Poetry By Patrick Jenkinson

   

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For Lisa

    What did you see in those houses?

    Those desperate pretenders clinging to some half overheard bar tale of suburbia while all around the seeds of hip-hop kleos bloom as lotuses in the puddles that filled our plungers when nobody had 50¢ for bodega water

    Did the silhouette of a little girl twirl about your psyche the way we we spun our crack stems at the tail end of a hit, not to make sure the last of the oil ran down into the blackened chore but for the simple joy of motion?

    I'm sorry

    I'm sorry that when you insisted we pull over and beg God for the cessation of the awful torment, I only half echoed your desperate pleas while wholly bent on how much time your diversion put between me and my elastic-wrapped divinity

    I'm sorry that when I heard about your death, I felt nothing save the mild satisfaction of having one more friend's name to throw upon an altar already sodden with the blood of all I cared about

    I'm sorry that the God you cried out to chose for his grace the one who joyfully hurled relapse statistics and barely understood French nihilism at every glimmer of sacred truth that cut through our endless fog, while the maggots devour your heroin soaked veins.




Vipassanā

    Jon Jon

    The project on James St.

    Malformed streetlights reflecting off busted curbstones as I make my way to the gates of Dis

    Within, where worn soles have slid trails of filth into delicate arabesques in praise of that which is most high in the minds of all addicts

    Breathing in

    Breathing out

    Breathing in

    Breathing out

    Thinking

    The Nidānas

    Sense perception and vedanā birth craving, craving births clinging, and clinging births a demon whose karmic toll a lifetime of installment payments will not abate

    The Impala busted, lying to my dad about owing money to the wrong people

    Bound to the passenger seat of his Cadillac for that endless circuit Berlin to Hartford to Berlin to Hartford to Berlin to Hartford

    Passing the exits that still hurl rocks of fear, joy, and unattainable hope into my mind's turbulent waters, until high holy 46 lifts its monolithic boldface sigil above the incomprehensible blur of worktime commuters

    A left, a quick right, four blocks up then another left and a loop around the one way

    Will there ever come I time when I cannot recite those turns from memory?

    Gunshots, and the still night air trembles in fear

    I am unfazed

    I have my dope, but no hard

    This is unacceptable

    No regard for the terrors swirling about the Cadillac, parked close enough for the muzzle shocks to seep into ligament but far enough for the mass exodus of panicked souls to appear as ink dots on a spreadsheet of inner city gang violence

    Save his only son whose dukkha seeped, hyper-Machiavellian brain may have finally burst out the back of his skull, glistened in the dim streetlight and settled upon the filth encrusted pavement

    I walk through the panicked back alleys in search of someone with enough business sense to not let a body get in the way of an easy 20 bucks

    Months later, the visiting area of the Hartford Correctional Center

    Wap with his dreadlocks and molten granite eyes pounding and waving from the other side of the glass asking my father how the Caddy is doing

    Breathing in

    Breathing out

    Breathing in

    Breathing out

    Thinking

    The Saṃyutta Nikāya

    As a dog bound about a post runs the same circle again and again, so too do we bound in Saṃsāra run through an endless cycle of thoughts until they give birth to action and pull the chains of human misery into a taut spiral

    But I do not have to let my thoughts corporealize

    They are only thinking

    Thinking

    Thinking

    That parking space just far enough to avoid Jon Jon's ire

    Beneath the basketball hoop in it's motley coat of rust and scratched paint

    Always open. Always waiting for us

    Me and Kieth and Mark and Rob pulling out our stems to see which of them has the least grime and resin

    Then absolute bliss

    The Dhammapada, Verse 1

    Manasā ce paduṭṭhena, tato naṃ dukkham anveti, chakkaṃ va vaḥato paddaṃ

    Having a mind with such corruption, suffering follows him as a yolked cart follows an ox

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Cakṣurvijñāna

    I saw him today
    Not on Flatbush or Bond or Ward
    But the meticulous groutwork of a suburban deli

    I don't recall his name
    But a year of vivitrol and therapy can't erase the visions of his ashen merchandise tumbling from the yellow Gucchi stamped waxpaper
    Cut sizzling on the periphory of black, bubbling oil

    He shows his teeth
    Not the pitbull clamped jaws of one whose 50 bucks is yet again a day away
    Nor the overdrawn greasepaint smile of a shark as microscopic rivulets of weakness filter through his spectrometer nostrils
    Today it is nothing more than a warm hello

    I stand within the outer darkness
    And I can feel the lion's fangs perforating the skin
    Severing the tension of taut muscles as my mind returns home
    To a subterranean world where souls claw out personal labyrinths to circle around the backs of friends and loved ones
    Where I ripped my nails from the beds as each pair of eyes reflected my own machinations    

    Abused, assaulted, subdued, and broken
    Endless litanies met with Epictetian torpor

    But from the smile of an old connect
    Comes a quaking of the foundations




With Dreams, with Drugs, with Waking Nightmares

    Another fucking dope dream last night

    Setting: Deformed offspring of the Chinese place where Maple meets Wethersfield and the Top Kat laundry near Sisson and Farm Ave

    Immigrant workers keep their faces in profile as the Minotaur, unwanted bastard offspring of institutionalized oppression and the bull of Wall St., roams freely through the maze of utopian menu item photos and Greek tragic chorus washers whirring out a commentary to my existence

     Devouring the GDP of a million drawn and quartered families alongside 35$ bodega pawn shop streetcorner transactions, and excreting pebbles not too different from sea salt and a soft brown powder that slides out of the wrapper as if craving union with spoon, foil, or paper

    My man slides through the cracked glass door with a wisp of frozen air, an aggregation of a hundred of similar faces, each eager to be the final stop in a Mussolini timetabled daily journey that, etched across a map, reveals a decade long criminal record

    He may be unreal, but his gestures are being acted out by thousands of pneumatic repo men at the very moment you read this:

     The coiled stride marking his station above the trap jawed bottom feeders lining every entrance to the outer darkness

      The smile purpose built to belie how every gift is really careful consideration regarding the fiscal returns brought to the city each day in a trembling Impala pockmarked with the blows of bats, tire irons, and C Town bags stuffed full of bolts and visions of ascension

     The shifting of hands and a tightly bound blue bundle is cradled within, that old jostling motion to stop the sweat of my palms from soaking through.

    I do not head for the nearest blinking light on an internal atlas that could, even a year out of the game, lead me unerringly to the closest unlocked and monitored bathroom from anywhere in Hartford

    I suppose that's some progress

    But neither do I follow the urging of my great retinue of therapists, doctors, probation officers and other such sting leavers and prison guards at the impenetrable gateway beyond this abyss, and dispose of my precious treasure

    I simply clutch my waxpaper aegis and mill about aimlessly until trumpets of warning announce the new waking day

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*Image: Flickr jesse hlebo CC

Bio: Patrick Jenkinson has spent nearly half his life in active addiction, five years in the violent grip of heroin, getting thrown about from living in sober houses to his car to jail like the winds from Dante's second circle, and as of now has a little over a year sober. These poems are his means of coming to grips with what has transpired in his life.

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