You Know Nothing

You do not know anything about earning a buck
Until you've worked the factories
12 hour night shifts
Empty stomach, hangover, gut rot
10.50 an hour

You know nothing
and you went to school
For a 9-5, ass grab position
Behind a desk on the 30th floor of some
21st century, post modern social club
With 500 friends online and the ego
of a pampered pre-teen pop star

You do not have it rough and
You don't know anything about smoking a pack of cigarettes and
pouring the rest of yesterday's whiskey
Into your 4th cup of coffee on break at 4:30 in the morning
and your line supervisor comes over to ask if you want to go home early
and you say
"Hell no!"
Why?
Because your mental state is like a steam engine now
You need that scratch to keep the body afloat
In this ammonia filled ocean of a world
Determination turbine
and that's tough

So... You took a media arts course in college
Professional writing?
and had your parents buy your intelligence?
Well, it didn't work and I'm not impressed
You just keep writing about broken hearts
and subconscious psycho babble that only oafs
cling on to because they think your stuff is great
Yet they hardly think at all
It means nothing

Not until you give up a piece of every part of your soul and body
dollars for breath
dollars for sweat and blood and time
money for staying quite and getting the job done
night after night after night
Until you finally understand that hell isn't a place you go when you die
but it's fully alive in those last 3 hours
when even the clock hands are too tired to count down

Not a single coworker opens their mouths to talk
The pallets and conveyor belts and machines keep moving
Until they break
The machines break often
so these men in hard hats and shiny orange vests
Who are paid double your salary
go to the machine and try to put it back together

They do so romantically
by playing with all of its parts
They stick wrenches, and hands, and tools into it
and look at each other awkwardly with wide open mouths

When the thing starts back up again they walk away like hero's
and everyone else is left with a bunch of extra work and emotional trauma
but I guess that's how all love making goes

You know nothing
Know nothings...
You do not know anything about giving up day light
and you are not strong until you realize it was already ugly to begin with

The Fear

She said she was afraid of losing her dad
He said he was afraid of losing her...

The guy who lived next door
Woke up every morning at 6 am
Got in his car, buckled in, just to make sure he got a coffee before work
Did the same routine everyday and worked at a boring office job
He was afraid of spiders

His mother
Well, she was afraid of commitment but she's long since passed now

This beautiful girl I met at a party one night back in the city
She took me outside to have a cigarette and we talked for a while
She told me she was weighed down and absolutely terrified of failure
and then she kissed me

My old friend Dominic was afraid of clowns
He was an asshole

When we were children my brother used to cover his eyes with a pillow
anytime I put on a horror movie
He'd scream at me to "Turn it off! Turn it off!"
and then he'd just end up watching it anyway
But he still covered his eyes
Whenever he felt a real sense of fear coming on
His face would be buried deep in that pillow

I saw a bum on the street just outside of the mission in downtown Ottawa last year
He was skinny, and withered, and bruised, and he had track marks in his arms,
and a bunch of tattoo's that had faded and appeared as though they were becoming the texture of charred, burnt leather
He was crying
I think it was because he was afraid to die
I'm sure it was probably coming soon
Or
Maybe he was hungry
Or
Maybe he just needed some smack

There's these guys in bars
They brag about how tough they are
They go out with their friends
Their carbon copy friends, who also brag about how tough they are
They gel their hair and dye their hair
and they slam back shots and look for fights
This is how they stay tough
It's how they get by
These guys,
They are afraid that their penis' are too small

This bomb went off yesterday in Boston
A big fiery thing
It was detonated near the finish line of a big marathon run
The explosion killed three people and is said to have wounded 170 others
I saw all of these pictures of people with their body parts askew
and their limbs blown off
and blood like graffiti on the streets of Boston
The bomb scared everyone through television sets and computers
and through radio's and cell phones
It may as well have gone off right in our living rooms
Primed by media detonators
Scary

Ergophobia is the fear of work or functioning
Ombrophobia is the fear of rain
Papaphobia is fear of the pope
Chronophobia is the fear of time and of time moving forward...
It seems we're all a little chronophobic these days

The Prime Minister, Man
He must be afraid of everyone
and rock stars are afraid of losing crowds
and doctors are afraid of losing patients
and lawyers are afraid of losing money
and children are afraid of the boogeyman

What scares me most is that everyone around me is so goddamn afraid of so many things
That they don't realise the fear is of themselves
and of each other
Progression scares them and so does death
and communication
and I feel as though I'll never be able to have a normal conversation again
Without scaring the shit out of somebody...

The Drink He Had To Buy

"There's gotta be some easier way to die!"
Tony blurted out after staring at the bottom of his empty glass for some time.
He had been sitting at the bar all night long moping about and trying to suck sympathy out of anyone who thought for a second that they gave a damn.
"Yeah. Yeah. Tony." Jake mumbled.
Jake had been bar tending there for 5 odd years now. He'd seen it all. All walks of life crawled into that bar. Bum's, cheat's, Guido's, harlot's, angel's, stranger's, musician's, mother's, father's, liar's, business folk of all kinds, etc. Lefty also crawled into that bar.
   Lefty was a hard looking man. A real drunk. They called him Lefty because one of the only stories he liked to tell was about an obsession he had with beating his dick off with his left hand. Lefty was right handed but he'd say "25 years... 25 years with my right hand. Longest relationship I ever had and within' keepin' up the tradition of things I thought I'd pay a little more mind to my left."
He was a regular at the bar back when Jake was still wearing pull ups. It seemed as though his
age had been beaten into his face with a meat mallet. His eyes were all sunken in and hollow but there was wisdom in there...
Somewhere.
He normally kept to himself. Had the casual conversation with Jake, and some of the oddities that rolled into the bar but he went in there night after night for the booze and if they would have him, he'd take a woman back to his $500 a month bachelor apartment. The apartment consisted of a bed with stained old sheets, empty, cheap beer cans resting on his decade old television set and dresser, and scattered boxes of macaroni and cheese beside their powder packets. If he had taken a woman home for the evening he would walk into the bar the next day just as broken as he was the night before and Jake would always say something like "How was she Lefty?" and laugh a bit to himself.
Lefty always had the same meaningless response.
"Jake...She was a cold bitch and a warm fuck."
 
"Tonight's the night! I'm sick of this shit" Tony yelled out.
"So get it done ya coward!" Lefty howled.

You see, This was Tony's routine. He'd stumble into the bar around 4 o'clock in the afternoon everyday. Right as rain. Calling out to everybody. Shaking everybody`s hand's and buying people drinks. There were some regulars who would make sure they were there for Tony's arrival just to siphon off a couple of the free shots of whiskey but they would always make sure to leave after Tony would hammer down about 6 or 7. This is when the act would start to take hold. Tony would get quieter and start to shy away from the people at the bar and grab a seat. Always somewhere near Lefty. Lefty didn't usually mind. He was to hard and didn't care for fools like Tony, until that night.
"He does this every god damned night." Lefty spoke up.
"Yeah so what! The timing just wasn't right Lefty. I'm going to do it and nobody's going to stop me."
"Nobody is going to stop you because nobody gives a GOD DAMN! Asshole." Lefty's temper had drained from his alcohol withered body, finally. You could almost see his pale face turn a subtle shade of beige.
"Alright. Alright." said Jake trying to keep as much peace between the two as he could.
"Buy me a round and I'll show ya Lefty. Well... How bout' it?"
    In all his years Lefty had never seen a man die. He was asked to go to war when he was just a teenager but got out of it due to a serious case of asthma. It was about a year or so after that he started drinking, and with the drinking came the smoking only further worsening his condition. He woke up some mornings coughing up handfuls of deep purple blood before his beer and toast with peanut butter. Lefty didn't give a shit. He knew he was going to die. He just hadn't the slightest idea of when it would happen. He thought of Tony's request as not so much of a cry for help but as a gift of insight he could give.

"You're on hot shot. Get him a scotch and water..." Lefty demanded.
"Now Lefty are you so sure that this is a good idea?" Jake asked.
"Hell! He's not going to do the damn thing. The man's just trying to sucker me into buying him a free round. I'm just pissin' my money away on this deal." Lefty said to Jake reassuringly.

        So the three of them had a round of scotch and water's wondering what exactly Tony had up his sleeve to get out of this one. There was a younger couple at the end of the bar drunk and blissful, kissing each other and staring deep into their partners eyes. There were two or three other fellow's that had popped in the occasional time for a few drinks sitting at a booth in the quite bar as well. Lefty, Jake and Tony finished their drinks.
"Everybody! Follow me." Tony yelled out to the whole bar.
"This should be rich." Jake proclaimed.

They all put on their coats and walked out into the cold winter air. It had been snowing for a few weeks now and everyone was just settling in to their new winter skin. They trudged through the snow, up three or four blocks to where the overpass just above the highway was.
"Come on man! Lets go back inside. I'm freezing my balls off!" Jake yelled to Tony who was just up ahead of the group.
Lefty was first in line about ten feet behind Tony. They got to the overpass. Without saying a word or a final goodbye of any kind Tony threw himself over the railing. His body fluttered through the air, weightless and at ease. It was at that moment that Lefty felt time stand still. He thought Tony looked like an angel, or a mystical bird just flying through the snowflakes in the winter cold before the aggressive... Thud.
    Lefty had never seen a man die before that day. He thought about the war he could have been sent to and all of the years he had spent coughing blood out of his lungs. He even thought about all of those women he cared so little about and that shitty littered apartment he used to never want to go home to. They all stood there at the top of the overpass with their cigarette's and their beer in silence looking down at what was left of Tony's body on the pavement below. Jake, Lefty, the drunk men from the booth, and the happy couple from the end of the bar. They all stood there in silence and the only thing that passed through Lefty's brain in the strange silence was that suspended moment in time. The fool of a man that he could not stand had now become something else, at least in his eyes. He saw something real, something that even beauty itself probably could not feel. He saw an angel that night and it was worth every penny of the drink he had to buy.