griddlecakes

Sometimes she is the mirror, bright!
But oh what might lie behind her silvered
laughter? only the dissolution of the
mission, only the one chance to run
from the final dismembering of who
we were originally. Smells like buttered
toast here today. I yearn for sausages
bursting with fat, surrounded by the
pickled cabbage, a strange bread
the manger for this sacrifice. I see
clearly the way I hid this entire time
with smoke and bourbon and too
much vodka, too many years. Nothing
remains of that once possible cartographer;
he threw his compass away and watched
the woman's graceless destruction.
Which one you ask, the mirror bright?
No that version of myself became
someone valuable in her own game
and so divined her place outside
of time and space. Lucky bitch. Or
worse now, living with a child but not
the one that was to be the gate, does
she know the memory of her plan
detailed in dream song the redhaired
woman below the tree and me still
screaming as I bleed and burn,
the harvest king returned to her
in the night, where she can still
feel my face and know the minutes
passing? Or, rather, past? And is
that howling the blank recognition
of our banal and ordinary pain?

This piece, as turgid and obtuse as it is, is still one of my favorite poems. And it does talk about a sort of romanticised longterm vision of being. There is a concept at work here that certain people in my life have been in it before, over long periods of time. An old idea, but one that seems truer and truer to me as I go on, sorting out the universe and discarding most of Phil Dick's ideas for my own. Certainly the "woman's graceless destruction" is meant to refer to Alison Gaughan's destruction of me, romantically. The cartographer reference also means me, by way of the Keye Luke on Mars poems written twenty years before. The child that was meant to be the gate means the child I thought I was meant to have with Alison Gaughan. She did eventually have a child, quite late in her life (43).

discarded identity

Now.
(______), you primal sad sack, bald,
still married to the adequate but barren girl,
(barren by choice I am told)
inhabited by what fear she may have known
early on your life a dream of golems and
girls both elvis and lied von der erde
the subtle march of our own deceptions
hacking away in the forest of subconscious
memory who you once were and who
I still am and who twice-born though he
may be is the great wellesian actor who
has claimed your hours as blood across
the decades. Chump you are and, truth now,
did you fuck the witch? and does
your woman know? How many hidden
things are in this picture? Where's Gary?
For one. Where's the monument to the
house burned down on second street
perhaps for fun He played that banjo
badly in that time now he feels the
keyboard swallowing up the remainder
of days, thinking hard about not thinking
about those disappearing leaves of
his previous life. All over, all done now.
Placed in the wooden box, the river
water seeping in, the scratchy pages
not quite right the one on top the Great
American Highway Speech oh the cassette
of that on the back porch on Washington
Street in the spring of 1979 I can still
hear your drunken syllables calling out
for patriotism and fun for the glory of
an American scientist and engineer
as seen from space well you would
know about that wouldn't you? Once
the leader, the maker of decisions. Now
the shill for those who run the business
of education and in this slightly comical
state in this latest absurdist version
of the good old usa. How are you
going to find your way back? I know.
You're not.