here is another (mostly) true story. the names were kept the same to incriminate the guilty:
They look like mythological creatures,
Stout faces burned by time and the sun,
Their eyes shine like a trash-filled cauldron
Burning at the end of an expansive snow laden lot,
They have the mouths of a carp,
Slowly aspirating in rhythm to the inflation and
Deflation of their corpulent bellies,
Which are contained by faded plaid shirts
Stained with BBQ sauce and whiskey
From misplaced sips from the bottle,
They emit an ungodly odor
Vaguely reminiscent of urine and bile,
Their matted hair hangs down from their foreheads,
They bounce on the train
Like hooded figures swaying in tandem the Southern breeze,
Suddenly one grumbles, a surprise on my part,
As he move as though a stone figure has become animated,
“Gimme your shoes, honky!” says the drunk Indian,
We are alone on a the train that’s headed toward downtown,
Just we three and the two drunken Indians of mythological lore,
The comment is directed at Drew and his gray Chuck Taylors,
“Gimme your shoes, honky!”
I know that to fight these drunken Indians would be a losing battle,
Not only do they have tree trunk arms
And pissed-off expressions that twitch in a fumy cloud of Jim Beam,
But, we are all beginning to feel the effects
Of Psilocybin invading our collective conscious,
Only minutes earlier I was telling my buddy Paul:
“These shrooms are making me gassy, man,
I think I’m gonna puke that Margherita pizza from earlier!”
I was saying this clenching my belly
While Paul looked at his fingers, which had become
Flaccid as wet noodles and were swirling as though in a sea before him,
“Gimme your shoe, honky!”
This time the drunken Indian attempts to stand
When he says it, but he sways like statue unlocked from its base,
He tries to right himself but his grain-soaked brain
Still thinks that he is sitting down,
Suddenly the train comes to a halt and the Indian topples over,
The doors swing open and we dismount the train
Leaving the two Mythological creatures to rot in their mobile tomb,
The world outside is just as hellish
As the one we’ve just departed,
There is something weirdly chthonic
Implicit in the environment outside,
Hoards of empty-eyed pedestrians stumble about
Like the walking dead with their mouths agape,
Office buildings tower overhead
Like the ominous tombstones of fallen gods,
A once verdant and overgrown park
Is now littered with skeletal trees and ashen snow,
And, at the heart of it all, at the Galvin Center,
Lies the Budweiser Beer Gardens,
In which the multitudes shift in and out,
Mindlessly filling their plastic red cups with a sort of golden death,
At the entrance to the beer gardens are monolithic columns,
Celestial spires or ziggurats
With corporate sponsorship that read: King of Beers,
It is like the gates of heaven, only instead of St. Michael
There is a DJ spinning the most unbearable house music,
He is like some long forgotten general from the Third Reich
Reanimated so that he can once again bring havoc upon mankind,
Who wears a headset whence he is seemingly
Receiving telephonic messages from Satan himself,
And, the most horrifying part is that the crowd just loves him,
Or, maybe they are hypnotized by the pulsating drumbeats,
Will these lemmings follow their leader to the precipice? I wonder,
But, Paul wakes me from my reverie
Handing me an Anchor Steam
That he has just wrestled from my backpack,
The beer will calm me down, I think,
Perhaps, retard these fleeting notions,
I look up to see the group has proceeded to march on,
Check this shit out, Paul says, motioning toward
A giant picture of a figure skater draped over a skyscraper,
The city has draped many similar enormous
Photographs over the buildings downtown,
From a distance the appear still,
But, standing underneath them now
I realize that a bit of air separates them from the building,
And, a breeze dances just below it causing the
Ice skater’s figure to wave and ripple,
Suddenly a notion dawns on me: the closer you get to
Any still object, the more you realize that everything
Is in constant chaotic motion,
This shit is really tripped out, says Drew,
And, I feel no words better articulate what I am feeling,
We trudge on, going through Anchor Steams like
An Escalade goes through unleaded fuel,
We roll joints laced with Opium,
And, blow clouds of billowing smoke into a crowd of missionaries,
We are lawless, we are vigilante, and we are stoned as a mutha,
We get locked into port-o-potties, and ogle beautiful women,
We offend young children with our crass tongues,
And make little girls cry with only our grimaces and pig-snort laughter,
We have fire burning in our eyes, and make demon-possessed expressions,
We talk endlessly, our subject matters cover the
Width and breadth of human knowledge:
Metaphysics, Epistemology, Ontology, Genetics,
And, with each passing word the world becomes
Even more harrowing and less familiar,
Suddenly, Paul and I are staring through a window at
A lithograph of an old couple, titled: The Lithographer and her Husband.
And, staring through the window into this ad hoc art museum
I realize that this is what I want; what I’ve been searching for,
To be re-rendered, to be recreated; reborn…to be made a work of art,
And, so I wander away from the group, bewildered,
And, in my Psilocybin-laced thoughts I think
I must move on, but I know not where,
And so, I meander onto the street, walking toward the train tracks,
My arms are raised in the air,
My friends are yelling at me, telling me that a train is coming,
The lights form the train trace my figure,
And, this moment becomes frozen forever as I stand on the tracks
Like a life-sized snow glow,
Marvin, the fucking train!
But, I my mind wanders on, transfixed on something far beyond,
Something just out of reach,
Snow swirls around me,
But, I look on,
The train’s lights paint
And everlasting picture in the minds of my friends,
But, I look on,
The train honks and flashes its raging lights,
But, I look on,
Overwhelmed by something that burns dimly over the ash-dust horizon.
