Pennies

Poetry in bed, leave the lyrics on the floor and let the radio sing us anthems from the big bands. I've never been to the city and I'll never leave you again. We'll just lip-sync everything until it hurts. Forever in your favor, let's stay in tonight and always. I haven't an eternity to spend in the bars or on the cliffs. This is where we'll dissolve into rose petals and ash. This is where the waves from the record player will carry us to the window and float us out into the great heavenly beyond. We ain't taking anything with us. Our books will stay, just so the neighbors can know what we liked. Friends and family will see us on the other side. We can live forever on nothing at all. And I'll promise you this over and over, time and time again, until my mouth rots and your ears burn. This is going to make us sick with our own jealousy. Let's go to bed laughing this time.

He Gave Murder Back To The People

"[Dashiell Hammett] took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley... [He] gave murder back to the kind of people who do it for a reason, not just to provide a corpse; and with means at hand, not with hand wrought dueling pistols, curare, and tropical fish.”

— Raymond Chandler (in The Simple Art of Murder)


After years of watching, rewatching and adoring The Thin Man film series, I'm finally getting around to reading the book.

A Panic Attack (In A Lower Key)

"A Panic Attack (In A Lower Key)"
for somebody else by jake kilroy.

You find yourself in the middle of a story that you didn't write, throwing up over nothing. You find yourself cleaning the kitchen, cleaning the bathroom, cleaning your room and finding nothing new or interesting. You're aware of everything that belongs to you. And then, pretty soon, you're going to happy hours and dinner parties before you realize it's December. Shit, it's Christmas, you think. I have to care about something, but you don't. You don't even try. You barely managed the thought. Instead, you briefly lapsed into one night of gin and cookies before calling both quits in your new year's resolutions that you wrote down on a whim. And you didn't even type them up either. You just wrote them on the back of your car payment envelope. You send it out anyway. You'll remember them. And who cares if your dealership and insurance company sees what you want to change about yourself? They're probably not any better off. Soon, it's another year and you haven't changed. Change is all that brings doom. So you stay the same. You hold onto nothing and you believe in nothing. You aren't even atheist. Your god is a shrug. Your meals are whatever you have in the fridge. Your drives are exactly as they were the day before. You hum bullshit to yourself on every walk you take, but you never actually sit down to write songs. It's too much work. Soon, you're talking about writing music. That's what has made you, talking about doing something. You're drifting in the weirdest way, you think. You don't mind meeting co-workers for drinks, as long as it ends there. You don't mind going on dates, as long as they end there. You don't mind seeing your family, as long as the conversations stop at what happened in the last whatever-time-you-spent apart. You read, but you take in zero information. You watch movies, but all it inspires you to do is watch more movies. You realize all of this and break your new year's resolution and start getting really drunk. You're making phone calls to people that don't remember you when they answer the phone with the word 'hello' as a question. You're not a period. You're barely a comma. You're a run-on sentence that nobody wants to speak. You're barely a paragraph and everything is a fucking paragraph when you think about it. Start shopping more and buying things to make up your life. Start considering philosophy as moral groundings. Start quoting others so you can say something. Jesus, just say anything, you tell yourself. And most of what you say isn't to you or anybody. It's just to talk. It's so your mouth won't freeze in the great winter of your existence. Buy more coats so you look like you go places. Buy more kitchen utensils so it looks like you entertain. Shit, just kick holes in your wall, so it looks like something happened at some place. You start coming up with favorite sites, to look like you have an online presence. You start deciding favorite restaurants so you can rate them on sites you only visit when you accidentally click on online advertisements. You don't even eat there. You mostly eat at home, and, even then, it's the same thing night after night. You go through phases. They're not even trends. You're just a dart board of choices, but you hate sports. You don't understand them and you wish you did, but you don't. So you think maybe if you start exercising, it'll all just come to you, but it won't. You go on walks by yourself, but it's to places you need to go. You're taking walks to the supermarket to buy toothpaste and deodorant, just to be an acceptable person to be around. You start wishing for a nervous breakdown on the way home, just so you can feel something. You just want something big to happen, so you can react. Maybe if your house was on fire, you could at least feel the warmth of your neighbors. You just want to say 'oh no,' for two fucking seconds. You want to have something to lose. You want something to gain again. You want to repeat, just so you can call something a routine, because you don't see anything you do as routine. You see it as a sprawling landscape of nothing. Where do you build your life in the barren scope of you? How do you go about constructing anything? What is there to have? Get real, man, and get real quick. That's all you've got. You just got one big long fucking epic promise to yourself that means you're going to finally do something and get it together. And, until then, all you've got is this. And this sucks, guy.

Wrong Section

I was in Barnes & Noble last night, looking for a recommended novella. After minutes of unsuccessfully browsing the store on my own, I approached the help desk.

"What can I do for you?" the girl behind the counter very politely asked.

"I wanted to see if you guys had a book in stock," I told her, "or find out if maybe I was in the wrong section entirely."

"What's the name of the book?"

"The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis."

She typed it in and began scrolling.

"We should have it," she said, as she moved away and implied that I was to follow her.

"Oh, it's downstairs?" I asked, as I followed her with a confused expression. "I was looking upstairs."

"What section were you in?"

"Sci-Fi & Fantasy," I told her. "What section is it actually in anyway?"

"Christian Inspiration."

"Ah," I said, as she found the book and handed it to me. "That's awkward."

She gave me a funny look and then went back to the help desk.

It was a moment where I wondered who blurred the genres, me or the book store. And then I contemplated how much personal ideas, notions and philosophies affect your general basic interpretation of art and the world.

But it turned out to be an honest mistake, as in the preface of the book though, Lewis writes, "I beg readers to remember that this is a fantasy. It has of course, or I intended it to have, a moral. But the transmortal conditions are solely an imaginative supposal: they are not even a guess or a speculation at what may actually await us. The last thing I wish is to arouse factual curiosity about the details of the after-world."

Twas a good way to start a great dialogue.

Considering Love On A Porch At Night Somewhere In The South During Summertime

In the barrel moon light, I heard your body crackle like a dying fire. I was on the porch smoking my pipe and counting stars. But it was a nearly starless night, so I numbered the ones circling my aching head. There was too much brandy in me to not sway. And I listened to the floor boards creak as I rocked back and forth and stretched my knees. Our porch is so white, I thought, but a striking pale blue under the big bucket wash moon, tucked in the sky of mirthless and endless darkness. I spit stray tobacco and watched the bugs lazily bounce off the lantern. Such a tremendous glow our house has, I considered. We have our bookshelves, our furniture and a kitchen. What more we need, I don't know. But, then again, what I don't know could fill the house too.

I have these moments before midnight where I come out here to count my lucky and dizzy stars that you'll be in that bed come the morning hour. Loving you is like catching the last train home and I find myself thankful that I made it, even though I've racked up a heap of bad decisions over time. Some evenings, I think my beating heart will wake you up. Other nights, I find myself unable to sleep so close to your fire and I reckon I'm a man that should sleep in the chill of the world.

I try to be decent enough, but you...you, darling, are the quiet hum I want to hear within me. You know, your skin rides the sparse light of this dark rolling landscape and, for it, I don't quite know what to do with myself. There's an honor in the way you sleep, so content and so very within the world. Even as a living, breathing man, going on day to day, I consider myself a visitor many nights.

So, in those soul-calling hours, I drink myself into a stupor, just to make it to the bed in peace. I never stumble, but, instead, I sometimes slump close to tears before I take the first step back. As I move like a ghost, weightless and haunted, I dig out my grave of memories and, upon reaching the sheets and your shoulder, the house has become a palace.

You are beautiful, certainly, and, you won't admit it, but, you have the makings of what the world was actually, truly made for. Bless you for even making me consider prayer.

I wish I could train the fireflies to spell out your name. That would be a treat. But I'm thankful that you settle for me making you breakfast every morning.

Ah, shucks.

My Poetic Pick-Up Line

Girls love poetry, right? Well, why wait until it's, like, your eighth Labor Day together or whatever to write her a kick-ass poem? I say, no more! Start things off all sexy-poetic, I say!

Here's the poem I'd drop on a chick at the bar:

Holy shit, girl! DAMN;
I wanna do stuff to you.
Hey: you like haikus?

And then BOOM! I'd be in!

Muthafuckin' Freaky Hug City.

But, see, the only problem here is that she wouldn't be able to see all of my awesome punctuation, you know?

Ah well, you live and you learn, I suppose.

The Haiku Break-Up

The Haiku Break-Up
an obnoxious break-up in the form of ridiculous and silly haikus.
by jake kilroy.

"You and me are through!
You're the shittiest boyfriend.
I want you to leave."

"But I don't wanna.
Who the hell will make me food?
Shit, I'll starve to death!"

"That's not my problem.
Besides, you only eat drugs.
I bet you're high now."

"So, what if I am?
My hands glow in the dark, bitch!
I don't need your tits!"

"Do you hear yourself?
This is why we're breaking up!
You're insane on drugs!"

"Me no way insane.
You, bad girlfriend, make me go.
Me best guy ever."

"Oh my god, shut up.
You can barely dress yourself.
Please just leave, ok?"

"But me live here, yes?
I give you hot massage, yes?
You no mad now, yes?"

"Why are you still here?
Stop talking like a caveman!
You're such a stoner!"

"I talk like cat now.
Hey, I can has cheeseburger?
Scratch my belly please?"

"Get out, you weirdo!
I never want to see you.
Don't call me again."

"Me understand you.
But, first, me steal things from you,
like big fish tank here."

"Don't touch the fish tank!
You can't pick it up, asshole!
Just get the fuck out!"

"Me has idea.
You love fish, so I am fish.
We are ok now?"