A Dungeon of Days
SD533
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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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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=105916
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
***
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
****
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
***
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
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
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
***************************************************
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
****
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
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Now, how awesome is that line!
This does happen, doesn't it?
********************************************
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
****
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 down
************************************************
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
****
*************************************************
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
***
*************************************************************************************
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
****
****************************************************
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
*****
((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
****
***********************************************
****
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
***
*************************************************
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
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
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Nobody cares about the price or the cost
All they want is a hit off his exhaust
Billy pounds forty eight hours into each day
His body is chasing his mind
Doing an inner Dorian Gray
False rumor often has it that he had died
Truth was that the rumor usually lied
Emotionally he's stuck at seventeen
He feels half-dead and it suits him just fine
The hard miles roll up fast inside
He was a man of sixty two
While he was still twenty nine
People waited to hear that he died
Billy's stoking rocket fuel
Keeping it clean with the help of a mule
He's a bonfire in the candle factory
The smoke and the ash is a continuing story
Billy's burning on a path of glory
He doesn't care about the price or the cost
Let them all trail behind in his exhaust
Billy went home in a shroud of controversy
He made himself a memory
But he was still given no mercy
People went to his life like it was a show
When he was on he was ready to go
Vultures will tear the meat right off the bones
He was in pieces before he was cold
There was no way to let them know
The lost years would never be missed
In his mind he got to get old
This was a life that lived like a show
Billy burned like rocket fuel
They'll bury him like they buried the mule
He left charcoal in the candle factory
The smoke and the ash don't tell the actual story
Billy went in a legend of glory
Nobody cares about the life that's lost
They all want one last buzz from his exhaust
Billy toasted a life of glory
The real story will never be known
Life is a joke when it's not your own
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
********************************
HE LIKED TO TRAVEL
He liked to travel
When he was younger
Once he took a trip
From his home up in Illinois
Down to Miami Beach Florida
He just decided to go
He had enough money left over
From the last paycheck he got
After he quit his railroad job
It was strongly advised to him
That it would be in his best interest
To retire from the railroad immediately
So he told the railroad to go fuck itself
And he left
He figured what the hell
He was arrested for drunk driving the week before
Two nights later after getting out of jail for drunk driving
He was hauled out of a Joliet Illinois bar
By the police
His car was stolen while he was in jail that night
He took his moms car out a couple of days after that
He was trying to find some dope
He was arrested again and her car was impounded
He even got himself arrested at the town library
He was opening up library books and laughing
At the names of the people that he recognized
Written on the library checkout cards inside of the books
It was all a big joke to him
But he was getting tired of it
He had been awake for weeks
He had taken a lot of acid in the previous year
The acid no longer seemed to have any effect on him
At least not an effect that he could notice
The acid and the ounce bag of pot he smoked every week
Had kept him relatively quiet for months
He started in on the drinking
Then his screws started to loosen
Drinking in the mornings didn't help things at the railroad either
He would have worked there for the rest of his life
If they had let him
He let his whole being spin completely out of his control
And everybody around him knew it and could see it
He still hadn't got around to realizing that yet
He still had money left from his last paycheck
Nobody he knew would sell him any more dope
Everybody told him that the town was dry
He decided he would go down to Florida
They had to have dope down in Florida
That's where the shit was coming in from
So he abandoned the late winter dreariness of that Illinois February
He got on a greyhound bus headed for Miami
He didn't have much money left after he bought the ticket
Whatever few dollars were left were gone before he was in Georgia
All of the places that the bus stopped at had pinball machines
And he could never get enough of that pinball action
He rolled into downtown Miami on the bus
He didn't know where he was at
He didn't know anybody
He didn't have any money
He didn't care
It was late afternoon and he just started walking
It felt good to walk after being on the bus for all of those hours
He could smell the salt and the ocean
He knew that there had to be dope down there somewhere
He knew he was on the right track
Somehow he made his way to Collins Avenue
Hotel Row
It blew his mind
Like he had been there before
Like this was where he was supposed to be
He spent the first night walking up and down
Past the hotels
He stopped in a bar to find out where the dope was in Florida
It wasn't long some biker guy had him by the throat
He didn't even blink
After the beatings he had taken back up in the Will County jail
Delivered to him after being handcuffed by Illinois state troopers
It was going to take more than a man's bare hands around his neck
To stop him
He left the bar and continued down the sidewalk
He walked late into the night
He went behind one of the hotels and waited for the sun to rise
He spent the next few days walking up and down Collins Avenue
There were so many cars with New York license plates
He wasn't sure if he was in Miami or if he was in New York
By that time it didn't matter
He had been without sleep and food for so long
None of what was happening even seemed real
He didn't know how to beg or panhandle
He didn't want money or food
All he wanted was to get some dope
He passed four days with aimless wandering and walking
He left his socks in the sand on the first night
He walked around in his shoes for days without any socks
The bottoms of his feet were blistered
He began to tire and get depressed
He was getting hungry
He was swiping packets of sugar off restaurant tables
He went inside restaurants to use the bathroom
Where he could clean himself up
He hadn't eaten since he left Illinois the week before
He hadn't slept for more than a month and a half
And he hadn't been without pot for a day in a couple of years
He sure was happy when some guy came up to him on the sidewalk
The guy wordlessly handed him a half-dollar sized chunk of ganja
Thick dry and resinous
He bummed cigarettes from strangers
He tore off the filters from the cigarettes
Removing some of the tobacco
He replaced the tobacco with the small potent chunks of the ganja
All the hunger and pains and tiredness left his mind
He could last forever if he could make his stash do the same
He smoked carefully so as not to waste a drop of smoke
His lungs held tightly to every hit
He overcame the urge to cough out the smoke until his eyes flashed
His visual field exploded
In bright lines of clear light after each hit
He held the smoke until he almost blacked himself out
Then he walked around the beaches in back of the hotels
In a stoned and silent peaceful serenity
He absorbed the whole afternoon
He was so thirsty after he smoked up the last of that gift stash
He went down to the oceans edge
He scooped up a handful of the salty water and drank it
He walked along the water's edge
By evening the pot was wearing off and his belly was full
Of ocean water
He reeled down the sidewalk on Collins Avenue in an almost drunkenness
He decided to spend the dead hours of the middle of the night
On the beach
In back of the Fontainebleau Hotel
He wandered in off from the beach to the hotel pool
There was a small building near the pool
He easily put his fists through the wooden lattices
Pulled shut and padlocked against the night
He kicked out the splintered fractures of wood and climbed inside
He found himself inside of a bar
He stayed in there for hours
He drank freely
He drained the beer tap into the carpeting
He smashed the bottles of tropical booze against the walls
He broke all of the glasses
He tore the barstools off
He broke all of the mirrors and pictures hanging on the walls
He destroyed anything that he was able to pick up and throw
He walked away from the mayhem when the sun started coming up
He looked across the water and wondered where Cuba was
He looked at the hat hanging on the wall
With a patch on it that said Cuban Missile Crisis
He wondered what Fidel Castro was doing that night
He went next door to the Atlantic Hotel and sat in the lobby
Nobody said a word to him
He was totally out of his mind
The escalating peak of insanity that had started weeks before
Back in Illinois
Was now in a state of full crescendo
He went back over to the Fontainebleau
He walked into the hotel and went down a hallway
He took the fire extinguisher off of the wall
He emptied the fire extinguisher foam onto the blue hallway carpeting
He turned a doorknob and walked into an unlocked hotel room
He found a porkpie hat on the dressing bureau and a salt shaker
He put the hat on his head
Pocketed the salt shaker and walked out of the room
Then he headed out toward a door that announced the Boom Boom Room
He was grabbed by a hotel security guard
People were gasping and buzzing with the discovery of the poolside bar
Torn open and apart in violent destruction
The hotel security asked him where his friends were
They wanted to know who had broken into the bar with him
He told them that he did it himself
He was taken from the Fontainebleau by the Dade County police
The porkpie hat and the salt shaker were taken away for him
Stuffed into his belongings envelope
He was beaten in a cell by a fat sadistic cop
He was used to this kind of shit from being arrested in Illinois
He still had knots on his scalp
From the night of his drunk driving arrest
He thought the Miami cops were a bunch of pussies
And he made sure that he let them know it
He was taken into a room and questioned
It wasn't a cop asking the questions
It was some kind of lady psychologist type
She asked him what he was doing at the hotel
He said he wanted to let the people come and live there for free
He was taken to a large block
Filled with rows of bunkbeds and prisoners
He ripped up the sheets from his bed and wrapped them around his feet
He was noisy and aggravated
The meanest and biggest guy in the block warned him repeatedly
He was told that he better shut-up settle down and relax
He spent the night awake cold and wrapped in his blankets
His name was called the next morning to get in line to go to court
Somebody in the line passed him a lit joint
He loaded up on the pot as he marched in the line going into court
He pled guilty to mischievous vandalism
He was able to walk out of the court house like nothing ever happened
He didn't know where in the hell he was
He was determined to get back to Hotel Row
He walked across the causeway and almost got hit by cars
He was able to get back to Collins Avenue
From where the police had taken him
He went right back to the Fontainebleau
He went into the manager's office and asked for a job
The manager told him to get a haircut
The police came and took him away
They dropped him off at a hospital
He spent several hours in a waiting room
With other people at the hospital
He was questioned by some doctors and allowed to leave
He had been in Florida for a week by then
He spent the night walking the downtown Miami area
He had no idea where he was at
He found his way back to Collins Avenue
But he was getting tired and hungry
He decided to make a collect call to his family
He asked them to western union him the money
For a bus ticket back to Illinois
He had enough money left after the ticket to play pinball
All the way back to Chicago
He had so much fun on the ride back
He scraped up some money and took another trip down to Florida
Two weeks after he got back
About a year later
The bug to go travelling
Hit him again
His mom had remarried and moved into a new house
He was living there with her and his new step family
He was collecting 200 hundred dollars unemployment every two weeks
He spent all of his money on drinking
He would drink anything
He was constantly and continually drunk
The problems started when he stopped sleeping again
The rest of the people in the house couldn't sleep either
He was usually making noise all night and keeping them awake
His mom and stepdad were getting tired of his disturbances
He would leave for a few days then come back
He was spending the nights downtown in Chicago
Forty miles away
He found out that the greyhound bus station was open all night
He would hang around inside the bus station all night
The bus station was big and there were always a lot of people there
It was the middle of winter so it was too cold to be outside all night
When he got too obnoxious the cops took him to jail
The jail always served baloney sandwiches before court in the morning
There were hundreds of guys picked up and brought in every night
In the morning the guards put them all in a big room
Numbers were written on the back of everybody's fist
When a number was called
The person with the number walked out said they were guilty and left
It was all a big joke to him
During the days he would find places indoors were he could keep warm
He would sneak into hotels and hang out in the lobby
He would roam around in the downtown library
He would hang around in the commuter train station
When he got hungry and depressed he found a way to get back home
One night his stepdad had enough and started choking him
The choking itself didn't hurt him but the idea of it did
He called the town police and told them
That somebody tried to kill him
The cops showed up and he realized that he was going to be the one Going to jail
He filled a cigarette cellophane with some marijuana
He shoved the cellophane into his cheek below his tooth line
He kept yelling that his stepdad hit him in the jaw
There was nowhere in town to lock him up
The town cops took him to Joliet to the Will County jail
The guards took his clothes and gave him the issue jump suit
The guards remembered all of the trouble he caused in there
The year before
He had ripped up his jail clothes and flushed a roll of toilet paper
Down the holding cell toilet
They had to put him in solitary with no clothes
He spent two days like that
Before he was committed to a mental institution
The guards weren't going to put up with his bullshit this year
They let him know that as soon as he got there
All the way to the holding cage he yelled
About his stepdad smacking his jaw
He crammed the marijuana he smuggled in into the end
Of a Kool cigarette he bummed off of one of the other detainees
The guards were upset when they smelled the pot
It was a still early and there was a long night ahead
A burly drunk acting guy was brought in after midnight
He kept taunting the guy and telling him that he looked like a cop
He taunted the guy so much that the guy started punching him
In the face
He was so wired and tight that he didn't feel anything or bruise
The guy hit him in the face so hard
That the guy broke a bone in his hand
The next morning he pled guilty to disturbing the peace and was let go
His mom and her sister watched in court
His mom told him that he couldn't go back to the house
His aunt told him that he could come and stay at their house
He spent the evening drinking with his aunt and uncle and cousins
They all had to get up for work and school the next day
They went up to bed and left him awake downstairs in the living room
He decided he wanted to light a fire in the fire place
He crumpled a bunch of newspapers around the logs
Lit the paper with a match
He didn't know that the flue was closed
The smoke poured into the room
The fire alarm started buzzing
While the whole family came charging downstairs
He knew he wouldn't be able to stay there for very long
The next morning his cousin drove him to the post office
They waited until the post office opened
He got that week's unemployment check
Before it went into the carrier's bag
He had decided that he was going to California
He had been listening a lot to the Pink Floyd album The Wall
He had heard that Pink Floyd was going to perform The Wall
In Los Angeles
He was tired of being outside and cold all of the time
He thought that it would be warmer out in California
He had lived in California for seven years when he was a kid
He was glad to get out of Illinois
He was hoping that he would never see Illinois again
He went downtown to Chicago and bought a train ticket to California
He had about fifty dollars left from his unemployment after the ticket
He had a few hours before the train was scheduled to leave
He had time to drink a few quarts of beer and play pinball
At the bus station
He went back to the train station in plenty of time to make the train
He spent the rest of his money in the train station gift shop
He spent his last 25 dollars on a jar of purple caviar
He thought he should celebrate
When he got on the train all he had was the caviar and a ticket
He made fast friends on the train
He met a woman that had hash
He met a sailor from Boston that had some pot
He stayed continually stoned on their dope
He was getting hungry around Arizona
He was caught one night trying to steal a loaf of bread
The conductor that caught him took the bread from him and let him go
He walked out of the Spanish style train station in California
He didn't know where he was at
He didn't know anybody
He didn't have any money
And he didn't care
He started walking down the street
He walked past a place that was giving free haircuts
Somebody came out on the sidewalk and ushered him in
He had a beard that he hadn't shaved or trimmed in 8 months
He got his beard cut off and his hair trimmed
He walked some more
He was glad to be out of the winter Illinois Chicago cold
He managed to find a rescue mission at 555 S. Main St in LA that night
He sat through the service
Waiting to get a bowl of soup and a bread roll
He wasn't tired
He left after the meal
He didn't go upstairs to get a bed with the rest of the men
He wanted to walk around that night and see what was going on
He had more than a week to kill before the Pink Floyd concerts
He didn't have a ticket and he had no way to get one
He just wanted to go to where the show was at and see what happened
He made it back to the mission in the morning for breakfast
He had found the greyhound station a few blocks away from the mission
He didn't think the LA bus station was as good as the one in Chicago
He mostly just walked the downtown area to see where everything was
He found out the next day how to get to the Coliseum
Where Pink Floyd would be
It was an hour walk but he was used to walking so it was nothing
He wandered around the downtown area during the day
He would show up at the mission for meal times
He came to the mission late a couple of nights
He wasn't able to get a bed but he was able to stay in the basement
He shaved and cleaned himself up in the morning
Down in the mission basement
He met and talked to a lot of the bums
There were a few people there that were his age
The main concern during the day was getting cigarettes
Along with something to drink
He was able to get himself drunk everyday
He went to a mall with a fountain full of wish coins
He took off his shoes
Rolled up his pants and then scooped up all of the coins in the water
He stumbled into a movie set one afternoon
Some guy caught him stealing donuts off a table
The guy said he was working in the movie
The guy said they were making a movie called Angel on My Shoulder
The guy told him that he could work on the movie as an extra
The guy gave him a phone number and told him to call
He called the guy every morning for a week
The guy took him out to a lot in Culver City where he stood around
After about 2 hours somebody gave him 25 dollars
He took the money and spent half of it in the cafeteria
He spent the rest when he got back to skid row on pints of wine
He found his way to the Coliseum for the Pink Floyd shows
He never got inside
He just walked around the sidewalk outside each night
He waited for the people to come out after the show
He saw the people leaving the shows happy and laughing
He wondered if they were even at the show
He didn't think it was something to be laughing at
After the shows were over he kept hanging around at the mission
He wanted to get some dope
He asked a guy at the bus station for some dope one night
The guy gave him a handful of pencil shavings
He thought the people in California were idiots
He thought that the bums had it soft and easy
At the Jesus Saves Rescue Mission
He was glad that he hadn't been able to get himself arrested
He saw the LA cops taking away Mexicans Indians and blacks every day
He got thrown out of the mission a few times for being noisy at night
He always got thrown out of the mission when it was raining
He hung around for a couple of weeks after the Pink Floyd concerts
He knew that he had a couple of unemployment checks back in Illinois
He was starting to get tired and depressed
He made a collect call home and asked them to send his money
His family told him to rot in hell
He met a guy at the bus station who gave him a ticket to Sacramento
He took the bus up to Sacramento
It was cold near freezing up in Sacramento
He had lost his Illinois winter jacket the second day he was in LA
He stayed near the bus station in Sacramento
He rummaged through the early morning garbage outside of restaurants
He freaked a lady out when he started eating cookies
Off of the sidewalk
He didn't see any bums in Sacramento
He didn't know where the skid row was or if there was one at all
He couldn't hang out at the bus station because it was too small
He spent a few more days in Sacramento and called Illinois again
He asked his family to send him some of his unemployment money
He offered his family one of his unemployment checks
They told him that it was too late for that
They already signed his name on his checks and cashed them
His mom said she would only send him a bus ticket to get to Chicago
His mom said she wasn't going to send him any money
He hung around the bus station for hours before the ticket was there
He knew if he was there any longer he would wind up in jail
He was glad to be on the bus and moving again
He had a lot of fun during the ride back to Illinois
Another year and a few months went by
He started getting the itch to go somewhere again
He was living back at his mom and his stepdad's house
He was enrolled in a vocational rehabilitation program
He was picked up at his every morning by a mini-bus
He rode the bus with retarded adults to vocational rehab in Joliet
He spent six hours a day repairing broken pop bottle crates
He was paid 25 cents for every crate that he repaired
He made enough money
For a couple of cartons of cigarettes and sixes of beers
He would sit in his parent’s house all night and drink
He learned how to keep himself quiet
He thought about his other failed travelling ventures
He decided that the problem was leaving with no way to get back
He had always heard about the breweries up in Milwaukee
He always heard stories of the brewery tours
Where people drank all they wanted
He told himself that he could go to Milwaukee on a saturday morning
He thought that he'd be able to drink an amount of beer
In excess of the cost of the bus fare
He planned on buying a roundtrip bus ticket to prevent any screwups
He could stay outside on saturday and drink for free on sunday
He figured he'd be back in plenty of time
To get on the bus to rehab on monday
He took it easy on the friday night before he got paid
He usually spent most of his money when he got it on friday
He loaded his pockets with a carton of cigarettes
He took along a bottle of various psych pills
That he had stashed away saved after he got home from the hospital
He took the first train downtown to Chicago on saturday morning
He was out of the house before anybody was even awake
He had called the bus station ahead of time to find out the schedule
He didn't want to take the chance of spending his money in Chicago
He wanted to get his tickets and head right up to Milwaukee
He felt like he was sort of established
When he bought his round trip tickets
He wanted this to go off as he planned with no surprises or bullshit
He had some tremor reducers in his pill stash
He swallowed a few of the pills for the bus ride
He sat on the bus and thought about all his other travelling mishaps
He knew were he was going and he knew what he wanted to do
He was going to get drunk up in Milwaukee
He wasn't sure what breweries were there
He didn't even know where the breweries were at
He thought that Milwaukee wouldn't be that large
He thought that finding a brewery would be easy
He was even willing to drink Pabst or Bohemian Club
If that's all that was there
He even had money left over after the ticket
He hit Milwaukee around noon
He wasn't even out of the bus station
When he met up with one of the locals
He met a guy that gave him some methedrine
He agreed to get some wine with the guy in exchange for the speed
He went into the first bar they came to outside of the bus station
The people in the bar knew the guy and started to throw them out
The guy apparently had been thrown out of there before
He bought some quarts of beer and bottles of wine for them to drink
He walked around with the guy and drank the alcohol
They stopped at more bars
At each place the guy was treated the same
Everybody knew the guy and wanted the guy out
The guy pointed to him as a new found friend
The guy kept saying "kool and the gang"
He headed into skid row with the guy and forgot all about the brewery
He ran out of money when it started to get dark
The guy he met decided to stay on the row
He wanted to walk around and see what was going on
He had a good drunk going but the speed was wearing it off
He had some tranquilizers in his pocket so he took a couple of those
He met up with another guy and shared some of his pills with him
It was getting cold so the other guy decided
To crash on a heating vent
He didn't know where in the hell he was at
He had taken too many downers and was getting tired himself
He thought the Milwaukee row was a joke
He decided to see the rest of the town
He kept walking and getting more tired
He didn't know where the bus station was
He could care less about the breweries
He kept on walking up and down the empty streets
It was in the middle of the night and he couldn't keep his eyes open
He was walking around with his eyes closed
He tried to keep his hands out for obstacles
He walked right smack into a wall a couple of times
He walked into a wall a third time smashing his glasses into his face
He felt around on the ground for the lens and was able to find it
He would open his eyes every few minutes and check for obstacles
He got tired of banging into things
He decided to find a place to crash
He was arrested when the Milwaukee police saw him turning doorknobs
He was taken to the police station
He walked through the police station with his eyes still closed
He heard the police laughing at him
He screamed at them that he was on drugs and to leave him alone
He watched the cops digging through his wallet
He got his wallet back the next day and the bus ticket was gone
He raised hell with the police and the people at the court
He knew that the sons of bitches took his ticket
The cops just laughed in his face
He didn't know what in the hell he was going to do
He knew if he called home he'd be out on his ass for sure
He spent the next couple of days walking around downtown Milwaukee
He walked around most of the nights because it was still cold
He would sleep under concrete overpasses at the top of the embankment
He passed out while the cars rolled over the highway above his face
He had to keep moving at night though because it was cold
He was able to get out in the sun during the day to warm up
He hung around there for a week
He stayed away from the skid row section
He finally broke down and called his sister and asked her for 18 bucks
His sister told him that he was in trouble
For missing the rehab that week
His sister also told him not to show up at home
His stepdad was pissed
He asked her to just send the money
He wanted to get the hell out of there
All the way back to Chicago he thought about how good it was to travel
****
He knew that women were a lost cause
His insanity joblessness homelessness and sleeplessness
Resigned him to a future
Of monkish isolation
He met a young woman
On a sidewalk downtown bus stop bench
She was waiting on a bus
He was interested in the animal cracker cookies
He saw scattered around under the bus stop bench
He sat at the opposite end of the bench
Deciding to wait until the woman was gone
Before crawling under the bench for the cookies
The woman started talking to him
The way a semi-open minded not been too far around
Cautious lonely person would talk
To a person they just met
Out of a charitable well meant extension of courtesy
He knew it was hopeless
He wanted to string out some meaningless small talk
See how far it would lead
Without him having to reveal
That he was a bum
He had no money
He had no job
He ate at the mission
He stayed outside
He decided it wasn't worth it
He was stringing himself along with false hope
More than he was haggling her curiosity
He went straight for the prize
He crawled under the bus stop bench
Picked up a handful of the animal cracker cookie pieces
Stuffed them into his mouth
Kept right on talking to her
Pretending not to notice
The look of recoiled horror in her face
In response to what he had just done
Like it was the most disgustingly terrifying thing
She had ever seen
He chewed the cookies for a long time
Pulverizing them into a sticky doughy mash
The woman was obviously becoming afraid of him
Before she escaped to the safety of the opening bus door
He opened his mouth wide
To let her get a good long last look at him
With the masticated cookie glop
Caked into his teeth
Painting his tongue
He went off in search of some water
An unattended spigot on the side of a building
A restroom sink
A drinking fountain
To wash down the whole mess
He knew that he had better get used
To being alone
For a real long time
*****
He bungled into a movie set
Spread out all over a workday morning sidewalk
Right in the heart of downtown LA
Wooden canvas director's chairs
Names printed across the back
One advertising a TV mini-movie series star
Peter Strauss
He aimed himself for the table
Covered with half rifled donut boxes and cartons of milk
He was able to shove two donuts into his mouth
Before a guy asked him what he was doing
He guzzled a pint container of chocolate milk
Belched in the guys face
Told him he was doing nothing
The guy told him he was working for the movie
A remake of an old 40's film
Angel On My Shoulder
He told the guy he needed a job
The guy told him that maybe he could work as an extra
The guy gave him a phone number
Told him to try calling
In a couple of days
****
He called the movie guy
Every day for a week
First thing in the morning
Out of the mission onto the street
After the stale breakfast roll tin cup of coffee
He started scrounging
Hustling up coins
For the telephone
He kept himself shower cleaned mission razor shaven
He knew that he wouldn't get anywhere
Unkempt smelly dirt crust mangy in raggedy filthy pissed-up clothes
The movie guy kept telling him to call back
He called the guy back
He made sure that he bugged the guy
Every day
Scraping the change together in the morning
Not losing the piece of paper with the number written on it
For the telephone call
Kept him occupied
Helping the time to pass quicker
Between meals
****
He kept calling the movie guy
Until the guy told him
There was an opening for an extra
The guy told him to wait
On a corner the next morning
Where the guy would pick him up
Then take him out to the movie lot
He wound himself up into a quiet excitement
He made damned sure the afternoon before
That he knew how to get to the corner
Where he was supposed to wait for the guy
He wondered if the guy was really going to show up
He wondered why the guy was willing
To go out of the way for him
He wondered if it was all
A patiently long drawn out variation
Of some pathetically tired buttfuck scheme
He decided if it was an empty double talk bluff
Ulterior motived bullshit disguise
He was going to be right there
To call it for whatever it was
****
He waited on the corner for the guy from the movie
He got there an hour early
Making sure that there was no skidrow drunken
Missed appointment hour late lost stupidity screwups
He anchored himself on the corner
He bummed cigarettes from passing strangers
That were smoking
He insulted people on their way to work
Keeping up the clown routine
Until it was almost time for the guy to be there
He twisted himself up
Belligerent talking out loud
Lunatic rant babble muttering
To no one in particular
While he was waiting on the corner
For the movie guy
He knew that he had to switch gears fast
He had to depress himself
Get real quiet real quick
He still retained the vague amount of sense
Necessary for understanding the obvious
Most people would have an instinctive fear
Of a sleep deprived out loud psychotic maniac
He started thinking it was all a bunch of crap
When the guy was getting to be a half hour late
He started thinking that maybe the guy had sent
Somebody down there before hand
To see if he was ok
He started thinking that the guy wasn't going to show
Because of the obnoxious shit he was doing
While he was waiting down on the corner
****
He waited on the corner
Until the movie guy showed up
Almost an hour late
His bullshit detector went into activation
When the movie guy said that
They had to stop off at his apartment
Before they went out to the movie lot
The movie guy was an indian
In his late 30's
The movie guy gave him a shirt to wear
A blue polyester turtleneck
Told him that he looked better with that on
The movie guy told him that he worked for a company
That hired extras for the movies
The movie guy told him that he wanted to make a movie
Someday about an indian that goes back
To the american midwest reservation plains
To rediscover his lost broken heritage
Until then
He was just marking time
He asked the movie guy if he had any drugs
The movie guy asked him if he was a cop
****
The movie guy drove him out to a lot
In Culver City
He was told to wait around
With some other people
That were going to be extras
He waited in the living room
Of a fake house that had no roof
He was told that he was to wait with the others
For the assistant director
He started to realize that it was all a joke
He wondered how hard it was to be an actor
To drop emotions on a dime
Laugh cry
Until somebody yells cut
He thought of all the stories
He had heard of actors party drinking drug taking
He thought about all the times he had went
To work in the morning after pounding alcohol hard
Late into the after midnight hours
Hung over skull busted
Stomach raw watery gut bowel turmoil
He remembered how useless he was on some of those mornings
He wondered if that was how actors showed up
For work in the morning
Spent tired wiped out
Still wasted from the night before
He wondered how hard it must be
To be an actor
How hard was a job
That could be done
While hungover burnt half drunk and stoned
****
He stood around with the other people
Waiting for the movie AD
Waiting to be extras
He waited with an elderly couple
Retired probably picking up a few extra bucks
Cashing in a long overdue years lost in the mail check
For a dream that never came out right
The celluloid immortality that escaped with their youth
He stood watching them
Overeager in their nervous childlike anxiousness
He was waiting for them to bust out
Into some cornball comic-serio soft shoe song and dance routine
Anything to catch the attention of a movie big shot
That might happen to be fragmenting their way
He waited with a real little kid
Seven or eight years old
Bored probably intelligent for his age
Ants in his pants
Unable to stand still for long hyper quiet
He wondered why the kid wasn't in school
He looked at the other couple of people
Waiting around to be movie extras
He could tell that they had done
This kind of shit before
None of them wanted any part of him
He started to feel like some kind of a freak
Empty stomach hungry starving
Straight off of skid row
Wearing no socks or underwear
And some other guy's stupid blue polyester turtleneck shirt
He started mumble talking to himself
He wanted to see some camera action
He didn't want to stand there like a sheep
In a backdrop room full of idiots
Waiting around for some asshole with a clip board
He wanted to tell somebody there
To fuck the acting
Let the film roll live
He was crazy enough to believe that
He could do anything
****
He remembered watching movies
The year before when he was losing his mind
Perpetually fried unable to get out of
An acid trip that went on for months
He started thinking that
The movies were real
Based from some initial premise
That was allowed to mushroom explode itself
Into a feature length film
He had thought that scripts acting direction repeated takes
Until it was gotten right
Was a dull load of bullshit
For highschool drama club memorize recite morons
He was convinced that the best movie actors
Were given the licensed reign to just cut loose
Right in front of the rolling camera
Without a script or rehearsal
Live time action sequences
Later edited into a movie
He wanted to be in a movie like that
A real movie
He had no sense of the craft
That went into movie making
The stand around wait to do nothing patient idleness required
He was too chaotically unfocused
To believe that movie making involved any amount of concentrated work
****
His name was put on a list
He was told that he was hired as an extra
He didn't know what he was an extra for
Or what he was supposed to do
He was told that he earned 50 dollars
For standing around that morning with the other extras
Waiting for the assistant director
He was told that he could only get half of the money
Because he wasn't a member
Of the screen actors guild
He spent most of the money
In the cafeteria on the movie lot
He found his way back downtown to skid row
He spent the rest of the money
On pints of wine and quarts of beer
He was broke and drunk
When he got back to the mission
For dinnertime
***
****************************************************
From pages 446 - 453 of "A Dungeon of Days"
****************************************************
He hitchhiked walked the 15 miles from Joliet
Back to his parent's house
His stepfather was all over him
As soon as he walked in the house
His stepfather told him to get out
All he wanted to do was change his clothes
Get something warmer to wear
For the still cool early May damp outside nights
His stepfather threatened him with violence
Stood over him in knuckle down fist clench
Hot breath down the back of his neck
He left the house
***
He was deep down secretly in fear of his stepfather
His stepfather
With the armada sized weapon ammunition arsenal
Up in the crawl space attic over the family room
Grenades
Smoke bombs
Smoke bomb launchers
14 hunting rifles
A pistol and handgun collection
Cases of shotgun shells
Korean war bayonet machete blade souvenirs
His stepfather
With the yellowed newspaper scrapbook clippings
For the first prize award
In the 1964 Orland Park Illinois
Police target shoot out competition
His stepfather to him
Was a more dangerous nut than he ever could be
His stepfather was a respected
Community pillar member of society
All he wanted to do was sing and draw pictures
He couldn't understand
He was the one that had to be locked up
***
He spent the next week
In the park near his parent's house
Staying drunk and stoned
On the reefer and beers
Of the people that went to hang in the park
He made foray raids into his parent's house
When his parents weren't there
Changing his clothes
Washing his hair in the sink
Guzzling glasses filled with raw eggs
While his sister and stepbrother yelled at him
To get the fuck out
***
He slept on the floor
Of the wooden outhouse shack at the park
Tying the shithouse door shut at night from the inside
With the leather strap of his belt
The people in the park quickly got tired of him
Started avoiding the park
Just to avoid him
The town cops started coming around
Hassling trying to run him off
He decided it was time to get the hell out of there
Once and finally for all
For good
He carved square blocked letters with his belt prong
Into the top of a park picnic table
ACID WILL FRY YOUR FUCKING MIND AND MAKE YOU PSYCHOTIC
He signed his name under the message
He knew that he was going away
For a long time
If he was going to be remembered for anything
He wanted it to be this
***
He went one more time
Back to his parent's house
He stole enough money from his sister's purse
And his stepbrother's bedroom dresser
For train fare to downtown Chicago
He was running desperate
Pushing through the sleepless awake
Tired hungry nerve collapsed exhaustion
Mainlining the adrenal gland
118 pounds of rubberband wound tight flesh
Pulled over bone
Shot through with mental electricity
Something big was about to happen
He could feel it
It was waiting for him
He was ready for it
***
He saw a cardboard advertisement sign
Taped to a downtown Chicago lightpole
Looking for people to be extras
In a punk rock movie
He rattled newspaper and payphone coin return slots
Until he found phone call money
The woman from the punk rock movie phone number
Took down his name
Gave him the address of a nightclub
Told him to show up the next day at noon
He had 24 hours to travel
The couple miles from Chicago downtown
Up to the movie shoot nightclub
He could take his time relax
Gather his wits
Focus his strength
This was his big chance
Opportunity out
He wasn't going to fuck up this time
***
He spent the night before the punk rock movie
Walking around the Chicago Gold Coast Rush Street area
Keeping quiet staying to himself
He looked up at the lights in the windows
Of the highrise apartment towers
Incomprehensible with awe
Vertical stacks of lives
Worlds stretching up into the black darkness
He tried to imagine
What it would be like to live
In one of those buildings
He washed up bar of soap shampooed is hair
In the washroom sink of an all night outdoor cafe
Went over to the concreted beachfront along Lake Michigan
To watch the sun rise a bright warm redorange ball
Over the far Michigan side of the lake
***
He met up with an older black guy that was living outside
Told the guy about the punk rock movie
The two of them spent the morning
Working their way slowly through Lincoln Park
The guy panhandled money off of good looking women along the way
He stood out of earshot on the side
Watching the guy work a well practiced hustle
The guy gave him some dollar bills
When they got up to the movie shoot nightclub
He wanted the guy to go in with him
The guy didn't want to be
In a punk rock movie
***
He went into the movie shoot nightclub
Checked in with a woman sitting behind a table
He didn't think that he was in a nightclub
He thought he was supposed to be on a movie set
He went into the women's bathroom
Not noticing the sign on the door
Not paying attention to the startled women
Putting on makeup around the mirror
He started complaining when he was told
That he would have to pay for his alcohol
He was out of money
After two bottles of dark imported german beer
He walked around the bar wondering outloud
What kind of bullshit fake movie shoot it was
***
He waited around with the other movie extras
Nobody looked like a punk rocker to him
They were mostly out of highschool new wave
Skinny tie acting class dressup geeks
There was a girl
In raccoon thick dark eyeliner
Wearing a blue denim mini skirt
Over ripped run black nylon fishnet stockings
Laying on her side on top of a pool table
Her friend was lifting up her leg
Both of them freeze frame posing
With fake struck dumb looks
While a guy was taking pictures
He laughed outloud to himself
He knew that those girls were punk rock
***
He was crowded with the rest of the movie extras
Into the nightclub area of the bar
Seated at tables around a stage
While a punk rock band pounded out the same song
Over and over
A song was about Maynard G. Krebs
Each time the arm crossed singer sang the tagline chorus
It sounded to him like
The guy was singing something about
Making cheap friends
The extras were told to pogo bop up and down
He didn't have time for punk cornball nonsense
He wanted to stand out from the background
Get himself noticed
Get discovered
He careened around the tables moving slant sideways
Grabbing drinks and bottles off of the tables
Gulping down other peoples booze
Then smashing the glass on the floor
He lost all of his patience
When a scene was shot
With what he figured to be the movies main characters
At a table near the brass rail cordoned off stage
A big dork with a drama school fag ivy league college accent
Whining bitchy dialogue to the actress playing his girlfriend
It wasn't a punk rock movie
It was a movie with a scene in a punk rock club
A guy gave him a Quaalude told him to calm down
He ground the white pill into powder with his teeth
He saw the bleach blonde pompadoured band bass player
Head shot posing in the bathroom mirror
He laughed calling the bass player a big poof
The bass player said something to a bouncer
He was walked out of the club onto the sidewalk
Told that he wasn't allowed back inside
He told them that they were all full of shit
Bunch of fucking fake punk rock pretender wimps
He mumbled outloud to himself about what a bullshit movie
The Quaalude he had taken was starting to kick in
He started looking around for a place to crash
***
He woke up on a wooden bench
In a small park near the movie shoot night club
In a neighborhood he didn't recognize
A middle aged guy was there when he woke up
Started bothering him
Following him around
Calling him John
He told the guy to get away from him
Warned the guy that he was a violently deranged psycho maniac
That was just about ready to explode
He headed over to Lake Michigan
Carved out a bed in the beach sand
Before he could get settled in
He was thrown in the back of paddy wagon
By the cops doing night patrol on the beach
He rode in the back of the paddy wagon
While the cops drove up and down the lakefront
Shining a spotlight on the sand
Looking for trespassers
Three white loudmouthed drunk Bridgeport college kids
Were loaded into the van by the cops
He told them that if they didn't shut the fuck up
He was going to stomp the living piss out of them
He spent the last couple hours of the night
In a cell by himself at the county jail
Stretched out on a wooden bench
Fortified by a baloney on white mayonaissed sandwich
It felt good to have a real roof over his head
***
He pleaded guilty in the morning
To a bullshit disorderly conduct charge
Left the Cook County Courthouse
Then fast talk persistent persuaded a CTA fare collector
Into letting him get on the el without paying
He spent the day walking aimlessly around the downtown
Late June sunny monday summer morning
It was too crowded
Too hot
The streets and sidewalks were clogged
With goofy smile people and horn honking car exhaust
The off gray shadowy damp hue in the concrete was gone
Everything was bleached with a blinding brightness
In the eye pounding relentless light of the sun
There was nowhere to hide
Nowhere to be alone
Something had to happen fast
He knew that he was running out of time
***
He went up North Michigan Avenue to the Watertower
Hung around the small square sidewalk plaza
Acting the fool
Talking outloud
Asking people for cigarettes
He found a magazine in a trashcan
A thin issue poetry magazine called Nit & Wit
With a picture of John Lennon on the cover
He carefully tucked the folded magazine inside of his shirt
He thought that the magazine was a sign
A secret hidden message
Instructing him to hold out
Not give up
Something big was still going to happen
***
He headed back to the downtown when it got dark
Spent the night across the street
From the Greyhound bus station
In the Civic Center Plaza
He crawled into the back opening of the Picasso sculpture
Out of sight from the bum rousting plaza night guard
He tried carving his initials
With a flattened aluminum can
Into the rusty brown iron inside of Picasso's woman
He lay in the cobwebbed back of the sculpture
Behind the sloped inclining breast
Remembering that he had read somewhere
That the day the statue was dedicated in 1969
It was the same date as his birthday
He thought about picture postcards he had seen
From 1960's Chicago Illinois
Where the sky is an unearthly even blue
The hustle bustle combination of old buildings and new skyscrapers
The time frozen shot of moving cars captured in traffic
When his aunts and uncles were young
When his grandfather was still alive
A summer day in 1969
Picture perfect
***
Great!!! Muy muy great!!!
************************************************
There's something holding me back
There's nothing keeping me down
The common sense that I lack
Is just the sense that I've found
If I could have what I want
I wouldn't have what I need
Forgotten thoughts are a haunt
I blindly follow their lead
I am listening to what you just said
There's nothing that I'm able to say
I try to pull the thoughts out of my head
Something much stronger now takes them away
I keep my head high up in the colors
I wash the drag of the day off with sound
I look beyond what reality covers
I know a new world is there to be found
I'm working like a railroad
I want to do it alone
I'm carrying the whole load
I'm bringing it all back home
I'm practicing hodgepodge religion
The myth runs a mystic paganal course
Turn deaf to all considered opinion
I'm disregardant to that and its source
Abandon balance on the cutting ledge
I retained the view seen from over the ledge
What was left behind needs time to dry inside
I've seen both of the ends of the worst life can bring
The part after it's done
And the part before it begins
Forgotten thoughts are a haunt
The ghost is more than I need
It's not the past that I want
Today is all that I need
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
I wasted years
When I was younger
Never caring or knowing
I now have fears
I'm getting older
Looking both back and ahead
Assuming there was more
Wondering what is left
Missing it while it's here
There's a hole in my life where the time goes
The memories mount where the past only grows
I smooth over the ruts and ride out the grooves
My beliefs may change but my faith never moves
Most of each day
Is all and about
Getting over and through it
Living this way
Requires no effort
Having no purpose or sense
Wishing it was over
Counting off what is left
Missing it while it's there
There's a hole in my life where the time goes
The future forgets what the past never knows
I ride rough in the ruts and wear out the grooves
My thoughts may wander but my mind never moves
Life day to day
Moves on just like this
Taking years and lives along
Each day by day
One day at a time
Takes from and gives to the whole
Always wanting more
When nothing is left
Wishing it was still here
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
From pages 57-59 of "A Dungeon of Days"
*************************************************************
When my reason is confounded with fractures
And my life only tears where it wears
It's time to go downtown and take pictures
With a camera of zombie-eyed stares
I'm soaking faces deep into my mind
My self obscured in the collective blind
I'm careful of the images I keep
I know they will return when I'm asleep
I need something I can dream on
I'm not getting any life
Black or white
Night or day
Asleep or awake
It's all shades
Of the same mundane gray
Give me something I can dream on
How real is real, anyway
I'm unconsciously contouring a role
Retreading endless karmic excrement
So much of life is beyond my control
I'd rather live in rapid eye movement
Being asleep claims one third of each day
The rest of the hours drain quickly away
I have no choice about the time I keep
That all changes when I fall into sleep
I have no time for the choices I keep
That will all fall when I change into sleep
I need something I can dream on
I'm not getting any life
Black or white
Night or day
Asleep or awake
It's all shades
Of the same mundane gray
Give me something I can dream on
How real is real, anyway
Stop the reliving of childhood traumas
Tune up the brain's electrical static
Left to recreate meaningless dramas
Nonsense plagues the mentally erratic
If it's inside or outside of my mind
It feels the same when I leave it behind
I'll take any kind of peace I can keep
Dreaming or thinking I'm always asleep
I've got something I can dream on
Now where do you get your life
Black or white
Night and day
Asleep and awake
Are you a shade
Of the everpresent gray
Now what do you dream on
How real is your real, anyway
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
How can I be all alone
When I can go out and melt into a crowd
How can I feel unhappy
When I'm numb and unable to cry out loud
In the lost world of my sleep
All that I dream will be true
Every battered wreck of a life
Was once filled with promise and new
What could cause me to worry
When I'm living in a secret of pasts
What is there that I can lose
When nothing I've found in this life ever lasts
I'm a harvester for gold
In fields where I've never planted
In the narrow shadows of the fools
The truth obscurely raved and ranted
I will merely exist
When living means only to survive
It's routine to resist
The miracle of being alive
Disillusion betrays
The ideals from which it's derived
I won't hatch an escape
If I'm living a lie
I won't hatch an escape
Until I'm able to die
Why should I work for change
When everything remains more of the same
Why should I fight for control
When I'm captive to fate's conspiratorial game
When I can no longer cope
I break down into a stall
A half-hearted attempt at something
Amounts to less than nothing at all
******************************************************************************************
I was getting all firecrackered up and fully fourth of julied
We were out celebrating our nation's birth
Will a future world care about the day that it died
Will they say
We never lived up to our pursuit of happiness jargon
We settled for a piece of life and believed it was a bargain
But we're still number one even if no one's counting
We push ourselves then wonder why the pressure's mounting
Do we think this will last forever
When we say that everything has an end
Did we think that this time it meant never
Many others before have done the rise and the fall
Is this the sound that's heard when the new freedom makes its call
Am I the only one listening to the sound of the freedom I hear call
Can you see the American flag
(I think I see the forest but I'm looking at the tree)
The flag was giving direction to the wind
Dissension has been pissing in that wind
It's easy to protect what we have and to overlook what we lack
We stopped moving while our world turned without us
If we go to sleep will our dream decide to come back
Should we say
We never openly declared the start of our civil war
We refer to it as the disparity of our rich and poor
Now the status quo still means having something to lose
We have freedom of choice but there is nothing to choose
Do they want this to last forever
They know that everything must have an end
Did they hope that this time it meant never
It's hard to imagine a nation changing its face
What if something better was able to stand in its place
Am I the only one to think we can put a better government in place
I still see the American flag
(I'm looking at the forest but I want to see the tree)
The flag was just there to color a parade
Disillusion rains down on that parade
I was thinking of America and the sound of Fourth of Julys
We tell ourselves we're the greatest on the earth
Will tomorrow's world allow this history of lies
Will they say
We wanted to go down as the winning side that never lost
We set aside a quiet day to justify the human cost
Still we ask for change while we keep clinging to the same
The new order means our old way with another name
Was this supposed to last forever
Will this keep going without reaching an end
Or is the end closer now than ever
We learn to adjust and end up worse off than before
What if we all decided not to take it anymore
Could I be the only one that thinks this country isn't working anymore
I can see the American flag
(I'm looking at the forest and it looks just like a tree)
The flag is all that will decorate a grave
Disregard will be buried in that grave
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Available exclusively at amazon.com and target.com.
Available for free download and perusal at authorsden.com
**********************************************************************************************
He came back from college a different person
All of the nights spent awake stoned alone
Along with a couple of weeks in a zen buddhism class
Unhinged the doors of his perception
Nothing was the same for him
He thought that he had cut through
To the core essence of reality
Everything that had been passed off to him
As life
Was a sleeping illusion
***
He was imbued with a self-cooked homebrew quasi-mystic philosophy
He said out loud whatever came into his head
No matter how uncomfortably inappropriate it was
He abandoned all reason to intuitiveness
Once walking home 12 miles in the middle of night
Turning down rides from the cops that stopped him on the way
Because he was impulsed to do so
He went around in a sleeveless mexican vest
With a round mirror glued on the back of it
He quit using soap when he showered
Sometimes he wore his pants inside out
He smoked Lipton's tea when he couldn't get dope
He tried to tell people what they were thinking
He pissed off everybody around him
He was out of context
Nobody was able to make him understand that
He was out of his fucking mind
***
It took him a few months to settle down
After he came home from his college experience
It was a strange spring
Mostly spent listening to the Doors
The Moody Blues and Spirit
Hanging around in the forest preserve parks
Meeting young women
Trying to keep himself high
He wanted to know what the river knew
He finally went back to his old construction job
Got himself a used 4-wheel drive international truck
Bought a lid of columbian every friday payday
Started taking acid on the weekends
Everybody around him was reassuringly relieved
He had gotten himself back to normal
***
He thought about the times he had gone crazy
There was always a brief period
Before everything went straight to hell
When he felt himself kicking into another dimension
Transported into a strange plane of existence
His knowing and seeing became markedly different
He kept thinking that he had inadvertently unlocked something
An unknown forgotten human psychic potential
That was hidden beneath the glare of the modern world
An energy of the mind
Crushed dormant by the clutterous noise of 20th century civilization
That was somehow brought forth
With the right combination
Of fasting with lack of sleep
***
He knew reasoning was an immediate casualty
After he had been awake for a few days
He responded with instinctual emotional reactions
The mind reduced to its basest functioning level
There was something about fasting
Maybe after the conscious drive of hunger was overcome
The mind not busy with directing
The acquisition decomposition absorption of food
Was able to work in other ways
It was all an exact science
One that had to have been mastered
By the seekers and seers of visions
The monks and shaman scattered
Throughout the ages
He knew that he was on to something
But for now he had to sit still
Wait
Ride out the depression he was dropped into
He wanted to go back
Find a way to immerse himself in the fire
Without getting burned
***
He didn't know why he had gone crazy again
He wasn't taking acid like he had before
When he got himself locked up the first time
During the last snap
It was almost like he was tripping again
He was just as wild wound up crazy as he had been
When he took acid constantly for 6 months
Then stayed awake for weeks at a stretch
Until he wasn't sure if he was awake or dreaming
If he was dead or alive
***
He wondered if he had experienced a flashback
He had heard once
From a big-toe basement chemist
That once ingested
Acid never left the body
It stayed stored unknown
Somewhere in the brain
He remembered that he got the screwiest
Once his weight dropped below 120 pounds
Maybe by then he was burning the fat in his brain
Burning off the lodged trace LSD residuals
Combusting himself into acid flashback psychosis
He would have to watch his weight
Next time around
He was 140 and counting
He figured he was a good 20 pounds away
From being crazy
***
Looking back he could almost pinpoint
The ascending point of each bout of madness
When the weirdly eccentric
Embraced the psychotically insane
It was after the first 3 or 4 days
Of not sleeping
When he still had to fight to keep himself awake
Suddenly the urge for sleep would leave
He became charged with a seemingly endless electric flow
Of steadily increasing energy
His brain circuitry was hot wired
Like he had traded up from a windmill
To a nuclear powered substation
The candle of life was an aerosol spray blow torch
Each of the three times this had happened
He remembered thinking that
He would never have to go to sleep again
He was awake for the rest of his life
***
Each time he convinced himself he didn't have to sleep
Madness was waiting to be discovered
No matter which corner he turned
Everything would be fine for a week or two
He functioned normally without any problems
He kept quiet
Kept himself busy thinking through the middle of night
While the people around him slept
The trouble always started
When other people realized that he wasn't sleeping
The insanity seemed like the result
Of the people around him
Constantly putting obstacle blocks in his way
Booby trap land mine detonating every step that he took
Because they were determined not to let him
Live out his life the way that he wanted
****
He started his junior college classes
After the end of august labor day weekend
Riding the half hour out to Joliet
On passenger seat tuesday thursday mornings
With his two younger cousins
It was a bright humid september
He was still swamp fevered sweaty sick
His depression entrenched in the itching malarial heat
Tied to the sunshined oppressing glare
The days drove like a stake through his resolve
The start of the school year
Cool breeze brisk autumnal electricity air
The looking forward to crispness
Anticipation about the new girls
The sounds of new music
The sense of expectation guaranteed fulfillment
All of that was now dead
He was in hell
There was no back to school waiting for him
***
***************************************************
He liked going to family parties when he was a kid
He learned by watching his relatives
A good time was drinking and socializing
He looked ahead to being older
He wanted to take his place in the family party scene
When he was finally allowed to drink with his family
He had to be carted out cut off
He was too excessive
Walking around with a drink in each hand
Getting so drunk
He had to hunch up his shoulders
To keep from falling over
He wanted every day to be a party
He didn't want to settle for fun on special occasions
The rest of the time in between
Passed mechanically
In a dull thoughtless sober depression
He had planned on spending
The rest of his life with those people
Now his relatives wanted nothing to do with him
The party was already over
Before it ever got started
***
He had been in the hospital for over two months
It was no longer a question
Of when he was getting out
A decision had to be made
About where he would be going next
He didn't want to get out
He didn't want to go anywhere else either
He wanted to stay there
For the rest of his life
In a wayward drift
Slipping away
On hospital time
***
He was having too much fun
He knew that things would never be that good
In whatever life followed after the hospital
He had nothing going out in the world
All he had were people
That couldn't accept him for who he was
People that he had unregretfully
Provoked into openly showing
The hatred they had for him
He was beyond consideration
For simple decorum
The formalities of tolerance
Were forever dispensed
As far as he was concerned
Too much ugliness had spilled from the bottle
Things would never be the same
For him outside of the hospital
There were only people
That hated him
That made him hate himself
That made him want to die
***
He was getting used to the idea
That he would never work again
He started to joke that he had retired
At the age of 19
Permanently wing clip grounded
Taken out of action by the authorities
That weren't going to let him work or drive
The bastards could take care of him now
His time was going to be free
To listen to music and sing
To sit around stoned drawing pictures
His putting up with a boss taking orders eating shit days were over
They could pack the whole thing right up their ass
Alarm clock time clock deadline appointment ultimatums
The whole thing was bullshit
***
He knew the work world
Was a hollow empty structure
An end up back at the start meaningless maze
A going nowhere circuitous life wasting soul smearing route
Set up
For and by
Unthinking drones
A way to occupy fulfill the empty
People that wouldn't know what to do
With their time
If it suddenly became their own
He was going to slide through their cracks
He wasn't going to do their work
***
His father stopped working
At the age of 38
After losing everything to a divorce
His father probably figured why bother
He watched his father trough tread wallowing
In the free ride subsistence level poverty
Supported by first and the third day of the month stipends
Veterans check social security supplemental income
His father's life became an aimless round about trudge
Of YMCA room skidrow hotel transience
Wintertime cold weather VA hospital resort style vacations
Paycheck day drunken binge spend splurges
His father became a willing captive
To the taxpayer supported government handout program
That left a man broke 24 days out of every month
***
*******************************************************************
From pages 182-188 of "A Dungeon of Days"
*******************************************************************
He didn't know what he was going to do
He owed 500 hundred dollars for his drunk driving ticket
He had a car payment due in a couple of weeks
He wasn't supposed to be driving
He was living in a semi-suburban almost rural area
Of wide opened spaces
Corn stalk bean field row distances
Long flat straight to the horizon roads
Traversing desolately stretched abandon
Destinating sparsely populated areas
Getting around without a car was nearly impossible
****
He got in his car
The day after his driver's license was revoked
For a drive out to Joliet
To pay a visit to an old employer
A general construction shod artist
Half-assed crooked home improvement contractor
That was in a money losing business
With a perpetually wasted on marijuana son
He had worked for this outfit
Before and after he went to college
It was low-skilled rusty broken down tool manual labor
In a constant atmosphere of charged hilarity and impossible chaos
Fucked-up home repair debacles
Perennial lawsuit lawyer liens and courtroom emotion dramatics
Better Business Association squabble beefs
Unsatisfied ripped-off customers
Refusals to pay
Stop payment checks
Refund demands
Battles with government agencies that withheld money
For work that was done late incorrectly not up to code standards
The place had gone bankrupt 5 times in a 20 year period
The old man kept a yard full of rusty metal
Junk piles of garbage salvaged from various construction projects
To be used as payment to the creditors
That were inevitably going to confiscate all of the rubble
The next time that the place went under
Everybody that worked there was a character
With extensively checkered histories of drug and alcohol abuse
The whole time riding in the trucks
To and from the job sites each day
Was spent smoking pot
Lunch was usually an hour drinking beers at the nearest bar
The business was an always open revolving door
For maniacs lunatics and psychotics
That came and went as they saw fit
Working whenever they had a whim or a need to do so
Once he had his foot in the door
He got some of his friends in
His friends robbed and stole at every opportunity
Gas money was used for cigarettes
The company trucks were taken out at night
For riding around town getting drunk and high
The time cards were padded with bullshit overtime hours
That were never worked
He went out on a job with a guy one morning
They followed a beer truck
For 45 minutes on a rural south of Joliet highway
Into the start of the downstate Illinois sticks boondock area country
To buy a six-pack of beer
At the tavern that the beer truck was delivering to
He felt bad sometimes about the old ladies and suckers
That were getting ripped off conned and cheated
Their homes being butchered and maimed by idiots
That had no idea of what they were doing
He went into somebody's basement with a jack hammer
He spent two days blasting out parts of the basement floor
There was a massive model train landscape with tracks and tunnels and bridges
Spread all throughout the basement
Locomotives and boxcars handpainted
Lifelike little trees and shrubs and countryside towns and houses
A hobby filled with loving care and obvious devotion
Representing somebody's investment of money and time
He never thought to cover any of it while he was jack hammering
The whole thing was dusted
In a thick white coat of concrete grains and chalk
He was on a crew to put in two basketball goal posts
For a south suburban Chicago Illinois township park district
They rented a backhoe that day
To dig the holes for the goal posts
It was a long ride out to the job site
Three joints and twelve pack of beer
They came back a few days later to hold up the posts
While a cement truck poured a yard and a half of concrete
Into each of the misaligned holes
The second hole was half filled with concrete
When a guy that worked for the town came out yelling at them
The basketball posts were not straight across from each other
He trawled the cement around the pole
While one of his co-workers tried to explain to the township guy
That they could still play half-court basketball
He worked part time for his old boss
After he left to start his career at the railroad
He would come in on saturdays and sundays
Stoned drunk and tripping from the night before
To do odd meaningless jobs for extra beer money
He had been going in on weekends
When he was cracking up the winter before
No matter how crazy and wild he was
He always put on a straight sober facade when he saw his old boss
He was a nervous wreck
That day after he went to court
Driving on the highway
Without a drivers license
Paranoid about cops spotting his car
Worrying about getting pulled over stopped hassled and thrown in jail
Wondering if his old boss knew that he had flipped out and went nuts
He knew that he must have hit the rock bottoms
His old boss wanted no part of him
After all of the derelicts and bullshit artists
That his old boss had put up with and allowed
To come and go through that business
He was told to leave
There was no work for him there
****
His only hope was to renew bonds of friendship
Ties broke damaged destroyed
Severed under the strains caused by his psychosis
When he was cracking up the winter before
His final descent into insanity was swift
After the people that he was drinking and taking drugs with
Abandoned him to his increasingly obvious problems
Nobody wanted the responsibility of aiding and abetting
A lunatic on an unstoppable path of self-destructive demise
His world caved-in collapsed down upon him
After he was cut adrift from the loose cords
That precariously connected him
To the society that existed around him
****
He hadn't talked to any of his old friends in months
He was angry about being ostracized
He was embarrassed about losing his shit and falling apart
He was painfully aware of why
Nobody wanted to have anything to do with him
He knew that he needed help getting his life back together
He was thinking that one of his old friends could help him
To maybe get some work somewhere
He had been on the outer fringe of a social group
All through and after highschool
That came to include over a dozen people
Living in several towns
They got together at night and on weekends
To drink and smoke pot
They went from spending nights drinking under highway overpasses
To spending their after work hours in Joliet saloons
He drifted in and out of this group
Going several times down to Texas to work
Going away for an insanity aborted year of college
They were always there when he got back
Doing the same things and going to the same places
He would fall quickly back into his place
Never sure that he really fit in
Assuming that he was accepted
Not certain that he belonged
He had been out of their world for 8 months
Since his breakdown his hospitalization and his summer in Texas
He hadn't heard from anybody that he knew
He waited a few days before calling anybody
Half hoping that somebody would try to get a hold of him
He finally called one of his friends
He knew the routine
His friend would be going out that night
To meet up with the rest of his friends in a Joliet bar
After small talk and silent pauses on the other end of the phone
His old friend agreed to stop by and pick him up
He felt pathetic when he walked into the bar
Bloated from a 40 pound overweight overfed swell
Stuffed tightly into a pair of jeans
Ready to burst
Screaming agony at the seams
He saw the sad looks in the eyes of his old friends
His throat jaw lung and chest guts fist clenched
He was too nervous and tight to talk
He wanted to turn hide and run away
He tried to innocuously sit at the bar
He stared straight ahead at the mirror
Against the wall behind the bar
He thought that he looked just like his father
He settled his gaze on the beer can in front of him
He talked to one of his friends that he had worked construction with
His friend was working for a guy putting up fences
He asked his friend if he could maybe work for the guy
His friend told him to wait and see
****
He found out from one of his friends that worked at the railroad
While he was working there
That the railroad had laid everybody off
After he had quit
He had worked at the railroad for about 6 months
He was stoned the day he went in and filled out the application
He was stoned the day he went in for his physical
He was stoned every morning when he showed up for work
He was stoned and half drunk every afternoon
After he got back from lunch
Near the end he was drinking in his car
On the way to work in the morning
He got so belligerent it was suggested that he resign
He quit so that he wouldn't be fired
He thought afterwards that the morning drinking had did him in
He knew the railroad was the best paying blue collar job in Joliet
He knew that it was hard to get in there and that he was goddamn lucky
He worked with middle aged men in their forties
That had started working at the railroad when they were his age
Living in homes with families all over Joliet
He wanted to do the same thing
He saw the whole rest of his life before him
Standing in the dusty steeltoed tired shoes of the railroad lifers
He liked the image of the life and future that he saw
It devastated him to realize that it had all evaporated
He agonized that summer working in Texas for low wages
He mourned the death of the life he dreamed he was to live
****
He worked on a line in the E.J. & E. railroad car repair shop
The railroad hauled steel to an Indiana mill
The open top gondola cars were sent to Joliet
For repairs and maintenance
His job was to shore up rivets and replace the handles
On the sides of the cars
He used a high pressured hydraulic gun
To squeeze the collars onto the rivets
The old days of hot bucket glowing red iron rivets were gone
He enjoyed the work
He took pride in his mastery of the skills required to do the work
It was a mindless repetitive routine
His thoughts to meander a drifting wandering plane
He liked when his body functioned robotically
Sailing smooth and unattended on the internal auto-pilot
His mind was allowed to pursue a world of its own
He knew the railroad was a dangerous place
With the overhead cranes lifting steel and box cars around the shop
With the movement of the cars up and down the tracks on the lines
He took the hazards for granted
Until the rivet gun he used exploded
Into the chest of one of his co-workers
Driving an oil and sand mixture with 2000 pounds of pressurized force
Through 4 layers of thick winter outer wear
Into the skin all over the guy’s chest
He had missed work that day
He heard about it when he came in the next day
He kept thinking about all of the times
He had worked with that gun head high
Right in front of his face while he plugged the rivet holes
He was upset
He started getting drunk before he came to work in the morning
He starting refusing to use the equipment
If he saw oil leaking out the bottom or through the seams
He was taken off the line and put on a clean-up crew for fuck-ups
He started missing work because he was getting arrested at night
After his car was stolen he didn't care
He had no way to get to work
His sister drove him to work for a couple of weeks
Before the railroad had enough of his bullshit and told him
He had to quit
When he came to his senses a few months later
On a chair in the dayroom of a mental institution
He realized how badly he had screwed up
He realized what he had lost
This ate away at him
After his friend told him about the layoff and lack of work
He wondered if it mattered
He would have been out of a job anyway
***
He saw his friends several times
Over the course of the next week
He knew that he was on a trial basis
Tentative status on still shaky ground
His friends were watching him closely
Looking for any remnant traces of the behavior
That they had witnessed during his breakdown
He kept quiet and drank beers with them
Nobody smoked dope around him
They were afraid that it might set him off
Into some bizarre psychotic acid delayed flashback reaction
He knew what was expected and he just went along
****
He felt better with the approach of the fall season
The cool dark september Joliet nights were a relief
After the relentless intensity of the numbing Texas sunshine and heat
He started feeling like his old self again
He made separate and formal amends with each of his friends
Having done something individually to piss each of them off
He apologized to them
They in turn told him that they were sorry
That they had to turn their backs on him
He started to feel like he was fitting back into his place
He picked up some quick cash putting up a fence with one of his friends
For the guy that owned the bar they were drinking in
They took a drunken blind ride
Out to their old boss's construction company
In the middle of a quiet Thursday night
To steal all of the materials they needed for the fence job
They spent a couple of days putting up the fence
Around some property next door to the bar
It was a couple of hundred dollars each
And all of the beer that they could drink while they were working
After that his friend got him the job installing fences
****
His new boss was a creep
A drunken alcoholic broke down middle aged fence man
That lusted and drooled for anything that moved within eyesight
Out of ear shot
Male female or animal
It didn't matter
He thought that his boss liked having his friend around
For a drinking companion
He thought that his friend got him the job
Because his friend didn't like being alone with the guy
He knew that the guy didn't want him there
He had an immediate dislike for the guy and had a hard time hiding it
He knew the job wasn't going to last long
***
****************************************************************************************
HE DECIDED THAT HE WANTED TO BE A COMPUTER PROGRAMMER
He decided that he wanted to be a computer programmer
He didn't know what a computer programmer was
He didn't know what a computer programmer did
He just knew that he had to do something
He was visiting at his mom and stepdad’s for christmas
He had spent the previous 8 months in Prescott Arizona
He lived with a guy and his wife and their baby daughter in a trailer
The guy had a landscaping business and he worked for him
The guy let him sleep on the floor in his trailer
The guy belonged to a church
He had to go to church with the guy as well as to work with him
He told the guy that he wanted to see his family for christmas
He talked his family into letting him come back there for a visit
His stepfather had kicked him out a couple of years before
He hadn't been back there since then
He left Arizona and told the guy that he would be back
He was going to visit his family for a couple of weeks
He was sort of hoping that he wouldn't have to go back to Arizona
He was sort of hoping that he move back in at his mom and stepdad's
He was hoping all of the trouble he caused at home was forgotten
He was told that he could stay if he could find a job
His family didn't want him sitting around the house and partying again
He hadn't taken a drink in a year and a half
He hadn't used any drugs for 8 months
He assured his family that he was ok and that they could trust him
He had lost his drivers license 4 years before
He hadn’t been able to get his driver’s license back
He still owed on the fine
He knew that there was an outstanding arrest warrant
He knew it would be hard to find a job without a car
He started taking the train to downtown Chicago to look for a job there
He applied at banks and stores for jobs that required no prior skills
He had only done manual labor and had a couple of semesters of college
He had no skills or qualifications to work indoors
He hadn't worked a real job for a three year period
He had to lie about what he was doing during that three years
He had to lie about where he was living during that time
He knew that he would never get a job
If he told people the truth about himself
He felt like he was being backed into a corner
If he was backed into a corner he was going to lie
Right to their faces and on their applications
He quickly realized that his chances of getting a job were slim
He saw an ad in the newspaper for a computer school
He made an appointment to go downtown for a seminar at the school
He was told that the school trained computer programmers and operators
He didn't know what either one of them did
He told his parents that he wanted to go to school
For computer programming
His parents said ok and said that they would help him
He applied for a grant to pay part of his tuition
His parents agreed to help him with the rest of the tuition money
He would receive a certificate after he completed a year of school
He thought that this would be good enough for him to get a job
He met the husband of one his mom's cousins at a family christmas party
The guy was the head of maintenance at a Montgomery Ward's store
The guy told him that he could work part time at the store as a janitor
The store job would pay for his cigarettes and train fare to school
He started computer school and his job at the store after christmas
He left for school at 6:30 each morning
He got back home from school at 3:00 in the afternoon
His mom worked downtown and took the train in the morning
He rode the train downtown each morning with his mother
He did his studying and homework on the hour train rides
To and from school
He came home in the afternoon had dinner and got ready for work
He worked the 5 to 9 shift at the store during the week
He worked all day on weekends
The store was a couple of towns away
His sister's boyfriend drove him each day and his stepdad picked him up
He grasped onto the computer concepts quickly
He was doing good at school and holding down his little job
He started getting bored with his job
He knew that a janitor was the lowest person on the ladder
In the little world of monkey wards
He hated the uniform he had to wear while he worked at the store
He hated taking orders from kids that were younger than him
He felt like a moron pushing a dumpster around the store
He parked his rolling dumpster at each checkout station
He wordlessly went behind the counters
Into the cashier’s workspace to collect the trash
He felt like a grimy dirtbag moron
He came in every week night and did the same thing for 4 hours
He cleaned out and wiped down the bathrooms
He collected all the trash from the registers, stockrooms and offices
He vacuumed the dining area and swept out and mopped the kitchen area
He never said a word to anybody
He got so much work done each night that he left nothing for the crew
That worked the morning shift the next day with his cousin’s husband
He kept thinking about the computer programming job he would soon have
He even had a 3 piece suit tailored
Pants cuffed and pressed on the hanger ready for the eventual day
When he would go on computer programming job interviews
He was picking up on the computer concepts
He was getting the best grades in his class
He didn't know that nobody coming out of his school
Had zero chance of landing a job in the real world
He didn't know that his 1 year programming certificate
Would be worthless on the job market
Competing with 4 year computer science degrees
He went to work and school during the week
He worked all day on weekends
He avoided his old friends and they forgot about him
He was getting along with his stepdad
He even sensed that his stepdad had more respect for him
He started to feel that all his problems from the past were behind him
He noticed marijuana roaches on the sidewalk near school each morning
On the sidewalk along the outside wall of the Board of Trade Building
Across the street from the computer school building
He figured that somebody must have been standing out there
Every night getting high
He started pocketing the roaches each morning
He would smoke the dope in the afternoon
After he finished his school work
He went to his janitor job stoned each night
He would do his job mechanically
He let his stoned mind wander while he worked
He didn't feel so bad about his job when he was stoned
He found roaches on the sidewalk in the same place every morning
He finished the first semester of school
With a perfect score on the final exam
He had 4 more months of school to complete for his certificate
He had a 2 week break between semesters
He bought a stash of dope to hold him over for the two week period
He told his parents that he would paint the outside of their house
He spent the two weeks of vacation getting stoned
While he painted the exterior of his parent’s house
He started sleeping less
By the end of the 2 weeks he wasn't sleeping
He was half out of his mind when he went back to school
He was able to act normally for a couple of weeks
He was smoking more and more pot and lying in bed awake all night
People at school and at work started to notice he was acting different
He hadn't said anything to anybody for 6 months
He wasn't acting like his usual self
His personality was taking a turn
He was totally open and saying whatever he thought to everybody
People were starting to worry about him
His family had seen this all before and knew what was happening
A concerned classmate called his mother to find out what was going on
His mother said that he had problems
His mother said that he was supposed to be on medication
He was embarrassed that everybody at school knew about his problems
He went into the bathroom one day at school
Another student followed him into the school john
The student bear hugged him and pulled him out of the bathroom
His fellow students were convinced that he was going to jump
Out of the bathroom window down to the parking lot 10 floors below
He decided that he had had enough
He went to work that night and let the trash pile up
For the 4 hours that he was there
He remembered the restaurant job that he had when he was 15
Every sunday morning he was required to vacuum the dining room
He had to move all of the tables and chairs to vacuum the floor
He decided that it would be easier to just rip the electrical wires
Out from the inside of the Italian restaurant vacuum cleaner
He was ready to do the same thing to the monkey ward vacuum cleaner
That he used each night to vacuum the snack bar dining area carpet
His cousin's husband that got him the job was gone
His cousin’s husband had went to work somewhere else
He figured that he didn't owe anybody anything there
He went home that night ready for anything
All the bullshit started with his family again
His stepfather went to the bar and got drunk
Lightning hit a tree next to the house and the tree landed on the roof
He picked up his check the next day at the store and told them he quit
He packed a suitcase and put on his job interview suit and left
He went downtown to Chicago and stowed his suitcase
In a twentyfive cent locker at the bus station
He wandered around downtown for a couple of days and nights
He spent all the money from his paycheck
He went to the beach by Lake Michigan and crashed out in the sand
His interview suit was getting dirty and lined with sand
He hung around at the beach during the day
He walked around downtown at night
He met a young woman at the beach and she took him home with her
He was up all night in her apartment
The young woman that picked him up had to throw him out in the morning
He spent the next 2 weeks hanging around her apartment and neighborhood
Sometimes he was able to stay for a whole day
Without her having to kick him out
She worked nights at a hotel
She didn't want to leave him alone in her apartment while she worked
He walked around the neighborhood where she lived until she got home
He told her that he wanted to get a job and move in with her
He even went and applied for a couple of jobs
She took him downtown to pick up his suitcase
He kept his suitcase in her house until she told him to get it out
His clothes ended up scattered and stashed
In the bushes around her neighborhood where he would hide at night
She was getting tired of him and didn't know how to get rid of him
He had been awake for weeks and was eating very little
He was getting tired run down and depressed
He went downtown to where his mother worked
He asked his mother for a couple of dollars for train fare
He wanted to take the train to a town that had a state mental hospital
He had been in the hospital a couple of years before
He had been dropped off there
Signed in to be committed by his mother and stepfather
He had gone to court and talked a judge into letting him out that time
He wanted a place where he could get some food and a place to crash
His mother gave him just enough money for a train ticket
His mother made sure that he got on the train
He got off the train and walked to the nuthouse
He knew that all he had to tell them was that he wanted to die
He had done this before to get into a hospital
He wasn't really lying because it was half true
He was admitted to the state psychiatric facility in Tinley Park
He was put on lithium and given a major tranquilizer
He waited a week before he called his family
His mother made arrangements
To have him transferred to a hospital in Joliet Ill
His mother kept him covered on her insurance for things like this
The hospital in Joliet was a regular hospital with a psychiatric ward
The Joliet hospital would be easier than the Tinley state institution
He was given lithium and minor tranquilizers in Joliet
He started to get depressed when he realized what had happened to him
He told his mother that he still wanted to finish his computer school
He told her that he could go back when the next semester started
His mother said that his stepfather didn't want him back at the house
He spent a quiet couple of months at the hospital in Joliet
His aunt brought some books for him so he spent the days reading
He was allowed to leave the hospital a week before the start of school
He came back to his mother and stepfather's house
He had nowhere to go
His stepfather went into a raging drunk the first night he was home
His stepfather stormed into his room in the middle of the night
He pretended he was sleeping face pressed into the pillow
He acted as if he was unaware of the light
That had been angrily flipped on when the door to his room slammed open
While his stepfather yelled and seethed at him
He went back to school to restart his last semester
He had no clothes because he lost them all during the summer
He was bloated-up on the downers and inactivity of hospital life
He was ashamed and embarrassed about returning to school
He kept taking his lithium and the mild tranquilizer he was prescribed
He thought about suicide constantly
He got into his school work and it came back easily to him
He came home after school and went to bed in the afternoon
He knew he was causing a lot of tension
Between his mother and his stepfather
His stepfather didn't want him there
His stepfather used every opportunity that he could find
To let him know that he wasn’t wanted there
He didn't have a job
His parents had to pay for his tuition and train fare
He was starting to be a drain on them and they let him know it
He decided to stop taking the tranquilizers
He was too depressed
He didn’t need to take himself down any further
His mother made him go to a mental health clinic
At the University of Illinois at Chicago
His mother wanted him to get help for his obvious depression
He went to the clinic twice a week after school
He finished the semester
He was given a certificate for 1 year of computer programming training
He received letters of recommendation from the school
He had gotten the best grades in his class
He got another suit for christmas that year
The school lined him up for a couple of job interviews
He was the first one in his class to go out on interviews
It was his reward
For getting the best grades and being the best student
He heard that his previous classmates had to take accounting jobs
Nobody was getting hired as a computer programmer from the school
He went on his first interview
For a job at a company nearly 60 miles away from his parent's house
He spent 3 hours on public transportation getting to the place
He tried to play down his lack of transportation
To his prospective employers
He lied about what he had been doing in the years since highschool
He felt like a jerk in his corduroy christmas suit
He got a letter of rejection from the company
The letter was dated postmarked and sent the same day of the interview
He went on another interview
Some guy called the school looking for someone to do some computer work
He went downtown to Chicago and talked to the guy
He wasn't sure what the job involved
The only thing the guy wanted to know was what he wanted to be paid
He told the guy that he would work for 12 thousand dollars a year
The guy wrote it down and said that he had more people to interview
He spent the next 2 weeks sitting around his parent’s house
He didn't know what he was going to do
His school didn't have anymore interviews
He was told that he blew the first interview by not being aggressive
He was given papers by his school
The papers stated that he would be an excellent candidate
For employment at their company
He was told by his school to give this letter to potential employers
The people that ran his school told him that they didn’t trust him
To put forward and present his best qualities
He didn't know how he would pay off
The student loan that helped pay for his computer programmer schooling
He didn't even think about paying back his parents
For their contribution
He was at home alone on Easter Sunday when he got a call
It was the guy that he had interviewed with for the job downtown
The guy said he could have the job if he wanted it
The job was going to pay 1000 a month
He told the guy he would take the job and start in a week
*****
*******************************************************************************
I hear myself thinking
Changing all the things I want to forget
I thought I'd be a different man
And breathe in the mountains of Tibet
I only breathe whatever I can
Too much weight keeps me down on the ground
I invited the bell to ring
But the disturbance of thoughts covered the sound
I'm not breathing
Like everybody else
But in that shallow
Empty feeling that has no name
I am at once with all
One and the same
Saving my life for tomorrow
Trying to fill the space that is hollow
It takes an elephant’s trunk full of memories
To know the time spent lost
Sleeping in the house of life consuming vagrancies
I catch myself dreaming
Knowing there's some things I can't make happen
I want to be a different man
And see a million chinese women
I only see whatever I can
Life only comes through television
I built a statue in my mind
But it can't commemorate the obsession
I'm not seeing
Like everybody else
But in that astray
Restless searching that has no name
I am at one with all
Always the same
Living my now through yesterday
Trying to keep the hard let downs at bay
It takes the single purpose strength of a Hercules
To find any meaning
In a life built upon idiocies
I find myself learning
Patience is all that I get when I wait
I tried to be a different man
And think there could be a gateless gate
I think whatever I can
My mind could never be so open
I look through the cracks in my life
But I can't see where the spirit is broken
I'm not thinking
Like everybody else
But in that anxious
Clogged confusion that has no name
I am at none with all
And still the same
Going through life while unconscious
Trying to maintain some sense of purpose
It takes the clear headed logic of a Socrates
To see the hobgoblins
Lurking in the foolish consistencies
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The totality of time melts down to a moment-
Without an end-
An eternity crisis has happened again...
I'm somewhere in the middle trying to get on top
It's a hopelessly bottomless situation
Every other thought is left out to drop
I just percolate and accumulate frustration
Build up a panic and then suddenly stop
Learning the hard way is a lifetime education
Impatience won't help in making an end
I retreat into imaginative devices
In an attempt to deal with an eternity crisis
Events will work out of themselves but I just can't wait
Things always get worse with expectation and force
When this is known it is realized too late
I look outside for the problem then discover its source
All my obstacles are the ones I create
Trying to stay on a path while altering its course
The pattern plays on and on without end
Long lessons bought in exchange for life's prices
Nothing will happen during an eternity crisis
Lost and adrift in the adolescent wonderland
Things could never be worse than the way that they feel
The future is present and so close at hand
The idea that time is able to change and to heal
Is a concept still too dark to understand
Leaving all to be immediate and in the real
In a nightmare that never seems to end
Life is an experience that scissors and slices
During the first time trip through an eternity crisis
Depression settles itself weighing down at a ton
It's a plague encrypted upon the genetic strain
From mother to daughter and father to son
There's not a known cure available for a built-in pain
The cause may be found but it won't be undone
It tears its sufferers from the world of the sane
A life pursues an unnatural end
To take the easy way out glitters and entices
For the sad conclusion to an eternity crisis
Career devotion never rewards it only robs
The best hours in life left there to be stolen
Willingly wasted at monotonous jobs
Rust takes hold of the heart where youth once reigned itself golden
Spreading unchecked throughout the middle aged slobs
Who count on time like it can be bottled and frozen
Fools save up for live to be lived at the end
Denying the wrath of debilitating vices
Unknowingly headed for an eternity crisis
Trapped in the downside of a crumbling social order
The least to fit on the Darwin economic scale
Sealed by fates cast in stone and sunk in mortar
Make an effort against the world and it's only a fail
To leave a class that keeps moving its border
Increasing the circumstances of poverty's tale
People look but there's no light at the end
The promise of hereafter no longer suffices
When surviving life is one long eternity crisis
Doing something I've done over and again before
Gradually becomes too much for me to do
Desperation resides and rots in my core
With battle and struggle I finally drag myself through
Finding that I'm able tolerate more
Relearning the sequence of things I already knew
I'm never sure how I get to the end
The trick is in a bag of coping artifices
The souvenirs from another eternity crisis
Haunted dreams deny their death and continue to thrive
Their reality has long been withered and dried
While still underlying each unconscious drive
When to let go is too painful to decide
Hope provides incentive excuses for being alive
It holds out after all possibilities have died
Once a dream starts it never has an end
It waits behind the concessions and sacrifices
Looking for a way to start an eternity crisis
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
******************************
I NEVER COULD
Dance
On the edge
Like some people
I was the man over the side
Splattered in a strewn of self-wreckage
I never could master that casual balancing act
Tiptoeing the precipice in a mock of imaginary danger
Acrobating in the safety of a well practiced stunt
My sloppy disregard was too real
I saw no stopping signs or guarding rails
I was an inevitable collision
With the bottom down below
An unfaithful plunge beyond the confines of youthful adventure
Into darkness
Beyond the thrill seeking folly that never has to
Try climbing back up
I never could
Play with fire
Like the nimble fingered swiftness of the magician
Deftly wrapped in the blue of the flames
Never consumed
Hands are merely warmed
Moving quickly through the air singed heat
Sacrificing the pain to illusion
Never bearing the scars of blistered skin
Engulfed to tightly heal over time
Always reassuring
The fire is real
************