The resurrection of Goth Dan and the sisters of everlasting Mercy...

Goth Dan's countenance was the color of an aspirin you would find while cleaning out your grandmothers bathroom cabinet a week after her funeral. He had powdery, ashen cheekbones. He was attired always in black armor showcasing his chalky limbs and pill-flavorless skin. He despised sunlight. He had beautiful long hair. He was highly indifferent to his own hygiene. He loved to smoke clove cigarettes and play dungeons and dragons or magic the gathering for days on end. His father had disowned him. It is doubtful that he had ever met his mother. Goth Dan who was really into vampires. Who was discharged from the Navy for going crazy on a Nuclear submarine. Goth Dan who was fairly good with computers.

Goth Dan who (God love him) never fucking worked.

Goth Dan would sporadically crash with each of us from time to time. He lived with Hale for three years, one day just showing up and spending the night on the futon and then staying inside Hale's guest bedroom for a week not saying anything, playing renaissance warlord games on the computer.

We joked that Goth Dan would fit right at home living in a crawl space, paying thirty bucks a month for rent, boasting that all he needed was a roll of toilet paper, his ten sided dice and his deck of magic cards.

Goth Dan who had "clinical" depression and who could talk about Hegel and Nietzsche with second year grad school competency.

Goth Dan who almost all got us all killed drinking "liquid "cocaine" on New Years eve 2000. The
elixir of Jagger, goldshlager and rupplemintz alchemized was consumed in goblets, each of us imbibing more than our anatomies could stomach, each of us hurtling, passing out, waking up the next morning in a battlefield of abandoned liqueur bottles and carpet stains the size of small islands in the pacific.

Goth Dan who stood up in a very straight, erect, in a stalk like fashion and who would always give you a long overbearing hug every time he would see you. After he would refrain from his gratuitous embrace you would wonder to yourself why your girlfriend never hugged you that tight anymore.

I occasionally would see Goth Dan walking back from Sav-a-lot with two packages of hot dogs, some bread and soda, boasting that this was all he needed to live off of for weeks at a time.

Goth Dan who stayed with Hale for a few weeks last summer before hitching down to Kentucky to meet in person a girl who he met online while playing a fantasy game.

Goth Dan who none of us have heard from since.

The song below, Sisters of Mercy 1959, reminds me of Goth Dan. One morning after a party (my folks were out of town, whole house was a forbidden cumulus of cigarettes smoke) I stumbled upon Goth Dan listening to this song over and over again like a Gothic carousel stationed in Anne Rice's Back yard. The haunting arpeggio of the piano keys waltzing with the lead singers brusque baritone splashed out of the speakers gently, like holy water nipping the side of your cheek bone at mass and realizing you have something to confess.

The ballad is beautiful and poignant and is about a time that is lost that can never be revived.

When I stumbled across this song last night on Youtube I thought about Goth Dan. I wonder if he ever made it down to Kentucky. If he still spends months when he refuses to see the sunlight. If he ever hooked up and married that girl he met while playing role playing games on line.

One thing I am certain of is that next time I see Goth Dan again he will look at me very silently and then give me a long hug, squeezing tighter then most heterosexual males squeeze when they give an embrace, conveying to me with his chalky limbs how thankful he is simply to have someone right next to him at this particular stolen moment of time even as the wind blows wild once again.

For the autumn weekend when your life falls apart and it feels like 9-11 happened somewhere within the womb of your chest you take solace in this song

Overcast coat autumanal afternoon monopolized with cheap beer and cigarellos and earl gray tea and pedro the lion (2002),

My friend Joe first burned these CD's for me six years ago when I was working two jobs, seven days between 85-95 hours a week, killing myself driving the wedding dress flavored vanilla hearse shaped station wagon I would later live in across the dowry faced arteries of the bluff in medias shifts, stopping at the emerald plateau of Barnes and Nobles (sometimes twice a day, since that was the only starbucks in town at the time) to slurp down venti's coffee holding the miniature caffeinated silo in my hand as I escaped in the country the tea bag hued cupola of heavy clouds overhead pregnant and lachrymose with the acidic rain tears of the planet keening a picaresque sad clowns smile over the helm of my dashboard the silver vacuity of the prairie swallowing my every direction as I steered, aimlessly, into the country, driving, smoking, fantazising about the rustic barn I would one day live in and refurbish because my books would be published and I would then have money.

I remember the applause her lips would break into as I would watch her smile while stopping in for coffee, flirting with the scarlet haired mermaid with the leprechaun reverberating eyes who would aesthecially abscond my romantic advances ( I would later find out she was engaged) every time I would invite her out for a drink, sometime.

Today the patter of rain reminded me of the wished-for sting these ballads delivered, the soundtrack of sad countenanced wet asphalt colored afternoons, killing time between shifts, the dips and swills of the late afternoon clouds bulging overhead like a limp sail.

Even thinking about the beautiful girl who once worked at Starbucks and smiling back at me all these years once again.

....wayward chorus truncates the aching anthems of youth behind ( Naughty by Nature/ MC LYTE circa 1991, autumn)...

These two songs capture the autumn of my seventh and eighth grade years perfectly. The feeling of searching for identity in the broken glass foliage of the south side, feeling trapped as the hard breath of autumn filled our lungs with a petty promise of something we would never obtain, immortalizing the desolation of the mired sociological milieu we stemmed from and vaunted by blaring out hard core shit-you-not rhythms of the defeated. By telling it like it is. Stranded in the cement silt of the south side of Peoria where back in the day a national survey conceded that the trinity of sagging doled-visage empty eyelided brick abodes constituting lower income housing projects ranked lower than the likes of competitors in Compton and Cabrini Green-- was the mis en scene where a thirteen year old boy fell into the chorus of the streets. It was autumn 1991 and I was in 8th grade and lived and died for these urban heart beats.






We talked about gangsta disciples and Vice lords and brandished crooked peace signs with our fingers. We ambled in a perennial limp, as if we had a bullet lodged in our flesh, pain winking somewhere below our left kneecaps. We wore our shirts practically draped down into our ankles, our jeans representing a sagging denim puddle dripping around our overpriced air jordans which we kept impeccably white enough to pass for shoe clerks in Vatican city. We wore starter caps with the tags still affixed to the top so they looked as if they had been shoplifted. We talked with our hands near our waists, gesticulating vividly with rabid twitches of our fingers. We addressed each other as "G" and "Dawg." We monopolized autumnal afternoon walking around in a triangle of bodies , our limbs and joints oddly cantering between the leaves and litter and graffiti hieroglyphics tattooed on the lower necks of buildings.

Everywhere we went we seemingly dribbled the rubbery orb of a basketball between the arch of our thighs.

We tried to be as bad-ass as possible. Even though the majority of us were white and had had our asses (literally) handed to us on more than one occasion by the GD's down the street.


The video posted above seems to vividly encapsulate that time period with the authenticity of angels. The feeling of trying to fly, soar, create and give, scream and kick and still, somehow, feeling that all you are is a statistic, an unwanted pregnancy trying to sprout between the abandon cracks in the sunken parking lot across the street from the old distillery long gone.

Drop that, and now you want me to rap and give
Say something positive, well positive ain't where I live
I live right around the corner from west hell
Two blocks from south shit, and once in a jail cell
The sun never shine on my side of the street see
And only once or twice a week I would speak
I walked alone, my state of mind was home sweet home
I couldn't keep a girl, they wanted kids and cars with chrome


I see this sodden (sad, fucked up and lonely) realization every year. That so much of what molds a young persons periphery and promise on life tends to stem solely from the arable soil in which he is planted. Every year I hear of kids I grew up with who are in prison, who are working piss jobs to pay child support for progeny they no longer remember fostering, kids I graduated high school with who now have kids who are ready to graduate from high school, kids who were found dead behind dumpsters, in SUV, shot. Murdered. Kids who have been dead a long time ago.

The scene one minute into the video where bevy of street urchins are being chased by the utilitarian nothingness is so reminiscent of that year it defies me not to cry in a pond of nostalgia.

Inside the stanzas and beats of the song itself there is hope. The proverbial bird singing inside the trapped linearity of the cage. I love the juxtaposition of heartache sprinkled over the keyboard with an anonymous Greek chorus pulling a Bob Marley telling us that every little thing is gonna be alright. The same is true with MC LYTE's POOR GEORGE (below):

The saga of a beleaguered tryst turned tumultuous beautifully backed by a stirring reverb that harbors recollections of youth. I remember Gia Walker rapping this song on the playground. Revisiting this song now seventeen (fuck!) years from when first I heard it, still resonates with a truth of the heart. How no one is promised tomorrow and how giving of oneself, ones feeling, ones all should not be deterred no matter what.


I wish I woulda told him how I liked him so much
How he made me feel with the slightest touch
Now hes gone and I cant tell him nothin
Wish he was here so I could say somethin
The story is not to say that Im in sorrow
Just to say no one is promise tomorrow
If you love someone you should say it often
You never know when theyll be layin in a coffin
Wake up, its important that you know that
No one on earth is promised tomorrow...

I still think about Kris Noel, also, when I hear this song, my friends sister who died of cancer my eighth grade year and how a year before she fashionably tied a bandanna around the white dome of her skull to disguise her ailment in the lunch line and how, a year before that, we would always play "bloody knuckles," while we waited for the doors of the school to open our fingers welded into an ashen corsage of dactyls and wrists, each pressing down hard into the others fingered flesh waiting for the other to capitulate or to scream.

Asking your overtly westernized variation of a deity just why He decided to forsake you (smashing pumpkins, muzzle)....

This is a song we used to blast in the golden static of wheat
the incipience of autumn 1996, the teardrop autumn when
every Friday was golden, the sun a radiant bulb of suffering
light bleating into the planet with translucent planks of light
eyelashes culled from some other world, all the time youth
dancing, youth escaping, the feeling of eternity and poetry
and coffeehouses and oneness, the geometry of limbs
configured in the shape of a human heart






surrounding the tables of Lums, ashing out expired
dreams into hockey puck sized ashtrays reading (always)
reading Walt Whitman and Sexton and Ginsberg
crying when Ginsberg desecrated the city where I lived
as sacred, yelping out "Holy Peoria" when reciting
the footnote to Howl reading Kerouac, calling it
"Kerouacking" every time we would grab a venti coffee
and a pack of smokes and jump into the sunken face
of my old Buick and just motor the fuck out into the
country, driving fast down the dust latitude of dirty roads
with the windows cranked south

bathing in the pond of open air that is reality

Trying to break free of the casket before being buried
we wanted the security of having enough in the bank
we wanted to experience dipping our torsos
into the spring newness of a muses interior thighs
we wanted life and pain and forgiveness and love

But at that time, we wanted to express ourselves

As when I hear this song today
twelve years later thinking about

the young poet trying to stretch the interior
of his skin around the steeple-shaped blocks
of the English alphabet and failing, a muzzle
manacled around his fingertips and everything

falling infinitely short with the exception of the

loose training wheel of his jostled heart.

October first, 1998 (play this one loud an anthem for the angels)

She sat on the lip of my bed as I played to her this song, her boots skimming up past the stalks of her kneecaps, sprouting up into the ashen stems of her thighs, a veiled skirted hem swaying in sensuous cadences inches below her torso, part of a self-contained outfit with black straps etching up past the topography her shoulder blades before sprinting down, criss-crossing her spine, X marking the spot of her deeply poetic heart from behind. She wore a vignette of what looked like a Betty Boop methed-out china doll on her shirt. She would later tell me that she chose that particular outfit because she realized then that, if we embraced, "The boots were staying on," that the goth-naughty -well-read- voodoo-doll-baby-catholic girl raiments were staying in place, taming the itching orchestrations of my lecherous finger tips by a simple assurance of her smile.

The night before we sat together in the poetry reading of Keith Ratzliffe. I had a beer and talked to the poet at the reception. We had the same creative writing class and although I was envious of her innate abilities to fuel the English language with an ardor and imagery that has seldom, I still fucking believe to this day, been matched (I was a green daschund cheeked Salieri to the magic of her Mozart) but every time I was shrouded in the presence of her breath I felt in awe.

Outside the entrance to her dorm I told her that I needed to tell her something important and when she smiled I told her that I thought she was gorgeous and then I picked her up and twirled her around and we embraced but still there was no kiss.

That afternoon I kidnapped her after our creative writing class. We dissipated into the carpet of leaves banking the sidewalks as we discussed writing and art and movies and life. Somehow we traipsed though the geometry of the west bluff and found ourselves on the doorsteps to the only house I have ever known. As I tried to kiss her lips folded into a dinner napkin and she handed me a missive and requested that I read it before the possibility of anything romantic exploded.

As I fell inside the orifice of her lips, riding the life boat of her tongue into the sweet oblivion and electric spontaneity of post adolescent amour. Both of our eyes closed at the same time. It was terse, spontaneous like a child pirouetting in front of a water fountain perching his lips at the rail of continuous fluid in search of wet nourishment.

I remember this song was played on that day, now exactly a decade ago. For some reason I wanted this brilliant Penelope scribe to listen to the shattering chords of the opening hymn like an introit to something that might have been yet never was--the way a glass chandelier snapping into triangles of ice, realizing that this crystallize emotional Armageddon droping like an end of the world avalanche inside the nest of your chest was transpiring in both darkness and in light somehow above and below you both simultaneously waiting with the gestation of pregnant goddess carrying in her womb the magic and molecules of something incubating, something fighting, something waiting to peck into the planet and hatch and breathe.

I asked her if she liked the song and she said it was ok. She was a PJ harvey Courtney Love sorta lass. She wasn't into the moribund New Wave alternative anthems that had shepherded me like a maudlin metronome through the nihilistic teenage perils of youth.

We left my bedroom and walked back to campus that autumn, our hands forming one solitary bouquet of fingers--a tugging orb buoyed in the scent of a new found connection. She told me that today was her parents' wedding anniversary. We walked next to the house where she would live in a years time and where our rapport would end in heart-fraught-with-splinters-and-thorns fashion but for that moment, the plainsong of her smile pushing through the hyphen of her lips made me feel that the end of the world and the world to come had somehow lapsed without me knowing and that this sheet of time currently was disintegrating into a sea of random quarks and neurons and that all that existed was the sight of her eyes, the scent of her body and the newness found in the interior cusp of her warm palm squeezed tightly in mine.