Burma Shave

I hear the salts and I hear the schmaltz, long gone and lonesome and Waits on a 2:30 AM bend. I drag it out. The knot in the throat still comes around but it don't rain around here, even though it's all so sad.

She's a sucker for a fella in a cowboy hat, and Marysville's just a wide spot in the road.

2:26 AM - 1 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

I sleep the sleep

The glue and the muse
Caught up in the hue
Of a sunlit Fourth of July
A dream never thought
In my seasons of rot
Has cast her reflection in my eye

I dream of her and wake up to her
And a thankful soul I am.

1:54 AM - 1 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

End of summer, ’93 (pre-binge)

Little windows. Long, long little windows of sunshine will pass every now and again. Standing above ground as a train-as-a-tunnel passes around and over and under you. You're in the same place, your body is never moving and there's a scene in every car. Bright in the beginnings of life and getting darker as time wears on, as realization puts its bony hands on your neck.

Sometimes I'll hear something and find myself back in a car I thought I'd slept through and then I'll remember it was a car where the moon would shine through the window and light me up. Tonight it's a smoky little song I remember from a summer when roses would sweat, sitting on their stems, petals falling in the dirt, and love was love and freedom was freedom and the teenage wonder about what was out there in the world was all there was. Windows open and dogs barking in the distance and the heartbroken whisper of a girl inching its way out of the speakers in our living room. I was sixteen years old. I was pure. I was sharp.

I found the song again and it brought back the feeling of hope in the world and life and all things I'd forgotten about. It seems that every year that passes takes a little piece away from you and I realize, hearing this, that the years don't take the pieces away forever, they just throw them out in a field somewhere for you to find later on, but I'm not sixteen anymore and there's what's what.

3:40 AM - 3 Comments - 10 Kudos - Add Comment

Sometimes you just gotta shut up and listen.

Wait, what was here is now gone, it sucked. 

11:53 PM - 2 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Dusty

Is this the way. is this the day, is this what you say
when the world comes stumbling, tumbling, bumbling
setting your hands to trembling, remembering
Sweet summer sugar
Till life blows away
When there's no home to go home to
and here you can't stay

Just take a chip off the block
Just take a minute off the clock
It's hard to make noise with a tic in your talk

1:01 AM - 5 Comments - 6 Kudos - Add Comment

I like short songs (13x)

Day turns into night
Move to Panama
Lepers in the light
I'm treated animal

Like a singular fish in a dish with a wish
Like a ringworm germ gone its term

10:52 PM - 3 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

Here’s an idea

If you're not Dave Matthews, stop singing like him. It's efuckingnough! Fuckin' wankers.

11:46 PM - 5 Comments - 3 Kudos - Add Comment

The Familiar Marine

What was it made him so angry? Was it his upbringing? Was it his wife? Was it himself and his feeling of never being good enough? Doesn't matter, he was an asshole.

I'd never met the Marine and beyond our weekend together with my grandpa, I've never seen him since. I don't even remember his name. He was the son of a grand cousin of mine name of Lawrence. Another in the long line of drunks I come from, not that I'm complaining about that.

This grand cousin had a trailer home in Lake Isabella and actually, it was right at the other end of the road where I'd finally met Mike Donovan, right up by where the dirt meets the pavement. The trailer, with its awnings and trees seemed to be built right into the ground, a landfill all its own and so dark inside, and depressing, it gave off that that Texas Chainsaw feeling. Just murder murder murder. Dirty light blue and dirty white, when you could see it, other wise, it was dirt and Juniper. Isabella neighborhoods have no sidewalks, adding their desolate nature when the homes are not taken care of. This was one of those places you don't even walk by when your a kid, you just crossed the street and went on, free of the demons trapped in its walls.

Lawrence was never around, ever. He lived somewhere else and used this place as a... I don't know what. Maybe he fished in the lake and needed a roof to drink under when he was done. Maybe he was a creep and needed a worthy shack. Only once in my life had I ever see it lived in and it was by Lawrence son, the Marine

The Marine had done his tour of duty and, strange to me, decided to slack off in Isabella in his dad's shack in the high and hot desert. With him, his fucking psycho, straight out of germany, non-english speaking wife. You'd think, being a Marine, having gone through the training and the becoming a man and all of that, he'd pick right up and move on with life, searching for the highest seat he could get but not this weirdo. He went where lonesome paranoia hides you out in a dark shack, rent paid, and a squawking german hollering in the unlit living room. Where depression is acute and the surroundings alone make a man go mad.

He came by grandparents place once, the Marine, talking high and honorable about defending our country and my grandad, the masked patriot he was, became full of the visceral "go get 'em" this man was spouting. So full, he took the man up on the offer to go out shooting up Erskine Creek Road the coming weekend.

Erskine creek road starts pointing east toward the red part of the valley and just past the flume curves south to nowhere. The pavement rolls past giant pieces of property that line the mountainside and up past the elementary and junior and high schools. If you go far enough, the pavement ends and you're in the driest woods you ever saw. Further down the dirt road, you might see a run down mobile home or two, both of them blue and white, and it's so dead you can feel it creeping into your skin and you have to get away. It's badlands out there, like that irrational fear of the dark as a kid, you have to leave it, you have to run. Dawn or dusk, noon or night.

The Marine showed up late Saturday morning dressed to the nines in all of his combat gear. Looked to me like we were gonna drop on some viet cong but you know these types, when feeling small they dress up. He says he's ready to go kill some cans and, from the looks of him, he wasn't lying.

So, we go up Erskine Creek Road, past the properties and the schools and the pavement. We didn't go too far down the dirt road though, just past what would have been the creek, all dried out from summer and deader than a doornail. I had the creeps just being out there, luckily he brought every kind of gun known to man. He had with him shotguns, rifles, handguns, everything legal though, no "I got this machine gun off a dead gook" kind of shit. Either way, my grandpa and I are looking at this guy like he's over the top. We're out here to shoot cans off a rock and he brings all hell with him. And dressed up in camouflage and a handgun on his right calf, on the outside, and a knife on the other.

The Marine lifted our targets out of Lawrence' old trash he left behind last time he'd been up drinking. There were a lot of them. Olympias. The Marine set them up on a big old boulder in a line and handed me a gun and a away I went. I was picking them off pretty good until we heard the rattle of a snake.

Now this man... Now this man... me being about ten or so, we coulda just left, or kept shooting, it wouldn't have mattered, we were about 20 to 40 yards off the rock, if the snake was going to get us, we'd see it but no, Johnny Hero has gets all tactical, takes his pistol off his leg and sneaks around the rock and, taking aim as if his life were at stake, shoots the snake in the face. At that point, grandad and I'd had enough shooting for the day and we made him take us back. Just the spectacle of it. "This commie snake must die" we had to go. This guy here, wasn't right.

A week or two later, I had to go up to Lawrence' shack, to hang out by the Marine and his crazy German wife. Somehow this was an obligation,maybe he'd asked my grandparents if I could come around, maybe in connection with that he wanted to instill in me a good wor ethic or a love for firearms or whatever. Anways, I had to go.

I walked up the dirt driveway to the right of the run down cars that were there. It was near dark and the place could have never seemed so wrong. Dark and desolate and bad and wrong and dead and only death. Blue and white and rust. I crept between the cars and the home and in the front door into the dark dark living room with its wood panneling and stolen cheap art on the walls, velvet and paint by number. There was a smokey old hide-a-bed opened up and bedding thrown all over and all the lamps were dead. I moved forward and turned left toward the back through the kitchen, the only lit room in the house and by one bulb, bare and hanging from the ceiling. A fridge from the fifties half open and covered in black finger and hand prints to my left and a sink full of dishes to the right, most of them broken and bloody. Streaks across the scratched up linoleum floor back toward the bedroom where I heard a scream and the door burst open, the wife in underwear and a bloody t-shirt, screaming for her life in german and the Marine close behind, finally catching her at the hide-a-bed, her neck in his hands and the screaming and the yelling and the blood.

1:09 AM - 2 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

I sat here hours

I sat here hours trying to type a tale about a loser or a fuck up or a disagreer or a hero and I came up with nothing, now it's near three in the morning and I'll not be a good man in my own mind if I don't go to bed and lay with my beautiful girl and for no other reason to lay beside her, I love her true.

I sat hours trying to dream up a scheme but something keeps pulling me back to bed so, forget it.

2:37 AM - 6 Comments - 6 Kudos - Add Comment

Following will lose you a limb

When I was just into my teens and friend of mine and I used to hang around this bike shop in Folsom name of Bicycles Plus. We were heavy into the BMX and when we were too lazy to ride, we'd go to the shop and laze around. We'd hang out in the back with the older fellas that worked there who were also riders. We looked up to them because they were badasses and they had our dream job. They'd fuck around in a shop, building bikes and eating McDonalds and when they got out to ride they were ridiculously good. We wanted to be a part of what they were and in a way I suppose we were, they let us hang around so there it is there. Sometimes my friend and I would build bikes in exchange for parts and whatever. After awhile though, it got to where we were building bikes to just not over-stay our welcome and that was fine with the owner so we were cool with that, the free parts were an afterthought anyway.

There at the shop, the help treated us like little brothers, sometimes offering the lived in advice a man of 24 might have to pass on to a 14 year old and sometimes fucking with us. Some of those times, relentlessly. Like the time when Nate The Mormon, who was working there to build a cash cow to fund his "mission" in South America, would whip us with bare brake cables which, when you consider it, are about as thick as some middlin piano strings. Bare metal, "WHACK!!!"

It got to where the boss had to tell him to mellow out but he didn't want to so he kept on, and we suffered.

Perhaps Nate The Mormon was overcome by the spirit. Or maybe overcome by what was really possessing him, that Devil frustration, welling up in his eyes like a the virgin he was and what doesn't get released below is channeled through his hands in anger.

But fuck that poetry I tend to fall into, this story's about another fellow worked there, a guy stunted in his mental growth, a dog whose desire to fit in took him to the tree and beyond and if you don't know what I mean by that, you soon will. This story needs no drawn out telling, its character needs no lines drawn on his face to show his sorrows by me. He needs no history back through his generations to find where the problem reared its head in his upbringing because this is not a tale of sadness nor is it one of revenge with the twist of empathy for the villain so as to endear him to the reader just before the lynching. No, it's a humorous story through and through.

Sean Dehart, sort of tallish, if I remember right, almost as old as the other employees at the shop, and large, as in wide, and unlike most large as in wide people I'd ever known, he lacked the qualities that most large as in wide people have. I myself was once large as in wide and I don't recall being a spoonful of baking chocolate bitter and hateful towards my younger and smaller friends but this guy was. The sad thing about all this was he only acted that way because he thought that's what all the other guys working at the shop were doing, he mistook their quid pro quo hassling of us for just beating up the smaller guys. See, we had the brains and could hurt with words whereas they, the workers, could injure us, it was a give and take situation, one might spit in one of our sodas and we would speak the truth about his crosseyed girlfriend. Dehart didn't seem to see it this way, he just wanted to belong and so fucking with us out of school was how he spent his day. He was a follower and never once the leader and when the day was done, he wanted us to hang out with because the older guys wouldn't have him.

Back at the shop I remember a time when they used to throw all the old tires and innertubes up into the tree over the gully behind the shop until the city came and told them they had to get them all out and the owner made Dehart go up the tree and get them. Back then his nickname was Doughboy and all I can remember was Doughboy, halfway up the tree, dragging his weight over the bark and an old man we all called J.D's Dad hollering "SHIMMY ON UP THAT TREE DOUGHY!!! YOU FUCKIN' PUSSY!!!" And Doughy wanted to belong bad enough that he sure as hell shimmied on up that tree, complaining all the way, scared to death.

He took lip from everybody just to belong and for me, when I see that, I spy weakness and I want to get rid of it, so I've got no sympathy for these that make these beds for themselves.

When the time was right, he followed, from the days of the shop on out into the future, the the scene for most was mini-trucks, he wanted a mini-truck. When that scene shifted to lowered classic cars, he got himself an early 50's chevy and tricked it out. Everything, from the hairstyles to the speech patterns to the costly cars to his likes and dislikes so personal you'd wonder why, would shift with the waves of his peers, and when that wave shifted to 5.0 Ford Mustangs, his life would change forever.

Here's the story as I heard it. Doughboy got himself a Mustang and thought, as always, that he was hot shit. Hot like Mongoose McKuen, hot like Pomona Drags hot. I hear he was at a light on Sunrise Blvd when he decides he wants to race a car beside him (The son of a bitch couldn't even race a bicycle, what made him think he could race a car? Lord knows). The light turns green and doughboy and his 5.0 Mustang go racing off into infamy, the tree of infamy, and Doughy loses a leg.

NOW, that's not the end of the story. Were it to end there, you'd leave here with a little sadness and sympathy for the boy who should have learned a lesson, that being "just because your friends have hot rod Fords and you have a hot rod Ford and they race those hot rod Fords without EVER receiving a scratch does not make it right and does not mean you will not succumb to the tree of suffering and pain. The same lesson being "Just because someone else has and does something does not mean you have to too." If we left the story at that, you may not sleep at night for worry and pray for the boy who could no longer shimmy on up that tree. Granted, it his own damn fault he shimmied INTO the tree but, like I said, his want to live another's life was undeterred by the loss of his leg and was perhaps stirred into a boiling desire, cooking his resolve till the water steamed off and his coveting of others existences burned up the bottom of the pan. Do you see? He just doesn't learn.

And here we go...

The trends shifted, it was no longer 5.0 Mustangs, it was no longer lowered Chevys, it was no longer mini-trucks, and it was no longer BMX and the bike shop. It was harley fuckin' Davidsons.

His parents up and moved to arizona and he, being out of work, went with them. He got himself a prosthetic leg and life was looking up. I don't know who he started hanging out with but he got that Harley bug and so, as he usually does, he got himself a Harley and became a biker. A rough and tumble-appearing Folsom suburb native biker, in Arizona, no less. Lookin' tough.

Now, picture if you will, the highway, well wait... more like the freeway, but paved anyway, german war helmet, leather from his neck to his five only toes. Doughy on his Iron Horse, the road screaming its anthem beneath he and his American machine. The rubber to the wheel to the chain to the growling motor slaving to the fist twisting the throttle. The fire in his soul, the feeling of being alive for just once, and...

"PIIIIIIFFFFFFF"

Off. Flies. His. Peg. Leg. Gone. His prosthetic leg just flew right the hell off on the freeway.

2:25 AM - 3 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment