I am still in the flicker flack tic tac of a movie reel that has run down the spool, a movie known as ‘The Earthbound Friendly Skies’, a movie about being in an airport that I am quite sure you have been in. All airports are the same. They are all mortuaries in motion, morgues of malaise, maladies of mindscape.

An endless thoroughfare, fairway, of prizes that no one wants to win. Over priced and over effort to achieve keepsakes of a moment that is never anywhere near the simple thought of somewhere you would want to be. In every face there is a sense of impatience, every chair a corpse, in every line another person who simply despises being in line and at that moment, being themselves. It is the dance of anticipation and deflation, depending on the direction of the travel, and always a pock mark of unruly edge that is the tip of the boil of exploding infection to be seen, sensed, and secluded in the air of everyone’s invaded personal space.

Walk this way, run that way. Looking at the clock inevitably does not really matter as it ultimately means about as much as having Flavour Flav’s necklace in jail. Tic - toc - tic - toc. The only thing that goes slower in an airport beyond time and lines is the amount of time that any pocket money stays safe in your pocket. Ten dollar cheese steaks, four dollar cokes, 75 dollar breakfasts; each and every register and check never holds water or cuts the mustered when held up to be compared to the experience, gastro or otherwise.

There are never smiles in an airport unless it is from a drunkard before they are reprimanded or a child before an hour has transpired. The innocence of both are thrown together like toys in an attic; carnival dolls that become as muted as the other patrons once the jig and gig is up.

Being in those hermetically sealed compounds all weekend was like chewing glass with my gums in an effort to convince myself that I still had teeth and I was swallowing the nectar of Gods, a honey of ambrosia fuck lust in the deviant soul of Eos; the whole thing was futile, leaving me the victim - a casualty of my own choices.

As I zombie walked with wobbly feet of too much death and atrophy of wait, I saw the many ‘airport me’s’ that had been on this adventure since I began flying when I was eleven. In every face I saw one of my own, a masquerade where everyone dressed as me. A living breathing history lesson taking me from the dawn of excitement and anticipation of everything the great wide open, the wild blue yonder, had in store, all the way to the jaded and frustrated frigid and carnivorous resentment of a ‘get-it-over-with’ housewife who rather have her husband dead than that 'thing' inside her.

The excited traveler who is dying to arrive at his destination, an escape from everything that he cud chews through each and everyday leading to the pinnacle of enjoying going through security and paying seven dollars for that golden bubble brew at the bar where they devilishly tempt his liver with the line, ‘How about a shot for three dollars more’. The vacation has begun for this man before the plane is even at the gate to wait for him.

The boy that is traveling on his own to visit family, strutting his stuff in an overly and ridiculous level of faux maturity that could only be found in a 21^st century ‘kids’ show on Nickelodeon on a Friday night. Three, thirteen, thirty; all a mesh in the mind of the entertainment provider whoring out an idea for another studio contract. Shrapnel left on the defamed and defiled doorstep of debauchery and deviancy, collateral damage for a money slut who will be dead by the time the whipper snappers rule the world; such a pleasant thought. The boy is still thinking that some older woman (anyone over eighteen) will want to jump his bones. He dreams of the days when he too can order a drink, make the decision to take a stand by flight and live it up in some random lay over town, legitimately pretend he can make the mile high club. Normally the raucous blaring ear bud nub knob canal blockers drown out the reality creating a soundtrack to what can only be bought as over zealous fiction and the viscous virility that wet dreams are made of.

The young women who have left behind the boys to travel on and about and within and without all in the name of some pseudo independence in the name of feminism or read by some as distraught journeys of loose nights, loose lips, and sunk ships. All lubed up and ready to go. The three dollar shot query is a 'given' with these broads not a question. All three of them need to be scooped up with a bucket and poured into their seats. Seems kind of futile to even recommend that they even attempt the whole seat belt rigmarole; beyond the bartender, the hopeful boys back home, and the eye candy lick suckers that find their destinations of the same zip code, who would really miss them? Buckle up buttercup, this plane is going to take off, get off, and get down.

How about the family that hates each other, hates where they are going, and hates what they are doing? As a matter of fact they hate the whole damn adventure; that is they hate life. They don’t mind letting it stink onto you either, as you pass, like a hung-over beer shit in an open stall after a morning of roughage, the smell eats your soul, melts your mind and makes you hate like they do. Do you know how much deep breathing of fresh air you need to do in order to clean out and clear up that sort of pervasive persistent petulance? Answer: A Lot!

How about the traveler on permanent layover? The one who has made the three bench seat, divided by arm rests to discourage sleeping, his new trailer park abode complete with sour smell of honey wagon necessity. Yes, airport people smell. They all smell. They smell like burnt gum, like rancid mouthwash. They smell like a trick played on us all, because once in the clutches of the beastly building of take off and landing, WE all smell. Sour mouth tongue stench when the fur is coffee toffee brown and the cigarette might as well be in your cheeks. Where the booze you have begun to sweat out is your new cologne. You’ve been there since yesterday afternoon, of course your socks smell like rotten cheese in a curdled yogurt blender of three week shower-less crotch sweat. Hey, buddy, put your shoes back on, this is not your living room!

I could go on about all their ghoul, golem, stone gnome visages. Retreat back into the safety of a rant about their endless phone calls that we should all give a shit about or the business deals that we should envy even if we have an IQ below 30 and don’t even know what business is. The laptop key chatter like platinum toothed roller coaster riders with castanet jaws flung ‘round a bend. The constant shifty eye whisper gazes of criticisms by people traveling in pairs. The teeter and twitter of the jokes hushed down into the snap short snortle chortle at the expense of another traveler’s oblivion. All of it. One big ball of shit wax waiting for a match.

Airport travel can be like listening to Glinka with all of it’s morose overtones and foreboding gloom that only let’s loose when a diatribe tongue tickles it’s way up from the larynx.

It’s like a delusional reading of Pushkin while taking the downers that only your Mother was allowed to take before bed, with the rollers in her hair and the bathrobe that hid something too sinister or too innocent but you were always in bed early enough to ever know the truth of the delicacies beneath the cover up of garb for presentations sake.

At least the beds were turned down right and the water glass and night light could guide you away from Kiev or St. Petersburg and into the light of the right direction.

St. Petersburg is why we talk today, and so be it, it has happened, and done so, with much more drama than mellow; only the soap knows, even if it is only the bar in your mouth.

I have been rocket shot through Satan’s anus. I have feared the rise and fall. I came out ok. The deal, the trip, the tumult, the triumph - done, done, done.

I won’t be flying again, until Christmas.

When that flight comes around I will be camping in Tampa for a night and then returning the next day with kiddo in tow.

Flights only get worse. Patience dribbles like old man drool.

One big stream of something eaten yesterday but needing a good wipe today.

Maybe someday, I will upgrade to first class.

Maybe someday, I won’t fly at all.

I know, for now, the trips will still come and the little nasty airport visages will trap me in the psychosis of their impending and interloping stories, all flesh fucking away my need for sanity and continuum of continuity.

Trap me, indeed, you airport devils.

I am sharpening my teeth for the trap …

Hearing the chatter of the crowd, little chatty Cathys , doing their thing. Folding their paper as such, preparing for a cool beverage sip, wanting one of warmth. The lights in that muted underwater nether hue make all but the most reckless of speed freaks, sleep; at the very least do the neck snap nod off doze. You can feel the people, without touching them, without making eye contact. You can smell the air they exhale, taste their sweat. You know that they are all around minding their own business, but rarely does that maintain as the main play, action, course of occasion.

With the pillars smeared with some faux paux re-creation of something that was never that exciting to begin with. The staunch starch stiffness found in the collars of men who do not breathe deep enough; wishing he did not have his children, dreaming he had no children at all. The curtains in some rich fabric that did not exist before the age of modern petro-technology. A fabric that I wouldn’t even piss on. The fabric some myopic woman, that I would not piss on either, admires to the fullest most verbal extent. You can feel the hairs on your neck, on my neck, not only raise but pack up all the other hairs and go homesteading in an Elvis movie from long ago, and certainly a more real audience of differing levels of pretentious and propriety.

But the Penguin of wands walks out tall and secretly, almost to the dismay of the others, but much to your joyful rebirth of situation, of instance; not necessarily happenstance but certainly orchestrated (no pun intended) circumstance. The malice of the lack of attention paid is something that should draw notice if even from the timpani player, but never the thought has occurred to them; at least not since a freshman night or operatic cherry break. Just ask the guy with the French horn, he’ll tell you. He’ll gladly tell you about all of that and his union dues. Ask ‘em after the show, the time is almost upon us; almost time indeed.

Almost indeed that time but the room has not fell quiet. The lights are still muddied with their shining lack. Lots of baton bats against the thigh, the conductor is as impatient as you. There must be a singer who mistook this for a soap variety. Another drama queen not sure of this or that. Can you dig the fat lady? I can dig it, her, and then some.

I never wanted any more then to hear her sing, not the end, but the song; the moment of glass rubbing, slick whistle wonder that only can happen when the smoothest of smooth is buffed out to a gleaming, glisten, glide. A time, a taper, a tempo so tepid that it feels you through the skin and the note becomes one and colour and then some with you and does so note from note, vibration to vibration, colour to colour; time cumming into existence and then asking progression what the hour is. Something found silly in the high pitched waiver of the voice, the transformation of existence as the strings are raped in the pit and the brass hums low as if not to intrude but gallantly make it’s presence known. Take it all and the prisoners. Make sure the night is fed and put to sleep with us all; in a state of exhaustion with a relentless vibrato to be tamed by no man, but seen as a chance of domination by a sultry vixen with visions veered obscene. How obscene!

She can not stop the take over, the soul invasion, the fornicating interloper quality of lust injected, lust. Even the profoundly talkative of nothing profound find themselves mute as if a young man somewhere, watching a football spliced commercial of disruption, knew how to use the remote in just the right way, and timing, as to make it enjoyable for those who only came for the main event and not the cheek kissing crap in between the lines, the meaning. Ah, to be on a couch would make the night pale with the putrid pallor of pseudo-cerebral secretion and seclusion sans sewn seduction.

To be in the show. To know.

The gut has been honeyed. The day has bowed graciously towards the nights advance. The sweet siren, or some rubbish like that, has done it. But it was not that powdered bitch upon the stage. Nor any of the tight taunting boys gallantly ripping about their Latin and Italian phrases with the gut twisting volume normally reserved for megaphones and the like. None of them actually do it. It is the notes. They are there without the vessel.

The notes make it feel, make you soak it up, make me sedated with splendor.

Note, note, note; all night long. One after another intoxicating the feather bed folly of slumber upon theatre departure.

And to think of them all played over in your head, in your gut, is like each tablature flagstaff of a black dot is jerking off secretly at thirteen in a bed with the door ajar and the hall light offering any parental passer by to know exactly what the pelvis rock stroke slip was all about. Yes, the reverberations are haunting like the voices of the hall. Echoes slice your mind.

And once the trap is set, you can only gnaw out.

It is the feeling of new, something that occurs that will be thought back at as a ‘time’, a ‘segmenting shard’ of reality, that you will hold for ever like a dying princess with an amulet, a crystal, something of power, of power lost.

You are living it, smelling the smells, tasting the second switch second hand saunter as slow slick ticks. You know by how it feels, by how you feel, that you will look back and know it to be a time to have remembered.

Caught up between the fingertips of ‘that moment’. Do you know ‘that moment’? It is like the first underdog push on a swing, the first backwards head hang off from a merry-go-round at the park. The first time you jumped off the top end of the teeter totter and watched your friend smack their tail bone against the stump under his end as he turbo jets downward.

That moment that it will never be like that again. A relationship from long ago.

Yellow summer quilts, over-cast New England springs reading Hemingway by the shore. That year that you wore Hawaiian shirts and made it ok in your mind as you made your statement that no one understood, or took the time to understand. The different ID photos that mean different things beyond you passing as an agent in constant disguise. Can one person change their look that much?

Swimming in a quarry under the summer stars. Cooking a seafood double shift and enjoying that ice cold beer while cleaning up a 130 degree kitchen. First Christmas. First Christmas with children of your own. A roast beef sandwich from Nick's Roastbeef in Beverly Massachusetts. The first time you left the country. The day you came back.

The time you had that couch. The winter you shoveled too much. The smell of salty air in a foggy 3 a.m. parking lot in snow by the ocean. The nights of never ending driving as if the running out of gas would answer the questions, solve the problems. The nights of the woods and the moon. The days of the never ending bus pass by as cigarettes were sucked in and through and down until there were no more. Mornings of the never ending breakfast. New York minutes. New England days. The destruction of Los Angeles in the blink of a wishful, lonely, man’s eye; all while being a boy and nothing near the man that wanted to be.

The man with the moment.

The man who knows nothing, knows more and let’s on nothing.

The man with the woman.

The woman with the man.

Notes hung high in the rafters before they floated down to the ears.

Moments like notes being hung high too.

When will night be before the day?

Dawn has already seen the answer.

I have too …

These days would make the depression of Seattle happy. The clouds drift in like unsuspecting symphonies coaxing up their vibrato and tremolo in such a way that only soldiers of long forgotten battles would know what to do with their soft and subtle cries. I am reminded of grey and blue and all the blood between, but more so, the large belled dresses of the women that cried for their arrival that never was to be.

Something makes men move on, makes them sacrifice; makes most of them pull their bloodied limbs, with no tips to be found, out from the dirt and drudgery and let’s them find a passage on. Ride the horse young heart, ride it hard and wild and hope that no one can ever find the saddle soaped too much that you fall and are dragged through what you could have been in; the passing fancy of a girl not quite old enough yet to love you, but old enough to enjoy candy in moderation.

Sometimes the streets are not paved, and in those dreams of the 'Pekinpah' are we reminded of the gritty men who did not shower and the women who would bath them slowly and feed them whiskey and lay them down satisfied enough to sleep. The men that found morality when it was a convenience and the men whose convenience was never moral. The bartenders who ducked, the guns that smoked, the bullets that bit through the deadwood and made kids shriek with the folklore not found in today’s lacking imagination.

A chivalrous sort that never knew when to say when, but rode it all hard through the dawn and into the day with only the night to relieve them from what could be found proof positive, for only night had even the glimmer of refuge but it’s fury could be harder than a jail cell's key when one tries to configure their escape through a XXX haze of clay bottle jug fury and ferocity that no one knows as home but rather the smug smelt smell of never to be again and then some.

Would the women in the hoop skirts know? Would the wolves cry right? Where would the crying men with feathers in tow go? Would we all have hidden if we knew the outcome. There always would be men in suits, uniforms, with far too many accommodations, that would easily take their own lives in a shutter shot moment of bullets flung free down a barrel of fate that could not hear the music, not hear the strings, never have been to the symphony, never tasted the orchestra in one cerebral bite of gut wrenching glee as your heart twists beneath the turn of the brass and smooch smoosh swoosh smashed smooth back into place by the tympanis and the strings, as if they were to line up, one line by one line, and felled by the oppositions bullets as they fell too. Dead.

Oh God, bless the girls in the dresses, bless their pastels, bless their faux virginal beauty in a Hollywood glimmer and let us know that whores are whores no matter the time. We all need love and then there is lust and passion, wonton need, and a circle is formed to pass on the receiving pleasure as if it were a waltz that never happened in a time when all of our eyes should be shut tighter than the pants and pantaloons that we have invaded. Bless them indeed!

Would you ever want to know any different than that which you find as truth now, or do you have the balls to load up the pack mule, clean up the guns, give that last kiss to move on and move forth with the vigor and verve that would make you a hero and leave your family without you? Could you do it with no guarantee? Could you do it without yourself? Can you see it without me? Would you ever want to share what that was, or could have been, if I had not presented it to you with such vivid verbosity as now, in these words, these mad man rants of nonsensical bewilderment and breath done beauty?

The children cling gallantly to the spurs, the stirrups, as you leave and find the muddied road that will never be a road because it all will be raped, taken, abused. Do we know what it was, what it is, what it will be? No, no, no!

Damn it! Listen up if you are to get the learning of the learned without the admission price of the ne’er do well and all of the ramblings within the unwinding riddle. Dig it, get it, ride high and mighty upon a stead that only velour could know and feel in times of linked chain nuance and cadre.

Only the women know. Only the children dream. The men are lost in making it right, making it all sing forth a note that can not be heard. Making the brass know it’s place. Making the vibration be felt. Deciding the decisions of redundancy because things are rarely changed just colored with different pens and smoothed together with the wax of crayons that melted a millennia ago. Wax on a radiator sill in a winter where the oil burns brighter than whale fat on the deck of a boat that never sets sail except for the whore’s vessels found in it’s galley, in it’s berth, found naked and astray and tasted by men who have tasted many before and never found bereft of a myriad of smiles; one for each and every taste of woman to encounter, one for every night of pleasure found without pants or candle light, in a night where the moon is enough, and you can hear the church bells upon morning’s rise as the Sun scoffs at the robust and resounding copper bell crack when it’s smile should be enough.

I am sure there is a Captain somewhere who could back up this tale. Take pride in it’s galley rein. Take note of the saddle sores. Know of what I speak when the bloodied men fall in their cause, in the mud of their day, their battle, the things that will never find bloom in their mind’s eye.

Like panties with bows and handkerchiefs under the other name of neckerchief, saturated and subdued by some scent of far eastern lands that no one knows, not even the owner, but rather the forgotten soul long since dead after bringing the scent to an orgy of women in pale white paint, who beg and bait their dresses to leave the scene of what the younger men want. Mole looking. Lip biting. Dances abound. Can you promenade like me? Do you want to? Powder me up and light the incense stencher and stauncher, far and wide, into the nasal abduction and seduction of my soul, my pants, my crotch heated with the fury of what I could be next to you, as you know it already, in every fantasy that you have ever dreamt of as a young girl, a young woman, feeling the symphony move the groins of many, who sway with their oculars and fans beneath the wigs.

Do you not feel the music, the pelvis push through the panty-less night? Can you taste the change of where men have gone, what they are now, the feminized versions that know not of the horses, the pain and the pride, the push and the shove, the penetration in a sweat ridden night of fear and loneliness found only to be forgotten once more when the death comes a callin’ in the dawn’s early light? Does anyone feel passion anymore? Do we know what can be feared and patronized and lusted after when it comes to the basic existence of who we once were and why we are that too?

Lay down the call of the now. Know what once was. Pick up something to read, hear, feel, taste, that is from another time. Feel the bombs. Ride the horse. Take in what only looks like it is too big and embrace it with what you never thought could be - one fell swoop of invigorating lust and knowledge swallowed down in a gulp of filthy dirty to be.

Take that and fry it twice!

Know that the sounds of reality are nothing without the feeling, know that the tastes are still nothing without the same. Grip it tight. Rip it off. Hold it like no other call to being alive that you ever could have imagined in the masculine dreams of dirty little boys playing games of death in a field without a sundown and only the boundaries of a youth and it’s indiscretions to hold it in reality. No one can be that now. No one wants to be that. How sad. How pathetic, how pathetic indeed!

Can you gather up the fabric and dream?

Do you want to be taken above the Earth and left floating in the sugar bowl of spooned out pleasure next to where the moon wishes it could be?

Have you ever made your day out to be a pleat? A gathered valance of perception, a calling to the fragmented?

Don’t let the grimace of the grind gather you up into the grinder of galvanized rigidity.

Don’t do it, don’t do it, damn it!

Stand tall and hold your head high. Be proud. Have faith.

Know that we all have a moist crotch come around to con, coax, and compel us into the sweetbread box of exquisite gourmet and then some.

Hear the castanets.

Hear the gypsy rhythm hookah sound of times that do not require a camel anymore.

So much is there for us, we only need to reach out and be us.

Can you still be you with all of the fireworks going off?

Can you see it, feel it, be it?

Can you be anything at all as the music slows to a pathetic pathos of pallor?

Lay me down.

Lay your old man down to die.

Find the snow bank and pray.

We all have it in us, open up, de-programme.

Shake your hair like you are a Muppet.

Feel the cannons.

It can only happen all the time once you feel it once.

I am glad that I have …

Gargoyle’s pounce and prod from their rooftop views of gallant stone and porous stance as they look me deep in the eyes. Music wraps it’s shroud around me and makes me wonder what the hell has gone on, what the hell is happening, and what will come as the doors open, the portholes gyrate like horny labia in the nights mixed with alcohol fuel and lubricant.

Will I come of age in the sully saunter of cerebral soliloquy? Will the strings make sense? Will their molestation come about in a way that makes the symphonic proprietors gaze properly in my direction? I think not so much of these things, these avenues, as I do my days and the ones that come up upon the following dawn.

I guess I really don’t say much. I don’t really convey a damn thing. I thought myself to be too profound which has led to a sin of forthcoming fortitude, one that should not be predominant. Something comes of years of writing. It is either nonsensical, megalomaniacal, narcissistic drivel or it is of the most profound to be found. I am neither. I dress in grey and walk through the valley’s of death hoping that the men wearing blue do not find me; that intended in many ways.

When one walks away and is left, forgotten, and thrown aside, they wonder and wander about thinking, pontificating, that they will never come across the same situation of demise and decrepit disillusionment that encompasses a reality of denial.

Like little tickles, giggles, across the keys of pianos made before their times. All of them are before me. I touch them all with the gentle splendor of the day and the individual rays of Sun that reach down towards us with the cotton ball softness of a make-up remove pad in the nights of drunken slumber that require a maternal gentleness found within their box of ease.

I make them live and breathe again. I make them sing. They dance from note to note and string to string with the subtle hammer dance smack of a gangsta with civility. Each little string slap, swat, love-kiss, is danced like a ballet beneath the strings and found to touch the soul without ever diving in too deep. Each little spring. Each little piece of felt. Each little pin acting as a hinge, a pivot point, a reflection of sound to come. All of them reacting, reflecting, refracting, a sound, a note, a minute minute of soul reflex ion and rumination resounding in relevance and resonating redemption.

I make things happen. I am the one who makes the pianos look exquisite and elegant - eloquent.

I make them work. I make them sound good, as good as they can be, and pass on their keys of ivory top passing on ruffie like entrapment to play their finite numbers and dance with flesh flung fury across their tops.

I will miss this career, this trade, this apprenticeship.

I will not dance naked as freely in the nights of knowing that I will not do this upon dawn’s early rise.

To make something so slick, to make something so right. To breathe back the forgotten breath of death and life back into something long forgotten and only used as a picture stand, a counter top, a book shelf of lacquer that could play the music if only anyone gave a shit. No one gives a rat’s ass about much these days beyond their image to the rest of us and the one’s who care about the depth are left to name tag call out’s by college students and whiny liberal professors. When are the conservative, republican or libertarian, men going to stand tall and vocalize what we need, who we are, and what past needs and requires focus?

Do we pass music by the way side in order cast ourselves as … what … cell phone users? Good God, someone help us!?!?!?!?!

I get it.

I am the dinosaur.

I am the relic, the fossil.

Oil will be made from my bones. Call Al Gore. This will make him happy!

I am the conservative that appreciates philosophy, literature, music, art, and architecture.

I am the dead man.

Someone dig my dead ass up from the box six foot down and rally around a piss contest to justify all that I say!

I am dead.

You are all dead too.

No one knows the trouble I’ve seen.

All of you know, you just hide and cower behind who you pretend to be.

Buying up all of the cell phone minutes that I will never use.

Don’t call me, it goes straight through to voice mail.

BEEP …

Oranges and vermillion danced behind the blacks and purples of the clouds that spat forth the doom of day. You could smell the clouds, taste the rain, and nothing felt better than the day being done. Done like the closing of a casket. Done like the smell of milling paper. Sour beets boiling in a pot.

A tip toe here, a gracious curtsy there; days are mere hopscotch hours for us all to chalk out and toss the stone right through.

The strings of Tchaikovsky wished me well into day and mocked my Rachmaninoff title. They cuddle me into tonight’s words which are less flute and much more cello. Yo Yo Ma does not even know who I am and, frankly, I like it like that. I think of myself more with a violin, like Itzach Perlman, even though I prefer the cello sound. Sometimes, from string to string, the sounds are not worth the note but rather the vibration. You do not need to hear to feel and this is a bigger lesson in life than ‘You shouldn’t have stolen Grandfather’s pocketknife’.

This from a man who prides the necessity for logic and disdains the overbearance of emotion. If you took the word ‘feel’ that way, than I must apologize much like the Mississippi does when it recedes in the drier months. Much like a tornado or hurricane does when it says good bye and carries it’s destructive and productive path down the road.

You must destroy to produce and vice versa. Anyone under any other framework does not understand the ebb and flow, the flow and eddy, of production; progress.

Mania can provide many paths to feel. Mania is like chewing gum. Chew, chew, chew. Until the jaw hurts. The gum gets hard, stale. The flavour is myriad nothing in every molar depression. There is hope that the gum will keep doing something. It doesn’t. You spit and then inhale 15 new pieces to rejuvenate the vibe, the flavour, the moment. I suppose it is a lot like an addict who shoots shit. Any kind of shit. Meth, heroin, cocaine, any and all of the combinations.

You throw down and show the heels, shaped like a Roman or Greek pillar from a time that could not be again yet glimpses out from the curtain, peeks out from the bush, and says ‘good evening’ more than it should, less than we’d like.

You can smell the leather, feel the velvet, wish for the metal and wood; the candles drip valiantly, just as they were told to, in the corner as the guests arrive, the night begins, the moment is about to be seized, exploited.

Metal scraping against other industrial sounds encompassed and enshrined by the embraced drum beat that pulses and purveys itself into the chest, a sound that is felt. Nothing could take you away from a Saturday night. Nothing could take you away from a bustier. Nothing sounds better than flesh.

Harpsichords notes come in from nowhere and the glimmer flicker of hot wax and dripping light secrete through the fog and haze of the room filled with smokes of all varieties. Tobacco, clove, marijuana, cigar, incense, oils.

A bohemian burlesque banquet complete with the sideshow of back alley drudgery.

Can darkness be this filled with light?

Will I bite my lip again?

All those little darlings with the strings of a symphony in their pants. The way they can all walk and saunter and strut as if every hormone man has created secretes into the night.

Loneliness is a horrible thing. Not understanding that loneliness is worse. Not finding other people of a comparable loneliness factor is even worse. Mistaking loneliness for anything other than loneliness is futile, infantile, and dismal to say the least.

Spit on the lens of your glasses with heels held high is another matter entirely. Something to write home about. Something to tell the grandkids while whittling away the days on the front porch swing.

How much should be shared? How much should be known? How much should even be grasped or gripped, which ever the case may be?

Sometimes the bow swipe brings us no further than the lit up bulbs of Christmas donned on a leather whip in a shadow world found only in the minds of some of us.

Costumes and candy and bottles of piss. More flies with sugar than with piss and vinegar - I think not. Do any of us, who are progressing through the big glass shields of six foot revolve into the buildings, those who evolve steadily like the navigation of men with sextons, know who we really are, what is held in the hands of Gods above? Blow the fife, sound the Bosuns whistle, make due with the gregarious sounds of the time when men called forth their destiny with the shear and simple call of men to arms, plans to papyrus, quill to parchment. It is easy to call out faith when there are so few around you and even fewer means to communicate.

From the hip, off the cuff, spontaneity has died a grisly death. It has been eaten up by the planners of the World, the people for a perfect World, the ones with agendas, the ones who smile has they map out their days second by second and minute by minute as if they were the ones on a bender, on a curve of societal extreme. They are the one’s that hold dear the bell curve, not I.

Hold tight the ideas of long ago. Smell the taste of leather. Dive deep into mania. Listen closer to the strings.

Know when things have gone awry and grip them tighter as if to pop off their heads.

Drink the rain.

Take the day.

Find the laugh and the scream.

Slam a door because it feels good.

Have sex.

Control.

Release.

Know when all are appropriate.

Feel when they are not.

Do not eliminate emotion or logic as they both are needed, much like all of us are, each and every day.

“I am me because We are we.”

Ubuntu …