three in the morning

A ghost at three in the morning

A life-storm, where faith is tested

Jesus will always catch me, no matter what

In my midst, he comes ghostly

See him and faith grows, but when life

Gets tough, my faith is shaken, then taken

Do I fall and do I keep my faith

What am I w/o you Lord

You are my shield and sword

& if I should fall you’ll be

There to save me.

Lilu, from the start...

Lilu, from the start…

 

Like these days when there are no clouds in the sky

There is no hidden purpose in demanding why

For in the complexity of you long uttered sigh,

My love, it blooms for you in the end of this winter.

 

While the colorful birds return from the Holy South,

My heart it screams for the quiet warmth of your touch –

& no matter the worldly words that pour out from my loud mouth,

It is in my pre-meditated actions that I express my longing love!

 

With big kisses, with small pens, along with the admiration of your eyes

While the curve of your mouth brings Mona Lisa’s perfection to mind,  

Simply, you are my earthly gift, my penultimate priceless piece of art -

And every ‘love you’ you tell me, helps my soul scream with joy!

For sometimes the simplest of stories of the simple girl loves boy,

Always leaves my blood gushing love throughout, beginning with my complex heart.

X

It’s a bar, simply called ‘Abandon All Hope.’  Making my way towards the front and I have a thirst that needs quenching.  All the bottles with shiny liquids swishing in.  there’s not many people in the bar, but two men, dressed in wool cloths sit at the bar.

Going to the bar, the bartender asks, “What’ll be” or something in some tongue I’ve never heard, but understand without hesitation.  

“beer”  I tell him, ‘just a beer.’  Taking a stool, I drink a swig to calm my burning thirst.  Looking at the two men sitting next to me, seeing them real close, one of them looks ugly, the kind that makes you keep staring and the other is quite sympathetic.  Lifting my beer to them as a toast.  One of them spoke up, the sympathetic one.

“what do you think of this place so far, Ivan,” he says with a round cup in his hand and a smirk o his face.

“I think this place sucks,’  I muster.  Looking at the ugly one, the ugly ties to say something, but he starts laughing instead.  A long hard laugh that gets the sympathetic fellow to join him.  They laugh so much, I join in as well, not knowing why.  The ugly one has tears in his eyes as he stops himself from laughing.

“That’s exactly what Dante here said when I frist brought him down here,” the ugly one replied with a smile on his face as well.

I looked at Dante and saw his face, sympathetic with all of us humans.  Looking into his eyes, I saw the stars deep in his eyes, the stars he wrote of.  Looking down at his hands, I stare at his frail hands and wonder how those hands wrote such great poetry.

Looking at the person sitting next to Dante, looking at the ugly one.  I realize who this person is.  It’s the one who wrote the tales of the Aenid.  In Latin he wrote.  The same man who guided Dante down here.  This ugly man laughing with a beer in his hand is Virgil.

All I could do was laugh in unison with the other two.

“Listen, listen, Ivan, I was just discussing with my good friend here what makes a poem nowadays.  In my days, we poets just wrote and our writing had a form, it had rhyme, it had stgructure so much structure, pyramids could be eredcted there.  We rhymed and we were loved for it.  We had poets who sait in dusty rooms while the plague took our families, but us poets still wrote disregarding the miseries for we saw hope in death, hope in life, but we never gave up, that’s the key, isn’t it, not to give up?

“But must we really suffer when writing this poetry?  Must we really live many lives just to write a piece of art?  When I wrote my poem, back in my days, poets were revered…”

“In mine too”

“Yes, in yours too, but back in my time, my dear friends, we had stages to perform our craft.  Stages that held long hours of poetic lines memorized to audiences waiting with silent hearts.   But in my day, poets were a dime a dozen, and in Dante’s, only you educated people survived, am I right, but…”

“Yes, lets get to the point now, since Ivan is here, go ahead, ask him, let’s get a modern”

“Yes, a modern point of view…well we would like to know what you tact on poetry is these days. Since the stage is gone and the epics are no longer being written, what us poets want to kknow, is how you survive as a poet in your day”

On the spot with two great poets, what was there to say but, “by writing, I don’t stop writing, I keep on, looking for what you wrote.  I read what you gentlemen wrote and was inspired by those words.  Thousands of years later, I sit in my room, much like Dante’s and not like Dante’s and with my pen I scratch out my existence and my worries in a world gone topsy-turvy and then I go to a stage much like Virgil’s and not like Virgil’s and I express myself the best way I can.  This poetry that comes fomr you Dante and from Virgil, I still compose in my heart.  And still I read to what crowds come.  In your days you had thousands, but this art is dying and I’m doing what I can to help, let it survive.  Strive on, to endure.”

“I like your answer young man, but let me ask you something else.  Do you believe in muses?  Or where does your inspiration come from?”

I thougt of this and answered my drinking buddies the best way I could.  I picked up my glass and took a drink that satisfied a little bit of my tortured soul for the first time in many years.  Taking a drink and not feeling lonely, having two of my peers waiting for me to give an answer and me eager to talk, spoke up, “Yes, I do believe in muses.”  I said in between two drinks of my disappearing beer.

“Told you he did, now drink up.”

The ugly one took a long drink from his goblet, with driplets falling over the edges of his mouth, onto the rough cloth he was wearing.

“Now what kind of muse, now since you said you believed in muses, I, we want to know if you do have a muse and if you do have one, can you describe it, if you can?

Looking the poets straight on, “I do have a muse and her name is Sara.  She’s this girl I’ve loved since I met her.  I don’t know why, but I’ve been writing for here ears since I’ve met her.  Every poem I’ve written was written for an audience of one and she is the person I’ve been writing these poems for all these long years for.  Every waking moment I have, I think of her, every place I go, I remember her, her face, her smell, her eyes, I know her and she knows me, I love her and she love me.”

“may I intrude real quick.  Then Ivan, if you are writing with a muse, then what are you doing down here?”

“oh I know what kind of love you speak of.  It’s that love that can’t be contained in life, but we try so hard to mimic with words, this love that takes all our lives to live  as, I know what love is and I know your love.”

“Don’t get too sentimental Dante.  We still have somewhere else to go”

“No, Virgil, I was just remembering.”

“Now you did it Ivan, you’ve brought him back inot one of his moods.”

“No its just that we all have our own Beatrice.”

“You just have to say that name, now I’m going to hear Beatrice this and Beatrice that for next hundred years.  Do you know I barely got him to stop talking about his love.  Do you know how long it took me to help Dante forget about her?”

I knew this was a bad idea, but no the great Dante wants to meet his lovesick poet, looking for his love and why because he told me earlier, “I have something to tell him,”  well here we are Dante, what do you have that I so important to tell Orestes, tell him, go on.”

“Ivan, listen to me closely.  Love is fickle emotion.  You can have your life after love, but if love is dead there, who do you keep chasing it.  I followed and searched for Beatric starting in hell, then to purgatory and onward to heaven.  And you know what, when I found Beatrice in heaven, oh yes I was happy, overly excited, but you know where the sadness came in this love, well Beatrice was already dead.  There was no way she was going to come back to earch with me.  These reports of yours, they are saying the same to you.  You can search the underworld for your love, but let me be the bad guy and tell you that your love is dead.  Your love  is not going to return to you.  You might as well give up your search and concentrate on the real problem here.  Ask yourself this, what got you here and how are you going to get back home.  This isn’t life down here.  You can’t solve a problem by finding the mistake, which is your love for Rhonda, but you have to search deep in your mind, in your heart and you must realize why you love the dragon, for its this love of the dragon that’s going to lead you down roads of destruction and many more Rhonda’s along the way.  Once you find the purpose and home of the dragon, it is at that place that you can slay the dragon.  It is does not have anything to do with Rhonda, there is no love between you two, this is all about this love of the dragon.  Once you figure that out, my young poet, then you can make true progress.”  Dante spoke as he picked up his mug and drank down the old suds.

I didn’t want to believe what he had to say.  I had this ugly feeling in my soul.  My teeth were on edge, like millions of drillers wanted to come out onto my tongue.  My mind was flying in all directions thinking of what Dante had just explained to me.  I looked at Virgil and he nodded to me as if I understood what had transpired at this moment.  I looked at the clock and it’s hands were moving backwards.  Looking in my drink and seeing millions of particles floating, lands and other worlds, solar systems in a shot glass, floating in a liquid universe.

1 Cor 1:26 – Consider your own calling brothers.  Not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth.

What is my calling, you may ask?  But Lord, I know my calling, and it is to talk to you daily, write for you daily, and praise you daily, the more I do what you want me to do, the more blessings I see, not necessarily personal blessings, but these blessings for my brothers bring joy to my heart as if these blessings were mine as well, but your glories, Lord, these I see and hear every day as well, and just the same, Lord, I see your mercy and chastenment, oh Father, forgive my sins.  So consider what it is what God wants from you, not what you want from God.  It is easy to want things, but to do things, that is an entirely different matter.  There is lots of times I am so lazy I don’t even want to help my brother, but I know there is no difference between a brother in Christ and a brother in flesh.  So I must help out as much as I can, even when I don’t want to; that may be the best time to help someone else.  It is being able to leave that sluggard behind, that old lazy sloth behind and do something, not because I will get paid for it, but to do something right because it is the right thing to do.

               And I remember that I am nobody.  I am not powerful;  I am not of noble birth.  I am a mixture of cultures of bloods indigenous to the Americas, a remnant of the savages that were slaughtered, but even I know my place, have learned my place when it comes to you, dear Father.  Like Gideon, I was afraid, not wanting to speak up.  Like Moses, I am a murderer of lives cut short.  Like Paul, I am a prisoner praising your name every day.  Like Peter, I have denied you more than three times and still you answer when the phone rings.  Like David, I have slept with married women and lied behind the husbands back.  Like Solomon, I have prayed upon false idols, because this woman told me so, or the popular people in this material world worshipped them, and I wanted to be like these popular people. Like Jonah, I have closed my ears to your words, only to be swallowed in jail, in the belly of the beast I prayed, and still you brought me out.  Like Thomas’, I doubted your existence, saying you cannot be real, how foolish of me,  but through this all, Lord, l still have the gift you imparted upon me because you knew before I was born, I was to come back and praise you.  Like this, praise you in places where you are made fun of, where you reside and are thrown away daily, but I know you Lord, and you know me and like that criminal who was crucified next to you, I know you are blameless and that you have died and risen for my sake and because of my faith, I too will be in paradise, happy to be in your presence, happy to see you once again.

when i was seventeen, as a game sent to me by my good friend

At that age, I read the stranger by Albert Camus and that book changed my life.  Since that first reading, I have read that book about fifteen times.  I was working at my first job, which was at the Greenwood Public Library, which is now known as McDonald’s.  Go figure, huh.  I had a car, a brown Buick; a Somerset was what it was.  It was a cool car; I used to go all over the place with it, with my friends and girls.  I remember going to the beach a lot and smoking a lot, and hanging out with these high school girls from my class at Moody High School.  The weird thing is that me and my friends used to hang out with these two girls, two cousins who were very beautiful.  One of them was a skinny girl whom I like a lot, but her cousin, was thin, but had a body that was rocking and rolling.  I remember being at the beach with these girls and I took off my shirt and the cousin, I forget her name, would stand next to me and rub her hand into my hairy chest and tell me how much she liked my hairy chest, because all these other boys she knew from school, were that, just boys.   And me, I was weird about it all.  I was their friend, their close friend when we were not in school.  But when it came to school, for some reason, I was ashamed to be seen with them.  Why, I don’t know, and I still think about that, about why I acted like I did not know who these girls were when I would see them in high school, but outside of school, I was their best friend.  I think that is very strange, indeed.  At high school, I was taking calculus and smoking lots all the time.   My hair was long; it went to the middle of my back.  I used to shave my head and only the top of my head was long.  I knew all these girls that had a crush on me from high school, but I did not do anything about it.  My anxiety was really bad and I did not talk to girls because I was afraid or I was a big pussy.  That is all I can think of when it comes to my relationships with girls.  It was no until a couple of years later that I would lose my innocence and I would think differently about girls.  At this time, I was a philosopher and a poet.  Girls were very far from my mind.  I read Nietzsche and Camus and Sartre.  I discovered Baudelaire in my life and started to read lots of popular fiction, like Grisham and Crichton.  When I was seventeen I was in charge of my life, and all I wanted to be was a poet.  Kind of like J. Keats, but little did I know what my life had in store for me?  I was taking classes at Moody that were audio visual video tape classes.  I used to make commercials, produce them for my class, and I used to snap lots of photos with a bad-ass camera that I bought with the money I was making from working at the library.  I used to play piano very much, and my piano teacher had me accepted at the Berklee College of music, located in Boston, Mass.  I was into Nirvana and Pearl Jam.  I really enjoyed Pearl Jam a lot.  I was getting into that underground indie scene, which would only lead me to even better music in the years to come.  I remember I bought this collection of compact discs, which was everything that John Lennon had recorded as a solo artist.  It was a compilation compact disc which consisted to four separate compact discs.  This was the most important buy that I made in my young life.  I loved these recordings so much.  I remember these crushes I had on certain girls, who would come in and see me at the library all the time.  They would look at me and ask my questions, and they would wait for me to ask them out.  But I was a naïve and stupid little boy, not realizing that these women were throwing themselves at me, so I ignored their advances and wondered late at night, why I did not have a girlfriend, and I wondered if I would ever have one.  My sexual tastes were questioned, and I wondered if I was a homosexual, not that I have anything against them, but I was curious about myself at that time, because I could not talk to girls, but I was able to talk to boys, any boys without any trouble.  Later on in my life, I discovered I was not gay, but that is at another age in my life.  When I was seventeen, I was already snorting things and popping pills like nothing.  I remember shortly before my eighteenth birthday, I had smoked a reefer, a marijuana stick, and I locked up my door, and when inside to my calculus class.  About twenty minutes into the mathematical lecture, by a teacher who thought he was the Jaime Escalante of South Texas.  My calculus teacher had all these sayings on his wall, from ‘poder es querer’ to a bunch of sayings that screamed Chicano pride.  What I do remember most about my teacher’s wall, was this long picture from M C Escher that always caught my eye.  Well, twenty minutes into this mindless number game called calculus and the security guard came in and asked for me by my name.  I went outside and saw police searching my car.  I was asked to open the car and the police dove in and searched my car thoroughly.  Fortunately nothing was found, except for two little seeds in the back seat.  My car smelled like weed because I and my two friends had just burned one on the way to school.  The vice principal at that time, told me that he did not know what was going to happen to me, but he sent me back to class and told me that I had better change.  That night was a Friday night, and I decided to cut off my beautiful long hair, to show the principal and all others who know about my predicament that I was capable of changing and that I needed a chance to prove to them that I was a good person.  Obviously it worked, for the vice principal called me into his office and told me that they were not going to pursue the case against me because for one they were just seeds, but also because I had shown initiative that I wanted to change my life.  This was the first time I lied about my usage, and it would not be my last.  I guess this was the first time that I was able to lie and get away with it, and use the knowledge to my ability, and get what I want.  It was not until four years later that I found out that what I was doing had a name already in the philosophical world, and this knowledge was very acute in my actions.  There are a lot of other things that I did at this age, but I’ll save that for next time.

16

.

She was tired.  Covered in blood, none of it her own, she replayed in her tired mind all the times she could remember the aliens picking her up.

            As much as she fled her destiny, it was always there, behind the cars, the capitol, the town lake, the water towers, moon towers, Pease park, the bark trees, the barbecue joints, the dirty men, the old dresser, the bathroom stall, under her bed, in her trunk, in her pillows, in the Gutenberg Bible, behind the frat boys faces, in all the syringes, the pale faces she woke up to, its always been there, etched in the stars.

            And just like the stars appear nightly, without fail, her stars came to her, right on time, not a minute too soon nor a minute too late.

            All good things come to an end and life on Earth was now over for Danielle.

            She looked to the east, saw the sun-light creeping over.  She looked up and winked.

            And there sat Danielle, on the corner of Cesar Chavez and Congress, at a bus-stop waiting for her spaceship to take her away, at twilight, weary.

XV  The Devil’s Backbone

 

Six months ago, Damian and I were driving to San Antonio to go party at Fiesta.  Fiesta is a two week mardi-gras-like party that is held in San Anto every April, annually.  It is a great time.  If you’ve never been there, you should go there once in your lifetime.  It is something you will never forget.

            However, it was a late night, and we were driving to San Anto at about three in the morning, the witching hour,  trying to reach Fiesta.  I had been up on meth, obviously my favorite, and I wanted to get away from all the shit Austin was throwing my way.  The bills were piling up, from credit cards to breaking contracts with leasing agents, to unpaid traffic citations, not showing up to court, in a timely manner, or even in a timely dress, not showing up to court-ordered probation, dealers wanting money or pussy or both, and me, feeling wigged out, again, for the umpteenth time, wanting to quit using, but not having the willpower to actually quit;  therefore I decided a little down time with my own folks would do me some good.

            The expressway is so quiet at this time of the night.  There are hardly any drivers on the freeway.  I made the choice, while we were in New Braunfels to take a little side trip. 

            There’s a little range of hills to the west of this central area of Texas, which is locally known as the Devil’s Backbone.  There have been reports over the years that this is a hot spot for unexplained phenomena.  There were reports, a couple of hundred years ago, that whole complete Indian tribes disappeared in the middle of the night.  The first Texans would write reports of tracking down tribes who were wild one night and all of a sudden, the next morning, no trace would ever be found of a tribe or anybody gathering at the same location where there was a wild party held the night before.

            Maybe that’s where this strange activity comes from.  Magic mushrooms and tall tales.  Eating ‘shrooms with an empty stomach gets you tripping a whole lot quicker than if you had a full belly.  I hadn’t eaten in days, so if I came across a batch of mushrooms, hmmm, hmmm, hmmmm, hummm, I would definitely have an intense trip.

            We took a right, drove for a couple of miles, took a left, hung a quick right, passed over a little creaky bridge, drove for another mile, found the fork in the road, and took the one less traveled by, went down a caliche road, until we finally came upon a green pasture, our magic field.

            We jumped the barb wire fence, which was so flimsy, we could have knocked down the fence with one easy kick, and we went in search of cow patties.  We came across some cow patties right away, and we waved our flashlights over them and saw no mushrooms.  We went in search of more patties when Damian remembered that someone had told him to look under tree growth, under the branches, and you would find some mushrooms there.  I don’t know, but I guess it has something to do with the spores and shade and sunlight.  Or was it moonlight?

            The lights that were so far away, suddenly got closer to us as we ran around in the darkness.  We had no idea in which direction my car was.  What if the lights belonged to a stupid Texan red-neck with a gun.  He would surely shoot us Mexicans and say it was self-defense.  Then they would let him be an honorary member of the Texas Rangers.

            I came to, hours later, as dawn was breaking, and I found myself naked in my car.  Damn, did I do it again, have sex without protection, while I was passed out.  That fucker Damian, I thought, what a scumbag.  I sat up in the back seat and noticed Damian was in the front, naked as well, but he was shaking, as if he was cold.

            “You don’t remember what happened,” he finally said in a hoarse voice, as if he had been smoking or screaming all night long.

            I heard Damian mumble, “It wasn’t me.”  That dumb fuck.

            I turned on the car, got on the road and looked for the interstate.  I knew exactly what had happened the night before, but I was trying to play it off.  I saw what they did to him.  Poor Damian.