Joey Cloudy online

TRAMP: Epilogue: Memento Mori

“And I’m bleeding, and I’m bleeding, and I’m bleeding

Right before the Lord

All the words are gonna bleed from me

And I will sing no more”

‘Seven Nation Army’

-The White Stripes

Sunrise, while his host still slept Aaron quietly baptizes his face in cupped hands filled with warm water over the Italian marbled bathroom sink, taking a French bath and dressing before he tiptoes over the almost Cronenbergian scene; the serpentine sprawl of naked limbs writhing torsos orgasmic cries of ecstasy moaning bodies an undulating tangled Tantric mass of unsated flesh remnants of last night’s reveries, through the bedroom across the living room and out of the apartment.

Ever the ecstatic epicurean we exit the second circle under florescent lights of the still, empty hall only electric hum of dead and dying ballast synthetic psalm of the cicadas droned into the ears as he slides his feet into combat boots, fires up a menthol then begins the pilgrimage taking the elevator down, down, down to the ground floor with his ALICE pack filled w the great books of poetry slung over a black leather armored shoulder. As he exhaled, the taste the cum, weed, and sweat of strangers still lingered on his tongue. He flicked the butt out into the darkness of the parking lot, his black clad figure following it into the empty morning.

The Deep Ellum air was volatile as a shaken nitro glycerin martini; you feared what would follow in the wake of your next breath. Everything glowed in soft inner light, every molecule of his being flew apart, and he could feel himself temporally connected to everything across the infinite sea of spacetime. The neon glowing sky revealed the secret death poems written in coldfire. For a moment, he felt as if he were finally going to burn wild as black phosphorous flame across our American dreamscape.

The thought police crouched on every corner of the strip, cretinous hands of censors caressing batons like erections as they listened for a cry of dissent to rise up, eager for a tender skull to crack. Nothing done here on this earth is of any consequence; in time, it will all be forgotten, lost as our dreams, and to know this now, that it did not matter because it was no longer his sacred place. It was time to chill out for a little while, grow fat, stop shaving, and let the beard grow out, cultivate a taste for poppies, better poetry through chemistry, intravenous genius. The hardcore anarchist poets were being crushed, chewed up, and spit out in the stainless steel and glass maw of our machinery.

He felt a pang of loneliness, but that was our common state; he did not pretend that he would not miss the pierced and painted suburban sluts, just as he knew that his place was no longer with them. He had outgrown the Deep Ellum scene forever. What else was there to do when he had been ostracized as if he were the literary leper, he had gone too far even for those who imagined that you could never go too far, he had crossed the line in the sands of their narrow minds and now they’re even knowing of his existence was a constant reminder of their own artistic inadequacy and moral mediocrity. Still, he knew that he just had to write his way out of this. His poetry was the only thing that rescued him from the poverty of the mind.

Another job lost that he did not care about, but he had lost all of his paintings, writings, and books gone, when he could not pay the storage fees on time. Ten years’ worth of hard work painting, writing all night gone. With the loss of his prentice work, he had nothing left to lose. It was a hard lesson, a good lesson in impermanence. He used the money he had been wasting on storage to pay for school this semester. He was committed to this road through hell’s sixth circle beyond the labyrinth before him.

The strangeness of sitting here, lost and found in his own imagination. It began to feel real now; he no longer felt the fraud when someone asked him what he did, and he said he was a writer; he knew who he was. All that was left to do now was to get to work making oneself worthy of the vocation. He knew it was time to learn as much as possible and be ready to commit your life to this evolution of the mind. It would take a lifetime to do it right and write the book-length poem “a complex and nuanced meditation on the sacred juxta posed against a Dionysian poetic of the profane”) It needed to be done. No one had done it right since Whitman. You could spend a lifetime studying and never get it right. It felt as if the world, a universe he was living in, was an expanding balloon and any moment now the whole thing might be blown apart or collapse into the blackhole at the center of self. He no longer accepted failure or feared success. Aaron began to allow himself the luxury of believing in himself.

Things were looking up for a change; it was time for new directions after all the chemical-fueled madness of the previous years. He had enough time to grab a bagel and coffee Downtown before he had to start heading toward campus. He was taking an honors course, getting credit for English and history, neither of which he needed. He was there to study under the resident Dadaist poet and Beat friend Joe Stanco, who team-taught the class with Professor Curtis Thomas, who handled the history portion of the course on the history of poetry in America from the Harlem Renaissance to the Beats.

The salt and pepper duo of professors are both Vietnam veterans. The irony wasn’t lost on him, being a former Marine. We continue the traditions of the warriors of ancient times. Cincinnatus turns his sword into a ploughshare, the retired samurai becomes the monk who writes books of death poems. The war is over, we turn our swords to pens, wander the American roads writing our love poems to eternity in cryptic scripts in the arms of the automatic night.

It was good to be back in the classroom again. By this time next year, he would be teaching creative writing in the public schools part-time, the new arts and literary magazine would be putting out its first issues, and he would have shot the documentary about the underground literary scene. It’s time to start sending stuff to the publishers and collecting rejection letters.

Last night’s party had been the finale; he was cutting the scene loose. He knew that those people were not his friends; they had no true love for him, they were nothing more than semen slickened sycophants, the literati’s groupies. He had an ass load of reading to do and even more writing in order to catch up with all of the academics, MFAs, and English majors, but he did not have the same goals as they. He was chasing an altogether more personal demon. They were of no concern to him, and what it was he would have to do to redeem himself.

He remembered every insult, threat, and humiliation of his stupid childhood, all the empty parties, all the joyless drugs, all the visionless whores, all the anonymous screaming pointless funerals, all the fucking and fighting, all the beautiful losers that he forever truly loved. Those whose minds were in tatters from their tours on the front line of childhood casualties of the invincible wars waged on reason.

It’s over; it’ll wind up just another commercial tourist trap like the West End soon. Not that it mattered, he had outlived the gang bangers and the suburban soft boys. He would just keep writing with complete confidence that he would save himself, that he could write his way out of this, that the words were his salvation, the words were his redemption, the words were all he would need from now on. He was glad that he didn’t have to host readings anymore; turning the mic and the hosting duties over to Houston had been the right thing to do, and the timing had been perfect.

The young Christian missionaries who had bought the place from Jester and were censoring the reading and holding their bible study classes in Deep Ellum at the same time as the poetry reading. Why don’t the Cro-Magnon fundamentalist retards just shut it down and have a good old-fashioned exorcism? And the goofy fucks were actually confused about why not just the open mic was dwindling down to nothing, but business was dropping off every night. Stupid mother fuckers didn’t seem to realize that everybody in Deep Ellum knew where the churches were and hung out here to avoid the holy rollers. Clueless fucks would be out of business in a year, still wondering why. Religious fundamentalist running a business in Deep Ellum made about as much sense as an Islamic fundamentalist buying a titty bar and having the dancers come out on stage dancing around in a goddamned Burka.

It was sad in a way. Insomnia had been an unofficial safe house for street kids for over a decade, and the open mic there had been the heart of the street perfumers since the early days of the slam scene. Over the years, the place had survived economic slowdowns, recessions, inflation, and at least one riot the year the Cowboys won the Super Bowl, and the victory parade got out of hand, and these assholes were going to kill it within a year.

Aaron felt a little sorry for Houston being in that situation, but it was easy enough to remedy. All that he had to do was what Aaron had done when he had been asked to host readings where the management wanted him to censor the reading; he just said no and walked away. But, he knew that Houston was too callow a whore for applause to walk away. His emails were getting whinier and more anxious. With Houston getting more desperate every week as fewer and fewer writers, musicians, and performers return to the place after they saw how it was being managed.

After her final argument with Aaron ended with him quitting hosting the reading at Insomnia, Laurel, thinking the place was the draw, asked Houston to take over as the emcee. Houston was an androgynous dark dark-haired, cute 19-year-old boy, passionate, and controllable. He was the all-American suburban soft boy, all the fat chicks that orbited the poetry readings in coffee shops, avant-garde plays in chic art galleries, and writers’ workshops in bookstores in every city in America, all creamed their granny panties over. He was not a chaotic force like Aaron, quite the opposite, he was completely nonthreatening and would do exactly what was expected of him, like a good dog, and in doing so become to poetry what Pat Boone is to Rock and Roll.

She had erroneously assumed that the readings would go on as they had before with the new host, but they began hemorrhaging audience immediately. Laurel and Houston both thought that it was a good idea when the Christians bought the place. Houston wasn’t even smart enough to be offended when they told him that they wouldn’t pay him the meager 50-dollar stipend that the previous owners had paid the former host.

They believed that all it took to have a reading was to print up a few flyers and turn on the mic, and that the place would magically fill up with people. It soon became apparent that no one would drive downtown on a Tuesday night to a reading hosted by Houston. Even the people who hung out on the streets or lived near downtown stopped coming to the little Tuesday night poetry reading. The people who were driving in from halfway to Oklahoma never came back after they saw the new management had removed all of the vintage posters and memorabilia, painted over decades-old graffiti, and redecorated the place to look like a decaffeinated poor man’s Starbucks with a new host to match the décor, and as the talent pool dried up, so did the audience.

The previous owners not only paid the host, but all performers got a free bottomless cup of coffee. The new owners didn’t pay Houston jack shit and wouldn’t even let the performers use the toilet unless they bought something first. Houston wasn’t fucking Laurel now that she was married and had moved to Arlington; she no longer came to the readings. The majority of the poets had stopped going to the weekly gathering shortly after Aaron had quit hosting, and Houston could see that if he couldn’t get him to come back soon, it was all going to be over. He already had several nights where he was the only one who showed up.

Aaron would go back to get some shots he needed for the documentary, but he would never read there again, not as long as they had that ridiculous, draconian censorship policy hanging on the wall to the left of the stage, framed as if it were art. If Houston would just stop acting like such a dickless weasel, he could just move on; there’s always another venue. Besides, it was never about the spotlight, the stage, or the mic; it was about the writing. Aaron felt relieved to not have to be on all the time. It was time to get to work on the epic poem and start sending poems out to be published.

V. WHAT THE THUNDER SAID

“…Murmur of maternal lamentation

Who are those hooded hordes swarming

Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth

Ringed by the flat horizon only 370

What is the city over the mountains

Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air

Falling towers…”

‘The Waste Land’

-T. S. Eliot

The Cantos: A spectral Liturgy, a book of prayers for the fading memories of our anemic ghost; Leon, my cousin, dead heart attack. We grew up together, Baby brother and Cuz got three strikes. On the run from the law’s mandatory life sentences for cocaine possession, just a couple of dope fiends. Two uncles dead within a year of each other, and everybody still pretending it was a heart attack. OD OD OD OD OD OD OD OD OD OD OD! Soon, there will be no more room to bury our dead. Heroine singing the blues, mothers crying, we should not have to bury so many of our children. Poppies in a field, rows of freshly filled graves. Fentanyl injected eulogy. We chisel their names into our Book of the Dead. Sign the guest list at the wake downwind of the chain-smoking Crematorium. Ashes to tears, dust to mud. Lenny out of the pen and on the run from the Jamaican posse. Andre shot to death parked in his car waiting to pick up his daughter from elementary school. Wade’s daughter shot to death, caught in the crossfire of a drive-by shooting, and the police department, with all of their guns and badges useless to him in his grief.

“I can do no more.”

-J. Wright

Aaron’s whole life in the South Side seemed surreal now, as if it had been lived by someone else. It was hard to remember the days when he was dealing or when he first moved out of the old neighborhood and couldn’t sleep in the suburban silence of the north side nights safe within his fortress of sheetrock lying on his back restless staring at the ceiling in the darkness bored until he heard a car backfire the mirage of distant gunshots lullaby finally singing him to sleep.

For years, he had been doing it, the work of a writer, but he never understood why he was doing it until now. The galleys of the first book of poems were being printed, and he would have his first book of poems ready in time for his first feature reading in March 19th. The pale blue 18 by 24 posters promoting the event were already in the windows at the bookstore and popping up in the glass doors and windows of other businesses around the city.

His entire life, he had been expected to self-destruct, to crumble, being at heart just like his mother; his family had always thought of him as weak, only a few believed he had the heart of a survivor. And most would not doubt you if you told them he was the antichrist. A few even forbid their children from associating with him throughout his high school years. Now, most were junkies, convicts, or ghosts.

It felt as if he had never been anything but this, as if it had always been like this, but that was a trick of the mind. The past was real, but he was no longer its prisoner. It was a way of thinking that had changed. He no longer felt guilty for surviving. The fire in the mind was all that he needed to shield him against the cool indifference of this world. His life now had merit, a true purpose, and meaning; at the most humiliating level, he surrendered himself to this calling.

Aaron pressed the embossed triangle on the play button of the Walkman without bothering to look at the title of the tracks on the newly ripped CD. The silver flying saucer of mutant machine language music whirred softly as it hummed to life spinning the plastic disc as he crossed the Santa Fe Trails buildings parking lot to Griffith right and north passing the A.M. stench of Mickey D’s, the monotonous mechanical math of the mega-phoned grumblings of the Greyhound bus station, right on Commerce east through the empty concrete valley of shadow between high glass façades. Left on Good Latimer, stop fire up another smoke. Right on Elm strolling through Deep Ellum as the poetry of Jim Morrison, “This is the End,” reverberated through the interior of his floating skull.

The music and the words drifted around his head, filled with meandering thoughts adjusting themselves in his mind’s rhythms until it became the soundtrack to his love-lost life and all childhood dreams.

The familiar song of the lizard king shifted to silence, and a new song began. The first sliver of light threatened to slash through the darkness hovering over the eastern horizon. Last night’s acid had opened a portal within him to a profound sense of empathy with the universe, and he relaxed as the sensation of being eaten by eternity washed over him in a great wave, forgetting for the moment about the teeth of time chewing the bones of our being to dust before it spits us out into the sands of the broken hour glass. He looked across his sacred Elm Street one last time through the jaundiced glow of the smog-tinted morning haze at the scarlet glow of the electric lights of the tattoo parlors’ digital clock; it was 7:46 in the A.M., September the eleventh two thousand and one.

“I remember what I told you

But I can’t remember why

And the yellow leaves are falling

In a spiral from the sky”

-Robyn Hitchcock

-about the author

JD Cloudy’s poetry has disappeared in the literary journals: Fatfizz, Mad Swirl, Texas Beat Anthology, Danse Macabre, Du Jour, and Death List Five. He has won no literary awards, entered no slam competitions, and never completed college. He lives to write in Dallas, TX.