Promised Land

With this life nearing its mortal years...I ask

What of those conforming days? 

Happiness...

Joy...

A life well lived

Then why the unceasing calamity inside my soul?

...if it is near...

Who will hold my dying arms?

Who pull me closer to my spirit self?

Away from this fertile land?

Away from this barren land?

The promises made to me, but I never received

Or, I never accepted

Or, I ran from...

I don't imagine what is in that promised land...

If it exists at all...and if it does, can it die on barren soil?

But I lift my heaviness and understand my arms are still strong... 

Time left to redeem and mend my mortal earth

And wait for heaven as much as heaven waits for me...

Once again, I promise to my self, I will not wander from the light of passing time

Under a Mournful Moon 
When I feel a midnight melancholy I put on rough out boots and walk under a night sky. It is late in my time. The years between you and me have left us faraway. I walk alone along a strolling verse of loss. My grieving thoughts spin slowly under stars held in distant homage to friends who have died. Oh, yellow moon...you hang against the night sky...I walk under your silent gaze. Who have you seen wrapped in white linen and buried under black earth? I ask you futilely, and sing to you forlornly.  Then in the suddenness of life as is in death, the melancholy is gone. When the morn's first light passes my eyes... When I see the fresh dew on the grass and hear nature's young voices... I am friends anew with this hopeful earth. I revere you moon, in all your silence and light. It is to you I will go in final rest.

In memory of friends:

Ian,
Mike,
Wallace

 

Shutter
He held the old black Nikon to his eye and took pictures. Every day for years he walked the urban streets and and with a short lens framed an alley man and engaged the shutter. The slap of the mirror startled some. Some grew angry. One threw a bottle at him, just missing his camera and crashing against a pissed up brick wall . But over time the Alley Men got to know him and accepted the pantomime of his photography. For all the years he took pictures, for all the years he engaged the shutter, and listened to the slap of the mirror and felt the weight of the camera hanging across his neck and shoulders he never loaded the old black Nikon with film. He never pulled TRI-X out of a yellow cartridge, nor spooled it, nor closed the film door, nor turned the rewind lever. Some Alley Men believed he processed the photos inside his head. His brain like a dark room where each image of misery was printed. Other Alley Men thought that was crazy talk. The old Nikon was empty. Nothing there. Just a short lens and the dark negative spaces of time and madness. 

 Waiting

I dream sometimes of barely floating atop a dark black sea...praying for gentle waves to safely take this soul 

I don't know where or how...whether ever it will be 

I don't know if it will be today, tomorrow, or when my spirit passes 

But someday the waiting will end and perhaps I will be saved,

My life may be preserved...a drowning, praying captain safe from a dark black sea

Blackbird
I remember the summer of Tokyo time...between the gathering of darkness and a sun's rise.  I close my gaijin eyes and hear the rumble of walking lives...the ghosted  memory crowds from Shinjuku trains hurrying the blended mix of jazz and cinema samurais and swords and sullen Blackbirds singing into the dead of night. Oh, reimagined salarymen as Shoguns stumbling into red lanterned Izakayas to embrace Kirins and taste the grilled catch of the Japan sea. Where did I stand in all this loneliness? So far from home? Nippon handkerchiefs absorbed my sweaty brow. Two years in Tokyo time...the end. Back home to where I can drive my car. Roll down my window; feel the ocean breeze. Look to the east...and dream of samurai trains; remembering how much I wanted to come back to my town.  And now with the decades passing I wonder how I was ever there and if in the dead of night Blackbirds drink Tokyo beer and sing forever into a sun's long rise.

 Beatles Library

The Alley Men

I have an evening secret... 

Under a rhyming street light.

live alley men who come apart

Like broken parts, Like wheels that come unwheeled

Minds astir, crazy, unwell, mad city birds fly ahead

I have an evening secret, I stop at the alley and take a breath..

my mind a bit astir, but no broken parts, and the wheels still wheeled

the devil cries inside, compels me...

I roll bye in defiance of the sorcerer's mind

Not yet ready to walk inside the rhyming alley

To sing Psalms to an atheist's Spirit

Not yet ready to walk within an alley's tears and madness

Space and Time

Do you know fallen sons who

fade away

into the silent movie of

whirring reels

of crazy minds 

of backlit flickers eliding space and time

backbeats and rhythm disappear

The band is gone

Projected words between quiet scenes

The band is gone...

Do you know clowning fathers who

cry alone

Eying final credits of their fallen sons...

who ride the whirring silence of space and time

Veins

Each day from work my muscles are torn,

my eyes are weary like heavy weights

my belly is fat, but my stomach is empty...

just like the empty kitchen shelves 

and the blank cold air in my fridge...nothing there but sticky food stains and dead celery...

only a last waxy sleeve of salt crackers... a hollow plastic jar of peanut butter...almost as empty as a beer can... I'm too tired to go to the store...to go get takeout...junkies prey on old working men who walk slow and alone... the crackers will keep me going...the last swabs of Jiffy sticking to the roof of my mouth...even my lips are tired...68 and stocking shelves...the only reason they hire me is cuz labour is in short supply..."I don't want to end up like that old loser"...is what I overhear.. the part time high school kid says so...

Then don't drink so much...and don't treat your wife like she don't matter and she takes the kids 30 years ago and walk's out on you and your crappy apartment and minimum wage job....68 and stocking shelves...sitting on a tired couch, eating crackers and peanut butter looking at Peloton commercials on a 16 inch flat screen...barely able to lift the remote...barely able to fill the bathtub with warm spinning water...

I drop my old, fat body in a half-soapy mess of drowning thoughts...what happens if my arthritis gets worse...what then?...disability pension...not enough money for rent...no more money for booze...homeless

I guess I'm better off than the junkies...they prey on old men...I wonder what goes through their veins...if its painless...the needle tearing the skin and muscles...I wonder if they know its night when the opioids damage their brains...what is high?...what is low?...supposed to rain tomorrow...damp weather makes arthritis worse...the doctors say they don't know why...I wonder if junkies get arthritis...if their arms hurt in the rain...

Butt Gas

                                                             -I-

Sometimes snow streaks from a maddening sky....

Sometimes a maddening sky weaves streets of snow...

                                                                                     -1+1=2-  

 A crazy man...I exited my apartment...pushed by the bland hand of nothingness...nothing but the view of a whirling winter from a single room window...I wanted to touch the cold...I wanted falling snow to touch me...I needed to walk away my numbness...to restore my life like a colour photo retouched by memories...

A small table outside an out of business hamburger joint was empty. I sat there and faced the street...and talked to myself. I exhaled a jumble...a jangle of words that did not stay...that did not build sentences...only crazy random talk...Nothing cathartic...just moist human mouth steam billowing against the cold.

Then she appeared. I thought she was there...I thought she was real...I didn't see an apparition...Or did I?...a female vision in tattered white linen with a sunken shallow face atop a body of hard thinness...forlorn lips that got muted by life but were too sad to kiss...vulnerable, but not against the cold...oh, no...did I create her with my jangled, mangled mouth words...did I create a suffering ghost lady out of vowels and madness...?

"Love tore us apart!" She cried out, her right hand pointing to the sky, her eyes fixed on me. "We loved each other too much. Then he melted like a candle and died. I still hear his voice, see his face. I search inside a hopeless truth. He's gone."

I wanted to say sorry...loss is tough...I've known suffering, too...I hope I can help...but all I did was exhale crazy, jangled words...and she was gone...disappeared in between what I wanted to say...and what I couldn't...

I ambled back to my apartment. I opened a can of mixed beans, and ate them quickly with a plastic spoon. I lay under my covers and tried to sleep early for the night. With my knees pulled up near to my chest I erupted loud gas from my butt. I thought of her...the lady in linen...I could talk straight now...I wanted to say I was sorry I melted like wax...but I didn't die...I wanted to say I was sorry we both slipped into madness...I searching for streaks of snow... she searching for woven love that tore us apart.

 

Time after Time

It was three in the morning when I got a call from a friend:

 

"SC, I got mortality on my brain. I can't sleep. I do internet searches, and I can't sleep."

"What do you mean?" 

"I look for old friends, people I've known and I find they are dead...cancer...heart attacks...suicide...I don't know why sometimes. I feel bad. I feel bad. I wish I could go back in time. Say sorry for the things I've done. And say sorry for the things I didn't do. I know we get older. Some day it'll be us."

"Sure. Someday it'll be true," I added wearily.

"You know, once I heard a writer interviewed. He said you honour people like a fighter who's been beat down to the mat. You lift yourself off one knee and fight some more. That's how you honour their  memory, you struggle for life as much as you can."

"Sure, sounds right," I yawned.

"SC, you know what's real. The sound of the trumpet, like a dying man. He plays jazz against time..."

"Sounds wise...but I got to go to bed...work tomorrow." 

 

I hung up and slept under the dead of night, till the alarm clock rang. I lifted myself off one knee and made my bed...and thought of an old friend, my indifference gone...dancing like a dying fighter time after time...

Legs and Hearts

Above me turns a grieving moon,

I can't sleep

So I walk the night with memories:

Of a city of young men dreams,

Cars pass by

Early winter, 

I roll my shoulders 

Pull at my woollen collar,

Turn my hood above my ears,

I stop at a parking lot like a hundred days,

Empty, 

But for memories,

Of a city of young men dreams,

Seems a hundred years when--

We fought against our enemy lives.

With wooden sticks and curved blades

We rushed into a frozen made up game,

To hold onto a ball no one could control

We've all grown old--I assume

But in the end I know we disappear,

Rushing the goal--

before the night steals the evening light,

before the air gets too cold,

before legs and hearts grow too sore,

The ball races wide along the net...

Is it only me who cheers under a grieving moon?

Perhaps I've walked too far, 

Perhaps I think too much,

Recall too much of youth and the cold,

My legs and heart are sore

Time to go home...I'll walk the parking lot...disappear along a make believe

 

 

 

The Blows

I lay alone in bed. It's late, the night's grown old.

I can't settle down

It's the restless time between sleep and fear,

My woman left me

It's cold, the hotel window is open;

it wont close, wont quite touch the sill

The curtains carry with each breeze

A radiator steams, but barely keeps me warm

My women left me and I hear the street noise

Sounds hurry in the cold,

Men fight on the sidewalk below

I can't see, wont get out of bed

But I hear the blows

My woman left me,

I can afford more, but I searched this bad part of town

Found a heart broken inn, with long stairs and lonely blankets 

She said she can't take my moods,

My controlling ways,

She found another man,

I've come home wounded to this bad part of town,

I left for awhile, thought I'd never see the street again

Everyone's gone

But I should have known, women leave me, and the night always grows old,

The morning heals,

but the night always grows old,

And some windows never close, never in the cold

 

 

Stolen Car

I walk through a field around the edge of my town

Just beneath an autumn sun a sky settles down

White clouds shroud a golden soil

Every year I pray alone in the temple of fallen skies

...for stolen lives

People I've known...

like stolen ground

Cut short by the thief of time

Alone I ask to see them once again...

A silent sunset like a Raven's eye watches me

A pair of headlights along a country road passes by

Stolen car like stolen lives...I ask no more

A long walk takes me to my town

It's 1980... 

I see a passing headlight along the dark edge of time,

like a fallen prayer that's settled down

 

 

 

Waits

Every night I listen to the rain,

Sometimes it falls gently on my rooftop

Other times it presses hard against my window

I sleep easily to the sound of rain

like the rumble of a downtown train,

drops roll down in narrow streams

like waving dreams under umbrella trees

African elephants

Crying whales

Who awaits this reverie?

I sleep easily under the sound of rain,

and see drowning men as heart broke sailors on a downtown train,

and their forgotten women like wavy dreams...they take shelter from a crying shame

 

 

 

 

 

Thin Ice

I sit by a creekside and watch autumn leaves skate away,

sliding atop a Canadian stream

barren trees

as golden and yellow ships race aside rock and fallen branches

The sun is at my back-- casts a shadow over the encroaching ice

As a writer I need my solitude, a walk in a forest tires me quickly

I am as old as a memory

Time to move along, a stop along a creekside is short, the air is cold, 

I want more time alone; but a dampness breaks through my wool clothes

When I was I young, I would not take this rest at all--nor walk along this path

Then I was not a writer, I saw no beauty in solitude 

Thick as a Brick

Skating Away

Life is not the same,

I hear the change of aging music in solo winds

A walk down the path will take me to my writer's home 

There I will set a fire in a black stove,

and burn new words--not a verse from an old song

 

 

Where he goes....

Down in the alley, between blood shot eyes and bent fingers, a man rumbles through a blue bin of brown bottles and cans made wet by a short spring rain. 

 

Each night he searches for gold topped beer cans behind the Easy Bend Bar. Not that the they are worth more than any other cans, but he imagines his small street earnings to be otherwise. He packs the nickel a pop empties into a giant construction bag--the great tool of his trade, along with an old shopping cart with half-rusted wheels he uses to haul his night's earnings to be redeemed at the corner store.

Last night he got beat up in the same alley. His eyes bloodied. His hands swollen by the only two punches he landed on the instigator's head. He got beat up by the same man he knew during his days on Wall Street, who now fought him over the same empty treasures.

 

He didn't go down...not that night, but years ago...

 

Once they were young brokers and rivals. Never quite trusting each other, their friendliness masking their common competitiveness to stake out the same territory of finance and success--make the most money, drive the flashiest cars, buy the crystal and glass condos, catch the same expensive women. Eternally lucid in their seductive dreams of more and more.

In the days of oil barons and gold mines they would have lit conspicuous cigars with hundred dollar bills. In days of Wall St. they would snort coke through rolled up Benjamin's, and drink too much Cognac out of a stoner call girl's high price shoes.

 

Maybe all of that is what takes them down. Or maybe it's the compounding, gnawing truth they are expendable. Or maybe it's just a singular something in their heads--within the high dollar universe of stars and meteors that collapse their minds. 

 

They crash through Wall St windows, slip off Manhattan ledges and land on park benches and fall into the scrabbled livelihoods of men and women who redeem bottles and cans, one nickel at a time.

As with the homeless Vietnam Vet--his PTSD haunting him every second of every relived, fearful thought..

As with the math professor, whose days of numbers and decimals drove her to madness...

As with the Japanese computer scientist, who just ceased thinking...

As with the Honduran mother who cleaned houses during the day and collected bottles at night, so her kids could have a better life...so they could escape the hollow madness of poverty

 

They are called 'canners'. They live at night, collecting and fighting for redeemable bottles and cans against the emptiness in their bellies, against the demon voices in their heads. 

In one perfected motion the man uses his alley strength to hoist the construction bag over his shoulders and drops it into the shopping cart. He turns his squeaky cart around and noisily rushes out the alley and moves hurriedly along the street. 

A police car drives up along him. An officer mockingly says: "Hey, when r' going to oil those wheels? You're waking up half of Manhattan. What's with you grabbin' only gold beer cans?"

In a panic he quickly pushes his cart in an s-curve. The cops laugh as they drive away. The man holds his cart to a stop, scared and out of breath.

From where he stands on the Upper West Side he can't see Wall St. It's gleaming towers, it's bustle of men and women...and commerce...and stocks exchanged and sold...and businesses opened and closed...and dollar demon voices...and shuddered lives, collapsed and crushed like haunted, hollow aluminum.

He stops at the corner store and drops his empties into the vending machine that coughs out his night earnings. Just $15. Each night's collection gives out less and less. He thinks maybe his old friend steals from him, arrives early and takes his golden dreams. He worries what's next, but he also knows there are no more windows to crash through, or ledges to slip from. No more benches in homeless parks where they can land. Just that he knows no where to go is where he is...just another life, another short spring rain falling on brown bottles and empty cans.

                                                                 __ __

Story based on HBO Documentary "Redemption" about Canners of New York

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2cejo9

Roy's Guitar

I walk into an alley of madmen and midnight messiahs.

Under a crazy moon they preach and jangle on overturned milk crates.

7 messiahs. They cry in disharmony. In dissonant voices. Made up words. Indecipherable verse.

Ragged newspapers as holy books like their ragged hospital clothes

They preach

The madmen listen

They sit in a half circle on thin cold snow. Some pass the bottle. Some mutter. Some yelp at the 7 messiahs.

I listen

I listen 

I listen...

To the alley music that separates the church and the bar

A choir sings, the organ plays Handel

Their voices carry to the crazy moon

From the One Lucky come electric waves of Roy's guitar

The chorus of drunkenness meets Handel's holy loneliness

The jangle of noise

The jangle of noise

The jangle of noise 

Crazy...Crazy...Crazy moon

The madmen rise and shuffle under the mania of streetlights 

The 7 messiahs leave the milk crates behind

Tomorrow I know they will come again. Where there are always alley cries of madness and music under a midnight moon.

 

 

 

 

Peace and Rising

Weightless in a night,

I float like a cloud

Like a paper lantern released by a gentle breeze

Beneath me, a country road marked by lights,

Trees swaying along a mountain silhouette 

My arms spread like bible wings

Is this my death? I ask my weightless self

I feel peaceful

No mortal stress,

Only a solace, a reverence...

As a Romeo meets his Juliette

My soul like a cloud in the night

Is this my mortal death?

Or my new love rising?

As a Romeo meets his Juliette

As a Romeo meets his Juliette 

 

 

Bone Chill

The alley men lit up cigarettes,

one dressed in brown lit up an old cigar

They all exhaled clouds of smoke

Inside the mortal night, inside the winter stillness

the billows of burning tobacco lingered

Second hand smoke, like alley lives never went far

Billy lost his mind,

Johnny drank too much,

and old Ralph had a little bit of both 

Some men died in stillness and silence, blue veins and needles

A final euphoria before a lone death took them home

The alley men snuffed their cigarettes on the tar below

The one in brown snuffed his cigar against the cinder wall

Billy,

Johnny,

and Old Ralph

Never played a song

Never sang harmony

They couldn't whistle either,

Not when there was a chill in their bones

They circled a barrel stuffed with smoking cardboard and waited for a warmth by fire, like a saxophone