The Whiskey Mule Diner (on Caroline Street) by David L O’Nan

I was wandering out of Whiskey Mule, the night began fading
The city is falling all over itself and dude, you smell like onions
Taxis are hissing passing by just pissing, ripped pantyhose legends prancing drunk.
Just ask the crooked mayor, he’s had his share of temptations.
He’s burned all his morals and held his head high as he’s collapsing.
Three women all believe that he’s dedicated, but he’s living deep on the tip of the Dead-End hill.

The diner’s lights are blinking an epileptic fury.
The faithful and the shrinks are washing their cuts in the sink.
They have been harassing their soldiers through the flesh wounds of thunder.
Bullets and promises go damp with the blood circling the city streets.
Just another cup of coffee surrounded by dust, rust, and feathers.
Our minds remember the times as a child of walking with family and preaching God to unlit skyscrapers
Bring light to this city you damn bawdy building!
Nasty voices call down to teach us new sinning that we never knew would go past the blinds of those windows.

The cobwebs in the corners of the Caroline and Market Street are doing a Cain and Abel waltz.
Across each other, intertwined while the poisoned neon glow of the Whiskey Mule hits it.
Old men walking crooked onto the sidewalks with lust in their eyes and itchy coats and itchy crotches.
They want to see the man play something from the 1950’s ‘til he is out again poisoned, asleep on the jazz piano.
Lifting Jesus to the ceilings, the waitresses are all crying except for the one who’s always smiling and fetching her phone number to a plumber, a priest, or a pariah that wandered in from the subway.
Sometimes this place has felt closed for hours,
sometimes it feels like it never stops breathing.
The fevers in this place is imminent and you walk out with hash browns in your hair.
Feeling like a motherfucker stuck in the drain.

At Whiskey Mule you began your marriage to a suicidal levitation. You want to sit on
the back of a 1969 boss 429 mustang and pull at the corners of the hairs on your head.
Wailing to a friend that’ll die with you in the end, “buddy, Let’s create some shooting stars tonight”
And you’ll battle the fog in your stupor, and you’ll wish you had more pancakes and in circles
you’ll go, pushing and shoving hobos until you’ll step on a broken bottle and crawl back into the diner
…And some Barbara Mandrell will be playing Sleeping Single in a Double bed.
You’ll feel like the stomach bugs are carving through your skin.
Go home to the wilderness of a quiet
apartment building that is surrounded by demons running around your head.
Drop the needle on the fading night. Another day stalks in and abruptly gathers energy from the
lightbulb sun.

Watching the squalor fight the dandy with the curly hairs falling out of your itchy scalp.
No longer a village wimp. You’ll take the bait to the next offering. Tracy will shake the bottle
and you can’t resist the bounce and the waves in the glass to the swarming through your throat
And you’ll dream of the fandango on a cobblestone bruising and the sunsets will sound like a sultry one-night stand.
Forget that crippling walk for just a little while and cut that rope from the sky, little man.
You’re asking to be certified, You’re asking to be hypnotized, but you keep asking to be recast as something
that doesn’t reflect in a puddle’s mirror, Jack.

The Whiskey Mule Diner on Caroline Street has good food and sometimes bad.
It has murmurs of grandiosity and mistakes to be had.
It has the memories, the merging from man to fallen angel.
It has the lazy eye blinking, It has the wisdom of a desire to escape the straitjacket.
And perform magic that illuminates from the squeezing.
My mind is heading to a new home,
Whiskey Mule

Pinot Noir by David L O’Nan

1971, Bakersfield Cold day, cracked around the edges but laying sweaty under itchy blankets. After 3 A.M. drinking Pinot Noir with mustachioed confessions. Can’t trust sidewinders walking when their sliding on slick brick roads blinding- The regular man walks around with sociopathic confidence, and he dreams of all the wars ending long enough that he can find him a lady. He wants a family and he wants to die from the cigarettes, he wants to live on nothing but pennies. He wants it all to be wrapped up for him like a present, but does he know how to praise. So he decides not to fear him, he shall not be dismayed. He walks with him on a sunset through the meadows- looking for that new wave. Drinking Pinot Noir and thinking outside the box. He’s that same old man he was yesterday. He’s invented himself excuses, he’s playing fast and loosely. Calling all the phone numbers in his paper wallet. Which lips will he kiss tonight, or will he be just biting on his? Chapped up and feeling cold- boned, drunk and sad. He drops out a few dollars for dinner with a nobody he knew from 19 years before. She didn’t like him then; she doesn’t like him now. But he’s already got images of him pushing up her purity veil and calling her his forever. More pinot noir for the dipshit. Close your eyes and wake up with the phone dangling from the phonebooth and a hard-on grin, jazzed up and creepy. Your brother’s wife and kids find you there. She is laughing pitifully. She has never cared for you really. The children hide behind an umbrella and a mask of ass and back covering their face to hide away from Uncle Stranger. He’s just a drunkened wolf wandering the streets, howling between the sheets of both polars he must face, day after day. He never really knows his eyes and can barely feel his face. He’s just molded full of lines with pinkish skin cheeks with an early morning yellow pickling through. Boy, he’s a pinot noir away from chasing Jesus to the cross. He wants to be crucified first, and let the city wash away his sins. That olive green mattress and his wino schemes has led him to three divorces and one incredible night that he relives over again and tries to regain back in his pulsing mind.

A Full Moon Over Secret Headquarters by David L O’Nan

The full moon becomes our religion
Watch the fold in the clouds, that is us
And if they shall search for us
Amongst our secret headquarters
Cuddled together sharing Egg Biryani
What are those stars, trapped behind obese trees?

The wind blows at our tent, our lockdown
Trying to infiltrate our codes
To steal away our dance
and leave our footprints to be discovered by the gods.
The river wants us too – It sways in a vulgar ballet
Then dies off against the dam.

Your scarf and dress left in a ruinous insult in the mud
Left to be panicky, dizzy, separated, and severed alone – In the grass.
How can I relocate our flames?
To dwell in the hum of purring
Collect our wings from the cheap magician
and terminate the spell.

A grandiose full moon smother
With its clouds
Even after promising heaven behind the dark curtains – That was us.

A Broken Pocketwatch Genius by David L O’Nan

Heard a gunshot through the golden curtain
They were ringing bells and smacking tambourines on our adventure.
I woke up on the greyhound bus, dumbfounded with a boner.
I can only remember someone whispering a smokey smell into my ear.
And then I went to a faint.
A pocketwatch missing and several ladies singing loudly
Anyone here could have been the culprit.

Sitting in piles of sweat, the heat boils me to anger.
My jeans are dirty and stained. Someone’s needles rolling down a blanket.
I just sit there trying not to dwarf myself in this world of giants.
Sloped over and hiding my head in a t shirt.
I was put here to go to war with the bubbles in my head I am just popping them and looking around to see who the snitch will be.
So I can maybe lead myself out of a touch of pandemonium.

By the edge of the bus I leaned and rested my aching head.
I smoked 2 cigarettes with a belly dancer-
who smelled like the walking dead.
I see a collection of papers on the floor, and I know we are somewhere in the south.
I see Missing Persons Posters folded under a green skirt and a musky towel.
Have I made a deal with the sin of flesh, or a greasy devil?

Have I made my genius wasted by hanging my clothes in the land of honey and feathers?

I see this girl from many moons ago across the street. I suddenly feel a little safe even though she never imagined me. She imagined herself as a stranger to kindness, and as a dart to be thrown blindly to the glass. She was innocent once, then new cables,

And new wires to trip her into doubt. She was once my dream when she wasn’t sharing the last name of some fella’.
Yet here I am still thinking that she was the one that could have known me better than anyone.

1. Tom Waits Sonnets by David L O’Nan

1.

In smoky bars of a Los Angeles town,
a troubadour with gravel in his voice,
The stranger would sing of love and of the clown,
All the moonlight’s broken hearts had no choice.

With bluesy chords and stories rough and raw,
Spun a world of darkness and the lush delight,
We’ve got lost souls stumbled through the straw,
And dreams both beautiful like shone heaven or tornadic blight.

Listen to the song, a hope to find Lucinda in Texas.
Sparkling lights amid the swirling gloom,
You can relate in your cough, in your tears, we aren’t alone
There is beauty hidden in the diners and the raincoats, lead to a hotel room.

Thus Waits became the bard of the night,
A poet of the soul, a beacon bright. While God is kicking down buckets over his trippy walks.

II.

In ’73, a debut album came,
And with it, Waits burst upon the scene,
A honky-tonk hero with a different game,
a piano, a rebel with a cause carrying around the voice of a time machine.

In his songs, the past and present merged,
The old world met the new head-on,
jazz and hippies, psychedelic trippy with the Nina Simone smoke.
A collision of cultures, a wild surge.
Where these truths really gone?

Wait’s voice was timeless, and his wit keen
gargle in coal, pollution and drink, and life beaten down by a boxer’s ring.
And with each note, he conjured up a new tale,
of drifters, dreamers, and the in-between scenesters,
Of love that wins and love that’s doomed to fail to mercy.

And so he won a following that grew,
Waits swam with the fish and the bones became bare.

III.

1975, a masterpiece printed,
“Small Change” an album like not any before.
With songs that left us shattered and revived.
Maltida needed waltzing, if all the thoroughbreds would gamble.
That we speak of decay and will the fun be pleasures or squalor.

Waits had honed his craft to razor sharp earsplitting honesty,
And in his words and music we could hear,
the sulky, the pain, the joy that lurked with each suffering heartbeat.
The truth of life that’s sometimes hard to bear in this languid fainting of feeling.

From Tom Traubert’s Blues to The Piano Has Been Drinking,
The gems came out rough, flawless, brash, blue-eyed and pretty,
A journey through the night of the sore stars, the lumpy roads
the world unthinking, a glimpsing of youth and elderly remaining delicate.

Tom Waits salty and timeless, voracious and colossal
A poet for the ages, a man of fates. A man walked on jagged and roasting in the roses.

1. All That is Left for Wanda by David L O’Nan

I called her up on a whim after a muddy day, a useless brain
My hair was messy, not quite wakeful, I remember a time we skinny dipped together and had a picnic about 20 Summers ago.

All that is left for Wanda
Is a smoking gun and a bottle of gin
Her eyes are heavy with worry
And her heart is heavy with sin.

I heard through having to know
that fuckin’ Larry was living in a prison cell.
He was a measly twerp back then, and a barroom skunk.
Even after all these years, I can still be irritated when trying to hide my empathic heart.

The world around her is fading
As she stares off into the abyss
Her thoughts are dark and twisted
And she yearns to escape all of this.

The whiskey begins flowing like a river
and it taste about the quality of a ditch.
She dances to a sad tune by Crazy Horse.
She doesn’t know where she’s going.
But she knows it won’t be coming soon.

She thinks of me as a little nosy and nutty,
some body odor, a wet dog on a rainy day
breath like Papst Blue Ribbon and well-made chili
Dude, just give me a break. I’m tired of man. Always talks of jailbreaks.
You sound raspy and one breath from a lung collapsing.

But I’m still wanting you Wanda, and she just laughs.
“There’s a memory of what could have been”
She begins to become quiet, glancing at a newspaper.
Feeling emptiness, looking at an unfunny cartoon and laughing like the insane.
You can see in her eyes she was staring down the roads of her past.

The clock is ticking faster
As the night draws to a close.
And all she can do is wonder.
If she’ll ever find repose.
Smoggy night, frogs sound drunk. Neighbor boys throwing rocks at trucks.
The wind is stout and erect, and pulling our brawny bodies down easy in the chilly rain.

Is there no hope for her
As she takes one final swig.
And throws her keys to the mud.
Tells me she’s heading to a rich palace far far away.
She disappears past the scarecrows and the hypnotizing Eagle eyes
Leaving only memories of what she hid. What was said. What was gained. Can’t soothe the sick.

The shadows reach out to her,
She staggers into the night.
The panoply of chickens follow
and my disease is too thirsty to ease her pain.

We both gave into the madness.
Mine is from years of regret in a rocking chair,
mine is hilariously laughing myself of the ironies of death.
We all walk these twisted winding streets.
All that was left for Wanda, was hissing, was the sail to the chasm.

Just Painted a Blue House by David L O’Nan (also from my book “Cursed Houses”

Power drained after the fresh blue coat over this wasted home.
After that acute fire, I was dry, I was dire.
I am in the grey floodwaters.
Dead tree branches fizzle in the boiling ponds.

And I feel this gun in my back,
Just shoot it now.
Take away all that pain with one flick of an aching finger.

I was feeling like I had never grown up.
Waiting lifetimes fade, yet still waiting for the past people to go.
They want to stay forever,
and you can never get the apologies just right.
And she’ll be there always in the background dancing and reminding you of your second or third levels of your hells.

Just let them fade away as memories. Please.
Let their ghosts be lost and their soul be in another universe.
So I can see the magic that lay right before me the way I want to be surprised over and over again. Magic.

You set yourself in an impermanence blackhole,
and watch where all the circulation
-burns out in this oven until I feel cooked and ashed.