Originally from Wyoming, Jason Joyce, M.B.A. is a writer, arranger, consultant and optimist who has made it his life mission to never grow boring. You can learn more about his companies, current projects and published work by visiting jasonrjoyce.com or @savageconfetti on Instagram.
War Paint
Remember digging a grave in frozen solid ground at three in the morning for your mother’s dead parrot? He was such a little sailor as he quoted lines from Frasier and Days Of Our Lives while he lie wheezing on his side, molting a careless bed of feathers. Down across a bed in what could be and Ikea show room. wrapping refuse like lovers’ clothes on Christmas, mapping out foreign countries on the floor, where pillows and sage sheets wear makeup like war paint.
We still cover up.
Covered up, comfortable clothes, stutter step to strapless and pin downs, dressed up for failed first dates, miserably, mercilessly. More simply- strangers, talking about eating disorders and parents who died when they were young. First impressions far from impressions college roommates tried to make after these dates on 3 a.m. Wal-Mart runs for vanilla bean ice cream and cookies.
Now we’re watching stock tickers for significant signs in
Initials, Fighting
off going home alone with dairy and ground up Oreos.
Homework notes on your flesh, and the word you see in the partial permanence is “validity”.
Partial permanence like hospital roommates, bedded beside your mother, now carefully wrapped in wash worn covers, IV line ribbons, oxygen hose bows, and a laminate bracelet gift tag. Hospital smells don’t follow us home, but we’re sure the spirit of an elderly patient named Bea has.
”Excuse me ma’am, we were just visiting.”
I startle you awake in the middle of the night talking to the open door.
She’s the sour piss nicotine
of dive bar shows, clinging to clothes, smooth speaker crackle, warm wash clean waves wound round a mattress filled with air where we reek
of possibility buried in bed fibers and other ghosts that aren’t quite there.