A Dungeon of Days

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  • SD533
    SD533 Posts: 221
    Billy is a blaze in a torch of glory
    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

    * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
  • SD533
    SD533 Posts: 221
    From "A Dungeon Of Days"

    ********************************

    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
    ****
  • SD533
    SD533 Posts: 221
    From pages 227-334 of "A Dungeon of Days" - Available at Target.com

    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
    ***
  • Erik Chabs
    Erik Chabs Posts: 17
    SD533 wrote:
    SMALL WONDERS

    When has gasoline ever extinguished a fire
    When has hatred ever given birth to compassion
    When has punishment ever guaranteed obedience
    When has anger ever resulted in reason
    When has betrayal ever grown into trust
    When has vengeance not been followed by retaliation
    When has guilt ever been a preservation of innocence
    When has confusion been a sanctuary of sanity
    When has stubbornness ever produced cooperation
    When has stinginess not created a want
    When has neglect not been a forerunner of need
    When has oppression not been a precursor to violence
    When has meanness pretended to be anything other than dispiriting
    When has suspicion bred anything other than dishonesty
    When has selfishness ever led to understanding
    When has there been a peace that has not been preceded by war
    When has desire not fed into a misery
    When does a result not become one with its cause
    When does a question become its own answer

    This is a poem from my book "A Dungeon of Days". The entire 458 page book is now available for free perusal and download at : http://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewwor ... rID=105916

    Great!!! Muy muy great!!!
  • SD533
    SD533 Posts: 221
    From pages 59-61 of "A Dungeon of Days"

    ************************************************

    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
  • SD533
    SD533 Posts: 221
    From pages 18-19 of "A Dungeon of Days:A Collection of Rhymes and Poems"

    ******************************************************************************************

    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

    * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
  • SD533
    SD533 Posts: 221
    From pages 355-359 of "A Dungeon of Days: A Collection of Rhymes and Poems"
    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
    ***
  • SD533
    SD533 Posts: 221
    From pages 319-321 of "A Dungeon of Days"

    ***************************************************

    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
    *****
  • SD533
    SD533 Posts: 221
    From pages 46-49 of "A Dungeon of Days". Available at Target.com

    *******************************************************************************

    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

    * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
  • SD533
    SD533 Posts: 221
    From "A Dungeon of Days"

    ******************************

    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
    ************
  • SD533
    SD533 Posts: 221
    From page 366 of "A Dungeon of Days"

    *********************************************

    He did his best functioning
    Within the walls of a routine

    Reliable days
    With a guaranteed set in stonedness
    He always knew where he was at
    There was nothing left to expect

    The deeper into the routine he went
    The more mindlessly mechanical the days became

    This allowed him to do one thing
    Manual rote robot automatic cruise controlled sailing
    Filling the wide open space between his thoughts
    With something other than what he was doing

    An almost dual-like existence in
    And out of the world

    A memorized sleep walking life
    A vacant overlapping layered structure
    Built over a span of forgotten months
    Around ritualized outwardly appearing purposeful actions
    Senselessly devoid of any inner meaning
    The routine provided escape

    This was the best way that he found
    To kill time
    ***
  • SD533
    SD533 Posts: 221
    From pages 339-344 of "A Dungeon of Days"

    ***************************************************

    He sat down for a talk
    With his stepfather agreeing
    To behave himself
    In the future

    No parties no friends no noise
    No staying up all night
    No bullshit was to be tolerated
    This time around

    He heard the brokendown hollowness of his voice
    Lost in the vague empty meaningless talk
    About how he was going to find a job
    Straighten himself out
    Get himself going
    Knowing with all the insight he had into himself
    It was a totally unreasonable demand

    He had gotten too far off the clock
    A four month mania sped nervous breakdown
    Followed by four months in a hospital
    Had left him
    Free form floating
    Improvising irresponsibility

    He was too far gone along
    To find his way back

    He was in a place his stepfather
    Ex-cop Ford automobile mechanic
    Would never be able to comprehend

    He was beyond the structured
    Work-a-day world tedium
    That his stepfather had
    In mind for him
    ***

    He was left to face the days alone
    His mother his stepfather
    His sister his stepbrother
    All headed out in the early morning
    Still cool drowsy summer light
    On their way to jobs

    He had a dim awareness of their leaving
    Each morning slipping quietly
    In and around the edges of his sleep
    Toilets flushed footsteps on the stairs
    Doors closed cars turned over in the driveway

    When the place got quiet again
    He went under for another round
    Of forgotten dreams alternating with lost blackness
    Gently letting loose
    Of the guilt that he felt
    ***

    He spent the first couple of weeks at home
    Flat on his back
    On a couch in the family living room

    The television mostly set
    On the afternoon Chicago Cubs baseball games

    The middle innings blurred
    Escaping unnoticed
    Lost somewhere
    In the inability to remain awake
    ***

    He light focus tuned his attention
    Into the televised games
    Hazily listening to the ballpark background noises

    The walkway pop of a paper cup being stomped on
    Kids yelling
    The sharp snapping slap of the vendor
    Cases being closed
    The organ driven automatic hand clapping
    Foul ball percussion

    The monotonous ebbing flow of the announcer's voice
    Blocked out of his mind
    With continual thoughts about suicide
    ***

    He remembered the summer of 1972
    When he spent all of his saved newspaper route money
    Going to see the Cubs baseball games

    An after morning rush hour commuter train ride
    To the heart of downtown Chicago
    With a paper sack full of peanut butter jelly sandwiches

    The 35 block number bus ride up Clark Street
    Staring out the window thought reverie fascination daydream
    Looking at all of the doorways
    The bus passed along the way

    To Wrigley Field at ten in the morning
    Three and half hours before game time
    When the bleachers opened
    A twelve year old's adventure in the city
    ***

    He watched the players take batting practice
    Warming up
    Standing around clumped in the outfield
    Avoiding fly balls
    Shooting the shit

    His favorite Joe Pepitone
    Hipster wig hat raccoon eyed hood lidded
    Five o'clock shadow in the morning laughing
    Talking into the back of his first baseman's glove
    To the college aged women in the stands
    Hiding from the coaches

    He found out later that old Joe
    Was just getting himself in
    From a night's boozing dope stoned carouse
    ***

    He kept score to all of the games
    Meticulously
    Like it mattered
    Getting his pencil and scorecard ready
    When the creaking voice of Pat Piper
    Forty-eight years in the same pair of shoes
    Came crackling out over the PA
    With the day's lineup

    He watched the Mets the Phillies the Pirates
    The Reds the Dodgers and the Giants
    Come in and routinely kick the Cub's ass

    The same people sat in the bleachers everyday
    Stayed until the last out
    Nobody cared if the Cubs won or lost
    They just wanted to watch a ball game
    ***

    He had the Chicago Sun Times and Chicago Tribune
    Morning newspaper routes
    On his block and the next block over
    In 1971 and 1972

    He went out every morning
    Before six o'clock
    While it was still dark
    Before anybody in the neighborhood
    Was awake

    Loaded the bundles of newspapers
    Into an apple green Radio Flyer wagon
    With his father's wire cutters on top of the bundles
    Making stops at each of the three flat buildings

    He had the whole neighborhood to himself
    He liked being out there alone
    ***

    He could have done his paper route
    With his eye closed

    He knew the smell inside each one of the buildings
    The cabbage steam cooked perpetually into the walls
    The moldy wood warped rotting downstairs door dankness
    The dusty foot worn thread torn stairway carpeting mildew
    The dark brown turpentine banister sticky varnish

    He learned how to go up three flights
    Then back out
    Without drawing a breath

    Letting loose of his lungs
    In a triumphant exhale
    Gulping at the morning air
    When he was back safe outside
    Away from the noxious nauseating fumes

    He knew the people that lived there
    Day after day
    Never noticed the smell
    ***

    He did his route with a transistor AM radio
    The fifth prize from a newspaper agency raffle

    He remembered the winter
    The radio played the same songs
    Every morning
    John Lennon's Imagine
    American Pie and the Theme from Shaft

    It was so cold outside
    The batteries froze up
    And the music died
    Stranding him in dark winter silence
    ***

    He put the papers right on the doorsteps
    Never had a complaint

    He never saw the people he delivered to
    He read the names on the ring of subscriber cards
    Dvorak Shinkus Golding Robinson
    He tried to imagine what they looked like
    Which ones were young which ones were old

    People left him envelopes with tips
    Waiting on the doorstep
    Addressed to the paperboy
    At Christmas time he cleaned up

    He wondered if any of them knew
    That he was one of the little bastards
    That used to run in and out of their buildings
    Up and down their hallways yelling
    Pounding on their doors
    ***

    He remembered his best friend
    Back when he had his newspaper routes

    A thin wiry kid like himself
    A kid maligned and deformed at birth
    One leg shorter than the other
    Missing a nut a kidney and a thumb
    Saddled further with an impossible handle
    Four last names strung together with hyphens
    The legal souvenirs from a mother that had been through seven marriages

    They were the two most hyper kids in the 6th grade class
    Constantly running and laughing
    Usually away from the adults they had provokingly agitated

    His friend used to pull a detachable thumb gag
    That had kids pissing in their pants

    The two of them ran around the neighborhood
    Together after school
    For a couple of years

    He was living in another town
    When his mother showed him a newspaper obituary listing
    For a fourteen year old kid
    With the same string of stuck together last names

    The man at the funeral parlor said it was an accident
    A shotgun went off while it was being cleaned
    ****

    His mental hospitalizations hung over him
    Like a conviction
    A sentence to a death he had to live out
    While he was still alive
    A precarious existence
    Where the first thing he would always be
    In the minds of others was crazy

    He saw himself reflected
    From the eyes of those he knew
    Distrust always came out
    Looking the same
    Whether it was based on fear or grounded in pity

    He couldn't go on
    Hating himself
    For the way others felt

    He wanted to make a swan dive fetal crawl
    Into the path of an oncoming train
    End the whole mess once and for all

    All he could see in the future
    Was more of the past
    ***
  • SD533
    SD533 Posts: 221
    From pages 156-160 of "A Dungeon of Days"

    ***************************************************

    He was scheduled to see the doctor
    His first morning there
    He thought that he would go in and
    Blow the doctors shit away with fast talk
    And that he would get himself out of there
    Because he would so overwhelm the doctor
    With slick double talk and bullshit
    That they would have to release him
    Because he wasn't really crazy
    And it would be obvious
    The shot he was given the night before
    Thickened his tongue and made it hard to talk
    When he was being questioned by the doctor
    He became frustrated because his mind seemed lucid to him
    But his mouth and tongue were not coordinating
    He had to make himself angry to get his point across
    To the doctor
    That he was not really crazy
    This was a mistake
    And he didn't have to be there
    The doctor told him that he was going to be given
    100 milligrams of Thorazine
    3 times a day
    ****

    He was assigned a social worker
    After he talked to the doctor
    The social worker kept telling him
    To get his act together
    He kept thinking that meant
    He was supposed to get a band together
    And sing rock and roll songs
    ****

    He had heard about Thorazine
    A few years earlier
    In a punk rock song
    That was on a Ramones record
    He thought it was kind of a joke
    That he was to be given Thorazine
    He thought that after all of the street drugs
    That he had abused himself with
    That there was nothing left
    That could cause him any harm

    He had cut up the cover
    Of a Ramones record
    Then dumped the pieces of cardboard
    With song titles on them
    Now I Wanna Be a Good Boy
    Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment
    Glad To See You Go
    I Remember You
    Swallow Your Pride
    Commando
    On the judges bench
    Before walking out of the courtroom
    When he showed up for his drunk driving traffic ticket court date
    He thought that taking Thorazine was
    His personal punishment for this
    ***

    He was given his first 100 milligram
    Orange brown M&M sized pill before lunch
    He bit into it and ground it into his teeth
    He still thought it was a joke
    ***

    He found a rock 'n' roll magazine in the dayroom
    He tore the magazine open to a page with an article by a guy
    That was locked up in a mental hospital
    The guy in the article said he thought it was a joke
    But he found out the people at the hospital
    Were playing for keeps
    ****

    He was served a moist lump of brown into gray multi-textured food
    At lunch time
    He asked the other patients at his table what it was
    He was told that it was bread pudding
    He was convinced that it was made up
    Of all of the left over food
    Thrown into the plastic garbage can
    During breakfast
    He decided it must be ok to eat
    Because everybody else was eating theirs
    ****

    He found out that all of the patients
    Were on a behavior reward system
    Set up by the hospital staff
    The levels were
    Step One
    Step Two
    And Step Three
    The reward for each of the steps was
    A daily allotment of cigarettes
    He was told that he would be issued
    Three cigarettes a day
    Because he was on the lowest level
    Step One
    ***

    He was given three cigarettes a day
    They were non-filter
    Packed as tight as lead in a pencil
    Manufactured supposedly by convicts
    Somewhere within the state of Illinois penal system
    He wondered what it was like to be in prison
    Making cigarettes for other inmates
    To smoke
    He thought maybe there was a secret con plan to put something
    In the tobacco
    So that people could smoke themselves stoned
    While they were doing their time
    He knew that anybody that wasn't a patient
    Or an inmate
    Would never have any business smoking these cigarettes
    Nobody would ever find out
    He went into the bathroom
    To see what was in the cigarettes
    That made the other patients
    Beg borrow cajole each other the ashtrays and floor for them
    He smoked his three cigarettes like they were joints
    He held the smoke down until his eyes flashed
    All it did for him was give him a headache
    ****

    He spent the first couple of days
    In the hospital
    Walking up and down the hallway
    From the bathroom to the dayroom
    He was convinced that there was a way to get stoned
    He tried smoking dried out chewing tobacco
    That somebody had given him
    He rolled up a rastaman joint cigar sized cigarettes
    On Bull Durham papers
    Made up of pipe tobacco he got
    From a guy that smoked a pipe
    He painted stripes of toothpaste
    On his state issue cigarettes
    Then smoked those like joints
    Nothing could give him that stoned feeling that he wanted
    He still didn't know how to smoke a cigarette
    He hotboxed them and held the smoke down in his lungs
    All it did for him was cause a mild headache and dizzy feeling
    Like he had been pounding his head against a brick wall
    ****

    He paced up and down the ward hallway
    There was a drinking fountain at one end of the hall
    He would hear the drinking faucet refrigeration motor
    Kick in sometimes when he passed it while he was walking
    He was convinced that he was able to start the motor
    Inside of the drinking fountain
    With the thought power directed at the fountain
    From his mind
    He started to think that all of the machines
    That had been built by humans
    Were dead
    Only coming to life when human thought power desired it
    He believed that electricity only happened
    When there was a conscious force of will involved
    The electricity would only be real
    As long as somebody believed that it was
    He thought that if the whole world fell asleep
    At the same time
    Leaving nobody awake
    Then all of the electricity that powered the machines would stop
    Ceasing to exist
    He became convinced that if he didn't direct his thoughts
    At the drinking fountain
    That the refrigeration motor would never wake itself alive
    The drinking water would then turn rancid stale and dead

    He then thought that the water fountain served water
    Because that is what the drinker expected to come out of it
    He thought that he could get the water fountain
    To serve him vodka if he went up to the fountain
    And said vodka
    Before taking a drink from it
    He spent the whole afternoon
    Walking up and down and drinking from the water fountain
    Each time he came to it
    Saying the word vodka
    Before taking each drink
    He started to feel altered
    Like he was getting drunk
    After doing this for a few hours
    He started talking loud and walking up and down the hall faster
    Until the staff had the nurse give him a shot
    Of Phenobarbital
    Along with his evening dosage of Thorazine
    To calm him down
    ****
  • SD533
    SD533 Posts: 221
    From "A Dungeon of Days". Available exclusively at amazon.com and target.com. Also available in a free downloadable format at authorsden.com.

    ******************************************************

    INDIAN SUMMER

    I ran ripshodden amuck through the folds
    In the pockets lined with my lost summer
    I don't believe what waits in the mirror
    Dismal fuel saturates the dried trappings of youth

    Fall flaps splintering wings
    Three saints in the wind
    Treadborn
    On a road of thieving slumbers

    Recluded in overcoated armors
    I now need the four sided blanket walled security
    I can overlook the false demand for the harshest of truths
    Under my roof I am in the safety of sleep's ignorance
    Unaware of the nights that will never challenge the dawn
    Waiting to be dropped off into cold morning drubs
    Anointed in poison soaking sweats
    Unwilling feet
    Find the floor and wonder
    Why is it still here

    Frozen harvests come down to claim
    The leaves on the trees of my gone summer
    Rotten in tropical confusions
    Yellowed in seeping malignancies
    Brittled in greenless disposition

    Rewind the clock
    There's never enough time
    Reinvent the wheel
    There's nowhere to go
    Peel back the bones
    They were never really there
    **
  • SD533
    SD533 Posts: 221
    From pages 9-18 of "A Dungeon of Days"

    ***********************************************

    The furies howl of gaunt retreat whipped into the bluster
    The shine is smeared with age that goes lacking in its luster

    I'm subtled by the blandness of this stifling ambience
    I'm caught up in the pocket of coattailed experience

    I'll chase for lost days through the plundered archives
    Next year freezes on the face of blundered still lives

    What can grind the madness to a halt
    When can I pin my problems to a fault

    If you've seen everything then what did that show
    I'm watching Donna Reed on the late night video
    But how could that matter to a Vincent van Gogh

    This is business as usual
    Life is not a question
    Life is a refusal

    The vision is surrounded and collected in the gloam
    Half-baked disaster is driving hard down towards its home

    I found the new mendicant in the old snake oiled charmer
    I went back home to fast asleep like a tired farmer

    I said a prayer for the Dalai Lama
    I sent my last thought straight up to Bodhidharma

    How can time be slurred down to a drawl
    When can I knock a hole into this wall

    If you've gone everywhere then where did you go
    I've been drinking more coffee than Joe DiMaggio
    But that wouldn't matter to a Vincent van Gogh

    This is business as usual
    Life is not an offer
    Life is a refusal

    (I'm sponged for the absorptive search of vicarious spills
    I'm loaded with the promise of imaginary fills)

    A life can stop while the years fly past like paper
    The old ways line the clouds that will wash away for vapor

    I'd be more open if I didn't act so reticent
    I'd be decisive if I didn't feel so hesitant

    I have a mind that corrupts and rectifies
    I have a dream that resurrects and crucifies

    Why must my part be so hard to fit
    Why is it wrong to be a non-descript

    If you've heard everything then how did you know
    I'm hearing my childhood on the flashback radio
    But that shouldn't matter to a Vincent van Gogh

    This is business as usual
    Life is not an answer
    Life is a refusal

    This is not so unusual
    Life is not an answer
    Life is a refusal

    * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

    I left myself wide open naked turned inside to the out exposed
    I shudder in revulsion at mention of the image I once posed

    Judgment lurked when motives appeared transparent
    Hatred consumed the heart of the withdrawn aberrant
    Silent retreat is a reflexed condition
    My past returns in the form of some blind rendition

    I found asylum beyond the extreme
    I sought out the harsh and willed it supreme

    I fell down hard
    This won't happen again
    I'll be on guard
    I won't be going over that way again

    I'm canned up and jarred
    Nothing remains of a trust after it's charred

    I relied on everlasting light of heaven in god up above
    My belief dissolved for doubt
    When the good was pushed aside with a shove

    The transient truth became permanent
    Wisdom glowed in the bulbs made of burnt-out filament
    There was no bleeding heart martyred miracle
    There is no hope for the terminally cynical

    Men will punish as divine will forgive
    Better to forget and learn to let live

    I was not spared
    This won't happen again
    I've been prepared
    I won't be taken over that way again

    I've healed and repaired
    A faith that has been damaged is always impaired

    I was raised on rot in hell temptation evil doing sinner guilt
    There was no escaping from the depths of the inferno I had built

    Innocence relaxed where demons exercised
    Virtue took on the bad shape of all it ostracized
    It's last legs for the common sense mosaic
    The new way will be housed in something more archaic

    I took refuge in the hollowed flagrant
    Morals have been bottomed out and vacant

    The page has turned
    I won't be falling over that way again
    If it happens again
    I'm not concerned
    If it happens again
    I'll see what I've learned
    Then I'll rake through the coals where I have burned

    If this happens again
    I'm not concerned
    They can scatter the ashes after I've burned

    There will be nothing but ashes after I've burned

    * * * * * * * * * ** * * * * * * * * * * * * ** * * * * * *

    I'm taking my gasoline straight to the heat of the fire
    I can smell the smoke of a flame that's starting to tire

    I misplaced my invitation to the shoestring lunch
    I kept wavering in the blur of a light flash punch
    My insides echoed with a swallowed pride gulp
    My thoughts emptied into the garbage can pulp

    I'm well on my pleasure reeking status speaking way
    I've faded for the nerve lacking time wracking gray
    I've almost forgotten my hop freighting dumb waiting day

    Yeah, I'm getting it down
    I've got my head above water
    But I'm still afraid I might drown
    I'm running it down

    You might say it's crap
    But I say it's brown

    I'm getting it down

    There's something wrong with the vine the grapes have grown out all sour
    The wine ends up tasting flat but it's still drunk with power

    I can't raise my spirits with a spaghetti line winch
    I put everything I had on the leadpipe cinch
    I loaded plates during the secular fast
    I steadied my mood for the seasonal blast

    I went off on a risk faking comfort making streak
    I quit being the quick stinking slow thinking freak
    I'm still on the ride up the lost battle no paddle creek

    Yeah, I'm putting it down
    I get the stench of the city
    But all I can see is a town
    I'm letting it down

    You're laughing at me
    But I'm not a clown

    I'm getting it down

    There's a rush of the river down to the floor of the ocean
    A life slowly settles as it continues in motion

    I quickly froze in the face of the cinder block stare
    I withered the bleaks alone on the dead clotted air
    I called out to the man with the crankcase eyes
    He said worthless words never mixed with the wise

    I made my best lifeless living nothing giving try
    I told the double walking backward talking lie
    I'm collecting tears for the gut wrenching heart drenching cry

    Yeah, I'm knocking it down
    A man puts a price on his head
    Just like he was handed a crown
    I'm setting it down

    You paid for a smile
    Life sold you a frown
    I'm getting it down

    Some days fit like a rag
    Others flow like a gown
    I'm wearing it down

    I'm living it down

    * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

    I lit the morning with empty hearted hope wrapped up in a big plan
    I heard the dawn would soon crack open with the coming of the new man

    I scratched my name on the welded relic
    I made my bed in the tattered cloth
    I saved a piece of the lotted fabric
    I shook the dust from a startled moth

    I held illusion with a pillared tenacity
    Radiance was veiled in secluded opacity

    I wanted something that was simple and profound
    From the hidden and renowned
    Not of the silenced or the sound

    I wanted something that grew by the ounce and moved by the pound
    I wanted something to light this darkness into clear
    More than all of that I just wanted - to get out of here

    I used to believe all my tomorrows could be cashed in for today
    I stood off to safety's side thinking I would get thrown into the fray

    I read the news from a bottled letter
    I rode the line of the fractured trestle
    I lost my shoes to the cornered debtor
    I dug the yard from the restless vessel

    I lost perspective in a confused grandeurance
    Impatience developed into lingered endurance

    I'm waiting for something that's sacred and profane
    Brought by effort without strain
    Between the pleasure and the pain

    I'm waiting for something that can cut against and with the grain
    I'm waiting for something to draw strength out of my fear
    More than anything I'm just waiting - to get out of here

    I lived for nights that could tell more stories than old Emmett Grogan
    The battle cry of youth has faded to a long forgotten slogan

    I cleared my throat like the character actor
    I learned to pray for the human terror
    I turned my back on the restless factor
    I laughed out loud at the holy error

    I shroud second sight inside sense starving obstructions
    Interest has drained out of self serving seductions

    I'm dying for something that's quick when it is long
    Made from weakness that's grown strong
    Beyond the realm of right and wrong

    I need something that can read like a book and sing like a song
    I'm dying for something that's gone far as it is near
    But most of all I'm just dying - to get out of here

    I'm just dying to be gotten out of here

    * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

    I'm an all too willing victim of happenchance
    Trapped beyond the dead end door of circumstance
    Fettered to an idea that I've been inconsiderately fated
    I've never been one to be easily situated
    Events unconnect while remaining deeply related

    I'm pulled under the sway of a misguided force
    I'm making my way out along an obstacled course

    It's no accident that things don't come off as they are planned
    I've come to accept this but I still don't understand

    I've seen a cruelty that sells itself as kindness
    Numbed by the faith made to comfort the mindless
    Clouded by the belief that something manmade is otherworldly divined
    Life has much to offer the least spiritually inclined
    God is just a symptom of a more universal mind

    A man loses his soul and the world is his to gain
    He'll have the rest of his life to sleep off all the pain

    There's a blessed hour after a lifetime that is damned
    I tried to accept this but I still don't understand

    (The only reward in life becomes buried somewhere in its end
    I understand this now but it took so long to comprehend)

    I know a man who's been betrayed into mistrust
    Left to the mercy dealt him by the unjust
    Shaped by tradition that condemns all it categorically tries
    He's marked by a system that holds down the ones it denies
    Hope provides an empty balm for the injury of lies

    He's been left out for dirt by an organized wrong
    As life is cheapened its will to survive grows more strong

    I'm waiting to be there when he gets up to take his stand
    He might not accept this but he can never understand

    * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

    I worship the sun and the new day that it is making
    My sleepiest dream is much more wiser than waking

    I'm breathing slow and knocking back the heat
    I'm looking for mind mirages in the street
    I'm part of the scenery
    I never can fit in

    I assume various shapes and sizes
    Imagining the life behind the dog day disguises
    This is the time of my own moronic season
    When I move further from contemporary reason

    A summer day makes me feel like I'm a boy again
    I wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then
    I still want the same things now that I wanted back then

    I give thanks to the sun and the warm washed feeling it brings
    My strength soars with the spirit of Icarus wings
    My skin is baked and browning in the heat
    The asphalt melts like chocolate in the street

    I have stubbed my outer senses
    I've turned myself within
    I don’t trust my outer senses
    I'm living from within

    I leave aside my abscessed mental freight
    Succumbing to the bending force and pull of moral weight
    This relieves the inner leperotic illness
    Lulling a troubled heart with momentary stillness

    A summer day reminds me of being nine or ten
    I wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then
    I don't have anything now that I didn't want then

    (It's the summer time
    I've got women
    I've got women
    I've got women
    I've got women on my mind)

    Earth is no heaven and the sun brings the fire of hell
    I climb out of my rut then crawl back to a shell
    I'm soaked in sweat from taking on the heat
    Exhaust fumes hang like a burden in the street

    I don't have far to look around
    To see where I have been
    I don't bother to look around
    I know where I have been

    I'm being slowly chewed up and swallowed
    Sifting through the tired dust of those that I have followed
    This dims the light of my psychotropic vision
    I'm sadly reduced to an object of derision

    A summer day sends me to before and way back when
    I wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then
    I wouldn't do anything now that I wouldn't do then

    If I could do it all over I wouldn't do it again
    (What can a poor boy do)

    * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

    I feel the light ripping through
    In and out the back of my eyes
    It's like hail stone gravel hitting on a pie tin roof
    I wipe a smirk on my face with a couple of tries
    It's time to get on with this small time goof

    I didn't know that I could be so tired
    and still feel so good
    I'll try to get some rest when
    my body tells me I should

    This life wants a lot
    It can have whatever it takes
    I spend the best hours of the day
    In a room full of fakes
    Because that's what it takes

    I have to push my mind out to the far and the wide
    I know nobody's coming out through the other side

    (That's the way this life has been going
    Totally wasted without ever showing)

    My nerves are threadtorn and bare
    Strung out along a fraying line
    It's a sensation that leaves me ripped open and raw
    Tight tension straightens out the normal curve of my spine
    I grind my teeth right into my jaw

    I never thought that I could look so lousy
    and still feel so good
    I have a mouth full of blood
    to mark the ground where I've stood

    Life asks for a lot
    I can give whatever it takes
    I reach out and grab hold of the prize
    With a hand full of shakes
    Because that's what it takes

    I want to push my mind through to the far and the wide
    I know nobody's made it back from the other side

    (That's the way this life has been leading
    Healing the wound that won't ever stop bleeding)

    Sore muscles howl out alive
    Burning below edges of skin
    It's a pain that locks hold with an anvil iron grip
    Each step is a stake driven further into my skin
    I try my best not to buckle and rip

    I get used to feeling bad for so long
    it starts to feel good
    My arms hang stiff at my side
    like they are made of dead wood

    This life needs a lot
    It will get whatever it takes
    I'll wind up alone in the end
    With a heart full of breaks
    Because that's what it takes

    I'm going to push my mind to the far and the wide
    I know nobody knows what waits on the other side

    (That's the way this life has been living
    Never wanting to know what it is giving)

    * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
  • SD533
    SD533 Posts: 221
    From pages 284-294 of "A Dungeon of Days"

    ****************************************************

    His favorite time of the hospital day was in the evening
    When the ward was open to visitors

    He liked the coursing electric current
    That pulsed through the ward
    Stirring the dead afternoon before dinner stagnation leftovers
    The sudden infusion of outside brains
    Unadulterated by hospital tranquilization inactivity

    The visitors were more considerations
    For his rampant running wild imagination
    He talked to anybody that would listen to him

    He drew attention to himself
    By center stage clown act deliberates
    Like smoking hand rolled cigarettes
    Filled with Lipton's tea leaves
    That supposedly smelled like burning marijuana

    He wanted to freak people out
    Pull weird shit when he knew they were watching him
    Warp their minds
    Like Bill Murray doing a Hunter Thompson
    In Where the Buffalo Roam

    His own visits were once a week cigarette deliveries
    From his mother
    That quickly broke down into profanity trading arguments
    ****

    He looked forward to the hospital meals
    Served on oversized trays
    Weighted down with thick plates
    Kept warm with shining stainless steel covers

    The food fascinated him
    Especially the vegetables
    The color green against the white ceramic
    Of the serving dishes
    Glowing soft under the translucent watery film
    Of still melting butter

    He had never eaten green vegetables before
    He avoided them as a kid
    He was always too full up at dinner time
    With drugstore candy bars and coca cola

    The spinach the Brussels sprouts the green beans
    It was all new for him

    He kept thinking about the food at the state mental hospital
    Gray starchy lumped pasty mush
    That sat constipating inside of him
    Swelling his stomach with shit

    He remembered the food he had been served at the mission
    Stale day old donation bread rolls
    Brown water floating barley speckled soup

    He thought about the food
    He had starve picked out of garbage cans

    He never bothered filling out the meal menu
    The way the rest of the patients did
    Talking out loud about the food they hated
    He ate whatever was on the tray
    Like it was somebody else's food
    ***

    He adjusted to the effects of his new medication
    The Thorazine induced hallucinations
    Slowly dried out of him

    The new medication made him pass out at night
    He woke up stiff in a film of hazy grog
    As soon as he was aware of the morning sun
    He rousted himself out of bed
    Forced himself awake with movement and cigarettes

    He slept in his clothes
    So that he could get his ass out of the room faster
    ****

    He guzzled plastic hospital pitchers full of cold water
    He figured that he could keep the medication
    From taking a foothold in his system
    With constant irrigation

    He was going to flood out drown the poison
    Then piss it all out
    ****

    He was given a small dosage of muscle relaxers
    To combine the tranquilizer side-effects
    The same shit he had been shot up with a couple times before
    When he was medication froze up with lockjaw

    The muscle relaxers widened his pupils
    Letting the light pour into his eyes
    Colors avalanched into fantastically bright warm blurs
    Soft edged out of focus slightly

    His up close vision became watery
    The plaster in the cracks of a tile ashtray
    Soon turned into a swirling river
    Of small dancing oval particles
    If stared at for a long enough time
    While not blinking

    The muscle relaxers made him feel good
    He felt so good that he had to keep himself in check
    Tone himself down
    In case somebody realized the shit was making him high

    He kept complaining about the stiffness
    Tranquilizer muscle cramp dull lethargy
    He exaggerated the side-effect symptoms
    Until he was able to get his dosage of muscle relaxers doubled
    From one to two milligrams
    ****

    The muscle relaxers made him want to sing
    He couldn't believe how good his voice felt
    When he sailed it out of his chest
    Into the high walled ward hallway
    Letting it float up into the ceiling
    He listened to the reverberation buzz
    Of his voice echoing back upon itself

    He liked to sing at night
    Blend his voice into the dark lit by neon
    When his mouth was medication dried of saliva
    His breathing slow deep open relaxed
    He could feel the sound vibrate his ribs
    He didn't know where the voice was coming from

    He could hear the medication causing change in timbre
    It was the way he had always wanted to sing
    When he was kid in the late 1960's
    Listening the whiskey brown booze smooth baritone
    Of Dean Martin crooning The Green Green Grass of Home

    He wanted to spend the rest of his life
    Stoned dry on muscle relaxers
    Standing flat footed
    Singing out loud
    ***

    He knew the words to hundreds of songs
    He knew most of the words
    To thousands of other songs

    He had spent at least 3 hours a day
    Everyday between 1964 and 1970
    Listening to the radio
    He knew every song
    That was played on southern California Top 40 AM radio
    During the mid to late 60's

    He spent the 1970's accumulating
    Hundreds of albums
    Each one worn out
    With constant continual repeated playing

    When he was alone
    When he thought that nobody was listening
    He sang along out loud with the singer
    The voice of a child
    Trying to imitate grown men

    When he started cracking up
    All of the songs that he had pounded indelible into himself
    Poured out of his head
    He didn't need the record or the radio
    All of the words and melodies were there
    In an explosion of recall

    He started to think that he had put
    All of that music there for a reason
    For a time when he wouldn't have access
    To a record player or a radio
    The songs were going to be there
    In his head
    For the rest of his life
    Whenever he needed them
    ****

    He was allowed to leave the hospital
    For 8 hours
    After he had been there for a full month
    A saturday afternoon pass
    To be spent in the supervision of his family

    His mother and stepfather came out
    Picked him up
    Drove him back to their house
    Set him up with a six pack of canned beer
    Then left him there while they went out
    For the rest of day
    ****

    He sat in the family room
    Alone with himself
    Smoking cigarettes
    Drinking beer that warmed fast
    In the saturday afternoon small town neighborhood silence

    He listened to the awakening April spring sounds from outside
    An occasional far off down the block dog bark
    The low motor whoosh
    Of the infrequently passing car
    With the muted puncture sound squawks of the hard rubber tires
    Rolling across the loose white rocks
    Random along the rounded over rough edge of the cold asphalt
    It was too early for the lawn mowers

    He dug an old Supertramp record from out of the closet
    Set the record player arm needle
    On the last side 1 song Asylum
    He played the song a couple of times
    Then sat listening to it in his head
    Please don't arrange to have me sent to no asylum
    I'm just as sane as anyone
    It's just a game I play for fun
    For fun
    ****

    His home visit went off well
    He finished his beers
    Along with several more he found in the refrigerator
    Before it was time to go back
    To the hospital

    He kept quiet on the return ride
    He knew that he was too drunk to talk
    His jaw tight in a tongue numbed stupid incoherency
    The alcohol magnifying with the hospital tranquilizers
    He watched his vision trying to double itself
    Into a split signal dichotomous separation
    His head trying to vortex launch him
    Off into a dizzying spin

    His mother and stepfather relaxed into a quiet peace
    During the drive back to the hospital
    In the cool saturday night Illinois highway beaconed dark
    Almost unaware forgetful of his being there
    He sat in the back seat sweating
    Behind a pair of cash register counter rack sunglasses

    His parents walked him up
    To the locked glass ward double doors
    Rang the bell for the nurse
    Then turned around left for home
    Happy knowing that somebody else was going
    To look after their problems that night
    ***

    He started spending time with a woman on the ward
    A 32 year old married mother of three children
    She was 12 years older than him

    She was one of the normal patients
    Right in the middle of the loud mouth gossip group
    Always surrounded
    He could never talk to her alone
    He had to climb through
    A half dozen other people that thought
    He was a crazy fucked up in the head idiot

    He started sitting patiently
    Quiet at a table full of people
    Dropping in and out of the small talk
    Over cigarettes
    She watched him
    Waiting for the crowd to fragment into a moment
    When he could be there with just her
    ****

    He didn't know why she was in the hospital
    There was nothing wrong with her
    As far as he could tell

    She told him that the last thing she remembered
    Before coming to the hospital
    Her uncle was trying to choke her

    He didn't push her beyond that for details
    He knew the story didn't make sense
    He didn't know if it was a genuine confusion
    Or a half covered attempt at a lie
    Camouflage dressing for a still sore open wound
    Trying to hide the pain of a truth
    About an emotional breakdown crippling brought on
    By some kind of not from within mental abuse
    ****

    She acted like a woman that was deeply afraid
    In a shattered circumstance of misplaced trust
    The victim of a sense altering betrayal

    He knew there was man involved somewhere
    Maybe it was her husband
    She told him that
    Her husband treated her like a stick of furniture

    He decided to go slow
    Give her lots of room
    He wouldn't try to corner her
    He always made sure that somebody else was with her
    Before he tried talking to her
    He knew that she felt protected
    With her women friends nearby

    He marked his words
    He didn't want to screw anything up
    He didn't want to scare her away
    He didn't want her to think that he was hopelessly insane

    He acted like a man with time
    Bought with the inside certainty knowledge
    Neither of them were going anywhere
    ***

    He had the hospital bedroom to himself
    For a couple of weeks before
    A new roommate was put in with him

    The guy was a Kankakee local
    Long haired stoner burnout older fading into late 20's
    Sent to sleep a month in the hospital
    After a minor vehicular grievance involving alcohol

    The guy went to a mechanic job each morning
    Then returned to the hospital
    In the middle evening after work
    To crash on hospital downers

    The guy came in each night
    Half drunken high
    Full of after work stops
    A dinner tray of cold food waiting

    Sometimes bringing back nearly smoked joints
    The two of them took turns
    One on lookout
    The other standing on the toilet in the bathroom
    Smoking the leftover roaches
    Exhaling the pot smoke into the top of the wall ventilation duct

    The guy had nothing left to say
    Talking in occasional quiet low keyed grunts
    During empty voice nod punctuated meaningless conversations

    The guy kept clear of everybody on the ward
    Spent most of the weekends out on pass
    Getting back to the hospital
    Just in time to pass out
    Just like it was a hotel
    ***

    His stepfather came out to pick him up
    For his next saturday afternoon visit
    Driving his Camaro

    He had stopped making car payments
    When his unemployment ran out
    Right before he landed in the hospital

    He had already made a year and a half of payments on it
    There was still a year and half of payments left to be made
    He would have settled for a repossession
    He wanted to put the car totally out of his thoughts
    Forget about it in his own way

    His stepfather must have made the payment that month
    His stepfather was letting him know
    The car wasn't his anymore

    He sat press jammed against the passenger side door
    In an awkward wind vent tire hum filter of noise
    He choked back the humiliation stoked ashes of burnt defeat
    He was right where his stepfather wanted him
    ***

    It was the third time he had lost the car
    First it was stolen
    Then it sat in the driveway parked after his license was revoked
    Now his stepfather was behind the wheel
    This time he knew it was gone for good

    The bastards kept taking it away from him
    It was the only thing he had
    The only thing of his they could get their hands on
    The only way he could be punished
    In their minds

    First it was the cops
    Then it was the courts
    Now the most closest to home son of a bitch
    His stepfather was taking his car
    ***

    He had nothing but shitty luck with cars
    His first car was a creaking 1950's Volkswagen bug
    Older than he was
    A hundred dollar special
    With a floor rust rot view of the street below
    Courtesy of his mother's younger brother
    His godfather

    He drove it on the back of town dirt roads
    A couple of times before it froze up
    He sold it to some guys down the street
    With the mysterious egg yolk shells still dried hard
    Around the gas tank
    For half of what he paid for it

    He figured they were the guys that clogged it up
    They pushed it down to where they lived
    Then went right to work cleaning the fuel line
    They had it running the day they bought it off of him
    ***

    His next car was a middle 60's mustang
    Split between him and his year younger sister
    A summertime fume filled noxious rattling bomb
    Loud as a tank driving through a mine field
    The oil burned faster than the gasoline

    He had the back seat piled with speakers
    12 inch bass woofers
    Salvaged from the 1965 family Packard Bell television stereo console
    Along with a couple pairs of coaxials
    Loose strewn wired into a cheap Radio Shack eight track player

    His sister finished the car off
    While he was away at college
    Ran it drip dry of oil
    It was ready for the tow chain pull to the scrap pile
    When he came home seven months later

    The day the car was scheduled to be hauled away
    He took out the back seat
    Then methodically destroyed every part of the interior and body
    That he was able to pry loose with a screw driver
    While his mother stood in the condominium communal garage driveway area
    Shrieking at him that he was insane

    He smashed the sparkplugs with a hammer
    He wasn't going to leave anything of value
    For the goddamned junkman
    ***

    His next car was a late model El Camino
    A favor from his mother's wrecking yard owning boyfriend
    An accelerator sticking deathtrap
    That sent him whipping into corners at 40 miles per
    A bald tire hazard that hydroplaned slid across wet pavement
    Like a slapshot hockey puck on ice
    Bumper smash rearend barreling into whatever was in front of it

    The car's interior had a disturbing odor
    Like it had been used for a month of july
    Dead body storage facility
    In a dark wooded decomposed algae infested swampy quagmire
    Rotting knee deep in the smoldering muck
    Somewhere south of Mississippi

    When he drove the car stoned on pot
    The unpredictable gas pedal and vomitous cadaver smell
    Made him think that somebody was trying to kill him off

    His sister drove the car to her job
    Where she worked on a plastic injection mold machine
    Until the tips of two of her fingers were severed
    In the start of a workday accident
    ***

    He drove around in an International Harvester 4 wheel drive pickup truck
    In the summer before he got his Camaro
    A summer spent in vaporlock breakdown at any time uncertainty
    Flat tire retread spare randomness with a rusted lug guarantee
    A clunkering box of piss dirty lemon yellow sheet metal

    He drove around with the hubs locked in 4 drive
    Until the front wheel finally fell off in the driveway

    He had 4 payments left on the truck
    When he gave it to his younger cousin
    For nothing
    In a drunken acid inspired gregarious act of grandiose generosity
    During the christmas of 1978

    His cousin turned around and sold it
    For a couple hundred dollars
    ***
  • SD533
    SD533 Posts: 221
    From "A Dungeon of Days"

    ******************************

    WINTER HEART

    He liked to walk along Lake Michigan
    In the cold dark bitter January heart
    Of a bleak unforgiving Chicago winter day
    When the water was a slabrous surface
    Table topped floe of ice chunks
    Choked swollen
    Spread out along a liquid foundation
    Idling back and forth
    Crashing steadily
    Aimlessly against
    The small glacial ice range
    Formed where the water lapped its frozen tongue
    On the edge of the man made shore

    He liked to walk along the lake
    In the grip of winter gray
    When all of the people and dead fish
    From the summer
    Were gone
    ****

    He looked forward to the winter
    When the sharp air
    Froze the inner lining of his nose
    Then cut deep down into his lungs
    Letting him know that he was breathing

    He looked forward to winter walks
    Head down in shoulder hunches
    When the blasting north wind
    Laced with icy dampness
    Slammed and sliced into his skin
    Leaving him raw and painfully numb

    He liked being out in the cold
    Slowly surrounded
    Settled and wrapped with a chill
    That found its way through layers of outer wear
    To bones that brittled into chalk

    He liked standing on cold corners
    Concentrating on toes
    While the blood in his feet dried
    Feeling drained into a quick coagulation
    Filling his stiff shoes with hard frozen bricks

    He told himself
    That this was the difference between
    Being alive and
    Being dead
    ****
    He liked walking through snowfalls
    Alone
    On a plodding weighty foot march trudge
    Into the screaming white sound
    Of snow landing
    On top of snow
    Falling through the creaking howl wail
    Of tree branches grown heavy
    From trunks that cracked
    With sighs from the first winter
    When neanderthal man wrapped and shod
    In bark and animal skins
    Noiselessly trampled paths
    Through the snowy density of northern european forests
    Breathing heavily
    Blind with amazement and wonder
    ****

    His favorite time of year was winter
    When the ordinary routine of daily existence
    Was overwhelmed by the struggle
    Of life
    In combat with the elements
    Battling for survival
    With the harshness of a nature
    That was always ready to destroy it

    This was the apex of his existence
    The rest of the year blanded in comparison
    ***
    He liked coming in from the cold
    Out of the hawk wind
    Into the dry heat
    Face flushed
    With sudden blood
    Pouring into rubbery extremities
    Life reaffirming itself
    Relaxing the incessant brace
    That has borne itself once again
    Through the trial of pain
    To the safety of comfort
    ****
    He woke up in the middle of a January
    Night sneaking through the crack
    Left deliberately in the window
    To beckon the clipper wind whistle
    Not knowing
    If he had to wake up in four hours
    Or in five minutes
    Knowing only
    That he could go back to sleep
    Forever
    *********
  • SD533
    SD533 Posts: 221
    From "A Dungeon of Days" available at Target.com

    *************************************************************

    A DUNGEON OF DAYS


    The only thing that was certain in his life
    Was his depression
    He always knew his way
    Around the bottom
    There was no time wasted
    In false hope
    He was free of the unreasonableness
    Rotting the soft insides of unfounded expectation
    There was nowhere else to fall
    When he was at his bottom
    There were no surprises
    When he was depressed
    Only the inescapable
    Fact of his reality
    ****

    He stood on the corner
    Each night after work
    In all kinds of weather
    Waiting for a bus to take him
    The last two miles
    Of his trip to home

    He stood on the corner
    Waiting for the bus
    At Milwaukee and Division
    And thought about the Chicago
    That corner was 40 years before
    Of Nelson Algren
    Russian european immigrant factory workers
    And gin mills with sawdust on the floor
    He watched the cars pile up at the intersections
    Behind the red lights
    Flying away with eyes
    Darting to the sides and into rear view mirrors
    Stomping accelerator pedals
    Pushing through the frays along the edge of the evening rush hour
    Trying to catch the end of the workday reward
    He watched the black charcoal gray exhaust fumes
    Rise above the choking traffic
    Settling into the grit of the sidewalks
    He looked at the people
    That lived in and around that neighborhood
    He wondered if they ever felt helpless and trapped

    He stood on the corner
    Waiting for the bus
    That passed through
    The Cabrini Green Housing Project
    Where the cement square rusty mesh open hallway buildings
    Made it look like a prison facility
    The lockdown entrances announcing metal detectors and security guards
    The smoke damaged outer walls advertising kitchen fires
    The boarded windows promising that these people won't be here for long
    He wondered how long it would be before
    This would all be taken over
    Torn down by the high finance developers
    He stayed on the bus while the people that lived there got off
    He wondered what it was like for the people that lived there
    To sit in their white washed cinder block walled rooms
    Looking out into night from their window view
    Staring into the wealth and opulence of Gold Coast Chicago
    Charging the sky with its bright lights and sounds
    The sounds and noises of money being spent
    Less than four blocks away

    He stood on the corner
    Waiting for the bus
    Thinking about his girlfriend at home
    He wondered what she was doing
    He knew that she hated it when he came home
    His face full of the hatred he had for the world and his life
    He wondered how long it would take him that night
    To act like an asshole and say something stupid
    To get her aggravated and upset

    He stood on the corner
    Waiting for the bus
    Not caring
    Almost wishing
    That the bus wouldn't show up at all
    ***

    He listened to the evening television news
    Every night from the kitchen
    While he made his dinner
    He thought about all of the stories
    Of violence murder and suicide
    Night after night and day after day
    He was always left wondering
    Why it didn't happen more often
    ***

    His delusion was a monumental epic
    It was the only variety of interest
    In his life
    He clung to it in survival
    Until its existence was smothered and nullified
    By the dull certainty
    Of his dungeon of days existence
    ****

    Whenever he heard about somebody going berserk
    Letting loose the furies of hell with automatic weapon insanity
    Purging a lifetime of caustic frustration
    In an end of all reason boilover binge of suicidal violence
    He was thankful
    That it hadn't been him doing it
    ****

    He listened to people around him
    Talking about the same thing
    All day long
    He thought that everybody must have went to sleep
    At the same time the night before
    And been infected by the same dream
    ****
  • SD533
    SD533 Posts: 221
    From "A Dungeon of Days"

    ******************************
    The Author’s Forward

    This collection of poetry is my truth. It is a chronicle of a portion of my journey through life and how I understood it. This is my story. All of the events that are recounted in these poems actually happened. I have tried to honestly recall my thoughts at the time these events occurred and I believe that I have been honest and true to myself on that account.
    At some point in the writing I decided to change the voice or perspective from ‘I’ to ‘He’. I did this for several reasons. I was aware that I was trying to distance myself from my past by blaming it on somebody else – ‘I’ didn’t do this or think that, it was ‘He’. I also decided that this was mainly a chronicle for myself and I didn’t want to have to read it at some time in the future and have to say to myself in my head that “I did this..”, or “I did that...”, and I didn’t want anybody else reading this to have to do that either. I was always aware in my reading that I was internalizing the thoughts of the writer. When I would read statements with the word ‘I’, I always felt that statement or idea would ring through my thoughts as if I had said it myself and it would become a part of me. When I would read a novel, I would become the main character and if the writing was good, I would feel all of the emotions that the main character would express if the narrative was in the first person or ‘I’. By referring to myself as ‘He’, I believed that I would never become that person again.

    I decided to put this narrative into poetry because it seemed to be the fastest way to express the thoughts and feelings. I began writing the longer pieces in this manuscript in a novella style of strung together poems. I tried to write each poem which was part of the novella as a snapshot or piece that could stand on its own as well as being a strand in the story that I was telling. I was trying to create a form of the novel for people that didn’t have the time to read a novel, and for writer’s like myself that didn’t have the time to write a novel.

    When I was in the middle of writing the poems contained in this collection, my thought or goal or wish was that this could help somebody. The lesson, I felt, was that the maniac described in this writing could eventually straighten his life out and become a law-abiding, relationship sustaining, job holding, tax paying citizen. I thought that if I made it out of hell, then anybody else could do the same if they knew that they weren’t alone or unique in their private and personal struggle. After toiling for years on this manuscript and being met with mostly the brick walls of rejection, I decided that the world didn’t need this or want it and I stopped writing. In August of 2008 I felt the sudden urge to go back to this manuscript and do something with it. Several weeks after feeling the impetus to do something with my writing, I was diagnosed with brain cancer. After two brain surgeries, radiation and continuing chemotherapy, I don’t know how much time I have left. I want to use the time that I do have to get this story out there so that it will somehow be found where and when it is needed most.

    The Author Would Like to Thank

    I would like to thank my family and everybody that I’ve known during my life for putting up with me. Special thanks to Francine Hall, my parents – Mom and Harry, my sisters – Patti and Karyn, my nephews – Justin and Evan, the Ryscamp family – Jim, Jeff, Jodi, Aunt Pat and Uncle Roy and all of my other Aunts, Uncles and cousins. I would like to give thanks to the people that I’ve worked with and for and I would like to thank the people that I’ve traveled to work with on the public transportation system along with the people that have lived and worked in the places that I have lived. I would mostly like to thank the abiding spirit of Saint Therese of Lisieux for being a guiding light and inspiration.

    *********************************************


    *
    GAUNT RETREATS – Songs for the bloody footed back pedal
    *

    He kept it all hidden down deep inside
    What silence locked below was taken with him when he died

    Tongues will turn to clay when mouths have gotten marbled
    Talk is spread beyond a message that is garbled
    Words are welled up in a strangle of emotion
    My voice goes unheard in the draft of mild commotion
    Slow days wait for sleep in nights of magic potion

    I'll tie the hanging rope to a rafter high up in the stable
    I'll have this out of my system just as soon as I am able

    I want to speak out loud
    Like I've never been told to shut up before
    I want to tell my thoughts
    Like a man with something to say
    I want to take my sanity for granted
    Like I never got carried away

    (I want to get old
    I'll probably just get in the way)

    He lived in a world that he designed
    Heaven and hell were on opposite corners of his mind

    The searchers are looking pointless and off centered
    The starting place is moving each time that it's entered
    Thoughts are dragging to the pace of rapt attention
    My brain is wired into a left behind dimension
    The open road has been lapsed with intervention

    I'll take off my muddy shoes and put them right down on the table
    I'll get this out of my system just as soon as I am able

    I want to be around
    Like I've never been told to get lost before
    I want to feel at home
    Like a man who's welcome to stay
    I want to take security for granted
    Like I have always lived that way

    (I try to get old
    All I can do is get in the way)

    Her beliefs were carefully destroyed
    Left behind in afterthought she was filled into the void

    Interest loses allegiance once it's drifting
    Backdrops fade onto a scene that's always shifting
    Hearts are drawn through low process of negation
    Souls are being dried in the hold of blunt stagnation
    The bare walls whisper in breaths of sighed frustration

    I'll empty the bottle with the skull and crossbones on the label
    I'll clean this out of my system just as soon as I am able

    I want to hear the truth
    Like I've never been lied to by life before
    I want to know what lasts
    Like a man that can see what's real
    I want to take my verity for granted
    Like I never could doubt what I feel

    I never could doubt what I feel

    * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ** *

    There's too much time wasted on this circle walking trudge
    When my mind sets on something it refuses to budge

    I go out each morning and do the headless chicken
    My heart is pounding and my insides start to sicken
    My calm is overwrought and pushed to panic stricken

    I'm as useful as a country courthouse judge
    I'll while the hours finding harbors for a grudge

    (I'm divided by my efforts
    I'm united by my fears)

    Look out below
    I'm pulling out the stops
    I don't know how far the bottomless drops

    My mind feels like a sieve
    I never had a goddamn to give
    I'm on a ship that silently sails
    I've been going so slow
    I've got a case of the snails

    I'm reaching back for something
    But there's really nothing there
    I'm reaching back for something
    I'm only coming up with air

    I'm seeing too many with the rabid maddog foam
    I watch myself in every long haired leaping gnome

    I walk past the sob song hemorrhaged throated belter
    My collar dampens with the drench of cold sweat swelter
    He's been stuck forever in the opened air shelter

    I let him die on the streets I used to comb
    I'm too busy collecting cardboard for his home

    (I'm misguided by my efforts
    I'm enlightened by my fears)

    I'm coming through
    Start ripping out the stops
    I'll make the best with the worst of my flops

    My mind drains like a sieve
    You only get one chance to live
    I have a front that finally fails
    If I had a hammer then I would never have nails

    I'm reaching back for something
    I'm not sure what will be there
    I'm reaching back for something
    I'm only coming up for air

    The night's simmering in the vent of nostril flair
    There's no place left to contain the raging ragtopped scare

    The exodus stomps down hard on the lead foot pedal
    The road will be empty before the dust can settle
    The ringing in my ear now sounds like scraping metal

    I went to work building circles for a square
    When logic undercooks it comes out blood red rare

    (I'm forgotten by my efforts
    I'm reminded by my fears)

    Full speed ahead
    I'm tearing out the stops
    I'll get there alone without any props

    My mind leaks like a sieve
    I only have one life to live
    I have a drive that quietly quits
    I've got the key to the door but the lock never fits

    I'm reaching out for something
    I'm just hoping it's still there
    I'm reaching out for something
    All I've been feeling is hot air

    * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
  • SD533
    SD533 Posts: 221
    From "A Dungeon of Days"

    ******************************


    THE CARDINAL JOSEPH BERNADIN/A CATHOLIC ELEGY

    He passed by the red brick mansion
    At the end of the State Street Parkway
    Across from Lincoln Park
    On regular walks
    Through his neighborhood

    He always knew it was the residence
    For the head of the whole Chicago Catholic Archdiocese

    Somewhere in the vastness of the Vatican
    He imagined there was a property deed for the place
    ****

    He was raised a catholic as a child
    He was five years old
    When his mother taught him The Our Father
    Every night over the course of a week
    His mother taught him to memorize
    A couple lines of the prayer
    Writing the lines on a sheet of paper
    Taped to the wall next to a plastic crucifix
    In his small bedroom
    On Prospero Drive in Glendora California

    The words ran together unknown in his imagination
    Hallowedbethyname
    Thykingdomcome
    Thywillbedone

    His mind fixed and set images
    Of daily bread and trespasses
    Winding them inseparably together
    He wanted to know what a sin was

    His mother made him say the lines each night
    To make sure that he had remembered them
    He saw how happy she became
    When he was able to say the whole thing
    Straight through

    He remembered how young his mother was then
    He looked back on it later
    As the last time that he ever did
    Anything that made her happy
    ****

    His mother took him to church with her
    Sun hot slow 1964 california sundays
    While his father stayed at home
    With his two younger sisters

    His mother gave him a quarter one sunday
    To drop into the collection pole basket
    He palmed the shiny coin
    Large and silver in his hand
    Before the start of the service

    When the usher came around to collect
    His mother told him to put it in
    He held on tight to the coin
    He refused to let it go

    The usher came around with the pole again
    Slid the basket down the aisle
    Stopping the basket in front of him
    Back to collect the unpaid debt

    He looked at the man
    With the coin tight
    In his clenched childhood fist
    He refused to turn over the quarter

    His mother took the quarter back from him
    After they left the church
    It seemed like he went to church
    Less often after that
    ****

    He always saw squirrels
    Running claw feet along the bark
    Of the wide short tree
    In the front of the cardinal's house

    He wondered why the squirrels stayed in the yard
    When there was a whole park
    Filled with trees
    Right across the street
    ****

    His family drifted away from the church
    During the middle later 60's
    Always moving around
    Never in the same place for very long

    Sundays were spent on long drives
    Out into the dry waste of the squatter shack desert
    To look at plots of undeveloped real estate
    To dream of a different life
    Up into the nearby mountains
    Stopping on the side of road
    For cliffs edge views of the canyons below

    He was an unwilling passenger
    On a shiftless nomadic unsatisfied restless quest
    Always in search of something better
    ****

    He went to a catechism class
    For a while after school
    He was the little white bright shining star
    Among the mexican second grade children

    He was taken to a religious seminar
    Where there were kids older than him
    Somewhere an hour away

    He embarrassed the people that had taken him there
    By trying to answer all of the questions
    The seminarian put forth to the group
    In a childlike simplicity wonder
    His answer to every question was Jesus
    No further elaboration
    Just Jesus

    He knew that he had done something wrong
    He wasn't sure what that it was
    He stopped going to the classes
    Soon after that
    ****

    His mother's parents came out from Illinois to visit
    Their daughter's family in California
    While his grandparents were there
    He thought that he had seen
    In a moment of half dream wakefulness
    A woman in a flowing white gown
    Move across the darkness of his bedroom

    His grandfather told him
    In the earnest superstition
    Cultivated over a lifetime
    Of believing in the saints
    And sunday morning hangover sermon penance
    It was a sign
    He was going to be a priest some day

    He thought that priests were in possession
    Of a sacred secret knowledge
    Indoctrinated in the art of direct communication
    With Jesus Christ
    He considered the responsibility
    Associated with a power of that nature

    He wanted his grandfather's sign to be real
    He wanted to be a priest
    Someday in the church
    Where they kept the Flying Nun
    ****

    He went by the cardinal's house
    During the low dark days of mid-decembers
    Every year a nativity was set up on the lawn

    A small scale open wood barn
    Filled with straw and plastic figures
    Re-imagining each year
    The birth of the Christ
    ****

    He studied the map of California
    Dotted up its length with symbols
    Each one representing a church
    On the mission trail

    The missions were spread roughly
    26 miles apart
    In pre-goldrush 1800's california
    The length of a day's journey on foot

    He wondered how long it would take him
    To walk the entire trail
    Stopping off at each mission
    Just like one of the original spanish padres
    Heat cloaked in black garments
    Varnished wood silver chain crucifix bead pocket filled
    Leading a pack of dry blanket dusty burros
    ****

    He had visited several of the old mission churches
    The cool dark earthen air of the adobe structures
    Red wall flickering lit warm with offering candles
    Spun him off lost into reverie

    He found no end to the fascination
    Everywhere he saw the physical signs
    Of people that had been there
    Hundreds of years before

    He could feel their prayers and beliefs
    This to him represented
    All that was sacred and holy
    ****

    Each time he walked by the State Street house
    He wondered if the cardinal was at home

    He looked quickly from the sidewalk
    Into each of the windows

    Sometimes seeing a lit lamp
    Not knowing if anybody was there
    ****

    In 1970 his mother decided
    During the spiritual crisis
    That may have been confronting her
    In the wake of divorce
    That all of her children were to make
    Their first Holy Communion

    He went to classes with his two younger sisters
    All of the other kids were three years younger than him
    He went through with it because he had to
    He thought the whole thing was a joke
    ****

    He worried about his first confession
    He didn't know how he was going to recount
    All of the things he had done
    That were bad

    He thought that if he confessed everything
    The priest was going to throw the whole rosary at him

    He finally settled on a silently rehearsed
    Brief nervous quickly muttered summation
    He had lied he had stolen and he had sworn
    He said his hail marys thinking he had been let off easy
    It was the last time that he went to confession
    ****

    He had walked by the cardinal's house
    For a couple of years
    Before he noticed
    The rain gutters leading from the roof
    Were a light green color
    The color of rusting copper
    He wondered why nobody bothered to fix them
    ***

    He was put into a catholic school
    For the seventh grade
    Queen of Apostles in Riverdale Illinois

    His mother decided to put her three kids
    Into the same school where her sister's children went
    Her kids were going to be a part of the church
    Even though she was unable to as a divorced woman

    He had already made friends in the public school
    He was sick of changing schools
    He had been to 6 different schools since first grade
    He had no choice in the matter
    ****

    He was grabbed from behind by the hair
    Pulled into an office by a nun
    His first day at the catholic school
    He didn't know what the hell was going on

    The nun was smaller than him
    Into her sixties built like a thin boy
    She was the principal of the school
    She told him he was to get a haircut
    He told her ok then left

    He thought she was nuts
    It was the start of a year long war
    ****

    He was a month in between jobs
    During the last spring month of 1989
    He mostly sat in his apartment
    Dealing himself thousands of hands of solitaire
    Waiting for the phone to ring

    He went down the street in the late mornings
    To meet the woman he lived with for lunch

    They sat on the steps of the Holy Name Cathedral
    Next door from the place she was working

    While he waited on the church steps for his girlfriend
    Afraid and unsure of the future
    Not knowing what was to happen to them
    He kept thinking about the cardinal and his house
    He knew it was the church where the cardinal presided

    He thought about that month
    After he had been back to work for a while
    He realized that it was probably going to be
    The most peaceful month he would have
    For the rest of his life
    ****

    He was in trouble the first week of catholic school
    He had written a filthy note to a girl in his class
    That was built like an 18 year old woman
    He signed the name of the biggest dork in the class on it

    When he was in the office with the old nun
    He didn't even deny that he did it
    He agreed to get his haircut
    In return his mother wouldn't have to know about the note

    He got his hair cut that night
    The next day his mother was called in
    The nun read the letter to his mother
    The old witch kept dwelling on the letter
    He almost thought she was enjoying it

    He took the hell he caught at home
    Right back to the school the next day
    He got himself thrown out of class
    He thought the goddamned old bitch had double crossed him
    He was pissed off
    He had gotten his hair cut off for nothing
    ****

    He spent the rest of his year at the catholic school
    In a constant state of disciplinary punishment

    He disrupted the school church services
    Laughing and farting in the pews

    When he was quiet in church
    He was taking apart the monthly missalettes
    Rearranging turning the pages upside down backward
    Then replacing the staples that held the books together

    He took off his shoes during religion class
    Carefully wiping the dust from the bottoms of them
    On the black cloak of the priest walking the classroom aisle
    Leaving upside down crosses on his back

    He had to pick up the convent and rectory trash
    There were always large grocery bag bottles
    Full of empty wine bottles
    More than could have been used in service
    He thought that the priests were a bunch of drunken winos

    He went back to public school after the year
    He decided that he wanted no further dealings
    With the catholic church
    ****

    He passed by the cardinal's house
    Thinking about the cardinal
    Unaware of the malignancy
    Slowing growing inside
    Fed on ascetic celibate breaths
    ****

    He went to the church across from his house
    During highschool a couple of times
    When he was drunk
    With a friend who was a member of the parish

    He thought it was a good laugh
    He laughed so much in the back row
    The last time he went
    The usher smacked him with the collection basket
    Up against the side of his head
    ****

    He got involved in his early 20's
    With a four square gospel church
    In the mountain town of Prescott Arizona

    The fanatics there
    Lapsed and former catholics
    Referred to the catholic church as The Whore

    He wondered what kind of church he was in
    There wasn't a crucifix
    Anywhere inside of the place
    ****

    There was a small camera
    Mounted on the outside
    Wall of the cardinal's house
    Pointing down at the driveway
    And brick overhang front door porch

    A view that could be had easily
    From any of house's large windows

    He wondered what purpose the camera served
    The house was wide open exposed
    There were no gates or fences
    Anybody could have walked right up to the door

    He didn't see the camera as security
    It was there keeping a record
    Documenting the mostly mundane
    ****

    His religious reading led him
    To St. John of the Cross
    In his early thirties

    He tried to understand the result of his past
    A past filled with insanity
    Mental ward hospitalizations
    Drug and alcohol abuses
    As the first of St. John's dark nights

    The dark night of the senses
    That was rendering much of what he knew as life
    To meaninglessness

    He wanted to know when it would end
    When anything that good happened
    Wasn't to be followed by something
    That was worse than all that was worse before
    The up and downed guaranteed uncertainty existence
    Of an unmedicated manic-depressive

    He contemplated St. John’s second dark night
    The dark night of the soul
    When free of all of life's trapping
    One would be left alone
    With nothing

    He wondered when he would be finally concealed
    Secure in his darkness
    ***

    He heard about the cardinal's battle with cancer
    On the nightly news reports
    Along with the rest of the city

    He remembered the small black plastic sign
    White lettering sticking out of the lawn
    In the front of the cardinal's house
    It said PRIVATE PROPERTY
    ***

    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
    ***

    He prayed for the cardinal's recovery
    More or less
    As did a number of other people

    He walked by the State Street house
    In the summer of the cardinal's remission
    Wondering how much longer
    The cardinal would be there
    ***

    He passed by the cardinal's house
    After it was announced
    That the cancer had returned to the cardinal

    The driveway was filled with cars
    He knew that the cardinal was at home
    ***

    He walked past Cardinal Joseph Bernadin's house
    In the late October fall of crumbling leaves

    He thought about the rituals of the catholic mass
    The Eucharistic Feast
    Through Him With Him In Him
    The Mystery of Faith

    He thought about a man
    Looking out of the window
    From the house at the end of State Street
    Facing the southern edge of Lincoln Park
    Looking at the trees
    Frozen black empty stark against the end of december snow
    Knowing it was the last winter
    He would probably see
    *******

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