mine is a bird aflame



Maybe more could have been said but the couch stunk of whiskey and only I could vouch for the extremity of my actions. My friend, he used to hurl empty bottles of Dortmunder at the wall to watch and hear them shatter. His life was all flexible molds, the figure, and a gray-green Rickenbacker solid body strung lefty that I was helping him learn to play. I used to sit in a brown straight back chair up there in his studio and sing blues out the window to the brown Indiana sky. I was usually drunk and could barely get a girl. the one I did get she was magical and loved me on the basis of a single song. But I couldn't hold her. She tried to paint me once while I sat on her mattress singing songs, sloppy, obsessive. Finally she had to refrain and put me away. No one could blame her but I, I became that Stephen Crane poem, feasting upon my own bitter heart. Some great music may have come from it or not but anyway it's all lost now, gone like the days. Though traces remain in consciousness and blood. All i wanted to do then was run insane, just go. I nearly lost my mind in a Georgia jail, awake in a raving dream of her and the end of the world. It was a vision of the apocalypse straight out of Jung. The heart indeed can hallucinate crises of despair and renewal. I'm glad it all happened but now I stay put. Back then I forgot how to be territorial but I sure remember now. To me, it's critical. I ain't bound to forget again.