Scarritt Piece, Version 1, 1974-77

Well thinking of the blues
those days on Scarritt Street
while Cheryl Frank taped
people walking through
that living room their words
inconsequential then and now
but left in that box just
under where I sit thinking
of those blues those antique
voices telling stories some
true and some revealing most
hidden in the thousands of
feet of plastic brown memory
cassettes poorly labeled
remarkable in their tedium

there was
plenty of Peg's Moose
understated sitcom style
adventure of an actual moose
his human friend
Feldman and her dry
supposed satire; it took
some years for me to click
the fact Peg's Moose
wasn't John, so many thought
that, no, it was Peg Her Moose
staying at yet another
Holiday Inn. I think
of Moose when I am at
the Holiday Inn, though we
always stay at the Express.

Gary's Monster rose in the seaweed
too many moments with his childhood
bud the inimitable Ross Hulvey
for whom no prose was too turgid
if it flowed from Arkham House
And Gary William's Shoggoth novel
was a good time, stealing the hearts
as it did, of many of the local
inhabitants; I think here of John
the All Night Poet, stoned and placid
nodding his approval, and
Edna Ferber, not her real name,
who the Other Gary, the one who got
away, once wrote a musical with:
Babes in Flames
sort of an Andy Hardy goes to Hell
piece, complete with songs

The poets had their dim tunes sung too
on those stretched metal carbon rungs
catching now on tapeheads ancient, worn
transitive you might say penultimate
this month Tim's final say in the
genre's reality betting now on dissolution
the box of cassettes left in the garbage
can at long last those banging screetches
of the microphone on the floor finally
just a song that is occasionally
played in dream world

Ricardo Mario was there
bleak and abstract hiding out
his machismo issuing a kind
of humorous remove he fished
around in abstract native
cultures Ixtlan today he fell
for Rosie in that combative
stance unwilling to cross
the bridge until too late
the bridge fell as it will
for all of us.

And Amezquita's friend the Greek
Anthony from Dixon who wrote
like Bukowski wresting the base
from its meaning his pieces
like shots of good whiskey I rather
liked him though he did nail
Alison Gaughan in 1979 and I still
imagined that she loved me

Pat is there
the Smith, the Hilton, the girl
from Hinsdale her prose the
chambered nautilus-like construction
each verb completed each thought
an application of mind So yes
her stuff was a little cold
what can I say? I lived with her
and only noticed after half a dozen
years she rarely listened to mine
that revelation brings me
to a more honest humility I come
to find out my stuff was also
a turgid soup of ideas and poetry
flopping around you should hear
me speak in these moments
proud of what I cannot explain
dripping with the bullshit of meaning
telling myself what i wanted to hear
but charming and still young
so young its hard to believe

no wonder Knoepfle used me
in those years he got paid yet I did
the true hauling for those many
hours he got his ass kissed by
the people myself included
and for what for avoiding inflaming
any passions yet finding that
frontier voice in its catholic
authenticity he must have been better
than me people actually read him
and even my friends avoid these pages

recently I found this note
in some odd piece: whatever you still
rage against is a true depiction
of that which you haven't
come to yet. My failure is large
and my Mother, somewhere, is still
disappointed. My ex-wives who once
said nice things about me, now both
avoid the subject, out of politeness

My son rarely speaks to me
and certainly doesn't read what I write
My daughter tells me I am a deeper
well than her, by which she means
there's a lot of abstract bullshit
in this great long list of memory

My wife doesn't go there
and I don't ask her to. I've lost too much
already. There is no way to know
if any of this has value. Isn't that
why Cheryl taped us in the 70s?
In case it had value.
Did it have value?