listen carefully...

The old man was true to his word. He promised to bring me back a bottle, which he did. As he also promised we’d drink together again. I read his face. Expressionless. Hardened. A swirling sea of swirling lines - a mess of memories. I met him a year ago in the usual spot at the usual time as I told the usual tales to nobody in particular.

Shimmering subconscious shadows flickering across the silver screen of falling snow. A surreal scene, so synthetic, like a Japanese anime. Frozen water floats by suspended in mid-air slow-mo magical calm. Yellow smiles rotten teeth and bloodshot eyes as my companion and I sit in stillness in the dark on a park bench shivering cold passing the brown bag back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth. As we spoke in tears of fifteen years of wasted life.

Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?
Dreams of loneliness...
Like a heartbeat...drives you mad...
In the stillness of remembering what you had...
And what you lost.

Numb.

Numb.

Junk dreams. Set scene: twitching arm, torn couch, rotten bowl of Cheerios and the shivering sound of a twisting coil of maggot. Alcohol burn meth-rage replaced with numb. Need to sleep. Needle full of junk. Need to sleep. Crushed Thorazine fairy dust dripping down my throat and it tastes like shit. Need to sleep. Stupid eyes as Bugs Bunny and friends flicker across dead retina. Rods and cones refuse to fire… only white noise across miles of rusted wire. Deeper and deeper in space and a million miles below… so damned cold. Listening to the steady beat of leathery wings.

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, I’m hunting rabbit.

Reunion

Hipster coffee-shop downtown. I sit in a shadowy corner booth sipping chai tea nursing a stubborn winter cold that won’t go away. Bundled up like a beatnik Eskimo in my bespoke shearling lambskin coat, fingerless gloves, and colorful scarf an ex girlfriend knitted. Hair’s grown out now to nappy mod-60’s-shag proportions complete with complementary 70’s-style sideburns and every third Friday of the month is open mic poetry night so the place is jump-and-jiving with pretentious artsy types so I blend in well.

I’m chilling with an old high school buddy who’s in town for a few days. He’s all grown up now, a professor. He teaches literature in upstate New York and every time we meet it’s bittersweet. He embodies what I could have been and I embody, to him, the quintessential Nietzschian figure. Tragically fallen from grace. He believes I chose the wrong path and threw away the “gift.”

Which I most likely did.

“ You really should be in Manhattan taking pictures. You know, it’s not too late. It really isn't. You're still young...” He tells me with patient optimism, in between sips of espresso, as though he’s a father addressing a volatile child.

I pause and sullenly gaze at him from beneath my oversized Tyler Durden gas-station aviators. And again I remind him that I'm broke and that I pawned my camera off a long time ago so I could pay hospital bills after I crashed my bike. Of course what he doesn’t know is that I actually drank that money away. Of course what he doesn’t know is that I've given up. That I'm disenchanted. That I'm not the same eccentric, bright-eyed, funny kid he knew in High School once upon a time. Perhaps he doesn't realize I simply don't care anymore.

Or perhaps he does know and he’s too polite to call me on it.

Aeternitas

I am a vampire. I am ancient. I thirst. I hurt. No words today or perhaps ever. I seek inspiration. I need reason. I need a life-giving infusion, a spark, that deep inhalation of acrid white smoke filling my lungs and super-charging my brain. For I am hollow. Dry. Brittle. I am undead re-animated flesh.

Nine-inch spikes tear skin and sinewy tendon, bore through bone. Thoughts of salvation. Redemption. Regret. Damnation. And I turn to you and through clenched teeth with raspy breath ask you:

“ remember me when thou comest in thy kingdom.”

I think of her.

Images click through my mind in split-second succession: her eyes, her hair, her skin, her hate, her pain, her death. She is incorruptible. I see her swathed in white satin looking angelic a hundred years from now, a thousand years from now, entombed beneath glass. Breathless. Cold. Untouched by the hellish wrath of decomposition. A saint. Wearing red lipstick one might expect to find on the base of a penis. My sweet. O’ may I lay down with you and join you in your sweet sleep. My Ligeia. As suffering and time and worms march across our still eyelids. Statues locked in a stiff embrace never to be re-awakened for all eternity… or until Christmas… or whatever comes soonest.

Now.

Reeking of dried shit, piss and clammy sweat. The needle zeros in with deadly precision, like a gps guided missile, finding a spot along the vein void of gangrene or bloat or dried blood. The magic spot. The big G. A garish red “X” painted on in marker. The pirate booty. Buried therein a time capsule housing millions of cells housing millions of years of evolution and survival, marked by this one moment of de-evolution, of self-mutilation, of self-destruction. And the Darwin award goes to…

Yes, I confess… I lie. More to myself than to you, yet I lie nonetheless. For I have sinned. Again and again and again. I’m a liar and a cheat and a junkie.

“ And I’ll tell you things that you already know so you can say:
'I really identify with you, so much.'
And all the time that you’re needing me is just the time
That I’m bleeding you, don’t you get it yet?”

That’s why you hate me. That’s why they love me. They? I am the pied piper of Hamelin and we are legion. The disenchanted. The lost. The drunks. The fiends.

Legend

Drunk, horny old dude leaning next to the bar with a lecherous smile tells every girl who walks by: “ Damn. You’re hot.” Same line over and over like an LP belting out Beatles tunes on crackling repeat. Black and white visions of John and Paul, with nappy mop-top haircuts, running through a sea of sobbing girls and flash-bulbs.

But that was yesterday.

The chorus of screams has died down. The hysteria of youth now replaced with a dull, barely-audible buzzing sound as his ticker struggles to pump blood through expired veins and clogged arteries. He’s an old tin can in a ratty bag full of tin cans collected next to a busy freeway overpass. Obsolete. Yesterday’s model sitting on a dusty thrift store shelf marked ten cents. No man’s treasure, every man’s trash. Whiskey-dreams and faded memories fuel his courage. Nothing to lose at this point, everything to gain. His pride sleeps in the bottom of a dumpster in a sticky puddle of garbage-juice. A pride long ago abandoned by it’s owner.

Yet in quieter moments, when he's alone in the bathroom taking a whiz on wobbly legs, when he's introspectively gazing in the mirror at his grizzled reflection, he swears he's still the same high school football hero who fucked the homecoming queen.

He's even told me, with misdirected trust and beaming pride , that he looks like Johnny Lawrence.

The Artist

“ So kid what is this website you're maintaining? This... blog?”

“ You seen it?”

“ Yeah I read it every now and again.”

“ Well, it's a collection of paintings.”

“ Paintings? They're just a bunch of stories.”

“ No, they're paintings. Every word, every sentence, every paragraph is a brush stroke.. a burst of color. Interplay between light and dark – chiaroscuro. And the page itself is a blank wall where all of these paintings, all of these canvasses, hang for the entire world to see. To enjoy or to hate or to ignore or to piss on or what have you.”

“ Paintings of what?”

“ My life.”

“ Are they real?”

“ Yes... No.”

“ Which is it? They're either real or they aren't.”

“ None of it's true yet at the same time all of it is.”

“ OK Edward Nigma, what does that mean?”

“ It's physics.”

“ Physics?”

“ Conservation of energy. Those stories didn't just spontaneously generate. They came from somewhere. They came from my life... from my experiences. Converted from one form of energy into another. A cathartic metamorphisis of raw emotion, be it pain or joy, into an abstract collection of words that tell the tale of said experience... or any similair moment experienced by anyone under similair circumstances.”

“ I don't get it.”

“ Maybe I'm not explaining myself very well. I'm hungry.”

“ And you publish these stories for complete strangers to read?”

“ Who better? These strangers have no idea who the fuck I am. There are no preconceived notions except those I place on the page. No stereotypes except those I allow them to formulate in their heads. No boundaries except those I create for myself to adhere to.”

" Playing God?"

" No. I stay within the realms of the true. I cannot write fiction. I never could. Yet some of the settings are fictitious. The characters are real yet names are changed. None of it is chronological. Yet it all happened. What tale I tell depends wholly on my mindset... or what's playing on my radio."

“ Sounds fun.”

“ It is. You should start a blog.”

“ Nah.”

“ Why not?”

“ I ain't got time for that shit.”

Beautifully Broke

Matters of money, as with matters of love or getting fucked, will invariably ebb and flow. “ Feast or famine,” says my buddy Kenny with surety and conviction in his voice. In the meantime I count my crowns and pesos piled up in neat little rows like Bob Cratchett in the cold counting house through fingerless gloves in dumbfounded disbelief like some fucking dumb-ass idiot glancing at his pitiful excuse of a paycheck. I lay in bed watching MTV and VH1 as celebrity spender’s and trust-fund bitches jetset to exotic locales, snort coke, and wash down pills with chilled Cristal and my fridge is bare. I’m getting skinny now you know. Perhaps it’s the hours of blank jogging on my treadmill as my downstairs crack-head neighbor who looks like Grace Jones tippety-taps the ceiling with a broom. My cheekbones protrude and my veins stick out as if I’ve been reborn at sixteen years old. Too bad heroin-chic went out a decade ago. God, I hate being hungry. All I can afford at this point is my gym pass and a bottle of Ancient Aged I shoot alone as my landlord quietly listens by the door checking to see if I’m home cause I’m 2 months late on rent.

some thoughts jotted on a napkin

The bass line drowns out my depression and all else as I sit and gently stir my Red Bull/Vodka under the neon black-light hullabaloo circus. She dances seductively-trashy maintaining eye contact hoping my gaze will flit down to her glowing French-manicured fingers as they outline her mound which “aches for me so.” Licking of lips, witty pick up one-liners, and a quick wink. Hoping. Tempting. Wanting. Waiting for the green shit to be thrown up on the counter, mindful of the no-touching rule, one… two… three… four… fueling men’s dreams…give or take a five-spot or a rail of white shit or a shot of Patron or some Oxycontin. Dealing in pleasure and false hopes and one-night-stand hot threesomes with her and her girlfriend trippin’ on Ex as the trance/techno ticks the time away. Double up rubber armor donned in awkward haste racing to beat the premature ejaculation thinkin’ about Mother Theresa and rotten road-kill dead-dogs whom were once loved but now gone, lost, and forgotten. My cousin sits awestruck hypnotized by round ass and tan lines jiggling like Jell-O fruit salad which he swears he’ll toss. He’s a filthy motherfucker, my cousin, that’s why I love him. My wingman. My dog.

The Snowman

The snowfall is as thick as a supernatural fog. In the swirling clouds I see shadows. Faces appear to me, jump out at me, like fun-house phantasms and then dissolve as quickly as they came. Perhaps they recede back into the cavernous emptiness of my memories.

Silence. The only sound is the cruel whistling of the wind and the occasional flip-flap of my hood. The world is dead as my soul is dead. I stand alone. Like Rip Van Winkle I’ve awoken from a hundred year ethereal sleep only to find desolation. Only to find deserted streets. Vacant eyes framed in brick peer down as I gaze up at the breathing, zig-zagging sky. My legs tremble beneath me like I’m tweaking. Lucid lithium dreaming. I feel dizzy. The strength and vigor I once knew as a youth has escaped me. I think it runs through the trees with the whispering dryad ghosts.

As I walk on I can hear the soft crunch of the snow beneath my feet. Can the dead who rest in the ground below hear my footfalls? In their shadowy slumber through lidless sockets, they see pitch black - even blacker than black my glimmering shadow floats by as a distant train billows smoke into the nuclear sky. And the dead forever grin through lipless smiles.

Cognizance City

Dying mumblings of an old man send me west. Four hundred ticks beyond the desolate Necropolis, the city of dead words, lies the bustling port-city of ideas. This is the meeting point- the crux. It is the final edge, or rather the beginning, or rather the still-beating pulse of this land: where reality gives way to the fantastic... or vice versa. The silk roads converge here. It is here where the world's mysticism is reinterpreted, repackaged, and then carted east by sharp toothed merchants to the dry outlying wilderness. It is here, in this sprawling city, lie scattered large halls where scribes exhaustively record and transcribe all thoughts, fantasies, passing notions, and ideas into infinite volumes. Materialization of pulses, these ideas, that float and hover around us unseen... into words. These texts are sent north, to the great royal libraries in Seraphim, to merely gather dust and be forgotten and then to ultimately die.

Or so I was told as a child... Or so I was sung as the flickering candlelight made the shadows dance and play.

I arrive into the city at dusk. All around me are the sounds of commerce. Shrewd exchanging of hands. This is a mercantile city, an ancient city, where might is measured not by the sword or by gold, but by thought. I arrive penniless and defenseless and my mind is still ill at ease. The journey was arduous and my caravan is exhausted. Yet I push on. I progress deeper into the metro-bowels and my bewilderment increases. Blank faces. Everywhere I turn I find emptiness, completely void of conviction or direction. No purpose. Something has alarmingly changed. Distrusting eyes weave in and out of the shadows. The occasional glint of firelight off a gold tooth or an ornate buckle draws my attention away from the task at hand. Strange men with even stranger smiles beckon me into dark alleys promising fame, fortune, and earthly pleasures. " A girl for you? We have young ones too, cheap, one great idea and she's yours for the night. Or do you like boys?" I ignore them and turn away pretending not to hear.

I seek something but I know not why. Or how. Something rare and coveted... inspiration. Before he passed the old man said I might find her here. “ In the heart, by the great hall, where only the wealthiest men - the thinkers, languidly sip wine and play chess.” These were his final directions, cryptic instructions. And here I am in the center of the city and I find only inanition. A deserted hall. Deserted streets. Empty minds. What once existed now doesn't. Or perhaps never did. Or perhaps the tales of old lie. Deceitful fables intended to mislead and fuel dreams and spawn hope. In fact, this entire city is a lie.

Or perhaps, just maybe, I am in the wrong place.

Nodders

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