Untitled
By
Jonathan Gabel
My lighter shinks amongst the cacophony of bugs
that fill the summer twilight
and my lungs inhale
and exhale
to set that tip aglow.
The bugs buzz like I buzz
stacked like static in the night air.
Land mines and orchestras.
The feeling grows as I inhale
and exhale
Filling the rhythm of life
With milky soft poison
Smoke that dances from my lips
And fills my head with a hungry joy
I hear the city in the background
Sitting like a dull gray primer under the bug's dominant dance
Unseen but all around us
Leaving me feeling like the world feels a bit too perfect at times
Despite all evidence to the contrary
A cruelly beautiful paradox
A circus of the absurd
And this young girl we call life runs from waves of grace
She runs from pride
Runs from ego
Stone jaws and gods of men
And what man could care what she is wearing
When it's always nothing underneath
And despite her fleeting nature
She still takes all of it
After all, she keeps the records here
She is the record keeper
That underage whore named life
Jotting down the notes of all that has happened
And all that will
On a stained paper napkin
--
The world feels too large now
And The vines that crawl up the brick peak and bow
Overstretched
With no where to go
But back down
Frustratingly Reflective of my current state
Beer in hand
Smoke gliding up and under a moon annexing a sky which use to be home to a sun
Sitting
Reading
in the last great bastion of filth this city has
Watching as rich girls click across the pavement in their heels
As they skip and woo
around an old crone who digs into the sidewalk
Scratching pavement for the remnants of cigarettes
And, to be fair, my eyes skip around her skeleton as well
unable to resist
tracing the girl’s tight tights up to their tight plaid skirts
Almost sickened by my desire to follow such tasteless people
Such suicide lives
Just To try and loosen them up
Deal with their babble for long enough to give them the old one two
Caught in Desperate times
wondering if one can objectify girls whom project
money
and looks
as sole virtues
I don’t need the money hun
And although you think I disgust you
I’ve seen how your type responds
when on the other end of my cock!
I would shout
As they toss my sodded ass back across the street
Better not
I lift my beer to take a sip
And the can rockets to the sky
And I sink in it’s apparent weightlessness
One more sounds good
While I wait for MY people
in a spot
Destitute and lonely
Whilst more cookie cutter faces flow into that taqueria
Leaving me to realize lol
That hell,
most of “my people” bore me too
Living lives paralyzed by parochialism
Yet lost afloat in a broad sea
leaving me feeling
As if
Locked away In a cell
Scratching my words into the walls and cackling
As I Struggle with my apparent lack of greatness
My lack of community
Wondering if that pain in my gut and my dour situation speaks more of those whom have locked themselves out
Then it does of the solitude I call home
--
There is one line left on the tray and it’s not mine.
My head is buried deep
in the legs
of the girl in bed.
She’s done
I’m not
I breath heavy.
It’s almost a pant.
Just enough consciousness left
to hope
for that buzz in my pocket.
Some response to those last ditch efforts.
It’s all desperation.
Whether hoping for a front
or a girl entranced enough by my drunken bravado
to send me some fuck.
I know I’m through,
I’m tapped out
But there is always hope
Still I pant.
I pant on a cunt I’m no use to.
The whisky and cocaine have rendered me obsolete,
unless I strike that 4am gold,
but I want her to have it,
she deserves that rabid animal.
Striking away
as she shakes in ecstasy,
myself knowing this will be nothing more but a blip,
a dot on a chart,
a flash of a memory
that hangs in shame under the sickness
of the next morning.
A sunrise through the fog.
A vision buried under layers of ego.
A truth that I can only admit to
when too strong
or too weak.
Gravel in the rain.
A bar I must to pay to enter
yet always rings with the same disappointment.
The same drinks
The same hopelessness
Yet I always pay to enter
Hoping the Entry fee is a signal
that I might find something different behind those doors.
That maybe this time I won’t be conned,
I won’t wake up asking why I threw those dollars
towards that man
just to pay in blood once again
for those same drinks and same disappointments.
Swallow me whole,
I hope once and for all this world would just swallow me whole.
Instead it’s just takes bites
It nips slowly at what I’ve built up.
Always leaving me just a little bit less of a man.
But feeling somehow more of one.
Like a carrot on a stick
And yet I still bite
Like a carrot on a stick
or just the carrots stub,
swinging from that string.
And yet I still bite
Always the chump
I still bite
Even if it was just the string.
I’d still bite
Id suckle that string all the way up to that stick.
I’d still bite.
--
She says she’s worried,
That my words are more true than my performance
My performance...
Then I must be actor of the year
As I bend the needle back into position
With my teeth
Actor of the year
As I Work and love and write and crumble
As I abandon
My father
And mother
And sister
As I choose my lust over the love I’ve been given
As I let that love starve while I burn money at the track
As I write for myself and work for my enemy
She believes with her eyes that a drink is but a drink
That a man is just a man
Sad and
Flat like a single note in repetition
Unable to see that a man can also be a drink
And a fuck
And a thief in the night
The crescendo of a concert hall
The lost steps of a dance with a lover
And the reason for the tears
in that lovers eyes
Never asking why
Anyone would choose this role
And yet here I sit
Unable to be anything but
Wondering how much of my soul
is my own
And how much
I’ve made up.
--
My heart burps
And I shove two fingers into my neck
To check my pulse
The flower shifts my mind
And I’m left wondering
If I am dying
Or if it’s all in my head
A black and white leapord spotted lighter
With red lips
Lays at the base of an abandoned dentist sign from long ago
Cracked and faded
On its head
The numbers 434 inverted laugh “hEh”
And as I stare at that cheap lighter
And that sign
I come to believe that we have lost our heading
We’ve been blown in the wrong direction
Confused by the haze
Unable to find beauty on the horizon
Buildings scream in pain
Who are these architects
and who hired them
to create
such
atrocities
we mass produce trash
Made by the tasteless
And fill the landfills of our minds
Until one day we finally block out the sun
That slowly loses its shine
within every man
Creating endless billboards
plastered with the drivel that fills the hollow heads of those who surround us
Allowing them to wear like badges
The emptiness in their souls
Maybe that was the plan all along
Fill the world with enough trash
and people will be begging to pay for beauty
For some kind of reprieve
Let them work for it
They say
Let them die for it.
--
Emptiness defines everything
and yet how can nothing reflect such beauty
the world is a desert and we live in a universal mirage
splashing in the waters and drinking sand
coughing on our own hubris
I think the illusion is cracking
All we know and love is the intangible
those things we can describe and experience
but never capture
never lock down
I see love and light in moments
moments that fly past
moments that find their place in memories
shadows of the greatness of mankind
who needs a nobel prize or a pulitzer
when they have drinking in an alleyway
laughing with a friend
when they have good sex
and good food
and good drink
I've gotten more joy from a winning horse
than any institution or collection of man could give me
I write into the dark
and hope that others bring light.
And shine upon
another self-important beast
who thought his words might mean something
might feed that hope that I am more than
a hungry tongue looking for a cunt
more than just nature gone too far.
--
Juniper, in the morning light.
Spry and willfull, heather of the grove.
Spheres of feeling, dashing off the waters song, radiant in all its glory.
There is god here. In all of this.
And like a streak of grey that grows in his hair.
All pain and sorrow. His failure, on display.
The girls skip by the lake,
making play of nothing.
Sorrow a reality not yet known.
They twirl like the flowers twirl,
virgin and new.
There smiles beaming with an effulgent luminosity
the kind that warms one from the inside.
It will be autumn soon,
but its spring in their mind.
Spring year after year after year
until spring
never
comes
again.
--
The houses sit
quiet and still
And I wonder how many people are fucking inside them
Old and young
Ugly and stallions
Mounting their girls
Girls laying discontented
Wondering why
the last thing humanity has universally deemed as great
isn’t filling that void inside
While other girls
shake in bliss
off hard cocks
And lose themselves
just for a moment
Risking the toils that come from such affairs
Just to lose themselves
for that moment
To be Kissed by that little death
Sipping slowly
on their fear
of the big one.
--
There’s a click click clicking sound
coming from above me.
And I’m unsure
if it’s a bird
or someone rapping on the glass
of the windows
that hang from the abandoned brick.
I think I’m growing to become a hypochondriac.
Either that
or everything is broken,
all at once.
But that’s what a hypochondriac
would say
would think.
But It’s something new every day
the heart attack
the stroke
neither either.
Today it’s my fatty liver.
Tomorrow a sharp pain
that can only be one thing
The ghost of my fathers undoing
Finally catching up to me.
The doc says I’m all good
Test after test
All good.
Which can’t be a point in my favor
because I don’t feel good.
Perhaps my guilt has finally materialized itself.
Maybe I’ve willed myself to die for so long that it’s finally happening.
Because I can’t believe that a man can go this long
getting away
scott free
for crimes committed against his own soul.
His own body.
Leaving the holy temple
to crumble in disrepair.
That’s not how life works
Or perhaps it is
Which only makes it hurt
all the more.
Because that’s not how life should work.
That bastard in the sky probably fucked up
shoving me in the vessel a writer requires
Deserves.
Able to Stomach suffering
after suffering
Mental
Physical
Eyes wide
And veins full of poison.
He used a bit too much clay on this one
Unaware of whats he’s created
Unaware of what’s coming for him.
Because now I have no choice but to weather the storm
and bleed the word.
This is my charge
Word after word after word
Words that keep this old man afloat
And signify the only hope he has left.
Jonathan Gabel is a full-time writer and bartender. A past student of film and photography, he now focuses on prose and poetry work, trying daily to bring a humanism and street level realism to his fiction and poetry. Flaws and all. Jonathan battled heroin addiction throughout his twenties which has become a big source for his work. He currently resides in Chattanooga, Tennessee with his wife of three years.
You can contact him at [email protected]
Private Destiny: Gabel, Jonathan: 9798355050061: Amazon.com: Books
By
Jonathan Gabel
My lighter shinks amongst the cacophony of bugs
that fill the summer twilight
and my lungs inhale
and exhale
to set that tip aglow.
The bugs buzz like I buzz
stacked like static in the night air.
Land mines and orchestras.
The feeling grows as I inhale
and exhale
Filling the rhythm of life
With milky soft poison
Smoke that dances from my lips
And fills my head with a hungry joy
I hear the city in the background
Sitting like a dull gray primer under the bug's dominant dance
Unseen but all around us
Leaving me feeling like the world feels a bit too perfect at times
Despite all evidence to the contrary
A cruelly beautiful paradox
A circus of the absurd
And this young girl we call life runs from waves of grace
She runs from pride
Runs from ego
Stone jaws and gods of men
And what man could care what she is wearing
When it's always nothing underneath
And despite her fleeting nature
She still takes all of it
After all, she keeps the records here
She is the record keeper
That underage whore named life
Jotting down the notes of all that has happened
And all that will
On a stained paper napkin
--
The world feels too large now
And The vines that crawl up the brick peak and bow
Overstretched
With no where to go
But back down
Frustratingly Reflective of my current state
Beer in hand
Smoke gliding up and under a moon annexing a sky which use to be home to a sun
Sitting
Reading
in the last great bastion of filth this city has
Watching as rich girls click across the pavement in their heels
As they skip and woo
around an old crone who digs into the sidewalk
Scratching pavement for the remnants of cigarettes
And, to be fair, my eyes skip around her skeleton as well
unable to resist
tracing the girl’s tight tights up to their tight plaid skirts
Almost sickened by my desire to follow such tasteless people
Such suicide lives
Just To try and loosen them up
Deal with their babble for long enough to give them the old one two
Caught in Desperate times
wondering if one can objectify girls whom project
money
and looks
as sole virtues
I don’t need the money hun
And although you think I disgust you
I’ve seen how your type responds
when on the other end of my cock!
I would shout
As they toss my sodded ass back across the street
Better not
I lift my beer to take a sip
And the can rockets to the sky
And I sink in it’s apparent weightlessness
One more sounds good
While I wait for MY people
in a spot
Destitute and lonely
Whilst more cookie cutter faces flow into that taqueria
Leaving me to realize lol
That hell,
most of “my people” bore me too
Living lives paralyzed by parochialism
Yet lost afloat in a broad sea
leaving me feeling
As if
Locked away In a cell
Scratching my words into the walls and cackling
As I Struggle with my apparent lack of greatness
My lack of community
Wondering if that pain in my gut and my dour situation speaks more of those whom have locked themselves out
Then it does of the solitude I call home
--
There is one line left on the tray and it’s not mine.
My head is buried deep
in the legs
of the girl in bed.
She’s done
I’m not
I breath heavy.
It’s almost a pant.
Just enough consciousness left
to hope
for that buzz in my pocket.
Some response to those last ditch efforts.
It’s all desperation.
Whether hoping for a front
or a girl entranced enough by my drunken bravado
to send me some fuck.
I know I’m through,
I’m tapped out
But there is always hope
Still I pant.
I pant on a cunt I’m no use to.
The whisky and cocaine have rendered me obsolete,
unless I strike that 4am gold,
but I want her to have it,
she deserves that rabid animal.
Striking away
as she shakes in ecstasy,
myself knowing this will be nothing more but a blip,
a dot on a chart,
a flash of a memory
that hangs in shame under the sickness
of the next morning.
A sunrise through the fog.
A vision buried under layers of ego.
A truth that I can only admit to
when too strong
or too weak.
Gravel in the rain.
A bar I must to pay to enter
yet always rings with the same disappointment.
The same drinks
The same hopelessness
Yet I always pay to enter
Hoping the Entry fee is a signal
that I might find something different behind those doors.
That maybe this time I won’t be conned,
I won’t wake up asking why I threw those dollars
towards that man
just to pay in blood once again
for those same drinks and same disappointments.
Swallow me whole,
I hope once and for all this world would just swallow me whole.
Instead it’s just takes bites
It nips slowly at what I’ve built up.
Always leaving me just a little bit less of a man.
But feeling somehow more of one.
Like a carrot on a stick
And yet I still bite
Like a carrot on a stick
or just the carrots stub,
swinging from that string.
And yet I still bite
Always the chump
I still bite
Even if it was just the string.
I’d still bite
Id suckle that string all the way up to that stick.
I’d still bite.
--
She says she’s worried,
That my words are more true than my performance
My performance...
Then I must be actor of the year
As I bend the needle back into position
With my teeth
Actor of the year
As I Work and love and write and crumble
As I abandon
My father
And mother
And sister
As I choose my lust over the love I’ve been given
As I let that love starve while I burn money at the track
As I write for myself and work for my enemy
She believes with her eyes that a drink is but a drink
That a man is just a man
Sad and
Flat like a single note in repetition
Unable to see that a man can also be a drink
And a fuck
And a thief in the night
The crescendo of a concert hall
The lost steps of a dance with a lover
And the reason for the tears
in that lovers eyes
Never asking why
Anyone would choose this role
And yet here I sit
Unable to be anything but
Wondering how much of my soul
is my own
And how much
I’ve made up.
--
My heart burps
And I shove two fingers into my neck
To check my pulse
The flower shifts my mind
And I’m left wondering
If I am dying
Or if it’s all in my head
A black and white leapord spotted lighter
With red lips
Lays at the base of an abandoned dentist sign from long ago
Cracked and faded
On its head
The numbers 434 inverted laugh “hEh”
And as I stare at that cheap lighter
And that sign
I come to believe that we have lost our heading
We’ve been blown in the wrong direction
Confused by the haze
Unable to find beauty on the horizon
Buildings scream in pain
Who are these architects
and who hired them
to create
such
atrocities
we mass produce trash
Made by the tasteless
And fill the landfills of our minds
Until one day we finally block out the sun
That slowly loses its shine
within every man
Creating endless billboards
plastered with the drivel that fills the hollow heads of those who surround us
Allowing them to wear like badges
The emptiness in their souls
Maybe that was the plan all along
Fill the world with enough trash
and people will be begging to pay for beauty
For some kind of reprieve
Let them work for it
They say
Let them die for it.
--
Emptiness defines everything
and yet how can nothing reflect such beauty
the world is a desert and we live in a universal mirage
splashing in the waters and drinking sand
coughing on our own hubris
I think the illusion is cracking
All we know and love is the intangible
those things we can describe and experience
but never capture
never lock down
I see love and light in moments
moments that fly past
moments that find their place in memories
shadows of the greatness of mankind
who needs a nobel prize or a pulitzer
when they have drinking in an alleyway
laughing with a friend
when they have good sex
and good food
and good drink
I've gotten more joy from a winning horse
than any institution or collection of man could give me
I write into the dark
and hope that others bring light.
And shine upon
another self-important beast
who thought his words might mean something
might feed that hope that I am more than
a hungry tongue looking for a cunt
more than just nature gone too far.
--
Juniper, in the morning light.
Spry and willfull, heather of the grove.
Spheres of feeling, dashing off the waters song, radiant in all its glory.
There is god here. In all of this.
And like a streak of grey that grows in his hair.
All pain and sorrow. His failure, on display.
The girls skip by the lake,
making play of nothing.
Sorrow a reality not yet known.
They twirl like the flowers twirl,
virgin and new.
There smiles beaming with an effulgent luminosity
the kind that warms one from the inside.
It will be autumn soon,
but its spring in their mind.
Spring year after year after year
until spring
never
comes
again.
--
The houses sit
quiet and still
And I wonder how many people are fucking inside them
Old and young
Ugly and stallions
Mounting their girls
Girls laying discontented
Wondering why
the last thing humanity has universally deemed as great
isn’t filling that void inside
While other girls
shake in bliss
off hard cocks
And lose themselves
just for a moment
Risking the toils that come from such affairs
Just to lose themselves
for that moment
To be Kissed by that little death
Sipping slowly
on their fear
of the big one.
--
There’s a click click clicking sound
coming from above me.
And I’m unsure
if it’s a bird
or someone rapping on the glass
of the windows
that hang from the abandoned brick.
I think I’m growing to become a hypochondriac.
Either that
or everything is broken,
all at once.
But that’s what a hypochondriac
would say
would think.
But It’s something new every day
the heart attack
the stroke
neither either.
Today it’s my fatty liver.
Tomorrow a sharp pain
that can only be one thing
The ghost of my fathers undoing
Finally catching up to me.
The doc says I’m all good
Test after test
All good.
Which can’t be a point in my favor
because I don’t feel good.
Perhaps my guilt has finally materialized itself.
Maybe I’ve willed myself to die for so long that it’s finally happening.
Because I can’t believe that a man can go this long
getting away
scott free
for crimes committed against his own soul.
His own body.
Leaving the holy temple
to crumble in disrepair.
That’s not how life works
Or perhaps it is
Which only makes it hurt
all the more.
Because that’s not how life should work.
That bastard in the sky probably fucked up
shoving me in the vessel a writer requires
Deserves.
Able to Stomach suffering
after suffering
Mental
Physical
Eyes wide
And veins full of poison.
He used a bit too much clay on this one
Unaware of whats he’s created
Unaware of what’s coming for him.
Because now I have no choice but to weather the storm
and bleed the word.
This is my charge
Word after word after word
Words that keep this old man afloat
And signify the only hope he has left.
Jonathan Gabel is a full-time writer and bartender. A past student of film and photography, he now focuses on prose and poetry work, trying daily to bring a humanism and street level realism to his fiction and poetry. Flaws and all. Jonathan battled heroin addiction throughout his twenties which has become a big source for his work. He currently resides in Chattanooga, Tennessee with his wife of three years.
You can contact him at [email protected]
Private Destiny: Gabel, Jonathan: 9798355050061: Amazon.com: Books
