meh haikus because I'm lazy

I should be writing
a longer poem but I'm
just way too faded

I have so many
vices it's like I can't tell
between Need and Want

A Fairy Tale for Home and Family.

I suppose calling it Five Points was ironically accurate, myself and my young brother having witnessed as many stabbings in just our first month in New York. This was Paradise Square, which was anything but. You can blame it on the Irish, the irony not the crime, well not all of it. My brother and I would sit on the corner of Orange street and stare at the side of the mission building like we could see the sun rise and set through the patchwork wood walls and pitch, sooty smoke of coal and wood burning. Probably bodies burning too, but I didn't learn of that until much later, little Alex never got the chance. My mother, God rest her soul, passed on the ship bound for Ellis Island in the year of Our Lord 18-hundred and forty-four, just three days before we sailed into port. My father, a good Irish Cathol with a rolling Gaelic tenor that could soothe a banshee, hailed from Derry. He had made quite a name for himself with his storytelling, poems, and jokes. Back home he did, but here in New York there wasn't much time or patience for stories, less for poetry, and nothing to joke about, save for the death, murder, and disease, but it became too redundant to speak of and poor subject matter. So, my father, he drank. The boom of the industrial revolution had faded to a droning whine and the only jobs, past whoring, gambling, and stealing, were all held by those that had come over a decade or so before us. So, where there was no work, there was whiskey, and though the landlord would be banging down our door every week for rent and for days at a time there wouldn't be wood for the fire or fresh milk for me and my brother, me dad he always had the drink, and drink he did. Little Alex had taken to wearing our mother's nightcap to bed, he would raise such a din if he misplaced it the whole building would moan and bang the walls. He refused to sleep without it. Alex was... touched. In the head. He wouldn't speak much at all and when he did he would shiver as if freezing for a moment then clam up and sway back and forth. Dad called him “his poor little defective”, I never much liked Dad calling him that, but he would swear up a storm and beat me something fierce if I spoke out. I never really cared about getting beat, all the boys got beat, and not just by our Mums and Da; if ever two coins clinked together in your pocket you couldn't get ten paces without being pulled into an alley or knocked about the back of the head in the middle of the street. We fought, me and my boys, and we fought well; I suppose Dad helped with that. I never minded, but poor little Alex caught the worst of it when Dad had taken to the drink too hard. I always knew the nights it would happen. Dad would be up at all hours of the morning, weeping and singing Green Grow the Lilacs, our mother she loved lilacs when she was alive, was buried with a whole great bunch of them donated by some of the kinder folks in our building. And Dad would be singing and weeping and drinking the whole time until he finished the last verse and then he'd just sit silently for a while. He would never say a word, he'd just slowly creep into our room and snatch Little Alex up out of bed, tear the nightcap off his head and beat him fiercely. Tears and rage in his eyes, teeth gnashing like some beast, and fists aflight upon poor Little Alex. I tried to stop him a time or two until he broke my arm, then I just became too terrified to stand up and I'd lay in bed pretending to be asleep as Little Alex would scream, the sound of our father's fists on his back and head like thunderclaps. None of the other folks in the building even noticed, which wasn't too surprising since all you'd ever hear, day and night, was someone being beaten, a woman weeping, consumed in sorrow for a dead son, or daughter, or husband, the whore down the hall would have visitors at all hours making a racket, and the family beside us had eleven children, three cousins, and four big sheep dogs; quiet was a commodity no one had in excess, and so we minded our own business and they minded theirs. My boys had seen me so many times with a black eye or a split lip from me own Dad they came to call him the Giant, and my brother and I were prisoners in his house. I taught myself how to write and read a bit, there wasn't a school that'd have us, what with Little Alex being in his condition and me showing up all bruised and battered and both of us as destitute as they come. The Mission tried for a little while, but the money ran out and they had been robbed so many times the doors shut and chains were run up to keep everyone out. So after a particularly awful night and Little Alex just being left unconscious for well over an hour I took to leaving little notes for my father under his bottle. I would sneak up, quiet as a mouse, just a bit before dusk and take a bright blue paper from a notepad I'd swiped and in pencil write:

Your wife, though deceased, still watches from Heaven

Her ears being deafened by thund'rous blows to her sons

Though drink you must, and drink you may

Know your wife, she weeps, ever' night and all day

This is nay but a message, but a warning for you

When you again meet your wife, will your heart prove true?

I would leave this for him at least a few times a month, whenever he got a hold of Little Alex real bad. He'd rouse from his drunk and find it and go pale as a ghost. He thought it were the faeries warning him, or perhaps even Christ Almighty himself, but it only staved off his fury for a few days, then he'd crawl back into his bottle and Alex, poor Little Alex, would pay the price. And we went on, Dad being drunk and out of work, me and me boys fighting up and down and across Paradise Square being chased by coppers and crooks, and poor Little Alex, clinging to our Mum's nightcap, rocking back and forth in perfect silence on our bed. After the city ran a Neighborhood Reclamation project, nothing more than cops beating the brains out of any man, woman, or child unlucky enough to fall under their billy club out in the Square, what little change my father could scrape up from singing and joking and reciting his raunchy limericks and poems went away, and things got worse than I could have ever feared. A man in our building, a syphillitic little squirt, had taken to making his own shine and, half blind and out of his head, he would gift this to our Dad for running his wares about the building. A mere capful of the stuff could send the stoutest son of Ireland to bed upside down, but our Dad would drink it by the mugful, and repeat the process until he couldn't barely even lift the stuff to his lips. And so one night, staggering and smashing into the walls of our hovel, he barged in and brought Little Alex up by the neck of his nightshirt and beat him so bad he bled from both his ears. I didn't dare to move, though I wanted to scream and drive a knife into his heart, for fear that he'd kill me only little brother if I made a sound. Dad passed out at the foot of our bed in a puddle of Alex's blood and his own drool and vomit, snoring as I cradled my poor little brother in me arms, rocking him back and forth until he finally stopped crying and fell asleep. Another night of this was more than I could stand and I knew my father had at least three more jars of this Devil Water in the cupboard out of my reach. The next day I ran about with me boys for a bit, I stopped and chatted with our neighbors and pet the great big sheep dogs, I swiped a bit of seashell from a stall in the Square and gave it to the bright-eyed lass whose family just moved into the tenement the week before and when I came home I put Little Alex to bed while Dad sat at the table, mug in his quivering fist, staring at the wall. I put Little Alex to bed on my side and, when he was sound asleep, carefully slipped our Mother's nightcap from off his head and put it on my own. I pulled the blanket up and tried to cram myself all together, to look small, small like poor Little Alex. It weren't an hour later that our door came crashing open, nearly pulling from the rusted hinges, and our Dad, God Rest His Soul, took me up by the collar of me nightshirt and beat me something fierce. My body bounced and rocked, held fast in his clenched, white-knuckled fist, until he landed the last blow and I went limp, my fingers uncurling and, crumpled up in my palm, the last note I ever wrote to me Father, me poor, poor Father fell to the floor. I kept this one short, there wasn't much more for me to write or say anyhow, it was just one stanza:

Though drink you must, and drink you may

Know your wife, and your only son, they weep, ever' night and all day

don't even get me started

1
I'm allowing myself two more glasses of bourbon and, say, five or six more cigarettes and then I'm passing out, but in the meantime I'm going to write whatever comes to mind until the above list runs out.

1:00AM on the dot and I don't think this exercise will have the effect I'm looking for, or maybe just assuming it will have. Said effect being I will be at least partly motivated to write more, and more often. Something tells me after this exercise I will be

A> drunk
B> over smoking cigarettes
C> too wired to fall asleep

And so I should go out for a smoke now. 1:01AM.

Dammit.

2
I feel completely separate from the part of me that desired to be creative. I allow myself to get into ruts through which I convince myself I am unable to create due to the situation surrounding me.

So I drink
and smoke so many cigarettes I could blacken the lungs of a horse
twice over
I enjoy my lows
as much as I enjoyed the last three lines I just deleted
they serve a purpose
a fleeting one
and then they are discarded
not haphazardly forgotten, but purposefully removed
I don't want to see the world burn
I just want to ignite some small parts of it
to illuminate the whole picture

3
this is all so I can justify not watching the presidential debates and feeling like I still did something

I feel guilty for not being as involved in politics as I could be, but being painfully aware enough of what's happening in the political arena

I find myself echoing the things I see on the few political resources I sort of follow because they conveniently coincide with my level of understanding of current events

I try not to be a douche about it and I think that's going well enough

4
tried to waste some space here
delete, delete, delete

tonight I had the pleasure of smelling a rose with a significant hint of citrus behind it
that might not seem like much, and it really isn't much
but it fucking intrigued me
wasting space

5
there aren't enough people who really appreciate alcohol
just, for instance, whiskey
are you talking about scotch, bourbon, or straight whiskey?
now do you want Irish whiskey or something domestic
yes, there is a difference
i don't know shit about scotch except that some of it tastes like fucking Band-Aids
and I'm not having that shit
bourbon is kind of where it's at
now you've got Kentucky, produces 98% of the bourbon (at least that's what the video at Woodford Reserve said) and kicks ass at producing that much bourbon
so there are very specific parameters by which one produces Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey
it's capitalized because it's awesome
a barrel in which bourbon is aged can only be used once
FUN FACT: there is an awesome Kentucky brewery that buys used barrels from Woodford Reserve in which to brew their beer; they make a stout and a lager, I believe
they are both fantastic
your batch must be distilled a minimum of, I think, three times before it can be considered quality enough to get that KY deal of "It's Fucking Bourbon!"
in big ass, crazy sexy copper stills
the color comes from the wood of the barrel and the amount of charring each barrel has
what's charring? glad you asked!
it's taking a fucking flame to the inside of each individual barrel and "charring" it to a degree which is based on a number system; it's 1-10, I think (whatever, I forgot)
the amount of charring affects the flavor, finish, and color of the bourbon
so, with this small amount of bourbon knowledge, you too can be an asshole in dive bars, bitching about not having your preferred bourbon, and vie for the completely temporal spotlight when talking to people at restaurants/bars about t heir choice of whiskey!
double points for finding a thin avenue on which to present your painfully banal dissertation on good bourbon!

you should hear me talk about wine

6
i think i've already spiraled out of control and am just now reigning myself back in
over the past about six years i have accomplished only a bit more than discovering the very bottom of my capabilities
i wouldn't say i've ever actually hit rock bottom
but i definitely scraped against it enough to scrawl my initials

7
i'm not even listening to music
this has been going on for far too long
i
need
sound
!

8
1:51AM
the clock is no friend
just passing time as you stare
while time passes by

I have a composition book from elementary school which is full of poems I wrote. Instead of daily journal entries, or letters to the teacher, or whatever else they had us write, I chose to write poems.

September 14 (I'm assuming, maybe, 1984)

The Giraffe's Breakfast

The giraffe has a neck
which stretches
so high
That sometimes I think
it can reach
to the sky
From his mouth
to his tummy
is such a long way,
his meals have to travel
for hours each day.
A giraffe would enjoy
his breakfast
much more
if he started
to eat it
the evening before.

This poem of mine always struck me the most amusing.

I was definitely sitting in class, not at all paying any attention, considering quietly to myself the premise of this poem.

Seriously; how long must it take food to travel down a giraffe's throat?

These are the kinds of questions that cost me many a note from my teacher to take home and get signed by my parents.

So, in some ways, things never change...

Although there aren't any more notes for my parents to sign, or for me to attempt to forge their signatures on, I can still meander off on some completely arbitrary aspect of reality. I find myself regularly pausing to contemplate just how many people might have stopped to admire a blooming flower. I wonder how many people might be making wishes on the rainbow I'm looking at, or a star, or anything; I just sort of wonder how many people wish in earnest anymore. How people must live with an actualized fear of there existing an eternal hell for them to reside in. Or a heaven. How so many people can personally conceptualize, categorize, and define in their own manner so much about their existence and yet, simultaneously assume that  everything is fated or destined and we have no free will. How others can actively deny their ability to take a hand in their own lives and assume destiny will take its course, even if it means they'll be miserable.

How so many people can find so much hope on the page of a best seller, yet can't find that same increment of hope in admiring a flower, or a rainbow, or a kitten, or a smiling old person, or a child laughing.

Or in the pure, unbridled emotion in the wailing of a newly made widow.

In the absolute finality of death, and in the human ability to persevere and not forget, but just keep going on regardless.

In a sunset. In roadkill. In the beautiful song of the morning birds waking your hung over ass up way too early.

It's life. It's all beautiful and ugly. It's a great big totally effed up mistake that's the most perfect thing ever.

Somehow I arrived here after posting a poem about a giraffe's digestion.