The Ballad Of Baby New Year

                 I attempted to breath. The night was stale & littered with rhyme. It crept upon me like radiation. My bones become jelly & sarcastic to the touch. The weather cold, but vacationingly warm for this time of year. The lights were still hung up in the branches of the avenue, but the holiday has past. It was the first steps of baby new year. The child of father time, entering the world. Just a baby boy. Crying & shitting his diapers. The hopes & dreams of proud parenting, watching their young son grow. Soon he'll be old enough to walk. Soon he'll be old enough to run. Soon he'll speak his first words. Talking & swearing. Then he'll be old enough to ride a bike. Then school. Pre-school, kindergarten. An awkward uneasiness around other children. Just a shy little boy. Then one day its little league. T-ball, baseball. He'll get the game ball for playing a sharp first base. Then he'll start to recognize the girls. Still with an awkward uneasiness. Then sometime in the 6^th grade he'll get his first kiss from a girl who sat opposite him in class. And she lets him hold her hand on the walk home after school. Then onto summer vacations at his grandparents cottage in Lake Geneva. Then there's his imaginary friend who always seems to be hanging around. Then onto Jr. High, where his earliest memories of insomnia starts to grow & deepen the wound. And then, somewhere around 13 he hears the piercing scream of a rock-n-roll guitar. And it consumes him. Then the lyrics. Ingested deep into his marrow. Then he begins to wonder if he can do that. Then he'll lock himself in his room with a cheap borrowed guitar from a relative & a beat up country chord book & try. Then on to his later teens where the culture begins to invade him. Then trends & fashion of the time & a drivers licenses & the mall, the largest one at that. More girls begin to catch his eye. More music begins to influence him. The uneasy awkwardness he begins to suppress with his growing talent. Then there'll be high school parties where hell get his first drunk. AND LOVE IT. Then on to graduation. S****y summer jobs in-between classes at the local Jr. College which he'll despise & drop out, joining the working class. Then he'll turn 21. And the bar scene. And the boy becomes the young adult. His talent begins to show promise. And more turn ons like art & literature. And a mad move west to California in a confused ramble of existence for a lousy 6 months only to crawl back home with his tail between his legs. And then the downtown city life where he sneaks into an identity & perfects his personality that grows out of him like fungus. Then comes a hat. And a comedic trademark of humor. And more bars & more scenes & living hand to mouth becomes a mantra. And then, sometime in his mid 20's hell move back out to California to take his chances on becoming a lost prophet of sainthood with a knack for fictional poetics & deep stoned moments of self hypnosis & inner exploration & pushing debauchery to his fullest potential & wrapping up all those emotions in a elegantly documented Great American Novel that chronicles the lives & times of the true drunkards of the world. (It may not be a work of epic proportions, but it's a hell of a lot better than the average shmuck). Then after a year, he'll return to home again. And his tail wont be between his legs this time because he had bitten it off in a drunken frenzy. The writing becomes thicker. The music becomes heavier. The liver becomes stronger. Then, he'll hit thirty. Like a head on collision with ambulances & all. And he begins to shape himself into the name hell take to the grave. It is then when all the heartaches & tragedies, become one with the soul & the growth of the young adult turns into the man & the age becomes a reality, but the heart & the mind remain pure youth. And love becomes suicide & recycled into the fuel for his drive. And the anxiety begins to leave scares & the once radiant glow of addolesance begins to dim ever so slightly & unnoticeable to the human eye, but the mind starts to play tricks & inflame his longevity & the theories & conspiracies grip his presence & a future too bleak to bare the day he awakes from his daydream of life to find himself turning into old man winter with a bad streak of alcoholism & the rotting breath of a December corpse.

                  Yeah...I see him sometimes. At the end of the bar. Drinking away his year. Rat infested lungs. Blackened hollow eyes of a shotgun barrel. Moth eaten cap hiding his greasy locks of pillow head. Whiskers like a razorback porcupine staggering the decaying back alley battlefields. "It always seems like a long hard climb when looking up from the gutter."

                    And just as I muttered that last sentence, the wind snapped my face with the frosted fangs biting in betrayal. The hopeless romantics last dance around the grave of the unknown vagabond who sleeps, numbingly tranquil, until the spirit rises from the ghost of another midnight. Only to haunt Halloween decadence, like a marionette of the dead.