Ferryman

The stars point my soul
toward the ground and I
got bug bites on my fingers.
The ferryman wants his
two cents and I only
got one sense and it
sure as hell ain't common.

The ferryman calls himself
Oblivion, don't call him
Death, and the journey's
taking forever, nineteen
years so far and many
more to go. The river's
bending and I have no
flexibility when it comes
to my joints, my joints
quake.

The trees around us are dead
and whisper lines in meter,
but the river isn't in meter,
it's full of mosquiteers.

The ferryman tells me to hold
my breath as we go under-
ground.

It was seven-fifteen
and I'm busy dreaming,
sitting in this diner thinking
with a cup of joe
(I'm a fiend for the bean, dig?)
And I know that once life picks up it's breezy,
this shit will pass, done phasing me,
accepting the back-forth reality
of super ego duking it out with the id,
my amigo, the placebo effect
has the mind swimming in oblivion,

and I gotta girl with eyes like a doe's,
full of calm and admiration,
I gotta tell you I'd be lost without her in this equation,
her character and natural fascination
for sensation, she's close like fabric to the skin
and for once life lessons might be sinking in
and she gets me, oooh she gets me.

I gotta tell ya, I need better kicks,
though my head's screwed into the meaning of wit,
tired of this shit, neurons rewiring I feel it
when the ganje kicks in, when her love kicks in,
when my soul kicks in to the experience,
I'm delirious with passion flying out my fingertips,
though life don't stop when you're out of dope
or out of hope, rewind the tapes and play it backward
just to show that it can't unhappen, me and my
mismatching socks, your mismatched hearts,
I know where my heart stands and that's on the ground
in the clouds kicking so much ass, and
oooh she gets me, oooh she gets me.

Cementland Reality (Just Breathe)

Our eyes lock,
time stops,
heart's poundin' raindrops
clock used to go tick-tock
but now it's gone like our soldiers in Iraq,
the wind's pulsing and picking up rocks
thrown against the window the force shocks
us laying in her bed,
our future we don't want to have so far ahead,
talkin' about all the books we haven't read--
her father telling her our own paths we tend to tread
shit, she laughed, he's been doing that since I was eleven,
it's our education we're smoking away.

She secretly wants life to be some surreal animation,
just sweet sensations, no church or state or federation
or health problems like lacerations
or TV's "Face the Nation",
no more infestations or incarcerations,
no more medications or the need to take them,
no more vaccinations or the need to get them,
no more transportation or the need to use it,
no more insanity or the need to plead it,
no more court rooms or the need for recess,
no more diabetes or the need for dialysis,
no more guns nor the lead that's in them,
no more me if I refuse to listen
to my heart that's pounding in her ear as she's talking
her eyes and mine expanding,
her eyes tell me love is now everlasting
like it wasn't before,
the sunrays peaking on the shore
of this long night finally,
the morning star brightly seen,
the green and blue serenity
but you know you're soon gonna visit
the cementland reality,
the cementland reality.

Bus lets me off, feet blistering in the cold--
This time no money to hold.
She says to me, "just breathe" when she picks me up
from the station and hands me the pipe, God standing over me,
over us, he's painting on a canvas an action shot
of soccer kids grinning
while an old woman's winning
all up in the bingo room,
she's filling her box pine tomb up
with casino chips while I'm
filling mine with potato chips, while a
little girl is buying a bag of pita chips, while a
dog dies because he found the bag of chocolate chips
left out on the counter--
the culprit now haunted much more than he wanted,
dead dogs suck, you know.

Vesuvius erupts, your heart's a plastic cup,
here's the crutch, I'm a little drunk
but I do gotta heart the size of a construct-
ion site while others still living off of Lady Luck
and those others still don't give a fuck
about anything but their pick-up truck
that was just towed from the Wal-Mart plaza,
'member the old days when shit was hot lava? (Yeah, I do.)
That shit sucked worse than Drone Wars by Obama, Clone Wars, and Big Pharma--
I might be a rhymer but this life ain't no soap opera drama,
'member my two second coma
on the porch of your condominium
while we were watching that movie Requiem
for a Dream?

I gotta question.
Yeah, I gotta question.

Why give wages a minimum
if the minimum is less than two millennium
a month, fuck askin' "can you loan me some?"
"Sell me some?" "Buy me some?" "Lemmie work some,"
But they repo'd the chromium
appliances or your kitchen linoleum to mine loads of uranium,
sitting in their lawn chairs having coke with rum,
later need some Tum Tums and can't seem to cum
inside their wives and girlfriends, sucking the fun out of everything.

The price of livin' comfortably
gets so dangerous when you're a commodity--
when that's the price of livin' comfortably,
and everything's a commodity
but not our souls in the rivers or trees,
not in our hearts our bowels or are teeth,
it's all not bound up in grief or greed or
weed, when everything's a commodity,
one day we'll all be free but until then
we're all fish swimming like
the fish keep swimming, like
Dori telling Marlin to 'just keep swimming',
my time is swimming and your head
is swimming and my time is swimming away.
Our time's slipping away.
This life is slipping away.
This Cementland Reality? Yeah it's slipping away.

Words off the paper
jump into your skin and

eat away at blindness.

Late Observation

The bugs get to me, a big

One with wings two inches

Long roosts on my front door,

Have you ever noticed how
life sometimes seems worse
than death?

A fishing boat leagues away from the San Diego docks and it’s about 2 in the morning, the lights from the night club scene shine onto the bay, and the fishermen drink their rum and try to sleep on top of agoraphobia, the humongous aquarium ocean and the loneliness of looking on that dark horizon to the storm clouds passing you to the north and to the east is the sounds distant and faraway, like where God is to our souls when we fish for food in our day to day, and San Diego is nothing more than the imprint of that fisherman’s eyelids, beneath his hat, next to his bed, where his unused toothbrush lay lying next to the toilet, the imprint of San Diego is nothing more than you and me and Sea World.

Fat Man Fred

Fat man Fred stands in the corner
with a boy of 30 in a baseball cap,
sideburns on both, and boy has
a doobie in his mouth and is cutting
a little bit of cocaine, Fat man Fred
stutters and takes a swig of whisky
through a straw from a plastic cup,
boy of 30 sells him a painting and
it's just another Saturday night so
the crowd's drinking cocktails and
wearing high heels and laughing
lipstick colored lifestyles, Fat man
Fred talks to you about

Charles Bukowski, Los Angeles,
the "Sity of Angles", but your girl
is enjoying the laid-back views
in the corner, little girl rapping on
stage and your girl is gettin' into it,
you're gettin into her, your fingers
in her hair as you and her dance
into the night, into the ever
expanding ever falling well of
falling in love.