668. VIRAGO STAGGER

VIRAGO STAGGER
"[My last grip disease;
please take more of these.
Make mine magic to stop
your bloody tease - oh these,
oh these, are my mackeral eyes.
-
'Sickening pessimists
picketing masses
separated communists
apocalyptic bastards.'
-
Last line goes like this:
I may have seen all this before.
This life is a bloody whore]"

667. GRUMBLE DE LA MAISON

GRUMBLE DE LA MAISON
Rather be a grand old man, a silent one,
one with a grin. Rather be a wise old man,
one who's been left, one who's still in.
Turn to other ways, and learn too late -
they're not your ways. Rather be a tough
old man, who is by nothing phased.
-
Plastic things, calisthenics, push-ups
and exercise. Never, thank you, gracias,
merci. Instead of that, I'll have this:
a looking glass sunrise, a microscope
of love, a path through all oblivion,
a universe of love.

666. SHRAPNEL/CONJECTURE

SHRAPNEL/CONJECTURE
Sergeant Poncharoff is dead.
Colonel St. John is also dead.
The three boys from the division
in Ohio are seriously wounded,
and the company dog just died
from a nasty head wound.
Good God! What is
this war for?

665. THE UNENDING STREAM OF TIME

THE UNENDING
STREAM OF TIME
If I told you the carpenters were up on
the roof with their cellar boots on their heads,
would you question me? Believe me? Understand
my story? If I said to you that three gentlemen, NOT
of Verona, were making sleeves out of mesh in which to
hold water, would you be able to follow the concept?
No, then, probably not. It's always been like that for me.
-
The sky unfurls a fury above my head; a three-quarters
moon now juicing its light on down, a few shooting stars
dicing the night with their pillage and flight. They take
from us all they can, and keep going. Time has a schedule;
it is that, of which all these things follow and keep. Days,
being numbered, remain secluded and calm. It is we
who get excited, do the dance, run the frenzied circles.
-
I've always believed, staunchly and without fear,
in absurdity - a total and all-encompassing meaning
of life in which, simply put, nothing is. And nothing
ever was. We are raising standards, alone - self-created
banners all of our own coloration and design. We watch
these things quite carefully, as if, on some other plane,
we designed it all to matter and to never end. No, no,
alas. Time it is which runs out on us, seeping away
like water in that leaky mesh I'd previously
made mention of. That circle of wet on
the floor, below : that is what we are.

664. ALIVE

ALIVE
Songstress of the sparrow lane, blind
and disabled, hobbling through the snow
with wings tucked in close. Looking about,
though sightless, for somewhere to be.

663. TALLIS IS NOT HERE

TALLIS IS NOT HERE
He went home on the last ship,
last seen walking the sea, last person
alive anyone wanted around. His famous
domino-double-fortune had finally dissolved
away, leaving but pennies on the ground and
some old stories to kick around. Candlelight,
empowered by a seance. An old wizened witch
stirring her pot of pitch. He was always sure to
attend; now he is nowhere to be seen. The flagpole,
flying something, had lost its own purpose in the
steaming night : tri-color pendant, elusive maritime
meaning, a message for sailors at sea to see. 'Tallis
is not here' - he went home on the last ship,
last seen walking the sea, last person
around anyone wanted to be.

662. UBERTEXT 21

UBERTEXT 21
You are annulled. You are finished.
Without category, secretive as dead ice,
wet as coal, black as a lie, divisive as any
integer can be. That lion on the transept
overpost looking down - it roars like a sheepish
chicken, a coiled rake, an ocelot in derivation of
the premungular ascopantier, the wide one in the alley.
-
I have come home twice, each time incorrectly
knocking on another's door. Both times the same
person answered : he was wearing a gendarme's cape
and held a timepiece and a wallet. One ticking, one
empty, both stolen from someone else. In his best fake
French, he managed to say : 'I can do that, you know.'
Those ancient philosophers were all alike, think you not?
-
Sally in the alley, with Frank O'Malley.
Two sources of food kept the cavemen alive:
boiled hippopotamus steak and the loins of
each other. 'I'd rather eat you than eat your mother.'
Really, that's just the manner in which they used to talk.

661. NO JOYETY (c.1451)

NO JOYETY (c.1451)
There's no joyety like the joy of
tripping freely through the space
of an idle life. Laughing at fools
and jesters is its own reward. Jongleur
and Minstrel, all those foppish types
who yet insist on singing and jive,
strumming their lutes and makeshift
guitars with the self-surviving words
of their boyhoods as girls. After all,
what is the King's Court but a
collection of entertaining
transsexuals anyway?
-
Lady Manscombe, the pretty
one in the tower by the lake,
she sits there, I know, waiting just
for me. Alas, I am busy right now
with her younger sister Amelie.
It can all be worked out.
Let the others fools
sing their lives
away.

660. THE WESTERN CURE

THE WESTERN CURE
When you find things, you find
them one at a time. No differential
of separation between either wanting
or, later, having. In that respect, the concept
I here touch upon quaintly resembles love.
You look and you look. Then turns up
what you'd never have expected:
the fire in the forge, the water at
the broken well.
-
It sometimes happens that
you miss that which is
right under your nose.

659. NOTHING

NOTHING
I'm so tired I could kill. I can't complete anything,
I can't finish my mind, I can't tend to my thoughts.
Like a bad angle in a carpenter's nightmare, I
simply fit nothing. I can make no sense.
I'd rather be electric, be finished, be dead.
I'd rather have a carpet thrown about my head.
Any magics there might have been have now
disappeared in turn. The eagle has lost an aerie,
the hawk has lost its roost. Over the river,
nothing. All over the land, nothing. In the
frieze of air within the sky, nothing.
In the sunlight, nothing.
Even in fullness,
nothing.

658. APPRAISAL

APPRAISAL
I am mostly harmonious to a fault,
a degree of my own. With the
wind at my back, I can sail.
With the rain upon my face,
looking up, I can still find
a very private happiness.
In spite of the snow and
rain. In spite of sickness and
death and all of the rest.
I too am an animal within
life knowing I am losing that
life - slowly and unerringly
certain. Yet, not miffed or
bestirred, I walk on.
Waiting.

657. JARIELA

JARIELA
Somehow, Honey Pie, the
past participle of loving you
is a gruesome regret and a memory
that won't stop. Something akin
to a pounding headache wrapped
up in spikes. A crown of thorns
with the urgency of lust.
-
However, I trust you will let me go
with that idea. It's really all I've
got left in this shadow-theater
of puppetry and mime I
call my aching heart.

656. A HARBOR DEATH

A HARBOR DEATH
Altazeimer Ferioker was the yellow man on the
ferry - the one in the windbreaker and the corduroy
hat - who threw himself of the front of the craft
so that he'd be run over and hit by it before it took
him under. He was a weird suicide with both hands.
He quickly went under and was churned up in the
roiling waters. As soon as those who saw knew what
occurred, even though by then it was too late, the
ferry was halted (for no real reason) and police and
fire craft arrived, harbor rescue crews, and all the rest.
He was long dead by that point, and ferry service was
halted for the rest of the day. Those on board were,
oddly put, 'ferried away' by another craft they had
to leap to from a shoddy gangplank connecting the
two. Ferioker, it was later determined, was from an
East European capital and heavily in debt. Despair
did him in, somehow right in front of what some
still call 'Lady Liberty'. As well may be, he made
his choice; free until the very-literal end,
to trade up or trade down.
Trade down he did.

655. ASSEMBLAGE ALONG THE WAY

ASSEMBLAGE
ALONG THE WAY
On the road to Jericho,
where nothing is ever new,
I have see-through eyes,
and they are looking at you.

654. ON DREARY LANE

ON DREARY LANE
I papered up the windows with brownkraft,
just so I couldn't see you. I was, by that time,
already tired of all your languorous half-dreaming,
and my drooling about it too. I could see you every
night, clearly undressing from across the way.
-
You worked slowly, never distracted - every
movement in perfect place. The clothing, piece
by piece, off and on the bed, the wraps, and then
the lace. The bra-clasp, so simply it always went.
I watched, eyes askew, at all the rest...and then YOU!
In perfect aplomb, you never seemed to care. It could
be me, or another hundred there. Your perfect portrayal
was constant. I lived for this effortless moment of time.
-
All this distraction - you have to understand -
finally did get to me, drove me nuts, made me crazy.
I walked across the street one day, just to enter your building
and stare at the elevator where, I figured, you must have
entered and left. Finally, once, there you were! Just as
I'd imagined! Or, in my way, seen; real as all get out,
and just as good. We smiled, you passed. I lingered,
in a shock of recognition - something, I'm sure, like
Darwin or Leakey or someone must have felt,
sometime, at once, after making some
great and binding discovery.

653. THE PLANETS - NOT HOLST

THE PLANETS - NOT HOLST
A little was never enough.
The garbled voice on the message
machine seemed balanced like a Jupiter
on some Venus or the sort of sixth-grade
astronomy I remembered from the old Mercury
Space Program from long ago. Men breathing air
that was no air in the most perfect surroundings of
weightlessness and no meaning at all. Fraught with
struggle, their surroundings had already killed dogs
and monkeys, so why not them? Things seen in outer
windows looked like celestial lights or nightmares - one
way or the other, new ground was being covered; yet,
oddly enough, there was no ground at all? What did that
stupid on-air commentator mean, I wondered? We were
sitting on the steps at the old portables wherein were held
our fifth and sixth grades. Stupid places, really, with stupid
people too. And now this - some guy on the radio spouting
his nothing. My 8-transistor Emerson, even IT knew better
than that. Why then should we bother? The entire world, if a
continuing lie taught by 'elders', was deemed (by me) to be
nothing more worthwhile than spit. Or the astronauts above me,
I figured, with their - weightless and airy - bags of shit. Powdered
foods and freeze-dried mealtimes. Not for me, thanks. If I had to
take my Heavens, and ruin the stars, it would be with a five-course
meal, tablecloths and napkins, candles and a bar. Generations
of grown men, cavorting in capsules, high above and afar, piling
up their meaningless drivel for everyone and all to hear and see.

652. THE AMEN CORONER

THE AMEN CORONER
Everybody's done without me,
everybody I once knew. Two
guys are dead, one's in prison,
another has his head squared off
in a fucking California nuthouse
somewhere. I can't take even a
minute to breath - they never let up,
all these idiots of the past, these broken
idols of Hell's own chambers of echoes.
If it means anything to you - alone -
I would at least say this : the State Police
are out on the Princeton Lawn, outside
Robinson Hall, watching carefully every
one of us passing by. Why? Some fool
from an Arabian country, now visiting the UN,
is in town for a campus talk - discussion
split with monologue, like an infinitive meaning
infinite nothing, or piles of Islamic shit, or some
old Jew-blubbering about the ageless habits of
nomadic fools. Christians? They're probably best
personified by the shithead police out on the lawn :
ever-watchful, stupid as all get-out, and dressed up
in ridiculous attire meant to signify something. Amen.

651. DISANT

DISANT
'A sa maniere' the genuflecting fellow,
the abbott, said - what he meant was this,
paraphrasing some new Bible of the air:
'What you need do is nothing at all, and at
your own pace. The entire world is a tedious
place.' And then...yes, hands upheld in resignation,
with no energy even for a assignation, he stepped away.
We are a worrisome sort. We say things we hadn't ought.
'John Barleycorn must die. If I had a nickel for every time...
She's built like a brick shithouse. That guy's as crazy as a loon.

Women have hidden drives, penis envy, and they get hives.'
-
Resignation, just a sick and tired resignation.
A pale backdrop of time and light and effort,
sum-totaling: Nothing at all. You ask, perhaps,
how? Now it is my own turn (to say something
daring) : 'a sa maniere' - in one's own fashion,
in one's own fashion, be that whatever,

and however it may be.
-
Now, so much time later, I look back.
The black dog, Rinny, is dead and gone.
The shed I had built is crumbled and gone.
The ideas I once nursed, of clinical dreams
and fantastic creations, are gone, all gone.
There is nothing to mind me but dust,
and a rather filthy, morbid air.
A rather filthy, morbid air.
A sa maniere.

650. MANDLEBAUM THE HARDIEVARKUS

MANDLEBAUM THE

HARDIEVARKUS
At Chesapeake and Morton all the lights went
out. There was no one to ask about anything.
In the morning's valued half-light I assured
myself - at least - that nothing was amiss.
Five flying arrows and two coal cars
later, this wearisome train was
still rolling. The shortest day
of the year was breathing
down our necks. Some
sort of achievement
for sure. Lux. Light.
The end of all
old meaning.
He, it, shall
surely come
again.

649. EXTREME VELOCITY

EXTREME VELOCITY
(nyc, 1968)
(to be read really fast)
I never had a home I never wasn't hungry the
car doors around me slammed and people
people endlessly talking like saltines on the
wet ground sloppy and saggy and dripping wet
no crispness left (but they're good long after the
soup is gone - so take what you can as many at a time)
the man with the tubular hat bent down to retrieve
a nickel I'd missed damn damn Goddamn on that !
slanted buildings seemed ready to fall in my delirium
this hunger was all and what if what if the glass from on
high came crashing down on my head all those people
falling from the sky with briefcases still in hand regimented
as they are and bland so bland not an adventurous soul
among them and me porous me dripping iniquity crying
in pain praying in vain down on my knees supplicating
again - two doorways down some rich kid comes traipsing
with an electric guitar in one hand held rakishly like it mattered
like some aggressive weapon of glee I was supposed to see I
guess this gutter-snipe's superiority to me but I'd never see
his fraternity never be in his redundancy paternity familiarity
and then his friend this wicked girl parading loins comes over
to me and - bending down ever so slightly in her St. Luke's Place
way - takes my hand, presses it ever slightly to her breast and
hands over a five-dollar bill and says: 'I'm so sorry really,
nothing that matters, it's just the way it is, just the way it is.'

648. THE MINDLESS CHARGE OF A DIATRIBE

THE MINDLESS CHARGE
OF A DIATRIBE
I never faltered at the first step of the
landing; it was the end that always got me -
where the little stairs went sideways and ended,
curling about and stopping, around the bend:
There! that twisted second floor hallway.
Always something mysterious, I guess, about
a 200-year old house. The old guy who lived there,
solitary but quite happy, said he was closing it up
soon and moving to Emmanuel - a rest-home
for elders about 3 miles away. The house was
a rickety beauty, and I hated to see it - like him - go.
-
Forty years later, son-of-a-gun, it's still there.
He's gone and dead long ago - just another
sturdy old black man in the annals of ancient
history. The house is yellow now - they turned it
into some professional space years back - real-estate,
law office, all that infernal crap. The yard was
paved for parking, with but a tiny patch of
grass left - no vista, nothing to see. A real
mess that works for those who mess.
(I guess).

647. HOW WOULD YOU LIKE THAT?

HOW WOULD YOU LIKE THAT?
If the universe was all glass and
you were a broken mirror, or if the swarm
of bees atop your head turned out to be
your hat forever? The sound of a waterfall,
in the middle of your night, coming right
through the room where you sleep. The
howl of a hundred coyotes disturbing your
private dreams. Over there, look, look,
that man with the wine glass is cutting an
edge on the table with a five-inch blade.
He thinks he's a mini-Zorro, swashbuckling
and proud, rousting the lazy with his bloody
broad sword. And behind me, if you would
just take notice, those two girls are playing
cards with no hands! It's a new constitution,
one for all these new places and lands : sites
we've ended up at quite by accident. What
if the chair you were sitting on was really God,
letting you catch your breath for a moment,
before moving you on your (predetermined) way?

646. VACATIONLAND : FAT THINKING IN THE SUN

VACATIONLAND : FAT THINKING
IN THE SUN
The manor house burned to the ground,
arching an eddy where the guardhouse
once stood; so many things to define the
day. And now, along the old canal, where
only the guardhouse is left to rot, come people
carrying their summer bags and hiking clothes,
and bicycles too. Everything in a whine,
like phone chatter concentrated and entwined.
Do they know what they see? Do they
understand their losses and voids?
-
This was once real ground - secreted with dirt
and toil, a serious thing for serious people.
Now, lined with the doggerel and the flowers
of the very same people who brought us grime
and Spic & Span and crime, it lingers in some
valley of incessant cheap death. Military dogtags,
like jewelry, around haggard wattles of necks
and wrists. It makes me wonder, to look at this -
300 years of an American culture running amok,
precocious kiddies and a four-wheel truck.
-
I can't say what the matter is;
only what the matter was.

645. BROWN PAPER FACE

BROWN PAPER FACE
That dishevelled thing you brought in,
that crumbled bag of love, the idea of
continuation, the elongated allure
of eyes, nose and lips...
all together, a moment
a new place, one
which never passed.
-
Had I the energy to chase
the erg, to warn the heading,
to barrelhouse the winesong,
I would surely do that - for you,
if for no one else. My life is
like an envelope, ready to
close when moistened, but
until then, seen as complete
only by its incompletion.

644. JUST YESTERDAY

JUST YESTERDAY
I will not know the meaning of want as
it wanes - 'everyday in every way, things
are getting better', that old 1930's rant.
My friend O'Toole's green Plymouth, sunk
on its springs and listing, finally made us
walk. To the bowling alley. To S. Klein's.
To Shipley's, for late ham and eggs.
It was like that everywhere - one was
either in the war, already home crippled, or
out of work and dirt-dead poor and
running for your life. Railyards held
all the secrets we ever wanted to find:
starlight in the night, an old winsome moon
saluting the caverns, and a girl or two,
out late, slinking around to see what
was there. One side of Hoboken
was covered in railyards; the other
teemed with hot-headed Italian hoodlums
all stupid and horny and dumb as Hell.
Whatever we did, we usually wound
up doing it twice. Getting better in
every way. Practice - like an old
bare tree still learning to grow
again its new green leaves.

643. THAT INTERVIEW WITH MARMONA

THAT INTERVIEW WITH MARMONA
["I wanted to get ready, but there was
just no place on deck. Everybody's got
something they're striving to see. On
to be, places to go, places to see.
Your first footing, as I recall, was
in the punk-chef movement, where you
already were a star. Bright bitter spirit,
all those things have been done before.
When, in the Beggar's Opera, Morana says:
'What are you, friend?' I always liked Polly's
response - 'A young fellow, who hath been
robbed by the world; and I come on purpose
to join you, to rob the world by way of retaliation.
An open war with the whole world is brave and
honorable. I hate the clandestine pilfering war
that is practiced among friends and neighbors in
civil society.' That's kind of always how it's been
with me.' Don't get me wrong, no one took any
of this for real. We were both just talking back
and forth, maybe to our own faint shadows, even, on
Plato's wall. I listened hard as the clock struck one."]

642. MANHATTAN BED AND BREAKFAST

MANHATTAN BED AND BREAKFAST
(with some Leonard Cohen bullshit on the overhead)
Softest pillow down like gooseflesh mending
time and broken wings together mixed with
that same open-range sadness of too
many wonderful vistas. In this
evasive context the entire universe,
it seems, sings. Sallow man coming
forth in a very velvet and purple jacket,
He'd have nothing to say if asked, so
why bother. The sink faucet, dripping,
would sound just like him, if I let it.
Two coffee cups on the perfect shelf.
The shaded lamp, throwing hotel light
on some Zelda's face until even the
newspapers strewn about want to
kiss it too. As much as anyone,
anyway. 'This is this', they offer.
Manhattan the island, New
York City, the place.

641. TO MY MOTHER'S KIND AVERSION

TO MY MOTHER'S
KIND AVERSION
To my mother's faint health I added
nothing. In fact, probably shaved a few hours
off her life. It wasn't by design that I sometimes
was such a bastard. One day, as I recall, she just
fell over dead. 'Her head exploded', some doctor
said. He was talking simple, for a dolt like me.
Medically speaking, you see. She'd had a brain
aneurysm or something - blood vessels burst,
flooding her brain and moving it off the stem...
whatever all that was she was as good as DEAD
right then. From the moment she hit the ground
there was no sense to even move around.
Now that shit, I clearly understood.
-
Had I the wings of an angel (I suppose)
I'd try to fly somewhere new, finding
her maybe, just to see what - if anything -
I could do. Now, that is. Well after the fact,
and useless too. As an effort, I guess, to
try and make good, to make an amend -
if I could - and mend it for two.

640. TO MY LIFE

TO MY LIFE
Your healing allowed me to prosper,
to cling to something, to stay and
subside. Taking potshots at
imagined enemies was never all
it was cracked up to be anyway -
shooting galleries filled with
crack addicts of the imagination.
Intensities. Forlorn distractions.
Crumbled sandhouses where
only failed monks dwelt.
-
I held in my hands the most
hollow of cards. Laced with a
similacritude of fiery tension,
this varied Ark of my covenant
meant nothing in any other language.
I couldn't speak anyway.

I'd gotten nothing done.

639. MY CLOTH BUTTONS

MY CLOTH BUTTONS
I couldn't save you so therefore
wouldn't try. What's the use anyway?
Boy Scout motto, triage, all the rest.
Why couldn't I just die when the flag went
down, watching my father melt away, in
his flames, to nothing? It's all a muddle,
in a paradoxical way - the same manner
in which floods and disasters
destroy houses and homes.
-
The last I knew, the lights were
going out around town everywhere.
-
Up the flagpole some girl ran her
pants while, down below, in
a staggered heap, she sat
in an alcoholic stew,
drunk as a pig and
liking it too.
-
If these aren't the
Dark Ages yet,
I'd hate to
see the
light.

638. AT FIRST CHANCE

AT FIRST CHANCE
At first chance, the endings begin, the
stories expand, the meanings become distorted.
Bedeviled by a morning's light, I summon the
strength to look up. Above me, in the approaching
light, great white puffs of cloud go silently
scudding by in front of the yet-dark sky,
while behind them, just barely, I can pick out
the wane of a sinking moon. Nearby, someone's
red car, in its own darkness, idles numbly at the
curb, the very thin coat of frost on its windshield,
recently scraped. In the darkness passing, hidden
somewhere in a nearby tree, the solitary morning
whistle of a single bird alone alights the air. I
am cold, and chiseled in my feelings as my
cold body's demeanor. I hunch for warmth
as I walk, a single slumming morning shadow
of a figure, like black on black on the
velvet chalkboard of night.

637. THE SONS OF HAMTRAMACK

SONS OF HAMTRAMACK

These sons of Hamtramack are rounding
the bend : aloof in their speedy cars and
whitened with an afterthought of snow.
Indeed. 'I came from Detroit without thinking.
That is where I was born and where my parents
died - and every chance I get now, that is
the only city whose newspaper I seek out
and read. I went to school at Wedeling Prep,
and it cost me nothing but my youth.'
-
He spun out, wheels spinning, recklessly
driving that coach into the wall. Two weeks
later, it was all fixed up and looked as
good as new. No one said a word
about the 'crash', ever again.
-
Detroit choirboys, they ain't.

636. A RANDOM SHIMMY

A RANDOM SHIMMY
(Club Five-O, 1958)
Nothing flexible like a knee.
Shabby loincloth, covering nothing.
And all those mysterious trees, which I once
swore I'd really seen, turned out to be fearsome
mistakes of stagecraft and nothing more.
Girls on stage, galloping. Hearts enraged...that too.
-
Two enormous black cars, like those rogue
Cadillacs of old, roll to the curb and distend
their freight. Two carloads of targeted behemoths,
masquerading as women in holiday garb, blob
out to the curb still talking : weary wanton trios
of bad taste and flab.
-
Around the curve, from a fantasy Waterloo bar room,
Melchior Eviscora, the flatulent MC, comes by to
greet the crowd : 'HelloladiesHelloMyGod!And
AllYouGoddessesToo!!' He talks like a run-on
gambling gay sentence, all hands and emotion.
-
The inarticulate articulate nothing.
The deaf hear little else.

635. KESTREL

KESTREL
"[Evian Axelrod Bardmouth both snickering
and skittering too - ice on the hardhat, and a
strong dose of kennel WHAT! haven't you
heard ? This master is Pelagius and what else
you didn't know. The cowpoke at the compost
heap, the omnivore Castillian, all of them (together)
are keeping sensible while the rest fall apart.
One cannot eat the bait IF ONE expects yet
to fish. It's just that way always.]"

634. BENEFITS OF THE BEEHIVE

BENEFITS OF
THE BEEHIVE
We've nothing against marketing the
edge of the calm : where the secure
moments of time sequester the mind.
Name in lights, high praise for very
little, those mind-numbing insecurities
made great and worthy. 'It's a life' the
madmen say. Oh, oh yes, I heard the
one in the cape say to another player,
'Look at me, I am loquacious to a fault.'

633. MARLEYBONES

MARLEYBONES
At sea. One thing or another -
the wild shoot of a sperm whale spouting,
the peg-legged domain of one Peg-Leg Pete.
We entered through a barrel-keg ramp,
slimed and steamed as it was with matter -
things unknown in the wily way of oceans
and travel. Crates with markings that frightened:
grease-pencil scrawls on wood, diagrammed
instructions in Arabic and Hindi or some such
slashing swirl. Each morning, at sickness and
dawn alike, a sprawl of liquid, a broth of eggs.
We finally rounded some Cape or other,
a pigeon-grace of escape and space.
Back on land, even if only for a day
or two, it felt like Creation had
stared anew. Ah! Creation
had started anew!

632....FROM EVERYTHING I SEE

...FROM EVERYTHING I SEE
Like a further devil, I wish to carry you
past the black forests where the smoke
smoulders the peat-covered ground. I want
to hear your drummer sing, your vocalist cry,
and see all your psychic policemen get
taken away. I want the final pole of the
driver's art taken down with him having
bullets in his boots. 'Who pours himself
forth as a spring, him Cognizance knows.
What shuts itself into remaining already
is starkness.' Something to that pattern
of Rilke and all his malodorous odes that
never quite set right with me. Instead of a joy,
some final, fuzzy weirdness of a boy who
should have been a girl, or vice-versa.
I can hardly either look or listen.
My feverish weight, instead,
just wants to run away
from everything I see.

631. THE MIGHTY MARINONI

THE MIGHTY MARINONI
He was a wan and useless gentleman, sitting
in cars with his telescope in focus, gazing at
the Heavens and any other locus. It never mattered
to him at all whether a moon was out or the stars
would fall. He'd probably want an autograph.
Serene and myopic, the self-determined act
of a circle closing remained his most
bracing achievement. 'Were I to return
once more to Tel Aviv, they'd probably
throw me a parade.' All vanity should
be so simple. All such fame
should be so self-made.

630. SET UP FOR MYSELF AND WANTING

SET UP FOR MYSELF
AND WANTING
(An aimless moon or once a lunar landscape where
I loved you : broadly, without malice, and caught
in an aimless air). No air at all. A stark and silver
light, brilliantly crisp, from within an atmosphere of
nothing cast off a distant sun. (The most brilliant
light I've ever seen). A dazzling background noise.
If this was ever outer space I would be told to
be prepared. As it was, all this was was a white and
wild, wide-open Dreamland of my own alone.
(Set up for myself, and wanting).

629. HERE I AM

HERE I AM
And the once and the very
and the magnificent scrawling
of Averroes too. People,
leaving home together often
come back alone. (Henry Beck,
Henry Beck, I put down that
coffee pot and you still
want it back).
-
Some great yellow ship sailing
upon the long and silent sea; I've
watched it leave Lisbon, more than
once. And it always returns, loaded and
gleaming - somehow beaded with salt
water and heavy with bales and crated cargo.
-
My mistake, way back when, 1548 perhaps,
was in blending the silver with the cadmium.
They ran together and ruined the mix, blending
colors which no one could recognize.
It had something (they said) to
do with God and the Devil, and I was
tried, found guilty, and later fried.

628. SOMETIMES HAVING A DIFFERENT PATH...

SOMETIMES HAVING A
DIFFERENT PATH IS
HAVING NO PATH
AT ALL
Coherent saplings and the luscious
face of Spring. The locutions of
Nature - once correctly transcribed - can
be read as the language of the Gods.
Peace inscribed on stone.
A lens on the very
light of light.

627. ENDEAVOR

ENDEAVOR
I wrangled a walk in the woods with Whitman,
that old dowager guy with the beard of white.
He claimed to know nothing about the modern day.
I believed him and said it was all right - the not knowing,
not the day. We traipsed along, past the old Friends Meeting
House on Suydenham Lane. He said he'd stayed there once,
in '58, just to see if they'd take him in. They did. He stayed
four days. Porridge, gruel and oatmeal too. I thought they
were all the same, but he said no, they were pretty different.
It's hard for me to fathom all that. The meaning of '58, for
instance. That's 1858, not 19 or 20 (obviously). But
he rolled it off his tongue as if it were today. That's
a disconcerting possibility. Talking with spirits over a
hundred-year's gap is a very tough endeavor.
-
He said he was me, and I was him, and what
I envisioned he envisioned too and he said
he had the length of my loins and the great
gap of my humanity in his tender vision.
Whew! All that stuff worried me too.
-
It was long before the vision wore out.
I saw him dispersing, falling away,
as we walked - the walk was almost
done, and we really had covered a lot of
ground, both verbally and by geography
too. I recommend it to anyone,
even to you; this walking
with spirits will do.

626. NEW AND USEFUL COMBINATION

NEW AND USEFUL
COMBINATION
We haven't the utensil for
real speed yet. The harrowing
rows of the harrow leave merely
slow trails. (Yes, yes, like snails).
My marrow can co-indict your head.
Out of that man's hat - as I watched -
stepped another man quite like him
yet different too. Reddish in a different
complexion, something combined of russet
or rust. Things like that absorb me greatly.
-
I'd never found a combination any
serious carnival would like, yet here
was, clearly, some variation of
a two-headed man.
Thought I,
anyway.

625. DEAD MAN, DEAD MAN

DEAD MAN, DEAD MAN
Some sort of venture this is : malformed like
a tweak-hammer, crippled like a broken bird.
The fiery wind, I notice now, is ripping the
roof shingles apart; no wonder all that noise.
How many times has one wished for silence and
a peacefulness that never comes? The low sky
is a simple tremor. It skims the land and tires
of tearing never - like thorns in the side of a
steed, the sting only momentarily slows us down.
Insufferable as we are, we barrel past each obstacle
in our way. Bellowing loudly 'Straight is the way of
God!' - even as we hear the little voice within saying:
'But there is a tree ahead of us!' or then 'There
is a wall in front of us!' and finally 'We can go
no farther! The way is blocked!' Only again does
that voice say - 'Straight is the way of the Lord!
Let us forge on to where no obstacle blocks!'
Blind faith. A stupid nullity. The true belief of
the dolt. Perhaps we are just too stupid to
realize the inundation of the nothing
under which we are drowning.

624. OUTSIDE THE PALE TREE

OUTSIDE THE PALE TREE
Outside the pale tree that is Life,
sojourner, exists so much more.
You should enter that long hallway
with me. We can go forward, prancing
and playful or sour and dire, exactly as
you may wish. To me, it would not matter.
I have been both before, and know this
passage well, by heart. For me, there
would be no Dark.
-
I am an errant eraser, to you.
I could negate or detract or
diminish or subtract everything
from you of what you are. With
me, it is all that quick and sudden.
Life could end in an instant, but,
you must believe me, it would
be my instant for sure. There
would be no more.
-
Contradiction? You may say,
but it does not matter. First
I say there is so much more,
and then I cancel that, to say
there would be no more.
Take it either way, my friend.
One or both, you will endure.

623. THE PAINFUL GARDEN WHERE ADAM MET EVE

THE PAINFUL GARDEN
WHERE ADAM MET EVE
('Talismans From Forever')
It was not just a lonely thing,
it was a BIG thing. Justin Mimeo,
Andrews Dolkert, Roger King. They
each will live forever. Once, (here I
am dreaming now at the end of the
Industrial Revolution), there really was
a rosy-fingered dawn, beneath the
new moon - hymnal songs, choir music,
some off-key ritual of sermon and chant.
Aligned as we are to nothing at all, I listen
for new words : 'raise high those roofbeams,
oh carpenters, for here the Groom comes in,
taller than a very tall man.' That was Sappho or
someone ages back - I bet - declaiming a new
pact with a featured old Lord. Tired. Alone.
-
I am asleep at the side of a roadway marked
'Innovative Way'. Beside me roar trucks filled
with cargo. They were not passing like this
last night, and now they have awakened me -
to something, I cannot say. Another world?
A different one, at least. I find it impossible
to situate myself in this world. Odd...
like a mosquito, trying to find the itch
it left behind on someone's skin.

622. RAPUNZEL'S DRAWN KISS

RAPUNZEL'S DRAWN KISS
Rapunzel's drawn kiss, some smattering of the
Matterhorn...we are watching a skit on an
old TV show : a Swiss maiden high on some
mountain, yodeling while she bends over as
blossoms fall from her cleavage in a tightly
sewn top. No sense to anything at all, yet
the point is gotten across - these fantasy
Swiss maids are all about sex. Some Jewish
TV madman's idea of it all anyway. You
can tell, even from far back now, how
near this all was to old Vaudeville. You
can take the boy from the city, but
you can't take the city from the boy.
Or something. The old lower eastside
ghetto - beckoning like a Gershwin keen
on a shiny success. What were they thinking?
The backdrop and the scrim, both poorly
drawn and executed, attempting to show some
pathetic Alps scene. Nothing works right.
The maiden has lipstick all over her face.
She looks more like a Gerty Mandelbaum
than anything else. The cow in the pasture
wears a bell two sizes too big.
-
Exaggeration, I guess, to get the point across.
Exaggeration to get the point across.

621. SLEEP

SLEEP
When it gets this late, I just want to
go home and sleep in the rafters.
Somewhere the sun doesn't shine.
Tomorrow is morning, and I'll
have nowhere to go. I'll sit back and
remember distant places - like sins I've
never experienced - the black hides of
old Utah, a miner's sketch on a black
piece of slate. My eyelids, I can sense,
are trying to close. It's not a new sensation,
mind you, something the species has endured
for ages and more. I watch the bird nearby, on
its perch, undergoing the same treatment I'm
giving myself. Aware, but at the same time, drifting.
Eyes closing up, head nodding a bit. Only it tucks
one foot up while it sleeps - whereas I stretch out,
flat on my back, and collapse and drift away.
It's all the same in the end - in both our way.
Tomorrow is another day.

620. AT THE MANOR, THOUGH NOT BORN THERE

AT THE MANOR, THOUGH

NOT BORN THERE

No fault with the imagining, though I may
have been here before. Nonetheless - this
yew bush needs mercury, the lamplighter's
drinking Scotch, and Marigold Madfearn, she of

the stove duties, has taken up with Gardner in
'doing the wren' behind the leaning shed. It's
all so simple, what people want: companionship,
sexuality and the forthright doings of a good turn
(no pun intended). I've been here since four in the
morning and am convinced, really, that I may have
seen it all by now - and it's only 10am. By late
in the afternoon, I'll be floating away with a fawn
myself. Yet, as they say, this is no country for
an old man and....here I go again I guess.

619. CERTITUDE

CERTITUDE
A semblance of the correct, and the flags
blowing harshly in the wind. Winter, like a
force-field intent upon entering its resistance,
approaches without hesitation or doubt.
Step aside lightly, and let it enter.
-
No current or storm can fight back,
so relentless is the striving - over our
shadows and our shoulders, dark clouds
and white snow. Everything together - all
separate yet jumbled. Remaining composed
is only a hope; to deliver nasty news
without speaking a word at all.
-
Pile high the drivers, snowmen.
Light brightly the massive drifts.

618. BROTHER LEO

BROTHER LEO
I am tooling around with nothing to do,
with time on my hands, and I have
nothing to say. Brother Leo, you were
always so calm - none of this would
have phased you. I can hear it now:
"What is it you would have you say?
Something important coming your way?
Pray tell, let me know." Then we'd
both laugh it off - you'd go back to
your pipe and ledger, I'd return to
my book.
-
Today, instead, I visit your grave.
You are gone now seven years
and I've not (to be honest) changed
a whit. I still have nothing to do.
I'm still tooling around, this time
driving some stupid little tan car.
I pass the corners we used to know:
that crazy grocer where you set me up,
the small coffee shop with the wizened
maid. It was all so fun, but now it's done.
-
I whiz the light, barely yellow, and some
fetid little cop pulls me over. He asks -"what'd
you do that for?"... I thought that was supposed
to be my question, and laugh. Of course, he
doesn't get the joke. So I said "I did it for
Leo, my friend who's dying in 15L". A
total fabrication, but what the hell.
-
He OK'd my paperwork, said
to not do it again, and let me
go. 'Go see Leo, and
good luck.'

617. THE HUNGARIAN REVOLUTION, 1956

THE HUNGARIAN

REVOLUTION, 1956
1. Living in Budapest
Dismal waterwork fanatics, the ones
who watch the meters and the pressures
and the flow; they linger like dead men having
just missed the action at a group resurrection.
Twelve tiny soldiers standing in a row - Slavic
intention, Russian names, a few mangy dogs
trotting alongside the men in a line.
-
The revolution (I noticed) ran to that Wednesday
afternoon - one lined in fur and of a questionable
weather. Then the guys with the real guns (those
wayfaring counter-revolutionaries of small-town
signatures), came out. They'd decided to
'perforate the populace' for easy, tear-out removal
of those trickster, dissident, 'anarchic/tyrannical
bastards'. Yes, yes, we did walk over the bodies.
They seemed to be everywhere, draped on
curbing and fallen in the streets and gutters.
-
With that, the new wind came, blowing the
old wind away. Nothing but eagles of despair
and the swarming of the despondent.
We were forced to play along.
The two rivers, the Buda and
the Pest, still ran on together
in their separate ways.

616. IT

IT
It wasn't you. Alone.
That pear tree, which had stretched
and then withered in your yard, was once
a magnet for bees. Of every stripe. They'd
linger and buzz and alight, dripping the nectar
of a sweet pear juice. The sticky stuff fell
to the ground. It glistened in the sun -
that same sun which had somehow
ruined Icarus. Crashing wax wings,
wildly infused, and suffering.
Witnessing the crash, like
an old Bruegel painting;
a scene no one notices.

615. HE WAS A NICE GUY

HE WAS A NICE GUY
The shot hit his gut and he rang out -
a loud, resounding grunt. I knew
he was dead. His fandango was done, that
last dance was over. Flowers of the doomed.
-
No stallion like that had ever run this
ranch before : perfectly coiled,
ruminatively black, a thick, lush
coat. I shuddered just to see.
That horse, I swear, had bangs
over its eyes; a mane like
an angel should only wear.
-
Brazos, Abilene, St. Pete.
The word went out and
they all went somewhere.
Nothing rivals a dream
like the dream that follows.

614. MEDIC

MEDIC
Well, apart from all that, everything went
well enough. The liver transplant somehow
ended up on the floor, and the kidney was
also dropped, though we managed to retrieve
at least that. Not finding that stupid sponge,
once more we did have to cut; but, no loss,
and all was salvaged. Then, remember, that
Dr. Truncater guy, he was present and did
oversee the operation…and all the liquor bottles,
and two of the nurses also. When everything
was finished, we had a very nice dinner.
He’d forgotten to bring the corkscrew,
but it didn’t matter. By that time we ALL
were tired of manipulating such instruments.
He broke the top of the bottle on the table-edge,
and we all drank it off willingly, and
with glee.

613. SONYA

SONYA
When I had nothing to do
I had nothing to do. They
were yelling for a recount
in the local Ward election -
a few towns over some idiots
were still fighting the brand.
Milk was running over the
carapace like beer on a
college bar-top. It was
all enough to be disgusting.
Sonya (a friend from the nearby
hostel) was whistling a tune
through her Rubbermaid
gloves. I reached out my
hand to touch her hair.
She was not afraid,
just lost in some
other thought.
　

612. ENTRAPMENT

ENTRAPMENT
Oh they broke this mold,
intensified the moment,
eradicated the siding - and reengaged the
big warriors - coming over the hill.
'You cannot make the dead walk or right wrong.'
It was the ending of the salad days : Armageddon
lurked. Seamus Heaney, I can recall, said back:
'the English language belongs to us; you are
talking at raking fires, rehearsing the old
whinges at your age. That 'subject people'
stuff is a cod's game, infantile, like this
peasant pilgrimage. You lose more of yourself
than you redeem doing the decent thing.'
I sat back and smoked another cigarette
while the waitress brought a tray. I faintly
recall the sense of it being a Tuesday,
and - out on the street - the Irish flares
were burning yet. Two girls, wrapped
in scarves like fish for the banquet,
strolled by, silently laughing
among themselves. I really
wished, right then,
I knew them.

611. FIRE AT THE ENTRANCE

FIRE AT THE ENTRANCE
My heart blazed for aching.
Stern four-wheelers of fire
and steam, like a chugging
train my beat kept beating.
I could have set my watch
by the set I watched.
-
It was all merely a
pencil line, once erased,
ghosted now, on a long-ago
dried and yellowed piece of paper.

610. LANDMARK LEGISLATION

LANDMARK LEGISLATION
There should be a mark where the sniper lives,
a discus thrower at the ready, a marksman with
the scent of the arrow and the bow. Some
quiver'd Robin Hood malarkey, dressed in
tights and sequined dresses. Sheriff what's
his name would understand. Hark.
-
Father, I am at your arched bridge now.
I am stepping in the seams you left
behind. I am twisting things, like you
did, to fit. Once, as a small boy, I clogged
around in your big shoes, my little feet loose
and sloppy in your thunderously large-size
shoes - for me. And hat. And coat.
In fact, it seems I dressed up as
you, back then and early on.
-
There was no reason for the frenzy. No
dollars taken from your enormous pockets
where small bills lived.

609. HEARSAY

HEARSAY
Gentle old men with gravelly voices.
'He's saved our skin many a time;
he's a great old cat, a womanly
cow but a great old cat.' Old guy,
bowed down and bent, twisted like
a cripple but with plenty of voice.
'I never had any disinclination to help,
saw a lot of people in my day - and they
wasn't all good, no way, but I never
shied from anyone, good, bad, or
whatever. Who was I to say. It's just all
wooden work. Wouldn't you?'
-
One hundred years from now
I'd still say 'that's just the
way I heard it. I got
a sister in Dallas.'

608. THE COSSACK PEOPLE

THE COSSACK PEOPLE
Now they can tell you in the geography
books where the Enmit enters the Don or
the Splietz drops into the Oder - and it's
all for nothing but to take up space. These
idiots get paid by the word. Illustrating that
word gets them paid even more. Maps.
Diagrams. Drawings of farm wagons in
leftover fields, children playing sticks
in ostracized tents askew on a meadow.
Oxen and chattel, climate and dogs.
All that tendentious stuff goes to make
up a world; not mine mind you but a
world nonetheless. Something that saddles
with shoulders, wears truth and murder as
an ideology, brooms through the system
of man like a plague. There's nothing we
can do about it. Too vague. We're
entitled to a certain amount of time,
and then...we're gone.

607. MEDITATING UPON THE DIVINE

MEDITATING UPON

THE DIVINE
Your grand semblance of irony disrupts.
Now we skim with nothing, now we are
mired in mud. Not in knowing which way
to turn am I spent - time lost is time not
returned. A grand and sporting mind such
as yours needs make sure that nothing gets
lost - your fungoes with the fielder, your
incessant yo-yo of the inner heart. If I saw
you standing outside, alone, or even wrapped
in flames, wherefrom would I know you?
Your semblance of irony would distract me,
right from the start. Yet, as you say, 'no
hope goes forgotten' before you slip away,
I watch and listen and nod. Or was it
'no help goes forgotten' ? either way,
you say, being like a God.

606. A HOSPITAL BASKET SOMEWHERE IN FRANCE

A HOSPITAL BASKET
SOMEWHERE IN FRANCE
Just as I am happy to be so broken, so
I am wise to be so dumb. Let the
little things mean a lot - all that ice
on the shiny driveway, all those plants
now withered and dead. This semblance
of 'Life' - like some leftover scum on the
black-lace iron of a third-story balcony
nearby - reads me well. I am speechless,
indubitably silent, and bereft - as if
some parent had died, or a baby
brother, found injured, was
now dead in a hospital
basket somewhere
in France.

605. CAPTIVA

CAPTIVA
In this morning light I
met a troglodyte. His
name was Henry, and
he'd been up all night.
Seized (certainly) not
of silence - no, not at all
- he sensed his moment,
dawning, call; and he
wouldn't shut up.
I listened listless, forced
as I was to endure - those
famished words, those
wild enclosures, remarkable
for their less, not their more.
So little then was there that
I saw no pretense in being.
I'd met a troglodyte hardly
worth the seeing.

604. I WENT HOME CRYING

I WENT HOME CRYING
You would have me then;
I went home crying.
Holding hands with Death
in its Kingdom of the Lyre.
Mussel-brine, the tinge of
sea-salt, the white air of
sand and breath and light.
-
I gazed distant towards the
open sea : huge bulks of
metal floating, as if still, afar
along the distance of horizon and
limit and all the edge of the world.
-
Everything, in its way, rounds out
a circumference befitting itself.
This one round orb, watery,
with, everywhere, things floating
upon it. The ship's bells rang
my memory. I went home crying.

603. LEAGUES

LEAGUES
The west wind, indecipherable
how it blows; a circuitous revelry
harboring sides and ridges. The
high corn itself, bending, does so
in homage. Blue sky high, brilliant
cape of sunshine, one routing finish
to day and light and being. All
those things, the very selves of
our existence, hold out their hands
to shake, in this very wearying wind.

602. SIMULACRUM

SIMULACRUM
Only the holy one knows the repeat
answers to the same questions :
said over and over, those catchwords to
the distant stars. We are wearing the
pants of a thousand ages.

601. FIERY EPILOGUE TO CONTAINER #5

FIERY EPILOGUE TO
CONTAINER #5
I can't remember everything.
My fate is my task.
The jets beneath my
dreaming are but the
memories of my past.
I was born to nothing,
from nothing. Now
I find, even that is
fading fast.
-
My room it is in flames;
calumny lit the fire.
It may be a lovely light,
but oh! the way it burns.
-
I'll see you in some morning, Stephen.
I'll see you as night turns.

600. SAINT DISMAS AND THE CRUMMY NICKLE

SAINT DISMAS AND THE
CRUMMY NICKLE
So tender is the night that it's not the
ache but the pain that hurts the most.
All things are meant to be : the fun,
the tragic, the sorry, the sad.
I never believed a word of it, but
the usual words are always said
at the most usual situations. A
tall dark priest in a tall dark hat.
He houses nothing but the holy.
Ministering to the prattle that
sprinkles water on a grave.
-
The woman who read palms
was standing at the side of the
funeral cortege. She was awaiting
a Cadillac of her very own.

599. HERE I AM IT WAS ME AGAIN

HERE I AM
IT WAS ME AGAIN
I am watching an unsettled sunrise
break through the sky. Otherwise,
bleak and idle am I. Wrestling with
mottled clouds, the source of this
equation. Thrusting forth its silent
rays, this sun seems both to glow
and seems to cut - both things
pliant yet harsh against the middle.
But it's always me; I've always
taken the middle way myself.
There is no ground here I'd wish
to travel. Oh people! You can have
all your 'other' places, going here
and going there. I'd rather take an
endless celestial path. You can have
all your mansions, museums and
huts. All those towering things of
a small-town sky, reflected even
now, and bright in a new-morning
way, just distract my intentions,
and take them away. But it's only
just me, again.

598. CALDERSON THE MAGNIFICENT

CALDERSON THE MAGNIFICENT
Don't give me grief. Give me Nothing. Nothing!
Advance the perpendicular, straighten the picture,
overwhelm the manciples with the gripings of
elected rabble. Rapscallions with medallions.
I'd want nothing from charity except the chance to
donate back to the liquid-bastard club what
brought me here. Dad's sperm-shaft and
Mama's twat - together in tandem it
brought me a lot - free acreage on
the Plaines Des Jarres. Dead
guerrillas holding angelic
guns, my overnight
suite on the
Zuider Zee.

597. SWANSONG AND MY VALEDICTORY TEAM

SWANSONG AND MY
VALEDICTORY TEAM
Fourteen people plodding along,
trudging up watery hills where the
flagons overflow, the wayfarers call,
and the awful cavalier still shucks at his
hornblowing partner. Maison DuPres,
in the manner of glee - all that sharkfish
and tuna, but nothing for free. Fourteen
people plodding along. Thirteen wishes and
a fountain of dread, lights on the patio, a guy
in blackface, playing his banjo for quarters and dimes.
I set the torch aside, lit the one adjoining, and sat
back, just hoping to watch the evening unfold.
My balloon'd feet settled hard on your lovely oasis.
Twelve times I thought of you, eleven wishing for
your company and ten seeking to stay, nine for the
wishing and eight for the world to go away.
I could go on forever, right on down to zero.
But. This wine is clouding my focus, Martel says
they're running out of fish, seven bottles of wine
are all that's left. I've told him six times to leave that
guy who changes water to wine a five, get the job done,
or go buy four more but leave me three minutes with you,
so I could kiss your two lips, or we could become
as one, together.

596. SOMETHING CAME THROUGH

SOMETHING CAME THROUGH
That high-powered oasis, darling.
Selever and Broadflint, where the
sunlight plays over the water. Horizon?
It can wait. The dark sky teases with
Cassiopia, Ursa Major and Andromeda too.
I've seen bats flying, past midnight, under
streetlamp and household lighting. One
hundred different ways to fool the cosmos.
Even now, my foot is in the water, and I calmly
suggest - to you - that we should stay ashore
for the night is far too dark and far too long.
Your jacket glows, purple, or a combination of
blue and red beneath the lights. I've always

wanted this, and figured it would be this way.

595. REVOLUTIONARY DESIRE

REVOLUTIONARY DESIRE
I've got to do something because I refuse to
go blind. I've got to do something because
I refuse to go deaf. I am not the one alone,
but I am many together as one. I can research
the spinner spinning the tale, the liar of words,
the one who twists. I refuse to not touch, because
I must remain tactile. I refuse to not feel , because
I must remain hurting. Others in pain are the
pains that I feel.

594. IT'S BEEN SAID

IT'S BEEN SAID
(A Spiritual Vendetta on Some
All Soul's Night)
It's been said (I have heard,
I've been told) that Spirits arise
this night from the dead (kindred,
morphic, ceased to be) and try to
speak with 'WE' (communicate, send
messages, evoke themselves in place and
deed). As if the DEAD have such any need?
-
In some language I have known, there
must be words which have been shown
to mean : 'balderdash bullshit crock of shit
trash cannot be don't lie to me'. I think I
remember such words to be. I DO NOT sit up
beseeching the dead. It is THEM must come to me.
-
My figuring is (while I'm alive, existent, busy here),
that I've much more to do than they could care :
small tasks, insincere things, stuff they've left behind,
in arrears (non-caring, useless, needing NOT any
longer to be done or mentioned). Fires on a hearth,
perhaps in such a way, themselves burn out and dwindle.
-
So it comes to me that WE should hear LESS of them,
not more. And that's the way I'd like it SURE. What can
I share with them anyway - some stupid old re-run,
TO THEM, to me is a brand new play. Really...
what could it matter and WHAT could they say?
-
Of less import to them is
their lack of importance to me.
I, you see, must continue to be,
must struggle, must play, to live on.
As for THEM, I say, 'BE GONE!!'
-
[This 'Halloween' is a bullshit mess-up,
a Dance of Sources for sure].

593. BEWARE OF JOHN FORD HOAXES

BEWARE OF JOHN FORD HOAXES
It's not in the way of seeing
that we see - long vistas and red
river rocks mean nothing. That
carbine, wrapped around some
rustler's head, could just as
well be on yours. Everything
as one, folded and fondled
twice over, is meant to
leave a message : something
crass, about the regularity of
how we live and die.
A corpse in the copse,
meat on a campfire to roast.
Beware of the John Ford
hoax.

592. MARMOSA

MARMOSA
Your white shirt.
The little stretch of garment between
hours of air. A watering sprayed in
the sky - where the squirrels smiled,
the white bird soared.
-
I never took the card you gave me
from the deck you put it in.
All along the Boulevard,
there was always
something
different.

591. IN THE ANCIENT RAIN

IN THE ANCIENT RAIN
I am walking the rocks of a million years;
skipping over the bonefield in the
more-than-ancient rain. Everything I pass
is all asunder - meanings, extrapolations
and designings too. Salt runs from rocks,
as well as from all the old passages of time.
An indecision now certainly marks my
decision to go on. I am in turn now only
bleeding for you. Emotion. Heart. Head.
-
Nothing different between those three
makes me pledge myself to such a unity -
the way the world is held together, the
regal manner of ice-age and death and
extinction. This ancient rain (and yes, yes,
I am still walking over the bonefield)
resounds with its echoes of all that was.
-
Forever is a long time.
The instant is now.
The ancient rain has
dissolved all things :
all empires and castles
and kings.
-
We are like children of a storm,
silent and struggling, while trying
to play in the puddles it has left
behind. This ancient rain draws
pictures in the clouds, reflections
on the water, and - in the distance,
like raindrops peppering the puddle -
shimmering ideas of what still can come:
Chimera and overflow, malice and doubt.

590. CONTALDO

CONTALDO
I slaked my thirst at Marigold's, where the
waters parted the sea; hybrid flowers wilting
on the wall-shelf, an abused piano calling to me.
I sat down to play and some angels brought a
harp. Nothing too great, but it did for a start.
-
In an instant, some hoodlum came through,
asking for money and taking it too. His name
was Contaldo, and he spoke with a leer -
'gimme any shit, and I'll take it from here.'
I think he was pointing to my chest.
-
The only assumption I could make was that
he had a gun - otherwise why walk into a
place like this, unless you're really dumb.
Oh well, here we go again. I gave him my
fifteen dollars. He wanted to hear 'Happy
Days Are Here Again.'
-
I told him I didn't know it; that was good
enough for him. He said it didn't matter
anyway since he didn't know the words.
We both got up to leave, together. He let
me exit and I let him go. Some guy was
eating his lunch on a small table outside.
-
We waved to him as we passed,
keeping a steady stride.

589. MY SOPHISTRY

MY SOPHISTRY
I threw your line-up card in the waste basket of my mind -
your profile portrait and your curriculum vitae too; all
that stuff, whatever you called it. Give me a fist
to the mouth instead - that I'll understand and
listen to. Your engineered infractions of
my time and place...I think not.
-
It wasn't gravel that wore down the
ramp; it was the unending pitter-patter
of thousands of distracted feet -
going about their daily grind,
unflinchingly wise and noble
as well.

588. THE AGE OF AQUARIUMS

THE AGE OF AQUARIUMS
At each end of the great world,
in each direction, there is fatigue.
I met Christopher Columbus and he
said that to me - likewise Vasco DeGama
and Magellan too - each of them told me:
in every direction, fatigue, and a tired old end.
A world of edges and flotsam on the sea:
broken things, hanging over the end, fat sea-mammals
gurgling as they die, bereft of both water and air.
Piles of coral, as sharp as daggers, cut the world
with Creation's original intention - to tear apart,
to rip asunder, to stab and hurt and maim.
Like old ladies on their way to Sag Harbor
(why not, where they belong?) the endings of
time and being show the hand of their despair.
"I am tired of this queer life. It is weary, here.'
-
Through the sky, a comet whizzes.
From some far and distant celestial
port, a line of dazzling light sizzles above,
coming down eventually, to crash even itself
over the edge of this vast yet dissolving place.

587. 1933

1933
The men who hurry are none
but worry; they make each
bromide safe. 'Every day, in
every way...' and the rest.
Folderol, Faddy-do!
-
Oh buddy, Mr. Subway Brain,
Dr. Pepper, Ryan's Emulsion,
and McLain's Weekly - everything
conspires to afford the contingency:
Yes, Yes! Those really are your
Warclouds on the horizon.
-
Don't color outside the lines,
God-Damn it! Now Daddy's
outside in the car beeping.
What am I going to do?

586. OVER THE FAULT LINE

OVER THE FAULT LINE
There was ever a moment like this :
the grand city of the vizier, running down
on its heels, its armies discouraged, its
banks sacked, and only moles left to
tell the stories. Men around campfires,
armless men, broken in battle, crippled
and defeated on the distant plains - they'd
struggled home, dragged on tree-trunk litters,
salvaged in animal skins, carrying the parts
they'd lost in battle. The string of arms and legs,
gathered together, bore a wagon of its own.
Sadness and sunrise, each morning, went together.
Their mothers and wives had died; nary a care
was left except the new urban worries of pain
and money and food and sustenance. They told
stories around the fires at night. Some swore,
really swore, they'd seen that man, one distant
midnight ago, arise from the dead and walk on;
'arise from their graves and aspire, to where my
sunflower wishes to go.' Someone else swore
they'd heard those words - recited back from
what he'd called a 'future,' but couldn't tell
if real or imagined. The others, totally
weary and beat, merely shook
their tired heads.

585. LIFE ON THE EDGES

LIFE ON THE EDGES
Quadrillian fandango going nowhere,
stepping sideways over rockfields of
doubt and motion - delicious proclivities
for love and abeyance, for reading
stories in the fossils of huge stones:
'this one flew without wings, this one
left thought-patterns on the outside of its
skull, this one, while technically blind, could
only see THROUGH things.' I sometimes just
say a simple 'yes'. If I really believed these
tales I'd be mad with fear by now, AND long
ago as well. We are, after all, only the human
sum totals of all the crap we believe in. I
want to understand you - maybe that makes
sense - and don't really care about the rest.
A full and total understanding would be best.
What you look like naked, how you moan beneath
the moon and stars, where you hide those
little things that make you precious. Special
moments beneath an oh-so-ordinary sun, one
different diamond in a boxful of coal.

584. OMINOUS

OMINOUS
I put your hand in my boot and we felt the lining:
it was made of dimes and quarters shining. Then
you bent down to show me your cloak. I
laughed, thinking it was some sort of joke.
Between the two of us, only a small sense
of change was made; a jacket of glass,
to wear in the shade.
-
The idea was to wear down each other like the
water which wears down a rock on the
simple-stream aspect of repeated abrasion.
But not really abrasion - because in 'human'
terms we find it difficult to understand
that 'WATER ABRADES' as some
science tome would say. 'Abrade'
means 'wears things away.'
-
Some little kid with a red toy engine
was sparkling by off in the hedgerow.
He made sounds like a siren, pushing
dirt and pebbles. I wondered, if the
land caught fire right then, even with
his toy fire truck, would he know
just what to do. 'Innate' means
'inborn, as if natural.'
-
Yes, well,
I guess so.

583. FANTASTIC PAJAMAS II

FANTASTIC PAJAMAS II
Maybe a real moron just says 'No more!'
and lets it go at that. It's a vernacular
architecture, anyway, these days and the
languages we use - fifteen moments
for the fine old calf, another half again
for Mabel Mercer and her Wandering Realtors.
Silver still shines like gold in the carriage-house
of the deceased. Claude Rains in the ashtray,
Cecil B. DeMille at the water-wheel pounding.
('You really are the cat's meow!')...

582. THE CRAZY MAN IS CRAZY

THE CRAZY MAN IS CRAZY
'Just like your cunt is my pocket,
wherein I put whatever I want;
that sorry semblance of stars and
the chemical beakers which hold them,
those slab-sides of new in a very fine,
calm brooding - of which full lips can
only start the story.'

581. SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE

SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE

(Too Much / the Car Wreck)

Just like something for everyone, we have
the habits of the scroll; the baby-talk fast-
feed lingo of the Soul. 'An idle mind, the Devil's
Workshop.' 'Pick what you want, pay for what
you pick.' ...and all the rest. They stand the test.
They come out best. BUT FIRST please retire
the bullshit, the horrid crap, the over the median
crazy car-wreck; glass and loosed tires flying
through the air, the singe of rubber and metal,
gas all a'fire everywhere. It's a terrible scene.
The focus is rare. There's now something for
everyone, but TOO MUCH is there.

580. AD MAN

AD MAN
Somehow I grow very weary of all the noise
I hear : jetplane rampage train roar whirr.
Just like that, some permission has been
granted to totally assault my ear.
-
I cannot turn around, to someone else,
and ask why. As I cannot stop some
bastard from trailing banners
in the sky.

579. EPITAPH

EPITAPH
(Gravesend, Brooklyn, 1978)

'When I was alive,
I was dead. Now that
I am dead, I have never
been more alive.'
-
At Gravesend, where the river markers
mark nothing but dirt, the old Citadel
church still welcomes whatever vagrant it
can hold. A can of cold soup and a few
prayers, whittled like a talisman over
unsuspecting heads. So little, going
for so much - while so much
goes for so little.

578. ENCASED IN IVORY

ENCASED IN IVORY
I am greeted by so many sights,
things strange and new to me : that
warrantless tusk, an elephant in
distress, blue water running down
the face of some African rock. This
gentle fellow, holding stolen jewels
in his outlaw hands, smiles, gleaming,
as he anticipates the moments ahead.
-
We hold such wild greenery as sacred
and rare - moss on rocks, thick and
varied growth overhanging every path and
trail. Somewhere behind us, the unknown
sound of a monkey or cat : a banging in the
sky, the gleeful cackle of another natural
force. Isn't that the seeming sense we've
striven for these decades on? If so, we've made
it work now, for both ourselves and all of 'them'.
-
An African river hunt with the spoils
of the sport going for naught.
A hollowed-out bark, skimming
swiftly, watches with the eyes of
those within it, every move I make.

577. CHAIN PLANT RECKONING

CHAIN PLANT RECKONING
We've taken the blinders off the dairyman's horse;
now it can see what it passes. No more than a simple
'clomp, clomp', its welcome noise colors the
morning. Ah! That should fix things!
-
Rooster engaged, making sunlight noises.
Old barn door, on weary hinges, creaking
its song. I walk on ahead, holding a
pail filled white with foamy essence.
Morning light, morning milk - both
seem equal for me - the
wonderful sensation.
-
Toil, labor and sweat.
Hay and straw, silage
and manure. It seems,
sometimes, I swear, the
pleasure of life comes from
its work. Nothing less,
nothing more.

576. BIOLOGY

BIOLOGY
All
species
make
feces.

575. THE DOCTOR OF HAPPENSTANCE

THE DOCTOR OF HAPPENSTANCE
Provisions for the horizon, the art teacher said,
must always be made first. One can prepare the
ground and the colors, but must know - before
beginning - where it will end. In other words, no
walking blindly through the forest of knives.

574. A GREAT WEAPON

A GREAT WEAPON
('The necessary musics of a needed age')
To be used right a great weapon should
be used on a great battlefield. Thus, (saith
the Lord?) I have dominion over you...
(You know and I know that story holds no water).
There's nothing great about living like this:
a sorcerer's jackboot stomping down, the
bad hands of an apprentice making rookie
mistakes, the liquid vehicle of a bad gland
dispensing all that semen.
-
When I was 9, a great thing happened to me:
looking up to the awesome sky I saw five thousand
1950's stars blinking on high and every one, in an
unwavering path, heading straight for an ending
already foretold. The man with the arrow, some
celestial archer, bent down to lift me up. I was
fearsome and proud, deftly traveling through the
ages of time - something Man would call it anyway.
He offered me a plug. I took it. In it, he said, were
held all the secrets of the cosmos.
-
When I came back down, he was gone, and I
was, somehow in a slightly different place.
Every measurement and distance,
slightly changed, amounted
to completely new things.
The universe sang on
the ground, with, he'd
said, the necessary
musics of a
needed age.

573. LEARNING THE MULE

LEARNING THE MULE
(look it up in the Temple)
You came into town on a crippled ass,
one walking sideways, cross-eyed, and swaying
while braying, bumping into all manner of things.
Everyone laughed, and then you fell off.
The townsfolk, unzippered, swore they'd
have their way with you - as their Bible
foretold. I was then a scribe, writing
all this down. Ignorant people amass
ignorant things, and this was, most
certainly, a sight to behold.
-
Behind the lemon tree, a girl was
playing sticks - longer straws for
gain, smaller twigs for loss; and a few
pebbles for use to easily keep score.
I wondered why I was always losing.
I realized only later she was a cheat.
-
The rabble sure can talk. Ten million
words a minute and not a damn thing
said. The fellow with the stern blue
eyes - every word he spoke was brutal
and insincere. I found myself hating him,
and wondered if that was right. Nothing
really, just the guilt-heavy sort of upbringing
I'd had. I'm sure he could have not cared less.
-
The Realm of Barbelo (in case you hadn't
noticed) is still alive and well.

572. YOUR OLD CAN OF STUTTER

YOUR OLD CAN OF STUTTER
...has kept me up way past the night, here comes
the light and it's right through the shutter. I wouldn't
know what else to do had I not read your
book : telling me to wither and die but never
give in, remembering the Alamo in so many
other ways, Sam Houstoning me, in fact, right
past the garden doorway and onto St. Ambrose
Street. Where the icing is free but the cakes
are immensely expensive : Heaven-sent malarkey,
fifteen girls for nothing, thirty men painting
thirty walls, one in each color of lightning.
That old chorus cat you called Mr. Finch,
it still sits motionless on the window ledge
right where you left it. Going in, going out?
-
I came home from Akron tired as a dog.
-
('Automatic poetry always makes me sick...')
graffiti found on a washroom wall in Ohio.

571. KANDUHAR

KANDUHAR
(Man Alone)
Morgana at the station, lining
the wheels. Ten minutes before daybreak -
a part of the moon still in the sky. Leftover
darklight, pounded by stars. Some lethal
infraction amidst bare bulbs and lamp-lit
rays splashing shiny light from pillar
to post. Coffee maven wheezes passing by.
An upraised hand, by Tommy Braden,
passes a 'hi' to his friend Tim-o Smith.
As solid as that bag upon his shoulder,
they've known each other for years.
A newspaper left on the bench extolls,
for whatever reason, the Yankees and
the Phils. Covering all bets, placing,
shills. Everything's in play before
the early morning's light.
OK with me.
I just want to be
alone.

570. WHERE ARE YOU GOING?

WHERE ARE YOU GOING?
Where are you going America ? in your
solid chrome-headed plastic filigree
watchtower-dome hat plating to tag
the Tag Heur to paint the new room
gilding the lily until the landlord dies :
swan-swocket land-locked Myra-prism
artfield naked ranger wearer of stripes
and douser of all fires water-hose-weasel
splendor-splattered orgasmatron water-pistol
expansion-loving troglodyte with one leg held
high up stepping the fruited plain jumping rock
to rock in your excalibur surge to reach the
onion-silvered stars and all that Heidi-Ho!
Where are you going America ? and
where is it really to which you go!
Go moan for man go moan.

569. MAN UP EARLY TO DISTURB THE RAIN

MAN UP EARLY
TO DISTURB THE RAIN
I have no excuse for the wobbling of the planet -
how space elides the stars and everything above
us changes. I just know the errant meaning
of what we judge. The past, made of people,
is nothing. Every Swanson and Lechmor,
merely names to learn. They've mostly
paved Chicago with stories of ale-pot
fury - old industries now gone to seed;
Detroit too, Cleveland, the whole
great Monongahela.
-
Over in Pittsburgh, those storied and
furious mills are now silent and shut,
as quiet as some nun in an outhouse,
seething with embarrassment to publicly
pass her shit. It's all no matter what came
before - we are doused with our own
new stupidity, crippled, and wobbling too.
-
It is said the stars pass no judgment.
It is said the planets, ever silent, don't
even see us in our folly - thus we are
more aware of them then they are ever
of 'we'. They have no concept such
as that. They just rest, as a fired mind,
blazing - a wild consciousness drawn
deep into space; a wild mind
setting the furies afire.