The dream to come up with original content for this blog continues.
I swear.
It’s just hard to find the motivation to do so. It seems like most of my essays head over to Drunken Monkeys. That’s certainly not a bad thing.
Doesn’t mean I’m not going to try to come up with something anyway.
I can’t complain though. I’m not that negative. I’ve been traveling more, and through that, and the long line of weirdoes I’ve met along the way, I’ve actually been eager to write lately. My resolve to sell that second novel is back in fighting shape, and I’m even starting to think of how to expand a novella I wrote a while back into a third novel.
The last couple of weeks have been particularly fruitful. It’s been a long, long while since I felt the drunkenness that comes with having more images and ideas than I know what to do with (Old Crow helps with that drunkenness, but it also kills the whole spiritual high thing I was going for a moment ago). I’ve tried to nail down a few in two of the poems I’m tossing into this post, but I know that it’s going to be the kind of thing where I lose twenty such visuals for every couple I manage to lock away.
That’s okay, and the reason why that’s okay is because it’s not going to be the last time I get to knock around a small piece of the world like this.
**********
Hot, Moonless Nights Abroad
By Gabriel Ricard
Abel came back to life on a Tuesday morning,
but Cain had already been back for years,
and everyone had always liked him more anyway.
He wrote great poetry about dysfunction,
and could ride a bicycle down any hill in San Francisco
with his eyes closed, arms out and heart way wide open.
When you risk your life like that,
every day is the last day of summer,
and when it’s gone,
when your nerve leaves you with the bill
you’re never going to get it back.
What the hell was Cain to do?
He moved to New Albany,
gained two hundred pounds
and got a job at the post office.
It was never his plan to come back and cause trouble,
or tell anyone anything they weren’t going to believe anyway.
He turned bitter in a hurry. He became quiet about it, too.
That kind of thing can happen to anybody
with unrealistic expectations of what’s waiting for them at home.
What really killed him,
and this weirdo knew a lot about dying,
was how quickly you could get bored
with a town of less than ten thousand.
Right, right, right,
yeah, yeah, yeah,
fine.
The Kindergarten teacher was a burlesque dancer
with a missing leg. You almost always wound up
with either a dead body or a bag of phony diamonds
when you bought a used car. The local chemical engineer
wore his wife’s clothes, and stopped people
from committing crimes they hadn’t even thought of yet.
One man had seen “True Grit” so many times
that he could look at it fourteen different ways.
Some of those involved pretty far-out stretches of the imagination.
Some writer also just happened to be born there
as he was making his way to the little-known town
of Gravedigger in Hollywood, California.
Hapless, foolish, bloated, lonely Abel
came to regret the whole drunken notion
of returning to the land of living.
He drank beer like Mary drank secrets.
He waited for fights with people
who tried to use his apartment complex’s dumpster
but didn’t actually live there.
When he finally decided that he would die
if he didn’t leave and soon,
he checked with some of his friends from the old days.
No one recognized him,
not even his voice,
so they just assumed he was a really,
really confident liar.
That just made things even worse.
**********
Until The Day of My Tenth Life
By Gabriel Ricard
The sandwich shop is called Hell’s Kitchen.
I can guess,
and I’d probably be right,
that the gentleman in camouflage
and a shirt that used to be white
has been sitting out front a long time.
If he’s blind,
if he hasn’t got a friend in this blue and red world,
and if he’s been waiting for the leaves to change,
then my heart is obliged to go out to him.
If he’s just waiting for a sandwich and a winning horse,
then I wish him the best with that, too.
Even though my dearest comrades and saviors
started out as strangers I don’t ask him for his life story.
I’ve got places I don’t want to be. Places I don’t need to be.
My heart is a Hollywood Video next to a Civil War cemetery.
Or at the very least it’s catching some sun in the hands
of a young lady. She ran away from the circus
to rest her weary eyes
in the cool hush of an unforgiving room.
I will love her until the day my tenth life is up for auction.
Love her until the ninth one feels shiny and new to the touch.
Hold her until everything catches up to me.
Because a quick cut can hear me trying to breathe properly for miles.
Savages will be waiting for me in the future,
and I know they will be savages when the future becomes defunct,
and I have a whole new set of rules,
that will not reveal themselves to me
until long after the ambulance forgets to pick me up.
You pay a lot of people,
leave a lot of heirlooms on a lot of doorsteps,
I guess, I think, I suppose,
if you want to be as happy as the person
you’re cheering up in spite of your downtown health.
I didn’t ask the man outside Hell’s Kitchen for his story.
He didn’t ask me for mine.
We didn’t even exchange a nod,
but if we had made eye contact
I think we would have.
It’s not about making a lifelong connection.
It’s about finding people you know,
and I mean know,
you’re going to see standing nearby
when your private worlds simultaneously collapse.
I’m amazed at how many of us
are members in good standing of that philosophy.
**********
Everybody’s A Drug Addict
By Gabriel Ricard
It took twenty-four years to reach out
and press my palms against the building.
There was no story there.
The memories of the brave and cynical
did not rush from the cracks to greet my tired blood.
And I waited, too. Believe me.
I might as well have been hanging around
for some easy money and one of those cowboys
who sings, but probably shouldn’t.
It wasn’t a disaster though. I didn’t cry,
or miss the bus at 35th and 5th on purpose.
I just reached out to shake hands
with those who live in the details of the shadows,
and are damn near stalking me at times.
I reached out whenever I felt the presence
of something very lost and very human
in the winds of summer. The kind of breeze
that digs deep before you can even wonder
why you’re suddenly so cold.
My youth sings on in a less-than-stellar
part of the world, and I wish all the time
that it would just shut up, go to sleep
and wake up in what I am working to make
a much more forgiving past.
This is just the kind of thing
I think about when there are more streets
around me than I know what to do with.
Bad intentions to my left.
Sobbing empires of dark clouds on up ahead.
Physical consequences of anxiety to my right.
Broken hearts and cheated livers right behind me.
What’s a young man who doesn’t actually feel young to do?
Do I play dress-up, change my name
and act that people might consider a little classier?
Do I prove that I’m smarter than at least ninety-percent
of the car crashes I’ve limped away from?
Do I learn how to at least make sense to myself?
I can’t keep visiting these old buildings,
and assuming the spark has been there
waiting for me all along.
It’s better that I act as though
I ran out of years to look forward to years ago.
Especially since it might be true,
and that one day love and travel
just won’t be enough.
Right now
I’m content
to be so good at pretending I think otherwise
that you might mistake it for arrogance.
Could be.
Could be that I’m just out of coffee.
