This is an updated version of a poem that is ultimately a manifesto in progress. Many of my friends (Short brothers this means you) will hate it. To those I speak of: Fuck You, assholes.

Defending Jack
By Ashton Goggans

Because On The Road was the only Bible I ever had
Because of the stars
The dawn, the dusk,
And each stretching inch
From Florida to California,
and whiskey, flasked,
In my coat pocket, alone
Screaming at the sun, falling from empty desert skies,
Confessing and repenting
To those dusk eyes waiting— look at the bleeding sky!


Because grammar is for the birds
Punctuation doesn’t stop the bleeding, you see
Life is a sentence, one gripping sentence, without periods in it
It doesn’t stop for anything
So fuck them, don’t stop, just go go go


You can’t show someone how to set their soul ablaze


Because I was seventeen and I thought my heart would explode
And for three-thousand miles I had him whispering in my ear, pouring
Honey-handed emptiness from the sweet cloudless brilliant sky
Fresh and clean and new,
Look at the fucking sky!
Running from fate, to confusion,
And he said it was "all I have to give"
But It wasn’t,
And It was

On Keys

On Keys

By Ashton Goggans

The Hasidic men that work at my apartment building have walked by me four times. They have seen me; I am wearing a t-shirt, jeans, and one sock and am curled up in the hallway on a discarded couch right in front of the office. They have seen me. I know they have. The office is on the same floor as my apartment--I have to walk past it to get to my apartment and every day for the first two-weeks that I was here I waved to the men with curly sideburns wearing funny hats. They never returned the gesture and so I stopped.

I have tried to sleep for three hours now but each time I am interrupted by doors opening and closing—taunting me.

“Why are you here?” A voice asked, pulling me yet again from sleep.

“uh, I’m locked out.” I said.

He returned inside the building and I could feel the warm air float out of the room and brush against my exposed left foot. He returned again a minute later, this time holding a cup of coffee. The steam rose from the cup and got lost in his beard as he lifted the cup to his lips.

“Where is the Super?”

“I called him. He said he’s in New Jersey.”

“And your roommates?”

“I don’t know. I can’t get a hold of them.”

“I feel bad for you.” He said, and walked back into the office.

I grew up in a town that didn’t lock its doors. It could have, but didn’t have to. I never had a key to my house—ever. When we went on vacations we locked the front doors from the inside and my Dad climbed out the back window. He was the mailman, a rural carrier, and had been for twenty-five years before I moved to New York. I had run a skateboard park whose doors required a bundle of keys and never got comfortable with them; I lost them regularly and ended up finding a good hiding spot in the bushes by the front door to leave them. I had given up on my car keys some time ago, opting to risk leaving the keys in the ignition than carry them. I never had a keychain and found them odd gifts to give. They are intended to organize, and improve the appearance of, what amounts to nothing more than a jangling mass of distrust.

Then I moved to New York. I found an apartment with two girls from local art schools to live with. I did not bring a car to the city and was happy to not worry about it—parking tickets, gas prices, keys. However, the day after I moved in my roommate knocked on the door to see if I was in. She came in the room and handed me a bundle of keys. I took the jangling mass and marveled at its size. She began to explain them to me, one by one: “This one’s for the front of the building, you have to punch in a code too, it’s ****. This one is for the elevator to get up; it only works for the 5^th floor though. This one is for the front door’s top deadbolt. This one’s for the bottom deadbolt. And this one opens the door. Got it?” I exhaled the breath that I had been holding, “Got it.”

The next day I bought a keychain. It was not one of my best moments. The keychain looked like what climbers use when ascending cliffs, but it read very clearly “Not For Hanging”. It clipped to my belt loop allowing my keys to stuff into my back pocket. Luckily my Dad had informed me that the best way to keep from getting my wallet stolen was to keep it in my front pocket so there was plenty of room for the urchin of security; had both items been in there, my already bulbous ass would have crossed the line into absurdity.

Not a day went by that I didn’t have brief, unsightly, panic attacks the moment that I did not feel the bundle stabbing me in the ass-cheek. It was terrible. Add this to the stress of moving from the rural Gulf Coast of Florida to New York City and I was on the verge of a meltdown. However, curled up in a ball, my arms tucked into my t-shirt for warmth, with one sock on, in the middle of January, I was relieved to not have the vicious ball of faithless inhumanity in my pocket.

Work in Progress

The pieces that follow I have been working on a little. I have some serious re-working to do on the short story but would love to hear what you think.

Wake Up Call

Wake-Up Call
By Ashton Goggans

Keys have always been a pain in my ass, literally. I grew up in a town that didn’t lock its doors, or didn’t have to at least. To add to the feeling of small town warmth, my father was the mailman; the ever chipper bringer of news, both good and bad. From time to time I would find myself in far-off places, sometimes in sketchier areas, and though I would remember to lock the doors from time to time it was rare that I didn’t immediately misplace the keys. The presence of keys in my pockets always felt foreign; a tumor of distrust for humanity.
In a fit of small town idealism and quarter-life crisis decision making, I moved to New York City, Brooklyn more specifically, to finish my Undergrad. Despite the dramatic change of pace, atmosphere, economic diversity, and crime rate, what I found most strange was the pile of keys which I was forced to carry: one for my big bike chain, one for my small, one for the building’s entrance, and another for the elevator, one for the main lock on our door, and one for the deadbolt. I am certain this mass of jangling, faithless, inhumanity caused my blood pressure to rise. I invested in a hook of sorts to keep them on, the kind that climbers use, and yet I still found myself momentarily panicking, more frequently than I would like to admit, the moment that I didn’t feel them jabbing my right upper ass-cheek, sending my right hand compulsively clawing at my ass for reassurance.
As a twenty-three year old single young man living in New York City for the first time, I found myself dabbling in debauchery and paid for it daily. On this particular morning the light that crept under the door to my room sent me cowering deeper under the covers. After a brief rationalization that I had things to take care of, I took a deep breath and in one movement slung the covers off and clamored towards the bathroom. Still dressed in the evening’s clothes, only one sock had survived the night. I exited the bathroom as quick as possible, trying to avoid looking at the reflection in the floor-to-ceiling mirror. In desperate need of stimulants, I put the kettle on the stove to make coffee.
My only source for time, my phone, had died sometime between last call and catching a cab home. Given the eerie silence and gray light that filtered into the loft, I figured it was around ten in the morning and my roommates were surely still sleeping. I am a slob. I know this. However, I have done a bang up job of keeping this fact concealed over the years, especially from roommates, in particular females. When I shit, I turn on the shower to muffle the grotesque orchestra and I never cook when anyone else is around to see the unsanitary nature of my culinary activity. And there are others. That said, I am infinitely conscientious of others, and not out of philanthropy or humanism, but out of fear of being disliked.
I plugged my phone into the charger and as I turned it on the kettle began whistling like the last train to Frisco. I dashed for the stove and as I rounded the corner I nearly died. The lack of traction caused by my one foot being covered in a sock caused me to slide around the corner, waving my arms like a man rolling up car windows in a locust storm, trying not to fall. Another flaw I have kept from others is my clumsiness. This has been harder than cleanliness to conceal and I was not about to pull the curtain. I snatched the kettle from the stove and took a deep breath. At that moment my phone must have activated. It rang—a fractured version of a David Bowie song echoed through the calm. I dashed for the phone, making sure to take the corner slightly slower, grabbed it and ran out the door into the hallway to answer. It was the manager of a store where I had submitted an application, and recently had an interview, calling to tell me I had gotten the job. The news came through the haze slowly, but by the end of the conversation I was overjoyed. I had moved to a strange city to attend a good school, found people to live with who had not seen through me, and gotten the job I wanted. Smiling I walked back toward the door with the intention of sharing this news with my surely awakened roommates; how could they not forgive my irritableness when they saw me in such high spirits. I reached for the door, turned the knob, and immediately realized my mistake. The door was locked. Like every other door in the city it locked automatically upon closing.
I knocked repeatedly and rang the doorbell. All of these things brought a pain to my stomach. I had been here a week and already I was the annoying roommate who never let anyone sleep in. Strangely no one came to the door. A neighbor was coming back home from church. I asked him what time it was.
“Almost one,” he said.
My roommates had been gone for some time and my drunken shenanigans had finally allowed me the ability to sleep in. I called Altyn repeatedly to no avail. Emily had just moved and we had not yet exchanged numbers. I thought she had a website for her jewelry and so I called my dad and asked him to look it up. Perhaps it is non-existent, perhaps not, but I blame my father’s ineptness with computers for not finding her number. After an hour, the cold began to creep in. Dressed in jeans, a white t-shirt, and a lone sock, the scars on my bare left foot had begun to turn a shade of purple, I couldn’t stop shivering, and I had to pee. Ever since I had moved I had possessed the bladder control of an invalid geriatric.
There was a dirty couch in front of the office building of our apartment and after some serious soul searching I decided to lay down on the crusty piece of furniture. I was able to fall asleep for half hour intervals. From time to time the elevator or stairway doors would open and a rush of noise and brisk January air would fill the hall causing me to shiver uncontrollably. I found a coffee cup in the laundry room, peed in it, and threw it away, only to fetch it from the trash some three hours later to pee again, and again a few hours after that. The Hasidic men who ran my building came and went, offering nothing but scornful glances. At one point one of them came out from the building and asked why I was there.
“I’m locked out,” I said.
“And where are your roommates?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I can’t get a hold of them.”
He sipped his steaming hot coffee, glanced at the elevator, and kindly said: “I feel bad for you.”
Altyn did not return until after dark, perhaps seven o’clock. She had left her phone in the apartment and spent the day with her family. When I got back in the apartment everything was where I had left it. The coffee was brewed in the French-press. The stove was still on high, a detail I had forgotten in my panic. Altyn put down her bags and walked into the bathroom.
“Jesus Christ Ashton! Why didn’t you flush?”
I stood there, one sock on, speechless.

The Rise and Fall

"The Rise and the Fall"
By Ashton Goggans
Dashed lines, racing to the horizon.
Sun setting on crisp autumn air and
The Flatlands blur together
As you drift to sleep, uninterested,
Bubbles are carrying the brave
Against the bronze, bleeding sky.

Do I wake you?
Would you care?
This life, beautiful,
Passing you by and I can’t stop it.
So I stop, for me, and follow them.

Abandoned fire-tower stretched to heaven
I open the door--the fall
Tickles your skin awake with a shudder
"Look," I say. "It's beautiful."
But you see balloons through the eyes,
Those hazy hazel eyes, of the dead.

It is done. I know. And I am scratching over the fence
Before your eyes close
Climbing towards the sky, I can smell the sea
But all you see is dusk, never dawn, and broken me,
Out the window (always out the window)
of the passenger seat.

Kiss Jupiter Goodbye

Kiss Jupiter Goodbye

By Ashton Goggans

“Hand me the nine-iron,” Jimmy reached into the blue bag stuffed in the bushes and pulled out the rusty club. “Wait for the light to turn green and we’ll all hit on the count of three, ok,” He threw the club to me and grabbed a handful of tennis balls out of the garbage bag sitting on top of the bench.

Thanksgiving had just passed and the city of Jupiter had put Christmas lights up all over the downtown area; light up candy-canes and Santa Claus statues with a few giant menorahs, for political reasons. Fountain Park, our park, was covered in bright white lights, our little holiday heaven--a beacon of truth. Jupiter was a retirement community; World War vets, still shell-shocked, and eager to take their struggle out on the snotty grandkids of their bridge partners. We claimed this space as our own, we being the kids who didn’t go to football games on Saturdays and who were yet to learn that girls preferred confidence over obscure knowledge of early punk bands. No one could take this from us.

Jimmy worked at the Jupiter Humane Society. He injected kittens and puppies, some whose eyes had not yet opened, with blue liquid. This, painlessly he was told, killed them from the inside out. He hated everyone , for obvious reasons. We had become friends some years ago. In middle school the skateboarders stuck together, we weren’t cool then, not even close. We were broken toy soldiers carrying our dignity, and comic books, in military rucksacks. We spent weekend sleepovers wearing out cassette tapes of Black Flag, watching the same skate videos over, and over, and frothing over stolen Playboy magazines.

Jimmy and I began volunteering at the shelter after we were caught stealing fireworks. Forty hours was enough for me but Jimmy had a fondness for the work--walking and feeding the animals, making sure they didn’t fight, and, when the daily duties were finished, running down the clock lying on the cold concrete floor with the tragic beasts. We hadn’t learned about blue-juice yet.

The local tennis clubs would bring their day-old tennis balls to the shelter. They felt philanthropic and slept easier at night knowing that the soon to be blue-juiced dogs had something to chew on. Jimmy said that the balls just sat there because the dogs would “fucking kill each other” if you threw a ball into the pack.

So here we were. Saturday night debauchery was a tradition for us. We would have firework-gang-wars with each other and convince the cops, who always showed up, that we were rival gangs in hopes of getting arrested. Jimmy thought it would give us more street cred. We would place cardboard in the middle of the five-way intersection, wear sweatpants and headbands, and offer free break-dance lessons to the passersby, or bring the water-balloon launcher and shoot anything that was lying around--- rocks, dead birds, day old muffins that the coffee shop I worked at let me take each night--anything. People loved us.

Tonight we were golfing with tennis balls: trying to hit cars stopped at the intersection down the block, and getting really good at it.
My Dad encouraged mischief; he knew the law and the freedoms that being a minor contained. At night Dad and I would sit and discuss most everything but usually came back to his youthful exploits. His eyes would light up as each memory crept through the fog left by three decades of drugs, debt, and fatherhood. He grew up just north of Jupiter, a different time, a different world,—he told me that him and his brothers got to name the street they lived on; Spartacus, they named it Spartacus. He hated video games and cut our T.V. cable with hedge loppers when I was seven. He would rather us be out knocking down mail boxes than inside watching television. He loved Jimmy, and more, somehow, when he got me into stupid shit.

The park bench, our park bench, faced east, and looked directly at the main highway. There was a major intersection there, where the street which ran along the north side of the park ran into the highway. We set up in the middle of the intersection, five deep tonight, and waited for the light facing us to turn red. All at once the five of us would tee off; the sound of brakes screeching meant contact, and sent us running into the bushes for cover.

We had been golfing for about forty minutes and had not even made a dent in the bag. Forty minutes was about the longest we could ever get away with anything on Saturday nights before the cops showed up. We never got in
real trouble; they just wrote our names down and told us to get lost. This was our Jupiter--every weekend the same shit.

Jimmy put the bag back into his truck, a 1982 Chevy pickup aptly named “The Brick” because of its rust color and seemingly immortal nature: we had tried to kill it and it would not die.

As he was walking back, on cue, Officer Wells showed up, lights twinkling, adding to the Christmas warmth. At 23 Wells was a junior deputy and had graduated with some of the older kids who hung out at the park. His dad had been an officer and was killed by a heart attack that occurred while cleaning leaves out of their gutters. The doctors didn’t know if the heart attack or the two story tumble had killed him. Wells parked on the curb of the park, left his lights on, like always, and got out.

“Hey Sherriff” we said in what seemed like unison.

“You boys want to get off that bench and talk to me?”

“Not really man, the bench is really comfortable,” Jimmy said, sitting down.

“I have had some reports of kids hitting golf balls into traffic over here,” He looked at the statue that stood in the middle of the fountain, then back at us. “You guys wouldn’t know anything about that?”

Jimmy hated being patronized more than almost anything, only slightly less than the blue-juice back at the shelter.

“They were tennis balls and no, we don’t know anything,” Jimmy snapped. “And another thing, we aren’t kids; we’re only like four years younger than you.”

Wells looked at Jimmy for far too long, then turned back to his car. He reached inside the passenger window and pulled out a solitary tennis ball, turned back to the group on the bench and dropped it at their feet.

“What’s this?” He asked sarcastically, picking up the tennis ball that now lay between my torn Converse. Jimmy couldn’t hold it down and started laughing hysterically.

“Are you planting a fucking tennis ball on us?” He asked.

“Jimmy, can’t you fuck around at home?”

“Do we look like golfers or tennis players to you?” I asked, feeling courageous after watching Jimmy laugh in his
face. Truth be told I was a good tennis player, I had taught summer camps all through high school, and Dad and I played most weekend mornings.

“Every week I have to come down here and deal with you. I’m sick of people complaining. I want you guys to move this somewhere else. I don’t want to see you guys here again tonight,” He said.

“Well where do you want us, if not in a public park?” Jimmy asked. The other kids had grabbed their skateboards and began to leave. I had my dad’s stories tumbling through my mind. Jimmy had all the misanthropy of a young man forced to kill baby animals boiling inside of him—we weren’t giving an inch.

“Anywhere but here, I’m done dealing with you,” and on that note he picked up the tennis ball and tossed it to Jimmy, turned, walked back to his car. He turned the glorious blinking lights off and as he drove off Jimmy smiled at me, and flicked him off.

“Where do you want to go?” I asked.

“Hold on,” Jimmy said, trotting off to his car. He opened the trunk and pulled out what was left of the first bag of balls and the second full one. He looked down the street, in the direction which Wells had left and crossed back over to the park.

The other kids were putting their skateboards back in their cars about to leave when Jimmy handed me the almost-empty bag, smiled again, and began emptying the contents of the second one into the intersection.

“This town is dead, there isn’t a thing left here. I’m gone, I am fucking gone! Kiss Jupiter goodbye!”

He dumped all the tennis balls out and began kicking them into the street. I dumped min and followed suit. The rest of the kids began laughing nervously, acutely aware of the implications of Jimmy’s actions-- Jimmy just smiled. He looked alive, radiant-- a beautiful sight, standing under the sepia light of the street lamp, glowing with indignation.

Sunday morning it looked like a cloud had descended over the intersection and rained down tennis balls. The gutters were filled from one end to the other with barely used fuzzy balls. The coffee shop was buzzing, like only small towns can, with talk of who was responsible for the offense. I smiled, thinking of Jimmy’s face, soaking in youth and hate and beautiful, pointless, defiance.

My dad walked through the door, stopping for the paper and Sunday coffee. He greeted the customers sitting at the bar, “Can you believe all the fucking tennis balls?” he smiled at me and I could picture him, thirteen again, filling his older brother’s air intake with baking flour. Authority is nothing against tradition.

Norman Mailer RIP

If you have never read Norman Mailer's anti-war novel "The Naked and the Dead" then you have truly missed out. Another one of Americas great writers has left us. "So it goes".

Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.
Norman Mailer