Her shoes were shaped like saddle shoes but they were covered in crushed green velvet. Her dress swished over them.
After we fed a strong beaked raven some donuts she went home to make some more pies & I continued up the beach with my headphones. I got a corndog & ate it & jumped a protective fence & climbed halfway down the ruins but not the whole way down before I sat where I could see the uncontained spectacle of crashing waves & rubble & dogs chasing ducks and sticks.
oh and they talk. they talk and they talk and they talk. and he is easily swayed along into committing unjustifiable acts of inappropriate comraderie. Fortunately, no one was shot. He says it will be worse when it’s in the paper but it will be much worse if he goes to jail. I hope that you discourage his fleeing to California. It’s what we do to each other. It’s not them, it’s us–they’re just a meteor.
Suspecting what passes for gold, strangers by day, he was aware of this, his most consistent declaration of profound seductiveness. For myself, I stretch and whistle grandly, my dear, it’s just marvelous, bite my tongue. About then, likely as not, there were cameras to record the eccentricity of the evening commute out of the skyscrapered gulley. Ready to follow home anyone who hollered back at the shouting. As if they don’t have enough on you already.
Now I got food in the kitchen, that’s better than money in your pocket, a pot to piss in, and a roof over your head. I got a sign language of continuous movement and noticeable stops. I got courtesy regarding the proximity in which you are moving. I got refueling in the dark.
& one day he thought, why, who was I to scold her, as if it would do her no harm, when it’s god your breath & mine. Before everything’s like a prison in this country, enslaved by a conviction in our lack of self discipline.
They come out for a funeral to party. Over this route man. There is time traveling. Close by and tempting. Like south africa, by taxi. this is what we were talking about. and don’t brush too hard but thoroughly. and no crack in yo mouth. i know how to get around in that. slain for land. circle. this way, and stop, then that.
California pizza kitchen hollywood naked in the parking lot.
Across the street from the A.C.T. theater there’s a hamburger jointplace with a guy in an apron smoking out front, he says, “all the ribs ya can eat plus a baked potato. it’s a fersh potato.” puff. lean. “it’s all the ribs you can eat.” he works at the hamburger place, you can see the grill man in the window behind him outlined in stream. next door just beyond the muni stop there’s another barker at the jack in the box, less inviting, screaming, not especially at the other 2 bums beside him, the bitches, but sounding out a great hope for those who insist on repunctuating all of the texts they read.
and in some ways, the question already became what is this huge, immemorial thing you are enamored of engaging to create, visible from space, commonsense certain, against you, not admiting any of the improvements learned, you have the right to remain silent, and doctors just laugh. Sealed in a concret box, deep beneath the earth. I’ve had more and ruined it for less, when i knew how little you thought of me and never suggested you get me some handwriting analysis for a birthday present.
It’s all he he he but she’s talking. Honey, we got to wait for that light, she says. They couldn’t teach me this useage because they themselves were not aware of it. Everybody else got it while I was still breaking it down. But you reap what you sow.
Flying over my head and spitting on me–that’s my big night out and what I learnt. I’m asking for your reassurances, too, mac–Gallileo lived long enough to inquire about the heavens because for 5 billion years Jupiter’s mass has protected earth, drawing //:(v.s Hale-Bopp)Shoemaeker-Levy (setc) and the like unto itself, preventing earth’s destruction, allowing our reaction. One second and half a foot from where it was predicted to be 2 years earlier. Yes I am a slave to it myself. You might say, all that love & all he wants to do is write his name on her, sharing the rest of me. Too bad for you if all you got to do is ignore it or visit it with scorn. The real damage is all these hidden lies and victor histories, repeatedly cilivization, used in mundane taskery all about the place.
in a glen, quiet as if ghosts or misplaced in time, with spiders clawling weepily along heretofor unnoticed sunny ivies, and happy they’re sitting easy on needles, she writes a letter to her mother about josephine returning to france. He counts the tops of the trees to ring dem bells and considers wa thiongo again. Josephine has a dog and hitchhikes around after concerts and is told by the man that she can’t stand here and does she have an id, other such hassles. Bullwinkle moose, a children’s ride their bike allup and along, back and forth. He makes as if to kiss her again from a different glance, and stands to devise a new approach, he
Moves from the right hip to here and with that calf steps thus, now this way from the left, and, and, in a circle, she says, she had to run for the bus until it was all she could do to keep going, like once you’ve been dancing until, but she caught it. He puts the radio away and then they take a switchback up the hill, across a street full of rollerbladers and it seems like everybody’s in line for a hot dog or posibly even some ice cream, so she says why not artichoke but they have to hurry because she’s working tonight, right left right to the store,
But first getting Sammy Davis Jr. feature Robin and the Seven Hoods on video, which they didn’t watch from making it on the floor.
First I steamed the artichoke and the shrimps in the bamboo steamer, and breaded the sole with egg and crumbs and fried it in onion and lemon, and baked the crabcakes, and cut up some feta, and baked some bread with the crab cakes, and drank a few pepsis while I did that, and mixed some mayo and relish and black pepper, and put some old bay on the sole and some dill in the shrimp, and put out some b&w cocktail sauce in a shot glass, and the butter, on the table. And when it was all done she had to make her own damn lemon butter condiment because I forgot about that, although she had in fact mentioned it, I just goddamn forgot.
We played mille bornes and I dealt first and I dealt him all four coup faires and then on the next hand he almost shut me out. He really seems to enjoy that. I wish he-how long can I take it? I wonder where I’ll stay tonight. His sister is almost my age.
Oh my god would you look at that. Welcome.
This light is getting brighter and at once lays open the scene to my eyes, which actively recruit from its knowing landscapes. Such muches are seldom softly overwhelming eternity, still resolving my right correct truthes to delightedly continue their goings on with various yesses existing as freedoms.
And with any luck we wake up together like that.
So, my onliest sadness, who sits after drinks on the twilighted roof of the crocker galleria, waiting for my kiss, to whom I could speak a true thought aloud with grace before dying, always said to me or of me to you if you’ll look at her and listen. And rocked to sleep and breathed awake.
Later on as tonight turns into tomorrow I’ll have a dream about running from the law, in a boat, in a car, in a plane, hiding under the floorboards, driven madly through the swamp dodging crocodiles, elevated to great importance: this radio station, this card game, the serious study of vocal birds-as if you don’t understand it, to give it any room.
These dreams mostly are set in brightly lit industrial wastelands with grain elevators and holes in the ceiling and pits in the floor, bottomless, and japanese robots coming in from all sides. Do I have special powers? Can I avoid their teeth by taking this vine somewhere out of the scene?
She handed him a cookbook. “You can read can’t you,” she said.
“I don’t (sirens reeling) make things happen just by reading them do I!” he screeched.
“Well not as slow as you are anyway, that takes practice. There’s a rehearsal to it.
“The thing is I wouldn’t wanna hurt you. Get distracted and just look from word to word and get tricked into making something happen unintentionally.
“Hey are there any polacks in here tonight? Cause I don’t wanna hafta explain this over and over.
“Hey! Hey you yeah you ya fat bastid! (Oh no! Not that rude mouse!) You so damn fat your ass got its own zip code, I got to roll over five times to get off you once I’m through fuckin ya, ya one ass cheek got one zipcode & ya other ass cheek got another one, I never seen such a fat motherfucker, boy they sure don’t make em as fat as you anymore.
She trails her, and stops singing everytime she turns around, investigating everyone for anyone’s reaction to the march. A little bulldog plucks a cloth frisbee from the air in anticipation of this explanation.
A whistles, his the sign language of stretching, the reach and various kinds of walkings and runnings and continuous movements, or noticeable stops.
An irresponsible poem for someone who will never read it. Who has all of that incidental mail. While you can still assume a position to inquire, “what kind of a man will I be?”
I worry about alternate universes where I would have written timeless songs but here in this world I just get a little melody & fuck it up & it fades out of earshot.
Lost it all as ever I knew it, down to the sand and gravel. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to answer to anyone at all. She’s so near that it seems she’ll disappear if I take back a routine all my own.
What I did was I took my two bags from the closet, the ones with all the letters, the ones from my life as it had been, and I read them all and I drank Aberlour and I saw in that way who I’d been.
I started to burn the letters–by then I was tight–and I made a mess with fire in the kitchen on the floor. When I got that under control I took what was left of the letters and put them back in one bag and went out into the snow and night and took them down the concrete staircase at the end of the block and past the last houses and down the road through the bramble along the traintracks to the pond at Panther Hollow and threw them out there as far as I could but there was ice under a certain deceptive layer of melted water and so eventually I had to find rocks and throw them at the bag until I sank it.
A certain theme was inserted into everything he played: Chained to the helm ash whe wor, what wit incantated flow of intensely fetishized words (“wishful insulation of language from action”), Pola rised upon the narrow common frontier of two immeasurable stretches. “What is important in life is life and not a result of life,” but that will be true of any complex system, before it comes to be understood, and its principles of organization and function are discovered.
I hope you enjoy this evening’s presentation. By way of further intriduction, I’d like to say a few words about my latest subject matter. You may be familiar with great figures. Many of them including If you are somehow desperate, you can read my copy. I have also given important consideration to work regarding those worlds of associated inquiry impressed, fully irradiated, by neutron imagined death machines appropriated and You will also find in this collection, plainly spoken, an Important Manifesto, a transposition of the life and times, insprations for which I am eternally greatful. A selection of positions on matters of current urgency is also provided, and when we meet I wish
Living on a modest inheritance and making only infrequent forays into the public arena-in short, the existence of a private scholar, once a familiar species, now almost extinct (or something by which you are happy to be measured). Blessed as I am able to cast this white noise dream for you, of no more want for address than you or I know, within the foreigner’s compound,
So son, instead of crying, be strong, so as to be able to comfort your mother. take her for a long walk in the quiet country, gathering wild flowers here and there. But remember always, Dante, in the play of happiness, don’t use all for yourself only. help the persecuted and the victim because they are your better friend. in this struggle of life you will find more and love and you will be loved. (Sacco)
Instead I relax, in it for the long haul
A terrible demon. A malignant power. A miracle to even be aware of it–tourtures unvisited on ignoranter ilk–call it all genius, or at any rate, the product of our collective rampant overwraught–to the gas chambers! to the landfills! We shall undream every cataclysm, this why I cry.
Repetitive Pneumatic Task Chair. Nowadays, these trainloads of bodies will just turn up anywhere. Probably later, a third man will be arrested. So, get to know your neighbors.
I was very clever and had ideas which were called for. I carefully collect the alphabet, presume preservers, recognitions of patterns or representations implying movements which imply circles.
Josephine Baker–they called her a vampyre & she went away empty handed. Oh! the stars and bars my Carmen. Service the visiting merchant.
Turpenoid sunsets. Matters of building & substance, unperturbed directness, uncouth deletions–one sketch after the other. I’ll fill them in later.
Echoes of the glass-jawed demagogue & the elusive art of conversation. Ever older, uncommitted. Uncalled for. Smaller phrases. But listen to me bitching. How much time do you need and for what? Standing stones? The hapless fugitive’s conversation piece, is a convex diction conviction: undenied indescribed assurance.
On my way here this evening I missed the first 5 Fulton for walking down to the stop instead of running, there it goes, & the 2nd for then immediately stepping up into the park astride the senior center for a pissdrag, which I did not even get because of picnic-table-sitting park workers nearby over thermoses. Uncivil misobedience. This will happen. Familiarly, I went right back and into the bus stop shelter & sat down on the slanty seat & didn’t even fire up because there was a guy right there in his car with the hood up & two kids playin ball with a tennis ball on the Avenue around traffic.
Then this old lady with no dentures came slanting across the crosswalk asking me but at the same time telling me that the 2nd bus had been Out of Service/Garage, & I didn’t feel it would make her feel any better to tell her about the 1st one we had missed.
Her grandson had been taken by her in-laws because last night her daughter had been arrested for driving with a suspended license. And you know when your kids young like you it’s like you growin up with them. Even she herself was now not stumbling around. Just a taste. She had gone to collect her pay, not even to work, just to collect her pay, and been fired. And she was just going to get her pay but they said it was no good for the children. As if they didn’t drink themselves with all that finest liquor in the cabinet. Every weekend when she cleaned and watched the children she tasted some of it all and it was all the best, he is a lawyer with a German car. But these hypocrites with their slave names say they never drink with the children around, maybe they lock them in another room at that time, but anyway he said to his wife, told her to “just mail it to her, she’s too drunk to be walking around with that cash on her.” And already by now the boy’s grandfather was going to probably have him. Where is that damn bus.
A study of real & imagined windmills, comets, overdue novae, Parisian millennial nightlife (including doorway graffiti found across the street from the Picasso museum, as refracted (barker-ed) through longest-standing English booksellers), handmade Italian saxophones from the 1940s, and which is dedicated to Irish/Lithuanian wedding bonds in particular; with love, friendship, interpretation, and understanding in general.
There’s her dresser covered in shells and pebbles. There’s her collage of dogs and promises mistaken for love. There are her three b&w photos of abandoned brick buildings and there is her moon mirror, her green plate, her flat square ceramic clock.
I asked her again to clear out of my room. She told me that she had already told me that it would be August not July before she could move.
I meant to tell her that she was going to make the lives of people around her tough in life but what I told her was that she was going to have a tough life. “The only time my life has been tough has been the last 3 years,” she said.
Later she tells me she wants to tell me she’s sorry to have said that.
Once you have stakes, now it’s a contest. I sure hated to be the one to tell ya. But I guess it’s good that is was me. I want to show people how to make as much as they can out of what they have.
The moon is a fossil. A swarm of yellow flies. Shaved my head and got a sunburn. The rarity of the assemblage led me to believe that I’d actually been elsewhere, amnesiated.
The closet is closed, so her wardrobe, decorated inside with drawings of an operatic dream she once had night after night, does not emphasize my complicity. Who knows what she will take from the bathroom.
as I retire from this uniquely spectacular visage to preserve: the cannonshot surf, luminescent green waves, foaming spray oxygenated sky of solid, uninterrupted blue, suspended with pelican birds & ocean ducks
my seat in the cavernous inlet a smooth stone among much bouldered rubble of landslide into the sea. occasionally, splashed by the largest waves 18 feet down in the cauldron, saltwater steam. row after row, unceasing current, white topped turbulence.
in front of me, guarding and directing the sunset, an indication, obtrusive, massive barometer of our precious fury.
kissing rock.
the birds higher, as in the sinking sun.
to my north, two ridges and the sheer jagged headland cliffs. bay black sand beaches hidden by distant fog, by soft shadowed churn, taller as the moon rises.
explodes & emancipates. scatters the breath. unprepared soup.
fifty miles offshore, towering, the bank waits, hungry for sun. when the sun drops, all of this will change in seconds.
(2000)
