Old Boy Blue

[Brass]

Old boy blue of many years
Who never shed his fear of tears,
Refused to share his life with friends,
And now's too late to try again.

For many years now, he's been blue,
And stopped believing dreams, it's true,
And can't look forward one more day
Without that touch of pain.

So far inside his mind he walks;
They're gone--no wife, no soothing talks,
And faces really loved by him now gone beyond that hill
Remain just teasing memories that come when night is still.

In places ghosts and shadows lurk;
The little school, the country church,
He strains to find what he has lost,
But learns that he must count the cost.

The kite, with love, his mother bought;
Not good enough--'twas all for naught.
And little toy trucks, he now agrees,
Were broke so further hate could feed.
And now with no one left, he sees
There's no where left for him to flee.

He broke and broke; thought he was smart,
Breaking every lover's heart,
And so he died all through inside,
While through it all he never cried.

 

[Brass]

Lycanthroholic

One cold and frosty moonlit night
Whilst feeling restless, full of spite,
I left my home, went over field,
And chanced upon a bitter meal.

A dog had come to challenge me.
She sensed my evil flowing free;
Attacked but couldn't overcome;
She came too close; her neck was wrung.

Such foolish courage of mortal flesh;
Not satisfied with run and fetch.
At least her blood-stained eyes were spared
The sight of how her bones were bared.

Those cold and frosty moonlit nights
When I would spread that touch of fright
Kept family to their house, secure,
For such as me there is no cure.

This is my prime;
I'm me times ten.
I play for blood
Again and again.

 

[Brass]

Innocent days when I at least
Resembled not so much the beast
Recede from me like memory;
Like most of you; like most of me.

 

[Brass]

Deep in the woods I stood that night, the light of the moon casting her living, moving shadows upon the ground as the treetops swayed to the leadings of the warming wind, together a mesmerizing song and dance of whispered secrets and flowing form, like the timeless dance of her and me when we were both so young and . . .

And there I stood, young again, alive with the desire for her presence which had grown to greater than ghostly proportions; a tangible essence of compelling nature pulling me from the grasp of the reality of this fleeting existence called life; some offer of hope in this terminal course.

But I knew the truth. Winter comes--was already here. No more spring magic. No more wonder. All is known and past. The table has been cleared, and the dishes put away . . . forever. She is gone.

Disillusioned, I no longer cared to stand. So I laid myself down among the trunks of the faithful trees, and there I slept. And in my sleep I dreamed a dream in which she lived. And when I awoke, the sun was screaming about reality, and reality would not be denied. The moon was gone. The wind, like her presence, had also died. And I was old and cold. And I could hear my old lonely self calling from some unknown place in the back of my mind, calling me back home. And it saddened me to no end because I could not remember where or when I had last seen myself truly.

 

[Brass]

So I'm sitting here listening to Bad Finger on You Tube. I had nothing going for me back there in 1972. And I remember thinking that those guys got it made. Fame, fortune, etc. But things went bad for them. They ended up with nothing, and the lead singer and the bass guitarist ended up hanging themselves. Their song, Day After Day, came out in the winter of 1971, and it reflected some deep feeling inside of me concerning my life. And so I held onto it. When it was playing on the radio I knew I wasn't the only one looking out of my lonely room. But later when I was homeless and didn't even have a lonely room to look out from, the song failed to comfort me. My adopted comfort song after that was Canned Heat's "On the Road Again." Alan "Blind Owl" Wilson recounting his experience on the road, saying:

Ya know the first time I traveled out
in the rain and snow,
I didn't have no payroll,
not even no place to go.

So there I was out in the rain and snow, and finding comfort in the song because it reminded me that I wasn't alone in this experience . . . until I had to admit to myself that Alan Wilson was dead, and I was alone, walking east because the wind was coming from the west, pushing me down the road after sunset. Cold toes! What will happen to me? A barn up ahead. I could build a room out of bales of hay. And so I did, and thus had a lonely room from which to look out. But it was dark. Nothing to see anyway. Nothing. So I thought about the desert.

In the desert there are no illusions. The desert purifies because there are no contaminating sights and sounds. There is the sand and the heat of day, and the heat is honest, and so is its sister the cold of the night. And they never oppose each other; each gives way to the other, exchanging only a brief glance as one waxes and the other wanes, as one awakens and the other sleeps. Always the promise of a warm day. The desert.

 

[LadyOnArooftop]

"I Am a Rock" is my comfort song

I've built walls, a fortress deep and mighty
That none may penetrate
I've no need of friendship, friendship causes pain
It's laughter and it's loving I disdain
Don't talk of love,
It's sleeping in my memory
And I won't disturb the slumber of feelings that have died
If I never loved, I never would have cried

 

[Brass]

I adopted that song, too. It was later in my life, but it definitely reflected my approach to people. There was a time when I was so depressed that I hated people who smiled too much. My motto was: If you ain't sad, then you ain't payin' attention. After giving it all some thought, it was obvious to me that life was just death in an exceptionally clever disguise. As soon as you start living, you start dying because the process of living is actually the dying process.

So, I drank.

When I was down and out and drinking myself to the grave, unable to stop and in quite bad health, I became angry and not very good company at all. Looking back, I can now see the reason for my nasty disposition and unfriendliness towards the woman I loved. My mistake began when I presumed to see myself through her eyes. And so, putting myself in her shoes, I believed that she saw herself as the recipient of damaged goods, and that she saw me as someone giving her no choice but to deal with the reality that I was forcing upon her.

I was a mess. She went to family gatherings and holiday get-togethers alone, unlike her siblings. And when I put myself in her shoes, I was overcome with something like grief when I considered that she would not give up on me. The grief was not for myself, but for her. She could have abandoned me, like I, for all intents and purposes, had done to her. And I hated being the source of her grief. I remembered being younger and sitting at the edge of a lake at night when the breeze was warm and strong enough to keep the mosquitoes away, and she sat beside me with her arm draped around my neck and over my shoulder. That’s all I wanted. She was all I wanted. There was no past and no future; there was just the moment. Then came the slow, terrible downward spiral into depression and drinking. They call drinking a disease. Well, the disease was not in the bottle, but in the state of my mind which sought relief from the agony of not being able to bear being in my skin for one more hour. I was self-medicating, and, like all medications, it became a daily affair.

The state of my mind was the result of my upbringing, and I was a bitter man. Eventually, I compared myself to men who were smiling and friendly and confident, and the contrast between that and myself was unbearably stark. How on earth could she not choose to leave me. Grace under fire. She didn’t deserve any of my attitude, but I was the scourge in her life. I guess what I’m trying to say is that, having come to not believe in love because of my bitterness towards life in general--and myself in particular--and watching her face my anger toward life every day and taking the hit without much complaint brought me to a place where I had to engage in denial of the situation. I had nothing but pain to offer her, and for some reason, she wouldn’t abandon me. It was like watching a movie in which a loyal dog would stand beside her abusive master and fight to the death to protect him from everything, including even himself.

Loneliness hardly covers the feelings involved in that state of mind. Despair is involved, and there is no talking oneself out of that state. Sometimes when one sees life in its simplicity, the truth of it can be devastating. It’s like when you’re young and you go to the fair, and your senses are filled with the carnival music, the lights on the rides, the smell of hotdogs and cotton-candy, the sounds of bells and whistles going off indicating a winner at one of the games, and the barkers talking into their bullhorns trying to pull young people in to play their games, and then the sounds of the cheers of the people in the grandstands laughing and cheering as they watch the rodeo.

But then you get older, and you begin to notice what’s going on behind the scenes. You happen to catch a glimpse of the grubby-looking carnies running the games and rides in one of their unguarded moments, looking unhappy and tired. And while looking, you see them taking swigs from a bottle in a brown paper bag, or puffing on something they’re trying to hide but doing a poor job of it. Then you notice some guy wearing old, greasy jeans with oil on his hands, and a cigarette hanging from his lips, and he’s pouring gasoline into the tanks of the engines that make the Ferris Wheel and all the other rides go round. And you see the drops of sweat hanging from his nose and unshaven chin. So, you turn away, sorry for having seen more than you were supposed to.

Then you wander on over to the grandstand where the rodeo is taking place. And at some point, you look deeply into the eyes of one of the bulls standing in a trailer waiting for his turn to entertain, and you see depression. For some reason, the bull turns and looks right into your eyes, like he felt you looking and knew that you were seeing what the others didn’t. And in that wordless silence, you hear him telling you the obvious. And you know that he is looking to you for hope. But you have no hope at the moment; there’s nothing you can do. And in an uncontrollable release of grief, you stand there and let out an anguished gasp of hurt, and then you just as quickly contain it, pushing it back down into that place where all hurt is stored to rot and fester and infect your being. Some of the spectators who witnessed your outburst look at you as if you were mentally ill or otherwise unbalanced. But in the next instant there is the roar of laughter from the rest of the spectators, and their attention is off you and back onto the other show. So, you walk away, and you feel like not part of them. Not even a little. You feel lonely and lost; fucking despair. And you know that, just like the bull, it’s not temporary; indeed it's hopeless. And you know that what you’re feeling is not loneliness, but onlyness, which is far worse.

 

[Brass]

What a lovely piece of writing. Is it your own work? if so, I'm most impressed, if not, what's the source? I only ask because I can empathise with so much of it. "Onlyness" what a very apt word, yes, that's me. All my life, even when I'm with someone I've felt alone. . . .

I thank you for your kind words. Everything I write is my own. Some hits, some misses, but always inspired by something. Sometimes funny, sometimes sad.

 

[Brass]

Yes, some definitely sad . . .

There was this family that lived about a quarter mile from us. They were poor; and not just poor, but dirt poor. There was the mother and father and four little girls who ranged in ages from one year to eight years. Their names were Darlene, Janet, Sarah, and Hester. They came from Tennessee and moved into a small, white, one-room shack. They didn't have running water; just an old-fashioned outside hand-pump. The stove was rigged up in such a way that it certainly wouldn't have passed a code inspection. Though we were poor, too, we had a lot more than they did.
They all walked down to our house a few days after moving in to that shack. My siblings and I were friendly to them, and they were friendly and smiling. They were just in time to sit in the living room with us to watch Gilligan's Island while the parents sat at the kitchen table smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. The oldest one--Darlene--said, "I really like Giiiiiiiligan's Island." She had a speech impediment. She stuttered. I thought she was trying to be funny, and so I laughed to acknowledge her joke. But it was no joke. My sister had to tell me later that Darlene had a speech impediment and wasn't joking.

While watching Gilligan's Island, my siblings and I were giving each other subtle looks because these girls had dirty faces, gnarled and ratted hair, and they smelled strongly of burnt wood and coal. And their clothes were so ragged. I'll always remember Darlene's coat. It was an old brown vinyl thing that was missing all but the top button, and it had a triangle-shaped tear in the back that made me think of a slice of pizza hanging down the middle of her back. I remember thinking that her mom should cut it off with some scissors, or maybe tape it up with some Scotch-Tape. We eventually came to learn that the parents would leave them alone once a week with not much to eat while they would go with a friend of theirs to an auditorium forty miles away to watch Bull Curry take on the Sheik in a no-holds-barred fight to the finish. We wondered where they got the money for it. One thing was for sure, they wouldn't miss it for the world. Their girls will attest to that.

At school it wasn't long before these girls were forced to take their place among the other living symbols of lesser beings--the kind of human it's okay to insult or otherwise hurt the feelings of because they didn't matter. One day while riding the bus home from school, Darlene was trying to find a seat after being pushed out of the seat she was in by someone who didn't want to be next to her. She would sit in another seat, but the one in that seat would shove her out. She was making her way to the back of the bus as she repeatedly tried to find a seat, only to be met with mean scowls and stronger arms than hers blocking her from every seat. To this day, I don't know why the bus driver didn't intervene on her behalf. But this all happened fast.

She was standing in the aisle pushing her way into a seat occupied by a little boy who was smaller than her. But someone bigger than her used his arm to help keep her out. And the next kid used his legs to push her out of his seat. Someone said, "Hey Darlene, you wanna sit by me? That burnt wood perfume really turns me on." Some other guy laughed, and then hands were reaching out and shoving her from behind and from the sides, and then some kid shoved her hard from the front. His hand met her chest and she went down. There was a moment of silence, and then laughter. Darlene was finally crying.

One of the older girls near the front of the bus got up and walked to the back. She reached down and lifted Darlene off the floor, and then took her by the hand and they both went back to the older girl's seat. The next day, the older girl moved over in her seat when Darlene got on the bus. She made room for her and motioned with her arm to sit. So she sat with the older girl. I recall the smile that came to Darlene's face, which was such a stark contrast to the absolutely wounded look on her face as she got on the bus. When she left her seat to get off the bus, I was struck by the sight of the back of her coat. It still showed the dirty footprint from the kid who pushed her out of his seat with his foot. Her coat bore the scar of the day before.

I'm the kid who delivered the final push to her chest that put her on the floor. I was ten. On a related note, a few years ago my nephew asked me if I believe in ghosts. I said, "Yeah."