Night 111 - Fighting Through The Itching To Revise Three Poems Each Night In The Cafe

As I struggle to type these words, my neck and my chest are wailing and the itch seems to be everywhere. For the past few nights, I have been going to the Bourgeois Pig as the itching begins at night and forcing myself to sit down and revise pages of poetry I found in my storage space. I found well over a hundred pages scrawled and written and types on various pieces of paper, all loos as opposed to the fifteen odd poetry journals I have written in over the years. I often do not remember when I first wrote the poem unless there is a specific reference and the pages are all mixed-up in random order. I just go from one to the next. I try to maintain the heart of what was first written while elevating it to the next level of expression.

But even more so, it is a battle. I do everything in my power to concentrate and create as my body screams and the clothes irritate my skin and all I really is a sweet moment of relief. Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn't. But here are the three poems scratched down tonight from the scraps:


promises of the crystal sea


the letters broke free and made it over the wall,
stumbling through dead reeds and stinging nettle,
they finally reached the edge of the cliff
where the silence of stone is celebrated.

i was abandoned for the ocean, blue and wide.
callow and callous, a starched empty shirt,
bereft without my tools, the building blocks.
the words chose a vision unspoken over obscurity.

every word ever written and still being read
sacrificed deeper wells, surrendered the sublime;
so much easier to dazzle in a cramped apartment,
the drone of the subway, libraries desolate.

am i just a city boy brewing more bad medicine?
so hard on the self, so unforgiving and damaged;
how could he sing the song of the mountain wind?
for what did he sell the promises of the crystal sea?


That is the first. I might have written it in Park City or in Manhattan in the early 1990s, and the draft was quite different, almost in the form of an aphorism. The second was written in Paris in 1994.


licks her fur


with a royal languor,
the persian licks her fur,
clean as only a cat can be.

hairless apes waste so much water,
washing away the wondrous dirt,
ignorant to the story in the earth.

barely recall what the pet looked like,
all those years ago on that velvet couch
in an expensive paris apartment.

i search today for the feline soul,
but the cat's eye infected by invention;
there is nothing to find beyond myself.


This is getting more difficult. The first draft of the last poem clearly was written in Los Angeles in about 1997. I expanded on the original jottings quite a bit and removed a touch of ethnicity.



his best customer


when the crack dealer
told me late one night
i was his best customer,
maybe, just maybe

it was time to stop.
he hides salvation
under his tongue;
sweet bitter ivory flakes.

perfect hunger answered,
in a transubstantiation
as the product is spit
into my quivering palm.

the best have dry mouths.
new boys all spittle and slobber,
the sacred reduced to sticky icky
and the eucharist wiped away.

trying to drive normal now,
pick at my nose, darting eyes,
ready to smoke away boredom,
sighs withering into ashes inside.

i never learned his name
but he always took my money.
as i drove away drowning,
he hid the silver in his jowls.



Okay, that was not easy but that it what I do to feel okay about myself as I struggle through this process and try not to go any crazier than I already am. And it makes me happy. There are valuable moments in the poetry. And there is always revision.

Sometimes I wish I could revise my life as readily as I can revise my poetry.

Day 87 Night - A Strange, Challenging Array Of Questions And Accusations Lurking In My Head

Very little has changed, but certain decisions need to be made. If I am to move forward successfully with this treatment, there are questions that need to be asked and inner accusations that need to be resolved. Although many will be raised in this entry, I doubt that many will be answered. The first step is opening the door and being willing to step inside. The picture a bit melodramatic, but it hits the nail directly on the head with a certain vengeance.

What Is Behind Your Door? What Is Lurking?

As Halloween approaches, it is a dark house with very little to be seen beyond the accusatory shadows and the questionable silhouettes. I have spent close to half a lifetime trying to escape reality and pretend that my delusions were on the verge of coming true. But this treatment has excised the dancing bears and the pink elephants, leaving me alone with an itchy rash on my body and very little of value to hold onto in the midst of this storm. It is not a fear of panic; it is just the understanding that there is no turning back and there is no turning my back on the questions and accusations lurking within.

How Do I Differentiate Between The Question Marks And The Crucible?

A Start to Questions & Accusations; Observations on those Dreams

1) If the side effects do not improve and I continue to feel my sanity being ravaged by the itching, will I be able to successfully continue this treatment until the end? I have never been much when it comes to completion in my life; it is a negative quality that verges on human heresy by turning my back on the gift of taking the action to express my authenticity. When I was 12 years old and spendng the summer at Camp Cobbossee, our bunk counselor was a Tennessee Vol baseball player named Doug Lawry. At the end of the summer, he gave each of us a picture of himself hitting a home run with an inscription on the back. My inscription quoted my favorite lines that I had read in an Archie comic book that summer: A Winner Never Quits, A Quitter Never Wins. Whether from Vince Lombardi or Archie, it remains a pertinent cliche for me today.

Can I Stop Quitting, Surrender My Bullshit, And Join The Winning Side?

2) Since I always embraced the dream that I would be loved in my life and that I would meet the woman who would be my true partner in this life, will this vision come true or am I just fooling myself? Right now, as I sit in the Bourgeois Pig in Hollywood, I am surrounded by beautiful young women, and I am old enough to a father to well over half of them. Still, as I sink into the morass of a dirty middle-aged man, I am still attracted to young women and I still harbor the fantasy. Can I afford to do this anymore? Right now, I feel so unattractive, despite the fact that the rash is covered up by my smothering long-sleeve shirt and these scratchy blue jeans. Although I dream of having the passion and conviction of Pepe Le Pew without the vast delusion, I wonder what I still have to offer. Although there is a certain freedom in my failure, there are unblinking consequences as well. Even when I decide to date a woman my own age or close to my own age, what do I really have to offer? Will I be loved again?

Can my passion be ignited again beyond the silly danger of delusion?

3) If I truly have accepted the failure of my life and abandoned those Hollywood dreams, can I move forward without the weight of regret and discover the freedom offered by such a surrender?  Boy, this is a hard question to answer and an even harder reality to face. The only reason I have been able to do it is because I have been stripped down to the bare bones by this treatment and these side effects. It doesn't seem like my bullshit works anymore, and how I miss my casual belief in those sparkling delusions. Still in the popular culture and particularly about a dozen years ago, the definition of excellence realized was the basketball prowess of Michael Jordan. Considered the greatest basketball player of all time, Michael Jordan expressed how intimately connected his success was connected to his failures. By failing over and over again but continuing to believe in himself and work hard with a sense of determination, he created his phenomenal success. Mind you, I understand that Michael Jordan is a flawed human being with failings on and off the court, but isn't that the very point to be embraced. If I accept my failures while maintaining my faith in myself, everything will be okay. Not necessarily wonderful, but a-okay with moments of beauty and creation in between the itches.  

The Bridge Between Failure and Success is Determination and Belief

More to come tomorrow, but that is all for tonight. My arms and legs are itching like crazy and my concentration flags because I cannot seem to push it beneath the surface of this consciousness.

Day 78 Morning - There Is Such Shame In Admitting The Truth Of What Is Happening To Me Now And What I Did To Myself In The Past And The Nightmare-like Consequences

I do not know if I will have the whatever that is needed - it is something like courage, but it is not so noble and it is also a violation and it will hurt those that love me - to actually publish this entry. There is so much shame as I come to the end of what has been perhaps the worst night of my life. It is so different to experience this insanity while knowing that I am sober and so far away from the drugs. When I was smoking cocaine on a daily basis, at the very least, I could explain away this insanity as cocaine psychosis. But I have no such crutch to lean on today as the side effects of these Hepatitis C drugs bring forth - like the cracking of the Seventh Seal brings forth hell on earth in Christian mythology - not only this diabolical rash that itches all night long, but a serenity-shattering flashback to the swarm of imaginary bugs everywhere.

Scratching the Itch Ignites the Flashback Firestorm of Invisible Bugs

I am not a bad person. I made terrible, indulgent mistakes, and I hurt myself and the ones I love. I have tried so hard to come back from that abyss, and I have changed the fabric of my life, but it seems like the greater tapestry remains the same. It seems like I cannot escape the horror of my past. It does more than haunt my dreams. It infects my waking with sensations of a physical insanity that I cannot stop. As I try to cure myself of this disease, the side effects of the treatment trigger a return to the past insanity of cocaine psychosis and result in these sensational flashbacks that are driving me to the very brink of sanity. I cannot sleep and my head spins with fantabulous stories of invisible bugs and I find myself back at the place I never wanted to be again. It is like an unwilling return to the circle of hell from which I thought myself reprieved, but the devil is laughing as he punches my ticket and tells me that there is no escape. Behold the horror as the delusion of being a child of the Inferno has returned and this moment is without mercy.

My Return to the Inferno is not as a Visitor but Reduced to a Resident Again!

If I showed you a picture of my right knee, I am almost sure that you would turn away and never want to look again. The splotch of red is not like a rash, but more like a plague exemplified in color and tone. There is a sense that if you look at it too long, it might happen to you as well. It has that certain unnerving quality that sucks in your gaze like a splotchy vortex of reflective ugliness. It looks like an infection that wants to spread and is searching for the ways and means of survival.

At this very moment, I feel like less than a human being. I feel like I just want this all to be over. I feel like I have fallen, and I do not know how to return to that imaginary path that leads to the illusion of my redemption. Once again, as I did in the past, I am fetishizing the forsaken because I can find no other explanation that justifies the petty and squalid nastiness of this condition. Why has it come to this?

Have you ever been possessed by an image? I dance with the bounty of Google images, and I find this picture of my condition that is described as thus on the deviant art website...  And from the ashes and the dust of the end of existence, the Pistachio God arose to create a reality where anything can exist... and what this Demented God chose to create is the tortured man with the endless itch that can never be reached. And I cannot believe that I actually identify with such an image of abomination...

Frightening that Such an Image of Itching can be Found

It remains one of the saddest realities of my life as a poet that perhaps my greatest long poem tells the tale of the bugs and this horror. It is called the last story and I have only read it a few times to people because it reveals such horror in such intimate detail. What I love about the work is that it does not romanticize the drugs and the Naked Lunch and the Burroughs bullshit in the slightest, but simply reveals all the ugliness and all the insanity of being caught in the depths of cocaine psychosis. It is the worst horror I ever experienced, and I am cursed today to be having such flashbacks caused by these damn side effects. I do not know how much longer I can take it. I do not know if I can go on.

Here is the poem and I am sorry to reveal this putrid ugliness and I know that the bugs no longer need and I am free of the slavery of that addiction but why is it happening today and can this poor boy who is beyond middle age and should act like the man he is but still in the stillness of this morning can he and can I be forgiven again... John

the last story

I

this is the only story i have left to tell,

all others lost in the white smoke of extermination.

i will tell my story of today and of a thousand days past.

it will be told and it will die and never be told again.

there are microscopic flesh-eating bugs in my brain,

the parasites of addiction flourish in the flames.

they rise with the smoke and attack in concert

each human orifice, hiding in clothes and shadow,

immune to spray and water, they swarm the body.

have i gone insane? will tonight ever end?

will tomorrow be the same?  can i stop?

there was a boy who entered the club of man

through violence, not a sweet killing song,

but the oration of sudden forever self-destruction.

i have seen night pass into cruel morning,

the exhaustion of those who cannot sleep,

bones mocked, flesh ringing, eyes closed open;

nothing will ever be normal again.

you laugh. you are bored. you wonder why.

you judge the proceedings after the sentence

for i have chosen the cage a thousand times.

i have done everything to myself

i would never do to others.

i have warned my friends of deeds

i welcomed the night before.

i am the hypocrite on a chosen stake.

i am a modernist, i am a rebel, i am soon dead.

i am a lifestyle of the rich and famous.

i am a vanity fair advertisement.

i am calvin klein raping the children. 

i am the kali yuga in all her glory and all her excrement.

i am falling for two thousand years and cannot say why.

i am lost.

this is shit. i have been reduced to writing shit.

i already wrote the great poems about my addiction.

did that.  done this.  better and bigger and more beautiful before.

now pathetic, on the cross of my own making, and empty.

i swear to crack i once was a poet of some potential.

so much lies on the tip of my tongue.  the speaking swirls.

i have danced to the song so many many times before.

everything awkward and over-practiced.

mechanical hell.

performed and purified in the ritual habit profaned.

this is the land between the third and seventh circles,

the harpies hovering,  the three-headed dog below.

in the limbo of the second ring i learn the arts

of slow solitary chunks torn from my living soul.

did i pass through the dark woods? 

did i pay the boatman as your life passed me by?

did i notice the passing tides of the river black?

did i arrive? did i visit in order to know?  did i die?

did i look back upon my love and live forever

alone in the smoke of fools, hours of no return?

if you will, may i please avoid the ending?

can i end a solo tragedy on a happy note?

o my lord and o my soul and o the universe alone,

can i be redeemed?!

the bugs want to know.

for bad behavior,

i extended my sentence for two more years.

i have to go downtown now.

i don't want to upset the warden.

he controls the bugs, he knows my name;

i might be in the hole forever and a day.

what was my crime?  what was worth the cost?

i was born, wasn't i?  i live on the planet earth.

i am jewish and once told my mother to fuck off.

i fucked women i didn't like.  i ignored the phone.

i stole sunglasses from seven different airports.

is that not enough?  fuck, i was born.

II

incessantly driven to destruction,

a self-created inescapable loss

ringing in each new second

with the evil becoming a need,

irrevocable, no hope to stop.

there is a vise of my own making,

the dopamine in my head is dead,

the superHIGHway under demolition.

can i live again on a country road?

take me home to what i was before.

father, why have i forsaken myself?

this is true.

i dream my mother is an addict,

stockpiling dilaudids and vicadins

in the back bathroom, locking the door.

as sneaky as her, i steal a bottle.

i'm startled to discover the quality,

the very best pharmaceutical shit.

i take two pills i have never taken before

with the smile of a new frontier crossed.

before they hit, upon confrontation,

i tell my mother betty ford waits for us

at rancho mirage. we won't tell the father

or the husband or the family with fingers.

our secret sins to be overcome together,

vanquished without the eyes of the world.

in reply, she snarls, demanding the drugs.

the stain spreads. 

mother, why have i forsaken you?

III

there are lightning bolts of joy

in darkest of days, hidden and unsuspected.

how sweet the moment

when sidewalk apparition of a dead bird

becomes the reality of an autumn leaf fallen.

sometimes we fall because it is the season.

like the immortals, i have had my stay in hell.

even in the stench of my own flesh burning,

there exists the promise of redemption.

i have drunk from black rivers of death,

celebrating acid scorching my belly,

but many rivers run through my life.

i know the future rises like a tide.

i shall not ebb unto death.

there is a wave coming,

water to be walked on.

since the beginning,

this i have known.

can you see the snake in the thicket?

it lies and lies and lies in wait

for the passing foot in the mouth

to decode, to implode, to fold the sweaty shit at four corners,

make the bed neat and tidy in morning, nobody knows nothing,

nobody knows vile revelation, nobody knows my truth.

hide the sheets of no salvation now,

pretend to eat breakfast on the phone,

welcome the snake, open every door.

i have my fingers exploring every orifice for the bugs.

in the ear, in the mouth, up the anus, up the urethra,

both eyes possible invasion points to the brain like calais,

but the nostrils are normandy, they will land in my nose.

hard to see up each nostril, beyond warning flesh flap,

into soft places where the feast of damnation lasts forever.

i cannot be the home of bugs, they creepy crawl all over me,

i cannot fall to a storm of hallucination. the bugs, the bugs,

the bugs are real. 

will call the exterminator in morning or more like afternoon

when i wake with bright windows blackened, a simulacra

of morning and my shower and coffee and donut and paper

all reassure me of normality, bugs forgotten (hidden, lurking),

need no pest control, no rehabilitation for the parasite of life,

there exist no gross infestations in my world so fuck off for now,

my brain working real good, baby, no banquet for tiny teeth,

make a call or two, look busy for a couple of hours, time to score.

there are lightning bolts of lies

in brightest of days, open and quite suspected.

IV

do you like pyrotechnics?  fireworks?  the big bang?

do i entertain? does despair focus a wandering gaze?

you may ask the destination of a man with bleeding eyes

but sometimes i cannot disguise my perfect exhaustion

of never ending, never going to end, never to end today.

today is over and long past and tomorrow has become today,

the tug-of-war, the merry-go-round, the wheel-of-birth.

find an image, pick a metaphor, exhume your favorite corpse,

anything to keep from moving in an eventual direction,

i feel more than anything in the cold the stark eventuality.

to come back to these words on a daily basis,

to avoid sobbing in the chest uncontrollably,

to whisper sweet nothings to young girls,

to spread cream cheese and eat a plain bagel,

to rise from the shroud and breathe again.

i must go on.  it is impossible.  i must go on.

if only beckett had been a drug addict and written,

if only kafka had been a drug addict and written,

if only shakespeare had been a drug addict and written,

then and only maybe and mediocre, i could say this.

must finish the section before taking one more ride.

can you imagine the resurrection of the umbilical cord,

beyond rotten, risen in shades, silently reconnected,

not to nourish, but to drain all that was given in love,

to empty the vessel leaking of value and tossed aside.

V

in vast silences of every night,

i shuffle and wash and smoke and wipe my brow.

everything peeling snakeskin, raw surfaces,

skin dry and flaking, sour blood in my ear,

ashes to ashes, dust to dust, flesh to flesh,

there are particles of death everywhere.

i need to explain.

i need to understand.

i need to redeem.

i need to forget.

i need to destroy.

i need to forgive.

i need to silence.

my eyes transformed into electron microscopes.

i can see the horror of invisible creatures,

feasting on the banquet of human beings.

they are the rulers of the world.

we are supermarkets.

i am being eaten alive.

speared from mouth to anus,

driven to the flaming spit,

shrouded in coals and fire,

eyes popping like glass,

heart boiled, stewed,

eaten on an altar,

regurgitated

in time.

something has to break.

VI

the body broken,

blood and spirit shed,

the story told.

now please if i will,

may we return.

return to visit

return to live

return to love

return to die

i guess -  i hope -  i fear -  i know

forgive me friends and lovers,

the bugs still need,                          

                                        i gotta go —

 

Day 76 Night - What Do You Do When The Perfect Storm Of Itching Never Ends?

Right now, over the past few days, I have been in the middle of the perfect storm of itching. The low-pressure blasts from my knees ran straight into the tropical gusts of my elbows, then became combined with the insistent swirling on my belly and the sudden upswell from my shins, to fabricate a once-in-a-lifetime worst-case scenario that is the perfect storm of endless itching.

The Insane Conglomeration Of Symptomatology Creates A Perfect Storm

There are moments like in the movie when a silence takes over the room and a calm envelops my body as I find myself in the eye of the storm. Nothing is quite as deceptive and unforgiving as the eye of a storm because it gives you a sense that it will soon be over, that the hellacious repetition is coming to a close. Like the fishermen on the Andrea Gale (Billy Tyne, Alfred Pierre, David "Sully" Sullivan, Michael "Bugsy" Moran, Dale "Murph" Murphy, and Bobby Shatford), there must have been a moment when I thought that the medications would work and the itching would stop and the storm would end. There must have been a sense that I would be able to escape the inevitable. When Billy Tyne realizes that the eye of the storm is passing and the monster is upon them, he tells Bobby Shatford, "She's not going to let us out." And the monster wave they face looms huge and is overwhelming and it reflects the way I am feeling tonight.

The Monster Wave Of The Perfect Storm Is A Mirror To My Mind-Set

What is the answer? I don't know if there is such a thing. I know that I am plugging forward, hoping to survive the insanity of these days and praying they will pass into the calm after the storm. I am so exhausted by the trial of this experience and I just want it to be over. But there is a long road looming before me, and there are no easy answers to the question of being cured once and for all. Behold the crucible of my time and, if you can, say a prayer for me.

At the very least, be thankful that I am not posting pictures of the affected areas. There is no need to share images what should never have arisen in the first place. When I see such images on the web, they just make my stomach turn, and I am quite sure that nobody needs the ugliness of such proof. Why would anyone make up a story about the yuckiness of needing to itch all the time? What would be the point? No, I realize that you can imagine it all for yourself, and I know that you want it to pass as well.

Day 60 Afternoon — Dreaming About Itching And Heading To The Doctor

Last night, the itching in both legs below the knee was out of control and nothing would stop it. Not hot water, not cold water, not Eucerin, not Cortizone-10 with cooling relief, not baby diaper rash cream and not Aloe Vera gel. I kept switching back and forth between my brown leather couch and my bed, trying to find a comfortable spot. When I did fall asleep for a couple of hours, I actually dreamt about itching my legs. There is nothing quite as uncomfortable as waking from a dream about itching your legs to realize that your legs are still itching. It is a struggle, but I will survive.

Actually No Good To Scratch Because The Itching Does Not Stop

Since I am dehydrated, I thought the itching could be connected to my inability to keep the water in my body. But I would down an entire bottle and it would do nothing. Coconut water, Orange juice, Crystal Geyser, Iced Tea... none of these substitutes seems to do the trick. As a result, I am going in to see the doctor in about ninety minutes. I am hoping to find a prescription cream that will solve the problem.