Rockbottom Blues

Somewhere out on the docks by the emerald waters of Seattle people are mulling around in moans and mist.  I dream of the silver in the air and remember their salty faces whipped by winds all red chapped.  At night I pry my eyes and reminisce about our old America, when she was young and unsophisticated; the times before our minds turned to bemused greed and her limbs became withered and gangrenous.

I sit back and sing the rock bottom blues on sad, cold January nights while roaming Buddha-bums hide under dark overpasses huddled by fire drinking wine or writhing on cardboard mats and vomiting malt on the desolate bedrocks of old America.  I hear the lost cry of orphans tumbling like smoke through ashes and grim slums.  Solemn moans dripping through black alley gutters in the cold depths of winter's unforgiving night.

Why is it that evil is so attractive to man, and we must forever and a day fend ourselves from what we know is wrong?  Doing what’s right is a climb to Everest’s peaks and back while trading with the devil on Midwestern crossroads is as simple as jumping into your car. I look to the skies of the great starry void and know that those with gold in the veins and crowns laid on the nightstands have given up the stars, so they lie awake at night and pray they may catch a glimpse of their candlelight flickers in their nightmares.

I find the duality of all things humorous and forgotten. 
We see blindly into the future and wish it were the past. 
All men are created equal but not all men are remembered. 

We look to those who have created fantastic legends and we admire their audacity and ambition, praying before our beds that we may come close to their accomplishment but we look through our hands and see the howling winds atop the crystal mountains that lie ahead and turn back to wholesome mediocrity.  We are secretly terrified of  our dreams, we tread carefully into the murky fogs searching for the truth in reason.

I ran towards the mountains in great strides that spanned a hundred miles and at the foot of the mountains I had forgotten why I ran to the end of the world.  I turned away in a shutter and walked back with my head down and cursed the fool who planted the dream.  We all curse the man with the bright blue eyes who shows us the path we know we should run, and curse him again when our eyes are opened to the breadth of the task.

My song to the small Americans breaks my back and I shiver in the cold rose dusks while I stand naked before the mirror.  We all stand naked.  I ran across the land and saw the hope that was once conjured by men who saw a masterpiece in forests and dirt.  I have seen the American dream.  Only when the sun rises will all men see the light, and although it is blinding, most will never understand its rays.  Instead they will live by night and howl with agony in their hearts at the moon because they’d rather be bathed in silver than gold.  They are the soulless fools who you’ve read about in castles jumping around with bells and circus colors who have nothing to live for but ignorance, and they drift off to deaths hand thinking they have lived.

I see the fools sitting on cement walls cackling in rhyme and ignoring time because they have no clocks.  Visions of strong-hearted saints rambling with rucksacks on highways headed for the sun in the depths of eternal knowledge.  I see wise men on dusty roads with gray beards and bright blue eyes with outstretched finger pointing down the forked path emitting hope to the lost and wandering souls in search of meaning.  I see women with courage sweeping floors with calloused hands and using their gift to their own disadvantage by choosing solace over success.  I see the multitudes of man never living up to the potential they saw as they fell out of the womb into the light of the world.

We teach our children what not to do and what not to see, and limit them with red eyes and chalk.  We point them towards smog and steel then send them chasing facade greenbacks rather than truth.  They run about in ignorance until one day the lonely child sitting in obscurity picks up an inkling of the universe and runs to tell her classmates who laugh.  She runs home and tells her parents what she’s seen with absolute righteousness in her eyes and they tell her to watch TV.  When she is twenty she will know that what she saw in her youth was more real than the air she breathes.