THE DAY THAT STOOD STILL, DANCING W/ MY WIFE

i am running out of time.
It is slipping from my fingers like memories of a lifetime Drunk.
Death is not waiting for me to answer the door. He is patient. Simply, he wants me to feel it. To sit & listen to his knocks. They are always different. Not always the knock of Mortality, per say, but always a close enuf tune.
& i do. & i do sit, wait. & i do listen. i am in limbo w/in his hands...& consequently, everyone else's. It's not a good position to be in.
As the cracked-doomed begins to punch thru the horizon, setting scenery aglow in shadowed promises -- that will dissipate in a heart-thump -- i sit, staring at this wooden table. It is covered w/ cigarette ash. If one, perhaps, leaned too comfortably, that One would smell the permeating wretch of spilt, soddened alcohol.
It has a voice, The Aglow, crimininaling those shadowed promises. It speaks in whispers. Soft. Almost toneless. but its tone, nevertheless, is still too strong to ignore. i know, i've tried many a time. All to no avail.
The pathetic Orb is higher in the sky now & i wish it would go away but it won't. i know it won't it never does & this saddens me.
i am running out of time.
i don't have a day to spare, but yet, still, it is beginning.
Fuck me.

LIONS, TIGERS, & ME, OH MY

i have been up for a day & 1/2 now. No sleep. my eyes are hanging on thin cords of heated metal pulled taut, stretching the nerves to searing screams. my body is lamenting for the flowered oasis of a bed. my mind whirls round & round in no particular direction, w/ no particular destination. & my fingers fall silent. They are tame & docile as a paralyzed cat.
my hands are concrete blocks in water. my head, swimming in a stratosphere not of the atmosphere. i am barely hanging on.
The drug certainly is working its way thru my body now.
'When, Jackson, have you ever held on?' A voice whispers.
It lingers there, the voice, as if on replay, as if coaxing an insanity to the surface of one who knows not the difference between then & now. & suddenly i become frightened of my cigarette, snuff it out, & pour a Pour fit for a Drunken king.
As i fall ass backwards, frightfully trembling, into a corner of this room, my lips kissing the tops of my knees, my arms hugging the life out of the mother of my shins, their faces begin to appear. They float there on a bed of weakened light. Staring.
Prepared for the worst, i slip another cigarette between my lips, SPARK, & inhale my life in a single drag.

& at the moment, i am Parched Desert Drenched.
i am a Time where Time once stood.
i am venerable, cracked & worn, framed against the wall.
i am now the Pupil of The Petal.
i am the farce that reflects the honesty of a beating heart infected w/ roaches.

W/ my exhale, these faces scatter like confetti, blown to pieces out & into a world that is entirely my own. & i find myself, once again, sitting stupidly inside the comma of a wall, staring at a history yet written, but believing otherwise.
Isn't believing 1/2 the battle?

BLANK DAYS

The cajoling laughter is a farce. But they think it's real. The reverence & respect handed out w/ a smile to all the clients & salesmen, is nothing more then a sinister joke w/ a punch-line only i get, one made for some type of self-preservation. The orders barked out daily come from a costumed-mouth, somehow pantomiming the idea & phrase: I CARE! & they all believe this sincere. Perhaps my almost-daily-attendance corroborates the former & negates whatever latter i can come up w/.
At home, a cigarette dangling from my mouth, i go over all this finely & meticulously. It doesn't make me feel any better, only worse. But there is nothing else for me to do. i try to turn my attention to the others of past, but the thought of Steven Chamberlain, or Leonard Demoine, Thad Fellows, brings a rumbling sickness to my stomach at the moment; sometimes, on some days, a look back is too much, so i continue w/ the parade of days that is everyday.
i begin to find fault w/ what i do. my life, as it pertains to their living, is nothing more then an empty sack; a writhing devil of a dream unable to awake from.
A cycle of macabre deference to the dying wise.
A glass, & no Pour.
Cause & effect w/ no affect.
"Hey," my wife says, walking thru the front door. "There's an undergraduate reading his poetry at the library tonight. Wanna go?"
No, i state simply.
"Why?"
i have no desire to listen to an undergraduate's poetry.
"But he's a nice guy," she informs me.
i sigh, get up, & walk to the kitchen to pour a Drink.
Tonight will be the same as always. Tomorrow will be no different.
& like a pill, i will swallow the Moon & wait for its effect. It has no thorns, but never-the-less, it wreaks havoc on the lining of a stomach chewing & biting on the limbs of all these blank days.

TENDER IS THE NIGHT SET AFIRE

There is something to be said about taking a shit late at night w/ the lights extinguished, surrounded by nothing but silence. A silky curtain drapes about you. The air seems to kiss itself into a Sunday nap. The body slips into a hot-spring, naked. A shot of Whisky. A line of Coke. A line of Poetry completed.
At such times, i think of a sooth-sayer for the past.
i am remembering the first time i had ever heard Jeff Buckley.
It was in an apt. building justly dubbed, The Roach Motel. As per usual back then, my friend & i were stoned to paralysis, lying on his floor in the dark for what could have been days, or even just moments, picture-painting aloud the ceiling w/ our thoughts & visions, roaches calmly climbing over us; to them, we weren't even there.
Beside myself w/ waves of intensifying thought, i struggled to rise myself.
"Hang-on," he said. "Stay there. I've something for you."
It would be this very night that would spawn so much of everything that was to transpire for years to come. An awakening. A nightmare. It would be the very thing that made me who i am today, for better or for worse. i wouldn't have this realization for at least another decade.
In the dark of E.H's apt., flat upon my back, i couldn't focus, couldn't think clearly, & at that moment, it seemed that was the most clear thing i could be thinking or feeling.
Far off, i could mutely hear E.H. rummaging around, softly cursing for taking so long to find whatever it was he was trying to find.
Finally, w/ a voice made of tender glass, "listen." He said.
As Buckley's voice exited the speakers, & slid into my ears, my breathing slowed. My heart quickened. The air thickened w/ each note he sang. The walls began to breath w/ life. The snow quilting the valley outside became a symphony of melancholy, & suddenly the night was set afire by the spark of the change of two boys.
What that change was, even now, i cannot define. Cannot place a word to it, but can only feel that night living in the marrow of my bones.
As i flush, that night that was so tender, so long ago, turns to a tinder of something like a dream.