The thieves’ story

Roberto carefully fastened the blank white, spanking brand new, fresh Georgia Pacific style high grade, non-smear typing, but neatly smelling, paper, courteously into the dusty, old Underwood; still clacking, noisy and rusty. An antique typewriter it was, cobwebbed, greasy and rattling every tiny, metal bone in it’s Underwood skeleton; and then, again, right when Roberto would begin to daze off, his fingers continued, the only part of him awake, and he began clicking away with his usual maddening rant and rave about the sins that he had accumulated over the past two decades and the obvious end of his youthful years. Now, Now, he was surrounded by bars. Now in a cell, no larger than his closet back at home, in Tarrant, where he lived by green trees and woody trails that lead to toppling swans in egg shaped lakes, on Hunt’s property, near Keller. Slowly graying and approaching the top of the hill, Roberto saw for the first time a true confession, half lies and half truth, like most confession told in dark secret unfound and undone places; and long before the eyes are without sever awareness of the foregone and humble crime that awaits all of us at one time or another, the crime we all must commit to pass the fatal and dismal test of reason and temptation of today and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and then, but then, then, the eyes see a real screaming painful glance of what was a trite confessor, not of ignorance, down on his knees before God, with a lit candle, and then like a miracle of nature and freak of moment appearing slowly before him one letter at a time and one thought after the next from the snapping steel fingers, brief above and below, wiping back and fro, the Underwood’s keyboard, clacking away. Tap, tap, tap, the story unfolded as he concentrated on the keypad and tapped at the rhythms of the universe, and, well and and and and and this and that, and this happenstance, and instant and complex situation here and there, and more ‘ands’ and more ‘buts’ and more and more conjunction till nothing connected and everything had a separate and independent part. Till it meant nothing, and nothing was meant, and he did his best until his upper-back tensed to a steal ball and he could type no more. The story was one he should have told long ago, he should have given from the first place, instead of acting it out in his crimes and misgivings of his non-fictional criminal past. At least before he pointed the gun at that shaking poor bleached blond, teenage clerk at the 7-ll money order counter, and had the small, petite, bleached blond, most likely California boy drop freshly bright green twenties, with those dead president eyes glaring back at him, warning him to turn back, but he’d poke his eyes out before giving in, and for well over twenty minutes and until the cops showed up right on his ass he was still persistent and deadly with force and emotion and anger and hate and cleanliness of thought, simple and complex action and spiritual belief’s of Buddha, Zen, Dionysus, Hinduism, and the three Gods above: Brahma, Shiva and Vishnu, the god of creation and destruction and the God Jesus who suffered to tell his story and save his followers, and then arrived with handshakes and pats on the back and kind words like Thank You and Excuse me, the lovely and charming social grace and while the officers, one man and one woman, both in a shiny and silver and blue pig outfit with fuzz shooting out of their ass holes, pressed the cuffs tight as blue and before entering his lonely, tired, iron sad, gray and pubic hair infested suffering, prison cell, and before he wrote any of what you read at this moment and at this time of your free or imprisoned life, beats away and awaits a climax, final conclusion and ultimate stillness within and out.

The Criminal.

Written by Roberto Pace

A man rotten away in a prison cell in the land of the free.

Atrophy. The idea of prison. Atrophy, the idea of hell, trapped in the body. Atrophy, my beginning and my end. Atrophy, never will I walk but in circles along wired fences and bullet proof glass and hallways of arm stretched length. Never will I remember the beauty of a pastoral field and the mother’s whispers and the honey highs at midnight snack hour, listening to the Flintstones howl on the cold, static TV set, and Dad and mom and tons of snoring purring down the main hallway near the stair unit. Never will I remember the opposite of atrophy; when I could move through time and space, slip and slide and listen to my favorite song on the FM radio in my get go car made by Ford, or Chrysler, or Chevolet. Atrophy; a true hell, a unspeakable dull stillness, truly a crime of the body, for the body and for the punishment of the rational mind, true death in its insanity controlled by the idea of 1984, and the Camera inventors and Hitler’s dream of control and cleansed white desire and structured fare blond society, controlled by the aristocratic, overpaid, over educated, over grouped and monies, sell out fascist, three hundred thousand dollar Fox and Jacob bearcats; and all, in all our way hidden by the greedy boogie man and his pile of dirty dick-guns. I am dead because of atrophy and because I think I possessed something sacred, something some refer to as social democracy and freedom of thought. I thought I possessed the freedom to write this, but the pigs, the feelers, and round ones have suggested too many words to consume out of their fear to be wrong. The capital fat asses consuming the starving children’s life blood and a villages meal a million miles away under a tropical storm where their houses fly as fast as our French fries fry. I will burn my eyes out before I allow them to speak among the important, sure they can speak to the masses but not to the important. Not to the ones that give up what they want and detach their crown of thorns, leave the oil to dry, and allow thought and starvation and all that is true, to free them into the next world, like He did for us. To die for another is the key and to die for yourself is the greed and the devil’s way. There is nothing in the end that means anything to those that hog all the radio-air -time and all the personal desires and dreams of the individual cast out to sea: in the end but a pile of shit, a pile of dirt an empire of trash awaits their itchy checkbooks and forgotten paychecks. My words are my riches. My words only. That is why I sit in this cell and confess what I did, how I tried and sincerely attempted to evaporate us all with my words: I am dead because my desires are dull and I can never think to possess anything more than my own selfish limbs and deformed body and wicked green as envy eyes and sharp aching elbows and blue toes and eyelashes and nails and sin and the ways of sin and all the million parts that roam and organize and depart inside us: I was strangely granted by the Almighty-the wish to inhale the most sacred of us all; the spirit. Evil or good, the spirit is the sacred tongue and it is always and will always be unheard and unread and at times un-experienced, not as tingling sharp as the flesh, but it is present and will be met. My body, now, as will always be until I am released, my true cell, the round Iron and manmade bars, my true thoughts-my machine toward FREEDOM. My punishment, my savior, my life and my end of all thoughts and my end all, and my end all-the body was and will always be my home-my body is my home-my cell-my vehicle-my freedom: and without these bars I could never wish for FREEDOM. Without being locked away; I could never dream of being free. . That is the key to my story. The torture of imprisonment is the cause of the effect that makes up what America calls The Land of The Free. Bravery comes with attempting that simple freedom. How is one free? How does one breath? How is one going to break my bars away and let me out of Huntsville.

Psychosomatically I am here and I can hear your words and your images as I write this, and as I free myself from your staring imprisonment, omnisciently I know you, because your eyes move left to right across the page, decode the letters, imageries and what many asshole professor may call, poetry, but I call verisimilitude and truth of words from mouth, to finger to typewriter, and and and and and and and and know me. . . . . .

Its hard here.. I wake at the break of dawn, with or without sleep, and there are many nights of no sleep, because this cursed story begs of me to tale. I awake. I go to breakfast. Thirty minutes to eat, which boils down, after waiting in line, getting the eggs, finding a safe, and isolated table, ten minutes. Then, I return to the TV room, watch CNN. And then to the basement to do laundry for eight hours and then to TV room to watch CNN and Ted Coppell and maybe, if lucky, a flick about Crime and the idea of Crime and how crime doesn’t pay.
See, they tell us how to think, when to shit, when to eat, when to move and when to walk. My mind is their ideal of their minds and that is how we are rehabilitated.

Then, I return to my Cell block C117.66 Cell number 2b. Which changed month to month due to new comers and to add-ons and construction to the old prison house.

And as I write this, wrong or write and to question such an idea as falsehood, I announce my in-corrections, maladjustments, anarchist view points, grammatically incorrect slang and chants of a mad man, I stand and sit and sit and sit against this blue cold Iron wall, and try and shed the shadows of the bars giving to me by you and me, now, I sit and ponder at the lies and truths and all the vicissitudes and take a peek at what might come up next, what murder may unfold and what crime you may witness. Words to speak from another, or silent pray in the mind by a millions, maybe billions and dullness cramps my side and filth rapes my nose and fear trembles my existence and now I exist, lonely and alone, the two worst words every created to put down for you, and ask you am I just. Am I right. Do I have the right. Is everything printed and created for your mere entertainment, legal or illegal or just dumb, is it for the intellect, the soul, the emotions to be raised and bubbled, or is it for the incinerator or basement fire, or is designed for a Christian, or anti-Christian, book burning, which is Pagan in its Nazi like ritual. And the commitment to dismiss this knowledge and leave for the dead is for the dead at heart and for the cold and fat and lonely and the words that are invented to bring us further into the blue shadows of law and righteousness. No man is this. No man is just. No man is correct. No person in this world knows the rules, nor invents them. It is a long torture device design to shame and hurt, and bring down to the lower pits of what Dante feared and confessed. It is for hell. It is for bliss. It is for nothing and everything. And it is for you. What are you? What is this that you are reading? As Daumel questioned. What are you while you read this particular ideas, words and images. Is it the maddening rant of a the criminal insane. If so why is it written? If not why is it, or was, burned? Obviously it has not been burned. Not every copy. Not every word, or you would not be suffering from Atrophy as you read away, or do you do a thousand crunch sit ups as you study the literature of our times. I am a made criminal. But no one can be such without living the life of a saint. How can a story of contradictions be so. How can the words of mine be for you and only you. What are you at this moment. Where is your cell? Are you in a cell? If you disagree and claim your stance of freedom, you’re a liar too, as well as an asshole intellect. What are the truths that I should give you at this moment as a tell this brilliant tale of thievery and crime and anger and stealing and love? It is only the moment you are in that gives you truth. These are my moments, truth or false, this exists now, and continues to prolong nature in the now and its complexity and metals are in the now. You are now free. You are now a prisoner. You are both in the same breath. For no one can leave the body without leaving the world. That is our price for heaven.

As I lay here in my tomb created by the riches of society, to keep my mind out of yours and my body out of the ruling lawful types. To keep my gaze from your children and my evil tainted idea from the innocent. As I go on and rant to make a genius point and head in the nowhere direction, what is it that you want, besides an ax or blow torch to end the suffering. Who is your guard? Who is your electric fence? What is your prison? A room of it’s own. A room with blue wall paper, incense, roses and a television static in the background. Perhaps a diet coke commercial has appeared on the tube, or perhaps you have got a great idea to purchase a new musical device from the local Mall. Either way you are just as dumb as the idea to pick up this book to free yourself. To say, “I have the right to educate my mind.” I have the right to freedom. I have my imagination as it wastes and wonders to the next thought. How long have you concentrated on these words and images. How long till your mind wonders and becomes independent. As long as your read, never. Bullocks on you. Its all ignorant in the long run, when the mind tails end in a pile of corroded soil six feet under where above you sit and read. And if not read, where you burn these piles of papers, images and ideas of the criminal sane and just. I am crime. I am freedom. I am not sane and sane for knowing it. Thus, I am just to write this down for you. See, There is no freedom without a bloodbath. This is my form of bathing you. I know that whatever is written becomes history and this is the only thing that separates me from the animals. And man from the animals. Everyman has to face what is animalistic. What is that of the beast? Every gofer has a tool. Every monkey has its reaching stick. Every ant becomes fuel for the hunger of the ape’s long sticky honeyed bamboo shoot. Every otter has its rock for its oily, gray clam shell and crashes through toward it’s pearl. Everyman uses a tool of some-kind in or out of nature. Above or below the ground. Higher or lower than the stratosphere. Every tool and every way and kind, uses this man, or this mankind. Every animal has its tool. And every animal uses its man. Who is the tool? The horse or the coach rider? The driver or the driven? The cross or the nails, or the man on the nails and on the wood. Who is the tool? The man or the beast. This is the only thing that cries freedom and chops off the rulers head and feeds the hungry cake to the masses. Good created the evil for His purpose. The evil await his judgment day and ignore what is pure and what is godly. I will pay for this strayed and quacked path. An ignorant man attempts to believe that the cake is what he needs. An ignorant man attempts to believe anything that is good and sound is what he needs. But how could any man only have good. How could goodness exist with out it’s dark nemesis. The shadow is made by light. Or is it that an ignorant man, his hopeless and countless labored choices to believe in good and just, and ignores the darkness and truth of his end. What is good? What is just? Do you see light? You see dark before you see the light? Or did the chicken egg come from the hen’s liar? Well, good is good. Just is just. And dragons breath fire when angry. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck than it must be a goodly duck. Then, it can’t be a dragon. This is reason. This is sound. Because you have agreed it is so. Just as you have agreed the gold standard is no more and money is money because America says its money. Work is work because Americas says its work. Freedom is a cliché. It’s a social grace. America never meant you are free. But you sure feel free today as your read my blood bath. According to the Hindus the duck never walked, nor quacked, nor paddled along the greasy pond that never existed in a (World) place and everything of exact illusion, nor does the dragon breath fire. Its all lies, but you read it after every minute falsely ticks on your beeping, useless digital alarm clock. The only aspect of life that incorporates a prisoner is the idea of wrapping your hands around the bars and committing to the limited and crouched circumstance of the Iron walls that may possess you.

All those who suggest ideas and words to other ears are The Pigs. The pig is a suggestion. It is a force. Any type of force is piggish and anything not forced is swan like. And all the pigs are authority figures. Listen to the inside of Orwell’s mind. The inside is far from pig-ness and grotesque control and angered hunger, and fear and a limitless of desire arises like lava and hate and kindness, and spitting and mewing like a ripped off lie and then truth, from the dirt pits, from the muddy pig baths at local Starbucks near the ticket stands on Broadway, heard by the intellectual Wallstreet asses and the mindful prune-ish but-heads, cockling the mind is an idea and will remain a mere abstract idea, a tool of thought, so that with or with out the Coked out version of Freudian wit-full womanly world; from the stomach to the groin and then to the heavens is said again, without notice or thought or prediction; is said again and again, and Freud clumsily but skillfully falls from his thick paged pedestals and breaks his ranting, jabbering loosened jaw, and the skit-zey world continues to spin abnormally right or wrong, or write and wrong; and then again, the sun sets before it rises and rises before it sets. At least I say it does and so do you. Right? Wrong? Never-mind what is minded.

Roberto Pace. Cell #1776.

A proclamation for the perfect and sane: There is nothing beyond these bars for you.

A proclamation for the imperfect and insane: Everything is at hand and awaiting after the riot. Paranoia is merely a hyper awareness of you and mines true intentions.

Now for Roberto’s Pace’s fictional story, inspired by wasting away in his Cell #1776 A Block. Down the hall from the blue-collar crimes cries the invention of a man named Tom Burnet. (Sounds like Burn it doesn’t it Tom.) “Why, yes it does Roberto.”

I have a question for you genius? Is thinking real? Is thinking real. Is it real? What is thinking and reality? What is thought? Is thinking real? Or is it merely the combination of short term memory and protracted problem solving? Lets find out shall we!

Chapter One.

The first extension of his slimy, primitive tail.

Tom Burnet was lost in a familiar, unerring thought. It was not a breath away that he could feel her, almost touch her soft lips. Shelly Thorns, the women he never mentioned, never, not even softly uttered her name. Like thorns that grew in the garden and that had stung too deep, far too deep to remove from the sole. A scar was left inside him that he could never repair. The thought that he pondered on was intrinsically planted carefully in the corner of the dark rooms in his head. It was not a breath away that an unforgettable sound, in one of those rooms, painted baby blue, a carriage, and white wool baby blanket that kept him heavenly warm, had fully enveloped his every movement he despairingly needed now. The feeling, even the sound of this warm web, was always with him, constantly spinning and beating, like a series of master drummers far off in the jungle, in the wilderness inside him, thumping at the soles of his feet to dance it all away. This feeling, cool, dark, azure, deathly deep blue was out there, above him, beyond reach, beyond comprehension. Then, the sound that awoke him as a infant at night gurgling and mewing for his mother, came again. That strange little noise we all are so familiar and surprisingly in awe of during dinner time came again, when the talk of the commercials and TV shows intrude upon our reality once again. The sound of a mimicked life arises once again and; then, the rawness of truth arrived in a simple beat. Lub dup, lub, dup, lub dup. The sound in his chest pumped away and it scared him. That familiar big city sprouted up inside him, burning his urge to write it all down, to commit it to the world, to existence, filling him like some strange evergreen plant that would never die, not in the coldest town. A hidden secret arose, like the forbidden fruit once had been defined with Reason and Temptation, had appeared before him in the form of a tall city; and not a small unholy, feminine, fruit, instead.. He had never tasted this strange sensation until now, this very precious rushing time, enraging energy and force, giving him an bestial energy he had never used and now aided and burned the story of his life in him like an iron imprint. Tom was constantly putting down in some journal, or shadowy corner in his back pocket, or doodled and tucked between restaurant napkins. Perhaps an answer. Perhaps the answer was temporary but it warmed him, soothed him for the moment he waited on the subway bench for the R train to arrive.

Breaths buried into his structured and planned out mind. Ashy thoughts, once pure, but now growing polluted and far from taintless were coming and going in long puffs off his Camel cigarettes. Then, in a flash he had landed in the future. Years passed him in a blink and he began to write.

Buy one get two free Camels at the local junction in the town of Crow where he marked the story from now. He went back to this city again for an answer. It was sad such a man could lose his innocence, some of the greatest of his blood had never suffered from the glitch, the tiny dot, by which the mechanics of the machine’s black blood and grinding, oily and drippy desire of fame and fortune, operated. In such an evil way his voice changed and became rusted with knowledge never meant for man to see and take in. Of course it was the big city. He could blame it on that. But the blame, you see, never ends. The blame never ends. It is more dangerous than cyanide or any toxic chemical growing in the refineries that charged the light and energy for mankind. This collection of the richest of men, in the spot of a financial moment, a dent in time had opened for him, a fortune offered for his words and thoughts, his paper turning to gold. It was this, the temptation he fought. The temptation of fame and fortune and to enter the Great Wall.

It was not some mere philosophy, or art, or performance, or trickery that he so treasured and tried to organize and plan his life around that was saving him. This type of feed, this entertainment was eating away at him like the blue and yellow pills he ingested morning and night to calm his mind and heart. No it was more than that. It was touchable, in sight, before him, breathing like a lover. Shelly Thorns was lost. She left for the south. Left him behind for another lover, another heart to heal and grow.

There he was in this big city that everyone flocked to time to time for financial award and fame. There he was again. This lost man. Alone. In some deep thought about the essence of what a city really is, a living force with form, a unknown necessity, like technology has become, a new fruit. . . and now with an almost a godly perfection it hovered and shadowed over him like a great God asking him questions and leading him to empty dead ends.

Like an organism larger than most gigantic killer whales, or Moby Dick ever tried to exist as: When the Captain of Captains, Oh Cpt. Ahab, of the mighty wailing ship able to take under killer sea creatures of the seven seas, Ahab, without fear, or self consciousness, or pity or fear, may have tossed his ragged self upon it’s flapping fins and slimy skin, sticking his mighty spear into it’s fishy ribs and his flesh joining the whales flesh, holding on to this stubbornness in unison, this hate and this sailor’s revenge that lead him far beneath the drowning sea, like a giant iron ship anchor, of no desire and salty downward, gravitated truth; Now, and again, and again, he watched the bars in his cell, the brick hall ways and passing inmates, like Ahab, once had bravely been, fighting in the rushing waves, salty water for their next fishy meal, and greater than the any peril of the sea itself, that now tugged on his puerile and silly, childish direction of man versus the sea (rather than Man versus God). He typed, like Ahab harpooned the watery mammals hearts: A direction once, in youth, lead by God, and now guided by what seemed to be his own choosing, words, words, words making up giant stories of his own precious chosen scene. He was a chosen one, gifted to speak, to own the past, to control the future, to change the past and revise the present. Those who changed history, changed the future and those who changed the past, powered the present. He was far from 1984’s concept dreamed by Orwell and far from the dream of Big Brother. That was already implanted in everyman, free or not. These thoughts, these literal stories, which was downfall, in his youth once mitigated toward Christ’s solitary popular words, barred by his fructification of fiction, “Worship must have crucifixion, and understanding, but now what tempted him from saving grace was lost on a bet of fame and glory of the word and by the word. Words became his safety net from love. And God became a voice in his head for the words to be taking in and housed. The man of the cross was present. He needed Him like a plant needs the power of water for fermentation. And God was always there in fermentation of his mind and body. Carrying him, mind and body, in the shadows and pain that slowly sucked from his lungs, which derived by Rene Duamal’s plants and Sogol’s climb to Mount Analogue. Stories now lost, in libraries across the countries, like the fictional talking plants and the invisible mountain made visible by Rene’s imagination..

This city needs grace like a plant needs water. He thought. Without grace the trash will just pile up and take over and corrupt what could have been synthetic manmade natural state of concrete urban horror that really remained-with its cigarette butts, spray paint and gang walks.

Even though long ago he was born now he felt he had just arrived.

“Taxi.” The cab past him in a flash. Seconds passed in his heart that seemed like centuries of war and love. He was now standing before the yellow line awaiting the underground trains, rushing, clicking by like flashes of pure heated solar rays: warm lights manmade and of faces in rocking pasts haunting his unconsciousness. It was all a dream. He sat up in his bunk silent and admittedly surrendered to the walls of his prison cell. It had been one year. One year to this day. December thirty 2000 A.D. “Oh, God, he better not show.” He hated him, his cell mates, almost blinding him into confusion, with his chattering hatred of authority, cash register locks, passwords and unbreakable bank mausoleum.

The prison was not just steel and alarms. It was an organism in a way, this Big City of bars, foul talk and unforgiving, hard chilling back breaking, bed sore ridden and hellish smells of the essence of rules. It was no different than Manhattan (Big City). See, it was really a live organism in a way: this Big City of bars, foul talk and unforgiving rules. The prison was not just steel and alarms. It was an organism in a way. This Big City of bars, foul talk and unforgiving, hard chilling back breaking, bed sore ridden, never forgetting and hellish smells of the essence of rules and proper conduct had crowded his every inch, his every bone, tissue, vein and beat of the heart, his everything. It was no different than Manhattan (Big Cities across America), more personal and emotional and greedy than Wallstreet or more creative than the artsy streets of San Francisco, or the crowded religions of Tokyo. It was not much different than death or the blackest part of sleep a man can sleep without knowing he is alive.

What is not of nature, in some form or fashion, is either crafted by the delicate and laborious hands of what some call artists, and others laborers, sudras and the untouchables in India, that Gandhi called The Children of God, now, a construction, a plan of the people, the city of man, with aim of building higher toward the azure sky that rested with perfect timing above him. Or perhaps it wasn’t these patched worked concrete maze, or labyrinth and vainly constructed men that cooked the metal, forged the perfectly planned alloys, and invented ways to reshape the ore and elements far beneath us, now a growing metropolis, inspirited by the Omniscient force of what had originated in the soil and now thrived in his superego, which weighed him down into non-action. It once, this growing concrete kingdom, never so carefully rested upon this innocent place once called Eden, from the firsts gardens, now city upon city years have passed, technology, rockets, nuclear war and men on the moon, which has now changed the eyes of men. Now, commanding his steps and his numbered ways, like robot workers on rolling electric wheels, thieving the walk of man away and his beloved dance and changing his perception of the earth’s initial shape. Towers lined side by side, streets covered in dark misty shadows commanding him to take a stand, to take a part of it all, to become one. And becoming one was impossible in this legion of laborious workers, writers, dancers, actors and artists.

This godly scene arose before him once again, and like always, just as he thought as temporary men do in this era, to this time, this exact second, 10 PM 2001, the tail end of August. And in that place, on sixtieth street he tumbled and trembled with shivers. A fear, but hid well within his craft of he learned stealth. Invisible from the bully of school, hiding under the bleachers, under the desks, the school yard bushes and behind the gym. Yes, he was a master actor/illusionist, story teller, using his words as defense and strength, lost in the street awaiting to breath others and his words into life, but for some reason, perhaps his deformity over his heart, prohibited him from acting at all. No, it was more than that. It wasn’t his calling. It was his temptation and he was failing.

A memory arrived behind bars. Doing time allows the mind to fly away like a lost black crow searching to cry a warning to the dieing poets and lost thieves.

Lost. Rain arrived that Sunday in the Central Park. Almost programmed to do from the great fiery clouds that blocked out the sun that day. And how Tom thought, and does, very much different this time, and at other times, simple, so simple it was too complex, are too set in pattern for paper and pen, and any genius or scientist of technology, or Buddhist should and could keep up with, and men at times do, with men like Tom, searching for pace but lost in his weakness had now become the thief, the quick one. And in a similar scene, a fast place connected by a labyrinth of streets and names and regulations, walkways, platforms, scaffolding, elevators and tons upon tons of forged, perfectly shaped and guided metal, of speed, timing and exactness, alone in the noise and unexpected flashes and glances of this city, this “Big Apple”, or a place that did not seem to fit with the perfection of an apple, had bit into him, and taken away what seemed to be a child within.

Why an apple? An apple? Why this particular name for this scene. Is it a puzzle, some type of riddle? How could one sprout here. How could one forever live by what was forged by the hottest ore and metallic of the underground. Where were the trees for apples to grow? Where were the trees? It wasn’t the Big Apple, or even in most cases, Manhattan, but it needed a larger name. So, he could it the Biggest City in the world. Bigger than the city of lights. Bigger than Shy Town. Bigger than the place of Lost Angels. Bigger than big itself. He began in thought. . . Something that went with gigantic but more simple, and basic. Like Big. Big was simple. I call it Big. Bit City, or maybe pig, or cig, or wig, or fig, the cursed fruit Christ had looked down on and he kept on taking them in, one by one, the sweet taste, than the rhyming arrived in his gluttony that ate him away, with what went with this Bigness that no one man could handle. The thoughts arrived again. Poetry arrived: Tig, hig, mig, fig, sig, gig, chig, qiq, awig, qwig, plig, kachig, shig, nig, zig, jig, rig, dig, yig, vig, lig . . .but Big suited the moment best, besides pig and that is what he felt like doing as his stomach grumbled and that hollow starving for the subway to pick him up and take him near the Village. A empty feeling arose in the pit of his belly and he jumped off the subway and up the stairs onto the sidewalk and searched out the best hot dog stand to hit up for a bag of barbeque chips and a large juicy dog with extra chili and cheese. Confusion had arrived in his mind. The city had twisted him like some mad tornado. Then, the thoughts like monsters arrived, plaguing him. Should I eat. They’ll think I am a pig. But Big what? Pig what? Why pig? I shouldn’t call it a city of pigs. Poets are thin. Gaunt, lonely thinkers. Boy I feel like pigging out at this nearby Italian restaurant. Maybe Chinese. No Italian will do. Now I can’t be bad, not now, I can’t afford such a sinful dish. A Pig wouldn’t do here. Too many good hearts running around looking for jobs. Not now. It’s not that by far. A job that is the answer. Money. I need money. Money to reach the skyscrapers and settle in. Maybe on Park Avenue. I’ll publish soon, but now, if I am going to live in this brilliant place, I am going to have to steal bread. But that is how the French revolution began. I must keep my hands in my pockets. But I’m so hungry. Balance. Self control. Come on get your fucking head together. It is too honorable of a place to get off center. It’s a city of riches. Not pigs. No. Big. Big what? Then, he took off running. He lost control and ran. Up in the morning. Six AM. Stretched. Deep breaths. Focus. Run. Run damn you. Run to dance class. Run to class. Become lean. Lean mean fighting machine. A machine for your art.

And the unknown mechanical beasts that passed so swiftly, and the streets buzzing, honking, clicking like mad birds, and rambling along like a razor sharp arms, the machine cried “Welcome”, Welcome to my game. Then, various tools thumping in a various of colors and shades, of off green and wild red, and bright golden silent yellows, orange, and pasty whites flashed past him like monks on parade. Prisms, a galaxy of variation and sizes and a maze of turns and twist and then, it all stopped as if it never existed as if he never entered or exited into this concrete mess, and there she was. . .she stood before him, whole, beauty, alone, like he must have been, in one time, or another, far away, adjoined from time as man has calculated man to be on this planet, in one moment she had reminded him of himself, a whole man, existing in a city, a continuum that must belong in the order of God’s plan, and stacked above, not innocently, but deliberately, in a never-ending deluge of concrete mass constantly growing like moss, stacking, amounting from dust to pebble, to stone and jagged designed rocks and every type of metal, allow, chrome, tin, fashioned in it’s specific, inane way, hand over hand, athwart to worker to worker, and crafted from the design of the endless amount of architects that cooked it up in frustration and a fruitful and maddening of crafty planning. For a slight moment, she could keep up, but not innocently like the man, not with reason, but with a murderous purple passion, a thirst for strength and massive power that man owned from his initial birthed breath, from his first attempt at moving his tongue, cradled in his own soil, whining his acidic breath, taking in mother’s milk and peering two inches before at the glared vision of his mother’s sweat pale face and soft caring hands and perfumed flowery smell, somewhere above him, the sounds, perhaps the ring of the cradle, or the jingle of the mechanical wind up Chinese toy he remembered, or the distant fuse of the changing the old television he glared at as a growing infant, predicting the sounds, almost teaching him as, next a toddler, this fuzzy noise, or to some music and to the city go’ers understanding and laughter and tears, and this endless visitor, that scratched in his tiny brain, in the blink of time, would mature into a man’s mind able to calculate, associate and relate objects to a modern world, when geometric shapes became reality and like a picture framed the city could stand alone and establish itself as choices, “take me to twenty first street and Park, hurry.” He was already there as the cradle noise and the fuse still settled in the gray matter growing and developing in his growing brain, and the cabbie changing lanes as he lit up another poisonous Camel and then the memory, his mother, she lifted him up to the sky and he laughed and now strong, her heart, inside him carried above the comfy cradle and into her warm arms, he could feel what it was like to be part of her, the need for milk and the taste of life, and then, they arrived, in a million voices begging him to continue with his story. The story. Yes, the story. I remember now, the story. I’ll KILL YOU BOTH. That little demon had spoke. I’ll kill you both. But who. Who would kill. Then, he remembered the story. Cain and Able. Was he able, or was he Cain now.

They, the two passers of this city, Shelly and Tom, once flesh to flesh, breath to breath, arm over arm, traveling together place to place, now far apart, never to touch again. . .He searched for her among the million of passing faces. Maybe she was her selling her art.. . .but she wasn’t with him yet, not yet, and then, she arrived, like a ghost, in another’s face, in another’s hidden eyes to almost touch him, and then, touched, almost connected, and almost exchanged for a price, a gift, the one chance to pass on a part of him into the Wall that lined every library of the great land that birthed him. And this, essence, the holy reason, of why he was here in the first place, arrived like wind against the door. Rattling, scaring and attracting a tingle, a sensation of fear. Doubt. It was her, not his mother, but the one he could detach to. . .She had arrived and never again will he call for her. Not after. . .not after. . .Then, he went to her again, but not after the arrival to this maddening place of slamming car doors, alarms and laughing. “This will be fine sir.” The cabbie pulled over and he stepped out on Twenty First street and the Golden Stallion, those tall words hovered before him, and he turned his head to see the pad of his college friends and the other mates that roomed there and the stair unit that she came to him again. . . Her curvy body with sexy bright, lingering emerald eyes froze his very breath. And that is why he was lost in the basement, like a mad artist, pretending stardom would save him, and if he perfected his tongue enough, they, the great ones would notice his educated mouth. Then, a stillness captured, trapped, and nearly shook him into alertness, into full consciousness. He was highly aware of every corner, ever passing thing, every vibrating mechanism planed for man’s survival, and meaning in the Big City. He was with her now. It was her again. The whole women standing before him with her mouth slightly agape, hanging for the next breath, then her next muscle, the neck, then the muscles, lightly stretched taught and she released a delicate, catty sigh. But it was more than a nonverbal, or female grunt. Oh, it was more than her usual heave of attention. A moan. It made his pelvis cringe and his spine straighten. Someone is on my side. Someone great. Just Great. He could picture her close to him. Her being on top of his flesh, with her under the sweaty sheets, finding meaning and beckoning the primal arrival of man’s fight for life. It was her again. Like God. She entered him, full of presence truth and life blood. She didn’t want to let him go. But God was stronger some how. God was more powerful than both and more jealous. Yes, the same lover that caused this mess. This technological, swamp of riddles, and big screens and Sony voices, Tom had fallen into. He would never mention her name now. That name that went back before Moses, before his sons, and there sons, and before all thousands of sons. Her name. God, that name. No more of it. It is worse than deadliest and painful torture of war. It brought bad luck. Her name was slippery and difficult on his tongue. It had those damn S sounds in it. Jesus, why all those sounds. Then, a cab, and then the screens again, and the tiny dots making up the millions and millions of pixels that formed a face, but not her face, another face, a vain and lost face. And disrupted his plan of action. Then, his lungs polluted. His breath, as he whispered it and breathed it back to her memory, her shape and design God had let him feel. They were connected, even though she was on the other side of the continent, near the beach and the visually arresting and beautiful cliffs and the tranquil easy sea. But he loved her more than himself, more than the cliffs, and beaches. Hell, he loved her more than man and man was all he knew before her. A man couldn’t love another being on this earth more. Not more than her. . .and this made his God jealous. Envious. It was her that he once he loved more than his own breath. And when he was in youth, lifting his head back, gazing at the mad world of towering digital clocks, beeping and flicking the time, time, time in sharp squares. With his set and bright green eyes, emerald with envy, emerald rays bouncing from them, every type, every kind of light he ever knew blinded him from clear sight, he used find her again and again, printed five hundred fold on headshots sent across the oceans. He went dizzy for a second and balanced his feet, once again, finding steadiness on the sidewalk of Worth. She was present that evening and a grayish rainy color was radiating off him, glowing, almost illuminated, fully seen in the light. It was time to call her name. He wasn’t the old self he once knew as a child or at least pictured at the time. The old remarkable clear sense of happening, and a purlieus feeling had surrounded him, familiar thoughts, glued to a familiar scene, perhaps, a memory, a particular squint of welcoming hands, familiar voices, tongue twisting songs, loving whispers, perfumed scents, familiar names that spawned scenes in that Big City, scenes he had seen on post cards where now present before him. Those combinations, symphonic crisscrosses of what makes Manhattan, the big city. Manhattan. And like a series of still photographs in an album photo-book and arising times from the pit of his memories, echoing in the hollow of his chest after each beloved breath sipped under the misty pouring of a sudden chilling blue rain that suddenly blanketed the streets of gray and darkly lit and at times overly bright, neon glow of Manhattan, now in his pondering, lost state of existence, almost like the moonbeams in famous paintings by the most ostentatious painters from Europe, and the homeland, now, all of it, in continuum, bouncing off troubled waters of the East River, or the diving river rats of Houston streams, had now enveloped his every sense and once again gelled him from movement. For a moment Tom had captured clarity, opened a door to brilliance, it was all a story in someone else’s head, perhaps someone he had met, perhaps someone had wrote. And as the rain slide down his pale, hollow cheeks, a word arrived to start it all. Her. The word, her. No name, but a face, a body and legs, and lips and millions upon millions of long, life saving breaths. He dried off with his blackened wool scarf, almost holy in some way, the scarf that he found before the airport deluged by the downpour on that Sunday, before he left to Dallas for the Airport to the city. He bought one just like it when he was younger but dropped it somewhere between California and New York. He purchased many scarves like it but they kept falling off him, lost in the stormy weather. She was the same. She kept wondering off in some storm that was cast upon them. Once again, the scarf. He wrapped it around him, straightened it along the edge of his neck, where the collar bone met the breast plate. Yes, the scarf will hide my flaw. The scarf. I need the scarf. But why worrying about an article of clothing, that isn’t life, or that isn’t the speedy recovering love can amount to. And at some fancy clothing shop with a clothing line name, he found it. No scarf from a factory should have a sense of holiness. But it had gone through the trial, the pains on the street in the Northern Bright city of Big. That is what he called it, the Big City. It wasn’t the Big Apple, or Manhattan. It was bigger than the name. He just related to it in his journals as the Big City. He related it to the word Big. Like pig, or rig, or jig, or cig. In the long run it made sense. It had to. It was simple. Everyone would understand it. Right? I’ll call it the Big City. But it wasn’t a great idea. It wasn’t something to publish or witness by the millions of eyes out there. Or was it? You never know. Big people lived in such a place. Big city, was fine. It will work. Simple things sell. It will sell. Sell. Sell. Sell. Sell. Sell. Sell. Sail away with the sell. Sell. Sell.

Decades seem to fly out the cab window as the endless flow of “Why am I here now. I should of never left this Big Apple” hid in the jagged corners of his mind. Again he repeated the same chant since the airport. Then, the thundering cry of a jet engine. Lightening glided across the tips of the an anvil shape cumulous clouds. A thunder storm had seeded the sky below the airliner. Tom was seated in first class and had already slurped down two virgin Bloody Marys’, to kill the jet lag, and topped of a half glass of white Zinfandel. The flight smooth out to a turbulent two hours, with a few bronco bumps and a tipsy tingle of jingling stormy air-pockets pitted through out the passing weather storm blowing off summer tropics.

Tom had finally done it. He, a man, a Christian decent with a strict protestant upbringing, had damned himself, turned on his God and shattered his destiny. Why did he escape his planned future, his genetic line, and pattern of nature? Why did he break the rules of the chosen path that was laid clearly for him, from his God, now, non-existent to him, a foe, a idiot’s dream? Why did he choose to follow a fallen direction, a collapsible end. Then, a change of heart and a complete one eighty. He decided to go back to his lord, to fall into his grace once more. Of coarse there was a God. Sure there was a creator. And it was Christ, his lord. But for some reason, perhaps it was a genetic link between him and Thomas, prove to see the scars from the nails and the scab from the spear in His side. He had to see him, know him. Only in heaven will I truly believe. That is Believe without a shadow of a doubt.

Tom had come to a realization that every man’s destiny is to die and no man will ever discover peace without finding God and His way. This was his true calling, it was not to steal what never belonged to him. Nothing of this earth belonged to anyone, not really. If a man was truly saved the only possession he endlessly owned was the love of God and only God and not the riches of the world. Every rich man wakes in the middle of the night from the bitter chill of His sayings. A whisper, “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle than to enter through the gates of heaven.”

Yes, man purchased it and claimed it was his, but you can not take a U-haul to the grave. One can not run very far if he owns a ton of belongings. Everything piles up to a meaningless bomb fire in the end, or in a embalmment, or ashy fire that is. Nothing was his in the first place. In a way, money, this green papered form of greed, or no money, and the physical action of greed, the theft, and everyman is a thief, in one way or another, if it, he ,or in many cases she, their actions, uses of laws, trickery, lies or even physical threats, and if his or her desire is enveloped in materialism and self worth, progress, which always leads to embitterment existence, then their fiery greed ends in a slow and painful self destruction and man’s seed never passes to bloom.

If a person puts himself first, and we all do, this is the cause of the greed of the world, then eventually he or she will eat themselves up and end their life with a pile of wood, cement, alloys, tin foil, gold chips, silver and various cloths made from cotton, nylon, rayon, canvas or leather and the endless amount of skins from the plants and animals man supposedly establishes dominance.

Oh no! He is going to be pissed off at me now. God, what have I done? I have betrayed you and your laws. Rarely do I read from your great and good book. Rarely had I attended your holy gatherings, your church, and your rock. I wish I could worship you more so. I wish I could be with your people again. Can I turn back? Is it too late? Have you abandoned me. When I look up all I see are seeded clouds of somber gray. Will you give me a second chance? But how many chances have you given me so far? Oh, how baroque and romantically pitiful I sound? When does the violin come in to back my melodrama?

Tom was no longer in the Big City of the North. In seemed less than half a heart beat when he arrived in the Dallas Love Field and headed off in a yellow checker, still further into the south. Now, a smaller city that was once established so many precious years ago as a hefty Fort, had appeared beneath the black leather of his clicking wooden soles. A place the Cowboys regrouped and guided their cattle into the stockyards to settle in and share the tales of the dusty trail. He was no longer North. Tom had landed south, far south, as far as you could get until the wildness of Mexico. Texas. He was on tame land. Worth was not an undomesticated city by a long shot. It was one of the most giving and accepting town’s he knew. Tom just passed Eda’s Place. A brothel, once disguised as a classy Hotel for ranchers, cattlemen and cowboys to kick off their boots and pass the bull about last nights stand off, or sour poker game, or to contest who had the prettiest gal back home. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid had once found refuge at Eda’s. Found a place to duck in from the hard rain and take refuge from the troupe of Texas Rangers and the other impossible lawmen. Eda’s place was one of the only hotels a criminal could find a worthy lady, taste of whiskey and rest his head from the repudiation of the unforgivable Western law. The rancher, cattle or even at times, southern poets would show their face in Worth’s saloons to fall upon a ranching call toward Albuquerque, or Oklahoma to drop of the beef. Even today the town of Worth still carries the worthy qualities and southern hospitality that makes up the charming characteristic of the south.

The legends of Ben Thompson, Bill Longley, Jesse James, King Fisher, Jim Courtright, John Wesley Hardin, Doc Holliday, Clay Allison, Bat Masterson, Luke Short and Old Man Clanton. The gentle decorum of John Ringo and the laugh of Curly Bill, and gigantic shadow of Pat Garret, and the lightning gun-slinging speed of Billy the Kid, and religious male chauvinist of Calamity Jane. Somewhere, lost, these legendary gunfighter’s ghosts still hiding in the soil, hellish fire or heavenly blue sky, wherever the great and godly adjudicator established the resting souls, still dodging and hightailing out of town due to the enormous, lawful and almighty presence of Wyatt Earp’s

But now a new thief was in town. Tom Burnet, now disguised as a tourist, now surviving as a cat burglar, city to city, had made his way onto Houston street near the famous Chicago grill downtown Worth. A while back, two years to this day, Tom made his fortune on a single bank robbery up in the big city. His cash was slowly draining to a timid supply. He also side dealt LSD, hiding the sheets (a hundred tabs of LSD, equally a grand in cash) in compact disk and DVD’s. He manipulate a DVD or CD, in a Compact Disk factory, and use the same paper material for the CD logos, or Movie images posted on the outside skins of the Compact Disks or DVDs. Sometimes when time and money was short, he’d just use the CD’s lyric books in the inside CD cases, or the DVD movie credit program, neatly and appropriately, tucked and LSD laced, in the outer sides of the DVD cases. It worked best when using DVD’s because the plastic casing was thicker and no LSD could transfer to the dealers, or runners, finger tips, or open skin. He’d easily dip the logo in Acid, after posing as a Compact Disk factory line doc worker, and cooked up a batch of LSD in his thermos, and spread it on a CD or DVD sheet out of reach, of any shipping personal, and transport the CD or DVDs as usual and pick them up at traced record or movie stores near your friendly outlet. Outlet malls where easier to drop off, pick up and well, buy out. Every CD bought was worth, half price, and every CD or DVD bought was worth close to a grand in drug money. All of it holding sheets worth of LSD when unfolded and cut up and tabbed. A funny story was flying ear to ear, that Tom would name collected LSD sheets, after the movie or album it was hid away in, or mulled in. For example, he once did a whole drug run made from the entire decade long season of the X-files. The LSD sheets where named after Maulder, Scully and Dogget. Some where even called X-Filings. His best shit was from a hit show called 24 concerning the drug culture and FBI. So, he called that sheet 24. The days of dancing test tube, or white blauder, or early 1990’s acid titles for sheets, where far over. Now, this ex drug runner and free floating cat burglar was in charge of The right Eye, of the operation, and well, was out to take the end all of scores of the Big Apple Thieve’s Circle (The B.A.T. C s). Toms job was short and simple. He was to take the priceless bust of the Mary of Pieta. A solid gold copy of Michael Angelo’s masterpiece duplicated from the original sculpture, the one where Mary looks upon her dieing soon taken from the cross on Calvary, now standing under spot light before the cathedral of Rome.

An army of unforgiving watery pellets fell in beastly march, dropping upon the black tar pavement of the city streets; in thick sleepy howls, dripping in an angry pace, spraying pavements in a sporadic watery pellets on the skin of downtown of Worth. The deepest of the rain had set in. It had returned to his life once more, caressing his heart to beat slightly faster, waking up the passion again. The eagerness to conquer the world had returned, to be a real king of his own domain, to rule his own life, make his own plan, to sail off to distant lands, take her, kiss her and make her apart of him again. To discover what was not meant to be found, was every man’s dream. Tom had a dream and nothing, or no one was going to prevent him from making it real and eventually making it his life, again. This excitement, this passion for the world had touched the motion of his breath and sent his heart roaring. He was on fire again, alive, really living, like God meant for him to do. In and out, in and out, they had arrived. Arriving in long chains of images, linking familiar sounds, long drives and walks to and from Rome, Paris, New York, Los Angeles, Dallas arising and falling in him, and every great city of the world calling upon his arrival, they called upon his entrance, his arrival, his learning, his experience, consciousness and wholeness. He was a traveler, a sight seer of the world, taking everything in, sucking the marrow from the bone, Carpe Diem to it’s fullest degree. A framed picture appeared so perfectly like the kind in the art exhibits and museums calling him into a different reality and into a constant reality that he faced day to day, minute to minute, second to second, heartbeat to heartbeat, breath to breath. Oh, the lasting breath, how it comes and goes and goes and goes and then. . . Then, remembered voices floated in to his existence in his head, known and unknown faces sneaked up on him like a slithering temptation lost in the purity of what was once the Garden of Eden, but now a concrete city of confusion, whispering to him to come upon it’s distraction from purity. “You took too long Tom. It’s taking too long. Your body is wearing down my friend. Do something about it. Do something, anything. Act, act, act now Tom.”

Stair unit to subway, air port to terminal, to front step, to sidewalk and back to some unknown street with names like Willing Avenue, American Boulevard, Canyon Trail, back to Fry street where the college boys hung out and drank cups of joe and smoked Camel cigarettes out in front of the head-shop and smoked bowls of freedom and talked like mad hatters and Cool beans and Karma Café, and read Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Joyce, and Jack, Atlantis in Long Beach, 21st in Manhattan, back to Tarry in Crow, Texas, to 21st street again, to first Avenue in New York, back to Willing street in Worth, back to Tarry in Crow, back to Willing, to Tarry, and back to First Avenue, and Fry comes in and then Bruno, Czech and Jamacac, whatever that was, and Absinth, and actors smoking hash in gas mask and reciting Hamlet and drinking more blue glowing Absinth, a little stir with sugar and light it on fire, Manhattan to south, North to Worth, south to Manhattan, it’s all upside down and backwards now, turn left a block down, you’ll find her again my friend, get it straight, turn around, shake it up, just get back on track, she’ll be detached, detached from the rails and back again, stir it with sugar and light it on fire, swallow it down and forget again and again, and again, again.

To speak out, join hands with it’s jagged edges and metal tricks and to smile upon it’s fun and games and twisted chances at fame only to arrive at useless pain of pills, stains from the nicotine intellect, that never went away, cigarette burns staining his soul. A celebration of life was beckoning him to forget Godly things and fall into the temptation he once shied from in youth, but now glared at with wondering eyes. The innocence was escaping him like the smoke that lifting from his lips. Sundays passed him. Sundays without church, long, stale and gray. The world had suddenly popped up, projected, as if for the first time, before his eyes, like a movie he had once admired as a young boy, now spinning for him to almost touch, almost become and grasp for his own, and only for his own. How greedy his hiss had become, his breath taking in air, filling his lungs, expanding the life inside him. Tom left himself, and his reality for a second to close his eyes and simply recall what it was like before. A large breath, he let go for a second and then tensed, and then let go, to tense again and again, until it all evaporated and went to solid. And then, nothing and then everything and nothing again, off and on, the images arrived and left, like the movie reel spinning, and spinning as the light passed through the lens. He had to kill apart of himself for it. Taint a part of him for the story to truly unfold. These images, these faces, had suddenly conquered him and fortunately rid his lonely existence on the street of the little town of Worth. It was a way out of his hell, his shame, the lack of success as a simple Worthian and not-so-proud Texan, was suddenly coming reality. “I remember that time. It was just like it was now, but years before.” As a moment of rain passes Tom continues with, “Yes, exactly like as it is now, but years before.” A visuals of long ago arrived unexpectedly as the rain began to sprinkle down on his uncovered shaggy lonely head. A picture inside him arose under his eyes, weighted far beneath him, sunken in his library of past memories, a heavy pondering of a her eyes caressing him with a lonely gaze, inviting him in again.

It was nine PM, time to take his pill. It was a small thing, round on the ends, the shape and color of a blue tiny tic tac, but a lighter shade, like a baby blue. The small pill had an imprint on the right side. The imprint read MG, for milligrams. At the breaking line, in the center of the pill was a thin line dividing the pill in a perfect half. The line was designed for breaking the fifty milligrams of pill into twenty five. On the adjacent side of the pill, next to the MG, on the left side, it read 50, marking the pill as a 50 milligram of medication. On the back side of the pill, or the reverse side, it titled the pills name, Zoloft. He had no idea where the doctors came up with such a name. It reminded him of the word loft, like the loft a person would live in or stay in temporarily while passing through a small town. He swallowed the small light blue without water. He just swashed his tongue around stirring up some saliva into a ball on the roof of his mouth, and used the spit as liquid in order to push the bitter pill to a pit in his stomach. He wasn’t that successfully with keeping it completely down. It hung somewhere in his esophagus, somewhere between the back of his tongue and the top region of his sternum. It seemed to hover up and down, like some busy elevator, traveling from the top floor, to the middle, to the ground floor, to the basement, back to the ground, to the middle floor and back to the top floor and back down again. A burning arrived, sizzling in a putrid acidic dance at the top of his belly, trying to come up and cause enough irritation for a cleaning vomit. No such luck. He was too hungry and dry inside, but the pill somehow stayed down, inside him, melting, exploding into it’s orderly fashions, breaking down, bit by bit, marching into his bloodstream, fixating on who he was and slowly rearranging, restructuring Tom’s body and mind, into the living structure, into a full organism as God meant it to be, but somehow forgot to complete. Now he was approaching a good state, a whole union of a saneness, positive, just civilized citizen. Sanity was approaching for one of the first time’s since a little child.

Months before.

“It’s called Sertraline HCL.” The doctor said with a slight red and tired eyes. The doctor seemed to be working hard, his mind very vibrant, alert and on fire with knowledge, wonder and intense observation. “What do you want from us, Tom?” A moment arrived. “I want to have clearer thoughts. I want to be less anxious.” “Here is a month supply of Zoloft. Take one in the morning. The kit starts with twenty five milligrams and later it will move up to fifty five milligrams.” “So eventually I’ll take fifty five milligrams.” “Yes. At first you may experience some diarrhea. Serotonin is released in your body and brain. It may affect your gut because it is dispersed there. Your body may not be producing enough of it.” “So serotonin is dispersed in the body and brain?” “Yes. The body needs serotonin just as much as the brain.”

The rain splashed down on the pavement. Tom was still trying to swallow the pill to his stomach acids so it could dissolve into what it needed to become.

The pill broke apart and washed into his blood, finally reaching the nerves of his brain and activating the (seroe toe non) serotonin.

A face of remembrance arose giving away a selective internalization of what others will never fully know, or cherish near as much as Tom does now.

And a story began to sink in him, reminding him of what he was and what he may become.

And the memories overlapped and spun in the back of his head like a movie reel projected in a movie house. His eyes full of light, casting a fiery, amazing, warm light similar to the projector that casts onto a silver screen for many eyes to collect, take in and make true to them, thus, to give life again and again, until a familiar feeling takes over and slowly warms the hearts of men.

This was immortality to him. The story made him live forever. It was the only way out of mortality and to never die. If anyone lived forever it was the writer. This is why he stole from the world, it wasn’t just to live, but to live forever.

His life had begun, again, and ended and begun, like it had some many times before. As the eyes moved from left to right on the simple page, his heart began to pump somewhere in the words, of the time he now creates.

This old town, now new to him, began another story, and concluded an old chapter of his life and the lives of those never seen until now. Now that I am about to present for you, the reader, the lifeblood of the words that lay before you.

A wanderer, a writer and poet. All thieves condemned into action unworthy to the moral man and unholy to the lawful people.

Tom felt all poets were takers of the world and some how even thieves. Some poets were even sent to the underworld to suffer for the sinful and tempting words they shared with men’s innocence. Aristophanes, a Athenian satirist playwright, believed that some great poets were condemned to suffer in hell until rescued by other storytellers in need of an honest and worthy poet. Also, Aristophanes liked to attack Euripides while using the image of the frog as a metaphor for his unique and eccentric style of verse.

Regardless or Aristophanes and Euripides Tom continued on with his story. Still Tom continued to live his life as a poet. Most would call him a thief. Some even called Doctor Zhivago a doctor. But these men were poets at heart and died that way.

They took what was not theirs in order to sustain the life blood of their words, hence, lives.

Tom fell into the thought again, slowly fading to the sounds of the words he would one day print out for another’s eyes.

A lift of the side of the cheek, a show of the mouth, the bounced back to positivism and grace, a photo album of faces, familiar dress of folk from the home front haunting him, as the old jagged cry pelted through the piercing rain from the south side of small southern town. A rushing mechanical force plowing through a piece of Worth with no hindrance but an unexpected gale sipping off from the tracks toward the Trinity river clawed it’s way through the scorching wind pushing in from a leftovers of mean northern storm. For a second the monstrous call sounded like the whine of a scared, vociferous animal escaping the preying of the stealthy menace pained by the emptiness of hunger. Hunger in it’s deepest sense, hollowly dry, painfully neglected and unforgiving, resting in a opaque windy, blackened sky and forever sinking into the abyss of the darkness that so heavily amounted over the sleeping heads tucked away in the thousands of beds rooted within the tiny houses, and occasional mansions, of the small cozy Texas town of Worth. A voice from the absence of day, scraping toward the night railing to further land, where the tongues change and the ideas of a civilization begin to harvest a new color, perhaps more ripe, or dryer, and take from another length of the vine. This night, behind the black, velvet line tracing the jagged treetops arose and enveloped Tom’s shivering constitution. A hungry predator on it’s way, lurking for something innocent, pure and lost. This faraway cry, this deep painful, resonant hellish roar, arose from the mouth of an old rusty engine, collected a industrial momentum, firing a fleet of crackles and hollers, trapped in a distance, unreachable, beyond sight, always afar, banging it’s triumph drum, toward the black blanketed sky, warning man to step aside and let it pass. This mechanical beast with flat iron, caged, breast was far from being stopped by any mere mortal. On it’s dangerous way, approaching with an ungodly sound and speed. The clicking steps of this long forwarding line of railroad cars, pulsing intermediately in a constant rhythm, like raindrops tapping from a rain gutter forgotten, but looked upon by a small boy in a yellow raincoat, in a shallow pool on top of cement on the rainiest, wettest day in the month of the lightening seasons of April. This cry that rested on the horizon, reminded Tom of who he really was, perhaps is, who he shall always be and will one day recognize until his last breath. It, the voice, the dedicated vow, the primal howl, the faraway message, so eager, so urgent, anxious and heated, echoed, sucking wonder from the lost, over the tops of the tornado beaten bank tower, and family of semi, tall, flat, headed, skyscrapers that skinned the shadowy sky, seemed to hide like a child at hide in seek, crafted towers, that clanged, desperately, hugged darkly over the western town of Worth. What a strange town for such a character as Tom. He didn’t fit into a place weighted with religion, so much dedication to the Savior that the world deserved.

Above was dark. In his head and slowly growing around him. The town’s spirit hugged and welcomed him, with a southern hand of hospitality, even though he was still lost from the big city, there remained open and kind arms awaiting to take him in. It was the way of the south. It is all the south knows. B

Back again the city beckoned him. The addiction for the untitled ones. The time he shared there opened his eyes to a knowledge and experience he never believed he would tackle and eventually take in. A gothic north, a city rapidly and secretly and prolifically unfolding the secretions, that arose from the globe of this vibrating organism. For a second, there, far north he claimed a title. New York, within that cry that awakes and hovers on the horizons and joins America to forays of the fountains of knowledge, art and life. New York was stuck in his head even though he was far off now, alone from the city, the Concrete Jungle, the feeding ground of new ideas, the flow of greed, now quieted, alone from the millions of voices that assembled, in the belly of a whale that swallows down the countless number of Jonahs, unwillingly emptying, and at times willingly, collectively, gathering but without unison or togetherness. The city was the well that had swallowed him whole. People of this great nation, from every corner and cob web infested block, stepping up to the great clock Tower, walking under what they accept as time, passing on their voices, sharing and exchanging, ideas, tongues, and histories; little did they know, they where in the belly of an ancient shark. The city. The city of New York. A gigantic conglomeration, the city of cities, with it’s millions of streets, and billions of stacked rooms, homes etched into towers, towers carved into the dome, stretching toward the almighty sun, that moved as quick as the speed of light, rushing, whirling and filling man with knowledge, and the mystics of the unknown was merely a whale, that once swallowed Pinocchio, or in this case a multicolored, army of business men, with the symptoms of Pinocchio’s dream, dedicated to the useless cause of growing into a real boy. Trading for the useless cause of the green, and the great pitiful exchange of profits. The anchor of liberty. The cuffs of freedom. The city was no playground for little ones but rather an idea supported by the workingman’s hearts and minds. It was a place a boy transformed into a man in less time it takes for the heart to doubly beat.

A city dedicated to the dark cloud that covered man and heaven arose in the back of his mind. As dark as the black of the velvet curtain before a stage show. As dark as in the belly of the whale. Burnt dark as the color of money. Ashen dark like the hollow return of a unholy searched life, hollowly feeding men the desire of fame and fortune and wanting to be seen and catered with far too much attention. An array of sinful sensualities, food, delicatessens of drunkenness and a shameful constant, speedy, savored, stimulation of new greedier technology that is always in the verge of the glowing, and in the glooming, grew before Tom as he recalled the past times there. Malevolent Dark like the evil that had crept through Burnet’s heart when he had lost himself within the shadowy, opaque answers inside the many dungeons of this mazy city. He could not believe he made it home. After all of it. After all that hell. He was near home, near the extent of home, still, with the freefall feeling, the weightless fall still hovering in his belly. After all that hell. Tom had gone to the lowest depths of hell and back. He had fallen to the ninth level and ate the meal of the poets. He had seen the flabby, lazy fat on the evil one’s flank. He had gone to hell and back. The lowest level, the ninth, where the evil one was frozen upside down, chanting to all of his poets, the codes to break what may be tomorrow. Now it was time. Now, he was going to get help. He needed it more than ever. It was time to share this horrible insight of what man had done to nature. Man had rapped his only love. His only chance at life was loosening from his grip. He had turned on his only place of existence, he had forgotten his mother and denied nature to grow freely. Mothernature was calling to him but he locked himself inside and hid behind a net that connected them all.

Mornings became nights and nights morning, and everything in between was no longer, there was only black, and white, one or zero (1010001) and he had forgotten balance and his carefree nature was slowly degrading and his rotten mistake where becoming his business (1001011100010). He became separated lost and abandoned from what was reality. It was as if he was no longer awake. He wasn’t at all. Tom was in a deep sleep awaiting for someone else to awaken him and lift him from this labor. He shoved her back, pushed what was left of her, into a crumbling mesh of screws, nuts and bolts, drilled holes in her temple, and drove mechanical beast under her skin, zooming passed the passerby, leaving her diseased, crazed and maddened to a state of a surging, unending pace. His professionalism and dedicated, intense need for growth only stumped him. This never ending defect for man’s assumed perfection was slowly constructing fields of concrete across her giving, soft skin. She was cracking up, wrinkling into state of stillness and mechanical order. Everything had to be perfect or it was fed into the clogged and shredded spout of neglect, and washed away into a flooding cold blue abstinence, or if it revealed a glitch, a tiny mess up, a small mistake, then, hushed and awaited, to the fall of grace and cast out of this cruel reality and into the numbness and nullity far from pain and truth. Nature was becoming machine. Light was now faked and sound forced to reveal the flowing brooks and winds that once, guided men and taught the essence of destination. The blinking lights and fast cars were lifting man from himself and sending him into her arms. Ford, Chevy, Chrysler and foreign vehicles, like Mizabesthi, Honda and BMW was becoming the new body of man. Work became easier, more convenient and at times a luxury. The cars had become man’s chests, hard working arms and developed legs and rippling stomach’s of iron, axle and greasy brains of motor gasoline. Now the chain of fast foods, Wendy’s, Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chickens had murdered his skill of the hunt and pushed the war into full affect. His belly grew full, large and round and limited him from the movements and dances God had once blessed him with. Computers, cell phones, blenders and microwaves had thought, spoke, listened, mixed and cooked for his convenience. A women was becoming useless in the kitchen. A man was no longer needed to pick up trash from the curb and dump it in the back of a dump truck, an electric armed reached out and snatched the plastic barrel, firmly and emptying it faster the a heart can doubly beat. Food was something replaced by an energy pill or snack bar that fed the muscle of industry. Nature, even the unseen nature within him, was slowly falling from his grasp, stolen by vain, thieving hands of the envious corporate code and heated revenge of the fallen one. Technology wanted eyes like him, hands, feet, toes. It wanted to walk about the earth freely and make choices. The machine wanted eyes, noses and a brain to collect the images of the world and judge what is right or wrong. The machine wanted to speak, eat, digest the world, take it in, pass it through it’s system, chop the tree, shepherd a flock, bake bread, have children, sing and dance, preach the word and ride the waves. It wanted to be man so badly that it forced him to invent, calculate and neglect his heart. It wanted to turn it’s nuts and bolts, and silver chips into the golden heart of man in which He, God, so carefully listened with delicate grace and granted omniscience, had created for all and for his love. How could Tom slow all of this down. How could he purchase some time for man’s goodness? Tom suffered from Hubris. It was the common tragic flaw of great heroes. Earth was slowly becoming poisoned and warped by man’s idea of a perfect world, this idea was slowly eating at him, ending him. Genetics and social Darwinism had ended him far before birth and yet he still breathed in this suffocation of persecution and collective hatred, and self hatred against difference and unique appearances. And Tom stood idly by unaware he was part of the whole, he was one of the blocks that made up the greater sum of the completed structure, the tomb, the resting place that stretched across the countless bedded plots of this country. He stood motionless joining the useless cause for perfection and self betterment, and slowly sank into himself not knowing why or where to go. What he had done to himself was far from his reach now. It was far too late for mankind. The second tower of babul had fallen. Communications lost. The ghastly sight of three thousand, hungry businessmen burned to their ashy graves, under a ruble of messy inventions and long distant calls, all of the current chaos that so lively lived in his vibrant, aware mind, had force him to look up to the heavens, plead with God for his unending love, warmth, rejuvenation, and then, ill loyal to his maker, shy to truth and compassion, fallen and beat, to one day give in to temptation, repudiate reason, in order to turn away and feed the machine it’s burnt offerings and oily truths in which it pretended so craftily to honestly desire. Did the machine welcome a new thought, a fresh invention, a improvement to speeding up the super computers that chained with tissue and protein to allow efficiency to the order of the corporations. Did the machine really want a faster, smarter, more in-depth thinking mechanism in order to outwit the unexpected and most clever being. Was the machine real, or was it mere temptation, a mind planted on top a desk awaiting to hit the wrong key and then. . . He had to turn to God now. The father gave him no choice. He was lucky. He had experienced too much pain. It was time to heal. The voices told him to return, or it was over. He ignored them and repudiated their beckoning calls. “If you don’t return you’ll lose. You’re a loser.” It must be his own badly seeded thoughts, unclear of the truth, welcoming him into a blinding web of false thoughts and an hungry abyss of insanity. Now it was a time to start over, regenerate and begin a new life in the south. God gave him no other path to follow. He had spoken and Tom answered.

2000 had arrived and the future was speedily passing with unlikely speed. Medicine was far beyond attaching leeches or draining blood for the ill. Pills, a galaxy of choices, in multiple colors, were turning the loony into clear thinkers and clear thinkers into geniuses. Tom was given the offerings from the most skilled scientist his society.

I am incandescent but I am not here. The lights are on but nobody is home.

Down in tumble, hard, thin unforgiving bullets splattered on the red brick sidewalk before him, in the same rhythm as the memories entered and exited his head. He was back in the town of Worth. The old hospital was down the street that he was birthed from which was not far from the slow crawling river with the religious name. It snaked through Worth curving from every constructed Church, Safe Haven and place of worth in town. Snaking and winding almost dodging what was founded in the name of the Lord. It was a kind river with a holy name, and a history that did not match it’s title. Rumor had it was far too polluted and the city had let it go beyond repair. It wasn’t until recently that laws were passed to keep the trash and toxic wastes free from it’s path. The river looked disturbed at day, but in awe at night, it was so lovely against a full moon shading the eyesores of technology and waste, that during the late months of April, and early March, overflowed from the flooding rains, was still bouncing back the memories of swimming and dunking best friends toward the muddy bottom. John Wilhelm, from Pennsylvania, broad shoulders, big arms and giant smile from ear to ear, would hurl him under the scummy water of the Trinity, and like a drowning cat clawing for air he’d reach to the wobbling lines of rays streaming at him begging him to lurch upward from under the Trinity and take in a sweet breath of life. He’d rise up hollering at John for being too forceful and his step father, dog peddling spectacle would flare up a stern, and healthy smile. Those were the days of swimming in the green Trinity that flowed down the west trial and into the forks that washed through Worth and further toward the south. The best times where canoe trips down the Brazes with his sober Dad, and beer gurgling acquaintance from the local junior soccer team. When Tom was just a boy, Dad and he would place last in canoe races. Dad loved to take his time fishing and sightseeing and chat about the current news on the runner up for presidency, or a recent crime, or murder rap of a famous figure that was publicized on TV.

Dad had an endless amount of reason why he believed the well known football star was guilty or how the murder took place. He had ever motivation nailed to the cue. Dad loved forensics and telling stories. Conversation was the only savior of the fish as Dad wobbled the pole to make a point about the current topic at hand in the boat.

The town that slowly built him into the walking story that he so heroically and pitifully performed, now, was still, quiet and wearily wondering over the bruises caused by last September. It seemed every small town was affected due to the revelations and exhibited support of American flags that waved so droopily outside the front patios.

Tom stared down at his old black leather shoes. He was down. It was a blue time for him. The color blue kept appearing in the mesh before the clothing racks on the stage windows, on curtains at his new place, bath towels, shirts in the laundry, in the skies, in the water near the river walk and even in other peoples eyes. Blue kept showing up everywhere he turned. Yesterday when he was in the shopping mall near Follies the song Blue performed by the jazz great Miles Davis. And when he was riding the bus home from town, he passed a giant sign near the highway that read The Blue Man Group. Every where he looked, blue, blue, blue. At lunch on the menus, Chicken Cordon Bleu, blue cheese, blue berry pie. Reading through the paper he came across a motion picture about a women who grieves over her husbands death. The title; Blue. Blue, according to the polish filmmaker from Warsaw, Kieslowski, Krzysztof, represented liberty. Red stood for fraternity. White was recognized as a color for equality.

Tom didn’t feel like walking that day so he hid indoors reading from Faulkner and a book on Multiculturalism. He couldn’t really keep it all together so he stared out the window at the giant sky filled with blue and slowly breathed until breath came back to him and then he returned to his books, study and wonder.

One day he is worth the bread he stuffs in his mouth and other days he didn’t deserve the meal of an ant. He took a unexpected breath no larger than a sniff which halfway loosened his jumbled mind. Slowly he was clearing out the junk that didn’t belong in his head, and certainly not to be adjoined with his memories. Everywhere he turned there was a reminder. A flag. Red white and blue. Then, the song. The lyrics inspired by war itself. Oh, say can you see. It only matched the revolution of the other side. It was a patriots song. By the dawns early light. A song for the rebel, the man that was forced to fight against the Empires and controllers. What so proudly we hail. It wasn’t a song to use to reflect the tragedy of New York. Perhaps, another song would do, a song with lyrics created by businessmen and the world trade groups that profited off of others enslaved weaknesses and controlled needs. Rockets red glare. Intruded and interrupted with pollution, excess noise of traffic jams, airport terminals, engines firing up, millions of voices bouncing around in his head from Time Square, the song cried out, a song long ago inspired men to clean his musket, but now just to set off a baseball game or national air show event. Bombs bursting in air.

He went into his mind again and the ole song faded as if it was being played over earphones on some Sony compact disk. Gave prove through the night. Millions of faces begging him for something he had no grasp to hold. He wasn’t a man that could save the world. That our flag was still there. Someone else had done that long before he walked these sidewalks of concrete and ashy burned foot prints. Perhaps the song should be played. Perhaps now there are rebels against rebels. Jefferson was right. Our past ingenious president was on target when he claimed that American isn’t right without a revolution now and then. Perhaps it was a song for them and us. They attacked a country founded by revolution and civil war and now they are simply part of the hell. It wasn’t like they put out the fire. They did no such thing. The flag still carries the color red in it’s stripes. They only started a more dangerous fire. A storm of flames uncontrollable and unmatchable by any other nation.

Tom was a stiff man at times but held a professional constitution in muscle and thought. He wasn’t much taller than the average Joe. Six feet max. He had a pointy chin, high cheek bones, hollow cheeks and a long Germanic noise that set him off for a young actor of the cinema. The hair was short, but had the potential to grow, long shaggy and poetically thick. As a child he was noticed for his thick mane that capped his skull. His body frame was that of a warrior, broad, strong with a healthy foundation. He had not grown a large beer belly, like the others that passed him, and was proud of it. Eating was not his forte by a long shot. He was careful about foods and usually only ate produce and health food, or all natural establishments and rarely ate out in restaurants, or fast food. He mostly took in turkey and light red meats. His favorite was leg of lamb with a French style sauce. His tongue held a bite of class. Manners were his best skills he kept to date. Not likely for a thief. He was unique in his constitution. He was trained in every game in the book and far from despondency.

That our flag was still there.

As the board and thick of night was growing on him, he made a devout decision to return home. Home before sunlight, a voice beckoned, as if it escaped from a darkened closet. Fort Worth Texas was a place filled with wonders, old poets, ranchmen, and cowboys looking to break a heart or have their hearts broken.

The shadows of night arose with a slow accord. Night arrived because it should have and for no other reason. Night was meant to be and it had arrived without a shadow or a doubt. Eve set in with her black dead face like a slow chord drawn out from a shaky violin’s falling resolution. The edge of the sun turned to a faint terracotta and then snuffed out to a sharp opaque. Night swallowed the town whole without hesitation hungry to cover the world from the sun’s bright needful rays. Streetlights illuminated the path for Tom Burnet, as he marched to his inner beat shying away from sorrowful youth and trying to activate a new outlook and reason to expedite a fresh form of expression to quay.

Tom was surrounded by people from his hometown, but not a single face he recognized. Even at home he was alone and cold.

He passed by the new gallery and peeked in at the warm smiles and exchanges of the graceful “How Are You,” “Welcome in” and “Good day.”

Tonight’s worth was composed of tall buildings, flashing yellowy bulbs and gallery windows. Paintings from Texas artist like Henrietta and Rome Milan, Geoffrey Beck and Salidino hung in the display cases near Pier One imports and the local hip café house. The gallery was down the street from the movie house and the new New York style restaurants. Even some of the artist displayed at the exhibit was straight from the big city. All that was on his mind besides self discovery along with finding someone to discover him, was fortune. The desire of fame and fortune was growing in him like a horrible disease. Like a virus that wouldn’t quit.

Only the fancies waited in town. The dandies and wannabe poets worked there. He thought. Zoloans. Sounds like Zolofts. Zoloft? OR in this story Zoneloft, boy does it make ya zone. Hm. Perhaps I’ll get use to it before I get into the details and the more, well, mildly complex parts of the story, it’s not too complex, maybe poetic, but not brain surgerah—shit, almost said it, well, I don’t even what to say it, the thought of it makes me want to jump off the balcony that I’m writing so close to right now. I’m debating rather or not to toss this damn machine I type on rather than dance, act or sing, which I’d rather be doing. This damn machine. The only performance time I get now is with my fingers. I wish I could throw it off the side and watch the blessed piece of crap smash to smithereens. Nothing could put it back together again. Nothing could put me back together again. Hm. Perhaps I should ask for Surgerah—almost said it again. The deadly S word. S and it ends in a Y. As in Why God does it have to happen to me? What does Zoloft mean anyway. Sertraline HCL. Is that supposed to save me. Zoloft? Those artsy turds are on Zoloft for God sake. What do they need pain for. What do they need to struggle for. Their stuck up there in some loft, some idea far above them, cozy and smooth and wanting pleasure. Only fools lived that way. Only fools searched for pleasure.

Roberto Pace walked by as the stage windows lit up by bright white floor units and dimmed special. Some of the artist actually stood on platforms in the stage windows with their white floury, faces and broad expressions painted for everyone to see. Rome Milan was known to craft a few paintings in one night. Most of his work was inspired from the form of impressionism. Rome showed, in the stage windows, paintings of bright sunflowers, a red paddle boat, floating next to a dock, the boat was small, it could hold no more than two or three passengers at max. The boat hovered on top of the still water adjacent to the old fashion wood dock in a mesh of wavy heavy blues and a flowing mixture of thick lines composing a port coupled with that, what seemed like a giant toy red sailboat bouncing in a stalled poise on troubled water, with escaping pride. He painted like this using broad strokes just as Monet once executed back in the real French Impressionistic days. Back before computers, or Fast Food, 24 hours War coverage on CNN, and before starter kits of sertaraline HCL was available for writers, and before story telling existed on the world wide web, and worldly communication wasn’t as accessible, . Rome learned from a master painter. His Mother, Henrietta Milan, was his teacher. She taught him the art well. Both borrowed from Monet and other French impressionists of his time.

There where other artist for sale at the Milan Gallery. Pop artist too. Peter Max had a paining of Mona Lisa smiling with a rainbow splashed across her face in the place of a mustache, and John Sanders had a few sculptures. One was titled Genesis. It was a perfect man half naked busting out of a cracked block filled with grape size harden bubbles to represent the form of man. The bubble were to represent the soil, or the earth, or a place where man, in the beginning arose. Roberto was fortunate to be able to be around so much rich culture. Artist like Kaufman and Middlekauf had worked there as well. The gallery across the street was pact every other weekend. Rumor had it movie stars showed up to buy and to sell their work. Jane Seymour was on her way. Roberto missed out when she arrived. There like that. Missing the small writers soon to grow big. They take em when there on top of the world and no one doesn’t know who they are and their face lingers on every magazine a human face can belong on.

Roberto was on his way to work at the new Milan gallery in Fort Worth. It was the tail end of October and November was walking up with it’s dropping pecans and rusty wondering leaves.

Artist displayed their work in the little town of Fort Worth. Wow. What a sight. It reminded Roberto of New York. There he was alone. Waiting for Maria to show. She was the assistant to Rome Milan the owner of the first gallery. He watched a few young girls pass smoking cigarettes and showing off their thing. What sexy legs they had. What curvy hips and firm rears, and round breast. What women these were, with their intellect and fancy step. Usually in tight jeans and too much make up.

Then, a occasional artsy type flew by the windows. Rain pelted and Roberto took cover under this tiny black umbrella. The onlooker peeked in revealing his support by tossing an occasional warming glance. Just a passerby. No buyer yet.

Roberto was waiting on the key. Once Maria showed, he could warm up and get out of this stifling rain. He had just landed a security job. Believe it or not, the head of Marry from Pieta had been shipped in from the Cathedral in Roma and was been held in the Gallery vault. Highly secured with red robs, the giant bolt locks, alarm system and security guards. It was his ninth job since he had returned home from Manhattan.

He was home again. After the largest cross country journey he had ever taken; he was home again.

Pace had no idea, not even in the darkest corners of his mind, where his youth had gone, but the rain didn’t care what was on his mind now. Not now. History was behind him, the future was ahead, and the present moment never let up. Nothing could make him feel more blue than now. The rain stung on his skin. Shadows flung across his frame in thick lines as if bars had enclosed and sprang up from under his feet. He felt alone, trapped, pinned inside himself. He couldn’t move. Even his thoughts seemed barred. It was like the first time he flung himself out into the world, alone. Then, out of nowhere, a small smile appeared on his face. A smile smothered by the rain. He blinked his eyes; Los Angeles, Hollywood, Broadway-Park Avenue, thirty thousand feet above the ground, his face on television and then, Wam, he was home, in his bedroom like a boy. But he was no boy now. He had awoke to the world, appeared again, stood up in his boyhood home, nodding to strangers. He had woke up as a man in a child’s situation. “Breakfast was ready.” It was as if an Angel had tickled him. It was but a ten years ago, he once laid in the bed with the most beautiful lady he had ever kissed. Brown long hair draped on his face and lips, he wrapped his hands across her thin waist and smothered her close to him. A tear spilled onto his lips. He remembered the salty taste, the crying and sniffling and all the times she made him blush, and feel life. On the verge of busting into pure emotional bliss.

Years passed. Three years since he left home for the first time at twenty seven.

Now, he was turning thirty eight. Then, thirty nine. Forty was on it’s way. There was no turning back now. He had reached a point of no return.

He had no idea what happened to his life. It was long after the passing of the new millennium. Not long after the great tragedy of New York City. He was far from that ashy year of smoke, hellfire, dusts and lost faces posted around the city. It was now. Now, to be savored. The most precious part of life was living for this breath. The next breath and the next, and next. South, north, east and west a strange call hung in the air. A sound not far from human but not from a mortal’s mouth. It was the roar out of time. The cry from far beyond our age.

South. Far south. Texas. For Worth, Texas. It was night. He was alone. No cigarettes, no girl, no warm coat and nothing to keep him warm now. It seemed to be all lost. The only thing he had was a pen in his pocket, and his words, not to mention his birthday suit, his hair, his eyes, his fingers, nose, eyebrows, ears, lips, chin, breasts, feet, legs, ankles, fingernails, toe nails, arms, arm pits, arm pit hair, shins, groin, buttocks, back, belly, belly button, knee, knee caps, thighs, calves, cheeks, cheek bones, forehead, crown of his head, neck, toe nails, old and new, chipped and torn and every million parts that made up who he was and who he believed in. He was the believer that man could not claim his home as his house. A home was more than that. It was even more than a place that took you in. A home was a since of completeness. Oneness. His home was his being in his own body with the spirit and with his belief in his Father. This was holy to him.

Home is in you.

A home was what he did, who he gave to, how he took others in and allowed others to take him in, what he read, abided by and loved. Home was his standards, the foods he ate, the music he listened to, the people he met with, the cities he visited, the jobs he did to help others and the thankfulness he gave in pleasing his maker. Most importantly home was God.

Snow flakes parachuted in like Angels falling from a white snowy heaven above. Tiny small angels with individual paths, patterns. Not one like the other. No complete likeness, or similarity. Angels falling on a lone star city. Old cow town resting in the snow.

Old man winter was not holding back. All the stage windows were heavily decorated with seasonal lights. He should have been smiling at the festive sight of the city. But he carried a strong face of sorrow. It was good. He had a minimum amount of materialism. He no longer watched television and didn’t have the cravens for the sex, lust and entrapping entertainment that tempting man from reason.

He was in town. He was lucky to be here. Roberto was alive. He was one of us. Looking at the world. Forward and backward, past to future. He had a decision. He had his two feet and a mind; choices. Life awaited his call. A freezing gale drifted into the center of his being. It seemed to stiffen the freedom that willingly awaited within, like it does in every single one of us. The freedom to go forth. To make the new path. To create. To know. To own. To seek and find. To understand the way of God.

The freedom to take on liberty and make the choice, the direction and the life he wanted to claim was blooming under his thick skin. Even as a grown man of thirty he was still lost, like a boy. He wanted to be some many things and he had such a shadow of a past that stretched in long years behind him. The dreams he curled up under the covers as a boy, and now a man, were unlimited. He noticed he was still inside. Reflecting on the times he was a boy, getting ready to see a great story unfold on the silver screen in the warmest movie house around. Images that lead him to faraway islands, and misty shores, with hot women with big eyes and warm lips. The cold scratched at the back of his neck. No smile formed on his face. The twinkle left his eye for a moment. For one solid little moment it was all clear. He had it all figured out. Then, reality kicked in. The next gale set in and froze his cheeks. He was gloomy. Sad. Alone.

Someone, or something, perhaps it was himself, there was no use blaming others for his isolation, this public solitude that enveloped his ever direction and appeared at ever cold corner in any town in his land was eating away at a core set of standards and order that was so carefully developed by the countless villages and their tongues and sayings, and codes embedded inside him. Perhaps, he had stayed home too long. Something, a side of him, had stole away with who he once was.

According to his direction he was headed away from Eden, away from Pishon and far from the land of Cush, or Ghihon and into a more impure part of the world. If he was the first man, Adahma, or Adam, from the ground, the man from dust, he was making his way toward the Euphrates and Tigress departing from Paradise and entering a new world, a new time and a new place lost from grace, and paradise, a place after the loss of innocence. The calendar on the café wall read December, 2nd 2002 A.D. The millennium had arrived.

A thick, dark, azure, blue, mushy drop splattered beneath the blankly, tensely white glowing street lamp, landing on the sparkling side walk displaying section of down town of Worth; eve had set in enough to activate the night lamps hovering in long lines, pole to pole, along the sidewalks leading out of town. Under the misty, pale moon of the cold winter night midnight approached. The freeze had set in without the most saintly one’s permission. Winter had no kindness to those with warm hearts, it was the purpose of Old Man’s winter’s mission. Ever since the young daughter ate the six seeds from pomengrand, the Greek beloved timed out the months of the cold season and was released by the gods, from hiatus. Roberto watched his breath turn into dragon fog and hover into the misty lamp light covering the blackened concrete sidewalks that lead into the parking lot pointing north of town. The winter joined hands with night and arose a chilling touch to the Tom’s cheeks. His forehead grew tight and hardened, his eyebrows sequenced together creating a sharp rooftop shape of an Old English Tudor and his back grew tingly hot and ached of being on his feet and sitting erect all day. He mustn’t stick out and let them know he is alone out here. Here in the cold of the world, deep in the time of winter and when the holiday made man reflect and turn inward into his past and rectify his deeds, good or bad, he was remembering who he was and slowly realizes what he may become in this southern homey town surrounded by mesquite and timber wood.

A siren lifted in choppy howls far of. Tom couldn’t tell which direction he was headed, much like the positioning of the siren, spinning in chaotic twists throughout the air.

Small town know his type. He had to look strong, well fed and hometown. The hard cold was on her way and this was a time of food and festive enjoyment. A strange feeling pushed on his stomach and tingled in his throat. He wanted to cry but the tears remained inside, dry and without release. He shivered and bit his lip from the cold. Good thing the handkerchief was packed away in his old tan western coat. He had picked it from a Justin’s boots near the outskirts coming in from the airport. It had a linen and it was full of down feather and reinforcements from the freezing weather. He had no idea where it was blowing in from, if from a thunder storm out at sea, or if it was the usual lowering of the barometric. Why this confusion had approached him, why this the biting cold, this loneliness glued to his spine. It made him shiver. Shiver like a wet cat. Who needed him to fight it and resist against the impossible peak of his what may be his major tragic flaw. Man was always hanging on this cliff. This winter season was before him always. This was the winter of his tragic heart and his fallen from the big city. What a sorrowful man he was, filled with a hard, raw outlook. He chose few moments to smile, but was learning the skill of faking a smile and eventually convincing a smile to others. If you held a smile long enough, sincere or bunk, it slowly transformed into reality. Actions speak louder than hidden feelings, as well as words. What he was to become of him now that he was alone was only up to fortune of free falling in some small town. It war far more luckier than floating about in a big city, which is like hanging off a skyscraper with broken finger nails. Becoming was far more than he planned as a child stumbling on jagged toys and faceless action figures from Toy R Us or some cheap toy store that shelved plastics from China. And how these small trivial playful moments, and wanted moments of labor and the drain of reality, had meshed into thoughts that existed him or once remained in the continuous path toward the multiplying harvest from a single planted seed, and a seed falling from it’s makings, and seed falling from another bloomed tree, flower, or bush, this seed spreading into a field, and another harvest and all from a single seed, there it was, buried under his skin, in his blood, blooming into an idea, birthed from what was beat into him by his devoutly strict and militant baptized raised father, it was growing, in him, since his hatching, perhaps another flesh and blood arisen like a evergreen from the soil, in him, into bony matter from a graceful touch and heated beauty of woman, in him, she awaited to send him to greatness. He was chosen, so he left the answer to God and the mysterious concepts of his old religion, deep in the good book of his Father, the world’s keeper, lover, poet, artist, whatever he needed to be to continue the beating tick of time, destroyer and the savior, unanswered that lay beyond this very stoop on the corner of Main street and the endless road that awaited his beckoning call in or out of the town of Worth.

Perhaps he’d stay and find meaning in home or would he leave in finding meaning in the absence of home, or would he drop the concept of home all together. Was it a place one could return again. No. It wasn’t the idea. Not to return. He had never left. Not the old town. Home wasn’t changing. The concept would sink him. Any type of safety, or feeling of security would ruin an artist. Struggle was all he had. Without his struggle he had the numbness of safety, the ordinary burden of satisfaction. Life is divine when one’s product is never satisfactory. If everything is perfect one’s perspective becomes nullity and pointless. Home was part of this fault or perfection. It was larger, greater more magnificent than a city or town, or village, or even a room. Home became a drug. A way to smother the struggle and water down the fire with secure hands warmed by the home fire. It is in the heart of man to turn back to home, but it not the way of an artist. An artist is a traveler, an adventure and escape artist.

Tom knew he’d die in this big city. Maybe not tonight in this small crabbed hotel room the size of a walk in closet. That is what it was. A walk in closet with a ash tray, TV and slit for a window. Anything for a slice of home.

Home is God. I must return. Home is pleasing our Father. This was his destiny. To die. To die and love God. It wasn’t complex. It was as simple as grace.

How do I please you my Lord?

There is an exact time chosen for every moment in this existence.

Thievery has no moment. It has no name. It is silent. Hurtful and quick. Instinctual. A thief does not push, or scythe away at his movements and directions . . .he or she glides, like the sad lover, steals away with the desired object, possess it and, in the same instance, in light or dark, in a cryptic hallway, or lost in a maze within a city, knows what he, or she takes from life and what to give. Tom never planned to steal. It was not how he pictured himself when he imagined his adulthood as a child.

A thief knows every step like the back of his hand. The grace of the step, the catty life, is not something a thief desires to lose. But if he or she requires it too much then the chance of falling into a spiraling imbalance and lost hopes may arrive, as long as his or her actions are governed by greed and stupidity.

Objects are not man’s worth. What man possesses is trite and shallow. Possession is not the answer. What is done is what makes a man. His actions make his character. He knew this and this got him far.

Simple actions speak louder than the complex inventions in the world. No super computer can outdo a persons moral choice, nor can the most valuable doctor’s tool, outlast a the goodness in a man’s heart.

A thief amounts to nothing, but one showed us on the hill of Calvary that words can wipe away sins and start over as an honest man do. That thief, that cloudy day, died next to the Savior, that thief to his side, a man, not a thief, after God touched him with grace, and the once thief lost his urge to take and died a saved man, forgiven of sin.

Out of nowhere, they find themselves trapped. The gadget fails to open the lock, cold arrives, the jewel was a fake and like a small explosion from their faulty canon, a whirlwind of nothing swallows them up and spits them out into a never-ending cycle of nothing. Just as the objects lead to nothingness and pile up to oblivion. And the thief’s dream is robbed by the impurity of a good man’s thought. Thievery can devour a man. Devours him with a jealous envy. He or she grows sour and spoiled if the thief takes too much material from life without paying with his own hands of labor, or taking on it’s weight in good deeds and proper exchanged designed by justice and sound advancement in order to build a purer and more livable surroundings. Gold plated eagle headed watches, money sprees, platinum Chase credit cards, Italian sport cars, hot women on Centerfolds, free nights in hotel suite of river walks up and down America, bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon wine of western cape, poets savored lines from the Renaissance, and whatever he or she can find to steal away with and enter the heart of the Romantic.

Perhaps it is the Zeloft, (medication I am on) speaking and not me at all. Perhaps that is the initial reason for the soft and loving nature of the speech. Perhaps that is why it is so light heated and easy to the ear. Maybe it isn’t me speaking at all, but the commercialized tiny light tan pill I place in my mouth without water and let the twenty five milligrams of mysterious technology dissolve away in me stomach acid and release the proper dose of SEROTONIN in my brain and body. Or perhaps it is the love, or SEROTONIN, in my body for the reason for this mess, this useless, shallow piece of art. Some will claim it a masterpiece, and other dung, what difference does it make to me. Do I do it because I chose to do it, or because I have nothing better to do? Do I tell the story because I am in love with it or tired of being in love and want another way out. Perhaps I want another way out of this life, so I chose words. There easy to manipulate, reorder, talk to, even hug, if I draw it out on a giant piece of poster board and cut it out in the shape of a women’s curve and rap my hands around it and squeeze really, really, really, really hard and. . .Why not. It might work. It’ll work right. Your reading it. Does it sound like a hug, or a kiss, or a night of passion with the opposite sex.

Why not work. Why not garden, or walk someone else’s dog, or help decorate Christmas cards dressed as an elf in the mental ward, why not give all my time to the charity at the local church, in some small town, become a volunteer fireworker, why not slave away in some industrial factory, or become a professor and teach college, or dedicate my life to some women and multiply. Why? Because I am a bad seed. I’m no good. I stole and now I want to know why I stole. I want an answer for my deformity and my misplaced life. I stole not because I wanted more, but because I wanted an answer. And now I’m left with nothing, but this chain of a typewriter, or computer, or laptop, or tape recorder, or memo pad, or note book paper, or the back of a match. Left to be put into the Great Wall.

A fantasy. A broken law. A waste. Isn’t that what she said. Isn’t that one of the meanings of this world. Love. Ha. Bullshit. Right. Sometimes the cost is as important as the payment. Love isn’t for free is it? Does love cost? It is supposed to be for free. That is what I was told. No one was supposed to be able to purchase such a godly commodity. Everything, no matter it’s purity, has a price. And in many cases the payment is as important as the cost. It goes on like this, sending the ball to the other side of the court until life wears on the player and the game eventually is snuffed out, whistled to an end and called off. What is the cost of love? Believe me it is worth stealing for. Anyone, would and must steal a chance at love. It is the necessity of life. Love was the reason Adam took his fatal bite. Love lured Faust into the pit of hell. If a man tripped and hit the ground he did it for love. He did it for her. Love is the most powerful temptation and the reason for Tom Burnets darkly lived life. Love conquers every dream and will vanquish any goal that man or women pretends to desire, or occupy the fragile and short length his or her time is measured. I have attempted to question if a women really feels the same type of love a man feels. Most likely the love a women feels is far more connected to the human breath and spirit, but I would not know the answer completely and not guess that she feels it in a deeper way. The mother’s love is unconditional, necessary and important fact to life, but the mother’s love is not the complete existence of the son. The son is independent from his mother and shall seek for a further love. The son most find a new mother and venture away from the bond and care of the mother and father. Once the women is discovered, a man’s career lifts off and takes flight. Marriage bonds them and makes them one flesh, bones, spirit and existence. A man’s women is a extension of who he is, or one would like to assume this is true. The opposing force to this is divorce. Divorce is proof that man and women, one flesh, can separate back into two different entities and start over. For the children the introduction of step parents arrive and a strange feeling begins to mix in the family and it takes a long time until the family accepts a step parent as a blood relative, if ever.

Why thievery. Why even mention thievery and love? What is the theft and love the poetical musician Dylan once talked of.

Theft? Can theft and love mingle?

That is what sparked the French Revolution. A man stole bread to feed himself from the evil one, from the prince of death, because he loved life, and he sparked a storm of princes and their unforgiving swords. The thief must not grip too tightly around it’s worth, than the earnings turn, trap and blind him from the truth of love. Love was born from the simplest deed of the mother deepening into the genius of man’s actions. It is what makes him step in grace. The thief, whoever that may be, should never put love over any South African jewel, or solid gold idol from the Pieta, or a mystic, cursed Egyptian staff tucked away under tons of sand and rubble. A true thief is not too forceful with his hands and does not carry himself in a sly matter, only when his draining actions appear and take force does he find smooth stillness and glide back to grace. He can walk a rope if he is doing it for love. He can climb through a ventilation shaft, if for love. A man can do anything for love.

What he did was wrong, disgusting and cowardly, but this immorality did not end him, but make him stronger and more balance. Balance even has a price. Gravity and the chosen, perfectly balanced universe did not begin as simple as a bang. There was a universe before the universe, smaller or larger, it isn’t proven, but one would like to think it was much smaller, calmer and more orderly. One would like to think this, but nothing is proven. It is wrong to say that there is no change. Nothing definite exists according to the nature of motion and the direction of birth, life and death, spring, summer, fall and winter. This is a truth in life. Change. The seasons, the greening of trees, the blooming of the most sacred garden flower, daffodils, violets and blue bonnets, and then the slow change, this bright colors turn to a paced gray and then brown, and then to a darkish earth color and closer to ashen, and then, a degrading absence of life, sands teeth, sands eyes and sands everything, slowly the extremity of the change, the heat of summer, the bitter freeze and frost of winter and then, out, out brief flower, and it wilts off the stem and flails, falling to a rest into the snowy icy imprint of the dead season. Seasons prove to us that nothing remains constant. Nothing can. Rain, drought, floods, tycoons, and whirling electric storms, and Godly eathquacks, and Wam the earth moves under one’s feet and change reminds man of God’s mysterious ways.

Nothing is constant. Almost nothing is absolute and completely concrete. Change is where fear lives. No one welcomes change but the poets and geniuses of the world. If change is welcomed, than, the man welcoming it’s instability is a wise and fortunate being. Most do not welcome change. This is one of the faults of man. And he must accept that it is wrong and rationalize that what is done is somehow credited to his well being. The endangering actions he abides to only digs the deeper hole leaving him in a pile of nonsense and meaningless trash. The objects of this world simply pile up and amount to nothing. What difference does it make if something is moved to another location. Is this thievery. If a jewels is thieved from a jewel store and moved to another jewel store a million miles always, and is placed in a case next to a thousand other jewels exactly like the jewel initially stolen, is it still stolen. Yes, but it is placed among other jewels of the same constitution. Only this is what slowly drains the thief to non-existence and chaos. The thief could never steal if everything was the same. That is why he breaks justice and disturbs the balance of law.

He must be wise to stop and quit his sinful deeds. Thieves start storms of irrationality. If he moves to a higher rank, and when the barbarian arrives, he become