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Movie night
Tim (Ginsberg) pats me on the back
Asking if I enjoyed Oppenheimer
He knows I know
Gary Oldman was good as Truman
Just unsympathetic to the real narrative
Remeran kicking in
I know he knows
Does a cigarette perk me up, he asks
It's an illusion
Calms you down though it's a stimulant
Keeps you warm though it slows circulation

Wonder who's wearing goggles
To see things as they are
Or who's brains been melted
Hard to gauge in our state

Chemical floods - pathways restored
Sucked into jealousy circles
Joy following big John
Latoya insults her after she sat with me
Don standoffish he can't take the Queen
Peer group resents his presidency

Facility near capacity
Some of us don't want to return
To crumbling castles
We're not stuck here like Los Alamos

With cell doors unlocked
Try to do the right thing
But no one's quite the Apostle Paul
Tensions rising
Who knows what diabolical plots
Are being cooked up (not to become meth)
In any of our callous mending minds
A village of destroyers of worlds

Guards couldn't find in his nasal cavity
A whole gram of meth
Still a hardworking honest man
Looks way older than 51
Joey P compares him to
The old man with a shovel
In Home Alone
Doesn't know how he caught
A stray bullet - 22 ain't nothing to pull
When his own brother shot him once
A barn mouse will wait on his foot
For crumbs of crank
Falling asleep recovering
From a motorcycle accident
Pomeranian licked infection to the bone
PTSD from wife's suicide
Cleaned up the blood
Before the kids could smell iron
Good to see him falling in love again
Even with Jess
Who looks like Rachel Druze from SNL
As strange as it is

White knuckling
Frozen in bed
Like the deer and I's staring contest
Last I drank in the woods
Wires like vines grow over me
Smell of onion or vinegar
In the parts neglected
Even a Marine bath
Teeth fuzzy like moss
Entropy - waiting for nature to reclaim me
In the mysteries of her immortal processes

Days spent longing for darkness
If this mattress could sail
To the eternal comfort of Alaska

Waves of memories
Some chaos some calm
Flood my senses
Piecing together
What feels like parallel lives
As the years catch up to me

Guess I always felt old
Or wanted to be
Still some youthful look
Besides a few stray greys

The last of us born
Before this Sci Fi world
I couldn't wait for
- Now it scares the hell out of me
And what it holds for those who will inherit
The things and things to come
We take for granted each day

Why should jealousy, wrath and envy
In this state hold me
When I know
I've already held myself back

I've snowballed into this situation
Now to find a place to melt
As I've said before
I'll climb out of this mess
As I always do

Smedley Ex Machina
You may become
my only offspring

*Started before rehab

The shape of the floorplan
One turn right or wrong
Depending where you're coming from
Besides hopping off at the junction
For a fix at the nurses station
We're still riding the L

Some now take different needles
Most trade strong drink for coffee
All jonesin' for cigarettes
Stuck en route on the L

Sunlight ripples on ceilings
Peaceful train underwater
Show any longshoremen
He'd be sure that we'd drown
Yet somehow always handed same Big Book
That belonged to a Clifton
Tremored scribbles on the L

Crusty's back to construction
Big Mike's returning to the oil rig
Replaced by touchy old hippie
And Boston smoking crack in a tree
Hope for closure to misunderstandings
With the De Lacey's and my Lord
And Burroughs Adding Machine
Left when El presidente Corey leaves
May he not nod off on the L

Scotty answers my call from the landline
Closest these kids'll get to a payphone
Last we talked at length
Before a blind date
But what fog made me forget
He returned to Pa
Same that made her disappear
Though we no longer smoke L's

Have I come to regard the majority
The same as the elites I despise
Useful idiots to be disposed of
Maybe I'm booked for the same cattle car
Maybe we all ride on the L

"In Eridu everything was reduced to ruin, was wrought with confusion" - Lament of Eridu




You stick anyone in here these days
They'd all keep phantom reaching
In their pockets for a scrying mirror
Jonesin' in the powder room

Segregation is natural
But we're all colorblind in the struggle
Pacing these halls
Seeking or giving light
Off a cigarette nub

Listening to the honking of geese
Addicts have synchronized migration too
We're allowed to walk the perimeter
Haven't quite admired the leaves lately
Changing late in the season - like me
To that color given by the tears of the Heliades

Trying to recall the rules of Pinochle
You'd forget too without playing a computer
Always wanted to read the book of Mormon
Only copy I can find is in Spanish

Consult notes I put on the back burner
Hard to deep dive now without the mirrored walls
That distract us all like Guy Montag's wife
Before nuclear apocalypse

Doubt I'll find Nonnus' Dionysiaca here
Can't make sense of Ovid's Phaeton
The relation of Pazuzu
To the 28,000 year rule of Alulim

Dragged down by Typhon
In parallel myth
Where the water fire is extinguished
Return to the heavens

As above so below
How the measurements of our rocket engines
Can still be traced to Roman chariots
In a long line of succession

Where is Eridanus in this terrestrial plane?
The Istros/Danube of Hungary?
The Padus/Po of Italy?
Somewhere in the Celtic lands?
- Funny how admired they were by the Romans
When everyone's more familiar
With the wartime propaganda
Of certain periods
Magnified by current academia

As below so above
This River Hades counterpoint
- As the ancients knew
This mysterious supervoid
Speculated to be a parallel universe
Some gateway out of our material realm
And these corporeal bodies

It is well with my soul
To float there eventually

Playing freeze tag in graveyards with imaginary friends

Cast out, pop these Skittles, work it out on my own
Know you care, know you miss me, shame won't answer the phone

Not rock bottom till
You smell lavas sulphur - then
Upside down heaven

In this sliver of tree line smoke refracts distant light
My only beauty beheld now, can't be surpassed by AI

Last good thing in my downfall has come to an end

Day drinking on a day off
Took a nap among the trees
I didn't think I'd wake up
To the start of World War III

It began like a Bond film
Paragliders and cheap shelling
As if our 'greatest allie' didn't know
It'd be their Casus Belli

No one on chat or forums this late
Enjoy the crickets while I can
Before nuclear winter
With calls to bomb Iran

Our endless empty pockets
Fund never ending shit shows
Once a narrative collapses
Like Hydra others grow

I watch my nephew's football game
More than meets the eye with sports
It's ancient tribal training
To prepare the men for war

Young man don't let them groom you
To false pretense loyalties
I'll tell you when you're older
When we wake up to World War III

Can't even escape surveillance
Marooned among the all seeing eyes
Of the trailer park
Staying with an indolent acquaintance
Who's been looking for a roommate

We finish laying stone
Around the deck perimeter
Guess I can't stash beer there
From his neurotic stepmother
A few rows down

Lennie doesn't drink
But he yells at her like he does
And he smokes more than me
Since his guinea pig died

Lennie doesn't ask for much
Unlike her in this temporary situation
Since I had to leave my old porch
- Not from eviction
But an unseen lease renewal
Seems it happened to another tenant
In their non-negotiable contract

Shekel goblins
More people grow claws each day
Whether as crabs in a bucket
Or birds to 'lift you up'

But Lennie doesn't pry
He's going night fishing
Where he drowns autistic rage

Hop on the Ebike
Brakes need tightening
Another long day
I want it
Ride with rush hour traffic
Into the sunset with shades
Another long day
I deserve it
Some truck from the quarry
Spilled riprap on the road
Another long day
But I don't need it