it’s not as bad as it looks down here where the have-nots hole up in brittle buildings. down here where the fractured sidewalk echoes the lament of your every slanted step. where January’s teeth only seem sharper. and, it’s not as bad as it feels as I peepshow the outside world through a distorted reflection in the dirty window. watching the blurred kaleidoscope of cars streak off in their various seemingly aimless directions.
and in between thoughts, I play a game of masks with a pretty toddler wearing pink-softs & fighting off sleep a few booths away. from where I sit, I fear for the future of the innocent kinetic child who sticks her tongue out at me & bounces on the springy seat of her booth & has absolutely no concept of tomorrow. I fear for the tomorrow that eludes her. so, I light another filterless cigarette in an attempt to slough off the sadness I feel for the little girl who is forced to spend her childhood in the calm before the storm.
then, as my smoke does its job, the once empty booths begin to fill with random people. and the once empty air begins to fill with random conversation. that nearly drowns out the pulse-less music pouring down from the speakers. the speakers that never seem to speak to me in these places.
I stitch a grin on my face as I shake hands with the irony of why I always seem to drift back to these places. maybe it’s that I feel more like a poet when I feel more like a stranger? or, could it be that the cheap coffee-flavored water is more of a stimulant than the taste would lead you to believe? and some lost time way back before I took my 1st legal drink, I lost count of how many nights I’ve spent sitting alone in these places. filling up empty pages in these places. how many trips I’ve made to their restrooms, urinating every cup of joe almost as fast as I fucking drained it. or how many sweaty dollar bills I’ve left on their tables making a poet’s exodus, sauntering off into the cold sleeping night. or the bloated ashtrays I’ve filled, hammering nail after nail into a rapidly encroaching coffin. the unfathomable tally of hours spent sitting in the laps of the apparitions haunting each booth.
…then, there’s the interruption of an absurd observation: it’s like the sixth-sensation you get when you plant your ass in a couch that’d recently been ground zero of some lovers’ tryst…
and, like the innocent bystander, I’m hit by stray bullets of conversation from the semi-automatic mouths of the diners & denizens around me. whether engaging in their tiny private wars of ideology, or merely shooting off pointless banter like the droves of drunken cowboys in musty old western movies. useless words & phrases ricocheting off blunt ears like some small-talk ballistics test. but I digress, since digressing is what poets do best when their train of thought derails, allowing all of the surviving fugitive ideas to run mad & free into the surrounding wilderness. (‘cause, you know, the signals always get crossed.)
especially when you’re shrugging in the anticlimactic over-dramatic death throes of the 20th century. it’s been days since the alleged apocalypse, and the only goddamn difference I’ve seen is a sudden surplus of zeros. or maybe it’s the vague urgency fluttering over people’s faces? the falsely frantic buzzing of people making unwarranted precautions & unnecessary purchases? well, I’ve seen the future, and it’s simply more expensive. or merely more extensive, when it comes to the slew of newly invented quandaries on which everyone’s gullibly wasting their energies. scurrying left&right like baffled lab rats in some mad scientists bizarre experiment. injected with generous daily doses of convoluted information. yes, it’s becoming steadily more clear to me that our society is nothing more than some over-budget Pavlovian experiment left unattended. too many variables and not enough control. (half the time it’s the other way ’round.)
America is caught in a feedback loop spiraling like some great gyroscope to nowhere.
but it’s more than just momentum & confusion. turbulence & inertia. it’s also a case of morbid wall-clawing boredom. the spasming unrest of a collective consciousness. our aesthetic bloodstream has been made water-thin by the poison of pop-culture paralysis. the wellspring of art has been sucked fucking dry by bloated ass-kissing ticks perched vulture-like in vacuum offices of industry. the idiosyncrasies of art; candy-coated by insubstantial idiots. (the idea didn’t become the institution, the idea simply sold its rights to the institution.)
…and, America waited for a punchline. an impatient drum roll signifying the end, the finale of anything extraordinary. so, what’s the next shiny new stimuli for the hypodermic nation? the wave of the future is to swim towards the past. to wade in familiar waters. people have been so afraid of the inevitable change bearing down on them, that the 90’s were merely a culmination of the past 3 decades. you can blame the resurgence of teen- friendly pop on millennial hysteria. people have invested some much energy, and money, into vicarious delusion that they can’t even recognize their own fucking lives anymore. well, it’s time to take a lengthy forensic look at the world within 16 feet. the alley outside your backdoor, or the curb out front where they pick up the refuse every Thursday. that sterile symmetric place downtown where you trudge everyday for a meager wage. or the fucking convenience on the corner where you buy your daily cancer requirements.
the accomplishments of the single citizen are now a blaring blank monitor blinking nothing. war, poverty, social acceptance, faith, ethical stability, death. none of our fucking fears compare to our phobia of monotone. or, our fear of new frontiers. but it’s a conundrous concern, accompanied by traditions of obfuscation: “we’re not ignorant, we just don’t let the little things bother us.” but the little things are what make the big things seem so big. it’s the small details that make life a function of art. or, art a function of life for that matter. but does it matter? is there any meaning left in this sepulchral sitcom we call Modern American Life?
I find my answers in the small hours. a 3AM stagger up an apocalyptic avenue or two. the severe scrutiny of cigarette smoke, as it seems to miraculously appear in the shafts of sunlight intruding through the green sheet in the window. a single line from a song, that completes an equation that’s been sullying my sleep. undermining my serendipity. the coy twinkle of a sly smile from some nameless beauty who slides in & instantaneously out of my hurried line of sight. (or that night I stole an eavesdrop stroll past some token tavern. overhearing a strife-in-progress. a conflict of egos ’tween meaninglessly maligned men, lobbing volleys of verbs at each other. both too stupid & proud to sway, but too inwardly afraid to land the first physical blow. I could live quite comfortably in the spaces of what they don’t know.)
and I think of what it would be like if we could all be our own Christ-on-a-dirty-hillside. take all of the ignorance in the world & transform it into bread. gather all of the empty mouths and fill them. and, if God is everything they say he is, than he’s in serious need of some therapy. after all, if we’re created in his image, than he’s just as imperfect & imbalanced, ill-tempered & ignoble as we are.
but, what the fuck do I know of godliness? I’m just a 23 year old drunk with a strange penchant for turning phrases. a quiet corner-booth voyeur with a pocketful of skewed views. that I sift through & spill out onto the stark-white starving pages of a beaten blue-black book. a bruised tome that never strays too far away, even when I whore out its contents to anyone who happens to not say ‘no’. my own personal bible, in which I measure the waning tide of my sanity. staining its pages with myriads of mordant musings & muddled midnight misanthropies. the black-ink box that collects the ashes of my past, mental mad ejaculations of the present & frenzied narcotic fever dreams of the future. a sanctum sanctorum where I can drown my pain in words & pick at my uncertainties like they were scabs that refuse to heal. the only safe haven I have, apart from an ever-fluctuating collection of CD’s, from the mind-murdering treachery of everyday deformity: the fucking flocks of void-empty flatlines with their trite little tragedies. the marginal barstool martyrs swingin’ their sick self-pity like it was a meat tenderizer looking for a steak. the sweet smooth-skinned succubae that infiltrate my everythings like beautiful musk-tongued viruses; consuming what they want and leaving the rest weak & polluted. the flailing stress-fractured fallout of Modern American Life, with its stagnating street corners steeped in shit & failure. intolerance & cancer. suffusing me everyday with its soul-tainting corruption & mind-snuffing oblivion. slowly killing my free will with each passing work day. and I’m always a little afraid when I reunite its worn covers, leaving the thoughts to ebb until I rape its pages of their purity once again. I’m always afraid I may never again have a reason to open it.
like now, as I jerk my head from its inner intrigue, interrupted by a feminine voice asking for money, and my exit. it’s closing time. time to take my leave of this dusty diner with an ironic name. time to extinguish my serialkiller & spatulate my ass from its burgundy vinyl quagmire. toss another greasy greenback on the table & condemn a couple of its brethren to their cash-register prison. time to don my anachronistic coat & go-to-hell hat, and turn the other cheek to the dull razor scorn of January’s teeth. but it’s not as bad as it feels. and it’s not as it looks as I shiver & shuffle under the overpass to the Fountain River bridge which marks entrance into the Land of Nod. I pull the fractured pavement beneath my longsuffering black boots. passing the brittle buildings & skeletal swill-holes. wearing the stares of midnight’s refugees, hiding in their filthy whiskey shadows. I flinch at the echoes of my own frostbitten footfalls & rehearse the script of another moonshot meander. ignoring the arguments of the Pall Malls rattling in my pocket, I ponder to the pounding of the tortured muscle in my chest, beasting against my ribcage. I mince my own words & tell myself saccharine figments. I try to distract myself from the gnawing knowledge that the street which signifies journey’s end just might be just that. the absentee funeral of my forward movement. a flashing forecast of nothing’s absolute zero.
“pusillanimous precipitation is expected, with dense clouds of delusion thrusting cock-like into the epicenter of my pitfall…”
so I continue to tell myself, through thin exhaled smoke of neverending cigarette, the skipping record soliloquy of a rhetorical reassurance:
it’s not as bad as it looks, here in my own brittle wooden room full of beautiful hole-filling music. its air thick-heavy with exquisite apparitions of thought, dream-thin traceries of sweaty indulgences and a veritable smorgasbord of smoke. holed-up here in the asylum of my mock opium den, I can storytell my world any damn way I please. and it’s not as bad as it feels smothered in it synthetic warmth, enjoying occasional visits from various spirits. letting the melt of their cloy erase any disconcerting shudders of tomorrow, as it phoenix’s up from their colorful glass bodies. and, as the outside world pixilates to a harmless buzz of cricket symphonies, canine allegories & sparse eclectic traffic, I know that I’m safe for at least now. and I know, beyond any coal-black shadow of my formidable doubt, that here in my room I can feel any fucking way I please.
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