Joey Cloudy online

(For my most mortal master, Robert Cochran,

And my most immortal master, Allen Ginsberg)

“and where is the great sorrow , 

that has carried me this far?”

-Robert Cochran

Allen Ginsberg signed the papers

Authorizing the thought police

To break into his mother’s mad mind

One day Robert Cochran 

may have to sign the papers

Authorizing a lobotomy for his mother

I’m lucky

I’ll never be weighted 

with such a heavy moral burden

Because on June 13, 1977

My mad mind mother succeeded 

In giving herself a lobotomy 

We had just celebrated

Baby brother’s 13th birthday 

Cookout on the patio,

New apartment in Richardson, Texas. 

No one knew

I had been the suicide kid 

At my old school, T. J. Rusk in Dallas. 

No one knew

I had been the neighborhood dope dealer 

Since I was 11 years old

No one knew my band’s sound system

Was stolen from the church

April 1st 1977

New apartment 

New school 

New job

So long as nobody knew

She opened the door to my loft bedroom

That overlooked our living room

Ceiling slanted downstairs  to the fireplace

“You were asleep.” 

was the last thing she said to me.

Mickey Rothberg has my songbook

3 inches, 3 rings, 3 years of my writing 

My songs I was writer and singer 

Violin, classical training abandoned 

For Sex, for Drugs, for Rock

Knowing with undiluted absolute certainty 

That success would be mine. rock and roll

Reading Linda Goodman’s Star Signs for Lovers 

No censorship in our house

My mother’s book confiscated 

In the public schools

By elementary teachers 

Who dragged me down empty halls? 

To the principal’s office

To call my mother

At work 

Southwestern Bell

I do not know what my mother told that teacher

But she returned my mother’s book to me

Red-faced and humbled

She returned me to my classroom

And neither she nor any other teacher

Ever dared attempt to censor my reading.

Beautiful as a young Diana Ross

Beautiful spirit manifesting itself 

in a beautiful woman

Alignment of internal with external beauty

Astrology, yoga, transcendental meditation

Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin albums

Singing along with Roberta Flack on the car  radio

“killing me softly with his words”

Only now seeing the irony 

in the prophecy of the song’s lyrics

Bike rides on back streets

Riding slow so we could talk for hours

Uninterrupted loneliness 

Roosevelt murdered

True love Drunken Son of a Bitch 

my father, wealthy with 5 gas stations 

Refusing to help with cash

Don’t think too much.

You who loved me most

Abandoned me in the American Abyss

Yes, I know you were lonely

Yes, I know men used you

Yes, I know you thought you were getting old

Time beginning to slice away your beauty

With a sharpened second hand

For I have seen the man in black

For I have heard 

the carrion call of the voice in the void.

But never did I think

The angel that bore me in her belly

Brought me through her body

Through her breath 

through her blood 

Naked and screaming into this world

Would answer and affirm 

the anguished angry cries,

And dive willingly into night

What could hurt so much?

That you would put the barrel of a .22 caliber pistol 

into your own mouth 

and pull the trigger

Taking the bullet train to oblivion 

Knowing your 13 and 14-year-old suns 

Would rise to find your exquisite corpse 

Black full-length negligee

Mouth and bed filled with brains and sweet smelling blood

Baby brother screaming and sobbing 

MOMMA’S DEAD ! 

MOMMA’S DEAD ! 

MOMMA’S DEAD !

. . . a mad mans mantra

Decades before I could cry

Decades before I could paint or write

Decades before…

What pain raped your brain 

devoured your heart, mad mother

That you would leave loving sons 

A lunatic’s legacy?

Even in death

Your beauty out shined the living Diva, 

Black shroud floating in a stagnant pool 

of scrambled brains and blood

Do you think you can escape earthly pain?

With a .22 caliber bullet to the brain?

Know fear at the subatomic level

Drop mortality bombs

I’ve assured my place 

beside your palace of terror in Hell

For Heaven is forbidden 

to those who take their own life

That is our first commandment

‘And the blood on your hands is your own

And the blood in your mouth is your own

And the blood you swim in cast crimson shadows 

As we ghost dance on the head of a pin’

What must I do to go to Hell?

How many more skulls do I have to smash ?

How many more do I have to beat 

into comas of purgatory ?

How many more do I have to

smash teeth

rip ears 

gouge eyes 

slash flesh 

break …

bone

For you have given me no choice

Heaven without you or Hell with you

No choice at all

I choose Hell.

 Lucifer is frightened 

Jehovah’s seen it all

Chinese Numbers Demon legions, 

The Archangels of the apocalypse

Lunatic laughter

The drought in my eyes

The famine in my belly 

The plague in my blood

“Cry havoc! and let slip the dogs of war”

The nightmares of the four horsemen

Pulling Armageddon’s chariot

through the lake of fire

All the while George Clinton 

Parliament Funkadelic sangin’

“Swing down sweet chariot stop 

and let me ride 

Swing down sweet chariot 

and let me ride” 

Heaven’s rather empty 

for the few, the proud 

I will rule in Hell 

rather than serve in Heaven without you

For my love is beyond LAW 

For my love is beyond DOGMA 

For my love is beyond MORALITY

Enter the remnants of Heaven’s 

unhinged pearly gates 

Flanked by chanting cheering 

Demon legion hordes

Returning home a conquering Caesar 

Light of a new sun 

God is Dead 

Long live the Goddess.

Why was all this necessary?

Why did you abandon us? 

You Selfish

                 Weak 

   Neurotic 

                Vain 

                       Unfathomable

            Inconsiderate

                               Cunt

God is Dead! long live Buddha

God is Dead! long live Shango

God is Dead! long live Kali

God is Dead! long live Bew

God is Dead! long live Fear

Fear for the women and children I abandoned

Fear that one day they will find me……unworthy

Fear I will draw my last cerulean breath of sanity 

Before sinking 

under the great indigo wave of madness

Fear I will drown

Fear I will unleash unnamable vile denizens 

Shackled in the rusted iron cage 

behind my brown eyes

Fear that I am…… 

my mother’s son

God:

Sinister! Cynical! Omnipotent! Asshole!

Cowering behind Heaven’s self-righteous walls

Paradise is lost to me and mine

Machiavellian Majesty 

Ruling over a court of servile jesters

And marionette angelic abominations

Sitting on a cold white marble throne 

God of love?

Blue blooded disciples of deception 

Priests of profit.

Atop a throne of bone and human skulls

I’ll rule over a court of anarchist 

angels and poets.

Black blooded 

Children of Chaos 

Truths troubadours 

Truth be yours.

Rode hard and put up wet

Grandpa Trudy tossed timeless terrors in Terrell

Who were you 

before your spirit cracked? 

Your eyes… 

bomb blasted stained glass windows 

to a shattered soul 

Mad Mother Mayhem 

Who were you 

before you ate your last supper? 

The “reality sandwich” 

And damn the ferryman

You took the bullet train to oblivion 

Beating death and darkness over the River Styx

Two pennies for your thoughts

Leaving this beautiful bad boy behind 

To laugh the meaning hidden 

The Clash, “Should I Stay or Should I Go?”

Savior; save your riddles for the Sphinx

Mad Mother Mayhem 

what’s the rush?

The first shall be last 

When we return from dust

When Blind Pony kicked me in the balls

Before we went to see ‘Billy Jack’

And all humanity ran out of me in a whoosh.

When daddy blacked your eye 

and bloodied your lip

When we moved away the next day

While the crying and the screaming 

still rattled in the walls

No car, no job, no excuse

Sorry, sorry excuse for a nigga

Drunken nights 

East Texas pine

cherry pop 

Deflowered in the back seat of a ’56 Chevy

Love child, conceived in lust 

18-year-old Bettye Jo 

8 month’s pregnant

shotgun wedding

Sonny told Joe

“Dallas ain’t big enough for you to hide boy.”

Myrtle Street, South Dallas, 

Overton Road, Cliff Dwellers

Three flakes of pepper integrating 

An ocean lily white with salty cracker ass,

Redneck, corn fed, inbred, 

country as cow shit, peckerwood, 

mother Fuckers, 

Shouting Nigga! Nigga! Nigga! Nigga! NIGGA!

Lynched niggas in Jopy

Unholy Trinity River Bottoms

white wingless flight, 

To the subhuman suburbs.

God bless America 

God I love America

God give me a goddamn flag to burn

Drop names

Drop drawers

Drop R’s 

Drop bombs

Drop dimes

Drop dead

Drop me off at the “bridge over the river 

Quiet” please

She’s only sleeping

Quiet please

The family weeping

Over the cold mortal remains 

Of the dearly departed eldest daughter of Mudea

Who was so well known

Who was Loved by so many 

Two funerals were required 

to bid farewell to Tyler Texas’

……tears to Bettye Jo

Callow sisters arguing over clothes 

costume jewelry, furniture

The car a brand new brown Chrysler Cordoba, 

Two wild child’s and a beautiful library 

filled with the great books

Left in Dallas to a drunk mechanic

Beauty and brains wasted

Blown to smithereens

Bullets and hate are all I have left

For this corrupt spinning compost heap the earth

Mad at my mother

Mad at my father

Mad at my brother

Mad at my God

mad

       maD              mAd

               MaD

                            MAD

Till all that remains of you

And all that remains of me

Until all that remains…… is the madness.

Baby brother’s train has jumped the track

Don’t know if he’s coming back

From the nightmare ride 

Where crack fiends hide

In the horrible amnesia of addiction 

Better a bullet to the brain 

Better to just end the pain

Than succumb to conspiracy theories 

UFOs J.F.K. Bruce Lee, Marilyn, Elvis’ 

cults of personality

I ain’t doin’ no better

Hiding from the terror

Novels, games, movies, music, painting, 

Writing you away……

If you would just let me sleep 

For more than 5 hours 

but if I sleep any longer 

I’ll awake to the sound of Blind Pony’s screaming 

Momma’s Dead, Momma’s Dead 

Always echoes in my head

Momma’s Dead, 

Momma’s Dead!? 

Momma’s Dead?!

God is love and I want his job.

Time has a face but no mouth 

Time eats us with three hands 

Father Time the cannibal eating us all 

With the insatiable appetite of the Apocalypse!

The perpetual motion machine

The Devourer!

Time…… is the great white shark

In the water of life.

The same piranhas that ate Allens mother

Nibble on the brain of Roberts mom.

I’ll do you this one last favor

Spare you Ginsbergs pain

You hold that crazy bitch down

I’ll slide the ice pick underneath her eyelid

I’m sure she’ll be as good as gold

At least that’s what I’m told

Trudy stared blank faced 

From the wrong side of the void

Mother you’re a liar

Mother feed me to Molochs fire

“Mother is the name for God 

on the lips and hearts of all children” 

Momma’s Dead

Momma’s dead

momma’s dead                                                  

 Dedicated to the memory of 

                                Bettye Jo Erwin Cloudy 

written at empty walls art gallery 

and aboard DART busses in Dallas, Texas 

Sunday June 10, 2001

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