January 29th 2000:
I pour blood like wine. Neither reading Durrell or thinking Foucault has saved me anything and I realize this when I lay in my bed mid-afternoons; when the voices kick in. There is one in particular, quite compelling, it says “everything you do is based upon destroying all you could be.”
When I am clear I know I live like a bee making honey. Of course, clarity has been slacking of late. There is a scene, a picture, so far back in the mind; the sun as it might be. Its brightness made me blind and so I moved through the world, as a would-be Oedipus, till I found distractions. False sight and a sense of being. God bless them, they were good friends.
The other possibilities are stained glass windows, filled with gold, and fulfilling all that is red in reality. The blood flows like wine, not like it would in a Bob Seager-4×4 reality. Frankly, fast-food is killing me and the realization of that fact might keep me around only slightly longer than Rimbaud. Why can’t I get over the mesmerism of a 99 cent value meal? It has so much more to do with religion that you would think. The hermit, the fool, the magus…. all coming into line at a drive-thru window where the cost is your flat-plastic delineation.
God, how I wish we were the cards I have drawn from the deck. My blood flows like wine because it is wine… and this is the answer I give to the voice that speaks most clearly: “I do it because it makes you go away,” that is what I say. But in doing this I trust nothing these damnable days. Do you know what loneliness is? I haven’t really, until now. Try this on for size: all the people you care about are all at least five hours away, the only romantic love you feel is for a woman that goes to bed with another man every night, and the only hope you have is destroying all that you touch, slowly, in a kind of numbing manner.
Like a silent virus, or would it be like the sea rolling up onto the shore? It is a slow death nonetheless. Yes, it is getting to the point where I talk back to the voices. What else can I do? Listen to them? Exactly. That is what I am trying to do now, listen to them. It might not be a Bob Seager-4×4 snuff film, but it will break something. Fuck “Like a Rock,” my blood flows like wine. “I do it because it makes you go away,” I say again, I say it again, over and over.
©EschatonLife
A collection of poems by Harry Crosby. Limited to 100 copies.
Remastered versions of these songs are being released in 2021 through Eschaton Life.
He rented out a little room on the other side of town, a small room with one window in the north. The floors were wooden, scraped and scarred from years of use and zero maintenance. The room came furnished, but the landlord removed the bed and dresser upon his request. Remaining was a chair, table and bookcase that were quickly put to use in his first hours there. Unloading a box of old books, a few pads of paper and his pipe he had completely moved into his shelter.
