I think that Allen Ginsberg was some kid like me. 

I may admire him in a light that would compliment his writing.

His words are bent in a way that relate, 

I truly don’t think he hates everything. 

The dying light for a spectacle, a timeless artist…

Poe, Shakespeare, Wilde,

Seen through the lens of many as a druggie like Williams, 

a bum like Jack, 

I watch the show of words in greatness. 

In neoclassical genius.

 Please stop asking

 me why I hate this world. 

There isn't light in my bedroom anymore. I’ve been looking at fences when I should have been looking at mountains. 

I don’t think you’ve lost like me. 

-I think; 

The sun still sets in the west. All the soil we toppled and kicked up with our shoes. The harmonious conversations still wait to return an echo stretched across the Napa Valley. 

I still exist somewhere along the fabrications of my mind, sorting your trash for the curb, conjuring the might to brace you for a final call. 

The rose you threw from the balcony rots. The flowers behind you; rot. I, rot. 

Some mean stare through a window in Pensacola.

I’d sometimes like to be talented enough to perfectly describe this feeling I had sitting with you at a cafe,

When you had told me it could all be real and square. 

I’d like to think those thoughts would just go away some day. 

And I wish you would too. 

I wished that you would die in a car accident last year. 

But fortunately that never came true. 

Now I sit as a peeling paint strip, flaked and torn onto terracotta flooring.

Behind a big life you apparently oh-so have. 

I am not big or healed by any case, 

I am alone and lagging on a rehabilitation overdue.

As I just am to forget tonight?

As I am supposed to love my world, without you?

 When I turned twelve I bought my first shotgun. When I turned thirteen I had my first erection.

And it wasn’t until I turned fourteen that I realized my world was only this. 

Autumn is sixty-seven years old in my town. Five people died last week from starvation, nine people gave birth to sickling, and the mayor just croaked from diphtheria. The city becomes wickedly cold in the winter, and dries to death in the summer. This town isn’t ho-dunk, it’s not hillbilly. Charm in the brickroads, in the stoplights, in the shopfronts; I still feel this cold air brush my hair in autumn, but I can’t help but beckon the nearing extremes. I’ve seen what the cold and what the heat can do to these people. It is only bad every time. 

There aren’t many kids in my neighborhood who like to shoot guns, there aren’t many who get down to the same kicks that I do. In fact most of them rot away inside infront’ plastic screens and eat chips and liverwurst for dinner, day after day. 

I’d spent a summer with a kid from out of town. He’s who I have to blame for my attraction to sex and blood and women. I’d greeted his family of homeless people to stay in my backyard for a few weeks. This kid, and his poor family, came from out of town to work the annual festival. They’d pitch up here to make money, then shove off into the unknown to make more. They were strange in the face, had a taste for candy and a smell for the gold. In my opinion, they’d fit right in here in town. 

It was one cool autumn night that he stood in pajamas with me. We’d been shooting my gun for a few hours now. We’d spent the rest of his allowance on twelve gauge. We shot animals in the darkness of the forest. I remember the lighting. He had an eye for a dog's head, and the reaction time to send them to heaven. 

This girl from the neighbor’s trailer visited us that evening, as we shot, and admired my face. I never saw her look at my cheekbones, but I felt her do so. I was busy being a cowboy, pinching my eye between a prong-sight and pulling the trigger. 

So I would aim into whatever crawled in front, or rounded some tree, and I would shoot until it died. I got better at it with my circus friend. He taught me how to kill, he taught me how to be attracted. 

Eventually he left town, it broke my heart. He didn’t seem to care that we’d never see eachother again.

Kids like me get bored in the winter. I've always been bored of sitting around my house doing absolutely nothing. I’d look at magazines of beautiful women that I’d find in my dads clothing hampers, I’d toss rocks over my home, I’d yell at my five younger brothers. Nothing stuck to my mind like shooting dogs did. 

My dad worked hard to repair this small house back when his arm wasn’t gone. He hated when my mom looked at it – he was defeated after all, now sunken into a life of back-room drinking. 

I tried to give him sticks from the brush site, to tape to his arm-hole, but he hated me. He thought I was an unrealistic boy. 

He dripped water on my face when I slept. I caught him doing it. He really hated me. Even when I tried to help.

So I delved myself back into the shotgun thing. I stole some money from my mom, and I got hard. I found the spot my circus friend told me about, laid some IAMS around a metal bowl and waited for the dogs. 

I blasted and she came ‘round again. 

At this point I’d been admiring my kill. 

I licked blood off of my lips and watched from over my shoulder as she swooned. Smoke sizzled from my shotgun, carcass splattered across my chest. 

I took my billy knife from its sheath and skinned the head. I let her wear it for the evening.

 Rotten bone from the opening in my hand is starting to drive me wild with indescribable smells. I've been picking at my skin and the infectious red pulsing from my wrist for the latter half of the day now. The surrounding skin is turning brown, three hues lower than what I normally see it as. I’m abhorred. Frightened. My face is running white. 

I’ve already reassured myself that it wasn’t tanning. It's slowly dying.

I haven’t considered the detriment of losing this part of my body yet.  As the idea is almost unfathomable. So many things would cease in my life, so many things just gone. 

My right arm, severed from my body, would be an unmeasurable loss.

I've had a make-shift cast around my arm since my taxi cab collision. The whole fucking thing wasn’t my fault. He was drunk, I was drunk, and the turn of events just ended up being a wicked mess. 

Brooklyn

I’d landed only a few weeks ago to stay with the girl I’d been mailing postcards to. She promised some lavish stay on the south-side of 9th Street. I heard stories of my old country, New York. Stories that grant red tomato sauce conceptions upon my tongue and through my brain, of glorious two story submarine sandwiches for nickels on the dollar. All nine yards. The fastical night-walk paradise of New York now my playground and a dime of a woman I’ve seemed to have scored. 

I played in the day and dreamed in the night. Collecting stones and pennies along the roadways to gather scrap-booking evidence for a time completely unforgettable. I looked like a mess and a junkie, asking names, asking for historical significance, asking for pictures. I viewed myself as this nagging little thing with a devoted attachment to a small town far away from here. Like this was some sort of heaven for me, like I was doing this with no intention to return. 

I’d note the tourists I've seen around my parts. Smearing sun-tan lotions ‘cross their noses and hiking swimming pants high above the waist linings. Desperate to enjoy ninety-six some odd hours with precious gold that has been piling for a lifetime. I know for sure that I looked like that, I know for sure my weekly New York lay was getting sick of it. 

“You know, you’ll be back next summer to see it again. Won’t you?”

We’d gotten breakfast on Third Avenue when I finally came to some conclusion on my trip. 

She’d ordered the breakfast paella and I’d gotten the benedict with jam toast. She smoked cigarettes before and after her meals like some french girl and I’d sit and watch her cheekbones catch morning light. Checking the contrast between her face and the scaling brick buildings behind her, squaring the thirds, quartering the picture in my mind. 

I’d thought that we should break up for the remainder of my trip to New York. 

Deeply, I wanted the exact opposite, but I had to shake her before Thursday evening, which was my last day amongst the city. There were too many things I hadn’t done, too many little pictures I couldn’t take with the presence of this woman at my side. Numbers began crunching, puzzling pieces, and solemn heartbreaking schematics began. 

At first, on my walk away, I pictured her dead to ease my soul. But I immediately began missing her as I turned the corner on Second Avenue. The insides of my psyche began bringing me to the shallow waters of weird, then the deeper unromantic ones. The lost and alone floatation along a desperate sea of people I had to dig myself through, just to get where I needed to go. Hands no longer held, guidance throughout this big city was upon myself.

Immediately began the search for the New York woman. The one with the golden apple centerpiece and the cherry wine suede couch. All in reaction, all in repair to the shock of breaking the heart of someone so much less desirable.

Cornering shopfronts, cornering delis and parlors, I took extravagant pictures and bought crummy knick-knacks. A wild and fast-paced journey around New York’s center that I would have never been able to brace. I didn’t want to act local, I wanted to act strange. I wanted my desperation to spew from my eye sockets and out of my ears all over the bustling New York pavement and along the trousers of the passing businessmen. 

The sun fell out of the sky and I felt the brisk air of modernity strike me. I was ending this day with a drink in my hand and the sounds of street performers in my ears. Scarf and sweater donned, boots laced high, imagining that my life couldn’t be any better than it clearly wasn’t. 

From this view atop the Empire State building, another tourist looks down on me. I imagine. He looks down to see some modern man with a desperate sense of exploration, a taste for the world, and a savings no longer. He doesn’t see me like I see me. He notices the Nikon, the backpack, the little rituals. He thinks;

“Well there goes just another Floridian up for the autumn.” 

Yet I see, looking up, with bad decisions included, the spirit of adventure and a man with no attachment. A tourist of not just the city, of life itself. A man who busted his ass for this, a man who can do whatever he wants. This clarity is now upon me. 

He, up in the rafters is like me, a revenant of the new world. Except I sit on a cornerstone, low below, with thirty-six more hours of experience. 

When I look up towards the night sky, towards the silhouette of this couple standing in elegant grace before a sea of stars, I see the crash and burn of the man. I see him throwing the magazines from atop the table, shouting in hallowing selfishness at his unnecessary attachment. 

I hailed the yellow cab, and I have to admit, I did so in a drunken way. 

I sloppily stumbled into the back seat and poured a little bit of my booze along the ridges of the weather pads. I thought to myself about the great extent of this idea of manhood rivaling a world so contingent on taking it. As my eyes rock back behind my head, with every bump to this journey, I couldn’t help but think of home.

 I had dreams that I ran out of money. 

I had dreams that the woman I was sleeping with left me for Paris. 

I thought I was the second son of a senator a few years back, when the fruit was cheap, like I was in on some kind of deal. The ones you don’t see the poor offered. The clerk gives you a side-eye and nods for you to come forth, from the back of the line.  In some lawless America where people are born into something – and get to keep it. 

But then I wrote to the editor. In dreams of chasing fame and craving likeness from my peers. 

Being rotten and poor like the rest of them, junked on the populous, addicted to stardom. I decided to write to him like he owed me something. With no fear in my integrity to publish great work for the mad, skinny, and mentally ill. Like some disguised medicine tricking the sick to get better, then sick again. 

Harsh truth, sick truth is – The poor and bastardly I want to touch and hold like Jesus Christ would rather be dead. They’ll beat giant war drums when it all gets too bad, never heading a subtle warning downwards. Thus you have these radical types who rally bums and rats around like a circus, because everything around them is burned and gone. Anyone could get mad at that. 

Anyone with a voice could observe that. 

Communists brain dump on the idea that rallying homeless eaters and beggars could be rational, 

I assure you. That is wackjob.

So why write to a stupid trash person who beats women or a dirty subway-fareman. They who crave this equality to the rich, yet will never picket a day to save his life? Women who work retail and then throw the life they've been given away to Fridays under disco light. 

Why?

Because without publication or likeness, I am nothing.

 rage 

Hallowed words. Paying absolutely no mind to anything other than a paycheck. 

Conversation, one-handed driving, and a handshake to god. 

As I pass over the bridge in the break of dawn, the buck stares me down.  

Giggling on the phone. Riding some attraction to one another to the very edge, 

two lost girls and one lost boy mixed up in some giant equation. 

These words are haunting and I’d rather not blow them out into existence. 

“______ , this is a little unwarranted, I'm sorry. It's been a bit since we talked. I was thinking about church and everything a few months ago. I know you hate sappy, so I'll try to keep it short. I chose to leave early, not much keeping me here. but I wanted to say thank you.

I know it's all probably strange hearing this, but you taught me a lot about morality. being good. being original. it's been on my mind. I hope you and the family are well.”

I wrote under a full moon that night, four years ago, to a woman I’d never expected to hear from again. 

She writes,

“Good to know you didn’t actually regret ever meeting me.”

“You made me think everyone around me felt the same as you did and I wasn’t good enough to be anyone’s friend and that my “pretty face” covered an awful personality, but from that I learned to be more independent and reserved with who I consider to be a friend. It’s good that one of us benefited in the end and I wish you luck with your writing, bass, and California dreams.”

“Have fun Doc”

Anyways. Heartache and mistakes can be acknowledged. 

I’d like to win, or be in some sort of world where it all never happened. When leaves would tumble through the streets en masse and pumpkins glow on porches. When I’d roll up on your street in the cover of darkness and be up to no good with you. 

The wind howls as I vicariously envy the multidimensional me who made it with you. I can hear the rain, the sun, the orange and yellow of today that would introduce us to a future of any possibility.

The scary, ghastly part of it all is that I hear this wind and the wind-up box behind my ears, as I see you, but not you, before my eyes. In front of this writing, in front of the backdrop of the city. 

None of it will ever be true. 

And my reality is lonely and white. 

But beyond that, the steccato walls and the damn wind brush the drapes above wood paneled floors from the sixties. 

It’s all real somewhere else. I can feel it. 

So I choose to hate you because of the real circumstances. And the other one that didn't work out. And the next one. Maybe even the one before that. 

When I never answered your calls, when I called you a fat-whore-pig, and I left you for some other dim-witted woman. When I took utter advantage of your emotions and watched you from the train window of life passing you gone. 

I choose to spit at you in my mind. Watch you rot in homelessness on the sides of my streets. Watch you rot in a grave from an amalgamation of pill usage and party lifestyle. As I curse you from my bedroom. Because damnation is what you deserve.

So beg me if this makes sense to you?

 Let me please hate you for never giving me a third chance in our reality today and let me dance with you with lipstick and leather in some reality far away, tomorrow.

 I submitted this as an opinion editorial to the paper

on 10/5/24

I pledge my allegiance to evil. 

Im going ten over in a thirty. Laughing like a madman. With this new intelligence of these grand storms due to crash straight into my hometown. Five feet water walls. Storm Surge. Shortages in all walks. 

Fat people running around, finding out what will be next in line to eat. 

I laugh because it all hasn’t been great for me. That these terrible women who won’t share coffee with me or smoke cigarettes after five, will finally get what they deserve. 

Hopefully this hurricane’s eye will stare the truth out of them, for they repent for being so indecent to the world, and to me. 

I hope the wind rips heads clean off, destroying whatever meaningless object they hold closely. 

 Madness, my eyes staring at the walls. I’d imagined I would be in Rome by now. Perusing around the streets with my money, holding my head at the table, holding my breath behind the women. 

Basking in all the red from a beer sign.

The pinching sensation behind your eyes at five’s rising,

destined to do the melancholy. Grunt at lousy drivers, kick around a stone in a five story parking lot

Tied the tie. Ironed the trousers. Did all of that last night and God bless, it doesn’t feel like heaven.

I am mad at the instructor. Teaching such a stupid thing. Tying cherry stems around loops in your mouth as I stare at motivational posters. 

She doesn’t know how mad I am at the walls, and everything else. 

She doesn’t know how many cups of coffee I haven’t had this morning, 

How many divorces I've been through.

These corny people. Walking single-file down the alleys. Winning some big battle against anguish and despair,

They smile and rejoice at the grass growing. 

Shame it’s always been this way. 

Shame it always will be.

So at the end of the day – When she won’t call back, when I am fresh out of money

and the tire’s air ran low, or the branch that crushed my dog, and the ticket for going too fast, 

Bog my sorry ass down.

I look solemnly at some stop sign behind my car. Switching its reflection from yellow to red, as my turn signal gives it life in the dark wooded area it sits in, recalling some great metaphor, relating closely to how it’ll be when the lights turn out. How when it all is blackened, reminders of real world start to bleed in. Surrounding great darkness and some small stick, with aptitude to change in light, will be swallowed once again when the light goes away. 

I saw it, mourning my life, my choices, my failure.

 I forgot the ball was tonight. 

The Seventy-Fifth Annual Charity Ball is held across the street from the courthouse. Ripe with rich ladies and dauntless men. Where I was supposed to meet my date tonight. 

Instead, I watch the sky. Under the moon with my patio so close to me. Small trinket lights that line my square-footage add a pleasant view up ninety degrees towards the sky. 

The window inside of my apartment glows with a rich orange tint, unfocused. It displays this glowing ball that shoots through my living room and into the Florida panes. Never reaching the final destination of shaded dirt piles behind my complex. 

I've heard that they would bury bodies underneath the dirt piles after the war. I’ve heard that they would put many into one grave. That the stench would aerate for miles and the townsfolk of yesterday couldn't stand the smell of it. 

‘They’ are unknown to me. I’ve lived my life ignorantly these past twenty years. Granted, I am still young, I know very little of what happened so long ago. If I were to guess, ‘They’ are some militia responsible for the digging of these unknown tombs. 

My date jabbed me in the stomach, on our second date, mind you. The one I was supposed to court tonight. I’d been in the hospital up until yesterday with a sore wound and some bubbling infection growing up the lining of my gut. 

She’d ordered the soup and salad. And then asked for my money. 

I started my car with a shaking wrist and a bundle of napkins wrapped around my lap. Not doing much to pressurize the bleed. The ride was rough. I saw the light a few times, causing me to drift the car to the right of the median. Looking down was hard. I remember seeing the dark red globs of organ and stained tissue along my seatbelt. 

When I’d finally arrived at the hospital, I told the emergency room clerk that I’d fallen onto an umbrella. “It’s been a miserable day, m’lady.”

I saw the pictures the doctor had taken with the giant radiation machine. It looked twisted. In a literal and figurative sense. That a woman could stick a blade so awkwardly into my stomach lining was truly a feat yet seen before, by me. 

I couldn’t taste the wine I’d poured before I left. My hands numb to the warm sink water. Threw my keys onto the counter and sunk into my couch. Life today hasn’t gone according to how I thought it would this morning. I stared at the television. 

Then I stared at myself in the mirror. 

The blood loss had affected my whole body. My skin was ghastly white. My eyes, dark gray. The lipstick I had put on in the morning was cracked and peeling. My nice shirt from J.C. Penney's was stained in thick red blood. Underneath the holes in the shirt fabric was the outline of white plaster-cast, bandage, and tourniquet.

I threw a few aspirin down and re-entered my apartment common. The sky yesterday, believe it or not, was just as magnificent as it is tonight. The sun had seemed to have set later, leaving the fading blue and yellow trails across the sky. With small and wonder-like nimbuses shooting from the sun itself. 

My couch was stained in my blood and the television network ended early for labor-day weekend. Some broadcasts on the radios still ran, so I tuned in for my night's remainder. I looked around my place. Admiring the layout I had done years back. Watching myself in the mirrored closet doors. 

Thinking briefly about what it would look like if she had been here too. 

Friday, the day of the ball. 

I think I lifted my bandage from my stomach in my sleep. The couch was covered in my blood this morning, so much so, that it looked like she’d come through in the evening. 

I had some dream last night. We picked out things to wear for tonight. 

She arrived in my dream. Around noon and apologized for the whole stabbing incident. We had the wine, and I could taste it this time.

She showed me the dress she would be wearing. It was beautiful. Pearl accessories and matching shoes. 

She gazed at my wound as I nodded in appeasement. 

“What are you wearing tonight, my darling?”

She asks me. 

I had told her that she had ruined my only pair of slacks and my only good-looking dress shirt. But I didn’t want to miss it, so I’d be wearing it.

She left the common and started rummaging around in my cabinets. I’d figured she’d gone to fetch a sewing kit.

She returned with a knife in her’s.    

    

 Down, down, down does this dream land sink you underneath.

Unveiled; The real truth of how long this street to nowhere goes. 

Impacted view. Not mediated by a rational thought.

My apologies.

Wild lands of street light medians and strangely stoic and quiet homes lining the road-edge. The brick laden road-edge with people walking from the bin back to front door. Personal caves that no one dares to enter. In fear of being shot, or called a creep for the remaining years. Inside the darkness consumes the light and provides a cool environment. It is free from the scorching sun, the biting bugs and the close-quartered combat of living in a metropolitan city. So when the groceries arrive on Monday from the store, these people slither from the Lazy Boy and brace the sun for a second. Then they slam the door. Closed door. Closed door to neighbor and those who choose to solicit on Sundays. It isn’t the fabled southern quote being spoken – “We don’t like your kind around here.” It is vastly more isolated and depraved – “I don’t like being kind and I’d rather not see the sun until I'm dragged out of my house.”

These are strange people who look at you through windows and through little slits in the bathroom ventilation chamber. 

Just around the corner, in expectation of kind friendly neighbors, you have rats who suck the life from the world and scurry back to the burrow. Saint Petersburg is stranger.

I spent Thursday killing ants with my fingers. Pretending that the little brainless things were people I hated. Thinking, sociopathically, that they would have a bad day. Just like me. 

I see the hole in the cement wall, about four yards across the two lane street. Its black inside and my eyes so asphyxiated upon it. Looking it up and down as it's a flesh wound upon someone's poor body. 

The foreman breaks my view as he begins to pour liquid cement inside of it. It fills the hole up. Like some sort of surgery. 

I'm so far down this train tunnel of madness and anger, that I can’t help to think that this metaphor bestowed before me is some great symbolism that equals a “You cannot repair the damage done with more of what made it.” sentiment. 

It breaks my heart because at the end of the day and lengthy somber thoughts, I don’t want to be the man so pressed and squeezed at the thought of the real danger of gentrification. It doesn’t seem like that. I’d even go as far to agree that the place has always been this giant shit-hole in need of fixing. 

I think the whole anti-gentrification movement is lame. 

Its all a fucking show. 

But the place is being torn down and shredded into this centric loophole of nonsense. These places that are too expensive to shop in and these restaurants with plastic burgers and metal straws on the menus. It isn’t fair to the kids who never found it cool. It isn’t fair to the people too poor to even look at the damn place. 

I can’t put up with waiting by the phone every night. My eyes are leveled with the dial, the top of the very phone-post. It makes me anxious waiting for you, waiting for nothing. 

You just sort of get rid of the important victories and mettle on the small fails like falling out of love. 

You sort of forget the indecent times you’ve been out of money and smokes and you just start to hate having all of it again. The only focus is on the fact that the damn thing won’t ring. 

You have the world sometimes. You really do. You watch it like a large rollercoaster scaling towards the sky. You watch the excitement and cheer of life and love drive itself so high with enormous stakes of dying and crashing down and burning in large fire; It’s the gambler in all of us. 

I’d dig through old boxes upon my return. I’d look at the pictures of us from when we were nineteen and homeless. Rolling across the country in ecstasy in lime-light — in weird dark thundering skies rolled across the western United States. My eyes have not yet adjusted from the dark hotel stay — to be graced with the richness of all spectrum in the bright Texan landscape. 

Who knew, This thing, this marriage that had lasted months could have so much of a toll on me. Wildness. 

I think about the stains of paint on the sides of homes. The unfinished homes from the fifties with the olden people who reside in them. 

I drive every night to bury the beast that comes out. The nervous anxious beast that convinces me that it isn’t going to be okay. The nervous beast that reminds me of my bad speech patterns and the alikeness I have to my father. Strange one. But I kill him with cigarettes and wind.

At the end of it, I know that I am just killing me. 

I speed down streets and I look at the homes I'll never own. I think of passengers and people who would never accompany me. They are different every day.

I pass over the bridges that hug small island inlets and watch the pink skies turn black every single night to ease the burning pain that I have in regards to my short five year adult life. I think about the times when I watched the same sunset out in dreamy california, pretending the nights would never end away from that place. But they ended up ending quicker than I had imagined and that wasn’t enough life for me at the moment. The moment in time when I had lived freely with this great expectation that life would be limitless, like a faucet in a busy restaurant. —-  That I would be gifted these big pools of water through perseverance and hard work; “But it just doesn’t work that way in the end, buddy.”

And I’d hear stories from the men on planes and the men telling my money at the fill stations complaining about the farms they’d bought and the families they’d hate to raise, waiting for these eternal answers that weren’t necessarily so apparent to men att(continue). Naive and young at twenty with four thousand dollars saved and no longer a wife to sit with me. The one that I married out of love.

One

There you are, alone, in the department store. Long after your parents had left you on a whim of being young and forgetful, the white reflectant tiled flooring combined with the densely packed shelving leaves you claustrophobic at such a young age. 

You hear the hum starting to brace your head. You hear the ominous static, high pitched, and impending sounds that brace you in these strange moments. 

Things around you begin to look so much differently than they usually do, panic. 

And just the other day the oak boards along a neighbors house looked like the blackened garb-ed woman. The one that might’ve eaten you alive. 

She’s gone to me. She’s nothing. A stain on my dating profile or resume, whatever you’d call it. 

I dreamed of running home. Every night. Whether that be from a window of a ship, or my dark and cramped little apartments. Watching this bustling big and disgusting place run like a machine and run so explosively that you just couldn’t ignore it in the evening. Meeting these grand and eccentric new people who were so much larger than life that it annoyed you to a point of craze and stupidity to join them in the chase of being some young and successful little fucking kid running around in the giant wasteland of the west coast. Smoking cigarettes in the industrial districts under light cones of street lamps and walking round’ the night with leather coats and drinks. Checking the boxes on the restaurants you’d tried and smelling the grease burning in the midsummers night sky, under full moon and smog clouds. Living off the light’s of Los Angeles, Encinitas, and Greater San Diego. Employed. By God did the place feel like heaven, every single day, and I'll never forget how badly I wanted out. 

There was a street in Escondido that I had frequented. A long parcel of tan sand-land with a small hearty little town that lived in the middle of it. Small Mexican ice-cream joints, Carnitas Al Pastor pop-up stands, occasional concession stands. 

• I drove through during nightfall, right about when the landscape started to turn yellow and amber-like. 

I thought about myself driving the vintage little sports car, some Austin Healey Sport. Thinking to myself about the things Hollywood has done to my head. 

Pretending to be some movie star cowboy riding down the street with full wind. Full mast. 

I waited for the clock like a dog at the door. For five years to be the new man I’d dreamed of being, I’d have to wait. The artist that wrapped at the door when I’d begin any new endeavor out of sheer boredom, or when any punk kid would boast about the five chord song he’d been an expert at writing. The ideas ran my life, the great and spectacular ideas of being the last leg of my blood and how I’d make it work.

But the white of paper burns my eyes to relieve the tragedy of my life. Damn near the only way I can encapsulate the beginning of such a miserable time. A beautiful time. Beautiful in the sense that I’ve finally found some pockets of my imagination that could have enjoyed some of it. 

She had countered what I had said in the interview today with some bleak weird twisty smile that threw my entire mood off. I, in the middle of an interview, now sit spiraled against the panel of questions yet asked. I notice her broken teeth and her frayed and dead blonde hair. How ugly she is and how soon she looks to death. I finished strong but the revolving faces of the corporate machine I desperately want into are so unbelievably haunting. I can feel the hydraulic press above my head. So dead. 

I want alcohol at these moments. Ruining the professionality of it all by giving a nice glimpse into what I’d be doing after I clocked out. 

Maybe show off some pornography I’d go and indulge myself into five-six hours later. 

Turn the thing into a fucking nightmare.

The job that’ll turn everything around. I’d hope.

I think about that. Stable life living in a pasture around all the things that could be supported by a job. Of course that pasture for me is some rank studio apartment. The pride in making joe in the morning and turning the key to my car. The “Get up and Get it.” Sort of thing.

What the old fat guys used to think, before, well you know. 

I think about the yellow lights that would contrast every place that I’d ever lived. No more white bright shining lights that melt your skin and blast you awake in the morning. Yellow cool somber lights that stick out naturally during a summer evening. 

I think of the smell of fresh home cooked meals I’d prepare for my lovely other in the cocked and squished ornately decorated studio apartment. 

Licking the pasta from my fingers after a taste test. Pouring a beer to the rim. With no overflow. My desk is situated somewhere along one of the free walls that my bed doesn’t ride, stacked high are these bundles of my work. Paper stacked and tied like christmas presents. All fueled by the small job and small life. Finally free from the desert of self fulfillment, onto this new oasis of independence that I have wanted from the world. No order. No big man watching me. 

I can’t help but to blast down these streets like dirt, they are dirt to me.

The streets are not dirt. The streets are bricks and have some charm to them, with bumps and cracks going east to west. Adding a pallet of dullish red to the already forest green marsh that seems to gather all attention from your eyes.  

This nowhere ville where the Rembrant painted skies contrast the bum paradise of lotto. The Rembrant painted skies at the evening time that nobody has seemed to order, factoring the fact that I've noticed them every single day since my return, are this unwell addition to my now permanent stay. 

Sickened from shellfish had on Sunday, now a slurry of pain to my lower abdomen while on patrol today. Sickened because there is no out, no little light at the end of the tunnel. I have just begun such a deep spiral down to wherever the hell my mind left off since the last habitation of Saint Petersburg. 

And wow does this state really kick you around and jerk you into so many different directions.

Unemployment

Is

…

So Terrible. You wake up. Make the fucking coffee. Smoke. Look at the sky. Check the mail. Beg for the job. Nap. Then just repeat it all. Everyday. In hopes that someones got something for you. 

I have contempt for this place and unruly anger at the fat and big people that have equally done nothing and everything to destroy such a wonderful place to live. Turning everything light gray and light blue. Rolling around in mud like the pigs. 

Who the hell do you think you are.

Having it so easy?

I pretend to shoot my fingers like guns at the fat people and at the hospitals that refuse to hire me.

There’s a marginal gap between useless and more useless. The square bodied women and the round bellied men, all wearing this cropped clothing to show off the irregularities of their form. Unscathed by the ugliness and so utterly perplexed by cheap infrastructure. I want to shake these people awake so that they will see all of the world correctly. They walk so lifelessly around the most beautiful place.

They don’t understand this vision I have of the masquerade, the weird raw beauty that goes beyond blue collar stereotypes, or even any stereotype at all.

I want to wear suits at night-time and act like it's the fifties with twists of gothic horror and mystery that sits underneath the streets I parade upon. Basking in the olden blue light that hums and hisses at you, spilling my drinks in the cavern of darkness that surrounds the brick built bar. Jaunting and talking so literally about the old world medias. Spinning around the street lights like a mad-man in love and bouncing in between them. Filing down the sidewalks to mossy undergrowth and metal fire-escapes that ride the two story brownstones. 

They've just had it easy. Or I am the asshole who says so. 

I ride the corner around the ‘North Street’ or whatever the fuck it is called again. 

Maybe one of these days I'll have it my way around this town. When my construction crew or my team of angry lawyers rips the blankets off of the families that destroyed it all. I'll get my stupid job and run the joint. I’ll rebuild it the way I wanted it. I’ll defy this unnatural progression with more of it. I'll set up snipers who’ll dime the carpetbaggers running down from the north.  

 

this will be my heaven.