The constriction of poetry and prose

the city lights are not contrite

obscuring all the stars at night

 

          I thought I was done with midnight ramblings, yet here I am, outside at an indecent hour, just me, the cold and all that the darkness will not let you see. I wrote the poems, the novels and was found wanting. These were limited in their longevity as a form of artistic expression. Then I found my voice on the dark streets of decay, creating something that was uniquely me, but this only served to isolate me more so I decided the provided would no longer be meant for anyone but me and let my writing become esoteric. 

          Yes I am human and I don’t want to feel “unlovable” but I am asking for acceptance from the normative when there is no way I will ever be able to belong because I dwell on the Azrith Plains far from the Peoples’ Palace where everyone feels safe and secure inside their “let me hide” walls. So I need to grasp while I unclasp and no longer listen to the gasps that emit like a collection of the greatest hits because everyone else stays with what is traditionally popular.

         So I will take this heart on my sleeve pack it in my bag and leave and let the axe of your axioms cleave any connection between you and me. I guess it would have been easier, if less poetic, to just say goodbye, but what after-all is poetry if not the mote in God’s eye.

***

 

How can you change me when you don’t even know what I wear?

(Bernhard, when does the paragraph end? Kafka really wants to know.)

          Photons falling in the form of light, sunshine is a delight until it melts your favorite ice cream and the forensics foretells your inevitable capture and arrest, but I protest that ignorance is not bliss yet you swarm like a succubus trying to feed off a corpse, riding a dead horse is the fastest way to not go anywhere and I no longer want to share, be a member of your membrane. I am not insane, in fact I am the only one who is lucid so stop playing cupid with my heart and your philosophy that three plus three must equal six. I’ve watched you play your pick up sticks and realize I no longer care to partake in your reindeer games and if it is all the same I will reside outside your pied that lets you proclaim diversity in your monotone circle. Go ahead and wear purple whatever love and acceptance I hoped to find amid your collective mind I realize now can never be without assimilation because you protect yourselves with platitudes disdaining my attitude born of a species that does not contain DNA. All I’m trying to say and I can’t be anymore plain is that you live with your refrains and I view a verse less world. Mother Mary was a virgin and Doctor Kevorkian was a surgeon who separated life from the living and all I’m urging is you do not play upon my vulnerability, a need for love, by thinking I could ever think like you and make thoughts be a litmus test that I could join the rest when I stop being someone no one could love; a lone wolf lingering in the loneliness of a forest you slashed and burned with your limited perception only allowing the seeds to germinate that will bring forth pleasant presentations. I do not need you to acknowledge my existence just realize there is a direct connection between what you allow to be relevant and the feelings that I am therefore unlovable that this leaves me with. So sit around your fire pit, the eyes glowing in the darkness will be mine. My only mistake is ever having sought acceptance in your fire concentric circle when the truth is I am nothing like you and your perceptual puzzle containing only three pieces you claim to be complete even though the box is replete with the other 9,997 pieces you say do not need to be considered. (And you say I’m the Existentialist)

***

written while on an acid trip in 1985

once i had a 1,000 heads

and they all said let’s go to bed

let’s close our eyes let’s get some sleep

and here we’ll lay no more to weep

can we please rest our weary minds

forget that the world is so unkind

forget how they teach us to be blind

did you hear about president ronald

he had a friend who owned a mcdonalds

who sold some burgers made lots of money

so he in turn endorsed some honey

have you seen the cat scan of his brain

doctors say it looks like a russian terrain

said it must have caused him lots of pain

do you know what happened to lennon

is he in hell or is he in heaven

and if in hell is he doing well

does he have old nick underneath his spell

can you please tell me where the truth lies

here on earth or way up in the sky

oh won’t you please tell me before i die 

***

 

 

 

The esoteric pen

Reaching repast where erasure replaces remember the fading embers of my un-stoked mind long ago realized there is nothing to find but still I keep searching and in all this perching on dead branches amid dying trees I find that meaning is not in the absence of leaves but in the wood being used in the construction of dining room tables where we are enabled to learn the fable of the communal quesadilla and its ability to bring together with a purpose. That in these days of existentialism and physics we are still able to visit a viable alternative to this uneven flow of space and time and whether or not I can make it rhyme life is a series of saying, “Well this sucks.” sparsely populated by moments wherein we can measure meaning in the convening that brings forth joy. However it is deployed for you, like the gathering of a few for a communal quesadilla in the simple act of a meal shared. I do not declare that all is equally defined but unscripted moments raw and unrefined help to remind why we keep on giving to this effort called living.

 ***

 

PICKLES!

(Seriously? You want to have a war of words with me?)

          Some sensibilities seek to save they offer no solution they only enslave.

 “If you would only think like I think and realize what I know the grace that would be bestowed, but first you must agree with me.”

          Some sensibilities seek to save they offer no solution they only enslave.

Words are like bacon wrapped around an all beef hotdog. They taste good on your tongue but once inside the indigestion will collide with the rejection till it flows like liquid out your anus it made you so sick. Some of us are hopping on pogo sticks and that is all we have ever accomplished, some of us are screaming into microphones raging at the all alone where we float among a sea of faces. Trophies are for high speed races, the rest of us listen to Adele and identify. I only care that you try to drag me over the jagged rocks with your incessant waves, the endless pounding that will save some concept of soul by stripping the flesh off the bone till all evidence of me is gone. And what is overlooked on the fisherman’s hook is that which is caught cannot be delectable until it is seasoned to taste and in all your haste you can’t simply see that all I want is to be accepted as me and not the me you need me to be in order for me to be a part of your scheme of things which dictate what everyone should be for love to be properly digested.

***

 

 

Contingent self-esteem dysmorphic disorder

Counting my Counting Crows albums I find no cure for me. Please do not misunderstand, I do not need something to cure some part of me, I am the disease. The symptom is self-loathing and the various versions of self-destruction have been my treatments to eradicate the disease. Meditation, medicine, methamphetamines and many other miracle cures made moments melt from my memories but as I survey the scenery of devastation I am the bomb that has destroyed all beauty and laid the landscape to waste. All because of this one thing I hate which motivates me to create the barren world I deserve.     

          Someone who cannot love themselves cannot validate your love for them, I would like to do more than swing and miss, but other than putting myself at the top of the list of things I cannot stand I cannot plow and harvest in a land when I don’t know which fertilizer is the one which will actually help anything begin to grow. Reap and sow, sow and reap, I pray the Lord my soul to keep while believing the people I meet created a vengeful god after realizing some things just can’t be saved.

          Oh sweet Christ I need a drink.

 ***

 

 

The ash of smoked opium

           This week my sequel to The Dark Streets of Decay was published, but I have no desire to propagate and promote. Having my writings published isn’t what blows my skirts up although I do enjoy when someone reads and relays their feelings because it helps me remember our earth bound errands. I spend most of my time thinking about things like how in 1775 where Pluto was in its orbit around the sun it has not returned to that spot yet and all of the United States History has occurred before Pluto has made a complete orbit around the sun and it makes me feel as if none of this matters in contrast to the vastness of time and space. But then I think we are the only thing that does matter because cold and distant space cannot offer a warm embrace and warm embraces are what we really want.

          I guess I shouldn’t generalize, who knows what the Phantom Killer in Texarkana wanted in 1946 and God help us all if the religious extremists win the day. In the meantime I will wear my words on my sleeve because writing is the only thing that lets me be me and the only thing I really I want to do. Whether I sit on this porch while the sun is searing the synapses of my brain or I sit by the sea and soak in its rhythmic vibrations I go inside myself to bring out the words, so deep that my surroundings no longer seem real and all I can feel is the wonder of the words wrapped around my mind.
          The world is unkind and I alleviate the suffering by being alone or am I just too sensitive to survive the frigid temperatures of human interactions? Hillbilly hammers and banjos that clamor might make up another person’s day but no one can reach my habitation unless they pass through the dark streets of decay and realize why I never have anything to say, only that I couldn’t stay on those streets, but I will always be the person who said that whatever is the reason you get out of bed it is reason enough.

***

in the early days on a sunny street

I’m not doing O.K.; I’m still not drinking, but goddamn, was that really the problem? I feel overwhelmed; the tides swell and drench mocking my effort to be dry. What is it that I want to do? I don’t want to be drunk so I don’t drink, it’s that simple, but nothing else is so easily solved. I’m lonely and I crave conversation, but invocations are all anyone can invent, so my time is spent pretending I am someone who prefers to be alone.

          Chilled to the bone I remember in my youth I was prone to running up and down the cul-de-sac in the summer heat where my friends and I would sustain by sipping from a garden hose, we were all gonna be somebody. I’m a long way from that surround sound of suburban houses and the problem isn’t what I didn’t become but what I did. For decades I thrived in the hive of unveiling the spiritual while still corporeal, unattained and profane I impaled myself on the analysis of atheism and the existential egress that if there is no one to impress then there is nothing left to guess, but even in my preponderances of the pointless I am still the same old boy I use to be, dreaming of a reality where I matter enough to be loved and not contained in this cell where I curtail everything that is me in order to be what you need me to be in order for you to be with me; my definition of being free. As the poet said, “Jesus loves me more than I know, but not as much as I need.”
          But like these O’Douls and now empty bar stools I am an imitation immersed in the imagination of an immaculate conception. God sends an angel at the inception to seduce with secrets and terrible lies until I look up at the endless blue sky and wonder why I am yearning for something that can’t be defined or might not be real, but when love is something you steal you just cannot feel you have earned it and thereby don’t deserve it; and at the center of it all is the self and the person who loves me least of all is me, and therein lies the real problem. It has nothing to do with what is in view, I just want to shed this skin, be born again as anything other than me; and I have never understood the madness of Layne Staley, Edgar Allan Poe, James Douglas Morrison, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson as clearly as I do right now.

***

In the vicinity of Seventh and Main

         The understanding that comes from certainty is not an understanding I have. What are words? Words can wound, words can offend, but we are the ones who determine which words have weight. Words do not create, movement does and that is why actions speak louder than words. Words really don’t matter, nor can anything be summed up in a few words which is why the writer once said he would show you his faith by his works.

          My words share what I have done, that is why my words fall under the genre of confessional, feelings professed, actions confessed, words that do not depict events correctly are called fiction, but words in and of themselves have no power, they do not bring understanding or clarity unless that is what we say they are doing, so the question isn’t what are words but what is our brain and how does it function? I don’t know; all I know are words and how I’ve determine their individual usage.

          How can I find meaning when I can’t even find meaningful words? Words can be used to satisfy the carnal, when I am hungry I can order food, but when I walk amid the pseudo spiritual sayings printed on plaques I realize it was not words that satisfied my hunger but the food and words can only soothe if we allow them to, but in these plaques I find no allowances. Artists put words on wood, everything from Biblical sayings to Rastafarian, lying on tables attached to their artists who wear t-shirts that read Irish luck or beanies over dreadlocks. I find nothing dark, just trinkets for tourists, nothing that sets me on fire. This is called the Downtown Los Angeles Art Walk, well I’ve walked, but I never found any art. I find more art in the atmosphere, though I still don’t find any meaning, an order to this chaos. Stand on a Los Angeles street corner and observe. Evolution is an over-used word, I just see what has become: buildings built around others that are old, characters creating traffics jams as they scream at the color of cars, even the business suits have scars but words will not take us far if words are all that is offered as healing.

          This is the concrete jungle and we are all wildebeest and keeping a wary eye out for danger is considered normal as we sniff the cracks in the sidewalks for grass that we can graze maintaining the illusion that words are real and our thoughts define us; that simply by agreeing with a certain arrangement of words we have aligned ourselves with the truth and determined the meaning of life even though it doesn’t reflect what is really happening around us. It just allows us to solve by simplifying everything into syllables, but words only mean what you want them to mean and are limited to your descriptive power at this or any hour I will define art as a painting of un-watered flowers dying in a garden bower, but even though I will have found a definitive I will ruin it because I will only be able to assess and affirm with my thoughts, which are, after-all, only words, and worse than that they are words which I have been taught.

***

The hidden influences were more of an amber color

       The last rays of light seep through the corner window and linger on the lone book lying in the bookcase. It is a leather-bound Bible my brother gave me decades ago, layered in dust and still around because it was something my brother gave me. Around the room paperbacks abound, novels that made the loudest sound among all the drum beats rhythmically enticing me to march to their beat. Most books I’ve read I’ve given away, the library is a pound that collects unwanted strays, but these books became family and were invited to stay: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Sheltering Sky, On the Road and Big Sur, The Naked Lunch, Haushofer’s The Wall, the poet’s prerequisite copy of Poe, Arthur Rimbaud, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Sexton and a collection of Jim Morrison’s poetry. There are other books this late afternoon finds me too tired to count or collect and put back on the shelves of my book case. I do keep my DVDs of Jim Morrison’s film HWY and Alan Rickman’s The Winter Guest in a place where the sunlight never directly touches, although the same could be said about my thoughts.

          From November Nineteenth, 2013 through March Seventh, 2015 I wrote The Dark Streets of Decay and its sequel The Dark Streets of Decay: The Extended Version and if you have read these two books you would understand why these other writers are my family. My only active addiction right now is caffeine and sobriety suppresses my supplications to the accidental atoms that congealed into a material measurement of madness and mayhem. I know I could twinge, go off on a binge, get lost on the fringe till my senses are singed by Layne Staley’s syringe, but for now I will cringe and cower on front porches near garden bowers and realize I am made ambulatory by my ambiguity. The Dark Streets of Decay set me free, I leveled the playing field to you and me with no expectation that anything is to be. It is how I am surviving sobriety because the only thing I choose to change is the content of what is curled by my hand and lifted to my lips.

          This isn’t an act of repentance, this is just me not drinking, no claim to fame, no feelings of shame, nothing else to change, letting my madness make me momentary perfecting the addict’s adage of “one day at a time”. I am not a crime and drinking isn’t criminal but I got tired of doing time where perception is subliminal.

 

***