dysfunctional harmonics at 3 a.m.

the rest of you chomp at me/& i cared
about you then/& then i didn't, or tried not to,
localizing my responsiblity in a series of
women/that didn't help~to fight the god complex
I decided to go to war with god/this was self-defeating
even in an objective reality so
the figures slipped the voice changed—
god was that woman I felt guilty about
true god was her father trying to right her madness
this too misses the point
grief is the melody we need to hear
that's the channel we forever tune in
all the accepted wisdom is all true

"time itself the magic length of god"
you know I could be writing letters here
if I could just figure out where to go next

is god the hidden camera in the commercial of life?
I honestly wish I could be funnier
too many polaroids in this mind of mine
including some I don't want to see just yet

There for awhile I was obsessed by Phil Dick's version of the theological universe. In a short version it goes like this: God was twins, but one of them was born too soon and she created this universe, but it turned out she was mad and thus this universe is "insane". The other half of god, the male, sane, half is busy trying to heal the female half. Thus god sends "microforms" of himself into this fucked up reality to lead us to mental health. See Jesus here, and other versions of this idea, including Buddha and Asklepios. Very winning, really. But then you know that Phil Dick was a twin and his twin sister, Jane, died at the age of one month. So he was haunted by the loss of the woman, of the girl, and this informs his theology at every stage. I don't believe it is the creator god who is crazy. I believe that consciousness is a responsibility and that avoiding the truth makes people insane. Including Phil, who for many years, couldn't even admit that he was himself. He had at least one secondary personality that all of his friends were familiar with and that he actually wrote about several times (most notably in Valis, where his other self, Horselover Fat, is the primary character). This idea of the insane god is ancient; the sumerians had a version. Phils' idea comes from the gnostics. He was fairly obsessed with the gnostic gospels which he had become conversant with through his deep friendship with the apostate episcopal bishop, Jim Pike, who disappeared in the Sinai Desert in 1969. Pike was on a quest to discover the actual process of transferring one living conscious personality into a new body; physical reincarnation. He was convinced it was spoken of in the Qumran materials. During this period of my life, 1981-1991, I read the dead sea scrolls and the nag hammadi materials and Elaine Pagels great book on the gnostics. For a long time I thought that they might have some sort of handle on the truth. It took quite awhile for me to work through the problems with the cosmology, but eventually I came to understand that everything from the Book, as the bible is known, is essentially tainted. That the jews screwed up the Egyptians cosmic knowledge. They got it wrong, but Constantine made the western world xtian and there isn't really much we can do about it now. Avoid it, maybe. Ask the Lady for Her mercy. Live in nature. So much of the Book is essentially anti-nature. That is the source of denying female sexuality, and in turn male sexuality. These are "animal" things, from the natural world. woudln't want that, would we? The Jews were always scared of the woman's orgasm.

as yet unbroken

the conflict is disastrous
suicide the contingency plan
the work of this world is arbitrary
patience & sacrifice are the tricks
of the adversary
worse than this
the conflict is nonsensical
meaningless~not the element of passion
spoken~the lunar remains
unhealed~all the rules of family
create nothing
that is to be expected
we string our beads in different ways

the caryatid
blank spaced hearts
fickle with opium
spin past your
orbit, lunar child
your white breath is
warm like a nightgown
the cool water
as yet unbroken
in a march chill
all your ripples
hard with blood & cold
from the unseen
ghosts of your future

the blood cooks in you
quiet like the absinthe
in a castaway
you vow not to regret
anything

you can't decide: ceramic tiles piece
spinoza in a spinach bile-green
the room a treasured dome
toilet affixed apprehensive
shadow partners delaying sexuality
in a sea green tub
the metal snorkels penis & silver
rugged ridged like a stroker's motion
monotonous against spinoza

was this the perianal bridge
crossed into the cavern of a soap
sliver's memory? was this
idea yours?

I understand they've made absinthe legal again in the states. But they've taken out the active ingredient that gave you visions. Typical. What's the point of absinthe without the visions? What's the point of the artist's life without the visions? This wonderful and strange piece lurks in the beginning of the subconscious, wondering whether one can capture the real moment where you have kissed and it means everything.

popsong

then there is the girl turned into
ventriloquist dummy, promising teenage
fidelity—or worship—equalizing
man's failures with god's
its something/not a canvas by Balthus
nor a compact mirror by Nabokov
but a memory of her taste; metallic
in recent filia, oranges & mints
her tongue learning his chariot shape
dead sea salt running in the saliva
of this oasis. She still captures
what is real in me~I still maintain
photographic mental contact
so that this air, frisky
in the fall's early heat, seems
rife with her musk. Now she sweats,
almost eighteen, in Maryland no doubt
the walls move in that city of ghosts
& this man, he turns into a pop song
a glissando of sadistic chocolates
still slightly nazi, but by way of wilhelm
reich, not third. Such it is—
no puppies or kittens dropped
in her period of neuroses.
will we not all bear the blame
when the role is called up yonder?
the shadow knows
but he don't evaluate.
the recognizable shape of her breasts
is in the palms of these hands
I hold over my eyes.

This poem is about my greatest mistake. Partly it attempts to deal with the hard fact that she was too young at the time and somehow reconcile my stupidity with my actual passion for her. It starts referencing her father (ventriloquist): he was a powerful figure in her life and in her mother's life. Although he was terribly handicapped as the result of polio in his youth, he was a regular marvel at manipulating women. Including his own daughter. At the time this was written I knew, had heard, that she had gone to Maryland to attend a ballet high school, and was living with him again. There is a brief reference to the pop psych figure, Wilhelm Reich, who had a following in the fifties, talking, as he did, about the importance of orgasm in our lives. I think once you've become accustomed to the place of orgasm in your normal physical life and once you've truly examined the experience, it becomes hard to live without the experience. There is a distinct magic in the energy release that comes with the physical act. That it becomes more complex with the sophistication of the mental reality simply makes it ever more powerful. In some ways it is a drug, but a drug that can be used to reach magical states. In any case, in the orgasm there is always a sense of the Divine. If you don't know this, then you are not really paying attention.

tv movie

the next one dies
i told the puppet kingdom
the docks hide spies
from us kamikaze orphans
no girl hurts me or leaves me
again this wasn't
a solitary sin i had help
i sent postcards
telegrams
radio messages
on short range transmitters
there runs 36 seconds
of her in that leather coat
headed towards high school
i searched her room
secret messages she held
she even kept them from me
i worshipped at her toe shoes
prick in hand
making excuses
all these women
advise surrender
but hate you for it
that's the truth
microfilm my losses
for a cheap moment
in this tv movie
we once shared

I really did sneak over to the house next door after this affair blew up. I know I am not alone in this kind of behaviour, but looking back on it nearly thirty years and it seems creepy and truly sad. Yes, I read her poetry in her room, picked up her toe shoes and held them to me in that bitterness you inhabit when it ends suddenly against your desire and need. There is real truth to that business at the end about women advising surrender. It is the only way out, mainly, but secretly most women would like to see your passionate stand in favor of true love. As long as it isn't them you are loving. Silly stuff. I like the business at the end about being in a tv movie. So very true. An after school special, no doubt.

einstein's brain

somebody mentioned einstein's brain
too many circus sands
beginning to understand being alone
the r'approchment dimming

so much of this life is in notes
regrets I've had a few
nasal passages permanently clogged
(I am) pouring sugar on the fire

having come home I have proved
there are no safe places
without money I am just tedious
all I dream of is food and sex

what happense when I am old?
courage & self confidence are the big problems
and an inability to bet
that is perhaps genetic

inside of me there are these plaintive sirens
of self pity * possibly hatred—
maybe not/I still believe in Akhnaton
& this memory of myself

there's a roaring good read rattling
these bars but how do I get out
of my own way? Perhaps I won't
then all I can do is gather this thin harvest

Statement from the seventies about my relationship to my work. I know and have always known that I lack the necessary courage to accept the story as flawed, as something finished, or at least something that I have given up on. So today I am many stories that I have not given up on. They live in boxes in my basement and study. BB used to never read a story after it had been published. She couldn't stand the idea that she could fix it, anymore. I understood that perfectly. To this day I think about my unfinished, unpublished novels and wonder why I can't let go of them. I finished Corlyss Disbrow's book, Sensimilla, yesterday, and once again I wonder why I haven't published these books, these old friends, these children. Fear of failure, loss of control. It's been a fucked up life people. No one will ever really know what it was that I was trying to say. Except me.

curtains

these final days are pregnant
is it my story's end that is gestating?
my spine curls with gravity's power
over the years my heart labours
in its internal singing of all the previous
requiaa

all that is flesh trembles
thick with its notions of not existing
yet it feels as though I am
preparing to birth some new version
of the self, life's macadam curtain
hanging in the heavens or the bedroom
is being pulled aside I can almost
feel the contractions forcing the
memories out of this womb
secure & hidden no more

I don't know where this came from exactly. I was at work, downloading endless Windows XP updates to the new computers we are about to put out when this feeling of expectation came over me. I am sure it appears a little dark, but it doesn't feel that way to me. It feels like this story ending is purposeful. Who knows?

the narrow dagger, the wedded death

Distant in your hidden bed,& glad dreaming; dreaming far away from hulking despicable writer bear, conning tower raised high to broadcast useless were-animal plans to a patient world of would-be friends & enemies. All noise, no thinking; all failure, no trust in he that broods like a chameleon in the self's cavern.

That he sits late, hiding, is known to the agents of the angel. That the weight of the planet Jupiter crushes him in the not-quite-heard melody of the Mississippi is known and true. That all this coming to pass is unlikely & that his betrayals are only surrenders: this is true and sad and butchered by his terrible stupidity.

And there are cries, angelic friend. Surrender, go to the post, give something once and let it go at that. I hear too much in my ice age. I cannot let the well enoughs alone. I shrug my coat off trying for death by exposure. There is no switch to throw for self electrocution, no decent home lobotomy kit to take care of these thoughts. My legs are falling asleep with the messages of spear wounds from other worlds. I have to stand, to stomp this flesh. It won't cure it, but you have to try.

And none of it will ever work. You won't come in a radiant vision this callous midnight. There will be no golden heat, no sun in sympathy, no rain to keep the measure: failure, failure once again. The list grows. The measure of worth, the image of a prayer. The coulds, the maybes, the broken promises, the wedded death, the ways this world conspired to prove my instant loss no matter how I'd take & shake the cylinder, holding it to the light trying desperately to see in—to be in—side of you.

And all this silly martyrdom leaves no cloth to cover me. No flag to drape on this thin-lined box. So silly, so absurd, so ridiculous in the breath that stops me now. My hands, the children's game I've made of it.

I gotta quit scrawling these midnight notes. The lists are crude deceptions later on. (Soon enough) I'll know in spirit how close to the wall erected in these words I have come.

No love tonight. But g*d is a well-known fascist, in any incarnation. Your loving disappearance is the melody of my loneliness. We are all, I guess, scared. The bombs of these thoughts are necessary though. You cannot make that omelette without you break some eggs (clear, clear viscuous membranic sheet of semen is a cloth falling open like a curtain. Should I grab my cock and make a poem of this pain? All the standing fluid starts to rot inside, like witheld rain).

She'd sometimes see me, simple lusting eyes. So well trained, but not this fear, now. No, she shirked no sacred duty. Her hands like time machines described the arc of many days and several years and held a narrow dagger to my heart—she promised to tear me open when it seemed fitting. There was respect in that.

You always knew more than you let on, old friend.

A notebook entry from 1977, perhaps in the fall. Other parts of the entry note that it is about five a.m. on Scarritt Street and I am trying not to make any noise in the household. At the time I was a devotee of Aleister Crowley's Book of Thoth and the deck of cards that goes with it; the egyptian tarot. Whether there was any tarot in egypt or not (it's pretty unlikely), the cards are wonderful and the Book of Thoth, Crowley's explication of the origin and meaning of the various archetypes embodied by the cards is quite worth the struggle through Crowley's seemingly endless bullshit. He speaks, repeatedly, about the spirit who guides the supplicant, the person using the deck to find out truths in this universe. That spirit he characterizes as the Hru angel. Yes, there's a longwinded explanation why this spirit has this weird name, but all that order of the golden dawn stuff is full of this sort of almost sensical b.s.

Of course quite a bit of it has that old Jungian subconscious archetype stuff going on in it, so leave me not appear to write it off entirely. I will say that one of the things I found from my trips through the cards is that the angel can lie to you and will. Now you can argue with me and tell me that it's my subconscious trying to manipulate me and I will nod my head and say, sure thing. But it doesn't make any difference what the explanation for it is, it is true. And once you've divined that you can walk away from the kind of information you get from these games knowing that it could all just be an illusion. We mostly hear what we want to, isn't that true?

Of course the two themes of this piece are the golden girl and the suicide I wanted to be. I've tried in my life a few times, but never that seriously, except for the time Bradway brought me to in 1993. I think I am past that need; the years are getting short anyway. Jerzy Kosinski committed suicide in his fifties, afraid of getting old and not being able to do it. He pulled a plastic bag over his head and breathed carbon monoxide. It's said to be a very calm and peaceful death. Hemingway, of course, blew his own head off with a fine shotgun, because (if you believe the scuttlebutt) he couldn't get his weiner to work anymore (with the girls, man, with the girls). I can understand how that might depress someone. I don't want to think about the time I am past sex. Perhaps that day is a figment of my imagination. You cannot know these things. And it's a good thing, too. Imagine how pissed we would all be if we had a firm date for the dissolution of the self?

your words

listened to the tape last night
heard your voice
prayed for a dying or a return
the usual farce from inside
drank of the stars but fell
back on the bed flesh in hand
concentric rings of light
each curving into a scene of you
like vertigo the pump shudders
your low laughter breaks the current
into sparks the semen
spraying a diamond in the lace
and then I was on an asteroid
no sense of movement
the vacuum would not carry
the sound of your words
this rock tumbled through the positions
no ribbons no toe shoes no form
no you

Perhaps the first poem I have found in the piles of detritus that describes an act of self-love. Surely there are others. This piece comes from the time after I was forbidden contact with BF. In retrospect everything was wrong at that point in my existence. I was really primed for this sort of mistake and B. wasn't just any young girl. Her background was complex; her parents intellectuals. She had already had problems living with a charismatic man, her father. Was I charismatic at the time? I think I was. Strange to understand that these many years down the pike. The static image of life on an asteroid with no sound pretty much captures the months after the affair with B. ended. I was actually unable to perform sexually for awhile there, until Alison Gaughan came to town and did what she did best. After that I moped around about B., drinking too much and treating Pat terribly, until at long last I moved out in 1981. Probably people think it had something to do with Bradway, but it didn't really. She was just the next girl who thought I was charismatic, in those days. I did have a tape of B. and myself and JdB pretending to be on the radio that I used to occasionally play. I finally got rid of it after BB left me in 1993.

broken mirror

codeine thickens the fog
the city wears a skin of rain
menthol nicotine eats holes in the tissue
theology occupies love's normal spaces
politics hides words
in places soon to be explored
old friends live on mars
having lost these maps

I am not sad, nor keen
the definitions multiply
the borders
beyond the possible interface
poems splice the weeks
photographs echo the car wrecks
it comes to me:
magic is desire

shadows of the winds tracing topography
like fingers across her flesh, an ordinary
sweet design the day sees its image
in a broken mirror

is there someone else in there
with me?

I smoked benson and hedges menthol cigarettes for maybe twenty some odd years. This piece also mentions the keye luke sequence. There is the concern for cartography. Also the sense of loss is presented as an average understanding. I have long felt that the price of consciousness is the ability to mourn.

separated at birth

you think you've got your illusions
wrapt up in your carbondale scene
all your breakers charged and
overloaded with alcohol and
your paranoia hat left
hanging at the front of the house
and its really only one room

but I am busy
traversing the gridlines
on this map just as
if I knew what I was doing
when I understood that this was
all shit some time ago
and I can add up your scorn
and reach in and even
if so many years pass
that I don't see your face
with a name anymore,
I will still know just
how much alike
we are

From 1977, imagining the faceless future. Very cynical about the act of writing ("this was all shit"), but at the end a recognizable point that is somehow actually true. Not that the fact that we are very alike was any actual help in carrying on a relationship, or even a friendship over the many years. Addressed to Alison Gaughan, who's photo (since removed) I found on an old hard drive and include in this post, for nostalgia sake and because I've been asked about images from this period in my life. I have almost none. These that I have found were sent to me as color xeroxes by Pat Smith the spring that Piper was born, 2003. I have asked Ross Hulvey for access to his photos from this time, but he ignores my letters. I have also asked John Ranyard for his photos, but I think John has other things on his mind these days. If anybody out there has any photos from the writing groups that you'd like to share, please email me at tosburn@msn.com. Thanks for the good thought.

By Request

Pat Smith and Steven Alfred Dolgin, circa 1974-75. Pat turned seventy, December 10, in St. Louis. I haven't spoken to her in many years.

By request. Gary Davidson poses for Greg Lakebrink, 1974. 223 East Scarritt Street. Springfield, Illinois.

nebulae

hidden in your reach
the horrible noise of death in my walls
passes this time the Illinois Central
engine leaving me alone in this house

Rod Steiger on the television
dealing with hot merchandise
you told me it was a gift
like walking on water you told me
there are ever shifting surfaces

leaving me alone tonight
you said me there are riffs
in this universe spending me
in decision that nebulae
is god's onanism
left to drift
in no conception across
this sky

I guess my parents should have left me
in the stars or mud—

The Rod Steiger movie is certainly The Pawnbroker. Scarritt was located a house away from the Illinois Central 3rd Street tracks that run through Springfield. Onanism refers to masturbation and "spilling your seed" uselessly, on the ground in the Old Testament. The Hubble pictures of the universe and the detritus of matter bear this image out. This poem refers to Alison Clare Gaughan, circa 1977.

trying to break free

So, Nora, holding out in Chicago
your eyes burning segments in the concrete
holding onto the necessary frames like
explanation in your surrender
this time there are arrows
& mercury on your surfaces
& this that turns up, me in this envelope
never quite allowing myself out (I am)
listening to the Doors; funny I should
think of you instead of Jackie
but there is is this image of you
seeking ways outside a skull
designed too small to cope with your
mind and and
and in some sense you are a mirror
to these hours


There is no doubt that Nora Metzger Jones had a profound effect on my early life. I met her at St. Louis University in the Honors Program. Ultimately she became the great love of my friend Jack Jones. Jack was the driving force and organizing principal of the first group of friends I had outside of Wichita. We lived together in an apartment near Forest Park in St. Louis. But Nora could not stand sharing Jack with, particularly, Chris Beckman. And so she forced Jack to destroy his little group. I'll never forget that night in early December, 1969. Yet, we remained friends for many years. And ultimately Nora and I had a brief and stupid affair in 1975. The Year we both turned 25. Yes, Nora and I shared a birthday, June 29th and we shared a lot of other odd things and people. She was a beautiful woman, but she was also hyper and nuts. She had way too many ideas and I am not really sure why she didn't change the world completely. If she could've been really dishonest she might've ended up Hillary. But she could barely suppress herself telling people her true opinion of them, often very dark and negative. For this reason there were many people who just didn't like her. But I know she was just born a hundred or two hundred years too damn soon. And I have always loved the girl and feared the woman. I wonder what she'll be like at seventy?

stealing a march

her mother calls me
into question; suzi gets married
there are many pieces of my anger
all part of this cloth
and Kathleen's pure passion
laid on an oriental carpet
her nipples stiff in a philosophic heat
o baby I am watching your hands fly
in patterns white & pure
as if you had sparklers to write it
out so we could finally see
I think I believe you anyway
it makes you holy Lane
your hands your words woven
in a cloak of many colours
none of it making sense
except that if it's you wearing it
whirling your changing features in
an amorous explanation it is all
true

and these vestiges of perception:
they've changed
you took me in a dark night
at 4 a.m. with the remains
of a bond burned by our ambition
I left you and on the way home
wrote this piece
you could say, I stole a march

This poem is one of those from the notebooks. I never showed it to Kathy Lane, the girl in Davenport I had a distinct yen for. She was friends with Suzi Olds, who was Pat's major friend and who dated Michael Zoeller, my Louisville friend, for awhile. Michael somehow irritated Suzi and she ended up marrying this guy named Robert, who was a handsome Omar Sharif looking kind of guy but who wasn't too bright, but very macho. Suzi was a take no prisoners type. Lane was a small intense girl, one of the few non-blondes in my romantic history. Suzi did get married and I went to Davenport for the wedding. I got drunk with Kathy Hogan, who I had known at St. Louis U. Hogan was buds with Nora Jones and at Suzi's wedding party we got drunk together and she strongly advised me to have sex with Nora and "get it over with." Because she felt it was something we both needed to do. Well, it was the seventies and I did a lot of weird things for dumb reasons. I slept with Nora, though I was afrad to because she was an ace feminist and frankly I am not the submissive type in the bedroom. Of course it turned out poorly.

This poem is about Lane and myself both talking about changing the world in some intrinsic fashion and being, of course, known for that. She was a beautiful crazy girl. I always did like that.