MY FRIEND THE COCKROACH
A RATBAG like the rest takes his relaxation on the pavement, watching men suck flies through straws with a hunger that is usually reserved for women. Beneath the guise of restful eyes, a cockroach scrambles for cash, polishing shoes with an old toe rag, and tipping his top-hat for coins, and all along there’s a fire in the grate to return to if you ever are in need of some sustenance for the soul. Its freeing to realise this, and I’m glad that you are here, and we’ll lay down for a moment, maybe in the sun or maybe in the shade, we’ll sip cups of tea with our pinky fingers dangling like grapes on a vine.
Oh, but the flies are too sickening. What a mess, what an absolute clusterfuck. I can barely stand the smell.
Go easy on yourself, the Cockroach reminds me, as he spits on my boot bulge, and remember not to hasten your end before it is due. When my shoes are all clean, he puts his thorny thorax hands around both of my ankles, and he says, ‘Ratbag, don’t forget that you’re just like all the rest.’ And he taps my heels together and he tips his hat on over and we bid ourselves farewell.
Later, Ratbag is drunk on the floor of the alleyway. He vomits all over Roach’s shined-up shoes.
What’s going to help you do the work, Ratbag?
Do you need to rob a bank, do you need to skin a cat, do you need to tell your great aunt that you love her again, as you wipe jelly off her wobbly lip in an old folk’s home in 2007 after her fifth stroke, and the nurses say she’s been asking about you and wondering where her nieces are, and would they maybe like to come to the Easter Show again this year, and Ratbag do you need to tell her again, as you feel revulsion rising inside at the sight of jello dripping down her chin, that her nieces are thirty and twenty-five now, both with nieces of their own, who don’t go to shows like that and never did because it makes their mothers feel sad to see fat people spend money. Ratbag, do you need to hold your dog again as she expires in your arms, or overhear your best friend from high school say what she said about you again, in the background of that video that got posted publicly on somebody else’s Facebook profile, and do you need to go back to that Monday when you got a cross in Kindergarten, from a substitute teacher who you thought liked you best; Ratbag do you need to lie in that bed again, do you need to feel the empty peel of empty sex with an empty man whose feet you can’t stand to think about? Do you need to go back to England, to witness the glint of foil in the street as the sun rises over a city that you never really got the chance to meet?
Oh, so you think you’ll find God in the place you last left him. I’d wager God’s got better things to do than to wait for you to chance back upon him as you retrace your steps.
Ratbag, here is what you need-- you need to lay down for a very long time, with some toast, and some tea, and some chocolate, and you need to realise that truthfully nobody's looking, and nobody cares, and you can obsess for all that remains of forever about everything you didn’t do, but the truth’s never changing; you’re a ratbag like the rest.
But what do I know? Says the Cockroach, as he pulls out his rag and puts my feet in his lap.
I’m just a roach who likes to shine shoes.