At 32 you’re not 24 anymore, and at 43 you’re not 31 anymore, so said the Jack-O-Lantern out on the porch, waiting to be bashed and smashed onto Cockleberry Street … and it was the invisible night all breathing out there with a chill, I can feel it through my open window even in November to let the air and the smokestack vibes in, vodka mathematics scrawled out on the wall with some leftover charcoal from art school days. I was going to be an artist, an artist with practical purpose, so they said. I was going to be an architect, I was going to be the next Mike Brady or Art Vandelay, but I took the way of the pen and heart and withdrew from school and moved to Denver to be hip and fresh and I got all beat up and raw in Mile High Land and needed something more and so sailed off to Los Angeles … and there it was, the City of Angels, where I finally felt alive and fine and free and fucked up for nothing but savage and good purposes … and time tilts forward.

I was in Moon River, that beacon place by the water, looking down at the carpet and watching the aliens taking long, romantic walks through the shag of it all. I was all numb form the dumb of it all, out there, on the other side of Peaceful Valley where they all stare off into dead blue space or stare off into their HD telephone screens, slow-motion rolling billiards balls doing tiny, tiny knock knocks inside their brains … baa, baa, baa the sheep strum the perilous strings of a world turned upside down while praying to the idiot gods. 

I watched the road for danger but there was nothing but yellow peace up there in that atmosphere where I tried to dial her love in on the universal radio … static heartbreak, scars of distance, the lake waves lapping at the shore … the watery, rhythmic shewoo, shewoo, shewoo of chilled water against sand, rock, time, darkness, bright lights … Manitowoc, Whitefish Bay, the one way, way up and the chant, rant of the green and trees and ivy and smell and mysteries that swell all along my bones and soul … lonely carpenter ant man outside wood lodge sitting in a plastic chair smoking Marlboro killers and nodding “hello” to the night guests, that swirling mouth of the desk clerk coming out in the chill just to rub my way and talk about addiction and talk about dreams and talk about life everlasting. But at the way we wage war, love doll, there will be nothing left, for we gladly fund killing and the raping of life without a tick, but ignore the wide, starving eyes of the battered and the innocent … and we sit here, and try to call ourselves, humanity???