showroom of compassion

Empires are risen and destroyed within our sonar shores.  Everyone has a place but I can't seem to find mine.  I see the dark turn of time, and it breaks my inner signals up. It's getting cold landlocked and frozen in past desolations throes.  less temporary than the styrofoam cups, broken down cars and pick-up trucks.  With whiskey and boredom peace can be found in sprawling lines of anonymous ideas written on pages with simple complexity. Develop the self in rage against the system that betrays me, us.  Word is no bond anymore, papers and copies are what spurs the system forward, absent and untrusting as we slip by in the corridors.  Be good, be kind, be interesting.  I've got a soft spot for anything.

I have no eyes beating at the door.

Some want it all.  Some want it more. 
I have no ears, screaming what seem to be words
The American Dream so discouraging.  It hurts.
I have no heart beating rhythmic misconception
I use instinctual perception when searching through the voids.
Incarnation of the soul bewildering scientific mind.
You can clap your hands and stomp your feet to the
charging electrical el train beat, down system,
down the roads to LCD youths in tight clothes
fighting the current inside, while going along for the ride
through corrosion of life in blistering sun
beat down, I feel it, you feel it too
I look into the mirror for hope, every time I stare into my own eyes
I have this intense feeling of knowing exactly what and who I am
i don't think it's quite self realization, as being aware and
contemplating your position as a biological self replicating organism
that beats you down the most.
We are the exhausted generation, upon arrival
we absorb ourselves in replication, mass representation
a mediocre modern exile from Eden.
Some words have weight and power, minds are strong
but being what we are, we cannot comprehend the answer.

beggars delight

    We pass through stores, and wait in lines.  We cycle our tickets, and walk through the turn-style.  Fragments of paper and trash litter the ground as some memory of life and time.  I’m in the world, a part of the world. 
    The tiny strips of DNA trace back to survival.  We are surviving, and doing so much more.  I walk by the guy on the bridge posted on his milk crate.  He laughs at the tourist walking by as they avoid eye contact and shuffle to the furthest side.  “Scared” he says with a smile and shakes his cup a little louder. 
    Fear, I think to myself, is something few people truly know.  Those brushes with the darkness that change our perception forever in the new world are seldom seen.  I feel connected as the street poet tells me about sleeping on the train and how brushing your teeth every couple days is just as good as three times a day.  I feel a connection because at a point I was embracing that feeling on top of a Humvee on the side of a mountain staring at the stars past the brim of a helmet.  At least I knew I would eat.
    It takes a special kind of person to live between the lines of society, a halfway person melting reality, and some foreign dream.  Surviving sleeping above the warm air of the subway grate.  Shaking the cup with the tiny metal discs that mean nothing, or everything.  They deal with being ignored, brushed off, and feeling angry.  From the “heroes” of a nation to the outsiders living on the banks, it’s really all the same.

Business Kid and The Disco Dogs

                               10     Fists To The Earth

   The rhythm of the fire moved to the music coming out of the solar powered FM radio. The beach was nice and the night had a cool darkness.  Smooth like black velvet and looking into it you got to where you felt like you were being swallowed into the ocean.  Peering into the sadness that the depths held for you, except it didn't feel bad, it was an adventure.  That night it felt like a whale had moved into the darkness and some kind of static energy floated off of everything.  We passed cheap wiskey to eachother drawing circles in the sand.  I think I was just trying to float.  Float on with the wavy breaks and hot currents of lifes deeps.  I saw the numbers in your head clearer than you did. It was no trick we both knew.  I lifted the rocks into the air, it was scary.  I was afraid.  But I was amazed, and excited to the point of hyperventilation.  All the stories of people who could do it ended terribly.  For a long time it was our secret.  I wish I could say it still is, but obviously I wouldn't be here writing this now if that was the case.
_____The head person, whom I should not name, has given me this pencil and pad of paper, one envelope and one stamp.  I fear though that this will never reach you. I have been imprisoned the past four years by people whom specialize in abnormalities such as mine.  These people are dangerous and I assume know who you are fully, so please do not attempt to find me, I fear that ill wll may befall you if you do brother. 
___.......................

Bitter Rich Fool

                                       Part 3.5

                             ****   9   ******  lucky me again

___Brent woke up to a scream in the night.  A howl of some creature disturbed and flitters of burning light outside danced in the windowpane as Brent's dreary mind sprung alive lazily.
"I'll kill everyone of you sons of bitches! Get the law called on me, I'll burn your carcasses and leave the bones for strays!"
 ___ This burst obviously came from Mr. Stevens.  Jill even caught a bit of the rant as she stirred in bed.  Brent went to the window and there was Mr. Stevens in his house coat and boots drinking whiskey from the bottle while holding a burning Maltav cocktail.  Brent could hear the raccoons scatter from the garbage in the back of the house.  Mr. Stevens took a stumbling run and threw the cocktail into a group of retreating animals.  They scurried quickly away and it didn't seem that any were injured.  Brent watched the old man as he collapsed and knelt down on the ground watching the fire burn up scortching the lively lawn and dying out in the cool night.  Brent felt like he understood the man a little more in seeing his sad nature quietly.
____We all die.  It doesn't matter if your worth a million dollars, have a thousand kids, invent the most amazing thing ever, you are expendable. 
____Mr. Stevens stared blankly into the advertising box in his living room.  He rolled around thoughts inspecting loopholes and options. He did this process frequently with no avail.  He eventually forgot what he was doing in the first place.  This kept him sharp, but his information was all mixed up.  He couldn't differentiate reality from fiction.  He didn't know the difference between the truth and fiction, most of which he had made up without  recalling his true meaning.  This left him uneasy and often afraid of everything outside of himself and outside of his control, because with all this time checking facts and separating created meaning from true meaning had robbed him of most organizational ability.  He drove himself mad when deciding on dinner for the evening.  The proper placement of silverware and a thousand thoughts on ettiquite, dining, and entertainment filled his head, beckoning him to make everything perfect.  In reality he was surrounded in a mess.  Yes it was often tidy, but no place of comfort.  He often sat in his room enjoying a book, because the insanity would die down behind the words.  He would often not even absorb what he had read, but just sit there calmly running his eyes over the words and mouthing or humming a slight tune as he did so to balance with the piercing silence of his lonely dark hollow.
___look out

Everyone wants love, yet no one grows flowers

stuck in swirling circiuts of sadness
retelling and retolling the lacking nature
of the beast, am the beast
and legends die

I'm standing lakeside
waiting for the high tide
so I can cast my bottle
and say goodby

anxiety is mistaken for
claustrophobic inside
agoraphobic out
wild wild world so boring day to day today

maybe we will meet today
maybe we did yesterday
or the other week or year
but it's all drowned
and no one has any real fear

I'm not going to settle
or settle down
settle around good things
build something from nothing

not going to draw
or draw from experience
not going to throw violence
anger in bundled fists

not going to carve
or carve myself from some
stone that I've become
I let the wind and water do their job

I'm not going to gaze
hypnotized in stasis
playing DVR for familiar faces
hibernating mind going faster than I would like

body dying from health and hindsight
creaking joints and dislocated spine
flat floor calling
white tiles and the faucet running
i look in the mirror
and ask where is my mind

Hollywood and Washington Stole Your Soul

 Part 3 of Many

Archaic and without substance my thoughts tremble and flutter.  Senses and perceptions becoming strained from overuse is often recurring.  The ground it shakes and breaks away senselessly. Violent cancers storm forth in the bodies of the overworked.  Eyes, oh god, tired eyes rolling and seeing all the same things.

???8???? Out of Gas

____It came to him one day when he was buttering his toast.  That he should do something about the weeds in the front yard.  Something had to be done and that was it.  The riding lawnmower had broken down and was parked semi-permanently sixteen feet from the side of the house.  The weeds now grew over the lawnmower much to the dismay of his neighbor Brent.  Brent's wife had told him it was ridiculous and he really should contact the authorities.  Brent thought to be more reasonable, and despite his wife's pleas wrote a letter for Mr. Walter Stevens, the tenant of the tidy cottage house.  They had shared a beer in the summer, when Mr. Stevens was more jovial.  Since then the relationship had grown more tense and bizarre due to a few nights Mr. Stevens had ran past their dining room window as they were enjoying  dinner.  Now this normally tolerable offense was amplified by the fact that Mr. Stevens was wearing an adult diaper, and only an adult diaper.  To Brent and his wife this seemed like dementia, an old man in his late years losing control.  It was when Mr. Stevens stopped and looked at them from the patio doors very close to where they were seated that it became an offensive act.  Brent started to get up as Mr. Stevens screamed like an infant, spraying spit onto the clean glass.  His hand then reached into the back of the diaper and the old man threw at lump of his own slimy excrement at the window, Brent and his wife both flinched with faces turned in disgust, Mr. Stevens laughed hysterically.  He threw his hands into the air and ran back home.

   ____ Since then Brent and Jill Anderson had spoken with Mr. Stevens brother Mortimer his only surviving relative.  Mortimer was 73 and still a quite bright man.  Brent was watering his lawn when Mortimer arrived in his luxury sedan and began climbing the steps.  Brent waved him over and told him of Mr. Stevens recent turn in behavior.  Mortimer was dumbfounded.  He had visited his brother regularly and had not noticed anything perculiar, and even claimed he did not know his brother to ever wear an adult diaper.  Brent scratched his head in disbelief, Mortimer gave his number and said to call the next time something happened.  Since then Mr. Stevens became a recluse shutting up his windows and throwing trash bags out his back door.  The local cats and raccoons had found a feasting ground.  The Andersons could hear the animals fighting in gluttonous rage every night.  Brent had to start locking their own trash cans after a few nights of being toppled over by what could only be a mutant raccoon the size of a Geo Metro.

____This time Brent called the local authorities to complain about this problem.  An hour later an officer arrived and spoke with Mr. Stevens through a screen door.  Mr. Stevens seemed to be polite.  The officer seemed satisfied as he walked away.  Brent and Jill were pulling the blinds open to see from a window when Mr. Stevens stared directly at them and gave a smirk as he shut the door.

____Country music was playing outside the gas station where Mr. Stevens was standing and filling a gas can next to his car.  He through it in the trunk next to a large bundle of dish rags.  He drove home nearly missing hitting a freakishly large raccoon on the way. 

more to come...