Laying there on
the backseat
of a 1973 Gremlin
watching the night sky
flowing by.
Like a glass-topped coffin
buried at sea.

The streetlights
Martian death-lamp
tracers.

The rattleslam dance of loosely bolted parts
shocks-bouncing the pockmarked-faces
of the potholed streets
as this trusting-bolus
of eyeballs and meat
is lulled to sleep
in a junk-drawer of
rusty knives and
safety-glass.

I was sixteen, and darkness had fallen
and we’re riding our bikes.

The boys I’m riding with
turn onto 95th street
and I follow
even though we’re headed towards
a white neighborhood.

I figured we were going to turn around
as the first set of railroad tracks
pass under my wheels
I feel fear
creeping over me.

I tell them we should turn
around.
They only laugh
and pedal faster.

I sure as hell
don’t want to go forward
but can’t go back
by myself.

So I plunge into the night
behind the fools on wheels
as we rattle over the
second set of tracks
I know we’ve gone
way too far.

Cars swerve close
horns blaring
laughter in the voices
of my friends
(years before extreme sports)-

as the high-beams light on
our backs
and I see my shadow
splattered
on the ground
in front of me.

They laugh as windows
are rolled down
curses are flung
along with pieces of garbage
at us.

My nerves jangle
as cars slow down
then pass with a shout of
“NIGGERRRRS!”
I’m not ashamed to admit
that on that dark
summer’s night
my nut-sack clenched up
like a peach pit
and shoved my testicles
up into my guts.

Along we rode
another mile
I’d given up on trying to say
anything
their bicycles were bigger
and they were stronger.
They slowly began to pull
away.

I followed as they
turned right on Pulaski
where blacks could get mobbed
and beaten
in broad daylight.
I wished for a street
without so many lights.

I felt like a cockroach on a wedding cake.
The cars hooted and honked
and swerved at us
like mad bulls.

The passengers cursed
and spat and screamed.
I couldn’t even sweat.

We turned right on 87th street
and headed back east
back towards our mixed neighborhood.

They really began to pump
leaving me further
and further
behind.

My heart raced.
A wheeze rattled through my lungs
and I cursed them all.

As we reached Western Avenue
I broke away from them
and rode home
their laughter
pelting dryly
against my back.

In pitch blackness
the light from that little
West Texas backwater
looked pretty brilliant.

The bus stopped at a 7-11 where 30 rustic white teens were "hanging out"
with their cowboy hats, ***** and cars.
What kind of town does it take for the 7-11
to be the popular spot?

I slid down low in my seat
to avoid being seen through the window.

Starting out with
nothing, as I did
but a very
nebulous idea of
what was cool
and a high degree
of anxiety
I was dropped
headfirst and
soft side down
into West Texas.


Hordes of blonde
Amazons with bows
in their hair
and their massive
Topsider-wearing gods
driving along
in new cars
of foreign makes.

In this small-town.
This tiny Paris or
New York City
they were important.
Anyplace else they
would have been considered
hicks.

I was like a baby,
a blank page
as it all went by.
I was in awe of
Travis and his
Mohawk
and his bedroom
you reached through
a trapdoor
in his Grandparents'
garage floor
and down a ladder.

I was 18 and in awe
of this 16 year-old
West Texan
who had absorbed
more than I had
or so it seemed.

I was like a blank
page filling quickly
a baby lusting
loving, hypnotized
by babyfat West Texas
girls with
part of their heads
shaved like
fresh lobotomies.

Girls that hung out
with Mohawk Travis
who thought this
nerdy black guy
was cool.

Mods...
The Lubbock Texas
people in black.
A fad of many
started by
homosexuals.

So many
confused sexless-girls
and their skinny
non-****** boy-things
having late-night
get-togethers
fueled by methamphetamine
which was brought
in by outlaw bikers.

Bikers that would stomp
these people
like kittens if
they ever actually
crossed their paths.
But that never happened.

Two different worlds.
Although I wound up
hanging in places
they separately frequented.

Mods...
So snooty and
faux-gay and the perfect
targets that
just begged to
get beaten up
but it never happened.

These Texan young
people in this
fishbowl college
town, trying to
snoot us all with
how cool and
avant-garde they
were.

They
got the dance clubs
packed with
college ******
that were
taking on the
clove cigarette and
black v-neck
sweater mannerisms
of this tiny group
of about a hundred
confused jagoffs
who lived in
back issues of
Interview magazine.

I'd hate to think
that I was without
a girl in the
outside crowd
because I was black, but I
don't know.
I don't know.
Maybe it was
because I was so
desperate and sad.

The dusty flatland
magnifies the
little lizard into
a Gila monster so
I'm Godzilla with
my frohawk and
engineer boots.

My searching for
something, something
I needed to be
a creative need
a statement made
something not so
quiet so boring.

West Texas College
town Redneck-rich
peckerwoods with
their tanned noses
in the air,

smearing
**** on the dorm
bathroom walls or
letting their
***** solidify on
the carpets and
in the sinks
because the
school has *******
and Meskins
to clean it up.

Life is fun
when things are
just handed to you.

A family of forgotten heroes... so strange that they've been forgotten...

What it meant to be punk, back then, was to be a part of a family. A blended Brady Bunch of damaged children, with their eyes wide open.

We were the kids that saw it all start, on tv in the 70s. all those panicked news segments and television dramas, warning middle- America that they were here. the punks. they were insane. their music was full of hate... they killed each other when they danced.

America was horrified, but we weren't America. we were born expatriates. We were born with our eyes open.

Even as we watched those shows and played with our SSP Racers, we were outsiders. Unknown to us, we even had a name, but we wouldn’t hear about it for another 5 or 10 years. In the 70's the name was still being used by a band of young British musicians: They were Generation X, and so were me.

From the outside, (by design) punk appeared ugly, hostile, hateful. But it was fascinating, to us at least. These punks were grown-ups, but they were like us. They were what we would be, they were grown... but they were not grown up... They weren't the Hessian dirt-bags that listened to "hard-rock", and wore denim. the sullen, racist, pimply faced, long-haired  guys and girls in Camaros, that the other kids (the social, normal kids that our parents liked) wanted to grow into.

To us the mysterious punks were a living dream...  superheroes. superheroes in black leather. living embodiments of Fonzie, that were an impossible mix of art and intention and suicidal amounts of not giving a **** about the normal people's world.


We were the whipping boy onto which was unloaded the fears prejudices and petty frustrations of the greater society that orbited us.

If you remove 80's punk from music and fashion,
it is a framework on which to build your moral hot-rod.
When everyone else drives a BMW or Cadillac you look at your ******* tin can, and know that its heart is detailed,
high-compression chrome.

A society that mirrored, multiplied and intensified the malignant parental gaze, which was the cause of the damage that drew us together like fingers in a fist.

So we went places that we weren't supposed to go, and took our licks from society's darlings, because they realized the ugly power structure as well as we did, but they chose to embrace it instead.

We were an entire generation of individuals that chose the martyrdom of a clean-conscience that was ****** upon you as a masochistic-morality, by an animalistic society whose only passions were fueled by selfish self-interest.

A passion for survival of the fittest based on lust and material gain facilitated by and nourished on the blood and tears of the leather-bound saints.

She makes me lose control I say
cause she's nineteen with baby-fat
her waist just like a willow branch
her curves a tidal wave.



Her voice is sweet and clears her lungs
much like a mad tormented bull
which snaps its yoke and runs amok
berserking through the abattoir.



She makes me lose control I said
and all my cool has gone the way
of broken ice that's chipped and shaved
to sculpt and birth a gleaming swan.



She is to me the essence of
the paints and lights of circus shows
and me the boy who walks the aisles
the man who walks the wire.

So if I were to walk the streets
vain as any wealthy patron
with spectacles perched firmly
in this pauper's jacket-pocket

I would recognize her form, if blind
she, the angel of the storefronts
her silhouette cut razor clean
in contrast to the satin dusk.



And my eyes so cold and jaded
running across her wondrous frame
like Braille beneath blind fingertips
they turn from wolf's to teddy bear's.



She makes me lose control I say
my placid Fonzerelli cool
lay torn and tossed like carrion
which falls from awkward vulture jowls.



But if there was a time at which
Id care for things like poise or style
the time is now, as I'm laid low
grinning like an awestruck child.

Cutoff boy-shorts and
Doc Martens
sad tired eyes that
some times smiled, but
quickly melted into
seething contempt.

Running the eternal
youth night parks
and blue fountains
she always stood just
outside my reality
a phantom.

My immortal-beloved
a vision of movie love
engendered through
a pretty face
floating ghostly over a
curtain of tears
a downpour of bile.

We only existed to
each other as the ideals
that we perfected
in our separate
solitary reactions  to
painful existence
and parted often in
disappoint
only to reconnect
as though the intervening years
had been just a
summer shower
waited out in
a Tardis.

When she came to visit
that last time
she hid from the outside
and then after seeing
that I was not what
she’d written out in
her punk romance
screenplay, she hid
from me too.
Either holding-up with
a lap-board, in my
*******, or next to me
on the bed
folding into herself like
some exponentially reductive
Rubix-Cube.

And whe we parted
it was with
relief.

But like an addiction or
an unfinished tattoo
she lives under my
skin, in the folds of
my brain.  And short of  amputating memory,
slicing away the dopamine spawned visions of
youth
there she will remain.

And I can’t think anymore of
whether she still
hates me, or ever
cared in the first
place
or of a day that things
could be what they
should be
instead of what
history has burned into me
with a cigarette-cherry of actuality.

Each building on the block
was comprised of
4 townhouse units.
There was another boy
a couple years younger whose
bedroom was on the other
side of the wall from
my own.
Sometimes I would laugh
because I could hear his
mother
beating the **** out of him.

It was funny to me
for some reason.
Hearing her angry ranting
and his wailing.
Like an unexpected
radio-drama.

But then I realized that
if I could hear his beatings
through that wall
he could also then
hear mine.

It wasn’t so funny
to me
after that..

Up until I was about
six years-old, and
figured out I wasn't crazy
for not liking
it, my father
and I would wrestle.

We'd play on his
bed, and all
was fine and
dandy, but
it usually ended
with him
putting a pillow
over
my face and
pinning me down
so that I was
unable to
move or breathe.

And I would
scream and
panic and lose
breath from
screaming and
struggling, and would
be waiting
to die.

Then he'd pull the
pillow
away, laughing.
But
seeing that I was
crying, he would
get angry and
say,

"I was just
playin' with you. You know I wouldn't hurt
you!"

Then he'd chase me away disgusted.
I'd go to my room feeling
confused.

Upset at myself for
being scared. For making
him so upset by
not getting the
joke.

The early encroachment of
darkness arrived hand in hand
with the naked black fingers of the
tree limbs.

Those fingers married to
the unmuffled wind
which now gasped and screamed
in fits of vitality (like
some terrified animal fighting
a trap) as it scraped itself across the frigid
concrete and over
the stiff dry blades of yellow grass,
and echoed that awful moan
across each and every hard
unforgiving surface
so that it could find the window
of my dark bedroom.

My nine year old self, under covers
eyes staring at the soft edged
steely-colored ceiling shadows
of streetlight-cast venetian blind windowframe.

Tar colored shadows pooled in the crevices
between the greys
extending in feathery obsidian tentacles
like summer pond leeches.

The crying wind carries with it
a cacophony of disparate portent.

From the trainyards, the
deep dead Cello of the engines
burrowing deep into my soul
accented by the prison door slammings
of coupling cars, and the off key
bellowing of the air horns.

In the alley the clashing metal of trash collection
percussion overlaying the robotic-dinosaur call of the garbage truck.

Sirens piercing in the distance with
visions of blood and violence.

So alone, in the darkness in my mind
this lullaby of horror
Carries me into oblivion.