Document #2

Bills pile up, laundry piles up, days pile up, life piles up, you look around and the house that is home looks more like it's been abandoned and trashed by the ghosts of crackheads past but it's just the place you live, a place you have the keys to, a weary place filled with arguments and regret and anger with the occasional smile, 4 beers in the fridge and cigarette butts on the front porch, sometimes a cell that's paced with a pounding head, the streetlights shimmering through the cracks in the curtains...

what is this life of art? what does it all mean? shit jobs changing light bulbs and bewildered looks from people who think you might be a bit to old to chase some poetic dream, days spent scraping change from under couch cushions and looking in bar windows at the people with enough money to enjoy a cocktail or two, the letters on the keyboard become your enemy, the antagonist, they laugh and scream failure every time you sit and stare at them, cuz someday, and didn't Mr. Fogerty say that someday never comes, but someday when the bills are paid and the dishes are done and the woman has left you to be alone with the smoldering ruins of your own mind and the place looks vaguely familiar, like a scene from your favorite recurring nightmare, somewhere between Dali's clocks and Munch's screams, someday when the heat's turned off and there's only one beer in the refrigerator, when the phone doesn't ring because no one has anything to say to you other than familiar chorus of "you asshole, you idiot"...

there are halls filled with kids, they study poesy and plot, they have time and money and think that all you need to know can be absorbed in classrooms, they will be awarded pieces of paper that state they have learned this art thing, pieces of paper that you would burn in the unused fireplace to keep warm, to keep that last bit of soul from freezing and the words from dying on the vine, they call to you, they send you pieces of mail that say you can join the club too, you can be what the academic industrial complex calls "successful", for the right price you can buy bits of paper and sell that last little bit of heat left in the gut...

yet guts will only get you so far and they certainly don't feed a rumbling belly, don't help shaking hands or pounding head, don't get the heat turned on or more beer in the fridge, guts can be quite often confused with stupidity and you can spend hours looking in a spit flecked mirror watching water drip from the grey in your beard, you can claim little in the way of victories and be a genius in the intricacies of failure, while brick by brick the house crumbles around you and you wonder if it's worth it, this art, yet there's really nothing else you know how to do, so you crack the last beer and the streetlights sing softly along with the late night public radio... cuz someday...