These days the wind is some kind of portent

Really everytime it blows it is some reminder of

Changes coming

I try to see it there in the air but the eddies and swirls and

Whorls canter out of reach and invisible so

I attach what I can

Maybe it’s my age or my

Job or my

Health whatever it is the wind

Sings to me

Praises and cajoles in the same whistling cadence and

One thing is certain

As a representative of Life Force the wind around here is

Omnipresent

Like old Cesars Palace cocktail waitress the wind

Never dies it just

Cranks

Waking up I felt the inflammation in my anus
A thing that throbbed and whistled I needed
Desperately
to scratch it but you know once you scratch your butt the itch tends to get worse and worse and worser then the gift a bowel movement from somewhere deep inside the center of my colon an aching need for release that pounded my intestines like tiny fists I hoped it would be quick
So I sat on the bowl
Oh the humanity
Was all I could think as link after link of pain and frustration and misery and wheat germ uncoiled from me and
plopped plopped plopped in the azure water
It seemed I sat for a day but it was only about 48 minutes
I rose and surveyed
The ugliness was unsurpassed in these clean times so
I flushed it away gasping for breath in the uprising choking chlorine that suddenly seemed to rise from everywhere
Now the wipe
I prayed for a clean clip
for white paper to stare back at me after one or two diligent swipes
Alas it was not to be
swipe wipe swipe wipe swipe
like the fields of Alaska after the Valdez tragedy my ass was it’s own
Prince William Sound
Peppering the landscape with endless smears of tar.
I knew I was doomed the itching now a Living twitching thing that tortured me my rectum an everlasting gobstopper of butt agony and
Wipe swipe wipe swipe wipe wrap paper around the finger jam it up again and again and still brown Crayola mocking me poisoning my world with its fetid redundancy
So I stood but clenching and unclenching urging me to itch
Itch itch
Honey let’s go
And that day my clean white underwear nestled against the weirdly engorged button of my shame
Ageing gracefully is for people in “ensure” commercials I thought
As I cruised the aisles of the local Pharmacy praying for a swatch of carpet to rub my naked bum upon like some cracked-out beagle unicycling across the rug
but I had a cure in mind
Where do you keep your anal itch creams and ointments I shyly ask
AISLE #B yelled loudly and with just the barest hint of
Understanding
And I tromp over and find it emblazoned in mile high letters on the box
ANAL ITCH CREME
I carry my nasty little secret to the checkout
of course a Fine babe in front of me and one behind
the price check was inevitable
No I don’t age gracefully
And I believe in Karma
Victim of my laughter
All my childhood long
At preparation H commercials and the
Suffering of Hemorrhoids
by the aged.

©2012 Harry Fagel

You get to watch that television
In America
From the comfort zone
Even in the ghetto cable T.V. blares loudly
Incessantly
And there is always cheese in America
Big blocks of whole milk created bliss
Passed out from big Gov-en-ment trucks by
Smiling youngsters
You can skateboard in America
Past the parks and parking lots
In and out and over and under as long as there are no bored cops around
To rip your wheels out from under you and send ya packing
In America
Children worry about what brand of shoes to wear
What brand of cereal to eat
What brand of toy to play with
What brand of gun to shoot
But that’s OK
Parents worry about the same stuff in
America
Fretting about this and that and this and that and
I love America
Because you can say these things
All you want
And no one comes booting in your door at 3 am
And makes you disappear forever
In America
You can make art and show it to almost anyone anywhere and
No “Representative of the People” will come and chop off your
Hand or
Head or
Wazoo
In America people have created time to still dream
To imagine kindness as a gift
To give love in the strangest of places
To believe in something bigger and better
In America
We try to try to try to just get along
We forgive and forget
We Want so badly to be equal yet demand that we remain different in
America

In America you can go to the movies
Buy cars
Get married
Have children
Make love
Run for office
Play all day
Dance all night
Drink booze
Smoke ciggy butts
Serve your Country
Write books
Practice Religion
Practice Magic
Practice Sports
Become famous
Become quiet
In America you can
Strongly disagree
Most of all in America you can make a difference for yourself and blessedly
For others too
This beautiful creature
Stretched out across oceans
Billions of everything living in her belly
Ideas
Animals and
People
America
America
America

©2012 Harry Fagel all rights reserved

Looking at a blank page

Seeking the rage that forms the art and

Finding only peace

Looking deeper searching the poison rivers

that once were lakes that once were

Oceans that once spanned space but now

Trickle along almost dehydrated from this complacency

I find myself in

Ennui creeping from the goodness I have found

To steal my passion and carry it far away from my minds eye

“Stop!” I cry and seek the blistering hole that has tortured me

Since childhood

Immerse

myself in its fetid depths and taste the rancor settled there the

Abuses and shamefulness and misery and failure

I wallow like a dog in filth

Catching bits and pieces of hell on my shifting skin

Memories painful slaps to bring me ‘round to my angst

FATHER do you sleep well in thoughtlessness your little mensch all grown up and bearing your cross whittled down to a splinter small enough to fit in a vest pocket

I did not wither in your footsteps following you to endless liquor sunsets and seeking the dead ghosts of the past with passion better given to the living

I did not learn from you the lessons I carry now that time of fatherly teaching passing you by like the thick blood pumping past your heartlessness

I love you still just for making me but nothing more and remorse a faint nag that surfaces when I dream of being a professional football player or a rock star which is less than seldom now

I used to cry listening to Sting singing

Of taking his father away with him to strange lands and just being

But crying doesn’t bring you here

MOTHER I see you lonely and feel my heart crack and sputter at all this time you sacrifice for others pretending your not but I know

I feel

I taste your sadness it spills from you in Angel tears that rip the world and stain the sky

You would never say it

But you do you just don’t know it so you hide in others needs and magnify your self with pity sometimes at your being overworked but mostly overlooked and alone

Grandpa needs you now so your loneliness gets pushed to second place again

I forgave you long ago for standing fast with bad men I understand you had nowhere to go but home and so you eventually did and I’m still a good man regardless because I’ve always felt

Your love

The words bleeding from me now matching the tears that spill from my eyes as I wonder back

Back

Back

Regret is an easy rock to grasp to your belly

Letting it pull you down into the abyss

Feeling the sea walls rise above you as you

Cry and drown

But here is where I need to be

Tasting shit at the bottom my

Present world a paradise and free

Where I laugh with impunity and eat life like rare steak and dance

My wife and children my anchors to joy

I must visit the hell

Inside

The vault of bad things and bad ideas and just bad

And bask there for a time before I return to now the time I revel in

Thus creating the balance I need to create and

So the blank page fills with rage

And pain

and maybe hope

And I can go on again

Giving the inside out to the outside in and

Freeing those sins that

Are my buoyancy now

Catapulting me past those failures I articulated

and letting me taste a future of

Blossoming

A time of regrowth

And a harvest of change

See me you fat cat motherfuckers

See me down here on my public patch that I cultivated from my own

Sweat and tears and built on the foundation that I carved with help from the lovers and loved in my life

See me you fat cat motherfuckers

See me spinning in a closing circle looking for the exit that has to be here in the mountain of debt I have

Consume consume consume consume

I go out in the day and in the night

Clad in the law and armed with stick and gun and light and loud mouth

I go out and risk it all

Sometimes for the innocent child beaten by endless fists

Sometimes for the innocent traveler waylaid by blood-letters

Sometimes for the innocent woman who just meant to nurture but mostly

I go out and risk it all for

Cracked out crazy methamphetamine high junkie wife beaters who lost their job and will to survive

Back in the summer of 92 and still they

Muster oxygen and have the strength to try and murder me when I walk by in my tans

See me you fat cat motherfuckers

I’m down here on my little scratch my misty point my scrabbled stones

Bought into it all key being bought into it

The more I have

The more I mean, right?

Stuff stuffed in stuffing

House bulging with wads of stuff I use to fill up the holes that were burned into me when I was but a Child poor me poor me what with the alcoholics and neurotics and psychotics surrounding my upbringing

See me you fat cat motherfuckers all decked out in silk and brass and huge cash wads and

See me struggle against the wait of my needs that you assured me I needed

I aint no welfare case

I aint no slug on drugs

I aint no beat off

I aint no pariah

Just a man, a dad, a husband a warrior

Now I have my beautiful family wrapped up in the same clown car

Sitting in our house

Working my ass off

Wife working her ass off

Spinning wheels in the cast off slick slimy vomit of greed

See me you fat cat motherfuckers do you see the tears drip drip dripping down my face as I grin

Through this temporal rift this unexpected shift this newcomer to thrift I am now

I can’t be beat with the the brass knuckles of WANT if I don’t HAVE so I give it away give it away give it away now

All the things don’t mean a thing when stacked to my youngest telling me he loves me or to my oldest telling me he loves me or my wife telling me she loves me and me encircling them all with the good arms the Lord gave me and knowing it’s going to all be Ok when

Chase bank takes our house away

See me fat cat motherfuckers

I will be ok.

©2012 Harry Fagel all rights reserved