My dry tongue was a tuneless trumpet Lashing involuntary cat calls And spitting mannequin opinions, And the night was a broken vessel Into which I poured the sum of my shouts, And my throat was smeared in the silvery, smooth silk of a chain-smoked night.

But, my heart was quiet, gazing Up at the infinite ceiling of some strange starlit tabernacle.

And We were moving up and down but mostly sideways. The dawn’s blush red fingers Tore open the veil of my black and blue eyes, In the silence of a destroyed room, I woke up, a mule for the morning’s weight and tried to shake off a thin jacket of soot with a cheery shoulder shrug a dash of hot water, a dull, bent razor blade, And the sculpting teeth of a comb. My dormant eyes blinded By the sickly light of some still indifference. A half-tipsy stutter, a drifting pause, a shrill, stinging siren. And my eyes recoiled at the death of the day.

The television crotches A makeshift quilt to defeat the breeze of our sighs Resting on a table near a hospice bed is a pill organizer as densely populated as a rich man’s rolodex, and behind the peeling, ash-stained wallpaper, The furnace hums ‘Om’ in a chugging, waspy drone.

Here, a young girl presses a pair of plastic toy binoculars against a tiny, fingerprinted window, And meets the roaring blithe laughter of stray children tossing up beds of untamed, brittle autumn leaves and tries to twig Why she’s gotta be the one Stuck in the silence of this sweating room.

In the kitchen, Dust flutters like fireflies  Two-liters of Code Red Mountain Dew Arranged like bowling pins, An unfinished case of Miller Lite, And makeshift skyscrapers constructed From Little Caesar’s pizza boxes and dirty dishes. Above his head, Hangs a handsome Jesus portrait Like Polaris in the nighttime sky.

The crinkled, Luna-cratered walls are dotted with palm-leaved honeymoon photos, a couple of Olan Mills family portraits, and a rorschach of mold stains. In some half-forgotten corner, The ever-glow of an aftermarket LCD TV Glistens with the sun rays of gray-scaled reruns of some half-forgotten sixties sitcom.

And it is here that we choke on this silence. This silence which we try to sanctify by beginning our sentences with “God willing.“ This silence which we try to stuff with gossip and talk about the weather. This silence which we try to chuckle away by half-heartedly joining in with the audience laughter.

And it is here that he stares at the only sky he’ll ever see again, an opaque, off-white piece of dry-wall stretched taut onto which he projects the gravely, coal-tarred burrows of a life unseen and unheard, Like water eddying, Rewinding and replaying the shrinking vinegary blotches of his collapsing triumphs and aching tribulations, And I wonder,

What can he say?

That he can expound at great length on the psychological drama of a Dostoevsky novel? That once he wandered through an Eden of Ivy green? That he donned the the handsome, tailored armor of a B.A., MFA, D.Lit, & C.V? That his career opportunities were the ones that knocked indeed? That he sailed through the city of Florence? That he marveled at the ceiling of the Sistine? That he swam the shores of Algiers? That he basked in the florid aroma of a snifter of Belgian-monk-brewed beer?

I ask, because despite the idle sanctity of my fidgeting convictions, Despite the heady books, And all that shit about the proletariat and bourgeoisie, the catching-up coffee shop blues with distant friends, And the hours chiseling a sound around the pitter-patter of a metronome click, And my White Pages of ex-lovers, And the clamorous nights of momentary eternity, climbing up cobwebs of bong smoke, diving down dark oceanic trenches of booze, And the swaggering, bar stool stories which follow Of flaky one-night stands, and my encyclopaedic knowledge of obscure punk rock bands, And how under the cold, smoky bible black sky, I’m shocked with the shivering jitters Of wondering why, God, why can I not just stop thinking about her?

Despite all of this: won’t my room still reek of the same silence? Now, whose sharp, silver sickle scratches against my shoulder And reminds me that Death is real. So, so real. And that I am but a single drop of rain in a howling & ceaseless storm, And that from the moment I am spit out from that cloud, I fall only to cease to fall.

And, I’m torn between whether that is More reason for achieving, seeing, possessing, caressing, & loving, Or kicking up dust and muttering, “Fuck it. What’s the point?” And, I wonder whether its a regal, benevolent God who controls my landing or if this is all simply An atomic dice-roll violently crashing from the invisible hands of chance. But this is all just idle daydreaming, isn’t it?

Because in front of me I see, clothed in the rags of a sagging, Duck Dynasty t-shirt, His receding hairline like the exposed roots of a dying tree, His leathery skin a clock-carved fossil, His face flushed in a warm mist of morphine, The withering carcass of a good man. Raised up in the caress of a tired wife, Whom, with lockjaw eyes, remind each other, That all things fall and fade and forever pass, And what could he say Except, “Honey, I love you.”

Linda, would ya please Stop stoning me for smelling Like stale cig’rette smoke!

“Toast, almond butter,” My stomach howled; bread kissed blaze, Matchsticks! Toast’s blazed black. :(

Stormy radicals Combust, Tinder sparks erupt ‘ello, there! Wassup?

There is no harvest to collect. No chaff to burn Antique dust clouds Coat the threshing wheel unturned

Saturday night, drought-line skin stretched airtight, Delta mud blues crackles & bites. Rolled, eagle-eyed birdflight, Ceiling’s swathed in purple brights, Hunger is a catfight. Stomach’s food for parasites. Mounds of frozen anthracite. The more the cavern bats cry, the more I know it’s life. So knife the lights– Done got that stage fright.

Good Lord, Give me some kind of reason To shake them hard-tossed debts Of this Sun-stained, blood-bought season.

Two Suns whipped them through deserts rough Good Lord, Didn’t You mend their broken cup? But why not mine, This time?

Good Lord, Would you let me see It? ‘fore them seven seals tear up And Jane’s red wine floods my dry kiss.

Has Your glass sea done shattered up? Can the Potter mend this broken cup I’ll hold out out to You Who do You choose?

Good Lord, Jumped on the rails to a dusty blurred line. Cranked up my guitar’s roar, And my finger’s hailed in cut time.

But, don’t time always tame her taste? Good Lord, ‘cause I’ve never felt so late As when I reached to kiss you In the upper room.

Calm, whispering kinda kid Felt another nudge of the ol’ lovesick blues, Snatched Rumi off his bookshelf but got bored after a couple of pages.

“In the silence of love,You will find the spark of life.”

“Or, the ashes of disappointment,” he griped.

Mind sprints blitzkrieg And before you know it, He’s dodging bullets in the Battle of Britain, Thinking that the world is damn near gonna end.

But alas, he survives.

Downs a couple of milk stouts, Flops on his bed, And jots in his new Moleskine ‘bout ‘how the cars stroll past Like tumbleweed.’ Then bogs his head for some shiny, golden-ticket hues To pen those trippy chipped grain patterns he sees on the hardwood floors.

St. John was bunkered up in the next room. Found out he knocked up another girl And prolly pranced around in a carousel Of about a million Oh-my-God, what-the-fuck-am-I-going-to-do’s.

The kid only caught one vaguely pant its way in but he couldn’t make out what it was he heard. He was too busy tunneling down a pink-walled foxhole he likes to call the ‘creative process.’

Writer’s block escorts his hand out on a nighttime ramble. The breeze moved him like a good memory’s velvet fingers.

Wonders for a minute at Orion and Taurus and about God and the universe for a minute more. Feet bowing against the diamond asphalt pavement. Innervisions spinning through his bright-blue Sony cans, and he taps his tipsy toes to “Don’t-you-worry-about-a-thing.” Moments like these, with the clean-as-a-whistle sky and the streetlit sadness, the grooving electric piano and the breeze wheeling up the cornfields, he likes to call ‘spirituality.’

After the wind numbs his fingers, He’ll sneak in like a mouse, dust off his shoes, trample right on upstairs, gliding by St. John’s bedroom floating the wings of In A Silent Way.

Midway through “Shh/Peaceful,” he’ll bust open a King James Bible cast nets for inspiration, and after he’s caught his dinner, Filet and fry up in in a tongue-tied sizzle ‘bout how he’s ‘a chain shackled to rusting hope – wading in gaping heart coves, chasing the the Doppler echoes of Bathsheba’s galloping glance.’ or how he sometimes struggles to be ‘a faithful Jonah swallowed like algae in the fleshy, lightless belly of another stormy, merciless evening.’

And St. John’ll prolly still be riding that carousel.