You look up at the sky and there’s all this primary fruit color and flavor, like a goddamned Fruit Roll Up on a Saturday morning of yore and you’re there at the streetcorner with your littlekid attempt at a yardsale selling a bunch of crap you shouldn’t have been selling to a bunch of jerks who shouldn’t have been buying, a bunch of cheap crap—plastic toys and knickknacks and gewgaws—that smelled like what the kid section at Kmart smelled like:  Promise of a fun day.  Promise of mudpuddle splash and dodging motorists and cavorting to the sounds of—wait, it sounded like this:  wheeeee and the soft squeeze of breath gushing from puffed-out cheeks and the cotton candy somnolence of a little kid’s dream, a pink-tinted pink-shrouded dream of a better time that was always so far ahead it was thousands of miles away and therefore remote as movies at the matinees the mulletheaded dikey nonetheless sweet daycare ladies would drag the daycare children to, and the daycare children got to eat popcorn and drink soda and watch the matinee movie at, like, eleven in the morning—Carebears, STARE!!—and there was that one kid Jeremy, who was a little dunderheaded and dumb and he looked kinda like a cavekid, who ate way too much popcorn and puked it all up to the left of where you were sitting and even as an idyllic four-year-old you were disgusted and disturbed and it ruined your day and you couldn’t focus on Carebears, STARE!! over the revolting buttered bile streaming down the sloped redpainted concrete floor of the matinee theater and neither could the other kids and the girls began crying and it was a real mess and in your disgust you still found the nerve to point and laugh at the crying girls, until the sweet mulleted daycare ladies had enough and herded the children out of the theater even though Jeremy was chuckling like a little dunderhead chucklehead and none of the children would look at him or talk to him the rest of the day—playground pariah—and the sweet mulletheaded daycare ladies wouldn’t give Jeremy a snack at snacktime and he complained and kicked and pouted and threw a temper tantrum—jerk—and made himself a raving nuisance till the ladies made him sit in the bathroom with the door closed like a little jerk and all the children laughed because Jeremy was a clown, a dumb slow Eeyore with a blonde bowlcut…

Jeremy had a bowlcut

and a stripedshirt

was dumb like

the way kids think

his dad got shot

somewhere in Panama

we never saw

Jeremy after that

when I pissed

the cure it

landed in

spittoons meant

for beer and

‘backy

there it steamed—

it smelled like

lottery

failure stubs—

I ordered

Round Two.

 they floated as wraiths

and itched like saints

they scanned for tourists

and horked cheap smokes

they hacked at honor

and licked old bones

they puked the pavement

and smiled at stairs

they wanted money

            and all I had

                                    were words

 I may not

have pushed

myself

toward

being

alone

I may not

have plumbed

the waste

of heck

had I

not seen

the stars

gleam atop

mountains

cold and

so blue

There’s a big rambling group of blackkids out of school for the day, shambling down the hill, hoodied and longpanted in cover of September coldfront faux-fall.  Laugh it up and grabass, guys—there’s a crisp in the air and you could even convince yourself the leaves are changing but that’s only wishful thinking—it’s only latesummer drought and the green leaves crackle with dehydration, like early mornings after big rambling winedrunks when your entire being screams with the accumulated sulfite heaviness waterwaterwater but it’s purged back up like crude jokes of the greasetrap night and you’re back to the start—like these faux-fall afternoons teasing happy blackkids, it’s only a window to better future times.

In foursquare rooms

they’ve cordoned off

the walls

and heat oozing

from the windows

drips the skin

like watertorture

and coaxed from

the rooms by threat

of watertorture,

we enter streets

rendered warlike-

-flooded sewers

potholes

the uncaring filth-

-travesties-

streets no better

than foursquare rooms

only more open

more per-square-foot

helpless shrugs

ancient glittering

STOP signs

a WALK/DONT WALK

stagnance

peat bog glip and glop

of faultline sidewalks

mothers pushing

babies in

babycarriage

dreamscapes

and only

doctors and lawyers

care

 the parking lot smelled of puke

and pork rinds

and the pizzashop was open

and pepperoni

and the rooftops were ablaze

with neon

the Marta was belching

the bums were bumming

the kids were kidding—

I waited in the car

            We were failing to understand the significance behind that mathematical preamble, that playpen for bigkids, pent up and bored—the stylish ennui of teenagers—and we thought we were so cool but what were we really?

            Dorks.  Whale penises.  You didn’t figure that out till years later, after it was far too late to go back and change all the things your hindsight said you’d done or not done, the wrong and the right (latenights on porches or barstools:  “First off I’d-a worn smaller shirts, and I’d-a shaved that unibrow.  Seriously dude, the fuck was I thinking?  And I’d-a just talked to a girl I liked.  God, if I’d known how far just talking gets you, man, and that was seriously the first and best chance I’ve had before or since and it’s gone and what were we thinking?”), but at the time none of that was known, it was hardly cared about and it was absolutely certainly no way ever talked about, except perhaps in furtive doodoo philosophizings, pants around ankles and shit tickets wadded up in fists not yet hairy, not yet rough with callous—dude, you’re a dork.  No girls like you, just a metalhead dork and mom even thinks you’re GAY.  Dorky fag—little inner belittlings which were nevertheless over by the time the can was flushed and your butt was clean, put back on the backburner of consciousness so that you could go back to the more important business of thinking and acting like you were a badass—put on, of course—with beerfridge larcenies and metal shows and outdated skate tricks and messing with people who, if you’d met them years later, you’d probably think were really good people but not now, not then—not ever, you’d think.

            And all the while, really, you were only a scared gawky dork-kid who’d go home and cry into pillows when some football captain or smartass football captain hanger-on would laugh at your hair or your clothes or the way you talked or the kids you poked around with, cry and punch the side of the bed, filled to the ears with bile and bullshit and backtalk you never dared to use to a football kid’s face.  And heavy metal the only outlet, the only purpose to your snotty little shitty life except maybe for that time your English teacher made you write a poem, and you went home and wrote it—an afterthought—while Slayer blasted in the background and you just did it to be done with it (twenty or so unrhythmic rhyming lines about spring and rain and unrealized romance, so teenaged, so grungily earnest), but you turned it in and the teacher read it and her eyes widened and you thought you saw the barest creakings of a smile contort her pudgy pancake face, and she said “James, this is fabulous.  I mean really, it’s simply fantastic,” and she kept it at her desk and a few days passed and you forgot about it but then one Friday the teacher asked you to see her after class and you tried to think about the number of times you’d fallen asleep at your desk that week or how many tardies accrued or which test you’d bombed or even, vaguely, if she would pull a wholly-undesirable TILF proposal (she wasn’t the hot just-out-of-college geometry teacher/cheerleader coach, she was the spinster bluehair English teacher, the kind you’d see in a Twisted Sister video or something) but she smiled warm and said “I hope you don’t mind, I submitted your poem to the student literary magazine with my recommendation.  Why didn’t you tell me?  Why didn’t you tell me you wrote poetry?  I never would have thought…” and on and on until your head was heavy and tingling with praise and self-congratulation and hazy notions of being a heavy metal Homer or some kind of teenage prophet, some Coleridge of the cafeteria, and she asked what poets inspired you and when you answered Phil Anelmo and Bruce Dickinson and James Hetfield it was an honest answer that you wouldn’t slap your forehead upon the recollection of until years later…

An infinity of competitors down in the streets. The vagabond digging through the dumpster—competition: he lives free while I live chained to my chores.  The Mexican kid rolling the mop bucket to the sewer— competition:  his is a heartening tale of American ambition; his entire life sweeps ahead of him.  The guy pedaling his bike down North Highland— competition:  he probably knows all the right people, and those glasses make him look like a writer.

The competition surrounds me.  I go down into the streets, dodging the potholes.  The potholes, too, are the competition.  I must sidestep or be left lamed by the ravages of ever-moving time.

The competition is my friend.  The competition is my enemy, too.  The competition will see to my failure and the competition will assure my ascendancy, which will in turn ensure theirs.

The competition toils in the dark; most will never know that they compete.  As the opponent, I can expect no more.  Why fight that which cannot be bothered to fight back?  Why turn every foray into the streets to an introverted pugilism?

The answer lies in the competition.  When I walk into the stores, I see in all the faces the contentment of that sweetest of knowledge— I have that which you will never have.  I see the happy knowledge and slink away, planning my next move against the competition.  When I walk into the bars, the laughter of the regulars is the sound of the struggle— I am alone, and this is the competition.

Sometimes the competition is middling and easily overcome, but more often the competition is brilliant and shocking in its energy and sharp of tooth.  The teeth of the competitors gnash me to a mess.  My struggle is to keep the mess to a minimum—a controlled clutter—while I deign to create a response to the gnashing of the competition.

There is much to know.  The competition is the dignified professor and I am the eager pupil.  I cannot hurt or best the competition, and in the end I cannot sidestep the competition.  If the competition twists me lame, I can only patch up and keep walking.  I cannot defeat the competition.  I must, one way or another, be the competition.

a last page-en-ing

a soft lax-en-ing

of thoughts un-think-en-ing

but now—

we’re here and not

there and not

bolted on pages like

idiots abroad

no wordy preamble

no Tower of Babel

no flaw left unnoticed

no clog left un-hairy—

scary word—last—

whether page or song

or friend or glass

or life

it’s gone and no

chest-thumpy gutcheck

will bring it back.