Written From Work: On the Scene Reporting

I work in an office of boring jobs. Dreamless cubicles in plastic flowered corners. Coffee grind breaks. Torpor faces with paper slit eyes. A file called Life shuffled over and over into nothingness and nothingness and nothingness before freedom comes unrequited to a pensioner's folded hand.

Food for Bedtime

I need a chick with a cream cheese a$$. I need a chick with a cream cheese a$$ to sit on my face so I can read her privates like a raw Charles Bukowski poem. Happiness would taste sweet, with all the flavour of a rendered cheese cake.

Fire

I saw the last of a great fire. Golden embers remained. Ghostly clouds of blue and grey rose lastly to a shrouded sky.

Let me touch those golden embers. Ignite the fire once more. Bring heat and light and burning joy, desire, want, ambition to the sky, to all of us.

All Inside Your Head

There's no tribunal. There's no judicial review. There's no judge advocate to mediate, moderate, mend the West Side rumble dancing on plastic nuggets of surrendered gold. All inside your head. Thoughts like battering rams. Emotions in a synaptic schmazz of fists and dropkicks in the squared skull warmed by woolly hats and threadbare hopes. There's no arbitrator to bring a concord of a Zen mind embattled with itself. No. Your thoughts are your own, like a hot summer riot. Your thoughts are your jailer, jammed together in cells of terror, of hurt, of war. Hand to hand combat like mud marines on a blood orange beach. March!! Left, right. Over hemisphere's of the swollen brain. Land mines: north, south. Hemisphere's of God's earth, starving and bellies turning, convulsing, in spasmodic gasps of quiet love in empty sorrow. Is this the one. He, the half-robed judge who arrests your thoughts burning like planks of fire in rusty barrels in cold November air. Flammable and inflammable. Smoke and billows of grey and blue. Jesters in sleek shark skin suits and cheap pilgrim shoes. Go! Fill the jails of your mind! Overcrowded thoughts in switch blade cells. Brain stunned, underdeveloped. Judge half-robed in laughing sneer to call back the angry poets of your pain. Wounded in stiletto handcuffs of verses made bad. Society's fault. Your fault. Heartless and bleeding heart sing on and on and on: grand schmazz under kleig lights and smoky memories in unsaleable dollars of purple prose and watered brain. Go forward, attorney of hopeless case. A verdict awaits. Alcatraz of the mind. Leavenworth of the soul.

Yarn

What do you spin, Ghandi? On the spinner wheel? Lines of soft cotton. Strips of linen delicate to the touch. What do you spin, Ghandi? On the spinner wheel? Lines of barbed steel. Hangman's rope, rough to the neck. Do you spin tales of peace? Do you spin songs of sorrow, words of war? Or is it to Life in the eyes of the spirit God, you turn. Love is in your heart, peace is in your voice. Spin us a raga of hope. Spin lines of soft cotton. For us bend the barbs of steel. Call to each of us the last hope of humankind. Spin apart the tangled rope of the bloody ring. Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war: Shakespeare's lament. Spin to us, Ghandi! Ghandi! Ghandi! Spin the world on a spinner wheel till it stops in an act of peace and accord.

To All of You

You don't know what life does to your heart.
Breaks it. Like crystal on hard ground.

You don't know what life does to your heart.
Breaks it. Like strung out Puerto Rican kids on a New York street.

You don't know what life does to your heart.
Breaks it. Like a steel tower crumbling. Like Kubrick's ape man beating a human soul.

Time Past

For ten years I've been covered in dust.
For a decade a grey smoke has burned my eyes.
I've never strayed past the early morning light.
How would I know?

Sounds

I've heard spirit songs rise from the wells of hope.
I've heard helpless cries from endless caves.
I'm deaf sometimes, but for sounds of a lonely God.
I hear what I can't see, the music of a summer rain.

Don't sing from a bottomless well.
I can't see in this endless cave.
I only hear when I'm blind.
Don't cry for me, for you. For sight or sound.

Leave of Absence Broken Early

I've seen shore-leave sailors explode into violence. I've seen merchant marines beat down one-eyed mad men for dollar clips and silver dreams. I've seen the swagger of cops. Their bloody billy clubs break watermelon skulls on hot city streets. I've seen hippies at the edge of ruin. The swirl of peace and love in the psychedelia of bad trips past. I've seen too much, like babbling holy men go wild with godless rage. I close my eyes in fleeting blindness, but my mind still sees, the heart still beats, the life stories of others get told.

Leave of Absence and Future Considerations

Ed's Note: The Square Corner has decided to take a short leave of absence in order to dedicate more time to serious writing. He plans to use the blog as a vehicle to present his first short story. This comes after some serious thought. He believes the four or five simultaneous blogs buzzing inside his head interfere with his increasingly stubborn goal to get published. Come back in a week or two and see what he's rendered.

SC

To...

To hell with it all. To hell with the Ghost of Charles Bukowski. To hell with Tortelli. To hell with Zigman Zibanski and the mendicant Boyce Boswell. To hell with it all. Posing, prosing like Ginsberg, as feeble attempt as it is. There's more: the incontinent devil in haemorrhoid rage from a$$ crack burning in sulfate flame. There's more: the hellish hep cat in imitative prose and bellied fur balls curled up in bewitched corners of the mind. Nah, to hell with it. Hear me, to hell with this and that and two fingered posting on one-eyed keyboards. Blogger's lament. Characters created and foiled. Unread. Treated to anonymity on a landless highway stitched on a devil's tail. To hell with it for now. Till I blog next. To a heaven's command. To a Ghost, to a Tortelli, to a ZZ and to words not seen.

An Angel in Redress

It feels like yesterday. It feels like troubled thoughts all over again. It feels like ropes of cast iron and sharp wire knotted around my neck. My shoulders bend. My back stretches and bows. Surely the strain can't last much longer. Or perhaps it can....Who's that buzzing at my door? A devil in red shoes? My prayers answered: An unkissed angel in camouflage and female khaki? I must, I must hold on. Tomorrow comes, I pray. Perhaps troubled thoughts no more. A sign in the window, maybe: Unkissed angel Gone. Camouflage and Female Khaki for sale.