Darkening Sky

There's a drifting slow snow
falling out of a darkening sky
holding the promise
of a fresh white coat
on the dirty slush
and grumpy world of January
I leave dark footprints
in the mushy snow behind me
as I close up shop
crack open a beer
flip the switch on the amp
crank the reverb
grab that cold steel bar
slide that steel guitar onto my lap
suddenly it sounds like east Texas
drifting across the room
from an old car radio
a slow slide of something like
a waltz wanders out of my fingers
sleepy and slow
forget about the cold
and the snow
turn off my mind
and let those notes flow

I love babies. So cuddly!

Your blogmistress at work

Wanker Man-Boys, Fear ME!

I got the funk, the snork and the glory of a rock godess and I can shred that cosmic funk, baby. Be afraid, wank-o-casters. I have more power in one hand with my heavy steel on my lap steel than an army of fools with Les Pauls and Marshal stacks, and that's when I'm still unplugged!Step aside, all you manly, butt lipped, foolish boy-men who think you rock. I cook and eat my dead! I eat black holes for breakfast! I've done and had things done to me by strange women you could never even dream of, let alone have the places to have it done! I've had better groupie sex with more women than a planet full of Motley Crues, Guns'n'Roses and David Lee Roths! Amy Ray asked me for kissing lessons! I am the purple flower of hell county, give me wide berth! My droppings bore through the earth and become volcanos in China! I was kidnapped by bodiless fiends from a corporate rock galaxy and got away with their wireless transmitters! I cannot be tracked on radar! When I plug in my Fender Dual Showman, the lights dim in LA and Three Mile Island melts down, again!Erick Clapton weeps from shame when he hears my name! I made Joan Jett think it was cool to be a dyke! My EL-34's are made of diamonds, my 12AX-7's were forged in a black hole! I am my own event horizon, I need no stinkin' drum machines! I compress my own damn signal with the mighty action of my own thoughts! My strings are made from Supergirl's Hair, the only thing strong enough to withstand my mighty pick strokes! My fingerpicking cannot be captured on film because it's faster than the light that shines on it! I have Leo Fender's heart, it's here on my desk next to Ted Nugent's testicles! Fear me, you human refuse who think you can play!

Pitter patter of little claws

My skull has rats
they grin
they chew
and try to tell me
what to do
mostly they grin
and scurry about
little clacking claws
on the linoleum
of my hindbrain
chewing on the cheese
in my frontal lobe
peeking around corners
waiting for me to throw
a mental shoe
at them
I'd put out some
D-Con but modern life
is filled with poison
already
I'd put out glue traps
but my mind
is already sticky
It's better than cats
at least the rats don't
need a litter box

wino santa's eye

Marty Robbins
and steel guitar
drift out of the stereo
"out in the west Texas town
of El Paso"
extra horseradish bloody Marys
jalepeno olives
they're sweating already
chased by beer
they
slide down the hatch
The Hulk and Xena action figures
hang from a limb
the Silver Surfer
fights for space at the top
with Dr. Doom and Dr. Frank N, Furter
who will claim the top
of this year's tree?
tiny lights and garland
twinkle like the gleam
in a wino santa's eye when you
offer him a bottle of
Mad Dog 2020
snow spits out of the sky
like the clouds are trying
but too thirsty to cough up
a good white cover
it must be the holiday season
tonight at our house!

A Memmo from the Boss

Good afternoon, everybody.
I've been gone longer than I thought, and I can see I should have left better instructions when I left as to what direction I wanted us to move in. Were it not for some family matters involving my father and our CEO, whom you all know has been too busy with other matters to pay much attention to matters here, I would have returned much sooner.
I have to say I am very, very unhappy with the changes that have been made in my absence. When I formed my vision of this organization, it was not about money, power or control. While I have been gone, I can see that some of the staff have self appointed themselves to higher positions, but also has taken up some rather disturbing rules regarding the establishment of a dress code, intrusion into personal matters by some of our affiliates, and enforced a morality code that has made many of our best people leave us to join up with our competitors. Not only that, you've started playing favorites with politicians. These things will stop, starting right now.
No matter how busy you're trying to look, or how innocent you might think you are, I am in the way of knowing just who needs correction around here, and some of you are going to get booted right to hell. For lack of a better term, I am very pissed off.
I thought I'd passed on some very clear directives, part of our mission statement, that were in no way ambiguous. You've broken all ten on a regular basis, and no amount of pleading is going to stop the disciplinary actions coming down. You're lucky I have a forgiving nature.
Oh, and by the way, Christ is not my last name, you idiots. It's a title. Please start using the actual translation, Jesus The Christ when both emailing and referring to me.
Sincerely,
Jesus The Christ, Son of God.

Stupid grey monster box lobotomy

I hate Microsoft. I hate the fact that by shutting off my computer three seconds early, I gave it an icepick lobotomy. I hate losing all my data, my passwords and my contacts because some stupid fucking motherboard was having a pissing match with a bloated, clunky OS run by a bunch of opportunistic geeks that I used to clean toilets for in Seattle, the wretched refuse of programmers who not only fill code with pointless shit nobody's ever going to use, but can't bother to do dishes between housecleaner vists or even put away their sex toys, which I would often find under the bed, next to spent condoms, half filled beer cans filled with chewing tobacco spit and piles of dirty underwear and half flushed toilets that I was tempted to clean with their toothbrushes.
I hate having to ask my sweetie to reload every goddamn program on my computer, and having to have her have to tear hard drives out to save the few things I forgot to back up, I hate geeks that think everybody understands what arcane shit they do, or is too stupid to exist if they don't. I hate constant upgrades to things I never use forcing me to learn shit that I did not need.
I also hate lima beans, hard core bible freaks, most repbulicans, but that's another rant.
At least I have my stupid monster box back up and running. Merry fuckin' Christmas, not that this holiday season had anything to do with Christ, it being completely ripped off from the romans and the pagan nordic tribes. Ho. Ho. Ho.

Joy to the fuckin' world.

Now these are the kind of wristbands I can get behind. Arhie McPhee rocks, I may order a case for all my pals.
Ho fuckin' ho ho ho.

rumbling plows

The plows are rumbling outside. It's been snowing big fat flakes nonstop for hours, and the whole outside world seems wrapped in a giant cocoon of soft wet snow. As fast as you shovel and sweep, it keeps piling up, and it's so damn soft and fuzzy outside you find yourself shoveling your neighbor's sidewalk just to have an excuse to stay outside a bit longer, to make that pot pie lunch go away faster so you can have hot chocolate and really need it when you go in.
I love winter today, and as a concept. I remember how incredibly cold and clear it was skiing across the lake when Northern Wisconsin was home, how the pressure cracks would boom and thunder on cold days, and how much fun it was to ride horses across the lake, knowing that there was three feet of ice under where you were paddling a canoe two months before.
I learned how to drive on a lake. A big hog of a GMC truck, one of many my dad beat to death. The thrill of cruising on the ice at 60 Mph, cranking the wheel sideways and spinning in circles till you wanted to barf beat any carnival ride.
In the late winter when the ice finally broke, the sound of a million shards of ice banging into each other and the shoreline sounded like a giant cocktail glass being rattled by god, mixing a daquiri only she could drink.
Of course, by mid March all this beauty will suck unconsenting donkey dicks, but today, there's moments of early winter euphoria outside. I'll worry about the ice damns on my roof some other day.

Eyeballs are the window to the soul

Sometimes I get scared looking into mine. It's your turn now. Boo.

My pal Luka

Me and my pal Amy

Seats 14 A and B

They both loved bad action movies, ugly boxy safe cars, both drank sickeningly sweet cherry brandy in the winter.
Both came from rural backgrounds and tried hard to hide it, mostly by acting big city and trying to sound like your average white bread TV newscaster.
She was mildly kinky, with a drift into dominatrix fantasies, in a bland, toothless way. He was looking for a mommy figure to keep him in line, and to spank his backside every now and then.
Both were more non-descript than they realized, and would never, ever stand out in a crowd, or do anything remarkable. They were locked into a pleasantly boring life, wage slaves to a corporation that could care less about either of them, and would shake them off like ticks on a dog the first time the quarterly statement looked bad.
In short, they were typical white Americans, riding on the luxury deck of the spaceship earth, clueless about reality. They had all the elements that made for a perfect modern couple. He was in seat 14 A, she was in 14 B.
Of course, they never talked to each other or exchanged eye contact. She never even took out her earbuds, even though she had her I-pod turned off. Like most of their kind, they avoided meeting people on public transportation, preferring boredom over adventure. But they would have been perfect for each other.

seven word sentences about my last week

Illinois is flat, Atlanta is totally insane
Interstate outlet malls cluster like cancer cells
Christmas lights and palm trees, just wrong
Walking barefoot in December, must be Florida
Baltimore over the left wing, landing soon
Rental car tin can to Amy's house
bashing mandos, singing amy, pedal steel jeff
Berferd howls with the violin, Ellen sings sweetly
Dogfarts, chili, sawdust, the thump of bluegrass
louder than sin, ruder than dirt, jerks!
Playing with Claudia is a true bliss
tuesday looms, guns dogs airports jet fuel
cruising to the airport through the snow
terminal bordom and overpriced bad food
rush through the Clevland airport switching planes
Two hours on the tarmac sucketh mightily
Turbulence over Lake Michigan, Peanuts over Milwaukee
I can see my house from here
The runway looms, landing gear down yet?
Nearly under the landing strip, smoked decadence.
Let's order take out take out BBQ!
Smokey Jon's rocks my dead pig world!
Order from the runway, cell phones rule
seventeen minutes later, the driveway looms large
road trip over, where is my bed?
stomp into the house, shed shoes, coat
sandwich in bed, with a beer, bliss
Six below, wind chill of minus sixteen
The big TV glows, new CSI disc!
home sweet home feels just soooo good

Points south and east

She was leaving in the morning, doing a long drive to Florida, taking her mom to her snowbird nest. She realized that her blog would be neglected, and that there was little reason for any sentient to want to visit Florida.
But she would be back in a week and a half. She thought she would be, anyway.........

Virus writers

Ray-man was a nightcrawler, a lover of darkness who preferred the company of his online world and his souped up laptop over ordinary humanity. A grad student killing time on a boring internship project, he spent his nights tending the server farm and wondering how all his tenured professors could stand the tedium of government work.
His shift at the SETI lab was a half hour from done, and he craved a glazed raised, a few hours playing role playing games on his computer and a solid sleep. The sheer tedium of tending a bunch of computers to look for alien transmissions was driving him to a restless state of irritated distraction he was ill suited for.
He shift was almost over when he realized something truly odd was going on. All the com lines in the lab were jammed, but with outgoing transmissions only, and the temperature in the server room had jumped twenty degrees in the last half hour.
Something was pushing information out fast enough to keep a T-3 line jammed, and to drive every one of the servers to near melting point.
He logged into the system with his own laptop. None of the lab machines would let him into the system. He looked at the odd code scrolling by, finally getting excited by something at work. One of his sneaky hobbies was writing viruses, and he knew what almost all the good ones looked like. This one was amazing, and unlike anything he'd seen before. But how the hell did it get into and now out of the system?
As his system crashed, he realized how it got in, and realized that there was life out there in space. And that it too got bored, and wrote code for fun. And this one was going to take down every computer on earth with a connection.


"At the moment of commitment, the universe conspires to assist you."
Johann Goethe

New Tattoo

The new tattoo looked great, although it was still oozing a little, and the salve made it look sort of greasy. It was her fourth one this year, and she was ready to take a break.
She checked her Mohawk in the mirror, trying to decide if she should dye it blue again. She ran a razor down each side, then blasted the center with some seriously heavy duty hairspray to make it stand up and fly right.
She slipped her rather large and pendulous boobs into a sheer bra, taking time to make sure she did't snag the nylon with her piercings, and leveraged them into a seriously deep cleavage.
The fishnet stockings, black underbust corset and the leather boots and skirt finished out the outfit. She took a long look at herself in the mirror, and got ready to go down to the party in the big ballroom in the basement, thinking about that new bulldyke that had moved in down the hall a few weeks earlier.
She was hoping for some serious horizontal action, the kind that lasted all weekend and gave you carpal tunnel from all the handwork and lots of sloppy kissing.
Damn, she thought, she was really liking this new nursing home, and the money her assclown husband had left her. It was making up for 40 years of his stupid macho attitude.

ouch

He woke up in a dull haze of pain, groggy and feeling a seriously disturbing throbbing coming from his crotch.
The hotel room showed signs of every wierd night people had spent there, from the peeling faded red velvet wallpaper to the dog chewed Gideon's bible.
He staggered to his feet, slid into the bathroom and relieved himself under the ugly, flickering flourescent light.
He was unerved by the size of his bandages and swelling, more than a little worried about what had been done to him, hoping that he'd be able to make the long ride home without being sick.
As he fell back onto the bed, he noticed the bible, and picked it up and flipped through till he came the book of Dueteronomy. It had been years since the book his parents shoved down his throat had even crossed his mind, but bits of that old hellfire and brimstone crap still lingered somewhere in the back of his brain.
Would his vasectomy reversal keep him out of the old testament hell? Or was he damned for having one in the first place?
He'd have lots of time to think about that as the beer and oxycontin kicked in. That 400 pound blanket of narcotic love beat the old testament any day in his book.

Deuteronomy 23:1
He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the LORD.

Thunder Road

Thirty years ago I found Born to Run in the record store.
Thanks, Bruce.


Thunder Road

The screen door slams
Mary's dress waves
Like a vision she dances across the porch
As the radio plays
Roy Orbison singing for the lonely
Hey that's me and I want you only
Don't turn me home again
I just can't face myself alone again
Don't run back inside
darling you know just what I'm here for
So you're scared and you're thinking
That maybe we ain't that young anymore
Show a little faith, there's magic in the night
You ain't a beauty, but hey you're alright
Oh and that's alright with me
You can hide 'neath your covers
And study your pain
Make crosses from your lovers
Throw roses in the rain
Waste your summer praying in vain
For a savior to rise from these streets
Well now I'm no hero
That's understood
All the redemption I can offer, girl
Is beneath this dirty hood
With a chance to make it good somehow
Hey what else can we do now
Except roll down the window
And let the wind blow back your hair
Well the night's busting open
These two lanes will take us anywhere
We got one last chance to make it real
To trade in these wings on some wheels
Climb in back
Heaven's waiting on down the tracks
Oh oh come take my hand
Riding out tonight to case the promised land
Oh oh Thunder Road, oh Thunder Road
oh Thunder Road
Lying out there like a killer in the sun
Hey I know it's late we can make it if we run
Oh Thunder Road, sit tight take hold
Thunder Road
Well I got this guitar
And I learned how to make it talk
And my car's out back
If you're ready to take that long walk
>From your front porch to my front seat
The door's open but the ride it ain't free
And I know you're lonely
For words that I ain't spoken
But tonight we'll be free
All the promises'll be broken
There were ghosts in the eyes
Of all the boys you sent away
They haunt this dusty beach road
In the skeleton frames of burned out Chevrolets
They scream your name at night in the street
Your graduation gown lies in rags at their feet
And in the lonely cool before dawn
You hear their engines roaring on
But when you get to the porch they're gone
On the wind, so Mary climb in
It's a town full of losers
And I'm pulling out of here to win.

dervish

Spin like a dervish
buzz like a bee
there's lots of ways
to find one's center you see
some slow it down
bring it to the ground
some sit and contemplate
in quiet solitiude
they find things great
with a placid attitude
me I like noise
and musical toys
cranking a musical prayer wheel
on the edge of unstable
grabbing ahold of the cosmic cable
hang on as long as I'm able
someday I'll be dead
have worms in my head
maybe be baked in an oven
no more koriana lovin'
so don't tell me to go
so damn slow
I'd rather die dancing
don 't ya know?
Old platitudes are fine
when they're in your mind
but as for me I leave them behind
gonna shake my booty and my mind
till time leaves me far behind

more fall hacku

Waterfall roar
Cool mist drifts over
ok, now pie and coffee!

Big merc drifts along
the miles home fly by
oops, that's my driveway!

mud on my feet
leaves in my hair
I return recharged

under my skin

I nod in morphine dreams
somewhere not here
Slipping in that needle like
it was a stainless steel lover
humming like Cole Porter
I've got you under my skin
you want a Hollywood ending
to walk away from the crash
without a scratch
a hero to swoop in and save
you in the last reel
Not too smart on your part
but I see the appeal

Fragility

The planet was crowded, getting short on resources and people were actively changing the ecosystems. Global warming was screwing up coastlines, changing weather patterns and it was time to speak up.
So a group of concerned people formed a group to spread the message, far and wide just how fragile our planet was. Backed by a big liberal groups with money, the started a campaign to educate people, one that included massive broadcasts, both radio and television, to get the message out how little it would take to push things over the edge, how few reserves humans actually had.
Of course, once those broadcasts reached far enough, the message did get received, loud and clear.
Nobody expected just how easy things would come apart after the Aliens got here, nor how easy it would be to knock over human civilization and make slaves of mankind.

Fish Dinner

There's a stiff wind today
a bright sun
a chill in the air and leaves too
fall days and the smell
of wet leaves
cotton gloves
chainsaw gas and oil
bring back a flood o memory
and a tear or two
it's been 21 years since you left
I still see your sneaky grin
your angry temper
your warped sense of humor
twenty one years since had you
burned to ash
and we fed your ashes
to the fish
like you asked
I miss you
and your temper
and your quick laugh
you were a good teacher
a strange friend
and a father who taught me how to work
and how to be a strong smartass myself

Janie and the tree

The tree creaked and stretched, warm sunshine drying the dew off it's leaves. The summer had been warm, with heavy rains, and new growth had made it bigger everywhere, including it's girth. It almost looked like it was getting a pot belly.
The creaking sounded like singing, both rythmic and soothing, as though it was singing a lullabye.
Janie stretched out under it, sprawled on her mother's favorite blanket, thinking back on how she'd seen her mother slowly fade away, worn down by a lifetime of babies and distant men and children who left early and came back late, late enough to see her last days.
She'd understood, not many people wanted to stay in Grand Marais, but it had been home to both Janie and her Mom for both of their lives.
As she leaned up against the tree trunk, she felt some part of her mother drifiting out of it, oddly comforting. She and her sisters had spent a lot of money having this tree injected with her mother's DNA, and maybe someday somebody would do the same for her. It was the kind of afterlife she'd enjoy, being a tree.

Human DNA/tree research is real:
"In an artistic response to the advancement of biotech, Biopresence has become its own godlike entity. Biopresence is an art venture currently based in the UK, which, in short, aims to preserve human genetic material by inserting it into living trees. The trees thus become "living memorials" or "transgenic tombstones" for the humans whose DNA they contain. This may top cryogenics for unusual final resting options."

http://http://www.inhabitat.com/entry_633.php

Deep Spacer

She had spent the better part of the last decade on full burn, putting 100 years worth of earth radio and TV transmissions behind her.
It had taken every credit she could lay hands on, and the hyperdrive fuel alone had wiped out her cash reserves.
She'd bet it all, and now, as she recorded the last of the old style analog radio shows and TV programs that she wanted, she headed back home to repackage and sell them back to a public hungry for novelty and nostalgia.
Thanks to the solar storm of 2204 wiping out all recordings and archives, and her own desire for status and cash, she was going to be wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice.
As she punched out of hyperdrive to hit earth orbit, she realized she was in deep shit, or more correctly a thick asteroid belt.
Where was Earth? And what was that small moon over there?
As the tractor beams locked on, she realized, that was no moon. That was a space station.

unreal

Once you see that everything is unreal, you can't see why you should bother to prove it.

E. M. Cioran

Weak Moments

He slid in the back door of the strip club with a sideways glance and the scuttling motions you'd expect from a sick crab or someone feeling guitly as hell.
Once inside, he made his way quickly to the door he spent nights dreaming of walking through, and pulled out his bundle of quarters and started dropping them into the slot.
The shutter came up, and there she was, dressed in her school girl outfit, 19 going on 13, underfed and waifish. He pulled his zipper down, started the urgent and very unsatisfying process of getting himself off. It took longer and longer each time, and by the time he did reach some relief, it was a thin, pallid moment, gone too quickly. He felt dirty, spent and even more frustrated.
He had the sinking feeling that this was a monster he would never get around, his attraction to little girls.
The following Sunday, his whole parish just couldn't get over how much energy he put into his sermon against the dangers of the gay community.
All the while clutching his secretary's daughter's dirty underwear in his left pocket.

Laundry

The days crawl by
like the whole damn sky
is holding it's breath
waiting for the other shoe to drop
waiting for the big change to come
that isn't as big
from the back
as it looks now from the front
why are the longest now moments
always the bad ones
and the fine moments
of nirvana
barely long enough
to get you through having
to mow the lawn
or do the laundry?
someday I'm gonna make god answer this one
or I'll have to kick her ass
but only
if I can keep the devil too scared of me
to come get me.

Sausage

The crunching noises were irritating, but the constant beeping of the back up alarms, the way the rude and rough men yelled at each other and the stinky aroma of diesel and rank sweat were the worst to her.
Every day, they kept the machinery roaring, tearing up more of the park and doing oddly rushed things with rope and string and levels and GPS boxes, making grids and sifting sand and dirt.
With the window closed, she could see their rippled back muscles and, almost hear the shouting, and even see some of the arm waving and frantic calling on cell phones.
She finished filing her nails as they finished dragging the lake. All that effort, she thought.
Not that it would do them any good to keep looking in the wrong places. He was still in the freezer, and she was really good at making sausage.

Deep space tourists

They traveled the dark mystery between the stars, spreading out over thousands of years, learning the myriad ways life could invent itself.
From sentient gas clouds to methane eating bacteria, from the multi pod sensualists of Haa'ralaxu Prime to the lava men of Terra's interior, they plumbed the depths of time and the universe, sampling the beauty of the creation, all spawned by the big bang and the big mystery behind what made that great explosion.
But the Human Earthlings were the first ones to assume that they came across the vast universe to kidnap them to explore and probe their alimentary canals, to insert alien metallic devices into the stinky mystery of the human colon.
Sushi with the dolphins was nice, though.

Death will tremble

For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own God. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.

Charles Bukowski

fall hacku, a bad version of Haiku

Cool nights arrive
Sleep becomes blissfull
need to order propane soon!

The dehumidifier roar
can sometimes stop now
fall is here

Leaves start falling
the woods tug on my desire
leave the repairs till monday

The Athlete

Everybody said he looked great. The trim figure, the sharp haircut, all those hours in the gym had paid off. He'd been sure it would, enforcing a regimen of free weights, diet, running and supplements. All done without hormones or steroids, just sheer hard work. He'd turned himself into a tanned, fit god with hair to die for, a washboard gut and every muscle defined enough to make him look like a movie star.
He even had makeup on, although it wasn't much. Just enough to give him a healthy glow.
All his Aunts and his Grandmother flocked around him, asking people to take photos and remarking on his fine appearance. They were the old fashioned type, caked with powder and cheap perfume, the last of their kind. You could tell. Only old people take pictures of their relatives in a casket.


"The abdomen is the reason why man does not easily take himself for a god." Friedrich Nietzsche

Howler monkeys

The howler monkeys scream
tension builds
blowing apart at the seams
bread and circuses
a sense of entitlement
chattering and pounding
slinging and flinging
like a bunch of babies
wah wah wah all day long
everybody's a target
an example to be made
something instead of somebody
so much to do
so few heartbeats
it would be funny
from a distance
from a longer timeline view
but it's easier to bitch about the old
than find something new
it's a planet full of monkeys
with too many loose screws


"Painting and fucking a lot are not compatible; it weakens the brain,"
Vincent vanGaugh

Mad

"Mad; adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence; not conforming to standards of thought, speech, and action derived by the conformants from study of themselves; at odds with the majority; in short, unusual. It is noteworthy that persons are pronounced mad by officials destitute of evidence that they themselves are sane."

Ambrose Bierce

Hiding Place

Everybody still thinks you're off on the road trip to clear your mind, dear. I haven't told anybody where you really are, guessing you would want peace and quiet, to escape all the yammering idiots you work for.
It's only been a few weeks and already I miss having you here. The house seems empty, filled with your rat piles of clutter, yet oddly quiet. I can't get used to the way nothing changes here in the house when I'm here alone like this. I miss the clatter of your keyboard, the way you shuffle up the stairs like you're 900 years older than god.
I miss the morning coffee and nearly burnt toast with apple butter.
Your brother called the other day, wanted to swing by and drop off a few pumpkins. He's creeping me out, keeps asking how to get a hold of you. I really don't like him much.
I guess it's a good thing you didn't get that cell phone, or he'd be calling it, or even using it to find you. I know you don't want to be found.
You're in a very good hiding place, or at least I think so. It was our secret place, so romantic, the place where we first made love.
I hope we may be together again before too long. I miss you terribly, and wish we'd have had a better conversation last time we spoke.
Of course, by spring, your hiding place may not be so good, I'm thinking you may start getting pretty smelly, when things thaw out. Or the flies start hatching. But at least I know where to come when I want to talk to you.

"Painting and fucking a lot are not compatible; it weakens the brain,"
Vincent vanGaugh

Sleep becomes blissfull

Cool fall air
at last sleep
becomes blissful
if too short
the night wind blows in
builds a restless energy
I want Gandalf and the dwarves
to swoop in and take me
on a grand adventure
I want a funky tour bus
a 23 venue tour
with a good drummer
a cranky lead singer
a handsome chubby bass player
I want to head north and west
a tent
a good camp stove
and espresso pot
camp below a glacier
before they all melt
leave behind
the muggy summer
the slowly dying garden
and all those damn ripe tomatoes
I cannot pick fast enough
instead I spray lacquer
keep fretting
It still beats a day job

Midnight Flowers

Dog days of summer
I can smell 'em
thick organic crud
shimmering heat
the whole world smells like
compost
dogshit
old hide glue
just a hint of
midnight flowers
nicotania drifting over stench
nightbloomers
fighting it out with decay
it smells like mortality
oddly comforting

Hog On Ice

like an ill fitting suit of clothes
or a frog too far from the swamp
like a hungry vulture in a creamatorium
after the burning
like a hog on ice in a tutu
like a self conscious wildebeest
in a china shop full of trigger happy freaks with large caliber rifles
sometimes life is just too wierd

No More Lentils

She was one of those former deadheads who had been lost since Jerry died. She had spent the better part of her 20's on tour with the dead, and had burned bridges and brain cells along the way, selling bad burritos., ugly hippie dresses and the occasional bag of mushrooms.
Her hair had devolved into about three big ugly dreads, a mouse brown collection of matted hair that made a rhino horn seem attractive, and her overall funk matched the cellulite and thundering hips she'd developed from sitting around between shows, or pointing her decrepit microbus down the highway.
Her better days had been spent tofu dancing with third or fourth generation hippie boys, twirling to the often off key drone of the Dead, and she'd reached the end of the road. She wanted running water, a refrigerator and a steady income.
She just wasn't ready for the shock of seeing her mother in the mirror once she got the short haircut, boring office drag clothes and steady job.
But she sure smelled better. And never ate lentils again.

The Front Slides In

Black spots
mud
wilting mold
like the hordes of Gengis Kahn
I strip the garden bare
the last reeking marigolds
fill the vase on the dining room table
green, yellow and blight speckled tomatoes
fill the counters
peppers stacked in the sunroom
the front slides in tonight
the last day of the garden
a fierce one this year
thanks
mudball earth
big yellow sun!

The Billionare and the Clone

He was rich, rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Fat with money, most of it made in the big biotech boom of early 2010, and his fortune was cemented when he came up with foolproof self transplanting livers and nanobots that destroyed unwanted fat cells.
So he indulged himself. He bought Jimi Hendrix's guitar, and carefully scanned it for blood to sequence DNA from.
Once he found it, it only took a few days to get the samples ready and the cloning vat primed.
And then, he waited until the day came when he could pop open the heavy lid, and finally get to see his guitar god, ready to nurture this clone into the same greatness that he so loved in the original hero.
Of course, when a chubby white guy with stringy thinning hair stumbled out looking for the nearest 48 ounce bottle of Dr. Pepper and for his guitar tool kit, it occurred to The Billionaire that he now had a very expensive guitar tech.

Something in the Wind

Alice knew there was something in the wind. She'd been feeling it for weeks, or at least smelling something bad on the wind coming from the house at the end of the block. She had once cleaned that house for old Marty.
She liked him, even if he did follow her from room to room, yakking away and pointing out corners he thought she missed, with his damn yapping dog sniffing her the whole time, the one that wanted to hump every leg he didn't pee on. She hated that dog.
She walked down the block and pounded on the front door, waiting for an answer. When she got none, she tried the door and pushed it open.
After the wafting breeze of decay rolled over her nose, she noticed the dog. It had gotten fatter. Then she realized what a good source of protein Marty must have been.

Cesspool Monkey

There's a monkey in the back of my brain
she's sitting in a cesspool
every time she gets mad, she throws the first thing
that drifts by
Some days I need to keep my distance from
puny humans
Other days, there are weasels and rats
chewing on the control cables
mostly the ones that control the
screaming muscles
ARRRRRGHH! or arugala!
may be emitted
I like the days when my better angels
get along with the turd throwers
and rodent teethed beasts
Getting older has made the cranky beasts
too tired to chew and fling
as often
and that's a good thing

Chicken Salad Sandwich

Charlie pulled the car over to the side of the road and took one long last look in the rearview, shut it off and lit his last cigarette.
It had been a long night, after a long couple of days, and he was spent, broke and out of gas. Things had not worked out as he planned.
Right now what he wanted a chicken salad sandwich, a cold beer, nine hours of sleep on a king size water bed and a 400 dollar hooker who could suck the chrome of a trailer hitch while humming dixie.
Somehow he didn't think much of that would happen anytime soon.
He did get the chicken salad sandwich a year later.
It was his last meal before the lethal injection.

Cranked Twin

a cranked twin
a bottle of Mr. Daniel's sin
I wanna pack it all in
three heavy chords and
a telecaster on ten
hit the road with a band I hate
and love and hate and play with great
somebody else's credit card
and some realy big
big land shark
shove the throttle down hard
just climb in some wheels
let those tires squeal
llke thelma and louise
without the suicide
like Janis without the
addict inside
like Stevie in his prime
just point me anywhere there's a gig
and
let me drive
Cause around here
there's sure
a failure to thrive
or even arrive
at something sublime

"The law of diminishing returns never rests."
James Kunstler

The Storage Unit

The storage unit was in the middle of a godforsaken chunk of ugly fast food grease pits, bad pizza delivery joints, used tire stores and shuttered pawnshops out on the edge of town that blossomed briefly 30 years earlier. One of those ugly disposable unplanned stretches out on the edge of a crumbling desert suburb.
He'd gotten the call earlier in the week from his Uncle's estate executor, and decided it was worth checking out. His Uncle had been a queer old duck, the black sheep of the family and had popped off his last stroke while sitting in his vibrating recliner.
From the sound of it, it was ugly, and rather a rude way to go. They'd found his desiccated remains a month back, and for some reason that escaped him, he'd been left the storage unit's contents. He didn't expect much, and had no use for most of his low rent family.
Sill, given how everything he'd tried had gone bust, it was worth a look to see if the old fart left anything interesting.
He pried open the creaky unit door, and a blast wave of heat rolled out. The space was huge, and it felt like a drying oven for making beef jerky. It was loaded with crap, box after box of the kinds of worthless crap old people never seem to be able to part with. Broken stereos, clothes they would not have fit in for decades, and worthless pulp books.
He cursed his luck, his family and his broken finances. He might be able to sell a few things, enough to maybe pay his gas for the trip home, although he didn't have anything there but a pile of overdue bills.
Then, he found the chest. Buried under layers of dust and broken crap, it looked like more of the same useless clutter, until he pried it open and saw the collection of coins, the bundles of cash, and the two bars of gold under the top layer of junk papers. After a closer look, he realized the junk papers were bonds totaling over a half million bucks!
As he leaped with joy, realizing what he'd inherited from his formerly useless Uncle Bob, he managed to not only knock over the pile of boxes behind him, but to hit the garage door enough to slam it shut.
The snap of his spine mixed with the slam of the garage door. As he hit the floor, paralyzed from the neck down under the huge pile of worthless paperbacks, he realized with a twisted irony that at least he would die rich, and well preserved in the dry air.

Sleeping

He used to love to watch her sleep in the car. It was the only time she looked peaceful, and he found it incredibly sexy the way she looked, her hair jumbled up, her pretty face finally relaxed. He could look at her for hours that way, remembering every detail, and trying as hard as he could to commit them to memory. He loved her almost too much.
Till he hit the tree, anyway. He really misses her. That truck, too.

She wondered

She wondered, was he walking the streets of some distant city, smelling the springtime air filled with the scent of flower blossoms and melting dogshit in the soft April rain?
Sleeping in a garret, drinking espresso in little cups as the red light district goes to sleep, the junkies and whores and moslems all jostling together as they make their way into the dawning day, some to sleep, others to pray?
Or holed up in some Paris flophouse, sleeping off the jet lag and the absinthe, waiting for the door to burst off it's hinges, busted in by the cops after a three day slog through 10 countries, ducking the cameras and sweating out the border crossings, complete with dogs and guns and scowling officials sniffing for that scent of fear and forgery?
She never did find out he was running a punch press outside Akron, punching a clock with a new face and wishing he still had the money.

Pull the Trigger

He'd pissed her off once too often, and deserved what he got. She'd been dealing with his bad moods, his snarling attitude and the way he ignored all his crap and expected her to deal with it for way too long. He was always barking orders, expecting to be treated like royalty, and she'd had enough. She was sick of cutting him slack for having come from a broken home, and scared he'd someday kill her.
He liked to sleep out in the late afternoon sun, and it was as good a place as any to end the wretched relationship. She waited until he was asleep, snuck up on him as he snored and farted off yet another day's dinner, and put the .410 against the back of his skull and pulled the trigger.
It made a terrible mess, but at least he was sleeping on an old cotton blanket in the front yard, and she knew it would work as a great shroud to drag him over to the pigs.
She pulled him into the pen, rolled his body out and watched as they hungrily started chowing down on him. She realized he'd been a pain in their ass for years too.
She dragged the blanket over to the fire pit and burned it. Later, she'd go over to the pen and take out what the pigs had left behind.
Then she would go back to the dog pound, and this time, she sure as hell wouldn't get a rotwieler.

The Pain Artist

Pain was his art form. Pliers, needles, rude machines, all were something
he
understood on an intuitive level. Fear made it all that much better, and he
loved the smell of it, the way eyeballs bulged, the screams and moans, the
way some of his victims tried hide it, all the time cowering inside and
screaming for mommy or making deals with god.
Not that it did them much good. Between the pain and squirming, the smell
of
burning organic material, the grinding, the tearing and the blood, his
victims got what he felt like they deserved.
Of course, emptying their wallets was a side benefit, and had paid for lots
of nice things, like the video recorders and the fast internet connection
where he posted his rude glorious efforts on line.
Yup, life was good. Worth all that expensive schooling to become an oral
surgeon, for sure.

The Comet and the Warehouse

The rain would not stop after the comet hit. It had been raining steadily
for the last four months, and the hordes of people fleeing the dying cities
swarmed over every available food source. Only because of stupid luck had
Jason survived, finding a cache of ammo and guns in the washed out remains
of a long dead survivalist's house.
Finding the stockpile of food in the warehouse on the island was a mixed
blessing, and they had lost three of their tribe just getting the explosives
to blow the bridges up connecting them to the mainland. There, they made a
stand to wait things out,for the weather to calm down and for the remaining
bands of starving people to die off.
His new tribe was dry, and they weren't hungry.
But he could not count the number of times he had wished that the warehouse
had been filled with something besides canned cat food and rawhide dog
chews.

The Closet Find

When she first found the leather and latex outfit in his closet, she didn't
know what to think. Normally she kept out of his closets, and while they
slept in the same bed, he preferred to keep his things in the west wing of
the sprawling mansion.
She'd stumbled across the fetish gear looking for a shoebox to store some of
her paintbrushes in.
She knew that every relationship had to have room for a private life, and
often wondered where he was late at night, but being busy with her own life,
didn't worry too much.
He mostly seemed happy, puttering away in his basement workshop with his
young friend Rob. It did strike her as odd that he wasn't interested in sex
much anymore, but it didn't bother her. Being a rich man's wife had
advantages, and allowed her to pursue her art. He could fool around however
he wanted as long as she got what she wanted.
But the nipples on the Batsuit and the funny tights his pal Robin wore were
a little tacky for her taste.

The Bean Event

The head wound was a bleeder, drops flying all over the place, and it took
all three crew members to deal with it.
While Romanov tried to sit still, Ivanovitch and Shultz did their best to
clean it up and glue it shut, and just getting it dry enough for the
surgical adhesive was in itself a problem.
Being so far from anything like a real hospital had some serious drawbacks.
It was going to be an impressive scar.
Romanof never stopped bicthing about it the whole trip, and blamed it on the
shipment of camping food that Shultz's boyfriend had sent in his last care
package.
After the whole mess was cleaned up, the bleeding stopped and the galley
cleaned of Romanov's blood, sharp edges covered with duct tape and paper
towels, Shultz pointed out that it was not the freezed dried bean
casserole's fault, but the third of Sir Issac Newton's laws of physics he
needed to think about, the one that states that Every Action has an Equal
and Opposite Reaction.
"Only an idiot eats rehydrated beans on a space station and doesn't think to
grab onto something when farting" he said.

I don't like Monday

Monday
eyeballs glaze over
the brain connections
fail to jump the gap
like a busted distributor cap
on a 65 micro bus
on the way to a Dead concert
lurching along the desert highway
about to die and make you miss
Jerry and the good acid
and the bad music
it sputters and lurches
like your great grandfather's
drunken 48 Ford
after it
slid into the creek
on the way home from the bar
in 1966
like a deer in the headlights
paralyzed, waiting for the buckshot
half hypnotized
half zombie
half way to a feeding tube
Monday, you suck.
really, you really really suck, even when
there's no regular day job
even on vacation.
Sorry, but it's true
Why can't you be more like your sister Friday?
She is much more pleasant
has a way of making beer taste better
sometimes too good
Or more like your lazy sister Sunday
who sleeps in
would load the dvd player
and make coffee
if she had hands?
Sorry, but I think I'm going to have to
let you go
You're fired
I'd have waited till Friday
but your sister said she didn't want to get involved.
Even she doesn't like you, and she's usually the one
who gets to fire people.
Sorry.