Luke 14:34 “Salt is good; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?”
there is a throbbing that stretches from a pierced right palm, through branching blue veins up to a small, malfunctioning pin-point in the brain
where the knowledge gets knotted up and trapped and snared, and it aches and begs and cries and pleads for a pardon, a way out
ANYTHING
any streaking stabbing screaming
ANYTHING
any scrawling screeching slicing
ANYTHING
any sobbing sorry sadsack suicide
it can get.
We are all nailed to narcissistic walls, eyes facing browned concrete. Self fashioned martyrs, bleeding in our own little corners of this basement called Golgotha.
Nervous and swerving my sole drags on the concrete underfoot. Perspiration, and red life, and the rhetoric of cloistered children drips from my face and I swear I can feel the eyes behind my soaked back. They see the slight pull of an imagined limp. A fissure in tissue. That opening those dirty fingernails
caked with soot
need to rip into weakened fools. Stumble along stumble along each stomp getting louder and I can hear muttering and surely those lucid white devils are ripping my spine to pieces. Turn around one hundred and eighty degrees and start to say syllables but all that falls from is
soot and crumbs
and those black dots, who knew black dots could cause so much bile to fill my bloated central cavity. I turn one hundred and eighty degrees and continue the clownish gait that is this existence with blood behind my eyes and tears under my tongue and that horrible forbidden knowledge in my ear muttering
you are nothing
Some people seem disappointed that the world is now parceled out in back-lit screens and orange bottles. Good riddance, I say. The jutting nail heads of society and the splintering rails of interaction have too long bit at my hands, pocketed though they be. I spill no blood on sleek black keys. My feet don’t ache under the pressure of visiting other bags of flesh and blood. I merely sit in my blue chair and go to the screen with the blue bar. I read the blue thoughts of blue friends and eat the blue things they give me and everything is alright. I see a flash of red when they want to talk or look at a picture of me. Such beautiful contrast with the blue. So I always know when they talk about me, click my blue high-lighted name. Sometimes I like to look at those pictures, as if only to prove to myself that I still exist. There’s me, three years ago. There’s me, three days ago. My entire existence can be traced on a blue line. Everything I do, everything I stand for, everything I am, parceled out into blue screens and ready for all to look at and give meaning to. So convenient, this blue life. And these damn bags of nerve and fingernail have the gall to complain about it.
Roy the Carpenter
A man known to those in the know as Roy the Carpenter stopped one January morning. Those in the know did not notice until the one January evening following, when the barroom haze was twenty cigarettes short of its regular mass. For the first dusk in twenty years, the third stool from the left at the bar in the Mediterranean was without a drunken host.
A surly, grey-bearded old man was the first to feel the absence. Though his hunched back, eternally knotted from years spent bent over the bar, prevented him from surveying the foggy room, he distinctly recalled one less frustrated door slam echoing out of his gaze. He sat five seats to the right of Roy’s ghost. When the clock clenched its cold fingers upon the night, he let out a long, loud wail, lamenting the loss of a beautiful soul.
A dentist claimed he was the last to see Roy the Carpenter. He claimed that he saw the old worker step off the cracked stone steps of his dilapidated porch and walk off the Earth. The dentist claimed he saw this on his way to work.
A scrawny man with fake glasses was the second to feel the sting of loss. He was seated at the piano, woozy with warm drink. The sharp notes on the sheet before him were dancing around the foolishly out of step flats. The scrawny man felt a deep sense of despair, for he was the flat note on the ground. All out of tune as the world waltzed in harmony. He heard the wail of the surly, grey-bearded old man from across the bar. With the dissonant song came a strange urge within the scrawny man. For the first time in a week, he put fingers to the fake ivory keys and let out a long, loud balled, lamenting the loss of creativity.
The authorities were not sure what to make of the situation. No man simply walks off the planet. Roy the Carpenter could not by any means afford a map of the space beyond. Roy the Carpenter had too blue a collar to just up and leave.
A shadow, grey and tarnished and unshaven was the third to take in the reality of time. Everything kept moving and Roy was long gone. For unlike those happy patrons full of drink, Mr. Scizzors was aching with sobriety. No coins on the ground to be had, no loose leather gifts bequeathed from distracted tourists. Slumped against the bars back door. Like a leaking trash bag. Through dry eyes he squinted up at the grey sky and saw Roy the Carpenter walking up as one might walk to their mailbox. Mr. Scizzors hissed and slinked away, for the daylight made his skin sizzle and organs moan. Too weak to walk into the abyss of space, too weak to follow that kindly figure from faded memories and beg for booze change. Too weak to do anything but slink away and wait for death or drugs.
A doctor was called. He said that it happened all the time. Roy the Carpenter was not special. A man walking off the Earth was nothing new.
The man behind it all, the man behind the wooden bar was the fourth to find out. Him and Roy went way back. The bartender, Davey Stool, turned his back to the nightly revelry and sighed a quiet sigh. Trembling fingers grabbed at a rag. The tumblers before him never quite seemed to lose that fog, no matter how hard or how long he scrubbed at them. Every drink poured left its remnants, every greasy set of fingers left their identity. The memoirs of many a man were in those stained glasses. Davey turned and put a finger to the bar. The wood was rough and old. Puddles of spilled drinks and puddles of tears in equal volumes. Another sigh. He cast an eye towards that third stool to the left. It was cut up and bleeding yellowed fluff. The elegant red of too many years ago was a beaten and scratched rash, a simple suggestion of a color long gone from this world. Davey sighed. This old place was too much. He walked out the back and saw a shadow slinking behind the dumpster. That old devil scrounging for something terrible poison. Whatever it takes. Stool looked up at the sky, and lit a cigarette. He fancied it as a candle in some great big church.
A chorus of voices could be heard through the cracks under that old door, a requiem of drunks realizing life’s end.
On Dogs and Music Award Shows
In an unexpected tangent off the well-worn circle of personal bad habits, I chose to forgo the Grammy’s of this year 2012, so as to watch the Westminster Dog Show. Blame it on a weekend binge of insomnia and cheap marijuana that left a tired pile of dust in place of my mind.
This marks the first time I have skipped the annual pony show that is the Grammy’s. With each passing year those statues of gold look more and more like wrought mistakes of tin foil. An unrelenting diet of music snobbery has made the very mention of the accursed showing cause a nauseating sensation, rather like boiling water, to spread through my organs. So perhaps the break was a needed one. My health stood at risk; what if I got so worked up about the concept of Skrillex being nominated that my heart gave out? No, I couldn’t put anyone in such a situation. No, I couldn’t deal with the Grammy’s, not this year.
—-
So I cast an eye to the dogs on display. The show had already begun, and I was thrust into this new world of animal criticism. The first talent was a golden retriever, presumably competing in the “big friendly dog” block. While it’s face was all smiles and it’s carefully groomed hair had a way of catching the light in such a way that only added to the dogs radiating joy, there was something that threw me off. As the golden retriever took it’s requisite lap, I scratched my bare chin and pondered. I slowly came to the realization that it was the dogs stout height. The golden retrievers of my life had been tall and proud; in comparison, the competitor seemed silly, a jester in the court of big happy dogs.
But alas, those dogs did not go to the grandest of all canine galas. It was the short, pretty one that now wagged it’s tongue before the world. Clearly, I was no critic of dogs. My opinion was too skewed by inexperience, too skewed by my own taste and my own life.
They showed other dogs. Ones with long, unfamiliar faces. Strange patterns of hair. Distant eyes. Fringe breeds that the layman would never understand. One of the dogs looked like it had a rug covering it’s tiny limbs. The announcers spoke of teeth and the structure of bones. Words and concepts that held no meaning to my casual dog loving ears. I was deep into a field that was new and foreign, one that I had no knowledge base or biases to lean upon. I just wanted to see more golden retrievers. I had no time for these underground canines.
And at last, the Grammys became clear to me. 
