Among The Ashes (Old Road Disappearing)

So much to say and yet it’s all been said
So many roads I’ve yet to tread
Upon this land I lay my head to rest
Upon the wind my spirit roams
Away from home

I’ve told my share of tales a time or two
I’ve never seen the good Lord’s face
If there’s a Heaven then it must be true
That sinners make the best of saints
Beyond the blue

I’ve danced in courts of kings who’ve promised almost anything
I’ve slept among the ashes of this tainted world
By now I should know better days have never left their treasure
Along this old road disappearing
Into the new

An honest man is hard to find these days
In men of great wealth harder still
It seems the only debt they’re bound to pay
Is the one the devil deals
When’ere he feels

And if loving you is the best that I can do
I don’t think loving me should be so easy
It takes a strong woman to understand the man I am
But oh my love it isn’t you
A fond adieu

So much to say and yet it’s all been said
So many nights we never tried
I swear there’ll never be another one
To make me feel as though a fool
The way you do

I’ve danced in courts of kings who’ve promised almost anything
I’ve slept among the ashes of this tainted world
By now I should know better days have never left their treasure
Along this old road disappearing
Into the new.

No Words Can Quench My Bellied Hell...

No words can quench my bellied hell
Nor battles set me free
It’s going to take a greater war
To squelch this agony
Inside of me there rests a cowardice
Brave soldiers die but once
But I have died a thousand deaths
And still have led the front
There lies a pride in disappearing
Under darkened seas
Sunk down amidst the armistice
‘Tween certainty and dream
Pledge to me you won’t let go
The secrets of our past betrothed
The documented current sweeps
The techno dumbed down undertow
It’s going to take the man in me
To stave off hunger pangs
Inside there rests a restlessness
It’s all that doth remain – this virile game
I’ve missed a thousand meals
And still have filled my plate
Turned back the clock only to find
The hour getting late
Min(e)d brain it strains
Pulls one (a)way then slides in stride and back again
In hues of heather angel rot
Bloomed psalms of sirens best forgot
Take this chalice from my lips
Infinity does not exist
Eternity is but a kiss
That blinds a man from hopelessness
His meaningless existence
Death is all and all is death
Yet precious breath will seek to breathe
The redolence of falsely believed
Sacraments that claim to save
A life demoralized, depraved
In effort to avoid the flies
The followers of such said lies
Are hypnotized by props that promise
Honesty beyond what even
Starving artists can perceive
Shear heights no mortal can achieve
Created thus to tempt the wanderlust
That lurks in each of us
To make us trust in deities that cannot be
If peoplekind cannot imagine
Cannot fathom endless heaven, endless hell
Duly fraught with forms fictitious
Makes a grounded man suspicious
Tales transforming hard sewn facts
Into exquisite myths of tattered fascination
Religious wraiths of masturbation
Pound down upon the door of reason
Like acorns shrill on thin tin roofs
Left shook the fear laid faith foundation
Charades that mask the oxblood sky
Bright adolescence dizzy with the threat
Of pending war, abusive stench
Still fresh on fingertips
Stretched lean at love’s elastic grip
The bridegroom wrapped in cloth of night
And bride in sacrificial white
Take flight into the dawn beyond
New generation
Life goes on.

Alone As I Pretend

Consecrate this man
To the world I stand alone again as I pretend
Will it never end?
Obligations voice their change of plans
Maybe I should have ran
Away
As strands of time unwind
Like rotting fruit of my own mind
There rusting on the vine
Delusion grips my hand
These cantaloupe reminders fade
In fields of marmalade

I am alone as I pretend

I am not really here
It’s only fear that draws me near
Obscure dream coming clear
My pain too cold to bare
This journey seems to lead nowhere
I’m spinning wheels I swear

I am alone as I pretend

It’s not expected my brokenness will mend
Transcending spiritual scare tissue, I pretend

Consecrate this man
To the world I stand alone again as I pretend
And it won’t ever end
Obligations voice their change of plans
I’m sure I should’ve ran
Away
As strands of time unwind
Like rotting fruit of my own mind
There rusting on the vine
Delusion grips my hand
These cantaloupe reminders fade
In fields of marmalade
In fields of marmalade … in fields of marmalade.

Dreaming Of Paris

This bitter wind, the sting of cold is creeping in
I’m not inspired to hold you anymore
(No Pentacost, the spirit dies, my hopeless loss
As yesterday regresses into grey)

I offer you this subtle truth, I cared much more than I could prove
Your vacancy, it washes over me
(Now I’m alone, I do not feel, you’ll never know
How vulnerable I could truly be in you)

Late evening walks and memories of photographs
A picture of you in the rain
Spain in the spring and France in the autumn sun
I’m dreaming of Paris tonight

Happiness fades, my broken heart is on display
A melancholy smile to mask my pain
(Condemned to grieve but please my love don’t cry for me
We knew inside our union could not be)

But oh maybe we could find some other way
(These naked streets I long for them to set me free)
I cannot breathe, I hate to be alone
(Embrace their touch, I cannot breathe, I want to be alone)

One day maybe we could fall in love again
(You look at me but cannot see it’s not the way it’s supposed to be)
I only fear that you’ll be gone by then my friend
(I disappear, it’s oh so clear I’m already gone my friend)
Don’t say this is the end
(I fear this is the end)

Late evening walks and memories of photographs
A picture of you in the rain
Spain in the spring and France in the autumn sun
I’m dreaming of Paris tonight

Glasses of red wine, floating on the Seine
I’m dreaming of Paris tonight

Muskegon (That’s Where I Come From)

Rusted welcome sign on the side of the road
Reads: "If you lived here you’d already be home"
It ain’t much more than a dot on the map
An old lumber town that never fought its way back
And there’s the mill where my father had worked
Like his father before, but it don’t run anymore
Over the bridge, across the railroad tracks
Time begins to unwind and I begin to relax

It wasn’t always that we saw eye to eye
Me and this town have seen some trials in our time
I cursed her up and down for being too small
For always letting me fall when I’d begin to stand tall
Told everybody I was leaving this place
I’d had enough of the simple, small town taste
And in the end I guess I just felt trapped
The night I finally left town and swore I’d never look back

For fifteen years I was bound to roam
Searching for my long lost home
The more I ran, I realized
You can’t escape your past no matter how you try
‘Cause when the day is done they’ll ask:
“Where do you come from?”

Doesn’t seem that much has changed
A face here and there but the vibe is the same
Blue-collared beaches with aristocrat style
The greatest lakes in the world that stretch for mile after mile
Sing Erie lullabies the sailors well know
From the coast of Huron across to Ontario
While old Superior sits high on her throne
Her Majesty’s waves tell of the shipwrecks they've owned

And on the shores of Michigan
Is where my journey first begun
Learned to swim on that beach
Ever since I’ve been trying for ports out of reach
In the setting sun – that’s where I come from
Lake Michigan – that’s where I come from

Tomorrow morning I’ll be leaving again
This time it feels strange, like I’m losing a friend
I know I said that I’d be going, but hell
I never said that I’d be doing it well
Write in the sand: “Wesley was here”
And watch how the tide makes it all disappear
Back on the road I’ll be ready next time
A stranger asks me in passing ‘bout the roots of my vine

He’ll ask: “Do you miss your hometown, son? What the Ottawans called ‘Masquigon?’”
And I’ll say: “I do, that much is true; gotta get back where those skies are blue
And my spirit runs – that’s where I come from
Lake Michigan – that’s where I come from
In the setting sun – that’s where I come from
Muskegon – that’s where I come from.

No Offense, Joe

I’ll probably jack off again today. Just like I do every day. Sometimes three times a day. I switch hands to avoid creating a curve in my cock I tell myself will surely take shape if I continue to consistently masturbate with the same hand. Some days I tell myself that. Some days I do. Though it doesn’t seem to help much. Not so much so I can see.

Someday I’ll be famous. And people the world over will sing my praises and name their white, black, blue, brown, yellow, grey and ginger children after me. And in my hometown a holiday will be proposed in my name. Important county commissioners will assemble to vote and decide unanimously to set aside every third Monday in March as a day of celebration … a day dedicated to me. The Lloyd Durley Appreciation Day. And numerous, nameless suits and skirts who run the varied town grounds around the world to which I’ve tread upon will experience a great swell of pride in their bosoms as they erect impressive marble statues in my honor and place them in their city centers. They will commission the great architects of the day to construct one continuous, state-of-the-art suspension bridge connecting all the vast continents, not just for the fuck of it … for me. And they will call it the “Lloyd Durley Had A Dream Suspension Bridge” and there will be plaques placed at every bridge crossing to remind people of my great contributions to humankind as they traverse into their new lives. Someday I'll bridge gaps. Someday be suspended. Someday I'll cross borders. Someday I’ll be famous.

But not today. This is not the day that old men will remember with fond gallantry their glory days of yore when they found themselves holed up in dank and windowless roadside bars drinking Dirty Mothers with none other than yours truly at three o’clock in the afternoon. And how, every now and then, another stranger would blow in, shake off the loneliness and join the outfit, bringing in with them the glint of outside summer sun shone streaming through the crack in the doorway escape plan to heaven. And behind it the indolent entrance of a balmy July heat wave wind waft. And these strangers, like the strangers before them, would fall instantly in love with my charming demeanour - its impact like ether - and pledge undying loyalty to me and my cause, which they’d say stood for everything decent and dignified, noble and true. And I would announce to my strange friends there standing around me so sophisticatedly that there is a plebeian aristocracy inside of us all. They would raise up their glasses in unison to me, applauding in one undulated ovation in the year of Our Lord: Mindless Reality Showstopper Brainmush Sixteen Aught Thousand and One Eighty-Two. I would summons them all, the meek and the small - my windowless children in the midday swill ashtray – and gather them all round my well-rounded feet, sat there clinking my ice float adrift in the remnants of another fine Mother. And the windowless strangers would each take turns standing to silently, reverently order a round. And then I would dig in, and reach back and purposely tell them a tale with such thoughtful proclivity. Someday they’ll pass those stories round. Someday they’ll hand my legend down. Someday they will - my heralded legacy delivered in verbal tones of awe and urban folklore festivity. Someday they will. They will drink in my fill. Someday I’ll be lifted. Someday be a sacrament.

But not today. This is not the day young mothers will secretly confide in their soap watching girlfriends the marathon lovemaking sessions once partook in with the greatest of lovers – me – before they met Ron or Bill or Larry or Joe (well, once or twice even after Joe) and how they could not walk straight for a week on end afterwards. They’ll reflect on these moments with tender nostalgia, confessing in hushed tones of whimsical intimacy they still rather fancy my face over Ron’s, over Bill’s, over Larry’s, over Joe’s (especially Joe’s) from time to time. When they don’t wanna fake it. When they want the real deal. And they will reveal all of this while the child they conceived with their Rons or their Bills or their Larrys or Joes (hopefully Joe’s) only a few months before soundly sleeps in the new painted nursery upstairs, and while Ron or Bill or Larry or Joe (most likely Joe) is hard out at work, slaving away behind a 9 to 5 desk or on an assembly line or down a manhole, bringing home the bacon to the family who truly adores him. The girlfriends will then flash sly smirks as they dip their seductive biscotti into slow cooling caramel coloured pools of café au laits, sedately slipping their freehanded fingers into the sop wet excrement of their daydream ripe crevasses. Unashamedly flirting with the curious pictorials plastered against the damp fathomed depth of their erotic crest sea swells; the massage of their much neglected yet lovely lady ponds now overflowing with sweet scents of glistened glean and the tiny trembles of internally played ecstasy. Someday those scenes will unduly unfold. Someday they will flow. Someday they'll be told. Someday I’ll be drowned in the round mound of pleasure and lost in the slither of slit satisfaction.

But not today. This is not the day that I will announce from the rooftops just who I am and what I am capable of. How my breath is the mist of another man’s clamour; how it calms the snow’s violence and murders the silence; how it mutes the night’s slumber entranced woken lunatics (plough mules for the harvest); how my torso akimbo in the radiant hymn division of none in particular makes dull-shined stars flicker. And how no one but me knew my inner said entourage of folly and strut and persnickety doo dah drē. And the mirror mirror on the wall to catch me if I someday fall. My encore rose flung curtain call. And how someday, just someday, I’ll deliver it all. Someday I’ll enthrall. Someday, this I promise. Someday, this I swear. But not today. No not today. This is definitely not a day to be spent trying to avoid the curve.

Sacred Palace Of Exile

Sacred palace of exile
Commute the sentence of our dear brothers and sisters
Forgotten POWs lost in the creaking timbered trenches
Of so many psychic wars
Their lux braille madness shining beneath the soft, analgesic distraction
Of their medicated smiles
Encourage them to breech your fortressed walls with seminal excitement
And incessantly initiate rape upon uninvited party guests
Rife with risqué righteousness and ripe beyond redeemable mention

There will always be critics
There will always be those who relish with a reckless proclivity
The right to speak and express freely
Their mouths afoot plodding latent pontifications
In heavy ponderance of majestic afterthoughts
And exacting their entitlement to idiocy fought for so ardently
On disastrous shores of feigned foreign promises
Reciting hypocrisy is not the only way of dying with your boots on
But it seems to be a rather ginger way of smothering the details

Her inquisitive, commercial love was no match for his battalion of silences
And she would weep, weep over the fact that he could be so cruel sometimes
His surly composure and duck-billed grin protruding outward
Like a presumptuous invitation built to bilk her fastidious desire
“Come,” it would entice, “come and challenge the demons that bide their time
Waiting underneath the cold and calculating embers of this seductive torment
Remnants of a mischievous fornication – so curious, these burdens of bedlam”

In the strange dawn of dreaming a new birth awakens
A crumbling aftermath of former suppressions now pressed into
Consolidated corrosion, diluted (by gum) from the finer manifestations
Conscientiously distilled from the one who blathers too many a loose screw
And drinks too much with too less scruples
I miss the days just before the Internet struck gold
When we knew how to communicate properly and w/ authority

Forgive us, ManMadeMonstrosity, for we know exactly what we do
In the confession booths of our embarrassment do we pretend to pray
For the blasphemous way the wicked world rotates
… and they still say we want a revolvolution
Believe when we say we’re too tired of all that
… enough of that crap
Enough of salvation and predestined, pedophilic divination
In the dark wells of our confessions lay our penniless virginities
Paid the price to cover costs, the quest we once pursued now lost
Quixote for your thoughts, your thoughts, Au revoir! To thee I sing

So many of us on this sphere, the billions rotting atmosphere
I taste the dead with every flick my split-forked tongue doth make
But even them more friends they know … I have myself no confidants
Abomination from me flows and purges all my ill-kept secrets

My phosphorescent everything I once was then and now am not
Again, I’ve lost the holy plot – again I’ve lost what’s dear to me
Who’ll set us free? A trinity? A man with tablets in his hand?
A boy who sat beneath a tree and in a breath achieved dhyana?
We were not born for death beyond the unexpected twist of penance
Like fish do squirm for drops of salience, so do we too invoke atonement
Infirmary, the cold blood leech of evermore adorns the floor
Exploring cracks of choking change, asphyxiating boasting severance

It’s easy to adore the lovely – the perfect body, perfect hair
But I prefer the souls less spotless, the soiled, unhinged and destitute
The brokenhearted make fine lovers; their helpless hope still holds on to
O Fortitude! What have you done for us that we can’t do ourselves?
So vandalize your childhood homes and drench your names in senile benzene
Strike the match and scorch aborted pasts that were not born to last

Behind the wheel I jockeyed for what one might call arcane position
Tore rear-view mirrors from their perches and sentenced all restraint to death
Headfirst and steely-eyed I drove until the centerline – a blur
Put the pedal down to make good time and ran over people I loved.