Everywhere But Home

Barely grown up momma's boys and disco dancing angels
Hanging out on lonely roads like wonderful disasters.

Little black top sneaker barons and Pony-tailed Marias
My child dry your crying eyes upon my waiting shoulder.

Lonely roads with lonely soldiers, lonely streets and names
And Backwoods Johnny smells the flowers, plays the needle junky game.

Let's build cardboard tabernacles and try to disappear.
Once more with a little feeling, Say you love me...love me dear.

This moment will be over soon and yes I know your tired
Someday someone will come through and finally make you smile.

Mary Full of Grace

Standing there, un-impressed
Look upon your face,
Like yesterday,
Before.
Same damn t-shirt, Same damn
Place. I think I'll
Burn the Fucker down
Your eyes like diamond
Dirty coal & Pressure / Heat
"My beer is getting warm.
Is dinner on the table?"
Same like yesterday.
Before.
Crying to your mother
On the fucking telephone
No way can you do this
Cake-walk dance any more
Empty, filthy, tired, torn
Strung out just like...
Yesterday...Alone just like...
Before.

This place is feeling colder

Face is looking worn

Brown hair, grey curtains

Arsenic and lace

Too much, too much, too much more

Empty just like yesterday

More alone than before

Sidewalk dancer

Stiletto heeled Madonna

Maybe Monday morning cigarette

And someone else

Someone new

Anyone will do

One more work-a-day

John Wayne

Cowboy killer street walk

One more chance

To fuck it up or get it

Right again

Sometime maybe

Someone crazy

Someone/

Anyone will do

Little crazy pigeon lady

Criminal, and then

Sometimes life is never easy

Sometimes you are too

True Directions

Mother-Child-Father faded
Merely memory, His dream
Held so tightly, suffocated
Soft as angel feather beds

Danger/Life: so over rated

Nothing cold nor hard or mean

Safely held, familiar places

Frequent faces of the dead

Numb to touch and over-Jaded

Revolt against the way it seems

Run so far in routine-races

Lost along the way His Head

Into strangest water waded

Lost his way and and all it means

Found redemption in its traces

Found a voice and letter RED

Baptized by the fire. Traded

All he knew for all his dreams.

Found redemption, unabated

By those who thought his life they led.

Fallow Fields of Yesterday

In fallow fields lie the broken

Hands of those who came before

The chains and fences strong but silent

Leaning with the hands of time.

Ancient in its fading presence,

The sky still thick with blackest smog.

The vision horror tribulation

The dust upon the floors, Reminder

How quick to learn, sooner still forgotten

Memories of fathers' times

Ancient wounds lie open, Rotten

Ride the rails and walk the line

*In honor of the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, in warning to that which we may become should we choose to ignore the lessons of the past.

The Quiet Faith of Simple Men

Often times I sit and ponder
The simple faith of yesterday.
I sit in quiet meditation
With nothing left, to God, to say

Where did they hide that glory, Heaven?
And lo, to where, those pearly gates?
Perhaps another conversation
I'll let the ceiling mediate

How to Make an American Heroe: 4 Possible Choices in a Sea of Opportunity

Life Choice 1:

Between sitting on the couch trying to decide whether it is worth the effort to stand up and get the remote off of the table to turn on the t.v. and trying to decide what kind of Doritoes to get when I go to the store on Sunday, it hit me; I want to stay inside for the rest of my life....no.....better than that.....I want to stay inside for the rest of my life and be one of those guys that has to be taken off of the bed with a small crane...no....a large crane. Oh yeah, what could possibly be sweeter than that? Lazy....and yes, with a capital 'L'. Just think: I would have the privledge of getting to bathe with a sponge on a pole, I would no longer have to decide what I want on my delivery pizza ( Pepperoni or Sausage...hell I'll have one of each), and best of all I wouldn't ever have to see anyone but the pizza boy and that little chinese kid that brings those neat little boxes of fried rice and 'sweet and sour' pork to me. The only question is what now, what comes next. And even that is simple enough to answer: ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!


Life Choice 2:

I went for a brisk jog today and decided that I want to be a sports heroe. I plan to hold a cell phone to my scrotum for at least 3 hours a day in hopes that I can acquire some rare, but curable, form of testicular cancer. Post-Chemotherapy and Ball removal, I will train to win the Boston Marathon for 6...no....seven years in a row. I'll get to be on a Wheaties box, how cool is that? I can put my name on everything and get millions for it. The possibilities are endless; except procreation, but who wants kids? But first things first, I need a better cellular plan.


Life Choice 3:


I was sitting listening to smooth jazz today and I decided that I'm going to become a postal worker. Now hear me out on this. I don't want to be your typical friendly mail carrier who secretly owns an AK-47 with the intent of killing all who dare to cross me the week my mother in law comes to town. Oh no, I'm going to be the most friendly mail carrier this town...no....this state has ever seen. I am going to leave fruit cakes at Christmas and Little cards on Feb. 14; Hell I may even pet the dog and pat your baby on his head. I want to be like the mail man from the old 1950s' t.v. shows....I think that "Leave It To Beaver" had one. And then one day: THEY DON'T PAY ME ENOUGH FOR THIS CRAP....BOOM!....C-4 in the mail room, 9mm in a shoulder holster....all out psycho-killer-mailman-from-beyond-the-grave style mayhem. So, I guess it turns out that I AM going to be your typical disguntled mail carrier. That's what a government payscale will get ya.


Life Choice 4:


I was driving down the freeway today, stopped in stand-still traffic when I saw this old man with a shopping cart, 40oz. Olde English in one hand, leash connected to an old mangie Labrador in the other. Suddenly it hit me. A hobo's life is the only life for me. Imagine for a moment, the romanticism of it all: riding the trains from Cheyenne to Omaha, getting kicked in the groin regularly from characters ranging from Central Park cops to Frat boys. Oh yeah, thats what I'm talking about. True freedom. With only a news paper for a bed, a rock for a pillow, and cheap whiskey and an old tire in a barrel for warmth on a cold winters night. I'll call my dog Lucky. Hopefully I can find one with one eye and no tail, I hear you get better handouts that way. I'll eat stale bread and half consumed Happy Meals from the dumpster out back of Mc D's. Yes folks, a hobo's life is the only life for me.

I'm Going To Take A Walk....A long long walk

I am going to walk across the United States. I want to start in San Francisco with 500 dollars in my pocket and just start walking. I plan to take a pack and tent and everything that I will need, but no more money than 500 dollars. I want to see this country for exactly what it is. I feel that, in order to do so, I have to walk until my 500 dollars is almost gone and then stop in whatever small town I am in and try and find a menial job. Something that will buy me food...Hopefully I can find a someone who will take me in, or else I will sleep in a tent, I don't care.

I am just so disgusted by the state of this country, the people living here, the people running it. I think that if I truly want to love this place again, I will have to see it for what it really is.

Don't get me wrong, I am going to finish film school first. That's one of the points of this whole thing I think. I want to get true America on film. I want to walk all the way across America and film everything that I can. I want to sit down with my days and days of footage and truly get a perspective on it all. Its a little early to be thinking of actually doing this, but it just came to my mind suddenly and I wanted to get it on record. I am going to walk across America. America the Beautiful, from sea to shining sea, amber waves of grain, all that good stuff. Who knows, I may learn something on the way.

In a Nutshell ( or How the Neighborhood Went to The Birds)

Last week we got some new neighbors, and our old ones were none to happy about it. Well, I shouldn't say that. I only know 2 of them in the first place. Perhaps I should start at the beginning.
The year is 1967, Andy Sherman, as we will call him, was a boy of only 18 years old with big dreams of killin' him some zipper-heads. Fast forward through 4 years in the jungles of Vietnam, 2 in Cambodia, and 31 deep in the heartlands of Southern Comfort and you practically know him like your own mother. Andy has long sense dropped his Christian name for simply "The Colonel". Now-a-days, the Colonel passes the days getting tossed - and I mean that in the most literal of ways - from a plethora of bars and tending to his only kin, a small schnauser named Ginger.
The year is 2005; Whippoorwill Lane is, for the most part, a quiet stretch of neighbor-hood just within the confines of town. America the Beautiful. My peaceful respite in the tree lined backyard only occasionally interrupted by the sound of Miss Sneddbecker's car puttering down the road with her trunk-load of groceries from the Sack and Save, her blue hair permed beyond recognition during her bi-weekly trip to the beauty salon where she catches up on all her small-town-turned-large gossip. This week's topic: The new neighbors and the fact that there is just something "not right" about them.
You see, the new neighbors on Whippoorwill Lane are mis-wired in any number of ways. The house down the road is now inhabited by NUT-CASES, WHACK-JOBS, WIERDOS, KOOKS, and CRAZIES!!!! The state of Texas is renting the house across the way and to the right to a group of recently released Psych-ward patients with emotional problems - they simply would not function within society and so were sent in for an emergency re-wiring, change of plugs, tug on the old battery cables. The new neighbors are under 12 hour a day state super-vision and this worries the bejeezus out of old Miss Sneddbecker and enrages old Colonel Andy.
Colonel Andy, it turns out, has been hitting the bottle again. When he realized that his next-door neighbors were a bunch of "nit-wits and loons", he decided to go over and let the "DAMN BEWROKRAT" watching over them exactly how he felt about them "driving down his property value". The least that they could do was ask before moving a bunch of NIMRODS into "his" neighborhood. 30 minutes, 3 squad cars, and a few busted windows later.....
Well, so much for my small little piece of respite in America the beautiful. Andy said that I just wouldn't understand. "Afterall", he slurred, "you're only a renter".
I guess so..."but then again", I replied, "You're just a crazy old drunk"

Well....there goes the neighborhood

One More Time and One More Chance for Reason ( or Machiavelli and His Little Little Helpers)

1

Often times I sit outside and wonder

Meditate on songs of birds and men

Other times I sit alone and shudder

Empty like frail jars of procelain

Sometimes hold my breath and sink right under

Drowning / Swimming slowly....now and then...

2

No one really seems to want to hear me

And sometimes people simply never call

And when I'm heard, my words are never proper

I set you up, but never make you fall

So, Many people often call me Jesus

And Many people often call me Saul

But if I were the former or the latter

I truly just might want to save us... one and all

Ancient friends
Dust off heart strings rusted and worn
Message from the past
Lightning and gentle breezes
A summer night porch swinging
Drinking sweet surrender
Long before the vine was ripe

Imamah and Ten Gallon Hats

Sweetest silence echoes softly from the lips of babes and men,

Dripping crimson, scarlet memory onto the barren path,

But a child sleeping peacefully beneath the fading starlight.

In Kansas lies the cowboy king in all his pallid glory,

Bankrupt of all his well intents and all his shining armor,

Lonely stranger tells the tale of unforgiven horrors.

Perhaps soon they both shall meet and walk among the ashes,

take a sip of awful cup and weep for ill-wrought folly.

Anonymity On A First Name Basis

I wanted to jump, scream, throw something. Anything to avoid hearing one more person begin a speech with "Hi, my name is Nancy No Name Smith and I am an addict." The fact that this individuals life was, at somepoint prior to now, spiraling out of control and into the depths of an all consuming addiction to marijuana of all things brings forth no pity within me. Perhaps this makes me a cold person. Perhaps I should be a little more caring toward my fellow man. Fuck it.
With every repetition of the line, "fake it 'til you make it" or "one day at a time" or other similar rhetoric, I wanted to gouge the offending speaker in the eye with my Bic ball point pen. I simply find that a 12 step program based on the notion that 1) addiction is a disease 2) one is hopeless to overcome said disease until they admit to themselves that they are spiraling out of control and seek help in the most desperate of manners, is total nonsense. I am at odds with the first premise here. Addiction is not a disease. Addiction is an obsession. It begins and ends in within the mind.
I don't even think that this is the real issue that is eating at the back of your humble narrators skull here however. The issue that is bothering me is the belief that the way to overcome this addiction is to stick to a book of rhetoric as if it were the savior incarnate. It is as if simply repeating the same empty phrases ( "fake it 'til you make it" or "keep coming back") is going to magically cause something to snap inside the mind. It is not too hard to imagine waking up one day and being like "FUCK YEAH!!!......THAT STEP 4 LAST NIGHT REALLY HIT THE SPOT......HELL I DON'T EVEN WANT TO DUMP THAT JAMESONS IRISH WHISKY INTO MY AA SANCTIONED BOTTOMLESS CUP OF COFFEE AT ALL BEFORE TONIGHTS MEETING!!!!!!!!!"
AA is for weak people, not addicts. Alcoholics Anonymous, and all of its spin offs - Marijuana Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Crack and Crack Whore Anonymous, Alter-boy Anonymous - are simply a way for weak people to trade one crutch in for another, newer, shinier crutch. AA is a place to dump all of the baggage of a wasted life, blame it all on a bottle / addiction - thereby absolving the said "addict" of any personal responsibility - and to pick up an organization, rather than a bottle, to use as a support crutch. I am not saying that this organization does not do good in the world. I am saying that, regardless of the fact that they have helped many people stop drinking, they 1) prey upon the weak 2) do not actually empower the individual to live a stand up life on their own but rather enable the person to trade in one crutch for another, the bottle for the book if you will.
Predatory in its nature, Sefl-righteous in its demeanor, and EMPTY in its promises. There is no cure for the thing that these groups call a disease. This disease they chase is a ficticious beast. It is a monster that lives in the heads of those that find the reassurance of the group enticing, comforting. The group itself will admit that there is no "cure" for the disease.....there is only one thing that can ensure victory......are you ready....."keep coming back" These twelve steps fast become 20, are racing towards 50 ad-infinitum.

FOREVER TILTING AT WINDMILLS!