THE NOBLE VAGRANT

Many years ago in the dim lit backside of downtown.

i saw old men, in old dirty suits, with slightly over grown tapered hair cuts, slicked back with grease.

i heard raspy voices, wild tales about adventures on the road.

it was like a private club, out on the sidewalk.

i saw them conserving cigerette butts by rolling.

eating two dollar breakfastes and drinking dollar drinks all day.

i saw them eke out tomarows living peddling, pitching, and performing for small bills.

i saw them working manual labor, looking out of place in their suits, dirty and torn.

like saints.

they were that town right down to the accent, it was written all over their face you could smell it all over em and every town has one of em.

the noble vagrant.

he knows where everything's at........... just ask him some time.
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BOUND, BY OUR WESTERN YARN - a poem noir

I had a vision...











- The Lunatic woke and came out in the morning....it was 8 in the evening.

He sat on a sidewalk trash can until 3 in the morning.

As I crept up behind him along side a building, he could not see me.

But I heard him begin to speak.

He said,

"But oh Man!"

"Where is our humility?"

"Can you see what the great minds of the Modernists have done to us?!"

"But can it really be Christ the hope?"

"Can it be so simple and so complicated that we forgot how it is that we blaspheme?"

"Did we rule him out for some thing better, or for the sake of our own vanity?"

"For even the protestants rely on they're own interpretation.."

"Is our authority really our own vanity?"

"Chesterton and Belloc knew.....they knew."

"Kerouac the st. Augustine of our times....he knew."

"But, somewhere, poor old Luther forgot."

"Marx the genius who must have forgotten to add God when designing a perfect society."

"Lilith, the great emasculator and baby killer and destroyer of families......"

"Refusing modesty and humilty for hate and ego and the right to be immoral."

"Who are our children?"

"Who are our fathers."

"Where is our Holy Mother?"

"Where are the meek?"

"Woman where is thine veil?"
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"In this mass transit society of emediate gratification, no one understands aquiring a taste."

"Instead of a cigarette....a candy bar."

"Instead of caviar.......that same old slop from mass media."

"Once again the savages have invaded Rome."

"But for me,"

"I see..."

"I see giant icons of the Mother Mary....and Fidel Castro luming down with big shifty eyes and a big cigar in his mouth."

"I see Machiavelli and Charles Bukowski, arms over shoulders singing drunkin Irish songs and pointing with sarcastic grinns."

"Laughing at the confused failings of the great expanse of the 'American know how'."

"But as Americans we cling to the hopes that computers, technology, materialism, wieghts and measures, the here and now, the great myth, will some how save our souls."

"BUT...!"

"Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us."

- And the Lunatic went and confessed.

Hanging off a priests ear, he confessed.

For he knew he was mad and he knew there was only one hope....

That latin god Jesu Christe, the God man from the Jews.........

And as I stopped following him some where in the back streets of the dewy morning night.

My eyes blackened and I could see no more.
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