I plan on continueing this little ditty in a political manner as my hiatus and my fiction has arrived me in a state of delusional dereliction - only to say the best!

"The time has come", the Walrus said, "to talk of other things. Of sails and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and Kings, and why the sea is boiling hot and whether Pigs have wings. True lay, true la, come one and all for Cabbages and Kings."

Somewhere between Alex Jones and Rush Limbaugh, somewhere deep in the twilight, we will find the truth, the fact, the fiction, and folly.

Maybe, just maybe, we will condescend and transcend at the same time and in doing so we can sleep so softly with the truth, that we scribe the future. Many have disregarded me due to my absence or my change of pace during the race, but, when all is said and done, there is a moment of Gil Scott Heron to be had; a bit of Ben Franklin's beverage.

When we continue to read and learn and conserve and construct do we lead the pack to the meat of the fury and fashion and, of course, the survival, do we begin to comprehend the wrath of a World that we found oursleves bereft of.

This is the begining of a new age; a time of podcasts and written blather that just may make a difference due to the lack of finacial backing and not the propencity of it.

We shall start the revolution.

We shall ingest the change.

May no one remain silent during the revision.

May no one revise enough to make the palate slavate less or more.

We will be one in our diversity.

It is time to stand up and say the truth. Truth is the ultimate painful succure of healing.

The wound is a gash of evil, and even the most ridiculous allies sum up it's pain with each drawn thread.

Gather.

Learn.

Know.

Godspeed ...

They walked up to the starting point , not thinking what may lay ahead, and in that they found half the wonder. Something tugged a twig this way and that; a branch was tossed aside with the calloused attention of a catatonic addict seeking out the perfection of their cause. Both children seemed to be groped and grasped by what would lay ahead of the immediate; what was now.

They looked at each other in order to figure out the atrocity to be had. One pulled a knife. One laughed and thought about how many guns there were in the World, and for a minute he had a thought of conscience. It was quickly disbanded by the thoughts of Baby Einstein and it’s projected images of Ravel.

The raccoon lay there like dead raccoons do. A thought of dancing beings rectified in the sounds of the cello and all of it’s magnificent 37 sounds. The boys stared at each other, not knowing what to do.

One reached into his pockets, deep, and pillaged out a piece of gum that had grown incestuously stuck to a piece of foil that enveloped the confection. He offered half of the stick to the other boy.

The other boy wiped his palms of sweat against his thighs and wished that red and white checkerboard images were not his fate. He stood up tall, and out of respect , accepted the stick of chewing delight with a verve and vigor that may not be found in the youth of today.

Both looked at each other with a desperation that was indescribable for such children. Loneliness is not comprehendible for youth; it is not a kid’s game. Only grown-ups find themselves masticated by such overtly trivial folly - existence is such a troubled game.

The snow creeped up onto the edges of both of their shoe soles in some unexplainable paternal way; protective, coddling, cuddling. Each crisp little flake, stacked so right, gripped and held them in place as they looked at the fallen raccoon holding it’s ground in death and stillness. Their exhales like the bulls of Pamplona; their grimaces like the victims.

The eyes, like glass, had nothing to say. Still. Done. Poke, poke; stick, stick. Both boys giggled and the dark haired one stuck his gum out on his tongue and quickly drew it back in toward his uvula like a glove to a bag during the “Thrilla’ in Manilla”. One of them yodeled to see if the sound would reflect back off the gilded pines in just the right fashion to create arousal in the fallen beast at hand.

The lighter haired boy dug deep into the pockets of a pair of corduroys worn far too tight that his Mother insisted still “fit just right in all the right places“. When his Mother would say that, it would make him feel uneasy; uneasy like drinking a milkshake made of spoiled milk. He scratched his balls in all the ways that balls want to be scratched; he knew - he read the tomb of ball scratching, “Scratch Them Now Or Forever Hold Your Peace”. He told his companion such and the both of them giggled in their girlish tones. When both of them talked or laughed or any other verbal exchange, it sounded like two ten year old girls who had been smoking Pall Malls for a couple of years; Muppets who had sucked down balloons of nitrous and helium mixed together in one fell shot. Suck, suck, suck …

The raccoon stayed still as if beaten down by a women dressed in leather in a London loft listening to Lydon and the lawless ruffians found within the cortex of spray paint, dog food, and fallen aristocracy. Obviously the snow and cold (and a Green Bay team from before the Super Bowls we all know) held the attention of the coon, much like the Ritalin addled Sponge Bob consumerism of the siblings left at home whom may have not dealt with mammal corpses in such a sedate and sound manner as the light and dark haired boys chewing gum and ball scratching did.

The claws of the beast were focused and prismed like a twenty-sided dice focusing on the future of a Fighter of some class level with an armor modification of some magical result. Both boys really didn’t know what to do beyond the focus on aspects of fortitude, resilience, that could still resemble life, strength. During one day not so long ago, the beast function scavenged, killed, consumed. Jaws hung heavy consumed with the awe.

The gum tipped tongues began to flicker once again, this time out of arrogance. Meat hung deep in the jowls of Death and the snow didn’t melt any quicker on the heels of youth. Reddened were the cheeks of boys staring down the gun of desensitized rigor mortise. It was more folly of find than memorial of mortality.

The dark haired demon, with locks a blowin’ in the frigid freeze, checked the state of his ass with his left hand and picked his nose (in some sort of residual disrespect to a creature he never once known) with his right; both diggings were out of animosity towards a creature that never even dreamt of parental trash receptacles. One finger (dug far too deep) was left smelling like feces; one nostril was blocked with a finger hunting ammunition to shoot at the farer of the two hooligans of high jinx and boredom’s reign. Tight and called out right - boredom knows a bitch (and a stinky pinky) better than any of those Piccadilly whores.

With that thought, the fare haired boy used the raccoon as a hat. He picked that stick rotting frozen corpse up, and tilted it up just so against his hair line in order to compliment his forehead. After doing so with a fervor addled twist of gala, his balls were adjusted once again (due to a fancy or a pre-occupation of dealing with Hustler magazine and a step-father figure) and he smiled humming some sort of palsy ridden version of Davey Crocket.

Some where in a basement deep in Greenwich Village, Bob Dylan and The Band twinkled the tinkle; just the right way that you would, and could, not tell which was which, and this made the boy’s chest puff out like a gay porn bitch snapping poppers with a heavy dose of blow in the anus. Lou Reed stopped and turned and the rest of the Velvet Underground still hated him, but the raccoon didn’t care either way because it was dead; it was dead indeed- dead as a hat; dead as the hat that it had become.

It is worth mentioning at this point that the 'Underground' may be velvet, but the rotting animal corpse was the furthest thing from velvet.

The beast then found ground and the ground found the beast.

The stick poked deep into the grey dusty flesh of the snow ridden beast. Death rose up through the souls of the boys and they nodded back and forth to each other. The cold embraced them. They needed to move but were stuck in their fodder. The Styrofoam crush of their footing comforted the minutes leading up to now.

Each of them spat their gum to the crystalline floor of frigid ferocity. The bandit grinned.

They now knew death.

The box would be easy with it’s introduction.

The ground would be kind with it’s instruction.

The cobblestone patio made the wrought iron chairs and tables jitter a bit back and forth when the traffic would pass and that was almost comfortable considering the awkwardness of the conversation at hand. The waiters wore black pants hidden behind long white aprons that began at the middle of the rib cage and flirted with the idea of touching the ankles. It made the man think of Crystal Gayle in a backwards sort of way. He smirked as he thought of this but was conscience enough of it not to make his female counterpart wonder what the smile could be about.

She sat there wondering why she never remedied the lipstick-on-the-wineglass issue she always encountered when dining out, especially at lunch. Her mescaline salad with balsamic vinaigrette was just not doing it for her and she mused over the delectability of the crab cakes with Dijon dressing one more time. She shunned the idea and refocused on the matter at hand.

He never was to good with these types of conversations, these unruly third or fourth month dating talks that revolved around some weird issue that had already begun to rear it’s ugly head like Lock-Ness coming up for air. One big gulp of oxygen on it’s behalf could send the entire sight-seeing cruise vessel capsizing to the frigid deep. He cautioned on glancing around at the occasional bicyclist that cruised by and avoided his apron analogy. He was learning to be safer and more reserved the more often he found himself in these types of conversations.

The chatter, clatter, and chitter of the hustle-bustle around them made it easy for both of them to forget the reason they had abruptly met in the middle of the day. They never really did the ‘lunch’ thing; it was mostly drinks and dinners and weekend romps where sex replaced almost all meals that could be deemed ‘lunch‘. Light reflected in a strobing manner off of his butter knife as it smeared the whipped butter across the heal of the French loaf. This seemed to bring both of their focus back to each other.

“Do you remember that weekend that we took to Santa Barbara? You know, the one where the hotel manager had to come up and ask for quiet three separate times?”, he said so with a gleaming that was meant to say that this conversation should not be happening and that the Hilton was right down the street. It made her feel dirty. As a matter of fact, it made her feel down right filthy. These were not afternoons that she would want to reminisce about ever again unless she were paying someone with a leather couch a hundred and fifty bucks an hour to hear.

The crab cakes took her thoughts back into a big black sack and beat them about the head again. “Mmmm … crab cakes … crab cakes … Oh God, crab cakes …”, she was gulping down the saliva as she thought more about the flavour, the escape. She knocked back the half glass of shiraz that had held her lipstick and motioned to the looming waiter for another.

“Ok. It is quite simple. I can not, no, I will not do this anymore. Easy. Simple. Done.” She looked up at the waiter who was trying to teleport himself away from the doomed conversation all while damning his expediency to all hell. “Thank you kind Sir”, she said with a wry sarcasm that bit through all of the tension in the air and let it snap back into a far more comfortable state. She motioned for him to wait one second with the bottle of wine and she proceeded to gulp down the freshly refilled glass. The last hit from the bottom of the bell swished through her mouth as she motioned for Mr. Uncomfortable in the Long White Apron to refill that little glass bad boy one more time. She smiled and completely forgot about the lipstick on the glass.

The man at the table was dumbstruck. His bread sat half chewed almost falling from his mouth. The way the butter had gathered in the corners made it look like it was trying to escape as well. She nodded at him with a raised eyebrow intending to say silently that he looked like a dumb-ass. She even made a little clicking noise from the corner of her smile. He swallowed the remaining bread hard and quick and reached for his Seven & Seven. The ice had melted a bit as he had been nursing it’s remnants over the course of the initial idle chatter and sense of unknowing. He thought to himself, “Who’s idea was this lunch?”. He recalled having made the reservations himself but was now left confused.

He sat there trying to think about why. The feet of his patio chair seemed more percussive than it had been and it was kind of jungle drumming his anxiety through the roof. He rubbed his smooth manicured hand across his stubbled jaw line and tried to look calm and assured after the obvious shock revealed by the bread incident. “Ok, was it that weekend in Santa Barbara or one of the endless nights of bathroom stalls and backseat rides from club to club as the sweat flew through the air like the rambunctious aphrodisiac of the depraved? Was it that one time that I forgot to call? That time I could not remember her middle name or compliment a dress colour or hair style? What the fuck is going on?!?”, the thoughts bumper car collided into each other like cascading drops of water spilling from the top of a gorge; completely out of control synapse.

The sex was good, the attraction was there. The dates were done impressively so. He smelled good, she smelled good. Money was spent, roses were given. Conversation was never difficult, common interests were held. He could not think of one damn thing that would make this lunch come to this fruition. He motioned to the waiter, who was trying to avoid any eye contact with the table, to come over and fill up his drink. She sat sipping her wine and gently biting the glass lip while almost giggling. She could smell his panic.

He straightened the napkin on his lap and wriggled his neck around behind his tie. The drink arrived and was very, very dark; filled with booze and sympathy from another man. “Would you care to explain to me what the hell you are talking about?”. These were the only words he could muster, the only words that could leave his lips and have any meaning in his now defensive state of paranoia and rejection. She giggled again and took a long hard swig from the glass before she actually leaned back and began laughing.

“Well, you see”, she began with some sort of composure just short of cackling interruption, “I just don’t see the point. You are not what I can see being with beyond this little tryst of seduction. For one, your taste in suits is appallingly childish and naïve. For two, you have never read Chaucer. And, finally, the part in your hair is no where near where it should be and makes the rest of your head look lopsided.” She burst out laughing hard and motioned for her fifth glass of wine to be presented. At this point the waiter was scared.

The Seagrams was inhaled by the man and he too motioned for a refill which sent the waiter running around more frantic than the beeps of a Morse code message. The man sat there rubbing his hands together and clenching his teeth as if he were making sand for the eroding shores of Daytona. With a glazed-over look he asked her if she was done and she responded yes as her sloppy shoulders did a saucy shake in his direction which knocked loose one of the spaghetti straps that held her dress up right. The drinks arrived and each of them marveled at what their only lunch date had become. He had become enraged; she had become giddy.

He raised his glass to her and she tried to kiss it’s rim with hers while sloshing red wine down onto the fine white linen. “To us, you dumb fuckin’ bitch. To us indeed! May you find a more snappy dresser to ruin your life!” He took a long hard tug of booze down his throat leaving only yellowed ice at the bottom and she struggled with meeting her lips to her glass. “By the way,” she said, “You have a small dick!”

Like a bull from the gate he shot up out of his seat and threw his alcohol ice into her eyes. “You are fucking insane!” Stepping away he threw the chair into the table sending dishes to the cobblestones in shards and emptying her wine down onto her lap and splashing down her smooth long legs. She sat there with her tacky and tawdry brassy bellows shouting out against the awning as passerby’s felt sorry for her in a shock-factor sort of way. She almost fell from her seat as she leaned back and caught herself just in time. She looked over at the waiter with her eyes almost crossed from guffaws and said, “Check please!”

He walked home as opposed to a cab, he needed the air even if it was mostly exhaust. The thoughts were racing, the insanity brewing; he felt as though he could not escape anything that was taking him over. Rage, the most powerful part of an unleashed mind. He arrived at his stairs and stormed up past his mailbox. The elevator was not working so he stormed up the inner staircase in hopes of exhausting the un-fleeting anger and undeniable fury. He walked into his apartment and tossed his keys into a glass dish on the coffee table. The dish cracked with the force of the toss. Shoes off, tie loosened, top-button undone; he walked into the bedroom and smiled.

“Come over here and take me; take me like never before”, she smiled as she scooted to the foot of the bed and her dress hiked up to the tops of her thighs. Wine had never tasted so good.

He accidentally turned on the ceiling fan, as opposed to the light that really wanted him to turn it on as well as his need to have it on, and then pissed all around the bowl and the floor, dripping down his pants unsightly; never once did a drop splash in the floatable serene and medical blue of the bowl’s waters that stood still in contrast to his stagger and inevitable swaying penis.

He thought of Brahms and that dismissed anything of such integrity and dignity as most of a wash could be found in a puddle of piss so unsightly.

Something could wrap the day up in the break of day, with the smell of fresh tar from a road project that never seemed to finish. A metallic taste in his mouth, as if pennies ferruled into nickels that had spawned quarters and left him tasting tin.

Violin music does something to a man. It leaves him barren, holding his genitals in one hand and relinquishing his soul with a gentle farewell into another. He screams deep into a night, so deep that it breaks a young lover and her favorable fancy of what the breaking should be. It leaves her barren in Nebraska nights, dwelling on the dawn of an age that she could not feel even if she were naked, out by the fuzz in four dimensions of never mind and forewarned meaning of yesteryear’s memory.

A gypsy rhythm that shook his pelvis to and fro, as he wavered into the living room and beyond. To the window that shed so much light unto the living space, making little shadow people of branch and twig jitter and gyrate about in a ritual of changing solar wiggle.

He plumped and pushed and pimped his fat ass down onto a couch seat and in doing so realized how damp he had become in his disillusionment with reality; his disconnect. His pants were so wet that we wondered, in a matter of fact manner, whether or not anything had actually made the bowl or not. He debated a sandwich and then decided against it as he thought of lust for images long not touchable and got an erection. The surrounding fabric, that cushioned his saturated fat ass, wished that he would get up and move due to the stink and stank of ammonia flare up and all that may be implied by the smell of hot piss growing cold on the short legs of a full grown man well unaware of his own demise and destruction; a licking, lustful, lewd glimpse at what could be in a club featuring rawhide and the ‘tower’.

He turned towards the stained glass panel of vision that hung so elegantly in the frame just beneath the door frame and a speck before the outline of the vestibule. The light cascaded in a way that made the doorway seem ethereal and the room almost heaven-like. He knew of nothing else; the stink added a glowing red-yellow that could actually make the air smell like lead solder if one put his mind to it.

“Anyone else want some of this ham sandwich or box of clams?”

No one heard. His toes jiggled and gyrated about with a sense of prowess only found in political candidates pinning up to the machine for a bit more funds in order to progress on the ‘right track’ to what they would want to achieve; this was nothing like the race that his mind had fought for decades, maybe even millennia, depending on what sort of faith or spirituality or, whatever the kids were calling it these days, he had. His toes seemed to levitate above the ottoman in a way that would make most 8mm recorder junkies jiggle with the anticipation of getting their YouTube moment in some fetish room regarding metaphysics and dependency wrapped up in the Saran of existentialism. Somewhere Kierkegaard was crying.

It all was easier with windows, with light. It is what provided the outside influence of reality check that was needed in order to recognize that some things, most things, were not right. They all were wrong in a dilapidated sort of naval explosion, liver melt-down, bleeding gut sort of way.

Vietnam had come to mind a few times and with it brought blood and opiates and face paint and more blood and formaldehyde and blood and tunnels and blood and MoTown and blood. To think that Phil Spector was doing what he did with his ‘groovy hair’ in his day and age of it not being so ‘groovy’ and all the while he had lead in a body part or two that led to Phil being able to be free, to be free, and the toilet seat was still dry but the floor was not. The piss shone back up in a reflected jaundice shade that reminded cheese that it was not the only yellow thing on Earth. Surfers from around the globe that had chased the dragon far too fast and kissed the lips of too many libations made note of what colour was not cool to paint their surfboards or their shorts, board shorts that is; the ones that hang low beyond the knee and make fun of Hawaiian flowers with their popularity.

He crippled himself with a sultry powder filled and covered with the lust of the morning and what could have been before the expectations raised to what they were when the hot steam hit him in the leg, much to his denial. He scratched a beard that was not there and wished he could tickle a beard of a different kind.

Something came together as he shot himself reading Salinger.

‘Nine Stories’ can do that to a man in the brightness of his day sewn together with sunrises and sunsets and the dawn and dusk cluster fucking their way into an incestuous hillbilly revival.

Some days it is easier to pretend that there is no one else. That Charon is home.

Cold, cold, indeed.

It has been so cold in the humidity of it all that the contradiction makes one limp and shudder. He cries, solemnly, into a neckerchief that he will later use to clean up what may have been a life or a mess or something other in a wreck of perversion found only by the walls that watch.

Brahms plays on and the piss stinks.

His halcyon can not be found; the morphine is gone.

Cry, cry.

Wipe the sweat from your brow, for we are not him.

The yellow flowers hung gently with their heads drooped so, in the washed glass bottle of baritone reverberation and reservation; it was a sight to see, even on the dullest of days. The most splendid of Ravel compositions could not contain the eerie splendor of decapitated spring in the succinct visage of the tablecloth image set before the man at the table.

He never quite knew what the whole thing was about; why he had become who he was and why he had allowed such personal atrocities to occur. It was a compulsion at best; danced between habitual ritual and addiction in a gaily sought out dip, where hips twist just so and make children giggle behind white dresses on the side lines, wishing they might be older someday and be able to embrace full the splendor of the moment at hand.

In his mind, he counted the dusty steps. One, two, three, and onward up to twenty five. Each and every light deprived particle of earth’s whimsical matter had settled just so on each precipice creating the moonscapes and craters of micro-landscape and layout. His footprints laid deep and lashed out as reminders of what was found in the earthen floor at the bottom of the descent. He wished it had never happened. He cried out at nothing and flung the bottle of bewildered blossoms hard down at the floor and then began to sob. The flowers had done nothing and neither had she.

He had to hold it tight before he lost it. Everything was about possession. He may lose it all; he could always feel the slimy grasp of slipping scent and sundry. With all of that at hand one can get a bit panicky; a tad full of fidget and fury. Could anything really be his? He mused and mulled over this quandary and concluded that only under the most extreme and most unethical circumstances that it could be and upon this glimpse into himself and his actions did he recoil into the denial of all that may or could have occurred if his memory had served him right.

Forty Arabian Knights somewhere, sometime, danced to rhythms that only Hope and Crosby could recreate in their most wild of dress rehearsals and he could not even bear such pipe smoking, whiskey drinking gala with such immediate intensity at hand. Could he be as simple as pizzicato plucking and flautist fever? Of course not and then some, of course. Such redundancies would only make one cringe; they most certainly contained a wince or two for him as the music played on and he could not find anything other than cartoons to race through his mind, or minds as they were. Can-can anyone?

Offenbach shakes, he shimmies, he saunters through convulsions of big band seizure and concludes with an array of illuminations found only right within the minds of those they may be beyond the now,  only found ill within the constructs of the here and now and with such shame they shake their heads and wish for better days.

The man looks down at the broken flowers and their glass. Such forlorn a face is not found at even the most intense of funeral pyres and ponders and pious encounters of the dead looking up from stillness to say goodbye just one last time. Could it all make sense in a vibrato molestation or a simple tambour raucous? No, no; not a sound indeed, but rather the lack of the splay sought out once the ears may be plugged from all the dead flowers that may scream.

The raft is set a blaze. The raft is set a float. The raft done sank with all the remorse that fire can conjure in the souls of set upon folks seeking out more than a corpse can offer.

A stand-up guy trying to stand up and all the while not deserving the generic and stand offish ‘stand-up guy’ moniker, not one damn bit. Shake it off. Dance about. Let the glass cut your bare fattened feet as you move about the hardwood floors that glaze up back towards the sun like honey in a light driven rain. Amber rainbows of reflective pleasure defying the sun and all that could be hidden behind all two scoops of it’s smile. He knows. The sun knows. The body in the basement knows all too well.

The smell has only begun. He knows it well, he knows it gets worse. The worse it gets, the worse it grows and growing, it goes, gets worse you know. Ah, such a shame to have no clue, that what you’ve done is wrong and not even the most obvious of signs even register on any level to perpetuate a fate of redemption’s embrace but rather the implosion of intensity causing the explosion of serenity found within the walls of demented vanity through profanity; a chiseled verity verbosity.

Delusion for delusion’s sake. A fortune riddle wrapped up in gum you can not chew but do so in order to justify the riddle and omniscience that you know not to be remotely applicable; the chew moves moons and makes one swoon to sounds found in tunes with serrated boons. Yes, this is what passes as intellectual in his redundant mind, the mind of a man with a body in the shallow sands of his basement necropolis.

He brushes down his slacks and vigorously shakes them clean of any remnants of sand from the push aside and pull up and out that had to do with the rituals that lay cold in the earthen foundation of his home where he lay his head. He knows full-well of his abode and it’s demons. He knows of his mind and what it may manifest. He knows of the preponderance of his pandering perpetuation. The house knows too, but has no choice.

He goes to the cellar door and holds his ear up close and tight; snug like a lover’s clitoral love. He has no idea what is to be heard but the shrill screams of uncertainty comeing through the splintered frame all the same. He fiddles with the doorknob as if it were his crotch and pulls and tugs at it’s short glass stubbiness. Slowly, he coaxes the door open and finds the closet in the hall. Coats of furs long dead, with times long gone, hang like reminders of who once held dignified decorum in this home and hall. In shock, he moves to the next door by the bottom of the stairs. Once again, to nowhere - a simple closet holds the table linens for the adjourning dining area. A contorted reflex of gape and gore grind across his grimace.

Many a door may be seen, found. A basement, no. A body, no. A simple vase of broken flowers that did not agree with the runny film caressing the yolks of breakfast.

A day filled with hallowed visages of once forgotten grudges held close by the amnesia of revenge.