7377. OK, THE LOOK IN THE EYES

OK, THE LOOK IN THE EYES

The Mediterranean is the mother to the rest of

the natural world : the soft shores of wandering 

all seem to end here. Wrapped mornings of water,

and the long afternoons of sun and decay. All these

ruins are growing inside me  -  tourists may come,

but no one can stay. I want your fleeting body with

me here. We can tender what we can touch.

-

Some broken Jesus again, at the end of the world.

7376. GREAT GARGANTUA/ORION'S BELT

GREAT GARGANTUA/
ORION'S BELT

I look up at the stars and I see the quiet

desolation of only Mankind making fire.

At home in the night, my dreams return me

somewhere I have known. I cannot translate 

what it is I already know  -  for I have been

there too long already, and these languages

and forms are long forgotten. We know too

much as we know too little anyway. Fierce,

fierce are the ways of the demon black sky.

7375. THESE MEN ARE TIGERS

THESE MEN ARE TIGERS

When they are out whaling, there's no

bringing them home. Slant the shaving

knife at the neck. No fuzzy trans-gender

Adam's Apple coif can still these men

a'marching. I have a cemetery on my right,

and  -  to my left  -  the vast crematorium

of the living. We all are centered beings.

7374. I AM SO UNCOMFORTABLE

I AM SO UNCOMFORTABLE

This is it, oh beleaguered land. I am so uncomfortable

with my world today :  not in the manner of the old,

no, when butter got soft and sugar and salt clumped.

Those were simple things, things with a fix. This is

a black darkness, descended upon me. The unfixable

world that now covers my heart, the vice with the

turnscrew turning  -  pressing harshly down on my 

veins. It's the discomfort of a too-tight collar of

razor blades, or a crown of 10-penny nails 

hammered deep into my skull. And - no - 

alas, I know not what to do but pass.

7373. HISTORY MARKERS

HISTORY MARKERS

I went to school with every other little kid in the land.

If we weren't dead blind, we were messing our books :

scratching marks in page corner turns, and writing

kid-names with hearts and arrow. So silly and all

so true. I wished upon a star before I slept at night.

I cried for Beowulf, I hid from Frankenstein.

7372. MY KNEE SLAPPER

MY KNEE SLAPPER

It's Halloween again oh damn. I knew you

before your disguise, and I'll know you after.

Peel the skin from off you face and let me see

those bones again. Skeletal remnants, like some

geographic land-rim, make this shoreline so clear.

Having a long history of taunts, even we have

bested the beast now of the intense disguise. 

Whoever you may really be, this life goes on

7371. BELOW THE WATER LINE, pt. 59

BELOW THE WATER LINE

(pt. 59)

When these items were being experienced, they

appeared as one thing. Of course, now, almost

50 years or more later, in a vague sort of broad-brush

retrospect, nothing is ever as it seemed. Then. There

was one period of time  -  in my brash, over-the-top

stupidity, when I can recall watching The Lone Ranger,

I guess a Saturday morning episode thing, and being

involved in some bizarre Saturday ritual of six, count

'em, six, bowls of cereal, in the sitting. Whatever was

that supposed to be? I remember my mother approving,

in point of fact, acting as a cheering section. I don't

remember any more of that  - except that it was, most

probably, egads, Frosted Flakes, to make matters worse.

The secretly tolerated deadly sin of Gluttony, at home?

The upkeep of a maddening sugar quotient, unchecked?

-

Funny how ideas of 'quality control' about things only came

later. We never cared. Our Hillerich & Bradsby baseball

bats always came to us already 'up to snuff'. Sure sometimes

they'd break or splinter, but that was that. They were just

all good  - no one needed an inspector to tell us that. And

what kind of brand name was that?  -  the one which sunk into 

my brain as the icon of childhood  - the name of the baseball

bat company was right up there with the five names of God.

Mostly, anyway, like God too, everyone shared  -  we all used

the same bat, often  -  whatever the weight, 24, 28, ounces, I

think it was. Big, fat heavy bats, 32's or whatever they just went

for the big, strong, heavy dudes  -  who were probably, anyway,

already 15 in 6th grade. As dull they were as the bat was dense.

-

The five names of God, did I say? Now where did that come 

from? No one ever talked about that stuff  -  upside down as 

we half the time were, in those junkyard oil-tanker innards,

half the time expecting to die, no one ever started a God rant.

Anyone who would have done that knew already they'd be

punted out of there like a flat-tire wheelboard down a steep

incline, and with nothing at the bottom. God was what was, 

and for the rest of it all we didn't care. No over-starched

ninny-nun was going to try and set us any better straight

than we could set ourselves. Those half-men who ran

around with clerical collars choking tight their bubbling

red fat necks  -  they too were for all essential purposes

to us, non-existent, a Sunday kind of blast, maybe, only, 

maybe, if the courtyard at the portables and the stolen

Kent cigarettes didn't keep us otherwise detained. There

were two Gods, you see, and we knew it. Straightforward 

too : our God and the God of the rest of that hoary mob. 

That we were supposed to listen to, but never did, nor 

would.

-

The thing about God to me  -  and none of the other stuff

made much sense, nor did I really care; it was more 

magic-for-money than it was anything else  -  my thing 

was 'evaporation' the 'transformation of water', that's pretty

much what did it for me. I'd wake up in the cool morning

and see  -  on the hoods of all the cars and stuff  -  the

great beads of moisture  -  rain or dew or whatever  -  on

everything. That was factual and present. I could touch it, 

and my hands would get wet, get cold, and stay that 

way for a while. Then after a little bit of time and

even some sunlight, that beaded water, the moisture 

that was on my hands, would disappear, dissipate, 

go away  -  having turned into something else. The

evaporation back to another state  -  no longer water,

not visible, an ethereal gas or something passing through,

going 'round its own cycle until it somehow returned 

again from afar, from high above, as rainwater. That

cinched it for me, That was beyond efficiency; it was

far better than any Mankind based cockamamie 'we can

do it just as much' Science crap. That clinched the God

argument for me  -  it wasn't so much some angry and

mean son-of-a-bitch type God always trying to have it

back at his people, his own stupid creation (for God's 

sake). It wasn't ire and anger and rules and regulations,

no stupid fat-assed haunchy nuns slapping your wrists 

with their Virgin-Mary rulers and Sacred Family crap

(like they knew anything about that) rosary-strap 

sidewinder beads they wore down their ridiculous and 

stupid, crap-happy habits, the black dresses of goons.

It had nothing to do with any of that : that was, or might

as well have been, Nazi shit, by comparison. What caught

God in the fish-net for me was the idea of a perfect and

punctilious efficiency of silent mind and eye and purpose.

Enough said  -  the efficiency and wisdom of the exchange

of water over the course of an hour or five hours or a day:

clouds, oceans, rain mist and dew. Those beautiful beads 

of clear light, in the early Summer morning, clinging to 

blades of grass. That's your freaking transubstantiation. 

That's God, or the God of Avenel, at least, to me.

7370. MYSTERIES OF THE STANDARD-BEARER

MYSTERIES OF THE 

STANDARD-BEARER

I wind up standing here in my stolen

venture. Just staring out, to wonder,

now, where I've been. The piano-roll 

is gone, and the church-key the big-wigs 

have lent me has gone missing too. It seems 

I can't do anything right. The newspapers 

mis-quote me, and then they correct the errors 

again incorrectly. How does it all count for 

anything? I don't know. I'm standing in the 

wind at Sea-Bright, looking forward to an 

intimidating day at the death's head casino; 

listening to Roy Orbison, and the 

sounds of the lakefront wedding.

Our lady, Queen of the Sea.

7369. WHY THE DUKE IS ALWAYS THE CLOWN

WHY THE DUKE IS 

ALWAYS THE CLOWN

(why don't you quit your low-down ways)

Vestibule in the closet.

Taking a walk downtown.

I haven't entered the wandering 

hordes quite yet and the dollar

is still intact. 'But you seem to have

come back again? Why is that?' I

try to answer but choke instead.

They say to me 'Your car is here, 

sir.' And in that I acquiesce. 'Yes,'

I say, 'yes. Let them know I'm ready.'

7368. MARCHAND

MARCHAND

That silver penny is now no good - the

one you grew up with and I remember.

Having to put paper in your loafers and

a penny in the slot; look at all you did

and how little you really got. Today, this 

cat meanders like a jazz-boy pencil-face;

he's got the words of ancient wisdom

and the Daily News' disgrace. Those

New York streets were guaranteed

to kill any who walked by.

7367. BELOW THE WATER LINE, pt. 58

BELOW THE WATER LINE

(pt. 58)

I used to walk between things a lot - whenever

I walked, also, I would walk close to the buildings,

as if slowly crawling my way along, outside of the

passers-by's traffic walking by. I never know how that

got started, but I think it had a lot to do with alienation.

I don't know where I got it from, maybe one too many

Kafka books read (man, they were deliberate and

plodding, one sequential, mysterious disclosure

after another). It was a way to 'show' or make

manifest, my 'separate' status. It was a manner

of acting out my inner Kafka. Well, maybe  -  in

any case, it's not the stuff you talk about, so I never

did. But my quirk was no different either than the

quirks mentioned earlier, of my friends : Jimmy

Yacullo reciting back everything he'd just spoken,

and Kenny Kaisen, smelling everything he touched,

pulling everything to his nose (the opposite of my

dog, who pulls her nose to everything). The emotional

equivalent of one of today's 'emo' kids  -  the feelers and

those with complete fearful and soft relationships with

the world. The kind of kids you just want to swat.

-

You think of it now  -  when we were kids we were

insulated from all that. The place was wide open, and so

were we. I never knew exactly what was going on inside

the heads of the grown-ups. I'd see them on their little

steps, porch-things, stoops, whatever they were called

on those new houses with the minimum of everything.

But I never really knew what they were thinking, or where

they were at  -  and I'm just as sure that they, looking at me,

never thought a second either about 'what' it was I was about.

It's odd. My father used to come home from work, in the

Summer anyway, and  -  after eating  -  it seemed most every

night my mother and him both would come out, she would,

when done with dishes and chores and stuff, and sit. My father

always hosed the lawn ; he'd sit there in one of those metal and

plastic strap lawn-chair things, from Two Guys, the store, and

just hose-spray the lawn, always. The spray would move around

as he moved his arm, and eventually it all got hit with water.

I guess, by planning  -  it was more ritual relaxation for him.

Less about the lawn and water than it was about his 'closing'

the envelope of the day. Neighbor to neighbor, some would 

talk, or shout back and forth  -  hey, hello, what's up...all that

stuff. But they mostly stayed apart too. My father also used 

to get the square cube of ice cream Shop-Rite used to sell, a

large, I guess, half-gallon box. He liked it, we all did. But we

could only get the flavor  -  what he called 'Neopolitan' I think

it was  -  three flavors (vanilla, chocolate and strawberry, or 

their ersatz versions of these flavors anyway) in one box, in

rigid rows, all the way down. He'd sometimes bring that out

too, and sit there with a long spoon and pick at it as it softened.

We'd do the same too, eventually. There'd be these great tunnels

of picked ice-cream by whosever it was who last ate at it, their

favorite flavor. Very weird, but simple and  -  back then  -  like

69 cents or something. In the meantime, we kids would be out

in the street, going bonkers for the evening, playing wiffle ball,

wiffle ball home run derby (which meant beast-fully  bashing the

plastic ball and bat to only hit high, crazed wiffle arcs that we'd 

hope would launch over the opposite curb). Or, the same, with 

Spalding (pink) balls, against the curb. As Fall got nearer, it 

would change over to touch football scrimmages and games,

telephone pole to telephone pole, or sewer cover to sewer 

cover, whatever. Parents watched. Lightning bug, crickets,

mosquitoes, the whole array of stuff. I'm not sure what it 

was that girls did, but I guess they had their own pastimes 

and games. Then it would slowly darken, things would

settle, things would hush, and we'd all be gone. Other

nights, different pastimes  -  hide and seeks, ringolevio

games, 'box' ball (which was a sort of bouncing games 

using three of the sidewalk sections as playing field, and 

slapping some sort of careful corner action on the pink

Spaldeens). I can't really remember. Also, the younger

kids had chalk-lines of Hop-Scotch and all that stuff.

Later on in years, Jim Yacullo, and Ray Szemborski,

both had basketball hoops installed, regulation height 

and size and all, on the telephone poles at their properties.

Ron Napoli, also down the street, had a really nice one 

installed at the top of his driveway, where there was a garage.

It had a nice, dedicated 'dribble' paving area, good range

for shooting, and we'd gather there, for a while, nearly

every night after school. It was funny how habits and

small schedules of time for these things developed 

themselves. We never went without  -  cold and dark, 

or hot and sweaty.

-

It was chummy stuff  -  when an  outsider arrived you'd

know something was up  -  interest in a local girl, some

connected grudge to work off, or a budding friendship with

an 'outsider'   - which usually meant then that we'd be 'losing'

somebody. It was like family, and when attentions and 

allegiance shifted, everyone knew. Pretty much, anyway,

that's what adolescence was all about  -  expansion, both

of geography and of emotion. Yeah, I can almost remember

falling for someone different, some other girl, somewhere,

in a crazed infatuation, back then, at age 11 maybe, like 

every other week. Now they say it's healthy and it's normal

to experience and evaluate varied kinds of sexuality. Huh?

Had I heard that shit then, I'd have barfed. For me it was,

first and foremost, the feminine aspects of life I wanted,

the opposite of me for sure  -  I was in no way after my

pals. That can be colored a hundred different ways, yeah,

and psychoanalyst stuff will do that to it, but all we ever

cared about was girls. You can talk a blue streak about

anything you want, but that was for sure the truth.

-

People would move about; even as I grew through the ten

year old and eleven year old level, I can remember things 

expanding. One time, by myself, I took my bicycle all the

way up Route One, up to the Linden Airport area. Just to

see; that was big-time travel. Another time I did the same 

thing all the way up St. George or whatever it is, as it 

threads northward, all the way up the Warinaco Park 

area  -  Roselle or Linden or Elizabeth, I didn't know.

My friend, Robert Shipley  -  maybe two years older

than me  -  was in a sort of awe. He just said something

like 'Boy, you're brave!'. He had a perfectly kept J. C.

Higgins bike he rode around on, really nice, black  -  and

on the back of the rear fender hanging down, like the car

clubs, he had a plate installed, that read 'Black Beauty'.

He'd named and titled and plated his bicycle! Now that,

to me, was more amazing even than running up Rt. One.

7366. THAT DRINKING MAN

THAT DRINKING MAN

If something was asked of you, would you waver before

the light in doing a task - too genial or hapless to truly

work with determination? In looking for a few good men,

many overlook the most useful : the regular giant of a guy.

He who lifts stones and breaks obstacles with his roughened

hands - calloused and sour, fatigued with the drudgery and 

the angst of opprobrium, saddled with a shoulder of doubt.

For such is the man, alone or in groups, married or without,

who gathers at hitching post and tavern, ready for ale or a

brew, sprawling over with good intentions. Later in the night,

after the others and the all have passed, he sees blindly, double

with doubt anew. I watch him try to focus and talk straight on,

to something or someone he deems to remember. That is not a

clock upon the wall  -  it is the very life and foundation ticking

away. For so few are so steady as to be so smart. 

(And right all of the time).

7365. WALKING ANEW

WALKING ANEW

I am walking anew with a camera strap over my shoulder - 

carrying this heave, this weight, this watcher. All eyes, I

scout and scan the deceiving horizon, perhaps hiding from

me something I would have missed - had I not been so alert.

I am hunched ever so slightly. The weight of goodness

covers me like a blanket; the slow pull of such a lens,the

freeze-frame heaviness of the camera's own body. It does

not swing loosely, as I must clutch it carried tightly to my

chest. I am in fear, perhaps, that it may fall, or snag, or

tumble. 'Round my neck, does the broad strap chafe and

annoy? Not for one second.

-

I have turned the corner now - for that distant rooming

house seems to have caught my eye. Its very old windows

and wood are sagging there with age, and that faded old

parchment of paint and glass, that patina of neglect and

decay, says something to me so right. It mus be captured

now, in this light. I step but back a foot or two to better

frame the sight. This long lens will array the arrangement

nicely through these eyes we share - mine and the camera's.

The noise is silently waiting for too,  for me - as I cannot

capture in light the background sound of the scene. The

very old fire of time and place are singeing me with heat.

I acknowledge where I am by simply snapping the shot.

I am so happy to be walking anew.

7364. THE BOWS OF THE WOWS

THE BOWS OF THE WOWS

Got to thinking today how my dog 

probably eats better than me  - but 

that's okay, and the way it should be. 

I don't take much maintenance, and I'm 

on my own. When I want something to

eat, I get it. Not her  -  she has to be fed, 

lest she'd be scavenging or attacking instead. 

So it's okay by me, the richness I see. 

She sure has some fancy habits.

7363. MY SHAME FOR THEM

MY SHAME FOR THEM

I haven't closed the book an anything, yet, but

do mostly feel it's closing on me in spite of my

wishes. I belong to nothing any longer : cannot

understand the world I see and am only saddened 

by the piddling mass of Nothing I'm now presented

with. For this we breath and live? I'd have to say

why? There's a dearth of everything today : the 

stupidity of the clowns and people  -  the now

interchangeable remnants of station and situation.

My hands are more mellow than the hands of the

handler -  the face that stares, the flickering image,

the things people say as the walk and they talk  -  

these are integers of the negative, a compound of

the vapid and the dread. I lived in a country once,

where the march of Mankind was applauded. No

longer so, my world has been given over to thugs

and thieves and liars and cheats  -  the bloated factotums

of babies, eating fat porridge while they already line

up for more. never sated, always wanting their false

'enoughs'. Enumerators of the lost, all counter of

the unknowing dead  -  they yet live on, as I traipse

by them, staggering drunk with my shame for them.
For this we live and breath?

7362. YOU CAN

YOU CAN

Insensitive to a fault, you can scan this

harbor with my eyes - the way I see it, or 

you can walk away and leave it all at this : 

the monkey on the nautilus string, the men

drinking beer, the outside diners, braving the

damp and the cold. It's all over before it starts.

Unless. Unless you yourself elevate it all.

Take a paroxysm's final crush and let it

bleed you deadly - you'll be back 

before the coming dawn.

7361. BELOW THE WATER LINE, pt. 57

BELOW THE WATER LINE

(pt. 57)

You know how it is about life, how

sometimes things about others flabbergast

you when you think of them later, or sometimes

it's things about yourself that you still can't

believe or understand? I go through that a lot,

in that I spent a lot of my time with with

people I liked  -  other kids around me, with

whom a certain sort of local-brotherhood took

root and grew, and then one day was just gone.

The ones who are gone and dead, yeah I'd like

to talk to them now, sure  -  some sort of local

Inman Avenue area megaphone to the new and

shiny dead. But it can't happen and it's all the sadder.

My friend Joe, who blew his brains out with a rifle

shot (I guess it's never two) and was only found an

afternoon later in his back driveway, in his car, plastered

over as it was with his brain mattter   -  found only

because his dogs were howling and the lights had

been left on. Yeah, you know, Mr. Big Deal, found

dead in his freaking Renault Le Car, the running (but

only sometimes) joke of the later 1970's. Right up there

in Pacer heaven with the rest. Yeah, I'd have a few

things to say  -  and just as much I'd like to hear.

Death by death is one thing  - but death by 'interdiction',

yeah that's another thing entire. It ain't right. How are

you supposed to grieve for someone who only ended

up, selfishly once more, doing what HE wanted?

-

My other friends who've died. What of it? What can

I do now? Just gotta' move on. Things about myself

that flabbergast me  - my (living) friend Al Zinze, he

tells me about a verbal showdown he remembers me

having with Martha, of Murray and Martha Candy Store

fame. I can't believe it, nor can I remember it, but Al

has it down right. Martha was Jewish  -  I've written

before of that  -  it never made much matter to me. He

says one day she'd scolded me for throwing down some

paper candy-wrappers in front of her store instead of

putting them in the trash can. In the verbal scolding,

evidently I turned to her and sarcastically said back,

after she said something like the old 'do you live in a

barn?' routine  -  I said, 'Yeah, well at least we don't

eat with our hats on.' That's crazy. I tell you, crazy,

and he remembers that like one of my golden,

Oscar-moment lines. I remember nothing of it; nor,

I here swear, does it seem like something I'd say

or even have the gumption to say  -  let alone even

know about (eating with hats on?), yet he remembers

it perfectly. Another time, he says, a few years later

in my later-teen years after all the squibbling and

squabbling problems I'd gone through, he remembers

himself and Robert Stewart seeing me near them on

a bicycle, passing along, and they called out to me

to have a moment, say hello, all that, and that I

simply looked right past them, completely ignoring

them, and went along my way. I don't recall that

either, and again it doesn't really sound like the

'me' of me. For these sorts of things, now, I'm

humbled, sorrowful even, to these people, for

what I've apparently done, and for being a schmuck.

'Flabbergasted' is what I called it, right? I have to

live with it, and can't take anything back. And I

will. What is this life anyway?

-

Murray and Martha's was a candy store  -  of gold to

us. Cherry Cokes and candy, ice cream, all that stuff of

Summer, after playing stickball in the schoolyard nearby.

It was something like 7 cents for a refreshment. They 

had a million stupid little penny-candy type things in

an open glass case to the left of the register. The register

itself was in a sort of little box-cage corner, but not 'caged'

as in today's security caging, just like 'removed' so it

got to look important and serious, and of course it 

overlooked the open-faced candy trays too  -  glass

display, endless array. My friend Alex tells me the

shoplifting quotient was pretty high -  I don't know, and

it seems like it would be a pretty difficult heist, but he

was tight with the family, so maybe so. I can recall,

in a closed-eye visual of the place, pretty much every

last detail of the interior. Newspapers. Magazines. 

School supplies, rulers, models, hair pins, glue, a

entire array of things. It was something. I had, in my

fourth-grade class, under Miss Evans, a girl named

Patsy Ann Zionce (check the spelling; a guess), and

there was a time, that Spring, when for some reason

the class or the grade was having an 'ice-cream party'

for something. The classroom windows looked out

over Avenel Street, and Miss Evans sent Patsy out to

get the ice-cream order (another time I can recall

Murray himself limping over with the boxes). Anyway

the boxes were plain, gray cardboard, with little round

holes every so often, about the size of a quarter, I guess

for air flow into the interior or something. I can remember

Miss Evans looking out the window with us all, at Patsy,

holding the ice cream, maybe two or three square boxes 

of twelve ice creams each, or something, and she remarked

'Look at her, isn't she a beautiful girl?' And Patsy, was, yeah -

her reputation, for a fourth-grader, was that she was very

pretty. But, hearing Miss Evans say that, aloud, it was weird.

I only think she was a 'Miss' anyway; could have been a 

Mrs., I guess. Don't know.

-

Murray and Martha  -  I mentioned earlier  - seemed always

to be at war over something, seething and screeching at each

other. Somedays the Cherry Cokes (all made from syrup)

would be made with happiness  -  other days you could just 

feel the anger and animus with which they were made  -  so

much so you hardly wanted to drink it. Funny. I guess they

always made up.

-

Over on that other side of Route One, right by the light,  our

neighboring family, the Raspitzzis (check my spelling anew),

they moved out from Inman and ended up there  -  a big house,

still there (but not for long, I'm told) behind that little building 

that later became Nelson House Printing, but which at the

time was the original Introcaso Cleaners. Walter and Betty

Fehring  -  with the encyclopedias I mentioned in an early 

chapter, they bought the Raspitzzi house, and moved here

from Elizabeth. The house the Raspitzzis moved to was

nothing like the Inman Avenue houses  -  it was large,

really large, and rambling, and from another time and 

another Avenel day entire. I never really heard from

them again. They had two kids, I think  -  Laurie, the

girl, and perhaps Peter, the younger boy. That's an 

example of the sort of 'layering' that I mentioned  -  in

which Avenel has so many different stratas of housing 

and people  -  the new, the old, settled and recent, all 

mixed into these varied sections. The mingling between 

them all  was just never that much. Things from 'another'

time were always so much more rambling and over-sized.

As was their idea of 'Time' itself, I always thought.

-

Across from them, there was  -  for a while  -  another

'supermarket, when those started happening. Foodtown

or something, and later then, a 'Fine Fare'.  Now it's

been a print-shop for years  -  my once-friend Steve

Glassman moved it there from Perth Amboy, where he'd

started out in a little dump named 'Business Cards

Tomorrow'  -  which at first was just that; a niche supplier

of next-day business cards to other printers, so they didn't 

have to bother (business card printing was always a pain in

the butt -  small size format, ink washes, etc. The idea of

'gang-running' a bunch at a time actually made some sense).

Near him also was another friend, Louis Schlesinger, whose

father, right there in the next building, ran Schlesinger's 

Hardware, for years. It was a really nice, crowded to the

hilt, with a massively great hardware store aroma, traditional

hardware store. Louie himself, in later life (now) has become

a fairly important psychoanalyst or somesuch, forensic stuff,

etc., with a few of that subject reference type books to his

name. I lost touch years ago. There was, also, just around

the corner there, in a house now right next to the pizza place

there, another friend, and his sister, a twin, Peter Panzarella.

I think I remember his sister's name as Patricia  -  it was one

of those family-deals where the kids names began with a 'P'.

They disappeared early on too. A lot of stuff I just lost

touch with. That older side of Avenel  -  closer to the 

origins  -  also had a number of places, in the middle of the

blocks, that were local stores  -  foodstuffs, cakes and

bread, milk and eggs, stuff like that. They're all gone now,

but one or two of the buildings remain. This was all the stuff

which pre-dated 'supermarkets' -  which eventually wiped

out all these very neighborly and local stores, in one fell

swoop, they came in, got everything consolidated, and

closed up all the little guys  -  because people always went

with the new, the latest, the largest. Go figure, yep, go figure.

7360. THIS GREAT DESERT HIKE

THE GREAT DESERT HIKE

I have walked too long in this downpour for

any sense to be made : like hives in a tree,

my feet are dripping. My back is wet. My

hair is matted : celestial feelings bewail me,

calling my wet-head notions down. 'Be careful

where you walk!', and 'watch out for water!'

-

A vast and treacherous schoolbus plods by -

driven by a demon, loaded by a witch. The

late-afternoon schoolcode kids are jammering :

the cyclic utterings of madness, corralled and

approved. 'This is what we give you now for

children; hordes, and hoarders, alike.

-

I invite no one into my space, let alone will

I share my water on this great desert hike.

7359. A REGULAR MENACE

A REGULAR MENACE

Here the fly on the flower petal dies.

Autumn begins the beleaguering mess.

7358. A VERY LIBERAL LIGHTNING

A VERY LIBERAL LIGHTNING

We hold the screen, and the tiniest things

slip through. Like Lawrence of Arabia,

taunting the sky, my harsh face is a

grimace of pale determination.

7357. SUIT UP FOR THE FASCISTS

SUIT UP FOR 

THE FASCISTS

Let's demand an Article 5, let's demand 

new sunlight, let's demand a day in the 

dark, let's get this stuff rolling on time. 

We can hang the big guy upside-down, 

only later. Make sure the train whistles 

blow, get those agriculture guys in proper 

order, straighten up these horrid fields

that big guy's riding through.

7356. SOLICITATE TO FACILITATE

SOLICITATE 

TO FACILITATE

As if a backwards dictionary entry, I stand about

with one shoe idling, look for the marks the cat

left on my skin. This life is a rigor mortis already.

-

And most people tell me I'm not even done yet.

You mean? You mean? More New Year's Eves

with those buggers and hats, streamers and glasses?

-

Yoy mean? You mean, cocktails at eight and oil 

changes and lawn cuttings and thickets of theaters 

and shows? If I can't have it any other way, and if

it's all the same to you, let's just have the theater close.

-

Some people tell me there's a glory train coming, with

my seat prepared and headed right for the sky.

('My bags is a'packed, I's'a ready to ride.

Oh me. Oh my!)...

7355. THE OPEN PLAINS ARE OF THE MOMENT

THE OPEN PLAINS ARE 

OF THE MOMENT

So many people have come and gone : some cashed

out, others walked away, while still others have died

of fever or the plague. I want to say I knew something

of all this, but I didn't really know a thing.

-

Standing by your sink now, I'm watching the faucet leak

drip. Very pretty drops of water, scattering as they hit.

It's a very pleasant sensation which I don't think is

seen or felt by many people. They'll buy white noise-

ocean sounds for their comfort to relax, but when this

comes about they just get nervous instead.

-

Oh boy, do I want to tell them a few things.

7354. SHUSH THE PALOMINO

SHUSH THE PALOMINO

When we come home I remove

my shoes; you sit back and 

enjoy a snack  -  dog-treat

watermelon milk-bone waffle. 

What a gracious life you lead.

7353. TIED ON

TIED ON

This normal stature just is not me  -  I'm usually

tan feet tall and running free. Now, the legions 

have my shoes and all that's left is quicksand

anyway. The more I move, the more I sink in

the quagmire. Once you learn you cannot

get away, you soon enough stop trying?

7352. YOUR BAKER'S DOZEN

YOUR BAKER'S DOZEN

A capital means of aggressive behavior  - 

her, but this, and I'll throw in that. 

Something like the sky, in a hurricane,

bringing a gift and wanting no thanks.

-

The blue glass is twisting the light around;

I watch tendrils on the table and cannot

figure anything out. My chapbook withers,

and my mathematics textbook is dead.

-

Should I feel here biblical or just strange?

Need I find a language we can speak with,

a set of words to compare? Like bringing

a gift, yes, and wanting no thanks.

7351. BELOW THE WATER LINE, pt. 56

BELOW THE WATER LINE

(pt. 56)

Back when we were chasing the Masons,

as just related, it little fell to us to know the

difference. What a world it all turned out to be.

As it is, Masons themselves, in that day anyway,

(I don't know, nor do I care, about Masonry today)

were segregated  - one had to be a 'free-borne' to be

admitted. Blacks were slaves; thus, no blacks. A

roundabout way to get  racism. Then this black

fellow in Massachusetts, 'Prince Hall' was his

name, he charted a lodge but had a very hard time.

The Mother Lodge, in England, of which there were

two, eventually took sides, one or the other, and

'African Lodge' Masonry came to be. 'A. M. E.' is

what it goes by, as title. We didn't know any of this,

and these people were the result of Prince Hall and

his early, groundbreaking work. Little known to us

what we were dealing with  -  essentially a breakaway

of a breakaway, through the lineage of 'ex-slave

freedmen.' So wonderfully interesting.

-

See, the thing here is you'd want to probably think,

'why is he getting so far afield?', but it's not. It's the real

kind of Americana that would never have been taught to

us in either School 4 OR School 5, and that was the

representation of Avenel by which we got our knowledge.

It's vitally sad, in  a way, to be so localized. But as kids,

we managed. I have no idea what kids in Kansas or Kentucky

do, but I'd bet it's about the same. One time my friend Kenny

Lackowicz and I, we'd go home to his empty house often for

lunch  -   whatever we had, we'd just gobble it down and get

back up the street, eventually. We'd found, through some sort

of 4th grade self-chemistry, that baking soda  - which his

mother kept in the kitchen  -  would fizz up big time if

set-to with water, in whatever concentration it was. Kenny

knew all this stuff, he'd worked it out. I wasn't that way, didn't

care for formulas and prescriptions  -  anyway, he'd set up

some weird thing whereby by letting a certain amount of

water drip into something he'd set up there, it would eventually

load up with water, tip itself over, and fall the water into the

baking soda, also set up, beneath it, at which point this

big (to us) fizzing, steaming oddball pile of baking soda

muck would smoke itself off, or something. He'd had it

figured to take about 4 minutes for the cup to fill and the

smoke-a-mania to begin. We treated the entire zany idea like

we were building an atomic bomb or something. We finished

up, he set it running, the water and all, and we took off

running, high-tailing it back to school, with the knowledge

that, in some four minutes, our little baking soda bomb thing

would have set itself off inside his house. Whatever. That

was our thrill  -  I never did get there to find out what the

damages were  -  but I figure there were none. Also, one

other thing with Kenny  -  in my Kindergarten class photo,

I'm the kid in the dumb little tie and the busted up and

scabbed lower and upper lips. A day or two before the

photo date, I got whacked in the face with the swing from

Kenny's swing set in the back yard, when he launched himself

off of it at high speed  -  sort of like broad-jumping, but

swing-propelled and flying through the air. We'd measure

our landing spots off against each other. Well this time the

loose flying swing went somehow awry and smashed me

big-time, right in the face, busting up my lips and face.

So, in the picture I look just like a pugilist; somebody's

bruised sparring partner, just like my Father was once,

in old Bayonne. Yep, the apple and the tree, falling

again, not too far from one another, like they say.

-

It's funny how the mind remembers things. Later on, 

far past the time, I suddenly find myself remembering 

things, of no real import, from youth. The stuff I did 

yesterday, still and quite vivid, is always there, but 

this other material seems to float up, through some 

chinks or cracks in the armor, and resurface all these 

years later without any real control by me over or upon 

it. I don't feel compromised by this, it just makes me 

quite curious - what's going on, what's underway. My 

own theory (unfortunately) is that while the mind slowly 

deconstructs itself, begins falling slowly apart, it 

fragments things, sets them loose, and they somehow 

filter up and out, or whatever directional imperative the

mind uses. One of the fine uses of being a writer, after 

many years and much intent practicing of the craft - prose, 

poetry, stories, memoirs, what have you, even drawing captions - 

is that these can be savored, examined, listened to and used 

and re-crafted. It's only the idiot who loses it altogether, the 

babbling old-timer with abstracted and loose memories swiftly 

blasting off into the ether. What is this life anyway, perhaps, 

but an unconscious mixing of all these blasted-off pieces of 

 other people's life re-made into the contortions we then find 

ourselves dealing with - the meanings and definitions of our 

everyday existences. I don't know. I actually don't think it is 

so, but so what? My own memories - a different category - I 

accept and deal with. Luis Aparicio, I believe of the Baltimore 

 Orioles, about 1958, and another Aparicio, a brother, maybe 

a Ken, somewhere else, playing. The two Boyer brothers; Ken, 

a third baseman of renown for the NY Yankees in that same 

period, right up to the 60's, early, and his brother too, Ken, 

playing somewhere else. Minnie Minosa, Moose Skowren, 

\Lew Burdette, of the Pittsurgh Pirates, I think. A vicious 

World Series sometime back about then too, Pirates and 

Yankees, '58, again I don't know, where many of these 

names clashed. Some sort of epic baseball battle. Red 

Shoendienst, Ted Klazewski and Don Clendenon. Like a 

baseball card hall of fame, or a gum-flat assortment 

of names and ideas, all this sticks around. I don't know 

why. Names linger. Not just baseball either. Bernard 

Baruch, Adlai Stevenson, dying on the street in London,

 I think; Robert Lowell, dying in a taxicab, I think. Hemingway, 

blowing his brains out. Christine Keeler, some British 

sex scandal, John Profumo. It's a riot. It's upon everything - 

my own life a wild, blown-out assortment of abstracted 

names and beings seen only by a child, but somehow 

absorbed. Marianne Moore at her endless Mets games. 

I could go on; but I'll simply stop myself right here. I'm 

sure you too have your own lists. It's like, as a youngster 

sick in my parent's bed and home from school for some 

days, I'd drag down the huge family bible, all those glossy 

and idealized pictures and stories, and get to portions of 

Genesis and other places which were nothing but lists 

and lists of names and begots and begats. I never 

understood that stuff; wanted to jump and run. But I 

can see the precise, infantilism involved just as much 

as not. A determination to make valid the claims and 

lineages of the people within the story the narrative of 

which you were trying to control. One has to show 

 complete and exact mastery of name and place and 

subject in order to make convincing twaddle instead 

of just twaddle. I read once where novelists, it was 

 said, go through old graveyards finding names for 

their characters. Maybe that's true, there are some 

good ones and some ordinary ones too - but mostly 

they are, in fact, pretty dated. I can't remember the 

last 'modern' book I read with a character named, 

say, Jedediah, though there is Jedediah Purdy to 

reckon with, even if he's not a 'character'. Maybe 

a run through old baseball rosters would work just 

as well. Except for the weird nicknames, things 

like Pee Wee and Speedy and Gopher and Lick.

-

I always sort of lived my life outside of definitions, 

 and I never knew why. It wasn't the sort of thing 

I could put my finger on. When people died, I never 

missed them. I could never get involved with people's 

 illnesses or sorrows. Just didn't matter to me, wasn't 

real, had no 'necessity'. As a youngster I could blow 

all that off, run right by it; but later on as I grew older 

I started wondering about it, why it as so. I may have 

mentioned already - I actually do forget - by one time 

I somehow managed to say something to my father 

like 'all the good people are dead', or something like 

that. He'd asked who it was that I had regard for, or 

something. He couldn't figure that out at all, but he 

too just let it go. What I meant to say was that it 

seemed to me that any people of real import - the 

ones with the 'ideas' and things by which we'd built 

society, had already all long ago died. He sort of took 

it as an affront to those living, as if I was beholden to 

them, I was duty-bound to respect and select someone 

from among the living with whom to gauge the bywords 

 of my time. He always took everything wrong, and got 

offended by everything, or so it seemed. And maybe, 

just as well, I always said everything wrong. Anyway, 

I hated the world and just wanted to run and hide - 

which is sort of how I ended up in the seminary.

-

When I got there, everything seemed different. 

It seemed sacred and holy, secretive and quiet, 

reserved and reclusive. It seemed, at the least, to 

be a place which allowed and expected an interior 

life and gave over long periods of time for which to 

have that happen. I'd never seen that anywhere else. 

All the other fictive stuff of which we were supposed 

to believe and fall all over ourselves with, that was 

okay, doing all that was easy enough and passable. 

It was a trade-off that never bothered me. I'd never 

seen anyplace else that didn't mind if you went inside, 

way inside, yourself - and they'd allow you to use any 

excuse of 'religious' purpose to get away with it. It was 

 like a philosophy book always open - no one knew what 

I was ever 'really' thinking; they all just figured I was 

within the program and thinking all that crap through. 

Fact was, I couldn't have cared less for all that rosary 

and Holy Mary and sacred heart and Jesus the Savior 

stuff. They were always going on about something - 

downright pitiful and stupid mostly - but I could just let 

it roll through me without too big a fuss. And it wasn't 

even that I was thinking of girls - that wasn't so difficult 

to forget about, even though I did think about them, in 

a simple way. What can you expect when this place was

way out in the sand-woods of a faraway pineland and 

there'd be girls' underwears and bras and stuff hanging 

from trees, as I did already mention, signifying some local 

boy's Saturday night car-conquest of some girl's virtue. 

The rules of the boy's clubs were that you hung her 

panties on a branch of the tree where you'd had her. 

Weird, frightful custom, but, whatever. I guess some 

girls just brought spares since they already knew this 

stuff was going to happen. We track-team runners and 

meditative walkers and wanderers through the woods, 

or at least me, had a hard enough time figuring out the 

'virgin' in Virgin Mary, and then that difficulty was 

compounded by these spectacles defaming all our 

ideas of what was really 'Life' and its Godly happenings. 

What a bungle it all was. And then, to make it worse, 

we'd have to learn about the 'Passion' of Christ and 

recite 'ejaculations' - what the hell? 

What was a kid to do?