The Portable Henry Rollins
Page 7
Tries to consume me
Tries to destroy me
It will not destroy me
I am here to clear the air
Look at this place
Look at the filth
Look at the decadence
It forces you to pick a side
Either you destroy it or you become it
Every moment of the day it stares you in the face
Taunting you
Destroying you
And you let it
Tag
You’re it
You’re shit
It is too late for spiritual awakening
Fuck that hippie shit
It’s too late for social change
You can’t educate a flock of sheep
Can’t you see that’s what they want
They want you to turn away
They want you to lie down
Like a lamb for the slaughter
Like a chump for the sellout
There will be no revolution
There will be no uprising
There will be no race war
How could anyone be that stupid?
How could anyone believe that bullshit?
What a joke
I know a lot about jokes
I see them all the time
I spent years with some living jokes
You should see them now
Fat
Stoned
Cowards
Living death
Men of action turned into weak pieces of shit
They could get my respect again
If they shot themselves in the head
At night I walk the streets
I take mental notes
I take inventory
The filth
The garbage
The stench
Liars
Freaks
Clowns
My mission becomes clear to me
My life focuses into a laser beam
My purpose
My life
My vision is pure napalm
I am here to clean
There is only one way to clean
You have to incinerate
You must cleanse with fire
You must turn disease to ash
Or it still lives
Things have gone too far
The strong are destroyed by the weak
Decadence has set a precedent
It has become a way of life
Not the way of my life
Shit is shit
I am here to burn it
Can’t you see?
I am beyond your timid lying morality
I don’t believe in equality
That is to say
That I don’t think that if you’re alive
That’s all you need to get by
The man who sells drugs,
Is not equal to me
The man who rapes his son is not equal to me
They cannot hide
Guilt trips will not shield them from me
I don’t believe in human rights
I think you have grown fat and evil
Hiding behind your human rights
Reveling in filth
The balance must be brought back
When I walk the streets in my neighborhood
Drunks come staggering from bars
Guns go off
Police helicopters fly above
Yet nothing happens
Some show
Let’s cut the drama
Get rid of the display
The ritual is nowhere
It’s hollow
The nights are made of tin
Cheap
Bitter death
I will show you my world
I will bring it home
My beauty
The summer nights of fire and truth
Can you see it?
A dark hot night
The whine of engines from above
The tree line explodes in fire orange
The air fills with the smell of gasoline
The air strike
Like a flower erupting in rapid birth
Filth turned to ash
So beautiful
Decadence lies bleeding
As I walk and plan
I hear angels singing
Black Sabbath songs
The soles of my shoes are thick
Keeps the blood and urine at a distance
The mind I occupy is iron
My time is now
I see them
Maybe it is you who I see
Singing the song of the loser
Your endless, diseased song
The end is coming
And I am the one who is bringing it
I am the punch line
I will defoliate before it’s too late
You spend millions on rehabilitation
Rewashing the brainwashed
There’s no such thing as rehabilitation
How big does a lie have to get before even you can no longer avoid it?
You shit in your bed
You wait for someone to come
And clean it up
Well, here I am
Ready to throw out the baby with the bathwater
At some point they show their true colors
After the breakup
After the trial
After the contract is signed and broken
Their true colors stink
These days
I find it hard to get along with them
I want to push them until the colors come out
And sometimes I hate them so much, I push and see
I do the same to the ones I like
The ones I don’t care about
I smile at real nice
I closed my door
I saw the world frowning at me
I sat shut away from their downward-spiraling universe
I stared at the walls
My universe frowned at me too
Shut away
Turn away
I want an eject button I can push
So I can get out of myself
When my universe frowns at me
All my war stories are old
They hang like old clothes in the closet
No one wants to hear old war stories
It’s all I have right now
My mouth flaps dry in the air
I am in this room pacing the floors
Sun up sun down grinding my teeth
Jumping at shadows waiting
I don’t want to think about that old war anymore
It’s driving me up the wall with bad insanity
I need new war
High on war
All the beaten-down men got on the bus long before I did
I look at their cheap clothes and run-down shoes
Their bags of junk
Their faces look like they’re going to drop off their heads
And hit the floor
Most of them are holding transfers
It’s late
Look at these guys riding into the night
Like a sad song played out of a cheap radio
I hate to feel need
I look at her and I need
I feel it burn
I have a black gift
I heal myself into a mass of scar tissue
Unparalleled in insensitivity
I numb myself to myself
Instead of listening to my need
I don’t feel the cuts and I can’t taste the blood
Like having a headache
Blowing your brains out to stop the pain
Stupid and gutless
But it’s easy and it hurts so much
That it doesn’t hurt at all
Stop the headache
Cut off the head
Stop the bleeding
Drain the body of blood
Stop the wa
r
Kill both sides
Stop hunger
Starve them to death
Stop crime
Put everybody in jail
He sits in his room night after night
No one comes over or calls
He makes no sound
He looks at his hands
He looks at the floor
He listens to his breath
He doesn’t look at the clock
Time doesn’t matter
His hands don’t matter
He doesn’t matter
He pays no attention to his thoughts
There were things I wanted to tell you
I couldn’t get it together
I couldn’t get past your eyes
After you were gone it hurt to have kept quiet
So easy to not say what you think
To not do what you want
Hard to take rejection
Easy to hurt someone else and not know it
Easy to make it hard
They will try to destroy you
At all times on all levels
All the things that go bump in the night twist your balls
Listen to how they talk
Sounds like trash falling out of their mouths
Every sound, every motion wants a piece of you
You must:
Disown
Disavow
Discard
You must break it over your knee
Dislocate
Look at all the animals looking at you
Big Larry the black fag
We used to hang out at the parking lot
I would watch him park cars
We would hang out on the avenue and talk
So much bullshit
Sometimes all we could do was laugh
He would sometimes reach over and grab my dick
I would say get off me you big black fag
We would laugh like shit
He would look at me with these watery eyes
He would say:
White boy, you got no box, you got no ass
What are you going to do?
I didn’t know
I asked him why the hell he didn’t like women
He laughed so hard he nearly fell off his crate
He said that there was something about that big old piece
Just hanging there, really did it for him
I told him that women were what was happening
He laughed hard as shit
Asked me how the fuck I knew that
I didn’t know shit about women
Much less anything else
All I had was a milk crate under my ass
And this big black motherfucker grabbing my dick
I told him that I was with women all the time
He laughed so hard
I thought his eyes were going to fall out
I met a guy once
He had been locked away in solitary for a stretch
When they came to let him out, he didn’t want to go
He liked it better in there
Said it was a world that he could understand and control
Sometimes I think it would be better to stay in a cage
It gets hard to take the shit that these fakes put across
They should be careful
Someone might take them out of the picture
Just for a laugh
Or because they have the blues
The world is big
You see how people react to the terror
The size and the noise
Freaks them right out
They wish for the cage like I wish for the cage
Sometimes I want to kill you
Make you wish you gave me the cage
Before one of your pigs takes me out
I am going to take a few of you down
I have the blues from the size and the noise
Where’s that cage
I have come back to you swinging man
I left you in that room years ago
I went out into the light and looked around
I have come back into the darkness
To bask in your rancid creaking rhythm
I can hear you swing back and forth
I can see liquid dripping from your mouth
Sticking your tongue out, making fun of the world
I see why now
They make me feel like they made you feel
Hollow and alone
Emptied and gutted
I must tell you right now
Silence is the most powerful sound I have ever heard
The things they said feel good
Don’t
You could never fit in
So you made your own place
That’s what I need to do
I feel pushed out of everything
I wish I could have seen you kick out the chair
It would have been great to see your eyes
But then again
That wouldn’t have been too good for you
The best things are done alone
Take my hand
Come into this dark room
Get down on the floor with me
Let’s get slain
Lick the sweat
Taste the blood
Hear the sound
For once
For real
I need something real from you
I want you so bad
I want to taste you
I need to feel your teeth in my flesh
I took you to you
That’s what you wanted
I think I did a good job
You got mad when I left you there
You cursed me
For the stench of your trash
Well, it’s all you now
Sooner or later you’ll see
The sun shines outside the sewer
It’s easy to come away empty-handed when you don’t reach out
It’s hard to believe you when you say you’re choking
When you have your hands around someone else’s throat
It’s all you and you now
If you lean too far to one side, you will fall
You’ll have to pick yourself up off the floor of your soul
Scar tissue is stronger than normal flesh
It’s all you for you now
All things inside
The poison
The medicine
All in you for you
When I look at you
I want to destroy your smile
It sits on your face like a lie
You look good
I want to know the truth about you
I want to get close to you
When I do, you see that I see through you
Your heart beats like a small bird
You know me well
That’s why you can’t handle me
It hurts me to act a fool
Pretend I don’t see you for what you are
All of you keep me on the outside
I want to believe your lies
Turn myself off and feel you
But I can’t stop seeing through
All of you
He sat in the dark room and waited for he
She was not his friend
He tried friendship for years and knew the truth
He wanted someone to be nice to him for an hour
He was lonely
It made no sense that someone would find him attractive
That someone would want to be with him for what he was
In his business everybody wanted something
There was always an ulterior motive, a game being played
There was something wrong when someone was nice to him
And they weren’t getting paid
Every time someone wanted to shake his hand
He wanted to say:
What are you after?
How much do you want?
He was not a bad person
He just couldn’t identify
He sat and waited for her to come
She was a whore
Not off the streets, she was high-class
His manager got her for him
There was a knock on the door
He opened the door and she came in
She looked at him and smiled
She looked down at a card in her hand
Asked if his name was Frank
He nodded
She went into a speech about the things she wasn’t into
Rough stuff, anal sex, S&M
He nodded
He spoke:
It’s hard for me. I’m not used to this. I need you to be nice to me for a while. I want you to pretend that you know me and like me. You don’t have to take off your clothes unless you want to. Maybe you could just put your arms around me for a while. Could you do that for me?
She put her arms around him
He closed his eyes
He felt good
She looked over his shoulder at the television
She almost started to laugh out loud
She wanted to ask if she could light a smoke
What a crack-up, this rock star
Her little brother had all of his records
If he knew what he was really like, he would throw them out
After a short time he pushed her away
Gave her a wad of money
Said: It’s all there, thanks
Get out
They don’t lie a lot
They just don’t tell the truth very often
Truth does not mean much to them
You can lie to them, or tell the truth
Makes no difference to them
Walk on them if you want
Eat with their forks
Destroy them for the hell of it
Animals in pain
Sweating and screaming
Sweating and screaming
Bullets blowing brains across apartments all over town
The janitor hangs himself in the basement
Had a falling-out with God
Leaves a note saying he was sorry for his life
Hot night breaks jaws
All is fair in love and hell
If you don’t like it, crawl on your hands and knees
And stick your head in the oven
Breathe deep
Dying in rooms
Crying out from plaster tombs
Heroin worship
Nightmare in the womb
Sliding down the icy spike
No way but out
In New Jersey she said:
“It’s always been a dream of mine to have you inside me”
In Rhode Island six people came and no one clapped
In Pittsburgh she said:
“You’re the most gorgeous man I have ever seen”
In Minneapolis the pigs arrested Joe
In Des Moines she said:
“It’s so exciting when you come inside me”