HERE!
SOUL HURRICANES (pretty much still rough left over from like a year ago)
1
Am I feeling sentimental or is that desperate longing just some sort of natural mode for me? This ride is endless and I've made it a million times, much rather to be on the other side of the continent. Take me to new continents in sun-soaked rain-soaked or whatever just have me drunk or otherwise inebriated and don't ever take me home let me find my own way. It is awfully late at this point and here I am in all my youth, an old man rambling on and on... More and more lately noticing that my words are death or over death and I too am overcoming this weakness we all feel as we fail to take the time to truly look out at the dying landscapes of small towns and their surrounding areas not yet afflicted by nationwide urban sprawl which will eventually consume every bit of property there is to be owned and I'm sure every square inch will be owned by one of three men. That senile old croaker with his few
hundred acres left over from world wars long past gets killed off and finally we've bought everything there is to own, thank you lord... the final judgement is nigh.
Desolate coasts scream to Summer, "Why have you left me in such a hurry... you swore you loved me and that things would be different!" It never is, is it? Every year the sunlight dies and gives way to fall's beautiful decay. Each of us is trapped in this cycle, and we love to hate it. Abandoned shopfronts dusty with fallen displays in an oceanic ghost town call out to me as I pass totally outside of reality and time... inanimate objects asking me what right I have to even exist.
Green embers of withdrawal paint my face all over my own room, and I swear it's tough to look at anymore. Somewhere I buried myself in a secret place to come retrieve when I was ready... and now I've forgotten where that is. Like original americans in sweat lodges, I am soaked and have visions. Nightmares mostly. I've seen house cats maimed by wild children hungry for blood just like the rest of us but we don't admit it so freely.
All of us fell into this pit and now somehow I'm the whore? The continuous search for anything and all anyone has found so far is disappointment. Eyes bleary and red from drugs and weeping on cold tile floors in restaraunt fogged with the steam of dead flesh... feel that same moisture escape your own skin.
Wake up in a sewer to watch rats as they devour hope and dreams the planet shared... it had to be something. Blue light cracks in the eyes of rodents as they strut about in their own filth knowing they hold much more power than their human counterparts ever have. "We've been on this planet much longer than any of you have, and we will remain after you are gone again!" In their little squeaking voices of death choking out threats and hate every being here is completely full of.
Throughout the country a million television screens crack and pop filling peaceful little middle class living rooms into raging infernos of hatred and malcontent. "The Hollywood facade has made us dissatisfied and we are here for our revenge." One look and it's clear that this is the end.
Explain depression away in six languages, try not to be too verbose about it. This is the sound of my brain popping like a can and fizzing over into the streets in the form of loose typewriter paper scattering about in a frenzied breeze. Tapping of fingers on ancient keys and the ring at the end of every line... I'm reminded of all those things
really make no difference anyway.
All technologies everywhere disconnect sometime and leave a million electronic youth in a state of social starvation. The only source of news and friendship coming at them two hundred kilobytes a second... not a single one touches or cares about them. Empty lives, no substance, no emotion. Tears are obsolete, there are machines to feel for us now. In a purple smoke smells like burning plastic baggies teenagers engage in sex acts and tear their own flesh off of their bodies knowing it too will soon be replaced.
Soul hurricanes bring down tree limbs and crush houses your salary can't replace a the thousand memories inside... sorry, you've gone bankrupt. Sell everything you own in desperate attmpts to buy something real but it's out of stock and so are we.
I walk through a love that is long dead and still try to embrace everything around me. I really believe myself when I say that I want to let this pass, but deep down I'm horribly aware that this terrible drunken sadness is the only scrap of real life I have to hold onto, and thus I carry it with me through days good and bad knowing that no one
can ever force me to part ways with it... in this I feel secure.
Streets in cities bordered so closely by buildings are best for feeling sorry for yourself. It's easy there to feel that cold city street loneliness, but directly beside you is the warmth of little middle class residences beaming with hope and reflections of young adult ambition. "Don't hold me too closely, dear." I'm afraid it's far too late and already she feels those sharp pangs of love slipping away as it always does simply because I can't bear to hold on to any one person for that length of time and feel sorry for my lovers because of this.
Diseased dogs howl on the corners of smalltown streets littered with condoms and banana peels. Dreams are inconsequential because, as he said... there is no context. Like a stuffed animal on the floor in the middle of a bank. The rabid hounds overtake all of our public buildings and decide they own us now and there's nothing we can do, and really there isn't. Our weapons may be more sophisticated, but there numbers are far greater. Shoot as we may and always do, a second pack will always flank the gunman from behind and tear him limb from limb left screaming, "What's left of the fantasy I loved so much?"
This is a smoky town. It's difficult to see even a few feet ahead and the roads here are perilous if not totally impassable. Spotlights along the way do little more than illuminate tiny particles throughout the air. Cough your lungs out and let the dogs lap up your filthy blood.
We spin and spin and spin until out brains slide out of our ears. That diabolical schlupping sound as internals pour from us. The empy human is quite a sight to behold. Before being pumped full of chemicals, corpses in the back of funeral homes look this way. The streets are
filled with blood and our race lies in gutters lapping it up. The fruit of our toils flooding the places we paid all of those fucking spics to build.
Freezing to death in flannel pajamas high in the air the arms of a concrete room wrapped around me I shriek with fear of everything.
Worry fills my sloppy speech as I stand in the middle of a room making statements on my own recovery which is in fact nonexistent. The sounds are muffled.
On certain star-filled nights of contemplation in November it appals me to think how much I care for lovers long since lost and no longer contemplating me as I weep with their memory. The old bed sways under the weight of my heart and though it is not measurable that old soul-bearing thing sure as hell feels it and cries with me.
Overhung mornings the blur into afternoons and nights... with bitter indifference I scan the streets of small cities gasping for air as they expand more rapidly than they are able to handle. If this is what
geographical adolescence is made of, count all of your lights and gas pumps... the choke sputtering on the feed we've been provided. We're a generation raised to raise ourselves and grow to be big strong unhappy societal contributors.
I saw it in her eyes that night. The purple electricity pulsing behind hazel facade. She knew it at the very moment I did, but all the same we were both as good as dead. Leaping from rooftop to flaming rooftop to escape each other... for whatever reason embracing as we took that final plunge into vomit and rank lymph. If you saw the way I drank that night you'd understand. I have a great deal of respect for those who can remain faithful to their lovers even in the loneliness of the drunken night, I have never been on this end of things.
You were the only one who saw me sweating that night. Nervous in the dim light of that dreary room... and really, for whom? They all thought they knew me, us, we, anyway so why bother trying to make any sort of impression besides that which came so naturally?
This is how it all comes crashing down. One giant cancerous mass in the middle of our gray-yellow urban utopia. Smoky rooms lined with indian carpets most likely stolen because bought off of the street but what
difference does that really make. We all count down the moments until we fall in love again knowing full well that it hurts a little less each time it ends and every affair is a little less meaningful really... how did life become such a series of events and not whatever great story it was planned to be? Like a forgotten novel left on the shelf and visited occassionally on empty days without ever really going anywhere.
I watched them all get carted away, and didn't say a word. Moments prior to that, I was in love... now there was not enough pride left in me to love anything at all. Not knowing which way to turn I chose not to at all and began walking forward through the rain and cold until some sort of shelter could be found. That same kind of shelter I knew and now know even better that I had lost some time ago. Please lord, don't let this be the real world. Green gases flaring up from behind half opened eyelid ignited the planet in dreams I wish were my own.
Big rusty ships sail across the great American continent leaving a path of iridescent slug ooze in their path so all the children run to the streets to lap the shit up and fuck each other. They squeal with glee as each little one, starting with teens and working it's way right down to toddlers, is fucked to their little heart's delight.
Somehow I seem to have developed a stong feeling of abandonment. Where it is I cam across such a thing I am uncertain of. I walk through crowded intersections at rush hour looking for the first bus coming this way.
2
Faces in masks of all colors and shapes. These images are all too blurred to understand. Like words in foreign languages we don't know anymore. As I move, empty streets fill behind me. It's easy at first glance to see something so full and busy as the ultimate manifestation of life eternal, but really all that bustling is just death waiting to take place. The differences between kinetic and potential death.
Those eery December lights illuminate garages where I weep and hide all night hoping someone will stumble across my pathetic state and somehow alleviate pain I have no means to cope with. Got drunk and robbed every store owner in town. I apologize, dear capitalists! I understand you are only looking to make a buck, what is it I desire that is so much more than that dollar? Nothing really, dollars are all the assurance I have.
If this is the end of the line or whatever you'd like to call it, then I suppose there is nowhere for us to run but backward. A line is a boundary we invented FOR SOME REASON. It's these nights in the cold that I understand why there was probably a line at the mouth of primordial caves thick with festering sludge waiting to consume flesh whole.
If you ever find yourself on my side of town or even somehow in the same building, which really isn't all that unlikely... track me down and tell me how you've been. You most likely will find me in the bathtub filled with ice and blood. I am every disgusted wife discovering her husband's extramarital bliss. Bliss is meant to be interrupted, usually by blood.
The desperately lonely will reach out to anything. Cloudy eyes reveal the liver damages you can't reverse but honestly you would rather not live to be that old anyway.
I escaped to the garage for a quick cigarette and found no relief at all, a bike without it's front tire spewing water across the floor.
TO HAVE THAT BACK I cannot even begin to imagine. Love love lovers all around and just a mess of semen... all it is, really. A waste of that precious seminal fluid and I'm sorry god! "Whatever chance you had is gone" and those words shuddered through me like poison injected deep into the neck of the traitor while he begs his country's forgiveness. Nations are just big woman entities waiting to be betrayed and tear men to shreds just for fuck's sake. AND FUCK THEY WILL!
Sometimes I go on sabbatical for months at a time. Why this is, I haven't figured out yet. I think perhaps I just disappear for a while and then problems start to arise once again so I write them.
This desperate spring depression flashes on and off in embers.
Finally I got mine and began to understand how they all felt there in the cold being hauled off one by one.
I shrugged and realized the game was over. Everyone is on a timeline that at some point glitches and leaves you alone with no other option but surrender.
The whole point all along was to be better. Having the upper hand on enemies and friends alike has always been of utmost importance, don't be fooled by behaviors that may indicate otherwise.
*************************
UNTITLED
1
Overdose on life and die… every morning two parallel gunslingers greet one another in the same dusty street with weapons drawn and never is a single shot fired. Mortal enemies with nothing left to live for but hatred of one another for reasons neither remembers anymore. Wishing more at each of these dawn meetings that one could kill the other, knowing full well that the other man is their reason for existence. Hatred fuels entire nations… giant squirming slashes on maps filled with overflowing black hate of individuals feeding scientific developments and various technologies…
Haunted implements of destruction sit on landing strips of cities burning in purple flame of cursed Egyptian night. But this is Chicago, and there’s no reason for this dark African tempest of emotions personified by corpses and scattered scraps of loose-leaf paper charred by unconscious wanderings of minds strung-out and too far gone to ever remember what they wrote on them.
Lie dead in greasy sheets on mornings alone in tenement room sick from every night attempting to kill myself with cheap cigarettes and cheaper wine. Window without panes through blows wet clouds bits of sewage afloat in piss-warm precipitation. Spend some time with kids deformed in such obscene ways words have not been penned yet to describe their illnesses and afflictions. Infected by cruelty we’ve all seen many times every day. Give us all a nickel for every time a gun has been resting on our teeth and some of us would have a ton of nickels. Others would have very few or none… but without that cool blued taste of steel driving us so close to the edge of death how can we experience life? Loaded gun wishing for you that life and the world were so much different… several clicks just one short of full realization of all these things.
BURST! Of orgasm on dry concrete… dry concrete bursting from us as we orgasm… this climax defining all the things words have thus far managed to avoid. Forced descriptions… once something is described or categorized its threat becomes null and the world is finally allowed to embrace it in all its loving warmth or sharp broken glass hatred. Our lovely assistants hand each other memos we’ve addressed to ourselves… rolling through endless channels and arriving back in our boxes stamped by anonymous, who lives in nowhere.
I am in fact anonymous. Each of us is, and we’re all from nowhere… and that’s where we’re going. Funny how we’re all from the same place and destined to end up there again together… but with faces upward you and I have managed to not notice each other on the trip and instead chose to make it completely solitary. Warm familiarity of worn in linens but longing nonetheless for crisp newness of untraversed terrain.
Drift in and out of conversations going too fast all around a polluted head. A gear grinding too fast as it is… overload of stimulus and the organs burst in a moment of sheer joy. Thick gray smoke on summer night not black like that opium haze but much softer and warmer clouds all around you invading your thoughts and realizing your weaknesses don’t let me leave yet please I want to stay another night with you. She undresses and dresses in a finer cloth I’m never allowed to see for total strangers I swear she loves more than me and still I spend all of my money on her and please just this once won’t she dress that way for me?
I slaughter men at night in my sleep. Blood and innards smear the telephoto lens every dream is filtered through to make sure I’m not really aware of just what it is going on behind my eyes in the grimier recesses of my skull dirty like underside of ancient bars in diners I’ve smoked too many cigarettes in.
The men I’ve killed, I wish I knew their names or remember their faces… so I might keep a lookout for them in the few waking hours I happen to roam the world during. Now, the world is right outside my window but not my door and if I exit one way I might never make it to the other and it’s this that I’m so terrified of.
2
So I laid in her bed next to her, it was clean and had that same smell it always had… and that smell was always me after leaving. She was dressed nicely (when she was dressed) but I am horribly aware that this is all a charade… and not even for me!
3
On a rainy Tuesday traveled not so many miles for not so important of a reason… but gas and car, neither were mine so few worries bothered me. Wet concrete cold, so I laid on it to prove it felt me… when I stood up again I knew that it had and that invariably the planet feels all of us in one way or another just as we feel it… only for as slight an impact as we may have on it, it seems earth notices us far more than we notice her and this is why the sky weeps on me this evening.
And laying on that cracked concrete wet and cold with age and rain realized the concrete itself was dying underneath me… turning to sand slowly but surely, and the planet was dying and sure enough turning into intergalactic sand. Everything dying all at once but at different rates and no choice but to write it all down and quietly think to yourself how anything will ever be accomplished before we are all dead.
At any rate it feels indescribably important to continue in this random bout of travel and to transcribe it for you so you might know the complete joy that is the desperation our planet is now consumed by.
4
Tiny teleprompters behind glassy teenage eyes in smoky caffeine establishments telling every patron just what to say and when so that they may purchase what has suddenly become so vitally important in this orange adulterous evening where sensitive boys cry in the abandoned dugout… he never played ball anyway.
Seconds only to respond to flashing stimulus of childhood or adolescence or whatever you might fucking call it but all the same the whole mess is one big explosion catapulting our poor souls into labor and toil and tedium and everything and anything we all hate so much but all embrace without end though never cease to whine whine whine until everyone has had enough and if you don’t kill yourself someone else had better pretty damn soon.
5
We’ve spoiled our precious minds with low budget pornography void of any true value… better lovers are not being bourne of these videos… in fact worse ones. Blood splatters on screen as actor and actress spontaneously dissolve in a spew of sick disease not yet named but soon enough everyone will know about it. Introduce yourself, you sloppy boy… have you no manners?
WE WERE ALL RAISED BY WOLVES. None of us is making it out alright, and no messiah is coming to pull us out of this mess.
6
Exiting love long dead and still an annoyance in your side that will never pass. Your deathbed with surround sound and high-definition thank the lord almighty I’m saved from boredom while I die.
Because really that’s all there is to bear in death is boredom. When all the color is stripped from everything you’ve ever liked to look at and music sound like little more than a screech the realization that death is so very fucking close and for whatever reason just won’t come to you yet.
7
In the middle of march dark snow fell on the hood of my dying car, always feel that car trying to take me further than I’ve ever let it and show me things I know I need to see… but never succumb to it due to obligations of time and money and PEOPLE.
If that old car ever did have the opportunity to take my anyplace… I’d never allow an empty passenger seat. There are expanses of people I could have a long and I can only imagine what each would be like consumed by that imaginary sadness that overcomes us all on any long trip.
Stretched out miles of horizon lines and ate them whole in the backseat with her at the wheel and I catch her glancing at me nervously all the time because she thinks I’m a madman and I know it and MAYBE I AM. The more likely case though is that I’m just trying to be honest and am in fact mad with love even all these words can’t express so I am always trying no to dwell on it and always failing because sometimes it is that very love that makes me want to do anything at all.
8
Murky harbor soiled so many decades ago and now the city tries to clean you but it’s too late. Reflection of franchise restaurant signs shows which way to walk in drunken stupor finally come to rest on bench luck it’s July otherwise I’d die tonight. Great blinking beacons of despair in the middle of surely one of America’s saddest cities…
Baltimore I feel all your poverty like that which exists in much larger cities but none of the grandeur and because of this you are empty and dying or dead and always have been.
The whole of our Chesapeake waters have been corrupted. Sweet virginal sea waited so long for something pure and good and got filth in return. We swam in dirty lakes in Virginia and saw cold ponies beating frantically to other shores as dismal as the ones they’re working so hard to escape from.
9
April morning! You’ve touched the world with golden lining but tease us still when you turn to night and freeze us all over again. I can’t bear to see the April that awaits me because as per my experience April is the month which more often than any other gives birth to love. And indeed my love was born in April.
In only anticipating the warmth of the months ahead something new and different is present and I’m terrified of it because it may very well hold that same dead feeling the snows always have for me but now even the beautiful sun will be tearing me apart and that’s not something I feel capable of dealing with.
We all fade out now and then only to reemerge more beautiful than before I swear it you’ll be fine if you’ll just let yourself stay in hiding long enough.
10
Our minds are on a string and they all tug at one another until they’ve become so strained every last one just gives in and heads toward the arctic where they will of course freeze and never have to think again but should we make them?
Sols short on gas fumes and drug hangings never make it out to see the shore again and if that’s the case why bother breathing anymore because that air will never have that rotten salty taste I remember so distinctly from my childhood and then later trip to Atlantic city to see whores of all kinds solicit us at 3 am and still we just laughed and rolled about in the sand practically nude despite the lack of warmth that early in June and some of us having just finally completed our schooling to go on to whatever (he became a minister) and the other three just imagining what we might do with ourselves in a year’s time.
And here only a little less than a year after that experience so much is completely different and so very similar and oh how sad the world really is when you see how fast it’s all going. In bayside night only about thirty miles from last years place of origination I soon embark on voyages more meaningful and dangerous and exciting than that first could come near but still I’ll remember that one in it’s sweet virginity.
11
In the crisp dawn of my adult spring there is loneliness the likes of which I have previously never encountered. Surrounded at all times by warm bodies and still my hands are cold and hurt even my own body when they touch it. I am every Egyptian pharaoh covered in shiny beetles moving my body in sad contortions and flinging me into inescapable death.
12
I sit on horizon lines, that gray-orange nauseous color of dusk or dawn and both are happening all at once here on the edge of the planet where I’ve rested my legs awhile to witness everyone’s death including my own and cry long and hard over this though I could never change it and have no desire to do so.
1
Am I feeling sentimental or is that desperate longing just some sort of natural mode for me? This ride is endless and I've made it a million times, much rather to be on the other side of the continent. Take me to new continents in sun-soaked rain-soaked or whatever just have me drunk or otherwise inebriated and don't ever take me home let me find my own way. It is awfully late at this point and here I am in all my youth, an old man rambling on and on... More and more lately noticing that my words are death or over death and I too am overcoming this weakness we all feel as we fail to take the time to truly look out at the dying landscapes of small towns and their surrounding areas not yet afflicted by nationwide urban sprawl which will eventually consume every bit of property there is to be owned and I'm sure every square inch will be owned by one of three men. That senile old croaker with his few
hundred acres left over from world wars long past gets killed off and finally we've bought everything there is to own, thank you lord... the final judgement is nigh.
Desolate coasts scream to Summer, "Why have you left me in such a hurry... you swore you loved me and that things would be different!" It never is, is it? Every year the sunlight dies and gives way to fall's beautiful decay. Each of us is trapped in this cycle, and we love to hate it. Abandoned shopfronts dusty with fallen displays in an oceanic ghost town call out to me as I pass totally outside of reality and time... inanimate objects asking me what right I have to even exist.
Green embers of withdrawal paint my face all over my own room, and I swear it's tough to look at anymore. Somewhere I buried myself in a secret place to come retrieve when I was ready... and now I've forgotten where that is. Like original americans in sweat lodges, I am soaked and have visions. Nightmares mostly. I've seen house cats maimed by wild children hungry for blood just like the rest of us but we don't admit it so freely.
All of us fell into this pit and now somehow I'm the whore? The continuous search for anything and all anyone has found so far is disappointment. Eyes bleary and red from drugs and weeping on cold tile floors in restaraunt fogged with the steam of dead flesh... feel that same moisture escape your own skin.
Wake up in a sewer to watch rats as they devour hope and dreams the planet shared... it had to be something. Blue light cracks in the eyes of rodents as they strut about in their own filth knowing they hold much more power than their human counterparts ever have. "We've been on this planet much longer than any of you have, and we will remain after you are gone again!" In their little squeaking voices of death choking out threats and hate every being here is completely full of.
Throughout the country a million television screens crack and pop filling peaceful little middle class living rooms into raging infernos of hatred and malcontent. "The Hollywood facade has made us dissatisfied and we are here for our revenge." One look and it's clear that this is the end.
Explain depression away in six languages, try not to be too verbose about it. This is the sound of my brain popping like a can and fizzing over into the streets in the form of loose typewriter paper scattering about in a frenzied breeze. Tapping of fingers on ancient keys and the ring at the end of every line... I'm reminded of all those things
really make no difference anyway.
All technologies everywhere disconnect sometime and leave a million electronic youth in a state of social starvation. The only source of news and friendship coming at them two hundred kilobytes a second... not a single one touches or cares about them. Empty lives, no substance, no emotion. Tears are obsolete, there are machines to feel for us now. In a purple smoke smells like burning plastic baggies teenagers engage in sex acts and tear their own flesh off of their bodies knowing it too will soon be replaced.
Soul hurricanes bring down tree limbs and crush houses your salary can't replace a the thousand memories inside... sorry, you've gone bankrupt. Sell everything you own in desperate attmpts to buy something real but it's out of stock and so are we.
I walk through a love that is long dead and still try to embrace everything around me. I really believe myself when I say that I want to let this pass, but deep down I'm horribly aware that this terrible drunken sadness is the only scrap of real life I have to hold onto, and thus I carry it with me through days good and bad knowing that no one
can ever force me to part ways with it... in this I feel secure.
Streets in cities bordered so closely by buildings are best for feeling sorry for yourself. It's easy there to feel that cold city street loneliness, but directly beside you is the warmth of little middle class residences beaming with hope and reflections of young adult ambition. "Don't hold me too closely, dear." I'm afraid it's far too late and already she feels those sharp pangs of love slipping away as it always does simply because I can't bear to hold on to any one person for that length of time and feel sorry for my lovers because of this.
Diseased dogs howl on the corners of smalltown streets littered with condoms and banana peels. Dreams are inconsequential because, as he said... there is no context. Like a stuffed animal on the floor in the middle of a bank. The rabid hounds overtake all of our public buildings and decide they own us now and there's nothing we can do, and really there isn't. Our weapons may be more sophisticated, but there numbers are far greater. Shoot as we may and always do, a second pack will always flank the gunman from behind and tear him limb from limb left screaming, "What's left of the fantasy I loved so much?"
This is a smoky town. It's difficult to see even a few feet ahead and the roads here are perilous if not totally impassable. Spotlights along the way do little more than illuminate tiny particles throughout the air. Cough your lungs out and let the dogs lap up your filthy blood.
We spin and spin and spin until out brains slide out of our ears. That diabolical schlupping sound as internals pour from us. The empy human is quite a sight to behold. Before being pumped full of chemicals, corpses in the back of funeral homes look this way. The streets are
filled with blood and our race lies in gutters lapping it up. The fruit of our toils flooding the places we paid all of those fucking spics to build.
Freezing to death in flannel pajamas high in the air the arms of a concrete room wrapped around me I shriek with fear of everything.
Worry fills my sloppy speech as I stand in the middle of a room making statements on my own recovery which is in fact nonexistent. The sounds are muffled.
On certain star-filled nights of contemplation in November it appals me to think how much I care for lovers long since lost and no longer contemplating me as I weep with their memory. The old bed sways under the weight of my heart and though it is not measurable that old soul-bearing thing sure as hell feels it and cries with me.
Overhung mornings the blur into afternoons and nights... with bitter indifference I scan the streets of small cities gasping for air as they expand more rapidly than they are able to handle. If this is what
geographical adolescence is made of, count all of your lights and gas pumps... the choke sputtering on the feed we've been provided. We're a generation raised to raise ourselves and grow to be big strong unhappy societal contributors.
I saw it in her eyes that night. The purple electricity pulsing behind hazel facade. She knew it at the very moment I did, but all the same we were both as good as dead. Leaping from rooftop to flaming rooftop to escape each other... for whatever reason embracing as we took that final plunge into vomit and rank lymph. If you saw the way I drank that night you'd understand. I have a great deal of respect for those who can remain faithful to their lovers even in the loneliness of the drunken night, I have never been on this end of things.
You were the only one who saw me sweating that night. Nervous in the dim light of that dreary room... and really, for whom? They all thought they knew me, us, we, anyway so why bother trying to make any sort of impression besides that which came so naturally?
This is how it all comes crashing down. One giant cancerous mass in the middle of our gray-yellow urban utopia. Smoky rooms lined with indian carpets most likely stolen because bought off of the street but what
difference does that really make. We all count down the moments until we fall in love again knowing full well that it hurts a little less each time it ends and every affair is a little less meaningful really... how did life become such a series of events and not whatever great story it was planned to be? Like a forgotten novel left on the shelf and visited occassionally on empty days without ever really going anywhere.
I watched them all get carted away, and didn't say a word. Moments prior to that, I was in love... now there was not enough pride left in me to love anything at all. Not knowing which way to turn I chose not to at all and began walking forward through the rain and cold until some sort of shelter could be found. That same kind of shelter I knew and now know even better that I had lost some time ago. Please lord, don't let this be the real world. Green gases flaring up from behind half opened eyelid ignited the planet in dreams I wish were my own.
Big rusty ships sail across the great American continent leaving a path of iridescent slug ooze in their path so all the children run to the streets to lap the shit up and fuck each other. They squeal with glee as each little one, starting with teens and working it's way right down to toddlers, is fucked to their little heart's delight.
Somehow I seem to have developed a stong feeling of abandonment. Where it is I cam across such a thing I am uncertain of. I walk through crowded intersections at rush hour looking for the first bus coming this way.
2
Faces in masks of all colors and shapes. These images are all too blurred to understand. Like words in foreign languages we don't know anymore. As I move, empty streets fill behind me. It's easy at first glance to see something so full and busy as the ultimate manifestation of life eternal, but really all that bustling is just death waiting to take place. The differences between kinetic and potential death.
Those eery December lights illuminate garages where I weep and hide all night hoping someone will stumble across my pathetic state and somehow alleviate pain I have no means to cope with. Got drunk and robbed every store owner in town. I apologize, dear capitalists! I understand you are only looking to make a buck, what is it I desire that is so much more than that dollar? Nothing really, dollars are all the assurance I have.
If this is the end of the line or whatever you'd like to call it, then I suppose there is nowhere for us to run but backward. A line is a boundary we invented FOR SOME REASON. It's these nights in the cold that I understand why there was probably a line at the mouth of primordial caves thick with festering sludge waiting to consume flesh whole.
If you ever find yourself on my side of town or even somehow in the same building, which really isn't all that unlikely... track me down and tell me how you've been. You most likely will find me in the bathtub filled with ice and blood. I am every disgusted wife discovering her husband's extramarital bliss. Bliss is meant to be interrupted, usually by blood.
The desperately lonely will reach out to anything. Cloudy eyes reveal the liver damages you can't reverse but honestly you would rather not live to be that old anyway.
I escaped to the garage for a quick cigarette and found no relief at all, a bike without it's front tire spewing water across the floor.
TO HAVE THAT BACK I cannot even begin to imagine. Love love lovers all around and just a mess of semen... all it is, really. A waste of that precious seminal fluid and I'm sorry god! "Whatever chance you had is gone" and those words shuddered through me like poison injected deep into the neck of the traitor while he begs his country's forgiveness. Nations are just big woman entities waiting to be betrayed and tear men to shreds just for fuck's sake. AND FUCK THEY WILL!
Sometimes I go on sabbatical for months at a time. Why this is, I haven't figured out yet. I think perhaps I just disappear for a while and then problems start to arise once again so I write them.
This desperate spring depression flashes on and off in embers.
Finally I got mine and began to understand how they all felt there in the cold being hauled off one by one.
I shrugged and realized the game was over. Everyone is on a timeline that at some point glitches and leaves you alone with no other option but surrender.
The whole point all along was to be better. Having the upper hand on enemies and friends alike has always been of utmost importance, don't be fooled by behaviors that may indicate otherwise.
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UNTITLED
1
Overdose on life and die… every morning two parallel gunslingers greet one another in the same dusty street with weapons drawn and never is a single shot fired. Mortal enemies with nothing left to live for but hatred of one another for reasons neither remembers anymore. Wishing more at each of these dawn meetings that one could kill the other, knowing full well that the other man is their reason for existence. Hatred fuels entire nations… giant squirming slashes on maps filled with overflowing black hate of individuals feeding scientific developments and various technologies…
Haunted implements of destruction sit on landing strips of cities burning in purple flame of cursed Egyptian night. But this is Chicago, and there’s no reason for this dark African tempest of emotions personified by corpses and scattered scraps of loose-leaf paper charred by unconscious wanderings of minds strung-out and too far gone to ever remember what they wrote on them.
Lie dead in greasy sheets on mornings alone in tenement room sick from every night attempting to kill myself with cheap cigarettes and cheaper wine. Window without panes through blows wet clouds bits of sewage afloat in piss-warm precipitation. Spend some time with kids deformed in such obscene ways words have not been penned yet to describe their illnesses and afflictions. Infected by cruelty we’ve all seen many times every day. Give us all a nickel for every time a gun has been resting on our teeth and some of us would have a ton of nickels. Others would have very few or none… but without that cool blued taste of steel driving us so close to the edge of death how can we experience life? Loaded gun wishing for you that life and the world were so much different… several clicks just one short of full realization of all these things.
BURST! Of orgasm on dry concrete… dry concrete bursting from us as we orgasm… this climax defining all the things words have thus far managed to avoid. Forced descriptions… once something is described or categorized its threat becomes null and the world is finally allowed to embrace it in all its loving warmth or sharp broken glass hatred. Our lovely assistants hand each other memos we’ve addressed to ourselves… rolling through endless channels and arriving back in our boxes stamped by anonymous, who lives in nowhere.
I am in fact anonymous. Each of us is, and we’re all from nowhere… and that’s where we’re going. Funny how we’re all from the same place and destined to end up there again together… but with faces upward you and I have managed to not notice each other on the trip and instead chose to make it completely solitary. Warm familiarity of worn in linens but longing nonetheless for crisp newness of untraversed terrain.
Drift in and out of conversations going too fast all around a polluted head. A gear grinding too fast as it is… overload of stimulus and the organs burst in a moment of sheer joy. Thick gray smoke on summer night not black like that opium haze but much softer and warmer clouds all around you invading your thoughts and realizing your weaknesses don’t let me leave yet please I want to stay another night with you. She undresses and dresses in a finer cloth I’m never allowed to see for total strangers I swear she loves more than me and still I spend all of my money on her and please just this once won’t she dress that way for me?
I slaughter men at night in my sleep. Blood and innards smear the telephoto lens every dream is filtered through to make sure I’m not really aware of just what it is going on behind my eyes in the grimier recesses of my skull dirty like underside of ancient bars in diners I’ve smoked too many cigarettes in.
The men I’ve killed, I wish I knew their names or remember their faces… so I might keep a lookout for them in the few waking hours I happen to roam the world during. Now, the world is right outside my window but not my door and if I exit one way I might never make it to the other and it’s this that I’m so terrified of.
2
So I laid in her bed next to her, it was clean and had that same smell it always had… and that smell was always me after leaving. She was dressed nicely (when she was dressed) but I am horribly aware that this is all a charade… and not even for me!
3
On a rainy Tuesday traveled not so many miles for not so important of a reason… but gas and car, neither were mine so few worries bothered me. Wet concrete cold, so I laid on it to prove it felt me… when I stood up again I knew that it had and that invariably the planet feels all of us in one way or another just as we feel it… only for as slight an impact as we may have on it, it seems earth notices us far more than we notice her and this is why the sky weeps on me this evening.
And laying on that cracked concrete wet and cold with age and rain realized the concrete itself was dying underneath me… turning to sand slowly but surely, and the planet was dying and sure enough turning into intergalactic sand. Everything dying all at once but at different rates and no choice but to write it all down and quietly think to yourself how anything will ever be accomplished before we are all dead.
At any rate it feels indescribably important to continue in this random bout of travel and to transcribe it for you so you might know the complete joy that is the desperation our planet is now consumed by.
4
Tiny teleprompters behind glassy teenage eyes in smoky caffeine establishments telling every patron just what to say and when so that they may purchase what has suddenly become so vitally important in this orange adulterous evening where sensitive boys cry in the abandoned dugout… he never played ball anyway.
Seconds only to respond to flashing stimulus of childhood or adolescence or whatever you might fucking call it but all the same the whole mess is one big explosion catapulting our poor souls into labor and toil and tedium and everything and anything we all hate so much but all embrace without end though never cease to whine whine whine until everyone has had enough and if you don’t kill yourself someone else had better pretty damn soon.
5
We’ve spoiled our precious minds with low budget pornography void of any true value… better lovers are not being bourne of these videos… in fact worse ones. Blood splatters on screen as actor and actress spontaneously dissolve in a spew of sick disease not yet named but soon enough everyone will know about it. Introduce yourself, you sloppy boy… have you no manners?
WE WERE ALL RAISED BY WOLVES. None of us is making it out alright, and no messiah is coming to pull us out of this mess.
6
Exiting love long dead and still an annoyance in your side that will never pass. Your deathbed with surround sound and high-definition thank the lord almighty I’m saved from boredom while I die.
Because really that’s all there is to bear in death is boredom. When all the color is stripped from everything you’ve ever liked to look at and music sound like little more than a screech the realization that death is so very fucking close and for whatever reason just won’t come to you yet.
7
In the middle of march dark snow fell on the hood of my dying car, always feel that car trying to take me further than I’ve ever let it and show me things I know I need to see… but never succumb to it due to obligations of time and money and PEOPLE.
If that old car ever did have the opportunity to take my anyplace… I’d never allow an empty passenger seat. There are expanses of people I could have a long and I can only imagine what each would be like consumed by that imaginary sadness that overcomes us all on any long trip.
Stretched out miles of horizon lines and ate them whole in the backseat with her at the wheel and I catch her glancing at me nervously all the time because she thinks I’m a madman and I know it and MAYBE I AM. The more likely case though is that I’m just trying to be honest and am in fact mad with love even all these words can’t express so I am always trying no to dwell on it and always failing because sometimes it is that very love that makes me want to do anything at all.
8
Murky harbor soiled so many decades ago and now the city tries to clean you but it’s too late. Reflection of franchise restaurant signs shows which way to walk in drunken stupor finally come to rest on bench luck it’s July otherwise I’d die tonight. Great blinking beacons of despair in the middle of surely one of America’s saddest cities…
Baltimore I feel all your poverty like that which exists in much larger cities but none of the grandeur and because of this you are empty and dying or dead and always have been.
The whole of our Chesapeake waters have been corrupted. Sweet virginal sea waited so long for something pure and good and got filth in return. We swam in dirty lakes in Virginia and saw cold ponies beating frantically to other shores as dismal as the ones they’re working so hard to escape from.
9
April morning! You’ve touched the world with golden lining but tease us still when you turn to night and freeze us all over again. I can’t bear to see the April that awaits me because as per my experience April is the month which more often than any other gives birth to love. And indeed my love was born in April.
In only anticipating the warmth of the months ahead something new and different is present and I’m terrified of it because it may very well hold that same dead feeling the snows always have for me but now even the beautiful sun will be tearing me apart and that’s not something I feel capable of dealing with.
We all fade out now and then only to reemerge more beautiful than before I swear it you’ll be fine if you’ll just let yourself stay in hiding long enough.
10
Our minds are on a string and they all tug at one another until they’ve become so strained every last one just gives in and heads toward the arctic where they will of course freeze and never have to think again but should we make them?
Sols short on gas fumes and drug hangings never make it out to see the shore again and if that’s the case why bother breathing anymore because that air will never have that rotten salty taste I remember so distinctly from my childhood and then later trip to Atlantic city to see whores of all kinds solicit us at 3 am and still we just laughed and rolled about in the sand practically nude despite the lack of warmth that early in June and some of us having just finally completed our schooling to go on to whatever (he became a minister) and the other three just imagining what we might do with ourselves in a year’s time.
And here only a little less than a year after that experience so much is completely different and so very similar and oh how sad the world really is when you see how fast it’s all going. In bayside night only about thirty miles from last years place of origination I soon embark on voyages more meaningful and dangerous and exciting than that first could come near but still I’ll remember that one in it’s sweet virginity.
11
In the crisp dawn of my adult spring there is loneliness the likes of which I have previously never encountered. Surrounded at all times by warm bodies and still my hands are cold and hurt even my own body when they touch it. I am every Egyptian pharaoh covered in shiny beetles moving my body in sad contortions and flinging me into inescapable death.
12
I sit on horizon lines, that gray-orange nauseous color of dusk or dawn and both are happening all at once here on the edge of the planet where I’ve rested my legs awhile to witness everyone’s death including my own and cry long and hard over this though I could never change it and have no desire to do so.