Archive for September, 2012
I Stole a Bus
The pedal is fat, fat, fat, but I want the tall one. Give me fuel. I lean hard on my right butt cheek. I go hammer-down on the tall pedal.
“Please, please, let us go, just stop, let us go, please, please…”
The lady in the smooth, maroon dress with black stockings and incredibly classy shoes seems to be ready to have a breakdown. She sits just over my right shoulder in the sideways seat just behind the door.
“Please; you won’t get far. Just stop now, please, please.”
* * *
Finally, the meds had started to work, creating an awakening, eyes not seeing straight but seeing honest colors – grays, browns fuzzy with the darkening psychosis of city life, sharp lines of malignant architecture gripping my lungs, browns of trees which had been blown out by the ruthless summer drought, but with tiny sprinkles of green, dancing with the subtlety of Stravinsky and the stillness of my favorite oak trees, humiliated in frozen spaces to assure continuing life in this bleak stratosphere. My freedom and my purpose had arrived.
With my pompous boss treating me like a ten-cent clerk, the bleak meaninglessness of my job came into blasphemous clarity, with the meds finally displaying the truth of the millions of American lines drawn as my prison. I told that fucker, my boss, to take my job and shove it, which was the reserved version of the one designed by my daydreams, having imaginatively told him hundreds of times that my job belonged up his ass.
My self-pity had grown in strength, allowing me to identify with the poor baby sitting in her stroller in front of me, mostly-stranded, perhaps deserted in the building lobby.
As I stood, melting in a compressed hopelessness, I saw that boy in the horrid, knit, rainbow hat. He couldn’t carry himself. He stumbled all the way down our long city block. I thought about heroin. I thought about the terrible fate all of us are suffering at our own hands.
With a push on the door that sucked out the finality of my intentions, I exited my building, pulling the baby’s stroller rather than pushing, glancing to find stumbling hat boy, not seeing him but seeing 30, maybe 40 faces moving different directions, suffering from terrible inner despair but not sensing it, thus moving like broken robots.
I stole the bus. I’ve watched these monsters for years from my third floor office window. They have massive numbers on their tops for the pigs in the copters, but no copters today. Jinxed I was, having picked the double-zero-three.
* * *
“What will you do with her?”
Bitch won’t shut up, but I can’t let her out now, can’t shoot her now.
“Slow down, please, please, what will you do? What can you do? You can’t do this.”
I stole a baby. I need to focus on the next right step. I stole the bus because I stole the baby – stealing the bus was not a great idea. The screaming, the fried air, I just wanted the damned bus to take me and the baby to freedom. My mission runs in a smooth flow within the tornadic emotions of my riders, even the baby going full panic in sympathy to the others, with the rocket blasts in my head and icy clarity charging up through my cordovans sparked by the vibrations of the hybrid engine.
Nobody misses the stolen bus except the driver, and I’m sure dispatch thinks he’s had a fifth of whiskey rather than believing him that his bus was stolen. I want to drive the double-zero-three, hanging high in flames, diving into the big river, but I drive North instead. My captives start to look questioningly at me. Double-zero-three is a smooth ride. I like the suspension, creating a feel like a boat over tiny inundations of waves.
The lady in maroon calms as I show her my face of compassion which is after all composed from the very center of the core of a beautiful diamond in truth.
My disturbing, chemical malfunctions simmering in my brain are growing, steaming from the stress. I am far more worried about the stolen baby now and how I might continue to save her from the fate of living in a house where the meth lab blew up five years ago and melted the baby’s mother’s face, even after which she continues to this day to cook and consume with glorious ferocity, watching her face that looks more like a squid out of water made of plastic, from the fate of being beaten and smashed by a father who is always drunk, whose last date with his wife ended as they sat inside their car beside the shore of a lake that was strewn with rocks, he promising to leave her blood on every piece of rock on that “beach,” she so high on heroin that she walked home which took over four days and nearly caused death by starvation.
My mind continues with these crusted, nightmare visions and memories, and they continue to rattle my senses, seemingly, glaringly, to support my actions, stealing the baby and then, in furious stupidity, stealing the bus.
My life is over, but I’ve done at least one good thing. The short light poles with antique lanterns, in charcoal gray move by quickly and steadily, and it strikes me dead-frozen that the only people who really get to enjoy these poles are all of the suicides who jump into the dirty Missouri River. The water under the sharp white bridge with the beautiful, short, gray light poles was always calm, even when someone dove in, and suicides don’t enter smoothly.
.
Foreshadows
NIN came back today,
running with sharp fur,
screaming at me, for twisted
purple minutes
arriving soon and blurry hours coming
at me,
“I’m gonna burn this
Whole
World
Down!”
“Burn.
Burn.
Burn.”
grabbing it from fuel in my soul,
searching for pills, gripping
to hide from the perilous beating
of instruments framed to harken, hack
my mind, pronouncing me gone, but letting me,
“Burn.
Burn.
Burn.”
swimming in reckless wakefulness.
And it goes forever, in seconds,
with miraculous drive, no change
from a shipment
of relief, no pills,
no comfort, no alcohol…
“Burn.
Burn.
Burn.”
growing in sickening alertness.
“this world rejects me,
This world threw me away
this world is going to have to pay”
and my shrink thinks
music the chicken, feathers ready to…
“Burn.
Burn.
Burn.”
But the music is the egg,
cracking open in shattered pieces,
running away from me in blasts of pinkish-white,
leaving me in my orange pool,
Gone.
Gone.
Gone.
“I’m gonna burn this
Whole
World
Down!”
.
Blaming the Stark Lines in Gray Buildings
Today, rejecting industrial clang,
and Brahms sings to me,
jagged but straight edges, if possible,
the waste of a day, rejecting the beautiful
concept of being with the living,
no being with the flow, no moving in concert.
No, bubbling in anger coming from another world,
anger undeserved, wholly natural, anger
at everything, which is, after all, a blanket of despair.
Begging for more and more Brahms, loud,
not quite hopeless, but rich sound
battling the jagged lines.
No flow as I wallow in the stench
of my torn and rugged caverns
with the echos of atrophied harmonies.
.
The Beginning of My Story
On that day, the weather was sporadic as it might be in the midst of the vacant, listless September, the clouds like a giant casino, filling and emptying with the winners and the losers, but Mother hoisted a natural cheer so I had been left out in the modern rabbit cage, hanging above the dark oily alley with strewn garbage and broken bottles, braced to the window (my cage), centered by the breakfast table. At the fateful moment, the winds having begun to stir without Mother noticing, some sort of vigorous weather event having snuck up from behind and from within the crevices of the Brooklyn tenements, it was then that one torrent of furious air swept the ash-can-like planter filled with mildewed soil with the outgrowth of a blusterous and half-dead, lost-red, filtered to colorlessness, mini rose-bush off of the ledge of the patio on the outside of Ms. Stilldinger’s unit, 8B, two floors up, one over to the left. With a tremendous twirling velocity, it nailed my cage, blasting the fasteners, bouncing me out of the back of the cage, as then I felt myself tumbling in an unnervingly slow motion, bouncing rather than ripping the canopy above the cook’s entrance (the bounce attributable to my nearly-perfect mass of 22.5 pounds having flown from 6 floors up), the canopy covering the cook, Freddy, who having heard the pot blast my cage had moved out to look up beyond the canopy in time to catch me in an athletic manner after I had bounced diagonally on the third bounce. This certainly puzzled me on the tentative value of baby cages.
Some babies come to the world as new creatures, new creations, but some come from another life. Some are from another world. My mind is aware of the future world I am from where cars fly instead of rolling. I’ve come back here as punishment after hanging myself, as if I had not punished myself enough all the way through to my last day.
.
American Football
Pushing the mower,
being painted by the slightest
anxiety as she awoke
from her slumber, reckoning
it was her time as the bankruptcy
of a culture is pervaded
by the luminosity of the day,
seemingly bent on the reduction
of the anima down to the carcasses
of winter’s solace from the deep affinity
for ice hockey, as the voice in a box
screams about the horrific need
to turn up the radio, to turn down
the TV, and thus the angst,
for the radio will not play back
with the DVR, so the show is ruined,
and how critical is this to the spirit?
Are you ready for some football, you,
you inane American with a vacuous
soul? Will you fulfill your life’s aspirations
by watching the drama on the field,
admittedly a drama with greater alacrity,
greater clarity than that of your own,
flat, foggy life, you, you with the dearth
of spirit.
.
After Lunch When All of My World Was Closing the Doors
I made note of the hippy
seeming genuinely friendly
when months ago, I felt de-
spised. I go there too often,
and part of his salary
comes from mine, but today,
marching slowly, feeling extinction
beat down on me, cheering
me to push the deceleration, and
the wicked sinus pressure came,
the air burning my skin, I was crying,
wondering why it was a lunch period
that stole my spirit, my will to live,
but in a swamp of honesty,
I knew it is because I’m not,
not doing the deal, I’m not being
who I want to be so I’m wasting
a life in a pool of worthlessness,
ready to quit, but I go back,
go back to work and suit
my self to go on living with
this meaninglessness. And I’m not
broken with this verbiage,
knowingly repeating it, but
it’s better to crash in these
words than to hang
from a tree.
.
Terror Bleeds White and Steals Love
The blue feels the white creeping,
stammering all over it. Perhaps
modern, blown lines, almost like ink,
the master of all for logical beauty,
Scarlatti sprinkles forks of death,
arriving through valleys in gutters.
underneath door jams, violent forks,
seething and slithering through the grinding
grout, grabbing bits of drywall, making
all appear destroyed by these punk offspring,
one who is strung out, as if by an Oak Tree,
with desperate chords that symbolize suicide,
starting in the purple of the stomach and vehemently
climbing as if a vine up these poisoned muscles,
throttling the neck, creating a flu of alien proportions,
creating the birth of the unknown guest,
depression, and the other sneaking to the kitchen,
because he innocently loves the cookies,
the other being so sweet to all of humans
despite the poisoning from Swanson’s,
green beans of rubber, and not intentional
hate, but love that will not cover him. Love
that leaves him on the side of the road,
pulling weeds, sucking on hay. The other is the
one, but a strange god was there, and the mostly-
full, gallon can of white ceiling paint tips warmly
and lovingly, and the one without love falls
with the cookies into a thick, fast-moving, syrupy
jelly, bloviating white – almost a river, and the
source of the Scarlatti stops, stomps slowly to see
what has been done, and screams, and screams, and
screams, while the one with flu hides in the corner
from the dirigible of scotch bottles which is blacking
out the love, and the one with flu is dragged by hair
to the accident scene, and then again, the screams,
and screams, and screams, and 11 pm, 1 am, 5 am,
bucket after bucket, as if it will never come back,
hell being this permanent scrubbing – scrub, you
bastard, you fucking asshole, scrub, scrub, and
the blue starts to feel blue again with the white
creeping while before the white was killing, killing,
and it was all of their tears, cleaning the white,
but not all the white, the tears not stopping because
they flow in these locations where there is no love,
and where there is none, there is scrubbing, and when
you asked me about hell, this is one of thousands
of places I thought of, places, events, devoid of love,
and they are everywhere. Do not open your eyes.
.
stillfugue 