Hostile Subject

He reaches into his pocket
“OUCH! Dammit!”
“what happened you okay?”
“Arrrgh!... Yeah.”
Rueful, he examines a bright bead of blood on his middle finger. He then inserts this in his mouth and pulls out suggestively.
Then, suddenly savage, he flicks me off for my inquiring eyebrow which I have raised in his direction.
“So what? So I have a hole in my pocket.”
“eh???”
“So I have a HOLE in my goddamn POCKET.
So of course since I don’t want
to LOSE anything,
so I put a NEEDLE in there to keep my inconsiderate HANDS
from losing any of my precious things.
So what?”
“ooooooohhhhhh. I see.”
my eyebrow is back in innocuous down position.
“I bet you do motherfucker.
Nice observational skills asshole.”
“uummmm…”
“Think you can figure me out?
You’ll never get me with your pathetic observations.”
“phew.”

I just inhaled and exhaled
and a cloud of blues in confusion
in the shape of smoke-storm din
swirled about and in my frail, worn head.

“It wasn’t unwarranted”
my deep mind angrily, justly said;
head in hole, I swore in it,
“That sweet kind of obscure clarity

that can blow pure in shared air
passed around with cackling, crackling glee
can cure unbending, cracking,
false clear-eye-claiming mentality.”

Then, slowly, the response came
like a punch thrown from periphery
“Then use those troubling blues
when passions run old, when cold pains veins

sluggish with an untold complacency that you must unsettle.”

I gotta free my manic mind up
so I don’t panic, seize up, wind up
swimming in circles, wildly, hollowly
without originality splashing shallowly
leaving the art of grounded progression for those all around me
so I gotta keep rollin in until I’ve found me
movin in from slipperily barren insubstantial sands
to dry hand-tilled, life-filled daring lands
then I gotta keep on strollin
can’t let this fat head of mine get too swollen
with stale air givin me a stale stare
so I’ll just hit the steaming, people-teeming street
sweep you off your feet
just gimme some rhythm, gimme some beat
and I’ll lift you to an ecstasy
fulfill every fantasy
of the beauty in rhapsody.
So just follow me
on this story
it goes way back
to the cracks
in our history
where we hid collective memory
on the dusk we had decided to play together
onstage that night so we’d stray no further
from the mystic time where our thoughts rhyme in verse…
but somehow we slipped with a curse
were tripped and fell into a crypt
looking up with a lack
of a philosophy
open to difference
willing to listen to
strange wisdom since
we only had small view
of the venue
and this our stage
and we couldn’t trust for all our rage
outsiders’ and criticizers’ less selective perspectives
and who urged us to submerge this lonely invective and emerge as a collective.

Man, this was our night
(was it that from where we sat is seemed we’d rise alone?)
we could have put on such a show
that’d dazzle like proud snow, like substantially dynamic liquid,
the collected clouds’ shivery slivers of creativity,
but without us in concert, hidden in fright,
(could it be that sharing performance would scare away our sense
of sacred security, of comfort in watery ambiguity, of anonymity?)
the curtains were drawn
the audience a pawn
the props were all on loan
only a half inch shown

how could any one know
what would have come with the dawn?