Where are the stars?

Where are the stars?

A new era dawns a new way to light up the night sky.

Geysers of life’s elixir travel through copper tubes,

issuing forth like so many streams of emancipation,

there is a rhythm to their chaos.

Birds nest in a plastic tree.

Four gorgeous women sit on a bench

Is it they or the bench that is more manufactured?

The oranges, blues, and greens that pastel the horizon are not

made of the same pure elements they once were.

We are a nation of suburban cowboys.

Giddy-up.

When Sagittarius rises over the Ford dealership,

we are all going to die.

The diesel twinkie billows noxious vapors

to suffocate the Arco Gods.

6-B Oxnard Via Telephone Road.

Is their a constant ration of gum to cigarette butts at a given bus stop?

America:

“Claiming propriety over municipal waste since 1632.”

There is a strange connection between bus stops and drug deals.

Why?

It’s like a horror film looking through a SCAT Bus window;

like an HBO drama listening to the conversations.

The payphone is the purveyor of the plague.

The payphone has worn out the digits C-A-L-L-A-T-T.

Bus eleven pulls away.

I hop on my alternative mode of transportation and follow suit.

Vapor of nerd stings the nostrils.

I am surrounded by 6′ by 10′ boxes,

marked with the latest gaming titles.

If you live life through a fantasy,

achieving what you never could in reality,

and obtaining the same euphoria,

have you really wasted any time?

I salute you, nerds.

Sex, video games, and cheeseburgers

all yield the same chemical result.

But only one burns calories.

The youth of America yearn for the latest SpongeBob game.

Daddy wants to please this Christmas.

“Daddy please?…Daddy can I?”

“Maybe later…we’ll see…ask your mother.”

Halls are no longer decked with bowels of Holly,

but the blood of Christmas past.

Jesus was never a main character in a video game.

Thou shalt not engrave false idols, right?

Separation of church and game play.

No one in this store has a girlfriend.

But they all speak clingon.

Does anybody have a pencil?

An after hours education in the halls of an institution.

Why are the Gatorade bottles locked up

while drugs pass freely from hand to hand?

We have made our schools for the handicapped,

and the pen cap chewers.

Have I learned more now in this instance of trespassing,

than in all my culminated days locked within an institution?

These benches are cold in the November air.

But my thoughts are warm; my belly full.

My mind is jumping from place to place;

a teenager on a shooting spree.

The un-ashed tip of a cigarette will become the unsolved mystery

of the fire department.

Children should not play with matches,

but they should learn to shoot a gun.

This is what I’ve learned from school.

Why is their not a school of graffiti?

The urban art is the last true writing on the wall.

Though it is dark,

the stars still refuse to shine.

The modern American lives in a perpetual twilight.

In the day we dwell in doors,

The cities light up the night.

The earth illuminates,

extinguishing those heavenly flames

and becoming a physical metaphor for atheism:

Man has closed heaven until he has satisfied his urges.

In the morning we will all attend church as if nothing has happened.

To skate is not a crime,

but to ride around the mall causing mischief

while your baked out of your skull…

Is fun.

I don’t smoke pot.

But if I did…

I’m sitting in a gutter behind Lowe’s,

and I can hear rats scurrying in the bushes.

There is trash all around me,

and the freeway is in the distance.

Am I living now?

Happily?

I see one star beyond a parking lot light,

and feel that it deserves interpretation.

It is a desperate, dying breath from God,

trying to speak to me.

Volumes have been written about his message,

but he sums it up in three words:

Love Everybody Unconditionally.One day I will.This urban Jungle is a unique blend of concrete and industrialized plants.

Everywhere I’ve been, I have seen a palm tree,

but not one has thrown its leaves at my feet.

Grass blades spout from the sewer.

I see the forest through the trees,

which is the sole benefit of clear-cutting.

My fingers are cold.

My Joints; stiff.

I am dying.

Slowly, I am dying.

And old fat man is skating with a beer in his hand.

He is a slave succumbing to alcoholism,

The driver of desperate men.

What is the penalty for drunken boarding?

DUI

I can use a drink.

I will return here another day.

Hip-hop flows from a solara

like water from a faucet.

Rough and easy.

It quiets down, and so does my writing.

Rap is the voice of the urban poet,

and the urban poet has no name.

World ‘round the same struggle is fought,

but no one words it the same.

Classical is cliche’ stimulation for infants.

Rap is the edge of an angry people.

Polished Punk.

America has a new song to sing to.

The urban rhythm is an expansion of the mind;

a war waged on a multifaceted front.

We have all defiled the same soil.

You cannot write of life from a roll top desk.

Experience is the law of the written land,

America is the youth of the world,

rooting its experimentation in the unknown.

I too, sing america.

I sit aside my darker brother at the human table,

He does not mention yesterday.

Today, I pledge my life to the cause of humanity as it lies in the cracks.

Tomorrow, we will have our exodus.

The lights will go out,

and the stars will return, bringing with it the religion we have blinded.

Dancing

Hey Jack, I know what your thinking. And I’ll get straight to that point. Have a dance and die young. You’ll live a life-time through the rhythm while the rhyme winds up taking your breath away. But how can such a thing be stolen from you, when it’s already in the possession of a gorgeous woman across the room, or indeed, the gorgeous woman in your arms, turning, burning and yearning in time with the music. Go ahead Jack, slide one hand down the small of her back; let your lips touch hers, and taste the bullet she just shot down from the glass gun on the counter top. Jesus, God! It feels so good to be so natural. So free. So incapacitated, misappropriated, and inebriated. Watch her hair twist with her body and let the wild strands slap against your bare neck and cheek; the sharp kisses of a tango; the hard slaps of a Bosa Nova.

And so Jack, don’t you wonder what your thinking? I know what it is. Now’s as good as any to start drinking, Jack, but you just can’t tear yourself away, nor should you. You’re in the midst of a punch drunk love; K.O.’d by anticipation. Take in the hip-to-hip, lip-to-lip, sip-by-sip, excruciation of reincarnation, for you have been born again as nothing less than a soul, and something more than a man. So black out and tap out because she will not bow down quietly. She has your breath, she has your body, all that remains yours is your soul, and you are offering it up to her because she is a snake in your arms, caressing your skin, wrapping around your waist, and tightening into a death grip causing your legs to numb and your eyes to bulge. Back to reality.

You pull her close and she presses against you. You both are breathing fire and your cataracts are fogging. you free a hand from ‘round her waist, and cling to the back of her head. And in one fell swoop, you press her upon your own delicate flesh, and fight from mouth to mouth for what is rightfully yours. A more vicious war has never been waged as the one on this minuscule front. Wet with sweat you refuse to yield, and she refuses to surrender until you reach the point of a waltzing climax; a salsa turning point in which you break her deadly grasp, let your hand slide past her cheek, and fall through the front door on the wings of euphoria. This is your dance, Jack. This is your night.

Cereal with Water

 

 

That’s the breakfast that I had the morning I woke up on the damnable day. I was just comin’ down from a bad case of ‘cocaine blues’ and forgot to go to the store the previous day. So water and Cheerios filled my aching belly. It tasted like soggy card board, felt like it too. High in fiber and nothing else. I ate it out of a cup with a fork because everything else was dirty. As a matter of fact, I think the fork may have been too. Any way, I tossed those into the building pile of dishes and dirt as well, and went into the bathroom. Snorting a line off the linoleum, flicking a roach off the mirror and watching it drown in the sink, I gave myself a good once over. First, a glance at the old pallet. My eye was swollen and blue, with reddening around the edges and some yellow shit right in the corner. I braced myself and wiped off the yellow shit, and looked at my nose. Luckily, it was numb, because the sight of the gash through the right nostril would have caused it to sear. So I wiped off the dry, crusty blood, and turned on the faucet, cupping my hand to scoop out the cock roach. I took a crusty towel and rinsed my face, then ran a comb with missing teeth through my hair. Looking at my own grill, I wasn’t much less worse for wear. My left canine and my right front had disappeared, and, feeling around with my tongue, I found that I was missing half a molar as well. Once again, it had paid to be high.

I’d have to get that tooth fixed, so I figured I’d squeeze into a dentist, give her the old once over, and see what we could do about pulling it. Then I thought, “fuck it”, and pulled it myself. I ditched the tooth and scratched my scrawny, white arm. It was okay, but I was missing my shirt. And my pants. So buck naked, I made my way across the hotel room, and into my hamper where I found some torn up blue jeans and a wife beater. Itwas blood stained, but I didn’t care. Blood stain are pretty fuckin’ tough. Then I found my Jean Jacket, and a broken cigarette on top of the T.V. I lit the cigarette, dawned the jacket, and walked out the door, where I was jumped by I don’t know how many sons of bitches, and beaten unmercifully.

The next thing I knew, my Jacket was gone, and I was shoeless. There was now a burn mark in my previously healthy arm. The fuckers got me with my own cigarette. I made out the bunch runnin’ down the street, so I started runnin’ after ‘em. I liked those shoes. They didn’t know that, clipped to my boxers, was a box cutter.

I finally caught up to them. They were sniffin’ lines in the alley, so I crept up quietly, real still like, and gut one by the neck, blade to their jugular, and I said “I’ll be takin’ my fuckin’ shoes back.” And they gave me my fuckin’ shoes back. So I let the guy go.

Cereal with water: That’s the breakfast I had the morning I woke up that damnable day…And when I looked in the mirror, my eye was swollen and blue, my nose was slit open, my teeth were shit, and I had a cigarette burn on my arm.

The Drunken Asshole loves a Woman

There’s a huge class difference between her and I. She’s got it, and I don’t. But I don’t let such a small blotch destroy my fantasy. And besides, she tells me it don’t matter. You’d listen to anything swimming past those lips. If she hung me out to dry, I’d hang through sun and rain ‘till she saw fit to save me from her games. Come Alimony or matrimony, I’d try to reach the eighteen year mark with this one. She’s beautiful! Even without the aid of a glass of whiskey. I like to consider myself genteel; I like to lie to myself. I wouldn’t lie to her. That’s why it won’t work out. You have to play the game. Don’t set your cards down on the flop. Wait for the river. But this time, I holler “Aces and Eights!” and expect someone to bet against me.

Oh, this one I could tell you about. I could tell you about every nuance of her physicality, but first I’d have to find out what exact, the proportion of a nuance is. Eyes! Nothing catches me like eyes. They jump out from unexpected places, opening souls to strangers like hookers on Jerry Springer. Not that she’d ever be in a place like that, or likewise, that sort of profession. She’s no goddamned mother-fucking woman of ill repute. She’s a fuckin’ angel. She’d be mine if I wasn’t everybody else’s. Can men be of ill repute? That depends on how you feel about a condom.

I drink. I drink a lot. I pass out on the floor after rolling off of a woman. As a matter of fact, I am firmly of the belief that if you can ride the floor without falling off, you are not drunk. She don’t condone that sort of behavior. I still try to shower her with drunken kisses. She deserves them. What’s a woman like her doing in those kinds of parties anyway. Better me than some drunken asshole.

I don’t believe in love. But I love her. There’s nothing wrong with death, but I won’t live to see her die. I’m not a religious man, but she is a God-send. I cuss, spit, moan and fuck. Sometimes I shower. But every time I see those eyes, and I stare into that black, caring center, I look back and hold her close. I don’t show her my face, but the tears well up inside, and she thinks I’m just laughing, but I’, really in the middle of a very sobering moment. My right arm crawls under her left, creeping up her smooth neck, caressing the back of her beautiful head of hair, pressing her against my chest or shoulder, and my left cradles her waste and dances on the boundary between friends and lovers, unknowing which way it should go. She doesn’t know how I feel, and she doesn’t feel the same, but even if I could tell her, it will always be too late. I’ll crawl back to the floor, and hold her in the morning. The rest of the night is strictly for iniquity.