11.30.2004

(bullet home)




My brain is the crack of a bumbling hero keeping time in broken bones. looking forward to the day this dog comes forth hollering agains the hands that held it's swollen head for years and days without thanks. without mention. without anything more than the basic recognition that he'd been alive, really.

If you could call it a life.

And i would, if only for the sake of argument. if only for the image rattling round of steve mcqueen drinking his way through the beds of a hundred starlets before dying alone. before ending a legend in the minds of every boy whose felt the road circle underneath the wheels of a two-ton steel wet dream.

Because i'm neither. i'm just a scrap. a rat-a-tat tapper with delusions of grandeur i wouldn't trade for the keys to old liberty (even if a life on the highway was calling me).

I haven't fucked that many and i haven't killed a man. but i've seen enough to keep me guessing that when that time comes for my bark to bite, i'll be snarling at the ready.

11.29.2004

(collapse the fist)




My brain is a young girl, bloodied legs and ashamed of what the body can make of a man when it's late and drinking's a thing from hours ago - full of smoke and the lucid passing of television screams.

I've assessed, in my life, that there is precious little left to shame me. there are a wealth of regrettable things. embarassing moments. archives better left buried under times when we were smiling and my tongue was whet with kisses and conversation.

But i make mistakes. sizable ones at that. nothing, now, that would qualify as markers on a hell-bound path. still my course of actions doesn't always lead me in the right direction.

Sometimes i wake up to find my flesh weak, my will itching with the need to forget that i can fail (what it takes, sometimes, to face another day as a sycohpant dreaming of subversion coming up from the dregs of rage). sometimes i wish i could just sleep it off. sleep for days in the shade of an empty room with only books to comfort me.

Thank god, though, that's not my luxury.

Escape, however necessary a virtue, is a coward's path at best. and i'd rather feel like shit than be afraid of anything again.

11.25.2004

(stole fractures)




My brain is a black flag burning high over the century calling out for rebels and friends to take pause this evening and remember just what it was we were fighting for in the first place. was it love? was it a name? was it some principle that grew confused with age and would sooner die than live another day under the auspices of our screaming charade?

Today, all things considered, i am thankful to be alive.

11.24.2004

(spitting airs)




My brain is a league of kings. titans. mythologized on barstools and lost to the whiskey jars where they spend fresh lifetimes waiting for some old poet to come around. to drink them up. to spit them out in a storm of controversy only a teenage kick would ever wish (when the suffering of certain indignities are the last true facets of a modern man).

Today, i don't feel so very full of shit. despite the cracks in my head and the rumble in my stomach. i feel possessed of a certain achievement and the smile's spread all over my unshaven face.

I'm not sure why.

Last night was a revelry. a series of light beer choices and jello shots before frozen pizza at 3 in the morning. not so different than any other evening. everyone made it home alive. everyone imbibed too fast and too long and today we're all enduring that mistake.

But that's us, really. me. the dropouts. the rockers. my pic. we're all functions of our mistakes and it's that failure we embrace so readily. perhaps that's wrong. perhaps we should be dreaming of something bigger (though to be fair, i know goddamn well most are) but when the end comes to our days there's nothing we'd rather ascribe to than drinks and conversation. silly notions. stolen kisses. the arcane remnants of a decadent age.

And we're all proud to be a part of it.

For now...

11.23.2004

(granite guignol)

In humble search of...


My brain is a twist of blood and chrome left on the highway by the last vagabond to creep out of the sunset and into the heartbeat of american air where the roads lead home no matter where the ghost.

So long as there's always the chase.

I need to find a superhero. a stupid kid. a fractured idol that can rise above the rabble of contemporary civilization and rain hope upon the hovering swarms of youth who forgot what it is to believe in something fantastic.

We're not talking comic book aping here and i could give a shit about the greeks tonight (though if anything, they knew how to weave their fucking mythologies right). no. what i want is a child of today. a postmodern lunatic with no grips on attention or a path for tomorrow with everything but the crack in his mind working against him. battered down by his contemporaries. ignored by his closest peers. left to his own devices miles away from his last notable influence.

Someone whose rising is a crime. whose desparate attempts to save the world read like burgeoning psychosis rather than one gloriously confused shot at redemption. i want him to kill. i want him to maim. i want him to tear the heart out of his nemesis with a hook and a nail torn out from his closet in a frenzy to escape the little voice created to help him in becoming.

Not because he wants the bastards to suffer (though lord knows they fucking should) but to spill blood for the justified. for the millions whose voices are drowned out in illusions of the great marketing frenzy that is the west (and the world) these days.

The new hero, the antihero.

The bruised boy of this tortured bosom we've all nesteld in so nicely.

Break the niche. fuck the mold. burn it all.

11.18.2004

(ipso x-acto)

hello cleveland Posted by Hello


My brain is a gold sound from an old phongraph rooted in the corner of a dying library where the ghosts of we scholars still sit and piss off the waxing poetics and scour of isms that first strangled our dreams of becoming the last great american anything.

A well timed scream...

Today i allowed a few minutes of mortality to creep its way through my briefly hungover and otherwise shimmering day of tacos and doughnuts and walking in the sun that shines a little brighter on the man who knows the value of an orgasmic start to the morning.

Not the rote woebegone existential dribble that's marked so many of my internal monologues: wondering when i'll find the book in print, when my pepper plant will become a tree or if a child really has anything to do with the legacy i leave this living plane. but a simple recognition of death.

I strolled under a scaffold. a rickety steel adhoc function of the new york city landscape whose beams i could see shaking with the weight of union men and concrete. it was about twenty feet. maybe thirty. long enough to ensure me a shitty fucking end to my questionable time once i was halfway in between either end (i'm not all that much of a runner. never really been an athlete. hell, whatever exercise i once promised myself is well curbed in favor of the tapping, the reading and some sleep [tv too. always with the fucking tv]).

I couldn't tell the value of the materials. couldn't determine how sturdy or wisely the lift had been raised.

And i didn't really care.

I was strangely unafraid.

Even though, in that moment, i realized that had anything above me gone amiss i would be destroyed (if not killed outright). my bones would break. my guts would ooze out onto the street beneath the weight. i wouldn't have a moment for redemption, regret. i would only have time to die.

And that felt fine. everything felt all right.

Not that i want to die. quite the opposite, really. i'd like to live a relatively long life (long enough, that is, to get the fuck away from the cave and see my face somewhere respectable if not committed to saving the world entirely). there's much more for me to do. to say. to experience before i kiss off this mortal coil.

I know now though, that if i didn't. if it all ended in some flash (or hulking mass as today might have provided) it would be okay. i'd have served my contract and i would have done it well.

Well enough at least, for me.

11.16.2004

(primer dial)

bars unknown Posted by Hello


My brain is parts unknown, wining in lieu of reservation when there are dreams of paris roaming around the day.

I've never been.

I've really never been much of anywhere and, to be fair, never really much cared to despite cosmopolitan claims. i'm a rat, you see, immersed in this city's concrete as much as last winter's shit (but hopefully, somehow, fairing far better for the well-being of the world in some long lost adolescent way of thinking everything will be all right no matter what the right's laid in store for god and country). but since i've realized again that i've a best friend roaming across the pond i've gone back to thinking of that lighted city the way it was described to me when i was a kid, doomed and out in la for what seemed like a long haul but only turned into half my living years (as such).

The only place i ever had to see.

It was billy, my dead uncle's friend who told me that. we were riding in the dinosaur of a truck he'd picked up (much to his unabashed glee) to see his stunning wife and child. listen to some "johnny was a queen from brooklyn" like we always did in those days remembering mark in our own way (i would later don stained jackets in latent emulation).

He was an actor. a musician. a friend who i've lost to everything but 30 second spots now and then.

We jammed with beck once. he, mark and i at the onyx (a dead scene in la now, but the first place i ever really wanted to be welcome...and was) on the lazy piano in the side room just down the street from my old school.

I only vaguely remember the day.

But i remember paris. i remember stories about smoking to jazz and illicit liquors. beautiful women. architecture. romance in every moment. art in every glance.

And goddamnit i have to be there, just once, to know the truth. it won't matter if it's a disappointment so long as it's miles away from the cave.

That fucking place...

11.15.2004

(wry beams)

welcome home Posted by Hello


My brain is a hole in the wall where the booze flows like a mighty stream taking all sensible hope and conversation for a ride into blinding a stupor of broken glass and crooked smiles before the searing pain of a burning sunday.

But that's just fine because it's monday which, in any other world would be a signal of dread at the sudden, repeated return to banality and slaving away for a crap wage and the recognition of a prick's ilk and lackeys (if you're lucky enough to know how to read it...i generally don't and am scrambling for the optimism). but for me it means i'm 3000 to my perfect pic.

That's reason enough to feel alive in the sunshine.

11.12.2004

(click click)

boom Posted by Hello


My brain is an explosion drawn off on the horizon just clear enough to recognize but never close enough to hold to purpose. a blip on the ontological radar. a scratch in the human wax.

This is all an accident really. i should be carrying on my whiskey dreams in brooklyn this evening (and i'm sure i will in a moment's time) singing some rejuvination into this tired wrists of mine. but after a scotch (or two, to be reasonable) the phones weren't ringing. the voices weren't calling for the rock and roll killing machine and so i decided to take some time to stare until they would.

Take the time to rat-a-tat tap something. to listen to the murder city devils and smoke three cigarettes i didn't need with this oncoming cold and weekend of broke debauchery without my trusted pic.

But the fire only burns so bright sometimes.

And now i'm gone...

(pit on the fury)

last known moment Posted by Hello



My brain is an oil slick, mired in brief moments of its glorious past. beers. booze. cigarettes and the bands that made them all taste better.

This is the last known moment in the world of menstrual nation, a band better known for it's incomparable love of failure and the scars that come along the next morning than for it's ouvre.

Not that there was one. not that there need to fucking be.

Menstrual nation was a moment, repeated endlessly at the end of countless evenings when all that was left to drink was swill and the guitars didn't tune worth a damn. they never had a drummer, just some strings, a couple of machines and the gusto of the last man standing last at the st. pat's parade wondering what the fuck it was everyone was vomitting about.

King kopay, greggnog and sr. somatic (from left) didn't need a stage. hell, sometimes they didn't even need microphones. all they need was a time and a fucking song swinging around their heads and that was it.

Terminal party.

People came. people sang. drank. fought and fucked to be near the madness of these three playing their beautiful disaster. screaming into the long air trying to save the world or something just as futile (i can't ever remember the manifesto being clear, but i'm a wino lost in flogging molly right now so...).

And sure, most of their performances were reduced to violence (taking on each other and anyone dumb enough to think it was a joke) but that's what made them great.

Makes.

Menstrual nation is (despite my love of long lost tense) a living thing. sure it's splintered into varying subsets (the whiskey dropouts, etc.) but it's got a goddamn soul all it's own.

And by the look of the glaze over these young fuckers' eyes it might just be breathing for a long time to come.

11.10.2004

(hope and sway)



My brain is a phantom limb, flailing out into the darkness. scratching the walls and clasping the air for some precious thing to call its own.

Mine's in seattle this evening and will be past sunday. but that's all right. time and space make better bedfellows than night after night in the same routine (even if i may continue my part in her absence) into days scraping conversation.

Not that it's all really come to that.

In fact, dreadful's about as far as we are from anywhere at all. i think it's the smell of fall to remind me. the connecticut sunset from saturday. but my partner in crime is as precious to me as wine and the words i can write sometimes (often the two stumble down stairwells, intertwined). she's the white flame of the perfect human. the dream of a hungry ghost.

But for me she is real. attainable (in my own way). a phantom i can understand and relate to. a beauty i can hold in my swollen heart.

And when she returns i will hold her in my arms as tight as i would my own life because she is becoming...

11.09.2004

(in dust)



My brain is a crowbar, bloodied and shaking in the hands of a revolution.

I'm still reeling from the consequences of last week's failure. i don't know what to say. i don't know what to think. i can't even begin to understand the low rumble of terror coursing through my spine.

What happens now?

We have failed the world.

And what shames me most is that half of my countrymen (my brothers and sisters whether i'd readily admit them or not) believe they were right. they believe they've chosen a righteous path in the face of global compromise.

How the fuck did that happen? how have we grown so divided, so confused, so desperate? where did america go? where are it's values? it's hopes? it's wild and unfettered dreams of a free world?

And how can it ever rise again?

11.02.2004

(con spiritu)



My brain is a fire come down from the hollywood hills and into the sweet dreams of every plain boy sleeping comfortable in his tenuous grasp on amreican civilization.

Because those were the days i watched it burn, just like i did three years ago. a city of blissful capital coming apart at the seams. a hundred years (and then some) going undone by the mistakes of the next white wave of the hegemonic shift and let me tell you babeez, i was terrified.

Fucking terrified.

Just like i am tonight. thinking about what might fall apart tomorrow. thinking about what fate may come when enough misinformation weighs in on popular opinion(where it matter most...long gone from these stomping grounds that i still call a home) and the world decides to once and finally say fucking no.

It's too late tonight to rationalize. i realize that well and am goddamn glad to fall asleep half drunk and loving pavement as much as i did in the teens when politics was a perifery and existential mishaps were the order of everyday because at least then i understood i was something. i knew well the impotence of my voice (even if i wasn't inclined to acknowledge it). i was a fool and that made me hearty enough to withstand any obstacle.

But today.

Today, my friends, the end of the world may come barrelling down on this nation for the injustice we've done if the outcome isn't right. if white is might and power is priviledge above and beyond the call to duty and service and love of the fucking world we've made and are so very much a part of.

No more half-cocked fantasy. no more teenage kicks. just the means to a bitter end.

I just hope i'm not right.