Photography © Glenn Bowie
American Lines
I.
Our love for the bomb, for obvious blood,
The dichotomy of love and hate
represents this cartoon slaver and dead end time.
Every second counts… We are getting younger,
every second counts.
We span the skies of slippery time and its representations,
a heavy space, and our children must admire age,
we must honor ‘good time’ and the niche of existence,
the pull of resistance, the permanence we doubt
that we are dying, abandoned, betrayed, as a desperate way
to smell relief, these American lines of
a passive aggressive pinball wizard, shy
and trapped with glassy-eyed ignorance, stone to stone
submission. There is no middle.
There are no doors because there are no walls,
just dreams and hot coals.
We flaunt ourselves and masturbate in crowded rooms,
and envy empty space, where echoes bounce the human barks,
down to the whisper of silence.
II.
Everything is progressive, backwards, contrition,
Man-made logic, flake of reasons, headstrong
our ideals like a clouded punch-bowl of truth
that cool, liquid face (clean as I know how) still alert,
daunted by the evidence, proving that I am no shot
in the dark. Predictably lousy or lame, animal tracks pointing
everywhere, no matter which way we run, slither, crawl,
no longer mattering how long it takes.
Our masks of pretensions, our false teardrops on the earth,
the guts of prophets lay splattered and no witnesses
will we leave, no clairvoyants of the dangerous prize,
We the liver donors on a single viable suggestion,
hollow faces hollow slaves, shallow mud people huffing
super glue, glorified redemption, exploiting that path
of wreckage and inconsistencies…. melting the witch,
collapsing the sign appearing somewhat sure,
and then the quake, the fortress razed of seminary schools,
and government buildings, all reduced to rubble
and white-fire stone, signifying rebirth.
III.
Love is the order of fate
and clinic spree indulgence,
the dice only lie when convenient, we are love,
we are each other, visionaries,
cracked mirrors among mental gas leaks, imprisoned
with blues and hometown blues,
and the New World blues
shadow-hungry followers, tracking the cold song,
and I have visions of you and my brothers,
many years from now, old and happy,
we who will not be beginners any more,
the American lines deep among the ravaged earth.
IV.
Life is oblivion mass,
where no shame wanders,
there is no rest, only the panic of dying,
no shine, only the storm, no futures, no plays,
no machines only mortals,
no wine or freeways, and our lives with chipped teeth,
jagged, yellow teeth, brown teeth, our teeth,
my teeth, your teeth. Everyone’s teeth,
where we shall all be hungry,
where it is hard to live…
to endure
in that patchy, late night fog,
we shall talk with our words trapped,
and our eyes tired,
the smell was rum on a dark night.
V.
I remember us on my couch,
staring at the TV Screen,
itching from the pills,
stuck in a doomed heaven
where we rot.
Our eyes like uncut diamonds,
sandy hair like apes on our faces,
and you giving me foot massages….
The purpose was to die in love, or live free
in a much too colorful world.
Our arrested obsessions, old, dusty,
air condition cells, our cigarette breaths,
we who did not want to know,
nor even tried to know. We hid from
the fangs of our teeth, and the pictures skipped
on the screen, the flow of words stopped
at some point. At some point we fled
from state to state in the flood…
of America.
VI.
We are the masters of the bridge,
of the tables in our homes,
of intentions’ retribution among slippery time,
the jungle games with American rules,
far from the fairness of the world.
We choke, a slave to the sky and air,
to rain, mindless states, numb and plain speaking.
We are the true vagabonds, the disaster
Pimps and slum dwellers, and along the way
we lost our trunks of definitions,
confined ourselves to the sick romance of greed,
to obligatory sex romps, and all the violence
we eat off our plates among our separate tables,
where the rhythms nurse our soggy songs.
Here flows our cerebral whim, convenient,
haughty, palatial and jazzy…
Slowly we unwind, aware of the tides.
VII.
We are the bold lesson,
tribal rites of passages,
we who burst into flames and screams,
we who became night,and faded,
dripping bronzes, uphill gusts,
and there is a pattern.
We talked of desertions,
we balked at desertions,
stone we are stone to grief,
broken bones, our prayers brittle, sour,
hollow, we are the distorted sirens.
From the street prophet slang pearls,
from our dirt kingdom,
we once bounced from bed to bed in our kingdom,
our version of Sunday school books,
we never understood anything….
We who were everything we did, everything we said,
now its gone, ancient smoke.
Co-edited by Luis Lázaro Tijerina
September 2005
Burlington, Vermont
Ryan Michael Fauber is a poet, prolific songwriter, singer, and multi-instrumentalist who was born in Dunedin, Florida on October 25th, 1975. Fauber began playing the guitar at 13 years old, writing poetry at 15, and penning his own songs at 17, of which he’s written a few hundred.
Fauber wrote hundreds of poems between the ages of 15 and 30, while shifting his focus primarily to songwriting and performing concerts since the age of 30, writing a poem here and there.
In his lyrics and poetry, Fauber tends focus on darker subjects and the plight of the average citizen, a champion of the underdog, he writes songs for the common people (his people), as opposed to for the establishment, the privileged class.
Glenn Bowie is a published poet, lyricist, musician and photographer from the Boston area. He also owns and operates an elevator company that supplies custom-built elevators for clients from New England to Hollywood. The author of two poetry and photograph collections (Under the Weight of Whispers and Into the Thorns and Honey) from Big Table Publishing, he donates all profits from his books to various charities for the homeless and local animal shelters.