Fireflies on water by Yayoi Kusama
Free Fall
JCD Kerwin
Maybe someday I
can make the city
burn with words,
but all I really
want to do
is fly.
(July, 2013)
Fly by Fire
Category Archives: writing
Mister Beauregard
Photo courtesy http://www.netcarshow.com
Mister Beauregard
JCD Kerwin
Mister Beauregard has no heart. He keeps an antique, silver watch just above his breast coat pocket, just above his heart, so that the tick-tick-tocking mimics the thump-thump-bumping of a normal man’s heart.
He drives a Chevelle‘69, just to pass the time, as he listens to the tick-tick just above his breast bone, just across his chest, in his powder-blue, Chevy ’69. It’s leftover from the times he drove ‘till sunrise on the strip; ‘till he drove all night chasing phantoms in his vision while he looked at Mars. Now he sees shadows when he stares; he sees clouds when he knows it should be Heaven in the stars.
His eyes are made of glass, they say, because to buy his poor wife’s ashes he had to give his real ones both away. Her ashes sit near the magazines he never reads, and by the urn that keeps the fattest tabby you’d have ever seen. Its name was Max and it chased cedar waxwings in the yard.
He smokes cigars when he drives so far, and the smoke curls like clouds along the Sunset Boulevard. He dreams he’s somewhere that’s neverwhere and notquitehere because he can’t quite see or hear the ticking of reality the rest of us all breathe and fear. He’s someone else who isn’t here; someone who is nevermore…the ghost of Mister Beauregard.
(March, 2012…although I could’ve sworn it was older.)
Back Door Theology in a Whiskey Glass
**Disclaimer: Contains R-Rated and otherwise controversial content**
Back Door Theology in a Whiskey Glass
JCD Kerwin
I caught snowflakes on my tongue
once upon a time in July,
when the air cut like razorblades
and eggs fried on my brain.
I saw Jesus in a snowflake
when I was seventeen
and Jerry Garcia in a peanut
at twenty.
They both said the universe
isn’t all that large
and Andromeda is not that far
away.
At twenty-five I’m still thinking
about Jesus crackers
and pot leaves
fighting over the world.
I think God is a heroin addict
and It’s laughing at Man
running around with palm leaves,
and back-seat-driving Pope-mobiles.
(I think the Pope and the Queen
go fucking on the weekends
because the Devil makes them
do it. After all,
It’s got candy that’s enticing
to all us lollipop kids.)
I can’t seem to drink enough
to become an alcoholic,
but I’m still too inebriated
for AA to accept me.
I’m chasing horses out of bottles
lining shelves of “just another pub”
in some weird corner of my world,
and I’m not sure if this time
God will take a moment
to join me.
Lord fucking knows
I could use an omnipotent psychiatrist
like God
to sort through the mental shit
I’ve shoved in dingy closets
upstairs.
I don’t believe in angels
but if I did, I’d tell you
one has Irish eyes that glow blue
when they’re laughing, and
they saved my fucked up soul
from monsters in my head.
(Those monsters would make me
their marionette if I let them, but
when my Indigo turns Blue
they stay away and I don’t have to pray
to Jesus Garcia.)
And maybe if there’s Heaven,
it’s right here on Earth,
trapped between the Nowhereland
and Almost There that we’ve created.
They’re our excuses for Paradise,
but maybe Eden’s not man-made;
maybe you can’t find it in peanuts
or grape juice at the altar.
(I don’t care to know ‘cause I know
it’d just frighten me and
I’ve got enough things to be afraid of
looking in a mirror.)
I’m content to walk beside
the same jackass human beings,
because maybe someday
it will all make sense to me…
And I think Jerry might be smilin’,
snortin’ coke with Jesus,
while I’m down here laughin’,
‘cause I found an angel and Paradise
before them.
(April, 2011)
Philosophizing Neon Words
Paul Valery said, “Poems are never finished, just abandoned.” I think that applies to at least half my prose. I write stuff like the nonsense below thinking it somehow looks like a completed piece of work in the end. Maybe it does in some ridiculous metaphorical drunken haze. (Check that, maybe that’s how I wrote it to begin with.)
Maybe all my writing is really poetry in prose clothing. I wonder, then, if all writers are really poets no matter how hard they try not to be? All writers are dreamers, after all. Are all dreamers poets? Are they one in the same? That isn’t to say poets are more “dreamy” than prose writers. I’m thinking out loud. Because I’m a thinker. I’m a philosophicalizer. I like to make up words. Words are fun.
Neon City Lights by dazstudios (flickr)
Neon Daguerreotype
JCD Kerwin
I smell like cigarettes and I’ve got a foul after-taste of something I can’t quite place. I’ve been sitting outside this painted neon disco for far too many hours, watching the wind-up toys move by for one more night.
I frown at the lights and listen to robotic laughter. It’s two a.m. and I watch people break through my vision like I’m flipping through photographs. I miss the way you used to laugh.
I’ve got your picture permanently etched into my memory. I think about it on these kinds of nights, waiting for the scene to turn real. Until it does, I’ll be watching these robots, pretending one of them becomes you.
(Nov. 2011)
Ink Trails
Now that I read this, I’m not at all fond of it. Even after revising the thing, it is, quite frankly, shite. (But isn’t that how we always think of our stuff?)
My paper boat by Aljaz Toman (sharkowskixchaos on devaintART)
Ink trails
JCD Kerwin
We used to sleep ‘till noon on Sundays because on Saturday nights we drowned in Manhattan, drinking each other under the city moon. Just tasting you made me an alcoholic.
You missed Louisiana and crayfish. I promised to take you back to wooden bridges and hot summer days as soon as I finished chasing my dreams. You never waited. I lost you where my eyes turned violet in the dark; the place we watched the stars all night and dreamed we weren’t at all that small.
We made origami from newspapers that belonged to homeless men who died upon the streets.
I remember paper boats in the distance and laughing in the night. We never listened to voices that told us Forever might someday end.
I watched you drift away on our paper ship; I watched you sink and fade, soggy to the sea. Paper ink floated with your hair while your smile became lost among the Funnies.
Now I stand on skyscrapers, sending paper airplanes into the city-sea. I watch them sail away with every memory of you.
(Nov. 2011)
J.C.D. KERWIN 