houston, come in, houston, i told her to stay put, houston!, but she wouldn't listen, houston!, she let it all flood in and it spread all over, houston!, she said she was digging it all but she knew nothing, come in, houston!, i tell her it will all fade away but she says she is making it all flow out, houston!, she is getting out, houston,

this is houston. we hear you, clear and sound. and we don't give a ****.

Houston stood up from his stooped position on the sunken mattress edge. Shuffling over to his one lone window he grabbed a paint stained old t-shirt and used it to gingerly wipe the filth off of the closest pane. The light he allowed entrance made the sorry state of his quarters look all the more uninviting. Piles of soiled clothing, dozens of glass bottles, torn canvas shreds(he could never hold his temper long enough to sleep on it) and empty paint pots from one unkempt corner to the other.   No wonder he had not worked in months. How could an artist create in such a state? He sighed heavily to himself and pulled on faded blue jeans with a plaid button up. Clothed and comfortable he surveyed his "work" room, which consisted of his five foot wide, two foot deep closet with the doors removed. The easle sat sad and empty, waiting to fulfill it's sole purpose: to support the realized weight of this man's genius.  He was a painter. A **** good one too or so some folks said. He was still a skeptic. Houston mainly  painted to control his temper. It was his only outlet for a hair trigger rage that simmered just below his sweet and gentle demeanor. Those closest to him understood his struggle and did their best to not instigate but every once and a while they dealt with the business end of Houston Montgomery. Not a show anyone would want a repeat performance of.
       One of his so called "masterpieces" was sold to a gallery down town for twelve thousand dollars last year. Seven months had come and gone since then. . He would trade his most amazing memory to be able to rewind back to that day.  Around that time the fates must have decided Houston was having far too much fun. That very same month he also came across a down on her luck actress who went by Sylvia Stone. He had been doing pretty well for himself up until that point. Bills were paid, fridge was full and his clothes were clean.  Then everything went to ****. She was easily impressed with Houston's new money and thought jumping on this pony was better than settling for a jack ***. Houston spent more time with her than he had expected. More time than he really wanted but he had not been with a woman in many many months and she was incredible in the sack. She did this thing with her mouth that had his eyes even now rolling into his skull and his spine quivering. Too bad she turned out such a psychotic ****.
         His art started to suffer. Normally he could sit down and pump out two pieces a week. For four months straight he only produced three total and they were horrible, shamefully lack luster. He told Sylvia he needed space, that it wasn't because he did not want to be with her but that he needed more time to work. He would get a few pieces done then they could spend a week together.  She seemed understanding but distant. Houston went back to dedicating his time to his work. Hoping that after he made some money Sylvia would be open to picking up where they left off, Houston worked quickly to pump out something fantastic.  

Things were quiet and productive
for seventeen days.

**Then Sylvia called.

Houston,
We seem to have a problem
Love never took off
The way we were expecting

After all the flowers
And all the money spent
We never had a go
We never made a dent

Houston,
All systems have shut down
We never could get this love affair
Up off the ground

10, 9, 8
7 and then 6
That's only as far
As this countdown went

Houston,
Could we give it another try
Isn't there a back up
Could we launch this thing at night

Although a love like this
Has been in the plan for years
All it is that we have left
Is a control room full of tears

Houston,
We seem to have a problem
Love never took off
The way we were expecting

Houston we have lift off
All systems check
We've left the atmosphere

I miss the earth
And I love my wife
It all looks like a blur from here

I don't know how long I'll be
I'm lost in time without a trace
Turn on your T.V and you will see
That it's hard to be a man in space

Houston we have touch down
And everything is A-O.K
I found some rocks
I'd like to give my son
If I wasn't so far away

Houston Brian says he feels like a fool
Because he missed his daughters birth
Here in space were jolly giants
And two normal people down on earth

Houston we have a problem
If you're hearing this it's much too late
We've lost one engine
And the powers gone
It seems with destiny we have a date

Tell my wife I'm sorry
That I won't be home tonight
One day soon I know he'll understand
Why I'm not there to turn off the light

Houston everything is fine
We found our place in the stars
We're really floating on air
And I think we're heading for Mars

For
              Carl Solomon

                   I

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
      madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the ***** streets at dawn
      looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
      connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
      ery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
      up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
      cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
      contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
      saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene-
      ment roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
      hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
      among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
      publishing obscene odes on the windows of the
      skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn-
      ing their money in wastebaskets and listening
      to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their ***** beards returning through
      Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
      Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
      torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al-
      cohol and **** and endless *****,
incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and
      lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of
      Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-
      tionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery
      dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
      storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
      blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree
      vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brook-
      lyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless
      ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine
      until the noise of wheels and children brought
      them down shuddering mouth-wracked and
      battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance
      in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's
      floated out and sat through the stale beer after
      noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack
      of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to
      pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brook-
      lyn Bridge,
lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping
      down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills
      off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts
      and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks
      and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days
      and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the
      Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a
      trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic
      City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind-
      ings and migraines of China under junk-with-
      drawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the
      railroad yard wondering where to go, and went,
      leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing
      through snow toward lonesome farms in grand-
      father night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telep-
      athy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos in-
      stinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking vis-
      ionary indian angels who were visionary indian
      angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore
      gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Okla-
      homa on the impulse of winter midnight street
      light smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston
      seeking jazz or *** or soup, and followed the
      brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
      and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship
      to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving
      behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees
      and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fire
      place Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the
      F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist
      eyes **** in their dark skin passing out incom-
      prehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting
      the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union
      Square weeping and ******* while the sirens
      of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed
      down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also
      wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked
      and trembling before the machinery of other
      skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight
      in policecars for committing no crime but their
      own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were
      dragged off the roof waving genitals and manu-
      scripts,
who let themselves be ****** in the *** by saintly
      motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,
      the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean
      love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose
      gardens and the grass of public parks and
      cemeteries scattering their ***** freely to
      whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up
      with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath
      when the blond & naked angel came to pierce
      them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate
      the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar
      the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb
      and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but
      sit on her *** and snip the intellectual golden
      threads of the craftsman's loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of
      beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a can-
      dle and fell off the bed, and continued along
      the floor and down the hall and ended fainting
      on the wall with a vision of ultimate **** and
      come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling
      in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning
      but prepared to sweeten the ****** of the sun
      rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked
      in the lake,
who went out ******* through Colorado in myriad
      stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these
      poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver--joy
      to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls
      in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses'
      rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with
      gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely pet-
      ticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station
      solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in
      dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and
      picked themselves up out of basements hung
      over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third
      Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemploy-
      ment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on
      the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the
      East River to open to a room full of steamheat
      and *****,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment
      cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime
      blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
      be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested
      the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of
      Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their
      pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the
      bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in
      their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned
      with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded
      by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty
      incantations which in the yellow morning were
      stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht
      & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable
      kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for
      an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot
      for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks
      fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccess-
      fully, gave up and were forced to open antique
      stores where they thought they were growing
      old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits
      on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse
      & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments
      of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the
      fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinis-
      ter intelligent editors, or were run down by the
      drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually hap-
      pened and walked away unknown and forgotten
      into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley
      ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of
      the subway window, jumped in the filthy Pas-
      saic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street,
      danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed
      phonograph records of nostalgic European
      1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and
      threw up groaning into the ****** toilet, moans
      in their ears and the blast of colossal steam
      whistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying
      to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude
      watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out
      if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had
      a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who
      came back to Denver & waited in vain, who
      watched over Denver & brooded & loned in
      Denver and finally went away to find out the
      Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying
      for each other's salvation and light and *******,
      until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for
      impossible criminals with golden heads and the
      charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet
      blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky
   &nb

Houston...
I try to mend things that are forever broken.
Let me drift away.
Don't help me.
I will find my way.

Houston we have a problem.
I believe it's time I relinquish my past, which you are apart of.
With you
My happiness
Under restriction.
Trying with you again is pointless.
I'm drowning in defeat and disappointment.

Houston you are my problem.
I can't hide from you anymore.
I must encounter the road of confrontation.
Tedious and weary, but staggering because it leads to your nature.

Corporate society, the paradise no one asked for
Everyone works for us, toward us, generations of sheep
Shepherds few, gathered around our executive table
They’d love to knock down our door
But they’d have to know to look in such exquisite places, their eyes have never turned so high before!
Aha-ha! Grace those who know their stations, serve and toil dutifully
I love to see them work their life away, the loyalty to big Energy, it brightens my day beautifully
Which brings the Board to the matter of Jonathan E.
Bartholomew, Chairman of the Energy Corporation, seated in Houston
Just handed the task to inform one Rollerballer that his career is done
Announces a televised special, featuring Jonathan’s career in multivision

Did you catch Houston vs Madrid?
Who are you trying to kid?
I haven’t missed a game yet, I wouldn’t now if it was the last thing I ever did
There’s rumors in the air, rumors on the street, propaganda floats from open leaks
I hear Jonathan is going to announce his retirement on a big show in a few weeks
Now, this lavish retirement package is all set, all you’ve got to do speak it to power
Jonathan listening, a bunch of hot air in a suit talks for five minutes and says as much in an hour
The two seem to have crossed a wire,
Butting heads when he refuses to retire
Maybe you should have said why, sir
He also requested to see his ex-wife sir,
She was reappropriated by a corporate executive who wanted her,
Perhaps if this goes much farther, she can be a messenger…

Savvy of their ways, he can smell a coup for days
Knowledge, that’s real power, so it doesn’t strike him as strange
That he finds all books on corporate history have been changed
And hidden in the memory vaults of their supercomputers, at protected locales
Jonathan can’t rightly figure out why they’re so shook about the best Rollerball player in the world
Neither can an Energy executive he asks for information, just one of his old pals

Well, he’s not keen on playing by our rules in our world
We’ll go and change his!
Semi-finals, Houston vs Tokyo, no penalties, limited substitutions, multiple deaths, broken bones and contusions
Fractured skulls, comatose players, ****** bodies wrecked and left wrung out with a broken neck
We raise the stakes on the track, crush their knees, break their back
His best friend claimed in the senseless slaughter, and another irreversibly vegetative
Jonathan, Houston wins, and he manages to live
The doctors pressure him to pull life support, his disrespect, defiant and tall
His teammate is braindead, they cite the rules of the facility, no family, permit me to **** him please
There aren’t rules. There aren’t any rules at all.
Even a plant senses life. It turns towards the sun. It’s alive isn’t it?
Talking to the bedside body in a Houston hospital,
He will dream he’s an executive, hands on all the controls
Bartholomew wishes him sweet dreams, and he will wear a gray suit and make decisions
But you know what, all the executives dream about behind their desks, reversed roles
That they’re Jonathan, with muscles, bashing in faces, their enemies give in
And they skate free; all that unrestrained barbarism and he only has to score goals

Post Tokyo bloodbath, the board reconvenes
The truth behind the threat of a Rollerball champion is revealed behind the scenes
The finals pit against each other the New York and Houston teams,
More importantly, Jonathan, who defeats the purpose of the game
By standing out he establishes individuality, they shouldn’t even know his name!
The entire point is to exercise the futility of individualism and satisfy bloodlust
And with a people’s champion at the helm of the sport, the answer is clear
No penalties, no time limit, no substitutions, Jonathan will die or lose; he must!
All in favor, no accidents, no sabotage, through natural defeat he will not live?
Affirmative. Affirmative. Affirmative. Affirmative. Affirmative. Affirmative.  

Zero, the central supercomputer for the world in Geneva
A repository of all human knowledge, which seems to be a
Bit off by quite a bit of data they hate to admit and let’s face it
Is there much surprise that the corporations bank of knowledge is a disgrace with,
Seemingly senile tendencies, their computer misplaced the thirteenth century, even the technicians can’t explain, but the bulbs are lit
Uh, yeah, I don’t know sir, it just seems like it’s not up to the task, what’d you want to ask?
He’s just a man whose career is a team sport revolving around getting a ball to a hole,
And they talk all this jargon, blow smoke and say nothing, he just wants to know how the corporations determine their goals

A final offer, by form of his former wife comes to try to talk him out of the deathmatch that is to come
In her eyes she is sold out, she’s only there to do bidding, an insult to his stirred mind that only hurts
I’ve been thinking, people had a choice between having all these nice things or freedom and we chose comfort!
But comfort is freedom, it always has been, history will show that poverty is an enemy of civilization, we struggled against need
No, they appeal to us, placate us, give us cards for our complacency to own us with our greed
They want me to quit, and she shudders, urging him on
That is why I came here, you have to, and he sees through it all now
Did they tell you if you got me to do it, that you’d have to stay with me? Are you my prize to be won?
Jonathan didn’t want to hear another word,
Disgust and rage, they turned her into a reward

New York is little more than a gladiatorial battle
Death on wheels, you can hear the blades scraping
Around and around they go
Hell on wheels, fires explode from the motorcyclists
The brutality erupts in spurts of blood, all players dying
Burning and broken and splayed and destroyed and screaming and crying
And twisted and contorted and smashed and ground and ripped and torn
No semblance of mercy for a moment is shown, no humanity in the war is born
It is ******, ten players on each team, down to three,
No scoring game, New York with a biker and a skater up
And Jonathan disrupts, the bike erupts, right in front of Bartholomew so he can see
He takes the ball, heavy steel, holds it over the last man’s head, his savage ******, mercy interrupts
And he leaves him laying, thankful for his life, two men out of twenty in one game survived
As he skates, blades scraping, fires crackling, flames taller than men stand by
It is so deathly silent in the arena that you could hear a dead man sigh  
The maiming and death and deception, the ice cold, exhausted look in his eye
He raises the ball overhead, where the crowd can see it up high
And scores one point before he goes around,
Slowly, arm in tatters, blood across his face and uniform in splatters
He throws his helmet and his glove down to echo in the silence, little clatters
He comes around again, the whispers of his name start to build to a chant
The champion! He just has to win! The roof comes off, they’re roaring now!
Jonathan! Jonathan! Jonathan! Jonathan! Jonathan! Jonathan! Jonathan! Jonathan!

WHITNEY HOUSTON LYRICS
"I Will Always Love You"

If I should stay
I would only be in your way
So I'll go but I know
I'll think of you every step of the way

And I... will always love you, ooh
Will always love you
You
My darling, you...
Mmm-mm

Bittersweet memories –
That is all I'm taking with me.
So good-bye.
Please don't cry:
We both know I'm not what you, you need

And I... will always love you
I... will always love you
You, ooh

[Instrumental / Sax solo]

I hope life treats you kind
And I hope you have all you've dreamed of
And I wish you joy and happiness
But above all this I wish you love

And I... will always love you
I will always love you
I will always love you
I will always love you

I will always love you
I, I will always love you.

You.
Darling, I love you.
I'll always...
I'll always love you.
Ooh
Ooh

-Houston Chronicle, 10.1.2018

A robot wandered the mean streets alone
While lighting up and smoking his last transistor
Remembering an IBM long gone
“Buy me a WD-40, mister?”

A ****** thermostat took him to Radio Shack
And talked about some Texas Instruments she knew
A Compaq sent them to a room out back -
“Do ya wanna undo my phillips *****?”

He paid the thermostat some gigabytes

And then…

He was mugged by a relay who put out his lights

it's 8pm

after the sun departs and we are greeted by constellations
or what we could see past the rising light of the city
The elitists of the day go home
A time of opportunities has gone down with the day
But what would the night bring us?
The start of a new journey and to be one with the city?
Never in the eyes of a 9-5 type

it's 12am

the stars
they call our name
towers being our line of communication
should we go?
we could get caught, though?
I have to wake up early tomorrow
what if, what if, what if
'What if' didn't make your greatest memories and you know it

every emotion between ambition and fright from what lays ahead
but that feeling is what makes it worth while.
doesn't matter if were opening the door to the outside or crawling out a window
the next feeling hits you and it is more than awe

it's 3am**

above the ***** streets of Houston
60 plus up with not a witness insight other than god
as our eyes gaze upon the lit streets, that stretch infinitely
our perspective changes
what once was Houston
is now a interlay different world
who knew a city could offer you so much without trying to give it to you