21st Century Beat

Beat. Like beat down. Like finished. How could we have known then that we would take on this forgotten jacket, this blanket of fleas? Safe in our dorm worlds, fingerfucking teenagers, full of piss and beer and bad ideas. Still a promised future… Still a meaning to our past. How could we have known?

Not even a birthright, merely a breath, a laugh, a half-smile. We perfect, golden assholes, marched down the brick paths of University, bright eyes fixed on our predestined glory… Unaware of grandfather’s taxman lurking, lowering his zipper, beckoning a decade-long suck. Allen and Jack and Neal waiting, midnight, Regents Park, downstairs with the pizza boy, waiting to give us this dreadful typewriter.

All the while the bottom- feeding whores of Wall and Madison sucked and fucked our tomorrows just short of dead, only to inflate and drain again. The first time it was all a game of nothing. Later it was home. They’ll kill us all before they leave us alone.

When did you find out you were beat? Did it hurt like the names they called you in the halls, or the first time you broke? There’s no romance in defeat. I don’t think we’ll fuck our way out of this.

How do you take your poison, baby? Do you take it up your hole, or down your soul, or burning bright inside that bowl? Do you steal? Do you feel? How the fuck would you even know? We’re all criminals, sweetheart. Even you. Its alright. I’d kill a hundred just to sleep through one clench-jawed night.

I’ve seen you alone in the clubs, the bars, loud music and sweat replacing conversation. But the longing, oh the longing to disappear into essence in the dark as that song wails and those pills you took take you over. I’ve been standing by, watching through my own tears, hoping you would look at me. I can’t see myself, not without seeing the ghosts of the fathers I’ve murdered, blurred in this dusty mirror.

Fuck me and make me forget my name, my sins, my waste… I did what I did and I am what I am and I’m not afraid, not anymore. Powerless and adrift… I am beat. Nothing to do but celebrate my trespasses, my loves, my crimes. I own them all and you can kiss my beat ass all the way from Bronx to Battery. I’ll sell these sins to feed my son. I'll fly through these Southern streets at night, a carpetbagger on 3 wheels, the young and rich on my back.

Closest to my soul, you know we’re beat, baby. Howling On The Road to oblivion. Underachievers. Beautiful dreamers too delicate for the ride. Too smart for the game. Too beautiful to live like whores. Reach under your dress and give me back my Japanese pistol. I’ll show you what my bullets feel like when they get inside. We’ll show them all.