Notes From an Artist as a Young Man

Atticus the Clayman Meets Someone

2011-02-23T20:30:00.004-06:00

Every morning the world looked like an oyster opening and certain animals would take a pause to enjoy that dependable light show. The coolness from the night spilled over into the day a little, never long enough keep moisture on the ground.

Atticus always found himself in pieces when the earth rolled around and shined sunlight on him. In that new light, he began the process of putting himself back together. That started by willing one of his sand specks to roll and lock onto another, and another until he was a ball rolling.

Once Atticus could stand up and walk around, he’d inspect the smallest crevices and smallest insects first. Walking added to Atticus’s stature. He’d straddle the earth atop those wobbling legs, surveying more of the land as they grew.

He had different reactions to feelings that snatched his conscience around and made him more ponder-stricken than anything. He watched grasshoppers rub their wings together and call out to one another. Seeing that put a hurt in him and he had no one to communicate it to.

He walked until the sun drooped low, when stars started appearing. Suddenly his awareness turned toward the night.

Stumbling around watching the stars and the moon, the comet trails, meteors and satellites take over the sky, he’d finally find himself sprawled about so that he could take in every sight above.

Then he realized that he was all over the place. Looking at the ground on ground level in the next day’s sunlight he began the process of putting himself back together.

Adrianna’s specks of dust started rolling round one another as the moon cast itself over falling night. Her dust particles gathered into a rolling mass whether in the new moon or the full moon.

Depending on where she walked, she might pass a swirl of lingering mounds sharing the night sky. When she approached these remnants she saw masks. She hurried into the wind but never made it soon enough to get a proper look.

Every night the moon went away and slivers of sunlight littered the clouds in the sky. Adrianna stood near those mounds and waited for them to start rolling around. When her moon’s stolen light was finally overpowered by the sun, those mounds had drifted into specks. Those specks started moving and slowly left her, unaware of the mounds she had left behind for them to meet.

One morning, her specks attached to his and she joined him on the sunlit jaunt. By nightfall she carried his pieces back with her on the rolling path to rejoining with her own body.

Normally he’d have laid in repose and let nighttime wash over his field of vision. Now he moved and found lives in the night with stars for light. She carried him and he her, both trying to find the world.

Ashes of Youth: Chapter 7.1

2010-07-16T15:46:00.002-05:00

The second thing I remember from my first day of Kindergarten was playing on a jungle gym and running full blast, I clotheslined myself on a steel bar.

My first day of high-school, I don’t think I knew anyone ‘cept a few who went to Carr School.

I was walking from my first period class to my second and I was late. I saw some guy walking to his class and I said, “That’s a cool band on your shirt.” I just wanted to see how he’d react. I gradually made gauging prime reactions the quest of my next two years.

The guy was a rare person whose reaction matched their character at such an age. We ended up being in a cooking class together, becoming friends. I learned that his name was Carter. It’s an odd thing to meet someone with a sense of honor that isn’t stunted or nonexistent. There was no shade to anything that was ever said between us and you could actually listen to his words instead of tones.

I made it to the first period, late, and met a few more of my new classmates. There were a few people I already knew, we bunched together near the center of the room over the same reasons that drew early man to seek fire.

We gradually formed bonds over plays we wrote together and ideas dawning on us that fanned flames of this newfound freedom. Growing up right before each others eyes, except for that first pixie-dusted semester, in that time we gave impressions by which our growth could be gauged.

It’s not all the pretty horses, not at all. It’s not that the pasture was green either, but it wasn’t just the pretty horses. Not by a long shot.

Ashes of Youth: Chapter 6.3

2010-07-06T19:12:00.004-05:00

We weren't kids after we laid waste to each other. We never grew up either, we remained so unsettled and convinced ourselves otherwise. On the day we finished with each other I listened to "Three Little Birds" for hours feeling like something different had been broken.

Kids no more, no havens for forgiveness. After thinking about this I realized what they really meant by “If you love something let it go”

It’s not just a line for a picture show
Oh no, oh no.
If you really love something let it go.

I might have been the right one, the wrong one.
I might have been all or none,
Or one, or ten.
There are always a million, billion things that I could have been.

The next time I hear you sing Rocky Mountain Way
I’ll sing along under my breath, or out loud
From the valleys to the clouds.
My god I loved you and nothing's left to say.

Children do this to one another? Your children maybe? What are they but humans? And oh, do humans do the worst things to one another? Or can that be denied by the same self-serving convenience with which I singed my forest of emotions?

Ashes of Youth: Chapter 6.2

2010-05-26T02:28:00.010-05:00

Everyone imagines themselves just. Vigilantes armed with words that they cannot wield properly but with which can still maim. We are peyote snake-oil ministers in every outlet for thought; You ever listen to somebody talk? Then you are too.

There is a din in the streets clamoring to be heard from the bottom to the top. Bullhorn buglers are directing the blind and the bright-eyed over a cliff that keeps everything running. Tunnel with overhead lights that claim to be sunlight, but if sun ever touched our paleness then we may be evaporated and never heard from again. Or we may already be in raindrops bound sooner or later to hit the ground. And the sad reality is that the asphalt doesn’t soften up for anybody.

Love is the case in point.

My first girlfriend was beautiful and petite and was just as eager to have me as I was to have her. We talked to each other for a couple of days and then started dating, like kids do, we broke up three or so times before we really broke up.

I was in love with this girl. I can remember teaching her how to bake in my kitchen and kissing her for any reason and no reason at all. When I could see her I smiled, when she left I was ready to see her again. It was better than being addicted.

A creek that snaked through the property, sometimes we’d go swimming and once my dog snuck up and stole some of our clothes. I’d hold her in the middle of the creek as we kissed. Something more than anything I’ve ever known.

During this my parents would be at work and held up by migraines. Some variations included.

Now I know that my mother knew that I was in love, and I know that it made her happy. Something that my girlfriend and I talked about. I finally realize that love makes for a way of happiness. I can remember thinking about being loved back for as long as life.

Ashes of Youth: Chapter 6.1

2010-05-20T12:01:00.003-05:00

What a sick feeling in my bumping, beating chest and throughout my veins. Down my arms and legs. It gnaws at my gut and it wreaks havoc on my mind. I can tell that my speech has been affected and I think that I may be going insane. Especially as I gradually lose the meticulously constructed cool-calm that I wrap about my person like a warped shawl. When this happens my mind goes inside itself while every neuron is firing off in a free-for-all. In the morning I experience a déjà vu that plays itself out like clockwork, I don’t understand this but I feel that I am becoming trapped in time, this feeling lasts only for a scant second (in the grand scheme) before my thoughts collect and rein me back in. I’m getting increasingly worried about not coming back. I’m definitely not stoned when this happens, if I were, I don’t think it would be so intensely alive inside. To be fair, I do have caffeine running amok and I would not pass a drug test. But this goes far beyond a typical paranoia case. In writing this I assure myself that I am okay for at least eight hours, during that time I will try to fall asleep. If I’m lucky I won’t be in that moment the next morning, otherwise I’ll stay sane by questioning my sanity.

dream:

It’s still February, a strange dream. I was in my house and my room was bare cepting two beds. Odd consciousness of dream states that I have experienced some kind of mental breakdown. I am transported from lucidity into my body and lay in bed talking with a girl that I was vaguely attracted to. I trusted this girl very much in this dream.

We were lying in separate beds and she was listening to me ramble scared thoughts and worries. The look on her face was one that said, “I’m not judging you, I’m listening, but you get through this on your own.” The oddness darting her countenance spoke to the fact that in waking life, I really don’t want her to know me. Sometimes I must relearn this: For a good portion of personal relationships there is no truth stringing us together. Such liaisons never speak to one another as mutual humans with mutual and actual emotions. I remained silent on the matter.

In my dream I told her that I just wanted her to lie in the bed across from me, she asked if we were going to have sex and I said “No, I just want you to hold my hand while I drift off, I’ve never had anyone do that for me and that’s what I want more than anything.” Then she just did that, I went to sleep in my dream knowing that she had me safe for the night. I thought of nothing as she held me there.

As I dreamed falling asleep I realized what a wonderful “NOW” this was.

The reason I found this dream significant is because I have never liked this person and have seldom enjoyed her company. That must be the mutual truth and an actual emotion between us.

Ashes of Youth: Chapter 6.0

2010-05-15T16:22:00.004-05:00

Enter: relationship so amazing it alters how you see them. Struck with ideas that the rest of your life will be like that one. You forget how you were before because you grew trained to feel. No initiative.

Enter: relationship that seemed to change everything, but turned out to be just a well-designed replica.

I don’t care how it sounds or looks: I’ve had my heart broken in so many ways that if I were to be happy with someone I would be as surprised as a Titanic victim. Not supposed to sink, but down we go.

It’s sometime in February of 2007, early February. I told the girl I thought I loved just about everything I could think of to tell her a couple of days ago. I think my biggest mistake (and luckiest move) was not telling her that I love her.

It’s amazing how you can get so attached to people in relative time and then one time it may be the last time you ever see them again, a lot of the youth experiences this through school friends. I haven’t graduated yet, it’s coming, it’s looming and I can smell freedom in a form of slavery.

I’m afraid that it may be too soon to adequately describe this period in my life, I’m even more afraid that this period of my life is happening the way it is. I suppose the best thing to do is to offer up an example for those with sound mind to pick apart. This is a letter that I wrote for the girl, intending to revise or deliver, though, neither happened and she won’t have read it unless she happens to find this page. I hope she knew it without ever having to read it:

I can’t be everything you want. Since the day we met, I’ve spent more time trying to be the perfect lover than trying to meet the perfect one.

I meant it, but I meant it to someone else from an earlier time. That letter seems to capture an emotion that I’ve slept with many nights of my teenage life. What that emotion is or if it is a cocktail of them. I’m not sure. I’m just assuming it’s life, that’s what all the people say.

Ashes of Youth: Chapter 5.2

2010-05-13T11:27:00.003-05:00

It seems different this time, and it is. That's why one shouldn’t fall into buying comparisons between old wars and new wars.

The worst feeling, in our newly dawned age of instant connection, is that if the disaffected refuge across the world actually talked to myself, my friends; If we talked to them we would find that there isn’t much difference in our basic dreams. The difference lays down in the straw of our day to day actions.

I know I don’t have to wake up to Iraq circa 2007, but I know in my heart that the people who are taught to hate me really don’t. The people in America who are taught to hate them really don’t. I want to think that kind of hatred is impossible. The unseemly hatred that attempted to be imparted on me made me physically sick. There is seldom enough capacity in someone to carry on the kind of hatred that we seem to believe each other possess.

The reason for the hatred is that instead of talking to new people when I get on the internet, I talk to my friends that I saw that same day, or look at videos, stupid ones and serious ones, even ones about the humans I felt this distant concern for. And I can potentially maintain a perpetual inhuman disconnect to everything that is real.

Sometimes I like that.

Sadly, I like the pixilated people more than the real ones.

But that doesn't keep their blood off of my hands.

Ashes of Youth: Chapter 5.1

2010-05-11T14:24:00.002-05:00

The bonds that made the joyous summer of 2006 possible were formed so many years ago. That little fourth grade classroom felt lives ago. James, Liam and I sat in a row and Danny sat in front of us. The first and third girls I ever liked sat behind us.

Long ago enough that we were discovering the things that make us human. Also an obsession with pushing the limits of what we could get away with. But things were different back then. I and Liam made straight A’s, barely able to understand circumventing authority.

Our grade school days and middle school days are so hazy to me now, as though they were experienced by different people. And yet without them I don’t know how we would’ve evolved.

September eleventh happened at the start of our seventh grade year during music class. Our history teacher came to the class and told us to turn on the T.V. We watched like everyone else did. We also saw the second plane hit in real time, there is no way to explain that. It’s a wreathing scar for those who saw it and especially those who experienced it, and neither of the two are holding out for it to heal, that’s for the next generation to make better, I hate that it‘s to be pawned off on them, but their perspective will help them pick up the pieces.

Yet the worst thing about that time was the sense of hope and pointed assuredness that was squandered. Not even squandered, but killed. The rest of the decade would be so damn hard to stomach. Those who were there and alive shouldn’t forget the genuine feelings. We shouldn’t have to listen to false-croon country-music stars or watch any eye-drop-tears movie that will dilute the short flash of earnestness that followed. Maybe it was all meant to burn at both ends, anyway that’s what happened and at one point or another every American would wind up against each other and forming new allegiances as they changed their pants.

I don’t know why we stuck together like we did. We were outsiders, more outside than we even realized. But there was more, what it was I don’t know, it was a product of the times but could never be bought and sold, you either were or you weren’t. It was so amazingly personal that only four guys shared the first half and five the rest, then it was gone forever. It could never be the same and probably shouldn‘t be. One day there won’t be anything of us left except these stories. It’s a weird reality at seventeen when reality is already so skewed.

I suppose the life I was living at age ten was like most kids’ lives. I played army with my younger brother, I had toy cars and action figures that didn’t make any sense. I was a Star Wars kid and was elated when they made the new movies, I couldn‘t understand why so many older people hated those movies, especially those older people who said their lives were changed by the first ones. My older brother, who was just the right age for the first set, put this into perspective for me and he did it the way it should have been:

“Those were kids’ movies, they were meant to entertain kids, I was excited to see you two so happy with something that made me happy when I was that age. Especially Kevin, I was seven when the first one came out, like him. That shit wasn’t made for thirty-year-olds who paint themselves up and camp out in front of theaters.”

But why were they so upset?

First, it should be agreed upon that generations are a creation of corporate empire marketing, be that as it may, I’m speaking of the age groups strictly in relation to their age and not their profit margin. In that I hope to get across my honest intentions in writing this. So here we go.

My guess is that Generation X never grew up. They are eternally children and lucky for that. There was no great war, no horrible war, no nation-shaking catastrophe for them. There was the cavalier, smooth-talking president who seemed like your grandfather. Then it was the good-time party-guy president. Desert Storm operations were over 100 hours after commencing and were watched on satellite broadcast at dinner, replete with commercials. I keep the tape my father and brother made of coverage of the war. I listen to the singers and I don’t hear songs of life, but references to the culture that they absorbed in their formative years. The movies read as an elongated homage to their younger pop-cultured years. So much so, that pop culture now only exists to be referenced.

In the face of what may one day be perceived as authenticity, as unearned for myself as it is, I find myself envying my brother. He was able to suspend his childhood into his teenage years and his twenties, just like most who grew up in that time. The people I know basically stopped feeling like kids after September 11, 2001. Even though we still acted like spoiled brats.

To future generations: Don’t romanticize this notion. You'll disdain life if you compare yourself to some asshole's nostalgia.

Ashes of Youth: Chapter 5.0

2010-05-09T11:11:00.003-05:00

Ashes of Youth: Chapter 4.4

2010-05-08T15:57:00.001-05:00

Damn those days were fun and we didn’t even know that next summer would be better. Some things really can’t be helped and youth should always be one of those things.

People who supposedly define something usually don’t feel much of a connection with what they somehow define. This presents a sort-of quandary, for if one with no connection to a movement can make it then what does that say about those who actually practice the lifestyle?

Maybe that they are reaching, that on some low-key level they recognize that there is no answer and so they reach out to someone who embodies what they want to be. The practitioner would not deny his or her philosophy for practical reasons and so it must be attached onto something that can hopefully change it externally.

Do you think that Jack White feels any connection to my generation? I don’t think he even cares about his generation. When the White Stripes first came up, so many tried to proclaim the clarion call of a new generation with Jack White at the bugle. Of course that was an intoxicating prospect for myself, but as time went on I came to realize that most of my friends didn’t listen to them except a few singles.

Would you want that kind of stigma? I wouldn’t, and yet I practiced it, the false generalization of a false prophet that I procured from madness and nonreason.

This was how I made my friend James represent freedom. He was tied down to a job, a girlfriend and the place he lived. But for some reason I convinced myself that he was free. I don’t know what I was lacking to make me do this because I didn’t realize I did it until now. He didn’t change my idea of freedom and that was the thing so inverted about my thoughts on him

I still have every White Stripes album though.

Ashes of Youth Chapter: 4.3

2010-05-06T20:01:00.001-05:00

Stinking from the long day, we hit it. Sipping on the vodka and yelling out the windows with the tweeters turned up all the way. Very young in a slap-in-the-face way.

Around eleven I was dropped off at my van’s parking space. I got in and we were leaving Panama, calling it a night. James’ flashed a thumb’s up at me and I did the same so he would know I was alright. I’d been feeling a bit sick. We were driving along making good time, then we came upon a red light on 231. I slid into the left lane. I looked over at them and they were already looking at me. James revved his engine and I did mine as a joke. But then he nodded at me and I nodded at him.

We turned to face the stoplight.

Green. Go! A minivan and an old S-10 drag racing on the damn highway. We started off tied then he pulled ahead, I gassed it hard, I caught him and then passed him. He gave up and I left him doing about 100 miles an hour.

I decided to not push my luck after I made a green light and he caught it red. I slowed down and just cruised along at 70. I went about twenty miles like this before I noticed a pair of headlights coming up on me fast, I didn’t think it was them until they whipped around me flipping birds out the window. I could see Liam working on the vodka.

I gassed it, trying to cut them off before they crossed both lanes ahead of me and got into the turning lane for Highway 20. I rode up on them fast and we both took the turn at about twenty five over railroad tracks. No time to think about that, they were ahead of me. I shot up to 80 and then at the first clear spot I shot around them doing 90 over a small bridge, whipping back in front of them. My speedometer was hitting 95. Then my cell-phone rang. It was Liam saying that they had to go back. I let up and watched them slow down and turn around in my rearview mirror.

I stayed pretty close to the speed limit on the way home. I was high from the adrenaline.

Ashes of Youth: Chapter 4.2

2010-05-05T14:17:00.001-05:00

“Man how can you drink unsweet tea?” Liam asked.

“Do you at least put sugar in it?” James asked.

“Nope I drink it like a man.” we all laughed and she came back with the drinks making sure to point out that I had unsweet tea, this got the required “ughs” from Liam and James.

We laughed and sat there in silence for a minute, and then I picked up where we left off earlier.

“Well you were supposed to give us food, shit, what if you didn’t? We would have starved.”

James laughed.

“Do you guys remember the JR bag that Danny had?” Liam asked us, well yeah we remembered it. We all agreed that it was awesome and we reminisced a little while longer. The food came and we ate, then paid and left.

We stopped by James’ Grandparents’ house to get a license so we could get to the pier. We visited for a while and then we went to a little fishing shack near the beach to get some lures and line.

We started up a conversation with one of the guys that worked there about King Crab fishing. I guess he liked James because he cut him a deal on the line. Then we stopped to get some ice and we were off.

Once we got to the pier we set up to get some live bait and then we chummed the water despite the people swimming right next to the pier. An older guy was fishing at the end and we talked a little while with him.

Finally it was time to break out the special water, straight vodka in a water bottle. With our drunken shark fishing the day aged and more people started coming to the end of the pier. Liam and I were hitting on some of the girls while James kept fishing. He was so determined to catch a shark he barely took notice when a really attractive older (I use this loosely because we were sixteen at the time) woman started hitting on him.

We kept fishing and after catching nothing we just dumped the bait and walked back to the truck. The sun was setting and we said goodbye to the ladies. When we got back in the truck we decided that it was time to hit the strip with our drink and James' speakers.

Ashes of Youth: Chapter 4.1

2010-05-04T23:43:00.001-05:00

It was the summer of 2005. I picked Liam up at his house early in the day, we went to meet James at a gas station on the way to Panama City.

“Damn it James!” Liam began, “I knew he’d be late.”

“I know, I know, but at least we aren’t late. . . That fucker. . . We need to gas up anyway.” I said.

We wheeled around to the gas pumps and put thirty bucks in, we were at the worst priced station on 231. The next week they had to lower their prices for price-gouging and then a few weeks later after Katrina.

James showed up and we checked out his fishing gear. We were going shark fishing off the pier. First James had to gas up then we stopped at the shop where he worked, I left my van there and we went to eat.

We all piled into his rough, old S-10 and went to some local barbeque joint. We turned his radio up loud, all he had was tweeters so it was earsplitting, I think we listened to the Gorillaz.

As we sat down we started the old ball-busting routine.

“So James, I haven’t seen ya in so damn long whatcha been up to?” I started.

“Workin” he said like always.

“That’s it?” Luke asked.

“Hell yeah, I go to school and I work. Do either one of you have a job?”

“No.” We both laughed at the same time.

“You lazy bums, at least I’m contributing to society,” as he said this we both started cracking up, he always laced into us about that. “I’m a workin man, you two just mooch, I remember when I used to be the only one who would bring Combos to school and you two and Dan used to just hold your hands out like I was supposed to give you shit.”

The waitress interrupted him to get our orders.

“Sweet Tea.” Liam said, she turned to James.

“Sweet Tea”

“Unsweet Tea” I said.

We all ordered barbeque sandwiches, she laughed and said she’d be right back.

Ashes of Youth Chapter 3.1

2010-05-03T12:47:00.003-05:00

I’ve known my oldest friends since daycare and Kindergarten, though, we didn’t become a close-knit group until the fourth grade. Bonding over shining the sun's reflections into people's eyes, Jolly Ranchers, and getting into trouble. That was a magical year that we lived minute by minute to the end.

Over the next five years we went from an odd almost-innocent rule breaking to smoked cigarettes, eaten pills, and swallowed cough syrup. During breaks, lunch and recess we did our drugs, vandalized everything we could vandalize, and one day lit a fire. The authoritarians focused on our misdeeds, rightly so, but we also became bohemian poets before we had any idea what those words meant. It was almost a scene, we had a style, bestowed knowledge on younger kids and accepted every chance to feel oppressed. We were so out there compared to what the school had ever seen before that they felt forced to underpin it with new rules.

We were an island and then we were islands unto ourselves, two of us were born on islands, and that never left us. It may have been our folly to believe that the good times would last forever, but it also may have been the only thing that made the good times great. There was that sense of unbelievable understanding, the idea that if you stood on a lake at night, the stars would become yours, the black sky was no longer black but a shade of blue and rest was just around the corner, redemption was not needed because we were the redemption.

But it was our folly in hope, the mountain we made and crumbled but never moved until it was in enough pieces that we could stuff it into our pockets and take with us. We spread the mountain, its snow melted to give water to the thirsty and the rocks provided footing for the unpaved paths. I still carry the mountain, I will always carry it, and if that means I will never walk on water again, then so be it. The knowing cannot float, rocks of knowledge will suck us down into the lake until there is only black and no rest sates us. These were our ramparts, our remnants, the mountain turned out to be a volcano and we were its lava.

Ashes of Youth: Chapter 2.4

2010-05-01T10:16:00.001-05:00

And then my eyes opened, my room was shaded by my dark drapes and yet my eyes hurt, I closed them and they still hurt. It was that dull pain that you feel in the back of your eyes, I knew it would last for awhile, but I kept my eyes closed anyway.

After what seemed like thirty minutes but was really about five, I dragged myself out of bed and made my way to the bathroom. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I was surprised to find someone that didn’t look hung-over or empty like they try to describe in movies and books. But I did look rough, my lips were chapped and obviously so, my eyes still kind of bloodshot and my hair was a squirrel’s nest. I splashed water on my face and sat down in the living room.

Liam was in the process of waking up and I was thinking about a cup of coffee. I sat there in that semi-dark room and went over last night, something wasn’t right and then a snippet of conversation came back to me.

[“Where the hell is my pipe?” I asked. As I ran my hands along the floor of the car. I was a little worried that the chanteuse might have pocketed it without my seeing.
“Don’t worry about it hon” the girl said. I tired to eye her but she wasn’t acting suspiciously.
“I think Imighta left it at the school” Liam piped up in a sickly way.
“Shit” I said, “I guess we oughta go . . . get it in the mornin’” I was trailing off because I was worried about some slack-jawed teacher finding it and then I would never get it back.]

My thoughts were run over by the slow realization that it was drizzling outside. I hoped that my pipe wasn’t laying on any sand.

At about ten Liam and I were mostly awake. I had to take him home so we decided to skip breakfast and ride up to the school. When we stepped out into the day the rain caught us off guard. My father’s truck was not in the yard and then I realized that today was a Monday and he had gone to work. He was a contractor and a damn good one.

I walked up to the car and saw that I had left the lighter on the front seat in plain view from the window, also I had locked the doors in case there was any paraphernalia in the car. Though, leaving stuff on the seat sort of defeats the purpose.

We drove up to the school and the first place we went to, the swings where we sat drunkenly smoking cigars and half-swinging, was where my pipe had been left. It was on its side on the ground and the sand had kind of lapped up around it from the rain. We turned to go back to the car and I looked to where we had seen the Christmas lights. Liam must have done the same thing because he said “What the hell was Danny thinking when he said Christmas Lights?”.

“I have no idea” I responded, “what were we thinking when we followed him to them and then stood on the train tracks? If those were really train tracks that could’ve been dangerous.”

Ashes of Youth: Chapter 2.3

2010-04-30T10:34:00.001-05:00

We smoked some more and visited old places that still had special meaning to us at the school. At the far end of the playground Liam decided that he wanted to try some of Danny’s snuff. He pinched the nasty shit and put it in his mouth. A few minutes later he was feeling mighty sick. He was basically put out for the night so he rested and nursed his sick stomach in the van’s middle seat while Danny and I partied on.

We started driving again and it got us to “Wal Town”, south of Marianna, a stop-gap town between Tallahassee and Panama City. We were starved, the munchies had set in. We stopped at Arby’s and I stumbled out of the driver’s seat. The next thing I knew this black girl came up to me from the ether and asked me: “Can I get a ride?” in the cutest southern accent I have ever heard.

“I’m not gonna lie” I mumbled “I’m drunkashell but I can giveyouaride.”

“That would be great” she said.

We got back in the van, she was riding shotgun, trying to get to some street I had never heard of where her sister lived. She didn’t know how to get there, it turned out that she was a victim of Hurricane Katrina and hadn’t lived here for a year or two. Her story made me feel like driving until dawn. She said that she has high from some weed that she smoked earlier as I was trying to find our own sack. We rode in the wrong direction for about half a mile and then we stopped at an empty gas station, we laughed and talked about living here long enough to clear my brain. Soon after we decided to strike out and try to find her mystery road.

Luckily, our giggly loss of direction translated to Liam’s ears. Somehow he knew exactly where the street was and how to get there. He sat up in a painfully sick manner and directed me to Laramie Street or something like that. We dropped her off and I watched her walk off in the night to her sister’s house, that was the last time I ever saw her. I don’t even know her name.

We went back to Arby’s and Danny and I got some curly fries and a sandwich. After we ate that we realized that we were still hungry. I went up to the counter to get another order of fries, I didn’t notice Danny walk up alongside me at first. While waiting in line some guy in a backpack asked us if we were brothers.

We laughed and I noticed how bloodshot Danny’s eyes were and so I laughed even more and then he laughed more until we were Hyenas, stoned and tired and still pretty drunk. I made up a story about how we ran a taxi service with the van and that we were under scrutiny from the Taxi Federation.

“What is that?” he asked.

“Those assholes try to get us arrested for running gypsy taxis, claiming that we clog up the road and put union taxis at risk. Really they’re afraid to take us on by themselves ‘cause we carry pipes.”

Our food came so we left him wondering what kind of pipe we meant.

Ashes of Youth: Chapter 2.2

2010-04-29T21:59:00.001-05:00

It was great, the four of us driving around getting buzzed and as the night wore on we became drunk. We went back to the same gas station for more beer and got even more drunk. At about one our drunken driver had to go home, so we piled into my van and drove off into the night once again. We first went to our old school, our elementary and middle school and where we spent our best years together. We drank and smoked some brick and a couple of cheap cigars. We were sitting on an old bench talking for a long while.

“Christmas lights.” Danny said and laughed.

I looked at his eyes and saw him glaze-eyed staring into the dark distance. Liam and I repeated “Christmas lights.” and then we walked toward the lights. What were Christmas Lights doing at Carr School in July?

We walked toward the lights in bride-eye wonder. As we got closer reality washed over us like some token tide at the ocean, as casual as a moon ascension. The rapturous Christmas lights turned out to be trailers that reflected lighted sidewalks. Then I looked down and I swear I saw train tracks, Liam and Danny thought this was so funny that train tracks were on the campus.

This was what our old school was turning into and suddenly it made sense to be standing on train tracks. They must have led to the future because they sure as hell didn’t lead to the past, we were the past. There we were, three teenagers, friends since Kindergarten, stoned, at the height of the first half of our lives. I got high just thinking about the times we had shared together, some of them so happy that etched out, old smiles broke when we thought and spoke of them, some of them so sad and fresh that the scars still hadn’t healed. We were everything at that moment and it seemed as though the belly-button of the world had been yanked to where we stood, we led the world and it revolved to our beat. I don’t think I have ever had that sensation so strongly since. The stoned world pressed itself to the cool glass of what would become the future. We held the brick to smash that glass.

Ashes of Youth: Chapter 2.1

2010-04-29T11:02:00.003-05:00

It was the summer before my senior year and it was the second best time of my life. There were parties that lasted until dawn and friendships that would last until death. The summers are the most important time frame of our lives, they are endless yearning and hopeless hope, there’s a certain majesty to the idealistic sun that lasts all day. So this is where you first find me, having the time of my life so far, not knowing if the best years of my life are coming or going but lapping up the waves that form and break on me.

I am indestructible and I am young.

“How much money have you got?” it was a question posed to the gang of four but really it addressed the two people who normally have money.

“I’ve got twenty-five dollars but ten of it has to go toward gas” Liam said, “so if you can pitch in ten or fifteen, then we can buy two eighteen packs.”

“I can,” I said, “anyone else?”

“No” the other two said.

We wound up with thirty bucks and then drove to the one gas station that would probably sell to us. In the car it was decided that I had to buy it because I was riding shotgun and I had the best beard. I stepped out of the car and nervously walked to the door, I went inside and said “hey” nonchalantly to the old man behind the counter. I walked to the hot beer on the floor and grabbed an eighteen pack. I walked nervously to the counter and put it there.

“Do you have I.D.?” he asked me.

“Yeah, sure.” I pulled out my I.D. and tried to just show it to him but he grabbed it. Fuck I thought, he studied it a minute and asked, “Does this say ‘80’ or ‘88’?”

“Nineteen-eighty.”

He asked me if I was sure a couple of times before he sold me the beer. Here I was, looking like I was giving him the hard time on the cameras. No time to worry about that, he held his hands out for the money. I fumbled nervously in my wallet for the green.

But now my hands trembled with excitement as I took the beer and when I stepped out the door. I could hear my friends saying “holy shit” as I walked toward the car, big smile breaking over my face. Then we drove off.

Ashes of Youth: Chapter 1.4

2010-04-28T14:29:00.001-05:00

My father and I talked about politics and the world and about our water pipes. We had genuinely interesting conversations that no one observed both taking part in the problem solving. Things are much easier to figure out when there are less people contributing to the think tank. I guess this is why I don’t trust any voting system, but I'm no terrorist, I like pork chops and baseball. We knew that we knew something, and to be sure, I can say that if anyone else were to try to drop in, they would never be able to make up for the years of dialogue between my father and I. That’s the way the world works sometimes, everyone wants to be elders but only about five people you’ve never heard of have the smarts to. I don’t mind being young and he doesn’t mind admitting I’m right sometimes, we’re neither of us elders.

We talk for a while and my brother wakes up around eleven with his hair in every direction like a rose bloom. They go into the living room to watch a movie and I go outside. The wind is blowing just right and the sun is shining as hard as one would wish it to, there are enough clouds to nab the right amount of sunlight before it hits the ground. I always appreciate how the clouds can look surreal against the sky when there are just a few floating around, how they turn pink during the day if you look at them right, and then you take in the whole picture and it grows dada legs.

And this is the morning in its melancholia and beauty. I’m living the way those two feelings exist together, so much so that they don’t seem right without each other’s compliment. I like the morning and its arc so much that I don’t even long for it after it’s gone.

Then morning is gone, and I do miss it. I miss the clarity and the newness, but alas, morning becomes noon, and then afternoon. I don’t like the afternoon because I get lazy, I might nap or I might play the guitar for a while. It’s frustrating because you can never do anything to its full potential in the afternoon, except napping. I don’t get much done in the afternoon, but today I’m replaying, in my head, different conversations I’ve had. I got stuck in that quest for smart banter and interesting wordplay, which makes quick friends but doesn’t help keep them. So at the risk of sounding pretentious I’ll say that I really do have those conversations. I don’t mimic scenes from movies like most people do when they start playing witty. This makes me inaccessible in ways that are close to people’s hearts. I don’t really lack emotion or passion, I just give off that air. So now I’m stuck in a different kind of illusion.

I accept that everyone is in some illusion or another and you just play along with theirs under the condition that they play along with yours. Life is what you think, before you realize that you’re thinking. After it has been thought, there’s time to rationalize and distill it so that it may be swallowed. Regardless you are who you think you are. Or if you’re a cynic you are who you fool yourself into being.

Or, if you’re a cynic and aware of it, and that awareness hurts, then maybe you are the lump in your throat and you can’t even rationalize swallowing in the first place. How did I get inside myself(?) you ask.

I get a second wind in the evening. I may drink coffee and write a song. The evening is the second best time for lucid thinking, more so than action. I guess that’s because you have the experiences off the day to add to whatever philosophy you’re constructing for yourself. I include myself.

This is important because we are alone when we’re young and that is when the mind is supposed to be the most agile. This is true, so is the fact that we’re alone when we’re older. But in youth you have a small ego still able to conceive. You haven’t slipped off to sleep yet and it doesn’t matter to anyone else what you believe dreams are. So you can just enjoy them.

Ashes of Youth: Chapter 1.3

2010-04-27T10:00:00.003-05:00

Blue and pink is everywhere. A day is born.

When I wake up I can smell the remnants of the night and have that smoky feeling. I hop in the shower and I make some coffee before my father wakes up. This is something I did nearly everyday I spent at home. Unless I’d been drinking the night before and he happened to beat me to the beans.

There are few things as lonely as talking on a phone in the morning of a Saturday. They have a certain melancholy that nothing can touch. My personal reasons behind this feeling are because I had this girlfriend a few years back and we used to leave the phone off the hook at night so we could sleep together. On Saturday mornings I would wait for her to wake up because she liked to sleep in. I would lie there for a couple hours with the radio turned low and wait for her to beep me.

Now I’m not much of a fool, I heard the blues man singing that there-is-no-true-love-blues and at first I didn’t believe it. I just liked the down and outness of the music. One day that relationship had to end. And it did, no theoretic somedays here.

Four years later, I’m staring into a cup of black coffee. I don’t even know how old I am. Feeling like a Moses, not a Methuselah so much, in actually I’m seventeen-eighteen young. It hasn’t been all bad, but it has been a hard four years. Not because of her, I wouldn't put that on her shoulders. I’ve lost my mom and grandmother, those two loses felt like twin towers pluming ashen over the timer of a downtown graveyard. I worked against the persistent forward motion of time, to my certain dismay everything still grew visible in sharp relief.

I don’t want to communicate that I feel particularly unique in my experiences thus far. Everyone has their problems and everyone deals with them somehow. Yet, if I had to attach a label to myself then I would use the word unique, because labels are easy and everyone is supposedly unique. Maybe it’s a copout and a throwback to every motivational speaker that ever filled you with hope or cynicism.

However you look at it, just don’t bother me.

I can hear the shower running from my father’s bathroom and that slowly pulls me from the introspective abyss. By the time he comes into the kitchen I am a full-fledged extrovert.

“Mornin’” I said.

“Mornin’, thanks for making coffee” he said.

“Yep”

“You take your medicine?”

“Not yet.” I always hated that our days started and ended with him asking if I took my medicine.

We sat there in the obligatory morning silence sipping our coffee.

“Is that boy awake yet?” he asked about my brother.

“Were you expecting him to be?” I smiled. He smiled too.

Ashes of Youth: Chapter 1.2

2010-04-26T09:57:00.002-05:00

There were the words that he always used that I distinctly remember as never communicating commands. More like little challenges for us to make it quiet or to behave like a member of a societal entity. We still felt compelled to act as though we were under command. Perhaps tone inflection or voice modulation stirred unconscious visions of retribution. Most of us had parents that inflicted some form of totalitarian punishment. This is the first glimpse of how humans act that I ever experienced with wide-open-sky-brain. It was third grade and I had to cease to be a little kid anymore.

This may not be exactly how it was but it still seemed true ten years later. I retain no horrible lost innocence feelings, just difficult questions I couldn't answer turning into more difficult questions. Are challenges simply commands for the brave? And does that render the brave as mere followers, blazing trails on their deathbeds at another’s behest? If so then the weak in their wake can see this fate, but still take to the road, do they know, do they really know?

I don’t.

Interrupt the past with my present and you will find that I’m just high and it’s a minute ’til midnight. Strangely, my mind ponders the high concentration of dope labs in this area and the possibility of one blowing up near my house. Mostly I’m thinking happy-trappy about the Flaming Lips. So now my adventurous brain is potentially making me a follower. That’s just fine, I have Yoshimi and the pink robots to lead me through the motions and then present the path to break away from those motions.

I killed a man. Not really. I just like to see what people are willing to believe if presented with something hard to believe. It stretches the imagination in a bad way though and I promise to never lie again. Words and their meanings have changed for all of time, but what a lie is to a man who lives on an honest life, that’s what I mean when I say I'll never lie again.

Now that I’ve run through those initial mumblings of the medicinally altered mind I can do what I do best and that is think. I find myself thinking a lot, except when I am talking. The mouth somehow hinders thought despite communicating them. I think especially when walking the halls of my school, probably because all I see are the faces of people who have never tried to understand why they are the way they are. I feel like they have never gotten past certain events in their lives, good or bad. So now they take those unique circumstances out on themselves. I know a little bit about people who have gotten past things in their lives. I had a friend who told me that his male babysitter made him perform fellatio. He is now one the few important people who made me who I am today. So I don’t have any sympathy nor apathy toward people stuck in a moment.

It seems like I stopped believing a long, long time ago. In what I don’t
know, I forgot it back then.

Stoned I just realized why people who chew gum constantly seem so dumb. Even though they aren’t talking they are going through the motions of talking, so they’re getting double the trouble for half the pleasure. So maybe talking is healthy, it’s just the motion that eventually gives your mind lethargic gonorrhea, I have to live with the burn for now but the medicine will kick in as soon as I...

I yawn.

I go to sleep for a full eight hours.

Ashes of Youth: Chapter 1.1

2010-04-23T22:59:00.002-05:00

As a generation we learned to love and lose in a time when nothing was free and nothing was right.

I was sitting at my new desk and talking with the kid to my left. Someone I would accidentally stab in the eye later that year. "I want the top desk." he offered, referring to the cubby holes between us. "I wanted that one, but I don't really care." I ebbed back.

I recall only two things from my first day of school. We all remember events and things differently and with charged imagination. All the while zooming together on the glue highway of gravity through this universe. Over all I think we seem to not mean any harm, but we sure cause it for blue by reckless chance.

To my right was this blonde-haired angel kid wearing a purple shirt. I know this kid. He looked at me, as I did him. Before I had time to think any further we both shouted each other's names and hugged from our seats. I had known this guy in daycare, back then I didn’t speak much but we had talked some.

The first conversation that I recall with anyone since I left the Keys was in daycare with him about our different opinions of the women at the daycare. We debated until we fell asleep during naptime. James was the first friend I made in North Florida. We found a commonality to make significant both having been born in the Keys.

Right then I knew that I had no reason to fear anything. This was before I even had the chance to think that two more of the people in that room would become my best friends. Life is new and unprecedented as far as I can tell.

The people I loved would eventually be lost. For those who loved me, I would eventually be lost. We learned these things slowly and pointedly. But there was always the love. That's a victory if you need one to believe in.

Ashes of Youth: The Score:

2008-11-14T09:04:00.005-06:00

It was written mostly from August to October 2007, while tearing ass all up and down the East Coast of Awesomerica. It is the fictional truth about some life I've lived.

It's raw, it's good, and I am going to give it away for free like a mixtape...

The Score.

Dad?
Yes?
Do you know who put the moon and the stars up there?
No who?
I did.
Well how did that come about?
I took one of your ladders and put it in the ocean. I climbed to the top with my paintbrush and some paint and I painted the whole sky black. Then I hung the moon and the stars up there for you.

I was three years old when I hung the moon and stars for my father. We were outside our home on Big Pine Key, me in his arms and us looking up at the eternal compass of the Milky Way.
He held me upright as we gazed at the stars gazing back from billions of years ago. If anything ever should have belonged to a man, this Big Pine Key sky should have been my father’s. So it was.

This story is about a boy who climbed a mountain. Not just any mountain mind you, he climbed Blood Mountain. The fourth highest peak in Georgia where the Cherokee and the Creek fought on Slaughter Ridge. That bloody history a testament to all of the South, like a harmonica blowing sad as though it knows it's been defeated.

This tale requires imagination to understand how people felt about certain trespasses, including the narrator. The reader can find as much in the things left unsaid as what is recorded.

This boy's name was... aw hell.. I'm having a Sam Elliott moment. Well his name ain't that important, the importance lies in knowing from whence he came. This was a bit peculiar itself because he was delivered by his father in his parent's home on Summerland Key and raised in North Florida. Nonetheless, he soaked up the horrors of Tate's Hell and the moccasins of the Chipola River; he knew that ghosts don't float around your house, they wait to whisper in your ear at night.

He began talking when he was a little boy, before being taken away from that
island and put inland with a fellow Conch refugee. Over the course of the story he travels every which way except down. Many times over, making his way to the ends of manic American depression and conversely, into the midst of its rhapsodic dreams.

So go to where you can hear 'Masters of War' through an open window just driftin' from down the street where there's a pretty stranger that you’re not gonna meet. There are limos riding around with windows tinted, wishin’ ta hell I'd run into Bob Dylan. Instead I saw chain smoking Keifer Sutherland puffing on a ciggie with a leggie blond walking beside him having her pants charmed off.

All balances are measured on the scale of eternity. Do not weigh yourself with that which isn't yours and do not worry about sinking or swimming, just accept exceptions.

I just finished celebrating but I'm only getting started.

2008-11-06T18:42:00.002-06:00

Fuck it. I cried when he won.

That was the proudest American moment that I will ever witness. We came together and put forth the best of ourselves and the best we could produce.

Let’s remember that and do it every day from now on.

Excerpt: Jean's Life

2008-10-24T10:30:00.003-05:00

Now some more history. The president decided that potentially designating American citizens as terrorists was too risky after the excesses of past decades. A new buzzword was needed. This buzzword became “Anarchists”.

Politicians got drunk saying the word with no moderation.

The name was created after the CIA captured a group who fancied themselves terrorists but after due process announced that they were anarchists who used terrorism. The anarchists desired total annihilation of the American government and all western governments. Due process meant coercion of course.

Now when a middle school student drew an anarchy symbol on themselves they had to be sent to the principal. The principal would upload information about the infraction unto a national systematic profiler which winnowed down the names of the students’ relatives and their addresses.

These people were then put under surveillance that allowed for movie rentals, traceable purchases, internet use, traffic violations and all behavior requiring a name or social security number use to be cross-examined with no oversight by competing agencies.

School principals knew not what havoc they wrought. They only followed procedure. Now get that standardized test out, principal.

And who still refused to be bullied?

Librarians.

They absolutely refused to take part in turning over book check-out records. If someone wanted to read A Man Without A Country the government wouldn’t know about it. Some librarians were jailed, but a secret society called: FRAP or; the Final Refuge of the American People, managed to hire sympathetic lawyers of extreme caliber for the war against wars.

And who was winning that war?

Those who were well read.

Were they anarchists?

No. They knew the Communist Manifesto as well as they did the Republic and the U.S. Constitution. They were ahead of the game.

They were so well regarded in certain circles that scholars donated their personal library collection in secret for the sake of the world. They performed work as valuable as the seed storage facility in the Arctic Circle.

God bless them, they were called godless.

Ode To An Overlong Month

2008-09-05T10:53:00.000-05:00

the poetry is hard, thankless,
without any compensation cepting the relieving of the brain
from its coarse futility and despondance.
we beat a path with our feet into this wilderness
through the wiregrass and across snakeholes,
in between flowering bushes and trees of unmistakable elegance.
Under moss and hanging branches,
suspended in time, forever and lost.

All spilling unto a bank by which a river ran,
crashing, as we were,
as though smoking a waterfall through copper pipes.

And I sez "let's dive in." and I dove in.
where to which uncertainty reigns
as though a witness to the conflictions of emotion.

the water filled in my splash and I was underwater,
how long i do not know,
Suffice to say that terror nearly overtook the undistinguished parts of my mind.
my fear trapped underwater with me,
each clinging to the other.
drenched
&
drowning.

when my coughing form deposited itself onto the sandy banks
my convulsions left no room for self searching.
i caught from the corner of my left eye
the sight of my counterparts each rushing downstream
all borne, destined for deeper penetrations into the heart of darkness.

My complacency became overshadowed by a second dive,
made from various curiosities and casual seeking.

And in passing my landlubbing friends I observed aloud:
"Brothers, I always dove first but you discovered more.
I love you and depart now for to light the way.
Adios."

Drunk on a Sunday Night

2008-07-15T09:57:00.001-05:00

All the boys who love their city,
all the gals who love hometown,
all swimming away with vast complications,
all looking for something to turn them upside down.

There's a galley on Main Street,
the street Hemingway spoke of all lit up,
and in it are various styles and dimensions,
while the lights hurriedly blink on for fear of the cup.

The cup is the one in the hairy man's hands,
that he doesn't jingle but sits next to him.
While he works his way through palm frond baskets,
Making things as pretty as the galley's lights on dim.

And you walk farther or closer and see the gay bar,
where six foot transvestites hang around the entrance,
And past them are closed shops with the neon all on off.
Where main street dies at night for the ice cream stands.

Across the way is a shop that sells communist carry ons,
to capitalists on the long main street.
It was there that I bought a green hat emblazoned
with an offensive star for to greet.

Further and closer and you come upon the establishment
of the greatest capitalist singer that ever lived,
His name is Jimmy Buffet, the place is Margaritaville,
and in there they card. What a bitch.

So go on up and across the way again,
where a man is telling dirty jokes for a dollar,
he says “cunts” loud enough for the kids to hear,
daddy gets indignant and pops his collar.

On and on, far, far away,
from the southernmost this and the southernmost that,
less than a block from the Southernmost Point,
I scared the golf-cart riding family of fat.

Get on toward the setting sun,
the bars get smaller and smaller,
'til you come unto the smallest one,
where they sell you drinks that get taller and taller.

Beyond that a ways before the sandal shop,
everything gets too real,
the homeless smoke cigarettes like it's going to kill them,
instead of giving back life some zeal.

The whole world dies for a block or two,
before you get to see redemption,
the place is called Mallory Square,
and there life starts to feel worth a mention.

This is one conch's story of life and death,
composed on a Monday morning.
As it's being written a storm blows in,
full of lightning and one thunder warning.

Excerpt: From A Streetcorner Screams God.

2008-07-06T17:36:00.003-05:00

Si. That means yes. As in, yes I am going to talk for a while. What I'm going to talk about is a man who lived somewhere in the Pacific after the world ended. He enjoyed coconuts so much, that at the end, he decided to move where he could always have coconuts. So he sold everything he had, bartered for a ride into the other hemisphere and with what he had left he bought crates of Rum. Sixteen and one half crates of Appleton Estate of Jamaica Rum. It was good.

When I met him, he was into his fifth crate of rum and knee deep in seawater. The rum was in a coconut which had two holes in the top. One was for drinking and the other ventilation. He funnel rum into the coconut and when it mixed with the coconut milk it became a further form of heaven. Further more than the reefs of Key West where you can see one of the world's eyes. It is the blue one, a blue so pure that it makes you want to look into it forever, and further, and further.

Heaven on earth is a problem, because heaven takes from the earth.

C'est la vie.

So this man waved at us with huge gestures and magnificently juggled that coconut rum bomb. It would later knock me out. He was glad to see people. Either: Americans at that. Or; Even if it was Americans.

C'est la vie.

Ya never know.
We were lost and had stumbled upon the magic man. He had so much rum, it would astound those who had no funnybone. And he had enough left that he let us drink a lot of it without missing our company. Whatever that was worth. Any further and he might have cried in the midst of the final drunk.

Eso si que es.

So I was talking to him and he's spent so much time thinking that he only has opinions. I'm drinking coconut rum bombs and listening. I laugh when I'm really drunk, which happens.

We were talking and he says something that put everything into perspective. It was this: “Life is fiction.” I forgot what I was talking about when he said that.

That was the way it felt on the boat surrounded by nothing but waves. That's what it is now that I'm standing here in the middle of the largest ocean on earth. Our lives are fiction. They are fiction when we're living normally. Or, when we are doing the most freakish/brutish things we can imagine. They are fiction against the galaxy which is fiction against the universe.

Which, by the way, Earth scientists have decided that universal time may be more important than universal gravity. Humans have to be able to see time and gravity as it is meant to be seen. Which they cannot do. Thus, they cannot see everything. Which explains why matter matters in our minds.

Hell, why not just fish? Spearfishing or catching suckers in a creek.

I already could see that when I left this place, I would have a lot to think about.

That's a good thing about fishing. You are thinking somehow or another. Living should be done with the urgency of spearfishing and the recollecting of canepole fishing. That's a simple code to live by. If you make it simple.

This man was saying all these things that made the fireworks in my head go off. And I was only thinking of my way of thinking about how he said it. It takes a while for waves and wavelengths to overlap.

Ideally, it's like King said; “The arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” I'd add, “But, don't let assumptions get the best of you.”

Heaven at the End of a Pen

2008-06-22T18:50:00.003-05:00

All godly love on full display. Breaking our faces in the Viking melee. Then Richard Cory dispensed medicines to himself and the words of the mind stopped. He dropped into the grass and rolled himself up for any passing Cyclops.

A Cyclops did pass, it was ol’ James Joyce clad in eye patch and he was already smoking away on his pipe at ten in the morn. He passed Richard at the same time he always did. He spoke: “Richard don’t kill yourself today my dear friend.”

“Someone will be by to smoke me soon. I will be out of the way shortly.”

And Mr. Joyce kept a-strolling finishing the rest of their conversation in his mind. It was always the same when the ink dried. “Thanks a million Richard. You were always a charming man and friend.”

He looked to his left and saw two twins. They were old. Just like the pictures said they would be. There were a thousand pictures. The twins were locked in heated discussion. In eardrums it sounded like this:

“Where you are born has no bearing on the kind of writer you will be.”

“I disagree. I find testicular fortitude is more apparent among the likes of Herman Melville.”

“I vaguely knew Herman. Certainly of him. His fortitude existed only in the sense that he kept writing in his time. If he would write now he could be the belle of the ball. What did you think about when you wrote Jailbird?”

“I decided to think about not having any testicular fortitude.”

“You thought you were old. Didn’t you?”

“I thought that for a long time.”

When James quickened his gait he could have predicted when and for how long he would, instead, he listened for the call of a bird. His apprehension in longing was broken by a bird strumming a guitar and singing.

Broken rhythm, it came out like this: “Ezra Pound… Maya Angelou… Sat in Captain Falcon’s tower….. Calypso singers live and learn and I’m jilted holding flowers.”

He always had it right, the beginning is important, everything else is a flight of fancy. James thoughts were drowned out by the birdsong.

He continued his walk into the wild-west part of town. He saw a man with a big mustache talking to a donkey by the livery. James said this:

“Zarathustra! You’re merely wasting your time, he doesn’t need you.”

To which Zarathustra responded: “Consider the lilies of the field. They don’t need me. Yet I stand before you.”

James waved and kept walking. He stopped by a store stocked with all manner of spirits from all manner of eras. He looked unto the laudanum and next to it the absinth. The proprietor stepped out from the back and said: “Welcome back to Vision in a Dream James. What can I do for you today?”

“I’d like to try some of this Will Shakespeare strand.”

“Hitting the reefer heavy I see.”

“Well it’s heaven, I won’t write anything ever again, so I can do to myself as I please.”

“I pass not judgment. How much can I put you down for?”

“I’ll take this entire jar.”

“Alright James. I hope you enjoy.” He then walked over to his writing pad and added James’ latest purchase to his tab.

In heaven you never pay your tab. In heaven you never have to write again. In heaven it feels like heaven.

James stuffed the mason jar in his coat pocket and made his way out to the rocks by the shore of the sea. He looked up and down the beach. In the distance a solitary figure sat staring out at the endless bounding waves. James began to walk toward the figure.

He tapped his pipe and stuffed some of the Will Shakes into it. He sat by the dark haired figure who never broke his gaze of the sea even when James asked:

“You dreaming?”

“Of swimming?”

“You never will.”

“I only care to dream.”

“This stuff takes my dreams away.”

“Even in heaven?”

“Et tu heaven.”

“I thought heaven would be as it existed in my mind.”

“You looked for those images stored deep in there. That’s more than most dream of accidentally.” James reassured.

Silence except for the ocean.

Then Ti Jean said:

“The ocean splashes me with salt water. I taste it and I taste the death of the planet as a gorgeous living organism. It will turn into a sepulcher soon and the scent will fumigate heaven.”

“If the world ends in the name of saving a dime has anything changed? If our descendants destroy everything the earth started will they be any different than our ancestors? I say ‘No’.”

“That doesn’t relieve the pain of watching it happen.”

“If there was no pain in the heavens then god wouldn’t have been inspired enough to create the worlds.”

“It’s something I cannot stand to witness.”

“I believe it was you who said: Accept loss forever.”

“I didn’t realize how much I believed what I wrote at the time. It seemed I had found heaven in that and I was way off the mark. Now I wish I could die and go back to Big Sur even.”

“You must refresh my memory.”

“It doesn’t matter. Heaven is filled with people much smarter than you facilitating your continuation of learning.”

“You best go far in the world lest you be left behind in heaven.”

“I was hoping to lose everything I learned on earth. That was the loss I was hoping to accept.”

“If that was the case what would you’ve done for all the people who died after you.”

“Given them the keys to the car. The kids were disappointed by my stories often. I was stretching yet I only did what I knew. And I only knew the truth.”

“You came closer than any have since Homer. Even he acknowledged that when he finished everything you wrote.”

“I didn’t know Homer could see in heaven.”

“You can do anything in heaven at the end of a pen.”

Trifuckta.

2008-06-20T10:25:00.000-05:00

Does poetry matter?
Not really.

Except to the self.
Except to the self.
Except to the self.
And the few who do.
But mostly to the self.

The self is the head of stare.
Stairs always lead up,
Always flow down.
Occupied by eagles
Clad in the makeup of a clown.

Skip to the loo my darling.

Can you hear me over this?

How about this?

I really do like this country.
Despite all my claims to the contrary.

I like being able to pee off of my front or back porch.

I like being able to say “Fuck you” or “Fuck off” to anybody,
At anytime,
For no reason.
No fucking reason.

“The goddamned plane has crashed into the mountain!” said Lebowski.
Man.

You Fool

2008-06-19T17:25:00.000-05:00

Best kick and kill
Before the bull’s have their fill.
Best eat the berries
Of the bushes getting heavy.

Saw two baby birds today,
Blind, unformed, in the nest.
One egg, never born.
The mother flew away when I lit near.

Breaking cracking lasting fasting,
See the picture clear
Hank Williams singing cold, cold, heart.
Sez boys don’t ramble.

Different song.

Same message.

Who holds the message?
The message holder does.
You fool.

Hark, the angels fart.
Hark, the meadowlark sparks.
Hark, the infinite space bleeds blows riots then quarks.
Hark, the angels sing.
From their buttocks.

God's Marshmallows

2008-06-18T20:04:00.002-05:00

We are all alone forever.
So thank god there’s a god,
Every time I see him,
I pinch him,
Just to see if he’s dreaming.
So if one day the world turns upside down,
Just know,
God musta been dreaming.

Peak of mental powers does come.
It’s all downhill after that.
Can you survive it without -------- ------- it if?

Who's to say god doesn't smile instead of decide?
We can be marshmallows, there you go.
Like a pyramid tapering out towards heaven.

An afterthought,
from the afterbirth,
of nothing?

No, someone was dreaming.

How Coach Pulled My Tooth

2008-06-14T18:46:00.000-05:00

“Fire cracker! Fire cracker! Boom! Boom! Boom!
Boy’s got the muscle! Girl’s got the pretty legs!”
So sang coach.

We kids all laughed. Coach said something that we couldn’t hear because we were laughing so hard. Then he got us back on the tail of attention by shouting:
“Hip, hip…”
“Hooray!” We answered back.
“Hip, hip…”
“Hooray!” We answered again.
“Hip! Hip!”
“HOOray!”
“Alright... give me two laps!”
“Aww coach...”

But we were off around the track. Some slower to start than others. My friends and I amongst the slower ones to run. With us were the fastest kids who only stopped to take their shoes off before leaving us in the dust.

I ran as fast as I could, which wasn’t fast at all. Putting me at about the middle of my class. Some days I took my shoes off, today I didn’t. Which meant that tomorrow I wouldn’t have stone bruises on the bottom of my heel. But I watched in envious admiration as the speed demons slapped their bare feet on the clay and gravel of the first curve.

Then everyone sped down a straightaway shaded by oak trees and long leaf pines. Each bare foot took another beating on the gnarly roots rising from a ground beaten down by thousands of runners over the course of an amount of years that I had yet to consider considering.

We beat our path on around the second curve, which was marked by three tires half buried in the ground. A moral decision we had to make every day was whether or not to cut the track here. I was pondering that as I came upon the first caved in tire, I leapt over it and kept going.

After we rounded the next two tires we ran another straightaway, also shaded by oak trees. This round of dirt path provided a halfway mark from which to wish you were finished. I looked to the right at an old house behind the school. It looked like an old man was on the porch with a basket of corn beside him.

As the path track merged from dirt to grass the steps grew lighter. Then we
rounded the third curve and were in full sunlight. No respite from the Florida heat.

We finally made the fourth and final turn in the full sun. I tried to pace myself, but, since I didn’t really know what pacing myself meant, I just ran full-bore. Firecrackers boom, boom, boomed in my calves and my side. I ran on, slowly losing ground. Going from being in the front middle to the middle middle to the lastly middle.

Second lap, here it went. On the second curve I let a smokescreen go that lasted all the way to the third curve. Luckily I was an actor in a silent movie and didn’t embarrass myself in front of a girl I had a crush on. I was running beside her and we were talking. I kept a straight face.

Coach was leaned forward with his stopwatch in hand. He called everyone’s time loud enough that we could hear it even if we weren’t listening. We sat on two benches in the order we finished. The fast kids on the front, I on the second and several on their feet waiting for coach to come by.

“Time?”

“3:05”

Then it was off to one of the baseball diamonds. I stood in between first and second base. As the third shortstop on the team. Coach didn’t care much what we did as long as we tried to pick up the ball when it came near us.

I was waiting and watching with my hands on my knees. I was also spitting blood that came out of a loose tooth’s widening hole. Coach was sitting on a picnic bench and watched me playing with my tooth.

“Come ‘ere son.”
I walked over to him.
“What’s bothering you?”
“Nothing.”
“Let me see.” He pointed at my mouth.
I opened it and he said: “That’s what I thought. Hold on now.”

He reached into my mouth, pinched that tooth and yanked it out. He handed it to me. An impressive front incisor. The roots of my teeth were like pine roots. When pulled on they were prone to popping and causing a tooth to fly out of my mouth
at dangerous speeds.

“Now you tell my son what I did next time you see him.” His son was my dentist. “Go get you some water and some tissue.”

So I walked around to the outside water fountain and drank on the cool water. Spitting horrific amounts of blood into the basin. Then I went in to the bathroom and stuffed paper towels into the new gap.

I walked back to the field still spitting blood. A few of the older kids were worried about my spitting blood, thinking something was terribly wrong they told coach.

He answered them with:
“Back to the game boys and girls.”
We played on.

On Tim Russert

2008-06-13T20:04:00.002-05:00

Rest in peace to the father and son who helped to bring my father and myself together in these dark and troubling times.

In him we lose another representative to the possibilities of the American Dream.

A bastion of journalistic excellence.

A fully formed man replete with the nobilities afforded by the last century.

Lest we forget.

The Hummingbird King

2008-05-24T12:19:00.002-05:00

Once in recent memory a beautiful ruby throated hummingbird was sipping at a feeder lovingly brimmed with sugar and water. The hummingbird fancied itself the most content of the hummingbirds and decided in the month of May that he should crown himself King of the Happy Creatures. His kingdom included the happiest subjects through out the world.

The Hummingbird King’s first act as his majesty entailed an investigation of the kingdom. In this undertaking, the Hummingbird King found that he was the most popular ruler that ever lived.

First he flew over two lovers playing Scrabble on their front porch. He saw them lean over the game and kiss. His subjects were happy.

Then he flew a ways and came upon a young man named Jason who was hiking a part of the Appalachian Mountains. He was singing to amuse himself and also to give God some relief from the weariness ensnaring the era. His song began:

“Weeelll, a Scotsman clad in kilt,
left the bar one evening fair.
And one could tell by how he walked,
that he’d drunk more than his share…”

His majesty continued his triumphant flight through time zones immeasurable until he came upon a morning dawning. The place in which he stopped was rife the vines bloomed. He flittered by one of the flowers for a scent of his kingdom and found the flower resting with petals closed.

At this he sighed. As he made to fly away and his shadow exposed the flower to the fresh welcome sun, it opened! A moth with fuzzy antennae flapped its rested wings anew. As the moth glided away, free from the flower prison, the Hummingbird King called:

“Rest easy my Subject! Your king has freed you!”

But the moth was long gone and even the most sensitive hairs on his antennae didn’t detect the vibrations of the king.

The Hummingbird King flew into a cave and saw downtrodden naked albino fish. He pooped in their cave water and said:

“Feast upon my subject, my subjects!”

And didn’t stick around to see if his joke or the feast brought them into his kingdom. He felt certain that they acquiesced one way or another.

The King flew until the land ended at the foot of an ocean vaster by far than any single thing he had ever seen. He listened to the waves roar and tear into the beach. He tried to detect a hint of emotion which he could call upon. But the ocean spoke only in circles and cycles and life and death.

The king fluttered fore and aft against the sea wind in consternation. Finally he flew into the opening of a bottlebrush bloom, his beak and tongue sipped at the nectar.

Ahhhh….

He decided that his subjects were locked on strings of far islands all wishing for a visit from his majesty.

The king ate three depressed mosquitoes and set out in flight across the ocean. He flew as strongly as his heart would pound. Slowly the licking waves salted him more and more as his path dipped toward the ever changing surface.

He looked into the vast blue for sign of his subjects and saw only a
jellyfish. Devoid of emotion, the jellyfish seemed to have no allegiances nor alliances. It lived only within the ocean. Flowing with the tide, against the tide.

The Hummingbird King flew on with all his heart before a cresting wave devoured him.

The unspeakable visions of the individual

2008-04-04T09:55:00.000-06:00

Evil titular devices appear in great succession on the horizon.
One after another, sometimes six abreast as the Romans,
Sometimes alone.
Sometimes muddled together in one dark shape.
All the same, all in line.

It was not their distant similarity to one another,
nor, was it their disheveled nazi march.
It was neither the enlightened horizon at their feet,
nor, was it my own fear gripping my ribs and breaking them.

There exist other states of mind to view them.
Often as not,
they appear joyous as opposed to evil.
Often as a baby is born,
they kill time.
Often as angels get wings,
they blow air from their nostrils counter to butterfly flapping wings.

Once I witnessed a tear.
Once I was a tear.
Twice were I eyes.
Thrice I achieved sun brilliance on my own terms.
I haved lived one thousand times,
and not died.
Only the above seven were memorable.

I am old crazy bespoken have not on turnip leaves.

They march on.
Not lockstep.
Not not.

Hush the seas.
High and low tides of the madman brain.
Only in the moment.
Only hell god shit on us all madman of the same cloth moth.

Explode in heart
Break on the great
Savor the saviors

Saints watch us from their heaven.
God from his.
Devil watches from his heaven.
Stars peer all around from and in their heaven.
Moon cracks a smile from its heaven.
Jesus hides Jesus trees and eats Jesus fruits in his heaven.
I kick the edges of my heaven and it expands dented on the outside.

My saint god devil star moon jesus fruit falls off the tree.
No Newton beneath.

I'm trying to tell you the goddamned truth,
Story of the world old, long.
Could live all my life and talk awake, asleep, eating, smoking.
The story would not end.

The Ballad of the Bhudda, Latter Years

2008-01-18T19:58:00.001-06:00

Therewith sat the silent.

Angelic and demonic,
Holy and hellish,
Suffering no liars,
Paying no heed to the unworthy.

And those lesser,
Encompassed by hedonist excess,
Sadist wherewithal,
Accusers accepting no responsibility,
Workers seeking excuse,
Thinkers lacking capacity,
Acclaimed deeming themselves,
Fictionists claiming truth,
Truth claiming fiction,
Spoken word accusing listener,
Speaker listening to never,
Listener attaching to tongue,
Seekers looking elsewhere,
Elsewhere faking where,
Where being there,
There becoming here,
Supernova actualizing sun.

Et tu the reverse?

No answer to the call.

Lifeless dragged the wretched limbs and bodies,
Bringing toward a place where someone knew,
And on sight threw leprous minds in bow.

Self-administered solace,
For self-inflicted incisions,
Into the crevices of battered soul and mind,
“I was always right.” thinks them,
And onto the new Zion they clambered.

The terrain treacherous as well as forgiving,
And in tow the ones who needed not the backs of others,
These pilgrims sauntered on,
Left behind are those that fell behind,
Forgotten are those who asked for help,
For the parasitic lesser seek not to support.

Onward mountain ranges,
River valleys,
Thick forest,
Thin forest,
Calm road,
Roughshod road,
Through quagmire,
Onto sand,
‘til if a thousand tongues
Gnashed together clearly,
In years it would take a thousand score
Times a thousand score,
To name each environment passed.

At times water scarce,
Comfort laughable,
Though nothing achieved.

For once the trip seemed ended,
And their tired, poor, amassed at the foot of the way,
Sat waiting for an answer,
A sermon from the mount,
A clue to use against the inner regions of the indecipherable,
Something more than what they considered lesser.

Untouched.
Unmoved.
Unflinching.

“Speak!”
Nothing.

“Speak!” louder,
And still nothing.

The lesser sure that they were owed something,
Certain that his silence was really indolence and disrespect,
All cried in unison, “Speak ye bastard!”

Silence.

Their echo shouted back at them,
But not a word from he that was being demanded of.

Reversal was always the movement,
Not contrary to anything assigned,
But on a line that was never slave to the definition of “line.”

Everyday for...

2008-01-02T10:23:00.000-06:00

It’s… angel spectacular,
Masculine,
Actualize
Anything worth denying passed before your eyes,
Before the word left the coup,
You’ve replaced your vocabulary to encompass you’s.
I’m military,
Why aren’t you?

Hell on!
Fight? Yes!
There’s something worth something underneath your dress,
Hold on,
Until you hone it down,
Laugh trap,
Smoke grass,
Underneath your nightgown.
I’m military,
Why aren’t you?

Morality,
Is overrated,
Let’s see,
What’s been dated?
Quote the bible,
Drive around in cars,
cars,
cars.
Cars!
Cars!

I’m military why aren’t you?

I’m military,
Shermanesque,
Let me guess,
You’re looking down the side of you dress?

It’s, it’s… holy amazing,
Craving,
Gotta get me one of them,
Don’t be late again,
Better to wait away the waiting time,
Than to do what you want,
What’s on your mind?
Well…

Leaving Tranquility: On and On

2007-12-13T18:40:00.001-06:00

Left behind my safety pin,
Decisions higher piled than before,
Shel Silverstein was right,
Shoulda took that garbage out.
Enough of the others,
Let us get down and out
To the nitty gritty,
Goin’ on to the somewhere else you hear of.

Hairline fractures on green leaves,
Water drops of dew slip through to our mouths.
Holy Sawyer,
And Nigger Jim,
Mr. Finn as well,
Captain Kidd and Charles Darwin,
Elsewhere in the ether we’ve heard of.

No answers anywhere worth looking at,
So let’s find a cacti,
Let’s ditch class on life for life,
In its place now and always,
No more mucking about,
Leave the bastards back there,
Where we never will hear of again.

Old saints hold older lamps,
Better make the end worth the beginning,
Got the same birthday as Elvis and Jesus and America,
Got the same birthday as Biggie Smalls and John the Baptist and Alexander Pope,
Just trudge on and on,
Won’t be any great dreams, hallucinations, ah peaceful,
Not again, leaving tranquility.

On Smoking Out Emotions

2007-11-24T10:22:00.000-06:00

He blew a perfect smoke ring that circled my face before arcing into the air. This was back when people could still smoke in restaurants. If you didn’t like it you went somewhere else, that’s the hope for my future. I’m leaving next week for sure this time, to where is immaterial.

The waitress came over and warmed our coffees, an ashy cigarette dangling precariously from her red lips over the table.

“This coffee here is fresh, I don’t want to hear no complaining.” her smoky voice emoting feelings long lost, “That damn war has got me so depressed, I’m turning angery, it’s a long time coming… Revelations. Might as well not look anywhere for anythin’, it’s all evaporating, might as well lose all hope now so as to not lose it later. The plagues are returnin’ and I have to heat up people’s coffee. Don’t look too close but that man at the bar has the sickness, I can tell by the way he spits silver when he talks. This is when everything of value loses itself and this country of ours… you know? It’s all about oil. Everything. Even your life ‘n mine, they’ll sacrifice us for that stuff… I… goddamn it, he’s lookin’ around tryin’ to get my attention but trying to disguise it.” And she was off.

It’s sometimes worth it to be a regular, somewhere.

The first Gulf War was shitting all over the television. Looking back it was a simple time, as all of the past seems under the microscope, or telescope actually, of the present.

When he stumped out his cig I wasn’t aware that it would be the second to last time I’d ever see him smoke.

He struck a match. Some hotel he stayed at. I’d be gone next week. The man with the sickness ate uneasily.

As we all should have.

His Son

2007-11-16T09:23:00.000-06:00

Well, I submitted the first draft of my book to Sanford J. Greenburger Associates in New York and they turned it down. Back to the writing room again. But for now.. a short story that I have never read once:

“He can have a sip.” Old beardy man said.

The boy proudly reached for the bottle of beer.

“One sip won’t hurt.”

A sip and a sup the boy was a-thinking, he wasn’t hearing the row between his parents. He continued to reach for the bottle and nothing was happening. It wasn’t coming closer but rather staying put with its bubbly sifting to the top and a-sweating mighty.

Must be some tripping of wires that connect his daddy’s brain with his
fingertips, hold up and hold up and waiting and this minute was taking a long old time.

Only a real man and his wife were talking heavy low tones sparkled flippant incidentals that put the boy in a wait. That wait was good for him, his arms stretched like two giraffe necks. Reachity-reach and unrequited tiring of one small-around arm, maddening if that youngster was the type that’d get mad over such inconvenience, he’s a coming back into the world and all its evilness.

“He’s too young to be having beer.”

“It’s one sip and it won’t hurt.”

“C’mon mom.”

Both: “Be quiet.”

“Watch this.” And old beardy man said a funny thing in those lapses of the brain. It woulda been a funny thing too if he wasn’t having a seizure as he said it. That beer dropped from his hand and that hand curled on up toward his face and neck.

His wife said a “Honey? Can you hear me?”

The boy being of sound mind and body said a “Daddy?” and for the life of his
father he couldn’t hear and certainly couldn’t answer his son.

“OH MY GOD!”

“GOD DAMMIT!”

Old beard was saying things that the boy had only heard when playing outside and happened to be within hearing distance of his father a-working.

That beer was a bubbled up and fizzing out. Draining from the bottle its life source like it was being drunk by the high-school alcoholic but instead spill-a-spill all over the carpet.

And then beard came back to, his pupils huge as god. Headache.

“What happened?” he croaked this slowly.

“You had a seizure.”

“God-fucking-damn-it.” He was just saving his best curse fo’ last.

Now it’s to that hospital. That means a drive and a drive and sooner or later you arrive at the hospital, this makes the third time in his adult life that the ol’ bread winner has had a seizure.
Four hundred years ago this would call for the burning of some witches or the lighting of some incense, a few prayers and a ‘depart from me ye cursed’ is implied, seizures were once signs of good ol’ fashioned demonic possession as recently as nineteen and fifty-seven. In some parts of fatty-arsed America that number changes to nineteen sixty-three, the kinds of places where “nigger don’t let the sun set on you here.” Fatty asshead sheriffs putting the final nail in that cross and saying “we warned him, we have a sign.” And if ever a trial… never a trial for asshead and his cousins.

Boy-o-boy. Beard and wife and son sitting in a room waiting and waiting and waited and waited until past and present are the same thing and future is some sort-of futuristic invention. Now white-coat smiley-tired doctor-man knocks, “come in”, this is his house.

What does he have to say? He says well you had a seizure. He says you can’t drive for six months. He says I’ll write you a prescription. He stresses that beardy man has to take it easy, that he has to make sure he takes the medicine, he must get sleep, he must… what’s that?... hmmm… You should cut back on your alcohol consumption, there’s a new study out says a man that drinks too much is more susceptible to those crazy flying neurons of the mind.

The bread winner and his wife and his son go home. He is downtrodden as a seizure is depressing. Well-o-well the wifey was happy about the doctor’s advice.
But ol’ bread winner will do what the hell he wants to do and after a day of work during which he can’t drive, he wants a beer, a rum and coke, a shot of Jack. One of those, all of those, any combination of those that he wants, he would be overreacting to not have a drink at the end of the day.

But his son? He hasn’t yet given his son a sip of beer.

'as jazz died in the park?

2007-10-25T15:51:00.001-05:00

Yesterday jazz in the park made a huge jump,
right before it was hushed up.

Saw a drummer, snare, hi-hat, crash, bass,
Two soloists, trumpet and saxophone.

It was cold as hell, I sat on a concrete lip,
I was wearing none but a hoodie and a thin one at that.

Those guys played pretty damn good,
the trumpeter was young and he ripped up the drummer's beat.

Then he stepped back after several minutes, great solo,
the old saxophone guy had just finished polishing his sax.

He started playing, the drummer was going mad,
he tried to keep up and the callous might think, he's too old. Too bad.

But all of a sudden the drummer played four beats really quiet,
taps, and the sax died down barely blowing, at the end of the beats,

Explosion of genius, the drummer makes it all over again,
the old timer ripped a solo right through the heart of that song.

The young trumpeter was standing back watching,
he played well but he just learned a hard, hard lesson.

Then the park security came and said you're playing too loud,
Shit. Is jazz in the park dead? The village is experiencing a new jazz movement.

I don't know, I stopped by the park today and only saw a hippie,
strumming his guitar, a few around him, but he was all alone.a

Anticlimactic Iron and Wine look-a-like guy.

2007-10-23T10:47:00.000-05:00

There was smoke or steam coming out of the roof,
the sun was setting and the weather was stereotypically fallish.

At first some classical wannabe guitarist was playing,
hooked up to an amp, it was impossible to ignore him.

I was reading a crappy book stuck between two crappy bands,
A jazz quartet that lost the beat and lost the plot.

I wish the jazz combo would come back,
but I guess they've moved on along down the hall.

After the guitarist left another guitarist came along,
he wasn't plugged in, at least he could be ignored.

He started singing, loud, "Clowns to the left of me..."
nervous, strumming nervously, loud timbre to his voice though.

He looked like the guy from Iron and Wine,
he sang that one song: "Who will sa-ave your soul?"

Then with a tint of irony that made the windows black,
"... Hit me baby one more time!"

Well, it wasn't so bad, he gave the song some credit,
but after only thirty minutes, he started the playlist over.

The same songs, except he didn't sing 'Purple Rain' twice,
what a damn shame, what a damnable shame.

This Friggin' Cat That I Live With

2007-10-20T11:55:00.000-05:00

Yesterday it rained 'til my levee broke,
went to the laundromat and didn't even smoke.

I'm living with a crazy goddamn feline,
it sleeps all day and tries to keep me up all night.

I think it's deranged because it stands guard over a dip in the floor,
and sometimes it gets the urge to do laps at three in the morning or four.

I'll wake up in shock and whisper/shout "Cat!",
and throw my flip-flop, if I was Dr. Dre it would be a ratatatat.

I won't let him sleep so he'll have to wait until later,
when I leave, but watch, tonight he'll spend an hour on top of the radiator.

Like I said he runs laps around my apartment, I've seen the track*,
Tonight I'll put a new obstacle up, it'll be my hand showing him what the five fingers said to the face. Slap!

* He starts in the middle of the room, then runs behind the couch, leaps on top of it from the floor, then under my bed, knocks over a plant, around my bed, sharpens his claws on the foot of the bed and my feet, and back to a crouched position near the dip in the floor.

Today I didn't even have to use an AK...

2007-10-17T15:25:00.000-05:00

I couldn't believe that today was a good day,
Went to Gizzi's and drank a Red Eye.

Walked around today shaven and saved,
went to a thrift shop looked at the sunglasses selection.

Ha ha, the village is in a post-wayfarers slump,
glad I bought mine a year before all of you did.

Went to the park, don't go to the fountain so much anymore,
listened to a free jazz combo, editing my first book.

Saw the police and they almost crashed into each other,
riding bikes and profiling black folks gathering.

The Jazzbeats backing them up, ah,
saxophone man took that smoky note and held it.

The drummer switched it up today,
playing with a brush and a mallet at the same time.

Dropped a dollar, not much,
but everyone is poor in the new millennium.

Went to the hot dog stand on corner of 5th ave and Wash. Sq. North,
places all over the place, eighth street is a treasure chest.

Know what Jack White meant,
can't keep up with hipsters, better to be a country star.

Everything seems so close when you walk

2007-10-16T10:33:00.000-05:00

It's been a while since I've seen that voodoo man,
Also been a while since I went to that Sushi Stand

But the violin boy had accompaniment playing accordion,
I liked it better when it was just him.

White boy funk band with a saxophone in Wash. Sq. Park
C-SPAN on the TV fighting about the war.

I was sitting on the fire escape,
New York has the biggest squirrels I've ever seen.

There was someone picking a Sitar in the park,
When I say picking, I mean it was like a cosmic banjo.

Walked up what was positively fourth street yesterday,
Wore a white jacket, just going to the grocery store.

Direct from Madison Square Garden the poster said,
I'm going there today to buy a bus ticket.

25 hours to get back to Huntsville,
and that's if I'm lucky.

Times Sq. Union Sq. Walking distance,
Just pull a Eustace Conway and walk home.

A Mural Appears, Late

2007-10-14T11:15:00.000-05:00

It's been two or three days since I saw that voodoo man
performing a hex on a sushi stand.

Was sitting in Wash. Sq. Park, guy with a limp going by
A violin boy was providing a soundtrack, not many tipped.

Went to Thompkins Sq. Park where? East Village
Walked there from the West Village, down 3rd, 4th, 10th streets.

When I left Thompkins I saw a Joe Strummer mural,
snapped a picture, now I shuffled and it went to "Lover's Rock"

People in the park always offering you a bag of grass,
it's really oregano most the time, you can find better connections

Really enjoy the Village, Kerouac years spent here,
been to Hemingway years spent here, gotta keep moving.

Walked everywhere since I got off that bus,
except the taxi ride from the bus station. Cost: Ten Dollars

Temp is 57 degrees, that's Farenheit.
Poetry finally coming together to form a picture.

Not stricken with paranoia nor hustle,
just gelling with the city, feeling it out.

Many people with white wires going into their ears, walking around,
not looking around, probably trying to drown out the sirens.

My friend said TV on the Radio sounds like traffic noises,
I don't think so really, but I do hear "city" jazz on the rooftop

I think I just may walk to Penn station when I leave, at end of Oct. '07
William Penn it was named after, naw shit, so was Pennsylvania

Ah, no spell check, just my cold hands, no gloves,
Lost ten pounds since I got here. I was 160, push ups every day.

One day I may write about this period, maybe not,
Only if I'm broke, or inspired, that will be happy.

Cops feel weird hearing rappers say "I run this city!".

2007-10-10T11:16:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I saw a voodoo man
performing a hex on a sushi stand

There's always a woman tells me good morning,
on the stairs. When it's afternoon.

Bought a The New Yorker at a Barnes Ignobles
and every time I look at their magazine selection "I say Blugh."

(The cashiers can sense it too
Weird to be a writer away from your home, you know?)

The man on the street knows what you want
if you want a music magazine, Rolling Stone or Mojo?

He's got Snapple Lemonade and Payday candy bars
My eyes are red and a sniper has me in his sights.

Whatever you say is wrong, whatever I say is right.
Right? Wrong it's a bit of nomenclature. Write!

Telegraph From American University, Overdue

2007-10-08T18:56:00.000-05:00

been on a greyhound bus for 20 hours stop gotta pull up the bootstraps and buckle the fuck down, no mucking about on the near or far shores that can't exist as far as my imagination will conceive.

my imagination has as of right now dried up into a stimpy sized pea, shriveled in the goddamn sun lie grape don't move til you're a raison cane wit booby traps, our traps can't be bothered with punctuation.

I'm late lazy stoned out of all mind and feeling gonna mull around numb as hell gotta catch the fall somewhere i may as well land where i can think softly and carry a big ol fat stick.

I was born a thousand times before i realized what the fuck was going on like what the hell is all this fluid and when it had a name i still didn't recognize and birth said you better recognize fool.

so i did and wished it was a binge on a subway hell a binge on hell and i've had enough fire and brimstone to be bothered with real life better flip that I'll I say I'll get on a case of real life taking durgs

aND YES yall i meant to not stop til when the break of dawn and not write again until the end of the day all day every day yes yes Yall ya don't stop with the body rock b-boys throwin down.

what i meant to say was i will write durgs instead of durgs whenever the mood hits me back and aa holly! that's a holla for the unintended uninitiated smack of dawn crack head leaned back.

eyesroll don't slap the biscuit from the hand that fed you, feed yourself and i'll clap like i'm a supposed to left the let down in a down trodden camp of okies longing for the nature of the hoovervilles.

if this was something else i'd say say goddamn to heavenly goddamn hellerific fantasmically oceanic universitality of the string theory and really i'd prefer the low end theory but when push come shove...

midnight marauder s by a tribe called quest that song steve bilko don't stop with the repeat on/repeat off this will never be put into a form that can be published and i'm fine with that stop.

Excerpt: From A Street Corner Screams God

2007-09-05T19:41:00.000-05:00

This is an excerpt from one of the books I've been a-workin' hard on:

Hell on wheels got nothing on my white ass blowing smoke and steam down god’s own highway and fuck-all cuz I’m a jackrabbit going to avoid the coyotes and scavenger types that imprint their particular brand of type on my forehead and you can take that to the banks of the river Thebes, put it in a newspaper boat and sail it to the ocean and if you’re timeless in your approach then on my lonely -----, I’ll find it and read the headlines.

Shove off letterhead lumberjacks cracking knuckles so loud the forests shake and quake under their own leaves and needles and evergreen going, going gone, and the forest will speak in some ancient language that we can’t understand cuz we’re so shitfaced the swirls spin and their spins spin and the spins of the spins of the spins will whip about in hurricane fashion and I’m left meticulously saving my scruples for a rainy day.

Don’t rain this-a-way no, no, no, don’t you rain this-a-way, Imma sloping my shoulders in a hunchback southern drawl with my thumb out band-aids, warts and all for a last call to make it to awake it and sleep it off son, there exists things that don’t wish to be awakened and you don’t want to be the one to wake ‘em up, so do as I a-say and just sleep off whatever geek minded ideas you’re floating that melon.

Kick that can down the alley cat’s way and hold yourself and brace yourself and don’t be looking outward but downward cuz this is where them dope-heads scatter their needles and aluminum foil boats and fuck ‘em cuz when you switch on the light they scatter too into darker and darker holes and I’ve no time to help and you’ve no time to help and they don’t want no goddamn help, just a buck or five and they can get fucked up off of cough syrup like you did in your grade school daze.

Buy These Shits

2007-08-26T18:24:00.000-05:00

This has been a great week for abstract hip-hop,
New music from M.I.A. and Aesop Rock.

So knock on the windows of the jetset's Hummers,
Or shake up the soil and the earthworm's slumber.

If the river's high then jump off the bridge,
Cut your bazooka teeth on Aesop's new mountain ridge.

And remember bitch, 20 dollars ain't shit to you,
So snap these up, they take plastic on iTunes.

Once Drawn, Now Drowning

2007-08-20T21:47:00.000-05:00

-What are we gonna do with all this earth?
-Give it to the meek.

-Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin

Soft flows the flat leaf floor,
Of riverbeds, long run dry.
Ear to the ground,
Cool, soft sand soothes the worry.

Don’t let the shadow of leafless tree canopies frighten.
Must there be no ground to scatter or cover,
Might there be a might and a will to slip off soft cover.

Not a well, not a hole in the ground.
Let “trip and stumble” float to its destination.
Callous trees blamed by carved hearts and initials.

There once drew water here,
For animals, for none.
The strong current, unforgiving,
So careless to have dove in.

Il Sommo Poeta

2007-08-19T12:12:00.000-05:00

If you haven’t, well should you?
Is there a clamor to be held aloft on shoulders,
Hoisted in the depths of a protected painting,
Protected by time, for once old enough then beyond reproach.
I’d rather not be protected by history.
I’d rather not be protected by anything that will become me.
I’m no entry in a half-assed history book.
No surface disturbing biography,
That enlightens like shadows in footprints on the moon.

A soul wind blows captured shod-song
And personal whispers,
Answered and unanswered prayers alike,
Animals slipping on loose rocks,
The silence of the lover leaving and not looking back,
The waterfall roar shooting barrel-riding thrill-seekers over her edge,
And someone saying “it’s time for you to leave” to someone already gone,
And the whimpers of terrified little ones.
The soul wind blew these all into hurricanes and typhoons.

Il Sommo Poeta casts stepping stones for us to follow into an abyss.
You can’t be as good as him or them,
You followed the stones too.

Ill poet interlude:

Trap me in prestige,
Wrap me in a blanket grown cold from the last who used it.

Whether I asked for it or not is immaterial.

Once I wanted to be a big word.
Then a small word.
Then a period at the end of a sentence
Then a period piece at the end of a period
Then timeless
Then nothing

End Interlude.

She vibrates elegance and obscurity into air where vibrations have been stilled,
But can return the room to an absolute,
Shalom, young angel.

Shalom held on high at the highest point in this natural world.
Shalom held on high at the highest point in the next world.
Shalom held on high at the pointed shoes of the lowest point of Death Valley.
And no wonder that is a place in America close to the far coast.

And hold on to the scratched patches of green,
I will unbutton my shirt to the bottommost button
And I will walk toward the end of [unnamed] street
And I will take no notice of people pondering aloud
About why I’m so indecisive about my body-décor.

When in reality, I hopes I sinks to the bottom of the Marianas Trench,
You’re there to remind me that it has already happened,
And at the whims of the current I am snagged on a cliff
Suspended, weightless as it were, in the dark,
Looking up forever and downward forever,
Wondering if a ship on her Maiden Voyage will come tumbling through the brine,
And if she will be close enough for me to grab of her wreckage.

Birds and Spiders

2007-08-05T18:57:00.000-05:00

Crack me open and fill me with crack.
The ghetto is a broke soft-soled shoe.
And look out for heavy editing.
They say numbers don't lie,
Except when the numbers go against the grain.

I'm going to pad my bra
And I'm going to clap overloudly and overlongly.
And I'll do my damndest to annoy the piss and wine right out of ya.

I will not vote.
Why should I tell those engulfed in flame that they are on fire?
There is no safety in numbers,
There is no power.

We are not la Neustra Senora de Atocha nor la Amistad,
And we are not Mel Fisher nor slaves.

We just lie on our bellies in springs and rivers,
Hoping beyond hope that we don't end up feeding birds and spiders.
So let me scare the hell and wine right out of ya.

Anonymous

2007-08-01T20:08:00.000-05:00

I will not bandy words with philosophers,
They can be the same as false prophets.
I’ve been a philosopher before,
I nearly killed my friend with words.

There are greater ones than those great ones,
But instinctively they all try to be like the other ones.
I have been the other one and the unnamed,
And both are as anonymous as the great.

I once heard, “I was a lover before this war“,
And I will be again.
They’ve given up on Jesus where I’m going,
But still crucify him where I’ve been.

All will have to walk through the fire,
And all will have to be burned.
I can’t say I’ve been burned yet,
But meekly felt the heat off the fire.

Being obscure isn’t a sin,
Neither is being known.
Loyalty is heartfelt and given over and over again,
Disloyalty is showing colors to people you can’t see.

There are no spaces to occupy here,
You either are or you are not.
I’ve been and I have ceased to be,
I’m accepting both as a moral possibility.

Can’t you scream the blues at the empty world,
Or do you have to have someone listening?
When you do something do you imagine someone is watching secretly,
And do you act accordingly?

There’s a person living with a heart big enough for you,
And either you’ll leave them, or they’ll leave you.
It’s a great big city to see and be seen,
You’re leaving tranquility again.

Cell Phone Poem

2007-08-01T10:51:00.001-05:00

Sorry about the long pause between blogs, I've been writing hard on two books and formulating a segueway for a third, I will be in New York soon.

Here's a cell-phone poem I wrote in a bookstore:

I don't want to paint words on canvas anymore.
But rather the underside of trains,
Speeding by in the night.

The Triumph of the Overdog

2007-07-27T11:15:00.000-05:00

Sometimes it seems, this will last forever.
And what if it does?
With murderers posing as angels of mercy,
Superstitions making the unholy holy,
Death on a Tuesday, forgotten on Wednesday,
False friendships forged behind curtained handshakes,
Puppet regimes where black blood flows,
Where the cost of our lives is paid for by others,
And the worth of those lives is determined by bill-collectors,
When no one has a funeral as Hector,
But the bodies are piled where the earth will be charred,
Comparisons and metaphors are used on the good-guys,
And no one knows who the good-guys are,

The song of the few is sung by the many,
And flags are draped on coffins in rows,
Arlington raises her head in sad wonder,
And hell is hot but there is no fire,
Where fire isn’t started, but is said to be burning,
Where twelve honest men would stand on the gallows,
And the jury is composed of one man twelve times,
And liars lie under oath but no guillotine threatens,
And oaths are only for the people who follow them,
But those that don’t will be making the rules,
And being embattled means you don’t look into eyes,

Where the apple isn’t eaten they just chop down the tree,
And the tree is made into paper to quell the blind masses,
And the makers of the paper are elevated to gods,
As religion rots from the inside out,
‘Til even Jesus himself constructs half-truths,
If it’s true that his mouthpieces are who they claim to be,
Then it’s obvious he values a sword over the pen,
So his book must not have even been inspired by him,
But rather a do-gooder who was stoned twice,
And the second time they managed to finish the job,
So the job is now what drives those bloodthirsty,
Those so evil it screams of the devil,
Or at least a demon who wires their speeches,
There’s no angel on anyone’s shoulder but rather a rocket,
And bombs on the brain and fear in those bombs,
Those who aren’t afraid are viewed naïve,
Those who are afraid, they died before they could,
And would go die again if they only had courage,
The sign on the border read: “No Courage Allowed Here”,

So many people eager to be technological, so devoid of soul,
Technology is all relative, relative to losing ourselves somewhere,
We’re are all free-agents, under our own employ,
And the target is you, them, us, we are our own mark,
The only way to stop the killer bees is to kill the whole hive,
And a nest burns so quickly, so let them eat cake,

Your new opium makes you think you’re a part of something,
And that something lines the killer bees’ pockets,
No one was ever meant to be famous,
We should be content to be lost to the sands of time,
Mostly because we all will be lost to time,
And if your name is spoke in a thousand years,
No one will no how it should sound because language will kill it,
No one has any concept of loyalty anymore,
So don’t worry, you won’t be famous for long,

A man’s mind was poisoned against himself,
He was the decider for a short time,
He decided that freedom fighters make for good bogeymen,
Especially when people have forgotten what freedom is,
When it’s okay to bequeath your liberty to sustain your freedom,
I’ve just said things that would get me stoned four years ago,
But now the stoning won’t be in the public square,
Don’t disguise yourself and hide behind your newspaper,
Poison still gets people killed even if the voices don’t say it,
Those voices, unseen, the source a mystery,
But those voices carry so much weight,
You better be brave, everyone turns on everyone in the end,
“And even if I won’t give you up, I’ll give them up”.

I Hate the Mechanisms of War More and More Every Day

2007-07-24T20:36:00.000-05:00

I was working on the apocalypse and then it came,
I forgot the lord’s name.

I couldn’t say anything as the dark skies broke,
When he asks me about that, I’ll blame it on my throat.

I’d rather die in my bed than fight in a war,
Especially the one they want me to die for.

I’ll volunteer for the volunteers, dieing against the clock in time,
To ensure they aren’t later charged with war crimes.

There must be a time to say that enough is enough,
And all the cowboy sneer isn’t going to make the weak tough.

If the Blackhawk helicopters land on our roof at night,
Then others must take up the residence to keep up the fight.

They’ll tell you to die for the freedoms of others,
Tell them to explain that to the children’s fathers and mothers.

I won’t tell anyone anything they don’t want to hear,
And that is exactly the reason we’ve wound up here.

A problem with war is that leaders will cut corners to preserve their salaries,
Open up the newspaper and look at the casualties.

Still, the Branches Lean on the Path to my Creek

2007-07-22T01:45:00.000-05:00

Look at the flowers that bloom this spring.
Down by the creek at my house.
From the earth a symbol of friendship, love, sorrow.
And if only a rose then at least a rose for those,
Those that aren’t here to give anyone a rose.

Hark, at the same time the moon rises.
There you are against the horizon,
It bows to the illuminated wonder of your reluctance.
And not reluctance, but more than we can foresee,
At least until the unforeseeable can be foreseen.

Stilt my legs up, make me tall.
Hush, the creek water flows around my wooden legs.
A small wave of resistance splashes either side of my new leg.
And my real legs stay dry to the bone, and you were holding on,
but I don’t know if you held my old legs or my new legs.

The Prayer

2007-07-18T21:56:00.000-05:00

For Bob Dylan and everyone else who isn't him.

At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea
-T.S. Eliot “The Waste Land”
lines 220-221

*

Break me off a piece of your reality.
Instead of read a name, ring a bell,
Let’s just remember everything we can,
Because the less we write down,
The less there will be to burn
when the burning commences.

There’s so much time and so much to forget
But you cannot fergit
That we will all be scholars of unnamed treasure chests.
And I will not tell you of the catacombs
Filled with pages and images and words and sounds
All the colour-coded swirls that reside in my mind.
And you will not reveal your catacombs
Let’s just pass them on.

I’m a rose in a wax paper storybook
And you’re a tulip.
We’re pressed and preserved and wink at guests turning pages.

Grapes sound good,
Feed them to me.
We’ll drink to them and drink them
Wine at the heart, held to your breast.
Moonlight and the image of you emblazoned against the moon.

I’m breathless, silent, tilted, impressed.
I’m captured, enraptured, jikhan, blessed.

This is only the place we slept
While visions of life appeared
And if nothing that happened really happened
Then I’ll step across the sands
And even still I’ll be stabbed.

Soon enough a self-coup will be paid for with our blood.
And we did it to ourselves, there’s always a chance for redemption.
No ego, no power-madness, no politics, no wanton war.
We did it to ourselves while it was all done to us,
That isn’t to say anyone deserves what’s happened to them
But it isn’t to say that people don’t deserve something.

It’s so easy to be disillusioned.
I know this darling.
It’s so easy to just go along.
I know this darling.
Because I did the same,
Today I can only see
Mountainsides in 2D
And I want to see the other side.

**

I went to sign up for the war,
And I found you’d already signed us up.
I wished you’d have just gone and won it yourself.

Sapere Aude.
Ah, but no one really does.
Let’s just leave the bed unmade.

Couplets, triplets, goblets, leaflets,
All miniaturized forms of
The -isms, -ics.

The romantics.
Can’t it all be that simple?
Just a haiku and war is dead?

Only mentioned the hopeless
Because we all have that in common.
It’s so easy to feel hopeless.

“I feel lost in the face of war.”
“I feel lost and dead and cryptic under its thumb
But I don’t knew if I feel hopeless.” Even if it is.

Let’s not assume oppressed heartbeats,
I want her head on my chest
Thump, thump. thump, thump.

And in the inclinations of the paintings’ eyes
We can spy a hint of sadness
Because those that render, have an eye for the hopeless.

It must be some kind of coincidence.
There has always been that coupled with ecstasy
And unburdened stars.

Everything is being born
Everything is dying.
All that was and wasn’t is born to be and not to be.

I’m sorry. Sorry that we haven’t done better
But eventually every method peaks.
Or else no one will come up with a new one.

Every idea, every last one is built on those previous,
Those often grievous things that preceded.
And the hope lies in the new creator.

I was a trooper and a warrior
Before this firefight.
I kept my weapon polished
Now I run naked through the night.

***

And I suppose, I supposed
That I needed something, but I don’t need anything.
I hope that doesn’t include her
There must be a way, even if there isn’t away.

We were all born on the day we were born
And everyday before that and everyday after that.
Luckily her wise provisions helped us.
And puppies raised by people try to use their paws like hands.

How could someone hear
And in their native tongue
And in their particular dialect
And by a mouth they can trust
While looking into eyes they are found in.
How could you hear and yet…
I wish everyone could be loved.

“She’s beautiful isn’t she?”
-Yes.
“You look like the kind of boy that might understand that.
But you might not understand and until you do, you keep yourself to yourself.”

She said, I hate that things happened backwards from what they should have.
I said, Like the letter s and question marks getting ?witchedS
She said, I don’t want to die.
He said nothing, because he’s never had to say anything for as long as I’ve lived.

I have known fear.

I have known it and kept it at a distant remove.
For if I’m afraid, then who else will be afraid?

But there is no middle ground on which to walk.
You must choose something to be your truth,
But I enjoy God and Bhudda and Jesus and Mohammed being interchangeable.
Well, so we meet again.
Let’s blow smoke to the gods.
And reminisce…

****

C’mon, a violin is creaking out an amelodic melody in an alley,
It calls to me, it’s calling to us, we should stop the small-talk and listen.
I can almost pick out the tune.
It’s on the tip of my tongue.
I guess it’s a harp being punched by hands stained with nicotine.
And not a violin after all.

Let’s ponder white flowers.
Let’s think about vines on trees.
Let’s converse in tongues forgotten by God himself,
And then he’ll hear it and say I remember when…

And the smoke we blew to him and to Zeus
And to Odysseus and Sisyphus and Orpheus,
And the Titans playing chess with Jesus,
And Bhudda, perfecting the art of not breathing,
While no one calls anyone by any name we could imagine.
And then the smoke we sent to their heaven
Will wrap itself around whatever it finds.
Blankets, fire, tall-tales, hurricanes,
And every possibility will rewrite every cause and effect.

But you and I will stand here, or sit, as time unfolds
We will be here.
Trapped in between two Ionian Islands,
Casting nets for fish but coming up with people asking about him.
And there will be hallucinations of armies walking on water.
And there will be everything darkening and shivering.
We will eat what we are fed, but nothing will taste good anymore.
There should be somewhere nearby.
Somewhere to relearn what we unlearned.
I remember you. You remember me.
Yet swords against pens against guns against bombs
And we all fight against the instant destruction.

An atomic bomb makes sense,
As everything becomes faster and faster
And our lives extend with each new discovery,
And as we run out of things to fill those years with…
Well, it makes sense to be destroyed in an instant.
But I feel sorry for all those animals who looked their food in the eyes.

A new smoke is sent to the gods then
By an anonymous pilot, employed by faceless shape-shifters,
Whose strings are pulled by people who have never been naked,
Who chase that hue of green that trees don’t produce.
Which gives meaning to names that don’t mean anything.
And everyone I know can’t imagine the world before it was like this.
If it ever was.

*****

Now here we are, because this is where we went.
The universe is expanding and contracting
And rotating one way and then rotating the other just as furiously.
And everything we are doing has never been done exactly as we are doing it,
Because nothing returns but only speeds toward that,

And you and me and we and us and them and those and all the others not ensconced
Are all twirling and spinning and running and screaming and dreaming and climbing
And falling and skipping and flinging ourselves down flights of escalators going up
While every other possible possibility is acting in its own way complimenting our motion
And working with us and against us to reach the same goal while the tunnel darkens
And as it darkens it lights up and enlightens and everything exists together, apart
And we all rush slowly and quickly toward the end of the enveloping tunnel that only
Can conclude at the only logical conclusion and that conclusion will be called oblivion
And the grace of that oblivion will be with us and within us forever and ever. Amen.

The War.

2007-07-13T22:54:00.001-05:00

I was killed by Athena in the hallway.
There were framed pictures but I,
Stole the wood and made a boat.

Bad news in the alleys,
No more grates spewing steam.
No more Marilyn Monroe.
Not in the littlest sense of sensory perception.

But come on,
I’ve my wits about me,
And I’ve thought about suicide.
Not in the back of my mind,
Up front and center, that’s why I have a headache.

Everyday people think about it like sex.
Everyday people have headaches
That require a medication.
Then less sex, then less sex.
Then more medicine and they stillllllll have a headache.

You can’t figure out the swamp I’m in.
Shoddy lilac bog smoking hand-rolled cigarettes,
The smoke chokes me.
At least it was made by hand,
Not a million miles away by slaves.
I’m sorry. I paid those slave wages.
You too.

Hell if I ever want anything again.
Hunger pains are nirvana.
Nirvana is not worth solidarity
It can be found everywhere
In every place not looking for clammy hands,
And then you’ll find it in your hands at a school dance.

Could have danced with that Christian,
Might have should have.

Impersonal in all personal ads,
I’ll just advertise myself since I’m not enough in person.
How much per line?
I’ll keep it short. Even if my parents said I was priceless,
Personal ads cost money, then I’ll find someone to tell me I’m priceless.
And happiness abounds. Chivalry abides. White flower on my doorstep.

Take me into you
View my mugshot in profile.
Stand by your man.

Explain everything right away.
Everything.
No stone left unturned.
A good soldier never leaves a man behind.
I’ll leave every stone path upside down.
Every stoned path, everybody must get stoned.

Desert, airplane missiles.
I’m not made out for kamikaze kabuki theatre.
I just like the masks
I just like the masks.
Make me whole again,
You’ll be whole again.

And then you’ll be too heavy to walk on water.
So let’s leave time-travel in those woods,
The place where you and I almost died,
Too tired to sleep,
Paisley explosions in the sky of my mind.
I don’t want to listen to the radio in Texas.

I’m stoned. Wasted. Gone. Bloodshot right on the money.
William Tell and the apple.
I’m stoned without ingesting any stones.
I’m always happy to be glad to be experiencing things that only matter to me.
You don’t even have to care.

We is creeps.
Creeping tree lined lanes in places where Mockingbirds are safe.
It’s too scary to even look at the house.
I was scared. Of my imagination.
I was scared by my imagination.

So kill me, keel you.
Shipwright brothers.
First flight of fancy and you stuff the air with apprehension.
Caught in the missiles, I’m riding them to the ground.
Caught up in the explosions, the kids didn’t see it coming.
I was a kid and I watched it. And we will all go to hell.

And every human being should be drawn and quartered,
For crimes against humanity.
But in the U.S. they are protected by a piece of paper they ignore when convenient.
And we ignore transgressions when it’s convenient.
It’s always convenient.
No one should have been born.
We are all going to hell
And area rebirths, spiritual awakenings
Then go back to sleep.

Well it is the most convenient hour to sleep.
Eyes shut, breathing, paisley explosions killing children you’ll never see.

You'll be okay

2007-07-12T12:29:00.000-05:00

Imagine everything you’ve ever felt or done or haven’t felt or haven’t done and then imagine the best you ever felt, as in the limit on how great you’ve ever felt up until this point in your life. Then imagine the worst you ever felt, the bottom of the barrel on how bad you could ever feel ‘til this point in your life. Then imagine all of these things happening at the same time and moment from now until you can’t imagine imagining anything ever again. That could be your life, if you realize that everything is happening in this moment in space and time and you will feel greater and worse than this exponentially for the rest of your natural life. And these moments keep piling up until you feel like you’re sitting on a mountain of the greatest moments of your life, but then you realize that the mountain is your life. It’s everything you’ve done and haven’t done and will do and won’t do, and no matter how tall that mountain gets you will always be in the greatest moment of your life.

Tell Her I Did My Best

2007-07-08T13:27:00.000-05:00

Phases of the moon says you
Makings of a month says I.
Neither an excuse.
You, Obtuse.
Dalliances , and I the dalliancee.

Then flowers wilt at your love.
Then flowers wilt at your toes.
And I resemble the wilted.
Torn pedals and bees skipping over us.
These times, these skies, always the same
Overthrown and your eyes the culprit.

I’ve cried in your arms.

I’m knifed up at last impressions.
Skies in cholo time piercing darkness of the mind
And I’m left unpierced,
Impervious to being a sheath.
I’m left is operative.
Be it whole, slashed, ashen-choked forest fire,
But I am left.

There isn’t enough ocean to drown it.

I’m a whiskey still
And I’m stilled at the quiet of death at night.
In the dead of night.
When quaking last minute ramshackles
Blast and beat their way through the superfluous fog.
And I’m broken enough, at least let me see.
To see where I’ll lay down to sleep,
Where my camp is already made,
Where fire awaits snuggled in the rock ring,
A roaring murder of silence sat stoic in shame.

Cut all your hair off.
Sometimes I miss the one I loved the most.
Sometimes I wish I was a sound from a saxophone,
Born and died in a room full or a room empty,
With lovers dancing or a lover missing.
But sometimes I wish I was a song
Only revived when the singer can move the stone.

What I would wish if I thought it had a chance of coming true.
All those prayers.
Good natured and otherwise.
I’d pray for you if I thought it had a chance
But we aren’t the chance-taking type.
And my hands aren’t going to be folded,
Rather clenched.

What if everything I did was exactly as it should be?
What if everything you did was exactly as it should be?
What would you do if everything was as it should be?
Nothing, but what might you think?
I’d be a thousand miles removed before I believed that,
And I’ll be a thousand miles yet.
Even if nothing is as it should be,
It’s not in the grasp of us to change ourselves.

I’d speak to your mother.
She remembers.
There were always tyrants,
There were always examples.

And I wouldn’t even take the time to piss on my tormentor’s grave.

***

I loved her. Once and again.
Tell her I loved her. More and more.
I didn’t send flowers, I had no means.
I was only asking for a message to be sent.
From the battlefield where I died a thousand times,
Carry back a message:

I’ll compose it everyday, the world my orchestra,
The birds are for your ears and hummingbirds are your favorite.
The sun will be for your blessed skin in cold and unforeseen.
The trees, mountains, clouds are for the unforeseen.
The sand is in between your toes and everywhere you step I’m there.
The wind will kiss you in thunderstorms.
The rain will kiss you in my absence.

I’ve no way home.
My compass and feet will not take me back to her.
I loved her. Once and again.
Tell her I loved her.

How To Have A Good Time

2007-07-06T15:33:00.000-05:00

I’ve got the keeper to your tower here
But he won’t hand over the key deer
They die in droves every year
We do too, get in line, the masters make it clear

We tell children to lose the weight they packed on as a result of neglectful parents who took the easy way out of one of the most important things a parent can do for their children… Feed them. Now one day those children will be the adults and parents, teen mothers and fathers, and they won’t be able to feed their children right because they will be sifting through all the goddamn ash and mess of this era. And an era is not really an era rather than a continuation of phobias and fears and misguided slights of hand passed down from crap shooter to three card monty dealer ‘til an honest living is being dishonest because so many people lie that it’s just easier to assume that everyone lies. And all the while we tell kids to lose their fatty, lose that belly, lose the gut, it’s your fault you’re so fat, not your parents and grandparents who really accepted war, and I mean let it have tangible effects on their sensibilities and hospitalities and goddamn it no one has time to teach manners, so if you waste time holding that door then you lose time you could be ordering all-you-can-eat off the cheapest menu around. And then one day the cheapest menu in town will be the corpses of the dead. And war will have consumed us. And oil will have consumed us. And god will have consumed us.

Enjoy yourself. Because the only thing we knew how to pass down was how to have a good time.

Up

2007-07-06T12:15:00.000-05:00

Bummed out
Not inspired
Not impressed
Not making fun
Not having it
Except in single servings

There’s got to be…

What a love
To admit to
Not loving someone
As much as they do you
If you’re that shook up
Then I’ll have mine stirred

I listen to Aesop
Don’t be laughing
Not when there’s nothing
Nothing to laugh at
And I won’t even
I won’t crack a smile

Nope the past is bad as dope
Then you end up
Sobering up with a bottle
And it’s not even an image
Sober, strung out
Halfway to oblivion
It’s no longer an image
Imminent public domain

Words have to be invented
To have any meaning
Meaning has to be invented
To have any weight

Leonard Cohen
Hallelujah
Make your victory march
Make it into a parade

Finding it hard to right
To write anything
That doesn’t have anything
Anything to do with her
And yet a future
Has nothing to do with her

I have nothing left for her
She has nothing left for me
Running on fumess

Smoke and naturally
The next word is plumes
And a rhyme scheme is born
But that’s rather scheming
And sneaky
Don’t you think

Only you’ll care what you think
Only you.

The Ballad Of Leaving The South

2007-06-28T12:39:00.000-05:00

Oh my eyes they burned without benefit of a flame
And the window which I left from was the one from whence I came
The girl that lay under the covers was through with my name
I wandered to the road in all kinds of shame

Well I slowly made my way back to my house
And my lips were burning from the cigarette in my mouth
I thought long about how we got from then to now
And then I decided that it was time to escape from the south

I packed my bags sparsely and I only took what I needed
I lay in bed awake until the night had receded
I guess it was around seven when I threw back the sheets
I told my parents goodbye and said I’ll see you next time we meet

I didn’t waste any time I headed for the bus stop
When the ticket man asked where I was going I said “Give me what you got”
I had an hour to kill so I looked to see where I would get off
Second thoughts were creeping up so I got ‘em out with a cough

And I was standing in the bus line waiting my turn
When I heard my name called out and it didn’t register coming from her
She said “Honey don’t you know? This bus ain’t going to Tennessee!”
I said “Yes it is!” and she said “Not until you talk to me!”

I was trapped and was holding up the line
So I stepped out and told her to get a ticket like mine
In a minute we were on the bus holdin hands like old times
She spoke first said I won’t lose you ‘til I’m ninety-nine

It was then that I woke up in the bus station once again
She was nowhere to be seen and I missed the bus by ten
At first I was gonna go buy the next ticket from them
But my wallet was gone it was snatched out like a hem

I didn’t know what to do, I walked back to my house
I knocked on the door no expression on my face
Said I should’ve known by now
That there’s no leaving the south

Questions In Time With The Music

2007-06-27T16:00:00.000-05:00

I’m through with every goddamn thing not worth continuing.

That’s the end in a way,
But an optimist would say “a beginning”
In spite of the ‘goddamn‘.

Well goddamn man anyway.
That was his plan that didn’t make it.

But both are so short,
The beginning and the end,
They’re so short in time
That I’ve forgone the journey.

The journey on down the crippled old Nile.

That’s a line from a song I wrote.
I’m 1/3 of a plagiarist,
Elvis still has that market cornered
So I can play second, third, fourth, fifth fiddle,
All the way to the end of Stradivarius’ being called fiddles.

But that’s enough about me
I want to tell you about goddamn Sam.
The firefly whose bulb was too bright,
So he stayed a kid…
There wasn’t a man amongst us.

Least of all Sam,
But he seemed like one.
So that was close enough for us.

I broke my leg when I was 5.
It didn’t heal right so I walked funny.

I say walked because before long everyone wanted to walk like me.

Dirty wheels.
Messed up girls.
Rusted scraps that we can’t chew
Because it’s made of metal. And rusted.
In the rain, the acid rain, the rain, the acid rain, the rain.

Our paths became so intertwined,
We beat the same two-trail into the dust.
And it blew away in the wind. All that wasted dust.

I wanted to destroy everything,
So that I might see the salvagers come out.
And watch them scurry(?), no, they aren’t rats.

I wanted to see something built from nothing,
A nothing that was a rupture from everything.

A tight rope made out of bicycle chains.

A GODDAMN CIRCUS?!?!

This is what the salvagers do?

Goddamn them for not being as romantic as I’d hoped.
No one ever is.
Especially not the romantics.

What happened to romanticism?
It’s floating down the Nile you called crippled.

Would Homer have spoke so well if he wasn’t blind?
The answer would put you in tears.

Was Aesop a real man who lived according to the dictates of his fables?
No one is a real man. They never were.

Are we real?
We aren’t real, we think we are, we think that makes us real. But we aren’t real.

I think, therefore I am?
You think that and you aren’t even thinking. Lazy.

But if we aren’t real, what’s the point?
Well, I’m the only one telling you that you aren’t real.

But why isn’t there an answer?
There never has been, the more we know, spelled with a capitol N, the less we kNow.

But you aren’t making any sense.
I’m not made of cents.

There isn’t a tree you want to sit under?
I want to sit under every tree.

You’ll die one day.
Yes I will.

I'm All Lost...

2007-06-26T09:47:00.000-05:00

This morning I listened to a Clash song
It was "Lost In The Supermarket"
From London Calling

And when I listened to it
I thought of Saturday Morning Cartoons
This made me happy and nostalgic at the same time

Then I kissed someone I love,
Then I just felt happy

I Left Out What You Wanted (But That's Not All)

2007-06-24T19:24:00.000-05:00

I punched the keys on a typewriter
Then your name spewed across the page.
The one I was writing my manifesto on,
And at first I was going to start over.

But with only a sentence to go,
I finished it.
And the last line read longer than I intended it to.

It went like a
1
2
1
2
3
4

My ghosts are closing doors
And shutters on the wind
The gusts of the gale
Made it harder than they expected

I guess even ghosts have trouble concentrating
Procrastinating, those ghosts
And I’m sitting here sweating and smoking
Feverishly and methodically not getting a thing done

(Not getting a thing done)

Last thing I knew
Last time I checked
You were on your way to hell
I’m guarding your pumpkin carriage
But that’s not all

(I’m taking up the reins
But that’s not all)

The blues are porous
Everyone’s got ‘em
I’m getting bored
In the spring and the autumn
I’m your leaves changing colours
But that’s not all

(I’m the sun shining different shades
But that’s not all)

Your window was up
I thought I’d climb in
But if I had known
What I was getting in
I might have just went to the front door
But that’s not all

(I might have just burned my house down
But that’s not all)

And this is where
I say your name
You know want to hear it
I know nothing’s changed
But my closed lips are in the way
But that’s not all

(Sometimes you leave me speechless
But that’s not all)

James Joyce

2007-06-20T11:14:00.000-05:00

A keen October wind was blowin’ round the bank
The drunkards stood waiting around the drunkard’s tank
And people spoke in whispers of the casket in the square
The stone-faced pall-bearers in two lines to lead the fair

And James Joyce is crying old Irish tears
In the corner of a pub, forgotten against the years
And Hemingway leans himself against the bar
He nods at the barkeep who pours him one more

Hell is spraying preachers who warn a coming storm
They sermonize all fears and shoot craps in the morn
But poker is a game for the honest man to play
Though he loses every hand that folds up to pray

he asked for a requiem

2007-06-15T20:03:00.001-05:00

What did you expect…. In time everything becomes timeless
Once I knew that we would all look at this and say “Once it was like that”

And then I guess everything will seem incomparable
Nothing will add up, measure up, and the more we cut up…
Bloody noses…
And then the paranoia…

It’s always a tickle
Under the skin,
Goddamn I,
(scratch a broken record)

Hell must have it out for you to put so much in your way.,.,.,
::”””KK

Shelter from the storm and then storm is shelter.
Music better be long enough to be my ringtone.
I want a symphony in my pocket but it must fit.

What?

Class be damned!!! This isn’t class warfare, sorry to the poor
I was talking about respectability,
Do you have it in you to stand in front of a microphone
That’s
In front of a camera
That’s
In front of the world going by god,
Do you think you can do that and pretend to know what’s going on?

It must take some kind of suit and tie
To stand up and say “I KNOW WHAT’S GOOD FOR YOU”

I’m glad someone does, I was beginning to think no one did,
I suppose I could eat everything that is in eyesight.
Ah that’s cathartic.
I can destroy everything in front of me with a -------

And a -------- is all I need.
Ah that’s cathartic.

I’m the new Scarlett, shit, I’m the new Rhett Butler.
Now you excuse me cause I don’t give a damn, never did.
Ah that’s cathartic.

Can you do me a favor and act like the second coming isn’t coming?
Why?
Well it isn’t. is it?

LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLazarus, f*** you. He said it not me.

What the?>>> Where did the word go?

It’s called censorship Mr. Welles.

Give me a war, I need to feel good,
You do too?
I thought it was just a million people on P(oison)rozac.
Well let’s get it over now that we’re losing.

One thing about war,
It makes young people feel old.
Two things about war,
It makes young people old.
They aren’t young during it and then if it lasts long enough, [their] [there] they’re old.

We belong to someone else’s pocket.
That pocket what a sieve.
What a shore leave.
What a way to go.

HE ASKED FOR A REQUIEM

Even though I was young then, I had hoped to get back to who I was before I became who I am. The ashes of smoked cigarettes that once seemed a sign of being mature, now were a signpost to something I thought that I had lost. If I could have been satisfied where I was then, then I might be satisfied where I am now.

I suppose that this life, one of comfort and ease was not meant for me, but I stood at the crossroads of a paradox because I knew that I wasn’t cut out for the pain and hardship others had suffered before me. I had read books, I had heard songs, ones that spoke to me in a language that I understood but couldn’t speak myself. I’ve heard people speak and not just heard the words but heard the colors they spoke, I saw the hurt on their breath when a sad story was told and experienced the change in the air once happy stories were recanted. Stories of heartbreak, passion, friendship, stories of sleeping beside a river, of the open road and drunken beauty. I could see the road before me, I knew that I would never be intimidated, sometimes scared but never afraid, if I held on then my circle would come back around, I understood then that looking back was not an option, I knew that pushing forward blindly was not an option either.

I had found the balance.
I counted myself lucky that I was myself.

The Hold Up: A Border Saga The End

2007-06-14T19:02:00.000-05:00

Mason found himself at the most conspicuous border crossing in New Mexico, but no one was there. He was in a valley asking about hills but no hills coupled there was only one and he had to make the crest. He waited a flatbed truck out and then drove to the top of the hill. At the top he got out his binoculars and a high-powered rifle.

Scanning the desert in all its heat distortions and sunlit reverie, Mason drug the tramp Mexican through the mud in his mind. He painted pictures in the dirt for about an hour dusting off the desert every five minutes with his binoculars.

At one hour and thirty minutes and a stick broken into seven pieces a he spied a man hurting. He focused the binoculars. A sound clipping the air to pieces at every turn was showering itself behind him, a helicopter. Vehicles must be near and they were, the off-road aspect of them was in high pursuit. Mason felt a gripping sense of duty and he made the rifle an extension of himself… the song “Ghost Riders in the Sky”… Dick Dale… surf guitar… there was no time… there was no time…

***

In Gomez’s mind an invisible entity that marked the difference between two pieces of land on the same landmass was freedom and he was leaving the supposed beacon of freedom to be where his freedom was. Everything was nearly over and he knew the nearing loud noises were just a façade that would disappear in the courts.

He didn’t even hear the crack of the gun, he just felt something and then he felt nothing.

***

Head shot.

Something to be proud enough of to never talk about again.

Mason remembered getting in the truck and leaving, there was no way to avoid the trucks and the helicopter probably saw him putting his gun up. He had enough to time to drive ninety while they tried to figure out what had happened.

No fear, no regret.

The Hold Up: A Border Saga Part XI

2007-06-08T23:53:00.000-05:00

Gomez waltzed.

Death halts. It halts before your dying form, it watches and takes in the last moments and those looks on your face when you realize that the end is the end and it’s near. When you’re sick it waits in the far corners of your room, if you die instantaneously it watches, inches and half-inches away from your eyes and it witnesses the pupils contract as unseen light fills them and it sees through your eyelids as they widen and then nothing. And if you’re unlucky enough not to die then it will just hang in the air, with its presence acclimating to where you’re going. Then when you die, you can be just as shocked as death and you’ll both turn white as the margins of your eyes. That’s only if you’re unlucky enough not to die.

For Gomez death would wait until dehydration made his cramping steps falter and walk backwards three feet in front of him. Then Gomez would crawl and death would walk backwards two feet in front of him. Then Gomez would stop moving except out of the need to not resign to his fate, and death would wait a foot from him. And Gomez’s final breath would be sucked in and stolen by death hovering inches from him.

But Gomez was miles from death and death had miles to go and many other promises to keep. And Robert Frost dies every time his poetry is consumed, but death waits not, watches less and never wants to witness that again, but the reason death remains so callous to its job? It has to watch the poets die. Over and over again.

***

Mason labored over shifting gears setting out for the stretch of invisibility that separates us from them. He kept a weather eye out for a haggard stretch looming in infinitesimal sadness that contained his sloth and his other sins. He kept his eyes on every new horizon in 270 degrees and a mirror on the rest.

Every sense was focused on that Mexican. He had fifteen minutes ‘til he hit the border at its closest point to Holden, no doubt a cavalry awaited armed to the teeth. And if he could match that man’s steps and ultimately overtake him. Then a weighted chest would be unburdened.

Could he buy his health at the cost of shells?

But lo, in the distance a growling limp with blood and sweat cursing at itself and all the sand around it was beating a path south.

Now for the hills.

The Hold Up: A Border Saga Part X

2007-06-07T09:45:00.000-05:00

Gomez hobbled in a hollow reverie for survival. He scurried as a rat and made his movements in the face of the sun beating down a world swathed in light. Gomez had five or six miles to go and no highway or river to follow.

There would be no Huck Finn to his escape. He was battle-battered and felt it, the cruel blow of the pistol still christened its likeness in his muscle memory. Gomez’s eyes searched as far as he could see, no sign of anything. The heat waves certainly made distance a game of catch and release, just as Gomez thought he had arrived somewhere another plateau set the bar higher.

He had been coming and going for nearly three hours when a homestead made its presence discernable in the masks of heat. Gomez trickled toward it, alone in the world in this corner with nothing to back against. This home seemed like a freedom that the invisible line at his country and this country couldn’t muster between them.

Gomez hid himself from any prying eyes that might be lurking in the unseen areas of this oasis. He bandied an arc to the watering trough of the livestock and plunged his head in. Immediately the world above disappeared, the sounds, the sights, the weather, his cuts burnt and cleansed in the abyss, the top of his matted head soothed by the coolness of the water, he drank and his stomach filled, his throat blew out the flame, he dipped his rough hands and rubbed his face clear of any dried blood. Then he broke the surface.

Water streamed down his front and back and sides, its cooling grace taking the oppressive heat everywhere but here. He cupped his hands and drank again, he brushed his hair back, he looked around for people, helicopters and the sun. When he cleared the sky of the first two then he made his direction and set off.

***

In a farm home a woman saw a bloodied Mexican dump himself into her horses’ water trough and look around wildly. She watched him and when she saw him walking away she grabbed the phone and dialed three numbers.

***

Gomez felt the water get heavier with each new step. He was two miles from the border and all the freedom that came with it.

He depended on how fast he could keep his feet shuffling ahead of everyone and everything that was after him. He knew that with each step he made they made two. The race was only midway through and already both sides were losing.

The Hold Up: A Border Saga Part IX

2007-06-05T09:53:00.001-05:00

Gomez’s mind wandered to the knives in his boots.

Why hadn’t he remembered them in the basement? God damn it. He pulled his right pants leg as high as he could. Well here it goes.

Gomez grabbed the table under the edge and flipped it short-ways. Every paper flew through the air and the heavy desk landed on the priest’s feet just below the ankle. He threw his head up and Gomez punched him as hard as he could muster in the throat. He ducked and brought up the long knife. He jumped over the desk, as he and the priest fell downward he maneuvered his elbow over the priest’s wrist. When they landed he kept the pressure on the wrist and the knife sailed on the drifts and drafts in the room.

Father Thompson watched the knife coming. His life didn’t flash before his eyes. That never happens. What he was pondering was how could he possibly survive this situation?

***

A puppy wandered around the back of the church looking for some food. His pathetic form making headway despite the heat, despite no puddles to drink from, despite…

Gomez flung open the door and his pupils shrunk faster than the scared puppy who fled the scene. He heard the cuts and forming bruises screaming obscenities at his senses. He took off in a southwesterly direction if the sun was to be trusted at half past noon.

***

The market was always closed on Saturday, there was no patrol tonight. Mason sat in his home watching The Deer Hunter, he had the police scanner on in the kitchen. His wife was making some kind of Italian salad.

“Honey?” She called out.

“Yes?”

“I think they just called an ambulance for Father Thompson. You should come here and listen to this.”

There was something in her voice that kept him from groaning as he left his seat. The movie still playing as he entered the kitchen. The scanner crackled an ominous sentence.

“Calling all officers, murder suspect fled the church. Mexican, no word yet on build or any identifying features. Expected to be bloody and tired. Proceed with caution, suspect considered armed and dangerous.”

Oh my god. Oh my god.

Mason’s wife looked at him, he looked at her but not as reassuringly as he’d hoped.

“I’ll be back. I’m going to go to the church. Get the shotgun, if anyone shows up you make sure you know who it is before you open the door.”

She nodded. Mason walked out the door with a pistol and the truck keys. After he shut the door she ran to it and opened it.

“I love you!”

He looked at her from the truck. “I love you too.”

The Hold Up: A Border Saga Part VIII

2007-06-01T14:19:00.000-05:00

Gomez heard the door open through his teeth. He flicked off the flashlight and held it like a club. In the temporary sunlight he hid behind a crate full of 1 lb. sealed bags of white powder. Two crates of cocaine, another crate of heroin.

Gomez did not dare to look outward at the unwelcome visitor with his purging sunlight. The shadow cast was lifted off the soil of the earthen floor when the form made headway down the steps leaving only the visage on the far wall and legs on the crates. He knew the arms would reach out for the flashlight and tentacles swabbed the columns seeming to hold the church above from coming down. I say seeming because they were wooden with three sprouts at the top and held in place by concrete ‘neath the addled dirt.

***

Father Thompson had no way to go but down and a narrow down it would be. The flashlight was missing, presumably still in the hands of the trespasser.

He began to speak aloud, enunciated to Homeresque proportions.

Our father which art in heaven. he took the first two steps.

Hallowed be thy name. more steps.

Thy Kingdom Come! His cadence rising in a sun-flare.

Thy will be done in earth. And his masked feet clapped the earth.

As it is in heaven. He walked to the heroin.

Give us this day our daily bread. A finger put into the top package with its slight cut, he tipped the finger to his tongue.

***

Gomez waned in bravado at the offering of the lord’s prayer, he crouched in form and demeanor at the proximity of which the robed man stood.

“And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” a sound of melancholy Macbeth in the man’s metronome ticking splashily against the sound of Gomez’s own hammering heart.

“And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” the man’s footsteps had demured against his voice, a most potent voice.

“For thine is the kingdom. . . And the power. . . And the glory. . . For ever. . . Amen. He pronounced it ‘Ay-men’ Gomez considered this for but a moment, as the berobed figure pounced from the side of the crate at the shocked Gomez.

***

A scrap of meat is not so fiercely fought for between savage, hungry dogs.

Father Thompson tried to pistol whip his unknown invader so as to not have to alert anyone with a gunshot, Gomez swung the flashlight and connected with the attacker on his left eyebrow. A grunt but not a whimper.

Father Thompson brought the butt of the gun down on the man’s head but he ducked and the priest tore a hole in the packages of Cocaine and the fine dust floated in the air, the men unwittingly breathed it in.

Gomez slithered out from under the man and slammed his head into what looked like the hardest part of the crate. All that happened was more powder escaping into the air like a fierce asbestos. Gomez furthered this by punching the man’s ear and into the crate for a second blow.

Father Thompson crashed his formidable elbow into the man’s chest and delivered a second blow into his chin and neck. The man gasped and faltered for a second. It was long enough, Father Thompson reached for his gun in the dirt, somehow it had flown from his hands. At an inch from it, he was able to tap it with his finger when the man began punching him ferociously in the back of the head.

Gomez had the man in a headlock and hammered his large knuckles into the soft spot of his victim’s head.

These men were soundless ‘cepting a grunt of pain every four or five seconds.

Father Thompson reached again and he had the gun by the barrel, he was seeing spots, he felt as though he were about to pass out. He leaned his own head forward and then swung the gun backward into the assailant’s face, he heard the nose bone splinter and felt the man’s grip loosen.

A gush of blood escaped from Gomez’s face, he yelped, spewing more blood. The gun came back again and smashed into his forehead. Gomez unwillingly fell forward on the man’s back, spots of cocaine had gathered in the blood that was now bubbling with Gomez’s wheezes out his nose. Gomez put his shoulder into the back of the man’s head and pushed him into the dirt. His head dipped and bobbed aimlessly.

Father Thompson knew he had weakened the man but when your mouth is full of dirt and your face is threatening to make a fossil record, every victory doesn’t seem as fruitful. He was frantically trying to elbow the man’s ribs. When he felt the man’s head dip sideways into the crate he pushed upward with his body and the man slammed into the crate releasing more dust into the air. Father Thompson pushed again and felt the man’s chin digging into his spine. He jumped outward, spun around and tried to knee the man in the stomach, this didn’t do as much as he hoped.

Gomez reached into the dirt and threw it into the priest’s face. The priest tilted backward, then without warning the crate gave and toppled its contents on the floor and on them.

Father Thompson finally broke the sound barrier when a package hit him in the groin. He blindly felt around for his gun under the strewn packages. Instead he found the bloody man and they grew to their most animalistic. They kicked and punched, they bit, pulled hair, threw elbows as readily as knees, all the while rolling and ripping the cocaine bed.

Gomez put his hand down the priest’s throat and the man bit but went backwards. They punched each other trading wildly. Then the priest, in a adrenaline/cocaine fueled fury bit through Gomez‘s hand to the bone. Gomez lolled backward. He howled. After two seconds he was looking through the barrel of the gun. His wild red eyes had given up.

Breathing hard, they looked each other in the eyes.

***

Gomez went first out of the doors, the gun in his back. He checked to make sure no one was back there. When they cracked the door to the church the air-conditioning shocked them to the bone, the two bloodied men looked at every shut door and limped to the priest’s office as quickly and quietly as they could.

Father Thompson shut and lock the door all the while keeping the gun leveled at the bloody man. He sat Gomez down in the chair across from his desk and looked out the window. Then he turned around and picked up the phone. He dialed the sheriff.

“Robert?” He wheezed, then he snapped. “Put Robert on. (A pause). Robert, this is Father Thompson, just listen. I need you to get down to the church, bring a gun. I just caught a Mexican breaking into the church, he tried to kill me. No, no one else is here. Hurry.”

He hung up the phone, then he smiled a bloody, toothy smile.

“Now we wait.”

The Hold Up: A Border Saga Part VII

2007-05-29T13:51:00.000-05:00

Over the next week Gomez worked harder than Mason had anticipated. He took a load off of the aging man’s knees and allowed Mason to spend less time worrying about how fast the apples got off the truck and were replaced in the bins. He felt guilty going on the patrols with the other guys but he was able to stay alert longer as he was getting better sleep. He felt that as long as one illegal was helping to stop many illegals then it might be okay to keep Gomez around longer than he had originally wanted.

Besides, Gomez was very religious with going to the Catholic Church several times during the week, sometimes more than once a day. He was courteous to anyone who spoke to him and he knew enough about the food they were selling to help anyone that needed the help. Mason felt that Gomez was worth the seven an hour but he wished he would have started lower.

***

Gomez sat in the front pew facing the crucifix. He was watching the woman to his left out of the sides of his eyes casting long looks at her. She seemed not to notice for her head was bowed in prayer. After a minute or two she looked up and saw Gomez watching her. She quickly gathered her things and loped out the door.

Gomez silently looked around. No one. He rose and walked to the door on the right, he checked down the hall both ways, again no one. He noiselessly lumbered down the hall and checked inside each door. He couldn’t find what he was looking for.

Then on the other end of the hall he heard the door open, sunlight as bright as an angel flooded the hall and Gomez slipped into the room he had open and he hid behind a stack of bibles. There were so many bibles in this room, they were still in the plastic except for one column that was about halfway depleted.

Gomez scanned the room. What he was looking for wasn’t in here either.

***

Father Thompson stood in the doorway a moment, he tried to let his eyes adjust to the darker hallway but he compulsively looked back at the area behind the church to see if anyone was watching him. He didn’t see anyone so he walked into the building.

He walked down the hall to his office past where Gomez was hiding. When he got there he shut the door, a bit harder than he’d intended but he had a phone call to make. He pulled the blinds apart and checked the yard, then he sat down and began to dial that old familiar number.

***

When Gomez heard the door slam, he rose and walked to the hall. Staying close to the wall he mangled a walking motion to the door at the end.

Outside was brighter than he expected. After his eyes adjusted he spied what he thought he was looking for. Two wooden doors leading underground. They were locked. He kneeled and with his knife that Mr. Mason gave back to him he picked the lock. He swung open one of the doors and went down the steps, five steps down he turned and shut the door. It was too dark to make anything out so he turned and cracked the door enough to see, there was a flashlight hanging from a nail, he grabbed it and shut the door again. At the bottom of the steps he swept the flashlight from right to left and then he saw exactly what he was looking for.

***

Father Thompson left his office, he leaned against his shut door.

Son of a bitch.

He prayed to himself. Father let this end, let them come, I need this.

He walked to the door leading outside, he wanted to check on the basement again. Soon enough this would all be over. If Maxell will send the trucks, it will all be over.

He shielded his eyes against the sun. His heart stopped and started when he saw the lock on the ground, he picked it up. Scratches. Father Thompson rushed back to his office, he unlocked his desk and removed a loaded glock. He had been through too much already to take this chance.

When outside he grabbed the door handle. He breathed slowly through his nose and opened the door.

The Hold Up: A Border Saga Part VI

2007-05-27T13:19:00.000-05:00

Gomez looked straight ahead, he focused on not shaking.

The man held steady and he was focusing on not shaking.

“What’s your name?”

Gomez looked at him quizzically. He wanted to take the things out of his pocket and just leave. His scratches started to itch with no quarter. He noticed how quiet it got.

They looked at each other in the quiet until the A/C unit kicked on, two seconds later the man’s wife peaked into the door. She wasn’t surprised so much as scared for her husband.

“What’s your name?” the man asked again and again he was met with silence.

“Que . . esta . . . nombre?” the man’s wife asked in broken Spanish.

Gomez looked at her and quietly he creaked out “Gomez”.

The husband looked at her quickly and keeping an eye on the Mexican. “Ask him what he wants.”

“I don’t know how to say that. He probably just wants food or somewhere to work.”

The man motioned to the Mexican’s pocket, “What you got in there?”

Gomez nodded toward his pocket and looked at the man, he nodded, Gomez slowly reached to his left pocket with one hand and pulled out to potato, he dropped it on the floor, then he got out the Piñon nuts from one pocket and then the other. They scattered on the floor like shells from a gun.

“See, he just wanted something to eat.” the woman said.

The man looked at Gomez and saw his shirt was tucked in, “Lift up your pants’ legs.” he said. Then he did that and motioned for Gomez to the same.

“Mason. . .” The woman began to step forward, but he motioned for her to stay where she was.

Gomez reservedly bent down and lifted his right leg, he removed a long knife and tossed it on the floor, then he lifted his left leg and tossed another knife on the floor, it was shorter than the other and had an odd bottle opener cut into the blade.

Mason lowered the gun and he stepped forward to kick the knives away, he motioned for Gomez to come with him. As they walked to the back office he spoke to his wife, “Honey, can you pick that stuff up? Just wash it and. . . Put it in a bag.” She nodded.

Mason sat down and motioned for Gomez to do the same, the seats were comfortable, especially to Gomez who had been walking for nearly three hours.

“Thirsty?” Mason asked. He walked over to the mini-fridge and removed a bottle of water. Gomez drank a long greedy, needy gulp and then wiped his mouth, “Thank you.”

“So you speak English?”

Gomez nodded and said, “Little” he squished his fingers together to drive home the point.

Mason got out a piece of paper and a pen. “I want you to write your name and where you’re from.” He made motions as he told Gomez to do this. “Do you want to work?” Gomez nodded. “If you’ll start today, I’ll give you food, a place to stay and seven bucks an hour. Does that sound fair?”

Gomez was following everything the man said, one thing he had learned as a child was to never reveal everything you know at once. He perked up at ‘seven bucks’ and he acted a little confused, when the man stopped talking he smiled and nodded, “Yes, Señor.”

They smiled at each other, Mason because he knew he would turn this man over to the authorities and Gomez because he knew that he now had a foot in the door of this town. They shook hands. Both with firm grips. The handshake lasted a little longer than either had anticipated.

The Hold Up: A Border Saga Part V

2007-05-25T14:55:00.000-05:00

The morning cracked slowly over Holden. There were no people mulling over the farmer’s market and no one minding it. A dusty, tired man was creaking his bones in a slow walking motion that was supposed to take him to this town but he didn’t know that yet. When he came to the abandoned farmer’s market he did a quick look up and down the street, he tried picking the lock with no luck.

He walked around the building and found a concrete block, he carried it back to the locked door. He hoisted the block above his head with both hands and swung down. The lock scratched but didn’t break, he repeatedly hit the lock until it broke, about seven swings. He tossed the block aside and opened the door.

When he walked in the market he was happily surprised to find it air-conditioned. Many markets just killed the air at night and hoped that the desert air would keep the place cold enough to keep the fruits and vegetables from dry-rotting. He breathed deep and took in all of the intoxicating scents that intermingled ’til they all conglomerated into one long memory. There are few things that will put your mind in a tilt-a-whirl like the scents of the past.

He walked toward the Piñon nuts and ate a handful, then he stuffed a couple of handfuls into his pockets, he walked toward the red potatoes and grabbed a red apple on the way, he stuffed a potato into his left pocket.

***

A dusty pickup truck rolled toward the farmer’s market.

Behind the wheel sat a clean-shaven man in his mid-fifties, in the passenger seat sat his wife, her silver hair pulled back into a pony-tail, you could tell she had been beautiful in her youth.

She looked over at her husband and smiled exactly how you’d imagine her to smile. Knowingly, lovingly, the most trusting eyes that crinkled around the ends. They’d been through everything you’d never know.

The truck bustled into its usual spot and they both got out of the truck, he saw the busted lock first.

“Get back in the truck.” he said. She obeyed.

He grabbed a shotgun from under the truck seat and walked back to the door. She watched the precarious situation. Then he disappeared into the door.

***

“Stop right there.” the man said loudly in no uncertain terms as he cocked the gun. Gomez dropped the homemade salsa from his hands. It shattered and salsa splashed onto his shoes and jeans.

The potato in his pocket suddenly became heavier than god. He turned slowly and in the curious darkness he was staring a ten-gauge shotgun down the barrel. There was no god here.

“Put your damn hands up.”

The Hold Up: A Border Saga Part IV

2007-05-23T21:17:00.000-05:00

Gomez was a statue. His feet in concrete.

Twenty feet away a child was crying, its mother doing her level best to console it, a man answering questions in Spanish was speaking in a homely accent. It may have been put on, but Gomez was so nervous that he didn’t pay attention to the inflection in the man’s voice.

Two minutes ago he was dead sure that he was about to be found, now he was silently thanking the Virgin Mary, Jesus and God in that order. The headlights still stared straight ahead, unblinking and unfeeling, but the spotlights were showing the humanity behind them by bathing the trio of Mexicans and the duo of Agents. Gomez was sweating but he was coasting down from an adrenaline rush.

***

Mason called to the young man, “What ya got?”

“One man, one woman and a child.” he answered.

Shit. Mason thought. “Anything on them?”

“I don’t know yet.”

Shit.

When the agents and the men had hustled the immigrants up the hill they sat them down with blankets and water, then they called it in.

“HQ, we have three, repeat, three, one man, one woman, and one child, repeat, one man, one woman, and one child. Over.”

The radio crackled back. “Copy, number sixteen. Bring them in. Over.”

“Copy that, over.”

Mason and the other men watched the illegals carefully. There were no drugs found on their person, no reason to believe they were trying to do anything except restart their lives. Yet, on the border, everyone is suspect. There are no limits to the desperation of someone trying to provide for their family. For all the Minute Men knew, these people had thirty condoms full of cocaine in this kid’s stomach and were just posing as a family.

The border agents opened up the back of their truck and put the family in. “Thanks Mr. Mason, we’ll process these people and they’ll be back in Mexico by Thursday at least.”

“Just doing our part.” Mason replied, “Y’all take care.”

The agents nodded at the Minute Men and got into the truck.

“Well, let’s call that a night.” Mason said to everyone. It was about 4:00 in the morning. All night and the haul was three people, one man, one woman, and a crying child. Everyone measures success differently and by the usual scale this was a hell of a night.

Goodnights and goodbyes were passed around. Then everyone got into their trucks and Broncos and SUVs, all the engines started in a vague concurrence and all the headlights flickered in the same manner. The night’s silence was polluted by the roar of the convey going home.

***

Gomez stayed where he was until the last wind carried off the last motor. Then he checked the hill as his eyes had adjusted to the light. He kneeled, stood up warily and he was off. There was work to do.

The Hold Up: A Border Saga Part III

2007-05-21T10:52:00.000-05:00

Gomez started as several pairs of headlights came on but quickly returned to his taciturn rapport with the natural camouflage around him. There were no anchors to his nervousness but to move would’ve taken a fire. He was deathly still as the spotlights played their game of tag amidst the headlights stoicism. He matched the headlights and held steady, if anything could have gotten him to move it wouldn’t have been the itch developing in his eyes and down his sides and back.

Gomez gave no movement to the sound of a diesel engine working up the hill then halting. The voices weren’t carrying right now, so all Gomez could hear in the straining stillness was a man guffawing.

He lay in that position another fifteen minutes before he looked in the direction of where the voices came from, three flashlights and a spotlight moved down into the flatland, he instinctively jerked his eyes away from them. It was a remnant of his childhood, kid’s logic: “if I can’t see them, then they can’t see me”. There was no time to waste and not much that could be done in that moment. Gomez slightly checked his feet to see if they were covered but tattered New Balances jutted out in muted tones. He was moving quickly to get them under some moss or something that would keep them well hidden from the prying flashlights of the American’s.

He slipped and kicked a bush, it shook slightly.

***

The four men made their way to the end of the hill.

“Alright, Mr. Mason, you and Mr. Ben wait here with the spotlight.” the younger border agent said this with a little apprehension. He hadn’t been on a call with the Minute Men before and wasn’t sure if they were as hands-on as the news reports were saying.

Mason stopped and looked at Ben, he turned his eyes to the young man who was eyeing them despite the headlights and spotlights. Mason nodded.

The young man walked into the flatland and had to navigate his way around the scrub brushes. After several minutes he got to the well lighted area where the person or people were supposed to be. He looked around, squatted, got up, walked around the area in ten foot circles with his partner.

***

The Minute Men looked on from the top of the hill unwaveringly albeit nervously and hoped that the illegals hadn’t given the slip. It seemed impossible considering how lit up the place was.

After two circles one of the border agents gave a call to the other and he ducked down into what looked like a hole, they both scuttled about without too much struggle. The Minute Men gave a whoop and high-fived each other.

At the bottom of the hill Mason and Ben looked on eagerly and got ready to make a run to help the border agents if the drug smugglers tried to put up any struggle. Mason fingered his 9mm pistol.

At the top of the hill one of the Minute Men removed his .308 with a scope and lay down in the dirt like he had been trained to do so many years ago. He leveled his scope on the agents. They were moving quickly but not so that he couldn’t keep his sights.

He aimed at their hands until they hoisted a man up off of his knees.

The Hold Up: A Border Saga Part II

2007-05-18T15:41:00.000-05:00

Gomez was mostly running. He watched for holes and for lights, if there were any floodlights sweeping the low area he was crossing then he would have to duck fast and hide well to keep from being detected. He heard a coyote’s call cut short as the crack of a bullet carrying over the hills sounded in his ears. He looked skyward and the sliver of a waning moon grinned back at him. Then a light as bright as god swept the brush thirty feet from where he was, he dropped like both his knees blew out at the same time.

He slid under a scrub brush the best he could. And waited as several spotlights lit up and played in sweeps across the field. He could hear the faintest snippets of conversation being carried by the wind. He stayed deathly still

One minute went by. His eyes itched.

Two minutes. . .

Three. . .

Four. . .

***

At the fifth minute one of the spotlights caught someone trying to move to a better hiding spot. They kept going like they hadn’t seen him but several cell-phones were produced on the top of the hill and the border patrol was called by an older Vietnam Vet named Mason.

“Hey Chuck, we’ve got what looks like two here. Rough looking, might be drug smugglers. You should send someone down, give me just a minute and I’ll give you the coordinates.” Mason checked the GPS in his Bronco. “Hey, you know Holden. . . Yeah, five miles directly south of it. . . Yeah, as the crow flies. . . We took 81. . . Don’t worry we’ll keep it lit up ‘til your boys get here, hold on.” he turned to the other men. “Go ahead and turn on the headlights. Alright, we’ll wait. How’s Jane and the kids?” He listened for a minute then he spit and laughed. “That’s one smart girl. . . Yep. . . Ha ha. . . Yep you take care too Chuck. . . Alright.”

Mason shut the phone. “They’ll be here in about ten minutes.” he said to no one in particular.

The Hold Up: A Border Saga. Part I

2007-05-17T08:29:00.000-05:00

Part one of a series I'll be working on.

Holden, New Mexico is the kind of place where hell wisps up in dust clouds and heaven bears down with the sun. Everyone sweats into their shirts and complains until they go into an air conditioned store, then they complain to the cashier about how hot it is who always agrees. The whole town is like a pretty downtown area so you can’t justify driving to the places in town unless you’re too old to walk, most people just park their cars in front of the grocery store and make small talk about when their town would get a Wal-Mart.

Everything seemed to revolve around church, it wasn’t all that bad except there were three churches in the town and even though everyone worked together and went to school together, the churches were like tribes. When push comes to shove, you stick with your own.

This was the mindset that permeated who you associated with, for example: a Babtist wouldn’t exactly dance with a Morman, though a nod to reassure the existence of both would suffice. But the cardinal sin was to not go to church, that was an easy to identify someone always delivered with a whisper.

This wasn’t all there was to be said about the people of Holden. Many things had certainly improved even in the last ten years. The internet had come to town, someone even had a hybrid car. But it was seen as a red herring because no one had forgotten the windmills that lumbered twenty miles north. Excitement over something new was always reserved anyway, which played into the churches’ hands and gave them a chance to promote “old time religion“. In fact, to check out how many people were strident believers in “old time religion” one only had to check out the churches’ website. But we’ll keep that quiet.

Holden played oblivious to illegal immigration though it was close enough to the border to be affected in every way. To travel out of town into the really rural areas you’d find gardeners who hired Mexican Men when their land became too much to take care of. You’d see warehouses where undocumented workers were stacking crates and driving forklifts. There might be a loaded down truck with hay piled five feet up and there would be a foot pop out and slide back in quickly.

At night there were no minute men here. There might be a coyote calling and if the moon was full enough you might see a father and a mother clutching two scared children as they made the border run. But more often than not, it would just a father and sometimes his son or his brother. The children stayed in Mexico.

Restoring America

2007-05-15T10:38:00.000-05:00

Front page of USA Today for May 15, 2007 describes a microcosm of what I talk about below. There are so many refugees from Iraq spilling into the surrounding region that no American should be surprised at countries refusing shelter.

Anyway, we are doing the same thing to the Mexicans, refusing shelter(or at least attempting to), they’re experiencing a terrible amount of distress as well. One has only to look at the election riots of 2006 when conservative Felipe Calderon was elected by a narrow margin. There is a genuine socialist movement in South America right now led by Fidel-idolizer Hugo Chavez and he is succeeding by getting people to rise to his bait. The movement will go northward and will hit Mexico, so what will happen? A fucking lot more Mexican illegals will be hopping that border fence. 11 million will be nothing, there’s something terrible brewing south of the border and the rampant corruption and poverty is the cause of it all.

I’ve heard from several Mexican immigrants that they come here to work, that there’s too much shit to deal with trying to support your family there. We ought to know that the gangs running things right now on the border, Tijuana has become a smuggler’s haven and the riff-raff is spilling into L.A. We can send the National Guard down there but they’re going to have the same job as they would in Iraq (I guess it’s a good thing they’re getting practice, huh?). They’d be policing people that don’t want to be policed and are going to make everything as difficult as possible until they leave. Now, this doesn’t mean that the president should shy away from sending the National Guard down there, but they won’t be doing any good stopping people who want to work from coming here, all that is doing is setting up future smugglers, who because they couldn’t get into the U.S. will turn to the gangs that are paying to get their drugs here.

If the U.S. hadn’t gone into Iraq then a viable solution would be to send troops into Mexico with the cooperation of their president (although it seems that if we hadn’t gone into Iraq then we might still assume that we don‘t need anyone‘s help), once there we could start to build Mexico up, this would be a good training ground for what needs to be done in Africa but China may have already beat us there. If the presence of American troops are seen to be building something out of nothing (which is what Americans do, or did, best), then our standing with Mexico and Mexicans, not to mention the world, would be greater than what it is. This would be a great help in taking the fire out of Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro‘s anti-American message. On another tangent, lifting our ineffective trade embargo on Cuba would be a help.

We are supposedly the greatest country in the world, a tall order to live up to, but things that seem rather simple to us, such as fighting genocide in Darfur, helping with the rebuilding effort in countries ravaged by the tsunami (which I might add, we did give the most money, but this makes sense considering our lifestyles), assisting with the removal of landmines in countries still haunted by the cold war, helping to reduce crime in Mexico (I don’t know if you heard, but they’ve hired Giuliani’s team), distributing condoms in Africa as well as proper medical stations to help reduce the AIDS epidemic, trying to relieve the suffering of North Koreans, offering to take in refugees from N.K. so China doesn’t have to bear the full brunt of it etc. etc. The list could stretch into infinity, all these things that make sense from a basic humanitarian viewpoint, that we could be doing, most of which we aren’t and if we are, we aren’t making enough of an impression to change anything. There simply needs to be an American presence helping the oppressed, not everyone can sail into the arms of the Statue of Liberty, people will die in ways that could be easily prevented if ideologues, corporations, politicians, statesmen, ambassadors, religious leaders, CEOs, presidents, prime ministers, gods and devils would check their ego at the door of life.

Why shouldn’t America lead the way? If you want something done you should do it yourself. If we can extricate ourselves from Iraq and still keep a visible presence there ready to defend the country from invasions and genocides, and yes a navy presence ready to leash Iran if they break any rules that we should establish while working cooperatively with them, Syria and Saudi Arabia to stop the quicksand that is Iraq from swallowing the whole middle-east. We should be there, simply put, because if something disrupted the world‘s oil supply then the Great Depression would seem desirable. The Muslims’ view of us is as distorted as our view of them, we don’t need to be an occupying force. That is hurting us more than losing what the president describes as “A battle in the War on Terror” (I will not go into the absurdity of the phrase or the supposed war, if you’ve gotten this far then you know what I mean.). America’s military should be seen as the tail of a scorpion, ready and full of venom. But America’s citizens should be seen as what they are, good people who are, despite everything, willing to help.

The American image does matter and the American image can easily be repaired if we do exactly what we are good at. Being good. This means supporting candidates who aren’t funded by oil and pharmaceutical industry, this means leaving the comfort of what you know and getting out into the world, you can change minds one at a time. But mostly it means that we can’t be cynical, cynicism has destroyed our spirit, we love irony too much and sarcasm has become a second language. We have to believe, in the face of everything, that goodness can prevail.

Raining

2007-05-13T01:44:00.000-05:00

It’s all ended in a crash.
And keeping silent, still the fast pad the halls,
Then a clipping sound buzzes near your ears,
Then a field sprouts up near your home.
Horses come and go where the rain falls in patches
And rocks leap up to take the windshields and hooves.
Then W. H. Holden caps off the last rounds,
And clay hills lined with holes are his victims now.
Then a stream pops up,
Then a stream dries out.
A basin worth nothing to those who needed it.

A wind blows toward where we stand,
We lean into it and close our eyes.
Then steam arises on the horizon.
The steam looks a smoke, t h e r e ’ s f I r e
Not a time when we needed that stream more.
But feet make flight to a patch of rain.
Then soaked, in search of a patch of sunlight.
There are no fires, there is no smoke.
Three is more than enough and just right,
Three matches and my lamp is done,
But it’s raining, there’s no way to find our footprints now.

Essay on The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

2007-05-09T10:00:00.000-05:00

A rather long essay I wrote for a college class, I'd be interested in your thoughts on it. Especially if you are a college professor or English major.

“I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”
Prufrock wants to die. But he is afraid of it.
Stifled by the ladies coming and going through the room he seems to occupy and they do not speak of him. They are talking of Michelangelo, the man who painted the Sistine Chapel despite the fumes and bits of paint plopping onto his face and into his eyes, the ladies are not speaking of his most magnificent creation David, they are speaking of Michelangelo himself. Just the man whose muscles and mind melded to work out these images from stone and from colored liquids that pile up around the painter waiting to be used. Prufrock watches them feeling like a “patient etherized on the table” presumably in the cruelest month: April.
Old Prufrock mutters in the streets like a mad man, yes, he should have been etherized and taken to sawdust restaurants that hold people arguing insidiously over the overwhelming question “’What is it?’”. No, no, there’s no answer to be found in just asking the question, we must visit to understand that which is but a mystery to us.
Oiy, there stands the witness and he is present but unnoticed by the women who came into his life and left, but instead of having his name in their mouth, they talk of one Michelangelo. He must not have left enough of an impression on them and he bothers up down smoke-rubbed windowpanes, he questions, he frets, and his hair grows thin (like mine). But unlike me, J. falls back into his familiar soot, not daring to be yellow long enough to lap and lick at the evening’s shadowy corners. Oiy, comforted by the October evening settling down to sleep around houses, Prufrock nestles in his uncomforting bed that feels so much like a patients table and cannot sleep until etherized, so once he goes over the day and makes a hundred different visions (dreams) and revisions (what-I-should-have-saids). Lo, Prufrock is but a child, his hair hasn’t yet to thin, he only knows of an unreachable destination that he should become as a man. Those women cannot stop talking of Michelangelo. This hurts him. Why shouldn’t women he doesn’t know speak of him so favorably? But J. cannot understand that the women are just speaking of M. he takes no time to listen to what they say about the man. So insecure is J. that he acknowledges words but not credence nor a cadence to them. He knows fully that people are speaking, he takes the time to make assumptions and juxtapose details that he makes up. This is why women come and women go. Talking, talking of Michelangelo.

Oh Shiloh, there is time to wonder about wondering “’Do I dare? And ‘Do I dare?’”. There is time to wonder “’Do I dare? And ‘Do I dare?’”. Time to turn and descend a stair in the midst of ascending it and bother about that bald spot growing (as mine is) and bother about your dress and attire ‘til you stand in the midst of satire, and you brought this upon yourself. Yes Alfred’s legs and arms grow thin they should be the extravagancies that are pinned down and asserted to a wall or a floor like a child plays with a bug. The child disturbs the bug’s universe for a minute that feels like a lifetime. If only, if only(!) I had not taken the path based on assumptions of resistance. If only there were time that went backward so I could return to the moment when I first made a step toward the Lost Highway and shout at my-past-self, (turn back!), there are no inches or feet, no meters or centimeters, the only measure of self is the coffee spoons that don’t take height into account, those coffee spoons shout at lengths of lengths of lives we lived. Oh Shiloh, I’ve known all about all the voices that die with a fall (like Kurt Vonnegut), oh, even the supermen are vulnerable, but what of the Alfreds all distracted and head movements toward music in a room that is so much further along than God. No, I do not assume, I presume.
Now the writer takes a pause, he rests, and takes into account that he may be writing gi-ber-esh. But sometimes the reason means more than the rhyme.
Lace bracelets the arms he has known, lace that turns fine brown in the face of lamplight darned out of the damp, darkness and we shudder at the thought. The thought we see through the cloud of perfume and undress, lo, I digress. A shawl ensconced those arms that decorate his bed, his ether, living in the etherized stupor that prevents him from presuming. But sign Alfred up, “’How should’” he “’Begin’”???

Never again shall he return to the soot, not anymore, Alfred may only look into the skies for the smoke escaping from the form of chimneys (nay the pipes). In Alfred’s world, men in shirt-sleeves lean from the form of a building’s skeleton. And they smoke pipes that smite the hope of returning home to roost in the old familiar soot.
My god, “I should have been a pair of ragged claws/scuttling across the floors of silent seas.” But J. has no trouble in this department, he scuttles across the floors of sawdusty, oyster-cloven, cheap hotels. And his hair grows thin (like mine).

Now we descend onto an afternoon’s evening sleeping so peacefully as to be smothered by long fingers. Sell me a story, for I am weary, let me rest, lest I malinger. And the time of day excretes and lives and sleeps ‘tween the space that J. and his love leave in the wake of their stretched bodices. And here is where I do not speak of teas and cakes and ices. For that is too easy a rhyme that doesn’t rhyme, and what’s more it has no reason to exist in this black and white drivel of vomit that you and I will pretend has a meaning and a structure. So let us forget that last sentence ever existed and soon after an exorcism of weeping and fasting, weeping and praying, then Alfred’s balding head (like mine) will return to the fore and a son-of-a-bitch-of-a-scream lets us know that his grotesque countenance is being brought out on a platter. A fitting end to a non-prophet, a fitting end we should all think, because if we do not all think the same then we will not be able to be J. Alfred Prufrock for all his bothersome complaints. We have not seen what he has seen, we have not. The eternal footman threatens to put out Alfred’s greatness and snickers (giggles?) at the thought of scaring this man, ever so slightly bald (not like me for I am growing bald). But in hell at the face of Cerberus, J. was afraid, and in short so too, will you be. Not even Dante has prepared the mind for the fording of the River Styx and this is when the eternal footman snickers (or guffaws?).

Now at the face of death J. comes to a painful realization that he and all like him would have been wise to take the worthwhile path that lies beyond the forests populated with shadows of marmalade and tea. No not that unfathomable mess. This man is looking back at his porcelain laden life and he ponders if “it would have been worthwhile” to dance naked, to shout at mountains, to do cartwheels down a hill in Central Park and if not cartwheels at least roll in the direction of the earth somewhere near Strawberry Field.s. And now he is envious of a new talking point, Lazarus, returned from the dead. Not Jesus, he has no need to be adored anymore. Not in the face of death, anyway prophets can say exactly what they meant and then in the comfort of comfort those that listened to the prophet will not understand what he meant, not at all. And he whispers this to them in their infernal sleep, (goddamn I) “Should say: ‘That is not what I meant at all./That is not it, at all.”.
Now J. goes back to his original point(after disowning his porcelain life), that being: WOULD IT HAVE BEEN WORTHWHILE!?!? He flings this screamt question at dooryards and sprinkled sheets. Sprinkled with what(?): with “the novels, the teacups and the skirts that trail across the floor”, maybe all of this, but sooooo much more.
It is impossible for Alfred Prufrock to say exactly what he means. There are no sentences, words, combinations of letters and syllables to come together to make the soliloquy that he imagines in vague shapes that float about in his head. Laugh if you must but he wishes to cast his nerves onto a screen from a magic lantern, he should have stolen the eternal footman’s, that would have stifled his snicker (or chuckle?). The River Styx cast in eternal dark, Cerberus would have to wait for his eyes to adjust to the dark as cats assail him with their slivered eyes shuddering in the comfort of the eve’. Hell should have given Cerberus an eye-patch so that at least one of his eyes would be ready for the theft of the magic lantern. There should have been enough pirates in all of Hades to tell them that. But J. doesn’t do that, he didn’t mean the Eternal Footman’s lantern, not at all, that is not what he meant at all.
Break off from death, that is too easy a subject to write upon, to shovel the metaphors and similes into a mass grave that you are writing about literally, but the words you use are figurative.

To be, no J. is not to be. He is not a rapscallion poacher like you and not a heroic introvert like. But we are not these things, we are Ophelia, or the King, unsheathe thy naked weapon and back thee. J. is NOT the eternal prince, the most famous to have ever gone to war, to war onward! Prufrock is no Prince Hamlet! He might scrape by as an attendant, a jester, a favorite son, a prodigal one. No Alfred is but the fool. Only of use, meticulous, sometimes he runs obtuse, but most definitely ridiculous. Every which way but loose which is when he rolls his trousers, only if loose is old.
Then presumably bald and withered and finitely loosing his nerve, he rolls his trousers, they trap dirt and sawdust and mites and allergens, that he collects while scuttling, much slower, on the floors where he lives, no, resides, no, rests, no, where he still questions his daring while staring into a peach.
Do I dare to consume the fuzz and skin that encompass all that is fluorescent in eating a peach. Scream, yell, whisper, gallow, fight, make love, angry, happy, not-angry, not-happy, in tune, tuned out all on the shores where mermaids sing “each to each”. But the list is for the young and J. cannot fathom the mermaids singing to him. He rides seaward, no he just bears witness to the mermaids not concerned with an old presumably bald man, who rolls his trousers and collects the crystals that make up the beach.
My god J. can only think of his calloused outer shell as he watches myths riding out with the surf. His whitened hair. A part in it. Now wait just a minute, when the waves break they reveal the black. A crushing darkness.
Crashing, crashing.
Into the ever deepening dark.
Where chambers full of red and brown sea-weed women who will not sing to the white-haired, ocean-parted Michelangelo(not), Lazarus(not), Hamlet(not).
They will not sing to those they don’t imagine, such as it is, Prufrock turns into a pair of ragged claws without a body, and he scuttles across the silent seas. As he scuttles he keeps an ear for the sound of women singing, so that he might catch what they sing when they are not talking.
But the sound of talking will wake him and as a result us, for we the barnacles attaching to his ragged form are looking for a secret that he could never know. And then, we drown.

Leaving Tranquility

2007-05-08T23:18:00.000-05:00

Lasting.
Pear-shaped apples in the spring.
Not a day too soon, or so I thought.

But no. Non-contendre, I plead that at least.
When the winter can still be protected against with fleece.
Still the winter inside lasts longer than all the years,
All the friends, all the cheers, and curses, and damns, and all the friends.

And first to go one loses their friends.
We are all fair-weather,
In one way or another,
We can’t be bothered,
We can’t be stoned,
We can’t be talked,
Nor be dethroned.
We can’t stand on two feet,
We won’t stand on one,
But assuredly we know we could,
So long as we mustn’t prove it.
And of course we can’t prove it.

Bored. Bored. Bored.
That is the platter we carry our horse-heads on.
We should be plastered, we should be mounted.

***

Safely, there aren’t many things between you and I.
Unsafely. . .
There’s nothing between you and I.

Not a sliver of trash, glass, parades, charades.

Nothing I care to enter or exit
From or toward. To and fro.

***

My god, peoples’ ideas are becoming overwhelming,
They stretch across paths like spider webs
But like silk are too strong and not strong enough at the same time.

There are so damn many paths.
So many that turn out to be like tributaries,
And flow,
Flow,
Flow,
Into larger paths,
And again,
And again,
Until a soft pattering of feet rustling fallen leaves,
Turns into a stomp to rival the running of the bulls.

We.
Don’t.
Need.
Crowds.

That’s what I say anyway.
That’s what I said.
Now I’m saying this, and that, then this again.
‘Til every turn I make becomes a new forest,
Full to the brim of paths not worth taking, yet intangible to imagine.
At least until I take them, then I know what I knew.
And what I know becomes this from that,
Except it was always this.

Then we realize that human nature was always thus,
Even in the face of this.
It seems so different now, from what it was,
What it seemed to be,
What we deemed it to be,
Where we spread our will and overfilled.
And stained the bloodstream and all it’s tributaries.

And now we all run on the same blood,
Inbred beyond all differences.

There is no future for the sake of the future,
If you consider the future a trillion years from yesterday,
If you do so then your long term goals must seem unrealistic.
At least to others, but reiterated:
There are no need for crowds,
For they are the vestals that drive our collective group think.
Then destroy thought.

***

Hell, the important people are at it again.
Hell, we are at it again.
I guess it makes no marks where I carve into the tree.
Whether your name faces you or me,
Or somewhere that we don’t look, can’t see?

Interesting, that I made a sand castle for you,
For you were the waves, the tide.
And everything I did came crashing down around me.
Then you took it back, piece by piece and grain by grain.
I don’t even know if I tried again.
I just don’t know.

Would I, should I?
Will what you want.
Then take it back again,
There aren’t any piano keys
Or damned boards sticking with splinters.
There is only you, then me, but you first as it always should be.

Left me in a Mexican town,
Where everything’s cheap,
And I drink tequila all day,
But I’m missing something(someone).

***

With apologies to A. Rae,
My unforgivable trespasses, I wish I could take back.

***

Lust in the eve, when shoulders each take a bumping leave.
My apologies aren’t good, they don’t make up for the things I’ve said.
I’ve said terrible things.
Sentences that make me wish I were dead.

Then when I do lie still, I’m glad I’m not.
And I’m glad that I’ve no time to rot
For sleep rests, a fickle thing,
A trifle in the morn.
When awake you rest and dream of sleep,
And in sleep you rest and dream.

***

Fever.
Creeping every time I shred a word,
Shivering in each second of the world.
Fever.
Got me sweating in the cold night’s grip,
Maybe it’s just the fleeting hipster quip.

But lightning bolts shoot down my street.
I cannot walk.
The angel-headed hipster has my teeth.
I cannot talk.
I threw my skepticism into the sea.
I cannot balk.
But I make you a place to sit beside me.
We’re not like them all.

We’re not like them at all.
You and I are not like each other,
And then again we are.

When naivety dances to bird song flourishes,
Then rhythm makes for the anthem.

When we’ve no need to speak of each other,
Then of you I will not speak.

When you think I pen in jest at you,
I pen at no one in particular.

***

And everyone who thinks that their name ought to title this ramble,
Shall be proven wrong. And that is none but the truth.
So many could’ve claimed a title,
But none tip-toed around the coconut tree.
And shaken was the husk,
We smacked the tops against a rock,
And tranquility was within.

But we’re leaving tranquility behind,
From the fields of lone trees,
And the lightning stricken mask,
Where dirt was lucky enough to turn to sand,
And we left a broken trail.

We leave tranquility
For the husks of campgrounds,
Where natives loved and fought.

We leave tranquility
For the springs borne of waterfalls,
And risk life to scale its face.

We left the tranquil
So they may meditate,
On things we dare not ponder.
We leave the places in which we were seated,
So no roots root us to the ground.

We take tranquility where our seeds are sowed
To leave it, for we have many miles to go,
And dusk is approaching faster than we think,
We have many miles, no places to sink.
We still risk all, with seeds to sow,
For there are many footsteps left and so many miles yet.
Rest now. And leave what you know behind.

The Arctic End

2007-05-06T00:06:00.001-05:00

Well, come now. You and I
In the thistle-blown forest
Where the bashful animals take peeks from grasses.
And the trees keep a shade perfect for blankets,
And I
Spread the blanket.

We sat, we kissed, we made love.
I loved you, that was all.

Now I’ve called on you many times
Only to be ignored
As if a slam wasn’t enough, you had to barricade the door.

I’ve no time to knock or to ring the doorbell.
I must leave now, the clock is beating a quarter ‘til four.
I kissed my hand and blew you the kiss through the window.
I shouldn’t have had an obligation,
But you seemed so demur.

I halved a life with you when we met,
Then halved that, then that, ‘til I had more halves of you than me.
We shared something, might as well have been our lives.
And we sat, we kissed, we made love.
The closest thing to you is my passion.
And passion can’t satisfy, if it could there would be no need.
I loved you, you loved me.
We loved each other so much that the word meant nothing and only actions spoke.
I loved you, you loved me.

Well, were we gonna have six then?/ Well okay, we’ll have two.

I would have been alright if/ only it weren’t for you.

But there are some things that will only thrive in/ a run down old zoo.

Mirrors

2007-05-03T23:19:00.000-05:00

Sorry for there not being any breaks or stanzas,
but this only made sense to me when it was read in a fast block.

Sadly you kept breaking your back
Back when talking fast still meant something
Something for the summer speed freaks
Freaking out the tinsel haired and tinsel eyed
Tiers that stood high above the soot of life.
Oh come on they weren’t that high,
Some will never know how young others can be.
If you’re borne to be young, then is that a blessing?
I should like to think so because then I am blessed
I’ve baptized myself in the tears of the young
And the tears, that’s rips, in the reality.
Oh, a white room, so sterile
‘til the new savior painted it
shades of red bursting full color
Then casting his cloak he killed whatever you wanted.
The kings of cool grew up because that’s what they do
Not before love and lust they gave and couldn’t take back
We took it thinking of forever while living in the moment.
What a moment, a white hot flash of a moment
Trapped in time, no, time became trapped in it
Trapped in those exacting series of minutes
That became known as the moment,
They bent time, they bent minds
Those were the new assassinations
The new riots, the real moments of uncertainty
Nothing if not real, emblazoned on hearts and wallets
Then reality crashed our ships
We remembered why we didn’t like some people
And at the same time they remembered why they didn’t like us
A high is only coasting without a low.
Then in spite of the red we saw a new red,
Wanted it, wanted the blood of our countrymen enemies
Casting the first stone was not shamed, we were ready for it.
Or so we thought, now blame is ready to go round, on the house.
Let me get you a round, a healthy dose’ll do ya.
A healthy dose might even kill you, so I guess in moderation?
Laughing at the word was the same as laughing at the extinct
I suppose the meaningless never ceases to entertain
And that is what gives it meaning,
But in one moment, shining bright white heat,
Meaningful banter replaced reality shows,
Music replaced the machine sounds in our minds.
Care wasn’t fooled because it ran rampant,
We were fooled because it ran rampant,
Now, back in its turtle shell, we can only look at each other.

The Driftwood Men

2007-04-29T11:08:00.000-05:00

And they swam and drug their battered bodies upon the sun-drenched shore
Pieces of driftwood drifting into and out of high tides and low tides
But breaking on the rocks they looked up asking for some semblance of an answer
And on those rocks stood saints so dry, balancing baskets of fish
Casting one after the other and with them a wish for the waves to break no closer
And to taste that meat, that fish, the driftwood men licked cracked lips with dry tongues
But no, the saints were not to be bothered, they must first wake up God
For man is drifting from him they spoke, sure of it he must be spurned and awoken
But God slept, with nothing to look at, he closed his eyes and the drifters made fire from each other

Arsonists! With nowhere to put the ashes of rivalries and triumphs or calamities
No dock, no sandbar, the only place to get a dry martini!
And lips stayed dry, and eyes stayed dry even as smoke smoked out tiers of tears
The drifters’ driftwood fires crept higher and enrobed the beach in colorful bonfires
And salt has persistently beaten about the noses ‘til only a wind revived the smell.
But the smell was the catalyst, it heretofore was the sacred sense
So the driftwood men pulled each other out of the fire, still burning, still smoking
Running to the sea, lighting darkness as they ran, they doused each other until no fire was left
And once the drifters sat in darkness and ebbing tide revealed more driftwood, then work began

A beacon of hope but without the light, no guides in the ever thickening black
The driftwood drifters put together each other and in solidity devised a raft
The willful were plentiful and the work went swift, each drifter relying on the other
And as the night pressed on, waves breaking and building the shore as it was given a new face
But finally the sun was pinking the sky and night was aft to dawn with the past riding on its back

Sun came quickly waking the driftwood drifters, and they saw what they built together without ego
A raft had been fastened while the hungry fasted alike with the well fed drifters
No one could claim credit, as dark secured anonymity, what they had made was made, no turned backs

And as the sun crept higher and the day got older the saints returned with their baskets
They gaped at the raft and at first dropped the baskets then turned to run for the pope
The drifters calmly collected the food, with no one to direct how it was to be divided
Then they loaded the raft, with room to spare, and set to making a sail
The first order was cast with everyone in cadence, for all were to remove the shackle clothes
And modesty was not found for everyone looked around and then the sewing was begun
The patchwork sail was slowly formed and for the first time the drifters spoke to each other
Then it was lifted on high and attached to the beam and the raft was sea-worthy in the sun

Then a march or a mob or the marching of a mob was capping the sand capped dunes
In progression as demanded by the written rule of fallible men
The pope in the front flanked with bishops and eyes set and stern
They left only footprints that the wind picked up and left swept
They came on the drifters who were anchored for the first time, all nude and merrily talking
The shock of the free was felt to the bone of the be-robed, be-speckled old men
At first the pope coughed but silence did not happen and he looked to the bishop for help
The bishop made noises and got their attention and for the first time the group smiled at the other group
The pope spoke first his voice unsure, he demanded an answer for the raft
When nothing returned he changed tactics and asked why everyone was nude
Not a cough, not even for fake politeness, the polite group just smiled in freedom

The pope and his clergy exchanged glances and turned to confer with their backs to the crowd
Whispers were whispered and the free people just laughed and spoke aloud
A verdict was reached and the pope was to prophesize doom for those who rafted
He began with his scripture and turned to a tale of Genesis
Once he finished he smiled half-cocked at the supposed sheep, his eyes smug, the words were his drug
And he waited for the raft and the sail and the fish to be taken down and returned to be rationed

But a young girls spoke with no fire, she simply asked the pope to repeat the part before the tree
When he finished she finished him, she said “Father, we have returned that apple, that is the gift of man,
We are no longer shackled we have repaid that sin, and the gift we received was immodesty,
No ego now father, no snakes in the grass, no one is lying, there is nothing anyone wants to steal,

We are happy now father, we are fed and the food was better than the wishes.”

The pope acted smoothly despite the inward rage, he expected to turn the tide
But the real tide was moving in and the drifters were moving out, they prepared to launch the raft
His words were batted and swatted like flies and they died on the churned up sand
The saints were speechless, the pope was preachless and the drifters were soon asail and reachless
The shore became a speck, and the lighthouse was ignored because the drifters were now adrift
They weathered storms and passed the shores where new saints stood waving from rocks
Not the sun, not the moon, not the stars, not the food was better than that achingly beauteous freedom

And for forty years they drifted with anchor on the bottom and became tanned and strong
Then a shore was found with no rocks and no saints and the drifters landed carefully
A camp was made, then two camps were made and split the land in half
The raft became legend, the people were just tolerated as new saints and popes appeared
And to counter the saints, kings were anointed with a deception of the majority
A sad thing was brewing, but the inevitable was too and the new world ended as it began,
Nude people not by choice this time and clothed people, both claiming to hold the key.
The habitats were soon reduced to the drifting driftwood that drifted until it was thrown up by the sea.

A Name to Call Our Own

2007-04-27T16:41:00.000-05:00

An old poem, a friend suggested that I should wait to publish these and see if they still hold truth for me.
This one holds a different kind of truth than it did before.

Words escaping in the heat of the moment.
People that held our hands.
Mountains that grew higher,
And higher
‘Til we could no longer see their tops,
For we were but foothills.

The air that we looked upon
But we could not see.

We only heard about it after exhaling
We were sure that we could breath
Some of us.

Some of us were not content to just breath
We found satisfaction knowing we could hold our breath
Not in fear, not even illuminated wonder,
Maybe defiance, but not really.

Could a finger be put upon what we were sure of?

No.

No hammers could be brought down on the open limitless sky
Oh my, it ends at the end of the atmosphere.
I knew that, I knew it with every inch of me.
But I also was aware that the hammer could be brought down on me/us.

And that knowledge,
That beautiful song
Erased my fear.

Once I was gone the road would be there.
Not for others, my road was my own.
Once I knew that, I had no fear.
No fear would or could be found in me
It was then that I realized
Nothing would ever fear me.
And that was all I could ever ask for.

Cape Hope

2007-04-24T08:59:00.000-05:00

Abe stood on the precipice of Cape Hope and cast stones into the air. They landed about him in the cast of his shadow, not one landed on him nor anywhere cepting his shadow. This could be explained by the sea wind blowing into his eyes and the sun assigning itself similarly. But on another token it could be that he was finally sated in his near lust for angst, he crept toward the edge with his toes and crept away with his mind. Abe was not a man though he fancied himself one. He was one of the misused who confused heartache with maturity, yet could not make the connection between the two because, for all practical purposes, there was none.

His shadow diminished when he sat down and the stone encrustation meant nothing now, nor did it ever. But it’s always easier to find the meaning in something once it has been done, rather than set out with a mission in heart. But this was the life of the young person, a young person, not merely a literary device nor poetic license without direction. However this young man was catapulting his version of life into the air so uncaring, he could not see and did not know that the words he used where so old and rusted that their original meaning could not be taken seriously again. His words landed on deaf ears as the truth landed on his ears, he was so eager to be downtrodden that he missed a bird’s feces as it landed near his outstretched hand. If he had been as perceptive as he thought himself he could have waited under it and given himself another reason to cloak truth in his self-pity.

*Interlude*

Most folks who think about it do not mind a lie told in the context of being a lie, I don’t even mind telling one of these lies for I am a story teller. But anyone who tries to cloak their lie without consideration of their own transparency I will not stomach, there are those who make up their lives as they go through words that come to them from sources that they may have absorbed but not experienced. There are those who have convinced themselves of some kind of lie that they fashioned in a moment that is but only a moment. A life is the accumulation of many of these aggradations and desolations but not a moment, there are life-defining moments and moment-defining lives, but those are comprised of people and not caricatures. The story is secondary and the words a worthless afterthought.

*End*

Taking himself to the Cape was as close to a stage as he could get but he was acting, though he didn’t realize it and couldn’t understand how or why. This stage was the stage of the world and no one was watching. Maybe some wheeling gulls or gusts of wind that carried the salted air further inland, but the wind carried no scent of the boy, nor his made up troubles, nor his pent up frustrations that catapulted a smell into the air meant only for those foolish enough to think that they care about his self-pitying life.

His thought process was an empty one and his thoughts equally void. Yet, like a train wreck, one could not help but continue to peer into the abyss that he cast his ideas into. But also like a train wreck those who witnessed felt no envy for not being apart of it.

As the sun crept lower from its afternoon high, the life behind him marched on with no particular rhythm cepting a seeming method to the madness. As shop doors closed and window shutters were pulled to, as gulls were flying to the pier or the boatyard to rest, as the lighthouse claimed its light and then sent it out for ships and sailors that were probably not there, the boy found himself finally coming to a conclusion and everything he saw sang a sad note that was not pulled from a benthic dead-zone of inanities. He rose, slowly at first then reaching a height reserved for those who are perfectly sure of themselves. The boy now relaxed for the sake of relaxation, he ambled to the edge of the cape, he took two steps back, he looked over the edge and imagined it much higher than it truly was. His foot scraped loose gravel and loosened more, then in the same motion he kicked the stones into the crashing waves. They scattered and scrambled in the surf and he imagined them landing on the bottom after tossing and turning with the conflicting currents.

He planted his foot and prepared himself to slide it over the edge ‘til no ground met it. In the coming dusk he imagined meeting the ocean’s surface and getting to know its bottom. He thought his life would flash before his eyes but try as he might, it was not time for that yet.
He shut his eyes, this perked up the other senses and he heard a vehicle’s tires crunching about the lightly coloured gravel. When he opened them he saw a quick blue flash, at first he thought it to be his eyes adjusting to the dimming light but he heard the crackle of a radio, some country song. The hum of the engine stopped and the crash of the waves picked back up. He spun to meet the intruder and saw a face he didn’t recognize in a uniform that he did.

“It’s getting late to be out here son.” the officer said.

He thought, “I’m just watching the sunset.”

“Well you don’t need to be that close to see it. Come back over to this side of the guard rail if you’re gonna watch it.” The cop paused and they looked each other in the eyes. “You’ve got to let the sunset come to you.”

He looked back the ocean and then back again to the cop. “Yessir” he mumbled.

As the boy hopped the guardrail for the second time that day the cop watched him. He noticed the slumped shoulders and shadowy walk. He stood there for a second and said, “You best be gettin home b‘fore long. There’s always a sunrise to catch in the morning.” Then he got into his car and drove on.

The boy sat on the grass and did the second important thing he ever did in his life. He watched the sky and then he went home.

The Pessimist Manifesto

2007-04-22T20:25:00.001-05:00

I claim no pessimism on my part,
you'll do good to do the same.
To each their own.

He’s got an asking price to go along with that cockeyed grin
And a interest in heliographs that’ll make your head spin
But a halfhearted whisper puts his nose into the ground
Where his ears shudder in fear at each and every sound
To bottom of the top where the birds got no cares
And the salvo of the grace is playing musical chairs
And you, you sneer as if you’ve got an arm for holding doors
But you shut your mind up when anything so much as snores

Then a lacking masquerade of sooths are selling futures cheap
And you grab up a few while they’re picking your pocket clean
Then the time comes and you’ve got no money to pay
But they give you the goods for free, cause they’re feeling generous today
You have a lost violin looking for a missing string
You’ve made off with a fortune and you think you’ve been the king
But you lost all your life in the blink of a tree
When the asking price was carted off with the violin’s creed

There’s a hell that exists and it does so on this earth
When you fall into the world at your firstborn’s birth
And you’ve never felt a thing until one depends on you
But there are no words left, to scrape up to make it true
Oh, the last king of the forest is capping off his flock
And selling them one by one to whoever comes and knocks
You’ve got no trail home and the path overgrows
As your feet in uncertainty try to discern where to put the toes

But an oven is left on and it serves as candle light
As its heat fills the room and gives away its life
And your sure that the house is just around a corner
But you make so many bends that your sure your stick was shorter
And somewhere sits a gypsy with his masks on the wall
And he drew the long stick and since has had a ball
But all the Cinderella’s and all the king’s men
Have to pretend to enjoy him while he makes it seem so grim

Like your feet he wanders and wonders
He scraps up a quarrel ignoring the over-unders
Help a clown, that he is, he asks for no ones’ gold
He has enough to make his escapades squarely unfold
A picnic blanket rests where a bear used to sleep
And you make the noises that are made when around him animals creep
There is no way to hold your hand down
You want to raise your arm even if no one is around

Help a man who captivates the forest on his own
He must treat everything as an overturned stone
There are no suspicions left too wild to imagine
When you’ve been alone so long that friars’ meetings sadden
That there are no lilies to keep the orchard white
Or the sun from screaming down and smoldering your eyes
The last supper is had on the December creeping frost
When the trustees are gathered and leap about the moss

The sermon on the mount is never near or far
The sermon on the mount is seldom grieved for
Though its message is forgot with each son begot
The lashers lash their tongues and scratch at their spots
Calling all cars there’s a life in pursuit
Of something happier than a captivated group
There are those not willing to be someone else’s savior
And they’re trusted most, when the rider’s unsheathe their rapiers

We’ve no war left that isn’t worth a fight
There are no scrimmages left that don’t deserve a try
We’ve gone past the fork and to the deadening end
That leaves us cornered and looking for a buyer’s friend
We’ve no one left to look for when we need someone to use
Nothing worth fighting for except for not to lose
We’ve nothing left to give that wouldn’t end our lives
Why aren’t we giving? Why to us do we lie?

The Wanted and Wanting

2007-04-21T09:31:00.000-05:00

You'll find no irony here.
If that be your bag then look elsewhere,
for I am only interested in the truth and it's nuances.

Happy they claim, those who have what they want
A vestal for man to brag or to flaunt
The wish in the poet is never to write
The curse of the lover is to pen all that is trite
The emptiness stretches into an abyss
Until the empty is what the wanters miss
A gift from the freedom of every fringe
A grand gesture of the fire forever singed

Happy they find, in the beaches’ waves
An echo shouted into echoing caves
“My dear” he began but could never finish
As fondness and passion sated and diminished
Ever rushing falls of the heart inflame
Every sign, every post, in direction the same
It saves the weary a longer trek
But regardless the passion becomes but a speck

Happy they lose, on the shortening trail
Grass bending at feet becoming so frail
And steps in length become less bold
As the resolute falter or sink into the fold
Any takers? Any gamblers? Can you finish those searches?
Of ten thousand years, of ten thousand churches?
They don’t disappear they return where they’re from
A world so criminal has killed all that’ve come

Happy we speak, with words so thin
That every last letter has become a sin
When only gestures convey what it is we mean
But still in speak and pronunciation so keen
The pages have burned and ink as if wept
Will liberate those tired of false intellect
When any one with a pen can change the weather
We seek shelter and hope for it to begat something better

Happy will come, we tell ourselves
As if the property of it will fly off of shelves
The only answer offered is that something is needed
But the esoteric egotists only speak to be heeded
No matter how many times words are rearranged
They only need be spelled again for the writer to be hanged
For if there lies one letter out of line
Then out with the old and break the book’s spine

An Essay On Oil and the Future of Our Non-Future

2007-04-16T21:35:00.000-05:00

Nobody will ever agree on anything. Ever.
Nobody wants to come to an agreement with other people if it might possibly change anything they’ve known in any way.
This is why people don’t deserve sympathy or respect.

Oil companies are chomping at the bit to get into the wilderness of ANWR, namely the 1002 area. Claiming that we can offset prices and reduce our imports if only those liberal, tree-huggers would stop impeding our progress. Well, sod that.
We as consumers experienced record gas prices in the last six years and were told that there was an oil shortage, we bought that in the form of gas. We mumbled under our breath as we fill our tanks at $1.75, $2.00, $2.50, $3.00 and even $3.50 a gallon. Then we filled our SUVs and minivans and drove places at one-hundred miles an hour killing small animals and children in the process, contributing to the poisoning of our planet and gave a bunch of savage fig-eaters (Big Lebowski reference. I could’ve done a lot worse.) some semblance of power and importance in the world. Who may be or are simply offering refuge to the reason the world is as messed up and chaotic as it is. As in terrorists and the cowboys who fight them.
The oil companies have posted record profits as we sift through. . . Record Prices! Regardless of how anyone feels about George Bush, ANWR, last night or tomorrow morning, no one, in good conscience, can deny the increasing evidence that much of corporate America is taking advantage of the War in Iraq to pad their pockets. And the oil companies are right there at the top, except instead of taking advantage of the chaos that is Iraq, they are taking the buggering right to your driver-side window. So if the reason for opening ANWR for drilling is to bring the cost of a gallon of gas down, then we should probably look past the trees and see if we can see the forest.
Then there is the aspect of industrializing a wildlife refuge, as in taking an area specifically designated for native people and wildlife, and turning it into a fucking oil-field. One group of the natives have sold their souls for oil also, being set to profit from the venture. With dollar signs in their eyes they say that there is no reason not to drill in the lands. They make this claim as if being from the area gives them a free pass to make judgments. They make these judgments as if no one should scrutinize their ideas.

Money can be the root of all evil in the right situation, in others it is just evil itself. There are no excuses for anything.

Americans on the whole have not had to suffer from the war. The only people paying the price are those fighting it and their families. In the meantime, diabetes and obesity have exploded as epidemics, Fox News and CNN makes sure that we are reminded of this each night complete with snazzy titles and catchy theme music to boot. The president says that we are addicted to oil, yet, feels the need to open our last oil refuge to offset prices, the only thing we’ve been burdened with as our military slogs through the Iraq and Afghanistan practices in abandonment.
We are in Iraq, refereeing a civil war. We are doing this for oil, don’t fool yourself, we do need to have that oil or there won’t be an America as we know it. But now that we’ve removed and executed their despot and disbanded their army, there is no strong arm, except our temporarily deployed troops, to keep Iran from invading and taking over the oil fields. Which ironically was their land to begin with, i.e. Persia.
Iran is predominately Shiite as is Iraq, although Saddam Hussein was Sunni. This meant that he hated the Iranians with a passion that rivals their hate for us. Saddam invaded Iran before he invaded Sunni Kuwait; it was in our strategic interest to keep Kuwait from being overrun by Iraq. But not Iran, because after the revolution that replaced the Shah of Iran with the Ayatollah, Iran’s relationship the west soured beyond repair.
When the U.S. withdraws which we will have to do, especially with the prospects of a democrat as president, Iraq will be Iran’s for the taking. Leaving Saudi Arabia vulnerable, which is the country sitting atop the world's largest oil reserve. When Iran takes control of the world’s oil supply then they will effectively have us by the balls. Also Iran caters to Russia who is becoming more rogue with the posturing of Vladimir Putin, and China who is set to become the next superpower.
There is not enough oil in the ANWR reserve to stave off such a happening. Which is why wasting our money, which first off, isn’t really ours, we’re just borrowing from China, to fund drilling for a product which is on the decline and will only increase in price when we are cut off from the teat that is OPEC, doesn’t make any sense.

The only thing that we can do is set our country on a path to alternate fuels now. Not only will they be healthier, but they will give America something to keep its recently soiled status as the beacon of hope in this world. We will be able to market our new fuel alternative and the means to use it to the rest of the world, this will be extremely helpful when the shit goes down. This country is fucked when anything happens that may disrupt our oil supply, ANWR should be a last and I do mean last resort. In the sixties we dedicated ourselves to putting a man on the moon and beat the Russians there. This was mostly symbolic but it did fucking mean something.
Now we are in a position to do something that will mean something. And not just something, but a fucking lot. There are no real reasons not to pursue alternative energies, especially when we can see its benefits and applications right before our eyes. The bother is keeping corporations out of the construction stage and let them focus on supplying the product to the people (Us!).
Goddamn it, I know that we are in a dollar-driven society and there are no reasons to trust the Enrons of the capitalist world. But we can at least trust them to fuck us with cash. There are no guarantees that OPEC and its more rogue elements won’t try to bugger us holding our addiction over our heads while we jump for cruel entertainment.

Anyway, we personally know how damaging extremists can be this day and age in our own country (look at the Religious Right’s influence on . . . everything). But even when Thomas Jefferson visited the Arab World he was informed of the need to wipe all infidels off the face of the Earth. We aren’t dealing in irrational disputes over different forms of government anymore. We’re dealing with a coming man-made apocalypse. We got a taste of it in WWII, but now every-fucking-body can get nuclear weapons. Does the government have a plan for a terrorist detonating a bomb in D.C.(?), that would destroy so many government officials, buildings, not to mention the constitution. Fuck the Patriot Act and Alberto Gonzales, we’re talking about the worst shit America would ever see. Would there even be an America? This isn’t house-divided, this is house-without-a-structure. What if Dick Cheney is away on business during said attack and has to become the President. That would be a thousand times worse than Bush.

In short we are damned if we don’t. There has to be an end to the human race sometime, otherwise the planet would choke and die, and we all know that the planet would sooner kill us off than itself. It killed off the dinosaurs and now they’re getting their revenge. I hope that when the next species is making poison out of my bones that they have the sense to avoid religion and politics.

From A Street Corner Screams God

2007-04-14T21:44:00.000-05:00

My aborted attempt at a modern Finnegan's Wake.
Instead it's an updated version of paragraph poetry.

Aggradations got me aggravated. Aggradations got me in a jones for something that’s not even worth wanting. But a lonely street corner is only lonely when the sign on the other side says walk instead of don’t walk and all those peeps zipping by like a bird in flight but don’t fly high enough for the sleepwalking, jumble-word-talking, asinine acidic qualities that we flaunt in settings designed for heavy petting with the eyes pointed towards the skies that appear as reflections in a lake or from the vantage point of the lonely street corner, in a puddle that is muddled with gas and garbage that even a bum who hasn’t eaten since he left his home wouldn’t look at.

And I say goddamn. I say it like a man stuck inside his plan would spray bullets but not the hollow pointed pointers described in dog journals for the walking funerals in their infinitesimal aggravations.

And I say goddamn. I’m a walking funeral that I describe on the fly in a way makes me less than a man but not more than what I cann or cannot be from where you look you cannot see for the sea because it clouds your visions even on sunny days when the overcast doesn’t gloom over fishermen casting nets or baited hooks to catch whatever sniffs by for a look.

And I say goddamn. I’ve been looking for that hook that was baited with me in mind because I’m the one that the larger fisherman wants on his line and even if I stick to the shallows I lay in wait for the gallows but a crass pizzazz parade got me jonesing for a way to silence the form of aids that = death to someone who just wanted help or even passing the buck from a slow-moving truck/train weighed down with clowns and tomatoes for sale at your local gas station as the patient patients wait for cadences announcing a new miracle cure that comes in the form of a pill that you take once a day so line up in the chain but if your gay go to the back because that fat man in the choke collar tie says so, so go, go, go.

And I say goddamn. Because I don’t have the disease but they tell me to take the medicine anyway and they say it so nice and punctuate with a please as if preventative medicinal stocks are going down and I need to buy them so the prices can make fat men fatter and pay for their new chockfull of tie tie-racks and I praise the new pirates not of/on Gilead but the opposite where Eldorado seems a mirage that comes in the form of a three story garage meant not for cars but planes that land in the water and sometimes on land so your local governmental figures can park where three dollar martinis are so foreign that the foreignism is not questioned.

But it is merely poured, slowly first then rapidiousity follows ‘til the shollows or the Shilohs, are encapitulated and snared into deeper areas where meaning lurks in the depths and dirks. forlorn. oh goldsmith. forlorn.

Answering The Hollow Men: A Poem

2007-04-12T21:32:00.000-05:00

In timid trepidation I post this.
A poem dedicated to, and about, our tragic generation.

From the vineyards they called
Knowing only the languages they spoke
Sure of none else than the grapes
Positive of possibilities presented to choke
If yelling from the rooftop gave no response
Then at the heart of wine country they camped
Blowing hard and knowing all
But so uncarefully they stepped and they tramped

And we for all our beauty could watch,
To watch and nothing else was it, we thought.
And to be content or being contented
Was something we loved to be taught
Ease was not the hard thing to do
Not even if we went the hard way about it
So a satisfied face was normal
Satisfaction became a lie and an excuse to quit

Quitting was not supposed to be in our blood
It wasn’t a nervous system it was the nervous system
Sweat beading on our brow, breath speeding or slowing
Waiting in curiosity for a name to be christened
Those who made jokes of the poets already named
Shook as if in the rain or snow
And smugness could not truly hide
Anything they didn’t want us to know

Playfully ladies danced a distraction dance
Skillfully they played on emotions running high
As if control was handed over from the start
To anyone claiming the keys to the sky
Blame was passed like a well packed pipe
And it smoked and burned a widening hole
In the fabric we constructed to clothe
The ugliness we thought was part of the whole

There were some who claimed not to be affected by beauty
When beauty was the only thing worth being affected over
The man admitting this was carefully concealed, he thought.
At the utterance, forced to dip and dive for cover
Scared by the fearful, ah, a fate so reviled
To be afraid, when the true fear should have been to be feared
Conversing would be reduced at such a rate unforeseen
Towards the screen door a path freshly speared

Sordidly, wonderfully attached to country and form
Gamely making love to the stars under the moon.
Like a plan of action unconcerned with the ends
A severed love is or was to be reattached soon.
So soon to be relieved of pain sure to kill
That I jumped to be reformed and then reshaped
By the hands of the drivers on top, underfoot
On the southern tip of the continents great cape

Such a lovely way about it to be so lovely,
But a clean manner of thought was only sterile clean
The future could be foretold when only white lay ahead
But being enveloped by the cape was a fate not foreseen
A fate for those we might have thought fools.
Did they know our thoughts? Could it be they cared?
If we didn’t care was it to be expected of them
The only thing expected was being what none dared.

Is the argument not to argue one wondered
For if all others shouted then to be quiet was dissent
But taught the opposite we confused us
Was there something unknown we were missing?
Shoved into a pigeonholed yelling hole
Was considered a way to solve the ills.
And in this vacuum devoid of compassion
Was a place missing the blanket to abate our chills.

Abated and ebbed the tide was this way and that
Cause and effect were the effects of slice and dice thought,
You could only hope that you could see through the mire
And a glimmer of true knowledge could possibly be caught
Great thinkers and liars broke the mold they said.
They stood up to the tyrants and made the world right
But suppose the tyrants were stopped before their tracks were laid
Would the saviors be cast in any such light?

Is it worth to need heroes in the tattered, torn world?
Or can’t everyone be a hero in order to save us all
Then names could lose importance like scars are lost
And no names or saviors would need be called.
And in the moment of truth when the brave ones stood
We were told of the odds, in hopes that we’d forget:
That either something will happen or it won’t
And because of this nothing has happened yet.