It's In The Tweener Times I Live

Another year's useless energy spent...

My life is a complete waste. And I can't even admit that without monsters swarming on me like buzzards looking to pick my bones clean, constantly circling looking for any signs of weakness. Heckuva world you got going here, God! So it's only in the most private of places and moments I can breathe and live, outside the monster's realm and the long arm of worldly law. Life for me is in the tweener times.

You can't lay around the shelter all day and one needs to get to the day labor building in a timely manner if you're to have any hope (the powers that be are bitching about us there again but that's another story) but as I was watching my fellow inmates ready themselves for the day's ordeal I lay rigid on my cot, firm in my refusal to move. "Ain't gonna do it. Fuck this shit!" I'm filled with teenage hope and dream energy coarses through my veins. The frown breaks from my face and my heavy chainmail of bitterness falls off. I'm living and I want to live forever.

I can do this for five, maybe ten minutes tops before the deepwater pressures crush me.

On the job site my teeth are grinding nonstop. I am a slave who whips his own back, forcing myself into labors that evaporate into nothingness because nothing is what they are to me. I help to build pharaoh's temples yet am forbidden to enter afterwards. I’m holding my breath as I hammer each nail, blocking out my heart, my mind, my soul. Compared to a dollar, they say, those things are worthless - that's the forever illusion of mankind and its ultimate doom. But today I'm trapped in the vortex between the time of sowing and the time of final reaping.

One Lie to rule them all,
One Lie to find them,
One Lie to bring them all
and in the darkness bind them.

Suddenly, I pull up, gasping for free air, breathing forbidden fruit. My mind clears and I lose myself in the song I hear from a radio on the other side of the foreman's truck. It's then I notice the morning's tender light and angels calling me to heaven - angels who in their innocence have no idea of the invisible chains that tether me to this twelve dollar hammer. In their cup is the nectar of dreams and my long parched lips yearn for a taste to free me from my mortal body and join their heavenly choir. And though I know the parting of my lips from the cup will burn me to the bone when I return to the hammer's reality, I take a tiny sip.

The taskmaster knows not I've broken my bondage as I steal glimpses of the cars passing down the street driven by free wills and smiling laughter - or so it seems to me. Then the noisy bird who landed next to me flies away and the tweener time ends.


Loneliness has no soul. It waits till you most need rest and spears you like a thief in the night. Such is the sleep of one who has snipped the flower of love like I have. I pass the mirror as I drag myself out of unholy slumbers and I see a face with the dead eyes of a doll and the scowling frown of an unconvicted killer. I decide to risk the frozen night air and buy some medication from the 7-11 down the street. Bundled up and fortified in my winter jacket, my writer's eye comes to life.

I hear a couple arguing in the distance. I don’t hear the exact words - they don't concern me - but I hear the sounds. They are dancing with the devil, not realizing the tune only gets faster and faster. Next I see one of those Hummer limos. Wonder what it's doing carousing around at this hour? Must be a movie star inside! I dream back to the early morning sun I saw that day and before the inspiration leaves me I plop down on the curb scribbling furiously as the nighttime's cold tarnishes my nose. I'm outside, alone, shivering, can't sleep and tormented by my past sins, but for the moment life flows through my pen and I'm living at last.

"Why is it all my best ideas come to me when I'm shaving?"
- Albert Einstein

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