Egos Eating

Touring Halloween in the autumn of egos

Chase me like prescriptions into a fuzzy blond unknown

From the mercury periphery of uplifting jubilant trite

I watch a silver city engulf the shadows of midnight

Touring Halloween in the autumn of egos

Eating shades of sarcasm in the house of the alone

Listing the prophecies and the troubles that they cause

Radical polluters counting the heads of golden flock

Touring Halloween in the autumn of egos

Sing to me incessantly in this cosmic rodeo

Eclipse the sun and stab the moon confront the karmic bang

Wring your eyes and roll your hands from your freezing frying pan

Touring Halloween in the autumn of egos

Morning pills and daffodils, a stage that’s set too low

Line the fence and beat the chest may we never stand apart

Kill you friend who’s on the mend so he’ll never starve

Touring Halloween in the autumn of egos

A symphony of sophistry a wave that never lulls

Gawk the freaks and bag the cheats fund the poverty loon

Walk another lullaby for the soul who left too soon

Ghost Writing

I wrote a letter for a ghost

Left it somewhere no one knows

Hide it deep in the seams

Of a silhouette tapestry dream

I left it there and went away

Years had passed

Relationships changed

Seasons grew and rearranged

And I didn’t come back until today

And there it was like before

Folded neatly hidden and stored

In a place no one could claim

In a state exactly the same

But down below on the ground

Was a note for me that I found

Was it from someone that I knew?

All it said was “thank you”

For Every Dictator

All the Nations

Wallowing in the decay of death

Trying to erase

Deeds by countrymen

To ascend to a Golden Age

By stringing up the past

By its heels

But in this act

Regurgitate

Ethnocentric Karma

Keenly instilling

The Nature of Man

Fire Hazard

She took one last, long drag of her Virginia Slim before tossing it and entering the bank. She took her spot in line and smiled politely at the customers ahead.

“Do you smell that?” the woman said. “It smells like something’s burning.”

“I don’t smell anything,” a man replied.

“It’s getting stronger, isn’t it? I think we better do something!”

“Actually, now that you mention it…”

“Call someone! Do something! The bank is on fire!”

Soon, everyone looked toward the commotion. The teller, standing on her tiptoes from behind the counter, said, “Ma’am, I think your purse is on fire.” 

Union City Convention Center 1946

At the start of the workshop, all the dudes were a bunch of fucking peaches and underground rippers playing prison riot. His wife was leather soaked dispositionally and looming to get on with those dudes and was actually the inspiration for implementing blue and purple skin to undermine the very tenterhooks of all recorded philosophy. She waded and waddled pointing a plump donut finger with a sharpened nail in a slow alluring manner like a debutante picking furs and minks. Later, beat denizens like vultures swooned taking pictures of uptight audience members gawking at the pit of flesh as the cascade was laid on top of the facade of norms and means, and the inflated morality of the lazy and fearful. Getting kicks and getting kicked, the subjugation of temperance was in full ricocheted effect with no thought of the dying sun or the far off coming of winter as the last stand of the ego was to make the private public… all in the name of creating the urinal of truth.

At the End of a Perennial Career

His father was tied gray, brown, dirty white among the last bucolic fantasies of business skills, tightly checked morality, and subdued cultural taste during the infancy of capitalistic self-awareness.  A victim of social Darwinism, he strode on worn out shoes of conversation. His cleaver thoughts dragged the body of work as a form of self-expression, of gentle humility, of soft pride, and it stained the heavy steps, the Masonic halls, the leering file cabinets, and the office door of his theosophist boss. He was trailed and haunted by rusty old memories of things he never actually experienced that had turned into blood desires of pain and hope, feverish sting rays of anxiety and interdependence. He knew reality was out there, but he could not describe it. He could only feel it… as his hands shook. 

Speak Upright

He told me used books were imprinted with the last reader's dreams (through the oil in their grubby hands!) and I was bringing them into the house. He could feel them in the air. It was thicker, older, bringing more shadows and magic dust mites. This made him anxious, rebellious, fatal, and sad. A terrible combination he continually summed up with the word "puke" repeated through the house like chimes from a clock.

Other people's dreams were useless - powerful but useless (another oxymoron to his every growing list?) - like the mirrors he conscioulsy avoided ("horrific objects with a penetrating gaze that can turn you inside out once in their presence"). "Denial. Denial. Denial!" He says its the most the effecient and successful way to live in these modern, quick fix on the rim of Armageddon, times.

He associates love with pain. There are mornings I hear him up early by the back window smoking like a beaten prisoner, hunched and frail, muttering, cursing. When he's upset a slew of "Hail Mary's in quick succesion tempers his anxiety. Love/hate mediation to ease the soul? Someday, it will be my job to pull the plastic bag off his head so only I find him dead cold ovrerdosed and suffocated with a bag on his head.

I tell him dignity in death is another oxymoron for his list. I respect his wishes and he respects mine. The world is always in balance so order is maintained. He worries his teeth are decaying at an unfathomable rate. He reflects on the philosophical meditation that this is "the best of all possible worlds." His deep dark secret is that his blood is poisoned, just like his mind. He losses breath easy. Everything he knows about human relations he learned from TV and therefore never trusts anyone. He frames all thoughts with nostalgia. He is unforgiveably hard on himself and this translates to his friends.

But I love him. We get along. We can sit for hours in the kitchen. Drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes listening to music and talking, talking, talking. His eyes changing from hard to sad and back again.

He secretly hates humanity and the world in general. He often confides in me his reason, "this is the best we can do? Cubicles and the idea that work inside an arbitary hierarchy is noble? Fuck that." He says some days he doesn't know how much longer he can do it, the endless work down the deserted highway with blurred landscapers living on memories and hope. He is wound tight. It pulls his face back into a frown.

He dreams of his Queen City. The mystic place of his birth he has been exiled from. He longs for those ancient memories of generic hardworking people and families he believed he knew. Hard drinking men and women who loved friends and strangers the same. Who spoke a common language of cynicism and laughter.

He has lost his angel. He keeps his anger inside. Holds it down like suffocating a geyser. It's there everyday, from the hot oven flare of emotional chaos to the stubbed toe letdown of the everyday mundane and pointless.

The boredom is the worst. He often tells me the hardest part of life is the the realization that the you are nothing special and the world is indifferent. He has dizzy spells.

He isn't waiting to die, he is counting on it.