Wednesday, October 1, 2008

recorded this at the dolphin when i was drunk

"help me honey, i woke up in a bar stool. i don't know how the fuck it happened like that, but i fell asleep during our conversation. you know, the shit about judas being our savior, cause if he didn't turn away from the angel and turn jesus in we wouldn't have our savior. it's silly though, i swore last night when your panties hit the ground you were my salvation. get me sober. get me home. do these fuckers behind us think i give a shit that his wife hasn't fucked in a month? she probably been fucked on the side anyway. his friend doesn't care and neither do i. you and i have a healthy one every once in a while, right? yeah, you're right; i should've saved that one for home, in bed. jesus, we talked about him right? i don't give a fuck if you're religious. you're mom's the reason you are. she died and you need to know that she went somewhere better, that she isn't just fertilizer. yeah, that was harsh weed, but that's the way thinking people see it. no, it doesn't mean...no, i don't think you're stupid. but it's kinda funny that you're more pissed about possibly being called stupid than me telling you that you're mom's fertilizer....i gotta shit. yeah here, fuck it...they have a toilet honey."


*it was a one sided conversation with a homeless man and i couldn't follow his rant either, but i recorded it and wrote it down*

Sunday, September 28, 2008

the coffin...or an old girlfriend

i got some calls from an old girl and a friend. at that point, i just wanted to burn up and swallow my pride, but i told her that i still loved her when i turned out the lights. she told me her pillow was wet whenever she woke and dreamt of me. i told her that my hands were still sweaty every time i thought of her. i also told her that i wished that a plane would come down into my apartment every time i thought of her. she told me that i was being melodramatic again and that she wished she never called. i told her that's okay. i wished she never called either. but then she began to cry. i'm a sucker for sad girls and for this girl, who never cried, i was even more of a puddle of mess. she told me that she was drunk and remembered main and how i drove up after working a fourteen hour day just to be lectured by her mom about how i shouldn't be disturbing her family's trip because i don't believe in god. but her father told her mother that i was harmless and i never got her in the pants. he said that bluntly. i got in her pants for sure, but while i talked to her i didn't think of that. i thought of what i have and cried to. i'm such a dick sometimes. i forget sometimes that i'm years and drinks away from that shit. she wore boxing gloves in a photo i saw years later and i told her i saw them. she said that she was scared. i asked her why she was smiling. she said that she did it for looks. i told her that 'you dress up nicely for looks.' she said that she did dress up for looks. i'm years and drinks away from that shit.

everytime i get her, it ends

she ate glass.
i saw a shard
make passage
through her cheek.
and when
she opened her mouth
to reveal her bloody teeth
i saw an ocean,
a sea,
a reminder of you and me.
with all the misspellings
and the rust we acquired
in our knees.
from always
falling over each other
and assuming
the role of the trouble.

that'll unstitch your palms.
and under your tree
we discovered
what teeth do to jeans.
what?

the months inbetween

you're in the kitchen
wondering where the money
will come from,
while i'm in the basement
wondering why my skin is scraped down to the bone.
and come the time of morning
when making love becomes boring,
i'll pull down the sheets
and wonder how long i actually slept since we've met.

fisher boy

the boy with a cyan cane, known to the greater world as a fishing pole went by the ocean to find his favorite killing ground.

he has a bucket full of water and a bucket full of fresh, soon to be dead clams and a football. the hilt of his cane is buried in the ground after it was cast with one of the soon to be dead clam, floating between the top and bottom of waves. he throws the ball to an imaginary receiver and imagines the throws that are never caught. he's that kind of boy. he doesn't think he'll catch anything today, it's too sunny and his imaginary receivers, well, he doesn't think that they're that good. his daddy was a college receiver. his daddy taught him how to fish. his dad had grey hair and his mom left him for bobby last week. at least that's what his daddy kept yelling into the phone last friday. he'd also knows that bobby is the family's boat mechanic. his dad's been gone for a week.

'anyway', he thinks, 'how strange it is that i have a blue cane. they're usually black.' his reel is regular enough. he picked it himself. he wanted it to be regular, but considering the pole being a shade of blue and being odd and all... he also wonders what it would be like to eat snow. would it hurt his teeth? his mother always told him he had very sensitive teeth. she would always get him coca cola with no ice when ordering in the drive thru. he would like to eat snow, at least one time, he thinks. he thinks that he wouldn't want to ever throw a snow ball at someone, just lick it, but not lick a flagpole, cause he's seen a christmas story. as he throws his football to his imaginary receiver he notices out of the corner of his eye that his cane is bent and begging for the sand to release it's hold. 'this 'un's the big 'un, bigger than at camp last summer,' he thinks. he ran headlong to his cyan pole and plays like his favorite hero, arthur the king and pulls the cane out of the sand and immediately finds out that the pull wasn't as hard as the bend suggested. yet, he does not release his pull. if anything, he doubles his efforts for his quarry. he knows that this bugger would only run out further if he showed a weakness. 'lucky,' he thinks. he put on the hundred pound test in his garage before he left his house. childish luck, surf fishing.
'sea bass? sturgeon? flounder. I'm at an inlet to the sea, so maybe...'
his heart is racing. today iss his day. the boy with the cyan cane rolled out of bed this morning, still alone and scared in his parent's house, devoid of food in the pantry, and knew that he had to catch something to eat today. with every pull of the mystery fish he thinks of how his father taught him how to scale and debone a fish before he went to summer camp last year. the lesson stuck with him, just like daddy's lessons on daddy's guitar that he could never touch unless daddy was there. he played it every time his daddy left for work in the morning and put it back before his daddy got home. he'd been playing it every day for the last week and for the first few days replaced it under his daddy's bed but recently grew brave and slept with it in bed as he would a puppy. and that made him wonder, 'why does daddy leave his guitar under his bed?' cause his daddy never played it unless he wanted to show the boy with the cyan cane a new chord or an old Beatles song.

he kept at the mystery fish for the better part of an hour and believed that this had to be the best, most adventurous battle to have ever have unfolded on this beach or any between boy and sea. he always wanted to be part of an adventure story. and he never knew of an adventure where a boy was victorious in the night. the red sun had already begun it's descent into the west, over what his daddy called the million dollar asshole's club houses and still was sinking when he, the boy with the cyan cane finally felt that the resistance died.

once he felt the draw towards him, he double timed his reeling. watching his cyan can rapidly bob, back and forth, left to right, and towards his back, he felt the reel eating it's way back home.

it was dark when finally he heard a slap on the beach.

Saturday, September 27, 2008

dearborn, mi

i can barely breathe in this Midwest city. it's taken forever to get here and everyone is jobless; at least that's what the Detroit newspapers say. everyone drives fords or Dodge's or Chevy's around here and I've never felt so foreign. my Honda made it up the driveway to your ex-girlfriend's parent's house and yeah, did i tell you that i think that she looks like a linebacker? yeah, well, she does. she came out of the house and got in my backseat and told us that we should meet some of her Michigan friends at a basement party called club abyss where we could score some coke. i wanted to strangle her, kick her, bust her teeth out till she bled to death, but then again, she would've probably worked me. remember, i did tell you that she looked like a linebacker...and she probably could hit like one too. anyways, i wanted to maim her because we'd been driving for hours and i wanted to sleep and not go party with a whole bunch of coke heads and i was sure that there was some couch inside her parent's house that was warmer than January and had pillows and blankets. but we went to club abyss and there was coke and i woke up. but then again, i slept. but then again i woke up. it was morning and i met the kid who threw the party. his name was mark and he was nice, but he was only seventeen. and actually, club abyss was his mother's basement, where he set up speakers and a turn table and his mother stored old Christmas decorations and sewing odds and ends. i asked mark if his mother knew what happened in her basement last night and if she cared. he told me she knew and that the coke we bought was actually coke from her friend who was a dealer. and no, surprisingly enough, mark's mother didn't do coke. she was just helping out her friend by using her child's friends as the primary business. well, after we ate breakfast, mark took us in his Chevy across the river into Windsor, Canada. i have to admit, i did enjoy that. we went to some casino and i blew a hundred bucks on some slots but got comp drinks and stared at 'foreign' women. it was so different. it wasn't so different. the bathrooms were cleaner that in Detroit, but the language was the same and the girls gave me dirty looks just the same. your girlfriend looked at every guy that went by and gave them the same dirty looks. that made me feel a little bit better. after the casino mark parked his car on the street and we walked till i found a place that sold cigarettes and bought a pack of player's unfiltered and a Cuban cigar. that was always a little dream of mine, to buy a Cuban cigar but in the end it tasted like shit. now i don't even like cigars. I've lost faith in them like i lost faith in god when i tasted his words. what a sad thought; i don't have faith. we found a bar where a guy was in the corner playing a guitar through a cheap amplifier. he was playing bad fleetwood mac songs bad. his singing got dramatically better with each drink. older Canadians drank. i ordered a pitcher of miller light and played pool in the corner. they were shit at the game. they looked more like chess players. we drank and we talked about new jersey and Philadelphia and how you weren't old enough to drink in the states. the old Canadians laughed at that. i laughed at that. the trip went pretty shitty after that. we scored some more coke from mark's mom, back in dearborn and a little weed in ann arbor, but then you fought with linebacker and we drove back east. i shit for the first time in days at a truck stop in Ohio. we drove through a Pennsylvania night, cutting like a scythe through Russian wheat in the mountains, finding our feet back in Philly. i dropped you off and forgot that i was your friend and didn't call you for weeks.

Friday, September 26, 2008

the bones of bats

when your bones go bad and the color yellow find your teeth and your legs stop working, even basically, you won't be able to escape, like running under water soon you'll find yourself working harder. and in the dark you hear your heart beating in your blood and your veins struggle with the mud, rust colored when you cut your skin. it's silly that long ago you were given the gift of bones and courage to go where you shouldn't have and now you can barely leave your bed.

younger times when spring came so did the cops burning by the ocean with beer and your love fucking on off season porches only to notice the neighbor has come early standing by his venetian blinds. she threw her egg in the water, wrapped in blood and cotton and yo imagined with the aid of the heater and violent violins on your way home that something caught it's death that night. and now you're ready to catch yours.

the city's year now becomes clear. the tangles untangle, the car horns and sirens have caught up with what the bottom of beers left behind, the ghost rings and their old ghostly conversations and no more sneaking out into the desert. the work and play piled up and built a home and hair and nails will still grow when you find yourself under.
so clap your hands when your fingers stop and push harder when you say you can't because you were bleeding bones and will now eat your crow under some astro turf and it can't get too much worse, right?

the bell blew the building and she opened her doors. the sidewall coughed and spit out the street. your legs hiccuped and our came your feet. this coming clean in this world of dirt, only you'll get dirty again so love your lover.

there's now nothing to hold, so this must be paradise. deep in the night, bless me father. i lost a fight so call off the pity. he stole my wallet and a picture of my first love so i will pray for lost things and sleep on your house steps. and i am still blind and bats still have holes for eyes and eyes for holes, blacked out and so cold. so come to me this night and we'll make it an occasion and make our own death dance and play flutes and whistle like champs and sing the same songs alongside the same radio and make it all go away. the girls and the sewer grates, they're all the same, they rot like holy shit and clean just the same.

give me a dime for every dollar every time i called her, told her i love you, only to find out later he fucked her, here in my bed. dreary sheets and bet on me, i told her. she was blessed with two hearts.