Outer Dark '13 (a poem)

Here on tomorrow’s shorelines
by oily breakers taken,
the self wanderlusts, sets sails
from naught to none, from dreams

Then just as for all the games since
forfeited and they’ll still remember,
for every restless Summer night
there will always dawn a gray

Still, on tomorrow’s shorelines
by gale and hurricane shaken,
you close your eyes, look back
and all that you see, well, just you try
not to hate ‘em—

For behind a pantomime of cinders
there might reign one last scorching ember,
and in the end there is no race,
but a downhill slalom straight into
the gas chamber—

Hence to the victor, the spoils,
but those bittersweet, unearned,
uncalled for and unavoidable,
just like a soul-searing  kiss
from Satan.


"Busy, busy, busy", ´13

Many years in the future, more than a decade after graduation, I’m 33 years old and the iPod which has long since replaced the CD player I kind of stole from Kay after he moved out of the old apartment downtown has begun to feel like an honest to god antique. Cybill and Bryce, comrades-in-arms for the fourth yuga, will rant and rave incessantly during the Sunday luncheons about the fifth version of the iPhone. To me, to whom the touchscreen is still something out of Epcot Center.

It’s close to two in the morning and I’m sipping from Cybill’s diet ice tea but without my usual late-night, all-by-myself cocktail party mixture of Stolichnaya and the anxiolytics. I’d probably also murder for a bottle of red wine right now, name the grape, come what might, and the refrigerator’s actually filled to the brim this time around but alas, no alcohol and no chocolate.

I have been working twelve, fourteen hours a day and barely getting any sleep at night. So I kind of get tanked instead of having dinner most nights and barely get any sleep. Still I make it to the office at eight and things sort of work out all right in the end. We grow old and what do you know, there’s some actual solace from recreational drug use.  Some local B-list singer was found dead the other day and the word Cocaine sort of popped up on the newspapers more often than Hugo Chávez.

But still…

But still, I have recently taken to going back the stacks upon stacks of books I keep at my place, you know, all those old books back from my College days and the gloomy, dark years that ensued and it’s like meeting up with old friends as I wait for the sleeping pills to work their magic. They are all there, see, Vonnegut and Salinger and Ellis and Kerouac, like guards mounting the ramparts and turrets at a garrison outside of time, waiting for us refugees from the twentieth century. And once we make it to the gates we are asked to provide a password, some key word od coded cypher so as to be allowed inside and tucked in for safety— such as the forgotten phone numbers we find inscribed in our own handwriting on the inside of a book’s cover, or a phantasmagoric slip of paper from an organ grinder that slips from in-between pages and falls to the ground, with the promise of a prophecy or the enchantment of a prayer.