A Dungeon of Days
SD533
Posts: 221
Hello, My name is Steve Dale. I wrote a book called "A Dungeon of Days:A Collection of Rhymes and Poems". The book is available exclusively from amazon dot com and there's an A Dungeon of Days myspace page where I've posted excerpts which can be viewed without having to get permission or having to join somebody's friend list. I was listening to a lot of Pearl Jam when I was writing this stuff, so I guess that I could say that my book was written under the influence of Pearl Jam among other things. Sorry to self-promo here.
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SMALL WONDERS
When has gasoline ever extinguished a fire
When has hatred ever given birth to compassion
When has punishment ever guaranteed obedience
When has anger ever resulted in reason
When has betrayal ever grown into trust
When has vengeance not been followed by retaliation
When has guilt ever been a preservation of innocence
When has confusion been a sanctuary of sanity
When has stubbornness ever produced cooperation
When has stinginess not created a want
When has neglect not been a forerunner of need
When has oppression not been a precursor to violence
When has meanness pretended to be anything other than dispiriting
When has suspicion bred anything other than dishonesty
When has selfishness ever led to understanding
When has there been a peace that has not been preceded by war
When has desire not fed into a misery
When does a result not become one with its cause
When does a question become its own answer
This is a poem from my book "A Dungeon of Days". The entire 458 page book is now available for free perusal and download at : http://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewwor ... rID=1059160 -
LIFE LESSENS
Life will find out
If there's one thing that means the most to you
If there's one thing that is valued above all else
Life will find that one thing
And life will take it away
Slowly
Or maybe
All at once
Life will find you
Down to your lowest bottom
Life will take you down
Even further
Life will reveal your kneeling floor
Life will tear that floor right out from under you
Just when it seemed safe for standing
Life will take you up
Life will raise you far above your lowly stations
That's life's way of letting you know how far you can fall
Sometimes life will let you dangle
In ignorance
Before it lets you fall
Life isn't fair
Fair is a gray middle average
Fair is concepted on a human spectrum that life doesn't recognize
Life isn't blind
Life just doesn't have to look
It knows
You cling to life and all its attendant forms
The more you desire of life
The easily is life able to steal itself away from you
It steals away both
Slowly and suddenly
Without apparent reason
For in life there is no reason
Life will defy all of your logic and understanding
Life will repulse you with its presence
It will push its least desirable qualities into your face
The more you try to turn away from life
The easier it becomes for life to confront you
To overwhelm you
To exasperate and exhaust your patience
Life will force you to take it into your hand and consider it
To reconsider it
For whatever it is
It is never what you thought it would be
Life is always something more
Life is always something less
Life knows no sate for your misery
Life will collect your sadness and multiply it
Life will bring your unhappiness and compound it
Life will exploit your weakness
Life will fault your courage
Life will cripple your strength
Life will lead you down its trail in expectation
It will deliver you nowhere
Life knows no controls
Try to force or guide it
It waits
It's waiting to fly back at you and explode in your face
With a vengeful unleashing of fury
Life will let you dream
Life will admit your dream
Once admitted
That dream will be a ground for denial
Life will subvert your dream with harsh injections of reality
Life will give you things so that it always has something which can be reclaimed
Life will claim things that you don't even have
Life will claim things that you didn't even know that you had
Life will disappoint you
When you think that you have endured
All of the disappointment that you possibly can
Life will disappoint you some more
Life will pile disappointment on top of your disappointment
The more that you can carry
The more you have to carry
Life is the stubborn obstinate pursuit of its vain self
Because life knows
Life knows that in death
There is nothing
***0 -
HOW THE MIND WORKS
He woke himself up early
On Saturday mornings
To implore his thoughts
To grasp for his soul
To consider his essence
To bring definition and form to his meaning
To try to obliviate the resigning suspicion he had
That there was no poetry in a man
Who worked 8 hours a day for somebody else
Before coming home to fight with a woman
****
He always wanted to be able to help people
He liked to think that he would do anything for anybody
If they ever asked him
Nobody ever asked him
But if they did ever ask him
He would do it
Anytime anywhere
Without a question
For nothing in return
He finally came to realize
At the age of 35
He couldn't do anything for anybody
He wasn't even able to help himself
***
For years he rode the bus
On the way home from work
That sat parked on the tollway
Next to the landing runways at O'Hare Airport
In the chrome and asphalt glare
Of rush hour homebounds and long weekend travelers
His stomach cramped in a bloated roil of contentious dispute
He sat patiently on that bus
Full of 5 o'clock shadows and 13-hour-day already smells
Watching the planes dive bomb the runways
Lizard skinned silver bellies almost scraping the roof of the traffic
The air searing and scraped with engine machine noise
Wing span lights wavering out of the eastern distance
Revealing the stack line of planes
Steadying themselves to land next
A mile apart coming in right behind
Outside of the bus seat window view
When the bus was moving in a direction opposite of that of an airplane
The approaching plane appeared to be motionless
A painted still dropped back against the sky
Suspended forever above the houses below it
For years he had terrible nightmares
Of horrific airplane crashes
His subconscious recreated all of the archetypical air travel disasters
That he had experienced from a lifetime of television watching
He saw nose down spirals that disappeared
Into an explosion above the trees
He saw landings in the street that tore open large buildings
He saw the plough into the face of the mountain side
He saw the overhead explosion that rained down cascades of debris
He saw the burning wing smashed cockpit descents into obliteration
He saw the dead weight vertical elevator drop plummets
After he saw the crash he would run to the site to find the survivors
But he could never get there
He would finally wake up soaking and shaking in sweat
Unable to fall back asleep
****0 -
THE ONE MAN MARCH SOUNDTRACK TRIP A-POLITIKO BLUES
He took the day off of work
He spent the evening before
Filling a 100 minute cassette tape
With all the songs
That he thought had once meant something
He was going to walk across town
From his apartment to the Democratic National Convention
With a head full of ghosts
Other people’s memories
He was going to walk right up to where
It was happening
Five thousand delegates and fifteen thousand members of the media
The keepers of the gate
All in one place
Getting ready to hand over the keys
To the kingdom
Letting a man assume a place in history
Without the hint of a struggle
He wanted to fly into the face
Of their machine
Piss into their wind
Slingshot a thought into their vicinity
Let them know somehow
That nothing of worth is gotten easily
He headed out in the early afternoon
Armed with his walkman and 100 minute tape
In a purple cloth crown royal bag
He settled into his headphones
Off to find Simon and Garfunkel's America
He headed south down LaSalle
Past the Moody Bible Institute enclave
Listening to Cisco Houston eulogize
Woody Guthrie's deportees in the plane wreck at Los Gatos
He thought about the season in the city
Divinity students he always passed on that sidewalk
He wanted to know what they were bringing back
To the middle america christian heartland
He cut over to Wells Street
Moved south through the nightlife district
The planet hollywoods yawning unconcerned
In the bright afternoon sun
He listened to a still fresh green Bob Dylan
Naively warning that a hard rain was going to fall
He walked toward the Loop
Listening to Dylan's echoing indictment
How the times were going to change
He still wanted to believe that the first would be last
He made his way across the Chicago River bridge
Into the downtown area
The syrupy strings of the change Sam Cooke wanted to see
Slowing his step in reflection
Of a long ago battle he had never known or seen
He stomped into the high building cool shade
Dripping sweat through the late lunch office worker throng
Blasting Creedence Clearwater Revival's Fortunate Son
Every look in his direction feeling like a cannon
He turned right on Madison headed due west
Listening to Marvin Gaye sing his Inner City Blues
He looked at the faces of the new black entrenched middle class
He wanted to know if they were able to say yet
This ain't living
He bounded past the edge of the Loop banking area
Through the outside of the building cigarette breakers
Ringing with the Stones' Street Fighting Man
He was 37 years old
He still wanted to know what a poor boy could do
He cleared the downtown
He was alone
The sidewalk wide open deserted before him
Confused in the new median strip flower box armada flotilla
The new west side enforced wrought iron code scam
Millions of dollars fake fixup for the convention
Light pole banner masts heralding Chicago '96
He listened to a 1965 kazoo tooting Country Joe and the Fish
Take 1 honing their fixing to die rag
He laughed inside at the ridiculousness
He imagined the flower boxes
Sun dried board rot rusty nail split
Dirt clodded glass shard median heaps
All things in time
He crossed the Kennedy Expressway almost wincing
The next overpass draped in abortion protest bunting
Listening to the nearly cornball Graham Nash pleas
To come to Chicago
He half feared somebody was going to trot that dog out
In this convention summer
Forever wrecking into insignificance
Let a man live his own life
He counted off the blocks west on Madison
To the United Center
Finishing the first side of the tape
With 10 minutes worth of MC5 rant rave
Angry white boys
Mad Like Eldridge Cleaver
He thought about kids
Being poisoned on the streets of their youth
Dying of heartattacks in their 40's
He was a few blocks away from the convention center
Tin soldiers and Nixon coming
Four dead in O-hi-o
He wondered how fast Neil Young was going that week
He listened to David Crosby screaming in the background
Trying to keep up with the rolling tape
He pushed on through the taxi cab staging area
Cabs parked idle in a line along the curb
The drivers waiting in animated bullshit session groups
He was stopped at the concrete dividers
Abruptly placed in the street and on the sidewalk
Manned by Chicago cops
Two blocks away from the convention hall
He wasn't going any further without a pass card
He stopped short of the walkway entrance
Listening to Bob Marley tell about Them Belly Full
He came all this way
He wasn't going to turn and go back yet
He stood off to the side of the entranceway
Listening to the Clash describe the Clampdown
He was going to stand right where he was at
In an almost defiant exhilaration
What could they do to him
Where they going to arrest him for just standing there
Was there a law against what he was thinking
He notched up the volume for Chuck D
Counting down to Armageddon
Then the Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos
He was standing at the media entrance to the convention
He watched the C-Span entertainment crews
People with shoulder held cameras and rolling carts of video equipment
Filed in and out of the armed entrance
He watched the old man on the sidewalk
With a small blue sandwich board announcing
A black friend to the middle class
Unsuccessfully trying to hand out leaflets
A green and black fatigued guy too young to be a vet
Wearing POW/MIA patches
Trying to pass off pamphlets
To the uninterested
Across the street in the empty protester designated parking lot
A flag carrying republican looking clown with a handmade sign
Covered in writing about Bonnie and Clyde in the White House
Drew the attention of the roving camera men
He stood off to the side invisible
Watching unnoticed
Unobtrusive
Wondering if he looked like Lee Harvey Oswald
He stood stock still in his worn lopsided re-heeled steel toe boots
Wearing the black levis he had worn at least 2 times a week
Every week for the past eleven years
Faded worn ripped at the knees
His black tee shirt hanging wet on his shoulders
Listening to Jackson Browne exuberantly proclaim
In a middle of life awakening
That he was made for America
He watched Andy Rooney the ancient
Curmudgeon padding past him on the sidewalk
In a goofball assortment of mismatched colors
With cameraman and watermelon sized duct taped boom mike in tow
Looking right through him from behind dark wraparound sunglasses
Seeking the carrion convention edge characters
While his energy dissipitated to Paul Simon's American Tune
He finished off the forgotten Men at Work warning
It's a Mistake
Looking into the faces of those entering the convention
Forcing them to turnaway
He wanted to remember them
In their finest hour
He felt his leg cramping behind his knee
He turned the walkman up full blast
For the Who's Won't Get Fooled Again
This was his grand finale
He hoped somebody would hear it pouring out of his headphones
It was all he wanted to say
If he could say anything
He turned his back to the convention center
Headed towards downtown
Listening to Find the Cost of Freedom
He wondered why in the hell he even went down there
He stood out there like a goddamned fool
He didn't care who they elected
He never voted in his life and he didn't see that changing
He took his 100 minute tape out of the walkman
Put in Miles Davis Kind of Blue
Started the walk home
Pretending it was 1962
Thinking
So What
***0 -
That was good, but damn I was hoping that guy was doing his walking around in 1995, and just happened to catch the last Dead show.0
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From pages 52-55 of "A Dungeon of Days"
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Cluttered with images and driven awake
My mind stalks the reflections of the sleep starved night
Someone has poured sand mandalas in the side of a lake
I'm backtracking to mission boards and vagabond feasts
With the dropout monks and self seeking priests
Trying to connect to any sense it might make
Listening for the silent mystical alarm
Watching natural causes turn into terminal harm
Wondering how many thoughts a difference would take
I'm waiting here for a change
The kind that grows from without
And tears up roots from within
I'm waiting here for the movement to begin
I feel so chronically strange
I used to pray for a god
Now I just talk in my head
Spilling my soul all over a life that I dread
I imagine psychic exchange
Where I'll be thinking out loud
Trying to fire a round
Into the noise that never is heard in sound
I'm waiting here for a change
Life presents a gauntlet I pass through alone
My mind fights with the animal that runs free inside
Someone has told me of magic in quartz crystal stone
I'm sidetracking to fun house trips and month long drags
With the shaman heals and rusty medicine bags
Trying to go wherever my mind has been blown
Acting brain simple in most outward observance
Looking blindly at all forms of physical appearance
Wondering how much difference I can make on my own
I'm waiting here for a change
The kind that pulls from without
And pushes bounds from within
I'm staying here to see the movement begin
I feel so hopelessly strange
I tried to follow a god
I was once easily led
Spilling my soul while going out of my head
I envision psychic exchange
When I'll be thinking out loud
Trying to fire a round
Into the noises that are not heard in sound
I'm staying here for a change
(If a difference was a day
I wouldn't last a second)
Swimming in concrete and feeling so small
My mind reels through the dim view of a dungeon of days
Someone has said my defense is a jericho wall
I'm train tracking death dreams and emotional voodoos
With the deep lung breaths and self-improvement gurus
I'm trying to run before I can mentally crawl
Casting myself with the societal misfits
Looking forward to the shift of the paradigm prophets
Wondering who was left to do the thinking for us all
I'm waiting here for a change
The kind that builds from without
And tears down from within
I'm only waiting for the move to begin
I feel so endlessly strange
I tried to talk to a god
It was like calling the dead
Spilling my soul with every word that I said
If there was a psychic exchange
I would be thinking out loud
Firing thoughts all around
Trying to make noise without making a sound
I'm only here for a change
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Your power drives
Your ambition wastes
You're the president of the United States
Never able to make a bodily move
Without stepping somewhere in the shadow
Of an over-cautious secret service agent
Anxiously ready and prepared to prove
That they would fill in the empty spaces
Between you and the threat
Of the lone assassin psycho
From a conspiratorial
Act alone tangent
You never know what some idiot might try to do
Does the oval office feel like a prison before the day is through
Where men would die to protect the power given to you
How is that power spent
Is it lavished in a squander
Of uneven temperament
Is it in the clutchhold of a miser
Whose judgment has become bent
Do you love all of the people, mr. president
So much as you would to yourself
What are you worth when your power is spent
Winner of the political hardball game
The ultimate old boy network hero
Guaranteed sentences or a footnote at worst
When tomorrow stumbles across your name
Inside of books on unopened pages
Between the tale and times
Of worldly leaders like Nero
King Louie the sixteenth
And Charles the first
You never know what some detractor might try to do
Would you sacrifice us now for a better historical review
When people will tell about the power given to you
How is that power spent
Is it lavished in a squander
Of uneven temperament
Is it in the clutchhold of a miser
Whose judgement has become bent
Can you face all of the evil, mr. president
Of the country onto yourself
Where will you be when your power is spent
Advised by experts before each decision
On how to target your benevolence
With personal agendas forced as policy
Drawn with rhetorical precision
Where truth lies somewhere within the extremes
Between image and man
Of self-serving indifference
Who barters human life
In dark secrecy
You never know what your backers might ask you to do
Have you been chosen by the many in the interest of the few
What other people control the power given to you
How is that power spent
Is it lavished in a squander
Of uneven temperament
Is it in the clutchhold of a miser
Whose judgment has become bent
Have you borne the burden of shame, mr. president
Of the country onto your shoulders
The social strand like your power is rent
What has your ambition meant
Where was your power spent
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *0 -
From pages 223-224 of "A Dungeon of Days"
***************************************************
He happened upon the LA greyhound bus depot
After he had been out there for a week
It was only a few blocks away from the mission
Near a police station
The LA bus station wasn't like the one in Chicago
It was a low grade dive
Late night haunt of cheap sleaze scum vice artists
It was small
Stop and go dull
Not like the allnight hangout action in Chicago
He spent the better part of one rainy night there
Mainly riding the escalator
Continuously going up and down
For an hour and a half straight at one point
In a full view taunt of the bus station security guards
Claiming in a loud voice that he wasn't loitering
Whenever he was making deliberate trouble like this
He always vocalized in a loud voice
What he thought the people observing him were thinking
He thought this stopped their wheels from spinning
Dead right in their tracks
Derailing them into helpless inaction
He let people know out loud
Right in the front
What kind of bullshit they would be in for
If they were going to try to do something about him
He would tell them what they thought
They were going to do
Then he would tell them
Why they weren't going to do it
He did this not by talking to them
But by talking outloud
As if to himself
Loud enough for them to hear him
He did this to cops security guards
Anybody harboring an idea of exercising authority
In response to him
This verbal offensive usually worked
He was an obvious lunatic
Better off left alone
***
From pages 274-275 of "A Dungeon of Days"
****************************************************
He always thought that people went for weakness
Like hungry sharks drawn to the bloody water jugular
He could never be quiet
Be himself
He always thought
His inner reflectiveness was mistaken as passivity
A welcome-mat open door invitation to be stepped on
By people that he didn't know
He learned that he had to keep people in check
Keep them from thinking they could walk over him
By getting in the first last and every other word
Using a strong voice as a force
Unimpedimented speech
Rising above conversational tone levels
He learned that he had to freeze people with eye contact
Hold them in an unblinking cut to the back of the brain glare
Look right through and into them
Startle them with the subtly communicated warning
That they were dealing with somebody who didn't think like them
Let them know that they were up against a maniac
That had mastered their fluctuating weapons of intimidation
Being a quiet depressed kid had gotten him nowhere
He was the food chain barrel bottom plankton
In a social survival system based on interpersonal domination
He had been the victim too many times
He learned the game on the shit end of the stick
He knew that the only way to be left alone
In the peaceful place of his own thoughts
Was to bulldoze trample over everybody and everything around him
****0 -
From page 350 of "A Dungeon of Days"
He believed that thoughts
Took on a form of their own
Separate from the thinker
Thrown out flung together in a unitive field
Gathering force with like minded thoughts
Strength intensity variant dependent
An energy was produced
Made manifest
Taking form in the seemingly random occurrences
That took place over the course of a lifetime
Prayers magic rituals affirmations negativity
All different fountains
Tapped into the same wellspring
He was convinced that if ten people consciously willed
For a person to have a bad day
That person would have an incredibly difficult time
To avoid having a shitty day
***
From pages 19-20 of "A Dungeon of Days"
We're the wildest animals with the sophisticated skins
The civility ends where the abstract of money begins
Hunger can starve the will and inspire one to act
Hunger can glut the spirit in fulfillment of what it once lacked
Poverty never learned the law of abundance
The rich get richer with an easy redundance
"There's three for me and one for you"
That's generosity in our human zoo
They tell us to be happy and take what we've got
I'm getting tired of all this have and have not
I've seen too much of the enough that always wants more
If we didn't have the rich would we still have the poor
If I had a little would I have to have more
The soul is subjected when wealth rears its figurative head
This is the new jungle where our desires wait to be fed
Thirst can dry out the sight and enable one to see
Thirst can gorge the senses when what was held back is loosed to flow free
Downtrodders fall prey to the traps of affluence
The mass clamors for lives of moneyed affluence
"You can have yours just don't touch mine"
That's where good luck parts ways and draws its thin line
Out here it's grab what you can and get what you’ve got
When somebody has it then somebody does not
I've seen too much of the takers that always crave more
If we take away from the rich does that make them poor
If enough would be enough how much would be more
(Time is money/Money is time
Neither one is real
Outside of the mind)
The floor is moving in the room where my valuables lie
My worldly goods will turn into garbage as soon as I die
Need can strip thought down to a disciplined clarity
Need can clutter the mind when it reverses its austerity
Ordinary life drabs next to the opulent
The losers fight for scraps left by the corpulent
They get three and leave one for you
Would you call them fools if they took only two
No one cares what you are it's about what you've got
That's how it is in this land of have and have not
I've seen too much of the want that will always take more
If we give to the rich what do we take from the poor
If I took less would I have to want that much more
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *0 -
"Trying to go wherever my mind has been blown "
Now, how awesome is that line!0 -
[Post edited by DangDang on0
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SD533 wrote:From page 350 of "A Dungeon of Days"
thoughts (take)
on a form of their own
Separate from the thinker
Thrown out flung together in a unitive field
Gathering force with like minded thoughts
Strength intensity variant dependent
An energy was produced
Made manifest
Taking form in the seemingly random occurrences
That took place over the course of a lifetime
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
This does happen, doesn't it?0 -
From page 148 of "A Dungeon of Days"
********************************************
He thought a lot about something he had read
By Saint Augustine
How could something be found
Unless it was lost originally
How could something have been lost
Unless it already had been found
How could something be found
When it was always in one's possession
Nothing was ever lost
Nor was it ever found
It was always there
Saint Augustine found a god
That had always been there
Waiting
***
*****************************************
From pages 312-314 of "A Dungeon of Days"
****************************************
He set up his day
With the married woman
In the always empty visiting room
He rearranged the thoughtless clutter
Of furniture in the room
To his own comfortable liking
They sat in a cleared out area
In the middle of the room
Away from the rest of the chairs
Facing out unobstructed
Towards the Kankakee River window
Cigarette pack ashtray
And a quart plastic hospital issue pitcher of ice water
Always within a bent arm's reach
He sat next to her talking
Almost like they were riding in a car
A sitting still feeling of continual motion
The days began to fly
He wanted them to last forever
***
He half listened to a portable plug-in AM radio
At a level just below a conversational tone
While he sat in the visiting room with the woman
Always in the background everpresent
The endless repetition of the same songs
He was soundtracking the experience
Indelibly etching his memories with music
Memories that could be retrieved years later
When the music he associated with them was heard
***
Every part of his life was remembered with music
His earliest recollections were of songs
The music would eventually lead him back
To where he was
To how he felt
To who he was with
When he was listening to the songs
He had been doing this since he was 4 years old
When he became suddenly aware of his consciousness
The first neural lines of memory being mapped
Each time he heard the sound
Of the siren voiced falsettos
Frankie Valli
Jan and Dean and the Beach Boys
The outside world was sounding a call
To wake up to what was around him
***
Music ran like a river through his life
First it was from the radio
Later it would be an album
Played every day repeatedly
For weeks at a time
Until it was heard unconsciously
The music and all of its surrounding time
Becoming inseparable
***
He could hear Len Barry's 1-2-3
In his mind
Taking him back
To the thoughts and feelings
Of his 5 year old 1965 southern california world
Like the reminiscent haunt
Locked in an old forgotten picture
Or the past that is released
In the trace scent of a once familiar fragrance
It was so easy
Like taking candy from a baby
***
He sat in the room with the married woman
Knowing in the back of his thoughts that years later
Whenever he heard Chrissie Hynde sing
“ Gonna use my arms
Gonna use my legs
Gonna use my style
Gonna use my fingers”
He was going to be right back there
Sitting in a chair next to her
On a Kankakee private hospital psychiatric ward
In the spring of 1980
***
From pages 108-110 of "A Dungeon of Days"
*******************************************
He was supposed to be a manic-depressive
At least that's what his family and girlfriend told him
But outside of a manic episode in the summer of 1985
And another manic flurry at the end of 1991
He spent all of the years in between and afterwards being depressed
Everyday he told himself that things were changing and getting better
Everyday he ended up wishing he was dead and that he could be over with
He knew that if he had any will power at all
That he would have been dead a long time ago
Either by accident or acceleration of natural causes
He didn't know how somebody so miserable could be spared
From the life robbing accidents and misfortunes
That were always happening
To other people all of the time
He wondered how much those people valued their life and their existence
He wondered if the untimely demises were unhappy like himself
He wondered if those people willed their tragic endings
Rushing the forces of fate into the shape of unfortunate circumstance
Or he wondered if they were innocently bystanding
The cruel hoax and paradox
Where the ones that want it the most are denied it
And the ones that don't want it at all are stuck with it
He thought about suicide a lot
That would have been easy
Or would it
He tried to tell himself that suicide was the coward's way out
He tried to believe that
Facing the continual daily onslaught took strength
He tried to convince himself that it would get easier
As he got stronger
He knew that he was forever tainted with a deep and festering optimism
That would make him hang on for as long as he possibly could
Despite all of the internal imagined agonies he endured and created
He came to realize that he would die soon enough
Life is short and fast
Nobody is going to be forced to live forever
Death is inevitable and it will find everybody
So in the meantime
He was going to try
To ride life out
And wait
****
The unmasked beauty in the smiling face of a woman
Looking at him
That was the only thing
That could make him wish
That he could be something
That he was not
****
He didn't like to talk on the phone
He felt empty in a room
Hearing his voice getting lost into the receiver
He quit calling people
After a while
People quit calling him
He knows that the phone works because he gets a bill for it every month
He still likes to pick it up once in a while
To hear the sound of the dial tone
Just to make sure that it really is working
****
He never had anything to say to anybody
He withdrew from the habit of smalltalk
He left people stranded in embarrassing unnaturally awkward silence
Unless something was specifically asked of him
He couldn't think of a thing to say
His mind was a total blank
He knew this bothered people
It bothered him for a while too
But he learned to live with it and eventually take it for granted
He convinced himself
That nobody really listens to anybody but themselves
He believed that everybody talks only to themselves
He didn't feel like hearing himself talk to himself
He didn't feel like holding his mind up
With all of its fractures and scars
To somebody else's light for examination
He saw a television program about autism
The program said that autistics can only interact
When there is stimulation from outside of themselves
He started to worry that maybe he was getting autistic
He started making an effort at initiating small talk and conversation
The more he tried
The more he realized
The only reason he never talked was because
He didn't have a goddamned thing to say
****
He decided when he was 31
That he was going to try to learn how to write
He thought that would be the only way he would ever communicate
He was damaged and turned hopelessly into himself
He thought the writing would help him break out of his mind
He always had music refrain riff choruses running through his head
He started writing those down on scraps of paper
The more he wrote the more he heard
He was singing songs in his dreams
And writing them down when he woke up
He did this steadily for several years
He accumulated pages of the songs he heard in his head
But he couldn't play an instrument so the music stayed inside of him
Then one day he stopped hearing the music
He was left with a stack of shitty rhymes
A moron crypt to seal his isolated confusion
Because nobody else could hear the music either
*****
She liked him at first
Because he made her laugh
She met him at the University of Illinois Hospital psych ward
He was having his 7th manic episode in 8 years
She was recovering from a botched suicide attempt
He stopped making her laugh when he got out of the hospital
She moved in with him a couple of years later
She used to think that he would change
Nothing changed in the 8 years after that
He never made her laugh
And she still wanted to die
****0 -
"Where the ones that want it the most are denied it
And the ones that don't want it at all are stuck with it "
And what you fear the most could meet you half way......
Yeah, what you fear the most is gonna meet you
half way!
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
"He was singing songs in his dreams
And writing them down when he woke up"
Inspiration in its purest and grandest form--your unconsciousness doing all the work, and you just have to copy it downPost edited by DangDang on0 -
Pages 263-269 from "A Dungeon of Days"
************************************************
He was quickly put on Thorazine
The dosage was set at 300 milligrams
Three times a day
Triple the amount
That had stagnated him into catatonic inoperable depression
During a month at Manteno
The year before
He had never heard
Of such a whoppingly out of line with reality dosage
He told the staff
That they were more deep down dark crazy and sinister dangerous
Than they could ever imagine him to be
He was determined to fight
The effects of the medication
He paced he ranted he sang
He kept chillum smoking his cigarettes
He wasn't going to let them destroy him
He ground the gigantic M&M sized Thorazine orange pills
Into powder with his teeth
He wanted them to know
He wasn't cheeking his pills
He kept taunting the hospital staff
To name their poison
Whatever it was
He would beat it
****
He pressed into his closed eyelids
With the backs of his thumbs
Lighting his darkened field of vision
With concentrically warped
Geometrically precise lined colored patterns
Transfiguring multi-hued shapeshift intensifications
Out of the blackness bright explosive rays
Of white red yellow sunsprays
Narrowing into tunneled dark specks
This was the trip
Eternity's door step
This is what the almost dead
Come back to life
Had to be seeing
The final release
Of cerebrally imprinted images
The rods and cones firing random sporadic dying confusion
As the lack of oxygen in the brain
Dries the flow of blood into the eyes
He stood in the middle of the observation ward
Pressing into his eyes
Broadcasting outloud to the staff
The textures of the colored shapes he was seeing
He wanted to make sure
That they knew
What kind of fucking weirdo they were dealing with
****
The Thorazine days passed slow
On the observation ward
His thought processes were disjointed splinters
Fly aparts in the face of the next moment's provocation
Concentration was a fractured dismantled impossibility
He kept the television on the ward
Turned up loud
Tuned into a low outlet local watt cable station
Featuring a hand full of rock music videos
Over and over
An unvarying small stock redundant repetition rotation
Pounding itself indelible on the shadowed walls of his brain
Like a late 1960's early 1970's AM radio station
The music kept him grounded
Centered
No matter how far into his head he went with his thoughts
The sound of a familiar song
Pulled him back gently
Into the dull ache mundanity of the moment
On a blanket of memories associated with the music
****
There was a video clip of the Who
Playing a live version of a Who's Next song
Without Keith Moon
Pete Townshend
The big nosed patron saint
Of depressed male adolescent loners
Windmill stalking fury trousers
Breaking down into a mad dervish drunk spastic dance
Doing the Baba O'Riley jig
To a canned fiddle
***
He knew the whole Who catalog by heart
Hundreds of teenaged hours spent
Headphone secluded in his bedroom
With drug store bargain bin corner clipped copies
Of Sell Out and Magic Bus
The Who Sings My Generation and Happy Jack
He wore out his 1972 Christmas gift Tommy
He turned his record club 12 for a penny copy of Quadrophenia
Into a term paper for sophomore English class
With footnotes from a 1964 Newsweek
About mod rocker riots on English resort beaches
He remembered the time he sat
In a car with the son of the boss
At his old Joliet construction job
Smoking a joint
Rendered into speechless stupid silent reflectiveness
When Bellboy came on the radio
Because he knew that's just what he was
He remembered seeing The Who
On the By Numbers tour
From a view obstructed upper balcony seat
At the Chicago Stadium
Which hid Keith Moon behind a tower of speakers
Suspended on cables from the stadium ceiling
He had read and reread the Pete Townshend interview
Printed in a copy of a Rolling Stone magazine anthology
Paperback leftover from the late sixties
A rambling autobiographically loose conceptually dissonant
Think outloud verbal sprawl
Like it was a revered oracle delivered by a pious sage
He remembered the time he sat
In a car with the son of the boss
At his old Joliet construction job
Smoking a lunchbreak joint
Rendered into speechless stupid silent reflectiveness
When Bellboy came on the radio
Because he knew that's just what he was at that moment
He remembered acid stoned staring
At the Who Are You album cover
Into the tired sadness on the faces of band
Recalling months later the Not To Be Taken Away chair
With a haunted slow set in realization chill
After he had heard that Keith Moon died
He felt disheartened watching his old hero
Pounding the stage like some kind of broken down clown
***
There were two videos by Iggy Pop
The hellbent warped fury years of the Stooges
Lined into the sides of Jim Osterberg's face
Already an old days throwback
Fighting a possible case of the has-beens
Iggy complained about being bored
About being only five foot one
He kept wondering if Iggy made the videos
Knowing they would be the only relief
For somebody locked up on a hospital mental ward
He wondered if Jim knew what it was like
To be locked up on a hospital mental ward
***
There was a video by the band Nazareth
Drunken scotsman power glory
Sandpaper lunged screecher banshee wail shred Dan McCafferty
One of the staples of his highschool
Riding around with his beer drinking buddies
With the 8-track blasting nights
Nobody messed with a son of a bitch back then
The hair of the dog was cleaned up now
Slicked back video perm styling
In a song that talked about
Jaguars magazine covers pop stars and halloween
With a hook big enough to pull a shark out of the ocean
***
Another of his favorite videos
Was by an english german looking
Dug up from the grave pale red lipstick drawn
Synthesizer jockey Gary Numan
Robot strange vocals about being In Cars
The music had a trancelike bleat
That fast forwarded him into an automatic slow motion
Stop everything in its tracks hypnotic
Computerized effeminate new wave music
Everything he had grown to know
Meat and potatoes guitar drum bass rock music
Was outmoded outdated out of style
Driven out of business
He knew he was looking at a new world
He drew the line with this non-guitar crap
In Cars was as far as he could go
The new music was horseshit bland generic interchangeable
No balls or adrenaline
The time was going to have to go on by itself
Leaving him behind
****
He was hooked up to an electroencephalograph machine
The hospital wanted to measure
The extent of the brain damage he had incurred
He deliberately attempted to skew the results
Fuck the test up into an undeniable abnormality
He played the Dancing Days Led Zeppelin guitar solo
As loud as he could inside his head
Windshield wipering his eyelids to the string strikes
His head strobe flash popping lit like a pinball table
He heard the needle pen scratching back and forth
Zig zag confusion all over the graph paper
He laughed inside to himself
Knowing that was the sound of his brain damage
***
He believed that if he thought something
In a real loud voice
Inside of his head
Other people could hear it
People would even say what
When he did this
Not saying a word
They thought that they had heard him
Say something
He did this with music
Played it loud inside his head
When he was around people he didn't know
Aware that most people couldn't tolerate
Hearing it turned up out loud for real
He wondered if his thoughts would have the same stifling effect
He knew that loud music
Left many people overwhelmed aggravated emotionally responsive
Unable to concentrate or focus a reasonable thought
He regarded the music he listened to
Along with the drugs that he had taken
As part of a lifelong training regimen
In being able to think through any noise or chaos
To maintain his thought processes
No matter what the load of outer sensory bombardment
He knew that volume was a weapon
Outloud or in his thoughts
***
He imagined a war fought in the future
With loud rock music
Leading the assault on large urban areas
Maniacs demons and wizards
Like Ted Nugent Jeff Beck Jimmy Page and Eddie Van Halen
Would rotate in shifts
Hired guns hooked up to massive sound systems
Covering cities in relentless guitar noise barrages
Three chord solo treble explosions
There would be no escape from the noise
Only the prepared would be able to survive
With their nerves and sanity intact
****
He was on the observation ward for a week
Before he was allowed to spend
An hour a day on the regular psychiatric ward
With the normal patients
He spent his hour in the radio room
A small plexiglas enclosed sound proof closet
With a stereo system powerful enough to shake a house
He cranked the Chicago FM radio stations
Loading himself up with noise
Before being taken back to the observation ward
The staff noticed that
The music calmed him down
Kept him quietly relaxed for several hours after
***
He had the best hallucination of his life
Listening to a Pink Floyd song
Comfortably Numb
In the hospital radio room
Towards the end of the song
The stereo speaker he was looking at
Began to melt
Dissolving into molecules
Which disappeared
Until he was able to see the block wall behind the speaker
He was blacking out while he was still awake
Slipping into some sort of below consciousness realm
Into an area right beneath the surface
Out of the music came the voice of Roger Waters
Calling him out by name
Telling him he was fool
The trip he was on would not lead him anywhere
He remembered the time
At a Moody Blues concert
Strychnine stiff in numb leg cramp pain
Loaded up on King Tut blotter acid
A metallic sounding voice overcame him
Telling him that we are the gods
There was nothing outside of our thoughts
He stood his ground
Refused to buckle
Went for the ride
For all that it was worth
Listening to the rant spoken over the music
Knowing that it was coming from somewhere
Inside of his head
He knew he couldn't cook something up like that by himself
He knew it was the Thorazine
It was kicking his ass
****0 -
From pages 380-387 of "A Dungeon of Days"
*************************************************
He slowly tested his limits
How late how long
How much could he drink
Before getting up in the morning for rehab
He nursed himself through
The first few hangovers
Moving tentatively
Stomach stretched raw
Torn out of shape
Shitting water
Head throbbing dizzy
Eyeballs ready to fall from their sockets
With every hammer pound
He was forced to listen to
He waited for his old work habits to come back
He knew that after a while
The hangovers would stop
All he had to do
Was keep pushing himself
Through those first few lousy days
***
He rode the mental health bus home
In the two o'clock afternoon
An arduous bladder stretching stop and go
Through the streets of the west side of Joliet
Through the heart of the Joliet black middle class
Rows of one story garage attached houses painted
In a mind totaling phosphorescent array
Purples pinks powder blues
Canary yellow and oranges
Peter Max colors
That he knew were best appreciated
Under the pupil wide influence
Of hallucinatory drugs
He demented into a paranoia
Maybe the whole neighborhood
Had been drugged by the government
The incoming water supply
Tamper lace treated with psychedelics
In a feebled bungle attempt
To render the residents
Mentally incapable
A dark impenetrable conspiracy
That collapsed in a failure
Exploding a rainbow
Back into the faces of the perpetrators
The only evident result of the drugs
Was the freaked out color paint of the houses
He developed the idea
As the bus rolled to its stops
Hard long look searching the eyes
Of the wheel chair strapped vegetables
Believing that they psychically aware of the plot
Maybe they were victims of something similar
He fast forwarded
Into a gone wrong awry
Aldous Huxley brave new world future
Of prenatal chemical altering embryonics
Damaged human catastrophe byproducts
In the blindfolded madness of scientific ambition
The ride finally ended when he got home
He laughed inside to himself with relief
The whole idea was a preposterous nonsense
He took the fantasy as a good sign
His imagination was returning
***
He would see blue lights in his eyes
A quick momentary dot sized flash
Something he guessed leftover from the drugs
It always happened
When he was deep into a thought
When an idea would suddenly reveal itself
The light would blink on
It took him a year to realize that
Nobody else could see it
It was something emanate from inside of his brain
It always happened when he was thinking
Whenever his line of thought
Resulted an inner mental pronouncement
The simultaneous spontaneous reaction
Of thought intuition and realization
Combusting to fire off a glowing blue charge
He knew that the blue light
And the thought that caused it
Meant that he was on to something
He gradually realized that
The blue light signified the truth
***
He got on the mental health bus
For a gray dark early afternoon winter day ride home
Somebody getting on the bus said
That the president Reagan had been shot
Somebody else said that they got all of them
All of them had been shot
Nobody knew for sure
What the hell was going on
He could almost hear the word
Good
That immediately resounded in his mind
And in the minds of the black guys on the bus
Nobody had to verbalize it
It was an unspoken understood consensus
It was payback time for the powers
A sign of a long overdue slowly redemptive justice
For all of the done wrong down trodden innocent victims
The ride home through empty streets was silent
Each man in a seat by himself
Out the window alone with their thoughts
Even the retards in their way seemed to sense
The imminent prospect of change
***
He bought himself a transistor radio
A cheap pocket sized AM old fashioned 9 volt
He scotch tape custom encased a picture of Debbie Harry
Cut from a magazine
Onto the face of the radio
He listened to the radio in the morning
While sitting at the rehab breakroom table
During the half hour 3 cigarette wait
He sat through before he was allowed
To start working on his pop bottle crates
He listened to the once mighty top 40 giant
WLS 89 on the AM dial
It was the dying days of AM radio
FM radio took all of the good songs
AM radio was left to send out the trash
The same doggerel shit over and over
He got himself used to it
Betty Davis Eyes
And a song by the neighborhood heroes Styx
With cool dripping synthesizer intro
That sounded OK turned up loud for a couple of seconds
He even got used to the put-on innuendo
Between the morning DJ and news woman
Low watt 9 volt electricity
A picture of Debbie Harry
Anything to get himself going
Anything to make him temporarily
Forget the fact
He was repairing pop bottle crates
With retarded people
***
He bought himself a record
By a punk rock band called
The Dead Kennedys
Loud fast densely worded music
A sacrilege joke assault on society
It was everything he had ever hoped for
A second chance coming
For the failed 1960's bastard coupling
Of rock music with change effecting political rhetoric
When Ya Get Drafted
Let's Lynch the Landlord
Chemical Warfare
Police Truck
Holiday in Cambodia
He memorized the words to the songs
Until he was able to spit them out
Right along with the singer Jello Biafra
He spent hours in fascinated confusion
Trying to decipher the collaged poster
That was included with the album
The whole thing was a sign to him
Something was happening somewhere
Something that he wanted to be a part of
Somewhere there were people out there
Just like him
***
He grew up like most of his generation
Believing in the tragic sainted saviourhood
Of the martyred shot down President John F Kennedy
He even remembered the funeral
On his grandparent's black and white
The Lucy Show was on afterwards
The night Robert Kennedy was shot
He went back to an eight year old's sleep
Thinking about a heroic man with a bullet in the brain
Fighting for life
He wanted a miracle to happen
He was disappointed to find out in the morning
There was no miracle
Robert Kennedy was dead
He reveled in the Kennedy family myth mystique
Joe Jack Bobby and Teddy
PT-109 Camelot and touch football at Hyannis Port
He built a shrine in his imagination
This was before the Kennedys
Became the irish bootlegger's sons
That couldn't keep it in their pants
***
He knew the killing of President Kennedy
Was a boon to crackpot delusional lunatics
He even took the trip himself once
Deep within the Dade County Miami Beach jail lockup
Under the influence of the ocean water he had been drinking
Handcuffed beaten by a fat cubano guard
He was put in a room
With a thinly built deeply tanned man
In an olive green short sleeved army type uniform
Looked just like President Kennedy
Hadn't aged a day in 15 years
He was convinced the guy was clairvoyant
Psychically reading his mind
The guy stood off to his side
Seeming to react with silent gestures of agreement
To the onslaught psychosis rush of thought
That went tunneling through his head
The guy was President Kennedy
In lay low secret hiding
Actively engaged
In a telepathic war
Against the corrupt government
That had taken control of America
The whole thing in Dallas was a propped fake
A Walt Disney built smiling waving robot
Set up in an open limousine
Designed for ketchup bag target practice
Kennedy saw the whole thing coming
Afterward he tried to tell his family
That he had seen the President Kennedy in Miami
No wonder they had his crazy ass locked up
***
He wanted to put together a guidebook
A step by step walk through how-to instruction manual
Of all the insanity deluded paranoias
He had sweated through
A list of things to contemplate
Suggestions that could lead the mind
Into a controlled throe of psychosis
A funhouse sitting in a chair walk ride
Through a lunatic's unending madness
There had to be a way to recreate
That momentary lapse of reasoning
That escaped sanity loss of mind terror
When the impossible became real
He would include all of his bad trips
The last survivor after the nuclear holocaust
The chemical wire in the brain that received government transmissions
The died last night trapped in a mundane bardo
The hidden camera built into the television set
The family members replaced by CIA replicants
The temporary death state of sleep
The space ship the rock stars were going to buy with all of their money
The movies that were edited from real life footage
The man who was kicked off the planet for thinking too loud
The faked death of President Kennedy
The loss of sleep reality that feels like a dream
The mafia recruit initiation rite hassles
The old men dressed up like old ladies
The disheveled bum that was really a famous person
The renegade sidewalk punk being scouted by the hollywood movie director
The FBI infiltrators in the downtown skidrow mission
The mental ward fugitive on the lam underground railroad system
The mental ward smuggled dissident holding area operation
All of his bullshit inventions
Maybe there was a way to put them into a pill
That came with an instruction booklet
After the pill wore off
Everything would return to its normal
***
He passed gradually through the back of the winter
He knew that things were getting better
He felt an anticipation welling
Something good
Something big was going to happen
The psycho maniacal spree episodes
That scarred his previous four winters
Were finally going to dissolve
Into the slowly forgotten unfortunate events
Of a past that was finally relinquishing
Its stranglehold lockjaw grip on the present
He wasn't going to flip out
Again
***
He got himself back into drinking shape
He was drunk every night of the week
He spent each night with different people
Moved himself around
He wanted to stay spread out
Only let people see a small part
That way nobody would know
What he was up to
He didn't want to be around anybody
Long enough to make them sick of him
Nothing was going to go wrong this time
He wasn't going to give anybody
An opportunity excuse reason
To get in his way
Cut off his fun
Fuck everything up for him
***
He celebrated the first greening of the spring
He shaved off the beard
That had grown wild thick black untrimmed
For the previous seven months
He bought a nickel bag sized dime bag of pot
From one of the guys at rehab
Got stoned after he got home
Spent the rest of the afternoon
Before his stepfather got home
Walking around the backyard
In a stupefied state of utter amazement
Staring awestruck at the individual leaves
On the trees
The networking lines leading to stem
Becoming capillaried arterous veins
Connected to the heart of the tree
The delicate threads spread into the green
Exact precise patterned
Each leaf the same
The trees were alive
They were breathing again
He could feel it
He told himself afterwards
That he needed to get stoned like that more often
***0 -
Pages 294-297 from "A Dungeon of Days" - now available at Target.com
*************************************************************************************
He learned how to drive in his mother's car
With his father ranting in the passenger seat while they rolled
Vacant through empty sunday afternoon shopping center parking lots
Telling him and anybody else that would listen
That he had no ability
He flunked the driver’s education road test
In the summer of his sixteenth birthday
Told by the shop metal teacher driving instructor
Who hated skinny long haired sullen rock and roll punks
That he had no business being on the road
He drove around blackout drunk high stoned
Wasted on acid
In a truck and a car full of open alcohol
With a moonflower bong on the dashboard
Everyday for a solid 10 months
Before he was arrested on a monday night
Turning the wrong way into a one way street
In the middle
Of an exceptionally cold blizzardous january nightmare winter
That rendered most vehicles inoperable and most roads impassable
His license to drive was suspended for 3 months
Before it was revoked for a year
He would have to come up with character reference vouching letters
If he wanted to reapply for his drivers license
Then he had to carry high cost personal liability insurance for 5 years
He still owed money on the fine
From when his license was revoked the summer before
There was no way outside of hell to pay it
He knew that driving was hopeless
He let go of the idea of ever driving again
He was wiping his ass clean of the whole fucking mess
****
He started spending more of his time
With the married woman he met on the ward
She was one out of about three other women
That he was casually chasing
Checking into during his spare time
Dropping out of the screwball moron routine
When he was able to talk to them alone
He half wondered how far he would be able to get
With a woman that was 12 years older than him
Trapped somewhere with a husband she said
She didn't care about
Struggling through the dry years of a lapsing marriage
That involved children
He knew that any time spent on her
Was probably going to be wasted
***
He started chasing women when he was 18
The available combination of alcohol and older women in bars
Worked like magic for him
Dissolving the highschool nightmare years
Spent in withdrawn teenage isolation reject loneliness
Without ever knowing what it was like
To have a girlfriend
He went after anything that didn't appear tied down
Making up for the wasted lost time
With a whiskey sped false courage bravery abandon
In a Dr. Jekyll type personality warping transformation
A restless always unsatisfied pursuit
The great white wife hunt
Was mostly a losing proposition
He had stumbled slowly into the gray vague dawn realization
That women picked him up
When he was able to sit still
Long enough to keep his mouth shut
He didn't have to do anything
***
He learned how to drink in bars
At a place called Joe's
Named after the owner
A dark thickbrowed stocky emigrate gypsy
A supposed member of the non-existent
East side of Joliet syndicate
An alleged man of rumored repute
A shark inside of a fishbowl
Who ran the joint with a tape handled dent creased wooden baseball bat
Strongarm managing over a revolving crew of muscle brained lackeys
The guy was mentoring one of his friends
In a life of tax free success
****
He got into Joe's as part of a gang of 17 year olds
That had been drinking quarts of piss warm Pabst Blue Ribbon
By the case
Underneath an expressway overpass
In a nearby town
Nobody gave a shit about a bunch of underaged kids
Hanging out shooting stick
Getting noisily drunk
Ordering up shots from every bottle behind the bar
Trying to find the one that tasted the worst
As long as they had money in their pockets
****
Joe's was a neighborhood bar
In the economically strapped Joliet Ridgewood area
The down the street tavern
Where guys stopped off after a day's work
In dirty sweat stained blue collar job clothes
Grease still smeared on their hands and across their faces
It was a place where hair slicked malnourished older booze hounds
Hand shake steady sunken skin ashen gray polyester seedy
With nothing at home except the sharp glare of a bare 40 watt lightbulb
Sat quietly at the end of the bar
Watching television sitcoms on the corner set
During near dead weeknights
When the headlights of passing cars
Moved along the walls
****
Joe's filled up on Saturday nights
Mostly with men looking to cut loose
Sandblast guzzling a weeks worth of useless memories
With an impatient eight hour delirious frenzy binge of alcohol
Until they were able to fuck or fight anything that got in their way
Cue balls bounced off of the wood paneled walls
Stools were knocked over
Disputes erupted into take it outside spillovers
That never made it out of the back door
The jukebox pumped out strong at full volume
An endless roaring three song for a quarter barrage
Country music by Waylon and Willie and the boys
Hank Williams Junior and Johnny Paycheck
Merle Haggard
David Allan Coe singing the perfect Steve Goodman song
The white working man's version of the black man's blues
Made by the pot smoking redneck hippie cowboys
The middle 70's golden age of outlaw country music
Before Eddie Rabbit and all of that urban cowboy horseshit
“A good hearted woman in love with a good timin' man”
He wanted a piece of that action
****
He spent a year in Joe's
Before he started hitting the area nightclubs
Where people his own age were hanging out
All the places and the people in them were a joke to him
Weak lightweight easy to knock over phonies
That didn't know diddley
He disrespected every establishment he went into
Smoking pot out in the open
Breaking bottles against the walls
Smashing glasses on the floor
Stinking up the places with the foulest cheapest cigars he could find
He knew that it didn't matter where he got kicked out of
He could always get into Joe's
****0 -
From pages 373-375 of "A Dungeon of Days"
****************************************************
He sat in a Frankfort Illinois bar
A slow dead dusty newspaper cluttered creaking floorboard dive
Half watching monday night football waiting
While his cousin rummy hustle shot dollar bill games of pool
He thought that he heard the football game announcer Howard Cosell say
In between the sound of cue ball breaks and empty tavern talking
That John Lennon had been shot
He got the keys from his cousin
Went outside to his cousin's van
Not wanting to believe what he thought he had heard
He turned on the radio to Imagine
Punched quickly through the radio preset buttons
John Lennon came spilling out from every station
Stunned sitting
In the dashboard glow of green radio light
He knew John Lennon must have been dead
***
He stayed awake the night John Lennon died
Lying on a couch in the dark with headphones
Listening to Rubber Soul
And the Walls and Bridges album
Thinking about the Beatles
John Lennon
Instant karma
A thousand trips
And the number nine dream
Confused in the feeling of unexplainable loss
For someone he hadn't known
The world suddenly became an emptier lonelier place
***
He bought the John Lennon Walls and Bridges album
When it came out in 1974
A Beatle freaked since childhood 15 year old
Paying a dutiful homage of respect
To a hero
He played the album once after he got it
Filed it away with disinterest
Then forgot about it
For the next four years
***
When he came home in the spring of 1978
After melting himself down at college
He found an old postcard
That was stuck inside
The John Lennon Elephant's Memory
Some Time in New York album
The postcard was part of the 1972 campaign
To keep John Lennon
From being kicked out of the country
He filled out the card
Mailed it in knowing
It was six years late
On its way
To a dead post office box in New York
He just wanted to let somebody know
That he still cared
***
He came home in the dark middle
Of a january 1979 friday night
Paycheck spent stoned drunk tripping
On purple microdot acid
He had been driving his cars for hours
Through the frozen waste of a moon shot snowstorm
Unable to sleep
He instinctively dug out
A once played John Lennon record
Walls and Bridges
He listened to the album
Through stereo headphones
In the gray winter night becoming dawn bedroom still
Over and over
His fried mind soothing in the melting warmth
Of the liquid hawaiian indian guitar of Jesse Ed Davis
Hearing John Lennon's name
Called out
Along with that of George
In the heat whispered trees
The japanese kimono rustle muffled voices
In the song #9 Dream
Convinced him that the record was made
For him to hear on that night
“Shoveling smoke with a pitchfork
in the wind”
A haunted message
Sent from through
And across time
Warped
With eight straight months of intense drug abuse
He felt like he had finally broken through
Kicked in knocked down the doors
To a totally new realm of possibility
Beyond any imaginable barrier
A ghosted world of spirit
Existing in thought forever
He knew nothing would ever be the same for him
He didn't get any sleep that night
He was able to keep himself awake
For the rest of that winter
The number nine dream
Was for all time
“Au bouwakawa
pouse pouse”
***
***********************************************************
From pages 189-184 of "A Dungeon of Days"
**********************************************************
He would drive his car to work
Every morning worrying
That he was going to be caught
By the cops
Driving with a revoked license
He knew that his blue Camaro stuck out
In the memory of the local law enforcement agencies
He had been run in by
The state police the county police the town police
He wasn't afraid of the bastards
When he was crazy
Now he was in constant fear
When he saw a squad car
While he was sneaking back and forth
In his car
On the way to work
Several times he was followed by the cops to his mother's house
He started using an unincorporated gravel road
That ran through the back of town
He quit using that road
After he was followed down it by an Illinois State trooper
He was a known troublemaker
Come back to the smallscale scene of not yet forgotten petty crimes
He got the feeling that the cops were just watching
Waiting for him to try to pull some more of his shit
*****
He bought his car after he started working at the railroad
It was a dark turquoise indigo blue Camaro
A 1978 model with barely
Over a thousand miles on it
Already for sale as used
In October of 1978
It still looked like it was just from the factory new
He bought the car
Because the color looked good to him
When he was stoned
Everything on the car was blue
The entire interior
A dozen different variation shaded tint hues
Of the color light blue
He also bought the car
For the cassette tape deck
With speakers mounted in
The doors
And behind the back seats
****
He had spent the previous summer
Driving around in a beatup rattling
International Harvester 4-wheel drive truck
A cornbinder
A chugging heap of rusty metal
Guaranteed to have a flat tire any day of the week
On the way home from work
Mystery carburetor vapor locks
Stalling itself on the open highway
Out in the middle of miles away from anywhere
Like it was out of gas
He drove the truck through creeks and fields
The settings on the front wheel hubs permanently froze
Weld rusted stuck locked
In the 4-wheel drive position
The truck was in need of serious work
He had no mechanical inclination interest or aptitudes
He just kept pushing the truck down unremembered roads
On its inevitable journey to the junkyard
*****
He learned how to safely operate a motorized vehicle
While being chemically damaged and impaired
In that truck
He took acid every saturday and sunday morning that summer
Then spent the afternoons driving alone
Around and around
On the quiet miles of forest preserve roads
In a Joliet park
He would drive through the woods
Like it was a movie on a screen
Endlessly rolled out before him
The leaves and branches of the trees overhead
Behind and on all sides of him
Except in the spaces where the light fell through
A canopied cathedral experience
In the shade of forest green
Wind rustled still
The sounds of the birds
Muted together in a single mosaic of noise
Chirps
Whistle trill call songs
Becoming one multi-layered distinct sound
Immobile plaster in the driver’s seat
He kept his truck moving through the woods
Not even aware that he was behind the wheel
Driving became an automatic response
When he was tripping on acid
****
He had the drinking drugging tripping and driving down
When he bought his car
After lumbering laboriously
In a boxy cumbersome lurching pickup truck
All over the area that summer
He cut loose on the road
When he got in that Camaro
He was a maniac
Quickly addicted to the feeling
Of automotive powered speed
That feels effortless
Without friction or impending restraint
When he was stoned
He started thinking that he was at one
At tune and part of that machine
He felt like the car was responding
To his thoughts concerning acceleration and direction
Even before he put them into action
He started thinking about cars and people
The brain inside the skull
The hard outer protective shell covering
The vegetable-like controlling cell nucleus
Inside a metal cranium
He thought that in the future
People would spend their whole life in an automobile type structure
Their vehicle no more unlike to them
Than a shell to a turtle
****
He kept the tape player running full blast
The volume turned all the way up
While he was driving
Listening over and over again to Rush
Pink Floyd
UFO
Ted Nugent
Led Zeppelin and the cold turkey horror screams of John Lennon
He could think of nothing better than
Being stoned listening to music
While driving his car
****
He had once heard a lecture by Timothy Leary
About a future of space colonies
He wanted to be the driver of a one of those space colonies
He was convinced that given enough dope and loud rock music
He could sit in a chair and operate a machine
For the rest of his life
Plowing across time on a lifelong journey through the void
In charge
In control
At one with the machine
While the passengers lived
In the hold behind enjoying their lives
****
There was a lot of snow that winter of 1978-79
Most people were getting their cars snowed-in buried
He never had that problem
He never parked anywhere for more than a few hours
He kept his car moving
Driving around alone in the middle of nights
That looked like the moon
Everything white except the reflective yellow in the highway signs
And the blue on the hood of his Camaro
****
He drove at high speeds
With no regard to the winter weather
Or hazardous driving conditions
He had no patience for the careful driving
Of others
He thought they were fools
With no understanding or communication
For the machines they were operating
When he saw cars going out of control
He took it as a sign of unconscious maliciousness
On the blind part of the driver
That had been unknowingly acted upon
By the cars that these people were unknowingly driving
He thought that most people had no idea
What they were dealing with
When they were given control of a machine
He thought that these people were dangerous
He thought that he could sense them in traffic
He kept an eye on them
Staying out of their way
Waiting for them to cross the line
He thought that he was able to tell
When the car and the mind inside of it were not one
It was a split double threat to him
Of machine and driver gone amuck
Anything was able to happen
He had to do a lot of quick high speed hairpin maneuvering
To avoid collisioned mayhem with other people and their cars
****
He liked driving in the middle of the night
When everybody was at home sleeping that winter
One barroom drunk after work friday night
After helping to push a buddy's truck out of the snow
He got in his car to drive home
Two hits of purple micro-dot
That he had taken earlier that evening
Exploded with intense colored lights and geometrical patterns
All over the field of his vision
At three o’clock in the morning
While he was driving
He continually found himself moving down the same road
Knowing that he had never turned off
Not aware of how he had gotten turned back around
Always traveling in the same direction
Passing repeatedly by the flashing lights of a squad car
Sitting each time in the same place
On the side of the road
In front of his old highschool
He approached the scene perpetually
Every time long look staring into the faces of the cops
Like they were ghosts
Frozen inanimate cardboard robots
Pasted onto an image
Macheted red and blue
By the swirling blink of siren lights
He was the only person driving on the road that night
Driving 15 miles per hour
On a foot of still falling snow
He must have driven past them cops
A half dozen times
A 10 minute ride home
Eventually turned into two hours and a quarter tank of gas
Lost unaccountable time
He became convinced
In the mid-december middle of the night early morning dawn darkness
That with the help of his car
He was able to trip and materialize himself
Into an alternate version of our world
Where everything appeared the same as it was in the previous life
He thought that he had died somewhere
Out on that road the night before
And to that world and to the people in it
He was dead
Being mourned that moment as dead
He thought that people died and woke up
On another world
All the time
Without even being aware of it
He thought that he had evolved his being
Advancing himself to a higher plane of existence
He was convinced that he had died the night before
Replacing himself in a subsequent version of earthly human reality
He got in his car the next morning
To make sure that spirit of his machine
Had made the trip
Into the new world with him
****
His almost brand new car
Didn't look so brand new
After a few months of winter driving
He had scrapes chips and small dents
In various places on the body of the car
He had burned holes on the interior console
With patchouli incense cones
Beer had been spilt all over the seats by careless passengers
The carpeting was matted with pot seeds
He started to look at his car
As a rolling ashtray and garbage can
He was glad when the car was lost for stolen
He thought that it was gone forever
When it turned up months later on a police impound lot
All of the damage that he had done
In the few months he drove the car
Was included with the damage done by the thieves
When he got the car back
The insurance company had fixed everything
It was like all of the abuse he had heaped upon the car
Had never happened
The car had been restored to its original condition
*****
Driving was never the same for him
His confidence and sense of machine mastery were destroyed
Stolen and revoked
Along with his car and his license
He drove like a dog that had been whipped on and beaten
Too many times
He slunk down the road
A whimpering tail hiding sneak
Back and forth to work
He was too scared to drive any other time
He didn't even turn on the radio
While he was driving
He wanted to be quiet
He didn't want to attract any attention to himself
Driving became an exercise in paranoid fear and silence
*****0 -
From "A Dungeon of Days"
((Happy Fathers Day - R.I.P.))
********************************
HE DECIDED THAT HE WANTED TO SEE HIS FATHER
He decided that he wanted to see his father
When he was 22 years old
He hadn't seen or talked to his father in a few years
He was having a lot of problems
He wanted to go right to the source
He had been living in a halfway house apartment for mental patients
He lived with a guy that laid on a bed in the living room all day
He stayed in the bedroom with a cheap stereo and hundreds of albums
He paid his rent with the public aid check he received every month
He was able to collect welfare
While he waited to be put on Social Security
He bought his food with food stamps and grocery store food vouchers
He bought cigarettes with the change leftover from one dollar food stamps
He spent the days in occupational therapy at a nearby hospital
He saw a therapist at the hospital once a month
He was supposed to be taking lithium for his manic-depression
He took the lithium three times a day for a while
He thought that the lithium made him depressed
He started taking the lithium
Only on the days he was scheduled for a bloodtest
He told his doctor that he was agitated and couldn't sleep
He told his doctor that maybe he needed to be on a major tranquilizer
He got the doctor to prescribe tranquilizers
He told the doctor that the tranquilizers made him stiff
He got the doctor to prescribe medication
To relieve tranquilizer side-effects
He got a months supply of medication at a time
He squirreled away the lithium and the tranquilizers
He took a month's worth of the side-effect pills in a week
He found out that by tripling the dosage of the side-effect pills
He was able to get stoned
He started taking the side-effect pills from the other patients
He was able to stay high everyday like this for months
He smoked pot whenever any was around or offered to him
He noticed that the opportunity to smoke pot increased over time
He had stopped drinking alcohol
He had spent some time in an alcohol program
While he was in the hospital
He thought that maybe the alcohol was causing all of his problems
He decided he was going to quit drinking and he did
He didn't follow up with AA or any of the other hospital programs
He was the only person out of the 15 in the program that quit drinking
He still liked to smoke pot and saw no reason to give that up
His life at the halfway house got routine and settled
His problems started when he started sleeping less and then not at all
He was talking on the phone with his mom one day
His mother told him that he was just like his father
He decided right then that he wanted to go see his father
His father lived in Prescott Arizona
His father hadn't worked in the 13 years since his parents divorced
His father lived from month to month
On a Social Security disability check
His father passed the years binging on alcohol and insanity
His father checked into VA hospitals from time to time
To sober himself up
He usually got a christmas card once a year from his father
He grew up being ashamed and embarrassed of his father
His father was an uncontrollable raging maniac
He wanted to find out if he was just like his father
He had been awake for a couple of weeks when he left the halfway house
He spilled all of his pills that he saved on his bedroom floor
He called his sister and said he needed money
For a bus ticket to Arizona
His sister told him that he was nuts and told him not to bother her
His sister lived 35 miles away from where he was at the halfway house
He climbed into a open freight train car
On the tracks behind the halfway house apartment where he lived
Heading in the direction of where his sister lived
He got off the train when it pulled into a switching yard
He got on the highway so that he could thumb the rest of the way
The first car that stopped for him was a police car
He was taken straight to jail
He had an outstanding arrest warrant
He had gotten a drunk driving ticket 3 years before
He had never paid the fine
He had been arrested for this more than 10 times in the past 3 years
He always promised to pay the money in a month
He never paid anything and a warrant would be reissued for his arrest
He always knew that the warrant was a guaranteed ride back to Joliet
He got picked up on the unpaid ticket warrant in Galesburg Illinois
Galesburg was a 4 hour drive from Joliet
He almost had to pay the gasoline bill
When the Joliet cops had to drive down there and then drive him back
This time he was taken back to Joliet to spend a quiet night in jail
He told the judge the next day that he would pay the fine in a month
He got out and spent the day walking
It was a 10 mile walk from Joliet to his sister's house
He showed up where his sister worked
He told his sister that he needed bus fare to Arizona
His sister told him that she wouldn't have the money for a week
His sister got a hold of their father on the phone
His sister told his father that he was coming down there
His father said that there was nowhere for him to stay
He didn't care
He said he was going down there anyway
His sister drove him back to the halfway house to pick up his albums
He told his sister that she could keep his records
In exchange for the bus fare money
He had just gotten into his month supply of side-effect medication Before he left the halfway house
He was feeling pretty good and oblivious to the chaos he was causing
One of his sister's roommates was dealing
Out of a halfpound bag of pot
He helped himself freely to the pot
He was smoking his sister’s roommate’s for sale pot around the clock
He sat in a chair and listened to the stereo through headphones
His sister wanted him out of there as soon as possible
He got on the bus with the last of his pills and a bag
Filled with jelly sandwiches
He took the last of his side-effect pills on the first day of the ride
He hadn't been without the pills for the previous seven months
He was starting to feel a little sick before he got to Arizona
He wasn't used to having saliva in his mouth
He was used to the dry mouth caused by the pills
He had an old letter from his father with him when he got off the bus
He found the address and went there expecting to find his father
He was told that his father had moved from there months ago
He was given the name of a woman who knew his father
He found out where the woman lived and went to her house
He was told that his father was expecting him
The woman told him where his father lived and how to find him
He found his father living in a small room
With a bed and a gas stove and a sink
He told his father that he would sleep on the floor
It was the start of the month so his father still had some money left
He went out with his father that night and his father got drunk
He rode back to the room with his father on the back of his motorcycle
He stayed up all night and talked with his father
His father told him to go see a lady about getting some work
He went the next day to talk to the lady
The lady owned a restaurant and a couple of apartment buildings
He was told that he could work
For 5 dollars an hour and a restaurant meal
He went to work that morning and his father went out and got drunk
He had a few dollars in his pocket and was itching to get some dope
He was still feeling cravings in his body
He was withdrawing from the side-effect medication
He wasn't sleeping and neither was his father
He talked to his father every night when his father came home drunk
His father told him about the time when his father had died
His father said that it happened when he was home
On leave from the service during the Korean War
His father said he went out and got drunk with his dad
His father said he dropped his dad off that night at home
His father said that he left his dad sitting at the top of some stairs
His father said that it was hot and his dad wanted to get some air
His father said that his dad toppled down the stairs
His father said that his dad had broken his neck
While falling drunkenly down the stairs
His father said that his family blamed him for his dad's death
He waited for his father to go out one night
He pulled out the duffle bag where his father kept his things
He found his father's service documents
He found papers that said his father was trained as a tailgunner
He found papers that said his father had to be hospitalized
In a Roswell New Mexico hospital for military personnel
He figured that his father must have went crazy after his dad died
He asked his father about it that night when he got home
His father was angry that he had been digging through his papers
He had been there a week and a half and they were starting to argue
His father had drank up all of his money for the month
His father bought a radio
For 18 $12 installments from a department store
His father took the radio to a pawnshop and got 20 bucks for it
He had been down there with his father for two weeks by then
He spent the days doing a few odd manual labor hours
For the restaurant lady
He wasn't sleeping
His father was drinking continually
His father wasn't sleeping either
He was still trying to find some dope to cool his burning nerves
He wasn't able to find anything
He was arguing and fighting more and more with his father
His father even pawned his belt buckle to get drinking money
He would go up to the bars once in a while when his father was there
He was kind of embarrassed at the drunken spectacle his father made
He remembered how much he liked to drink and how good he felt
He remembered that the happiest he had ever been was when he was drunk
He watched his father and wondered if he had been that foolish
He left a bar one friday night with his father after it closed
His father was going to ride the 3 blocks home on his motorcycle
He was always worried about his father riding his motorcycle drunk
He told his father that he wasn't going to let him drive the bike home
He was arguing out in the street in front of the bar with his father
He took the keys from his father and started walking home
He flagged down a Prescott cop
He told the cop that his father was drunk and needed a ride
His father had an extra set of keys with him
His father got out his spare keys and cranked up the bike for home
He watched the cop red light his father a block later
He walked up to where they had his father pulled over
His father was so drunk that he could hardly talk
He heard the cops ask his father to recite the alphabet
He watched his father say half of the alphabet and stop
He saw the frozen look of terror on his father’s face
He watched his father get taken away for drunk driving
He got the motorcycle and pushed it the rest of the way home
He figured that his father would be out of jail the next day
He found out that this was his father's 5th drunk driving arrest
He was told that they weren't going to let him out of jail
For a long time
He talked to his father and assured him that the bike was home and ok
His father said he couldn't say the alphabet if he was sober
He told his father that he didn't know that he had extra keys on him
He told his father that he had put the cops on to him
To give him a ride and make sure that he got home
His father got mad and told him that he was a fucking idiot
His father stayed in jail and he stayed in the room
He was told by a cop that his father was going to kick his ass
He was still doing odd labor jobs and eating dinner at the restaurant
He spent most of his money on records
He listened to albums by the Clash and VanHalen at the library
Through a pair of headphones plugged into a clunky turntable
He wasn't sleeping and he was still craving for some dope
He started acting weird and talking to himself
He visited his father at the jail everyday the first week he was there
He quit going because his father got meaner and crazier each time
He decided he was going to get himself thrown in jail
He spent several nights trying to get arrested for something stupid
He decided he would have it out with his father right in jail
He was told by more people that his father was going to fix him good
He was getting weirder and crazier by the day
He was to the point where he wouldn't be able to work anymore
For the restaurant lady
He had been awake for the 4 weeks since he got down there
He was still fighting a real strong urge for some kind of dope
He was upset because he got his father thrown in jail
He was walking around the town and haranguing the cops
With a loud taunting voice in an attempt to get himself arrested
He was finally stopped by a cop on his way home
After working on a friday
He had acted weird while he worked that day
A lot of people had taken notice to his weirdness
They thought that he must have been drunk
He was assigned the job of helping two carpenters
He was to go outside of the house where they were working
With the measurements for boards
That a carpenter outside with a table saw would cut
He would forget the measurements as soon as he got them
Laughing and spewing nonsense when he went to tell the guy outside
How long the boards were supposed to be cut
He laughed and made up rhymes to remember the numbers
He sensed the anger and mounting impatience
In the voices and on the faces of the men he was working with
He let the work site at the end of the afternoon
He was still determined to get himself thrown in jail
He was walking home in his socks and carrying his shoes
He was given a ticket for walking against the crosswalk light
He was told to sign a ticket and appear in court
He signed his first name with his left hand
He signed his last name with his right hand
He was immediately handcuffed by the cop
Two more cops came up in a car
They demanded some identification
He told them that his ID was back in the room a block away
The cops drove him back to the room
He was led to the room in handcuffs
He was still carrying his shoes
He noticed the cops were wearing their helmets
He got the padlock off the door and the cops pushed him inside
He was punched kicked and choked by the cops
It was an explosion of violence
He was kicking and twisting away from them
He started yelling that they were killing him and the beating stopped
He had one of his toes broken in the altercation
He was charged with resisting arrest and battery on a police officer
He demanded to be thrown in a cell with his father
He was put in a holding cell by himself
He kept yelling out for his father
He told his father to come on and that he was ready for him
He made so much noise that they brought his father out to his cell
His father told him from the hallway through the bars of his cell
To shut up and settle down
He told his father that he was going to kill him
He was released the next day
He was hobbling around
He couldn't put any weight on his broken toe
He decided to show up at the restaurant for his nightly meal
He was acting weird and talking to himself
He stabbed a baked potato on his plate with a fork
Leaving the fork stuck standing in the potato
He was arrested and handcuffed in the restaurant
Two cops threw him around in the parking lot
He wasn't taken to the jail
He was taken to the hospital
He told the doctor that he needed a shot of Haldol and some lithium
He was strapped down on a bed and given a shot of tranquilizers
He felt like he was dying when he fell asleep
He woke up the next day and remained strapped down
He was finally unstrapped on the second day
He stayed in the hospital for a week
The hospital gave him the lithium and tranquilizers
That he asked to be given
His father got out of jail the day before he left the hospital
His father came and visited him at the hospital
His father told him that he made a lot of trouble
His father said that the cops had let him out of jail
So that they could follow him
His father said the cops thought that he would lead them
Straight to a cache of illegal narcotic drugs
His father said that the cops were convinced
That some kind of drug made him like that
His father said that he was busted at the restaurant
For the way he was eating
His father knew about the fork in the potato
His father told him that he'd see him when he was out of the hospital
He hobbled home from the hospital and met his father in a bar
He got the keys to the room and went back there
He waited in the room for his father
His father came back that night extremely angry
He was afraid that his father was going to kill him
He heard someone knocking on the door in the middle of the night
He let in the old bum that was at the door
The bum said that he just got in town and used to live in the building
The bum said he was going to see about getting a room the next day
He thought that with the bum there his father wouldn't kill him
He had it out with his father the next day after the bum left
His father told him to get out and don't come back
His father told him that he was a no good trouble maker and a dopehead
His father told him that if he didn't leave he would kill him
He thought that his father would kill him so he left
****
***********************************************************************
From pages - 205 - 207
*************************************
His family wanted him out of their new home
He wanted nothing more than to get way from there
His dream of having a father and brothers
Quickly wilted in the light of the obvious
His step brothers wanted no part of him
They thought he was a stupid wasted crazy idiot
His step father waited for the word from his mother
That it was time to do something
About him until then
His step father tried to be patient
Putting up with the bullshit
Of the no good son of his wife's ex-husband
***
He started riding the train to downtown Chicago
40 miles away
To get out the house
Away from his family
He hung out in the buildings
Where the rock radio stations were
Applying for jobs
Talking to anybody that would listen to him
He spent nights in the downtown Greyhound bus station
An all night haven for homeless
Reprieve from the January Chicago cold streets
Sheltered refuge for maniacal derelicts
With nowhere to go
Like himself
He found out about the bus station the year before
While taking trips down to Miami
There were bathrooms
Heat
Pin ball machine cigarette butts spread out on the floor
People from all over the country
Moved in and out of there
A good place to spend a sleepless night
Warm with a neverending
Choice of things to do
He went to the downtown public library
During the day looking
For pictures in books
Of anybody famous
That he might recognize
He afternoon sat in hotel lobbies
Like he had some business there
Keeping quiet and to himself
He would take the train back to his parent’s house
After a few days
Tired hungry and worn out
Clean up change his clothes grab some food
Before he was rousted out
Into the cold night again
Things temporarily settled down
When he would get his unemployment check
He bought beer had parties
Got drunk with everybody
The money was gone after a few days
Taking along with it
The fragile patience of his family
When he returned after disappearing for a few days
It was strongly suggested by his step father
That he quit coming back
Because nobody wanted him there
****
His step father finally exploded
One night after everybody came home from work
He had been drinking and smoking pot all day
His girlfriend had been over
There were empty beer cans and trash all over the house
He had been sitting in a bathtub full of water
With swim shorts on
Singing out loud
With shaving cream smeared all over the bathroom sink mirror
His mother and his step father burst into the bathroom
His mother screaming at his step father to kill him
His step father started choking him
Letting loose all the pent up rage and fury
That the ex-small town cop rifle range marksman Ford mechanic
With the ass shot up and filled with lead in Korea
Could muster for the lousy dopehead bastard
That was living under his roof
He stood toe to toe with his step father
Looking him in the eye
Throat muscles hard in a resistant knot
Until his step father unwound his grip and backed off
He told his step father that it would take a lot
More than that to put his lights out
He called the police
Telling them that his step father tried killing him
The cops came out to the house
His step father and his mother
Had him handcuffed and removed from their home
Leaving the night workers at the Will County Jail in Joliet
To put up with his all night non-stop bullshit
****0 -
From page 208 of "A Dungeon of Days"
***********************************************
****
He had been listening to The Wall
Album by Pink Floyd
That winter
He heard there was going to be
A week’s worth of concerts
By Pink Floyd in Los Angeles
A monstrous show that was too large
To drag around the country
He had listened to Pink Floyd
A lot the previous year
Stoned on acid and pot
Sometimes listening to a Floyd album
On drugs
All the way through
From beginning to end
Became a practice exercise in paranoia damage control
The strange music and sounds
Inducing mild panic in the twitching drug bewildered mind
Leading the thoughts down a winding
Path of weird spiraling noise
That coil wrapped back into and out of itself
Going on forever
Ending up and coming out of nowhere
Frightening intensity that usually made him forget
He was only listening to a record
He once spent an excruciating almost intolerably unbearable evening
Sitting in the basement
Of a friend of his cousins
Smoking thai stick on top of blotter acid
Listening to all 4 sides of Pink Floyd's Ummagumma album
Straight through
Overriding the strong necessant urge to run from the house
Freaking and screaming out into the night
He knew after that he could handle any of the pseudo-bullshit
Challenges that life could present to the drug warped mind
Driving working
Cops parents aunts uncles bosses
Gas station attendants
Middle aged grocery store counter clerks
Would never again pose as problems
He didn't have a concert ticket for the Pink Floyd shows
He knew he wouldn't have any money
To buy a ticket when he got out to Los Angeles
He just wanted to go there
Just to see what would happen
If he did
****
***************************************************************
From pages 234-240 of "A Dungeon of Days"
**************************************************************
***
He went to the indoor sports arena
Every night of the Pink Floyd shows
He didn't have a ticket
Or have a way to get inside
He didn't bother to try getting inside
To see and hear the show
He just wanted to be there
***
He roamed around the concert area parking lots
He walked the sidewalks outside the building
With the crowd of concertgoers
On some of the nights
He was run out of the area by the cops
For being verbally antagonistic
He demanded alcohol and drugs from people
He accused people of being undercover narcotics officers
He yelled Pink Floyd lyrics
From the song Sheep on the Animals album
At the people arriving making their way into the arena
"Harmlessly passing your time in the grassland away"
"Meek and obedient you follow the leader"
"Have you heard the news the dogs are dead"
"You better stay home and do as you're told"
"Get out of the road if you want to grow old"
People laughed at him
The way they would in mild amusement
For any raving dispensable froth babblous idiot dement
He yelled Pink Floyd lyrics
From the song Pigs on the Animals album
At the uniformed security and cops covering the area
"Big man pig man ha ha charade you are"
"Pig stain on your fat chin"
"You house proud town mouse ha ha charade you are"
"You're trying to keep our feelings off the street"
"You got to stem the evil tide"
This was too much for the Los Angeles police to bear
They screamed in his face
Ordered him out of the area
Baton arms cocked with ready violence
Just stopping short of beating the living life and shit out of him
Warning him to clear out of there quick
****
On the nights when he wasn't chased off
Into the darkness
For the walk back to skid row
He paced drunken circles on the sidewalk
Around the building
Vaguely aware but not paying attention
To the muffled reverberations of the music
Heard outside of the arena
He rummaged through the sidewalk trash
Left outside by the concertgoers
He helped himself to discarded unopened cans of piss warm beer
Unfinished bottles of wine
Crumpled cigarettes cigars
He found letters and notes
That seemed to be addressed to the band
Among the strewn debris left outside the show
He read the dropped letters
Wondering why they were left out there
Wondering if somebody had placed them there
Purposely
For some paper sidewalk trash sifting fool
To pick up
Read and wonder
About their bizarrely vague contents
****
He watched the people pour out of the hall
After the shows were over
The crowd was young comfortable affluent privileged white
He was reminded of the rich parent kids he saw during high school
He resented the obvious implications
Of easy money
Lazy opportunity
Available dope
Reliable automobiles
Concert ticket connections
****
One of the nights during the week of the shows
He stayed in the area of the arena
Long after all of the people had left
He saw a guy come from out of the arena
The guy had rock 'n' roll written all over
Long black hair mane mustache boot leather jacket levi denim blue
A woman on each arm
With a large wine gallon jug shaped paper sack in hand
An english hippie let loose
On the 2 o’clock in the morning after the show american night
He watched them from across the street
For the brief moment
Before they disappeared into the shadowed treelined darkness
He thought about the rock and roll dream
That he had been trying to buy into since he was a kid
He thought about drinking drug taking women chasing
He thought about his con-artist hustle girl friend
Back in Illinois
He had been trying to be that guy for years
****
He remembered the first time he heard Pink Floyd
In the 1973 summer after 8th grade
His only friend's brother came home
From the Viet Nam war navy Philippines
With a small pile of japanese import Pink Floyd albums
And a slight wartime case
Of lingering depressive unexplainably meandering psychosis
When his friend's brother went to therapy
At the VA in the afternoon
He sat in his friend's brother's room
In a ceremoniously silent religiosity
Listening to Pink Floyd records with his friend
On a bilge smuggled contraband asian stereo
The Pink Floyd music represented
A paranoia and fear
A slow plunging glimpse into the mysterious abyss of madness
That he was unable then at the time to understand
****
He found pieces of styrofoam
Parts of the metaphorical wall
Made up of school teachers mothers and women
That Pink Floyd was building to tear down each night
On the sidewalk after the shows
He carried the found pieces of the wall
Back to the mission on skid row
With the stoic determination of a bum pushing around a shopping cart
Loaded with useless unsalvageable worthless junk
He was convinced that the styrofoam pieces
With the brick block shaped outlines formed into them
Were important
Physical evidence that someone had busted through
Torn into
The Wall
He carried the scraps of wall prop
Along with some of the notes found on the ground
Back to the mission
Determined not to lose any of it
To the sidetracks
Of inevitable obstacles
That were sure to be encountered along the way
He was let into the mission chapel area
With his plastic bag of styrofoam paper souvenir garbage
To sit out the rest of the night
In a noisy room full of drunken farting snoring men
Who had showed up at the mission
During the night after the bedcheck time
He passed out in one the room's rows of folding chairs
Waking up a half hour later to the realization
His pieces of the wall were gone
Along with a half smoked found on the ground package of marlboros
That somebody picked from his shirt pocket
He wondered why somebody would bother to steal
Such an obviously useless collection of trash
****
He had been outside most of every night
For over 3 weeks
In a continuous riot of sustained never letting up motion
He walk stomp roam prowled
Around the downtown area all night
Stopping at the mission to sit in a chair
Or go down to the basement
Until he had to be forcibly kicked out
For causing repeated disturbances
He couldn't sit still
He couldn't keep his mouth shut
He kept himself moving
He would nod out for a few minutes
Then shake himself loose from the clutching claw grip
Of beckonous sleep
He was doing anything he could
To keep himself awake
****
It was easy to stay awake during the day
With the incessant glaring chrome bright sunlight
Automobile exhaust driven activitied noise
Incessant feed waste products
Of the hungering grind
Workers jostling about positions on foot
Showing up every morning for work
Cup of coffee empty stomach rushing shirt tail tucked tie jitters
Clogging the office worker district sidewalks
In a sun soaked shoe polish brown lunchtime
That seemed to last all afternoon
Until the harried commuter in an almost panic flight
Cleared the downtown for the outlying vicinity
At the end of the day before it got too dark
He was convinced that all of the awake people
Had a slight electrical mental psychic energy
Discharged into the city's atmosphere
The collected thought remnant field
Rising up from one million brains
That he was able to tune into
Pick up on
To jump juice start his worn down dead batteries
To keep his own brain awake
He sensed the dissipation of this energy
When everybody was asleep
There was nothing left
To keep him going
****
The nights kept getting longer
The lonely late all alone in the silence down time
When most everything folded into itself
For the rest it badly needed
He was left to fend for himself
With frayed to the burnt melted wire wits
Calling on muscle action to bone will power
Fighting the combined cumulative effects
Of alcohol hunger insanity fatigue
Doing whatever he could to stay awake
He put the sleep off for as long as he could
He knew once he started sleeping
It would be the start of the imminent crash
***
He gradually fell into the rescue mission upstairs bedtime routine
With a hundred other tired old men nowhere else to go bums
He slept in his clothes
In turned once a week white sheets
Under raggedy wool blend cotton threadbare torn blankets
He slept with his shoes on
The laces tied tight in triple knot maze complexity confusion
To make sure they were still there
When he woke up
Everybody had to be in the wrack early
The lights were shut off while the noise
Drunk guys hollering out loud to nobody in particular
Car engines winding wide open dry sputtering loud low on oil
Bald tires squealing over dry pavement around corners
Still coursed life through the streets outside
A guy with a flashlight dozed
Half bored magazine comic book page staring monotony
Making low voiced get back to bed small talk
With the guys that kept getting up to piss
The lights were turned back up in the morning
To roust everybody out
For another tortuous sit through a sermon with hymns
Before being allowed to eat
Day old restaurant cast out leftover stale handouts
That could be had from one of a dozen trash dumpsters
Sleeping upstairs at the mission reminded him
Of being in the mental hospital
****
When he spent the night sleeping at the mission
It was a straight eight hour plunge
Into an unknown void of empty black nowhere
He closed his eyes to the street lit dusk darkened room
Then opened them up to the sudden blast of morning fluorescence
There was nothing in between
It had all lasted a second
An instant lost somewhere between moments
He didn't have a drop left to dream
Every neural path was exhausted dry
There was nothing left
Halfcooked or part of the way baked anywhere
In his brain
He had nothing left to unload
****
He remembered when he had been up for months
The year before
When he felt like he was permanently tripping on acid
He was convinced that his mind
Had no way of telling if it was awake
Or if it was dreaming
He thought that he had busted through the fine line
Barrier between consciousness and unconsciousness
Reality wasn't even considered
Part of the equation
****
He was afraid that if he went to sleep
He would lose the edge he seemed to have
Over everything
He thought that sleep would rob him
Of the power
To think on the run
To talk anybody down
To not feel physical pain
To possess relentless stamina
To forget about hunger
To have no fear
To do anything
That to him seemed possible
He started to believe
That he would never have to sleep again
For the rest of his life
****
He thought about Jim Morrison of the Doors
While walking the late afternoon
Low industrial brick building gray cracked sidewalk weed stretches
He found a bar called the Hard Rock Cafe like the one
On the Morrison Hotel Doors album back cover
The outside of the bar was painted blue
It wasn’t red like the album cover
He imagined the mythical bearded bellied Morrison
Kindling the slow March afternoon tavern darkness
With brown bottles of beer
Marlboro cigarettes
Shot of whisky ring circle damp coaster ashtray on the bar
Drunken ramble irish bard lyrical poet
Staring at the wall facing the bar
Seeing nothing
Thinking
***0 -
From pages 34-41 of "A Dungeon of Days"
*************************************************
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Start writing the new history book
The new president is here
Look out for the
Rip tore
Cold sore
Sell war
Rot corps
Settle score
Rap poor
Asking for the four more
Now that he's elected
Bolt the lock on the back door
I'm down here
Pounding on the pavement
Thinking 'bout the government
I'm part of the minority
That has a problem with authority
Break out the disposable bottles
The baby boomer is here
This means that it's
No toke
Blow smoke
Canned joke
Drink coke
Multi-poke
Chain choke
Party till your voice croak
Got himself elected
But he can't fix what is broke
I'm out here
Standing at the bus stop
Waiting to see the flip-flop
I'm part of the mentality
That can't settle for practicality
Clear a place at the power table
The newest dealer is here
Good thing that he's
Corn fed
White bread
Mush head
Brain dead
Feather bed
Lock dread
Moving with the god sped
Had to be elected
We're so willing to be led
I'm still here
Sleeping in the door jamb
Sacrificing the new lamb
Part of the instability
That will confront your credibility
Make room at the wallowing trough
The hungriest pig is here
I hear that he's
Trip tried
Bulls eyed
Pork pied
Neck tied
Southern fried
Hog stied
Wonder if his wife lied
Now that he's elected
Ask him if he's satisfied
I'm up here
Camped on the window sill
Looking for some time to kill
I'm part of the hostility
That is doubting your sensibility
Crank up the media exposure
The first families are here
It's time for the
Back bite
Think lite
Cat fight
Be trite
Neon bright
Left right
Do it with the hand sleight
You can't get elected
Showing signs of the stage fright
Bob Dylan
Still on the pavement
Who cares about the government
Is it still a priority
To be suspicious of authority
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Old man, your time is getting late
Why would you want to live so long
Has all your life been a way to make death wait
Or am I looking at you wrong
Spare me the wasted time and troubled expense
Tell me if the lesson was worth the years
Did you find out if life made more than just non-sense
Is the wisdom given to age a fable of pretense
I got to get out from behind
The blind folded that are leading the blind
When you were where I am
Did things look this way
Can I endure as long as you
Living like I am today
Did you ever walk with the dark of night
And believe that it would never end
Did you ever lose your will to fight
And embrace desperation as a friend
Did you ever want a sudden silent end
Old man, your time is closing fast
Did you ever think you would live so long
Has your generation kept the best for last
Or am I looking at you wrong
Take me to your gloried ghosted battle
Tell me of those left behind by the years
Did you ever hear the glimpse of death's hollow rattle
Is it hard to watch your peers slaughtered by time like cattle
I want to leave all this behind
I don't want to lead or follow the blind
When you stood as I stand
Did you pass this way
Can I survive as long as you
Being how I am today
Did you ever want to unlock your brain
And release the parts of you that died
Did you ever have a grievous pain
And wonder why you never broke and cried
Did you ever want the peace of those that died
Old man, your day is drawing near
Do you know why you've lived so long
Is luck the only thing that has kept you here
Or am I looking at you wrong
Show me how to duck from life's firing flame
Tell me how to slide through the empty years
Did you know loneliness and call it by its name
Is "survival of the fittest" now just a softened claim
Did you have to follow behind
Were you caught in the line led by the blind
Would you know where I'm at
Have you been this way
If I should live as long as you
Will I be like you today
If I could live as long as you
Will I have to be like you today
I would like to live so long
Am I looking at this wrong
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
I sell my life and my soul
For the rewards secured by the drudgerous mental toil
I wait for originality
To spring life from my weed-bitten glass-tainted vacant-lot soil
I'm the free dealing gambler
Throwing away years for pleasure that pays off in hours
I'm the routine rooted rambler
Roaming the plane with the herd that paper authority cowers
I'm never at a loss
For finding new ways of losing
I have different sounding voices
For each excuse I find myself using
I'm waiting for the day when I wake
Up to the voice that says
It's now time to go home
This has all been a dream
This has all been a mistake
(Nothing is worth repeating)
I have to face what I am
Whenever I corner myself in an eye-to-eye gaze
I'm subject for captivity
By those that hold me to some unremembered now forgotten phase
I'm the death row crackpot
Praying secretly for an eleventh hour pardon
I hit the lunatic jackpot
Waiting for a perfect world and the time to tend my own garden
I'm never at a loss
For finding new ways of losing
I have to examine my choices
As I undergo more ego bruising
I'm waiting for the day when I shake
Out of the voice that says
You were always alone
This is all a bad dream
From which you'll never awake
(Nothing worth remembering is forgotten)
I can never get away
I'm froze in the shadows etched on the wall of Plato's cave
I'm losing pieces of myself
In the unending attempt for fulfillment of all that I crave
I'm the classless dwindler
Rotting from the desire fed material cancer
I'm the self-scamming swindler
Cooking questions which I won't possibly be able to answer
I'm never at a loss
For finding new ways of losing
I have to live with the bad choices
In a life I don't remember choosing
I'm waiting for the day when I break
Into the voice that says
The fault was your own
This was always your dream
It's up to you to awake
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Jesus saves the bones that the winter cold turns to chalk
I need a warmer place where I could walk
I'm not tired and I don't feel much like sleeping
I could stop and stand still awhile and talk
But I can't find a way to slow my thinking
Who carries those that would carry the world
Why do the weakest have to be so strong
Who's out running for the roses
When everybody wants to sing that whiskey song
Jesus saves the shoes that get left out in the rain too long
("When I was young it was more important...")
Jesus saves the bowels that rumble like a mountain
I've got extra angels on my shoulder
I found a piece of Roger's floydian foam wall
I could fish spanish coins from a fountain
But I can't find the street with the shopping mall
Who will turn the lambs loose with the lions
Who is serving the serpent its own tail
Who's the only one that's buying
When the souls of bitter wrath are turned out for sale
Jesus saves the feet that walk for yesterday's bread gone stale
Jesus saves the lungs that exhale with whistles and stink
I always find faucet water to drink
I could eat some sugar and the paper packet
I can take a shower inside a sink
But I can't find an open filling station
Who's going to pay for the barley gruel
Who subscribes to the bloodless testament
Who could not justify the cruel
When humility assumes the belligerent
Jesus saves the cigarettes the shirt pocket almost bent
("I was so much older then...")
Jesus saves the matchbook cover picture Kennedy
I'm just episoding insanity
I'm driving the wagon straight through treacherous bends
I'm just experimenting poverty
But I can't find out how the adventure ends
Who will sleep on that bed of burning coals
Who knows when the sane stops and the mad begins
Who reels from the punch of the joke
When world beaten faces become cracked with grins
Jesus saves the paper clips and souvenir safety pins
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The bottles half-empty
The glass only gets half-filled
I drown in my years forgotten
When I drink from the days I've killed
I could have another half-life to live
If circumstance commands it
If my body so demands it
I don't know if I could stand it
In the paralysis of thought
I'm hounded by the noise
How does a man do what he enjoys
More or less
It doesn't matter
Things are worse
Things could be better
I'll continue to believe
until I've been riddled with doubt
I whisper some things
I know I should shout
I'll just keep on...
until they carry me out
I can be six to one
Half-dozen to another
I can be staggered by regret
Then find some way to recover
I'll be the same tomorrow as today
Past action guarantees it
Friends and family foresee it
I don't know if I can be it
In the catharsis of my thoughts
I'm bounded by the noise
How does a man know what he enjoys
This or that
It doesn't matter
Things get worse
Then they get better
I try conjuring brain storms
but end up ghost dancing with drought
I'm trying to know
what I'm all about
I'll just keep on...
until they carry me out
I can't take anymore
I've had all that I can take
When I lose interest in life
Then I have to learn how to fake
What would I do with more luck than I need
I'd find some way to taunt it
I'd probably try to flaunt it
I don't know if I would want it
In the analysis of thoughts
I'm sounded by the noise
What man ever does what he enjoys
Now or then
It doesn't matter
Things seem worse
That once were better
I keep trying to find sense
in the stupidity I spout
I still want to know
what life is about
I'll just keep on...
until they carry me out
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
She tells me
That I don't know how it feels
When a living only means
Watching the death of your ideals
From the compromise of dreams
While inside your mind just screams
Through fires washed with tears
She's told me this for years
The last thing that she wants
Is to have to see another day
When the world won't turn your way
It knocks the wind out of your pride
It leaves a scar you'll have to hide
Sometimes love gives more than it begs
Sometimes there's only swill left in the dregs
Sometimes the road looks long and wide
Let's roll back and become one with the ride
You can live like there's no tomorrow
If you're right you'll never know
She wants me
To fill in an empty space
Never certain if I care
Mistakes the look worn on my face
My mind's in some other place
When I'm lost behind a stare
I've been this way for years
With her when I'm not there
She listens while she knows
I never have anything to say
When the world turns you away
You learn to crash but not to glide
You only open when you're pried
Sometimes love gets more than it needs
Sometimes we kill the tree but not its seeds
Sometimes the path is hard and dried
Let's find a road that's easier to ride
We can always count on tomorrow
If we're wrong we'll never know
She's so glad
I've never been like the rest
But being here only means
This life settled on second best
Not the vision of her dreams
It's the silence after screams
That echoes all her fears
It worsens with the years
The last thing that she needs
Is to live like this another day
When the world would go her way
She used to laugh more than she cried
She used to show more than she'd hide
Sometimes love gets more than it takes
Sometimes we trade our oceans in for lakes
Sometimes the way is long and wide
Let's be the road and be the ride
You can't forget about tomorrow
If you do I'll let you know
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *0
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