Who can stop us from taking an address or two down
Not to use now, but for end times, when the shit explodes?
Nothing can stop us. Write down that address, and wait.
What can it profit a man to let the foe slip from his paws?
Love demands reckoning, at least one good bloody day of it.
And love is not the love of fellow man. Love is the sword
Driving the money-lenders from the temple
Protruding from the mouth like an expired ATM card.
Love is smiting the Amalekites to every man
Cruising this neighborhood in my unsightly Neon
(Not mind you Subaru or Beamer)
My skunk’s nose wedged in every cookie jar.
But I am not the child with his nose pressed
Against the sweet-shop window in the grey of winter.
But I am most certainly the bloom of summer months,
Fleet Mercury and ruddy Mars and Cyclops,
Alfalfa with his sling-shot in his pocket
Stirring up the blue-haired ladies during tea-time,
Ungainly but energetic, stumbling through the yard.
***************************************
The first frost of the season, the temperatures dropping.
What is the spot on this soft liquid crystal screen
That I cannot scrape away with my fingernail?
Out, damned spot, soiling the blue vibrating
From the operating system, always on or asleep.
The Valley News called. The newspapers are hurting.
The editor’s seat is shaky but warm, and the desk-lamps burn
Through the wintry evenings. Only office windows betray
The presence of the city. Come and go the cruise liners,
The volumes of the buildings like orthogonal cubes
Until you think how they stand in night their real state .
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
May 23, 2010 Sunday
A leader who can funnel the indignation of the crowd and give that indignation a single voice, a name, who can claim to take the country back but exactly what is this country for which the leader makes a claim.
A leader who waffles haplessly in the effort to appear judicious and balanced may lose the election but at least is not shown the hangman’s noose.
****************************
These exercises are as dry as dust he admitted in the private notebook he kept for himself and which was at this very date his only outlet for both personal doubt and reflection. He found himself lapidary at times, running on about topics that couldn’t possibly interest others, such as how to capture the lint accumulated in the dryer’s basket, instructions that read as follows: after removing the basket, cover your hand with a woolen sock and run it down the chute to capture as much lint as possible, then from the basket itself, pick a corner of the layer of lint and begin to roll it into a clump that you continue to rub across the screen, picking up more lint because, after all, since like attracts like, likewise lint attracts lint. Not discard the lint ball and throw the sock into the hamper, and hope that lint has not accumulated in the exhaust pipe. And if you can, as the sun lifts the leaves and pulls the masses into the roads and footpaths, drawing them into festivals and dirt track races, his thought took subterranean courses, among the collisions of stone, quartz and shale, his personal theaters were beer-cellars, and when the animals left their burrows to gambol through the forest, he replaced them. His favorite breakfasts had the texture of leaves and stems, for dinner he’d take the legume over the lettuce-leaf, for him the tuber of the carrot o the convolutions of the brassicae over the fruit or flower, like Leopold Bloom, the pork kidney over the flank steak, the tongue but not the pig’s knuckle, the gizzard not the hot wing, and among drugs, the depressant and pain-killer over the stimulant and psychotropic agent; for vacations, spelunking over swimming Caribbean beaches, no matter how many kept women or gorgeous gangster’s molls lay topless on the sand as menus read but not tasted. By dawn he failed to feel the leaden weights of sleep fall upon his eyes, sweating in his cocoon of bedclothes, the brands mixed, Martha Stewart with thrift store chic or go-to-hell practicality. His propensity was for Plutonian depths in which clear and separate entities could not be distinguished, worlds in which flickering shapes penetrated, mingled with others: had he been banished to the sky, he would hope to inhabit a raincloud sailing over the Andes or the least inhabited of the Himalayas, not (please!) over deserts or the thirsty gardens outside Los Angeles. The shovel he drove into the stony soil was nearly shattered, as if the stones had been spontaneously generated by the clay that had once been Adam, meaning from the clay. Against the shade and marble veins quarried only hillsides away shattered the pick of his mattock.
A leader who waffles haplessly in the effort to appear judicious and balanced may lose the election but at least is not shown the hangman’s noose.
****************************
These exercises are as dry as dust he admitted in the private notebook he kept for himself and which was at this very date his only outlet for both personal doubt and reflection. He found himself lapidary at times, running on about topics that couldn’t possibly interest others, such as how to capture the lint accumulated in the dryer’s basket, instructions that read as follows: after removing the basket, cover your hand with a woolen sock and run it down the chute to capture as much lint as possible, then from the basket itself, pick a corner of the layer of lint and begin to roll it into a clump that you continue to rub across the screen, picking up more lint because, after all, since like attracts like, likewise lint attracts lint. Not discard the lint ball and throw the sock into the hamper, and hope that lint has not accumulated in the exhaust pipe. And if you can, as the sun lifts the leaves and pulls the masses into the roads and footpaths, drawing them into festivals and dirt track races, his thought took subterranean courses, among the collisions of stone, quartz and shale, his personal theaters were beer-cellars, and when the animals left their burrows to gambol through the forest, he replaced them. His favorite breakfasts had the texture of leaves and stems, for dinner he’d take the legume over the lettuce-leaf, for him the tuber of the carrot o the convolutions of the brassicae over the fruit or flower, like Leopold Bloom, the pork kidney over the flank steak, the tongue but not the pig’s knuckle, the gizzard not the hot wing, and among drugs, the depressant and pain-killer over the stimulant and psychotropic agent; for vacations, spelunking over swimming Caribbean beaches, no matter how many kept women or gorgeous gangster’s molls lay topless on the sand as menus read but not tasted. By dawn he failed to feel the leaden weights of sleep fall upon his eyes, sweating in his cocoon of bedclothes, the brands mixed, Martha Stewart with thrift store chic or go-to-hell practicality. His propensity was for Plutonian depths in which clear and separate entities could not be distinguished, worlds in which flickering shapes penetrated, mingled with others: had he been banished to the sky, he would hope to inhabit a raincloud sailing over the Andes or the least inhabited of the Himalayas, not (please!) over deserts or the thirsty gardens outside Los Angeles. The shovel he drove into the stony soil was nearly shattered, as if the stones had been spontaneously generated by the clay that had once been Adam, meaning from the clay. Against the shade and marble veins quarried only hillsides away shattered the pick of his mattock.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Feb. 6 2010 Sun.
There is a frame and eyeglass and rectangular lens by which to view the contents of the frame. Call it Art, call it Context, what you will.
Inside the frame a note-sized sheet of vellum paper, of the creamy, linen sort for invitations requiring RSVPs, or table napkin on which a revered author scribbled some notes, perhaps a stanza or an opening line to a story finished elsewhere.
Someone, an author himself, an unfinished novel under his belt, scrutinizes the table napkin scribbling or the vellum fragment nested in the frame with the eyeglass and rectangular lens. His monograph depends upon his tracking the source of this fragment, whose hand this fragment fell into.
Worlds hinge upon this monograph of words, disproving other sources also, firestorms inside the academy. Let’s retrace the steps, change the conversation.
With what I find beneath this eyeglass, I stir the sluggish pot. So my findings resound.
Inside the frame a note-sized sheet of vellum paper, of the creamy, linen sort for invitations requiring RSVPs, or table napkin on which a revered author scribbled some notes, perhaps a stanza or an opening line to a story finished elsewhere.
Someone, an author himself, an unfinished novel under his belt, scrutinizes the table napkin scribbling or the vellum fragment nested in the frame with the eyeglass and rectangular lens. His monograph depends upon his tracking the source of this fragment, whose hand this fragment fell into.
Worlds hinge upon this monograph of words, disproving other sources also, firestorms inside the academy. Let’s retrace the steps, change the conversation.
With what I find beneath this eyeglass, I stir the sluggish pot. So my findings resound.
May 29, 2010 Saturday
The house cat who can swallow the bird, softening the bones within its jaw, can live, can learn to live away from the house, can lose its master among the fields, stalking in its moonlit happy valley, scratching its claws on the bark of fallen tree-trunks and branches, testing its strength among the woodland debris, the expanse of hay and fallen leaves, his whole creation yawning before him.
Pine for October’s gothic enclosures already, valleys and overcast skies with bats swooping over the traveler’s head after sunset. Who can count how many bicycles in retrospect caromed down Academy Road during the fitful peak of day while I only watched them, a spectator at my improvised work-desk, also breakfast table. The woods were behind me. Far back a pioneer’s cabin burned down, a hermitage that could have doubled as a military barracks, so Spartan and scornful of modernity were its inhabitants, sending their sons to the foreign wars of each generation, their Protestant heritage refusing to soften before the spectacle of eastern caravans and oriental covertness and obsequies. About the deadly follies of the Asiatics, they can only sigh and hope for a swift and brutal Viking conversion, modified naturally by American-mandated tastes for consumer items, a volley of choices you are free to refuse as an individual but not to expel as a collective force. And the sons.
They ironed the kinks of bohemian inclinations from their sons at a very early date, although the inheritance was humble and the financial ties light. Any waywardness or sign of easy virtue among their daughters the mother stigmatized upon first hearing, swiftly and brutally. The women were pretty, severe and disapproving of the mores of the time, their opinions more inflexible than their spouses. They wore their hair au natural and never wore makeup, a trait that one might mistakenly associate with hippies. But now the house was gone and the remnants were in tents and storage sheds after the embers from the posts and beams had cooled in the meadow where the frost had settled.
I found a small plant, spongy with ridges as if the stem were trying to leaf but couldn’t, spread over a rock and growing in the lawn of the front yard where the grass had browned out. I brought a handful of these plants to the local nursery. “A succulent” judged the proprietor “in the same family as cactus.” But the species he could not identify, only that these plants suck water from the ground as the cactus does, although they lack the thorns that might keep them from desperately thirsty predators. No animal, bird or rodent, preyed on these succulents, no matter how vulnerable, how tender they were. As phallic as the field of mushrooms making the girls in Tess giggle, their skirts tied up. In swift propagation upon the lawn.
A green lawn says you’re home. A brown lawn says sweet home is imperiled. But a yellow, blanched-out one says here is the desolation that visits you sooner or later. Your yard labor only delays the obvious. The hermit kingdom that begins and ends as a legend in your own mind. As he looked at the dwarf pines in the back yard and beyond them the dirty chocolate lab that barked before the apartment block, the oparking lot littered with cars parked haphazardly, neither in parakllel nor in perpendicular fashion, the trucks of roofers and odd-job men he thought of the pines on the coast of Epirus, the rocky inhospitable inlets near the straits of Corfu, and the rock face above which the pines towered and barred the stranger from entering the hermit kingdom with its funny tongues, its insoluble customs and tribal divisions as mysterious to outsiders as Masonic or Eleusinian rituals, as the gold sheafs of grain decorating a lady’s throat in a jeweled sarcophagus on which the jewels have been pulled from their various sockets and clasps, he hoped his Bosnian pines would grow one day as high as those pines crowding out the quotidian accidents outside this precious border—it was the border, not the land within the vborder or the land without the border that was precious, thast indeed was what he paid for: the gate before the deserted village, nature’s gate, but it would eb years before the pines would grow beyond the size of bonsai, or the final efforts just on the treeline oif the mountainside he would shrink in their triumph against the orbits of the sun, and the disappearance of the barking of the chocolate dog and the dirty termination of the street in rubble and fieldstones—as he breathed his last, the tree-tops touched the sun that set beyond them.
Pine for October’s gothic enclosures already, valleys and overcast skies with bats swooping over the traveler’s head after sunset. Who can count how many bicycles in retrospect caromed down Academy Road during the fitful peak of day while I only watched them, a spectator at my improvised work-desk, also breakfast table. The woods were behind me. Far back a pioneer’s cabin burned down, a hermitage that could have doubled as a military barracks, so Spartan and scornful of modernity were its inhabitants, sending their sons to the foreign wars of each generation, their Protestant heritage refusing to soften before the spectacle of eastern caravans and oriental covertness and obsequies. About the deadly follies of the Asiatics, they can only sigh and hope for a swift and brutal Viking conversion, modified naturally by American-mandated tastes for consumer items, a volley of choices you are free to refuse as an individual but not to expel as a collective force. And the sons.
They ironed the kinks of bohemian inclinations from their sons at a very early date, although the inheritance was humble and the financial ties light. Any waywardness or sign of easy virtue among their daughters the mother stigmatized upon first hearing, swiftly and brutally. The women were pretty, severe and disapproving of the mores of the time, their opinions more inflexible than their spouses. They wore their hair au natural and never wore makeup, a trait that one might mistakenly associate with hippies. But now the house was gone and the remnants were in tents and storage sheds after the embers from the posts and beams had cooled in the meadow where the frost had settled.
I found a small plant, spongy with ridges as if the stem were trying to leaf but couldn’t, spread over a rock and growing in the lawn of the front yard where the grass had browned out. I brought a handful of these plants to the local nursery. “A succulent” judged the proprietor “in the same family as cactus.” But the species he could not identify, only that these plants suck water from the ground as the cactus does, although they lack the thorns that might keep them from desperately thirsty predators. No animal, bird or rodent, preyed on these succulents, no matter how vulnerable, how tender they were. As phallic as the field of mushrooms making the girls in Tess giggle, their skirts tied up. In swift propagation upon the lawn.
A green lawn says you’re home. A brown lawn says sweet home is imperiled. But a yellow, blanched-out one says here is the desolation that visits you sooner or later. Your yard labor only delays the obvious. The hermit kingdom that begins and ends as a legend in your own mind. As he looked at the dwarf pines in the back yard and beyond them the dirty chocolate lab that barked before the apartment block, the oparking lot littered with cars parked haphazardly, neither in parakllel nor in perpendicular fashion, the trucks of roofers and odd-job men he thought of the pines on the coast of Epirus, the rocky inhospitable inlets near the straits of Corfu, and the rock face above which the pines towered and barred the stranger from entering the hermit kingdom with its funny tongues, its insoluble customs and tribal divisions as mysterious to outsiders as Masonic or Eleusinian rituals, as the gold sheafs of grain decorating a lady’s throat in a jeweled sarcophagus on which the jewels have been pulled from their various sockets and clasps, he hoped his Bosnian pines would grow one day as high as those pines crowding out the quotidian accidents outside this precious border—it was the border, not the land within the vborder or the land without the border that was precious, thast indeed was what he paid for: the gate before the deserted village, nature’s gate, but it would eb years before the pines would grow beyond the size of bonsai, or the final efforts just on the treeline oif the mountainside he would shrink in their triumph against the orbits of the sun, and the disappearance of the barking of the chocolate dog and the dirty termination of the street in rubble and fieldstones—as he breathed his last, the tree-tops touched the sun that set beyond them.
Monday, February 21, 2011
Jan 19 2020 -- May 10 2010
January 10 2010 Sunday
A singing vine
A buzzing fly
And a ladybug
Collapsing itself
To a spotted dewdrop
Settled within
The waxy surface
of the lampshade
Chains that hold
the swings in air
Have not rusted
Nor has the slide
Shelter is unnatural
Upright lean-to or pagodas.
Feb. 21 Sunday
As I rode the elliptical training machine, the television played the same infomercial loop (it never ends!) for a Time-Life-Warner 60s soft rock CD. Bobby Goldsboro, whose face in digitized format underwent silvery luminescent alterations, resembled an animated corpse with a toupee. His face looked made of molded collagen suffused with an argentine, almost lunar glow beneath the wig of black, a plastic helmet with a pompadour for a visor. The most painful soft-rock songs continued to play as I treaded the elliptical. My heart-rate soared. I couldn’t find the remote. Finally, after listening to these lachrymal tunes for nearly 15 minutes of exertion, I leapt at the console to touch a button that might turn the television off as Jimmy Dean sang Big John, no one in the gym to scold or to help me. But I couldn’t turn it off or change the channel. For the second time, Herb Alpert appeared, indicating that the loop was re-beginning. And the apparition of Bobby Goldsboro appeared as well, singing Watching Scotty Grow. I bore with it another ten minutes, which recalled how much I’d recoiled from the top 40 as a youngster. A swim meet tool place in the building, all the parking spaces taken. I would book a flight to a place where this music never played.
May 9 2010 Sunday
The violets of the flowers mingled with the violets of the dusk,
The sun was setting behind the branches of the flowering shrubs,
And the head-lamps of revolving cars lit the space between the rungs
Of the park bench, and the iron fence of the park elongated into shadows
While a confounding number of footpaths lead the pedestrian
To the sidewalk of the square, whether to the City Hall steps or the post office
With its Jeffersonian dome and rotunda, or the white church,
Or to the zone for bars and restaurants, as ordained by the town council.
An ordained minister does not intervene in the tribulations of his flock,
But presides above them like the sun that sets in violet
But in vermillion rises.
****************************************
A sun has not arrived to evaporate the dew from grass that must be cut unless the lawn reverts into a field. How roots behave, clutching a sphere of soil when the weed is pulled from earth by the stem, while taproots investigate the clay.
A breeze connected to a storm-front to the west shakes the trees, shudders the grass-blades, and the saw-toothed leaves of the dandelion, which have already shed their spokes. The needles of the conifers turn brown at their tips, and the cones do not ooze sap.
A king is crowned by his people, an emperor is coronated. Once upon a time Toyota made a Corona; now only Corollas are available, the former a crown, the latter a halo, an aura about the crown. The halo’s color denotes angelic rank, a crown of thorns is abnegation, as would be one of nails. From the skull cap radiates enlightenment; never touch the pate of an oriental child, or the septum at the top of the skull.
May 10, 2010
Planted: one small Alberta spruce on a slope
Between the frayed juniper and the arbor vitae
With its already dessicated brown and orange tassels.
Many small stones, potato-shaped, or the size of walnuts.
How do the taproots of an evergreen
Find their way down, soil so inhospitable
It’s killing off a towering maple.
The towering maple is dying, its middle trunk
Hollowed out by woodpeckers and ants.
Meanwhile, the freshly mowed lawn
Doesn’t brown out.
A singing vine
A buzzing fly
And a ladybug
Collapsing itself
To a spotted dewdrop
Settled within
The waxy surface
of the lampshade
Chains that hold
the swings in air
Have not rusted
Nor has the slide
Shelter is unnatural
Upright lean-to or pagodas.
Feb. 21 Sunday
As I rode the elliptical training machine, the television played the same infomercial loop (it never ends!) for a Time-Life-Warner 60s soft rock CD. Bobby Goldsboro, whose face in digitized format underwent silvery luminescent alterations, resembled an animated corpse with a toupee. His face looked made of molded collagen suffused with an argentine, almost lunar glow beneath the wig of black, a plastic helmet with a pompadour for a visor. The most painful soft-rock songs continued to play as I treaded the elliptical. My heart-rate soared. I couldn’t find the remote. Finally, after listening to these lachrymal tunes for nearly 15 minutes of exertion, I leapt at the console to touch a button that might turn the television off as Jimmy Dean sang Big John, no one in the gym to scold or to help me. But I couldn’t turn it off or change the channel. For the second time, Herb Alpert appeared, indicating that the loop was re-beginning. And the apparition of Bobby Goldsboro appeared as well, singing Watching Scotty Grow. I bore with it another ten minutes, which recalled how much I’d recoiled from the top 40 as a youngster. A swim meet tool place in the building, all the parking spaces taken. I would book a flight to a place where this music never played.
May 9 2010 Sunday
The violets of the flowers mingled with the violets of the dusk,
The sun was setting behind the branches of the flowering shrubs,
And the head-lamps of revolving cars lit the space between the rungs
Of the park bench, and the iron fence of the park elongated into shadows
While a confounding number of footpaths lead the pedestrian
To the sidewalk of the square, whether to the City Hall steps or the post office
With its Jeffersonian dome and rotunda, or the white church,
Or to the zone for bars and restaurants, as ordained by the town council.
An ordained minister does not intervene in the tribulations of his flock,
But presides above them like the sun that sets in violet
But in vermillion rises.
****************************************
A sun has not arrived to evaporate the dew from grass that must be cut unless the lawn reverts into a field. How roots behave, clutching a sphere of soil when the weed is pulled from earth by the stem, while taproots investigate the clay.
A breeze connected to a storm-front to the west shakes the trees, shudders the grass-blades, and the saw-toothed leaves of the dandelion, which have already shed their spokes. The needles of the conifers turn brown at their tips, and the cones do not ooze sap.
A king is crowned by his people, an emperor is coronated. Once upon a time Toyota made a Corona; now only Corollas are available, the former a crown, the latter a halo, an aura about the crown. The halo’s color denotes angelic rank, a crown of thorns is abnegation, as would be one of nails. From the skull cap radiates enlightenment; never touch the pate of an oriental child, or the septum at the top of the skull.
May 10, 2010
Planted: one small Alberta spruce on a slope
Between the frayed juniper and the arbor vitae
With its already dessicated brown and orange tassels.
Many small stones, potato-shaped, or the size of walnuts.
How do the taproots of an evergreen
Find their way down, soil so inhospitable
It’s killing off a towering maple.
The towering maple is dying, its middle trunk
Hollowed out by woodpeckers and ants.
Meanwhile, the freshly mowed lawn
Doesn’t brown out.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
February 17 2005
Edge, on edge, edgy, I’m edgy, and a stand-up comic describes his style as edgy because he curses a lot. Is edge some four-letter words, is it life or death? Is edge pushing to extremes? Is edge danger, or a challenge to conventionality? My teeth are on edge, the molars grind, the pulp’s exposed. The paper cut, plain photocopy paper, sharp as a saw blade, though not as strong. The sickle blade, the sharp tongue disclosing truth. Oh no! How corny to upset old ladies at coffee-klatches! Undermine the peace! Yet that’s edgy, son. Your rapier-sharp wit could uncover a gold mine of unchallenged assumptions holding a class of people together like glue. Knock down the jambs, edgy guy! Dress for the role, black leather or tutus. Show yourself.
Things slant a certain way, and other things slant another way. And there’s a point where all lines converge but it’s not easy to find, and the worst thing is the point changes with the movement of the eye. There are an infinite number of these points towards which all lines of perspective converge, and the points lie at an infinite distance. The lines come closer, but they never actually meet. At this point the eye sees the point towards which all converges without the point really being there, so the eye makes up a story to bring the story of the nearly converging lines to a close, and so in the distance the perspective closes: everything is eventually drawn into a vortex.
An infinite number of points in a sphere of an indefinite diameter. Who can say what this diameter is? 20 meters or miles? Does it only extend as far as human sight? How do the short-sighted fit into this picture? How about the farsighted, the ones most likely to see a moose among raspberry bushes and bramble, or the street signs for more than a block away.
But on the other end, do these lines of sight pass or engulf you, extending behind you wherever you’re looking? Do they include you as a wave includes? Or do they simply pass you? You seem to be the tangent they happen to touch before diverging. Everywhere I look objects placed at different angles confuse me, like cinderblocks accidentally dumped in a parking-lot. The little speakers –the tweeters – are pointed in one direction, the woofer in another direction. They each remain in separate, irreconcilable lines of perspective, until I make them point the same way, because for best effect, they have to reach my ears at once.
Things slant a certain way, and other things slant another way. And there’s a point where all lines converge but it’s not easy to find, and the worst thing is the point changes with the movement of the eye. There are an infinite number of these points towards which all lines of perspective converge, and the points lie at an infinite distance. The lines come closer, but they never actually meet. At this point the eye sees the point towards which all converges without the point really being there, so the eye makes up a story to bring the story of the nearly converging lines to a close, and so in the distance the perspective closes: everything is eventually drawn into a vortex.
An infinite number of points in a sphere of an indefinite diameter. Who can say what this diameter is? 20 meters or miles? Does it only extend as far as human sight? How do the short-sighted fit into this picture? How about the farsighted, the ones most likely to see a moose among raspberry bushes and bramble, or the street signs for more than a block away.
But on the other end, do these lines of sight pass or engulf you, extending behind you wherever you’re looking? Do they include you as a wave includes? Or do they simply pass you? You seem to be the tangent they happen to touch before diverging. Everywhere I look objects placed at different angles confuse me, like cinderblocks accidentally dumped in a parking-lot. The little speakers –the tweeters – are pointed in one direction, the woofer in another direction. They each remain in separate, irreconcilable lines of perspective, until I make them point the same way, because for best effect, they have to reach my ears at once.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
9/13/2003 -- 9/14/2003
9/13/2003
You could walk a tightrope over the land corridor that leads to the Free State of Danzig and you wouldn’t please anyone, dodging the border guards while ordering strudel from the local bakeries over your cell phone, and you don’t even own a headset. This had better be good, considering the hits you’ve already taken.
When you pause you deliberate, and when you deliberate you reflect, and when you reflect you have that nasty habit of rearranging events that you can never actually change ad infinitum, because you are at a place that you would not wish upon your worst enemy. Who is your enemy, do you need one as governments and nationalities do to distinguish their integrity from others. The faceless incommunicability of the ones you’ve never touched, were perhaps too afraid to go after, collide with or push through one another, through one another’s bodies in a manner one could not confess to the priest or to the marriage counselor. The house of the dead is the house of the ghosts of the past of the living, the past selves of the living with which you were familiar and to whom you could breath fire and do nothing wrong. The past self of a living person is a ghost invoked by print media. The younger self discontinuous with the present self.
The steps and ladders of the music as it proceeds to some conclusion, a few air-tight spaces in which separate occurrences independent of another occurs, the sum total of the effect being spell-binding in its alleged unity, for which you have not been trained nor accustomed to catch, a rhythmic ladder of strings or wing-beats against a sun that seems to cool and disperse its fire in the sea, an egg yolk in the white of the sky. These various but intact file spaces conceived by equally proportioned notes, a furor of fiddles, terraces of the concert hall to approximate the angelic thrones, molding of blanc mange the herringbone clouds, the equally spaced studs of the ceiling of velveteen the firmament that in retrospect seems paltry when compared to the Superdome roof controlled in the immediate future by a proconsul who wears cowboy boots beneath his pinstripe-suited exterior. A rank smell that wafts into the window from the west.
9/14/2003
A parking garage replaced my early Surrenden St. apartment of over 25 years ago. The cement walls and columns rose through the summer, the din of cranes or giant hammers pulverized the ground. O winter breaks you spun your used vehicle in circles in the parking lot, upon the built up ice. Who cares now if your tires are really skates or the treads of skis the Neolithic man frozen on the side of the Italian Alps might’ve wished he had if he could have seen into the future instead of falling asleep beneath the impending avalanche—crash and boom!—and his fur pelt jacket refuses to keep him from freezing on that mountainside, while the mind in the perishing body thinks identifiable circles before it desiccates over ten millennia, his thatched hut on the lakeside blurry—now the skiers have taken over the polyglot Helvetian village from which he wandered, hunting mastodons or macroceros in the virgin snow nosing to the frozen ground for grass or chestnuts. There’s plenty for everyone, how carry the foison homeward unresolved.
What, might I ask, does that have to do with the price of eggs? A tangent that no one can follow, such as the gloomy mittel-European sloe-eyed philosopher traces with his pointer over an illuminated globe in his darkened classroom, his acolytes planning their career moves on luminous Etch-A-Sketches. How few degrees separate yourself from the social station you desire, commanding armies above a darkening plain while others can hug one another in bouts of indulgent reassurance. As much as they may laugh they know the man with the light pen before the blackboard knows his stuff, knows the hoi polloi cannot know better.
A tightrope walker across the Danzig Corridor
Reflects and falls, rues the day he choose.
Someone always pays for the mistakes
My unrequited crush will shatter into glassy Narcissistic mirrors
When you smell a rat you hear an odd inflection
A paper tiger has a chance of floating on the gulfstream
While those of flesh and blood become extinct.
I walked across the creaking floor to see the time-and-temp clock better.
You could walk a tightrope over the land corridor that leads to the Free State of Danzig and you wouldn’t please anyone, dodging the border guards while ordering strudel from the local bakeries over your cell phone, and you don’t even own a headset. This had better be good, considering the hits you’ve already taken.
When you pause you deliberate, and when you deliberate you reflect, and when you reflect you have that nasty habit of rearranging events that you can never actually change ad infinitum, because you are at a place that you would not wish upon your worst enemy. Who is your enemy, do you need one as governments and nationalities do to distinguish their integrity from others. The faceless incommunicability of the ones you’ve never touched, were perhaps too afraid to go after, collide with or push through one another, through one another’s bodies in a manner one could not confess to the priest or to the marriage counselor. The house of the dead is the house of the ghosts of the past of the living, the past selves of the living with which you were familiar and to whom you could breath fire and do nothing wrong. The past self of a living person is a ghost invoked by print media. The younger self discontinuous with the present self.
The steps and ladders of the music as it proceeds to some conclusion, a few air-tight spaces in which separate occurrences independent of another occurs, the sum total of the effect being spell-binding in its alleged unity, for which you have not been trained nor accustomed to catch, a rhythmic ladder of strings or wing-beats against a sun that seems to cool and disperse its fire in the sea, an egg yolk in the white of the sky. These various but intact file spaces conceived by equally proportioned notes, a furor of fiddles, terraces of the concert hall to approximate the angelic thrones, molding of blanc mange the herringbone clouds, the equally spaced studs of the ceiling of velveteen the firmament that in retrospect seems paltry when compared to the Superdome roof controlled in the immediate future by a proconsul who wears cowboy boots beneath his pinstripe-suited exterior. A rank smell that wafts into the window from the west.
9/14/2003
A parking garage replaced my early Surrenden St. apartment of over 25 years ago. The cement walls and columns rose through the summer, the din of cranes or giant hammers pulverized the ground. O winter breaks you spun your used vehicle in circles in the parking lot, upon the built up ice. Who cares now if your tires are really skates or the treads of skis the Neolithic man frozen on the side of the Italian Alps might’ve wished he had if he could have seen into the future instead of falling asleep beneath the impending avalanche—crash and boom!—and his fur pelt jacket refuses to keep him from freezing on that mountainside, while the mind in the perishing body thinks identifiable circles before it desiccates over ten millennia, his thatched hut on the lakeside blurry—now the skiers have taken over the polyglot Helvetian village from which he wandered, hunting mastodons or macroceros in the virgin snow nosing to the frozen ground for grass or chestnuts. There’s plenty for everyone, how carry the foison homeward unresolved.
What, might I ask, does that have to do with the price of eggs? A tangent that no one can follow, such as the gloomy mittel-European sloe-eyed philosopher traces with his pointer over an illuminated globe in his darkened classroom, his acolytes planning their career moves on luminous Etch-A-Sketches. How few degrees separate yourself from the social station you desire, commanding armies above a darkening plain while others can hug one another in bouts of indulgent reassurance. As much as they may laugh they know the man with the light pen before the blackboard knows his stuff, knows the hoi polloi cannot know better.
A tightrope walker across the Danzig Corridor
Reflects and falls, rues the day he choose.
Someone always pays for the mistakes
My unrequited crush will shatter into glassy Narcissistic mirrors
When you smell a rat you hear an odd inflection
A paper tiger has a chance of floating on the gulfstream
While those of flesh and blood become extinct.
I walked across the creaking floor to see the time-and-temp clock better.
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