Look into my eyes… Empty tapestries are my pupils—
deep springs once filled to the brim of unbridled Basquiat expression, echo but the whimper of another down-on-his-luck schmuck’s depression. Imagination’s an undignified, drowning animal in my iris’ lake several seasons uninspired, encircling this numbskull alcazar; brick by brick by brick secular nicks and scars creep like ivy up its walls once mortared in lively mantras Time’s cheapened and reduced to slag. Debauched crocodiles languidly zigzag in the waters below,
mouths agape t’snap for another scrap of my Yellow Robe I drape
like Spanish moss precariously over the edge… I guess this is my mid-to-mid-life-crisis crisis... Where’s the mighty, big heart with the mighty, inked sword with the mighty, big words I’d graffiti cozy as Christmas anywhere I’d mosey? Each idea’s quickly smoked away, and the resin dumped in the ashtray of “maybe I’ll create that some day.“ Creativity’s viaticum since birth’s damn near empty, and I fricken THIRST, a writer’s cotton-mouth at its wicked worst,
incessantly immersed in a bottle; its pungent waves
laying siege t’my gardens
riddled in faded garden gnomes & childhood’s windchime dinosaur bones - their gentle pings reminders of laughter lost -
hung on uprooted Bodhi trees
useless as flotsam as every damn one of them from their stems to knobs ebb and bob back out to adolescence’s seas. Too long in this spiritual sewage I’ve wandered:
My lotus crown cast aside like trash;
My father’s precious two-cents
Squandered and squandered.
How much more spoilage must I endure unabashed? Maybe des dirty ol’ doldrums sobriety’ll set straight. Get all flirty with ‘em and wait till they ain’t looking and sockem bopem Muhammad left-hook ‘em ‘til every tooth’s broken for all my chutzpah unspoken and the blood of this flog falls soft as dandruff, blessed drops
from my noggin’s forgotten dialogue.
*
No notoriety I need, nor riches I require.
The heart of an artist’s all I desire. &
My dignity a Phoenix, like Lazarus from the ash,
tired of debauchery’s
Uninspired balderdash.