Last of the Rock n Rollers

Man, he used to live a life

Known all over but still a

Mystery to them all

You could see his face in the

Corner of every bar

At every party

Even the ones he wasn’t invited to

Leather on

Holding court with

The select few

Straight bourbon rocks

All the clichés at once

Like a goddamn fireball in the snow

Effortless

He would duck in and out

Unseen

And reappear elsewhere at the

11^th hour

Too late for others

The exact right time for him

And they all followed his lead

Drums would sound

Drinks flowed once more

And morning after morning

Sunlight shone on his face which

Bar whisky red-eye

Remained unblemished

When you spoke to him you could

Sense he was mortal

Just like you and me

So with every raging night another piece

Of his soul would diminish

Gone forever

They would take it all

And give nothing back

But the booze fixed all that

And the bar lights and the women

Each morning frost

Washing his face clean

Of everything before

And then

Like all of them

He began to retreat into logic and

Into real life

Reading better books

The right books

With the screaming nights weakening

The evening became his home

In the mirror

He would consider himself for longer

Eyes looking back to scrutinise

Skin

Lips

Teeth

Hair

As with the desperate and lost

Most of whom given time

Find their way eventually to religion

Steadily he began to fit in and

Steadily he began to die

At last even the sacred music began to fade

Until it was no more than a whisper in his ear

A memory of friends long gone

And nothing more than

That.

Too good, too sober too clean

The grey hairs in my amateur beard

Have finally outnumbered the black

It looks a complete mess

Not one thing or the

Other (I will shave it off tonight)

But thank god for these aches and pains

And lack of remaining melanin

Thank the deviant pagan gods

For 48 hour hangovers

For stigmatism and a delicate stomach

Because I look around me now

At the young people

Of which I am no longer one

And this I only recently acknowledged with any grace

They are turned on not

In the traditional sense

Tuned in not

In the classical manner

And my god do they all lack character

What has happened to our last hope  

When they all know

Exactly what line to follow

What job to get

How to get it

Exactly their direction home

What to wear how to eat

Who not to fuck

Adorned in the correct clothes

As though they fell out of their mothers like that

Blinkers on to any dangerous asides

Jesus

How do you ever reach functioning adulthood

Without first joyfully running the gauntlet

Of a semi-professional degenerate?

Alternatives

Cutting through a bagel, I recalled the girl stood next to me

At the checkout earlier that day and slipped with the knife

Straight down rather than a slice

A solid full-blade thunk into the palm of my hand

The metal didn’t hurt but embedded its smooth edge

Deep into the flesh stopping on the bone

She had purple eye shadow that intentionally matched

Her purple leather satchel bag

I found this for some reason unsettling

Even more so than her sideways resemblance to Isabella Rossellini

I stare at people too long, I thought. But what else is there to do?

I leaned my weight on the handle seeing how far I could get the knife

Until the pain started, but it went all the way through

I was just stood there dripping blood - half a hand on the counter

As people came in to make their grey coffee and dead sandwiches

They didn’t seem to notice. Or if they did

Nobody said a god damn thing about it to

Me.