Scrawling Under a Broken Hoop

I hear a young Jim Carroll say that in the next life he'll be holding the paddle.
I see four kids dangerously like me.
At 16,
15,
fuck it a 13 year old train wreck.
I can recall countless wasted memorabilia that met its demise.
Trophies flew in his world,
glass breaks in mine.
A mother yelling out the window she won't watch you kill yourself ,
you break windows-need to PUNCH GLASS
breaking doors kicking the stairwell walls,
running screaming stripping off the chains.
Writing in the dark because you're over my shoulder non stop,
scrawling till I get enough on backs of pages then a new book 17 or 20 of em filled to the brim and never enough.
Authors I love scream about angst and how he looked so young and so old and so dead.
Shaved head bad job caking on cover-up to overlook the bullet wound.
I'll never forget him lying dead-going through motions because we know we have to-we know it all too well.
Sitting at his service on my birthday makes September just hurt more.
Before you died we ripped lines and sipped Heineken and talked for days,
four hours before,
i never thought i wouldn't see you again,
i said I'll see you tomorrow and i never did.
these things keep happening to us-it never ends.
When we were twenty my first big chunk of cardiac tissue flipped in a Jeep on the way home to see us.
Never thought a phone call from Texas would be the last time I heard you speak.
Never thought we wouldn't carve trees in the cemetery ever again.
Smoking countless hours away, fucking in the grass, sleeping on the beach and making sure we always took it all--took everything for our entitlement because it was owed to us.
All the rich kids and their god-damn entitlement, it was so easy to just take stuff from them.
Too bad we only knew half the story.
Then we got some truth.
Death was truth.
Like a buzzing alarm clock you can't find and when you do oh god the words you find--
like sweet release,
like waiting for years and coming for days
a week
a month.
When you were no more it was surreal.
I stood by a mantle and stared at a photo and an urn.
Watched tears run down your sister's face and left them on mine because i was numb.
You used to be the one to wipe em off until you couldn't.
Not even two years passes and it's happening again.
One minute I'm thinking about who to leave the bar with and the next...
i didn't think
i didn't know
i said I'll see you tomorrow and your tomorrow didn't ever come.
Instead you grabbed your father's gun and did what I used to wish I could.
it was always too scary to think i wouldn't see you again until i couldn't,
my hands would shake and tears would flow
it looked so easy but the hardest thing was imagining your faces and i couldn't ever do it...
but you did.
For a fucking year I didn't even pick up a pen.
New York City crumbled and I swallowed pills in silence,
watching movies that were really my life slipping numbly by.
i don't recall where i went hiding out for so long,
or where i first saw your reflection,
in a fountain at the park,
in a window on Lexington,
or on the subway going numbly,
dumbly,
alone to work to school to a bed in another borough.
Amen for those distractions because they kept me alive.
I wouldn't ever have made it without them all.
Never intending to live to thirty and beyond,
We thought 19 was lucky and 25 was deluxe-you even stretched it to 27 and i was proud.
Things are never what they seem and sometimes we don't even see em for real until they slice us with a jagged edge of bottles we broke or burn us with the tip of a joint passed without looking.
However your memories come back: whether bleeding or burning let them out.
They don't go away and everything changes.
Traveling and breeding were for the sane,
I would just fuck around-float along and see whats next.
Could there be a way to do all this that would be OK?
When I got a stammered message that you died I was wasted.
Home for a change of clothes and a shower-rare.
I sat on the kitchen floor and cried as she screamed about how many beers did I have,
what was I on,
where was i going now.
Really?
He died.
Did you ever even hear me tell you that he died,
suddenly,
at twenty?
Why did I even say shit out loud-oh right,
i didn't say it...or did i and it fell on numb deaf ears,
swept under the wall to wall carpet,
or the floor mats of your new cars every year or two.
Might as well waste my intended future i certainly didn't want it,
for what...tuition,
a house...
Come on what was that in my future when the future was gonna be so short.
There could have been a change for better,
a chance to get it all down in print by 21,
be safe and stable,
expel the pain.
Nah-max it out instead,
charge up the denial and take it all from me.
I thought I didn't deserve a thing but
shit I didn't deserve that either.
Sometimes I think about never breeding because it's the easy way out,
I don't want a little ungrateful monster who's gonna tell me they hate me,
I don't want to be the one to say you're 18 so fuck off-good luck with life.
I'll never throw another person's spirit under the rails of the NR and say here's some plastic because I know so much more.
Death is truth,
truth hurts,
but everyone is blind to it at times.
Instead of reality or mature behavior,
we get "look what you're doing to yourself" screeched in hysterics as another vase hits the pavement,
we get "don't talk to me like that" and "show some respect" and it all becomes a blur.
I don't claim to have the answers to anything,
or know what comes next.
Even as everything happens I tend to want to stay numb,
but numb isn't inhuman,
numb isn't blind or stupid.
I won't ever forget some of the things we said:
fights and brawls,
drugs and scrawls,
nights spent sitting on a boardwalk fubar and wishing for a bullet.
A brown eyed Spanish girl named after a saint,
agreeing with me it was true "there's days you feel like dying--you just think about dying"
And I loved her.
She made it far-far away from these broken courts and sand filled pain pits.
Many of em did.
Yet it's the ones that hurt the most,
the ones who were like me and couldn't tell it out loud,
so many years: years without saying I love you,
when it was all i could ever think.
we never even apologized.
Those ones who couldn't say what we needed to say-they are my heart's blood
in veins,
arteries,
skin,
marrow.
I feel them every day and every day I hold them close.
Without them I am no one:
a souls a swish a swing,
not a breeze a breath
a gnat on an ice cream cone you already ate.
Without my angels to share my living I would have no life at all.
No life no words no time no place.
Death is truth--what a fucker,
it brings pain and inspiration: two things I've always known and needed,
and loved.
Truth on the other hand...
Truth can go to hell.