I just watched The Nightmare Before Christmas on accident...damn, for a children's movie it sure is incredible visually, nearly every scene is irresistible eye candy, exceedingly creative and full of strange nuances that I never noticed when I was younger. It's all so strange, both delightful and macabre, and...damn, when that walking sag full of bugs rips open and falls into the cauldren at the end, fucking awesome. Anyway, it's been a hell of a weekend, actually, a hell of a Saturday. Getting fucked over on Friday didn't help it much, but all was not lost as I walked around town in the blistering cold and recognized things that I swore that I had forgotten and would never find again, like what it feels like to run down a set of train tracks with blaring whistles and rumbling at your back and how radio towers can look like UFOs in the wrong light. Skip to Saturday, however, I hung out with my dad. Doesn't sound like fun, right? It probably wasn't, and shouldn't have been because hanging out with a parent and calling it even remotely amusing isn't commonly considered "cool," but I can't be bothered by that. He took my sister and I around St. Luke's hospital and showed us what the public eye doesn't see, for some reason, taking us to these basement passages in which they rolled murder victims around on gurneys, boiler rooms that were massive and seemed like the gut of some apocalyptic monster, and most noteably, the roof that overlooked 380, the Quaker Oats factory, and a hillside that looked like it was on fire. I couldn't help but smell that terrible scent that recalls injury and death of loved ones, that sterile hospital one that's forgotten about yet is vividly familiar once one enters such a place. However, he had the key to this place and we had the insatiable interest, I think that for a while he felt like Dad again. There was a point to going up there, a haircut or something, but OH, the PLASMA TVs! Wonderful bits of technology, those, man and boy both examined the screens from every angle and realized that you can see the picture from any angle just as if you're viewing it from straight on. Incredible. We then split apart, then my dad and I cruised around up to Cedar Rapids again for a while after the sun had set and I watched the opening scene of the Excorcist...which, by the way, is amazing. The rest of the movie did nothing for me, an absolute waste of time, but the opening sequence in Iraq is so subtley powerful that...uh...I command you to rush out and find it now, watch it, and turn the movie off right after the scene where the sound of the dogs fighting is juxtaposed with the shot of that demonic looking statue. Yeah, do it. So, more to the point, we drove around Cedar Rapids, and it was a typical Saturday night up there, kids in parking lots with their cars and bikes and separate but interlocking storylines connecting the framework of the night together. It all reminds me of a modern day American Graffiti, really, seeing all these people conversing up and down the avenues, probably to race or at least test their manhood together; they're different faces but the motivations are surely the same, the Fords have turned to Toyotas but the spirit carries on. The second poem here is about this, in fact. On this night, of course, nearly everyone was celebrating Halloween, so things looked a bit off, but in a great way. And then I went back to town and wrote down everything Ben said on a roll of paper towels because he is, as everyone knows, The Messiah. Then I went home at 4:30 and woke up at 3. And there's several details of recent happenings. And here's several poems about recent happenings, not necessarily the same ones. I know, the first one doesn't appear to make much sense, but it's actually a commentary on how being power hungry is hopeless and those in power innately know it, my condition in regards to this, and finally an eager gaze to the future that I had to put so this poem would stop being so damn bleak. And...the second one is about cruising around in Cedar Rapids, like I said, and the title is a reference to an old poem I wrote, "Black Cedar Blues". It's like a series, or something. And what the fuck is with all these "angel" comparisons? It's like I believe in God or something, geez. What of Tomorrow? Caesar knew it all meant nothing In the muddy canals of his irrigated heart Flooding/bleeding over Yet never cared to admit the fear And relinquish a power-hungry dream to those dreaming it. They're post-conscious fools I'm a hypnagogic vagrant Coughing my poverty all over rags of circumstance It was in the courageous contours of everything cowardly In which I made my home now a hopeless hermit hibernating Knowing that a love lived lifeless is a life loveless lived They were starlit nights of tents spotted with alcohol A thousand maligned voices woven into the crystalline air Shattering such a frail canopy, shards raining down and washing Us clean of our regrets, a thousand shouts, a thousand angels Tumbling into the tangled tresses of memory Impenetrable mire But disregard them, What of tomorrow? Black Cedar Truth These October leaves losing summer's grasp Tumble into rivers rushing... To be at the wheel of this meandering progress is bliss Portrayed in jarring frames of Sudden change, flickering, neon dreaming of blood-soaked taverns Outside of which angels beckon stray cats to curl into arms Of questionable security, indelible warmth Buddha on a park bench nods in tar-lunged approval Perpetual grin, an apparition streetside Motions to the hyper-vigilant "Keep this aimless path, this fruitless sweetness, these: Poor young girls turning wrong way on one way Their confidence closed in clasped hands over painted visage Reveals psychological stress fractures, some hairline hints that Beg for assistance, asinine or otherwise, yet not penultimate Fool of this broken avenue will revive her hope in sterile humanity." Polar claustrophobia festers all in a dreamlike line of sight (while knowing America still coughs Graffiti into the snot rag of machismo) Children with toy cars, runs haphazard to country roads of The Legendary Dead Man's Corner hopeless urban legends and Fiery mangled wrecks screaming to moonlit sky "Why?!" While the seraph dressed in shadows and cobwebs Walks across this Mecca of obscurity Unlocks tattoo parlor doors, rusty and neglected Needles not of ink, but of seething opiates calming the river, cauterizing the flow no, no, Adrenaline flow never dies, even under gaudy billboard irrelevance And crushing Quaker magnificence, the omnipotent Oat of this rural land caught in a city's hazy vision With me, my guide to these strange stretching wonders Of bleeding bliss and concrete construct anarchy Is my father, he exiled from home, he not knowing that "home" an ill-conceived concept He's an artist great, unassuming and unknown Sculptor of sunrise yawns, painter of temples Of art so abstract only the fool reveres it (these temples I do adore) And here he skids slipshod over shining asphalt while Stereo blares serpentine to those ignorant of the spectacle of it all... | 
