Friday, September 19, 2008

Homecoming

All night afloat
On the silent sea we have heard the sound
-Dylan Thomas


Now what?


I wish the best years of my life weren't spent
nestled between the breasts of God,
looking straight backwards into the gold. 


O Smelting iron of time!
where your pale moon-scorched skin hadn't yet fallen
in my hot sun-drenched embrace...


Remember what shaped you? 
Remember those days of dead eyes waving
down our parents' hallways in the dark
and remember? Each breath didn't yet mean sadness.


I think you'll find that things have changed considerably, says my guide.
I think you'll find whatever happened, happened for a reason.
I think you'll find
the sky blue sky wide open like inverted seas
and filled
with handsome handfulls of treasure
if only you dive in,
leave the cheering golden crowds behind.


Now what we gunna do?
Don't you hear the music playing?
Rain drums
everyone instrumental
and trying to keep pace with the windshield wipers
as we slide down this highway to the sea


What a tiny world in that rearview mirror.
How very little gold there 
's to see.


Through this storm
You only wish to relax but may I remind you
how hard it was? Remember?

Don't stop at the red light,
making love and hope and harbors in the sand

Now we return home. Dark hallways
free from anger.  Free from guilt.  Free from all those nettings
looking back, straight wards filled with numbered mistakes
locked and peering through the bars and glass


Empty cells and broken shells
we're free. We're going home.
They won't touch us again
we're headed home.
We're coming home.

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Friday, September 12, 2008

If and

If I died tomorrow


I'd first like to say


that I am nothing.


My soul is an idea, and it dies with me, as yours does with you in this avalanch we call life.  Snowflakes shine brightest in the moment they crystalize and freeze, and for a while they rest on the eternal mountain, blessed in the company of friends, before they melt away gone.


and gone... and gone...


Some promise in sadness of a heaven in the sky.
Some charge murderously, with despair in their eyes.
Some go for thrills, few will ask why
this cumbersome march turns beneath the stars up on high


And time,


Time is a virus, hatched in our minds at birth
in those dreamlike images that predate written language
or man who could stand


the low voltage of the reptile mind
intensely satisfied with
a little sun
and a pit to hatch your eggs in.


If I died tomorrow


I am nothing.


The night is frigid, and I just wanted you to know


from this moment in the sun


before the shameless freeze
of these particles floating through the sky


That I was.  Masqued by my time
my mind
and my pace of the climb


I was.


Now, nothing.
Now nothing.

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Thursday, September 11, 2008

Obama Jokes

1) A midget clown, a transgender hip hop artist, Barack Obama and a penguin pull up to a gas station. The gas station attendant takes one look at the and says, "You know, we don't see many carloads like yours here." Barack Obama replies, "At these prices, I'm not surprised. That's why we need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil."

2) A traveling salesman knocks on the door of a farmhouse, and much to his surprise, Barack Obama answers the door. The salesman says, "I was expecting the farmer's daughter." Barack Obama replies, "She's not here. The farm was foreclosed on because of subprime loans that are making a mockery of the American Dream."

3) A horse walks into a bar. The bartender says, "Why the long face?" Barack Obama replies, "His jockey just lost his health insurance, which should be the right of all Americans."

5) A Christian, a Jew and Barack Obama are in a rowboat in the middle of the ocean. Barack Obama says, "This joke isn't going to work because there's no Muslim in this boat."

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Home Stories

It started with a gun to my head. Most things do around here. Our endings are our beginnings and The Dude I live with chooses to define his seminal moments by directing firearms at them.


"Is that thing loaded?" I ask.


"Maybe," he grunts, "slacker. What, are you afraid?" He nudges me off the couch and towards the door.


"Hey! Hey now! But I live here!"


"Not if I lock you out."


"I have a key."


"And I have a key. To your despair..."


"Ha! Hey man, that's pretty poeti--" and he locked me out of the house.



So I went for a walk. There's a kind of release instigated by the mechanical movement of legs on pavement: A freedom in the bipedal perambulation, as it were. Yes, yes, I know I have a penchant for the melodramatic, but one has time to craft sentences of gold when they are in the zone of introspection that a constantly shifting landscape over a long period of time creates. The sun bore down. The afternoon waned.


I walked down until I had crossed the railroad tracks, and found the old house. The other dude I lived with introduced me to an old man named Frank about a year ago. His unofficial caregiver, I'd come along on a grocery delivery and enjoyed the company so much that of my own accord I'd been back many times since. Frank lives in a low-built ranchero home bounded on either side by vacant lots where at one point sad houses identical to his pooped out splintered families that have since gone to dust and taken the adjacent lots with them, in one case replaced, on the south side, by squatters with a trailer home.


"Hows things Frank!" I hollered into the sweet smoky confines of his cave, slipping around the screen door. Floorboards creak, something crashes to the floor in a dark room. If voices were made of wood Frank's would be oak, hardened by a decade of methadone and a lifetime before it of Godknowswhat.


"WHOSIT?" Frank gurgles.


"It's me!" I reply, impersonating my own voice and fingering the dust off a portrait of St. Clare, listening to his shuffling footsteps approach from the darkness.
“Well get th’fuck outta here. Who asked you?”


“Nice to see you too,” I said as sunlight, slipping through a crack in the dusty vinyl curtain, illuminates the holy figure framed on the wall. “Who is this is portrait of?”


“That’s Saint Clare,” he booms, suddenly standing right behind me, “Now get lost.” Hanging up his cane and pouring himself a drink, he continues to himself, “My lil’ Clarissa I call her. Patron saint of seein’ things how they are, dirty laundry, and little lost girls an the pedophiles who find ’n love ‘em. What’ll ya have.”


“G & T.”


“That’s a golfers drink,” he rebuffs. Pouring the drink slowly, ever savoring life’s lesser pleasures, one gets the impression that he has seen many go soft and burn out by getting too much too fast.



Franklin Hellfire Hagan was born May 17, 1924 somewhere in western Europe but raised in St. Louis. The H. stands for Hellfire, but don’t ask why, he doesn’t know. His father named him Hellfire and he but appreciates the mystery of “my middle name, dead center of my identity, and like most people I find, its what’s at the center that’s something you’ll never know.”


He dumped 3 long years into the Pacific Theatre and returned with a broken nose (still bowed to this day), a limp in his left leg and a vow to never again set foot in a jeep as long as he lived; a vow which has since come to include all automobiles. “I keep th’ windows drawn at night,” he says, “all those prowlin’ red demon eyes…”


I’ve never been able to get a straight answer out of him as to why. He can be a bit eccentric.


“Starvation can do that to a man. Makes you shrivel up into yer own skin and call things for what they are. Eccentric personalities have always served ta unmask the mechanisms of control,” he once declared to me over a flourish of Queens and Aces, “you should work on that.”


“What? Control?”


“No. Unmasking.”



Frank’s wife died, out of five kids two sons are dead and only one of the remaining ever visits. He estimates eight grandchildren and a few great-grandchildren, but isn’t sure anymore. I imagine myself to be his most frequent companion.


“How long have you lived here, Frank?” I ask, getting out my pen and notebook and taking a seat across from his bucket-seat box of a chair.


“Not long,” he grumbles, settling into the fold in the cushions, “the house was built’n ’60. M’wife died in ’70 an I moved out here from Vegas in ’81 figure.”


“What were you doing in Vegas?”


“Getting’ fucked over.”



He has a grizzled white beard that stumps out of his chin, and softly smokes a fragrant pipe which lends the house its distinctive aroma. “I owned a casino,” he tells me, reigniting the bowl and conversation, “but the bills stacked up over my head so high I’s drownin’ in ‘em so…” blows out a perfect smoke ring, “at any rate I cashed out my chips and settled. Like a scab in this disease ridden patch of country.”


“That’s poetic.”


“Fuck you!” he shot back. “How’s that drink?”


“Best I’ve had all day.”


“As Ray Milland said, ‘One is too many, and a hundred ain’t enough.’”


“Well I’m only here for the one. The Dude’s got me locked out of the house.”


Frank scratches his head and looks at me obliquely. His pale eyes as porous as a clear morning sky. “Who?”


“The Dude. The Dude I live with.”


“Huah!” he laughs, “Listen ta you, Mr. big writerboy. Mr. ‘I am that Masked Man’. Mr. ‘The Dude I live with’. Mr. drinks at ‘The Place I Go.’. Who do y’think you’re protectin’ with all this? Everythin’ in your world revolves around YOU. Nobody cares.”


“But I like the anonymi—--”


“No! Nobody cares about anythin’ in this world ‘cept themselves and whatever they cn’get their grubby hands on. Least of all about you an yer runnin’ around wearin’ a mask. Anonymity is fine. Hell, I fuckin’ encourage it! But get the fuck over yerself first. Jesus.”



I waited a beat and then finished my drink in one swig. Frank set down his pipe and reached for his cane.


“Stay fer dinner?” he asked.


“No thanks. You need anything before I go?”


“I don’ need shit!”


“Would you tell me if you did?”


“Would you?” he asked. I got up and headed for the door. “I’ve put shit in my body an treated m’self like a pin cushion fer years but ain’t never let nobody walk allover me like you’re always doin’.”


“He held a gun to my head.”


“Tell ‘im to fuck himself. He was probly just fuckin’ ‘round anyway.”


“See ya Frank.”



Back in the pearlglintz glare of setting sun I squinted and sweat my way home and when I got to the house the door was unlocked. The Dude, sitting shirtless on the couch was watching reruns of Home Impovement while fiddling with an open bottle of beer.


Slacker. Where’d you run off to?” he asked.


“Places,” I said.


“What kind of places?”


“Places you’re not invited.”


“I own the world,” he boasted, “I’m invited everywhere.”


“Then somewhere you’re not welcome,” I said. I joined him on the couch to emulate the Tool Time studio audience laughing at Tim Allen’s hijinx.


“Sorry about earlier,” the Dude said, “I didn’t mean to give you a hard time.”


“You gave me a hard time earlier?”


“I was just feeling shitty about… oh, well if you don’t think it was a big deal then nevermind. I retract my apology.”


“Good. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”



Our endings are our beginnings and the sun set. Heavy winds blew from the west. I went to grab a few more beers from the fridge.



“I ordered pizza,” he said, “hope you’re hungry.”


“Starved,” I said.

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Wednesday, September 03, 2008

Daunt me, O Pessims!

Lord God sloshes his salty-cup
and tides splash side to side
world spins round, sun comes up
And all will be alright.
-E. Henry Thripshaw?


Why not something uplifting?
Yay!
It's Game Day!

Ask me a question.
The gamely challenge
lies in my ability to answer
in a manner befitting today's spirit
of Positivity!

Let'r Rip

-dmm

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Monday, September 01, 2008

Crucial Truths of Science

I feel like my life is a stage-set
and I have just emerged from a black cave

a cavernous expanse of frilly wigs and costume tails
and other dusty identities that no one dares wear anymore
into the snare of acidulous spot-light
with absolutely no idea what to say


Woke up exhausted this morning.  Dreams of boys I used to love.  Not anymore.  Slipped off like antimatter, out of space and time and into something else.  Me, today.  Smoking the hours away and cleaning up the mess with the smell of bleach.  One day is fine, I can take a shit and think nothing of it.  But when a week of shit piles up there's not enough bleach to really scrub out the stains.  And we're getting to that my boy.  We're getting to that.


Whispering  things like "bullseye" and "follow the money," these solitons travel down the perfect railroad track at a constant speed.
Sooner or later these networks will erode and you'll forget me and I'll forget me.  Remember something else.  Always something else isn't there?  My Dad says so.  There's always something else.  You'd be surprised.


I handed out little slips of paper to everyone I know.
"Why is he wearing a mask?" the ones I didn't know asked their friends I knew even less.  I gave the slips of paper to them too.


I'm sorry.


It said.  Girls, you know?  I've known them all my life.  We meet and we become good friends and we go our seperate ways.  It's really quite beautiful.  Girls are beautiful and impervious to change.  So full of will.  So full of love for their cats and sleeping dogs dreaming babies and this and that.  A thousand pictures that I put down on the table and smoke the ether of the day away exhausted.  Back in the days of high school I loved one.  Went on stage and couldn't remember my line.  Who's sleeping with who?  Which boy loves me?  I don't know anything figure it out yourself these drugs aren't working right I don't feel anything good except the urge to go to sleep and even its not that strong maybe not wake up.  You can't give me a promise of hope can you?  Didn't think so.  Animal cruelty.  Impure food additives.  Don't hand the paper back, you can keep it, it's my gift to you.  Sorrow.


The stage is bare.  The mountains daunt and clap.  The sky is empty.  My hair is long.  Hair grows out of the strangest places.  Shower shave and shit.  Tiles bleached to infinity.  Train turnstiles loom like crusty mountains.  That's good right?
The sound of someone laughing while they're tied down on the tracks?
That's drama.
The perfect train tracks.  The empty sky. Aw fuck it I'm going

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