Young Man in Front of a Poster of Timothy Leary 1967 after Elaine Mayes

“I described God: obese, lazy, dressed like a stockbroker
in His pink shirt and chalk-striped flannel suit, puffing on a cigar”

– Stephen Berg, Words

The eyes have it, framed by cupped fingers
shaped as O’s, invisible glasses to enhance seeing,
to facilitate interstellar traveling beyond
the locked doors of perception.
This could-be-anyone-young man, is off-road
for the moment, in torn dungarees, stained
paisley shirt, three buttons opened to reveal
satanic tattoos, badly worn scuffed riding boots,
filthy as the rucksack tossed aside in a corner
against the bamboo door, ready, or not,
for the next trip.
His eyes seemed focused on somewhere else
far beyond where he is now, on the juncture
of black macadam with infinite space,
where the broken double yellow lines of his life
are a permanent state of mind.
He seems like a scientific experiment gone
wrong, one mixing perpetual motion with
an inability to focus his thoughts, Rand McNally
road mapping nowhere, hurtling out of control,
deeper inside into an electro-convulsive storm,
one where shocks have been applied
and, will, not doubt be administered again.
In late afternoon, an unnatural light
illuminates all the hollow bones of his face,
exposing dense cavities of shadowed skin,
electrifying dim, hollow pointed eyes,
a brave new world revisiting what remains
of his life. Who will be in ten years? Twenty?
An equity bank fund manager? A stock broker?
Or dead.

Alan Catlin’s trilogy of Carpe Diem bar books is nearing completion. The first two: Bar Guide for The Complete Deranged and Another Saturday Night in Jukebox Hell are out from Roadside Press and the final one, Last Call for Lazarus will be out this summer from Impspired.