He said, and this I will always remember:
No sleep tonight for the sober or broken-hearted
No peace for the love-lost, lonely soul
And then just like that, another night is stolen away
in what I thought was a fair trade
Today will be a rough one,
The sun is never on my side
It has already woken the birds,
those birds, those birds, those fucking birds
And so it goes, and just as it begins
And just as I begin to rise
Sticky stuck
Sweat stuck to the sheets
Shivering, and still partly with a dream
I forget for a moment that you’ve gone
And smile
Oh, happy delirium
How sad it is that
You will die in here,
Waiting for a bus to Malibu
What then have I been waiting for?
Another day to break?
Then surely I am soon follow,
To greet the red dawn with red eyes
Eat my dreams
And ask for seconds
Just like so many dead beats
And down-and-outs before me
Street lights flicker with the fading stars
As the penny parlor barbers
And nameless newsstand vendors
Open shop
Standing stoic
In the fog-pressed palm tree skyline
Selling death and satisfaction
Selling you your life away
And the traffic that has been picking up on Ventura
Soon becomes little more than sad white noise
To strange drunken howls-
Bum-echoes from a nearby ally
But their laughter too fades away
Leaving lonely
The sole cry of a lost brother
Who has slipped off to find
A spot of soft ground to sleep on
He calls out to no one and the rising sun
Cursing the wretched state of man
And dragging his past behind him
And I think of Oswald, the drunk
A rotten river bum with the liver yellow face who once gave me twenty dollars for a haircut when I first moved to Los Angeles.
He said, and this I will always remember,
He said: Forget about the girl.
