Canto II: Unpublished Music that is Played and Heard Every Second of Every Day
The River flows down the glass the ill informed mass of those who left last. They shadow the streets with dark glances and in the night, ritual dances. In form, reborn and dancing to the song in fields of golden corn. Symbolically trying to transpose the music played at my funeral.
A mural on a urinal. Sick sounds of deprived people echo and the sounds fade as they dissipate into the atmosphere of shades and colors of others, sisters with brothers, just like you, it could be you. Toying with the wares of life you find you are white in a place full of darkness, and there are certain hardnesses. You'll face a lover who you left behind before you make up your mind. There are pins and needles of pain that slowly drive weak ones insane, drooling from the pain, feeling it rain feeling it reign. Another dancer to that song in the night - it's where you belong. Thunderstorms over the hills, empty bottles of cheap vodka - pills. Oh the pills! The cheap thrills and inner kills. Ashtrays become full as fast as the kitchen sink, the stink, the evil that dwells in the rot's earthly cells. The living the dead the things that were never said. Too short is a lifetime, too fast is just one of mine. Get what you can out of it, you'll never stay the same as your cigarette. The bet. The emotional let . . . go . . . let go and give in.
The spin is a tradition that started some time in the past. A way to spread the thoughts out over many pages. Written in separate ideas gathered into a pool. All of the impressions it leaves and the new thoughts that never go away. And it's just a bunch of words in a poetry book.
Take another look. See the seeds that were planted and believe the influence, feel enchanted. Close your eyes and let the black nothingness turn into something of your wish, your dreams. Fantasize about nothing, about no one, about me. Forget about the different ecosystems that are all added to eachother to form one great self supporting system that operates like a machine with colors of brown and highlights of blue and green, there is a scene where everyone is inbetween the flower and the stone, tripping in the park and making love in their homes, creating music in various basements, people move on and in come replacements. I believe that it's possible in a place like yours, or a place I used to live. Memories that take to give, a struggle to double the dealings of the lost feelings with the tarot card whore.
Everything you stood for fell, everything you hated became more concentrated. You continued to get more secluded and the world became more diluted. Milked out by plain thoughts, and all because of your looks. A perfectly good looking boy trapped in a man's body, you used to bang all the hotties, you blew your chances with the sweet romantics. Now isolated again, you try to maintain some of the self esteem, but its being drained and the hourglass is running out of grain. There's a stone erected for you, the trap is set, the song is constructed by the masters of the art who all took part in you thinking you were nothing. Let the dreams die and become a tear tattoo under your eye, think about it everytime you get high and say, "What if . . . " but that's just a lie you tell to yourself. You got the pistol in the drawer, you hear that song, you've heard it hundreds of times before. It's a snub nosed forty four. You think about it and know it ain't no bullshit. There's just one single bullet. Just one shiny little neatly constructed death dealing bullet.
You watch the dust as it falls. You hear the Dirge as its Sirens call. Led into the temptation or maybe it's just your relation and bond that you feel with that thought. The only suicide hotline is your friends, and none of them want to hear about your latest trends, this is the end, all of the Karma has shifted and you are no longer gifted. Your pad is just free space. Unpaid, damn, will you ever get laid?
The song reminds me of that same sad song that an old man used to sing one time every day on the corner of fifth and Broadway . . . three thirty nine every day, he had a song he would play. The words were sad and the music was timeless. Those who heard it walked away feeling worthless, a street corner success.
Passive we seem to be for things and people that are pretty, we fuck the shit out of our whores and we smoke the shit out of good scores. And so many things are forgotten, so many souls left to linger, the soul finger and the sacred spot, it's hot and I forgot her name before I ever played that game. Into the hand dealt at your own command. What else can you do when the plan always falls through. Live a life of ease on a sandy beach. Drinks are all free and so is the sea, so is everything you feel and every one you see. It's all real and it's free free free. The only thing you can do is look, you can't have, for this was laid out like the cards by the Devil's very hands.
A card tower that will crash into the carpet, a dirty war pit where death and life stand shoulder to shoulder like the crackhead scoring a boulder for robing another liquor store. The gun is for free if the lifestyle you crave, but you will become a slave. A slave to the grindstone, you will be ground to the bone. Still the song plays, like a welcome mat to your grave, a smelly dark pit, a little piece of paper - a hit. You're heading there As you stop on by the Last Ditch Effort, a real life endeavor. Your hope is to at least be noticed, and things could change, things could reverse. You feel the stare of the midnight pervert. Why do you feel the ocean from so far inland? How do the children feed in the maelstrom? Is there light at the end of his trouble? Can you escape into that fragile glass bubble? These things you ponder can only make you squander away all your dreams on cocaine light beams that give you flashes of the dreams you had after smoking hashish. Glory leaves in the morning and real life is ugly with real warnings. There's going to be awful things to hear and see, but none of it effects me so nothing becomes a fear for me - I'm covered. There are better things to do - there are others. They sit around tables sharing the elder's fables, playing cards and making wagers. They're the characters in the s�ances and the torture chambers, deciding other's fates in meetings in shadows, with candles, the gallows . . . they are shallow, but their powers will be felt.
What is life to the streetwalker blues man? Singing about things lived on a world far away, living from song to song, day to day. Will a bomb blowing up next to his bench blow him out and make his music fade away? Will it just blend in with the song heard by every living being, the ever loving Sagittarian - the Dirge. If there is no meaning, no current drawing one in, no center, what is the point? There is none, and no way to begin, living in perpetual thought and unacted on intention. Smoking lots of pot and getting lost in the smoke, you choke. Is there a point you get to when the day job consumes you. Working is all you have time to do. Why? What are you hoping will happen? Your elders are sitting in the backdrop laughing. Humiliating, but just another facet of reality you consume every day. I still have to speak about how you were weak, never letting yourself obtain the level many seek. Too little of an effort to ever be taken seriously. So it's not mentioned and overlooked for its density. The immensity of the end assembly of talent in ways unseen by many and not taken seriously by any. Another discarded superstar, passed by like a car when you are walking far and it's dark, overhead is a star. It blinks at you, making you lose your sanity. All of the vanity, all of the humanity wasted. Wasted, it was a Monday night. One drink became a few, then you fell under her voo du, and drank a couple brews. After a couple more, you finally admit to your good conscious that you are a whore. You feel worse at times, and wonder what the fighting is for. Trying to succeed in the city full of whores, it's not just a mission, it's a war. What is it for? What happened to being real? What happened to getting in touch with how you feel? Where's the mystery? It's all so easy now. There's nothing left and there is no imagination. So you come scamming in, thinking you have a shot. You never even made it to where someone sees what you got. Before too long, you faded into the scene, becoming a legend to few, another face on the street. You know there will be seasons when you can make a sound . . . other times, you'll be the only one around. Fading into the wall, becoming an echo in the background of the Dirge. You faded faster than you made it - and that is something they say, a Sagittarian thinks about every day. In many ways, the song that plays and the lifestyle is portrayed is related to the lump of clay that never finished getting formed, a half developed fetus being born, thoughts are torn from one conversation to the other right up to the mother of all conclusions, hummed by janitors in institutions, it's not an illusion, it is sound's equivalent to a kiss, it's that, it's this, it is meaningless and the very epitome of meaninglessness. Your favorite life preserver on the ship of the world's most dedicated explorer. You were the holdover until the bulldozer plowed you under, you wonder, and you realize you were always right: A loser in High School is a Loser in Life, the bullet, the pills, the noose, the knife. . .
Prose spilling out like blood on the carpet, soaked up, smoked up, choked up, you can't speak, feel tweaked like the last line you did was pre-peak, and the five before those, the prose, the form, the thoughts born are raised to adulthood, in bad and in good. Living in a storm of emotions kicking and screaming at you, you know your options, you know what you will do. There are people who you love and those you admire, they are reflections of reasons whay you should aspire. As the fire at the pyre lights the faces of the traces of life you touched in life and now in death, there is a four piece band playing your last request, the final demand. Sagittarian Dirge, I hear you - no matter where or when she is being played - I know. I can hear her in my sleep, I can hear her when I am awake, to live for the song is wrong, but to take heed to its sound wouldn't be a mistake. As the rhythm of the prose expands and contracts, the Dirge is broken down to a different level, full of emotional facts. Somewhere you are touched, or slapped, or brutally raped, somewhere in the text, and it leaves its impression on your face. It's something that fades, but adds to the overall look, a permanent reminder - an emotional "hook," and a give away when your face is being read like the cover of a book. As a library of faces approach you on a street, you feel the same fast paced heart beat, you have to move your feet. It's a feeling you can't ignore, it shows in you eyes - Sagittarian eyes, so much depth, so few lies. So much wisdom that always dies and never drives into the heart of the matter, but it gets shattered in your face, part of that overall pie chart of pain, the things that can restrain, the main reason you're still the same. The old things never kept form so they died and new ways were born. And you kept the dream in a jar which sat in your windowsill in line with the star, and as it flickers, it keeps pace with the beat of the Dirge as it is being played on the street by horns honking, dogs barking, tempers steaming, lovers parking, gunshots and screaming, sirens from cop cars and music from topless bars. The passing rigs and loud cars. Hard to sleep . . . the song will keep you from concentrating on the sheep and you will end up writing lyrics to the Sagittarian Dirge, a song with no music and a story without words, only played at the request of another Sagittarian with another hole in his chest where his heart once pounded and a dream once resounded into a life of unlived passion and unfed desires to a death of peer's laughing and soul fed fires. Let the wisdom be passed to save other Sagittarians from that inviting grave.
-braden
canto II
5.12.99
