breaking fingers

leper in a paper jacket
watching for rain: illinois,
transparent a perfume of hours
an epoxy of belief
the author is a codifier
choked his chicken categorically
his women, collared, black satin
lace anagrams—
all a conceptual migraine
re-establishing all my poses
no matter the fingers I break

sunday on televison
tarzan and his drums
tuesday it's village of the damned
golden child's eyes giving death
for otherwise valentines
these successes bartering
years of dying
the chamber closes
her teenage lips are wet with fancy
anyone is anyone's lover, possibly,
or enemy, at least
walpurgis is past
Marley is dead

At the time, 1980, Marley referred to Bob Marley, who died in his early thirties froma brain tumor. Looking back at this life I can see, clearly, that there is a reference to Marley, Scrooge's partner, here. I played that part on stage in the early 90s. "In life I was your partner, Jacob Marley." I did it in Boris Karloff's voice and it was uber successful. But, here, it is Bob Marley's early death that is the surface concern. The movies noted are of course Johnny Weismuller's Tarzan, and the Village of the Damned is indeed a Brit sci fi with golden haired alien children who's eyes light with with laser death. George Sanders is remarkable in this kind of cheesy movie. Later he committed suicide, leaving a note that said, essentially, "I'm bored." A good enough reason, I suppose.

I know recognize Walpurgis Night as Beltane, the great Celtic feast. That night the fires would be lit, the liquors consumed and anyone could fuck anyone in the darkness and the children born of such unions were called Merry-made. And were legitimate. This was, obviously, a way to deal with the smaller gene pools of the english countryside, after having wars had given way to mere political fighting. Without rape and pillage, the odds of genetic problems rise dramatically in small populations. But not if you whirl the gene pool once a year, allowing anybody to be with anybody. No need for that now; modern medicine can head off the kind of dark productions inbreediing brings to the race. With the exceptions of rich twits like George W. Bush, of course.

What does this poem mean? Something about figuring out how sexuality was fucking up my life and its meaning? Or creating my life and its meaning. Yes, I have many interesting fetishes. What can I say? Catholic upbringing. Wide ranging reading as a child. The Richard Burton book, the Jewel in the Lotus. Never mind.

the path home

small privacy in a late May evening
at an Exxon station somewhere near Roanoke
an unhappy infant cries
I wait for Sandra and her lover
the florescent lights glare; the people buy co-cola
and leave me on the curb
counting minutes like jackstraws
scattered in god's chaotic way

seven hundred miles distant
Illinois breathes on
serendipitous in her over planning
there are stories there
stories high as the sears' tower
stories as long as the Illinois Central
stories sad or tough
or mugged by their inconsistencies

its a velvet night, just chill now
maybe warming—I cannot tell
I have just arrived from another starved winter
the chaldean girl sits like a stone sparrow
in disquiet—a boyish blonde absorbing
my losses with no seeming loss, herself

I live with another old friend
in only some discomfort
the object is: to make a life
to tell no lies
to hurt only carefully
so the dissolution is slow
although certain

this is the path home

Written in the spring of 1980 when I went to Virginia with Ross Hulvey to attend Gary Adkin's wedding. I ended up staying with Sandy Riseman because Ross could get a room in the dorm, being a Hollin's grad, but I couldn't. I thought at the time that he and Gary could've asked Richard to find a place to put me, but they didn't. I turned out to be just another accoutrement to their lives. I understand now that Ross was afraid I would charm the ladies at Hollins. I honestly had no recognition that people felt that way about me until Becky Bradway left me in 1993, telling me that I dominated things and she thought she should be the one dominating things. I just wasn't aware of that, surrounded, as I thought I was, by deft and interesting people. Well, Ross was a shy doofus, that is true. But Gary Adkins seemed to play the charming card quite well. Now I often hang with Dan Keding, and he is even more the center of attention than I am. A fair thing, I think.

In any case the chaldean girl in this is once again that blonde honey from Springfield's dark catholic side, Alison Clare Gaughan. She was laughing at me, those days, from the deck of the destruction of my weird love affair with the too young blonde.

If there is a lesson here, it is that you need to pay close attention to the details. I have been checking the numbers on this blog for the last two months and it is certainly an educational experience for me to note that I am the only person who comes here, at least for the last couple of weeks. I average one person a day. Of course, I come every day. There is a lesson here people. No one is interested in this poetry. Nonetheless, I keep putting it out there. Perhaps, sometime after I am gone, somebody will stumbled across this stuff and find something useful enough to keep in it. I hope this is so, but I don't expect it. But I leave my children, with at least fond memories of their father. Well, maybe not so much Joel. Hard to say from this end.

he said that

you do have me he said that
to me and those others for awhile
he said that his redbeard
the external wiring of the dynamo
concealing the workings of the cosmos
he told us a few stories
he tried to avoid patriarch
he couldn't teach he said that
if you don't already know this
you cannot be my friend
but I will try he said and married
and he saw that now maybe
I didn't know he didn't marry me

out of tulsa and its money and its dust
a dumpy kid when he was young
his mother told me one year he didn't talk
the next he did I see it hasn't changed he said
to me when I told him this story

this to his father:
ray jones you fascist freethinker oklahoman
like the rest of my relatives you raise
your own dust alongside of these days
where is your boy Jackie now? somewhere out there
still tethered to Nora still dreaming
of Emil the end now in sight those equations
nothing more than smoke rising from the prairie
theory not a poem memory not a solution

in the distance the boy is running through the dunes
I am what I am that's all that I am
that's all that I need that's all that I remember
red dust crusts on these pages

To Jack Raymond Jones, wherever you are these days. My friend at Saint Louis University1968-70. Husband to Nora, father to Emil, freethinker, partisan.

America Rocks the Red Planet

ON Saturn's Day
We embarked
Six Trillion Dollars Deep
the trough we laid
across interplanetary distances
to the Red World.
We ate the freeze dried proteins,
monitored our investments
in the futures' markets,
engaged in disciplines (as) naval gunners
training—guns contained
but smoking.

At the end of a lunar cycle
280,000 miles closer to the red mine
due west of the solar disk,
Our Commander goes into Shock,
His Virgin Mother naked and helpless
in the tinny web of cloisonne,
cracks spreading from his schizophrenia.

We pat him down, vacuum the semen from his
airtight outfit—
He resembles Elvis, the thick drugged-out-on-speed
Living Corpse Elvis, still holy
but lost in his chalice of selfishness. At Some Point
Mission Control informs us
this Madness is predestined, planned by
the planners, and the Isis on his lap
is a projection of a personality
stronger than we average souls can interface:
Viva Las Vegas, come to life,
E.'s Mother, the Virgin, is Ann Margaret.
At nineteen She is prepared to give birth to all of us
but not to sleep with even Elvis—there is no need:
His seed is thick in all he does.
Our Captain possesses the necessary madness,
coining all the realms in all the cubic emptiness
we cruise each 24 hour cycle.

We got to the Planet of Ore, Mad Elvis Our Jesus,
driving hard in the CIA's store-bought Cadillac,
cruising on high we took the top 27 feet of Mars,
and process it, and take it home to those most corrupt
on Earth where it will become an electromagnet
of Power: the field generator of their dreams.

This millenium, this hidden forest, belonging to those
so rich they have no laws nor land ... these words
now grains of sand on the great Martian Plain
the prayer comes:

We take the worlds, each in its order,
as JHVH ordained, using Elvis as our frontman,
driving him mad—Our Sacrifice, Our Trowel.

Sure if I could only tell you
all that has happened this night, perhaps we could
return to what was once Ground Zero
the Noise so common now we cannot hear it
anymore.


(From the early 1990s. I've always obsessed on the Elvis movie, Viva Las Vegas, because as ridiculous as it is it becomes something more than a bad story with some rock stars in it. At some point when Elvis and Ann Margaret are "dating" in the storyline, it becomes suddenly like a document from Mount Olympus. They become two creatures representing the circle in its deitific form. It doesn't seem to matter, the space and time of it. In any case this is a dark, weird piece, coming from the Reagan years.

This was written well before the tragedy on 9/11, 2001, so the Ground Zero reference shocks a little at this date. Crazy stuff. Reminds me of Cordwainer Smith's work. He was a strange sci-fi writer who was close to poetry in his long concepts and language. He grew up a diplomat's son in China and used what he learned in those early years to give us a future history lyric and dark, yet full of hope. He re-imagined several major xtian myths in light of a much older world. Particularly the legend of Jean d'Arc.)