Break them down
5:30 in the fucking morning.
If I don’t do it now
I won’t do it
-in bed counting the minutes
it will take to stand up, walk to
the bathroom, piss, pour the
dog food
start the coffee
determined to get out of my head
and get it fucking over with
-reckoning with the boxes full of the past
and the new things
taking up all the space
I have a deep-seeded hatred for
cluster and clutter
and the filth that builds up
in my mind
from bad memories or
things that remind me of repetition
of patterns
on my back
Journey’s
Only The Young
stuck in my head
for some reason
toilet
kitchen
dog food
start the espresso maker
standing in the cluster and clutter
of all the things from my old storage unit, and the collision of worlds as it looks upon all my new shit in the living room
I pour some hot water over my
dog’s food, mix it in, and stare
at the wreckage of past and now
my dog cocks his head at me
I set his bowl down
and nod at him,
“Your dad and his animism. Eat your food.”
He digs in and I cook up 4 shots of caffeine
I watch the coffee run into the cup and
the years blur
the faces blur
the voices
the loves
the places
and placement
all become a
dull and numb
thing
first shot of caffeine
courses
box-cutter from the garage
headphones on blasting
Only The Young
on YouTube
while I break down the boxes
and during the fourth or fifth
listen-through
I get to a shoe box and mechanically
unfold every flap
and I remember
the jobs
I can feel it again and it
fucks with me in the strangest ways
I was nineteen again, twenty, twenty-five,
stumbling into the warehouse or factory
assembly line or work station
dark and early like it is now
whichever shit hole I was renting
in whichever shit hole part of whichever
city or town across the States
waiting for me 10 hours
from the job
what waited was
a typewriter
a desk
a mattress, maybe
and maybe another story
to get my mind unweighted
to free me of all the bullshit
from which I knew no escape
the workers in those places
the older ones would see me
there, tired from a night behind the machine
or hungover
or wrecked from
fucking a hot little thing
until I had to leave for work
and she had to leave for
work, or wherever
the merciful beauty of them
went once we parted ways
on the sidewalk
and on the bus
or driving a beater
or riding a bike
or walking
to those jobs in those
cities and towns
I learned fast to lose
the dread of what was
facing me when I walked
in
wasting my mind
my heart and blood
full of all the love and power
in the world from the
words,
from the stories and poems
but in the outside world it didn’t
mean shit
and I stood there working under
those lights with the rest
of them
and the older ones would look
at me and smile
and the smiles held an admixture
of envy and sympathy
it was written on my face
when they were dead
I’d take over for them
but if I could see back then
where I’d be
now
an author, a beautiful rental in the Northwest
a Japanese pond in the back yard
money in the bank
a car that fucking WILL start every morning
a full fridge, a happy dog, and devices around
my house that will
connect my writing with the world
any time I want
the world opened
at my feet like
a Spanish whore
on ecstasy
but mostly I would
want to see that
there was no shame in
the way I chose to live
the road
not the fucking hippie road
or the fake fucking Kerouac road
but the real road, the road that
often spits you out after
your prime
spits you out behind a counter
or into another factory
all the glory behind you
because you gave
the road the chance to
be one hundred percent honest
with you
and you accepted
that without understanding
that you could be
better
and that all the
stupid motherfuckers
you had to deal with
were simply there because
they were everywhere and
they really meant nothing
beyond a test of your
endurance
and what your writing
really meant to you
and still does
but the way I chose to
live was fucking brutally
senseless
and at the same time
I couldn’t help but feel
all of it had a purpose waiting
and when the good things came along
the good dogs
the good buddies
the good women
the good times and
laughter
plenty of those
-writers like to focus on the
hard shit-
but in reality, there were
some damn good years
when I total up
the moments that
kept me from losing it
cutting boxes
breaking them down and stacking
them on the kitchen floor
switched over to
Diary of a Madman
Ozzy sings and I watch
the back yard
lighten
it’s grey but almost bright
and I grab another box
a shoe box again
and mechanically unfold the flaps and
flatten it
and think about those old
faces smiling at me from across
the lines, the floors, the tables of
industry
the faces of them
they’d laugh if they could see
me now
and I’d laugh with
them
I empty the grounds
into the compost bin
under my sink
grind up another full group
hit the double shot button
and wait
while Randy Rhoads
fucking rips through
another solo.