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
***
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
***
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
****
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
**
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
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 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 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)
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
***
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
*********
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
****
****************************** 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
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
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
*******
His sole hospital preoccupation
Became his married woman girlfriend
He was right next to her
As soon as she came out of her room
In the morning awakened
Fresh from fussing around in the mirror
With a blue eye shade shadow layer of cosmetics
He was right by her side
Never farther than a voice away
Stayed next to her the whole time
Until the night staff told them
It was time to knock off for the day
They did everything together
Except sleep in the same room
***
He never had somebody
That he could totally pour himself into
Somebody that could put up with him
For hours at a time
Without getting tired of him
He had never in his whole life
Gotten this close
Wide opening himself up to another person
He always kept a permanent wedge chasm stakelike
Driven between his innermost thoughts
And those that were around him
***
The woman thrived on the exhaustless attention
He was just what she needed
They were both in a cut-loose devoid of responsibility
Dream floating through a hospital ward inactivity limbo
They had nothing whatsoever to do
Just sit around talk smoke cigarettes together
Wait for the meals to be served
He was able to accomplish
What her husband hadn't been able
The husband that was too busy working a job
Combating the daily bullshit of the outside world
The thankless breadwinning provider
Out there breaking ass
On a consistent reliable everyday basis
To keep a foot on the mountain of bills
Carrying the load of a two car home
With three kids and an unhappy wife
The husband that treated her
Like a stick of furniture
Didn't have a chance
***
The woman kept telling him
She was going to be seeing him
After the hospital was a long gone
Almost forgotten part
Of both of their pasts
He told her that they weren't going to let him out
Until he was a bloated stiff armed silent zombie
Tranquilized into a suicide inspiring depression
That was the only way
His family could tolerate him
The woman told him that
He didn't have to go that way
She was going to help him get through
She showed him a large pharmacy prescription bottle
Stashed in the makeup case pocketbook jumble of her purse
Filled with amphetamine diet pills
The two dollar a hit black cadillacs
Black bombers
Black molly speeders
That he had seen before on the street
She told him that she got it from her sister-in-law
She would give him two of the pills each day
She told him that he had to keep his mouth shut
He wanted to know if she could get more
***
He had never felt better in his life
He had found a medication combination routine
That was finally going to work
He slept straight through each night
Knocked black into a dreamless cold death
On the Loxitain tranquilizers
He cleared out the morning cobwebs
With coffee and muscle relaxers
He popped a couple of speeders after breakfast
Then sailed right through the day
The automatic pilot flying
On cruise control
He was able to get laugh out loud drunk
On saturday passes with his family
He was able to get a buzz on
From occasional joints and roaches
Smuggled in and passed off to him
By other patients and their visitors
The hospital staff didn't know what was wrong
Whatever they were doing wasn't working
The doctor told his family
Things weren't looking good
There was no change or abatement in his behavior
***
He had a new guy moved into his room
His other roommate left unceremoniously
Woke up had breakfast then split one day
Having completed a court enforced 30 day stay
The new guy was from a nearby town
A couple of years older than him
A born thief and a natural liar
A lazy slouching whining bastard
The kind of guy that borrowed things
With no intention of ever returning them
The kind of guy that inventoried other people's belongings
Mentally cataloging all that was there for the taking
He had nothing in the room
Beyond the trenchcoat and hat he showed up with
And a couple of days change of clothing
He still managed to lose a shirt and a pair of sox
To the lousy worthless son of a bitch
***
He became friends on the ward
With a puerto rican mexican cuban guy
The guy kept promising to get him some pot
The guy came off like some kind of low leveled gangster
Without ever coming out and saying
That's what he was
The guy would talk normal until a staff member came around
Then the guy would start bird arm wing flapping
While bounce balancing shifting weight
On one solidly floor planted foot
Slow motion stop moving
Back leg swung back suspension
Air hang drop kick ready paused
Saying the word bubblelicous
Laughing in their faces
The guy thought americans were stupid little babies
Television commercials revealed them
For what they were
The hospital people were in a leery fear of the guy
The guy cheeked then spit out the hospital pills
The guy never said why he was there
***
*************************************************************************
From a pages 366-372 of “A Dungeon of Days”
*************************************************************************
He molded his week
Around the two college classes
That used up tuesday and thursday mornings
He skipped the drunken hang out
The nights before class
Spent the evening skimming the textbooks
Going to bed early
He spent school day afternoons
Horse breaking with his cousin
He set aside each wednesday
For the visit from his married woman girlfriend
The rest of the week he was free
To go out get drunk stoned with his cousins
Crash deep into morning early afternoon
Awaken slowly to the alcohol marijuana blearies
Sit alone in the house
Recopying the notes he wrote in class
He found umbrage in the schedule
The busyness gave him less time
To think about killing himself
***
He watched the daylight recede
Dusk drawn shadowed five o'clock dinnertime
The gradually percepted cooldown
The dried leaf winds of october
The slow death dramatic autumn spectacle
Nature transforming itself into a winter
He felt a stirring energy for life
Growing in the memory of dark november nights
It always held out a hope
Of something that was promised for him
If the seasons could change
Then maybe his life could change too
***
Every wednesday for four months
Had been spent with his married woman girlfriend
She left her three kids to fend for themselves
Drove the hour out to his house
Bought a motel room for the afternoon
Loaded him up with diet pills alcohol and sex
She drove through the rush hour back home
After they had gotten their fill
Of each other
Some weeks she showed up
For an extra day
Sneaking around out in the open
Too obviously clockwork predictable
A careless flaunt in the face
Of the required clandestine
He kept wondering where the end was
For all of the fun he was having
He knew that this was no way
For a married mother with children
To be carrying on
***
His married woman girlfriend's husband
Had been gone away all summer
Out of town construction job working
In another state
Her husband didn't take long
After getting back home to family life
To realize that something wasn't right
The guy's wife came home sloppy disheveled
On two consecutive late wednesday afternoons
Half bombed laughing mascara smeared
Negligee stuffed inside of purse
Disappearing for the whole day
Unaccounted to unknown thereabouts
She arrived at his house the next wednesday
With a rusty metal magnetic key case
A spare pair stashed in the car underside
For locked out of the car disasters
She told him that her husband took the keys
Without remembering the emergency set
She said she was going to fix that bastard
He momentarily startle flashed with the vision
Of an irate out of control fixed bastard husband
Busting down an afternoon motel room rendezvous door
Brandish ladening spiked baseball bats
Sharp machete hatchet blade knives
Bullet full double barreled guns
For all he knew
The guy might have followed her
Maybe was seconds away
From a blind fury rampaging stormtroop
Into the living room of his parent's house
He told her to turn around
Get in the car
She had to go
Don't look back
Haul ass back home
The wednesday afternoon game was over
***
He started to miss the married woman
He was forced to take a face slap sobering stare
At the botch stalled relationships
He had going with the people in his life
His interaction with those around him was quagmired
In an unnaturally choked meaninglessness
He never talked with length or depth
To anybody that he knew
Emotionally silent frozen abort truncate
He heard the few words that he spoke
Pin drop quietly to the bottom
Of a well of empty insignificance
Shut off closed down mistrusting
He was unable to look anybody in the eye
He was noticeably nervous
Almost in a petrified knotted cast
In fear of other people
He was the only one that knew
How far he had receded
Into his loneliness
***
He waited a blank month
Dull walking numb
Through the days lost irretrievably
Before calling up the married woman
A beggarly salvage for scroungeables
In the consensual aftermath
Maybe there could be one more
One more
One more last time
This time she was the one
That had to say
It was all over
***
He came to a loose formal agreement
A grudgingly mumbled verbal acquiesce
With the girl he had been hanging around with
When he went out nights with his cousin
Instead of drunkenly messing around with her
Whenever he haphazardly ran into her
He was going to be her boyfriend
With all of the responsibility
To commitment that was implied
He would be calling her on the telephone
Making arrangements to meet her
Going out to her family's home
Getting the once-over from her mother
***
His new girlfriend's mother
Didn't want him anywhere
Around her daughter
She told him over the telephone to quit
Calling for her daughter
Click cutoff dropping
The receiver down into his ear
The old lady knew
He was a never amount to anything bum
A whipped down beat back mongrel maggot dog
Shamelessly lacking self-esteem
A freeload plundering cadge
Without a job a car or a future
Looking to pillage on her daughter
Her daughter didn't work or have a car
Scraped loose change together for cigarettes
Spent all of her time figuring out ways of getting high
Came home drunk every night of the week
And she slept late
They were both a couple of losers
He wondered why her mother had a problem with him
***
He went out on double dates
With his new girlfriend
The two of them tagged along
With her older sister
And whatever stiff
The sister had lined up for that week
His new girlfriend's sister was a hustler
Out on a single purpose determined scam
For a good time
He became an unwitting accomplice through association
It meant a free ride for him and his new girlfriend
Driven around by some trying to be a nice guy chump
Stereo cranked saturday night car backseat oblivion
The two of them ripped loose from their senses
Partaking in the generously offered dope
Alcohol free flow available abundant
Most of the doubledate saturday nights were lost wasted
Neither of them knew where in the hell they were at
Or where they were going
***
He went out on a cold early winter weekday night
With his cousin to watch
The John Belushi Blues Brothers movie
The movie had taken on a synchronotous importance for him
The random coincidental purpose found
In the unrelated happenstantial crossings
Occurring along the impersonalized paths of chance
He walked into the movie theatre
Remembering a saturday afternoon
A year and a half earlier
Spent sitting in the dark
For the last 15 minutes
Of a two day Continental Trailways bus ride from Texas
The bus gridlock parked
In the commandeered underground tunnels
Of downtown Chicago Lower Wacker Drive
Unable to proceed to the bus station
All traffic temporarily on police barricade hold
For the filming of a John Belushi movie the driver said
He thought of himself sitting on the bus
Waiting for the traffic to loosen itself
Aware of the momental extension of his anxiety
Returning home for the drunken driving court date
That guaranteed the certain revocation of his drivers license
He had spent four months hiding in Texas
Unable to face anybody that he knew
Following his first psychotic disruption mental ward hospitalization
He knew then that the end of the bus ride
Meant the end of the darkest days of his life
Whatever was ahead would have to wait a few more minutes
In the carnival frivolous atmosphere of hollywood movie making
He sat in the dark of the theatre thinking
About a yellow hazed glare day 11 months before
Rolling up to the gates of the Joliet Illinois Stateville Penitentiary
In a fence building work pickup truck with his friend
The movie studio production semitrailer trucks
Parked outside the buildings inside the prison
The excited gatekeeper guard said that
They were making a John Belushi movie
He sat in the theatre reminiscently aware of how
He had kept glancing at the movie trucks
That day in the prison while he worked
Overwhelming in a sudden personal realization loss
Of dot sized insignificance
He had went from a deep bottom
After coming back from Texas that summer
To a flat lining settled unsatisfying low
He was desperate for something to shake loose in his life
He was still clutch clinging to that desperation
Nearly a year later
He watched the movie unfold upon the theatre screen
Vaguely aware of its content
He wrapped the previous year and a half of his life
Around the back of his mind into a circle
With the movie marking
The significant points of reflection along the way
He saw the night as a culmination
The third point in the triangle
Of a journey
Along a deadend circuitous route
Out and around and back again
On a road that had taken him nowhere
He walked out of the theatre with his jacket open
Embracing the chill night air
His breath a long pulled train of billowing frost
Black winter sky myriad speckled in points of star bright
The trip was over
He knew it was time for his life to change
****
He kept up his wednesday motel room appointments
With his married woman girlfriend
The whole thing was becoming boring
Dull predictable
The soul depleting unvarying staid exercise
Of two people using each other's body
Chasing placid escape in the carnal
The only thing that he cared about
Were the alcohol pills and smoke
Available with the occasion
***
Each week he saw his married woman girlfriend
He sensed the intransible gulf between them widening
Each week that he saw her
He felt himself farther away
The bridge of a 12 years age difference between them
Taking on a flagrant appearance
With her escalating use of makeup and hairdye
False eyelashes fake fingernails multi-colored eyeshadow
Little girl fake dressup imposter costumes
The garish ridiculousness sickened him
He wanted to tell her
To get rid of all that shit
It was time to go back home
To be a mother to her children
And a wife to her husband
But he still wasn't ready
To let go of the only thing that he had
***
He had a built in auto-destruct mechanism
For as long as he could remember
Which had a way of deliver rescuing him
From any seemingly impossible to reconcile situation
That he needed an immediate way out of
No matter how hard he tried to keep going
Another part of him was working secretly
Circumvent undermining
Looking for a way to sabotage
Fuck up everything in a totaling completeness
So that whatever he was doing
Was brought to an abrupt screeching skid end
All it took was the first thought
The acknowledgement that he was sick of the shit
Then another part of him took over
He learned at these moments
To let his common sense reasoning step aside
Get out of the way
Stand back watch with bemused marvel
Let one part of himself
Destroy another part of himself
***
He started hanging around with a girl
A year older than he was
On his nights out at the barn with his cousin
She was one of three sisters
That were running around with his cousins
It was a wordless attraction
Built on a mutual indifference
They found themselves
Thrown together by circumstance
Night after night
Stoned drunken into a useless stupidity
Left alone in a hayloft
Conversation was unnecessary
They both needed somebody
That they could grab hold of in the dark
He started showing up
For his wednesday get-togethers
With the married woman from the hospital
With barn straw in his pants
From the night before
***
The girl he was hanging around with
Had an older sister
A tough little broad
With two kids
Fresh hatched from a marriage
With a guy that was supposed to have been
A dope fiend pusher wife beating maniac
The older sister had went around
On an angel dust binge
Wound up OD'd in a paramedic run
Then got carted off to a psych ward
She made jokes about taking Thorazine
Like there was nothing wrong with it
He was hoping that maybe
He could hook up somehow
With the older sister
***
He never talked about what had happened to him
He never heard the behind the back gossip about it
He never knew for sure
What people had been told about him
The girl he was hanging out with
Told him about her older sister
About how she had flushed her whole life
Down the toilet
Bad decisions bad men bad drugs
Two daughters in a perpetual tow
A road of ruinous squalor
Laid out before her
He listened to the story
Didn't think that it was so bad
After all of the shit he had been through
He wondered what she thought about him
***
He headed out on a saturday morning
In a car that his cousin had borrowed
Up to Alpine Valley Wisconsin
For an REO Speedwagon concert
They had a cooler with ice packed around beer
A bottle of vodka in a paper sack
A nickel bag sized tin foil wrapped stash of pot
Along with a half-assed set of directions
They hauled the couple of hours through Illinois
Swilling beer from the can
Smoking bowls through a resin clogged pipe
Windows cranked open to the rushing wind
Pacing themselves
They missed the turnoff for Alpine Valley
Kept pushing steadily north
Cruised through the Madison exits
Going hours out of the way
Until they started seeing signs for Green Bay
He knew they had overshot the mark
Didn't say anything
Neither of them seemed to care
The open road rolling out under the car
The motion with speed was a welcome release
They decided to turn back around near Green Bay
Figured if they kept pushing on
They could still make the show
A speeding ticket detour cost them a couple of hours
His cousin's boss wired the money to get them going again
They fought the saturday evening Wisconsin highway traffic
Pulling into the concert parking lot
To see that everybody was just leaving
His cousin got nailed for speeding again
Just short of the Illinois border
He slept in the damp car outside of the police station
While his cousin banshee howl wolf barked all night
In the small town Wisconsin jail cell
He woke up in the morning to his aunt and uncle
Pounding on the car windows
They took the unopened bottle of vodka
Put the rest of the beers in the trunk of their car
He didn't bother listening
To his uncle's sunday morning parking lot ranting
He already knew
The whole thing was going to be his fault
***
His cousin was three years younger than him
His cousin and his cousin's year older brother
Had been one of the few constants in his life
Since his family had moved back to Illinois when he was 10
His two cousin's were his best friends
He used to think that they were
Almost like younger brothers
After his first crack-up he noticed
His cousin's started treating him differently
They looked down on him like he was
A condescent black sheep uncle
That was almost embarrassing to have around
***
He liked hanging around with his younger cousin
His cousin would do all of the talking
When they were alone together
He listened to his cousin talk
He felt comfortable knowing
That he wasn't expected to provide a response
It seemed like his cousin's talk was thinking
An out loud incongruous ramble of words
An in progress redefinition of ideas
A selfclarification
That nobody was ever supposed to hear
Sometimes while his cousin was talking to him
He caught the look in his cousin's eye
A quick frozen bolt of bewildered fear
He knew that his cousin wasn't ever sure
If he was really there
***
He knew that he made other people uneasy
When he let their words trail off into dead silence
He would hear their words
But he had nothing to offer in return
No reassurance for them
That he was in agreement or understanding
He had no way of letting them know
That he had even heard what they said
***
He remembered the first time he met his cousin
His cousin's family pulled a fold-up camping trailer
Across the country from Illinois
Out to his family's home
For a 1968 california vacation
He went with his sisters to a camp grounds
For a weekend with his cousin's family
His cousin spent the whole time with a fishing pole
Sitting huddled on the bank
Of the narrow creek
That swirled muddy water through the camping grounds
Steadfast determined through dirt streaked tears
His cousin refused to accept
There wasn't a fish anywhere near the place
His cousin looked like a little old man to him
Hunched in a green illinois flannel shirt
Waiting for the big one
That was never going to be there
He always thought of his cousin after that
As a wrecklessly hopeless dreamer
***
He went with his cousin to buy a horse
Somebody unloaded a three year old on his cousin
A nervous skittish temperamental moody animal
That had never taken a bit
He was supposed to help his cousin break the horse
He stood like a dried lump of turd
Fingers fumbling in the bottom of his jacket pocket
When the vet came out to do the gelding
White sausage horse parts in a ziplock plastic bag
The cold wasteful destructiveness sickened him
***
He spent the afternoons with his cousin
Out of kicking distance
While his cousin brush combed the horse
Ran the rope tied horse in hours of circles
Slowly leading the horse's head into a halter
His cousin was working out of a book
Full of horse dreams and horse plans
The horse got meaner and crazier
He figured that the horseshit strawbale hay
In the barn they were hanging around
Had finally gone to his cousin's head
***
He put up his last fence
At the Joliet State Penitentiary
It was an 18 foot fence around a basketball court
In the prison exercise yard
He rode up to the prison
In a fence truck full of empty beer cans
Ashtray full of roaches and half smoked joints
The guard at the gate took one look into the truck
Tools and equipment scattered
All over the cab and in the back of the truck
The guard said there was no way they were
Getting into the prison
They drove back down the road
Threw out all of the empty beer cans
Straightened out all of the tools
Then drove back to the prison
The guard let them into the prison
The fence was being put up
Next to the prison commissary
The prisoners stood in line waiting for commissary privileges
Some of the prisoners drifted over
To where the fence was being put up
They wanted to know if he was getting time
For putting up the fence
The prisoners assumed that he was a con
The guard up in the tower
Overlooking the yard
Must have assumed he was a prisoner also
He kept his rifle on his shoulder
Pointing down on him and his friend
While they worked
They were the only ones
In the yard
****
He spent several days working at the prison
In the afternoons he saw the prisoners
In the exercise yard
Next to the basketball court where he was working
The black guys pumped bars
Loaded with immense rolls of iron weights
With arms that were bigger than both of his legs
Skinny long stringy haired
Burnout hippy white guys
Pitched horseshoes at iron stakes
Sticking out of the ground
Their bell bottom blue jeans
Dragging through the dirt and dust
The rest of the whites
And the browns
Were involved in a game of softball
Loud with cheering and hustling
He thought that the basketball games must have been the same
Short explosion bursts
Of locked up energy and emotion
That needed an eighteen foot .6 gauge chain link fence
To surround and contain it
To keep it from spilling out all over
The prison exercise yard
****
He sensed a sinister evil at the prison
Something lingering from the 1930 or 40's
A legacy of apparitous terror
On the part of inmates guards and prison officials alike
Part of past that conspired
The old black and white prison movies
He watched late at night on television as a kid
He thought about Jack Palance and Burt Lancaster
Busting out of jail
In the dark cool Joliet run away to freedom midnight
Of some imagined half awake long ago
He thought about the real life monsters
Like Richard Speck
Housed somewhere inside of those prison walls
While he was working out in the yard
He wondered where they kept Speck
He wondered if Speck had a window
Or a view of the yard area
He wasn't afraid of the inmates he saw
Out on the prison grounds
He was afraid of the malignant spirit
That seemed to live all over the prison
Leaving everything inside quiet empty and dead
****
He wondered how old the prison was
It looked like it was built
Back in the 1920's
Designed from some blue print
Left over from the middle ages
Of inquisition wracked tortuous revenge
Iron chains
Hangman scaffolding
Guillotine electric chairs
The prison was made out of distinct yellow bricks
Rough cut bulging rectangular oblong misshapen masses
Custom chiseled from the same quarry
Made to order
In sizes varying
As large as an automobile
And as small as a fist
Piled into a fort like wall
That looked 40 feet high
Blocks long on every side
Capped with rusty barbed wire
And castle like shotgun guard towers
The building was meant
To exude and represent punishment
Deterrence in the form of fear
To whatever was concealed beyond those walls
He noticed that the same bricks were used
To build the high school
Across town from the prison
In Joliet
***
Vehicles entering the prison
Had to park in a doubledoored bay
Over a walkway with steps that went
Under the vehicle
To allow the guards to check for prisoners
That might be hiding on the underside
Of the vehicle
Nobody ever checked under the fence truck
For a prisoner
He wondered if the walkway was always there
Or if it was installed
After some guy rode out of the prison gates
On the underneath of some truck
****
He saw a movie truck in the prison
One of the days he was putting up the fence there
A guard said it was for a John Belushi movie
He kept looking at the studio truck while he worked
He thought about the summer he had spent
Down in Texas
After he had gotten out of the hospital
He thought about the couple of months
He had been working around Joliet with his friend
Everything started seeming empty useless and boring
He was wallowing insignificance
Perpetuating meaninglessness
Wondering when change would set itself free into new motion
****
He was officially laid off of work
A couple of weeks after the fence was installed
In the Joliet Prison
Work had quickly slowed down from every other day
To half days to an hour a day
He went down and filed for unemployment
He was told he would be paid
200 hundred dollars every two weeks
That was enough for his car payments
With enough left over for drinking
He found out that his friend and his boss
Were going to be working all that winter
Inside the prison
Putting a fence around the multi-storied tiered railings
Because an inmate had thrown a guard over the rail
The work at the fence company didn't really stop
It had just dried up for him
*****
He quickly established his unemployment check collecting routine
He woke up late morning early afternoon
Sat around the house alone watching television
Went out to the bars at night with his friends
To get drunk
And chase women
He had no responsibility
He was 20 years old
Living at home with his mother
He had no hope or thought about the future
He made payments on a car
That was sitting in the driveway
Parked
He put down the names of bars that he drank in
On his unemployment forms
As the places that he applied for work
He just wanted to get and stay drunk
To make up for lost time
To heal and smooth over
All the rift rough spots
That had come before
Between him
His family and his friends
He wanted to erase the ever present feeling
In his mind
That tortured gnawing paralyzing fear
That told him
Everybody from now on
Foremost and first off
Would think of him as being crazy
He was now and forever to be regarded as a nut
He would never be considered normal
In the eyes and minds of anybody that knew him
Again
He wanted to make everybody around him
Forget his past
And let him escape from it
****
He was still depressed
More than 7 months after being released from the hospital
Work had kept him busy
Too tired and too worn out
To consider suicide
Now that he was left idle again
The suicidal escape thoughts returned
****
He started to think that the weight
That he had piled on
In the hospital
Was the reason for his continual
Unabated depression
He was convinced that
The forty extra pounds
He had been carrying around
Was causing some kind of physio-mental disturbance
Larding his mood and outlook
His energy and thoughts clogging up
Dense with the saturation of fatty deposit despondency
He decided that the weight had to go
Every afternoon he put on 2 pairs of pants
5 layers of t-shirts sweat shirts and a jacket
Then climbed into his old railroad winter coveralls
He would put a stack of old rock and roll albums
On the family stereo turntable
Then he would run in place while the music played
He would run until the music stopped
Soaking through all of the layers of clothing
After he stopped running
He spent another hour sitting in a steaming bath tub
Filled up to the top with hot water
He was at home all alone during the day
Nobody knew that he was doing this
He ate one small meal each day
Then drank beer all night with his friends
He was able to sweat off 35 pounds in a month
****
He started to feel better gradually
As the weight soaked and dried salt into his exercise clothes
He started to feel like his old self
His mental frame reflected in his changing physical appearance
He had more energy
Drinking became enjoyable again
Instead of burying himself in a stuporous withdrawn silence
He was talking to people again and laughing
Almost able to forget
For a while
All of the misfortune he had brought
Down upon himself
He went into the winter
Thinking this was the best he had ever felt
In a life flavored with depression and unhappiness
****
He became friends with a woman
He would meet at the bar
During his nightly drunken escapades
She was 5 or 6 months pregnant
Impending motherhood in its showing glory
The father-to-be wanted no part of the outcome
He met her through his friend’s sister
He worried that she might find out that he had gone nuts
He worried that she already knew he had gone nuts
He wasn't sure what she expected from him
He was obviously a drunken fuckup
No job living at home collecting unemployment
He half wondered
During increasingly less frequent sober thoughts
If he could take care of himself a woman and a child
He realized that only a person
With more problems than his own
Was ever going to have anything to do with him
He liked being with her
She kept him calm and he was able to relax
When he got drunk enough
He let her take him for rides in his car
So that he could listen to car stereo
****
His mother got remarried at the end of that year
To a guy that lived across town
With his two sons
In bachelor pad mechanic grease all over everything squalor
He moved into a new home
With his mother his stepfather and his two stepbrothers
He drank a fifth of vodka on the moving day
Got so drunk that he was dropping everything he carried
He was happy
He thought that he was getting the brothers that he never had
He thought that he was getting the father that he never really had
The new house had a family room
With a bar and barstools
He bought all kinds of bottles of booze
Bar glasses a blender and a Mr. Boston drink book
He filled the closet shelves with his hundreds of rock record albums
He spent the first few nights up all night in the family room
Drinking and listening to music
His whole family was celebrating
It was Christmastime
His mother had just remarried
The two families had moved into a new house
His younger sisters were staying at the house for the holidays
He was so loaded that he had bruises
From falling over and banging into things
He got so drunk that he couldn't stand up
He thought that this was the way things were always going to be
****
He spent an unemployment check on a new year’s eve party
He bought a halfbarrel of beer
All of his friends and his stepbrother’s friends came over
The house was full of people
He played albums all night
Then threw the records on the floor when they were done playing
There was spilt beer and quarter full plastic cups of beer
All over the house
He wanted every night to be like that
****
Everybody in the house went back to work
At the start of the year
He was wound up from the end of the year christmas celebrating
Nobody bothered to tell him that the party was over
He stayed up all night listening to music and drinking
While his family was trying to sleep for work the next morning
He drank up all of the christmas gift bottles of whisky and scotch
He drank up his parents vodka and then tried refilling the bottles
With water
He had people over every night of the week
Every morning the family room of the house was strewn
With beer cans ashtray garbage and people
That got too drunk passed out unable to leave
He emptied all of the swill
From the opened beer cans that he found
Into a large mug
Then guzzled it down to start the day
When everybody left for work
He started scheming around for a way to get drunk
He was usually broke
He got a $200 unemployment check every two weeks
He would spend it all in a couple of days
Then he would scrounge around broke
Pilfering loose change from the couch seat cushions
Until he got the next one
He wasn't sleeping very much
He would pass out for an hour or two then be awake
He wasn't eating very much
He would drink a glass of beer with salt and a raw egg for a meal
He was having too much fun to notice
That his family was getting tired of his bullshit
Real quick
****
He was still seeing his pregnant girlfriend
When he met another woman in his town
He met her at the gas station
She asked him to help push her car up to the pump
Because it was out of gas
He had just came from the grocery store
Where he cashed in two bags of soda pop bottles for money
It was one of the rare times that he went driving in his car
It was the middle of January winter outside
He was running around sweating without a coat on
He had just put some gas in his car and was in a hurry
To get some beer with his pop bottle money
He pushed her car told her where he lived and invited her over
Without even looking at her or noticing her
He had forgotten all about her when she showed at his parent’s house
A few nights later
He was getting drunk with his friends
And his pregnant girlfriend's older brothers
His pregnant girlfriend was sitting on his lap
When the woman that he met at the gas station walked in
That was the last time that he saw his pregnant girlfriend
When his pregnant girlfriend left
With her brothers that night
They told him that he had better never bother her again
The woman that he met at the gas station spent the night with him
In the family room of his parent's house
After everybody else had left
****
His new girlfriend was a hustler
A con rip-off artist woman
That could get away with anything
Because of the way she looked
She was the kind of woman that drove away
From the gas station without paying
He couldn't believe anything that she said
She said she was married to a big mean harley biker gang guy
She said that she had two kids
He didn't know if any of this was true
She worked as a waitress in a restaurant
Where she was in trouble for stealing credit card numbers from receipts
She came around whenever she felt like it
He didn't know how to contact her
He didn't know where she lived
He thought that he had something special
She was a scammer and he had nothing
He thought that this must have meant that she liked him
For himself and not what for what she could take from him
She usually stayed all night when she came over
His mother was getting tired of finding her there in the morning
His mother started yelling and ranting when she came over
One night his mother told them both to get out of the house
He drove her in her car
With 4 inches of snow and ice on the windshield
His head out the window to see the road
Drunk laughing yelling and screaming out into the middle of the night
To the empty condominium where he used to live with his mother
They spent the rest of the night there
On the floor
****
He was hardly sleeping that January
He was drunk all the time
Things around him were falling
Apart fast
He denied what others
Hinted at in his presence
He was cracking up
Again mental hospital bound
****
His renewed friendships of the previous autumn
Quickly frayed
Unraveling after a weekend trip
To a frozen winter cottage resort town in Wisconsin
Three days of around the clock drinking
Ended in a Wisconsin ski lodge
Broke out of money drunk drinking other people's drinks
Wearing a coat without a shirt underneath
Bare chest bellied to the snow and the wind
Registering nothing
****
His friends started avoiding him
He started hanging around with a guy from town
That had went around the bend
A few years earlier
On psychedelic drugs
Never making the return trip to sense sanity or reality
Convinced that the voices in his head
Were being broadcast from somewhere
Within the town
By somebody with a microphone
Hooked into a secret transmitting device
His friend talked
Utter disjointed nonsense gibberish
Having him around the house was too much
For his mother and his new step family
Nobody could sleep with his crazy friend and his girl friend
Drinking all night in the house
****
He was committed to a mental institution
When he was 19 years old
At the time
He thought that his life was over
He still thought that was true 16 years later
Only then it didn't seem to matter
****
He was an acute paranoid schizophrenic in March 1979
After he spent 9 months intensely abusing LSD
And after he stayed awake for most of the previous winter
He was schizophrenic and believed to be permanently brain damaged
In the late spring and early summer of 1980
After he had been totally drunk for 7 months
And after he had spent several months awake and living out of doors
He was a manic-depressive in 1981
After being awake and living mostly outside during the spring
Of that year
He was psychotic in the early summer of 1982
After he had been awake for more than 8 weeks
And after he hadn't taken any drugs for almost a month
He was a bi-polar disorder in the late summer and early fall of 1983
After staying awake for a month
And after sporadically living outside for several weeks
He was suffering from a manic episode in the summer of 1985
After staying awake for a couple of weeks
He was in an escalated and agitated state at the end of 1991
After he was unable to sleep for a week
****
Sometimes he could only see the inherent decay in things
He looked at trees
In a wind washed ocean of leaves
Summer green
All he could see were black January branches
Mottled with ice and abandoned
He looked at the highwayed suburbias
Bristling with small business and franchised enterprise
Driven convenience
All he could see was faded asphalt fractured by an overgrowth of weeds
Boarded windows lined by crumbling brick corroded frames
Broken glass mosaics shining desertion
He looked at people that he didn't know
Filled with the moment's spur and galloping energy
Unaware vitalous pre-occupation
All he could see were forms laced with old age and infirmity
Weathered by a time that was still years away
Sometimes he looked at people and felt that they never would get old
Sometimes he looked at things
And all he could see was the lost promise in their hopelessness
He looked at automobile salvage yards
Twisted rusty metals spewing engine parts and worn interiors
Inconsequential decay
All he could see was a brand new car being driven by its first owner
Handled with the respected deference
Given to babies and cartons of eggs
He looked at out of business and for sale signs
Advertising economic battles given to eventual failure and capital loss
Inevitable disaster
All he could see was the lifetime realization of somebody's dreams
Aspirated with the lure of getting rich quick
While working for one's self
He looked at people that he didn't care for
Seemingly constructed of unbendable hatreds and self-serving greeds
Uncertain motivation
All he could see was the fresh-worlded innocence of their childhood
Spirited with playful discovery in a world of lesser concerns
Sometimes he looked at people and saw them swathed in their infancy
Sometimes the seasons couldn't change fast enough for him
***
JOB IN THE SUBURBS
He left for work
In the pre-dawn darkness
Of a city succumbed in tired sleep
To travel to his job in the suburbs
He made it a point to get himself out on the street before 6:00 a.m.
He didn't have to get up and leave so early
It didn't matter what time he showed up
As long as stayed and worked for 8 hours after he got there
He used public transportation to get to his job
He traveled with all of the forgotten people
That had to wake themselves up and leave
For work at that time of the morning
Because they had to
He rode the el train with the young run-down black men
Traveling from the south sides of Chicago
To wander mindlessly through soul denying maintenance shifts
Within the gray loading corridors of the airport industrial area
Or within the warehouses of the stores in suburban shopping malls
Pocketing half smoked cigarettes and visions
Laughing off old boy and all the shit that he says
Living for friday night paydays of reefers and booze
He rode on the train with the northwest side hispanics
Unable refusing and pretending not to understand ingles
Quiet dark brown indian eyes watching and learning the ways of america
Dressed in a cast-off collection of outdated oddfitting clothing
Numb with cold on the first winter day without coats jackets or gloves
Traveling huddled in confused scrambled groups
To assorted pick-up points
Loaded into overcrowded rust spotted vans
With drearily streaked greasy windows
Dropped off at the back entrances off hotels and landscape details
To work as aproned maids and backbending manual shovel stooped laborers
Human elements unnoticed and unsaid
In the cracks and around the edges of the great technological machine
He rode on the train with the northside polish ukranian slavs
Just finished for the night or just starting for the day
Middleaged escapen refugees
Of torn eastern european bloc-nation descents
Swabbing the toilet rimmed plastic underdesk trash can of corporate USA
Breathing cough fumes into the red-eye industrial strength antiseptics
Leaving their smells and their cabbage sweat in the empty office air
Taking nothing but that which is unused unneeded set aside and unwanted
Asking for expecting and receiving all that is less
He rode on a bus with college educated black women
Reporting to timeclocked routines
Of monotonous telephone conversation copy machine duties
Checked thoughts and deeply held breaths
Catching sleep on the ride
With heads quietly pillowed with a jacket against the window
Worrying about children left alone by themselves at home
Thinking about men who come in drunk at all odd hours of the night
Wondering about men who don't bother to come home at all
Knowing that there had to be a break or an end somewhere
He left for work in the pre-morning early waking Chicago darkness
When white authority was still
At home slow and asleep
Nowhere to be seen
****
He worked and competed with people
That had graduated from college
He was considerably less educated
He had completed a few college classes after highschool
And he had taken 12 months to complete an 8 month training program
At a bullshit technical school for computer programming
That ran advertisements on the late night early morning television
While most of the people he worked with were getting their education
And never missing a meal
He was dividing his time between being locked up in nut houses
And living outside in the street
****
He worked in an office
With people that said words
With little fear or understanding of the reprised consequence
That the idea expressed by those words might bring
If those words had been said in the presence of the people
Those words were meant to describe denigrate and deride
****
He was an anomaly
In a company of more than 300 people
He was one of the few people that lived and came to work from the city
He refused to relocate himself
To somewhere in the suburbs closer to his job
He didn't own a car and was seen arriving and setting out on foot
He skipped lunch worked a straight 8 hour shift and then left
He never divulged any personal information about himself or his past
He only talked to people
If the conversation was specifically work related
He quit cutting his hair and it grew down to his waist
He never went to the company sponsored social gatherings
He never hung out after work or went to the bar with his co-workers
He missed 3 weeks of work because he had a nervous breakdown
He came back to work after he had a nervous breakdown
He went on after his breakdown like nothing had happened
He was voted the Employee of the Month
After he came back to work from his breakdown
He came to the office early
Hours before most of the other people got there
He played music on a cheap tape player
All day long when he sat at his desk
He used the music to block the sound and noise around him
Allowing him to focus single mindedly on his computer programming work
He spent 4 or 5 hours a day traveling back and forth to work
He walked through the office like a zombie
He avoided making eye contact with anybody
He was an eyesore and an embarrassment when clients came to the office
He never sat around with his boss and laughed at his jokes
But he made goddamn sure he busted his ass everyday and did his job
Because he didn't want to give his boss any reason to fire him
****
He was good at his job
He was a computer programmer
He could sit for hours and concentrate
On the most boring and mundane of intricate details
That would have left most other people screaming
In a torture of agonies
He developed that ability
During the hundreds of hours he wasted
Fried out of his mind and tripping on acid
Trying to fathom and determine the secret mysteries of life
He could have never believed that somebody would pay him to think
****
He was good at his job
He learned how to force himself to think logically
He had to continually think about all the possible things
That can go wrong in any programmable situation
And plan for it in advance
He had to be paranoid and logical at the same time
Every computer programmer he knew was paranoid to some degree
If they weren't paranoid they were no damn good and didn't last
He used to get locked up and loaded with tranquilizers
For being paranoid
Now it was almost like he was getting paid for it
****
He was the kind of employee that employers hire
Because they have an assuming notion that he will fit in
Be an acceptable cog in their little machine
Because he looks like he acts and thinks
Just like them
So they let him get his foot inside of their door
Only to find out that
He has no intention of fitting in
Or becoming part of them
And he has no intention of leaving
He just keeps showing up
Doing his job
Collecting his paycheck
**********
He started to drink heavily
Looking for the good times
The laugh outloud fun relief
The alcohol had fueled before
The drunks took on a darkened ugly moroseness
Frustrating smashed bottle escapades
That would eventually aggravate
Into a late night breakdown of anger
Requiring physical restraint
Nothing was working
Everybody was all over his case
People were abandoning him
In his eyes
People were letting him down
***
He started taking the pills
That he had stashed the summer before
Muscle relaxers topped off with downers
Mixing the shit with beers
He told the people at rehab
He needed the downers to calm down
Then went back and told them
He was having side effects
He was given muscle relaxers
For the side effects
He wanted to blot himself out
Smash himself over the head
With a chemical hammer
So he wouldn't feel a thing
***
He ran through the muscle relaxers
A month supply gone in a couple of days
Triple quadrupling the dosage
Taking them every couple hours
Until he felt stoned
He used the downers sparingly
They made him pass out
Wrecking the muscle relaxer high he had going
After three refills in three weeks
The guy at the pharmacy told him
That was enough
***
He couldn't get enough of the muscle relaxers
It was better than anything
He had ever gotten illegally on the street
The stuff made him spaced out
Dry mouth quiet stoned
Like he was tripping on acid
Without the boxed-in no end in sight fear
Lost mind paranoia
His body felt good
Like he was nestled in a cloud
He moved around like he was made out of paper
Colors intensified
Bright blurry
Opiated warm
Fuzzed around the edges
He wanted to be put on muscle relaxers
For the rest of his life
***
He had always heard about the breweries in Milwaukee
Stories about beer production plant tours
Walking through a vatted factory with a sloshing bucket
Drinking beer for free
He decided to go up to Milwaukee
Hit one of the breweries
Schlitz Pabst
There had to be breweries all over town
He didn't care which one it was
He wanted to get good and drunk
Right inside a brewery
Get so loaded
They would have to roll his ass out of there
He didn't care if the beer they were handing out
Was piss warm 89 cents a quart Old Bohemian
Made from tap water
Spigotted through a muddy green garden hose
He just wanted to get drunk
***
He could ride on a bus to Milwaukee
Leave on a saturday morning
Get there before noon
He estimated Milwaukee to be an hour walk
From one end of town to the other
He would start walking
Until he spotted a brewery
All he had to look for was a water tower
With a beer brand logo
He might even be able to hit a couple of breweries
Before it was time to catch the bus back
He'd have money in his pocket
After drinking for free all day
He could hit the Milwaukee bars afterward
Stay out there all night
Get the bus back to Chicago in the morning
Be back home before sunday afternoon
Make a nice weekend trip out of it
He had the whole thing figured out
***
He headed up to Milwaukee on a saturday morning
Woke up while the rest of the house was asleep
Got the first train out of town to downtown Chicago
He left the house with his shirt and jacket pockets
Stuffed with cigarette packs
He had a prescription pill bottle
With 15 downers and 25 muscle relaxers
He had nearly 40 dollars in his wallet
After he bought a round trip bus ticket
For Milwaukee
Cigarettes pills
39 dollars with change
And a round trip bus ticket
He was organized
He had a plan
He didn't tell anybody where he was going
Nobody was going to be able to fuck it up for him
The whole thing was bullet proof
This wasn't going to be
Another of those one way ticket excursions
Like in the past
Where somebody from back home
Had to bail his ass out of jam
There was no foreseeable way
Anything could go wrong
***
He rode on the bus up to Milwaukee
It was two three hour ride
Out of downtown Chicago
He had already put a dent
Into his supply of muscle relaxers
He sat placid in the bus seat
Thinking about when he got back home
About how he was going to regal his friends
With stories about his Milwaukee brewery adventure
He looked at the day as a scouting trip
Once he figured out what was going on
He could ringlead his friends
On a drink for free Milwaukee brewery system tour
He looked out the bus window
Taking in the half gray late April Wisconsin scenery
Feeling good about himself
Satisfied
Something was finally going to happen right
***
He got into Milwaukee around noon
As soon as he got off the bus
A black guy in the station spotted him
Walked along side of him
Trying to sell him drugs
He told the guy he was there to get drunk
The guy quit on the sales pitch
Gave him some crystal methedrine
Told him he could have it for free
He told the guy it was time
To go get drunk
***
He headed out into downtown Milwaukee
With the guy he met in the bus station
The bus had let him off
In the skid row wino section of Milwaukee
Seedy dive bars open for morning business
Package bag liquor stores
Empty bottles scattered broken along the sidewalk
He told the guy to lead the way
He bought rotgut wine and cans of beer
The two of them walked down the sidewalk drinking
When the beer and wine was gone
He bought some more
He spent the afternoon
Walking around the Milwaukee skid row with the guy
Drinking paperbag quarts bottles cans of beer
Richards Wild Irish and Mogen David maddog wine
Wherever the guy took him to buy alcohol
The place would go up into arms
When they saw the guy walking through the door
Barkeeps customers proprietors
Everybody yelling for the guy to get out
He figured the guy had been kicked out
Of every bar in the area
The guy kept laughing
Whenever somebody started giving the guy shit
The guy would point to the bag with the wine
Then say “Kool and the Gang”
He figured Kool and the Gang must of meant big times
In a backward ass rinky dink town like Milwaukee
He lost the guy somewhere in the late afternoon
He had spent all of his money
He didn't know where in the hell he was at
He had totally given up forgotten about
Trying to find a brewery
***
He decided to explore the Milwaukee skid row
Maybe there was a mission
Where he could get some food
He met up with a guy younger than him
A dirty faced burly kid
With snot running out of his nose
The guy offered to show him around
Took him out to a dry weed damp dirt clodded field
In the back of a factory
Where there was hot air coming out of the ground
Through a vented grating
A board was set along the heat exhaust vent
A half dozen kids were lying on the board
Teenage pre-teen runaway grubby raggedy little kids
Scrunched up together trying to keep warm
The guy he was with told him that
He could crash there with them
He told the guy it was too early for sleep
The dusk hadn't even turned over the dark yet
He split the last of his downers with the guy
The guy swallowed them without asking what they were
He told the guy to take some of the muscle relaxers
To ward off the cramps
The guy got scared
He told the guy the pills were nut house tranquilizers
The guy punched him in the face
He left them out in the field
He didn't have time to waste with idiots
It was just getting to be saturday night
He had a bus ticket in his wallet
To get back to Chicago
***
He tried finding the Milwaukee bus station
It was night
It was dark
The streets were lifeless
It was dead for a saturday
He didn't recognize anything
He finished off the last of his muscle relaxers
He was down to his last pack of cigarettes
It was time to get the hell out of there
***
He walked all over the downtown Milwaukee sidewalks
Fucked up drunk wasted lost
Speeding on methedrine
Trying to find the bus station
The evening turned into the middle of the night
It looked like sunday
He kept on walking
Like a robot
He was starting to pass out while he walked
His eyes would close
Then his consciousness would drop a notch
Transporting him into the random chaos
Of a dream state
He would awaken to a light flashing crash
A sudden face smashed startling jolt
When he inadvertently walked into the sides of buildings
Light posts
Newspaper stand kiosks
He walked right into anything
Blocking the path of the sidewalk
With his eyes closed
He readjusted himself
After each obstacle
Found a clear path to aim for
Closed his eyes
Then started walking again
He kept walking with his eyes closed
Slamming into things
Until he broke out a lens from his glasses
He started to look for a place to crash
Out of the cold damp frost night
A cop saw him turning doorknobs on a deserted building
Trying to find a door that would open
He was arrested by the Milwaukee cops
Taken to the police station
Charged with prowling
And attempted burglary
***
He went through the arrest proceedings
Moving through the Milwaukee jail processing area
With his eyes closed
He screamed at the cops
He told the cops that he was all fucked up
Out of his mind on drugs
Downers speed muscle relaxers alcohol
All he was trying to do was get to the bus station
So he could get the hell out of there
The cops thought the whole thing was a joke
He saw a lady cop laughing at him
***
He was thrown into a brightly lit
Steel door slot cinder blocked wall
Plexiglas observation window cell
He flattened his back onto the thin pad iron cot
Took off his smashed glasses
The black dotted white ceiling tiles
Looked like they were underwater
Swimming with spots
Of hallucinatory blue colors
He was glad to be somewhere dry
Off of the street
Where he wouldn't bump into anything
***
He sat out the sunday
In the Milwaukee jail
He had a court date on monday morning
Half fucked up wasted
Spillover from the day before
The time went by quick
It wasn't like downtown Chicago
Where hundreds of disorderlies
Were dropped off at the county jail
At 26th and California
Paddy wagons from every precinct in the city
All the saturday night derelicts in one place
For sunday morning holiday court
Everybody had a number written on their hand
Everybody was given the same instructions
When the number was called go up
Plead guilty
Then leave
He figured Milwaukee was running
The same kind of vagrancy rap
Sit the night in jail
Go to court
Plead guilty
Then leave
He half wondered if they were crazy enough
To actually charge him
With attempted burglary and prowling
***
He went to the Milwaukee court on monday morning
He was fined 125 dollars
For turning doorknobs on buildings in the middle of the night
He agreed to pay the fine in 30 days
He would have agreed to anything they said
He just wanted to get the hell out of there
He would never come back to fucked up town like Milwaukee again
He wasn't going to pay them anything
He waited after court to get his wallet back
The cops took his wallet when they hauled him in
He had a bus ticket back to Chicago
Inside of his wallet
He waited around at a counter for his belongings
He was aggravated out of cigarettes impatient
He had been detained in Milwaukee long enough
He dug his wallet out of the yellow envelope
He rifled the pocketed folds of his wallet
Tore open the envelope
His bus ticket was gone
***
He wanted his bus ticket back
He stood yelling at the cops in the jail
Stubbled dirty awake for two days tired
Wearing glasses that were missing a lens
He felt suddenly powerless
He was half blind
He couldn't lock hold of somebody's eyes
Freeze grip them in a glare
Let them know that he meant business
The cops threatened to re-arrest him
Told him to get the hell out of there
He said he wanted his goddamned ticket back
He remembered showing the bus ticket to the cops
The night they brought him into jail
He told them he was trying to find the bus station
He couldn't have lost the ticket
The cops took the ticket
Maybe the lady cop he saw laughing at him
Was trying to make sure
That he stayed in Milwaukee
***
He took the ticket mishap to be a sign
He wasn't meant to leave
He was supposed to stay in Milwaukee
Nobody knew he had gone up there
He would just vanish
Never go back
Just disappear
Like he was dead
He thought about everybody back home
Girlfriend
Cousins
Friends
Parents
Step brothers
Sisters
Nobody gave a fuck about him
He was a crazy pain in the ass
He had nothing to go back for
He flash forwarded ahead
Twenty years into time
Heard himself telling a story
About how he came to Milwaukee
Lost the bus ticket home
Been there ever since
***
He wanted to get off right in Milwaukee
He purposefully steered himself clear
Of the downtown skid row area
He found a government welfare office
Went in to find out about getting housing
Maybe some food to hold him over
Until he could get something going
He was told that he would have to wait
30 days before he could have an appointment
He knew that 30 days
Living outside
Without money food or shelter
Was the same as 100 years
He would never be able to make it
***
He walked around downtown Milwaukee
Everything was new
Clean like it all had just been built fresh
The people were scrubbed clean
Well dressed in warm layers
Light skinned light haired
Probably northern european descended
Milwaukee was swathed in an innocence
Naive to the rotting urban decayal
Devouring the maggoty core
Of major cities like Chicago
Milwaukee was waiting unaware
Isolated in an oblivion
Ready to be picked clean torn apart
Ripening for a scourging harvest
Of institutionalized poverty
Homelessness
Rampant widespread drug addictions
Alcoholism
Joblessness
The homey wholesome heartland holdouts
Were waiting to be discovered
By the rest of america
***
He spent the monday afternoon
Tramping the Milwaukee downtown office building sidewalks
Halfheartedly bumming cigarettes
From people he saw smoking
He watched the end of the workday downtown desertion
Files of workers scrambling
The pedestrian commuter maze for home
He wandered into the residential areas
Looked through the front of the house windows
Seen from the passing sidewalk
Lit with the open curtained warmth of table lamps
Televisions flickering the prime time
The neighborhood air marked with the smoky aroma
Sent from wood burning fireplaces
He walked past the houses until they were dark
Saw the occasional switch flipped muted glow
Through side of the house glass block windows
Signaling middle of the night half asleep
Trips to the bathroom toilet
He was shivering in the thin jacket
He had worn for a sunny spring saturday afternoon
It was a late April 40 degree Wisconsin night
A slow quiet rain started to fall
He headed for a highway underpass
Made his way up the slanted cement embankment
Found a flat two foot wide edge of muddy concrete
At the top of the embankment
With the bottom of the roadway
Running over it from above
He wedged himself into the flattened space
The underneath of the road inches from his head
He listened to the wet tire hiss sizzle of the cars
Driving across the roadway above him
The steel belted radial 50 mile an hour berrap noises
Of cars and trucks pushing through the night
Sometimes he even caught the sound of the radio
The roadway vibrate rattled
With the traffic overhead
An unending steady stream
Small vent holes cut into the edge of the overpass roadway
Spray dropped dirty highway rain water down onto his face
He gradually fell asleep
Wondering if a life like this
Was going to be worth living
***
He was institutionalized for the first time
When he was 19 years old
He was sentenced to spend no less than 90 days
At the state of Illinois psychiatric facility in Manteno
By a judge in the Will County courthouse
After he spent the weekend in the county jail
For missing a drunk driving court date several weeks before
He had went from his mother's home to downtown Chicago on a train
To watch a movie on a cold March saturday afternoon
He had been out of touch with reality for more than three months
That period had been filled with escapading insanity and energy
He wasn't sleeping and he was occasionally eating
He had been arrested for drunk driving
He had his new car stolen
He had lost his job
He had been arrested more than a dozen times
For the kinds of things where the cops let him go after a night in jail
He had taken two bus rides to Miami and walked around down there
With no money
He had pissed off and lost all of his friends
His family was sick of his bullshit and wanted no part of him
His mother saw that he was crazy and worried he'd end up dead
He was unsuccessfully trying to withdraw
From a year long drug and alcohol binge
He had been regularly abusing LSD mescaline and bootleg amphetamines
He had been smoking columbian marijuana hash opium and thai sticks
He had increased his drinking to the point
Where he started in the morning
Going to a movie seemed like a safe thing to do that Saturday
He left with enough money for the movie ticket and the train fare
He had enough money to get there and back
He went to see the movie version of Hair
He had been listening to the Broadway soundtrack album
Since he was a kid
He thought that the hippies had been a bunch of fakes and wimps
He wrote the words Sid Vicious with an ink pen
On the back of a tight fitting army jacket
He left the jacket in the theatre after the movie was over
He walked out into the cold still freezing early spring evening
In a t-shirt
He had been unable to feel the cold that winter
He often went without a coat
He went back to the train station and headed for home
He handed a pocketful of coins to the conductor on the train
For his fare
He was told by the conductor that he didn't have enough money
To buy a ticket back to the stop in the town where he lived
He was a dime short
He remembered the dime he had thoughtlessly and happily tossed
Into the dark noisy theater air
When a commercial was shown on the screen featuring a local radio dj
Making a joke about giving somebody a shiny new dime
He was told that he could buy a ticket to the stop before his town
There was seven miles of railroad track between the two train stations
A on the train woman offered to pay the extra dime he needed
For the ticket
The conductor told her no and refused to take it
He was put off the train at the stop before the one where he lived
He grabbed on to the side railings of the train when it took off
He jumped off the train when it suddenly stopped
After going a few hundred feet
He thought about walking the tracks back to his town
He decided to break into the locked station instead
A cop arrived after he tore off a window screen
The cop said that the train had called for him a half hour earlier
He was handcuffed after the cop ran his name over the radio
He had a warrant out for his arrest for missing a court date
He was taken to the Will County jail in Joliet 15 miles away
He was placed in a large lockup cell with some other men
He was yelling and screaming at the jail guards and corridor cops
He was climbing the cell bars and spitting on the floors and walls
Outside of the cell
He kept yelling that if he had to be in a cage
He was going to act like an animal
He stuffed a roll of toilet paper down into the toilet bowl pipe
He flushed the toilet
He watched the water flood over the sides of the bowl
He told the other people in the cell that if they had to shit
They were just going to have to hold on to it for a while
He took off the jail issue shirt he was given to wear
He ripped the shirt into shreds
He tied the sharded strips of his shirt around his waist like a belt
He was allowed to carry on like this for a couple of hours
He had been in this jail before
The cops knew he was a trouble maker
He was taken out of the holding cell and thrown into an isolation cell
He was put into the isolation cell naked
He spent the night and the next morning in the cell
Singing rock songs at the top of his lungs
He liked the way his voice sounded in the small concrete room
It was cold in the cell
There was nowhere to sit except on the toilet
He smeared his breakfast all over the cell walls
He tried to cover the small plexiglas window of the cell with food
The guards came in and smacked him around
When they saw what he was doing
It was sunday afternoon
He had to wait until the next day for court
He tried lying on his back on the cell floor
His tail bone hurt
It dug into the floor and it made him uncomfortable
He saw the deep scratch marks in the paint on the iron cell door
He started thinking that people were put in here forever
Never to be let out until they died
The sunday afternoon dragged on into sunday night
He was not given any lunch or dinner
After what he did with his breakfast
He was cold and uncomfortable naked on the cement floor
He started banging his head against the floor
Trying to find relief in the explosion of lights and colors
That he saw each time his head pounded into the floor
The monday morning jail guards kept looking in the small window at him
Naked and sitting on the floor
Like a captured animal
He finally went up to the window and let loose
In the loudest strongest and most powerful voice of his life
He shouted that if he wasn't given a blanket to cover himself
That he was going to kill everybody that worked in the jail
That got the attention of the guards
Six guards and a woman police officer stormed into the cell
He stood before them naked
He was ready for another round of sadistic beatings
He stood there with the guards for several minutes not saying anything
The guards had guns and clubs and handcuffs and shoes with heels
He was told that he would be given a blanket
If he agreed not to tear it up
He sat with the blanket over his head until it was time to go to court
He was given another set of jail clothes
To wear when he was taken into court
With the other prisoners
He was handcuffed to a jail guard when he was brought into court
He had been through this routine many times before
In the course of just a few months
He was convinced that he would be walking out of there free in an hour
When his name was called he stood before the judge
He was told that the court was committing him to a mental institution
He was taken out of the court and into an area in the jail
Where inmates talked to visitors
On a phone with thick glass between them
His mother was there waiting for him and she was crying
He yelled and cussed into the phone and across the glass at her
For having him put away
He told her he never wanted to see her again
He was taken back to the holding cell where he had spent the weekend
He was put back into the cell naked with only a blanket
While he waited to be taken to the mental institution
He was hoping that he would get there in time for dinner
Because he was getting hungry
***
He had heard about Manteno when he was a kid
About ten years before
His father was sitting in a drunken hung over stupor
With a cigarette dangling from his mouth
Squinting his eyes as the smoke trailed up into them
His father had recently been discharged from the VA hospital
His father's mother was yelling at his father
His father's mother kept asking his father
If he wanted to go to Manteno
He kept thinking about this
While he sat in the jail cell
Waiting to be taken to Manteno
****
He was driven in a police truck
From the Will County jail in Joliet
To the state psychiatric institution in Manteno
It still hadn't dawned on him where he was going
He thought a lot of things
During the hour drive from Joliet down to Manteno
He felt like he was being broken out of jail
On some wild escape adventure in the night
He thought that he had been the victim
Of some sort of sinister renegade government
That had taken over in place of the real government
And that he was being rescued by the real government
That had went underground and into hiding
He thought that he had made some kind of breakthrough
A psychic mental telepathic cosmic revelation
Brought on by the large quantities of LSD and sleep deprivation
And that he was being brought to place to be studied and tested
He thought this was like the movie
One flew over the cuckoo's nest
And he was being sent to free and liberate
The nuts that had been locked and withered away
In Manteno for years
He thought that this was some kind of initiation
Into a mental-physical guerilla army
That was one day going to do battle
With the evil government
That had silently taken the place of the real government
He thought that he was involved in something important
And he couldn't wait to find out what it was
It still hadn't dawned on him
That he was being sent to Manteno
Because he was dangerously fucking crazy
****
When he arrived at Manteno
The first thing they did was
Take his clothes away
He traded his t-shirt and levis in
For an oversized pair of green checkered polyester pants
And a brown acrylic shirt
He wasn't given any underwear to wear under the pants
He told the guy that gave him the stuff that
The pants were falling down and made his balls itch
The guy told him to stop acting
Like a punk popster
*****
He arrived on the ward
At evening medication time
He saw all of the patients
Lined up sheeplike
To take their medication from the nurse
The pills were swallowed down with kool-aid
Poured from a stainless steel pitcher
He started thinking about Guyana and Jim Jones
He wondered if
That was how the kool-aid was dispensed in Jonestown
*****
He noticed the people on the ward
A lot of them looked like foreigners
Dark bearded arabic jewish
Speaking in different languages
To themselves
He thought that maybe they were
Smuggled-in newly arrived under the table immigrants
That freaked out when they got to America
That had to be locked up until they cooled out
Until they got used to things in a strange country
He started thinking that the whole place was a front
For escaped russian dissidents
That were waiting to be assimilated into American life
He thought that these undernourished scraggily men
Were recent gulag escapees
Great intellectuals in the world wide struggle
To take back life from those that had stolen and denied it
And made it wrong
He couldn't understand their soliloquies
But their gestures hand waving restless pacing and quiet tones
Made it sound like they were saying something important
****
He met some of the other people on the ward
They all acted like they were glad to see him
Or any new person
The way people act
When they haven't been around other people for a long time
Then get all excited when somebody is suddenly there
They talked to him like they had known him
For a real long time
He thought that it seemed like they had been expecting him
****
He was told that he would have to go to sleep
By the ward staff
He was given a bed in the hallway
All of the beds in the men's sleeping rooms were filled
He told the staff not to worry or bother with getting him a bed
He told the staff that he never slept
He told the staff that he would be real quiet
And not make any noise
While the rest of the patients were sleeping
Two uniformed security guards were summoned to the ward
To hold his arms behind his back
While the 250 pound night nurse stuck a needle
Full of Phenobarbital
Into the back of his ass
*****
He was woken up at 6 o’clock in the morning
When the morning staff turned on all of the lights
To roust the patients from their beds
All of the patients were supposed to get up and make their beds
Then go into the day area of the ward
The rooms with the beds where the people slept
Where locked up during the day
All of the patients went up to the front desk
To get one of their cigarettes from behind then the desk
Then they waited for one of the staff
To screw the wall lighter into its socket
Then they all stood in a line
To light their cigarettes from the wall socket
The patients were allowed to have 1 cigarette before breakfast
Some of the patients didn't have any cigarettes behind the desk
They picked up the cigarette butts off of the floor
And relit them for what they were worth from the wall lighter
Or they took the lit butt from somebody that was at the end
Of the cigarette
And took it the rest of the way down to the filter
He had never smoked a cigarette before
He didn't even know how to smoke a cigarette
He was used to smoking pot from a bong
Then holding the smoke down into his lungs
Until his eyes flashed with light
Before he would let it go
He never saw the sense in wasting his time with tobacco smoke
****
He waited around for the two hours
With the rest of the patients
For the two hours
Between the time when the patients were woken up
Until they were able to have breakfast
Most of the patients were quiet
He was still dull from the shot
That the nurse gave him the night before
He was starting to get hungry
He thought that if they were going to lock him up like this
Then they would have to feed him
****
He saw people in the hospital
Older adults
That never worked a day in their lives
Wards of the state from day one
Didn't have to lift a finger
They let other people take care of them
Showed up at meal time
Lived comfortably
Swallowed their pills
Kept their mouths shut
He knew there was a free ride
Just waiting there to be taken
***
He thought the whole mental health thing was a scam
From the doctors to the nurses down to the patients
An insurance racket where people got paid
For doing nothing
A safe haven sanctuary for people unwilling to deal
With the harsh existence of the outside world
***
Psychiatry was an imprecise nonexistent
Fraudulent pseudoscience
Formed around a vaguery
Of ambiguous generalized terms
A ravel of arbitrarily loose
Double-sided word concepts
That could be coerce bent warp weld hoodwink nod framed
Into meaning anything
People getting paid to evaluate explain
The behavior of others
An unquestioned reality consensus opinion
A career scale confidence game
Built out of a phallic symbol mythology
By a coke hyper duplicitous viennese quack
Who thought that everybody wanted to fuck their own mother
***
The doctors didn't do shit
Rich men that bought their diplomas
From second rate foreign country universities
They signed their names on the bottom of forms
Shoved in their faces by the nurses
Asked the patients how they were doing
Then split before they even answered
His doctor ran around like Latka Gravas on crank
The nurses were glorified baby sitters
Filling out the forms
That kept the money pouring in
Keeping an eye on hospital property
Making sure that the patients didn't destroy everything
Keeping the place from going to hell in a hand basket
Most of patients were weak whine babies
Who would have been better off
Getting back out to face life
Instead of trying to shelter themselves from it
The patients that really needed the help
Were so far gone
They were beyond helping
***
He was sent one morning by the hospital
To a day care out patient treatment center
A place where a bunch of tranquilized bloated zombies
Sat around a table in a house
Doing occupational therapy art and craft ceramic work
He was told to check the place out
If he liked it he could go there each day
Then return to the hospital at night to sleep
That would be his life
He agreed to see what the place was about
Knowing that he wanted no part of it
Knowing they were all out of their fucking minds
The people that sent him there
And the people that spent their days there
***
He noticed the cumulative effects of the house immediately
A room filled with heavily downer dosed people
He was put under the stifling sedated oppression
He felt like he had been given a knockout punch to the head
Sock sand sapped from the blindside
His body ache weighted in a down drag
With a thick pounding heaviness
Something was draining the energy out of him
He was in a room full of low running brainwaves
An energy depleted lifeless vacuum
Like somebody had ripped the cord from its socket
He felt the thought torpor malaise saturate him
It would be impossible to combat the force
He started wondering if there was something in the air vents
Aerosol depressant spray chemicals
Surreptitiously pumped out
Into the atmosphere
***
He knew the outpatient house was a mental death
He stayed there for the morning
He was forced at the end of the ordeal
To sit in darkness for the last half hour
While a gruelingly dull film was projected onto a small screen
It was too much all at once for him
He hadn't sat still or focused a thought for six months
Now he was expected to sit quietly
With a table of reticent vegetables
In a crowd stuffed overflown room
Pretending to be comprehending a film
He listened to the moving mechanics
Of the projection machine pulling the film from the reel
Each click of the motor notching him closer
To the moment that he could get the hell out of there
Go back to the hospital and tell them
He wasn't interested in being a part
Of their outpatient daycare program
***
When he went home on saturdays
It gave his married woman girlfriend a chance
To have some quiet peace
Time to herself
While he was gone
She spent the day sleeping
Late relaxing getting caught up
Working on her finger nails
Peroxiding her hair
Doing the kinds of things
That a 32 year old woman thought she had to do
To be attractive to a 20 year old
***
His married woman girlfriend spent one weekend at home
Left early saturday morning
Stayed gone until sunday night
She came back with her husband
In tow with the guy that treated her
Like a stick of furniture
He watched the two of them together
He kept thinking about what it had been like
The king and queen of the prom
The Joe Stud quarterback football american hero
And the pumped up little blonde cheerleader
Straight off the slick glossy gray black white pages
Of a small midwestern town
1966 highschool yearbook
A whole life together ahead of them
He wondered what happened to them along the way
Three kids and 14 years later
It was inevitably bound to go wrong
***
He was issued a standing pass by his doctor
He was allowed to leave the hospital
For two hours each day
Most of the time he stayed in the hospital
Sitting around with his married woman girlfriend
He took her out with him a couple of times
She had no interest in his boundless wandering
He would start walking with no destination
Getting himself lost on the streets around the hospital
Walking without paying to attention to where he was going
He would landmark building navigate himself back
Not knowing where he had been
***
The two of them usually stayed on the hospital grounds
Sitting in back of the hospital
On the grass
Or on the railroad trestle stones
That crossed over the Kankakee River
He wanted to be there with her forever
He would get caught up in the time
Not noticing its passing
Afterwards sensing the loss
For what was then gone
***
The hospital worked with his mother
To find a place where they could send him
He was made to talk to various people
He signed his name at the end
Of stacks of printed forms
Right next to the X
Right where they told him to sign
***
He had no interest in the procedurals
He jam cram scrambled his thoughts
Full of nonsense
Whenever he dealt with the paperwork handlers
He wanted to let them know
They weren't going to break him
He wasn't going to be changed
He wasn't going to live
In their version of what the world should be
They were going to do
What they were going to do
He wanted to let them know
He didn't care what they did to him
***
He was set up with an interview
With an indian guy
That ran some kind of hospital home
His mother was hopeful he could go there
His mother got him going
On the idea
He was told it was place
Filled with people just like him
His own age
With problems like his
It would be a place
Where he could listen to music
Draw pictures
Maybe meet women that were his own age
***
He worked himself up
For the interview with the indian guy
When he heard the guy was an indian
He imagined the guy
To be some kind of hindi brahman
Steeped in the thousands of years
Spirituality wisdom traditions of the Rig Veda
Hare Krishna Bhagavad Gita
He wanted to make a good impression
He thought the man would give him a home
Where he could thrive
As himself
***
The indian guy was in his late 40's
Graying at the temples
Dressed like an american business man doctor
He was flying on three black bombers
When he met the guy
He had a huge wide grin
Spread out all over his face
He bowed out of respect
To the man
And the religious significance
He held for all that was India
***
He had the indian guy interview him
In the hospital radio room
He couldn't keep his hands
Off of the stereo receiver
Switching the channels
Stopping suddenly to quickly roll
The volume knob all of the way up
Then immediately back down
When he knew there was a moment
In a song
Where the sound of a single note
Was going to be left
Hanging in the air
He punctuate blasted the stereo
For less than a second
Amplifying the space
In between the echoes
At the end of Whole Lotta Love
Right before the guitar crunch kicked in
He wanted to show the indian some style
***
He couldn't maintain his excitement
While he spoke with the indian
Wound up hyper sped with overexuberation
He kept a grin on his face
Throughout the half hour talk
Answering each of the indian's questions
In turn
With a question
***
He bowed when the indian left
He felt like he had made a good impression
He felt like he had won the guy over
If the guy was running a home for weirdoes
The guy would have been able to see
That he was going to fit right in
***
He was disappointed to find out
He wasn't accepted by the indian
The indian wanted no part of him
He wasn't getting into the indian's home
His mother told him that
He completely turned the guy off
The indian left the hospital
Thinking he was a complete fucking idiot
The hospital people were pissed
Because they went to a lot of trouble
To set the whole thing up
He wondered what the problem was
He thought he was supposed to be
A complete fucking idiot
***
It was a warm Kankakee May that year
Everything was full leafy grown green
The sun cut a hot knife
Into the leftovers of the cold winter spring air
Letting the dampness escape from the ground
The crisp around the edges
Waited for the wilt
Of summer time's sluggish despondency
***
He thought about 10 years
Of illinois summers
He remembered that he was always depressed
Fighting his way through a struggling let down
A low
That he instinctively associated
With melting heat humidity
Sunstruck endless afternoon deadening brightness
***
The high he had been on
The elevated mood increasing energy swing
Since the end of autumn
Early winter
Thanksgiving to St Patrick's Day holiday binge stretch
Was running itself out
Nature would now take its course
The longer hours of daylight
Sent the message signal
It was time to come down
***
His married woman girlfriend was given
Her release date from the hospital
He knew about it for a couple of weeks
He let the time slip by
Unaccounted for
Not really thinking about it
Only the immediate was real
He was living in the moment
As long it was still guaranteed
He wasn't going to worry
About anything beyond that
***
His married woman girlfriend acted like
Her leaving the hospital
Was to be a temporary separation
She told him that as soon as she was out
She was going to come back
To the hospital
Take him out on an all day pass
Just the two of them
No hospital in the way between them
He let her make the plans
He wasn't going to waste his time
Thinking about the future
He wasn't going to waste his time
Thinking about something
He was no longer able to believe
***
His married woman girlfriend left the hospital
He fell into the gaping hole
Her absence left in his daily routine
He found that he was unable
To occupy amuse himself
Long ago exhausting
The hospital's possible potentials for diversions
He was bored aggravated listless
Argumentative irritable
Dried of amphetamines
He felt the hospital downers
Getting a hold on him
He was taking on weight
He sensed that he was sinking fast
***
He spent the days alone
Walking around Kankakee
On pass from the hospital
Walking without direction
Purposeless activity
Anything to make the time move
Seem like it was going faster
***
He hung out sometimes
With the puerto rican spanish mexican guy
From the hospital
The guy rigged up some kind of scheme
Living with a woman from town
As a combination handy man gardener chauffeur
He sat around mornings with the guy
In the woman's garage
Drinking quarts of beer
He quit going there after the guy snapped
Hurled a half full bottle of beer against the wall
Right in the middle of a sentence
Squared off in a boxing stance
Knuckle up fist fight bobbing
Snake eyed slant
Talking about c'mon motherfucker
He was too relaxed off guard surprised
To do anything but try to calm the guy down
When the guy got back halfway to normal
He slowly backpedaled his way out of the garage
Got his ass back to the hospital
Feeling weak helpless
And useless
***
He was put on the Public Aid welfare roll
His hospital bill was piling up
Everyday was hundreds of dollars
Billed to his mother's work insurance
Three months worth of itemized charges
Five yards of continuous paper
With no end in sight
He was given a green card
Which would be used
To pay for his medical expenses
The hospital was working fast
To get him out of there
The Public Aid medical card wasn't going to bring in
The kind of money
That could be had
From a patient covered with an insurance policy
***
His married woman girlfriend came back to the hospital
Just like she said she would
To take him out for the day
He met her down in the hospital parking lot
He was going to reap into the harvest
Two months worth of sown desires
Spent sitting patiently by her side everyday
He had kept his hands off her
He had kept his mouth shut to the other patients
Now he was going to get his reward
He was going to spend the day
In a fourteen dollar Kankakee motel room
With another man's wife
***
The hospital caseworkers were closing
In on a deal
To have him sent
To a nursing home
In Chicago Heights Illinois
It was one of the few long term care facilities
That took in people
Covered by Medicaid
He tried imagining a nursing home
He kept thinking of one story ground level wings
With dormitory type rooms
He wanted to know if he could bring his albums
Along with his stereo
A pair of headphones
And a case of books
***
He thought about the night his car was stolen
He woke up in the back seat of a police squad
The cops told him that they had arrested him
Trying to get into a nursing home
He had tried often to discern the meaning of that
A premonition hidden amongst the unknown
The secret buried in a subconscious act
For one who already felt old
Tired of life
Receding
Ready to withdraw
From an outside society
That he did not want to be a part of
The middle of the night black out
Nursing home break-in abort drama
Would now reveal itself
As an inescapable reality
***
He had several weeks to wait
Before he would be sent to the nursing home
He thought little about the nursing home
Half way looking forward to it
Vaguely projecting occasional scenes
Across an idle moment of imagination
Trying to envision what it would be like
He was too far set
In three months of hospital ways
To think of anything else
***
Comments
*********************************************
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
***
***************************************************
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
***
***************************************************
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
****
******************************************************
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
**
***********************************************
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)
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
****************************************************
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
***
******************************
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
*********
*************************************************************
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
****
******************************
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
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
******************************
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
*******
*****************************************
His sole hospital preoccupation
Became his married woman girlfriend
He was right next to her
As soon as she came out of her room
In the morning awakened
Fresh from fussing around in the mirror
With a blue eye shade shadow layer of cosmetics
He was right by her side
Never farther than a voice away
Stayed next to her the whole time
Until the night staff told them
It was time to knock off for the day
They did everything together
Except sleep in the same room
***
He never had somebody
That he could totally pour himself into
Somebody that could put up with him
For hours at a time
Without getting tired of him
He had never in his whole life
Gotten this close
Wide opening himself up to another person
He always kept a permanent wedge chasm stakelike
Driven between his innermost thoughts
And those that were around him
***
The woman thrived on the exhaustless attention
He was just what she needed
They were both in a cut-loose devoid of responsibility
Dream floating through a hospital ward inactivity limbo
They had nothing whatsoever to do
Just sit around talk smoke cigarettes together
Wait for the meals to be served
He was able to accomplish
What her husband hadn't been able
The husband that was too busy working a job
Combating the daily bullshit of the outside world
The thankless breadwinning provider
Out there breaking ass
On a consistent reliable everyday basis
To keep a foot on the mountain of bills
Carrying the load of a two car home
With three kids and an unhappy wife
The husband that treated her
Like a stick of furniture
Didn't have a chance
***
The woman kept telling him
She was going to be seeing him
After the hospital was a long gone
Almost forgotten part
Of both of their pasts
He told her that they weren't going to let him out
Until he was a bloated stiff armed silent zombie
Tranquilized into a suicide inspiring depression
That was the only way
His family could tolerate him
The woman told him that
He didn't have to go that way
She was going to help him get through
She showed him a large pharmacy prescription bottle
Stashed in the makeup case pocketbook jumble of her purse
Filled with amphetamine diet pills
The two dollar a hit black cadillacs
Black bombers
Black molly speeders
That he had seen before on the street
She told him that she got it from her sister-in-law
She would give him two of the pills each day
She told him that he had to keep his mouth shut
He wanted to know if she could get more
***
He had never felt better in his life
He had found a medication combination routine
That was finally going to work
He slept straight through each night
Knocked black into a dreamless cold death
On the Loxitain tranquilizers
He cleared out the morning cobwebs
With coffee and muscle relaxers
He popped a couple of speeders after breakfast
Then sailed right through the day
The automatic pilot flying
On cruise control
He was able to get laugh out loud drunk
On saturday passes with his family
He was able to get a buzz on
From occasional joints and roaches
Smuggled in and passed off to him
By other patients and their visitors
The hospital staff didn't know what was wrong
Whatever they were doing wasn't working
The doctor told his family
Things weren't looking good
There was no change or abatement in his behavior
***
He had a new guy moved into his room
His other roommate left unceremoniously
Woke up had breakfast then split one day
Having completed a court enforced 30 day stay
The new guy was from a nearby town
A couple of years older than him
A born thief and a natural liar
A lazy slouching whining bastard
The kind of guy that borrowed things
With no intention of ever returning them
The kind of guy that inventoried other people's belongings
Mentally cataloging all that was there for the taking
He had nothing in the room
Beyond the trenchcoat and hat he showed up with
And a couple of days change of clothing
He still managed to lose a shirt and a pair of sox
To the lousy worthless son of a bitch
***
He became friends on the ward
With a puerto rican mexican cuban guy
The guy kept promising to get him some pot
The guy came off like some kind of low leveled gangster
Without ever coming out and saying
That's what he was
The guy would talk normal until a staff member came around
Then the guy would start bird arm wing flapping
While bounce balancing shifting weight
On one solidly floor planted foot
Slow motion stop moving
Back leg swung back suspension
Air hang drop kick ready paused
Saying the word bubblelicous
Laughing in their faces
The guy thought americans were stupid little babies
Television commercials revealed them
For what they were
The hospital people were in a leery fear of the guy
The guy cheeked then spit out the hospital pills
The guy never said why he was there
***
*************************************************************************
From a pages 366-372 of “A Dungeon of Days”
*************************************************************************
He molded his week
Around the two college classes
That used up tuesday and thursday mornings
He skipped the drunken hang out
The nights before class
Spent the evening skimming the textbooks
Going to bed early
He spent school day afternoons
Horse breaking with his cousin
He set aside each wednesday
For the visit from his married woman girlfriend
The rest of the week he was free
To go out get drunk stoned with his cousins
Crash deep into morning early afternoon
Awaken slowly to the alcohol marijuana blearies
Sit alone in the house
Recopying the notes he wrote in class
He found umbrage in the schedule
The busyness gave him less time
To think about killing himself
***
He watched the daylight recede
Dusk drawn shadowed five o'clock dinnertime
The gradually percepted cooldown
The dried leaf winds of october
The slow death dramatic autumn spectacle
Nature transforming itself into a winter
He felt a stirring energy for life
Growing in the memory of dark november nights
It always held out a hope
Of something that was promised for him
If the seasons could change
Then maybe his life could change too
***
Every wednesday for four months
Had been spent with his married woman girlfriend
She left her three kids to fend for themselves
Drove the hour out to his house
Bought a motel room for the afternoon
Loaded him up with diet pills alcohol and sex
She drove through the rush hour back home
After they had gotten their fill
Of each other
Some weeks she showed up
For an extra day
Sneaking around out in the open
Too obviously clockwork predictable
A careless flaunt in the face
Of the required clandestine
He kept wondering where the end was
For all of the fun he was having
He knew that this was no way
For a married mother with children
To be carrying on
***
His married woman girlfriend's husband
Had been gone away all summer
Out of town construction job working
In another state
Her husband didn't take long
After getting back home to family life
To realize that something wasn't right
The guy's wife came home sloppy disheveled
On two consecutive late wednesday afternoons
Half bombed laughing mascara smeared
Negligee stuffed inside of purse
Disappearing for the whole day
Unaccounted to unknown thereabouts
She arrived at his house the next wednesday
With a rusty metal magnetic key case
A spare pair stashed in the car underside
For locked out of the car disasters
She told him that her husband took the keys
Without remembering the emergency set
She said she was going to fix that bastard
He momentarily startle flashed with the vision
Of an irate out of control fixed bastard husband
Busting down an afternoon motel room rendezvous door
Brandish ladening spiked baseball bats
Sharp machete hatchet blade knives
Bullet full double barreled guns
For all he knew
The guy might have followed her
Maybe was seconds away
From a blind fury rampaging stormtroop
Into the living room of his parent's house
He told her to turn around
Get in the car
She had to go
Don't look back
Haul ass back home
The wednesday afternoon game was over
***
He started to miss the married woman
He was forced to take a face slap sobering stare
At the botch stalled relationships
He had going with the people in his life
His interaction with those around him was quagmired
In an unnaturally choked meaninglessness
He never talked with length or depth
To anybody that he knew
Emotionally silent frozen abort truncate
He heard the few words that he spoke
Pin drop quietly to the bottom
Of a well of empty insignificance
Shut off closed down mistrusting
He was unable to look anybody in the eye
He was noticeably nervous
Almost in a petrified knotted cast
In fear of other people
He was the only one that knew
How far he had receded
Into his loneliness
***
He waited a blank month
Dull walking numb
Through the days lost irretrievably
Before calling up the married woman
A beggarly salvage for scroungeables
In the consensual aftermath
Maybe there could be one more
One more
One more last time
This time she was the one
That had to say
It was all over
***
He came to a loose formal agreement
A grudgingly mumbled verbal acquiesce
With the girl he had been hanging around with
When he went out nights with his cousin
Instead of drunkenly messing around with her
Whenever he haphazardly ran into her
He was going to be her boyfriend
With all of the responsibility
To commitment that was implied
He would be calling her on the telephone
Making arrangements to meet her
Going out to her family's home
Getting the once-over from her mother
***
His new girlfriend's mother
Didn't want him anywhere
Around her daughter
She told him over the telephone to quit
Calling for her daughter
Click cutoff dropping
The receiver down into his ear
The old lady knew
He was a never amount to anything bum
A whipped down beat back mongrel maggot dog
Shamelessly lacking self-esteem
A freeload plundering cadge
Without a job a car or a future
Looking to pillage on her daughter
Her daughter didn't work or have a car
Scraped loose change together for cigarettes
Spent all of her time figuring out ways of getting high
Came home drunk every night of the week
And she slept late
They were both a couple of losers
He wondered why her mother had a problem with him
***
He went out on double dates
With his new girlfriend
The two of them tagged along
With her older sister
And whatever stiff
The sister had lined up for that week
His new girlfriend's sister was a hustler
Out on a single purpose determined scam
For a good time
He became an unwitting accomplice through association
It meant a free ride for him and his new girlfriend
Driven around by some trying to be a nice guy chump
Stereo cranked saturday night car backseat oblivion
The two of them ripped loose from their senses
Partaking in the generously offered dope
Alcohol free flow available abundant
Most of the doubledate saturday nights were lost wasted
Neither of them knew where in the hell they were at
Or where they were going
***
He went out on a cold early winter weekday night
With his cousin to watch
The John Belushi Blues Brothers movie
The movie had taken on a synchronotous importance for him
The random coincidental purpose found
In the unrelated happenstantial crossings
Occurring along the impersonalized paths of chance
He walked into the movie theatre
Remembering a saturday afternoon
A year and a half earlier
Spent sitting in the dark
For the last 15 minutes
Of a two day Continental Trailways bus ride from Texas
The bus gridlock parked
In the commandeered underground tunnels
Of downtown Chicago Lower Wacker Drive
Unable to proceed to the bus station
All traffic temporarily on police barricade hold
For the filming of a John Belushi movie the driver said
He thought of himself sitting on the bus
Waiting for the traffic to loosen itself
Aware of the momental extension of his anxiety
Returning home for the drunken driving court date
That guaranteed the certain revocation of his drivers license
He had spent four months hiding in Texas
Unable to face anybody that he knew
Following his first psychotic disruption mental ward hospitalization
He knew then that the end of the bus ride
Meant the end of the darkest days of his life
Whatever was ahead would have to wait a few more minutes
In the carnival frivolous atmosphere of hollywood movie making
He sat in the dark of the theatre thinking
About a yellow hazed glare day 11 months before
Rolling up to the gates of the Joliet Illinois Stateville Penitentiary
In a fence building work pickup truck with his friend
The movie studio production semitrailer trucks
Parked outside the buildings inside the prison
The excited gatekeeper guard said that
They were making a John Belushi movie
He sat in the theatre reminiscently aware of how
He had kept glancing at the movie trucks
That day in the prison while he worked
Overwhelming in a sudden personal realization loss
Of dot sized insignificance
He had went from a deep bottom
After coming back from Texas that summer
To a flat lining settled unsatisfying low
He was desperate for something to shake loose in his life
He was still clutch clinging to that desperation
Nearly a year later
He watched the movie unfold upon the theatre screen
Vaguely aware of its content
He wrapped the previous year and a half of his life
Around the back of his mind into a circle
With the movie marking
The significant points of reflection along the way
He saw the night as a culmination
The third point in the triangle
Of a journey
Along a deadend circuitous route
Out and around and back again
On a road that had taken him nowhere
He walked out of the theatre with his jacket open
Embracing the chill night air
His breath a long pulled train of billowing frost
Black winter sky myriad speckled in points of star bright
The trip was over
He knew it was time for his life to change
****
****************************************************
He kept up his wednesday motel room appointments
With his married woman girlfriend
The whole thing was becoming boring
Dull predictable
The soul depleting unvarying staid exercise
Of two people using each other's body
Chasing placid escape in the carnal
The only thing that he cared about
Were the alcohol pills and smoke
Available with the occasion
***
Each week he saw his married woman girlfriend
He sensed the intransible gulf between them widening
Each week that he saw her
He felt himself farther away
The bridge of a 12 years age difference between them
Taking on a flagrant appearance
With her escalating use of makeup and hairdye
False eyelashes fake fingernails multi-colored eyeshadow
Little girl fake dressup imposter costumes
The garish ridiculousness sickened him
He wanted to tell her
To get rid of all that shit
It was time to go back home
To be a mother to her children
And a wife to her husband
But he still wasn't ready
To let go of the only thing that he had
***
He had a built in auto-destruct mechanism
For as long as he could remember
Which had a way of deliver rescuing him
From any seemingly impossible to reconcile situation
That he needed an immediate way out of
No matter how hard he tried to keep going
Another part of him was working secretly
Circumvent undermining
Looking for a way to sabotage
Fuck up everything in a totaling completeness
So that whatever he was doing
Was brought to an abrupt screeching skid end
All it took was the first thought
The acknowledgement that he was sick of the shit
Then another part of him took over
He learned at these moments
To let his common sense reasoning step aside
Get out of the way
Stand back watch with bemused marvel
Let one part of himself
Destroy another part of himself
***
He started hanging around with a girl
A year older than he was
On his nights out at the barn with his cousin
She was one of three sisters
That were running around with his cousins
It was a wordless attraction
Built on a mutual indifference
They found themselves
Thrown together by circumstance
Night after night
Stoned drunken into a useless stupidity
Left alone in a hayloft
Conversation was unnecessary
They both needed somebody
That they could grab hold of in the dark
He started showing up
For his wednesday get-togethers
With the married woman from the hospital
With barn straw in his pants
From the night before
***
The girl he was hanging around with
Had an older sister
A tough little broad
With two kids
Fresh hatched from a marriage
With a guy that was supposed to have been
A dope fiend pusher wife beating maniac
The older sister had went around
On an angel dust binge
Wound up OD'd in a paramedic run
Then got carted off to a psych ward
She made jokes about taking Thorazine
Like there was nothing wrong with it
He was hoping that maybe
He could hook up somehow
With the older sister
***
He never talked about what had happened to him
He never heard the behind the back gossip about it
He never knew for sure
What people had been told about him
The girl he was hanging out with
Told him about her older sister
About how she had flushed her whole life
Down the toilet
Bad decisions bad men bad drugs
Two daughters in a perpetual tow
A road of ruinous squalor
Laid out before her
He listened to the story
Didn't think that it was so bad
After all of the shit he had been through
He wondered what she thought about him
***
He headed out on a saturday morning
In a car that his cousin had borrowed
Up to Alpine Valley Wisconsin
For an REO Speedwagon concert
They had a cooler with ice packed around beer
A bottle of vodka in a paper sack
A nickel bag sized tin foil wrapped stash of pot
Along with a half-assed set of directions
They hauled the couple of hours through Illinois
Swilling beer from the can
Smoking bowls through a resin clogged pipe
Windows cranked open to the rushing wind
Pacing themselves
They missed the turnoff for Alpine Valley
Kept pushing steadily north
Cruised through the Madison exits
Going hours out of the way
Until they started seeing signs for Green Bay
He knew they had overshot the mark
Didn't say anything
Neither of them seemed to care
The open road rolling out under the car
The motion with speed was a welcome release
They decided to turn back around near Green Bay
Figured if they kept pushing on
They could still make the show
A speeding ticket detour cost them a couple of hours
His cousin's boss wired the money to get them going again
They fought the saturday evening Wisconsin highway traffic
Pulling into the concert parking lot
To see that everybody was just leaving
His cousin got nailed for speeding again
Just short of the Illinois border
He slept in the damp car outside of the police station
While his cousin banshee howl wolf barked all night
In the small town Wisconsin jail cell
He woke up in the morning to his aunt and uncle
Pounding on the car windows
They took the unopened bottle of vodka
Put the rest of the beers in the trunk of their car
He didn't bother listening
To his uncle's sunday morning parking lot ranting
He already knew
The whole thing was going to be his fault
***
His cousin was three years younger than him
His cousin and his cousin's year older brother
Had been one of the few constants in his life
Since his family had moved back to Illinois when he was 10
His two cousin's were his best friends
He used to think that they were
Almost like younger brothers
After his first crack-up he noticed
His cousin's started treating him differently
They looked down on him like he was
A condescent black sheep uncle
That was almost embarrassing to have around
***
He liked hanging around with his younger cousin
His cousin would do all of the talking
When they were alone together
He listened to his cousin talk
He felt comfortable knowing
That he wasn't expected to provide a response
It seemed like his cousin's talk was thinking
An out loud incongruous ramble of words
An in progress redefinition of ideas
A selfclarification
That nobody was ever supposed to hear
Sometimes while his cousin was talking to him
He caught the look in his cousin's eye
A quick frozen bolt of bewildered fear
He knew that his cousin wasn't ever sure
If he was really there
***
He knew that he made other people uneasy
When he let their words trail off into dead silence
He would hear their words
But he had nothing to offer in return
No reassurance for them
That he was in agreement or understanding
He had no way of letting them know
That he had even heard what they said
***
He remembered the first time he met his cousin
His cousin's family pulled a fold-up camping trailer
Across the country from Illinois
Out to his family's home
For a 1968 california vacation
He went with his sisters to a camp grounds
For a weekend with his cousin's family
His cousin spent the whole time with a fishing pole
Sitting huddled on the bank
Of the narrow creek
That swirled muddy water through the camping grounds
Steadfast determined through dirt streaked tears
His cousin refused to accept
There wasn't a fish anywhere near the place
His cousin looked like a little old man to him
Hunched in a green illinois flannel shirt
Waiting for the big one
That was never going to be there
He always thought of his cousin after that
As a wrecklessly hopeless dreamer
***
He went with his cousin to buy a horse
Somebody unloaded a three year old on his cousin
A nervous skittish temperamental moody animal
That had never taken a bit
He was supposed to help his cousin break the horse
He stood like a dried lump of turd
Fingers fumbling in the bottom of his jacket pocket
When the vet came out to do the gelding
White sausage horse parts in a ziplock plastic bag
The cold wasteful destructiveness sickened him
***
He spent the afternoons with his cousin
Out of kicking distance
While his cousin brush combed the horse
Ran the rope tied horse in hours of circles
Slowly leading the horse's head into a halter
His cousin was working out of a book
Full of horse dreams and horse plans
The horse got meaner and crazier
He figured that the horseshit strawbale hay
In the barn they were hanging around
Had finally gone to his cousin's head
***
************************************************
He put up his last fence
At the Joliet State Penitentiary
It was an 18 foot fence around a basketball court
In the prison exercise yard
He rode up to the prison
In a fence truck full of empty beer cans
Ashtray full of roaches and half smoked joints
The guard at the gate took one look into the truck
Tools and equipment scattered
All over the cab and in the back of the truck
The guard said there was no way they were
Getting into the prison
They drove back down the road
Threw out all of the empty beer cans
Straightened out all of the tools
Then drove back to the prison
The guard let them into the prison
The fence was being put up
Next to the prison commissary
The prisoners stood in line waiting for commissary privileges
Some of the prisoners drifted over
To where the fence was being put up
They wanted to know if he was getting time
For putting up the fence
The prisoners assumed that he was a con
The guard up in the tower
Overlooking the yard
Must have assumed he was a prisoner also
He kept his rifle on his shoulder
Pointing down on him and his friend
While they worked
They were the only ones
In the yard
****
He spent several days working at the prison
In the afternoons he saw the prisoners
In the exercise yard
Next to the basketball court where he was working
The black guys pumped bars
Loaded with immense rolls of iron weights
With arms that were bigger than both of his legs
Skinny long stringy haired
Burnout hippy white guys
Pitched horseshoes at iron stakes
Sticking out of the ground
Their bell bottom blue jeans
Dragging through the dirt and dust
The rest of the whites
And the browns
Were involved in a game of softball
Loud with cheering and hustling
He thought that the basketball games must have been the same
Short explosion bursts
Of locked up energy and emotion
That needed an eighteen foot .6 gauge chain link fence
To surround and contain it
To keep it from spilling out all over
The prison exercise yard
****
He sensed a sinister evil at the prison
Something lingering from the 1930 or 40's
A legacy of apparitous terror
On the part of inmates guards and prison officials alike
Part of past that conspired
The old black and white prison movies
He watched late at night on television as a kid
He thought about Jack Palance and Burt Lancaster
Busting out of jail
In the dark cool Joliet run away to freedom midnight
Of some imagined half awake long ago
He thought about the real life monsters
Like Richard Speck
Housed somewhere inside of those prison walls
While he was working out in the yard
He wondered where they kept Speck
He wondered if Speck had a window
Or a view of the yard area
He wasn't afraid of the inmates he saw
Out on the prison grounds
He was afraid of the malignant spirit
That seemed to live all over the prison
Leaving everything inside quiet empty and dead
****
He wondered how old the prison was
It looked like it was built
Back in the 1920's
Designed from some blue print
Left over from the middle ages
Of inquisition wracked tortuous revenge
Iron chains
Hangman scaffolding
Guillotine electric chairs
The prison was made out of distinct yellow bricks
Rough cut bulging rectangular oblong misshapen masses
Custom chiseled from the same quarry
Made to order
In sizes varying
As large as an automobile
And as small as a fist
Piled into a fort like wall
That looked 40 feet high
Blocks long on every side
Capped with rusty barbed wire
And castle like shotgun guard towers
The building was meant
To exude and represent punishment
Deterrence in the form of fear
To whatever was concealed beyond those walls
He noticed that the same bricks were used
To build the high school
Across town from the prison
In Joliet
***
Vehicles entering the prison
Had to park in a doubledoored bay
Over a walkway with steps that went
Under the vehicle
To allow the guards to check for prisoners
That might be hiding on the underside
Of the vehicle
Nobody ever checked under the fence truck
For a prisoner
He wondered if the walkway was always there
Or if it was installed
After some guy rode out of the prison gates
On the underneath of some truck
****
He saw a movie truck in the prison
One of the days he was putting up the fence there
A guard said it was for a John Belushi movie
He kept looking at the studio truck while he worked
He thought about the summer he had spent
Down in Texas
After he had gotten out of the hospital
He thought about the couple of months
He had been working around Joliet with his friend
Everything started seeming empty useless and boring
He was wallowing insignificance
Perpetuating meaninglessness
Wondering when change would set itself free into new motion
****
He was officially laid off of work
A couple of weeks after the fence was installed
In the Joliet Prison
Work had quickly slowed down from every other day
To half days to an hour a day
He went down and filed for unemployment
He was told he would be paid
200 hundred dollars every two weeks
That was enough for his car payments
With enough left over for drinking
He found out that his friend and his boss
Were going to be working all that winter
Inside the prison
Putting a fence around the multi-storied tiered railings
Because an inmate had thrown a guard over the rail
The work at the fence company didn't really stop
It had just dried up for him
*****
He quickly established his unemployment check collecting routine
He woke up late morning early afternoon
Sat around the house alone watching television
Went out to the bars at night with his friends
To get drunk
And chase women
He had no responsibility
He was 20 years old
Living at home with his mother
He had no hope or thought about the future
He made payments on a car
That was sitting in the driveway
Parked
He put down the names of bars that he drank in
On his unemployment forms
As the places that he applied for work
He just wanted to get and stay drunk
To make up for lost time
To heal and smooth over
All the rift rough spots
That had come before
Between him
His family and his friends
He wanted to erase the ever present feeling
In his mind
That tortured gnawing paralyzing fear
That told him
Everybody from now on
Foremost and first off
Would think of him as being crazy
He was now and forever to be regarded as a nut
He would never be considered normal
In the eyes and minds of anybody that knew him
Again
He wanted to make everybody around him
Forget his past
And let him escape from it
****
He was still depressed
More than 7 months after being released from the hospital
Work had kept him busy
Too tired and too worn out
To consider suicide
Now that he was left idle again
The suicidal escape thoughts returned
****
He started to think that the weight
That he had piled on
In the hospital
Was the reason for his continual
Unabated depression
He was convinced that
The forty extra pounds
He had been carrying around
Was causing some kind of physio-mental disturbance
Larding his mood and outlook
His energy and thoughts clogging up
Dense with the saturation of fatty deposit despondency
He decided that the weight had to go
Every afternoon he put on 2 pairs of pants
5 layers of t-shirts sweat shirts and a jacket
Then climbed into his old railroad winter coveralls
He would put a stack of old rock and roll albums
On the family stereo turntable
Then he would run in place while the music played
He would run until the music stopped
Soaking through all of the layers of clothing
After he stopped running
He spent another hour sitting in a steaming bath tub
Filled up to the top with hot water
He was at home all alone during the day
Nobody knew that he was doing this
He ate one small meal each day
Then drank beer all night with his friends
He was able to sweat off 35 pounds in a month
****
He started to feel better gradually
As the weight soaked and dried salt into his exercise clothes
He started to feel like his old self
His mental frame reflected in his changing physical appearance
He had more energy
Drinking became enjoyable again
Instead of burying himself in a stuporous withdrawn silence
He was talking to people again and laughing
Almost able to forget
For a while
All of the misfortune he had brought
Down upon himself
He went into the winter
Thinking this was the best he had ever felt
In a life flavored with depression and unhappiness
****
He became friends with a woman
He would meet at the bar
During his nightly drunken escapades
She was 5 or 6 months pregnant
Impending motherhood in its showing glory
The father-to-be wanted no part of the outcome
He met her through his friend’s sister
He worried that she might find out that he had gone nuts
He worried that she already knew he had gone nuts
He wasn't sure what she expected from him
He was obviously a drunken fuckup
No job living at home collecting unemployment
He half wondered
During increasingly less frequent sober thoughts
If he could take care of himself a woman and a child
He realized that only a person
With more problems than his own
Was ever going to have anything to do with him
He liked being with her
She kept him calm and he was able to relax
When he got drunk enough
He let her take him for rides in his car
So that he could listen to car stereo
****
His mother got remarried at the end of that year
To a guy that lived across town
With his two sons
In bachelor pad mechanic grease all over everything squalor
He moved into a new home
With his mother his stepfather and his two stepbrothers
He drank a fifth of vodka on the moving day
Got so drunk that he was dropping everything he carried
He was happy
He thought that he was getting the brothers that he never had
He thought that he was getting the father that he never really had
The new house had a family room
With a bar and barstools
He bought all kinds of bottles of booze
Bar glasses a blender and a Mr. Boston drink book
He filled the closet shelves with his hundreds of rock record albums
He spent the first few nights up all night in the family room
Drinking and listening to music
His whole family was celebrating
It was Christmastime
His mother had just remarried
The two families had moved into a new house
His younger sisters were staying at the house for the holidays
He was so loaded that he had bruises
From falling over and banging into things
He got so drunk that he couldn't stand up
He thought that this was the way things were always going to be
****
He spent an unemployment check on a new year’s eve party
He bought a halfbarrel of beer
All of his friends and his stepbrother’s friends came over
The house was full of people
He played albums all night
Then threw the records on the floor when they were done playing
There was spilt beer and quarter full plastic cups of beer
All over the house
He wanted every night to be like that
****
Everybody in the house went back to work
At the start of the year
He was wound up from the end of the year christmas celebrating
Nobody bothered to tell him that the party was over
He stayed up all night listening to music and drinking
While his family was trying to sleep for work the next morning
He drank up all of the christmas gift bottles of whisky and scotch
He drank up his parents vodka and then tried refilling the bottles
With water
He had people over every night of the week
Every morning the family room of the house was strewn
With beer cans ashtray garbage and people
That got too drunk passed out unable to leave
He emptied all of the swill
From the opened beer cans that he found
Into a large mug
Then guzzled it down to start the day
When everybody left for work
He started scheming around for a way to get drunk
He was usually broke
He got a $200 unemployment check every two weeks
He would spend it all in a couple of days
Then he would scrounge around broke
Pilfering loose change from the couch seat cushions
Until he got the next one
He wasn't sleeping very much
He would pass out for an hour or two then be awake
He wasn't eating very much
He would drink a glass of beer with salt and a raw egg for a meal
He was having too much fun to notice
That his family was getting tired of his bullshit
Real quick
****
He was still seeing his pregnant girlfriend
When he met another woman in his town
He met her at the gas station
She asked him to help push her car up to the pump
Because it was out of gas
He had just came from the grocery store
Where he cashed in two bags of soda pop bottles for money
It was one of the rare times that he went driving in his car
It was the middle of January winter outside
He was running around sweating without a coat on
He had just put some gas in his car and was in a hurry
To get some beer with his pop bottle money
He pushed her car told her where he lived and invited her over
Without even looking at her or noticing her
He had forgotten all about her when she showed at his parent’s house
A few nights later
He was getting drunk with his friends
And his pregnant girlfriend's older brothers
His pregnant girlfriend was sitting on his lap
When the woman that he met at the gas station walked in
That was the last time that he saw his pregnant girlfriend
When his pregnant girlfriend left
With her brothers that night
They told him that he had better never bother her again
The woman that he met at the gas station spent the night with him
In the family room of his parent's house
After everybody else had left
****
His new girlfriend was a hustler
A con rip-off artist woman
That could get away with anything
Because of the way she looked
She was the kind of woman that drove away
From the gas station without paying
He couldn't believe anything that she said
She said she was married to a big mean harley biker gang guy
She said that she had two kids
He didn't know if any of this was true
She worked as a waitress in a restaurant
Where she was in trouble for stealing credit card numbers from receipts
She came around whenever she felt like it
He didn't know how to contact her
He didn't know where she lived
He thought that he had something special
She was a scammer and he had nothing
He thought that this must have meant that she liked him
For himself and not what for what she could take from him
She usually stayed all night when she came over
His mother was getting tired of finding her there in the morning
His mother started yelling and ranting when she came over
One night his mother told them both to get out of the house
He drove her in her car
With 4 inches of snow and ice on the windshield
His head out the window to see the road
Drunk laughing yelling and screaming out into the middle of the night
To the empty condominium where he used to live with his mother
They spent the rest of the night there
On the floor
****
He was hardly sleeping that January
He was drunk all the time
Things around him were falling
Apart fast
He denied what others
Hinted at in his presence
He was cracking up
Again mental hospital bound
****
His renewed friendships of the previous autumn
Quickly frayed
Unraveling after a weekend trip
To a frozen winter cottage resort town in Wisconsin
Three days of around the clock drinking
Ended in a Wisconsin ski lodge
Broke out of money drunk drinking other people's drinks
Wearing a coat without a shirt underneath
Bare chest bellied to the snow and the wind
Registering nothing
****
His friends started avoiding him
He started hanging around with a guy from town
That had went around the bend
A few years earlier
On psychedelic drugs
Never making the return trip to sense sanity or reality
Convinced that the voices in his head
Were being broadcast from somewhere
Within the town
By somebody with a microphone
Hooked into a secret transmitting device
His friend talked
Utter disjointed nonsense gibberish
Having him around the house was too much
For his mother and his new step family
Nobody could sleep with his crazy friend and his girl friend
Drinking all night in the house
****
*******************************
LABELS
He was committed to a mental institution
When he was 19 years old
At the time
He thought that his life was over
He still thought that was true 16 years later
Only then it didn't seem to matter
****
He was an acute paranoid schizophrenic in March 1979
After he spent 9 months intensely abusing LSD
And after he stayed awake for most of the previous winter
He was schizophrenic and believed to be permanently brain damaged
In the late spring and early summer of 1980
After he had been totally drunk for 7 months
And after he had spent several months awake and living out of doors
He was a manic-depressive in 1981
After being awake and living mostly outside during the spring
Of that year
He was psychotic in the early summer of 1982
After he had been awake for more than 8 weeks
And after he hadn't taken any drugs for almost a month
He was a bi-polar disorder in the late summer and early fall of 1983
After staying awake for a month
And after sporadically living outside for several weeks
He was suffering from a manic episode in the summer of 1985
After staying awake for a couple of weeks
He was in an escalated and agitated state at the end of 1991
After he was unable to sleep for a week
****
Sometimes he could only see the inherent decay in things
He looked at trees
In a wind washed ocean of leaves
Summer green
All he could see were black January branches
Mottled with ice and abandoned
He looked at the highwayed suburbias
Bristling with small business and franchised enterprise
Driven convenience
All he could see was faded asphalt fractured by an overgrowth of weeds
Boarded windows lined by crumbling brick corroded frames
Broken glass mosaics shining desertion
He looked at people that he didn't know
Filled with the moment's spur and galloping energy
Unaware vitalous pre-occupation
All he could see were forms laced with old age and infirmity
Weathered by a time that was still years away
Sometimes he looked at people and felt that they never would get old
Sometimes he looked at things
And all he could see was the lost promise in their hopelessness
He looked at automobile salvage yards
Twisted rusty metals spewing engine parts and worn interiors
Inconsequential decay
All he could see was a brand new car being driven by its first owner
Handled with the respected deference
Given to babies and cartons of eggs
He looked at out of business and for sale signs
Advertising economic battles given to eventual failure and capital loss
Inevitable disaster
All he could see was the lifetime realization of somebody's dreams
Aspirated with the lure of getting rich quick
While working for one's self
He looked at people that he didn't care for
Seemingly constructed of unbendable hatreds and self-serving greeds
Uncertain motivation
All he could see was the fresh-worlded innocence of their childhood
Spirited with playful discovery in a world of lesser concerns
Sometimes he looked at people and saw them swathed in their infancy
Sometimes the seasons couldn't change fast enough for him
***
JOB IN THE SUBURBS
He left for work
In the pre-dawn darkness
Of a city succumbed in tired sleep
To travel to his job in the suburbs
He made it a point to get himself out on the street before 6:00 a.m.
He didn't have to get up and leave so early
It didn't matter what time he showed up
As long as stayed and worked for 8 hours after he got there
He used public transportation to get to his job
He traveled with all of the forgotten people
That had to wake themselves up and leave
For work at that time of the morning
Because they had to
He rode the el train with the young run-down black men
Traveling from the south sides of Chicago
To wander mindlessly through soul denying maintenance shifts
Within the gray loading corridors of the airport industrial area
Or within the warehouses of the stores in suburban shopping malls
Pocketing half smoked cigarettes and visions
Laughing off old boy and all the shit that he says
Living for friday night paydays of reefers and booze
He rode on the train with the northwest side hispanics
Unable refusing and pretending not to understand ingles
Quiet dark brown indian eyes watching and learning the ways of america
Dressed in a cast-off collection of outdated oddfitting clothing
Numb with cold on the first winter day without coats jackets or gloves
Traveling huddled in confused scrambled groups
To assorted pick-up points
Loaded into overcrowded rust spotted vans
With drearily streaked greasy windows
Dropped off at the back entrances off hotels and landscape details
To work as aproned maids and backbending manual shovel stooped laborers
Human elements unnoticed and unsaid
In the cracks and around the edges of the great technological machine
He rode on the train with the northside polish ukranian slavs
Just finished for the night or just starting for the day
Middleaged escapen refugees
Of torn eastern european bloc-nation descents
Swabbing the toilet rimmed plastic underdesk trash can of corporate USA
Breathing cough fumes into the red-eye industrial strength antiseptics
Leaving their smells and their cabbage sweat in the empty office air
Taking nothing but that which is unused unneeded set aside and unwanted
Asking for expecting and receiving all that is less
He rode on a bus with college educated black women
Reporting to timeclocked routines
Of monotonous telephone conversation copy machine duties
Checked thoughts and deeply held breaths
Catching sleep on the ride
With heads quietly pillowed with a jacket against the window
Worrying about children left alone by themselves at home
Thinking about men who come in drunk at all odd hours of the night
Wondering about men who don't bother to come home at all
Knowing that there had to be a break or an end somewhere
He left for work in the pre-morning early waking Chicago darkness
When white authority was still
At home slow and asleep
Nowhere to be seen
****
He worked and competed with people
That had graduated from college
He was considerably less educated
He had completed a few college classes after highschool
And he had taken 12 months to complete an 8 month training program
At a bullshit technical school for computer programming
That ran advertisements on the late night early morning television
While most of the people he worked with were getting their education
And never missing a meal
He was dividing his time between being locked up in nut houses
And living outside in the street
****
He worked in an office
With people that said words
With little fear or understanding of the reprised consequence
That the idea expressed by those words might bring
If those words had been said in the presence of the people
Those words were meant to describe denigrate and deride
****
He was an anomaly
In a company of more than 300 people
He was one of the few people that lived and came to work from the city
He refused to relocate himself
To somewhere in the suburbs closer to his job
He didn't own a car and was seen arriving and setting out on foot
He skipped lunch worked a straight 8 hour shift and then left
He never divulged any personal information about himself or his past
He only talked to people
If the conversation was specifically work related
He quit cutting his hair and it grew down to his waist
He never went to the company sponsored social gatherings
He never hung out after work or went to the bar with his co-workers
He missed 3 weeks of work because he had a nervous breakdown
He came back to work after he had a nervous breakdown
He went on after his breakdown like nothing had happened
He was voted the Employee of the Month
After he came back to work from his breakdown
He came to the office early
Hours before most of the other people got there
He played music on a cheap tape player
All day long when he sat at his desk
He used the music to block the sound and noise around him
Allowing him to focus single mindedly on his computer programming work
He spent 4 or 5 hours a day traveling back and forth to work
He walked through the office like a zombie
He avoided making eye contact with anybody
He was an eyesore and an embarrassment when clients came to the office
He never sat around with his boss and laughed at his jokes
But he made goddamn sure he busted his ass everyday and did his job
Because he didn't want to give his boss any reason to fire him
****
He was good at his job
He was a computer programmer
He could sit for hours and concentrate
On the most boring and mundane of intricate details
That would have left most other people screaming
In a torture of agonies
He developed that ability
During the hundreds of hours he wasted
Fried out of his mind and tripping on acid
Trying to fathom and determine the secret mysteries of life
He could have never believed that somebody would pay him to think
****
He was good at his job
He learned how to force himself to think logically
He had to continually think about all the possible things
That can go wrong in any programmable situation
And plan for it in advance
He had to be paranoid and logical at the same time
Every computer programmer he knew was paranoid to some degree
If they weren't paranoid they were no damn good and didn't last
He used to get locked up and loaded with tranquilizers
For being paranoid
Now it was almost like he was getting paid for it
****
He was the kind of employee that employers hire
Because they have an assuming notion that he will fit in
Be an acceptable cog in their little machine
Because he looks like he acts and thinks
Just like them
So they let him get his foot inside of their door
Only to find out that
He has no intention of fitting in
Or becoming part of them
And he has no intention of leaving
He just keeps showing up
Doing his job
Collecting his paycheck
**********
***************************************************
He started to drink heavily
Looking for the good times
The laugh outloud fun relief
The alcohol had fueled before
The drunks took on a darkened ugly moroseness
Frustrating smashed bottle escapades
That would eventually aggravate
Into a late night breakdown of anger
Requiring physical restraint
Nothing was working
Everybody was all over his case
People were abandoning him
In his eyes
People were letting him down
***
He started taking the pills
That he had stashed the summer before
Muscle relaxers topped off with downers
Mixing the shit with beers
He told the people at rehab
He needed the downers to calm down
Then went back and told them
He was having side effects
He was given muscle relaxers
For the side effects
He wanted to blot himself out
Smash himself over the head
With a chemical hammer
So he wouldn't feel a thing
***
He ran through the muscle relaxers
A month supply gone in a couple of days
Triple quadrupling the dosage
Taking them every couple hours
Until he felt stoned
He used the downers sparingly
They made him pass out
Wrecking the muscle relaxer high he had going
After three refills in three weeks
The guy at the pharmacy told him
That was enough
***
He couldn't get enough of the muscle relaxers
It was better than anything
He had ever gotten illegally on the street
The stuff made him spaced out
Dry mouth quiet stoned
Like he was tripping on acid
Without the boxed-in no end in sight fear
Lost mind paranoia
His body felt good
Like he was nestled in a cloud
He moved around like he was made out of paper
Colors intensified
Bright blurry
Opiated warm
Fuzzed around the edges
He wanted to be put on muscle relaxers
For the rest of his life
***
He had always heard about the breweries in Milwaukee
Stories about beer production plant tours
Walking through a vatted factory with a sloshing bucket
Drinking beer for free
He decided to go up to Milwaukee
Hit one of the breweries
Schlitz Pabst
There had to be breweries all over town
He didn't care which one it was
He wanted to get good and drunk
Right inside a brewery
Get so loaded
They would have to roll his ass out of there
He didn't care if the beer they were handing out
Was piss warm 89 cents a quart Old Bohemian
Made from tap water
Spigotted through a muddy green garden hose
He just wanted to get drunk
***
He could ride on a bus to Milwaukee
Leave on a saturday morning
Get there before noon
He estimated Milwaukee to be an hour walk
From one end of town to the other
He would start walking
Until he spotted a brewery
All he had to look for was a water tower
With a beer brand logo
He might even be able to hit a couple of breweries
Before it was time to catch the bus back
He'd have money in his pocket
After drinking for free all day
He could hit the Milwaukee bars afterward
Stay out there all night
Get the bus back to Chicago in the morning
Be back home before sunday afternoon
Make a nice weekend trip out of it
He had the whole thing figured out
***
He headed up to Milwaukee on a saturday morning
Woke up while the rest of the house was asleep
Got the first train out of town to downtown Chicago
He left the house with his shirt and jacket pockets
Stuffed with cigarette packs
He had a prescription pill bottle
With 15 downers and 25 muscle relaxers
He had nearly 40 dollars in his wallet
After he bought a round trip bus ticket
For Milwaukee
Cigarettes pills
39 dollars with change
And a round trip bus ticket
He was organized
He had a plan
He didn't tell anybody where he was going
Nobody was going to be able to fuck it up for him
The whole thing was bullet proof
This wasn't going to be
Another of those one way ticket excursions
Like in the past
Where somebody from back home
Had to bail his ass out of jam
There was no foreseeable way
Anything could go wrong
***
He rode on the bus up to Milwaukee
It was two three hour ride
Out of downtown Chicago
He had already put a dent
Into his supply of muscle relaxers
He sat placid in the bus seat
Thinking about when he got back home
About how he was going to regal his friends
With stories about his Milwaukee brewery adventure
He looked at the day as a scouting trip
Once he figured out what was going on
He could ringlead his friends
On a drink for free Milwaukee brewery system tour
He looked out the bus window
Taking in the half gray late April Wisconsin scenery
Feeling good about himself
Satisfied
Something was finally going to happen right
***
He got into Milwaukee around noon
As soon as he got off the bus
A black guy in the station spotted him
Walked along side of him
Trying to sell him drugs
He told the guy he was there to get drunk
The guy quit on the sales pitch
Gave him some crystal methedrine
Told him he could have it for free
He told the guy it was time
To go get drunk
***
He headed out into downtown Milwaukee
With the guy he met in the bus station
The bus had let him off
In the skid row wino section of Milwaukee
Seedy dive bars open for morning business
Package bag liquor stores
Empty bottles scattered broken along the sidewalk
He told the guy to lead the way
He bought rotgut wine and cans of beer
The two of them walked down the sidewalk drinking
When the beer and wine was gone
He bought some more
He spent the afternoon
Walking around the Milwaukee skid row with the guy
Drinking paperbag quarts bottles cans of beer
Richards Wild Irish and Mogen David maddog wine
Wherever the guy took him to buy alcohol
The place would go up into arms
When they saw the guy walking through the door
Barkeeps customers proprietors
Everybody yelling for the guy to get out
He figured the guy had been kicked out
Of every bar in the area
The guy kept laughing
Whenever somebody started giving the guy shit
The guy would point to the bag with the wine
Then say “Kool and the Gang”
He figured Kool and the Gang must of meant big times
In a backward ass rinky dink town like Milwaukee
He lost the guy somewhere in the late afternoon
He had spent all of his money
He didn't know where in the hell he was at
He had totally given up forgotten about
Trying to find a brewery
***
He decided to explore the Milwaukee skid row
Maybe there was a mission
Where he could get some food
He met up with a guy younger than him
A dirty faced burly kid
With snot running out of his nose
The guy offered to show him around
Took him out to a dry weed damp dirt clodded field
In the back of a factory
Where there was hot air coming out of the ground
Through a vented grating
A board was set along the heat exhaust vent
A half dozen kids were lying on the board
Teenage pre-teen runaway grubby raggedy little kids
Scrunched up together trying to keep warm
The guy he was with told him that
He could crash there with them
He told the guy it was too early for sleep
The dusk hadn't even turned over the dark yet
He split the last of his downers with the guy
The guy swallowed them without asking what they were
He told the guy to take some of the muscle relaxers
To ward off the cramps
The guy got scared
He told the guy the pills were nut house tranquilizers
The guy punched him in the face
He left them out in the field
He didn't have time to waste with idiots
It was just getting to be saturday night
He had a bus ticket in his wallet
To get back to Chicago
***
He tried finding the Milwaukee bus station
It was night
It was dark
The streets were lifeless
It was dead for a saturday
He didn't recognize anything
He finished off the last of his muscle relaxers
He was down to his last pack of cigarettes
It was time to get the hell out of there
***
He walked all over the downtown Milwaukee sidewalks
Fucked up drunk wasted lost
Speeding on methedrine
Trying to find the bus station
The evening turned into the middle of the night
It looked like sunday
He kept on walking
Like a robot
He was starting to pass out while he walked
His eyes would close
Then his consciousness would drop a notch
Transporting him into the random chaos
Of a dream state
He would awaken to a light flashing crash
A sudden face smashed startling jolt
When he inadvertently walked into the sides of buildings
Light posts
Newspaper stand kiosks
He walked right into anything
Blocking the path of the sidewalk
With his eyes closed
He readjusted himself
After each obstacle
Found a clear path to aim for
Closed his eyes
Then started walking again
He kept walking with his eyes closed
Slamming into things
Until he broke out a lens from his glasses
He started to look for a place to crash
Out of the cold damp frost night
A cop saw him turning doorknobs on a deserted building
Trying to find a door that would open
He was arrested by the Milwaukee cops
Taken to the police station
Charged with prowling
And attempted burglary
***
He went through the arrest proceedings
Moving through the Milwaukee jail processing area
With his eyes closed
He screamed at the cops
He told the cops that he was all fucked up
Out of his mind on drugs
Downers speed muscle relaxers alcohol
All he was trying to do was get to the bus station
So he could get the hell out of there
The cops thought the whole thing was a joke
He saw a lady cop laughing at him
***
He was thrown into a brightly lit
Steel door slot cinder blocked wall
Plexiglas observation window cell
He flattened his back onto the thin pad iron cot
Took off his smashed glasses
The black dotted white ceiling tiles
Looked like they were underwater
Swimming with spots
Of hallucinatory blue colors
He was glad to be somewhere dry
Off of the street
Where he wouldn't bump into anything
***
He sat out the sunday
In the Milwaukee jail
He had a court date on monday morning
Half fucked up wasted
Spillover from the day before
The time went by quick
It wasn't like downtown Chicago
Where hundreds of disorderlies
Were dropped off at the county jail
At 26th and California
Paddy wagons from every precinct in the city
All the saturday night derelicts in one place
For sunday morning holiday court
Everybody had a number written on their hand
Everybody was given the same instructions
When the number was called go up
Plead guilty
Then leave
He figured Milwaukee was running
The same kind of vagrancy rap
Sit the night in jail
Go to court
Plead guilty
Then leave
He half wondered if they were crazy enough
To actually charge him
With attempted burglary and prowling
***
He went to the Milwaukee court on monday morning
He was fined 125 dollars
For turning doorknobs on buildings in the middle of the night
He agreed to pay the fine in 30 days
He would have agreed to anything they said
He just wanted to get the hell out of there
He would never come back to fucked up town like Milwaukee again
He wasn't going to pay them anything
He waited after court to get his wallet back
The cops took his wallet when they hauled him in
He had a bus ticket back to Chicago
Inside of his wallet
He waited around at a counter for his belongings
He was aggravated out of cigarettes impatient
He had been detained in Milwaukee long enough
He dug his wallet out of the yellow envelope
He rifled the pocketed folds of his wallet
Tore open the envelope
His bus ticket was gone
***
He wanted his bus ticket back
He stood yelling at the cops in the jail
Stubbled dirty awake for two days tired
Wearing glasses that were missing a lens
He felt suddenly powerless
He was half blind
He couldn't lock hold of somebody's eyes
Freeze grip them in a glare
Let them know that he meant business
The cops threatened to re-arrest him
Told him to get the hell out of there
He said he wanted his goddamned ticket back
He remembered showing the bus ticket to the cops
The night they brought him into jail
He told them he was trying to find the bus station
He couldn't have lost the ticket
The cops took the ticket
Maybe the lady cop he saw laughing at him
Was trying to make sure
That he stayed in Milwaukee
***
He took the ticket mishap to be a sign
He wasn't meant to leave
He was supposed to stay in Milwaukee
Nobody knew he had gone up there
He would just vanish
Never go back
Just disappear
Like he was dead
He thought about everybody back home
Girlfriend
Cousins
Friends
Parents
Step brothers
Sisters
Nobody gave a fuck about him
He was a crazy pain in the ass
He had nothing to go back for
He flash forwarded ahead
Twenty years into time
Heard himself telling a story
About how he came to Milwaukee
Lost the bus ticket home
Been there ever since
***
He wanted to get off right in Milwaukee
He purposefully steered himself clear
Of the downtown skid row area
He found a government welfare office
Went in to find out about getting housing
Maybe some food to hold him over
Until he could get something going
He was told that he would have to wait
30 days before he could have an appointment
He knew that 30 days
Living outside
Without money food or shelter
Was the same as 100 years
He would never be able to make it
***
He walked around downtown Milwaukee
Everything was new
Clean like it all had just been built fresh
The people were scrubbed clean
Well dressed in warm layers
Light skinned light haired
Probably northern european descended
Milwaukee was swathed in an innocence
Naive to the rotting urban decayal
Devouring the maggoty core
Of major cities like Chicago
Milwaukee was waiting unaware
Isolated in an oblivion
Ready to be picked clean torn apart
Ripening for a scourging harvest
Of institutionalized poverty
Homelessness
Rampant widespread drug addictions
Alcoholism
Joblessness
The homey wholesome heartland holdouts
Were waiting to be discovered
By the rest of america
***
He spent the monday afternoon
Tramping the Milwaukee downtown office building sidewalks
Halfheartedly bumming cigarettes
From people he saw smoking
He watched the end of the workday downtown desertion
Files of workers scrambling
The pedestrian commuter maze for home
He wandered into the residential areas
Looked through the front of the house windows
Seen from the passing sidewalk
Lit with the open curtained warmth of table lamps
Televisions flickering the prime time
The neighborhood air marked with the smoky aroma
Sent from wood burning fireplaces
He walked past the houses until they were dark
Saw the occasional switch flipped muted glow
Through side of the house glass block windows
Signaling middle of the night half asleep
Trips to the bathroom toilet
He was shivering in the thin jacket
He had worn for a sunny spring saturday afternoon
It was a late April 40 degree Wisconsin night
A slow quiet rain started to fall
He headed for a highway underpass
Made his way up the slanted cement embankment
Found a flat two foot wide edge of muddy concrete
At the top of the embankment
With the bottom of the roadway
Running over it from above
He wedged himself into the flattened space
The underneath of the road inches from his head
He listened to the wet tire hiss sizzle of the cars
Driving across the roadway above him
The steel belted radial 50 mile an hour berrap noises
Of cars and trucks pushing through the night
Sometimes he even caught the sound of the radio
The roadway vibrate rattled
With the traffic overhead
An unending steady stream
Small vent holes cut into the edge of the overpass roadway
Spray dropped dirty highway rain water down onto his face
He gradually fell asleep
Wondering if a life like this
Was going to be worth living
***
****************************************************
MENTAL CASE
He was institutionalized for the first time
When he was 19 years old
He was sentenced to spend no less than 90 days
At the state of Illinois psychiatric facility in Manteno
By a judge in the Will County courthouse
After he spent the weekend in the county jail
For missing a drunk driving court date several weeks before
He had went from his mother's home to downtown Chicago on a train
To watch a movie on a cold March saturday afternoon
He had been out of touch with reality for more than three months
That period had been filled with escapading insanity and energy
He wasn't sleeping and he was occasionally eating
He had been arrested for drunk driving
He had his new car stolen
He had lost his job
He had been arrested more than a dozen times
For the kinds of things where the cops let him go after a night in jail
He had taken two bus rides to Miami and walked around down there
With no money
He had pissed off and lost all of his friends
His family was sick of his bullshit and wanted no part of him
His mother saw that he was crazy and worried he'd end up dead
He was unsuccessfully trying to withdraw
From a year long drug and alcohol binge
He had been regularly abusing LSD mescaline and bootleg amphetamines
He had been smoking columbian marijuana hash opium and thai sticks
He had increased his drinking to the point
Where he started in the morning
Going to a movie seemed like a safe thing to do that Saturday
He left with enough money for the movie ticket and the train fare
He had enough money to get there and back
He went to see the movie version of Hair
He had been listening to the Broadway soundtrack album
Since he was a kid
He thought that the hippies had been a bunch of fakes and wimps
He wrote the words Sid Vicious with an ink pen
On the back of a tight fitting army jacket
He left the jacket in the theatre after the movie was over
He walked out into the cold still freezing early spring evening
In a t-shirt
He had been unable to feel the cold that winter
He often went without a coat
He went back to the train station and headed for home
He handed a pocketful of coins to the conductor on the train
For his fare
He was told by the conductor that he didn't have enough money
To buy a ticket back to the stop in the town where he lived
He was a dime short
He remembered the dime he had thoughtlessly and happily tossed
Into the dark noisy theater air
When a commercial was shown on the screen featuring a local radio dj
Making a joke about giving somebody a shiny new dime
He was told that he could buy a ticket to the stop before his town
There was seven miles of railroad track between the two train stations
A on the train woman offered to pay the extra dime he needed
For the ticket
The conductor told her no and refused to take it
He was put off the train at the stop before the one where he lived
He grabbed on to the side railings of the train when it took off
He jumped off the train when it suddenly stopped
After going a few hundred feet
He thought about walking the tracks back to his town
He decided to break into the locked station instead
A cop arrived after he tore off a window screen
The cop said that the train had called for him a half hour earlier
He was handcuffed after the cop ran his name over the radio
He had a warrant out for his arrest for missing a court date
He was taken to the Will County jail in Joliet 15 miles away
He was placed in a large lockup cell with some other men
He was yelling and screaming at the jail guards and corridor cops
He was climbing the cell bars and spitting on the floors and walls
Outside of the cell
He kept yelling that if he had to be in a cage
He was going to act like an animal
He stuffed a roll of toilet paper down into the toilet bowl pipe
He flushed the toilet
He watched the water flood over the sides of the bowl
He told the other people in the cell that if they had to shit
They were just going to have to hold on to it for a while
He took off the jail issue shirt he was given to wear
He ripped the shirt into shreds
He tied the sharded strips of his shirt around his waist like a belt
He was allowed to carry on like this for a couple of hours
He had been in this jail before
The cops knew he was a trouble maker
He was taken out of the holding cell and thrown into an isolation cell
He was put into the isolation cell naked
He spent the night and the next morning in the cell
Singing rock songs at the top of his lungs
He liked the way his voice sounded in the small concrete room
It was cold in the cell
There was nowhere to sit except on the toilet
He smeared his breakfast all over the cell walls
He tried to cover the small plexiglas window of the cell with food
The guards came in and smacked him around
When they saw what he was doing
It was sunday afternoon
He had to wait until the next day for court
He tried lying on his back on the cell floor
His tail bone hurt
It dug into the floor and it made him uncomfortable
He saw the deep scratch marks in the paint on the iron cell door
He started thinking that people were put in here forever
Never to be let out until they died
The sunday afternoon dragged on into sunday night
He was not given any lunch or dinner
After what he did with his breakfast
He was cold and uncomfortable naked on the cement floor
He started banging his head against the floor
Trying to find relief in the explosion of lights and colors
That he saw each time his head pounded into the floor
The monday morning jail guards kept looking in the small window at him
Naked and sitting on the floor
Like a captured animal
He finally went up to the window and let loose
In the loudest strongest and most powerful voice of his life
He shouted that if he wasn't given a blanket to cover himself
That he was going to kill everybody that worked in the jail
That got the attention of the guards
Six guards and a woman police officer stormed into the cell
He stood before them naked
He was ready for another round of sadistic beatings
He stood there with the guards for several minutes not saying anything
The guards had guns and clubs and handcuffs and shoes with heels
He was told that he would be given a blanket
If he agreed not to tear it up
He sat with the blanket over his head until it was time to go to court
He was given another set of jail clothes
To wear when he was taken into court
With the other prisoners
He was handcuffed to a jail guard when he was brought into court
He had been through this routine many times before
In the course of just a few months
He was convinced that he would be walking out of there free in an hour
When his name was called he stood before the judge
He was told that the court was committing him to a mental institution
He was taken out of the court and into an area in the jail
Where inmates talked to visitors
On a phone with thick glass between them
His mother was there waiting for him and she was crying
He yelled and cussed into the phone and across the glass at her
For having him put away
He told her he never wanted to see her again
He was taken back to the holding cell where he had spent the weekend
He was put back into the cell naked with only a blanket
While he waited to be taken to the mental institution
He was hoping that he would get there in time for dinner
Because he was getting hungry
***
He had heard about Manteno when he was a kid
About ten years before
His father was sitting in a drunken hung over stupor
With a cigarette dangling from his mouth
Squinting his eyes as the smoke trailed up into them
His father had recently been discharged from the VA hospital
His father's mother was yelling at his father
His father's mother kept asking his father
If he wanted to go to Manteno
He kept thinking about this
While he sat in the jail cell
Waiting to be taken to Manteno
****
He was driven in a police truck
From the Will County jail in Joliet
To the state psychiatric institution in Manteno
It still hadn't dawned on him where he was going
He thought a lot of things
During the hour drive from Joliet down to Manteno
He felt like he was being broken out of jail
On some wild escape adventure in the night
He thought that he had been the victim
Of some sort of sinister renegade government
That had taken over in place of the real government
And that he was being rescued by the real government
That had went underground and into hiding
He thought that he had made some kind of breakthrough
A psychic mental telepathic cosmic revelation
Brought on by the large quantities of LSD and sleep deprivation
And that he was being brought to place to be studied and tested
He thought this was like the movie
One flew over the cuckoo's nest
And he was being sent to free and liberate
The nuts that had been locked and withered away
In Manteno for years
He thought that this was some kind of initiation
Into a mental-physical guerilla army
That was one day going to do battle
With the evil government
That had silently taken the place of the real government
He thought that he was involved in something important
And he couldn't wait to find out what it was
It still hadn't dawned on him
That he was being sent to Manteno
Because he was dangerously fucking crazy
****
When he arrived at Manteno
The first thing they did was
Take his clothes away
He traded his t-shirt and levis in
For an oversized pair of green checkered polyester pants
And a brown acrylic shirt
He wasn't given any underwear to wear under the pants
He told the guy that gave him the stuff that
The pants were falling down and made his balls itch
The guy told him to stop acting
Like a punk popster
*****
He arrived on the ward
At evening medication time
He saw all of the patients
Lined up sheeplike
To take their medication from the nurse
The pills were swallowed down with kool-aid
Poured from a stainless steel pitcher
He started thinking about Guyana and Jim Jones
He wondered if
That was how the kool-aid was dispensed in Jonestown
*****
He noticed the people on the ward
A lot of them looked like foreigners
Dark bearded arabic jewish
Speaking in different languages
To themselves
He thought that maybe they were
Smuggled-in newly arrived under the table immigrants
That freaked out when they got to America
That had to be locked up until they cooled out
Until they got used to things in a strange country
He started thinking that the whole place was a front
For escaped russian dissidents
That were waiting to be assimilated into American life
He thought that these undernourished scraggily men
Were recent gulag escapees
Great intellectuals in the world wide struggle
To take back life from those that had stolen and denied it
And made it wrong
He couldn't understand their soliloquies
But their gestures hand waving restless pacing and quiet tones
Made it sound like they were saying something important
****
He met some of the other people on the ward
They all acted like they were glad to see him
Or any new person
The way people act
When they haven't been around other people for a long time
Then get all excited when somebody is suddenly there
They talked to him like they had known him
For a real long time
He thought that it seemed like they had been expecting him
****
He was told that he would have to go to sleep
By the ward staff
He was given a bed in the hallway
All of the beds in the men's sleeping rooms were filled
He told the staff not to worry or bother with getting him a bed
He told the staff that he never slept
He told the staff that he would be real quiet
And not make any noise
While the rest of the patients were sleeping
Two uniformed security guards were summoned to the ward
To hold his arms behind his back
While the 250 pound night nurse stuck a needle
Full of Phenobarbital
Into the back of his ass
*****
He was woken up at 6 o’clock in the morning
When the morning staff turned on all of the lights
To roust the patients from their beds
All of the patients were supposed to get up and make their beds
Then go into the day area of the ward
The rooms with the beds where the people slept
Where locked up during the day
All of the patients went up to the front desk
To get one of their cigarettes from behind then the desk
Then they waited for one of the staff
To screw the wall lighter into its socket
Then they all stood in a line
To light their cigarettes from the wall socket
The patients were allowed to have 1 cigarette before breakfast
Some of the patients didn't have any cigarettes behind the desk
They picked up the cigarette butts off of the floor
And relit them for what they were worth from the wall lighter
Or they took the lit butt from somebody that was at the end
Of the cigarette
And took it the rest of the way down to the filter
He had never smoked a cigarette before
He didn't even know how to smoke a cigarette
He was used to smoking pot from a bong
Then holding the smoke down into his lungs
Until his eyes flashed with light
Before he would let it go
He never saw the sense in wasting his time with tobacco smoke
****
He waited around for the two hours
With the rest of the patients
For the two hours
Between the time when the patients were woken up
Until they were able to have breakfast
Most of the patients were quiet
He was still dull from the shot
That the nurse gave him the night before
He was starting to get hungry
He thought that if they were going to lock him up like this
Then they would have to feed him
****
****************************************************
He saw people in the hospital
Older adults
That never worked a day in their lives
Wards of the state from day one
Didn't have to lift a finger
They let other people take care of them
Showed up at meal time
Lived comfortably
Swallowed their pills
Kept their mouths shut
He knew there was a free ride
Just waiting there to be taken
***
He thought the whole mental health thing was a scam
From the doctors to the nurses down to the patients
An insurance racket where people got paid
For doing nothing
A safe haven sanctuary for people unwilling to deal
With the harsh existence of the outside world
***
Psychiatry was an imprecise nonexistent
Fraudulent pseudoscience
Formed around a vaguery
Of ambiguous generalized terms
A ravel of arbitrarily loose
Double-sided word concepts
That could be coerce bent warp weld hoodwink nod framed
Into meaning anything
People getting paid to evaluate explain
The behavior of others
An unquestioned reality consensus opinion
A career scale confidence game
Built out of a phallic symbol mythology
By a coke hyper duplicitous viennese quack
Who thought that everybody wanted to fuck their own mother
***
The doctors didn't do shit
Rich men that bought their diplomas
From second rate foreign country universities
They signed their names on the bottom of forms
Shoved in their faces by the nurses
Asked the patients how they were doing
Then split before they even answered
His doctor ran around like Latka Gravas on crank
The nurses were glorified baby sitters
Filling out the forms
That kept the money pouring in
Keeping an eye on hospital property
Making sure that the patients didn't destroy everything
Keeping the place from going to hell in a hand basket
Most of patients were weak whine babies
Who would have been better off
Getting back out to face life
Instead of trying to shelter themselves from it
The patients that really needed the help
Were so far gone
They were beyond helping
***
He was sent one morning by the hospital
To a day care out patient treatment center
A place where a bunch of tranquilized bloated zombies
Sat around a table in a house
Doing occupational therapy art and craft ceramic work
He was told to check the place out
If he liked it he could go there each day
Then return to the hospital at night to sleep
That would be his life
He agreed to see what the place was about
Knowing that he wanted no part of it
Knowing they were all out of their fucking minds
The people that sent him there
And the people that spent their days there
***
He noticed the cumulative effects of the house immediately
A room filled with heavily downer dosed people
He was put under the stifling sedated oppression
He felt like he had been given a knockout punch to the head
Sock sand sapped from the blindside
His body ache weighted in a down drag
With a thick pounding heaviness
Something was draining the energy out of him
He was in a room full of low running brainwaves
An energy depleted lifeless vacuum
Like somebody had ripped the cord from its socket
He felt the thought torpor malaise saturate him
It would be impossible to combat the force
He started wondering if there was something in the air vents
Aerosol depressant spray chemicals
Surreptitiously pumped out
Into the atmosphere
***
He knew the outpatient house was a mental death
He stayed there for the morning
He was forced at the end of the ordeal
To sit in darkness for the last half hour
While a gruelingly dull film was projected onto a small screen
It was too much all at once for him
He hadn't sat still or focused a thought for six months
Now he was expected to sit quietly
With a table of reticent vegetables
In a crowd stuffed overflown room
Pretending to be comprehending a film
He listened to the moving mechanics
Of the projection machine pulling the film from the reel
Each click of the motor notching him closer
To the moment that he could get the hell out of there
Go back to the hospital and tell them
He wasn't interested in being a part
Of their outpatient daycare program
***
When he went home on saturdays
It gave his married woman girlfriend a chance
To have some quiet peace
Time to herself
While he was gone
She spent the day sleeping
Late relaxing getting caught up
Working on her finger nails
Peroxiding her hair
Doing the kinds of things
That a 32 year old woman thought she had to do
To be attractive to a 20 year old
***
His married woman girlfriend spent one weekend at home
Left early saturday morning
Stayed gone until sunday night
She came back with her husband
In tow with the guy that treated her
Like a stick of furniture
He watched the two of them together
He kept thinking about what it had been like
The king and queen of the prom
The Joe Stud quarterback football american hero
And the pumped up little blonde cheerleader
Straight off the slick glossy gray black white pages
Of a small midwestern town
1966 highschool yearbook
A whole life together ahead of them
He wondered what happened to them along the way
Three kids and 14 years later
It was inevitably bound to go wrong
***
He was issued a standing pass by his doctor
He was allowed to leave the hospital
For two hours each day
Most of the time he stayed in the hospital
Sitting around with his married woman girlfriend
He took her out with him a couple of times
She had no interest in his boundless wandering
He would start walking with no destination
Getting himself lost on the streets around the hospital
Walking without paying to attention to where he was going
He would landmark building navigate himself back
Not knowing where he had been
***
The two of them usually stayed on the hospital grounds
Sitting in back of the hospital
On the grass
Or on the railroad trestle stones
That crossed over the Kankakee River
He wanted to be there with her forever
He would get caught up in the time
Not noticing its passing
Afterwards sensing the loss
For what was then gone
***
***************************************************************
The hospital worked with his mother
To find a place where they could send him
He was made to talk to various people
He signed his name at the end
Of stacks of printed forms
Right next to the X
Right where they told him to sign
***
He had no interest in the procedurals
He jam cram scrambled his thoughts
Full of nonsense
Whenever he dealt with the paperwork handlers
He wanted to let them know
They weren't going to break him
He wasn't going to be changed
He wasn't going to live
In their version of what the world should be
They were going to do
What they were going to do
He wanted to let them know
He didn't care what they did to him
***
He was set up with an interview
With an indian guy
That ran some kind of hospital home
His mother was hopeful he could go there
His mother got him going
On the idea
He was told it was place
Filled with people just like him
His own age
With problems like his
It would be a place
Where he could listen to music
Draw pictures
Maybe meet women that were his own age
***
He worked himself up
For the interview with the indian guy
When he heard the guy was an indian
He imagined the guy
To be some kind of hindi brahman
Steeped in the thousands of years
Spirituality wisdom traditions of the Rig Veda
Hare Krishna Bhagavad Gita
He wanted to make a good impression
He thought the man would give him a home
Where he could thrive
As himself
***
The indian guy was in his late 40's
Graying at the temples
Dressed like an american business man doctor
He was flying on three black bombers
When he met the guy
He had a huge wide grin
Spread out all over his face
He bowed out of respect
To the man
And the religious significance
He held for all that was India
***
He had the indian guy interview him
In the hospital radio room
He couldn't keep his hands
Off of the stereo receiver
Switching the channels
Stopping suddenly to quickly roll
The volume knob all of the way up
Then immediately back down
When he knew there was a moment
In a song
Where the sound of a single note
Was going to be left
Hanging in the air
He punctuate blasted the stereo
For less than a second
Amplifying the space
In between the echoes
At the end of Whole Lotta Love
Right before the guitar crunch kicked in
He wanted to show the indian some style
***
He couldn't maintain his excitement
While he spoke with the indian
Wound up hyper sped with overexuberation
He kept a grin on his face
Throughout the half hour talk
Answering each of the indian's questions
In turn
With a question
***
He bowed when the indian left
He felt like he had made a good impression
He felt like he had won the guy over
If the guy was running a home for weirdoes
The guy would have been able to see
That he was going to fit right in
***
He was disappointed to find out
He wasn't accepted by the indian
The indian wanted no part of him
He wasn't getting into the indian's home
His mother told him that
He completely turned the guy off
The indian left the hospital
Thinking he was a complete fucking idiot
The hospital people were pissed
Because they went to a lot of trouble
To set the whole thing up
He wondered what the problem was
He thought he was supposed to be
A complete fucking idiot
***
It was a warm Kankakee May that year
Everything was full leafy grown green
The sun cut a hot knife
Into the leftovers of the cold winter spring air
Letting the dampness escape from the ground
The crisp around the edges
Waited for the wilt
Of summer time's sluggish despondency
***
He thought about 10 years
Of illinois summers
He remembered that he was always depressed
Fighting his way through a struggling let down
A low
That he instinctively associated
With melting heat humidity
Sunstruck endless afternoon deadening brightness
***
The high he had been on
The elevated mood increasing energy swing
Since the end of autumn
Early winter
Thanksgiving to St Patrick's Day holiday binge stretch
Was running itself out
Nature would now take its course
The longer hours of daylight
Sent the message signal
It was time to come down
***
His married woman girlfriend was given
Her release date from the hospital
He knew about it for a couple of weeks
He let the time slip by
Unaccounted for
Not really thinking about it
Only the immediate was real
He was living in the moment
As long it was still guaranteed
He wasn't going to worry
About anything beyond that
***
His married woman girlfriend acted like
Her leaving the hospital
Was to be a temporary separation
She told him that as soon as she was out
She was going to come back
To the hospital
Take him out on an all day pass
Just the two of them
No hospital in the way between them
He let her make the plans
He wasn't going to waste his time
Thinking about the future
He wasn't going to waste his time
Thinking about something
He was no longer able to believe
***
His married woman girlfriend left the hospital
He fell into the gaping hole
Her absence left in his daily routine
He found that he was unable
To occupy amuse himself
Long ago exhausting
The hospital's possible potentials for diversions
He was bored aggravated listless
Argumentative irritable
Dried of amphetamines
He felt the hospital downers
Getting a hold on him
He was taking on weight
He sensed that he was sinking fast
***
He spent the days alone
Walking around Kankakee
On pass from the hospital
Walking without direction
Purposeless activity
Anything to make the time move
Seem like it was going faster
***
He hung out sometimes
With the puerto rican spanish mexican guy
From the hospital
The guy rigged up some kind of scheme
Living with a woman from town
As a combination handy man gardener chauffeur
He sat around mornings with the guy
In the woman's garage
Drinking quarts of beer
He quit going there after the guy snapped
Hurled a half full bottle of beer against the wall
Right in the middle of a sentence
Squared off in a boxing stance
Knuckle up fist fight bobbing
Snake eyed slant
Talking about c'mon motherfucker
He was too relaxed off guard surprised
To do anything but try to calm the guy down
When the guy got back halfway to normal
He slowly backpedaled his way out of the garage
Got his ass back to the hospital
Feeling weak helpless
And useless
***
He was put on the Public Aid welfare roll
His hospital bill was piling up
Everyday was hundreds of dollars
Billed to his mother's work insurance
Three months worth of itemized charges
Five yards of continuous paper
With no end in sight
He was given a green card
Which would be used
To pay for his medical expenses
The hospital was working fast
To get him out of there
The Public Aid medical card wasn't going to bring in
The kind of money
That could be had
From a patient covered with an insurance policy
***
His married woman girlfriend came back to the hospital
Just like she said she would
To take him out for the day
He met her down in the hospital parking lot
He was going to reap into the harvest
Two months worth of sown desires
Spent sitting patiently by her side everyday
He had kept his hands off her
He had kept his mouth shut to the other patients
Now he was going to get his reward
He was going to spend the day
In a fourteen dollar Kankakee motel room
With another man's wife
***
The hospital caseworkers were closing
In on a deal
To have him sent
To a nursing home
In Chicago Heights Illinois
It was one of the few long term care facilities
That took in people
Covered by Medicaid
He tried imagining a nursing home
He kept thinking of one story ground level wings
With dormitory type rooms
He wanted to know if he could bring his albums
Along with his stereo
A pair of headphones
And a case of books
***
He thought about the night his car was stolen
He woke up in the back seat of a police squad
The cops told him that they had arrested him
Trying to get into a nursing home
He had tried often to discern the meaning of that
A premonition hidden amongst the unknown
The secret buried in a subconscious act
For one who already felt old
Tired of life
Receding
Ready to withdraw
From an outside society
That he did not want to be a part of
The middle of the night black out
Nursing home break-in abort drama
Would now reveal itself
As an inescapable reality
***
He had several weeks to wait
Before he would be sent to the nursing home
He thought little about the nursing home
Half way looking forward to it
Vaguely projecting occasional scenes
Across an idle moment of imagination
Trying to envision what it would be like
He was too far set
In three months of hospital ways
To think of anything else
***