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Velvet Skies and Paper Storms* by Robert D. Lyons |
The velvet summer sky hovers above the forgotten suburban street light, the orange glow lighting the car like a blazing chariot from the inner depths of hell; hitting the sharp curves at seventy, side streets calling our name, just whispering all the depraved pleasures the night has yet to offer in our half deaf ringing ears. Now up to seventy five, feeling the wind sweep us away; the whirlwind coming through the sunroof. Strategic highs and hung over lows; Cody is a surgeon while high at the wheel, guiding our scorching fireball of a hornet like a scalpel through this sleepy plastic surgery city.
Dub step takes us away, floating, to the frowning moon; the roars and barbaric yawps of the bass traveling through the busted and crackling speakers in the back: blown out. Our hearts beating and mending to the persistent WOP WOP and vibrating bass drops, holding us tight through the shiny synthesizers in the starless dynamo of the machinery of night. Leaving our mark on these dissolute streets, and hellish radiance of light, but with enough drugs, you just might be able to make out the stars burning above our track of LSD leaking from our finger tips and eyeballs bleeding THC with absolute mercy, the constellations just mapping our strange and obscene journey to nowhere with liquor burning away inside of our stomachs, filling us with the courage of a roaming lion: invincible.
Garret shoots out of the sun roof like a rocket, holding his head to the side of the car, his hair soaring through the air in freedom as he pukes his slimy green guts out on the grimy patchy street: bread crumbs, a salute to the lonely and lost streets cloaked under a starless sky. Cody, pushing down heavy on the peddle, up to eighty, running, but not sure what from. Running from these neon glowing mutant gardens and tactically cut lawns that suck the soul from our drug glazed eyes to grow. The taste of vicodin brings my tongue to a numb mute, and all I can remember is that somehow this drug crazed flight from the unknown or inevitable, this electronic sneered mating call, is a mayday from doomed souls cast away from utopia, doomed because they could no longer tolerate the paths ahead forged by stronger and more delusional men. The storm is afoot, and there is no escaping it now; drive hard and pierce the veil. Survive and tell the tale, or die and truly live.
* Originally published in Kerouac's Dog |
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A bit about Robert: The first time I sat down at a typewriter I had no illusions of publication. I had fallen deeply in love when, what seemed like a blessing of fate, I ran into a girl with oracle eyes on the steps above the junior entrance during our first day in high school. We were both lost. Five minutes late to our classes. However, we both liked punk rock, and just walked around talking for ten minutes before parting to our destinations. I finally found my class, and there she was, sitting across the door, smiling. The love I felt for her was the kind that turns your guts into stone faster than heroin. I couldn’t speak without sounding like an imbecile, and every time I tried to confess my feelings, I was paralyzed by her eyes. So I sat down at a typer and wrote down everything I could never tell her, and those words came out as poems. Not much has changed since then, in our own ways, we are both still lost. I ended up dropping out of high school when I was sixteen do to strenuous and brutal strings of personal tragedies, boredom, and love. Since then, I have continued what Wolfe called the buried life: writing, drinking, whoring, and surviving. I have been published in over eighty literary mags and have book on the way, but a woman can really put you in your place and teach you a bit of modesty: after all the poems and short stories, she replaces me with the most sickly, boring men alive. All art is quiet useless: she taught me this before I read Wilde’s A Picture of Dorian Gray. |
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