edited by David McLean. exterior concept and design by Pablo Vision.
without chaos
I don't know how to attain inner peace without chaos
my impulsive nature is that tornado that leveled the whole town of Greensburg Kansas
it rages through the common-sense part of my brain everyday and still I rebuild because they say i have to.
I look down at my hands then the holes in the wall in my eyes, the scars on my thin crooked fingers stand out iridescent in the light of Los Alamos churches stand on every corner along with banks they are both named First Assembly or National and I don't enter either one.
I go in a gas station where I always feel welcome cigarettes and gasoline, coffee and lottery tickets; a small boy waiting in the parking lot pulls the wings off of a butterfly, looks up with blue eyes
and laughs.
small silver cross
Walking through the window of night I carry a small silver cross in my drug pocket given to me by a homeless ex-boxer.
I was seventeen and impressionable and he appeared from the box car shadows of the Union Pacific train yards in Cheyenne like the spirit of Tom Horn but with a limp black eye and Mick accent
I carry this cross not because I believe in Jesus but because I believe in shiny things.
The human heart sets into motion the plastic bag levitating in a corner, the addiction, the paper planes, the nickel barrel between rotting teeth
she was my heroin, I was her bitch she the hot devil coursing through my veins, the blood river and the canoes of native American warriors, rushing ashore, have become more, than the white man's folklore
it's a movement in my gut, a battle cry an inevitable genocide It's been four months and you are still eating my bones with your disease
I don't give a fuck about the sun anymore Whether it's up or down if it shines on my face in the morning if the roses never grow again.
I blow smoke in winter's face pick up a stick from the sidewalk peel the skin back with my thumbnail and keep walking until I'm somewhere else drop the stick so when it comes to it has to start over like the rest of the broken and the damned.
gas prices of 1989
How can I forget you? I still remember gas prices in 1989. I can't forget the first time you told me to pull your hair and fuck that pussy harder, the little names I called you like twinkle tits or thunder pussy, the electric current of mad nights with you on my arm still courses inside me; the walks in the park, the fox, the bluebird, planting flowers on the porch, the first time you wore a dress for me even though you were uncomfortable your eyes so close to mine.
All I could see was your soul dancing like a machine gun barrel while the sky fell around us.
Mister Misery
Elliot Smith stabbed himself in the chest with a twelve inch butcher knife. Between the ribs a sharp tongue poking through hot teeth. A tiger mauling a tourist through the bars of the cage.
He caught his final reflection in the blade. The kitchen was a mess that day. The dishes were piled the drain dripped like the hands of the clock ticked the last minutes of love. The space shuttle Columbia taking off. Three two one.
He died of a broken heart. I wish I could have told him the monsters are in the head.
Kurt Cobain knew but a shot gun doesn't leave any room for self-improvement. I always tried a big shot of dope a warm train that always ran on schedule. My heart Promitory point the needle the golden spike in my transcontinental railroad.
At least that way I would have a few seconds so I could feel what it is like to never have left the womb.
six feet above
Most of my friends are suicidal. Their eyes are children waking up to burned down villages every afternoon during The Price Is Right. They have learned how to survive whether it be from the top of churches with the birds or the bottom of an arroyo washed from a flood. They see the light but haven't fallen into it in a hamburger stand bathroom in Venice in the teeth of a mutt barking at cars from a chain in the stars swirling in a dank motel room sky the bats are always around the corner waiting.
where were you?
The sunlight is hot dice crashing through the window. Tossed by the lucky hands of gamblers. The church bells ring and I wake up thinking of Chelsea. Geese form big arrows in the sky a car engine almost dies the parakeet sings blood moves like the street.
We are going somewhere.
In the morning dreams are already memories. I spent so many sick days shivering in bed the covers split I bled the Red Sea. And where were you when the iron gates came crashing, when a shotgun was the only way out David Bowie sang time takes a cigarette and Jim Carroll shot rubber bands at the sun.
I open the window and breathe light a smoke and wonder where were you when I was pure?
love is
Love is the blank space in a magician's hand.
It used to be a red ball maybe a coin, the queen of spades,
a dove so disoriented by fingers it flew towards the sun only to be eaten by a hawk.
last month
I have been in love and have cried over dead dogs. Have judged others like I was some sort of insecure god. I've been beaten robbed and raped.
But who hasn't?
My words choked by the illiterate hands of thieves. I have stood on a mountain top in fog covered morning when I was taller than the sun just to watch something anything rise again.
D.A. Levy will never be made of marble
I made love to a juke box in the ever open café, rode my bicycle through dreams deferred. Gazed up at angels while I lay in the park, came to a realization that Chinese fireworks and rich men in airplanes are not the sweet aftertaste of freedom we fight for.
The rocket's red glare has become an allergy symptom and can be cured with prescription eye drops.
I clicked Jack Ruby's slippers three times but they never took me home. They took me to the streets of Chicago where Wesley Willis jammed on the keyboard head butted me and yelled “rock”
demons in silk shirts tangoed in his head, took me to Cleveland when it was still smokestacks belching into the face of heaven. Twenty seven is the age of icons Jimi Janis Jim Kurt Tupac. D.A. Levy had a year to go to have his own statue where pigeons could rest tired wings before they became some bird more glorious. Like a bald eagle or a swan.
I'm a meadowlark hatched on the Wyoming plains singing alone,
singing puffing my yellow chest until I am heard, singing the song of myself, singing for mornings. Singing the hope that maybe tomorrow
will be a little better than yesterday, a little better than today.
porn star
I needed to breathe, to walk into the darkness as an observer. Life was getting to me again the desires and diseases; the chess game played twenty moves ahead- the invisibility.
I wandered by the Drunken Monkey a man on the patio drinking with his wife called me over. He had the handshake of a used car salesman and a smile just as limp.
“Do you think my wife is attractive?, he asked.
I know how women can be about their looks, I didn't want to hurt her feelings, so I said, “She's not bad.”
Then he turned to his wife, “He's handsome isn't he baby?”
“He's very handsome.”
“How would you like to come home and have some fun with us?” the husband asked. I played into it, “Maybe her, but not you.”
A big plastic gorilla stared me down and the man moved in closer.
“Can he at least watch?,” she replied.
I was no longer an observer I was a character in this mad porn flick playing on the garage wall of God. All his friends smoking cigars and drinking fine scotch as the projector burns the film. “I'm good. I'm sure you can find someone else.”
“But I know you have a big cock handsome. I can tell. Just come in and we'll buy you a few drinks. You'll be fine. What else have you got to do?”
I thought about it, I was just walking around doing nothing; another lost porn star with no direction.
“Most guys would die for a chance like this.” she said.
The husband moved even closer raping me with his glassed-over eyes. I walked away and they kept calling me back.
In some strange way- I felt like somebody.
first role model
It was 1985 my father laid off by Union Pacific, my mom still gone and I started seventh grade. My dad's friend Jeff moved in; tall handsome 27 year old Toastmaster a hustler and a gentleman refugee of Toledo- his cocaine cut in Detroit.
In the academy I was a newborn a nobody a guerro. A circular cow-lick dirt under my nails, arms like two limp John Holme's cocks screwed to my abdomen. I carried every single book in a maroon duffel bag wore my heavy winter coat to class- I was scared of vatos gazing from under blue rags but terrified of the thought of little girls in acid washed mini skirts actually talking to me.
I'd get home like I made it out of war and there scattered across the floor- women's clothes, a trail of bras and panties leading to Jeff's door. Sometimes I put them to my nose and inhaled- a strange mixture of perfume and something like dirty armpits. I heard so many women screaming in there but never saw their faces it never scared me, I wanted more.
One day a lady came running out picking her clothes up on the way, I tried not to look. I didn't try too hard. “You motherfucker!,” she yelled. I stood in the hallway acting like I was just passing by.
He came out of his room out of breath and gave me some advice I've never forgotten-
if a chick bleeds on your sheets make sure you change them before you fuck someone else in the same bed.
the day before easter
Sitting in the coffee shop watching people in love and some people by themselves. I'm trying to think of people to acknowledge for my new book and all that comes to mind is how a girl I know has been across town smoking meth for days while her kids are at home waiting for the easter bunny.
Jason "Juice" Hardung's work has been published widely through the American underground. Appearing in The New York Quarterly, Zygote In My Coffee, Underground Voices, decomP, Thrasher, Lummox Journal just to name a few. He has a chapbook, Breaking The Hearts Of Robots out on Covert Press. He is co-editor of the Front Range Review and Matter Journal. Writing, for him, is something that soothes the savage beast, or whatever it's called. He is on probation for the next two years and hopes to have a novel done by then. He lives in Ft. Collins Colorado and loves it there, but doesn't like all the Subarus with kayaks strapped to the roofs, the earth tone sweaters, Teva sandals, or white kids in Reggae bands.
"The Broken and The Damned by Jason Hardung is a love poem for the schools of lost children. The story of a boy waiting at the corner of lost and found for the light of his mother's eyes to change to gold, a long drive into that dark episode we call father that always finds us where we live. These hungry poems will inhabit you like a junkie's old leather coat, the fix is verse. They need to be held and read out loud to your delinquent heart. Hardung's history packs a .38, does time, rides shotgun with a Cadillac moon singing liberation lyrics that will provide a solid rush, that healing you get when you first feel the poem enter the bloodstream." - S.A. Griffin
"The Broken and the Damned by Jason Hardung is very powerful. Vivid imagery combined with abundant candor make this collection sing. Travels on the vulnerable landscape of the psyche, memorable, beautiful, painful, human." --- Ellyn Maybe
"It's hard for me to be objective because I adopt literary geniuses as brothers. In a nutshell, Jason Hardung is cruelly talented & his poems are murder in a book. His tender but also brutally visceral poems are so adeptly rendered, they make razor blades slide down... the throat like Bailey's. In my opinion, Breece Pan...cake, Charles Bukowski, & Phil Ochs are privileged to share the same canon. Buy this ASAP!"-- Jeni Olin author of Blue Collar Holiday, Hanging Loose Press
the broken and the damned reading by Jason Hardung on the epic rites radio network here.
100 pages
Jason "Juice" Hardung's work has been published widely through the American underground. Appearing in The New York Quarterly, Zygote In My Coffee, Underground Voices, decomP, Thrasher, Lummox Journal just to name a few. He has a chapbook, Breaking The Hearts Of Robots out on Covert Press. He is co-editor of the Front Range Review and Matter Journal. Writing, for him, is something that soothes the savage beast, or whatever it's called. He is on probation for the next two years and hopes to have a novel done by then. He lives in Ft. Collins Colorado and loves it there, but doesn't like all the Subarus with kayaks strapped to the roofs, the earth tone sweaters, Teva sandals, or white kids in Reggae bands. 
