(right nicked)

My brain is a long man hanging from the devil's tree wondering just how it is that new jersey ever became a good enough place to die as any in this union.

Except my only mistake this evening was consuming too much chick pea and too little sleep after another weekend doing my absolute damndest to live my life like i fucking mean it (which i do, even if neurosis demands me home those times my mother takes one her turns and finds herself plugged into a myriad of clicking machines trying to keep her functioning another year).

Or am i being too kind to myself?

Hardly...

I'm just racking up that overtime for that big pie-fight in the sky.

(mortality play)

My brain is a dance floor in saturday night fever, without the glory of john travolta's once humanistic frame peddling slick shit brooklyn postures for the drunk battered fathers and some fran drescher types.

Not that i've ever endured the whole film. in fact, i think i took in the most of that disco dancing sans broken bones (goddamnit) flick this evening in the emergency room at lenox hill while my mother paced in front of me, clutching a copy of the da vinci code. belching and sighing. belching and sighing.

See the woman's got this thing about her, this magnetism for plagues that confound physicians at 1am and has left me drained since i was just a little scrap of a thing sitting on her lap listening to her talk about angels and how she was destined for a place in heaven.

Those were the cancer days. a time for chemotherapy and augmentation. masectomies. vomit. crying and baldness. fear the likes of which i've never quite learned how to convey (thankfully, i was young enough to be nothing but ingrained with a perpetual sense of loss and a distinctive notion of mortality that strikes mute horror in my heart time and time again) but i still know all too well.

It begs a question, really.

Have things grown better or worse?

Back then the notion of death was clear. my mother had cancer. my mother was going to die. only she didn't. she's survived many years, countless operations and a seemingly limitless amount of illnesses and hospital visits. always coughing. always ailing. getting better for a day, maybe two before she goes off in another turn and i don't recognize a choice but to turn away and wait.

So i wait.

But what the fuck am i waiting for? am i waiting for her to get better? am i readying myself for the day she finally does up and fucking die?

I don't really know.

Is it too late to even wonder?

(missed erection)

My brain is a rusty hatchet dulled with patience and two centuries of listening to the hegemonics shift around me.

Oh fuck the magniloquence, i feel stabby. very fucking stabby because like most americans (letting the blanket spread as far as my worldly travels [excluding, of course, ireland and canada who've got their own thing going] in a sense of fairness surprising when it's already so dark outside) i work a futile job serving megalomaniacs of all shapes and sizes of ego.

And on a friday when i could be banging my head to the terrors of pig destroyer i'm sitting in an office while old white man muse over how best to hock the benefits of insurance.

Oh lord could i stab a motherfucker right now.



Stab.



Stab.



Stab.

And i am no violent man. i may talk a lot of nonsense and dream the world into a flurry of unfathomable bloodshed, but really i'd never hurt a fucking...ARRRRGGGGGGGRRRAAAAAUUURRRGGHHH!!!!

STABSTABSTABSTABSTABSTABSTABSTABSTABSTABSTABSTABSTABSTABSTABSTABSTABSTABSTABSTABSTAB

Like a blind man with something to prove to a room full of fat bastards huffing and prostrate as his mind snaps in two at the vision of existential hell he can't even produce which only fuels his stabbing rage until there's nothing left but piles and piles of sweating mounds of bloodied flesh and fat - real fat - sweet oozing pounds of fat that he can smell and taste and hear giving way under his feet and his so fucking satisfied at his one act of great prejudice that he imagines, somehow, that maybe he really can see the workings of his devil's hands.

Stab.

(pussy wallows)

My brain is a backstage ashtray full of warming swill and cheap cigars, ignored until the morning's come and long gone from whatever memories the body allows a hangover to retain sway off into the hair of the dog that ripped it's teeth into your balls and convinced you (and will continue to for all the discernable future of a life spent in this goddamn brilliant little city) that you were a king of men in whose wake all the world should tremble.

But i'm feeling much better now.

Two glasses of wine and the usual ploys of working out something worth an editor. it's a pattern all too familiar to me and my p.i.c. (one i'd like to think she forgives in me, though i know it grates her nerves to the point where she'd kick me in the shins in her big girl boots as soon as listen to another word about how the world just can't inspire me when i'm so tore off from another drunk. and she's right to do that. i mean, for fuck's sake, at my age i should learn to do something better with my time than chase a dream that's faded recently. i should be learning a trade. i should be plying my wares. i should be making more than the pittance i receive from answering phones for advertising agencies. but that's another indecent tirade for a more respectable time...) and it's one i don't feel like repeating all that far into this evening.

I'd much rather muse on kittens, though i don't see as i have all that much concrete to say. been so possessed with this fucking thing it's a wonder i can really aspire to anything else at all.

Seriously.

I just can't fucking stop. the flashing. the kittens. the oscillating nonsense. the kittens. the kittens. THE FUCKING KITTENS THAT HAVE BURRIED THEIR BABY TEETH INTO THE BACK OF SKULL AND WON'T RELENT UNTIL I BOW ONCE AND FOREVER BEFORE THEIR GREAT ARMY OF HELION OVERLORDS AND EVEN THEN...EVEN FUCKING THEN THERE'LL STILL BE THE VENOM COURSING THROUGH MY HAGGARD FRAME. PULSING AND TORTURING MY BIPEDAL VEINS LIKE A HORDE OF MEWING BEASTS RUBBING THEIR FUR ALONG MY PSYCHE UNTIL I GROW A CUTE LITTLE TALE AND A TASTE FOR THE SOULS OF THE INNOCENT IN WHOSE BLOOD I SHOULD BATHE AND BECOME THE IMMORTAL!!!!!

THERE IS NO ESCAPE!!!

BOW!!!

KNEEL BEFORE THEM, LEST THEY STRIKE THEIR UNMITIGATED KITTY VENGENCE DOWN UPON THEE WITH A FORCE THE LIKES OF WHICH WOULD SHAKE ZEUS FROM HIS OLYMPIAN SLUMBER!!!

I don't know if that's musing so much as a warning.

Either way, it's from the heart.

(das brute)

My brain is a long slow drag of a late night cigarette, welcoming the cold loneliness of autumn (coming faster now with each new passing hour) with a familiar smile and a pop song i hope stays in my head into the winter when the sweater days have all turned grey and hopes of spring are the fool's pride of the morning.

This is my time and i will thrive.

(due note)

My brain is a two-string ukulele, played in a little concrete island dream where my ukulele lady is just a dozen stops away. waiting for me to come strum along my silly melody...

(axe a stencil)

My brain is an atomic clock.

Tick tick ticking away the hours i should be sleeping or seeing gwar or masturbating to a dirty polaroid too small to make out too successfully anyway so i am reduced, at last, to using my imagination or some fucking derivation thereof. coupling some learned experience. some perfect orgasms over porcelain faces and where i'd next like to see her long legs in a garter belt turned around all perfectly coy and inviting me to do what she knows i've wanted all night fucking long.

Down to what though?

Isn't that the fucking rub that could make a coward of me (or a greater man) any day i took enough time to sit and let my self think about it really.

Tick. tick. ticking.

And it's not the mortal coil that's terrifying really. i know that thing unwinds at will and that soon all of us are ash to ash spread out along the dust but i've no idea what the world has before that. no, that's not right. the world can be a petty issue this late in a night (actually, it only seems so exhausting because i've been under the weather all fucking day and inundating my cells with vitamins and extracts along with dayquil, a series of analgesics and a whole lot of buttons that boast their effervescent power like i would the last seat at the russian roullette table). i wonder where i turn. how i twist and half-life.

Shit.

I don't really feel all that much like talking about this now. not when there's such a lovely schematic to enjoy.

(manifest density)

My brain is a terricloth noose, convenient certainly but not really all that impressive when the cast of csi come crashing in on the last will and testament to a man whose spent so much time thinking about how little he actually thinks (coherently, at least) hours can easily become insufferable games of existential pinball with a hairtrigger tilt and too many goddamn multiballs spinning around nowhere at all with just enough speed to make them literate for a minute before they spiral off into the sunset of another workaday without so much as a picture to speak of sense memory.

It occurs to me this evening that interpol is a band i should've given a damn about. it occurs to me bjork's a lunatic that we all love for reasons that don't really ring true anymore. it occurs to me that ewan mcgregor does not equal an artisan of any timeless nature (even if the ladies have loved his jock since shallow grave when he played the miserable scottish bastard he always characterized so familiarly).

And it occurs to me that inspiration has not been all that forthcoming with my rat-a-tat tapping lately.

Though i suppose that much is evident.

I think i've been scouring all the wrong excess. i've been playing the old routine that worked when the days were dark and i stood unemployed and less desparate to make a name for myself. drink drank drunk. smoking haystacks of american spirit. jerking off. wasting mine.

I need an aesthetic arrest and i need to come back from it with a new perspective so i can lay away my dead.

(slip schemata)

My brain is a baja smile, lost on the plastic grin of an idiot nation more than ready to drown itself in long-torn waves of likeability. style over substance. manners of a proletariate no one really believes in anymore (at least, not in any fashion that can be readily discerned as faith. no. there is faith aplenty in this nation but it's been so fucking misdirected as to have lost ever ounce of pride and accountability. it's all gone into vengeful gods and clay fucking puppets marred and dancing for the cold end of a million some apostates. not a final solution really. life's gone a far shade of genocide when it comes to reaching out and touching someone with an iron fucking fist of kindness and commerce except for those poor bastards down there in the sudan. someone seems to have finally acknowledged their plight which is nice nice nice but it doesn't really do a whole fucking hell of a lot to keep a nation from dying now does it? does it even start to compensate the world for ignoring the cries of a hatchet job down the bad side of a mother's skull? not really. not by a long shot. but it's all we've really got. words. words. words. semantics and apologies and buzz about mistakes and earnest attempts to be better than we once were. better than the evil that swims around the global populus. and it is evil, you can be shit sure of the fact that he did get that one right. but at least it's honest [or so i have been lead to believe. a dictator doesn't do all that much to assimilate benevolence when there's opposition to be crushed like an inconsiderate gnit]. at least there's really no question of a man's intention when he makes murder a decree. and isn't that worth a little veneration, really?). and i don't know that i'm all that proud to say, today, that i'm a much a part of it as anyone.

Because if this is my voice, then i've already given up the better part of america's ghost and i don't know when i'll have the chance to hold it close to me again.

(bas sans relief)

My brain is a tepid salve, certainly possessing of some healing properties but none that ever work that well on a monday morning.

Not that i've ever been particularly adverse to mondays. i never get those sort of blues (tuesday being the day that usually does me in, smack dab between the onset of a fresh and familiar workaday week and the invariable hump that once was the moment the men came together to gamble, slug whiskey and eat meat...fucking bygone days, broken off by the insufferable squabbling of two married men who should goddamn well know better but don't because wives don't stand for any degree of snivelling machismo no matter what crisis their men may be pursuing). it's just that this morning is so very fucking bright outside and though i don't know that i'm hungover i sure as shit don't feel all that sober.

Perhaps i just needed more sleep.

I always seem to need more sleep.

I'd coddle that up to depression, but i've been have such strange and wonderful dreams the last couple of days i don't feel like i'm trying all that hard to escape from the world i've chosen to live in so much as run off to a place that's better than any one i'll encounter in my waking days.

And yes, i do believe there is a distinction there.

For example...

Two nights ago i had a long and shiftless dream that had me marrying my pic (re: partner in crime, but i'm running late) in an early-morning ceremony somewhere deep in the woods. she asked me on waking. i agreed and followed her smiling, albeit confused (still in my bathrobe, actually), far away where we kissed at the altar of a benevolent farmer whose cows i'd milked just a day or two prior.

And when we left it was a walk in the park. holding hands. not really speaking. not knowing at all what to say. just in awe of the fact that we were forever locked in an inextricable link. in the eyes of man, god and the law.

It felt good.

Plain.

Wonderful.

And when i've finally woken up, i hope some of that joy lingers in me through today. it might help me temper the sunshine.

(better sways)

My brain is a heartstring, tugged and strewn all over me.

I am a fool. a drunk and drugged out sentimental jackass so fucking in love with the one woman who couldn't be here tonight it borders on the fucking absurd.

I know. i know. i spoke about the work. about the book to be and the middling dream i was wrestling with disecting into a full-blown freakout epic...

But fuck it.

I'm in love. in love. in love.

And words will come and nights will pass. and i'll verge from my well-versed mania into the throes of unspeakable depression but that will do nothing to alter the fact. that won't hinder or slander or skew for a second that i have found a partner in crime that so completes me, she's stolen away all my notions of hope and beauty so all i can do sometimes is lay my head back and admire her.

Which i do.

I do.