Beer Cans and Banjo Picks

Today, I feel like I've used up all the romance in me. I've spent all my magic, and I'm left with nothing but cheap parlor tricks and second-hand props. I've given all my secrets away, traded them for the bodies of lovers I never should have taken to bed, but I am covetous of petty things and pretty things. An addict of the flesh. It all just seems so wasteful to me. I've frivolously pissed away whatever gifts the gracious gods bestowed upon me, and I have none left to offer up to you, who are so much more worthy than the rest.

Beer cans and banjo picks are scattered across my desk. An ashtray full of extinguished cigarettes sits beside an empty mason jar that once held strong, Kentucky moonshine upon my bedside table. These are all the things I have become. Notebooks filled with jagged, hurried writing abound, scattered across the floor, and littered intermittenly among them are photographs of men and women I have loved, friends that I have murdered, and things I am not drunk enought to identify.

I can scarcely recall all the horrible times, so overshadowed are they by memories of the good. The laughter, the drink, the knowledge that we are blessed by the gods with youth and life and health. The knowlegde that ahead is love and more laughter, more long nights and short days lost to sleep. And yet, they persist. They hang over me like a black pall, those times of trial. They seem into my lungs like miasma until I wake from dreams of making love to you, coughing up blood, unable to breathe. Cancer fills my lungs, and pours out into my body, twists the naked flesh and bone until I resemble something like a blurred photograph, something too hideous, too heinous to be loved. Too full of rage and loathing to love another.

Today, I feel like all the gifts of tongue and penned word have left me. Squandered on lesser pursuits. I cry out to the gods that, had I know that you would come to me I would have kept those precious gifts. Had I known that they were finite, I would never have spent them so recklessly for a few hours of sweat and breathy moans. I would have, instead, discarded those dead weights before they sank their claws into me and dragged me into their mouths. I have spilled so much for their sake, and only received ugly, welted bite-marks and dried saliva in return.

I can hardly tell if you are Redemption or Salvation, or both. Or neither. You are obscured somewhere, somehow, and I can not be certain you're really here or if the delusions have set in again. I'm in one of my moods, and though you always elude me, you seem even further from my reach when I sink this low. You may be nothing but a mirage cast by my feverish mind. Men cry out for water as the desert turns their lively, strong bodies into dessicated husks. Children cry out for food, or shelter, or love, when lesser gods and their pawns turn homelands to rubble and mass graves. I cry out for your fingers linked in my own, the comfort of your nearness, the brush of your lips and the soft, hushed breeze of your breath on my tongue. Lonliness has ever been my dearest friend, and my most cherished enemy. I will not dry out and die as in the desert. I will not starve and be left in the crumbled streets in a heap as in the genocide. But I will wither and die all the same.

I like to look back at the meandering path I've taken, wound through woodlands and cities and places unlike either. I wonder how many of the turns I took were the wrong ones. I wonder, too, at how unaffected I am by that prospect. Nights like this, all the turns that led me down this path to you seem the right ones, though I am all but certain I should never have come here.

And yet, and yet, I am drawn inexorably forward. It may destroy me, as the gravity well of a black hole pulls in hapless bits of things and utterly destroys them. It may only exacerbate my already woefully collapsing health. It may bring me something more than I could imagine, even in the days before I gave away all my gifts and expended all my vices. Time will tell. Whatever comes, I will bear it, as I have always done. Quiet pride, seething rage, and deep, fathomless things I can not begin to translate. Things all thinking creatures feel and cannot describe. The way I feel for you, the way I feel for my vanished gifts and my forgiving gods. Things beyond words and thought, beyond the simple, liminal paths of things. I will bear it all.

Lonesomely Yours,
-S.R.

Hey, Fuck You

If you were a colony of maggots in the shape of a man fist-fucking Glen Beck you couldn't be more putrid to my eyes. No more obscene. If you were bleeding out onto the sidewalk, I'd be more upset at the stains on the concrete. If you were beaten and raped and left to die, I'd applaud the faceless men that so abused you, but I'd hunt and kill them for failing to finish the job. You're less than a child, you're less than an insect. You're fetid meat rotting in a cesspool. You're a pile of shit no one cared enough about to flush.

You fucking touch me, I will rip you apart. I'll reach in and take a bite out of that shit you call a heart. I'd rather grab you by the teeth and smash your balls into your lungs than listen to another second of your mindless, trivial worries. I'd rather gut myself with a melon baller than spend another second breathing the same air as something so utterly, impotently worthless as you. You make the worst pedophiles cringe and cover their asses for fear of the greasy, clouded pile of gutter trash walking past might somehow creep inside them.

If you were on fire, I'd shoot you in the balls. That isn't a metaphor, that isn't a clever way of saying I wouldn't piss on you to put you out. I would literally shoot you in the balls because it is the only way I can think to make watching you suffer and die anymore pleasant. Seriously.

My point here, is that I can't wait. I can't wait for you to straighten up your spine and go toe-to-toe with me. You have never, in your wildest imagination, been able to conjure up what I will do to you. I'll tear your limbs off with no more effort than pulling off spider legs, and fill the wounds with razor blades and chlorine. When I've finished ripping you to pieces, the shreds that remain will be so far beyond the sensation of pain, beyond recognition as having once been human, that you won't even remember how to beg for death.

In other words, you are nothing next to me. For all your piss-poor competition and all your mediocre acheivements, you're still a pathetic excuse for a roach buried in a pile of shit.

Whenever you're ready, asshole.

-S.R.

The Sound of Sunshine

I have a powerful craving for sunshine and sand, a hunger for clear blue water and warm, clear skies. I want to give the breeze a kiss, and feel the earth rise up around my ankles. This frigid north is as dear to my heart as any lover, but I feel like the cold has already seeped into my flesh. I think a warmer climate would do me some good.

I ache, sometimes, for the south. There has always been something...pleasant about it. The people are no better or worse than anywhere else, the politics and social ballet is the same, but I've always held that place in an esteem all its own. Life there doesn't seem to carry the same kinds of consequences it does here. I never felt the need to hurry when the sun beat down on the sandhills of Carolina. I never wanted for anything, running barefoot through backyards in a warm, Georgia November.

I'd like to pass some days of my life there, I think. The endless mountain vistas here have me captured, have always drawn me back to the banks of the Hudson. I want to die here, an old man being laid to rest in the frozen ground as all my ancestors have been. I want to wander the snowy woods until a warrior greater than I places the challenge and cuts me from this world. I want to leave a crimson stain in pristine white and breathe my last with weapon in hand, before I set off sure-footed toward Valhalla.

But until then, I want to play the banjo on the beach. I want to drink by the fire and tell stories of the most glorious days until well-after sunrise. I want to cool my sunburned skin in the sea, and watch lightning playing out across the waves at night when Thor is pleased. I want to wake each morning feeling younger than the day before. I want to take lovers to my bed and, tomorrow night, have another companion beside my fire. I want to throw my shoes in a closet, give my suits to a homeless man, and wear the same pair of jeans every day. I want to grow my beard until it touches my waist, and never want for a single dollar again.

I want to live, like no man has ever wanted anything.

Blissfully Yours,
-S.R.