Cheapen the Punch

Egos Eating

2015-02-18T14:55:00.000-06:00

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

2015-02-18T12:46:00.001-06:00

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

2015-02-11T07:21:00.000-06:00

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

2015-02-10T12:58:00.000-06:00

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

2015-02-10T10:40:00.002-06:00

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

2015-02-10T10:27:00.002-06:00

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

2011-01-22T15:05:00.000-06:00

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.

In Our Little Time

2011-01-22T07:11:00.000-06:00

I remember the fog being soup
But comfy like that blanket we share on my couch
It made everything still and contemplative
Buildings and houses like solemn faces
Lining our parade through the town
Watching stoic and gray
You an Atheist and me a nonpracticing Catholic
Driving on God's blessed day of rest an hour before dawn
Yellow orange red green dots blurred in the soup
Everywhere hazy yet flickering like eyes
Like stars, like Christmas lights dropped and draped
Lazy and sleepy like our waking minds
The city quiet frozen dead except for the train
That halted us and made us a photograph
So we could look upon ourselves for a moment
And as the cars passed like an echo
I found your hand lighted by the dashboard
Blue and green and soft and timid
Our cigarette racing heartbeat masking
The heartbeat shadowy familiar
That brought to me Aristotle and his cave
Contemplative asking, "is this real?"
The sun will come and it will be a new day
A moment of hope on a Sunday
The worst of all days because it symbolizes end
I tell you how I hate goodbyes
But you are not a farewell
We have the reverberating day ahead
We have the promise felt and solidified
In the fog and quiet and the peace
Like so many echoes of the passing train
I'll see you again tomorrow
And tomorrow

On The New Year

2011-01-22T06:41:00.000-06:00

That mother city that bore me
Its thick rust air and salamander ghosts
The friendly abused and addicted
Black night frozen winter camaraderie
I carry it back to the Midwest
Away from the virginal lake to the landlocked mind of solitude
Still brushing golden brown love canal dust
From my shoulders and my heart

Feeble carrying a weight to mundane to understand
Back to her geometric smile and shiny sharp eyes like glass
Washed anew on a salty beach of permanence
Cleansing me with their youthful faith
Away from broken bones and misery pains
Away from trash heap nightmares to real and profound to be dreams
Away from dumb luck and heavenly disaster
To her and her punk scorn with a lash of hard love

Suddenly at ease with time to spare
My mind's eye a wall to lean against
No rush when the days no longer go by like there's no tomorrow
To abandon being caught between summer heat and winter disinterest
Ephemeral coughs of uncertainty south of the Badlands
To forgo gnashing my bleeding teeth on jagged thoughts
With a bent back swollen pink and oblong
To reside in a palace of peace and ubiquity

I must remember to thank her outside my baby steps
Passed the reprieve of forbearance
To live as one like the moon solemn yet free
Content to come another night
Because she is strength yet undefined
Hard and true and arrogant enough
To chase away all the blue Mondays
And crackerjack sideways I've ever knew

The Road

2011-01-22T06:26:00.001-06:00

THE OLD YEAR (Part 6)

2010-05-27T17:52:00.000-05:00

“You’re coming.”

Cable guy and friend push their way in.

“This is Justin. My friend I was telling you about.”

“What’s up. You’re coming out with us.”

Justin is loud like bright colors and a few inches shorter than me. He is skinny with a wire frame. He has on jeans and an over-sized t-shirt. He has a cap pulled low and blonde chin hair like a sad neglected lawn. His eyes flash when he speaks. He has a twisted grin.

“Hey, what’s up man. Like I told Derrick, I can’t go. I’m too fucked up.”

“I don’t want to hear it. I’ll fucking drag you out if I have to.”

My heart stops a split second. I try to comprehend his statement. Did he just threaten me?

“Seriously dude. I’m a mess. I smoked some shit from these dudes at Wolf’s. Now I’m freaking out.”

“It was probably laced with something. So what. Get ready. We’re going.”

“Naw, man. No way.”

“This is a nice place you got here. I like your guitars. You jam.”

“Yeah. A little.”

“Play us something. What kinda music you into?”

“Everything. I can’t. Dude, I’m fucked.”

“You said that.” He walks over to my microphone stand and pulls the mic off. He starts swinging it like a small lasso.

I look at him. His eyes are menacing and his body language threatening. I look over, across the room, to the kitchen, and where the knife resides out of sight.

“Get up. We’re going.”

“What don’t you understand.” I turned to Derrick. “What’s with this guy?”

“I’m just bustin’ yer balls.” Justin chuckles. “Man, I really like your guitars. I’m gonna have to come over one day and play ‘em.”

I sense I will need to forcible move this man out of my home. He walks around eyeing all of my things, mic in hand. My heart is beating fast, it’s still hard to focus. I’m unsure if I’m interpreting everything that is going on around me correctly.

“You told Derrick you were coming out. So come on, get up.”

“Look…”

“Speak into the mic!” Justin puts the microphone in my face.

“What the fuck, man”

“I’m just messing with you.”

“Look, you guys gotta leave. I need some quiet. Maybe I’ll meet up with you?”

“You won’t. Besides, you’re coming now.”

I turn to Derrick again to see if this is real, if things are really going this way.

“Come on, Justin.”

“No, if anything, I’ll drag his ass outside and I’ll live here.”

“So this is how it’s going to be…”

“Speak into the mic!”

“Get that fucking thing out of my face!”

“I’m just fucking around man.”

“Listen. I told you. I’m fucked up. I’m not going out. You guys have to leave.”

“Why are you getting so upset?”

“I want you to leave!”

“Okay, okay.” He moves towards the door, stops and looks at me. Then he gives big grin and says, “I’ll see you later, man.”

I close and lock the door as the thuds from their feet on the stairs fades. I go and pick up the knife and check the lock again. I am convinced they will be back to loot my place. Things will get violent. I pace the room for awhile and then sit and listen for noises. I wake on the couch New Year’s Day, knife in hand.

THE OLD YEAR (Part 5)

2010-05-27T17:51:00.000-05:00

The men from the truck with no hood are laughing and I assume it’s at me. Amber is across from me behind the bar and seems far away – twenty feet at least, like a portrait on a mantle across the room, her face young and white and helpless yet certain. She asks me something but I don’t make out what it is. I say, “I know.” I keep glancing over my shoulders to know who’s around me. My spine is an iron rod. There is a hum and tension that is loud like gigantic electrified pulsating cables that I can’t see but know are there. I am perspiring.

I look down. The video machine screen emits gibberish as it vibrates and drones like sick electricity. Floating transparent playing cards turn to dust and return to the glow from which they came. Everything is alive with popping atoms and fluorescent trails. I begin to question what was in the weed. I am convinced I’m on acid. Everything is happening in circles, on repeat. All experience happens five times before it appears to actually happen. The noise in the bar is roaring like tons of garbage dropped off a skyscraper and splashing on top of a parking lot of old fords.

Words are randomly coherent above the noise. “Raven.” “Wood stain.” “Baby carriage.” Possum.” “Crockpot.” What does it mean? My feet are sweating so much I think my shoes will fall off. It takes all my strength (courage?) to get up and leave. I turn to those who got me here. They look old and senile.

“I have to pick up some friends, be right back.”

I don’t wait for a response. I muscle my way out the door and start walking as fast as I can. I am afraid to turn around. I just go like a rolling garbage can down a San Francisco hill. Suddenly, I am a coward scared of all the unknowns and uncertainties and unimagined thorns.

I am feet from my apartment. My throat is wide and clear. Success captures me in her grips, hand on back as if to dance. I am safe. The confines of walls that hide instigate in me a new euphoria. I can relax and deal calmly with the mind altering drugs rattling my chemistry. Is it the drugs? I may be less erratic straight, but no less paranoid. Remember passing out on the plane? My mind became of a hot furnace of anxiety I could not name.

Home safe, I turn on all the lights. I sit on the couch in silence and try to get a grip. I rub my hand on the back of my neck and let out a big sigh. For a moment the world stops. In the silence I feel a welcoming embrace. I reach to old friends in my mind when we played cards and drank and thought we were invincible and wise. I would sneak off with Mary and then smile at her smile smiling back at me. Youth is a faded newspaper, usually proven wrong or forgotten over time.

The quiet breaks. A banging on the door gives me a jolt. I stand and stare at the door like a foreign object. A new round of rapping like gunfire sounds. Then it hits me, it’s Cable Guy (his profession). I told him I would go out tonight.

A shaky, white hand pulls the door open.

“Hey, man,” I stammer.

“Where’ve ya been? I was here earlier and there was no answer. I thought maybe you were in the shower so I came back.”

“I want out already. Down to Wolf’s with Boyle.”

“You coming out? Me and Justin, my buddy from Florida, are having drinks over at my place.” He talks in half-time with small glassy eyes in the middle of a sleepy dumb face.

“I don’t know. I’m really fucked up. I smoked something I thought was weed. I’m having a hard time dealing.”

“Fuck that. You’re coming out.”

“No. Seriously, I’m really fucked.”

My legs are exhausted from the haul. I move to the couch and sit down. I let out a breath and pray to be alone (the only thought I can hold on to). Cable Guy stands above me authoritatively looking down. He is round and moves slow. I sense tension. I begin to sweat.

“You’ll be fine. Come on.”

“I don’t know. I need a minute. My heart is racing and I’m kinda freaking out.”

“Screw that. Let’s go.”

“Seriously, I can’t. Give me an hour or so. I’ll let you know.”

“You won’t let me know. After you close the door I won’t hear from you. Come on over to my place.”

After more debate I convince him that I can’t make it right now and will let him know in an hour what my next move is. During the conversation I hear my words come from my mouth electronic and amplified. The veins in my neck are now pulsating. A pain radiates in my back where my kidneys reside.

I sit back on the couch and slowly breathe easier. I tell myself the worst is over. I pick up a guitar to shield my mind from the troubling thoughts that keep invading. I lose myself in the raining harmony of notes. I see neon numbers on infinite steps.

The phone rings. It’s my mother wishing me Happy New Year. I return the wish and she asks what’s wrong. I force a cheery, animated disposition (similar to Kari and I finally emerging, on mushrooms, from Scott’s basement to the loud and gregarious multitude on New Year’s Eve a decade earlier – later we hide in the upstairs bathroom and lay on the floor together like the only two people alive, my finger twisted around her light brown hair). She showers cherished sentiments before passing the phone on. I talk to 12 or 13 different friends or relatives, all drunk, all spending the holiday at my mother’s tiny home in South Buffalo. I still have 3 hours left in my day. My current status: locked away in my apartment, scared of the world.

Off the phone, I return to the couch, to safety. The drugs have taken a new turn. Everything is in soft hues and looks far away, but still. My hearts starts its familiar racing and my stomach aches. I feel nauseous. I convince myself my Achilles has snapped and balled up in my calf. I’m searching with my hands when the door starts banging again. Panic lights over me. The knock screams danger. I look to the kitchen and think of the huge knife sitting in the drawer. I walk over to the kitchen, open the drawer and pull it out. The shine of the knife looks like a still pool of water. It feels light in my hand. I hold it up and swing it around with feigned death thrusts. Then, the door booms three more booms. I put the knife down beside the fridge.

Email From Fetzer

2010-04-22T18:24:00.000-05:00

this is how i would define your life bill.....
i remember when you were cleaning out your closet
and waaaaay on the bottom of your closet was mike bossy rookie card,
mario lemieux rookie card....etc etc. all ruined and bent and junk.

that seems harsh now that i type it.
or...maybe you are valuable, with some wrinkles thru you.

thousands and thousands of dollars all there in your closet....ruined

Email From Fetzer

2010-04-10T15:23:00.000-05:00

no jesus freak.
but to think there aint something out there...
someone planned all this shit. who decided to give me thumbs??
do you know how ingenious eyebrows and eyelashes are??
and i got them??

there's a great magnet out there!!!!
positive in... positive out.
i think we have souls. i think my soul has been places before me.

the disappointing part is someone decided my soul should go to some short fat balding guy...
i can't wait for my next life... hopefully i'll be a bit taller. maybe i'll be someone more important.

Email From Grizz

2010-04-04T13:38:00.000-05:00

Uncle Creeps,

Here's my review for The Battle Of Hampton Roads. Conor Oberst is playing in a bar. His angriest shit. Every 30 seconds one of the members from Neutral Milk Hotel, The Arcade Fire, How Water Music and the Pogues joins in until every member is there. Each band at times takes control of the song, at about 9 minutes all the bands break out into a bar brawl. Until only one member from each band is left. Then they jam it out hard.

- Grizz

THE OLD YEAR (Part 4)

2010-04-02T19:06:00.000-05:00

Boyle’s wife is calling in ten minute intervals, like markers on a highway. Click… Click… Like those afternoons when I was unemployed and used to bar hop through Kaiser Town with Kari’s dad, with his small hands and beady eyes and con-man smile hiding secret after secret, as his ringing phone interrupted with an offensive shrug and would always come when I finally got a chance to tell a story. He proudly held his importance over me. I was secretly embarrassed. He was full of surprises and petty scorn. He was an egomaniac. I had no idea who I was.

Boyle is leaving to spend the last night of the year with his wife and child. I decide to stay because I have no where to go and no one to see. Besides, the alcohol is giving me what I need (energized numbness and delirious hope built on unfounded declarations). I give in to the universe of possibility. Boyle buys me a shot, we shake, and his large frame with the baby face is gone.

In the restroom I stare into the mural-size mirror. I move my face in a way to present/exhibit all angels and perspectives. I look so different with every turn, not even the same person. There are some universal truths. My nose is bigger than I care to notice. The scar under my left eye is worn and sad instead of rigid and tough. The skin above my right eye is saggy and invades my ocular cavity in a way that mocks the color of my blue eyes.

My hands are beginning to sting. I flex them in rapid succession. The moon is still big behind me and watches me as I watch my shadow in front. I can’t tell if my shoes are covered with dirt. When I look down I get dizzy. I stare ahead into the blackness, out towards the hidden blank landscape rugged but flat, vast and barren. Where are the curbs and corner stores? Where are the people and their history embedded in stacks of photographs? Where is my sick lake and rust colored fumes? Where are the ashes of generations sleeping in the cracks of the sidewalks? Where are the shamrocks?

“Meditation is pretty cool.”

“I meditate. TM. It’s pretty powerful.” I chime in.

“TM?”

“Transcendental Meditation. It’s pretty fucking awesome.”

“I’ve heard about that. What’s it like? I just do regular mediation, where you clear your mind and shit.”

“You just repeat your mantra. You’re supposed to get your mantra from a teacher, but I just read book. I say ‘Ram’ (rhymes with ‘bomb’). You say it over and over. It’s crazy. Your mind starts to drift to thoughts and smells and feelings you haven’t ever thought of but experienced. It’s more powerful than drugs.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. And you are so rested and focused after. You do it for twenty minutes two times a day. And the twenty minutes flies by.”

The path I am taking is straight. I forgo the navigational awareness of dirt roads for straight line efficiency, no matter the terrain. I surmise the walk from the bar to be over two miles. I do not pass a house. There are no telephone poles, no trees. I am surrounded my mountains on all sides in a valley (whose name means ‘water rock’) with an area of 364 square miles and sits 2695 feet above sea level.

My gait is shortening and my chest is leading the way. The wind (a mild gust) is unrelenting and makes me frustrated. It is stubborn and beyond my control. My mind is electric. Thoughts are moving in and out like people to a revolving door in a skyscraper stabbing the clouds. I’m the door man, but everyone is passing by too quickly. Everyone is in a hurry and can’t be bothered. They are faceless and I am not noticed. I speak in half-starts and double-takes.

“You want to go out and smoke?”

“Serious?” I ask. My mind is instantly racing, weighing the consequences, sizing my acquaintances up.

“Yeah. Come on.”

We walk out into the brisk night.

“I’m over there.”

The pickup is a faded orange with a thick dirty white horizontal stripe in the middle from headlight to taillight. As we approach, I notice there is no hood. The engine sits exposed reminding me of a plastic medical model of the human body. We get in, three to front seat. I’m in the passenger’s seat next to the window. The short guy is in the middle and the lanky long haired one, the owner of the truck, is behind the wheel. The driver pulls out a huge joint. The one next to me draws from his pocket a one-hitter. We start passing the dope around.

“This shit is good, powerful California weed.”

“Cool.” I say.

“What do you do, man.”

“I’m a teacher. What do you do?”

“Unemployed. Stay at home dad.”

“Cool. I would totally be a stay at home dad.”

“It’s alright. I get to play video games when the kid takes a nap.”

The pot is moving from hand to hand quickly. I am never without some in my hand. The cab is full of smoke. The typical stoned awareness of your body, your hands, the back of your neck, begins to hit me. My mind fogs up. Trails and vapors form.

“Oh shit, people!”

“We gotta go.”

I look to see a group of well-dressed thirty-something couples getting out of a sedan. My two companions are quickly exiting the cab. I reach for the door handle. It’s missing the knob.

“That’s a rape door.” The driver yells back to me from outside the truck.

“A rape door?” I ask and giggle.

“Yeah, you can only get in, you can’t get out. Only the handle outside works. If you want to get out that way, you hafta roll down the window.”

We walk back to the bar. The pavement seems a long way down but the pebbles lounging before me seem huge. I tell myself to keep it together, repeating it like a mantra. My chest is tight. The bar inside is packed. My head is continually down as I walk back to my place at the bar. I bump into people and excuse myself. My half pint of beer welcomes me. I drink it with a thirst. My money is still in the machine, waiting, but I can’t make out the numbers. How much do I have left? I begin to hallucinate.

THE OLD YEAR (Part 3)

2010-03-22T17:39:00.000-05:00

The air is turpentine and burns my nose. I have a mouth sucked dry of moisture and peddles of sand between my teeth (where my tongue is a serpent searching for mice hiding in a row of ragged rocks). My legs warm with devious soreness and my heart beats faster than exertion dictates. I can feel the blood pulsate in the skull my skin cannot seem to fit around. What a mess I got myself into!

I seem to be making no distance at all as the desk lamp (the moon) above me is getting brighter. Is it getting closer? Ashen moon gravel and alabaster chalk dust is spread out over the undefined path in front of me. I tell myself fifteen more minutes until refuge behind my apartment walls. It is my only focus as fleeting as it is (thoughts like weak sea legs on a tumultuous sea). Rocks try to birth into my shoes creating faint angry screams of collision. The earth is pushing up into me as hard as I am pushing down on it.

Cold snot runs from my nose and my eyeballs are solidifying. Petrifying? My chest holds ephemeral bursts of anxiety. Black-inked waves on a purple ocean crashing on a gray shore. Will I ever make it across this desolate expanding land? My mind stops to catch its breath. Suddenly, I am encouraged by the prospect of a flash flood washing me away. Thick muddy brown water like melted ice cream escorting me down predetermined land scars. Sometimes things happen that you cannot stop. Where is that rainy prison cell street walled with old stone buildings and the hand of my next love?

I cough a dry cold cough. I try to focus again on something to ease the anxiety of never getting home and begin to wonder about Bethlehem Steel and the pink and lime green pools of liquid Popp saw on patrol. Those toxins killed Scott’s father (and many men just like him). I can still smell the sulfur from the bronze dust snow that blanketed my father’s dark blue Cadillac as I dug holes with trucks under a gold morning sky. Instantly, I long for the giant rusted thimble that sat behind Madison Wire. I remember those gray days where we would sit inside it and talk about our future not knowing if the soil below the cracked cement was saturated with poison. Those stalwart toxins fed families and bought cars and gave vacations out to the lake it contaminated. I relive my father setting down a plate of pork chops a dozen high for our family of five. It’s all too much to think about. My cheeks sting from the desert whiplash wind.

Boyle picks me up and I decide to act drunker than I am in order to mask the depression that has taken the clarity of my senses away. I feel sick from the mushroom pizza I ate too fast (like a dog). Walking out the door, I imagine the green and brown bubbling fungus foam expanding in my belly when my appendix burst and I was too afraid to wake anyone in the middle of the night. The pain was so white hot it stopped hurting and was replaced swollen numbness and the fear of death. When I returned from the hospital, Ma and Nan made my room so sterile and clean that my personality was almost completely scrubbed away, except for the cracked plaster holes in my sky blue walls the size of my fist. My first act home and healthy was to sit at my desk and weep. The sun poured into my room on that quiet afternoon during the last days of winter as my abdomen stitches itched with warm tingles.

I was content to hide this New Year’s Eve but I know that is not human. I must be a social being. We are social beings (from parlor tricks to speeches of state) that entertain and act out in order to revive our own self worth. I walk down my pebbled stairs and out to Boyle’s truck. I see him sitting there and a sudden sharp anger comes over me. I pull open the door and hop in the cab. We start to talk and I feel better. The tension leaves like the quick dimming of a TV screen before it goes dark. But the day is still light. Seven hours until the New Year. Who was it that broke the mirror at my mother’s house that one New Year’s Eve?

“Should we see what the rest of the cronies are up to?” I ask.

“To be honest, I want nothing to do with them. Oh, they have to check with you and if you’re not coming over they’re not. Fuck that.”

On the drive, I hide behind my sunglasses, afraid to show my eyes. The afternoon is bright and indifferent. We move down rugged twisted roads and pass the remains of the various communes that once infested this valley. Old crooked sheds with faded plywood walls, lounging relics, are surrounded by sad wire fences. Empty chicken coops with failing roofs, forty year old rusted and dismantled pickups, unrecognizable scrap metal sculptures dot the dust lots. Memories lay and die in the shade. Brown thin branches to bare bushes (soon to be tumbleweeds) quiver in the breeze. Some scream. Others sigh.

The bar counter is sticky. An empty package of cigarettes is torn to pieces and spread around the video machine sunk flush into the counter top. Amber, with her hefty chest and young girl (unfamiliar with the world) smile, is picking up the scraps of paper one piece at a time. We sit down and Boyle quietly taps his wallet on the counter as he stares up at the TV. He buys the first round. I watch Amber pour the drafts and begin to feel useless.

“How you holding up?” I ask and take a sip.

“Alright. I guess. I just want the holidays to be over. You know? Just get passed them.”

“I know what you mean.”

“I just don’t have it in me. I told Lizzy to go and buy all the presents for Benny. I wanted nothing to do with it. With him gone, I just don’t give a shit.”

“It’ll get better. Spring, man. Wait until spring.” I raise my glass to Boyle and then chug the pint. I wipe the suds from my lips with the back of my hand. Boyle continues on about the loss of his father and the effect it is placing on his wife, young son, and scattered soul. All the while I stare at drips of beer on the counter, tiny isolated villages containing universes within themselves flickering from yellow to orange under the light. I nudge my mind back to Boyle, to listen and empathize, because it is the right thing to do.

THE OLD YEAR (Part 2)

2010-02-26T17:49:00.000-06:00

I draw three queens and hit the button as I hope for a fourth. No luck. I know the microchips that sit beneath the bar counter are against me. The random number generator has a conscience but it is evil. I find hopeful amusement and subsequent despair in the heavenly wagers I make with the universe, ‘if I hit this flush everything will be fine.’

“Intelligent design is an excuse, a candy-ass way, to circumvent the constitution and proselytize the masses.”

“Right. It’s Christianity’s way of combating Darwinism. That’s all.”

The men next to me in faceless voices (because of my trance on the video screen) are raving like Ivy clad intellectuals. I imagine elbow patches and manicured nails at the end of soft white slender fingers. I see corduroy and plaid and clean virgin white pressed shirts. Finally, due to the fact that my eyes are beginning to sting, I look over and see desert kids – dirty in jeans and t-shirts, with brown faces of stubble and blood shot eyes. They are young but made worn by the unyielding current of poverty. One is short with a chubby face and short brown dirty hair. He has acne like little volcanoes in a ring of fire lining his chin and jaw. He appears to be in his mid-twenties. Roughly the same age, a tall fresh faced boy is wearing round thin-rimmed glasses and has shoulder length brown hair. He is skinny with sharp angles to his joints. A robust blond with a smushed face sits between them gambling and interjecting from time to time. I turn pack to the video poker laid before me like a plate of bright colors; rays of light exploding up like a fountain.

“Science is the future. It will solve all our problems. And Christians refuse to believe that. They paint Darwin like some lunatic. It’s fucking disgusting man.”

“I know. I’m so sick of the rhetoric.”

As people, our relationships are thin strands of onion made of paper dipped in water colored by ego. We hear what we want and jump ship often. Connections are not real. They can stop at any moment, through death or stupidity or ignorance, but most often they end through weakness. When I look too closely at people, into their eyes (the starving), at the shape of their bodies (the loneliness), I am overwhelmed with despair and want to plunge knives into my pin cushion abdomen.

I play for the straight. No dice.

“It’s like with freemasons, they were born from the oppression of Christianity.”

“I once heard the Red Cross are the freemasons in disguise because the symbol for freemasonry is a rose wrapped around a cross”, I interject.

“I heard that too.”

I turn back to my plate of hearts, spades, clubs, and diamonds. I hit two pair and follow it with four jacks. A swirl of satisfaction balloons in my chest. A house built with electronic cards.

THE OLD YEAR (Part 1)

2010-02-24T17:56:00.000-06:00

I remember the abandoned chemical factory, with broken windows like missing teeth and half-burnt walls and graffiti floors, or that now desolate empty pothole spotted parking lot that housed the drugstore I worked at and laid open the imaginary field where I played touch-football with Dean and Felschow and Goobs and grew to over six foot sitting against the paint chipped wall under a winter gray sky with a soccer ball between my feet as I sang to pretty redheads. I want to dream of anywhere but this desert dirt bright white from the sad-faced full moon. Every step I take the world around me expands like I’m standing on the caboose of a train, arms outstretched for a past gone by. I can smell the burning electric of my toy trains as the battery overheats.

The scissor wind cuts through my plaid sports coat. I drift back to my mother’s kitchen, to the smell of potatoes and carrots and ham and cabbage (the same smell of Nan’s kitchen) as I linger in the warm vibrations of safety as the snow piles up outside. I sidestep to the massive driveway in Depew and the early morning work with a bent metal shovel and mounds of snow with nowhere to go, stoned and listening to sports talk radio on a walkman with a missing cassette door and my stinging exposed back aching.

The desert is the moon. As I walk over small dunes and dips, my right leg seems longer than my left. Things blur before they focus, my eyes a cruel, thoughtless lens, a world of blurred photographs. I need to set my mind on something other than the weight of itself. I see a pool of blood before me quiver, dirty blood no longer hidden behind the innocence of skin and tissue. I think of Patrick in Fredonia in the Chinese restaurants raving that he could see the floor breathe.

I get angry at these invading thoughts and lash out at the reality I am in. I try to scream my dizzy head away. I know when I get back to my apartment I will shout, “I’m home”, to an empty cigar box that reeks of desperation and fallen dust. “You didn’t miss much, baby. It was a quiet night.” I can see disease. I have burdening x-ray eyes.

The moon, the searchlight, hangs over me like an interrogation lamp. Accusing white light brings me back to the crisp fall nights playing soccer with the Germans behind the burned out, boarded up buildings of Philadelphia where the Police helicopter’s spotlight directed police cars six in a row down the narrow, dark streets. Those nights we would drink until we were sick and laugh as we carried each other to our beds. The next day Scott would refuse to leave the only couch and bribe me with money for food so he could use the bathroom while I was gone to the corner deli.

I think I can feel the stones through my brown boots, but I’m not sure. Bursts of hot pain on my arches. Each step delivers a long twang up from my feet like a vibrating rubber band. The mountains around me are crooked houses with mad grins slanted and looming but far away. I miss sidewalks and curbs and corner stores. I forsake the present for the past and her warmth. The comfort in knowing you survived.

Luckily my sense of direction is still intact. Off in the distance, a mile or two, I see my apartment nestled in a group of two story buildings standing like bums around fire. With cold hands and a runny nose and sore legs, I march on with thoughts of Jews running half naked in that book I read in high school.

BEST ALBUMS of the DECADE: 1 - 10

2009-12-16T17:51:00.000-06:00

1. Broken Social Scene – You Forget It In People [2003]
2. Wilco – Yankee Hotel Foxtrot [2002]
3. Bright Eyes – Lifted or The Story is in the Soil Keep Your to the Ground [2002]
4. The Shins – Oh Inverted World [2001]
5. The National – Boxer [2007]
6. Rancid – Rancid [2000]
7. Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros – Streetcore [2003]
8. Tom Waits – Orphans [2006]
9. The Gaslight Anthem – The 59 Sound [2008]
10. My Morning Jacket – It Still Moves [2003]

BEST ALBUMS of the DECADE: 11 - 20

2009-12-01T17:09:00.000-06:00

11. …And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead – Source Tags and Code [2002]
12. Elliot Smith – Figure 8 [2000]
13. White Stripes – Elephant [2003]
14. The Hold Steady – Almost Killed Me [2004]
15. The Mountain Goats – The Sunset Tree [2005]
16. The Strokes – Is This It [2001]
17. Fugazi – The Argument [2001]
18. Band of Horses – Everything All The Time [2006]
19. Radiohead – Kid A [2000]
20. The Libertines – The Libertines [2004]

DEAD INDUSTRIAL ATMOSPHERE

2009-11-09T17:03:00.000-06:00

BEST ALBUMS of the DECADE: 21-30

2009-11-09T17:00:00.000-06:00

21. Arcade Fire – Funeral [2004]
22. Spoon – Kill the Moonlight [2002]
23. Simon Joyner – Skeleton Blues [2006]
24. Woods – At Rear House [2007]
25. Randy – The Human Atom Bombs [2001]
26. Ryan Adams – Gold [2001]
27. Guided By Voices – Isolation Drills [2001]
28. The Avett Brothers – Emotionalism [2008]
29. Stephen Malkmus – Real Emotional Trash [2008]
30. Built to Spill – You In Reverse [2006]

October 30, 2007

2009-11-05T17:56:00.000-06:00

BEST ALBUMS of the DECADE: 31-40

2009-10-27T16:37:00.000-05:00

31. Kings of Leon – Youth and Young Manhood [2003]
32. Cat Power – The Greatest [2007]
33. Marah – If You Didn’t Laugh, You’d Cry [2005]
34. Alkaline Trio – Alkaline Trio [2000]
35. Gomez – How We Operate [2006]
36. Lucero – Tennessee [2002]
37. Toys That Kill – Shanked! [2006]
38. The Microphones – The Glow Pt. 2 [2008]
39. Underground Railroad to Candyland – Bird Roughs [2008]
40. Bon Iver – For Emma, Forever Ago [2008]