earthmann

I am waiting for the bus to leave the station. It’s on to the Drag that perimeters the university. It is a fun, smelly plate, teeming with taut-faced students slightly confused as to what they should do immediately post high school, and speckled with some coasts’ runaways and what not and so and on.

With every failure we lower the standard? I certainly hope not. For years I have wrestled with the things of this world, wrestled their unchecked effects. For the better part of year I imbibed at a reasonable pace, fewer hairy scotches. Not for self-will, mind you, but circumstance and economics.

Will the cleaner burning me keep his legs. I wallow in a thin pool of pleasure, holding my head beneath the surface then recovering it alternatively.

I remember a sign from the men’s dorm of a fundamentalist college:

You can lead a horse to water, and if he doesn’t drink, then submerge his head beneath the surface until it stops squirming.

So now I must decide which way to go, or rather I must decide to believe in strength to go, to not fall once again into the endless rut
that eternally grooves
at the weathered end of a gospel record.

No more crashing. No more burning. No more poisoned flights.

Besides, if I fall again there will be no rail of sentiment
with which to pull myself up.

I just had my first shot of wheatgrass chased
by the juice of an orange wedge.
I went for a pint of coffee at a hip all day and night coffee shop
here on the Drag. The baristas knew I was not one of the Kool Kids.
I asked for a regular coffee.
I don’t know what I was thinking. Of course want caffeine, that’d be like going to a bar and asking for an alcoholic beer.

Or going to a gas station and requesting “leaded”. Or maybe the exact opposite or whatever.