She's
A classical beauty,
Classically tragic;
Like a burned match
Ignited from a sharp static.
Pulling me in
Like the last glass
Of the red, red wine
Enough to drown me
Out of my fearing her;
Or so I burn my finger
By the match I am
Clinging to.
She'll use me,
O how she uses my feet
As I stumble door to door
In the low-lit walkways
To find her smiling wide
As apples in the mouth
For a moon-sized bite
And I just can't get her
Out of my mind
Tonight.
I don't sleep much, if you couldn't tell. I lay awake most nights wondering what the hell I'm doing. Now, before, and next. A heavy conscience for a light sleeper is a wreck of a way to spend the evening. Often I think on where I'll be, assuming I'm going somewhere. If you've no preparation for travels away then how can you really travel? I'm waiting; waiting to take the excursion of life, but like all other things of difference to me, I lack the backbone to make the choice and follow through. I know what it means. I know that life is going to go right on ahead and deal my hand whether or not I am up for it. Wherever I am, whatever I do, I should at least let the cards fall where I am happy and able to receive them with some sort of expectancy and the capacity to deal with a loss here or there. Still... Here I am, fucking around at 12:30 in the morning, pounding away at the keys that bind me to my horrors in infamy while the sensible boys and girls have all run off to play with one another elsewhere. It is the way of things. It is the strings that bind me to myself. I have been falling since I've returned home and soon I will finally stop at the bottom, only to again rise up in time for spring when love and the weather are quick to receive my long awaited longings with comfort, warmth, and distraction. Where I will be by then, who can say? Not I, nor whom I will be, for that matter. It is the great mystery, I suppose. I know, wholly anyways, perhaps three things about life. You live, you die, and things change. In saying that, it really doesn't sound like life is all that those old men boast it to be. Those old men, old soldiers of the day and night and everything inbetween, know one other thing. Details. The little details we pick up on throughout our wandering. Please, don't read anymore. I'll not have you staying up late because I decided to go ranting and raving so slightly tonight. Go to bed, you scoundrels and vagabonds. Your internet connections are not your only friends, you know. There's a nice bed and pillow or two with your name all over them; cold, lonesome, and ready for a good healthy jump. Don't forget to brush your teeth.
-Charlie
Boy oh boy have I been revealing... I have come to the conclusion that I say way too much of my own shit on here that anybody can read if they want and you know what? Earn it, motherfuckers. I love you all, really, but I don't know you, you never comment, and in the end I just feel like an idiot saying all my personal thoughts with no response, reassurance, or what have you else. Take that, Tokyo.
I will spend this evening out to coffee. I will go to the cafe, order my drink, and sit on the terrace embracing my book and my sketchbook and my pen, the cigarettes, the coffee and the evening air. It is no good to drink coffee alone, but then again, what is the use of staying home? There is nothing here to make me feel warm and welcome, happy and peaceful. Escapism is perhaps the next best thing to peace. I fight for peace, but there are no fights tonight and so coffee out alone is what I shall receive, and I'll have it with as much pride as a man living alone might muster up.
I picture you all alone at your table.
I picture you, a single horse in the stable.
Fire from your nose,
And all the urgencies
From the race in your mind.
From the mouth of my petulence
You are born
And quickly fly off the wheel again,
But death lies loose on the backs of the disturbed.
Sipping at your coffee; the drink of all your thoughts.
And what such thoughts would make a drink
That having could have not?
Filterless cigarettes whimper in the tray.
Your stained, river fingers draw them on with disarray.
Well I have warned you twice old man,
If again you piss anywhere but in the can
I'll make that coffee fly out of your hand,
The cup be up your ass.
It is sometime in October,
And I hear the harlet song
Of the crows among the trees;
Raspy voices singing long.
While the cool breeze chills my neck,
And the sun falls down in sprays
I stop to look high for a moment,
I should have stayed in bed today.
But the sun came falling down
On my sleeping eyes this morn,
And to wake beside no one
Makes a bed as mine forlorn.
When I came to see the grounds,
And have breakfast at his table
I did not expect my spirits
To be so carefully disabled.
So I took my coat from the hanger
And walked outside in anger;
Never does a man feel brave
When he rises to dig a grave.
So I plunged my heavy shovel
Into the cold October ground.
When I stopped to take a breath
The crows were no longer around.
The cold, brown steel against the earth
Was all that I could hear.
As the grave began to form
The mortal wound whispered in my ear.
And so I did, late on this day
Give rest to another who has gone away.
And now I can tell you, by my hands cold and sore,
Death comes for the dead, but it takes so much more.
My head is filled to the brim with dizzy, sorted thoughts on this eveing like all others, but somehow special for the rest of the world. It's Saturday night and nothing matters to me much and I wonder why that is and also if I've just become so wrapped up in my sins that I dismiss everything else around me. I am stuck on a little wooden boat, far out on the ocean front, and the storm before me awaits my drift and rumbles and tears at the skyline for my arrival, of fresh blood and aching; of old passings, and new beginnings ended. As I press my weight into the oars I think on times that weren't so troubled. I wonder if it was that version of me and not this one that was the right; of days and of nights, when the drinks and the friends and the laughs were thick, instead of lost to me now. Why, oh why must it be this way? Someone, anyone will say it doesn't have to, but you don't know and you never will. I have had a headache all day long. Nothing has helped it. The oxygen, like the mountainous places I've travelled, is thinner in my lungs from the smoke and the paniced pangs of constant loss from my grip of life. I'll never fall too far. Just far enough to shut out the light and stay in to doors remembering instead of living, watching instead of seeing.
This town is finally, really getting to me. Maybe its just that I'm not busy anymore. I work everyday, and then the weekend comes round and nothing usually comes of it. Sometimes it is good, but mostly I just sit and think about what I would be doing elsewhere. Funny how that works out...
You know, I really wish I could say something wise or meaningful to you here and now but the words aren't coming and they aren't coming more and more often. I don't know what that means either except that perhaps there is some sort of deficiancy in my heart. I don't feel inspired by much anymore. It seems that the people I know and that are around me are distanced; glazed over eyes to the world and I suppose the mirrored face that is mine seems the same to them. Like when we meet one another, and how all these words that should be spoken lay lazy in the backs of throats not wanting to surface themselves. So we just sit quietly and think ever so slightly why we aren't saying what we want to say. Well, whatever it is its only going to become worse before it becomes better.
On a more awkward note, my cat, the ever loveable Jerry, has leukemia and is currently suffering from a nasty lung infection that he might not make it through. My mother is sad and I am too since this will be the second cat of ours this year. I know its only a cat, but this cat is gorgeous and loveable and fat and friendly and he teases my dog and used to chase him around the yard and it was hilarious. He's a talker and a former smoker. He's a damn fine fellow of a feline and if he goes I'm gonna miss the little son of a bitch. Quite strange isn't it? A cat with leukemia? I've never heard of such nonsense, but whatever. I guess now if I get cancer I can say that it runs in the family. Oh well thats an odd thing to think about though too, me getting cancer. I'd be pissed. No kids, no accomplishments, no great adventures; yeah I'd be fairly pissed about it. I probably will have some sort of cancer, lung or liver, if I don't change my ways.
To cats with cancer and deficiencies of the heart,
Charlie
I drink my coffee in the morning with the rain spouting here or there and the cool air sneaking into my truck somehow (it is an old truck you know) and I watch the cars go by me and the people in the busied streets off to work and what have you. I think good thoughts about people that make me think them and I think that maybe today I will have the patience to quit smoking and go to the supermarket and buy better foods and maybe even have a go at a jog in the evening when the day's work is done but then I think maybe not, it is monday and maybe I am aiming too high again and these are just thoughts that come with the change of weather but they are really lovely thoughts all the same so I continue this big spin and wait for the work to come and for the coffee to kick in. The washing machine is sounding behind me like a thunderstorm (it is an old washing machine you know) and its spinning round and round my clothes in cool water and I can't help what it was like before we had washing machines and how technology might have been better not so rushed and that if we have come so very far with it in such a short time that perhaps all that time we cut away was only to bring us here waiting about our doom that is soon to come from all this technology and everything and it makes me say that I wish I could have washed my clothes by hand now instead of all this excess. No matter, its only Monday and I sit here with a fresh cup of coffee and I listen to music and I love it because it requires very little of anything on its own except good things like talent passion love and understanding and so I am listening to dream a little dream of me and it makes me feel fine any time of day with a sound that is unlike the music that is current (it is an old song, you know) and I feel fine and the coffee warms me and the music loves me because I love it back. Monday thoughts, like how nothing really surprises us anymore as people and anything created these days for the greater population of man is too complicated to understand and that no cause these days seems very admirable or if it is I know nothing about it and I'm sure most people don't either which makes me sad. It makes me wonder in the coming years what team I should be playing for or what I should be doing with myself to stay out of trouble with others and yet still abide by my own morals and rules about life and me and everything else but then again these are just silly Monday thoughts that never go anywhere and are far gone by Tuesday's wake and so I'll wrap this up and simply step outside and smoke a cigarette against my better judgement (it is an old habit, you know) and try to think of good things again and work well and sleep well and maybe we'll talk soon and maybe we won't. Maybe we never talk.
-C.A.Dominick
I have a new song playing on this page, in case you hadn't noticed. Hey lady, you were right, this song is wonderful.
It is a bit sad though, too. Ahh, we silly thinkers, we always like the sad stuff a little more than anything else. You know why? It seems more real.
We go on throughout our lives remembering good and happy things, and we remember them just fine, but that hard, fast, holding pain of life always seems to draw us in a little quicker than anything else. The triggers are small, simple, and many. The reaction is as vast as the mind will allow. It only makes sense. The human body is designed to weep. It is very frail and very symbolic and very tender and very capable of unlimited expanse of the collective thought processes. It is embodied with more emotion than anything I could ever elsewhere conceive, simply because it has found so very many ways to express its emotional pain besides simply crying out or walking wounded.
Truly Human. Truly loved and lost and frail. Nothing in the mind can be measured except by the mind, and if it can be seen in the mind; if it can take physical form, than it can be done.
...still, this sad song moves along and the words I half-hear because I am so caught by that beautiful rhythm that is backing them. I wish I had been better to music. I wish I had wanted it more, for I would create it with the love and respect of a musician who wanted it enough to make himself capable. I listen to this and I know that I can create such beauty with my hands, mind, and voice. Well, maybe not my voice, but I could do it with my hands and head. I hear songs in my mind I've never know all the time and wish I could just work them out on my own instead of always hearing them resonate inside me. All in due time, I suppose.
I did not find resolve this evening, oh no. No matter, it will come too, with time. I hope only to sleep and dream a good dream for once this week; all week long my dreams have been so hard on me and I awaken hurt, confused, and sad. I don't want to find sadness in my sleep when in my waking life I listen to songs like this and am reminded of so much of it. There is so much of it that I have known. That seems silly, since I am but 22 years old and nothing of life has even grazed me, but it is there all the same. It is in the people. The people make and break your years and cause your every function, right or wrong. We are never alone whose heart is not somehow consumed with the want of companionship in another. To be alone, to know that ultimate want for others, is to understand how very frail and fragile we as human beings are.
I'm listening to the Smiths right now. I know, I know, kind of wussy music, but it's alright. I like it just fine, except it always makes me feel strange, like I'm reminiscing on times gone by. I haven't been listening to the Smiths very long, a couple years maybe. Because it makes me feel like that it also makes me feel like I'm invading some generation past that I didn't grow up in or fully understand. Sure, the eighties, right? Yeah, I was born in the eighties but I was six by 1990 and at six you don't know much more than your friends, your bike, and your parents and family affairs. This generation, this strange generation we are apart of has had a dramatic share of changes, and could be said that it is unlike any other. Of course, that too could be said about every generation since being that within every generation different great events have marked themselves in history. I really don't know where I am going with this or anything, just thinking out loud, so to speak. It gets you thinking of how very young this country actually is; the spoiled child of the world with all the money and all the power and no idea what to do with it; naturally it turns towards spoiling itself. I wonder how bad things can get before people realize whats going to happen. I wonder if I'll still be around when a few more of the great, big changes take place, and if they are going to be for the better, or, and the more probable, the worse. Will I be sitting there somewhere listening to the Smiths when all this shit comes falling down? Probably not. I can't imagine the Smiths giving me much more satisfaction with my years to come, unless the women I marry is a die hard Smiths fan or my kid finds an old record of them stored away in the basement and begins an entirely new, old obsession. Well, we all know how I'm not one to be talking of social affairs nor politics; I don't have the brain or patience for it. Maybe I can scrounge up something else for you instead.
I got word a few minutes ago that it is snowing in St. Cloud, MN right now. my former home. Funny. I could be living there right now and be bitching about how its snowing. Someone else did this time. In a way it almost seems kind of convenient, as much as it is dreaded. I almost hate fall for the fact that I have to feel fooled in the changing weather. Sure, the leaves are pretty and all but the sun is out and alot is still green and then at night the wind brings you the winter air that chills your nape and lends a few shivers to be warnings for the waking of winter. To have it simply arrive would cut out all the waiting and just make cause for adjustment. "Well shit, its snowing.' 'Guess we oughta put on the big jackets and bring out the shovels." Oh but fall is beautiful though.
I have just sprouted a theory: all this quiet dismay people seem to be feeling; could it be a reaction based on the fact that all of us quietly know how the earth is not going to be the same for very much longer? That is to say, that we all sense its slow and steady downfall and realize that we are powerless to reverse the damages of man's doings?
I know I said I would get off this subject since its normally not my style, but it has been in my head all evening. I look around me, and physically speaking all I can see is wood, concrete, glass, plastic, asphalt, steel, copper, morter, sheetrock, paint and rubber. All these things whose creation and shapings and moldings depend on petroleum and that take up so much space for the housing and convenience of people. I wouldn't want it another way; I've not alternate solution that would prevent trees from being cut down, gas burned, or grass left uncovered. I'm no tree hugging hippy nature extremist or any sort of person like that. I guess I was just thinking...
Seriously, is this what the Smiths do to me?!?! If so, I'm not sure how much I want to listen to them anymore.
I turn on the light and open the browser; click the link and hit "create new post." Thinking, "maybe something will happen tonight." I guess thats not really the point. I haven't been myself too much lately. I think I very easily have forgotten who it was I was in the first place. I feel that I have destroyed alot of relationships with people I have known in the previous year; and that I have defamed my own character by actions unfit for the person I sometimes boast I am. I am not that person right now. I don't know where he went, when he fell, and why he couldn't make it out without carrying all this clutter with him in shame and illusionary form.
...I listen to a song presently that reminds me of winter here in town. This particular song has a soft introduction with a piano and it always makes me sad but with a clarity in the sadness, as if all along I was supposed to feel this way, and that it is the appropriate feeling to feel. I often wonder about that, too. How I should be feeling at particular moments when resolution takes avow. Well, that is another dilemma all of its own.
Mostly I am weary for the past few months and the actions I have taken with the people I have met and known. Nothing of true and tragic disaster has taken place, but subtle occurrences have made it so that I feel, and seemingly am now apart from the few people still around here that matter, or mattered to me. For those of you who may read this and know what I am vaguely addressing, my apologies for any pain or ill-manner I have caused. I have now learned to keep to myself these days.
That is precisely what I have been doing now for the past few weeks-- keeping away from anyone whose presence is less fortunate by my own. I understand that I am making this out to seem a little too much on the dramatic side; it is a little more black and white, but then again you are getting my perspective of things and how I have perceived them. After all, this is my blog. It seems a silly enough concept now after having it for all this time. I should save all this angst and simply use it towards a better project of my own rather than always giving you the inside track. Thus far it has done me no true good. Many of the people who read this have been affected, and not necessarily positively by it, which has in turn caused some of this lamentation I now endure. For that too, I apologize.
It is late and I am unresolved, therefore I will return to my solitary state of being and try to seek some clarity from the present mess that is my life. I blame it on having too much free time. I should engage myself in something of substance and keep my mouth away from the drama's and dilemma's that reak of adolescence and unnecessary circumstance.
Yours respectfully,
C.A.Dominick
I do declare a reformation to take avow and transform spectrums of unpleasantness into foreverness of progress towards newfound innocence. This, but one dense distance of arms to lovers' arms reminds the viewer of a time when branches shivered between the tangles, fair and fortunate to be freeing themselves in a procession of marriage to the wind. In the darkness we are all the same in that we breathe so quietly and quickly in the drifting of our peaceful sleepstates. If I could sink in this vividness, if but only for a moments time, then I would make you my bewildering bride and run away in the sage of this dampered day so soft with fray. How secrets fly swifter on the shoulders of sisters walking fast to help their mother is a wonder to me. How brothers lay distant in the sepulcher of their prideful hearts of their fathers' blood and bones. When the night is won by the low-light spray of the moon's display I am over and gone beneath the the hillside streaming through my fingers every star since lost in flight.
To be continued, perhaps...
-C.A.Dominick
"You who were born with the sun above your shoulders, you turn me on, you turn me on, you have to know... You who were born with the sun, she keeps her distance. you turn me on, you turn me on, but so does she. You who were born there where beauty is existence, you turn me on you turn me oh but it heals my soul. you who were born well you shiver and you shutter. you turn me on, the girl is gone so come on lets go."
The soundtrack plays, my heart, if for a moment stays back in time to try and measure the way things were. In the car, driving from place to place; the heater cranked, it was so cold then. We would take it to the top of this parking ramp and look over the sleeping town, watching the cars go by and the lights lit up; stars in front of our eyes. But the music... Maybe the best thing about you and I. Always, we had music. Everywhere we went it was a silly competition to see who could outdo who at discoveries of melodies and soft voices and hooks and lines. Those were the times, and when we dined we did it well, and laughed and joked and you or I would always give the waiter a bit of a hard time. You and I, miles and miles are there between but we still dream all the same. That tree, that one magnificent branch that should have fallen by now, and just as well, for neither one of us will climb it anymore. But I still drive, and I know you still turn the key and go back in time when I was there; I know you know that I felt just the same as you. Well, timing is everything, as they say. The timing was off; its always off, it seems these days. Just sitting down by the riverside spreading my arms to the open wide, you there always by my side. You, you, you. Me, me, me.
The sedatives kicking in, I think a little of the years gone by and wonder how it will all turn out in the end. But it is late, and I must sleep, and so should you. I want to write of many things, but some are just so hard to find and others touch too deeply in the waking of my sleeping thoughts.
Whatever all this is it means nothing. The written word means nothing really; it never will unless something of it has happened and unless someone has felt it and known it. Now the drugs are deep in my lungs and my blood is thickened by them so much so that I forget to make any sense out of anything.
Goodnight
-C
"Southern charm? You'd be the devil if you weren't a church goin' man, I measure!' 'Well what would you know about it anyways?' 'It seems to me that you are simply watered down frustrations and a ball of mental malfuntions, my dear.' 'As if you know en-ee-thing about it!' 'Why, it was but three days ago where I found you, like a child in a candy store gawking so fervently at those teenage girls.' 'Mr. Benns, you're just a pervert and a scoundrel and no amount of so-called "southern charm" deludes my judgement.' 'What was all that talk about church then, Miss Clawdy?' 'Well... I spect as well that your only real initiative for the house of God is so you can spy on all those pretty young things sitting in the pews ahead.' 'I suffice to say, you are an incorrigable one and no amount of prayin'd do the job to rid you of your demons!' 'That's just a bunch of claptrap.' 'Oh I fear, Mr. Benn's, you some kind of disease on womanfolk.' 'Well then Clawdy, you old bird, here comes Baby, now lets just see if Baby's got the Benns..."
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*Tiny living soldiers stand guard every single night when the lamp goes out and the wishy-washy moonbeam glides through the window pane.
Sgt. McNarles, first name Charles, stands guard at the medicine cabinet and things are getting desperate. "It's just the right night for a midnight fight over pharmaceutical delights," he spouts as the soldiers shout out the roll call in the mess hall behind the bathroom stall. Tiny soldiers, all conformed to the everydays and nights of the big, savvy people and their enormous fight against nose hair and gingivitis, make of themselves simple, sorted systems of symbiotic strife. The cat is fond of them; they lose a lad nearly every month, but the cat is glad, with a belly full of miniaturized green beret. So the motto goes, "wherever there's a soldier, the cat knows, so be on your toes."
Charles McNarles, guardian of endless bottles of cure-all concoctions, is found remiss and a little on edge tonight. "I've got to get going, I've got to stay ready," he repeats to himself, over and over and over as the sink water drips and the shower curtain wades through the undertow of the air ventillation coming from below. But this was long, and long ago. The soldiers life is another story for another time.
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"What the hell am I talking about?"
-The Author
"Brilliantly written; it is warm and inviting like grandmother's cookies."
-The New York Post
"This is one of the greatest tales of the year."
-The Times
"A masterpiece among masterpieces."
-Chicago Sun Times
"Who ate the last piece of chicken?"
-Roger Ebert
"No, you idiot! You weren't suppose to put that down!"
-Roger Ebert
"Oh fuck this shit, you're all nuts."
-Roger Ebert
"I think it's nice. Go and get me a Sunday paper now."
-Mom
Well, if there's one thing we've learned in this day and age it is that the world is full of crazy assholes with nothing to do and no one to talk to and I'll be damned if I am some sort of exception to the rules. You'll be damned too. We'll all be damned. Want to know the shit-end of it all? There's no ice cream in hell. Isn't that a shame?
-Chawrlee
What I need; 22 and nothing to do, is a big cigar and a nice cold beer. I'll sit out on the porch with John Fahey in the backround and a little Hemingway to read and observe the pleasantries, (if there are any) in the neighborhood at night.
Every night, or very near it, when I go to bed I lay awake for several minutes, and in that time it almost always happens that I hear a siren sound off somewhere in the distance of proximity of my part of the town. The siren goes off, and then the neighborhood dogs begin the howling. There must be nearly eight or ten of those howling goddamn dogs. Part of me laughs and part of me sighs.
Ahh, but I'm not to that part yet, and while I'm still fooling around with the present ol' John Fahey's guitar is a-whalin' away and I am taken aback at such a splendurous sound. If you ever come across it the next time you go music shopping, I suggest picking up his later album titled, "Old Fashioned Love" for it is well worth the twelve or thirteen dollars you may spend. It is at once lively and romantic and sad and honest and rivers and meadows of chords flood the ears with pleasurable tone.
If I can't have a cigar then I'll settle for a Camel. I've gone full circle again; until recently I hadn't been smoking camel's for nearly a year. Maybe thats a lie... Who could know if not me? Or care, for that matter, I suppose.
What I need to do is get rid of all my excess I see cluttered about me. I hate having things I never use. One day, sure, but not right now. I don't mind bare walls and the bare essentials to get me by. Keeps things simple and easy and I know what I'm doing most all of the time.
I'm so glad to be reading Hemingway again; it has been quite a while and since renewing my taste I wonder how it was I went without him in the first place. I'm not certain, but I feel as if I could confidently say that he is my favorite novelist. I love the way he always talks about the meals wherever he goes and how people feel about the ordinary things. I wish I could have known him in the time when he was my age. Then I would be in Paris maybe, and see the great city along with him and go to the tracks with he and Hadley and maybe even discuss books with he and Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare and Company. That would have been much nicer than a carpentry job in a middleweight, sleeping town of only fifty-thousand or so in the southern part of the middle of the country. We can't pick our battles, we can only choose how to fight them.
I'll get on that good foot again and soon it will be high times with lovely people and drinks and dancing and all the good things I used to be so fond of, and that were fond of me also.
-Charlie
I feel as if I've still been trying to rush so much of everything here lately. Honestly, its hard to find that happy medium. On the one hand, I can be a huge procrastinator, never making up my mind; never finalizing. On the other, I am prone to spontaneous actions, going wherever the wind takes me. Quite frankly, its getting to be too much. It makes me not want to speak to anyone about anything because I will probably say something that won't be true or I will do something I said otherwise. I want to take this winter off from everything. To not think about college or where I am going to move or what I want to do or bands or poems or anything. I am tired of making excuses and promises and engaging myself in things that are not completely rational and what I really want. Sure, I am young, and still have time enough to screw around a bit longer without losing too much slack, but I don't have that much more time at my disposal and I guess I'm just through fucking around with myself. I will smoke cigarettes and do push-ups and practice my guitar and write when I feel I must and work hard and relax with good books and good company. I long for some of my northern friends and their savory conversation and their delightful company, but I feel at this point it would be wrong to go running back. Not until I have myself straight.
-C
