Forcing definition from this diseased confusion
Life is an insult
So fuck it
I’m taking it down the cinder trail
And I don’t want to hear about
What you think you stand for
Because it’s nothing
Furniture, boxes, bonfires, lists
A cast of renters
The embrace, the kiss, the long look
Falls to the floor on death row
Life is an embarrassment
Some things are too embarrassing
I could never tell you
I could never tell anyone
How much I think about you
How it scares me
Every morning as insomnia’s grip loosens
I stare at your picture
I think of your painful shyness
Your ravaged self-opinion
Your incredible beauty
How drawn I am to you
You are the reason I don’t want to die all the time
When I am with you life is worth living
Time away from you is strange and full of pain
When I look into your eyes
I can see how life has savaged you
It’s ok if you fall
I will be there to catch you
Anyone who would want to hurt you
Would have to kill me to do it
I will never be able to pound words into lines
To match the velocity of your presence
I will never let you know how much you hurt me
No, I will never tell you
The last few months have sent me into myself
It’s not easy to forget you
Time is healing me
I keep my feelings to myself, it helps
I don’t understand you or your kind
I end up getting myself messed up
I can’t take any more beatings like this
In dead hours
Sitting in my room
Face in my right hand
Music playing
Thinking about him
His hands in your hair
The scent of your skin
Making his eyes close
Your breath on his neck
As she becomes
Away
I watch myself try to hold on to her
I have never known a pain like this
When you go insane there will be nothing
When you go insane there will be no one
Nothing to hold you
No one to love you
No one to talk to you
But it won’t matter
It won’t matter if the walls are gray
Or that time is hollow and lonely
And passes whistling and hissing like wind through high weeds
I’m laughing and shrugging all the way to death
I’ve never known a moment of real life
Watch me as I run mindlessly and directionlessly
Forward
If I thought it would help
I would stay with you for as long as it took
I would show you something different
That I was telling you the truth the whole time
As it is right now
I have taken all I can
Your shallowness has thrown me into a deep hole
It would be better for me to hate you I know
But I can’t
I try but I keep thinking of you sitting alone
Seeing yourself as pieces of broken glass on the floor
Your inverted rage is hard to be around
Good luck
My loneliness is so large it has outgrown me
It walks beside me, a wasteland that keeps in step
Sometimes our shoulders touch
It feels like teeth sinking into my flesh
A new and strange stretch of desert opens before me
If you want to hurt them and their children not yet born
Tell them the truth always
When you meet them
Stare deep into their eyes
Take those who wish to dominate you
Turn the game around and play it on them
Don’t spare them a thing
Make sure you tell them about the blood and the pain
They can say what they want
You will trigger all their responses
It’s all blood and death from here
You won’t be kept waiting long
To take a step into this vast emptying desert
This lit-up hope-filled expanse
This space that reduces us to the truth
To embrace this life-extinguishing process
To constantly fuck with death
To live through this slaughter without killing yourself first
Here is dot dot dot
For me it’s the ever-widening shadows
A silence that steadily increases in volume
Separation from myself
So that I walk alongside my body
I hear their voices like wind in high grass
Darkness is rushing forward
If I could I would melt into your arms
I would fall like ten dead languages
I would not front
I would not lie to you
I don’t think I could lie anymore
I have grown too old for such youthful pursuits
I want to love someone before I die
Hurry
It won’t be long now
All we do is eat sleep and worry about the rent
Somewhere there is real life
And those who live it
What about the rest
Paralyzed by television and police choke holds
Alas
Life widens and grows distant
The loneliness that the world generates
We keep it going all night long
Waiting for a dull moment, or a lot of dull moments
To sneak away from the pain
During these unmoving silent nights I feel its crushing wheel
Is there anyone in the world who I can know?
I am tired of knowing myself so well
I am immune
Too exhausted to notice
Too paranoid to sleep or wonder for too long
Too self-abused and withdrawn to help myself
Real life doesn’t come close to this
Love heals scars love left
We’re all hypocrites
Searching desperately
Before our ability to attract
Takes too much effort to use
Or disappears much to our horror
We die trying to impress each other
I’d rather be respected by a bolt of lightning
I like my world
Right now it’s all I can stand
Get too close and they’ll take you to the bottom
They fuck me up
I go to the store and I have to listen
It’s a nonstop tragedy
The night is here though
No gunshots
I wish the sun would take a vacation
Leave me in darkness for a while
Let me heal
Let me try to figure out why I’m fucked up
I’m obsessed with documentation
I must record every drop
I have good equipment
I don’t miss much
It’s a sickness
An obsession with contempt for life
We all need a sickness to live
A way to show our fear of death
I’ve got hours of conversation trapped
Pages of words in lockdown
Video on double life
Doing forever
Don’t end up in this place
It’s all important and meaningless
Depression drives a car into my back
It gets worse with time
Sometimes I can barely speak
The phone is almost impossible
I tried talking to a woman tonight
In the first thirty seconds I wanted to get away
Tour starts in a few days
Start the tour or kill me
At this point I’d take either one
Don’t come close
I’ll hurt you
It’s all I know how to do
I can’t translate the pain into words
That don’t cause pain
Don’t tell me you love me
You’ll make me think of my mother
And 1,000 broken windows
Years of knotted screams into the bed
So much hate it would break your ribs
I put the miles through my eyes
I slam silence into my brain
Anything to get away
Walk away from me as fast as you can
Never speak of me or to me again
It’s too late
For all that
Death is the only shadow on my road
Men hugged him
Women asked him to come home with them
The money rolled in
He was so lonely it was pathetic
If they knew how he lived they would laugh
Sometimes he saw it all as punishment
Never escaping the humiliating inferno of his parents
The parents are gone now
Now he gets paid to humiliate himself
He constantly disgusts himself
In the name of telling the truth
Loneliness and alienation choke him
He tells people to stay alive
He tells himself to die
I live behind a wall of scar tissue
Scare tissue
Scarce issue
I don’t like to think of myself
I like lifting those weights though
I like the feeling of pain
Nothing else
I am rescued from my mind
The nights are painful again
I can’t do anything with that kind of pain
It’s bad
Behind the wall of scar tissue
Hemmed in tight
I don’t want them to know me
I tell them everything so there will be nothing left
That’s the part I’ll keep for myself
I figure the deeper I get into the pain
The better I’ll be at dealing with it
That’s how bad I hate this shit
100 women left me tonight
I didn’t take it too well
I kicked myself for letting it matter
I kicked myself for letting it go so far
I lost myself in the shuffle
Now the room is cold
All of a sudden it’s Saturday night
There’s no magic
Too dangerous to go outside
No shit
I pride myself on being the loneliest man on earth
Damn
December 19, 1991
Part of my life ended
My best friend was murdered
On my front porch
He never hurt anyone
The man who shot him in his face
Never knew his name
I am still alive
Sort of
From now on
My life is totally fucked and without purpose
Without inspiration
A mask that I will die wearing
After dark I wait for something horrible to happen
I figure I’ll have people shooting at me for the rest of my life
Like a drama in installments
Nightmares delivered to my door
Darkness comes and I wait for more horror
I figure we’ll be friends for life
I’m swimming in an animal bag
Everything smells like meat
Everyone is a killer
I look at all of them now
I search out their eyes
I let them know that I’ll kill them back
They take one look and they know I mean it
I lock the door behind me
Everything that moves begs me to attack it
I know how people are now
They take your money
Break your heart
Or try to kill you
Now I walk the streets like a secret animal
Some of them know
But not all of them
The one who fucks with me
Will lose his throat
He’ll have no idea what he’s fucking with
I live on the outskirts of humanity
I am scarred for the rest of my time here
That’s all it is to me
Time left here
Time spent walking the city filth
Breathing in and out and keeping my teeth sharp
Waiting for something horrible to happen again
Every slow dance took my breath away
Pinned my heart to the wall
I believed every slow song
I was intoxicated by the smell and the movement
Every one of them broke my heart a little
Now there’s nothing but wise bitterness
Fatigue from seeing the whole thing
The pool of blood in the dirt
The end of real time has begun
It’s all legendary from here
The detectives went through my house for hours
I was at the pig station
I didn’t know until later
They went through the food in the kitchen
I got back to the house and all kinds of shit was turned over
My best friend’s blood was all over the front walk
They’re looking for something to bust us for
The pieces of shit even went through the attic
They were curious as to why I had so many tapes
He talks to me and makes me think he’s my friend
I look at him and know he thinks I’m scum
If I give these pieces of shit the time of day then they win
You know
There’s so many pieces of shit in the world
It’s amazing anyone gets by
The pigs asked if me and Joe were faggots
They were so relieved when they found out we weren’t
Fuck you pig
Like I have to prove myself to you
I can’t think of a more fucked-up situation
I have to talk to these shitheads all the time now
They still ask other people about me
Like I might have been up to something
I’m some kind of suspect?
Nah, but you sure are some kind of pig
Joe you should have seen the tabloids talk about you
They really love the fact
That your father was married to the bitch in Charlie’s Angels
They talk about her sorrow
How you two were so close
Like you hung out all the time
How you were 29 and in Black Flag
One of your father’s piece-of-shit friends was lying
Talking a lot of shit
You looked great in the Enquirer
Good pictures of you and whatever the fuck her name is
I saw her at your wake
I wanted to spit on her
Your father had it at Gazarri’s
All his AA friends were there
After all these fake-ass people who didn’t know you
Had spoken and congratulated themselves on their acting
And talked a lot of shit about god and AA
Your father stood at the end of a line
So people could come up and talk to him
Your mother didn’t know anyone there
She just stood to the side
With her husband and your stepsister
They weren’t
used to the Hollywood sickness
It was gross
After that we went and looked at your body
Your father didn’t go
He didn’t go to your funeral either
Don’t know why
Maybe because there would be too many people
Too busy with their own grief
To compliment him on his
I miss you man
I look at pictures of you and I can’t take it
Yesterday I wanted to crawl inside the pictures and be with you
I have been thinking a lot of dying myself lately
Life is pretty boring without you around
I have to tell you Joe
I did it all for you
I was hoping that if I went out there and did something good
You would see that you could do something magnificent
Like I told you the night before you died
You have such a great talent
It’s because you didn’t lie I admire that truth
You will inspire me for what’s left of my life
I see now that it might not be all that long
That piece of shit took you out
In less time than it takes to turn off a light
When I was looking at you on that gurney
That bullet hole in the side of your head
All filled in with mortician’s clay
All the powder burns on your face
What courage you have to be dead like that
This thing that we all fear the most
And there you are pulling it off like it’s nothing
You even had a slight smirk on your face
But you were cold and you smelled like formaldehyde
It was so hard to leave that room with you in it
It took me three times I think
I kept coming back to say something else to you
It never seemed to be enough
It will never be enough
Please come visit me in a dream soon
I miss you so much
My good friend
1992 is a couple of hours away
I’m staying in someone’s house
I am almost 31
All my stuff is in storage
I am single and plan on staying that way
To appeal to the more tender nature of a woman
Is a total waste of my time
What a joke
Meanest damn people I ever met
I am alone in the world and there’s no changing that
My loneliness burns deep within
I don’t mind because
I am one from none
My line has never been so clear-cut
Death has stripped most of the words from my speech
Talk is a disease
The Portable Henry Rollins Page 12
