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.