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.

Gimmie Back That Bullet

"I don't know how to tell you this Vince, but, shit, man..."

"What is it? Spit it out, Jason," I replied.

"Kurt is in a coma."

"Kurt? Kurt who?" I replied.

"Kurt Cobain man! He tried to kill himself. I just saw it on CNN before I got to school."

"Is he dead?" I replied.

"No, not yet. He took a bunch of drugs, a cocktail or something. He's in a hospital in Rome. That's all I heard. Jesus, I can't believe he did this..."

"At least he's in Rome. I mean, he's got to be better off then he would be here. Why the hell would he want to kill himself?" I replied.

"Don't you understand? We're doing this to him. All he cares about is the music. The media are killing him--MTV--ahh, what a joke. There are too many posers out there with their hands out."

"Yeah...well, I hope he pulls through," I replied.

"Shit, I've got to get to class. I'll talk to you later, Vince."

I guess that was big news for a fragile 13 year old. In the last year I had gone back in time two decades from discovering rock 'n' roll, (i.e. Aerosmith and the Scorpions) to quickly getting up-to-date with the 'now sound' of Grunge in the Melvins and Nirvana. Luckily for me, I was young enough to have skipped over "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and gone through my tweens to "Rape Me" instead.

I wanted to be a rock star. I wanted to go on world tours. I wanted fruit trays ordered just for me, without anything from the melon family. I wanted to make a bunch of noise in an arena in Tokyo and have an orgy with 3, no, 4 Asian girls that didn't know any English. I wanted the sloppy, narcissistic wife I could do drugs with and have a semi-handicap love child with.

I wanted to try heroin. I wanted to overdose. I wanted to die.

I found a spiral notebook in my room a week prior to this revelation. I found it in the top of my closet buried under a bunch of board games and a wood burning kit my 15-year-old step cousin had ruined by trying to burn a pot leaf onto the hood of his dad's jeep. My brother had run away from home a year earlier, but the signs of his handiwork were there...sketches of the Joker, a semi-nude photo of his girlfriend Jackie, my brother holding a ceramic moonshine jug in one hand and one of Jackie's breasts in the other while Eddie looked on from an Aces High poster on the wall behind them, and finally, on the last page, written with some of the letters backwards (for effect I assumed): "Live Fast and Die"

He took out 'young.' No boundaries. No rules. If you're going to die why tack on labels like 'young'? Shit, die straight out of the womb if you want. I couldn't tell if he was a prophet or slightly and certifiably retarded, but I wanted what he was selling and besides water-downed Guns 'n' Roses' jargon it was a new way for me to live my life.

For the moment, however, I stood alone in the hallway, late for class, wearing a Pink Floyd shirt that the same brother had given me before he split town. It had a cow on the front and said "Atom Heart Mother" on the back. I had no idea what it meant, but my mom was adamant it pertained to an atom heart mother fucker of some kind, so I kept wearing it.

A month later, Kurt Cobain was dead.

I tried to watch his prayer vigil from Seattle on MTV, but the camera closeups of people wailing and falling down to the ground were a little more than I cared to be associated with.

A few days later I was watching 60 Minutes with my parents when Andy Rooney's end segment came on and boy, did he have some ripe words to say about Cobain. A textbook definition of a curmudgeon, Rooney seemed to have trouble identifying with young peoples' public mourning for Cobain.

"What would all these young people be doing if they had real problems like a Depression, World War II or Vietnam?" Rooney said.

Footage was shown of a girl weeping at the vigil, "What's all this nonsense about how terrible life is?" Rooney quipped. "I'd love to relieve the pain you're going through by switching my age for yours."

My dad laughed and as he usually shouted to no one in particular added, "Say it. People are idiots." I thought Rooney was a dinosaur, but he was right. I felt just as old and wise, but on the other hand, Rooney had been in World War II. What the hell did I know about living? I'd seen Deer Hunter enough times to know Vietnam was a time and a place I'd never want my ass to be.

A year passed and I was now fourteen, sitting on a bench outside the school cafeteria eating lunch with Jason. A group of kids from my grade came walking down the hallway and out into the courtyard. They were all dressed in black, two of the girls wore veils. The fatter of the two had a rose in her hand.

"Look at this shit," Jason said.

"What are they dressed like that for?" I replied.

"Don't you remember? It's the anniversary of Cobain's death."

"Oh. Jeez, it's been a whole year already?" I replied swatting a bee away from my Coke can.

The kids walked by. One of the boy's shirts had Cobain's face on the front. The picture made Cobain look like a sad, helpless puppy. On the back, in bold letters the shirt stated: "I knew he'd die."

I sat there with Jason eating my turkey and cheese sandwich and watched them walk further away--a disappearing funeral procession--march of the brainless.

"Ah, to hell with this," I thought.

I searched around on the ground for a decent-sized stone and tossed it into the air. I lost track of it in the sun but it landed in the dirt, just missing the fat girl with the rose. She turned around, I couldn't see her eyes under the veil, but I knew she was looking right at me.

Jason laughed, shook his head and said he was going back in the cafeteria to buy a Nutter Butter. He never came back.

I sat there, waiting for the bell to ring, trying to spot exactly where the rock had landed.

"People are idiots," I thought to myself.

When All the Grave Keepers are Gone

A Ballad of Young Paul

“These are the times when madmen are like moths,”
Says Pa, says Pa
“Be safe,” says Ma
She pleads to Paul

Paul smiles and leans
Into his sweetheart’s apple cheeks
“Farewell, my dove,” says Paul

The ships are all boarded up
With children all tucked in
From these hours of darkness
That are expected to roll in

Where the boats won’t row to shore, not tomorrow they’ll go
Paul is lying o’er, o’er the bottomless hole
The one he’s been born to lie in for hours, years and more

But the grave keepers are gone
And so is the crab grass out on the lawns
Where bloody bones stir under dinosaur-slick ground

When the brain dead come out of their coma
The children’s snakes and trees do blossom
And the fruits shake loose
Down the spine and into the watery tear

And in the words of the Good-Good Book
The mongrels and heathens come out for a closer look
And crawling through the sand with piles of it in his boots and his hands
Here comes Paul

Well, it’s been ten years, maybe three more
Since the Reaper came down
With his sickle and alarm
And the boat sinks down
Eaten up to the mast and the oars

Paul jumps down
Out of the boat
The rocks start screaming
“Lord, don’t let him out!”
And he swims and swims and he kicks
Through the rivers and the sticks
Through the shanty houses with broken sinks
And fat women wearing barely anything

Paul recalls, “Be safe,” says Ma
“Your sweethearts got a lot of gall
To still be in love with a scab like you.”
Oh, Paul remembers while he fingers his lips
As he falls asleep under a half moon
Looking up from its reflection in a ditch

Meanwhile, there’s some criminal behavior
From the violin player
Who used to be in a band with a cousin of Paul’s

He’s cheek to cheek
With the girl that’s been in Paul’s dreams
And on the violin goes the chorus
To “Old Dan Tucker”

He kneels in an alley and tells her he loves her
When he spots Paul and a sewer rat prying together
Peeping out from the guts of a drain

Violet cries out, “Thunderstorm!”
And with that, cuts the clouds and pours the rain
So long Sun: melt, dissolve and dissipate directly down to the grains

There’s a small altercation
With the appearance of a pen knife
But unaware of the location
The blood leads to the side
Of the man in the band with a cousin of Paul’s

Violet screams, dripping tears into her cone
Of huckleberry iced cream
And how Paul shakes and shivers
But not a word can he deliver
Upon the body that lies under
The wild dingo dogs’ baited howls

“It was a classic case of self-defense,”
Paul finally positions with Violet
But the only thing she can promise
Is, in fact, to not be quiet
For, in her chagrin, the lesser of two evils had come to expire

“Run away, Paul, you slippery, slimy toad
No more shall we meet and no more shall we cross these roads
May the Devil find you and prick your bones with poison
As the Sweet Lord chuckles and neglects to confine him.”

Twice defeated and doubly heart-ached
Paul simply runs in place
As is the case for the rest of his life
In and out of flop houses
For surviving he’s certainly not the proudest
Since he’s never had a house that’s to be called a home ere go

Paul constructs one last letter
Intent to tell Violet how his heart still swells for her
But a reconciliation Paul knows is not set
He sends the letter away and just as quickly
Ties a fine buckskin belt around his neck

The overturned bucket is kicked

And where Paul is sent—above or deep down—no one knows

But now, after 13 years of no affection
Violet’s been given some unearthly direction
That’s led her back to Paul

Violet unhitches her bags
And climbs down from the wagon
Here at the place of Paul

A redheaded crow roosts on a branch
And rattles the fence
Leading down the cobblestone path to Paul

As Violet knuckles the door
And whistles a tune
She’s shocked to find upon her arrival
Flies buzzing around the head of Paul

She weeps and she wails
And yells down to hell
“Oh, how you made me suffer
For this magnificent malignant!
For now I am too old to find any young lover at all

This sack of dripping flesh and meat
That used to kiss so sweet
Is now just an address for decay.”

And she was quite correct
In the extraction of her display
For the only mourners left were not exactly worms
But instead a blowfly or two
And some maggots that grew out of Paul

Groucho

I work at a university library. It's equivalent in size to a small hospital...Italian architecture, imported marble pillars, dirty carpets, broken elevators, 30 years old...dirty, broken, aged and part Italian...If it was a foreign exchange student I might have half a chance.

The library even has seven floors, not unlike Dante's seven levels of Hell.

The other day, I was sitting on a concrete bench in the middle of campus before I started my shift. I was there for about 15 minutes, every minute turning into a darker hour. Young women walked to class in their pajamas and Sunday's finest unaware of the hourglass being slightly nudged on their ripe, Venus Di Milian bodies. The men, strong and clueless, followed behind with their hats on backwards and hair long and shaggy. It was a sea of cigarettes and cell phones. It was an ocean of hope and sexual adventure. And here I sat. A 26-year-old dingy washed out to tide.

As the 15th hour approached, the last class had ended and the campus was all but vacant as Thursday was the last school day of the week. I wasn't discouraged though...I kept right on sitting. I snatched a glimpse of a squirrel hesitate before running up a nearby oak tree. I smelled the air full of the flagrant plume exiting the lavender trees. I felt the concrete underneath me and the crisp, Hill Country breeze blow through my face. And I watched a lost Asian student wonder up the hill, back down again and finally disappear.

I saw a feather, or some piece of white matter, come over an encroaching building and gently float down the side, past my main view, and then back up into the clouds under a sunless sky. Then there was nothing.

Now I knew how Forest Gump felt.

But without any of the accomplishments or exciting stories...

Just the bench sitting.

I buried my face so deep into the palms of my hands my eyeballs made an indention in the bone.

Slipping Into Oblivion

"I ate my dinner. Would it be a great inconvenience to comb your hair?"

"No. In fact, it would be a great pleasure. Please, come sit beside me. Oh yes, you have such strong hands; your grip on the brush and the pressure upon my top is divine indeed!"

"Haha, Oh Grandma, your tongue is so wild, like a sweet melon being sloshed of its innards."

"I only hope you don't comb with such vigor that you remove my scalp and crush my skull compartment into pieces. But I suppose my brain could use a good brushing."

"Grandma, would you like me to comb your back?"

"If you insist sweet child. What a precious gift you are! That's it, keep combing, all the way down to the tail my dear. Say, wouldn't it be fetching to give my teeth a good cleaning? I haven't made way to a dentist in some time."

"Do they give you pain or suffering Grandma?"

"No child, but they are rather discolored. What if I privy a night out on the old town?"

"Grandma! At your age, I would harp that you do no such thing."

"Ah, but what a hot time it would be. What if my prince were waiting on steed, sword in hand, waiting to carry me away?"

"What if?"

"Well, he would see my teeth and keep right on going, that would be the deed that transpires."

"What about Grandpapa. Have you no respect for what he would anticipate?"

"Little one, he passed away decades ago. My vows are still true, as true as that great horned owl that swooped out of the sky like an albatross upon a salmon in the headwaters. He was an engrossing man, virile, and uncomplex to the point of tedium. His death was inexplicably macabre. But, in the by and by, he would have embraced me moving on."

"How can you be so sure Grandma Rat?"

"He was uncomplex like I say, but also a downright sourpuss. He languished in swimming the waters of melancholy and ambiguity. Yes, it was as if he had called that great owl to zero in on him as he stood there, in open view, dead of night. I told him to come in from the storm, 'come in Paulsy' I said. 'The night is ripe with reapers and you have a glassy-eyed target on your face.' I suppose I dozed off into slumber, for when I awoke and rose to the window all I saw was Paulsy, with his body plucked clean from his head, which was all that remained. The only thing more torturous was my movement to his body, drowning in tears, I crossed the tree hole and over the swallows' sticks and as I came close enough to look into his wide blue eyes, a sparrow flew down and picked his head up and departed into the twilight."

"How awful, Grandma!"

"Yes, but the worst and most distressing was still to come. A winter fell soon after, and I had made a fire in the tree base to warm my bones. The chimney, you see, was not operating to par and I feared the whole tree would burn alive. So, I got bundled up and made my way into the thick of it, climbing up the tree, brushing off the snow and braving the brash wind as I went."

"What happened next, Grandma?"

"Well child, I made it to the chimney and found some foolish rodent had nested a stockade of acorns and trash in a crevice in the branch restricting my ventilation. I jammed and I jabbed until my situation was resolved. In the process, a deathcloud of smoke shot for freedom into the direction of my face, sending me into hysterics and consequently causing me to fall, or slide rather, down the tree."

"Oh no!"

"Oh yes, but you see, something, or someone caught me. I landed right on my arse, in a nest--an abandoned sparrow's nest to be more exacting. Now, it was winter, and of course there was no sparrow to be seen, but there were two eyes, one lonely face, and no body in its place."

"It couldn't have been Grandpapa!"

"I'm afraid it was. Half skull, half fur-skinned, unused and pleasantly unbothered. There he was. I sat there as long as I could, becoming frostbitten under the snow's weight. Finally, I went over to him, brushed the icy earth away from his head and kissed his lips. And I swear to you, little child, they were as warm and suffocating as the smoke still filling my lungs."

"So, you just left him up there?"

"Yes, I did. Paulsy loved the outdoors. He loved being planted up in the trees, catching a high from the morning breeze and making no gripes about bird droppings or cricket carousing. Of course, he loved the winter most of all, winter is a dejected man's stomping grounds you must understand."

"Wow, what a delightfully upsetting tale Grandma. I can't believe Grandpapa had such a tragic come-to."

"He did. But time is nothing more than a Shepard's hook, guiding us closer to the flock and farther from the fires."

"So, if there is a message in this for me Grandma, what might it be?"

"I would say, sweet Fern, you should appreciate those blessed romances you will kill or let near kill you. You see, no matter how hard you try to make something that seems so right, correct, or someone as uninformed as possible to your overpowering mental leakings, some may always and forever be twisted into pieces inside like a knotty pine tree, or like your Grandpa Paulsy. But they still have merit and should nay be easily given up on and thrown to the great landfill beyond the reaches of the sky."

"It's hard letting someone you cherish and adore go sometimes, isn't it Grandma?"

"Yes, it is child. It truly is."

"Now Grandma, about those teeth. Let's take a look. Say Ahh..."

"Ahhhh..."

"Grandma, what an awful collection of bugs and baby sparrow's egg juice you have stuck in here. I'll have to get the big teething brush for this occupation!"

"Be gentle, my dear, be gentle."

Count E'Clair

There was a toad who went by the name of Count E'Clair

He had a sword in sheath that was sharp to bear

No more pointed than his tongue when it came to be drawn
Pleas of compassion for this toad were never clipped too long

Such a quick-tempered wit and fixation for despair

No one, you see, ever crossed paths with Count E'Clair.

In the forest of Green Suite came word through the smokestack trees

whispering on dead branches spitting out wilt disease

That a frog or a tad had the gumption to proclaim
That the count was a fraud and a rouge and a drain

The Count, resting on his self-imposed detraction
Stated to all he wanted the culprit of this much mis-stated reaction

"Who is it that wouldst say such a braggart thing?"
"I am 'The Count', 'The Executioner of Killers', I am 'The King'!"

"Whoever mocks me shall in the stocks be--no, no, that is too kind,"
"Instead a knife prick in the face, in the heart, and the center of the center of the eyes."

"You there, Froggy, do share, who do you believe this goon to be?"

"Me sir? The cur I know not sir, maybe your countess, yes, ask her, sir."

"Ah, my countess you say? Yes, bring her to me, or I'll have you Fricasseed!"

Eventually, the Countess came forth, her name was The IV
Not in lineage, but in the precedent of wife, of course

Number one was a mistake, she kept the Count awake
her incessant snoring cost her the use of her nose

Number two was a shrew, red-headed, olive-skinned, it's true
Oh, this poor one, was in dire need of a clue
A messy bed she kept, along with the red nest on her head
The fine for her deplorable lack of a comb? Death--Death--Death!

Now number three, if it were up to me, well, let's just say she was murder.
Not the kind that you kill, but you sign away your will
Even if the sum was a button less than a nickel.

Her name was Loretta and she put up a fair case
the legs, the gills, the glowing, wart-filled face
She was caught, or rather heard, and how she did crow
under the weight of one cock-strong toad

Her fate was quite horrible, into a pot she did boil
And served to some visiting French diplomats.

Now here we are, The fourth Mrs. E'Clair
She was a little more homely and little less rare

But she did for the Count, what the others could not tackle
She spent her hours in the bedroom, to the bedpost she was shackled

No more complications, or so thought the King
Until, a girl with no movement or motive to cling

Is left to eat only things filled with syrup and creme.

Yes, she was of great girth, so to bring her before the king, meant, broadsiding the earth
But, here we are, "What say you, my love? Who is the spawn that spat on my royal glove?"

"I know not Countie, my pot-bellied sweet, now let me return to my chain, I'm famished, let's
eat!"

"You bucket of flabby flesh, what a disturbing mess, but you just don't seem to understand..."
"My honor has been put in a stranglehold and someone must pay, I demand!"

"Froggy, take away the Mrs., roll her back in the wheelbarrow, I need rest."

And so, through the rabbit holes and fox burrows

The trail of slicing and swarming verbiage crept

The King's sleep was not pleasant, for only in nightmares he wept
In a flash of slimy sweat, the King shot out of bed, out of his long johns, soaking and wet

"I can't let this pass, one can never be so crass, I will seek vengeance, this is my sole task!"

At once and then some, Froggy wrapped on the door

"What is it you need? Try knocking some more!"

"But sir, it is Froggy I have news to tell, the guilty party is flying right off of its rails."

"What's this you say? Spit it out you frog, Cut out your bumbling or I'll sail your skull in the
bog"

"Sir, My count, I have to say, the troublemaker is not a frog, a minnow or an egg."
"I just heard, from a polar bear-like bird, that the Stink Beetle of San Alter dropped these biting words."

"Oh, the Beetle? and how would a bird know? Was it flying through a cloud full of dung-covered snow?"

"Why, no, you see, as it's come to me, the hawk was around dining on Pill Worms in the trees."

"Go on!"

"Well, the trick of the trap that the bird said was laid, was that he was going to eat the Beetle, until it did spray..."

"Spray what?"

"Stink, of course. And while the Beetle was slow to make any getaway, he told the bird he was unstoppable by any bird, frog or prey."

"I see, I see, yes, this all comes together like a fine Cabernet with my evening fly supper. The Beetle is devious, dubious, and soon enough an endangered and expired sapsucker."

"But Count, here's the problem, yes, the problem at hand."
"The Beetle laughed at your highness, then disappeared in the sand."

"In the sand? Where to? Where would he go, he just disbanded?"

"No, not exactly, it's believed he's traveling to the center of the planet."

"What? How can this be? Why would one travel to the bottoms of the seas?"

"I think he is going to be with his brethren, inside of the earth, where all the insects inhabit."

"It is supposedly worse than Hell in that abysmal cavern, with the wizard of wasps in control of all lowly maggots."

"So, I say Count, what is it that we shall do?"

"To the Center of the Earth! Froggy, send for the crew."