Take this life of love and give it everything. Take all that I have and leave me with only my dog, wheels and a road to everywhere. And my books. My pup, the road, wheels and my books. And a pen. and paper. and can’t forget the costumes and makeup.
I once lived in a van, and was more than happy. In this apartment I am grateful, but discontent.
The road calls. Screams my name. Everything is for sale.
What is it to be free?
Free from worry, free from life, free from trying.
Do you know my past?
Many years ago, I had a gun. A Colt Cobra .38 seven shot snub nose revolver. It was a beautiful blue, and I could shoot. I have always been able to.
Once, only once, I pointed it at a man – a man I intended with all of my heart to kill. I was lost, alone, cast out from myself. There was empty, and then – there was me, far below.
The day before I rode to my work, a job working for 12.50 an hour on Harley’s with $4000.00 paint jobs, and as usual in those days, I parked my bike, took off my leather and helmet, opened up the second drawer from the top where there was a pad and pen and began writing again. I wrote like a fever then, on everything I could find – receipts, bar napkins, my hands… to get the pain out.
To get the pain out.
That grey day in San Diego was different though. I did the same things, my ritual, my writing, but only a short time had passed before Sean P. Moran, my best friend at the time, tapped me on the shoulder. “Hey – are you okay?” “Yeah, just need to write.” “Okay, but Steve…” “Fuck Steve. I’ll get to work as I always do, soon.”
Steve was the manager of the entire shop and show, an ex-cop. I looked at my hands, noticed they were shaking, then turned and looked at him, a strange concern on his face as he stood looking at me behind the window. I looked up a bit to the clock so I could have a good reason to tell him that it has only been minutes and to tell him to fuck off, but then noticed – I turned around to the three lines on the paper, then looked at a different clock, just to be certain.
It was 11:30. I had been standing there for three hours. Three Hours.
It was then that I knew what I had inside, and knew it needed to be gone. I found a stranger, sat him down on my lonely and beautiful bed with the covers constructed so meticulously, and got my pistol. As I shoved it so hard against the roof of his mouth I imagined the blood, the splatter of his head on my wall, and was perfectly fine with it. Hammer cocked, finger pressing on the trigger, I knew that this needed to happen – to release me or find me.
I know I could never kill an animal. Not again, as I have been a hunter, gun in arms – but a human? The lowest form. A human I know I could kill if, and only if, they deserved it.
So many people are tediously wrapped up in death, but I have seen it, lived through it, and know that it is a blessing. Yes, I am sorry for your loss, but it is YOUR loss. It is my loss. We need to quit being so selfish, know that they are where they need to be, spill a spot on the ground in honor and drink for their life.
All of you who judge my drinking, all of you who think you are perfect, all of you must know that the only reason I am alive is because of you, think on this as I have. As I Always Do.
~ ~ ~
Finger on the trigger and hammer cocked, just a little bit more pressure,
then I tasted the steel. My finger, my head, my tongue licking the barrel. I was the doomed stranger. I took the gun out of my mouth and saw the blood imprint on my finger. Tomorrow will always be better. This is what I wrote after that.
3/24/99
because there isn’t anything
that makes sense anymore
because there isn’t anything
that i have to make me smile right now
and the pain of my impatience
has control over me
and i feel
futile like nothing will ever
be complete
and i hate it all right now
and i hate you all
right now
and fuck this place
and fuck this job
and fuck this morning
and fuck you people
and fuck this page
fuck the moon
fuck the sun
fuck the stars
fuck this life of nothing from nothing and
i would love to open myself up
and feel this poisoned blood
leave me
watch as it stains the sheets
a final crimson
watch this morning
and everything else
disappear
as my eyes slowly close
but wouldn’t that be
just so fucking
redundant
and what if tomorrow is just
a little bit
better
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
I am free now.
…and as the fool, the liar
I exist
yet only one of these titles are true
when dug down to the metal of my soul.
When the spade in my hands sparks on something
that can never go away once it is built in any of us
I see the label so carefully engraved after the dirt of the years has been brushed away. I excavate myself, my heart,
the shovel I use constructed out of words because sticks and stones were not strong enough to break these bones
to shatter the cage built around my heart
to shatter me so I can be rebuilt with dreams remembered.
I am a fool, and this marker I wear proudly and always have
because we are the ones who are honest
we are the lonely ones wise beyond our years
we are the ones who follow dreams at any cost. Every cost.
I know myself – or at least, I have and am trying again to remember who I am, was, will kill and die to be.
9:30am. Up earlier than usual, I decide to do something to make the best of the day, get off to an early start. I pick up the book that was six hours earlier put down, and again I am lost in the beauty of words. It’s a lovely vacation, short as it may be, to travel through someone else’s mind and to see the world through their eyes. It’s a good way to open your own.
I’m out of coffee and milk, so eat a couple handfuls of dry cereal and make some Swiss Miss hot chocolate that was bought on special a few weeks back, in one of the rare times I had money and even more rare that I wanted hot chocolate. It comes with little marshmallows in the mix but I’m not quite certain why, as when the stirring is done and the powder is dissolved, so are the marshmallows. It’s a swindle, a deception. Only if you carefully pick the marshmallows out one by one and add them at the end can they last for any time at all, and perhaps someday I might do that just to see how long they last, but not now.
I must finish cleaning, packing everything, everything into plastic bags. The upstairs apartment has been found to have bedbugs, so all the apartments that surround him must get sprayed as well to cut off these little terrors at the pass. Gone are the days of the innocent rhyme my parents told me as a small child after finally getting me into bed. Now bedbugs are a nightmare as real as day. I’ve been fortunate enough only to hear horrid stories about them, but now they are here. I’ve been needing to clean and organize anyway, been meaning to, but didn’t want to be forced into it. Still, I’m not surprised that I am. I put the intention out there and am just being helped along by the Universe to accomplish my goal. There is no good or bad, just help and action.
I should know better by now. We create the world around us. Nothing happens by chance and there is no coincidence. It’s as simple as that.
Into this world the child is born anew. That’s the joke. We are all looking for a savior but there are hundreds born every second, free from prejudice, free from opinion, free from hatred. What do you want to be when you grow up? We create the child, instill in it our fears, our hatred, our ignorance. Not always the parents but most widespread the world around them, and they are always walking the fine line between freedom or belonging. Peace or war. Will you fight or will you succumb and be accepted?
This is what I was taught.
There is a choice, and it doesn’t need to be one or the other. There is no right, no wrong. There is only what was ingrained in us before our first breath; the awareness of love.
Most of life is the quest for this knowledge again, yet we search for it in so many places where it will never be found. We search for it outside of ourselves. We have forgotten where it originates from, and all we need to do is be quiet, and listen to the singing of the wind again. It will lead us to the time when our own hearts began beating.
Now, if you’ll pardon me, I’m going to truly begin this day; take Ruby to the park, watch her play with the joie de vivre that puppies own – and listen to the wind on this beautiful, chilly grey morning.
They are branded on the soft insides of my forearms so that I could always see them. Always remember.
The first, on my right, was done at a time of personal repentance, after I acted as someone unknown to their own Self would, put people’s lives in danger as if to try and destroy the love that I did not feel I deserved. I was a stranger to myself; A stranger to my own heart.
These are my scars
It is the rune Teiwaz, the rune if the Warrior, and I branded it upon myself reversed. It takes a certain strength to press a white-hot wire into your own flesh, to hear it sizzle as it sinks, to know that this pain is only a fraction of what I had caused – not only in two others, but ultimately myself as well. https://kseaflux.wordpress.com/2004/12/29/honor/ https://kseaflux.wordpress.com/2004/12/27/walkabout-in-sea-minor/
Though the mark has faded over the years, the memory and the people have not – nor has what I learned from that time. The heart is sometimes too strong. Strong, and when held in the confines of experience and love, immeasurable in its strength. From that time, everything changed.
https://kseaflux.wordpress.com/2005/10/09/264/
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Many months later, I found myself in a forest in Austin. I gave what I could, fought hard to be someone that I believed in again, and eventually felt right enough to have the same Rune branded on my left arm, upright and pointing to my heart. The heart of a warrior, always and forever. It is somewhere pulsing through my blood, Norse Blood, Viking Blood. A heart of adventure, of strength, of passion. It makes me who I am, and falling short of that, reminds me of who I can be. It reminds me of who I was and will be again. I want to throw everything gathered away except for my dog, my bows, and Beans ashes – and with clothes and hats, food and water… my makeup, torches, books and the things that remind me of my past and drive. Drive to nowhere, everywhere, not looking for anything but seeing it all and becoming me again.
The Runes have been my chosen oracle for over twenty five years, and I made them all. Found the stones that spoke to me in many places, some thousands of miles away from each other, and have kept them safe, with me, and when I have been uncertain in this glorious game, they have always reached down inside to what I knew and answered perfectly. They have been delicately held in a deerskin bag by my bed, and only tonight, for the first time in months, I drew a single stone. It was Kano, the Rune of opening, fire, torch.
“This is the Rune of opening and renewed clarity, of dispelling some part of your life that has been shrouded in darkness. You are free now to receive gifts and know the joy of non-attached giving.”
“Kano is the rune for the morning of activities, for seriousness, clear intent and concentration, all of which are essential at the beginning of any endeavor. One of the thirteen Cycle Runes, the protection of Kano is this: The more light you have, the better you can see what is trivial and outmoded in your own conditioning…”
“Recognize that while on one hand you are limited and dependent, on the other you exist at the perfect center where the harmonious and beneficent forces of the Universe merge and radiate. You are that center.”
“Simply put, if you have been operating in the dark, there is now enough light to see that the person on the operating table is yourself.”
For twenty five years I have walked with death, and there was a time not so long ago that its familiarity commanded that life be just as strong. Inside was a fevered eagerness, a zeal that demanded that everything I did was pregnant with a lust for every moment I was blessed with… but then, things changed. I was forced to sacrifice the freedom and reckless abandon inside of this vagabond heart simply to stay alive. I fought like hell. I educated myself beyond what western doctors were trained in, and with the help of so very many amazing people, I was able to get the herbs I needed to not only help me walk again, but to keep living. In these times I had a resolve that, if I lived, to create a new world around me; to never again forget to see the beauty in the smallest of things, knowing that each was a miracle, a blessing. Knowing that I was.
Somehow, however, I have grown idle, lethargic. I could lay the blame on a hundred things and have, but it is time to realize that the blame is mine alone to bear, and mine alone to shed the weight of. I have forgotten the passion I once held for life, even in the grips of death. This changes now. There is no more time to waste in the futility of what once was – I am not that person anymore.
I can see again, and it is time to operate.
I don’t know exactly when I lost it or when it left me. Perhaps it was when I was taken out of my motorhome for the first time, second time, or even later, when I was told I was to be living in this apartment after the hospital stays. Whenever it was, I wasn’t aware of how much it was needed or even that it was gone until just this morning. You see, all I thought I needed were dreams, and those… well, those I have by the hundreds, all swarming around inside of my heart, trying to take shape inside of my mind so I can see exactly what they are, where I will be, and who, if anywhere and anyone when they come to fruition… but I didn’t realize that just as important, if not more, was hope.
I have been here before in my heart and my head and my soul and it was deeper then, the absence more profound than I felt that anyone could know and still live. Then I understood death in all of its absence, and in finding the pit, I was the lack of everything, pure solitude, unequaled, unrequited deficiency. What is what we call “human”?
I dig this up from the past.
3/24/99
because there isn’t anything
that makes sense anymore
because there isn’t anything
that i have to make me smile right now
and the pain of my impatience
has control over me
and i feel
futile like nothing will ever
be complete
and i hate it all right now
and i hate you all
right now
and fuck this place
and fuck this job
and fuck this morning
and fuck you people
and fuck this page
fuck the moon
fuck the sun
fuck the stars
fuck this life of nothing from nothing and
i would love to open myself up
and feel this poisoned blood
leave me
watch as it stains the sheets
a final crimson
watch this morning
and everything else
disappear
as my eyes slowly close
but wouldn’t that be
just so fucking
redundant
and what if tomorrow is just
a little bit
better
3.24.99
i look out the door to the gray sky
same as it is inside
when there is nothing left
and nothing matters today.
i look to the gray sky
the color has faded from this boy
dead eyes and an empty heart
and nothing matters today
i dream of the peace in draining
on top of my bed, eyes slowly close
and i feel as there is nothing left to give
i’ve never been able to see it so clearly.
a dream of over and done with
i just don’t care anymore
and it doesn’t matter who she is
i never knew her anyway.
erase forever and always
never have they made much sense to me
when the beginning of the story is nothing but a myth
the author gets to choose his own end .
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Hope. Hope is what enables me to get out of bed in the morning, when everything seems to be crumbling – or worse, when everything is the redundant horrid deep and agonizing same, every single morning. When I fight with all of my heart for someone trying to rekindle slivers of who I you know that I am but cannot remember, when I look towards the end of the means and see nothing; jaded, fooled, led into a pit of dark despair through a strange and unforgiving sense that I am now broken, that the years in the hospital beds only repaired the outside.
Who am I now? Where is the person whose passion seethed through every word written, who couldn’t live without a pen and anything to write on, whose fist came back bloodied, ripped open when the words weren’t enough and I could only loathe my reflection in the mirror of the Crow Bar because I could not hit the unknown woman swollen with child smoking and drinking and I ran to the bathroom, choosing to fight my reflection, reflection shattered with a fist of who I was then? Who was I then? The blood soaking through my glove I adored the life in the pain as I kicked my bike to life and nothing mattered but the wind and the guttural throat of my pipes as I threaded my way through the cars and was alive.
Tell me I am still the man I am supposed to be, life or death on an uncaring whim, the glory and sorrow of solitude complete, echoing inside of me, knowing the emptiness and how the world was etched upon my heart for no one else to see. I am not the answer to your pain, but if you listen closely, I will tell you things that no one else knows about life, I will sacrifice mine for yours.
I cast this crumbled life aside, I fear for the woman who perhaps sees who I was and chooses to love me. I fear for the woman I am afraid to love, but do. She will go away, just like the others. She will go away and we will both be better for it. I am damaged. This I know. I am reminded by what someone said to her about me – “Do you know that he has this and that? Do you know that he is dead already? I’m only looking out for you.” Fuck you. I am death, I am love, I am me, I am nothing, everything. I am poisoned with a life lived in full and I told her long before you ever had the chance to try to destroy me in her eyes. This is my life. In shades the pathetic warn another for lack of their own life. You seek to destroy the faint sense of happiness that I might remember. Do you realize that in your disgusting voice that you have, with your ‘good intentions’ that you have brought more death than I ever could?
I am words, I am passion, I am more than your pathetic life that needs to destroy. I love you, I pity you. Grow up and live your own life. Do not try to rescue me from me or any other. Somehow, she still loves me for now. Love is not physical; it is tainted at the very least in its truest form, and I believe that I was cursed and blessed with this poison for the sole reason of routing out those who do not know how pure it can be.
Lacking a mirror to slice my fist open in, I end this now. Sometimes that someone is so hard to find, but I love her, and I will always have me. I will not suffer you. I have fought and lived to live.
of Petals & Thorns 