Parental Dispositions

                        Darkened evening shadows descended gradually down celestial havens of mid-summer  complacency. Lackadaisical air-conditioned rendezvous; you and I commenced animated puppy-love beside your stepfather's garbage disposal. Seething sweat-filled concrete swimming-pools of corporeal perspiration; bloodline rashes itched and etched toward dry auburn patterns of rug-burnt July
                                 residential afternoon sofas with me and your family tabby shedding
                                                                   grey hairballs
                                                                        onto crimson
                                                                               furnished curtains
                                                                                  covering early afternoon breezes
                                                                                       sweeping through open screen-windows.
                                                       Your mother was an (whore) drunken recluse in her late thirties; scarlet and cushioned living-room love-seats spread fervently out below domesticated corridors.  Maternal cookie-cutter innuendos, martini-olive dinner-time cutlery- brandishing your deliberated childhood with 5:00 P.M. Moonlighting chicanery: initiating promiscuous schools of thought between the local Jews, Protestant barbers and already irate Catholic women-man she was a handful before her sister's wedding. She had a  razor-sharp shrieking voice that resounded itself way out beyond
                                                              remote backyard perimeters, past
                                                                             city street corners, perpetuating profane gasoline mirages of convenience store nativity. Your pale narrow wrist pressed impatiently to your warm upper-chin in middle class waiting rooms of young adulthood. You childishly wept like an rich man's daughter at unnecessary barmitzvas attended by nonpracticing sentimentalists; I loved how you'd allude to unpleasant periods in your life-as if you endured this time for somebody else
                                                                      at your own expense
                                                                               your expensive clothing and
                                                                                   your stale imagination's expanse neglected
                                                                                     to expand
                                                                                         beyond suburban outdoor clothes-lines; recreational apparel hung in late- August alignment and what if
                                                                   a routine sun's radiance refused to shine tomorrow;
                                                                     formidably declining itself to us with insidious                                                                                               vengeance                                                                                                                                                        like remember when I took a hunting-knife to your stepfather's throat a decade ago on an backdoor kitchen porcelain morning; I took his shitty head by his unkempt hair and bloodily smashed it into the molding floorboards; we were really just emotionally depraved adolescents square dancing amid
 midnight gymnasiums of September (never was a cloudy day); I took you home to your parents bedroom while they were on vacation from themselves in Disney Land 
                                                                                                              or  was it Wildwood or
                                                                                                                 who gives a Fuck?
                                                                                                                       I do, or did.
                                                                           We smeared sticky butterscotch on each others bare flesh amid lukewarm avenues of fleshy curves, intricate ridges and sweet aromas; a mid-afternoon ceiling fan breathed Hershey-kissing promises to your tepid asshole in sugary jests of lovemaking and
                  Fucking.
                     Then you confided in me surprisingly
                            that you always wanted to be a man
                             and I confided in myself
                                    that I was done with you.
                                                               

Donna's Story

                             A few nights awhile back, a friend and I walked in the rain to a south Philly strip-bar. It may of been a Friday or a Saturday; it doesn't matter. In the greater northeast of Philadelphia; we rode around on buses and trains most of the day; confused and mourning the death of some kind of infallible life or beloved existence we never had in the first place.
                              My friend had pills that he ordered online; kind of like generic speed I guess. I took way too many of them and chewed them instead of swallowing them. They were much too strong; I felt immediately that I could keel over at any moment from heart attack, or lack of sleep and nourishment. What is it that I started out to do? I certainly wasn't trying to prove anything to anyone.
                             The drinks at the strip-bar were too expensive; pretty much not worth the moment. People say that they feel bad for strippers; I couldn't help feeling sorry for myself being there; you gotta give them crumpled up dollar bills, you can even throw the bills at them if you like. People say that you should  blame parents for begetting strippers; I strongly disagree with the idea, nobody's perfect. I waited tables for ten years; that was degrading- at least strippers know what to expect from customers: degenerate bachelors jacked up on speed or too drunk to perform in the first place.
   
                            Donna lived in a row-house on the outskirts of a populated city. She had three little boys all taken into state custody.
                     
                          Eastern coastal patterns temporarily permitted sudden gusts of wind into open wintry transit station-lines; frost-ridden jet-streams rolled in from an vast icy Atlantic perimeter. Prime-time darkness descended then digressed off downtown street-cornered intersections. Irritable motorists tailed in off                          New Jersey turnpike tollway galleries,                                                              Interwoven                                                    traffic-light indigestion shrouds
                                                                                 the Ben Franklin Parkway
                                                                           on daylight-saving evenings in February
                                                                      Radio signals churn while pistons pounced dead and rubbery
                                                                              vibrations anon automatic engine exteriors;
                                                             Sullen raindrops dribbled off fire-engine red aluminum detailing;
                                                                 postponing Wednesday rush-hour transgression.
                                                          Donna pleaded with me upon familiar pastime-playing fields;       her pale frigid fingers clasping tightly the wheel of her old man's Pontiac;
                                                          in Thursday afternoon traffic
                                             behind a local school bus letting neighborhood kids back out into the rain
                                                        " If I could just have this one thing; Dan just let me have this one thing and I'll be good- I swear; It won't be like the last time; I promise."
                                                                              

Repentance

                              There rose an indignant famine throughout an certain eastern coastal region; great winds whirled in from the vast Atlantic perimeter, spreading dormant fatigue upon our belligerent Sunday populace- moist and fertile clouds surrounded an grayish tempest; windswept glaciers capsized minute attempts at vague productivity; olde wintry days of Howl surrounded bedridden February.
                                        St. Valentine shot me up with tepid sedative; hypodermic evening milk embalmed our collective subconscious, along vintage county-lines of maladjusted angels.
                                   I've spoken to you and through you soberly, returned immersed in euphoric complacency. Ice-sculpted edifices of cold hungry peasants grimace year-round, we cursed pleasant springtime premonitions, fervently piled decayed bodies atop sweltering dog-days of August insipidity .
                           
                                (A village circle's circumference; bag-women hang their heads in dreadful tiding)
                         
                              Come, come Evangelia; the plaza fountain is frozen now and forever. Vulturous civilians only sigh in passing; transient messages delivered promptly through our father by eternal Pharisees - we currently warm icicle fingers atop street-line sewer drains in stale anticipation; pridefully awaiting the thief who'll lift our hollow spirits back to hell;
                 
                                          In the juvenescence of the year came Christ the tiger
                                 
                                   Warped metal breathes in prolonged intervals of leap-year lineage.
                            Neighborhood ancestry speaks in vacated warehouse tongues, to interwoven city-street corners in residential evening. Prodigal shopkeepers and timorous entrepreneurs hastily scurry along cement sidewalk surfaces, smudging mindlessly toward flickering holiday traffic-light conflagrations. Daylight saving denizens; diseased souls possessing corporeal corpses- unselfconsciously sacrificing personal ends with society's primeval means.
                            4 p.m.; a lulled hush scowls from an remote streetcar rasping down distant avenues. On the fourth-story floor of an section-eight infested tenement, death subsides in humanly initiation. Victorian windows open out onto an slumbering evening courtyard, carpeted in petaled auburn grassland among withered tree-trunk-skeletons.
                            A season dead within a season's cycle. Frail beginnings commence reluctantly into an desirable abundance, an necessary end to our worldly wants and desires.
                            Our fathers flesh for only our sake; we'll continue to hate beyond possible perception. This misconception is designed to take us out until the end, \
                                          and it will
                                            as it has
                                              and will continue
                                                   until an perpetual end
                                                        unimaginably agonizing and torturous
                                                         an end we knew whilst living
                                                          and nothing
                                                               more and
                                                                  more of
                                                                     nothing....
              
                   
                                    (repentance)

Winter Pantomime

                                        ( Boiled-over affection lies in pools of drunken inertia;
                                          vaguely recalling a lack of awareness on my part.)
                                       
                                          Tuesday afternoons of malevolent December. Flickering holiday traffic heading northbound tonight across the wide polluted interstate. Neighborhood space-heaters; a second-story library staircase perimeter.
                                          A city's hearth is on fire; radiantly illumined beneath propped village streetlamps; adorned in frail crimson moonlight and pedestrian sidewalk machinery. Assorted window silhouette-trees; ornamented landscapes tied ribbon red bows of azure. Mural collages overshadow columned sedimentary wallpaper canvases toward placid evening. Infernal daytime structures of prohibited parking-lots in bedridden autumn. Windswept dormitories piled in downtown factory high-rises; refract and reflect pale morbid souls of yesterday's transmigration.
                                         Her incarnadine complexion is tepid and coffee-like; fatigued and neurotic in microcosmic intervals.( Let us make our 5:00p.m. visit to an routine clergyman. Man of pillared cornerstone and tiresome eulogies amid infertile seasons of incest.)
                                         Lovers permit morning comfort to one another; tranquilly nourishing themselves in temporal awakening. Frail and bruised limbs penetrate corporeal bloodstreams; dangling downward toward tiled porcelain floorboards. She stood erect before an heirloom bedroom mirror; mortal antiquities past down from futile generations of self-abhorred folly.
                                        These insidious months grow gloomily and monotonous; analogous; juxtaposed in withered ideals and inherited maelstrom; depraving the spirit's source with unnecessary genealogy. Fervently sucking the inkling's blood that seethes between condominium trees; nocturnally varnished in seasonal disparagement; a motorized refrigerator labors in artificial climates aside pantomime pine-trees in deadened winter.
                                      An apartment radiator combusted between domesticated livelihoods; wine-glass apparel in vacant one-bedroom efficiencies; front-door stoops remain immobile through cedar tree bough disposals. Rural cemetery outskirt blueprints; engraved monuments pillared idly beside a darkened riverside embankment, dank and immersed in embedded aisles of flowerbed burial soil plots.
                                            

Intimacy and Fire

                                         We met in sunny fields of juniper; spread out across a flashing continent of vast vegetation. Maroon and crimson were our thrift store clothing's color at faded evening;
                                        the many velour shades of nightfall's anticipation. In neighborhood doorways we interacted commonly; exchanging ordinary countenances for words. Our futile identities reside calmly tonight amid the pulsating blood,
                                         surrounding our heart's home.
                                         In autumn, leaves rained down in auburn mists; descending from the abundant earth. A tranquil wilderness presented thunder amid August's faint lightning showers. We observed the stoic trees while they grimly sighed and swayed between placid hours. Your eyes cut sharper than double-edged scissors; piercing paper-thin flesh-like sinews,
                                      How clear and concise; the summer bled on. Into fiberglass attics of December, your winter sweater, knitted in delicate thread from soft fingers of frail suburban housewives who've known no comfortable mercy. There minds wander hollowly like dissipating ember below well adorned household mantels.
                                      Past telephone calls made in vain; get behind me Satan: I misplaced my wallet somewhere deep in the forlorn chambers of a prehistoric reptile zoo.
                                        In vacant innocence of sultry morning minutes, our denizen souls burst outward, beyond cold January shutters; out past the dry corner post office; these embalmed streets still recoil through stale attempts at misrepresented utopias, of glamor, clamor and thwarted mistrial.
                                        Our sacred love temporarily sways in irrevocable convalescence; I solemnly recall her mortal boundaries in inevitable human concupiscence:
                                   
                                          Bar-Jesus still paraphrases scripture in omniscient catacombs off drunken midnight boulevards; along forlorn perimeters of primeval fate; amid flickering tinsel alleyways of biodegradable furniture and dreary raindrop stiletto innuendos . The fleshy worm still festers within her corporeal physique; she abhors herself and not her sin. She delights in others misfortune; and hauls a hardened heart with her wherever she goes.
                                         her purse's fabric is less toxic than her feeble soul.
                                       In a local city hospital on a prior mid-summer morning; many decadent decades ago: while automatic engines monotonously hissed off the Ben Franklin Bridge down the New Jersey turnpike,  orbits and orbs of tranquil phosphorescence manifested manifold planets all revoloving around one hypnotic sun; a dawn-like premonition of Saturday sofas on a summer afternoon, a southern city row-home; where a creaking screen door remained propped open for the freshly vacuumed carpet to dream of six coming days and nights without a vacuum. 

"Sundry Awakenings"

                                        
                                          Its been a long time for you now; to
                                                               follow me down apprehensive evenings of Sunday origin; where embryonic night and crimson drapery coincide; to dwell and stumble down dormant avenues of pensive sorrow in bleak November. 
                                                 Apartment window balconies in poignant summer we're inclined  to remember; everything in its semi-totality; as you find yourself now; brandished and hollow amid infertile seasons of dry anticipation; did we foreshadow all that has come to pass; warily elapsing onto deaths primordial doorway. These eastern foothills are blasphemous, minute glimpses of transient humanity in concupiscent intervals; is this what we are condemned to believe in; autumn courtyards below brick concrete columns of mortar masonry; as a broken grandfather clock is hurled down from a third-story railing mezzanine.
                                        You of elderly visions and provisions; constrained to your leisurely recliner; morbid hypocrisy clouds your senile days and ways; dreadful decades of routine hands and vain gestures. Consuming carnal meat with carnivorous tongues; do not teach me what is of the mortal earth: I have eyes to see how afternoons unfold to delicate dusk; as its always been.
                                        Flesh wounds remain sacred to men alone; desolate in the year of pedestrian upheavals and inherited folly. Feline misinterpretations perspire from feminine lips; taking civil orders in neighborhood boulevard diners off polluted interstates. It is the lethargic daytime hours that wage inevitable war on our pliable souls. Through condensed traffic and toxic smoke signals ascending from automatic engines. Rapture comes to us in lunar midnight premonitions; evangelically and well hidden, our love's engraved upon 
                      illumined window sill bulb imagery, refracted in shadowy luminescence off porcelain tenement light fixtures.
                                       We have all become false witnesses; groaning through sporadic tumults of gas-station indigestion. To think is to lie to one's self; do not think; but be as the stoic ocean tide calmly breaking off Mideastern shorelines; the profane city will wear and tear us down to our self-inflicted marrow; putting faith in what is of this world, what more is to be expected than an inevitable death only this world can possibly contrive.
                                           Youth's passages deserted me upon prior timelines, nakedly abandoned amid sultry cornrow lineage. Night-winds came on strong from the silhouetted east; I knew not where to lay my soiled bedhead. Gathering all I could in loose time, making haste among the dewy September daffodils, I came across an ascetic derv possessing an flickering oil-lamp. I asked him where I might find an country house along the desolate perimeter, he replied "thou continues lusting vainly for things thou shall not find, what is the matter with naked children these days?; always desiring something outside to complete what thou hast inside already."
                                       I've prayed through logic and self-restraint, I've prayed with bruised fleshy fingers shackled tightly on either side; you can't take this away. To not live by the law of men; but live by faith. In faith lies reward in which law doth not provide.

"A child's prayer'

                                            (In  earlier months we found ourselves warily fatigued, famished amid carnal                                   idealizations and immediate recreations.)
                                             All along the terrestrial forests, a sacred hymn discoursed along illumined trails of seething foliage, 
                                             elfin honeybees swiveled along mortal boughs of celestial tiding.
                                             sullen oak tree pinions swayed and withered between pale morning hours                                                of placid daylight.
                                             bucolic backgrounds combusted in unquenchable flame
                                            wrought in an diabolic forenoon.
                                             It was, and is; of the earths tranquil heat and kindred velocity; quaintly                                 shimmering in arid billows of seasonal mist upon the voluptuous vale hillsides.                                 Let us not fail to render the toxicity of
                                             mortal flesh and 
                                             avarice
                                             Ascend! do the autumn nymphs rise above barren foothills of
                                             broken humanly spirit; maternally lost amid embryonic constellations of mythological eternities;
                                            speak no more the sarcastic anecdotes that pull ascetic tapestries down upon the poor widows livelihoods.  
                                  
                                             immersed  in desolate refuge , misplaced and depraved amid scorching deserts of abundant futility,
                                   reposed at the hot-gates of Crete
                                           We marveled amongst ourselves humbly,  while eminent days transgressed in transient intervals of leisure; wrought through illustrious fields of columned grain and moonlit eclipses,  Fidelity being our central focus and desired objective; while our hearts acquiesced demonic motes of routine interactions, subtle coquetries of negligence, our digression flickered incessantly through our frail psyches,
                            
                                               Evening residences; rural silos and lemon-yellow husks of interstate evanescence, (aside a pleasant state highway)
                                                   . A 57' Chevy sauntered up the remote desert mountains; below emblazoning atmospheres of ultraviolet piety;
                                               crescent pinnacles of freeway breathing, automatic, then hushed to dissipation..
                  
                                              (A child's prayer)
                      
                                        Priceless hymns echo down neighborhood walkways; tombstone stove of electricity; hand-me-down damasks spread out in retrospective kitchen alignments; we listened vigilantly while narrative talk show hosts unraveled our domesticated fate. Papa beat me to a bloody pulp when bringing up politics; he was always drunk, so it didn't make any difference if we were in a bar.
 
 

(the lame progression of illness)

                              I've seen the tiresome journeymen stumble in and out of dim-lit barroom vestibules, with stale morning footsteps; whispering snarlingly on broken bar-stools, silently adulterating- blindly staggering down narrow hallway landings; firmly mounting tenement staircases; grey bloodshot eyes prying-peering out from second and third story window balconies. Furrowed clod plots and piled dirt patterns align an autumn courtyard below; among the layered brick and columned mortar; shadows die in the eminent depth of countless dreadful evenings aside a dry fiery mantel; wretched sounds that lull from distant outbound trains and railway cars of ole rustic tiding,
                              sullenly domesticated; enveloped in soaked cardboard binding; a soiled paper bag refugee remains homeless and wayward tonight; garbage disposal headlines stretch vaguely out across grim night-sky networks of white electronic brilliancy  .
             How brisk and blithely, the naive neighborhood schoolchildren frolic round cemented sidewalk corner-stalls, promenading down dusty streets of ornamented silhouettes.
                    It is the worn forlorn age of monumental suffrage laid out for a season's cycle, embedded oak firmaments, late November archives of mid-autumn growth;
                                     
                                                      ( the lame progression of illness)
                                 
                          Florid red and sea-foam green: and not with impunity; our dying memories flicker like dead boughs of bare cypress trees wrought  in the deep green depth of remote forest hillsides. In the innocence of ungodly hours we find ourselves at home, within a hearth's tranquil heat, in dens of unflattering recreation.
                    
                                     our children have not won the war, though
                                     let it be known, unto
                                     their deaths they shall fight
                           
                           what a frail woman has said and done to me; my adorned ghostly wife
                           her undergarment oaths of sacred anointment; let 'em shine tepid bright streams against the hollow ceiling. A family promise made wholly from a heart's faith; vacant windowsill candlelight refracts sordid shadows from the clear cluttered night. Late city streets they bleed midnight tendencies; remain ethereal and gloomily immortal in flesh-like eternities.
                             Our mid-afternoon garden of common residence; casually speaking in terminal tongues; how habitually mortal we are!; clasping a pale feminine sole of your bruised dainty foot ; lying naked on a bedspread; I flung a velvet pillow by your heirloom headboard; I fancy you tenderly; but how rottenly spoiled you are! Watching you hesitate upon crucial awakenings, prevaricating lucidly to ones self, disgustingly; and so beguiled! attempting to justify ones self to ones tattered self; beaten into self-afflicted submission; to surrender and to
                                   admit complete defeat is
                                   but a transparent awakening into
                                                             a selfless proclaimed progress of glory, holiness and
                                                                                     fearless
                                                                                          victory.
                                    
  
                                 

"Rikki's Requiem"

                                            Alone with a vacant soul and a perilous heart: I resided wearily, in a dim-lit one-room basement efficiency on the downtown outskirt. A friend practicing a Christian ministry attempted  guiding me toward radiant daylight, through active worship and daily abstinence. A flat suburban highway stretched invulnerably before spectating motorists; consciously dead at their steering wheels, between coffee gas-station intervals. Tedious workdays being a lifestyle necessity for me during that time; how else can a junky feed his insidious obsession? 
                                            Rikki lived a few blocks toward the heart of this factory town and its weekday traffic. She possessed a petite body frame with small slender shoulders; strawberry-blonde hair with dark highlighted bangs. Her gray-hazel eyes were often shaded in black mascara overtones. Rikki lived directly behind the Main st. nail salon. While malicious evenings of tedious reckoning were at hand; we interacted efficiently through stale moonlit corridors and drunken pavement pilgrimages.  Chemical endurance fluctuated through a season's nostalgic cycle. Amid late-Halloween ornament alignment; Row-home residences adorned in precocious maple seasoning: pumpkin-porches along wooded stoops of auburn. A late-autumn recluse returned home upon a gravel driveway parking-lot; leading to a rotted lower-class apartment building, An unmaintained tractor rested idly outside my cellar window.
                                             Dear Rikki, a meticulous feline swindle merchant of dry and deadly goods. Her sinful, reposed life remained indifferent; to the far desolate cries of plagued remote wildernesses.
                                            Rikki's body now rests between brown-gold burial leaf-piles; a gray-grain tombstone eternity amid haystack needle cemeteries. Deceitful and syringe-full; blood-red q-tip acquaintances: pale narrow wrists of cellulite abscesses. A guaranteed cure manifested nightly, by stupefied heavens of unconscious sorrow. St. Peter in all of his acclaimed glory could never of predicted such unnecessary heartache, nor abrupt departure. Dear Rikki angelic valedictorian on high, in an earth tone corduroy jacket, ripped denim jeans while commencing local barroom upheavals. Midnight recklessness and diseased drunken mayhem shrouded her tumultuous days. Nocturnal cloud shapes grimly oscillated through black omnipresent horizons.
                                           Anxiety-ridden, dear Rikki pleaded in foxhole prayer. Coming out of 5th. St. woodwork havens with artificial Sunday piety. Quaint afternoon streets temporarily humbled her involute quest of endless desire; among the wind-swept dooryards.
                                        Prescription sleeping pills never sufficed her psyche with rest nor contentment. Her morning obituary bled ink-red hues through the Daily News. We already read the headline while she slept in her apartment bedroom; behind the nail salon; where her front door opened out onto backward alleyways of intermittent torture. To think, was to be enslaved to dear Rikki. Rehab forenoons in stone sober-settings; as institutionalized as I was during that time; tomorrow became a rapacious fear to her that yesterday could hardly handle.
                                          A fatal progression took Rikki's frail life not long ago; amidst her daily evening travels to Kensington and back. If not one thing; then perhaps another. A plagued orphan toward dissolute wreckage.  Rikki perished, morbidly misplaced among her familiar so-called friends. 

Autumn Oracle

                                
                                   
                            Adolescent schoolboy with subtle winds upon his elementary shoulders; how hazily the winter sun blares on his black-Velcro backpack, hurriedly strolling up lulled residential avenues of late-October. A lazy slumbering forenoon; it is the lackadaisical hunting season of stoic middle-aged men in worn shirtsleeves; hungover postal-workers stumble along cement neighborhood walkways, sweating out  last-night escapades of generic-vodka-bottle delirium, handing out mundane social security revenue-checks to senile elderly women in row-houses and legless-Vietnam vets amid sullen wheel-chair vestibules. A glowering television hall-lamp bleeds lemon-yellow beads below calm domestic corridors. A crimson carpeted landing unravels beyond a brass-rimmed staircase mantel. Bourgeois in essence, a poignant perfume odor permeates out through kitchen screen-doors; onto unkempt backyard foliage heaps. Moonlit dream-hours hush and dwindle amidst bedroom candlelight shadowing. A rhetoric hush arises from walk-in closet catacombs. Mother's lavender hair-brush retrieval evenings; raven black window trees rustle through nostalgia's unanswered questioning.
                              Lovers of great maple passageways, forlorn autumn forest of dank silken imagery overshadows late midnight maelstroms of romanticized reckoning. Our forsaken ancestors rested humbly in reclined lawn chairs along these auburn courtyards; reciting lustful hymns of forgotten poetry and vulnerable flesh anthems. An abandoned family-tree basilica of rotted oak bark and brown seething cedar. Radiant flames ascend then pierce the frail night-sky horizon; burnt piles of dried crumbling leafs and loose-leaf paper manuscripts.        
                                  We are sacred: of the earth and its deceitful pleasure: of
                                  the bewildering awe of a mortal flesh magnitude.
                         
                                Run-on routine workdays kept by an underpaid Cantonese housekeeper. Vacuuming in the unalterable silence of a windswept Sunday. Post-cathedral footsteps linger down marble mezzanine stairways: Feline football sofa cushioning; Varnished coffee-table alignment evenings spread out amongst spacious living-room hallways; we somehow co-exist through the casual monotony of workplace business-call intervals; how we panic at nothingness while it defecates upon us, captivating our beaten senses in its subdued presence. A dejavu machinery landscape; lucid daylight descends down upon vast bucolic pastures from an ultraviolet afternoon heaven.
                                   
                                            ( from a 3rd story window balcony) 
                           Porcelain dummies crowd a revolving town's epicenter. Taxi-cab traffic signaling natives; Fine-dine wine glass restaurants allude to an unmaintained glorification of a working-class peasantry hero's obituary:
                   To dream is to sleep and nothing more and
                    nothing more
                                is to
                                      die.      

"My dead friends and I"

                                  My dead friends left me rotting in a third-story tenement hallway uptown; where the regional railway coincides with intersecting bus-stop terminals. The weather was brisk and at autumn's peak. Fogged evening window seats on a rush-hour train. I could feel dark ages riding down upon us: eternally. Prior decades of keeping to myself; blowing off steam in greyhound restroom intervals. Truck-stop prostitutes: we dwindle in subdued terror and erroneous mayhem. The plunger left in his pale sinew as he exhaled one final terminal breath.
                                  Dying shadows spread out against concrete apartment building courtyards below. I peered downwards to an urban uproar. Bedbug furniture being thrown from a second-story balcony. A livestock woman seems upset at her domesticated lover for unknown reasons. Better head to the neighborhood delicatessen before two a.m.. Black-and-white living-room television static upheavals. Beer-stains battered upon torn maroon carpeting. Cockroach kitchen-upholstery: leave the fluorescent lights on while we rest upon gun-shop mattresses; soiled in head-lice and cheap make-up furniture bedding.
                                My ex-wife came back from traveling abroad one winter afternoon with a new face. A fresh approach to the city and all it had to offer. She came back to a pensive young adult-male about 5'8 with nocturnal bedhead. I had the eight-ball blues at a stale morning diner one early Saturday. Bloody-Mary waitresses: a counterfeit delight. What happens on the east side stays on the east-side: downtown trafficking violations. Drunken Sunday art museum madness. Picasso was a bastard, Dali: an arrogant son-of a bitch. Pollock was an ungrateful drunk. Basquiat? who the Fuck is basquiat?
                                My dead friends and I stroll down residential walkway landings amid late-October reckoning. Cement sidewalk brick-house vestibules where street-bred pigeons nest and crap. One particular dead friend of mine hasn't shit in three weeks: he blames it on his opiate habit.
                                So anyway: my ex-wife left me lying naked on the torn-up maroon carpeting I was  talking about; juiced-up on dirt-bike tequila listening to Jackson Browne records. Every once in a while my telephone would ring: the 5th Avenue score report: Leroy and Muhammad wanting feedback on this boy 'Measles' I was telling them about the night before.
                                 Once a few years back; my ex-wife and I were still madly in love. Drinking junkyard bourbon with twisty straws out of empty gasoline receptacles. We would watch V.H.S. movies until placid daylight ascended up through the pale horizon; I thought we would live forever in our delusional livelihood; we achieved some morbid sense of camaraderie. She would occasionally ask me why I was drinking first thing in the morning; I would say "because I have to". It was just the way things were at that time. To this day I still can't decide which one I love the most: The flesh and blood or the pale silent ghost. The ageless mystery remains within the confines of my daily cemetery tombstone retrieval..
                  

"From a local diner window"

                        From a local diner window; an afternoon street yields to a moment's stillness. Endless days spent watching tenement wall-clocks steadily bleed out tenuous minutes. The second-hand winds down between indoor hours; protected from pale morbid winter. Fluorescent shadows drift and pounce off household walkways. Marble steps of stone that lead to her doorway; remain petrified at her residential entrance cameo. Boredom flickers as electronic evenings grow dim; it is the decline of a seasons cycle. This suburban town knows no distinct flavor; mediocrity pours from its brim. A lakeside park resides upon a street city intersection; while vacated park-benches rest silently beside a grim Tuesday river. Winding out of time: our frail existence exhales it's last feted breath.
                       Routine maidens of the lower-middle class; teach our routine children wisely. We shall know no heavenly rapture in this inconvenient era. On blue-collared summer vacations we absorb the beige-white shore-board; while Saturn's phosphorescent ring flickers mechanically amid jaded black-hole orbits. Stationary time knows no desired satisfaction; piling old dingy clothes in dark remote corners. Dusted cupboards of stale early-morning descend frail mortal ancestry. This sullen neighborhood neck of thinning woods grow sacred. I act a patient fool before my vulnerable lifetime grows short. The folly of innocence lost among naked days of laughter. Love knows no educated boundary. My bleeding pen of yesterday scribbles pretentiously through self-proclaimed diaries; layered in age-old evening soil. The auburn dust of a misplaced generation greets my workshop window; below Autumnal trees: withered through laboring weather. The boughs grow hollow with meager disease. I watch the swallows migrate up the snowy coast. Below transcending skies; my lover in slumber: on a scarlet bed she lies. Awakening to an empty death of Mexican immigrants in peephole kitchen vestibules; where porcelain floorboards grieve a long-awaited absence of morning mops to sud their surface.
                       A century gone wrong in the eyes of god; is nothing but a brittle leaf fallen between femininely fingertips. A womanly scarf shields her soft neck from the frigid terrain; while mild clouds disperse gently above: get off your pawnshop knees now darling. There are still sharp thunderous cries that echo throughout our apartment courtyard on quaint autumn evenings. A native yelp upon our urban threshold; a pair of worn sidewalk sneakers beyond their prime. Road-shoveled dirt and cement-truck upheavals; pained personal suffrage is all that remained: after a totaled misused decade. 

Thickened Bloodline References

                                 In prior days, I allowed myself to be frequented by insistent worry and restless indecision; presently I find myself at rest; in complete entrancement beside daytime riverside embankments. Afternoon calls my subconscious to an open countryside clearing. These vast greening fields have known peace for quite some time now. A commanding wind descends across the widened Pacific perimeter. Oceans of gray grain and abundant barley. Sunflower willows in the prime of god's seasonal imagery. I squat beside an abandoned lakeside where the country-stream runs steadily. Hours dwindle majestically beyond my subdued presence. We picnicked once along these village water-canals. I held your firm hand in my apprehensive grip; never to let your breathing escape me. Pale winds descended down upon our painted playing-field awhile back. I've let you escape me in god's time; recalling fondly our comfortable delusion. Back home in residential evening; independent music resounded beneath our four-story apartment ceiling. The afternoon city is yet to forgive me for wasted years thrown out with the recyclables. Womanly acquaintances left streaking rainbow residue upon my frail blue horizon.
                          Salt-water mermaids drowned in green-sweeping seas of late-afternoon promises; broken and calmed, winded with reassured resistance. The flexible elastic of young adulthood snapped between my frail bruised fingertips. I check up on you occasionally amid modern channels of electronic signatures. My wish is for you to maintain health and happiness; as long as your unpredictable years unravel before you. (angelic-eyes aligned in nocturnal eyeliner). Green seaweed caught upon ragged rocks of purple coral. Limestone and water-stained.  Ivory waves and sea-foam-buoys remain adrift throughout the sun's ultraviolet sparkle. Radiant light-beams refract off oceanic crests wreathed and washed up on shoreline beaches . Clouds drift above leaving skyline trails of fading smoke; intoxicating the layered o-zone atmosphere. Clear through lunar night-time cycles; vibrant in shallow lucid daytime intervals.
                                 What have you seen from local Brooklyn balconies; peering downward to preoccupied pedestrians doing jay-walk jags to traffic-signal restroom havens. In the quaint corners of broken night; I apathetically sneer to the broken-down taxicab natives soaked in overpriced gasoline. Eastern: yet area-codes away. Upon f-stop timelines and desirable dreamlike equators: you wear your girly shirtsleeves adequately. Our decades unfold exponentially; piling years upon lost days of failed attempts at vain contentment. 
                                 In the crimson hearth of prosthetic awareness; this may come once a lifetime. Our porous flesh lies vulnerably in maroon pools of thickened bloodline ancestry. Families derived from defective tongue-like sinews. I want our kids to emanate from your deep-routed vagina sewer; while the sharp cryptic knives of humanity pierce through our child's playpen anatomy.

Previously Unreleased B-sides: "Sidewalk footprint impressions"

                                   Fatigued and neurotic, impressive thoughts implode beneath a vast concrete wall of echo; while many commanding footsteps ascend the weekday courthouse entrance. A monumental marble staircase unravels before the required presence of uninspired lawyers and uneducated petty-criminals. I was an innocent bystander before initiating a private war on myself. A darkened blue afternoon sky stretches above my worn countenance; where cigar-shaped clouds immerse and transgress off a grim faded skyline. Ageless tricks played at the drop and jingle of many a-brass button. Expensive neckties and forlorn academy belt-buckles. This is the era of necessary inconvenience; with too much aggravation. Tell-tale assault charge stories manifest hourly in this justified perimeter. Spend your hard-earned weekly money on my jailhouse commissary books before my arrival. I'll read up on legal terminology and prosecution loopholes. Abandoned lovers leave your degenerate husbands behind in these steel-celled quarters to reap what they sowed. Leftover baggage; unanswered years of excruciating burden. Unfortunate alcoholic lingo terminated with the abrupt summoning of dog food tray lunch-trays.   
                                   Send springtime flowers to my predicted grave burial-plot before I retire. In brisk autumnal weather; where field-side highway wind-towers sway to the declining wind of an embalmed evening. In dead-end streets where neighborhood vultures sleep in hope of brighter days and vibrant hours. The nocturnal serenading stars of coming freight-train nights transcend counterfeit moonbeams in soft steady anticipation. Residential mothers and cruelly beaten housewives fry battered eggs in placid morning; while the jagged piercing of annoyingly narrated radio commercials shriek at an ungodly hour. Waking up to random kitchen audio, the thunderous clanging of stove-top frying pans sizzling with pork grease. The fat of centuries plagued my ex-wife with unexpected love-handles. A dismal moan descends from the next-door upstairs bedroom window. Not even noon yet and the fresh-faced newlywed couple's already at it. Making sensual love amid domestic-relation corridors.
                                  As a teenager in residential purgatory, my temporary lover would come over after her parents went to work. I'd invite her in through  living-room-screen doors.. We'd make animated puppy love upon afternoon sofas. Residential portraits would sweat; glazed with the tepid heat that emanated into our household atmosphere. An unnatural poignant aura of chemical scent and modern perfume. No one told me patchouli went out of style back then.Caught in the firm morbid grip of a lazy slumbering summer afternoon. Abandoning old ideals of national icons and suburban baseball diamond-fields. The lackadaisical dirt of adolescence; then months later: a cold November rake in hand, gathering up old pine-needles. Hard love is a lot of hard work. Easy love comes easy to the cold and the needy while caught in the brutal confines of frail deserted Winter. A daily allowance can suffice an adolescent while behaving correctly.
                               Years later; we recall these delicate incidents amorously: as if we outlived ourselves exponentially. Yearning for the forgiving warmth and maternal understanding of unresolvable childhood. It is mistakable and foolish to get married for these reasons perhaps.
                               Bubble-gum machine windows align the September Saturday township streets. I find myself at well-awaited peace (for once in my life); experiencing a modern type of serenity. These sidewalk intervals know a wide variety of native footprints; my footsteps seem unfamiliar to them: I am not the same person.

"Revelations Manifest Themselves"

                         I've been raised to love a good gasoline rainbow spread out against gritty oil-slicked street-curbs. Cement city sidewalks align public-transit intersections; lit up in fluorescent midday populace. Residential boulevards of late Summer: the decline of bloom among the dying cypresses; welcoming a rebirth of Autumn. Bicycling down county hillside pathways that surface layered auburn dirt; faded with each genuine season: an urban bred-rose breathes it's way up through the paved concrete: burnt through the radiant ultraviolet-sun that pours down afternoon fragments upon automobile windshields.
                        Local township schoolyards; the sweet sleeping honeybees of late-September. Anticipated death and abrupt misery in darkened November. Let the semi-morbid countdown to eternity begin; icicle-in-hand, while we wait in vacated commercial cemeteries filled with lucrative assorted floral arrangements and assorted coffin corpses: exhibiting an abandoned tombstone demeanor.  My generation died with the passing of the last century. Strolling down these village walkways at night; I come across an unkempt young man from the Salvation Army (who goes by the name of Phil.) Phil was my roommate at the Eagleville Psych-ward in June. Phil sees me but doesn't remember me; it turns out that I'm doing much better than he is (for now.)
                       Let my unmet spoiled mistress rest easily tonight with her routine thoughts upon her pale thwarted mattress filled with fluffy feathered pillow cushioning; a dull wooden headboard soiled with hair-grease and self-obsessed misfortune. My love is for the endless restfulness I am yet to encounter in this pensive lifetime. I can now madly cackle at the sordid mistrials and mistakes I subjected myself to thus far. It is the springtime of passion and desire for me while the oval earth broadly turns upon it's dull axis. I've experienced a wide array of non-sturdy emotional foundations, looking for acceptance in all the wrong places; and this is okay too.
                        Park pavilion children grimace at the perspiring evening, while it dwindles down to dusk. The lakeside teenagers make their way home to their parents households; speaking thug-like dialect, possessing biblical names: and residing in residential suburbia. Swamp flies pervade our diseased porous flesh in dense August humidity. Blood scab Mosquito bites itch and swelter: the death of a brief putrid summer. The refrigerator's freezer was amid the hearth of dry-July when it ran out of ice-cubes; blame it all upon the unfilled ice trays.
                      Dissolved in ashtray coffee table accumulation, the petite den window that looks grimly out onto my adolescent wonderland has been boarded up with hollow antique shutters and dreary velvet drapery. I shall decorate this weathered screen window with myriad flickering light-bulbs of seasonal imagery. Red and green; the night shall allude to a comfortable death that knows no timeline. 
                      
                       
 

"Our life was good in the beginning"

                             A few years back: within decadent residential enclosures, approaching late November sullenly. Unwinding red and green light bulbs flickered in steady intervals; from household windows out on to our city street. A painted snow-scene aura radiated from her feline sweater. Auburn-like; a thick bushy brow captivated her dark brown eyes solemnly: a wooden Jesus ornament towered high above the decorated boughs. Hallmark cards we opened on special mornings amongst our few unique children, how irreplaceable: a child's blood. This was our life; and it was good in the beginning. I remind you a few years back now: I'd have our South Philly row house prepared for your return home from work. Children would be reading at the living-room table, below ceiling-light candelabra, nose-deep into their homework studies.
                           Evening would delicately ascend from the translucent artificial fireplace, up through the screen-entranced chimney. Santa Clause would bump his fat ass upon getting caught in the cumbersome woodwork. There were many things beside the fireplace that were artificial during this time. Our marriage whether we'd like to admit it or not was a sham: a delusional fantasy, a desirable pipe-dream lacking a sturdy foundation. As much that I told you I loved you: I lied to myself. Our kids bought our marriage some time; all three of them: two boys (twins), and one girl. I cared for you dearly in the wild beginning. Life introduced certain undetectable romanticized trouble for us both on the same timeline: without parallel. We struggled together before our struggles became one; then we both were screwed.
                          I recall how you worked part-time at the same downtown department store I frequented. I'd see you in brief passing: coming and going. I'd dream of you as a sly adolescent girl on the run from her problems. Maybe as a child scribbling nightly fantasies into a self-proclaimed diary. Our honeymoon was bittersweet: tragic and comical. Quickly we found out there was no smooth sailing for us. You're deceased belligerent mother the alcoholic: verbally abusive and belittling. Your father, still alive and pleasantly clueless. Still playing a major role in our dysfunctional livelihood. I'd be downstairs in the kitchen washing dishes; gently placing them onto the sink-rack. You'd make your way downstairs from putting the kids to bed; glass of red wine in hand. We were both passionate about our drinking and monthly finances. Many forlorn nights ending tragically due to false expectations and intoxicating black-out periods.
                           Those days in the beginning era of our marriage: I treasure beyond anything else in my life. It seemed that everything was right for us: the kids, our careers, our youth; how time caught up with us immeasurably. It was not soon after that I fell into a deep heaving black-pit of depression. You were able to take care of the kids while I sat home and drank; looking for work in all the wrong places. Divorce papers and the trailer were next for me. At least I can say that I'm a man who once had it all. My family was my responsibility; and I threw it to the waste-side. You are a very strong woman who could control your drinking much more than I could. Sure if I could go back perhaps I'd change some of the things I did and said; maybe make a few different decisions. Destiny has a way of smiling into your frail tartar eyes, then fucking you from behind. If I do recall correctly; you never like it from behind.

\

Bessie Nightly

                           Pardon my late-pajama afterglow dear Bessie, as a light drizzle settles beneath the lazy residential backyard tree-stump perimeter. In ages grown worn through afternoon fabric embroidering and brisk lunchtime seasoning. Bessie offers me desolate bedtime stories and hand-me down garments of grim yesterdays along stained-glass Baptist cathedrals. Centuries weaved by the old thimble and brass medallion. Once upon a century: a trophy wife, a young beautiful bride to a well decorated World War 2 veteran. Old rusted tea kettles and brand varnished brush strokes.
                          Vintage nylon tucked away neatly in bedroom drawers, layered in faded timeline sequins. Bourbon and dingy drapery align her household windows. Dusted in the graveyard aftermath, gone overseas in abandoned railway transportation boundary-line stations. The old summer grove homeland stretches out beyond the winding Mississippi. Drunk by 5 p.m. and nowhere close to the ancient burial wetlands, mama would rub Kentucky whiskey on her gums as an infant.
                          "The Wright Brothers got nothing on me, who would have known the bastards were right", she stares into her nightly scotch highball. I sit across from Bessie, between a plywood coffee-table, below incandescent light fixtures, sighing intermittently, as random thoughts breeze through my fatigued conscious. Martha (my ex-wife) was a young vibrant woman; with an uncanny knack for crossword puzzles, when she grew heated she would insult me in Latin. Well-read and insanely bipolar, I would know when she stopped taking her medication. I can only listen to Bessie for so long before I become extremely drunk and anti-social. A character flaw I always possessed (even as a young boy in cemetery courtyard surroundings)
                           I moved in with old Bessie about a year and a half ago, when I could no longer afford to pay mortgage on the estate after Martha left (bah! she took the kids with her, she can have 'em!) I earn my keep by stripping down to my bare essentials on cue, (when the vocals come in on track 8 of Sinatra's first studio album, it is a great album though.) Continuing onward we commence to have a rather personal exchange of angel food cake and peppermint patties, she then stuffs a two-dollar bill up my anus, laughs hysterically so that angel food cake disperses from her nose out onto the plywood coffee table (some cake lands in her highball as well, she slugs it all down in one clamorous gulp when the song ends and the ceremony climaxes). She then throws her elderly granny panties at me, making me parade in front of the living room window butt-ass naked with the panties around my neck, usually by this time of the evening I'm so intoxicated that I don't even care anymore. Thank god for Bessie though, she is a damned good looking gal for an eighty-nine year old. I'm still that lost little boy that needs old Bessie to take care of me. Martha was right, she knew I started seeing Bessie before she left me.
                        

"Rosemary and I"

                               Rosemary blinked from her first story living-room window, looking out onto the neighborhood's sleeping rural sidewalk. Consequently dense in domesticated summer, residential outskirts  rest languidly upon buried-aged foundations; condensed prickling auburn foliage over jagged sedimentary stone.  Creased bushes and thunder-droughts dried and- (you can crush them between your fingertips). The early autumn seed, and cruel ripe nectar. Beaten marble rock and velour shades of evening. Night-toned moonbeams surface and eclipse above, descending downward, falling gracefully, to Ohio's vast crescent cornfields. Midwestern and seasonal: Let us pause and grimace, it is quite current that death beckons her.
                              Rosemary; isolated and strawberry blond; pensive upon a maroon-cushioned loveseat, possessing a deep longing for the afternoon city. Cryptic and elusive: daytime thoughts sweeps through her frail subconscious. The dim-lit kitchen upholstery and antique coffee table fragments. Wall-hung imitations in momentary panic. Van Gogh's' sunflowers quickening in broad retractable sun shadows, that permeate above the carpet. Wallowing in existence and mockery. The soap rack and liquid soap dispenser. Cotton linens crusted in deluded detergent, myriad gnats and swamp flies swarm along pestering lake-land perimeters, while the shallow ghost of low-class economics binds one's starry-eyed vision.
                              It is the evening of our minds that stagger out onto village walkways; while crimson dust of futile belonging grows cold and withered. Putrid along with August heat, our bones degrade, desensitize, one's memory plateaus then disintegrates. We hear the youth-like cries that surround a populated township circle, left frayed and murmuring. Agriculture's diamond baseball fields and silent side-shows. Hidden footbridges converge with unresolved creek currents. 
                              Wandering years drift in and out through my dreary perception, while distant desert morning frost awakens in stale hope of hope itself, or all that imaginary dreams have to offer. I sit and listen; waiting patiently for the pale eyes of destiny to find me, (after tracking me down for so long.) Through long-awaited passion and untempered fury. My disease grows calm with the transparent trickle, of the one fatal guaranteed cure.