deficits

long ago
in another's time
I always knew somehow
it'd come to these lines
you've forgotten me
I've remembered you
basically I know you know
some still true things
some things I thought
you would keep
I know even less
but here it matters more
here it makes me long
ago like a murder in a storm
the things you wouldn't say
the memories on vinyl now
slipping past this panic'd day
each morning's waste
I'm usually alcoholic
in this vision
my bible opened
my sins recorded
for anyone to see
you were always
so very much smarter
than me

From 1975. Another piece tracking through the desert that was my relationship with Alison Clare Gaughan. It is so very clear what a wretched loser I was in this scene. Yet she wandered in orbit from 1972 though 1986 when finally I said we have nothing to talk about now. What did she really want from me? Why was it necessary to make me dance that sad and pathetic male dance? I really don't know. I do know that so much of my seventies self revolved around her that there was almost nothing left when I came to understand that she had played me all that time. Maybe she meant well. Maybe she did love me. She said she did. But probably there wasn't anything she could really do. She just was being realistic. She needed a male that would pony up the bucks for the life she desired. I know this because you can find out anything on the web and I didn't even have to pay for the info. It lies out there for anyone to find. What a waste of our time this all turned out to be. Did I learn something? I don't really think so. Perhaps, even if someone is your friend and you trust them it doesn't mean they will tell you the truth. Alison lied to me, several times about important things. And I just let her. Well, she will be forced to deal with all this, and probably much more, when she crosses over. May the Lady show Her some kind of mercy.

the way of not dying

the soul begins to rise
despite your corpse
there are still courageous people
in this world
and I am today's hero

oh it's pretentious bullshit
I know that too
but it doesn't bother me now
I know I must gamble
foolishness to find
all that is holy

this is the way of not dying

post kent state rumors

you in your white trench coat
in the berth of a detroit ship
deep in the concrete slip
third floor, parking garage
fourth and capitol
your black vinyl gloves grasping
the wheel, turning to a new
direction

you tell me now
this is the story as it continues
through 1975. That you
you have been who you are
for so long you cannot be
anything else.

What a coward.

in 1969 I had never even heard of you
living through that time/ the romantic
underbelly before the cops ripped
us open with the death of
Alison Krause

I never knew you then
but have anagrammed your name
around a dead woman
who holds the lantern to this life

its light shines spaces through
the months as I arise your small
breasts in my hands on this page
another scene that starts to fade
I whine about your betrayal and write
you around another murder like Alison's
death on the green at Kent State.

death, death, death, that is
what you mean to me you bitch you
cunt your warm kisses deep
within my heart your ragged
breathing as you come your
parted wet meaning a cave of mystery
a particle accelerator for the
manic solitary poems of this self
you are a standard dance partner
a practical whore a lawyer in the making
you are everything that
desecrates the finale
of this stark redemption
that you could find your way
is not a given.

and today we both are lost
on the coast that is not a coast
crying for a hiding place
a way to forget
each other

Alison Krause was one of the four students shot dead at Kent State University, May 4, 1970. It is ironic that there is another woman by that name who is famouos now, the singer/fiddle player from Champaign. Kent State was very powerful event in my life. I used it in poems for many years.

Nothing is hopeful here, in this poem. From 1975, with some notes from along the way. I've worked this piece on and off for thirty years. So terribly sad. Everything about the relationship that is described here was a waste. Every word I spent on this sad and desolate girl was a word flushed down the toilet of being. That she was beautiful is a given. That she was a whore in the bedroom. That was a given. That she was intelligent and good with a metaphor. That was a given. That she was a coward, running away as hard as she could from her own truth. That turns out to be the actual fact. To this day she strays as far from this story as she can. How ludicrous, then, this makes me. So be it. Could be worse. As a matter of historical fact, I am, finally, with a woman who is an actual daughter of the true Lady, Arianrhod. A loving, kind human being willing to face this life and this man. I consider my relationship with Kimberly an act of charity, from the Goddess Herself. As for Alison, poor sad girl; wishing her well, after all this time. Not forgiving her.

the host

the host, is it a car for the almighty
or the host, is it the guy taking your coat
or the host, is it johnny or jay or
colin, behind a desk, cracking a joke
???

the host a large group
all the faeries and sprites
all the angels and rebels
the vast crowd
others of us and you and
myself before and after
we breath and speak
that audience that doesn't hear
me that ocean of recognition
eating, shitting, fucking
killing each other
itself

and the melody lingers on
it is its theme its meme its
leitmotif trundling
notes always the overture
never the coda

the host overwhelms us all
becoming a transient memory
briefly on the tongue
his flesh or Her's
my flesh or your's

consumed

Brought about by that discussion about whether it is possible to desecrate a cracker, because someone believes that it has been magically changed into the flesh of the man-god. Although I do not believe in the magic that way, I do actually believe it is possible for the physical symbol of the host to embody all the human consciousness that has ever existed and that will ever exist. This is the function of symbological thought. And it truly is a kind of magic, though not what the Pope would like it to be. Memory is the true act of magical being.

Stiffie

Jump hard into playing that game milady
Night is a samovar & you are sucking
this life out of me. Stars are burnt (diamonds
as a form of coal); the alien life form
tokes up on the gems in your eye sockets
Down at the harbor's last available wharf
the ropes are knotted with pithy remarks
the cold sea water is a metaphor
spawning this big fish; not Moby Dick
of course. You are still in court,
your briefs filed, your slim tush on its throne.
The vinegar flush mixes with smoke
from your past. Is there an alien taking
my desire? Is there an obvious joke
in the ever present stiffie? Sad fire,
extending through the timezone.

1/2005

I thought this sounded famliar and I discover that I put this on the blog last September under the title "Bad Faith." This version is shorter and more pointed and doesn't use the crudism for vagina the other one does. I think I like it much better. I know these things are small, subtle even, but the wind is sometimes a breeze.

helpless godzilla

in the dying smokes godzilla
deity of the flickered human time
he'd burn the brittle stems
of the cottonwood but his throat
is full of words he doubts

in the many years the rains have
ravaged the mechanical parts
of the monster-god
the tree spirit sings low
baseball wisdoms in its many
random seeds
godzilla watches helpless

daughter bears son
fights father loses sight
watches the child disappear
all seamed shut in
this factory the life static
the tree a massive pump
worked by the sun

godzilla's tears water the seedlings

out of focus

pain in the breath
april day gone dark
rolling stones
make sad replies
to ex-lovers

the body is motionless
waiting for her death
or her coming

the wrist turns
in slight electric shocks
from a bone growth

clever thoughts arise
and wither in the perception
of what they hide

the rain doesn't come
it waits like the thoughts
of betrayal in the vocal's chorus

a train sounds one warning
at the crossing outside

too many mistakes
are hidden in the lists
of success

people sigh
pulling large painful breaths
inside them
like cigarette smoke
designed to kill
the memory of loss

nothing works any better or any worse
the problem does not come into focus
it has no solution
that is its solution

Another take on a similar theme. This from 1976-77 and speaking to the indeterminancy of my life at that point. I had a bone growth on my wrist that really bothered me, but when I did go to have it surgically removed it turned out it would cost several hundred dollars so I just learned to ignore it. Eventually it went away. Scarritt was located just off the third street railroad tracks that run through the center of Springfield, Illinois. I've worked on this piece before, so this is a cruder take on the original lines.

winter's loss

damn cold afternoon's penance
sweating here in the privacy of a self-imposed hell
my dreams are a kind of excrement, like mucus
filling this soul (there is)
no breathing allowed this late in the year
birds slit the dying sky with territorial swords
that fucking tree you know the tree
tree of laughing tree of bells
tree of the place where there is no sin
so we lay beneath that tree and you told me
about your dad and now the aorta explodes
too much excrement in the system
no survival no spring expected
this year

From December, 1979. The tree is once again the enormous cottonwood that grew behind the house on Washington Street. They cut it down about ten years ago and I went and stood on the stump and it was like six or eight feet across, or maybe I am just remembering it that way. Vachel Lindsay did a mixed media piece about what he called the Tree of Laughing Bells. There is a wonderful poem, also, that goes with it. It posits a time in the morning before rationality cuts in, when we are still pure in our passion. And even a little scary. So, it seems clear from this piece that on some level I understood how stupid that relationship was. But it is also clear that for me this was about the heart, however unrealistic.

On the Bus to St. Louis

Dear AG,
Don't know why this, now,
on the st. louis bus—thinking
of you and the letters,
your history etched in its
genetic chains.
It's coming up Samhain again.
Another centenary birth for you.
So now I am keeping careful notes
of your dreams, attempting to reap
the metaphor, the strictly crystal
cut of this frame & that image
of the woman with woven red flame hair
(like Medea who I spoke of last year)
I'm thinking of you, of course
and the strictly personal power.
This all opens like a line shot
gone braille, touched with silvered fingers
pressing at your focal points.

And now I love you like the wanton you are,
expect your story to follow more of the
genetic spiral than the others.
In May, Walpurgisnacht, I'll celebrate
with Gary D., burning your memory
in an iron bowl, calling it out,
fearing your incipient fate
and you—in Ireland—are you
riding a storm on an interdimensional
timeline? are your words only experimental breath
in this personal relational geometry?

In this time
on the St. Louis bus
this pen defeats me.
It will call no souls this evening
on the greyhound, (I am) lapsing
into commmon speech.
I will find no holy cards
in the passing night,
no true dreams, only your
bitter kisses preserved
in these dark hours.

This is a re-write of a poem I posted a couple of years ago. I can't quite pinpoint the year, though I know it was the time Alison Gaughan went to Ireland with her sister, Carolyn, which is thoroughly documented somewhere in the notebooks. I note this poem once again offers the idea of multiple incarnations and relationships that exist beyond a single lifetime. I suppose this must come from too much science fiction and a liberal dose of hindu wheel of life information. Walpurgisnacht is the northern european day more properly termed Beltane, May 1st. Alison did have a recurring dream of a redheaded priestess sacrificing a male victim. Very celtic, actually. He was burned in a tree. There is no doubt that Alison had both celtic genes and viking genes. Later in her life, she reproduced with a latino, so I'm sure her son is an interesting mix.

Sometime in the early seventies I published a long, imagistic piece in a magazine called Kalligraphia that Sandra Martin published via a class at SSU. It was entitled "Understanding Medea" and was an attempt to deal emotionally with the events surrounding the spring of 1973. That was the period of time Becky McGovern threw me out of our house. I was seeing Pat Smith, who was still married and living wih Larry, across the street from John and Sandy Knoll. Pat was also "seeing" John and had been for a couple of years. Ironically, these many years later they are married and living in St. Louis. When Pat and I abandoned Springfield for Chicago, John took up with Alison Gaughan, who was of course linked inextricably to the engineer boy, John L. John Knoll at that time went through quite a list of the locals, but the thing with Alison was primarily to punish me for being with Pat.

I will note that John and Larry both invited me to have threesomes with them and Pat during this period. And Pat and I did eventually have a couple of menage a trois, but not with them boys. I'll never forget John detailing his sexual conquest of Alison, over the phone, while I sat on the floor in the apartment at 1907 South Bissell in Lincoln Park, listening to him. I wasn't exactly jealous, not having been with Alison myself, but I actually knew she was already trying to figure out how to get the fuck rid of him. Something that happened repeatedly to John, usually about two weeks after he started seeing a new woman. Alison eventually told him that she had to give up sex, entirely, for awhile. She lied, of course. She truly was a wanton. Today? I have no idea.

peer or imposter

I was still awake, and I knew your painting hides in my attic
(the one Kareco did) above the room you once occupied
and I thought the oil-drawn eyes were lighting the square chamber
of that pyramid, with strong yellow light from what source
I cannot say. And I turned on my pillow, hoping to catch
the occasional machine-gun bursts of typewriter keys in your
private world (the one we never really see)
but the strain in the dark was such I could only hear
mythological burglars and imaginary young men with hammers,
testing doorframes. My heart was a huge Bear on a hillside
paused among the trees, trying hard to remember,
watching the world of its peers & imposters,
almost as if you were really here. And in this house that is not
a pharoah's tomb, and that is not President Lincoln's tomb,
I caught my wonderment, in the midst of a usual insomnia, trying
to feel what you must feel when you awake in your bedroom
in your family's home in Dayton, Ohio.

Gary Davidson lived on Scarritt Street in the period before he went to Virginia to study at Hollins College. Sometime during that period our old friend, Karen Cooper, did an oil painting of Gary that was a leetle bit on the scary side, and Gary left it in the attic on Scarritt. Scarritt's attic was a four sided pyramid in shape, and Tim indulged his 1970s mysticism with several pyramid experiments, one of which that achieved a kind of success (not what I thought, of course). Also during that time a young man across the street, crazed after a five day drug odyssey, went nuts with a hammer and murdered two old men in his building and attacked several other people before being disabled by an elderly african-american gentleman in a drug store who was defending his eight year old grand-daughter. Both Gary and I were true paranoids in the 1970s, and why not? There obviously was cause. My paranoia had more to do with the FBI visiting in 1969 when the people I was hanging with had this sort of weird association with some of the people in the Chicago Seven (Abbie and Jerry, actually). In any case I had no drivers license through most of the 70s, and little of an official identity. This poem comes from a dream. When Gary lived at Scarritt, he would arise very early (5-6 a.m.) and start writing in the dining room before anyone else was up. And Gary was famous in Scarritt circles for his first novel, Stuffed, which was about an animate talking stuffed bear. Clearly, I would have liked to be counted as a peer, and not an imposter.

Cinema Song

Who was that under the marquee?
Who came to me in the midnight sun?
Was it you, wrapped in a blanket?
Was it you, hoping for the dawn?

Who came to me with large watching eyes?
Who watched me shiver in the winter wind?
Was it you in that wiretapped cinema?
Was it you reading subtitles as a child's hymn?

Who was it who wept on my shoulder?
Who watched the heroine disappear?
Was it you, draped in the midnight?
Was it you, sitting with me there?

Were you mercy, my love?
Were you life?
Have I found you, my love?
Have I laughed?

Were you always my love?
And was I not quite close?
Have I known you, my love?
Is this one life enough?

From the 70s during a period where I wrote a number of rhymed and metered pieces. This is more successful than I remembered it. I'm not sure of the movie, but I am thinking it may have been Jean Luc Godard's Breathless. This piece reflects both Leonard Cohen's songs, and Jacques Brel, the Belgian singer/songwriter. Those unfamiliar with Brel should try and find the broadway cast album of Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris. The songs are dark, funny, bitter, romantic and beautiful phrased.

stone tablet

do not seek power
do not stand still
discover the melody, the harmony
arrange sound as light & light as sound
be equal with all creatures: flora, fauna, stone
do not exploit even the self
apprehend the trees
see yourself in the Lady's eyes
learn to breathe

that which we mark

hands and feet in this silly gallery
humans and creatures of a mad design
are we alone in a pre-determined universe
that isn't ours can you see the hands and feet
darling the fingers and toes the knotted
limbs in sultry repose your kisses
gathered by someone's index
and transferred to stars in a galaxy's
extruscence, andromeda's arms
flung careless in love or open
in a carnal poem your hands
unclenched your feet pointed
to the corners of the bed
north, south, east, west
this universe in fluid motion
the magic song time
plucking the harp that is
this self your flesh in nova now
in flame in anticipation

escaping

your memory, warrantless now
as I walk backward in the sadness
(I see) (in this ragged night)
your face, lips just parted, three
dimensional in my dream, yet still
rejecting my kisses, still not quite
present, an ephemera, an irish faerie,
your words, sequined in the
lawyer's voice, describing days
perhaps past perhaps imagined

my courage is minor, truly
but some things need to be done
the life that was mine became
a metaphor, perhaps accidentally
it doesn't matter
someone does remember
but this isn't a prison
there can't be justice
no one's singing a requiem
the shadows blink and obscure
things true things, lost
still my hands find the pieces
of your puzzle
not that you yourself
are even interested anymore