Untitled #11

I'm a wandering boy
And I can't explain
The feeling of peaceful
boarding them trains

Up from the mountains
Lying on the plains
Drunk in a boxcar
Counting the grains

But I'll pass away
And no one will know
And I'll never roam
Around no more

I ain't very handsome
I ain't very tough
Never had too many pleasures
But I guess I've known more than enough

Ain't got no job
Just one less problem
Except when I'm hungry
And I gotta kill for a little drama

But I'll pass away
And no one will know
And I'll never roam
Around no more

Well here in my right hand
I gotta few crumbs of cornbread
and here in my left hand
Well it's holding up my head

I've lost you once
I'm gonna lose you again
I can barely hold on to
The top of my hat

Barnaby the Squirrel

Barnaby was a pervert, a coward and a squirrel. he was abused as a child, probably, and was always looking to prove something that was, in most cases, unprovable. Barnaby hung out in a group of oaks trees on little Zoe's street. Zoe was six and deathly afraid of squirrels, due mostly to Barnaby's cruel, but self-affirming tricks. One time, when Zoe was 4, Barnaby jumped in her bedroom while she slept. He was loaded on acorns and goofballs and after biting the clothing off of 3 of Zoe's dolls and eating some Doritos out of the trash can, he passed out. When Zoe awoke, the first thing she saw was Barnaby asleep on her chest snoring, with an erect penis. When she screamed at the sight of the pulsating member, Barnaby went into a confused panic, clawing her stomach as he tried to escape. Barnaby flew into a closed window, falling back on the floor. Zoe was in hysterics. Before her parents came in, Barnaby found the right window and rolled down a tree. Zoe's parents never did quite make out the vividly incoherent story she was trying to tell them. Meanwhile, Barnaby, slightly bruised but ultimately unaffected, made his way down to play some poker and watch the broads wiggle as they served him drinks in an elm tree in the Baker's backyard.

Neither Limes or Lights

When I arrived at the bar, there was a line to get in. I couldn't believe it. I thought someone had been stabbed in the patio area as it was flowing out into the street with human filth like an unbridled sewer main.

But in San Antonio, this had become the bar of choice for the surrounding college and local art crowd so it was to be expected that on a weekend night it was the place to be. Only the winners, baby. Only the fashionable, hip, 21-to-30 somethings known as the "Who's Who of Who Cares." I didn't drop in for over a year, but, due to a birthday gathering, was forced to bemuse the goddess in waiting. As soon as I got in line a young girl I had only talked to a handful of times in my life and hadn't seen since I made the last unfortunate trip to the same dive ran up to me and grabbed the bars of the steel fence that separated us.

"I heard what you said about me you fucking prick!" she snarled. I stepped back, looking down on the petite, red-headed stranger. "What the fuck are you talking about?" I asked and sincerely wondered. "You, your friend told me what you said about me. I look like Uncle Buck's girlfriend from the movie Uncle Buck?" I went back another step and tried to carefully think about what to say next. "What?" was all I could come up with. "Fuck you," she retorted. "Shit, you mean Chanice Kobolowski?" I said. "Oh my god," she yelled, shaking the bars into my face. "You even know the actress's name?" "No, that's the character's name...I mean, I think...as best as I can remember." Her face leaned into the bars and her lips softly stated,"Go fuck yourself."

I looked into the crowd and saw more of the same coming on strong. I saw a few friends--some drunk, some scared, some depressed, some empty, some angry. No one looked at ease. Before I could enter the gate, some 22-year-old neo-yuppie in a suit and tie pulled his girlfriend, also business-casual, forcefully by the arm through the crowd. "I'm so drunk," she repeated over and over in different inflections, surprising herself with each one. "Come on, let's get the fuck out of here," he snorted. "I'll take care of you when I get you back to my place." The girl, squinting her eyes in two directions laughed, fell over the curb in the street and started crying.

I took out my license and waited for the next Sad Sack to leave, so I could get in. A man, with more sense than I had, sauntered out of the gates alone and made his way across the street to a gay bar. I lifted my right foot to step onto the yellow-piss-road when the white, dread-locked doorman launched his paunch into my crotch. "Hold on buddy...should I let you in?" he said with a cunty smile. "I'm not sure, but it would probably save me a lot of trouble if you didn't," I answered. He told me he was just kidding and let me in. I made a z-line for the bar which was the proverbial swarm of bees around the sweet domestic honey. A friend of mine, who I hadn't seen in a while stood next to me and we chatted. A hand came up on both sides of our inner arms. I turned, looked down and saw an out-of-work La Femme Nikita crossed with Hermey from Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer staring back at me. In a night full of magical trolls and unsolvable riddles, this new gatekeeper sloppily spoke, "So, are you boys trying to start a new scene or are you in line for a fucking beer?"

"A little of both, baby," I replied.

She spit out, "I'm not your fucking baby." She was wasted. One of her eyes was twitching and cocked to the right like a gun that was ready to backfire into her face. She just stood there, one hand on her hip, upper lip unnaturally raised, waiting for me to say something back. I walked out the door without a beer. I sat outside for about an hour, trying to focus my attention evenly around the crowd, taking in the assorted transexuals, sluts, and scabs.

On my way back to my car, alone, I noticed 4 or 5 leaves zig-zagging backwards toward me. I realized they were cockroaches and leaped in the street. One followed me, but made an exit into a sewer drain. Another disappeared under a piece of trash. Another went into a crack in the sidewalk.

We were all going to the same place.

I stepped back onto the sidewalk and followed it until I reached my car.

Plorae

I look up at the moon
The moon that I know so well
But the moon does not know me
So it says, "do go to Hell"

Like the creature in my mind
Sleeping softly I eye and pine

She doesn't know I know her yet
Less than mutually, we're both upset

They say a shark can sense a pulse
From a length away of nine feet
So why must this drum inside my chest
Send you to climb in trees?

You came to me as a faint swan
Broken facial features and red hair quaintly drawn

But now you rule like a fisted queen
Spades of Black with daggers preened

Oh, I guess I shouldn't say it's over
There's just this disturbing weight upon my shoulder
But I guess maybe she doesn't know
It's just my life I've gone and blown

Excerpt from "Holy, Holy, Hallowed"

Death came riding over a hill.

He was still miles away, invisible to anyone else, but he was approaching.
I took a breath and mounted my pony. The heel of my boot went in her
side as I pulled up on the skull, guiding her brains into the East.

I may have bothered kicking dirt into the lingering fire pit if I thought I might fain some spec of anonymity. But this was Death, He knew who I was and where I was going.

Admittedly, and in the most harshest of truths, I'm not sure where I was going; time had expired for me when the jackal spit me out in a crib.

When the dwarfed sun sat and rose again I was in Nancy crossing the border to Wurz.

Death was behind 60 kilometers or so, all the way, driving on at a steady pace. I look back once and only once, but see nothing. He is there. I've felt his lack of presence enough times to know. The magnificent beast he rides breaks through the ground like a woodchopper's ax. And this debris he sends into the air clings to its rider and I no longer separate him from gray sky or red earth. On the dustier and darker parts of the journey I often wonder if the rider disappears inside the bowels of the creature to rest, but I can only presume on these impractical reflections that journey with me.

Through and through, he sits erect like some great traveling tomb.

The two of us have met before, many times to be sure.


(Inner Set)


Dear reader, when I tell you Death is following me I don't mean to present to you a madman. There is no spit leaking from my lips. There is no eye twitching or bouncing around its cage and in these times there are certainly enough madmen to fill every sanitarium from Bordeaux to Bucharest. I have no intention of exaggerating my circumstances.

Although I speak to few others in my passage, if the subject of Death or "death" should come to bear upon the mind of strangers, they seem to accept my reality as delusion or metaphor.

But this is nothing I am striving for interpretation or analytics over. Death is that of legend and myth: a skeleton, a skull, a book and a sword. Death moves. Not unlike an expedient salesman flogging elixirs and detrimental condiments for the damned, there is much work to be done to make it to the end of a busy day. He is a reaper of lore, smiling, accustomed to his profession. This is no matter of pleasantry or wit. The answer is that Death is not the end.

Just three weeks ago I stopped in Jena for the benefit of my horse. I went to a bar, a hotel, even a surgeons office--all doors and windows were shuttered and secured. There was, in summation, life in town. This was clear to see from half-full bottles of ale and hour-old cigar butts. I wondered if Death had already been here, conquered, and held the inhabitants ransom as another display with his obsession and mockery of me. But as these pursuits came to mind I rode across a beggar, laid up against a hitch with his head down from the sun, saliva and soured liquor dripping into the whirlpool of mud he stared into.

"To where have all the people gone to today?"

The man, if that moniker would even suit such a miserable thing, didn't respond.

"Arse, where is everyone?"

He looked up toward me, grinning or straining his face from the sun. When he opened his mouth I mistook the few teeth he had for smashed pecan shells. I repeated myself a final time. A trickle of urine ran down onto his dirty bare feet and in between his toes.

No words came out, just a buzz of mumbling. I landed my boot in his face and planted him on the ground. The sky, hanging unusually low and nearly crushing down the top of my hat, broke apart as the fool started giggling and proceeded to hysterics, reaching for an empty bottle in a puddle he had probably been through a hundred times before. There was no sip of backwash to be downed, save some wet dirt and manure. He cursed me as I rode away, gripping the bottle and throwing it at the hind of the horse. "Friend, you couldn't chase a maggot of a dog's dick."

I rode up an incline over the main part of town cutting through a ravine and up over a barren hill with more dust blowing than weeds rising. When I approached the top the townspeople were gathered in the valley below. I rolled tobacco on my way down, putting the cigar between my lips and staring into the great black wide open covered in small strips of clouds following the smoke from my mouth. Even covered in hot, human sweat I felt cold, sterile and stalked by something almost certainly inhuman.

Somewhere in the center of the eye of onlookers was a casket with a little girl, no more than 8 or 9, sleeping inside. Cause of death was one of two things: disease or murder. The few faces that looked my way positioned me to take the case of murder as disgust and loss of faith seemed to be in vogue. I dropped down to finish my cigar. All around me I heard the uttering and crying to the name of Eva Waller. The priest spared no fat in his sermon, but as the rain fell and the sun went on carelessly shining regardless of the wet smell of a warm rotting corpse, all I heard were his last words.

"And as you walk through that dark and ominous Valley of Death, may you set your soft fingers in the palm of his hands, and let God do the rest. Shall you never have to fear that day, or that hour as we, the common, wounded and mortal man, will forever be, when the trumpet blows from the mouth of that mighty hunter known as Death."

The pine box was covered with dirt and lowered in.

Where ever there was an innocent life taken, there was a guilty monster, waiting in the chamber, watching the procession, waiting to be hanged, waiting to die. And most pressing to follow suit, this meant Death was in the shadows. As I crushed the cigar under foot, I noticed a figure pass through the crowd, placing a handful of white tulips on the fresh dirt. No one noticed. The tulips were wilted and the mourner's hands were finer and whiter than most refined grains of sugar cane. I knew. The procession back to town, to the gallows, had already begun and I was fighting my way going through the crowd the opposite way, I felt the vacant eyes of man in pursuit. Not a living man of blood and tissue, but that of a walking sickness. No eyes in his face, just empty sockets in their place. My wrists quickened in the reigns, bearing down on the horses back. She screamed. Inside me head, I was screaming just the same.

Chapter 136

"Shit," Basil Valentine said. "Do I have to suck the marrow from your bones or eat the lice from your hair? You bloated fuck."

I took my pants off and lay on the table. I wanted to wince but it would be of no purpose.

"Just get the metal away from my spine and out of the way of my heart old man."

"Ah yes, a real straight-shooting blowhard. You see rider, I have tasted the rotten juices squeezed from Death's brains. Don't underestimate every man as fodder for your own pathetic being.

"You faggoty cunt, just address my wounds. Death's knife is still in my skin."

Basil, finally calming, took out his instruments--dirty, rusting
scalpels and crude scissors and assorted accoutrements--bloodstained and pissed
on.

"Yes, no worries son, this will be relatively painless if you are what you say you are. An animal, no? Hunted? Prey mingling with the predator. you can't out run the blood pumping in a tiger's heart can you?"

I felt a blade go into the back flesh. I was ready to die. Anything other than Death's hand. I tasted blood in my mouth and smelt rust in my nostrils. Everything went black.

Then there was laughter.

Then there was nothing.


I awoke again, this time with more cognizance than the last 5, 6...not sure how many times. I felt a beard on my face, thick and coarse. It has been a week, maybe more. My body felt wet and when I touched hand to head, red came back in return. Gauze and assorted wrappings were soaked through and the smell of moribund hounds suffocated my sinuses. I focused on the light from the window and stood from bed, but the mind was playing tricks. I was crawling through broken glass and torn book pages. A piece of glass went through my knee and my face broke the ground. I went to the door peering into the crack before me. Basil's eye was staring back at me. But it was not attached to any end. His face was smashed and I quickly realized my face was lying in a mess of his brain parts. I wiped the matter into the beads of sweat from my mouth and rolled back to the window...my adrenaline was building now and as I moved the stains from the window with my palm, a town on fire greeted me on the other side. Dead bodies burned, buildings fell apart, but no other noise did I hear, just the break of flames against the walls surrounding in on me. I collapsed and felt another boil on my skull burst.

David Allen Coe

David Allen Coe show review: July, 2007 (a sample of my 'professional' work)

“Country DJs knows that I’m an outlaw; they’d never come to see me in this dive.”

Those words, from David Allan Coe’s song “Longhaired Redneck,” may as well have applied to his performance, July 11, at rock venue White Rabbit. Country DJs probably weren’t in attendance, but an audience mixed with frat boys, over-the-hill cowboys, and even a few hard rockers was on hand to watch Coe, 66, prove why he’s a dying breed in the land of country outlaws.

When Garth Brooks paraded on stage in the early ‘90s with his rock show gimmick characterized by his use of the wireless headset mike, it seemed easy to side with Waylon Jennings’ view that Brooks was “doing for country music what pantyhose did for finger-fucking.” Now take into consideration Coe, on stage with the same mike strapped around his mouth, but wearing a wig, beard and braids similar to George Clinton of P-Funk fame, playing a guitar emblazoned with the Confederate Flag specially designed for him by Pantera’s late Dimebag Darrell, and sticking both of his middle fingers up in the air.

I’ll never see that mike in the same light again.

Coe started the show off hard with his homage to Hank Williams in “The Ride” and began a 20-song-set medley, never really completing a whole song outside of his self-described favorite greatest hit, “Please Come To Boston.”

Coe is a songwriter (he damn sure lets you know it) and he’s also a talker. He was quick to stop a song to explain the meaning or amusing origin as he did with “Jack Daniel’s, If You Please” which he heard his father say one night when Coe, 11 at the time, went to a bar to retrieve his drunk old man.

One of the stranger moments of the night came when Coe pointed at a fan wearing a GG Allin shirt and solemnly stated, “Allin was a good friend” before proceeding with “If That Ain’t Country.”

Coe also performed a few of his raunchier tunes including “Linda Lovelace” with the chorus, “Well, I've fucked 'em all from coast to coast, cause honey, that's my bag/ I'm the only guy in the world who can make Linda Lovelace gag.”

The second part of the set seemed plagued by sound problems in which Coe’s guitar grew unbearably loud. Even worse, Coe dedicated much of the last half to sharing stories about his pal Kid Rock and singing his songs. Still worse, Coe covered Uncle Kracker’s overplayed cover of Dobie Gray’s song, “Drift Away.” There was no encore and Coe’s last words to the audience were ominously, “I think I’m dying.”

Gordon Blow, 52, waited at Coe’s bus to have a record autographed, but was informed by Coe’s guitar player that he “rode separately.” Blow, a guest DJ at 69.1 WKRP, had seen Coe in San Antonio back in 1978. The biggest difference almost 30 years later?

“It’s louder!” Blow said. “My ears are still ringing. They’ll probably be ringing in the morning.”

But Blow still enjoyed the show and how could he not when Coe introduced himself as a man with a fourth grade education who spent 20 years in Ohio State Penitentiary and had been on Death Row.

You’d better enjoy it…or else.