Henry looking at a blank page early Sunday morning at Wah Wah coffee shop. The same paltry fat chick, same place everyday, first to get the newspaper, sitting on it so no one else could read it. It was the little stuff that chafed him.
The day hot as hell, Henry barefoot on asphalt in Devils’ Square making mental reverence to German soldiers frying eggs on the decks of their tanks in the Sahara, wondering if he could fry up an omelet on Devils’ Square asphalt?
Waiting for the fat chick to surrender the newspaper, fat chance, hoping she would drop dead soon, visualizing it.
Later Henry stuffing his nose full of high octane Bolivian Cocaine, needing the inspiration here, plugging in the jute box, listening to “Rocks Off” by the Rolling Stones and later Roy Buchanan. Trying to get his mind off the woeful and onto the higher stuff.
Out of dire need Henry aligning himself with great poets.
“Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea. “
From “Fern Hill” by Dylan Thomas…
Life a prison for him and many, toiling in green chains…
Henry at the end of the grand experiment too, his green chains wilting and turning brown, wanting to say something.
Henry walking the hallways and alleyways of his mind, he could see their faces, babyish youth. At first sweet and innocent, later on with a hankering to rip things up, he could see them, their faces painted white against the back drop of the night time arcade, resolute not knowing, cooking up something dreadful.
Henry lazy, fazed and fantasying. Dreams and art were inseparable, it had been that way for hundreds of years, maybe thousands. Pipe dreamers smoking opium, Samuel Coleridge writing on the iffy nature of soul.
“The body,
Eternal Shadow of the finite Soul,
The Soul's self-symbol, its image of itself.
Its own yet not itself—“
Writing addictive like opium, addictive for Coleridge, the William Burroughs of Romantic Poets, allot of folks using dope to make fresh art. Dope and art inseparable.
Henry ruminating later in Wah Wah coffee shop about a recurring dream of the Old City in Jerusalem, a city of his design through the mind’s eye, flowing and circular, the yellow break road with danger in the creases, chased by hell hounds and Nazi headhunters.
At Wah Wah another day Henry wanting to wrap this story up. He was without inspiration and had nothing to say, just needing a little filler here, a couple more paragraphs.
He couldn’t be bothered much with people anymore, most people talking shit, even scientist and doctors. Politicians full of shit for sure, there was a major disconnect between what they said and what was going on.
In the end—LIFE— a bucking bronco ride we hold on too with hammer and tongs till the ride was over, some let go and fall off into the Heavens.
Henry wondering how much longer he could hold on?
