Not To Touch The Earth (An Excerpt)

She took the used, rolled up 20 dollar bill as it was passed on and hoisted it up her left nostril. She lowered her head down to the back of the porcelain toilet and huffed in a line of that powdery stuff up her nose. She'd been married for 5 years now but this was no time to be worrying about that. They were held up in a stall in the men's washroom... Both of them. She met him not 30 minutes earlier and here they were together in this bathroom stall at a little bar called The Flamingo. The bar was located in a small, under populated town in mid Ontario and was only ever busy on Thursday's and Saturday's. Much like The Flamingo the town was petty. It's shortage of places to go and things to do made the people who lived there very restless and at times quite stir crazy. So every Thursday and Saturday night they would pile into the bars in droves like hysterical children leaving their morals behind at home. She inhaled another line, this time up the right nostril in order to keep a balanced numbness as the man slid his hand up her silky black shirt and pried his fingertips at her breast. She leaned back and tilted her neck in order to look at the ceiling as the rush of the drug powered its way from her head down to her fingertips. He kissed and bit at her neck. The faint sound of the house DJ playing Daft Punk's "Get Lucky" leaked it's way in from the other room. She felt free in there, beside the toilet in the men's room with this man she hardly knew. She didn't have to focus on the 2 children she had at home or what it would be like to have to raise them alone. How one day she may have to explain to them both that Daddy wasn't coming home. This escaped her.  She took the man by the hand and dragged him back out to the dance floor where she closed her eyes and moved her body to the loud bass booming inside of her ears. This was her night out. Her time.

She had arrived there with her husband (who was also the father of her children) and a few friends whom of which cared only about themselves just as much as she did, so much so that she may as well had just arrived alone. After an hour of feeling ignored and watching the woman he bared two of the most influential things in his life with throw herself at the mercy of drooling men he decided to leave and go back home to safety. A place where his sanity could not be tampered with, questioned, or tested. She watched him storm out of the front door through the incoming crowds of people with a staggering sense of domestic freedom. The drugs, the booze, the dancing, the sex, all craving's she refused to let wallow and stir.

She pushed back the freshly dyed blond bangs out of her face while her eyes picked up on all of  the smiles and glares of men with scruffy facial hair and up-kept bodies. Some dressed very well and others... well, they wore muscle shirts and tight revealing v-necks as if to broadcast the idea that they clearly spent and spend countless hours in a gym, lifting weights, doing squats, and primitively grunting it out to look the way they do. It brought her a fantastical notion of pride knowing she could have any man in the room. She bounced from stud to stud. They bought her drinks. They grabbed her ass. They whispered sickly erotic exploits into her ears on the dance floor. This turned her on. It got her off.

As the lights went on at The Flamingo for last call she knew she would have to choose, but which one of these cavemen would be lucky enough to degrade her tonight?

"You're coming back to my after party, right?" One of the carbon copy men asked as he took her by the hand and walked her towards the door.

"You have any blow?" She asked trying to secure one of her vices for the remainder of the evening..

"Yeah. Yeah. Of course!" he replied

And so she went. Hopped into a yellow, vacant cab and in the back seat got fondled all the way to the mystery man's house in between inconspicuous key bumps of cocaine and laughter.

He lived in an impressively large villa by the river and by the time they arrived there were already a bunch of his friends drinking in the living room. After introducing herself, grabbing a beer, and doing a couple lines with these guys the savagery started to begin. Not only did the man she go home with start fooling around with her, so did a few of his friends. They went upstairs to a bedroom and slowly started to take off articles of her clothing. She was kissing one of them as another sucked on her breast. The shy one watched as he did a few lines before pulling down her pants and licking her inner thigh. She moaned in triumph. This was who she was. The life of the party. She took all three of them as everyone downstairs drank beer laughing at the sound of her heavy "Oohs and Aah's."

Her husband was sound asleep in bed at home. Their children were in the next room snoring peacefully. Most people who attended the festivities at The Flamingo were also at home trying to get some rest before doing it all again the next following Thursday. The men downstairs had fallen asleep on couches and scattered pillows and blankets on the hardwood floors. She however... Moaned deep into the morning, drunk and fervently high on cocaine. She had one cock in her mouth, one in her pussy, and one in her hand. A warrior woman in a silently sedated world...

These Bones

These bones of mine keep me mobile
and prim, and proper, and tall
They hold all of the guts inside of my skin
to blacken out the Sun
A big ol' pile
A structured mass
That are seldom ever seen
Until they twist and break and penetrate
The soul that is within me

These bones...
They play with fire and wane under the moon
In some naked dance of permanence
Be it in soil, wood, or tomb
I swear they're getting sharper
Unlike most that wear out smooth
Other bones...

This skull is drunk with knowledge
These hands are getting old
These feet crack when they're walking
Those obscure and dirty roads
A spine,
With force I straighten up through my cranium
That with age I'm sure will weaken
But for now... Well...
It's good
The bones of Tchaikovsky are somewhere FAR from here
But the music they made still lives inside a hollow near my ears

I hand the pen over now to this skeletal form and pray
These bones will deliver a poem
Before my essence fades away

The Voice

Just another night out on the railroad
running behind trains
Believing, sincerely that you'd never have to follow them back again
There's a tangy, copper tongued taste of surprise
every time your eyes shoot down to your feet
and you keep telling yourself that somehow you haven't yet tripped once
on any of the stiff, rooted, wooden ties, leading their way from the tips of your toes
to the faint and perplexing reaches of god knows where...
But it's somewhere
and the reflection of that dream
keeps your legs running
and the sweat pouring
and you know that she's out there
Just minutes away from the very untouched, sanguine pathway
that the calloused hands of hope levelled out the first time
you both said hello
and when the goodbye came
You thanked the sky for not crashing down on your head like bad luck
You cursed the velocity of time for giving up
You held your soul up by its throat, told it where to go, and hit the open road
and I'll be damned if there wasn't a certain amount of respect in doing that

Just another night out on the highway
chasing cars, and trucks, and tail lights
Smelling the fiery, searing rubber of all the wheels on the asphalt
The scent of victory over the pretence of distance
Drinking down memories like gasoline
Pushing, pushing you further toward the enchantment of a better day
You marvelled over the thousands of miniature, bright, bulb like, stars up in space
and rapped off some compassionate prose about how she is present
in the same universal positioning that you are,
Yet also the same spot that none of us really quite understand anyway
and even though you've been running around with empty, untouched hands
The sound of her voice through the telephone makes all of the flowers in the world stand up
and the purpose of gunning it out alone, at least for a little while,
worth it in the long run
So you keep chasing that thing down
Doing everything you can to make good time
and all the cars on the road know you by name now
and you gotta know that... That's alright

You've gotta dream, dream, dream while sitting on the clock,
or hounding trains, or rushing cars
and, without exception, squeeze the delectable juices of experience into your cup
and drink it on down to the soft linings of your heart
which should be located right below everything that tore you up in the past
and in turn made you weary of the unforeseeable future,
(Somewhere just behind your left lung, if I'm not mistaken)
But it's not of any concern now
Just try, try, try not to prick your finger while you're smashing the moon on that long drive back home
and her voice should be there when all the flowers begin to start dying again
or when the colour on the walls take to bleeding
When the music burns you out
When the muscles start to burn
When the dreams overflow
When the words are no good
When your bike won't unlock
When bulldog's leap up
When ceramic tile's are for sleep
When you'd rather not sleep
When every breath you take grabs for air
Her voice should be there...

Well, That Guy Was Pissed!

There was writing to be done!

Yesterday I had a stroke of writers block and nothing could be more frustrating and so full of anguish to me then when I am unable to find word's to put down on paper. 

So... 

I had some things to do today and in between going from place to place I took in a few sights, walked around (in the pouring rain no less), and listened to music. I was really giving it my all, trying to get this mind rolling. Then they hit me! Yes! Word's! Sentence's flowing again and I had to get these jotted down. 

I went into a coffee shop just a few blocks away from my house, grabbed a coffee and a donut and let loose on my notebook. One poem finished. Next.... I could feel the discomfort and uneasiness slowly start to creep through my fingers, through the pen, and onto the paper until....

Two men sat down at a table a foot or so to the right of me. Both older men. They sipped their coffee and at first were of no harm to my process. 

"You know what I was saying earlier was the cut and clear fact that when God spoke to us for the first time it was through Moses. What he said was 'I AM WHO I AM.' Meaning God created the light of the day and the light of the night. Moses grew up in Egypt and was forced to believe that the Sun and the Moon were actual God's but this was the first time we as people were ever spoken to by God and it was at that moment in time that the Egyptian beliefs were completely disproved. This was done by the scripture which was the first book."

The man was almost preaching this to his friend at the table in a thunderous manner although his friend didn't quite appear to be getting what the man was saying anyway (which was highly understandable). The word's in my head began to disappear and all I could hear was the voice of this man over everything. My word's again had vanished.

"Ya' see, there were ALL of these "scientists" who came AFTER Moses, ya know, the Greek scientists, Aristotle and Plato, who tried to disprove the word of God by saying that he did NOT create the Sun and the Moon only to find out that through scripture they have been proven wrong."

Okay...

Sink teeth deep into tongue. Remain calm. Pick up your things, head for the door, get outside, walk a couple of blocks away, maybe scream if you need to, and just go home. Confrontation is not the way to go. Relax Jaden.

 "Now we have these men like Richard Dawkins trying to tell us that alien's have visited earth and that the scriptures are just written by men and he titled his book The God Delusion. Yet every time he gives a lecture he contradicts himself. EVERY SINGLE TIME. Really! The man doesn't know what he's talking about especially when we have proof like that, from the beginning of time no less! Just after the creation of man and the Garden of Eden. People are just so damned naive now a' days! Fools."

If my tongue was not reduced to a bloody pile of ground meat inside my mouth it sure as fuck was soon to be. I flipped over to a clean page and wrote the only clear thing that was present in my mind. The calm I was trying to keep a tight grasp of had moved on to a feeling of angered steam, which then carved itself a path for fire. I folded what I had written into a neat rectangle and walked over to the man at the table after putting on my coat.

I handed him the folded piece of paper. The outside read "I wrote you a poem" signed J.L.A. The man looked surprised and opened it up only to find that the contents of the inside read "Word's To The Narrow Minded Man Sitting Next To Me In A Coffee Shop: AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH."

He stared up at me with that look you get when you've just unintentionally made a joke about somebodies mother who you then find out through a complete lapse of silence has just passed away and yes, oh yes, you have now become that asshole. He crumpled the paper and threw it at my head.

"We're going outside!" The man exclaimed as I stared at him blankly.

"Okay." I replied as I picked up the crumpled ball.

I did not want to fight. I am no fighter. In fact one blow from this 52 year old, broad bodied, arrogant man and I'm sure my slender frame would crack instantly under the weight of his fist but I accepted this as fate because if you're going to do something (and I mean, I had committed myself to the thing very deeply at this point) you see it straight through to the end. No choice. I walked outside, set my coffee down, and lit up a cigarette. I stood there for a couple minutes but the man still had not left his seat. I walked over to the window and gave it a couple of light taps with my lighter. As I said before, this man would have beaten, kicked, destroyed, buried, butchered, pummeled me... What have you... but in this situation my "ca hones" appeared to be extremely large and any man with that kind of fearless courage is not be tampered with. 

The man never came out and there was no fight but I also did not have to walk a few blocks to scream at the sky, nor did I bite off my tongue. In fact, I feel alright now! No frustration. No anguish because now I know....

There's writing to be done!

No Work Tomorrow

Put me in a factory
and work me like a mule
Work me until my fingers are too bruised to type
or until my hands are so calloused they can no longer grip the pen
Work me like death or suicide
Work me until the thought of an ulcer seems comforting
I want to go home in the night and drink a beer and pass out drooling in front of the television set
Wake up the next morning
Repeat...
Work me until I'm sweating and crying and cursing the God's, screaming:
"I'm done with this shit! It's too hard to move on!"
and then work me some more
Make me believe I'm doing it for the betterment of myself
Make me believe that the cracking of my limbs and the silence of the young kids and old women beside me are getting more than their "money's worth"
and when one of them doesn't show up for their shift the following day
I'll believe they escaped to some place better
A place where sunlight pours through open windows and the warm winds are like old songs touching ears
as if they were ancient, ambient, memories passing by
A place where beer and wine are drank not to forget but just to have another great time
I like to think about that...
I mean,
We all need something to believe in