it’s all graft sure enough our sweat buys us candy but there’s little gravy handy I was a toiler couldn’t get myself square but manna flows from heaven and I know I’m due my share
I tried to scrape an honest
living but didn’t have a prayer some
call it criminality but I don’t
really care coz only a fool goes
hungry when there’s gravy stashed
somewhere
I
can’t afford to think about this it’ll only
drag me down but where can I go
that you haven’t been down to the
shore and into the water
out to the undertow
where all the drowned sailors bleached by the
sea huddle
together for comfort and ease
I’ve got the deep chill from standing on the outside coz while all the world was fast asleep I was on a bender and burning out my innards with jugs of liquid fire the intrusion sparked the fear within and I blew a heavy fuse trying to contain it back in the night back where the fun begins I’m all fingers thumbs and knotted nerves but I’m skinning up and dumbing down I have avian reflex in beak and eye but this rooster’s teeth are worn from gnawing on old grievances
she always thought I wore my heart on my sleeve but she was wrong only the sleeve was real the heart was an affectation heart
or soul what’s the difference when they’re both absent? she said I’d carry that load through the ages and that I’d been enslaved by my own instruments I serve
but do not know
I learned to run from her sagacity I need no commentary on my decline I leave
my own words as reference a salutary
lesson in personal abuse my words are
as brittle as my bones and as hollow
as my intent I didn’t force the world on anyone I acted as an outsider a mere observer in my
capacity as counterfeit hero if my
efforts fell short of my bourgeois pretensions it
was more a matter of attention span and
my penchant for the seemingly exotic than any predilection for deceit
somewhere on my covenanted half-acre of hell there stands a mausoleum washed smooth with tears here the holders of my promissory notes are interned along with the wax effigies of former
lovers I lie but not through intention I
lie from carelessness and a casual disregard for facts I
have a proven record of self-deception and quiet ineptitude may the evidence show that I was never deliberately cruel but
was perhaps reckless in the pursuit of pleasure
the most damning indictment against me is
selfishness I confess my guilt but reserve judgment to myself
praise be to the tallyman who sells us back our shirts and keeps our children hungry for the sake of democracy the nation’s books are balanced on our broken backs we make believe while making do that we hang on in together and he provides the glue
when I get low I get high I’m not gambling for salvation indifference is my prize when the sun sets on the good and clean the geeks and freaks and junkies join the medicine show our bankrupt ideals and crooked jungle rules weave loathsome pinprick tapestries that stain us to the soul and the wonders of the world dissolve on our dirty spoons to be regurgitated in an idiot geometry in the catch as catch can where our flight is stunted with leaden wings in another shabby paradise not the advertised cool blue nile or the taj mahal with the lover of our dreams but instead the squalid nightmare of endlessly repetitious junkydom and the eventual release of that fatal final dose
