsided like
fresh banana slices; every surface I touched
produced a synthy arpeggiated swell;
my uncle on the sofa told me to fuck off
and let him watch the studs of the month
piledrive each other in peace

I went to the fridge, and one of my dad's exes
was leaning on the counter, scowling at me
through a plastic monocle, as if half a pair of
safety goggles got stuck in her orbital bone
she looks like someone misremembering Bonnie Raitt
greyer than I remembered, but her drug store
eyeliner was still black and thick and digging into
her skin like fork marks on a fresh pie crust

she hissed that she quit listening to the radio
after the station changed formats, about
how the DJs were pussies now and that
somehow that was my fault, about how no
one listened to any real god damn music
anymore, about how all heartbreak was
approximation, about how every record she
ever owned was swollen with terrible advice