.

It was always a melee

Of female beauty

Working in Indianapolis and Carmel,

Going in at 5 a.m.,

Vomiting into the trash can and

Seeing the day

Shoot by like chrome airplanes

Which were like splinters into the eyes of

People on health sheets and so

I see the gamut of humanity as I

Didn’t need anything

But incurred teeth to my neck

Of those who did

And

If I ever get any power

I’m going to give these people something

But I don’t know what,

As I sidestep the incisors and

Point a proud eye

At our paradoxical species.

In one more vista of yoga pants,

In one more shadow

Of a frantic Black Friday shopper,

In one more traffic jam,

D’Angelo Russell decides he wants to join

The Lithuanian national team.

.

His rejection is met

In the world at large,

Under honking horns,

Amidst shrieking babies,

On the jet stream of

Ravenous capitalistic fury

.

As the nation

Braces for a “silent night”

And shuts its blinds and curtains

With alacrity,

Like a mouse hurrying for the end.

 

I hated the buzzing, electrical lights in the room and I hated the heat emanating from the vents, providing us with gratuitous, grotesque comfort. I wanted pain. I wanted to see the end of the road. At this point, I couldn’t envision it, so I just sat in the room, miserable, waiting for everything to burning down, waiting for the bottom to be the top and the top to be the bottom, again.

The rash of human malevolence had hit me. For this reason, I felt like nothing was working.

My grandmother sat with a vacant, half-obliging expression of disdain, watching the TV. We’d all eaten. There was nothing left to do but engorge ourselves with entertainment, indulge in the shortcomings of the lesser beings on the TV, whether or not they’d initially been conceived as that.

I knew girls didn’t have any hidden answer to everything. They grasping at straws just like us, patiently, vacantly awaiting the next ephemeral, slipshod conclusion, or nugget of entertainment, to worship temporarily.

Outside, the snow stagnated in cold, relentless frigidity. Most of it had turned to ice, making the roadways a foreboding expedition.

My grandmother lived next to a bridge that went over a set of train tracks. The tracks were home to the Am-Trak train, which ran from Chicago to Detroit, and everywhere in between, including her quaint Michigan town. On this particular night, the trains even seemed to be crying, from the dormancy of humanity, from the ready-made sterility of our everyday lives, which come prepackaged to us for our mindless consumption. Well, Christianity would teach us that we’ve lived an eternity of sin, already. At this point, it was about a 50/50 as to whether our grandmother would successfully drag us to church, the next morning. All of the masses seemed the same. A ritual was something repeated, to ensure a result, hence suggesting that said result had been, in some right, successfully achieved, as a reaction. Perhaps, though, some rituals were just a sublimation of the self, just an antidote, like a blank canvas onto which the individual can paint any paradigm, or any shifting conception of him or herself, for that matter.

In time came bloodshed. It tasted metallic, it tasted clear, we ate it with our morning breakfast and coffee, we breakdanced to it, we wore it like a parka which kept us warm on nights of numbered days on the calendar.

I grew up with a cat. It was a complete hellion when we first got it. My mom almost gave it back.

Cats are real funny — like ha-ha-funny and also strange-funny. One time I saw it looking at a blank wall, glancing back and forth, along the wall, in a potent state of zeal and suspense, as if a bunch of other stuff were occurring, on the wall. Another time, out in Colorado, I found myself lounging next to it, after a work day. It just lay their still, and even silent, not purring very loudly, almost like a slug would. I sank into the moment. There was nothing going on on the wall. Blood had been shed. Bodies lined the death camps and floorboards. We were all hurling toward death, in a miasma of finite colors and shapes, little whips, cracking, telling us who we are, sounding their vituperative song into the night, to die, and to be laughed at in another form, eventually, by a blind, inadvertent cat, seeking the mountains.

With our planet having

Consumed a new wealth of outer space

And undergone caustic winds

In the hallowed nights

The brewery still sits

Across the street from the bank

And our house of cards still stands

To marvel at with

An iridescent nod of fools.

You

“Know you’ll be alright,”

And then

You’re back on the smack?

.

I have no idea what possessed

You to say that

.

And the football coaches who celebrate

Are the ones soon to lose and get canned and

I

.

Don’t know

What possessed you

To lose sight of the vision

But it makes for good comedy,

That’s for sure.

Around my old high school

Various girls appear,

Teenaged,

In various adornments

Such as a black sweatshirt

Or giddiness on a nice day

Walking with a boy,

Who make me drop everything,

They make me humble,

Make me want to work at Planned Parenthood,

Not caring if I get fat,

Make me want to put on a smile,

To be patient,

To talk with them,

To unload the contents of my mind

Into theirs

Like a gorgeous sort of photosynthesis and

I’m not sure how long this will last

But I feel as if in heaven

Observing a sort of blind faith in the moment

Within slender figures

Laughing at clarinets in the sun.

I was walking around the old, derelict high school which had just closed down. Here and there, people would pass me and smile. I looked, really quickly, into their eyes, and then looked away. I knew the feeling — it was like when you went on a nature walk and felt like you had to immediately become Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Inside, again, we’d cower, operating under the tenuous premise that the world was still, in any way, functioning. Long ago, I’d stopped getting the newspaper. My last newspaper exploit had involved going into the library, getting a paper and looking for the classified ads for jobs open. I couldn’t find classified ads anywhere, in the entire issue, and toward the end there was this vast, infinite section devoted to recent transactions that had happened at auctions. The whole thing, too, was written in this shorthand sort of legalese-approximating shmear, making it all but impossible to read, even for me, a person with a bachelor’s degree in English.

I watched a lot of sports. In general I felt like people wanted to kill me. I would take my makeshift, haphazard identity and maneuver it the way I could, knowing all the while I didn’t want to have kids on this planet, and somehow, usually, harness some celestial light which would make people homicidal toward me. This was also, though, what made me feel better, on an everyday basis, ironically.

In the bar where I worked, there was this dude who would take pictures of the hot bartender, when she bent over. He was in there every day and would turn his entire head and stare seamlessly, at women, all the time, if they walked up to the bar, even if they were with a husband and even in the case of a 70-year-old woman with a lot of wrinkles, at times. The girl he took a picture of, I have to admit, was so hot that I started hyperventilating, looking at her, one time, when she was bartending at Hooters. I’d actually developed a slight fantasy, one time, though short-lived and ephemeral, of eating some of her feces. When I’d heard she was signing on at the bar I got word that she was cuter than the current, petite and redhead bartender, which I hadn’t prior thought to be within the realm of possibility for anyone.

These were, generally, the hires they made in that bar, which was less than half a mile from the downtown library, where it wasn’t at all out of the ordinary to see a person whose face was so haggard that they were wholly incapable of making facial expressions. The city was now down to three public schools. I’d heard a story about, the very year after I graduated high school, a stampede taking place there and an assistant principal getting his ribs broken, the result of one of the cross-town public schools closing, before which event there had been five functional public schools in the city.

Everywhere, you saw advertisements, and messages like “I know I can / I know I can / Be what I wanna be / Be what I wanna be”. Recently, in Wal-Mart, this black girl, mortally obese, had cursed me out, and then ushered a soft missive which I made out as “Fight me.” I think I remembered her from my high school class, actually. I hadn’t remembered being anything but perfectly polite to her.

In another grocery store, one time, this black dude glared at me when the white woman he was talking to gave me a glance. I was actually just trying to get some allergy pills and get out of there.

When I talked, people tended to laugh. I wouldn’t usually tell them anything, as a general rule.

And all across town, amidst all the late-night cat calls, amidst broken glass, empty buildings with busted-out windows, amidst hostile people on drugs and fat people yoga pants, there could be gleaned the skin initiative. The psychotic eyes of a man with hairy arms lorded over the community like a desperate gossamer, longing, wishing eternally to manifest into an organism more complex than a chimpanzee. I chilled in the Jamaican bar, eventually. The DJ sucked but I didn’t care. The bartender was this nice, kinda cute girl I’d worked with at the Irish pub. The Jamaicans who hung out in there looked generally pretty happy but kind of grossed-out and disgusted, which I liked. I liked sitting by them and I didn’t bother them and they didn’t bother me. These black dudes would come in, seeming really horny for white chicks, but they didn’t really bother me and I’d make small talk with them about basketball and stuff. And, across the street, stood an old edifice, full of fluorescent lights, full of ghosts harking to a time when our streets and buildings filled with messages, signals, little paradigms which indicated that life as a human being were anything more than a debased exercise in primate desperation. I thought of old men telling me stories and jokes. I thought of this old man in Burger King, I’d heard going on a rant to me, telling me he hoped the people died who denied him his degree from Notre Dame from ’96. The lap dance is so much better when the stripper’s crying, so they say.

Cleopatra’s boyfriend

Walks somewhere in or out of town

In a manufacturing plant

With a clipboard

Covering the walls and machinery

With his smiles

Like slime,

Covering the silence

In victorious battle cries

As he thinks about doing the job

On the cinnamon-skinned beauty

And she will ignore,

Even disdain him,

Knowing him for an oaf

As I point out how he

Trolls me like an eighth grader

And watches the NFL and

We all know a lot of this is best ignored.

I’m not sure if it’s just because we’re getting toward the time of year of my birthday, or whatever, but I find myself in the last week or so kind of looking for the paradigm — the overall model by which to live. As we all know, in capitalism, this can be a challenge, sometimes, with the obvious inclination toward a competitive, rat-race paradigm pervasive for humanity.

I’m looking for the truth, essentially, and in order to find this, I need symbols, and I need plots of land to be designated as sacred, somewhat like is prevalent in Rastafarianism (a sect probably unfeasible in America with its widespread land owned by foreign corporations). Lately, the high school on the north side of South Bend, my hometown and current city of workplace, has closed on account of lack of funding. This was the high school closest to the University of Notre Dame, a prominent Catholic institution and college football beacon.

As a Michigan fan who studies Zen Buddhism, I find it a little more complicated going to this side of town and gleaning paradigmatic truth or morality. So I have to get kind of creative, you might say.

The infinite light fixture retail expanse rests right on the main highway that takes you from South Bend into the state of Michigan, where you might go for beach trips, marijuana dispensaries, or, circa 2005 or so, to buy any alcohol on Sundays. I think I must have beheld it once at a young age and kind of pushed it into my unconscious. It resembled Mount Trashmore, in a sense, for its sheer, vast anatomy, like an earmark of our bulbous capitalistic society overseeing levels of transaction and economy which are hard for the human mind to conceptualize. (Likewise, this level of goods production would simultaneously seem to imply the inevitability of an unwieldy level of waste, to follow, hence, of course, potentiating things like “Mount Trashmore,” and such.)

About three or four years ago, following an apartment eviction down state and ensuing bout with living with my mom back in Niles, Mich., the I.L.F.R.E. just kind of reappeared, to me. It was like I’d reached a state of mental hopelessness which gave me the ability to appreciate the establishment, which, as far as I know, encompasses only one proprietor, or company, a fact that truly boggles the mind. The lot stand at about four acres, or so, probably, of parking lot/light fixture vendor/back lot/dumpster space. It’s located very closely to the Indiana tobacco shops that sit near the state line because of Indiana’s more lenient taxes, and ensuing lower price points, of said. There’s a country bakery, a Dollar General, some houses and so open, rural space. In this way, the I.L.F.R.E. takes on a phenomenological disposition totally ironic, even foolish. It’s the type of garish capitalistic wrinkle you’d expect to find in, say, Lake Station, Ind., or Commerce City, Colo. — some very unadorned, off-the-beaten-path suburb to a big city that provides cheap land for manufacturing and proximity to a ballooned quantity of potential consumers. 

Well, the closing of Clay High School should help with the I.L.F.R.E.’s budgeting. In general, at that, the north side seems more and more like a problem child all the time — there was a shooting at Cheers Pub, recently, which in fact even rests outside of South Bend’s city limits, and lies closer to Notre Dame’s campus than any part of the city of South Bend. I’ve been in the Clay Pub, before, and heard really perverted rhetoric emanating from a 50-year-old man (that penchant for making bartenders uncomfortable seems way more common in  70s and ’80s high school grads than my Ludacris/Nelly generation, for which I’m somewhat grateful).

Finally, at some point, my reality pared down to the simple predicament of riding in the car with my mom back to her small house, where my tiny room with a bed, some Spotify on the computer and maybe some ESPN+ would await me. And I finally connected with the I.L.F.R.E. in a way I never had before. Its luminescent mainstays seemed polymorphous and beautiful, finally, in a new sort of way. The overall endeavor somehow resembled the afterlife — an infinite, blinding light, yielding a vast prairie of nothing. It provided contemplation, consistency, identity, and, almost, a kind of purity, for its guilelessly uniform objective set of selling light fixtures. And just like the night around me made no pretense for offering any light or moral clarity, the I.L.F.R.E. stood, proud, stalwart, objectionable and indefatigable, on a night that, nobody would argue, was either an odd or even numbered day of the given month, whatever it might have been.

I moved into the town

That’s like a grid

Where people look away

And take the expedited paths.

.

I moved into mice,

Cracked windows,

A broken boiler,

Broken window blinds and a

Landlord who seems generally fearful.

.

I moved into a junkie,

Totally bombed,

Standing in my driveway,

Looking to the side and

Not moving his face or eyes.

.

And I moved into you, Hardy’s.

.

I always knew you were out there.

.

You creep in like a snake’s venom

And as I’m inebriated,

Floating down the Dionysian stream,

A 50-year-old gym teacher starts talking to me for three hours,

A flaming-hot girl flirts with me

After having her ass grabbed,

A dude from Mozambique relates to me stories of Madagascar,

Upon my request,

A totally non-globalized nation,

.

A dude from Chicago

Dressed in a hideous, black long-sleeved thingie

Of some sort

Admits that Green Inferno was decent

But The Human Centipede was more intense.

.

He’s going to the horror movie festival

Next month.

.

And the pills come.

.

I wake up in my apartment,

In a daze,

Throwing jackknives at this

Fu**ed-up world and

All the while

Knowing that I’m subservient

To the menace in the night that’s

Like an underground gossamer,

Unearthed to reciprocate

Light years and light years of disease.