Crocodile Tears

     I didn’t like what they were teaching me, didn’t want to be taught that way, so I grabbed my pole and boat and oar and made it with the crocodiles. Swimming with them, I try to mock them mocking me with their wide, smiling snouts and conniving sneers. They look at me look at them and know I can’t see past the ancient pools of black, leering slits of laughter beneath a drying sun. They eye me apathetically, probably not at all. I struggle to be patient like them, but it’s weary business, croc of shit business.

            It’s been awhile. I take a break.  Climb into my boat. I abandoned those teachings, but I brought the rest. My boat looks just that way, like the rest. Long and wide like an almond, with carved sidings. I run my finger along the turrets, which croak. Sounds like music. Four wooden shafts stick straight up from four corners, forming the tavern which is my home. Red fabric, like an old bandana, spills over the sides in tendrils, slashed and faded by the crocs, by the wind, by the sun. This roof of faded paisley throws little shadows all over my arms. I look at the crocodiles to see if they like this. They do not care.

I must learn to be like them.

            My cooler is filled with beer. Without it, I would not be able to swim, would not be able to drift with the crocodiles. It will do me no good, but I ponder the mystery of that lavish leer anyways before reaching in for a cold one. I feel around; they feel the same, but I want to choose the right one. Harpoon. That’ll do. Pop the cap and toss it into the water. The plop is satisfying, is the only sound I’ve heard all day. I grin maliciously at them, floating in the water like logs, existing primordially between here and there, but always sober. They don’t know what it’s like, to drink a pint. Bastards.

            I am angry. Condemning them patronizing me, which they aren’t, but I dragged the qualities of those people like makeup, gooped onto their rough bodies, so I can get a rise without a reaction. But it is not the same.

            Back in the water. On my back, floating languidly beneath the drying sun. My skin is parched, like theirs. It takes a long time for it to get that way. I have to roll around in the boat, rubbing my naked skin against the sidings, just to make it rough. And that’s before the wind.

            On Sunday, the longest day I ever learned. At dawn I came to learn their ways so I too could stop looking. Now it is late, late in the day. Like a lolling log I float on my back, though I pale in comparison. They are beasts. I, an ordinary monster. No wonder.

            Drying sun has cracked and spills its yoke, lapping gently in the cool, green water.

            My brothers and I, we wrote on trees, late in the afternoon, afternoons like this. We wrote on trees and smelled the bark, dug our fingers under the crumbling, brown-stained pine.

            I float over to him, the big one with the rough brown edges, who reminded me of bark, of my brothers. I call him Bukowksi. He is dozing, floating listlessly. A log on water. I stare at him, hungrily craving his subsistence, wanting to float like him, like a log. Remembering my brothers, I pull a pen out of my trunks. It is felt tipped. I want him to feel good and tickled, like someone running their fingers up and down your back. Above his back left knob of a leg, a smooth area, marbled brown and green and grey, faded and dried. I can see the salt grains, which look like rocks in the low angle of the dribbling sun.

            I bring the pen to his back, gently, softly, and slowly, began to write –