Jeff Stewart

The red bird was her favorite. Reminded her of old songs from her youth. The blue was the wiser. Never preened for anyone but her. The morning her old man stayed gone, she went ahead and fixed the glass. From his time gone, four days followed with what could be, had the heavens heard her wish. When the detectives came in to tell her the news, she had two words for them: You sure? They glanced at each other, and one of them asked her to come down with them to identify the body, to sit for questioning. She looked at the birds. A tear broke loose over its edge. Once and big. Long crawl down. Inside the tear, the years of it, over. She breathed and looked skyward. Swollen heart. The joy in her. The detectives stared at each other. After she had viewed the corpse, grey room, two-way glass. Never a suspect, but her relief at the news caused intrigue in the lead detective he had not felt in years. Heartbeat aside, he needed a recorded statement. He set the coffee in front of her. Before he hit record he had squeezed her hand.

“Just protocol, sweetheart.”

The apartment between them, empty. His on the end of the hall. Hers two down on the left. The Sun gone from the city, the last moments of light, gold. A knock. Nobody knocked on their floor. Out of bed, the dream pulled pack, a café blurred. Feet to floor. Eye through the doorway. Two men in suits, talking to Aria. Her door open. Her body unseen. The men were sharpened. Linear men. He listened there nude. The detectives, there by word of the bartender. The body was discovered a week after death, they canvassed. Easy work led them to Aria. Her voice from her place. The sound. Satin over chalk. The music. She had nothing for them. She had neither felt him walking behind her nor heard a sound. Blade broken off in his head, teeth kicked out. In that order. They waited for body language. Aria, stared through them. She asked them how the landlord was holding up, and nothing more. They left, locked out. A beat of three on down, and the shower turned on.

At the counter, she watched them leave the lift. Across the lobby. The lead told her they were still working the case, but after this much time, absence of outside prints, and the fact nobody in the area knew anything, to have no expected miracles. She smiled at him. This one was plenty. Done with the floor upstairs. The face and body behind the door up there. The ink behind her robe. The hardness of the widow facing him. He gave her a smile, loose. He left with his partner. Night in the city had swallowed day and any trace of the case.

The city kept him busy for its own reasons.

•⊷⊶•

The old man was prepared for nothing, and he remained that way. What he wanted from the city was easy, a blank space from which to breathe. On his bed in the dirt, when the city called to him it was nature now. Servitude, hungry. Involuntary. Never enough love from the skyline, from the base of his fathers looking down on him. When the night covered the city, the old man could even see the tops of the buildings bent down, slight, glass eyes watching his blood.

—Four nights back, a long thought up into the stars, he had been pulled to his feet. A degenerate moved west down the boulevard to pluck their flower. The old man in dirt, he was a fix for the city. Nothing he would do more. Where the silhouette of the stranger would walk east, across the street moved the beauty of the city, a song of life everyone heard but her. A mass of silhouette following. The old man reached down his side and gripped the handle. When he moved, he moved to hunt. The warm voices in his head, what was needed, and what he would give. Unlimited love:

Leave the blade inside, son. Take his teeth for fun.

The kill was not the first, the last, or the slowest. He had done worse to others when the city called him out.

At the counter. The landlady sat, younger. A reverse lift of burden, Schopenhauer. Her old man, dead, the city out there in her consideration. Her birds in tune with her. Well-slept, bellies full. Songs of the streets, audible now. She had tried to feel for him, to feel the loss, any type of semblance to sorrow. It fell dead upon conjure. The wish for him to feel long pain, fear until his end, was the only stone in her faded. Her fridge bulging with health. Skin on the mend. Lotion on her face, lemons to her elbows. Unlimited moonrise, a kind Sun. The faces crossing the lobby almost beautifully. The fridge became full on the afternoon of the letter from the holdings company. A condolence, and praise for her work. She was full management now. All checks would be paid to her name. It arrived with one, made out with an extra month in full. Hers. Signed with a stamp. She sent the post office box a card. A message of grace, of gratitude. She dipped her wedge in honey, sucked it off the end. A slow bite into the meat of the fruit. Life had not been as bright as this dark truth. Age set aside, she could breathe and live like the others did.

Link for upcoming audiobook excerpt

Sunday night…Hope you all are warm and good and ready for winter if you’re anywhere near the east or north.

Been a bit fucking crazy this year. So, I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this, but I have a writing app called Prose. It’s like social media for writers. We’ve been working on getting it rejuvenated now that all the obstacles are gone. Working again on our iOS app, Android, and our website, which is still moving right along: http://theprose.com and being worked on by the new dev team. I know I posted a link to my Jeff Stewart Author channel on YouTube here the last time I posted. Thank you if you follow that, by the way… I wanted to send this link to the latest video on the YT app channel, called The Prose Channel. Here it is: https://youtu.be/bSRiRHu3iCI if you would like to see what I’m working on currently, and for a long time to come. I’ve been doing a lot of voiceover work, and not a lot of writing, but that will change as it always does, and must… Anyway, just wanted to check in here and update you. I miss posting on here. I need to be more active on this site. I really do. Alright.

Hope all is well with you and yours.

-Jeff.

Sorry it’s been awhile since my last post. Things have been, well, they’ve been strange. But: I started a YouTube channel, and uploaded my first video. More to come. Link is below. Subscribe, please, and like, or either, or both. Or, just watch it if you want to. -I really have no idea how this all works, but it’s good fun for me to record, I like it. More writing on here soon, by the way. Anyway, here’s the link. Hope all is well with you and yours. -Jeff. https://youtu.be/PL0jp0cSa0Y

My father moved in a whore and her son when I was at work. My clothes were folded behind the couch. I saw their suitcases. They were in the kitchen talking. I walked into my room, sat on the bed and looked around at his things. My father walked by and looked at me. I asked him what had happened. He threw me disgust. I walked into the kitchen where they stood. She was a fat brunette, high hair, her fat feet crammed into pumps. Her face was whiskey and batter and trade. Her son was skinny, long hair in the back and wired on speed. My father walked in.

     “Jeff. This is your new family. Billie and Brett.”  

     She gave me a slimy nod. Her son tilted his head back and stared me down. I looked at my hands, walked into the bathroom and ran the water. My palms were bloodied from a spill on my bike riding home from work, working double shifts to save for a car. My father rushed in and slammed the door. In the mirror he asked me why I was being so rude. I kept washing my hands. He asked me again. Through the mirror I could see that he had been up for days. I could see that he had just met her at the bar, and I could see him moving their suitcases up the staircase into our apartment. To my left on the counter I saw a clear vanity bag containing make-up, hair brushes and a small glass pipe. I looked back to the sink. He caught the side of my head with a solid right. It echoed in my skull and left my ear ringing. The hit knocked me into the wall. I resumed washing my hands. He told me that this is the way life was, that if I didn’t like it, to pack my shit and get out. He closed the door quietly. I collapsed to the floor and held my ear with both hands, coming up with blood on my palm. The pain was incredible. I washed the ear, walked back into the bedroom and sat on the bed. It occurred to me that this would be the way it was. I walked into the bathroom and grabbed up my things. In the living room I saw her chopping lines of cocaine on the coffee table. They watched the blade and nothing else. I sat back on the bed and began putting the things my father had missed into one of my pillowcases.

     I heard the whore whisper to her son to come talk to me. He walked in and stood over me while I sat on the bed. He nodded down to me and curled his lip back.

     “What the fuck are you doing in here?”

     He was sweaty junk. His lower jaw orbited his skull, and his eyes were disgusting. My father and the whore appeared in the doorway, and my father smiled. In his smile I saw terrible things. The whore yelled at her kid.

     “Brett! That is no way to treat your new brother!” 

     He ignored her and twitched, “I asked you a question, faggot.”

     I looked at my father. He told me I had to fight my own battles. Her son nudged my shin with the toe of his sneaker.

     “Get out of my room.”

     My father laughed. He said that if he were me he’d get out of the room before Brett taught me a lesson. I asked him if he’d lost his mind. He was unresponsive. Her son flipped his fingertips against my sore ear and told me to get out again. I stood up and punched him in the teeth. A few slipped back. He fell into the closet doors, and they fell off their tracks. It was loud. My father came for me. I ducked him and her son was up, hand over bloody mouth. He had tears in his eyes. My father had fallen behind the side of the bed. He was grumbling threats, and trying to stand.

     I caught her son with a left this time, in the throat. He fell back into the closet and screamed like a girl. His mother came at me in a blind rage. I kicked her hard in the crotch. She stumbled back and dropped in the hallway. I felt a hand on my shoulder spin me around, a flash of meaty knuckles and my lights were turned out.

I woke up hours later. My head was pounding. It was dark in my room. I was under the covers with my shoes off. It occurred to me in the dark that I had turned seventeen the day before. I sat up and walked into the bathroom. The place was pitch black. I flipped the light on.

 The whole area above my eyebrows and down to the center of my nose was dark blue and kidney shaped, like a dark birthmark. My neck was stiff. I touched the bruise. Shockwaves of pain rolled around my head. There was the clear vanity bag to my left. In a cup in the medicine cabinet sat a plastic cup with dentures at the bottom. I walked into my room and put my shoes on.

Through the bathroom light I could hear them passed out in the living room, down from days of speed. I watched the room from the doorway. My belongings were no longer packed behind the couch. In the bathroom I lifted the dentures from the cup and crushed them under my heel, returning the crumbs back into the cup. They floated there. I closed the medicine cabinet.

Out in the living room I stepped over my father on the floor. The other two were sharing the couch. She was sleeping on top of her son. I was heading across the street to the store for aspirin. Outside sat my belongings in a duffel bag next to my bike. I wondered why they hadn’t been stolen. We didn’t live in the hills. I closed the door. My father jumped up and locked the deadbolt.

I wheeled the bag on my bike across the street. The Sun was coming up behind the supermarket. I placed my bike and my bag next to a register and found a bottle of aspirin and a jug of water, a candy bar, some medicated cream and a box of gauze. When I went to pay my wallet was empty. I had three weeks’ pay in there. Both of my pockets were empty. The lady at the counter asked me what happened to my face. I told her I had just been mugged. She pointed out that my tooth was chipped in half. I felt it. My upper lip was swollen and my front tooth was chipped. I hadn’t noticed. Since she’d mentioned it, it hurt to breathe in. I left the store empty. My sister lived six miles west, in an even worse part of town. It was still hot in Phoenix. October meant nothing. The bag was without straps, and I had to stop every few blocks to balance it on the frame. I walked my things to her house.

She was at work and the kids were in school. She had three kids from three separate marriages, living in a two bedroom duplex in Glendale. I didn’t want to walk into her work looking like I did. I hopped her fence and fell asleep under the trampoline.

I woke up sweating from the heat of the black rubber. I found a corner of the yard and threw up. Under a palm’s short shade I went through my bag and found my Walkman far at the bottom. I played my music until my batteries went dead. I thought of ways to get my four hundred and sixty-two dollars back from my father, though I knew it was spent already. I laid my head on a pillow of shirts and closed my eyes. Since the sudden death of my mother, he was bound for what he did. The pain of his chemical life was easier for him than dealing with his guilt for treating her like dirt, for ignoring her. Only thing was he still had a son. I wanted to hate him but I couldn’t. I thought about my mother reading her bible from her chair under the big lamp. She was with the faith but never once pushed it on us. I thought about the old man now, a husk of waste on the floor, while I tasted my vomit and blood. My throat grew thick with bile and I leaned to my side and let it go on the grass. The Sun reached through gaps in the palms and gripped my swollen eye. It burned with tears but my eyelid wouldn’t open for anything. I covered my brow with a shirt and remembered back to my old life, to my mother reading the word, and my head burned beneath the sky that was once full with stars, which was now bright with sickness while I tried to breathe. All of nature’s passions spent, all of her god’s forgotten grace descended and rotting, the failure of his plan and the bloody tears of war-torn angels. All the mysteries of children lacerated.

Excerpt/beginning of Breath Upon A Burn

Mixer in the afternoon

alright, on my third             

but outside the Sun is frying

everything in its touch

everything regarding the city suffers

a famous, commercial writer once said

never place your desk in front of a 

window

sitting here now in the early afternoon

frontal lobe joggled just enough

head change

ice at the bottom of a glass

sings as sweetly as Simone with

the right timing

watching the tip of the mountain

burn from my window while I write

take advice from no one

if it goes against your gut

ignore and avoid kept men

with soft hands

in weak imitation of the greats

ignore their cries for attention

and self-promotion

while they use age as a gauge for

wisdom while their

wives fold their clothes for them

in the next room

which overlooks a tiled den

and a gorgeous yard

ignore the bullshit

to simply survive is not enough

while outside the mountain burns

and your words hit the page

with force

the reward is doing it

the reward is in the lift of heart

those of us who have made a living off

the writing will tell you it’s

a long and brutal fucker of a climb

but a climb with each second worth

more than a life

avoid the circles of trash, stench, and 

low-flying resilience

aspire to money for contentment

but be driven by neither

accept to banish

abolish to embrace

don’t place faith in

the existence of things you

cannot see

but place it in things

you know must be there

laugh at the sorrow

while the sorrow eats you

and outside the mountain burns

and sheds rocks like tears

the Sun disfigures dream

the life of us gripped

in the fist

of our own surrender

of fear

but spiked with moments

of unfathomable joy

of moments combined

in memory

that becomes our fortress and gate

our Mars and Pompeii

our sunlight, Liszt, and metal

our poets, singers, thespians, and

criminals of war

all the love inside

trapped but burning

beneath all the anger, waiting

beneath the unfathomed greatness

built in

moment to moment

the buzz gripping the mind

the time running out in this poem

before I start sounding like one of them

and feeling the oddly warm comfort

when you become what you despise

sitting here in the early afternoon

the dead men on my shelves

the dead women on my shelves

the dead-eye stare of a mountain

on fire

weeping across the desert west to

California

where I know beauty

must be waiting

while I sit here writing

ugly in desert

officially drunk

while the mountain burns

and laughs

at my stupid

fucking

face.

11:38 p.m.
desert milk moon
streets sharpened and
peeled back in poems
sitting in my study with a
book of Jeffers next to a
play by Eliot
a drive across the oceans
of ink
of boulevards pronounced
in smoke and sweat
decades adding up and creating
a feel of Faust
of Cervantes
milk moon
and flags in blue fire
reading the heavyweights
plucked like stones
from the shelf.
Tonight’s a night for them.
A Machiavelli moon
lit high above
a Sun Tzu street
enough of our genius
without them we’d be nothing left
to have gone before us took guts
the blood on the page,
theirs,
the suns of Neruda
gripped in the fist
of moderns,
our fingers still fleshed
at midnight
beating the hours back
because of them
I sit here and think about what
they’ve left behind
rolling hills of words
for feed
the sun-torn expanse
bleeding and spilling
into ours
dropping down from
them into us
our hearts’
excuse for laughter
for understanding failure
for victory against
the bullshit
I sit here and write into
the midnight hour
high on the words
of beautiful madmen
once so brilliant of eye.
Tonight’s a night for them,
while I stroke these keys
and reach out
across their oceans of
ink
all bravado aside
all my own bullshit
dropped away
sitting here behind
the machine
reaching with everything
I have
to be a speck of
dust shining
in their
skulls.

morning
Seattle
rain.
coffee and the burning of incense
my plant on the sill absorbing
the rain, wind, and album
while it rotates on the player
my dogs full
head full
all the decades lost and drained down
my feet bare against a throw rug that costs
more than my last car
and my blood tricked by health
my body snapping back into form
mind tricked by money
but today remembering the old days
the shit days
the days of running on fumes
in every sense of the phrase
an inch close to suicide without
even knowing it
the road and cities and sabotage
the faces and
the teeth in those faces
the rats inside of them
the roaches inside those
and the rotting insides
of them
but I sit here and drink coffee
Disintegration belting out from the
speakers
a nice contrast to Bad Brains
while I fed the dogs
and stretched
-yeah, no shit, stretched-
and watered the plant
which I’ve named Tom Araya
because when it was given to me
by some woman last year
it was just a stem and three leaves,
and it was thirsty
and shooting up from a
small, dark pot
and for some reason,
my mild synesthesia
placed a summer orange glow
around the
dark blue planter
and I heard Araya scream his
famous intro
on Angel Of Death
I’d never had a plant before him
and today Tom Araya is much taller
and living in a much bigger planter
15 or 16 leaves, his stem supported
by a bamboo splint
and next to his trunk in the soil
a new part of him is shooting up
in three stems from his badass
origin.
I sit here and listen to the rain
the album
the burning of scent
and time
and maybe wonder
but that’s what age
must put between us and
the world
and it’s what we use
to keep feeling like there’s
a fight to win
but I think about my plant
both of us abandoned by whores
after birth
both of us rescued by
soft hearts
and grown
from those hearts with
the best that they knew
and even though
I let time and populace
and myself break me down
from soil to trash to nearly saying
fuck it
I held on through words
which became my own soil
and I became their synesthesia
a slave to the source
to that place, the core that
has never stopped burning
toward a sky that we will
never know
regardless of how much
we praise it and mystify it
and give ourselves over
sitting here in Seattle
the rain tapers off
and I glance at Tom Araya:
I’ll keep getting richer
and you keep
getting
prettier.

On my back listening to music
old albums from the mornings of
youth: waking up lean, ready, relaxed, hair in mouth
and touching shoulders
the world out there full of color and blood
the sand and sun and salt water waiting
the bikinis waiting without expectation
the songs of then, like the one this morning,
the careless yet loving caress
of not knowing
the song’s intro bringing me back to those mornings
waking up in my rented room on the beach:
California, 18 or 19 years old
wild-eyed and mad with the words, fast, beautiful,
without stress, without care, without bother for anyone
else’s opinion, without the need to shield myself
from the eyes and hateful intent
of dicks and cunts
I was unaffected by their drain
and sometimes I still am
but the years put wear on a man’s heart
his skin, his mind, his instinct
and without being careful, the past can spill over into the future
but mornings like this come more often as we cut loose the hateful faces,
let the shitty intent of others
roll off our backs
and keep our eyes on the Sun and surf and cities and towns and fields bathed in moonlight
the present spilling out before us
with what is earned
and nothing else
leaking its way to the
future
the center opens
and we
walk on in.

https://flowofprose.com/post/11242/Sexy-Mexican-Maid”>Sexy Mexican Maid

I hit the bank and got the cash, drove to the house and carried everything to the place downstairs. The hotel last night was a bitch, literally. This couple was going at it all night, yelling next door, fighting, the door slamming shut, flying open, on and on until 5 a.m. The entire motel smelled liked weed, which was fine, it was legal here now, but for someone like me, a once-a-year stoner at best, I hadn’t made friends with the smell, I couldn’t embrace the burning tire odor. Dog shit all over the back lot of the motel, garbage strewn in front of the door.

I got us fully moved in, fed the boy and stood in the shower, the high and perfect setting on the spout cleaning my flesh, my thoughts on the last month, and last night’s voices of domestic violence running off my shoulders and into the drain:
“BITCH, YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR MONEY AT! AH PAID THE MOTHERFUCKER SO HE WOULDN’T TAKE YO ASS TO COURT!”
“OH, FUCK YOU, MOTHERFUCKER! I’M THE ONE MAKIN’ THE FUCKIN’ MONEY FO THE ROOM! YOU SUPPOSE TO BE THE MOTHERFUCKIN’ MAN!”
The slamming door, then another one of her screams:
“WHERE MY LIGHTER AT?!”
I felt the water move down my skin, and the last year of being out in the wind moved with it. I thought about the last book tour, my Australian girl, my diamond, really, the one who flew over and traveled the coast with me down California from Washington, to Vegas, to San Diego, to her departing flight from LAX. Six weeks of happiness, six weeks of beauty slated not to last, but to be ripped and torn from me, from her. We were the ghosts of each other now, she moved on and I moved on, which was healthy, it was essential. I counted back to the year when the word first found me with its tattoo, with its permanent mark. I was a young man, a cook in Tempe, my fingers weeping into the keys of my first typewriter, the bricks of the room bringing Hell onto the page, the reckoning of worth, the strength in pure solitude. As the water covered me there, I rested my foot back on the stone, and I felt the words start to grip me again, I felt the sentences strengthen, I felt the wind of words and the wind was the world, it reached from Mombasa to Montezuma, from the depths of Mars to mirror the Moon and flow back to Earth. We were all carbon, and the universe was carbon, there was nothing separate between us. I looked down at the floor unblinking, the water falling from my brow, and I remembered everything and nothing, and I remembered the loving eyes of my angel dog, Meg, my Border Collie-Blue Heeler girl, her electric soul and her bones in the ground. It would soon be four years since she left this place, since she left Chico and I behind to sift through all the things she knew, the things she took with her. I thought about the faces of the past, the ignorant faces on the jobs, the teeth of them, the look of them because they knew I hated them, they knew I didn’t share their fears, and they pawned me off to insanity.
I shook off the thoughts and killed the water. I dried myself and let the sorrow of those days go into the towel, the anger of them. Chico nosed his way into the bathroom and looked up at me, his mouth full of food, and I laughed.

https://flowofprose.com/post/7112/Shower-stone-domestic-violence-

Blasting through the southwest. Stark brown, mesas, plateaus, cacti, Joshua trees, dirt and disfigurement. The desert has its own kind of dignity.

https://flowofprose.com/post/4640/in-transit