you left, again

bitter, later
close to you on the radio
too much alcohol
ashes and sand
playing dolly parton again
making up dumb stories
on a loud edge
trying to remember how
I got here
trying to figure out
how I'm gonna get out
I know you're there somewhere
honey the way the unexplained
heat shows up
those scenes come into
the night my hands
fumble for the pills
on the nightstand
my nausea captured
by another bad dream

the partisan

my words to you keep coming
out upside down I don't like
explanations want only hands
across your small hard body
know full well the disciplines
of these phrases the opacity
of even simple language

don't think its sex though
though it is most assuredly
that that I plan for but it is
still representative of something else
I know I need you to love me
with careful hands and some fear
and I could change your life
completely that would be part
of what I mean that is the end
point of this mosaic I need
to occupy you like myself

but I can't tell you
it would be good for you
I can't even say
it would be good for me
but at least we'd be alive

note

and at your words
in the second part
you deform me
with no special thought
but we come
from our own frames
for our own reasons
and I haven't followed
your love life
for some months now
so it's gone and left
me in a constellation
as the flesh of a star
in tandem my howl and
my plainsong
anger and pleas
for more than sanity
and less than freedom

haunted house

I can't be here
in this haunted house
the ghosts are those of loss
the places I put myself
for people who would not see

the place I came to
the one who never came

the crisis threatens my understanding
lying awake with blonde angel in the wings
remembering her promise and its lie
this bullshit outside of time
that's meant to last outside of death
it means the same (she said)
she said she said
afraid of being hurt
another defensive manuever
she's circling the wagons
there is no way around it at all

you are alcatraz
this is my tunnel to the sea

Well, I spent a lot of the seventies waiting for Alison to show up. And some days and nights, she did. Far too often for my mental health. I kept waiting for her to say we could be together, though we were sort of together. But she had numerous different lives. And I was only part of one of those realities. The problem with this sort of relationship is that eventually it does become a prison. I should note that I have often been suicidal throughout most of my life. Only in the last ten or twelve years have I really not had that possibility on my mental list of incipient actions. True enough. I have made minor attempts to kill myself five or six times along the way. Probably the most serious was the one brought on by the sudden and irrevocable knowledge that my second wife was in love with another man. A difficult moment, but I believe the Lady saved me that day. In any case I don't go there anymore. I know death will come soon enough for me without any actions on my part. Jolly note, eh?

the angelis

the angelis
the burst of light
the bells ring
the multiplication of lives
words arranged by sound
their meanings
nudging genetic origins
kerouac said life
is pain & drank too much
I am reduced to begging
and even that is ignored
there is nothing to do
but taste this sorrow
it isn't your fault
although it is

the world acts like a disease
friends sing me stories
of innocence and experience
everyone secretly creates fame
my guts are torn open
in expiation I fear my sins
but have trouble defining them
sometimes death seems comforting
usually it is an evil angel


So the high point of this meditation is the line about having trouble defining my sins. Later in my life this is less and less of a problem. That is because I spend less intellectual currency pretending an understanding that supports my ego's small goals. This piece also has aspects of my difficult relationship with the entire Scarritt scene that I promoted and kept going for a number of years for no particularly good reason except that I needed to feel important and have some sort of audience for my own work. This piece also references Blake and Kerouac, proving that I have had some sort of actual relationship to actual literature. And again Alison Gaughan is seen as some sort of dark angel who has left me behind in purgatory to pay for these very sins.

nonaligned effort

inside are the chills
words can only remember
snow formed into hills
the angel will not leave
the blood is obscured
in today's freeze
my young friend throws
the drifts aside
for maybe only hours
like the life recorded
in my notebooks
always coming back
these same flaws
I know my blood
my fingers ragged
with nonaligned effort
the dusty keys static
without magic
should you ever know
me better surely
you would phone me?
the sense is like the soft snow
it drifts and comes again
this thought is fleeting


Again a poem that uses snow as a metaphor for the repititious shit of daily existence that interferes with the "magic", which of course would be the creative process. Underlying this sentiment however is the sense that what the narrator knows of a certain relationship is like the soft snow, drifting and returning but the knowledge itself isn't real. This piece is from before I became a hardcore truth addict. In those days, the seventies, we prided ourselves on recognizing that there wasn't necessarily a truth. This allowed us to be ambivalent and take different positions based on our current evaluation of the world through the prism of our own egos. Oh, not everybody did this. Maybe only I did this. Well, me and J., anyway. Everything could change, minute by minute. No matter how much your worked at it, the snow accumulated. All you could do, really, was to lie down in it and spread your arms and legs and leave the image of an angel.

the bright ring of yourself

remembering your hundred disappearances
you'd always return, never sure where you had been
another universe? a lateral area?
the occupation of a hundred hands
the swelling of a thousand pricks

your hundred disappearances I was so used to
could even see those times approaching
but knew you'd be back, with the coat turned up
the collar forming a halo rays of light
from several concurrent suns dancing
into the bright ring of yourself

and you knew I knew
for this you came back
tolerated my provincial planetary existence
you came for those words that were not spoken
you came for your history
you watched me chisel your d-n-a
dispersing shadows
making metal rings of light
double spiralled through the histories

you came for your incarnations
for the old woman you wanted to be
and for the girl child who dances
you came for a cinema of your times
and of all times
this was you

I remember those disappearances now
I remember all the places you went and why
I don't mean I understand
no only that I know or knew some details
of what you are

and now you are really gone
I've still my notebooks with your maps
in them
it is all I ever have anyway
but I remember you and your disappearances
no matter where they've taken you

iceland

no way
no awakening
my hands at reykavich
hesitant on the rook
my friend tells me
he's getting
a new voice
my lover searches
bravely for surfaces
there is a number
to these observations
the story is delayed
but I don't know why
all the out-of-town faces
disappear and reappear
like diffused light
I see someone else
in the mirror
I hear automatic tympani
in my telephone
I remember Gary's novel
is in my ex-wife's typewriter
upstairs in the small room
I use for this work

but
who's breasts do I imagine
in my hands
tonight
you know

Bobby Fisher played a major league chess match in Reykavich, Iceland in the mid 1970s. He won, as I recall. The friend with a new voice was Steven Alfred Dolgin who was once a good friend of mine. Although he only sporadically lived in Springfield, he was a part of the Scarritt scene if only in effect. His girlfriend, Mary Ann Demas, who he fought with on a regular basis, came around quite a bit and she also wrote some pretty decent poems. Also, Nancy Isaacs, who lived down second street with an old friend of Dolgin's came around to talk about him with me. She had a definite yen. We talked about sex quite a lot. A charming girl, really. Of course this poem is primarily about Alison Gaughan. Gary's novel in the typewriter refers to Gary Davidson's remarkable piece, Stuffed, probably the most successful of the novels written in the Scarritt scene in the 1970s. I have a manuscript of it in this very room. Only proper as I did help to type it up. Well, art is hard and love sucks.

the vernier is shot

winds of these prayers paint the flatland of my fathers
my words chill me; no one comforts me
Keye Luke is back on Mars, & the lunar was explored last year
there are no angels in the snow of my front yard
only a photographic image of last year's wings

my hands are finally pale this season
the noise has become interference
it has lost its purity
there is no wisdom in the static
no messages from the yellow man on the red planet

the plains spread away from this door forever
no moon, no stars

When the vernier is shot on an old radio it means the ability to tune the signal has been lost. This poem lists all the conceits from the 70s: Keye Luke, the lunar explored, the snow angel. Photography is represented. The idea of wisdom hidden in the static is an old one. I first used it in the novel It Seems So Long Ago. There was a character in this post nuclear holocaust america who claimed to see the future in the snow on his television. There was no signal to pickup, just the white noise. That character was meant to represent John the Baptist in a novel built on the fifteen mysteries of the rosary. In this piece it represents the abandonment of the author by his muse/partner, Keye Luke. This was written long before Luke's demise, of course. So, this piece is primarily about my relationship with Scarritt, the group, and the idea. People left. People gave up. There is usually a retreat in every campaign.

taken from sleep

you that sang machiavelli patient in october
your hands open your palms down
do you know who I turn to all the time I am dying?

today Jane cut some coriopsis
I looked out her window the one with the cactus plants
remembering how you sequester your visions
in a wide angle lens

Alison and I used to go over to Jane Morrel's house on College, off of Iles, to hang out with Jane. We met Jane in Knoepfle's first poetry class at SSU in the fall of 1972. She was 69 and had had heart surgery fairly recently. She was also one of the truly great poets in town in those days, though we at first thought she'd be another old lady writing flower poems. Well, Jane did write flower poems, some of the most moving stuff I have ever read. Alison always had a specific relationship to Jane; and I was sort of an axis between the two of them. Jane did love Alison and her work, though she worried about her lifestyle. Alison's birthday is in October, the sixth. She talked about reading The Prince when I first knew her.

postcard of regret

the train is gone now
alien heartchild—
understanding seems circular
in the morning

your features are only approximate
in my annotations; desire is just
a cousin at an early age

and so many of your words
are like the lead-coated bird
under Greenstreet's knife

shall we dance
in the pages of another book?
shall we sleep?

Sidney Greentstreet played Casper Gutman in the version of the Maltese Falcon made famous by Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor. The falcon has long been an iconic image for me, of the illusory quality of all desire. This poem is again a commentary on my failed relationship with Alison Gaughan. The final line in the Falcon, when Sam Spade is asked what the statue is, he replies, "The stuff that dreams are made of."

stolen like the days

susie wake up
I hate it when you go to sleep
your pussy dry and denying me
know it means I don't turn you on today
I get so depressed little sue
all blonde and laughing
in your dreams
never knew a drive-in
might mean disappearance
is that southern california
for you? is that it, susie?

it wouldn't be so bad
white skinned dreamer
if you'd tell me why or
tell me anything—
instead she turns the car radio on
during the car chase scene
the alleys close us all off
the flesh sticks together
no slippery slides to immortality there

ah honey
shit, little susie
all you ever do
is suck the cock down
to keep the heat off
this is so american
it's frightening

it's like eating the young
or swallowing time
I feel the semen stolen like the days
I hear joni mitchell on the radio
I know clint eastwood won't find
his way back

Loosely based on a date I had with Alison Gaughan. I think the movie was "The French Connection", but it could've been a Dirty Harry movie. It doesn't matter. There were a number of Little Susie poems. I started writing them because Alison Gaughan would come over for group at Scarritt and stay very very late so she and I could be alone together after other people left. This led to that reference from the Everly Brothers, "Wake Up Little Susie," about the couple falling asleep in the balcony at the movie theatre and how it is going to ruin their reputations. Alison was very concerned that her boyfriend, later husband, Jack, not find out about me. He knew about the writers group, but I think he was convinced I wasn't macho enough for Alison. Maybe I wasn't.

maybe maybe not

these words
this patience
makes me sound phony sweetheart
what really hurts now
are the disappearances
the things we never said
in the intrigue
the bullets of the self
poisoning the blood
and you are the antibody
but you are gone and this disease
sounds phony now with its own
empty circular solution

I am
balanced on the tip of the pyramid
no one will give me the shove
which face will I slide down?
none of the above
all the words accumulate
in the will
a slow poison
the hours crowding
into this house

This piece is strictly speaking about Alison and mine's inability to get beyond the fact that we were in love, but couldn't really be with each other because we both were living off of somebody else and we were not quite capable of dealing with that. So rather than simply say we need to find a way to make enough money to live together, which would've meant spending time not making art (which is truly what we thought we were doing those days), we just hummed our way through a decade of game playing. The pyramid reference is very pointed. Sometime in the late 70s I got into that idea that a pyramid was a way of focusing psychic energy. I build a pyramid and put it in the attic at Scarritt. The roof itself was a four sided pyramid, so I figured it would do some serious focusing. Hey, it was the sixties. People did things like this. I did many. I used it to ask for a specific boon which I actually received. And not a small thing, either. I didn't ask it to work things out between me and Alison, however. I felt that only she could do that. I, for one, was ready to give up everything for her and I told her that on more than one occasion. And she would say, maybe. Well, that's her crime, her sin in this. By and large she wasn't a terrible person, but she kept me hanging on, and herself too. Maybe.

heart as the arizona

she talks silver threads like ribbons of spit flying
my eyes see golden wires the fine circuitry of a sexual connection
the sky fills with sudden japanese zeroes
their humming cantata of kamikaze intent

the dark mirror shows eyes flecked with blood
the soul sheds tears through the corridor of dreaming
every day fills with the banshees of pearl harbor
surprise pain suicidal love

if hope is a radio white noise is the semen of dreams

This is one of my own favorite pieces, but I know that it appears to be almost entirely opaque. Let me explain a couple of things. The USS Arizona was sunk at Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, December 7, 1941. It sank with a good thousand men on board and few if any of them escaped this tomb. There's a memorial in Hawaii, just above the site of the sunken ship. I saw a teleplay in the early sixties based on the idea of a group of men, trapped in one of the compartments, under water, realizing they only had a few hours to live. This kind of thing has always made me for claustrophobic.

This poem refers to the sudden attack on myself by Becky Bradway, that resulted in the end of our fourteen year relationship. Though looking back on it I can see I should have expected it, it took me entirely by surprise. Becky had promised me solemnly when we decided to have a baby that she would never do that to me. But, of course, Becky never kept a single promise she made to me over those years. I don't know why I expected she would keep that one. In any case, with that information in hand I believe this piece opens up into a dark but hopeful flower, resting on the surface of the pacific in the bay at Pearl Harbor.

dead yellow friend

keye luke you hibernating
yellow sonafabitch
you better do a lazarus
or make room in the catacomb
I don't even got an anabel lee
here this time
baseball's on strike
saturn's in retrograde

keye luke
you gotta throw me a line
or I'll go down like
peter lorre
all this damn baggage
at my throat

you mentioned perishing once
but I thought you meant the food
we backpacked through a fuck of
a lot of sand, number one son

you'd do those illustrated quadrants
over the campfire, ruining your eyes
deimos is worth less than memory as a moon
or a source of of light and anyway
the martian women are centuries dead now

bet that's why
you died, isn't it you sneak?
getting some dead alien pussy?
foreign sex for foreigners

& me I'm stuck worthless in honkyville
trying to peddle useless maps
of places people don't want to go
not even my friends

This is a very late Keye Luke piece. I believe the baseball strike was in 1993, which explains the tone of the piece, that being the fall that Bradway left me. Long time followers of this series will recall that Keye Luke, the actor who played Jimmy Chan in the Warner Oland/Sidney Toler Charlie Chan movies, and myself went to Mars and mapped its surface over a series of expeditions. As a metaphor, of course. Thus the useless maps refer to poems. The idea that these pieces contain a metaphorical map of actual emotional reality, but it acknowledges that nobody really wants to go to those places. Even today this is mainly true. The actor Keye Luke did die around this time.

first disappearance

yeah
(she was) pale blonde witch
with her spread wings
angel strawberry hair
perfect hard breasts
telephone in her purse
capable of the deep cut

she used me
she used all of me
she was deep in the magic
she pulled the flame from the fire
but it consumed her:
folk music, books of psychosis,
kneelength sweaters,
dreams of me as dylan
her legs are still an endless corridor
but she has been stolen
by the ghost of another woman
looking for an ordinary revenge

(she was) dancing in black stockings
wearing nuns' shoes and very blue eye shadow
her lips slick with juice
(she was) dancing these words
sweet odors from her time
hands describing me describing her
her patience was a pregnancy
always something growing in her
ideas never overdrawn
she call the shots
used my mother's phone to call
her new york enigma
I never minded, feeling lucky that time
but I hated some of it too
when the letter came back to me
the air seemed to collapse
there was no way to breath
(she was) stolen now

This poem is about Marcia Jean Froelke, who I dated the last part of my senior year of high school. Marcia was deep into a fantasy that the shade of Alice Liddell was trying to steal her physical being, so as to be able to seduce and destroy the reincarnation of Charles Dodgson, you know now, Lewis Carroll, for having seduced her as a seven year old in victorian england. Did she really believe this? At the time, I was pretty much convinced she did believe it. Did I believe it? Well, it was the sixties and she was a very beautiful girl, so I rode that train. I will say this, twice in the last thirty years I have exchanged letters with Barry Paris, whom Marcia believed to be the second coming of Carroll, and in both instances, after asking me for an explanation of this story and me sending it, Barry has refused to continue the correspondence. No biggie, but it does make you wonder what really happened between them. I do know that Barry's first book, the biography of Louise Brooks (and a remarkable book it is) includes Marcia Froelke Coburn in the list of acknowledgements. Barry has been a film critic and journalist in Pittsburgh lo these many decades.

This poem was written long before cell phones were even a concept, so that phone in her purse line means something very different. In this case phone stands for her sexuality. Keeping it in her purse means having it available and ready to change location. Marcia tended to have two or three men at a time.

I suppose by way of disclosure, I should mention that I wrote a novel based loosely on this story, Stones Out of Time. Often called my "cemetery fuck book" by my charming literati friends.

Broken

I want to fuck your brains out
remove you from your cool
make you say for just one lousy second
there is something here
to be regretted
I want you to not accept death
still, there is
no percentage in playing this game
no point in that rage
no role in that fever
for me let me opt out
cool down
lose track
dream forever
in a kind amnesia

Julie in the Music Box

The girl enters the castle
every room is a music box & plays a different melody
in this room she is Beauty, in the pantry she is lost
some rooms are little more than closets,
in others the bed hasn't been made. There is an elegant
nursery, and a room with bandaids & antiseptics.
The library is full of torts, and she is perfect there,
imagined, like the brocade wall paper; the inkwell has
been filled with black india. Someone will scrawl her
a memo and try to make it rhyme.

In fact, in no part of the story
is her patience understood, the careful walk
through hallways of chambers uncatalogued
this particular lifetime, more than just an
exploration, more than just a ramble through
the day::::::odyssey she trembles
when she can admit this she holds herself
carefully, a casual downward, southward glance
to check the certainty of the camera's placement.

some questions (she's forthright, okay?)
who designed this monstrosity (you goon!)
who owns the map?
who could have been the one?

She casts a key in the kitchen. Some doors
are locked, but not for long. She will let nothing
hide anymore. She tears the curtains down.
She opens the windows.
She makes this place perfect.

This was an attempt to describe a girl I briefly, very briefly, had a mild thing with when I was doing theatre in Springfield in 1994. She was 25 at the time and I knew she couldn't get past the fact that I was 44. She was dating a doctor who had plenty of money, but she was attracted to the gypsy boy that I probably appeared to her at the time. Later she moved to Chicago.

te absolvo

saw you at gym this morning
you looked wan, hair pulled back
you looked skinny & tired
I sat at the kitchen table trembling
at what happens to us in our quick lives:
the odd batches of memory
the seriographs of lazy pleasure
the tight drums of this daily penance

From the period right after breaking up with BF. We lived across the street from the school that B. was attending. I could watch her at her morning gym. It took me a couple of years to get past what I had done. And truly the penance for it never really finishes.

Strange Sins, Two

In the eye of this storm
the hours are divided into sins
of commission and sins
of ommission. That these are standard
percentages in life's gamble is
barely noted, and never really
understood. Someone won't tell me
what is the beginning and what
is the end.
My energy runs out,
like blood from a cut artery
but it boils away
in this nuclear heat
becoming a dense atmosphere,
so very hard for me
to breathe.

Written during the time I was writing the reincarnation-incest novel, Strange Sins. The title is from Raymond Chandler, "her eyes were like strange sins". The idea of lying by leaving data out had really never occurred to me before this. It is ironic that I eventually married and lived with a grandmaster of this technique, my ex who used to write fiction, but now writes something that reads like fiction but is supposed to not be fiction. See what I mean? Perhaps it is an art, then.