Author: Christopher James

Small towns were a vicious a trap tooled in the basement swat shops of circumstance.
It was a town so small…a prison of narrow streets and boarded up windows.
There were no video cameras turning in the darkness, but empty space has eyes and wind has ears.
No one really needs the newspapers.
Everyone knows everyone’s business,
But everyone pretends not to know.
Every Saturday nostalgic music is interrupted by Papa Jim’s Weekly Swap Shop radio show.
Ears perk in the darkness and silence of Sunday night.
Chafed fingers twist the radio dial to see who is selling what old dream and for what small price.
The yards are littered with dreams: dead, rusted hot rods that once reigned as the supreme speed in the course of a quarter mile sit jacked up on cinder blocks.
These metal corpses are not for sale.
The owners sit on rickety porches with a cigarette stuck to their bottom lip, dreaming of the day that they will fix her up, and tear out rubber smoking toward the ocean.
No one has the guts to tell them that they will never leave.
No one ever leaves.
There are no fortress walls,
And there is no razor wire gleaming in the pale moon night or Agent Orange afternoons.
The roads are open for commerce.
But if you don’t get on the Greyhound and go when the last school bell rings,
Then escape is forever denied.
There are only stale promises of cotton gins, fertilizer plants, and dead men.
Here lives the shrunken man of hollow-eyed acceptance.
As you grow older you grow smaller.
The only pleasures left are a fist fight, a f*ck, or a hallelujah
in a stone church built by dead men next to a cemetery where granite slabs record genealogy.

You never learned the difference between faith and ignorance;
You never had time to wonder if there was one.
You are forever drenched in the sweat and grease of manual labor.
You have no savings account.
Your earnings are spent before the check is cashed.
Your preacher assures you that there is God and a better world waiting for you.
So day after day into endless repetitive days you pray,
But no secret voice ever offers you any answers.
There is no burning bush, no blinding light, and no blood of the lamb.
There are only tiny dirt roads and combines silhouetted against a stark grey sky.

Your father drove an eighteen wheeler.
Your grandfather picked cotton and hauled hay.
Your back is busted from handling pipe in the oilfield.
Your son will be a mechanic,
And your daughter will marry mechanics, and cotton farmers and livestock auctioneers.

Since this town is a holy town, you have to drive twenty miles to buy your favorite bottle of solace that you can afford or can’t afford.
It doesn’t really matter which is which or how it comes as long as you have it in the lonely night to numb The Nothing.
It won’t take too many drinks to swim in that pool of grey ether off in zombie land.
You know the way; you have swum there before.
With time your tolerance has shrunk to the size of your ambition.
Finding the path to the dark tank in your mind happens quicker and easier.
You will lift a glass of emptiness.
You will lift a glass of loneliness.
You will empty the bottles of fear, regret, and frailty.
You will swim in the rivers of distorted perception until life becomes images refracted in broken glass, faded dreams and tunnels devoid of light.

One night while swimming in the gray pool with a broken Jack Daniels bottle in your hand the levy will break with no warning.
Words will spurt from your mouth like blood from a puncture wound,
And you will educate your daughter to your suffering.
The stories will explode from knots in your body that mark all the secret cesspools where you buried pain.
Images will fly from your mind with the sting of your father’s bullwhips.
You will find yourself shirtless in the living room displaying scars and fleshy reminders of what happens when you slam the living room door.
Film reels will unwind from your eyes, and your pupils will change to snowy riverbanks in Kentucky where you slept beneath a one-lane bridge with a bag of oats.
The weather in your mind will become erratic, and your hands will remember the feel of the butcher knife you held in your hands in the shadow of mountains contemplating the murder of the man that had beaten your mother.
Your back will straighten out remembering the white table, and your arms will bulge recalling the straps that held your fifteen year-old arms as the heroin oozed from your sweating pores.
Your mind will become a photo album spitting spinning visual captures of friends claimed by duty and death in far away jungles, and men that came back bathed in blood and nightmares.
Your daughter will meet the dead as you regurgitate corpses on the coffee table.
She will see in the projection screens in your eyes a man swan diving from a bridge at midnight.
He will fall quick-quick-soft, quick-quick-soft into a sudden head collision beneath the surface of the Sabine River, and water will leap and fall redder than goldfish eating roses.
You will lay the memory of your best friend on the table charred in the black soot of a gas well explosion in Texas.
Your tears will drown you in the regret that it wasn’t you instead of him.

Your daughter will learn about the weight of guilt, the weakness of need, and the disappointment of failure.
Then she will promise to never leave, but she will change her mind the night you throw the television through the window, beat her boyfriend and call her a n*gger lover.
She will never write.
She will disappear into a dot on the map somewhere between Tucson and Topeka.
You will be completely alone.
Your son will be dead by this time.
He will learn to make mind altering drugs from drugstore chemicals,
And he will charge into a world of hallucinations to escape the boredom and repetition of reality.
He will perish attempting to fly beyond the walls of small town ignorance with a pair of wax wings and mythological expectations from the top of a water tower.
His wings will never open.

So you will buy a gun and you will write God a letter.
You will revoke your participation in his experiment.
You will buy a gun and six bullets.
One bullet for God,
One bullet for Jesus,
One bullet for your ex-wife,
One bullet for her child-molesting husband,
One bullet for yourself,
And one bullet for unfinished business.

The morning radio waves are gray graves swallowing my heart in static and Kurt Cobain feedback. The sun melts awake after a night of pouting moon and swooning lovers put to bed by the insistence of savored stars glowing tremble-ish. The water pipes roar themselves soar when the shower wakes me with water warm morning alarm, and my arms reach out for soap and the hope of redemption.

So soft waiting. Fainting or fighting must one begin. Electricity surges burned blue. Everything will fall fast and soon. Sounds funnel through cardiovascular limbo, and the inertia of emotion fuels fission. Nothing as precise as thunder, as a wrecking ball, as the jury’s verdict: Guilty as insinuated.

Everything falls, but first we have the prologue of termites. The slow gnaw. The patience of cancer. An engine revs into an explosion of parts: the block cracked, a rod snapped, but first the oil breaks down, gaskets disintegrate.

And so the malfunction begins with Blue Eyes casting off cat-eyed Sun Boy to hide her moon-mind. She wields apathy as her greatest weapon of protection. Her silence is the electrolyzation of the open-hearted emotional changeling who cuts his teeth and feeds his appetite with flowers perfumed in the midday sway of watercolor sky. She changes the language of her kisses as she rolls tides through her eyes. Her gaze ensconces Atlantis. How many ships have wrecked on her siren coast? How many men whispering her names are hidden in the cofferdams?

The breakdowns continue to wrack Sun Boy’s brain. Murder piles itself on neglect. Kym never glowed her smile at work that day. Phone call search lights fleshed the pale city. A meeting was called to make known what was felt. Dead. Trapped and killed without remorse. Her face and breath wrapped in black tape by the crack fiend’s hands. She floated somewhere between her paintings of Heaven and the mystical maybe that her parent’s prayed for. Her red hair flowed out forever around the sun and soaked up epitaphs of burning gas.

Sun Boy’s sleep plagued by the same bad dream. Night shook and no sheep were counted. The nightmare sweated his sheets, and carried his mattress across the River Styx to battle his shadow.

No redemption without confession. I am Sun Boy, and everything falls now.

I will come out of the cold cave as a tiger waving Damascus moonbeam blades and words of molten lava. I will flick my pain in the night’s star lace with rattlesnake flinch and fists of arrows. I am Sun boy. I am the archer. Give me my ram’s horn. give me my fire launching bow. I will blow down the amethyst brainquake, drive my lover into a corner, and demand that she pay attention. Held captive at voice-point. Tears heavier than sinking rocks. I will erupt the raw tsunami inside of me.

Give me armor from space debris.
Temperature rises 56 degrees.
And everything falls now!

Rust rain racks my thoughts with hollow conundrums.
Pelts my skin with paint of tainted angels hooting
And booting me knee first and thirsty onto the city sewer grates.
My brain is a bursting bomb: hydrogen inseminated
And split in the shake heave windowpane whipping rattle smash clash thunderstorm.

Realization is a wham slam slap crazy punch drunk skull crunch,
And life is a diluted dream.

The light beams are reflected, redirected, and caught in a clusterf*ck.
The lies are printed.
Goddess statues dented.
Pigeons evolve and subsist on cremation dust.

I’m reeling from feeling too intensely the effects of euphoria,
And my heart is a hammer beating me to death.
Arteries stretched to bursting point.
Dropping me hard on the sundial point.

My heart is a hammer
And the gods are taking bets on my will to survive.
The fates are snipping strings
Cutting and measuring
Laughing and pleasuring
Themselves with my demise.

Icarus is melting his wings.
Sisyphus is rolling his rock.
Lipo throws fiery poems on the river
And it all takes place without me
On the sun-side
Shadow-side
And in the valley is where I hide
Tromping and stumbling
Unable to glide anymore
Unable to abide anymore.

Lightning leaps in my cold wire core
And my heart is a hammer beating me submissive to this poem.
Desk chained and fettered in ink
Clashing flash phrases
Brain implosions
And word crazes.

The blank page is staring me down to teeth.
I have to get the words right
I have to get the words right.
I must find a form for this void that is consuming me.

I’m cloaked in confusion
Sweating nails with gunfire velocity
Driving wasted thoughts in the noon moon
Leaking lunar brains in the blue Milky Way shimmer
Cancer coating the mystical darkness.

I’m waving straying praying to the muse
And I refuse to lose again.
I stop begin stop begin push the pen.
If I can get the words right I can make things better.

Slam Bam hammer beat heart
Bam Slam heartbeat hamme

Cut me slice me vivisect my limbo
Light a candle in my darkness
and transplant me holy in the golden sunflower kingdom.
Give me words to say what feeling is doing this killing
Stop me from milling in my unkind, muttled mind.

I’m clinking
I’m clanking
I’m drawing blanks
The wind whoos and dances my flame.

I’m trailing smoke
I’m a punch line for jokes
I am a rubber-band man snapped back
To whelp myself red and white
I’m in fright without delight.

I need a conclusion an absolution the final solution to this abstract puzzle scattered on the blue green mean wave sea.
I need shelter from the shock shake storm clarity in form a key to the lock that bars me from the milk honey paradise.
I need a wise woman a wise man a gentle king a guiding hand a mage a sage a vivid page a full lung blown breath to inflate my balloon and carry me home to Auntie Em.

Will someone please cry olly olly oxen free?

The lights fade down dim diminished
And all I need is a solace kiss
To be called and missed
Love loved and love returned
Rejuvenated in the cleansing burn
Languidly loose and unconcerned
Floating longways sideways high
To float to fly
To reach the pinnacle point of magenta passion
Where our lips are binary stars.

My mama wouldn’t touch me.
I looked like my daddy,
and my daddy was dead.

My stepfather wouldn’t hear me.
He was jealous of my daddy.
My mama still loved my daddy,
I looked like my daddy
And my daddy was dead.

I was born into this world as a baby,
and was transformed into a breathing candlelight vigil.
I am my daddy’s mirror.
I am my daddy’s tombstone.
I am my daddy’s obituary.
I am my daddy’s begotten.
My daddy is not forgotten.
My mamma won’t touch me.

There could be another explosion.
Please don’t ever let the sky turn black over Dumas, Texas again.

A-clack-clack
Was that the sound of him working?
A-clack-clack
Mama packed his lunch that morning.
A-clack-clack
They said that they turned the valve off.
A-clack-clack
They said it was safe.
A-clack-clack
The explosion erased my daddy’s face.
Ka-boom
And it slammed him into his release.
Slammed him against the kingdom of his beliefs.
A-clack-clack
The explosion made a vacuum made a void,
And inside the void the boy learned to hide.
A-clack-clack
Reconstructive surgery put daddy’s face back on,
But reconstructive surgery couldn’t fix my mama’s heart.
No surgeon’s needle will sew the lining in her that came apart.

The sky is as black as Dumas, Texas every morning.
My mama can’t look at me without mourning.

Mama is still beating on the policeman’s chest;
She’s telling him that he is a liar.
Liar!
He’s not dead!
He’s coming home in an hour.
Liar! He’s not dead!
I’ve already cooked his dinner.
Liar! He’s not dead!
I’m making sweet love to him in two hours.
Liar! He’s not dead.
I will erase Vietnam with my fingertips.
Liar! He’s not dead.

Mama, daddy is dead.

You look like your father.

Mama, Daddy is dead,
And I am not my daddy’s mirror.
I am not my daddy’s tombstone.
I am not my daddy’s obituary.
Daddy is dead.
Your husband is dead,
But I am not dead,
But daddy is dead,
But I am not dead,
But your husband is dead,
But I am not dead.

I’m right here mama, and I am not dead.