Tempus edax rerums.

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Chapter V     Which follows the Short Chapter of Urbis Brain Droppings which do smell fine… Chicken-Scratched June 2007 – Feburary 2008.

Secret & lovely Reader, as punishment for my elucidation excesses, I present to you replenishment’s profound writing refreshing stresses! Hither commeth, strangepeade, Glorious & Hidden Master with promise of further chicken scratches caresses…

34. Fear

From remote substations,
Merrily and full of stomach hungers wanting libations,
Did I descend upon the Amish countryside farmer’s creations.
With DCSI Field Service Engineers and PP&L reps,
To fill our bellies with fine German foods buffet.
Knowing not my intestines were to rebel
And squeeze out a soufflé!
Knowing not,
Flowing soup from an unwashed pot,
Filling belly to unwise size lot,
When all of a sudden,
My asshole squeezed shut from lighting bolt,
Sent from bubbling intestines revolt!
Sweat trickling down my temple remote,
Feeling Fear & Panic,
My inside-gaze of tremors horror of guts foul mechanic’s retort!
Under curious gaze of friends un-hiding,
Did I excuse myself confiding,
Tight butt cheek walking & praying,
Heading straight and true to crapper aligning!
With wide-eyed Fear,
Guts gas bubbling out my rear,
Did I run bolting like a steer!
Shouldering through people of gazes that sear,
Did I find toilet of manic & insane eyes who peer!
My sweating butt cheeks let out a machine gun tapper,
And crying out in relief & surprise,
Did shit sail out in embarrassing groaning reprise!
And smear poo everywhere to my un-cool.
Knife poised and sweating in the loo,
Cut off underwear so stained by my stool!
Shame, Fear & Horror
I came out un-same side rear unclad poorer,
To be presented by old man gazing in horror!

35. We’re Tragic

Sitting in the Chevy,
Just twenty-one and drunk, on Norfolk Navy Base,
I let out a sigh, my heart’s levy,
Full of quiet, watching the Moon’s judgment of my case.
Gunner’s Mate friend’s self-imposed silence, respectful, is so heavy.
“We’re Tragic,” I said.
“He died. Why didn’t my sister bury him?” I said in my head.
Rotting on a slab for thirty days the maggots fed,
And the coroner didn’t have an address, so sad.
My father’s Army post traumatic stress syndrome was bad,
But my sister couldn’t recognize tragedy,
Because in her head,
She only saw red revenge’s fad,
For beatings had,
And I understand,
Burned out compassion for what was once a boy,
Now a lost lad.
“What do we make here?” for no one clad in green had,
And so my father came back from mountains & jungles battles mad,
And died Agent Orange cancerous screaming for his mother alone,
And my sister should have known,
But it’s all tragic,
And in my pocket,
The plane tickets: heavy as a stone.
Fly to bury a soldier,
Without his gun’s empty echoing salute,
Next to his unvisited brother earth socket alone,
In lost military graves solemn non-grieving my sister would refute,
And I put the bottle to my lips,
Sad-eyed whisky’d on my recriminations tragic sips astute.

36. Thirty-Six

Today, I turned thirty-six,
And my dad died at fifty-six,
And Iron Maiden sang of Wasted Years,
I’m hoping to start Golden Years,
God, if I can only let go of my fears,
No more room for melodrama,
Thinking of a woman from Alabama,
Need something normal,
No more room for abnormal,
Today, I turned thirty-six,
And I can’t help but think of my dad dead at fifty-six.

37. Simulacrum for Maddy

Sitting in my chair looking outside,
What was it that I want to think I silent confide?
Breeze lifting boughs of trees,
Common everyday noises free,
Secret beauty of buzzing fly,
Creaking of aging house quiet cry,
Passing car,
Angle of morning rays of light of Sol from afar,
My mind to quiet places beauty drifts,
My heart relaxes, shifts,
Secret sun light in my chest filtering out,
Opening of jubilant soul’s flower petals not pout,
Simulacrum of empty, hanging passing moment’s readout…

38. Zombie

My father passed on nothing could.
And like upon door of stout wood,
My heart’s banging on splintering dead image I would.
Decrepit, moldy boxes in attic of mind before I stood,”Nothing here…”
Not a skill, not a thing, not a word for inner eye to peer?
Nothing to hear?
Is absence something and not a heart’s terrible tear?
Or was he a zombie I fear?
I dread inner theatre & song,
Captivated my father so wrong,
Far away in Dali’s Time so strong,
In some far away country dripping distances long,
Went up some dark river like Conrad,
What came back wasn’t whole and was bad.
And some day when I a father,
And pass on to son & daughter,
Love of words reading to make laughter,
Of hands mastery of tools that create, fix & matter,
Of banter with loveliness that which make young people’s heart’s canter,
Of science & philosophy’s ethical morality lighting our way lantern,
Of swimming in oceans deep to light with soul’s sunlight splatter,
But nothing to melancholy poison them a mad-hatter,
I solemnly would rather not to gather…

39. Allegory of Judgment

Chrissenger of I was thinking,
Saw my eyes of similar,
Images vile & stinking.
No plan,
No thinking,
Obscured by mere block dissonances bland neon bar winking.
Fowl language,
Drinking,
Presence of children in one-room apartment.
Thrust of sentiments honorable,
Counter of acts dishonorable.
Time to go from blows un-Christian deplorable.

40. Heat Sync

Her body entwined with mine,
On my side her breasts pressed into my chest,
Head buried somewhere near my shoulder supine,
In the dark I felt put to test,
For in her beating heart’s heat,
I felt her need only of tender caresses guest…
Our hushed words decoded: she needed a heat sink,
But I felt, too, like she, connections unphysical bliss
& our blossoming heat I hope will sync…

41. Species

What am I?
She said wide-eyed, “…we’re crazy…” in full,
That I’m crazy for holding her in my arms sly.
Am I Hamlet pondering my skull housing I?
To question my feelings & convictions in a mull?
No, I to not foreboding; my heart yearns to fly…
Like on the couch holding her close we to soar high.
Why the disconnect with thoughts like leaves the wind to cull?
Humans a different species like the seasons, are trees tall not to cry.

Chapter VI     The Sad Chapter of the Patchwork Man whom I did meet in the Big Haus. Chicken-Scratched in Berks County Prison March 2004.

The Patchwork Man

I will be your teacher and, behold, here is ugliness, and here lies tragedy, here sleeps the Patchwork Man.
I feel a sorrow for the others, but not for myself as I’m just an eccentric ruffian passing through, but a full and fulsome sorrow for all the small, forgotten little people who have no idea, no conception or inkling of the wider world about them. They are the rats of society and they are stuck on a vicious exercise wheel of petty crime and drugs while clothed in dark discord. I see them, these seemingly hapless men, these Blue Men harvesting an obscene fruit under an incandescent star in the endless groves of the ill tree of Shame.
And so the harvesters, too, are the eaters.
I fear it and so should you. I fear the reaching, corrupting root of its pestilence in my belly and the foul, withered, queerly quivering blossom in my spirit. For you see, to know the overly ripe flesh riddled with worms, the heroin-addict withdrawal vomit fumes wafting to your outraged nostrils and the heavy syrupy acidic juice oozing down your tortured throat to your screaming stomach is to know the fruit called Sorrow.
I have seen what the word pathetic looks like. I wish I hadn’t. I’ll share it with you.
It is now etched, branded and stamped with sweaty, Vulcan fury into my occipital lobe forever, for all eternity. The word pathetic looks like a diabetic, time-ravaged old man sitting nude in a chair in a half-lit, dirty shower stall under a lukewarm jet of water while lathering the stump of his amputated leg with palsied, arthritic hands. His gray, drooping testicles looked like they wanted to jump ship. I never asked the old senor what he had done to find himself in the retirement home of prison as I didn’t want to know, didn’t have the courage to look damnation in its watery, hopelessly alcoholic eye.
And Time is a murderer that stocks him in this Rogue’s Gallery.
Yet, it was with an aloof contemplation of that image in my mind that I arrived under the cold, gray and drizzling sky at the deserted, decrepit bus station of realization that this old man wasn’t a deserving repository, a worthy receptacle of my naïve pity and compassion, for I had seen him in union, in marriage, in a disturbing kaleidoscopic vision gyrating drunkenly in six different stages:
Ignoble, fatherless birth.
‘Danny’
‘4′
‘Queen’
Pathetic personified: diabetic incarceration.
The stink of an alcoholic death in a lost, filthy low-rent apartment in Reading, Pennsylvania.
I met a Puerto Rican and his name was ‘Danny.’ He was twenty years old. He and I talked for the short time it was possible before he returned to the filthy warrens of Reading. I found him to be intelligent and street-smart, though he did not detect these qualities within himself, nor the possibility, the rich bank account inherit, implicit with his youth as I did. He told me that he would sell Dope again and there was nothing I could say to dissuade him, for if the military and college had been so good for me, what was I doing here?
It is very difficult to give encouragement in prison.
‘Danny’ doesn’t realize it, can’t see beyond the arrogance of his youth that he is just another nameless shell about to be expended. Though it academic, it is something completely different to witness, to feel the inhumane forces shaping and controlling ‘Danny.’ He merely becomes sharper upon the whetstone of prison where he strengthens the bond to his society – The Gang. The System doesn’t do anything to prevent this by offering him alternatives and thus the idea of Crime and Punishment subsequently loses, as I see it, some degree of realism and relevancy.
I wonder if ‘Danny,’ and the many just like him, has any idea of native self beyond what is foisted upon him in the prison blues on the inside and the counter-culture programming and marketing on the outside.
If ‘Danny’ had a father, a real true blue father, this man would surely have heard with the ears of his heart the bells melancholy ringing for his son’s wayward soul and with an augury of the gut, known that his son desperately needed fathering with whatever means his immigrant hands would have grasped at – God, the belt or the military. Yet society is blind to the effects of the social disease of not enough fathers, not enough discipline and somehow doesn’t feel the misfiring of its womb while collecting the aborted abominations for the ever slavering industry, the ever hungry economic maw of prison. Society’s Puritan Eye of Sensibility is saved the offensive sight of the juvenile worms chewing away at its belly, but we all feel, at least I do, the pain when a man-child like Bradlee R. Fulk, a 17 year-old heroin-addicted robbery suspect, is shot multiple times by Wernersville, Pennsylvania police on the evening of February 19th, 2004. In the hush that surely descended afterward, I wonder if anyone thought how Society had failed him. He was just a kid.
‘4′ is a thirty-one year-old man. Short and wiry, he stares with the dark, pool-like Puerto Rican eyes out upon of American landscape of violence that utterly shocked me into silence. ‘4′ and I used to workout before he returned to Reading. We would do twenty-five sets of twenty push-ups and twenty sets of ten pull-ups. When the sweat would start to roll, some clothes would start to come off. I remember the first time we got down to just our shorts. I’ll never forget it. I now understood why he, at the best of times, had a bit of difficulty keeping up…
‘4′ has been shot five times – five different times. Five different times that missed major arteries and organs. Surely you now understand why I referred to him as, “4.”
He has a large, striking tattoo on his left shoulder with the blazing red caption, “Money is the root of all evil.” I suppose he would know more than anyone else.
He is lives in Reading and is the father for nine children.
‘Queen’ is in his early forties. He has a lot of gray in his stubble and a lot of time behind bars – around twenty of them here and there. The reason why I refer to him as ‘Queen,’ privately of course, is to honor his quick, slashing manner in which he dispatches his opponents. Chess can teach you many things I have discovered. Among them is humility. ‘Queen’ taught me to carefully consider my moves. He said that I’m impulsive. I’ve never heard that before. He also said that I’m a smart-ass.
‘Queen’ has had many years to hone his game to the sharpness of butcher knife and he plunged it deep into the heart of my stupidity, but I know, and I feel he does too, that ‘Queen’ doesn’t have a lot of moves left. He will never be free, even when he leaves the Big House. He will always be in check by an ever-vigilant queen. A queen checkmated me once so I guess I can relate.
I liked ‘Queen’ the most, even despite his cocaine trafficking convictions. He has lived a lot of life behind bars, but is no slouch. The men respected him.
Sadly, however, in my gruesome analysis, ‘Queen’ is just a stage. Like the others.
All of them whirling in a chaotic and jumbled vision. All of them some important part, some integral, tragic necessity in a composite man.
A patchwork man.
A Patchwork Man who will never experience or understand the beauty of the world, as I’ve been fortunate enough to come to know. Patchwork Man is essentially empty. Benign. Each point of his existence is the same – Birth, Life & Death. All equal in potential. All equal to nothingness.
It is like he doesn’t exist and if not for the brief ignition of the sparkler of his ignorance, Patchwork Man would not at all.
And when the sun sets on their tragic lives, the dust will soon fly before the winds of the cold night to scar our souls, for it is us, our society that gave birth to him.

Finite