Homage & Apology

the insurmountable nature of desire

2012-02-01T12:24:00.001-06:00

there are two roads that track each other
fear and desire
sometimes these ribbons run together
sometimes they cross each other
sometimes one or the other will double back

I am in a vehicle, my body,
that drives along this track
it's fuel is time and since time
never stops then this vehicle
never stops

one day I will fall down dead of course
and my version of this journey
will have gotten to wherever it got to

some days I realize I am on fear's highway
and those days I seem to go ever faster or
ever slower its a perceptive reality
some days I recognize my true path
is always the path of desire
though what or who it is that I desire
is never quite clear

but Nabokov said that what his book, lolita,
was really about was
the insurmountable nature of desire

so do I wish to overcome desire?
the buddha advises it
and if I do, is it even possible?
isn't what vladimir is saying here
that desire cannot be controlled
and inevitably destroys the self?

I got to wonder about this.

the story on hemingway was
that he killed himself because he couldn't
get a stiffy anymore now that I'm sixty-ish
I have a little more sympathy for that
than I once did.

did he have desire but the inability
to act on it destroyed him? so desire
ultimately destroyed him?

and my desires are not just that one
desire, no more really the wishes in
my heart have more to do with
opening the path to those others
I love and cherish, wife and kids

what is it that is left for me to see
in the distant mirror what is left to
fear the sharp noise of failure
whistling in my ears each morning's
memory of a hardon echoes that
past of giving into passions
right or wrong good or bad
the mistakes I learned from
the children that I had

this is just an exercise in
an al gebra that doesn't exist
geometry I could do
symbolic logic structures
suddenly eat the holy self
the worm ourobouros
can I see into my own heart?

snowy day

2012-01-12T11:10:00.003-06:00

I'll take you home on a snow day
we'll pretend we're in an old movie
fire in the fireplace, coffee in the pot
You'll reach across the table and
take my hand—I still wake up these
mornings suddenly alive knowing it
is you in my bed lucky lucky man
the way the world turns one day in
1995 the way the new hire smiles
when I walk past her office could it be
could she care for me even a little
everything I ever said I said for you
though I didn't know you yet everything
I ever tried to understand was really
understanding how this moment in
existence is now defined by your heart
your hand in mine the days the drumming
passage of this time however long I
may be given but you were always there
the gift the gift that means the world
that is the time the face I see in
my dreams the words I long to hear

Your song that echoes mine
a complex harmony in a very surprising
third or forth act to this otherwise
pretentious life And on the snow day
we see a way to happiness all things
are present in the present moment the
marking of the calendar merely the
blocking notes on a script
We make our way through the sweet hours
Most of our words belong to the girl
she is what we have come to and what
I have found with you, this beautiful woman,
this true daughter of the Lady
I'm no Jimmy Stewart, but I hold you close
my own blonde Kim You make me laugh
You give me meaning In your eyes
I find hope, and a new world, and a place
we can be surprised by all that
our little girl has to say, a place
to breath easy, a place to stay young

64 on this side

2011-12-14T10:51:00.002-06:00

shadows are the toys
in the subconscious mind
I'm sifting through mine
looking for a wooden souvenir

all the lost kisses
those fiery young tongues
wrapping wet around this
64 Gb memory stick

there are many shades
to the darkness many versions
of the fuck one's tastes
change a little over time

the shadows hide the actual
features which is which don't you
remember her breasts her flesh
in your hands

its hard to replay the reasons
so often nothing more than opportunity
so often a mistake no matter the
secret orgasms in the fetal night

its hard to simply reduce
the gift to zygotic survival
even though I've dismissed
all meaning from these tropes

surely being is more than this
or am I just a slackjawed romantic
bartering old pleasures for one
more round on the Lady

Will She raise her skirts for me
this time? She wears white as in
the coda of Bob Fosse's onscreen
life the playful veil Her tease

I have chopped down the tree
a thousand times and still I grasp
the axe and eye the leaves beginning
another season of stems and seeds

is it memory or are there notions
of value playing backgammon in
the next room the other player
offering me the doubling cube

and in these shadows
I no longer see fortunes acquired
the play of light and darkness
becomes a sort of casual beauty

novel writing

2011-12-06T10:43:00.003-06:00

shattered armor lying on the ground
here in the next chapter the baby was
lost the song was unfinished he grasped
the wooden sword thinking it a working
model the chapter is a draft the candor
of the major female character just an
illusion somewhere in me the voice
calls wake up the night time is just
another method of avoiding your memory

he said no one finishes a poem
and there was that guy who hadn't
had an orgasm in 95 days one day
for every complaint in Luther's
list and a couple to flaunt a moral
superiority I understand the way
such abstinence breeds a contempt
for nature I am so above the biological
self that must mean I am like the deity
yeah right you da man

but the poem is unfinished and
my orgasm has eluded me again
still in my mind's eye the memory
can be tracked the naked girl
assenting to her desire and my
dark needs I still think its
those days in catholic grade school
with all that talk of virgin martyrs
crying their sweet eyes out refusing
the advances of the wicked and
offering up the pains the tortures
to a perfect white lit fellow himself
a masochist no doubt

in the last chapter there was
a bell rung for each brave act
it rang twice in its loneliness
he did the right thing but the
maiden preferred the dragon and
his wooden sword shattered in
his grip at least it didn't
suddenly incandesce the helix
fleeting its four desires
unsynthesized in the light

no child created
no poem finished
no song repeated

winter cold, 1977

2011-11-29T14:17:00.002-06:00

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

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

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

is there someone else in here
with me?

I smoked Benson and Hedges menthol cigarettes for maybe twenty some odd years. This piece also mentions the Keye Luke sequence (a series of poems using the Chinese-American actor Keye Luke as a metaphorical device). There is the concern for cartography, map making. Also the sense of loss is presented as an average understanding. I have long felt that the price of consciousness is the need to mourn.

cadillac hearse drives thru snowstorm

2011-10-31T11:23:00.002-05:00

the steam heat turns my skin into dust
I remember you're in reno
I remember, like Elvis
the karate in making that love

there ain't no rock and roll
here at four a.m.
friendly fire is asleep in the bedroom
but apt to get up, coughing w/her alleries
or I'd jerk off
to the acrid guitar music
of your remembered flesh

–all those cars
—the occasional couch
—the stolen bed

well/some chances are crazy
and sometimes I gamble
you don't/that's why you're still alive
somewhere in the desert
while my skin turns to dust
in this silence

Springfield,Illinois
February, 1982

perfume rising from memory's swamp

2011-10-18T13:18:00.003-05:00

down wind from your memory
high enough the clouds are mist
in my constitutional I breath
deep the perfume of your time
in the living room at scarritt
on the red couch my hands lost
in the circuitry of your golden
wires you grew them so long
trying hard to find a recognition
that lived beyond these simple
years I am you know this
still high on my desire the burning
incense your woman's flesh
swollen and suddenly wet in
a post poetry night at scarritt
you failed to wear panties what
a good girl I can smell your
asshole in the fall evening
my self and its tongue an active
participant in this memory the
red couch it opens now in the
night of memory your too white
limbs arranged the lights low
the candles flicker steely dan
plays in the next room or is
that dolly parton hard to really
know I am so distracted hearing
again your words your voice
your possibility in that time
some decades back we did have
the slightest opportunity
to change the story

but we didn't

she turns sixty in las vegas

2011-10-07T13:02:00.004-05:00

You were sixty years old
yesterday you were a vision
in the bath when I was
younger you chalked up
another defeat in the court
of memory you saw my ghost
parenthetically in the motion
that you filed you were still
seeking a transubstantiation
in the fall of yet another
year your justice girl scale
still balanced between "I
don't know" and "can't decide"
just like before a hundred
times you're sixty now a
skinny woman aging with a brand
new law degree and your ancient
memory is suppressed and
replaced by that need to
avoid the possiblity you were
wrong the pain accompanying
a sudden fit of anamnesis
the paper a virtual storm
of madness and desire the letters
the worms of careful half truths
laced together in a garment
you have worn these decades
now an irish custom mis-stating
your responsibilities until the
wake where you will wander
in the land between, avoiding
the truth that must be confronted
before you will return

it's an interesting story
there's no doubt
I appreciate that much of the error
was mine then
we had our role
given so many turns of the sun
ago and both of us have
flinched on many an occasion
this time though
it was you who failed
you who said you didn't care
didn't care

that's pretty much it.
now you lawyer up your caring
in a western courtroom pre-
tending the vinegar you
taste is wine

another year then
another dispensation
absolvo te

yeah that'll work
adieu princess

loss attenuating

2011-08-30T13:32:00.004-05:00

the flagrant noise of misplaced desires
rattling in the confines of this elevator
shaft misnomered two thousand and eleven
you wore your converse sneakers slipping
in the rocks of foolish dances handing me
your memory from the downside of thirty
years infatuation your's and mine you left
again to frame the world in such a way
your fear that last march to valhalla or
the baptists hell whichever it only serves
to mark the sudden loss of memory that is
truly what you fear and what I fear also

and there is an ugly tune echoing
in my dreaming heart and you seem to
walk away from me in this vision you
have too much to do and I don't feel
important any more but then who was ever
important when the deadline is rung and
someone else has produced an obituary
with almost no relationship to your
heart: educator and world traveler
a man for all seasons, but now it is
winter

and I've Yorick on the mind
thanks to Jane in that one poem
I remember in my 20s this nightmare
vision of my own hands, the flesh
leaving as in a horror picture
the words flitting into air like
smoke disappearing in that knowledge
that time is itself a liquid
dissolving our memories and our
very lives into the great stew
the sea that laps at the Mother's
womb

I wish you were here Gary
& you are right: I will miss you
when you are gone
this heart is blind in the night

the insurmountable nature of desire

2011-07-21T09:28:00.003-05:00

dream, and even then, revised

2011-06-22T10:15:00.010-05:00

prologue

he is ready to implode to twirl
in the curtain to return her bra
and panties to the closet of his
imagination and oh if he only knew
how much harder it is going to get

1.
originally chained to science
the abracadabra of year number 12
transferred my heart's bondage

before I was a romantic
after, a romantic with a penis
indeed who
loved the girls and not just
for their use, not just for
their looks, and not just for the
complex games they played with
my mind. I cared about the idea

of Girl, of the mom, the sister,
the daughter, the lover, the wife.
She who brought us all here.
I was in my 20s when I knew I could see
something was wrong in how we
related to each other, the boys
and the girls, the men and the women

I could see the hatred coming from fear
in the faces of the males that I
knew well and I could see the fear
and the need for cunning in the faces
of the women I knew well. Of course
we were mostly in our 20s then, so
none of us knew shit. Not really.
Not shit that would later
turn out to be good and useful.

Thus the journey boogied on
from one sad escapade of flesh or
ego driven desire, slick with the
juices, sayanora to the rational
we did the artiste thing living
passionately striving for the
honest heart

but dragged then into the
tornado of hormonal mis-truths
for the sake of come see me
darling girl for the sake of
change for you or change for me
I'll be what you must want or
you can be what I desire

what dreary fateful
lingerie a lonely slip
to quote the dude abiding
and night after evening light
this woman or that understanding
not what I knew or know but
what is truly believed I finally
came to the Lady and this one
I married in my heart
finally for real

2.
Even now the Hammer
builds His house within the structure
I live in and in His house He wants
His way the possibility of truth
only lurking there central air disclosing
all the odd desires the ones
that reveal that which humiliates us
we think is making us stronger

tell this then to the twelve year old
he is always humiliated and when
he discovers his worth is measured
in teaspoons on a daily basis &
any given girl can catch that
memory and return it with a meaning
he will awaken in the night
clutching himself in yet another dream
and even then

This is a re-write of a recent poem. Much of the hard work here was contributed by my old friend, Sandra Riseman, a poet of real talent herself. I first met Sandy in the poetry seminar that was the first creative writing class taught at Sangamon State University in the fall of 1972 by John Knoepfle. This class also included Springfield writers Jane Morrel, Janne Hanrahan, Steven Dolgin, and myself. All of these folks were aligned with the Scarritt writers group. Sandra later went to the graduate writers program at Hollins College and then made her way to the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, where she found a life and where she lives today.

I know this piece is not finished, but I feel it was opened up by Sandy's re-ordering. I worked on the language some and changed it in several places. I hope to re-visit it in the next couple of weeks. Suggestions are welcomed.

still naked in the day

2011-06-03T13:41:00.003-05:00

your fate is an armoire disguising
the dress to be worn in the rapture
your fondness for the kitten is
duly noted the increase of her days
spent clawing the furniture the armoire
has scratches on its 18th century feet

somewhere in the deepness of this
celluloid cavern is a tape of you
reading that scene in Sara Sara Jane
where the freaks from Scarritt pick you
up and you hear those desperate jokes
we wore like hats in them days

I admit I am a little afraid
to look in the armoire and see the
tuxedo I shall be wearing when we
share that dance beyond
I admit I took your chap down
last night and walked those narrow
lanes again remembering how badly

you played bridge that time
Jake and Joel beat you and Cheryl
that time you and Cheryl went to
see the guy who published Uzzano
and shared some serious sisterhood

the days are nights and the nights
are curtains hanging now beside
your armoire its beautiful polished
surface with bright brass fixtures
waiting for the opening now
waiting for the chance to wear
that gown in the night

dream, and even then

2011-04-19T12:29:00.005-05:00

Originally chained to science
the abracadabra of year number 12
transferred my heart's bondage

before I was a romantic
after, a romantic with a penis
a very hungry boy indeed who
loved the girls and not just
for their use and not just for
their looks and not just for the
complex games they played with
his mind I cared about the idea

of the girl, the mom, the sister,
the lover, the wife. She who
brought us all here. I was in
my 20s when I knew I could see
something was wrong in how we
related to each other, the boys
and the girls, the men and the women

I could see the hatred and fear
in the faces of the males that I
knew well and I could see the fear
and the cunning in the faces of
the women I knew well. Of course
we were mostly in our 20s, so
none of us knew shit. Not really
not any shit that would later
turn out to be good and useful.

Thus the journey boogies on
from one sad escapade of flesh or
fate, ego driven, slick with the
juices, sayanora to the rational
we did the artiste thing living
passionately striving for the
honest heart

but dragged then into the
tornado of hormonal mis-truths
for the sake of come see me
darling girl for the sake of
change for you or change for me
I'll be what you must want or
you must be what I desire

what a load a hunk of dreary
fateful lingerie a lonely slip
to quote the dude abiding
and night after evening light
this woman or that understanding
not what I knew or know but
what is truly believed

and even now the Hammer
builds His house within the structure
I live in and in His house He wants
His way the possibility of truth
only lurking the central air disclosing
all the odd desires the ones
that reveal that which humiliates us
makes us stronger

tell that to the twelve year old
he is always humiliated and when
he discovers his worth is measured
in teaspoons on a daily basis &
any given girl can catch that
memory and return it with a meaning

he is ready to implode to twirl
in the curtain to return her bra
and panties to the closet of his
imagination oh if he only knew
how much harder it is going to get

Another Novena

2011-03-30T13:53:00.002-05:00

Trying to remember,
when I die will there be doves?
The thick cloth covers me.
I remember the chocolate,
remarkable in the cup.
Everything seems beatitude.
Memory isn't film,
the various disappropriations
of day, hour, minute are
catalogued, but not precise.
I am trying to remember
which experience awakened this need?
Which day did I telephone the saint?
When did I do that tarantella,
confusing each of you,
this feeling for that?
And this life seems only
time noticed, mercy spent.
Outside, an awful noise.

Arise asshole.
Shake the dirt from the box lid.
You're kidding yourself again.
This isn't the way out.
Just the usual awfulness,
and you know it doesn't have to
be this way.

I am buying a ticket
for another ride on the carousel,
the painted pony
rising and falling
with every breath
I am rehearsing the old song.

mandolin lesson

2011-03-30T13:50:00.001-05:00

admired is he jerking this chain
or playing with his mandolin? on
certain tuesdays he hath gambled
with his heart or with his hammer

undefined the past an arrow
glancing harmless off the shoulder's
blade the memory of all that chipped
it's place in the quill deceptive

china boy china boy broken
at the top of the stairs limited
scope the arrow spent the mandolin
played song of repentance

lyric of defeat its tuesday
now the wheel spins to double
naughts my warming self to see
its constants in the mirror

brief melody played murder
unremembered chosen from the
list of static tactics you
heard this apology in the wind

"and the mandolin wind
doesn't change a thing ..."

2's a Crowd

2011-03-30T13:39:00.003-05:00

these posts are at best noises
in the night's carnival a song
sung once and sent alight to that
euphemism they use today the cloud

there is a secret captured
by this advice the sands of
missives past thrown in
your face there was no brief report

it added up to a simple sum
the wages of pride and the knowledge
of little the impermanence relied
upon for, what, privacy?

even now. You ask me all these
questions like a network affiliate
seeking a secret hook into the landed
class you smile with your ambition sleek

like a power suit in that once
gleaming caeserea our parting shot to the anima
selfless now in either desire or hysterical
fear the days repeated the days

mere abstract measurements for amazon's
cloud I'm keeping the words there now
it's here it's not here it's here it's just an
idea like this poem surely there is

a place for that you should

the latent map, again

2011-03-29T12:03:00.002-05:00

chambered heart the pieces of pie
each plastic triangle smooth and creamy
consumed by that devil or the ghost
who thought I was his brother in the
dreaming disguise the hotel discarded
in the subconscious town the one he
thought dropped from the latent map
the apartment segued into the house
of his memory the one with the basement
running through the many rooms
something not quite right in every one
chambered life the heart caught in its
lust for recognition or for someone's
desire but no one remembers this
unruly hammer smacking wildly at the
construction of these days the point
is still there, though, that one person
or another, still opens their plastic
container and sees the detritus
this chambering of being this wax on wax
remarking of one bright blossom to the
very next, covered in the nectar that
implies a kind of salvation who am I today
that I should break the hours into minutes
the days into hours, the weeks into days,
the chambers following each the other
through the basement up the stairs
trying to find the forge, or the bedroom
whichever one is truly meant looking
for that satin doll who's life
is like a poem itself her actions
all of a sorting she brings what knowing
I can reach into a focus showing me
the peeling wallpaper the ceiling leaks
the change that isn't dealt with these many
days across the desperate train ride
we are now on ...

somewhere then
the rest of the noise abates
into song the tin cans
clattering on the string
duke ellington in
the elevator

portrait fermenting

2011-03-03T12:04:00.003-06:00

the serious thought came from below
the frame was empty at that moment
in the air is the light is my sudden love
who was he in that time who was the marker
that marked the page who he thought
he might yet be in this new time the marker
marked the thought still the actual frame
was empty its rustic construction un-
encumbered by any given stain Or

was that man still painting in Springfield
was that song still in production
at the theatre centre or maybe in that bar
the crows mill school was the idea finally
brought to light your ... sentience an
anamoly or am I now a peasant boy
just buy a new white shirt take home
this bottle of wine from your painter
friend have yet another sip and stain the
paisley from that memorized and unremarked
reaction yes this flesh is just what you
must be this time around it is all flesh
to be accepted

in the frame the face
wearing the days so well
the hair is tangled still
so very long
the wasp flies audibly
from one brief thought
to this one
now

the sting no longer the governing memory

romance, a thousand years later

2011-02-24T11:34:00.007-06:00

wasn't it you that spoke of the miscarriage?
isn't that really a theme in your poems?
someone is always pregnant or losing a child
or having an abortion someone is menopausal
what is that if not a comment that its really over

so you had your one baby late in the game
and now he is close to the time he will leave
you as he should and you are now an advocate
for children in your work now aware
of the strands of impatience you once prized

did we share that bed last night?
I cannot dredge it up from the memory of that vision
you were there again we were still trying to figure
this out and that little girl she was still
in the other room dreaming about being real

how's the song go? imagine my surprise when I saw you
now that's a memory I'd rather live without, truly
I wish you'd recede into the distance on your red horse
you know the one if I'd recognized this a thousand years ago
I'd have cut your throat, after the rape of course

will I ever bleed out?

the centuries, part 1

2011-02-08T11:25:00.003-06:00

the cheese stands alone
stinking in his poverty
millions of his minutes
taken by the aristocrats

the choir sings on fox
with a secret rage for
teenage girls and boys
glenn opens his box of

whoopass allowing the freaks
in egypt no chance of their
own choices only what's in
the air of repose that last
book of the new testament

where the conspircy theories
were first codified for the
entertainment of the masses
the original big budget movie
called apocalypse now

we've played this tune so many
years now the leaves falling
every october in the face of
someone's specific fear

is there a way out of this deck
can the cheese make a stand, alone
in the cyber farmyard having watched
his family destroyed by greed at
the top

the freaks walk through town
armed and dangerous clowns of stupidity
their children acting out in some hazy
understanding of what happened

in the towers of world commerce
they play chess for the big bucks and
the very expensive fucks leaving their
excrement as a special reward for those
to come

in the end I find myself
no better than nostradamus
cheesy in these unregarded
musings overlooked and diffident

channel catfish on the line
an anagram of the nation
careful not to step on any
cracks

Unfaithful, An Elegy

2011-01-12T12:49:00.009-06:00

there was always a talking head in that kitchen
on scarritt street (it was) my mother's distant voice
reminding me of all that I had left behind
while Pat cooked the chicken livers and
drained the bottled PBR her smile seeming
a measured remark to my boozy indolence

we were all drunk during that time we kept
ourselves drunk drunk mostly on cheap
beer and extravagant ideas exchanging hopeful
notes of how much we thought we wanted from
this living this time upon the wheel

she had her kids and I had one too
we wrote our books and fled the normal
days living hard within the fantasies of our
fictions re-reading the best parts and playing
cards while smoking maryjane and the friends
the friends we had a gaggle of them then
their egos seeking a warm fire of appreciation

they came to drink Pat's beer and smoke Pat's dope
and hang out and talk with Tim his ratcheted
up ego expanding every idea to the size of
a galactic superstructure how many different
stories wandered through that day and night
of desperate differentiation?

the grand poet popped in to get his ass kissed;
he wasn't getting that at home he confided.
His poet's wife herself a semi-writer
rode her fictional beast into holiday inns,
in that slow deliberate fashion like her feet
were bound so many thought it was her husband
but it really was her hidden self and on the couch

the gentle poet, as he styles himself these days,
lisped his lists post-marine stylings his voice
uncomfortably shrill his personal life a long
yet dull tale of divorce and recrimination
his verse an appendix of western american song

there were others, ones I loved, ones Pat tolerated
particularly the blonde femme fatale who's behind
I can still remember in these hands honestly she just
confused us both, Pat and me, and Pat made sure
to note this fact every chance she had and why not,
one had to wonder if there was a sly game afoot

I could never tell, I was truly the most
innocent in this country. Irony, though, they
bonded in that most cruel way, the young blonde
and her sister from another decade, sorting through
their derision at my failures, me not being
the famous artist they had both counted on

me absconding with the talented broken girl
in the wake of my worst crime that infatuation
with Berkeley, someone truly innocent here but played
by both her mother and by Pat my losses sneered
at by those cruel women both of whom I loved

I see this dark tear staining drama
from the safety of the decades
and still I am the fool within its territory
and even in the end I read Pat's words her constant
bitter refrain that I was not the man she needed
me to be and I wish for time to travel back
and let me in on that great secret love she sacrificed
for my art an art that she ultimately
did not even believe in an art I have
long since abandoned

its been a terrible journey, this lifetime, this
post youth facade of humility and minor memory
yet nearly every drug filled night of games and hats
and tragedies and kisses lost in scotch and cigarette
smoke exists like ghosts within my otiose brain
sometimes examined and mined for catchy metaphors
these scenes are schlepped across the years
in a makeshift understanding

Are you out there, somewhere, Pat?
Did you ever find a reason for the sudden departure?
I know you never forgave me, despite clear evidence
that what I did was probably for the best for
both of us and certainly for my daughters, two
in twenty years. There surely is a reasoning afoot
in that.

I hope you have met the Lady now. You have if you
have faced the many self-absorbed falsehoods you
told your self in the name of pride and
vanity. I know that I will follow you in that
long march to truth, and that my trip will be no easier
than yours. We all awaken to the lucidity of dying,
catch ourselves on the way out of this flesh,
remembering the scenes and words, feelings, ideas,
all that makes the flesh of self, beyond these simple
complex physical organisms that we ride through time.
I hope you are well. I truly loved you. It was
a series of mistakes for both of us. I wish you
Peace now in your mother's arms.

I truly wish I had been a different man, or had a different life. So much is clearly error in regarding those years with Pat Smith. She was a fine person who deserved a good life. I provided a lot of heartbreak, though much of our lives together was happy for both of us. I know she would've been better off without me, of course. But I was a charismatic guy in certain ways, and I was possessed of a huge confidence in my art, in the very idea of art. And Knoepfle supported that evaluation, if not enthusiastically, then because he could make use of it himself. She took that evaluation, and Knoll's kind words about me to heart. I really never knew what I was doing. I was desperate to get away from Becky McGovern. She was a difficult person to be with, an only child, and very puritanical about sex. Pat, on the other hand, came from a marriage where there was little sex so she had developed into being quite an adventurer. I was a young man. I think if I had had the opportunity to spend more time with Janne H. I might not ended up with Pat, but who knows? The thing with Janne, what the hell ever it was, went on for years and years. Really, the whole time I was with Pat, Janne lurked. Pat had terrible anguish over it and you can see in her poems that this is the central fact of living with Tim. Of course, it wasn't just Janne. There were several other women and I was probably a terrible flirt in general in those days. Pat beat me up one afternoon on South Grand; physically beat the shit out of me. I didn't fight back. I think that one was about Becky Bradway, who I was fucking in the afternoons on the couch in the living room, under the watchful eyes of Maurie Forgmigoni's remarkable painting of Pat that dominated the room. By then I should've understood that Pat didn't care for my work, and she was definitely pissed off about the Berkeley thing. Yet she defended me to others on that score. And she sat down and wrote a novel about two 13 year old twins discovering sex, each in their own way. She was clearly one of them. The one who just went off and had sex with some random boy. The other twin had an affair with a much older guy. I think back on this sometimes and remember that when Pat actually was 13, the seminal event of that part of her life was that her mother committed suicide in Hinsdale, where they lived. She climbed into their airstream and took an overdose of barbiturates. And Pat's father hardly made it through that time. What she must have had to endure, her little girl self suddenly discovered to need to be the one that got her father through that time. How incredibly difficult that had to have been.

Well, this is all a form of self flagellation. Pat was not a saint nor a sinner. But she could sing a song and write a good poem and a fine novel. She hosted many a nice party. And she could drink a lot of beer in her prime. I truly hope she is in a peaceful place now that she has shuffled off the mortal coil.

a candle for the spelunker

2010-11-30T10:58:00.008-06:00

so the dust is lost tonight
patience is worn like a poorly fitting coat
chambers have collapsed in the caverns
of the dreamer, voices are the music
their vibrations aching in the sediment
its thin joinings this place was created
the natural way, the electronic river
fired neurons carving data into this form
the kayak of desire surfs to the brief
parole of sleep or sexual fantasy
but now it surely starts to lose
the frisson of separation the holes now rooms
each won by these obsessions
seguing into each another re-inventing
the fear that fear that act of conscience
seeks to overcome the respect of the self's truth
the suspicion it has carefully covered these tracks
these thoughts come like rapids
closer to the dissolution carrying
the idea there might be actually be a self beyond
the sudden delta at the ocean's entrance

asking asking friends where have I been
this last time on the wheel where are
the flowers the sirens the reward for having
stuck to this truth without regard to ego?

the silence is a bleak sound track
to the slightly german feel of this movie
of internal dissent: fassbinder? or
lina wertmuller, exploring sex with a cruel enemy

and when at long last
swept out of the cavern
I am at bay here
in the darkening field
hounds gathered
for an end
hear their song
here the yuyuling chorus
outside the final fire
the frontier is shadow
my prison finally
tim in situ

Scarritt Piece, Version 1, 1974-77

2010-11-23T12:31:00.002-06:00

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?

metaphor mashup

2010-10-18T13:57:00.002-05:00

more crap from the western world
inviting disinterest confusing one
version of the heart for another

and all that rowing against the current
all that flapping the wings so passionate
in my error the landing gears not
properly engaged the anchor poking a hole
in the bottom of the scull

there was a picture of sid & nancy
on the web and I was so surprised how
beautiful she was, they were

loss happens without regard to justice
but truth is still the reason for the ride
wherever the wind takes us

never more than a draft

2010-10-06T13:25:00.004-05:00

well its your birthday today
not that I'm on your list anymore
you're just another moment
in the distance now a voice
in my head telling me nothing
your picture is lost in the scrap
book of the internet its dis-
appeared you don't remember me
you don't think of me you
have another life and I am
just a relic of an old mistake

so are you the Lady in my dreams?
the blonde goddess I pray to?
were we supposed to bring someone
into this world? is it all some
game which I have once again
fucked up?

this will never be more than a draft
of an understanding that you would simply
deny and at the end of my breathing
your loss will be just the tattoo
played over my grave

in the charmed narrative

2010-10-01T12:03:00.005-05:00

in the charmed narrative:
the blondes become action figures
the robot chicks are japanese
my days accumulate their longing
and I see you different than you once
were in the shadows of my memory

can you find the melody I am listening for?
the screen flickers with someone else's
movie but I am keeping track anyway
all facebooked and blogged in
ill repute the celebrities skin
taut from overuse or ill use or
no use at all just constant
recognition of that place between
each individuated organism call it
human for the sake of argument

it's an attempt
to not lose contact but the contact
is broken the bridge has been
flagged already as unsafe in each of her
or your reactions is that reaching
for the brake tap tap as days
hours weeks seconds chambering along
asking for their own page in the
great book the ink still wet
her page and your's and mine, even
all offsetting onto each other
no version of this life is more than
ragged memories edited by desire
and more importantly fear
fear telling us what we want
what happened when we were near
when you held my hand
that day at a basketball game
we were perhaps fifteen

if there were really magic
this would be a charmed narrative
in the mind's theatre I would
reach for your fingers and
feel the back of your hand
and you would feel
whatever you felt that day

this isn't desire then
so it must be fear
that time has learned is the
protaganist of all our lives
strange to confront this
so near the horizon
you'd a thought I'd have better
defenses see the hours soak
the winding sheet
see the wooden box burning
in the long dark night

looking for the horizon

2010-10-01T11:53:00.002-05:00

spilling the disaster
across the years you once
called my number when
you needed my memory and
now my daughter does that
now and again plucking
the data from a life once
disfigured by my own self
pity still I have to wonder
where you are tonight in
asia or down the american
south your mother in atlanta
your lover in the magic
kingdom and I am here
listening to that last
message thick with inter-
ference on the answering
machine I called you back
and left my own digression
words felt useless now the
years gathering the remains
of my health and destroying
the dreams of security this
lands ability to come back
from its essential tragedy

so I listened to Frost
on the car stereo yesterday
& I thought about you again
somewhere in the universe
cracking wise helping
someone find the way

did I ever know the way
smoke rests on the fortress
hill the wooden stockade
charred broken a dream
breathing less and less
the horizon closer
now

wafer thin

2010-08-26T13:30:00.000-05:00

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 ultimately
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.

Bond Street Memory

2010-08-16T15:24:00.001-05:00

this rhyme flies in the face
of your dark time couched blank
behind the walls of bond
street logic, an apparition now
your skinny thighs wrapped in
blue silk a violence trapped
my hands capturing all the moments
tears and remarks candles leaking
waxy white streams your breath
itself a storm the weather pre-
figuring the bucking gilded girl
catching herself wiping away the tears
still languid on this altar
introibo ad altare dea
thor's hammer ends the roman
dias seeks the maiden's startling
orgasm the cross itself trembles
the fingernails transfiguring
pain into sorrow the thick memory
your time behind the camera
your embarrassed wordless poems
were they pleasure were they desire?
typical catholic girl never all in
balancing the idea
she walked a hard path
a granite wall from her father's
account book the desire chosen
the other blood bonds equally
sardonic every night portrayed
as the party at an irish wake
this girl on bond street wrists high above
her golden face urging a transition
and just as quickly as peter
denying it three times in as many
decades all short of meaning
thor batters the structure
accomplishing almost nothing

interference

2010-08-16T15:15:00.002-05:00

winds of these prayers
paint the flatlands of my father
these words chill me
and no one comforts me
keye luke returns to mars
the lunar was explored last year
there are no angels
in the recent snow
and only a photographic
image of the girl's wings
in the album now
my hands are pale this season
there are no excuses for
letting myself drowned
the noise has segued to interference
it has lost its sonic white 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

More private language. Besides the Keye Luke figure this poem also uses the reference to the Lunar Explored, a manuscript of poems written in the mid 1970s. The lunar in the title referred to the female principle, the moon being the ancients direct icon for the female. For me there was always a sexual, or at least genital reference in the word lunar. The snow angel reference is once again to a poem of Alison Gaughan's about making snow angels ("our angels never touch"). Later Gary Adkins used it as the title for a novel he wrote that took the Maltese Falcon story and retold it in contemporary Springfield, using Bill Lambrecht, the journalist, and his partner, Sandy Martin, as two of the main characters. The reference towards the end to static and wisdom come from my first novel manuscript, It Seems So Long Ago, which is set after a nuclear holocaust in the american southwest. There is a character in this book who watches the static on his tv (no broadcast signal) and imagines he can see things in the snow that give meaning to his existence. You can see the cross reference to the snow angel at work in this. I had a period between the first and second Scarritt groups where I felt completely abandoned by my friends. This piece comes from that period.

nostalgia

2010-05-18T13:13:00.007-05:00

dressed in a coat of scarlet concept
stressed in that deliberately combative manner
you channel rivers of the captured heart
into argument and envy this need for revenge,
a carnivore's intrinsic lust all this
twisted into threads to hem the apron
you would wear this day

the universe promises an end
not one you'll see of course
it isn't anything you could apprehend
nor need you fear its carrion horse

we all walk the stone steps of sanctuary
remembering our mother's sanctuary heart
the conflict's roots born from that initial act
someone's apparent come within her womb

truth is, we're all bastards now
we drag and dispose our desires
and our woes we chuck our facile reactions
into the roses and pick and choose
the words we long for most

everything is magnified
by these frozen choices the self's
remarkable journey away from fact
into the lariat swamp of memory
where we shirk the truthful pain
though chained by guilt,
and its awful recognition

and is there charity in the realm?
is death's specific justice that of truth?
can Calliope's freakish song remark
the boy hiding in the reeds?
these questions magnify this heart's suspicions
chambered now for a hidden truce this piece
in that auricle this lie in that ventricle
this memory kept a secret, not a ruse

hello little one

2010-05-18T13:07:00.003-05:00

sabrina welcome home to oregon now
I knew your dad when he was little
I held your sister in her infancy
the world turns every day
the light greets you
hello little one
can you hear the music?
they tell me you will sing in reply
how I would give anything to hear you

welcome to oregon
your dad was always a good son
welcome to 2010, a good year
now that you've come

scavenger hunt

2010-05-18T12:52:00.005-05:00

there isn't much in this rambling memory of you
bits of trash from different sundry evaluations
your image clinging to the dirty dishes
the noises of that music in the anteroom

he waves a forlorn palm hoping for someone prescient
these are merely errors lining the cage's pan
covered with the headlines from the gossip of need
splattered with my own disingenuous shit

the rooms I walk through every night they are
crowded with lost delight empty of even an ancient promise
the houses are half constructed the old ones unrepaired
every step is new every journey is mirrored on a map

in the dream state spit licking time do I stroke my hammer
in anticipation or defeat, dream hunger in Illinois
stuck in a land out of time one stone impediment
or another washed with the bitter seed

or is there an arc here, a memory made into an image,
committing neither error nor ambiguity?
the sequence of events; not the critical disinformation
is it really just a scavenger hunt through this life?

who made up this list? some of these items never existed
somebody stole my copy of the rules, darkness fell too soon
was there even a prize, or was that too part of the game?
when will I just sleep again, ever?

Failed Suicide, 1993

2010-05-05T11:27:00.003-05:00

Her moans from the sunroom on 117 South
Grand were the first tracks of her betrayal;
later those cabins at Allerton she looked on
the young father from west illinois and found
another someone new to replace me she had
always had that list of boys/men
―the farmer-poet, the would-be Vallejo,
the jazz-drummer—methedrine in his blood stream,
the saxophoner from the punk band, food & money
singing about Argentina, “land of meat”.
She sent that one mash notes. Her spirals were
composed of bitter, innocent stories,
her passions avoiding the real issue:
her father's religious requirement
to void the dark lust that lived like
a dead snake deep in his armor,
a ghost snake a snake of hatred.
And my catholic pre-occupation with
her pain primed me to take her path
too many times (my) mind overlain
with an extra-terrestrial reality.

She fucked me over boys.
The truth is, she got tired of me.
Tired of the same old stories,
too much like her sick grandfather.
And then the bad chance, the poet laureate,
he didn't come through for her.
Left her living in a garret
with my five year old daughter in
a sad neighborhood in Bloomington.
Is this history or just a long-awaited panic?
I let the pain take me to the hardware store.
I bought the plastic and
walled myself in the kitchen,
turned on the gas.
She almost killed me.
I am certain that was her plan.
Fuck her. And fuck her minor art.
She could have been the real thing.
If only she could have gambled honestly.
If only she could look in the mirror
And open her eyes.

deconstructed dream

2010-03-04T12:15:00.009-06:00

is that you
in this remarkable desire is that
your trench coat sashed above
those six hundred dollar boots?
are you bare beneath this london fog?
I know you are, like so many times
before you have your caramel leather
gloves on your golden hair beneath
that maroon beret the fact is this:
my mind's eye is focused narrowly
upon that narrow strip of flesh
freshly waxed and hidden now
beneath your oh so very chic coat
you walk over from your car
to where I stand vibrating like a mad man
and there's that twinkle, thin lips pursed
the message fraught with hope and betrayal
are you ready cher timothe?
I want to ravage you with these fingers
on this keyboard thirty years later oh
what a joke this life became the flimsy
desire calloused into injury the wound
scarred over but never healed
the raison d'etre for this time now
disassembled in the weak light of aging
the ifs and cans and shoulda beens
the dreadnaughts of disaster groupies
lining up to pander to the fantasy
once again and in that kharman ghia
driving to Lincoln Park he pulls open
the gated dream, exposes that which
real estate describes success or failure
in this version of the scheme and she
opens her legs, the valley perfumed
with her own desire the night sky
cool in the spring another year's petulance
sung by the cicadas in this brain
drilled ajar now by disease and liquor
chambered like a nautilus channeled into
battered armored excuses the days are
links in the chain mail of it wasn't me,
it was you and it wasn't you, it was me
but none of that helps now
the leaves fall to the forest carpet
all manner of dead and dying memories
line the passageway into the final valley
where we return to this ancient love
again & some day you will understand
it was our failure that led to this end

the normal heart, 1985

2010-03-01T12:44:00.002-06:00

There may have been a lot to say to you
fifteen years ago~ so much we thought
we knew; obvious, expected even. But then you
turned on me, or I on you, or one of us
upon the other. The elephant rolled over.
Stupid story. And I avoided seeing your
politic, imagining us above the normal heart.

But I paid for this error,
the usual flesh boiling off
in the hot broth of time passing.
The bones are exposed now,
silver designs in a negative.

March again, lover, cher,
the carnal spring, sopping up my blood
but there are no acts of passion
believed in, intended, remembered,
or wished for, in anyway~

just soft noise of the possible,
that chance missed,
that prescription tumbled in the trash basket
traitorous now
the normal heart

I believe this was written in New York City, during the time BB was at Columbia's writing program, and I worked for the Russian Studiers at the Harriman Institute. This poem is yet another earnest attempt to separate and understand the damage Alison Clare did to me. In truth it is a confession of pride, admitting that I thought she and I were above the normal romantic escapades. That we loved each other in a different way.

the brave white hat

2010-02-17T10:19:00.002-06:00

Wearing the brave white hat
wondering where the hell you went
these days represent stairs
dancing down the choreography
of time and light. The body
decays—drinking again.
No state of grace driving up
outside the door. I am
abandoning the ship with its jazz rock
and those other Narnian fantasies,
staving off the hollow bell,
the locked closet of this fear.
And where the hell did you go
in the midst of that whirlpool of moments?
Why won't you tell even one
secret, like the shrouds of your sailor's
warning, covering the moon?
Can't you take it any more?
It was your decision: Don't you
see the points beginning to tangle
in what little that is real?
Now the bullshit is like a normal cartoon.
Bullshit just packing this coffin.
I should've known, all the risks you take,
the killing concrete, the six hour bruise
of night, the laughing chance, the odd
gamble with death, this would be
the one time you wouldn't bet.
Anyway, I'm taking off the brave white hat,
that damn hat, and having another drink.
It's 97 outside, in here the heart
is glazed with black ice.

Alison Gaughan. Not much to explain. She had destroyed me by this point. I admit, I allowed that to happen. The heart is some sort of icon for that which can be lost. This life is so much about losing. My world, though more detailed, becomes smaller as the years pass and I wonder how much of this reflected any actual people. Some, though perhaps not as much as I'd like to believe. I miss you all.

"laughing chance" comes from Steely Dan's "Deacon Blues," which Alison quoted to me in a letter, explaining our losses. "They call Alabama the Crimson Tide..."

the pump shudders

2010-02-17T09:56:00.004-06:00

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 my hand
concentric rings of light
each curved into a scene of you
like vertigo the pump shudders
your low laughter breaks the current
into sparks the semen
spraying a diamond into 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

Coming from the time in the end of the 70s when I became involved in an affair with someone I shouldn't have and the forced and abrupt separation from this person. Lost love is a powerful form of grief; the image of being on an asteroid with neither air nor movement accurately describes my existence in 1980-81. The person spoken of here was a serious student of the ballet. This is one of a number of pieces with a masturbation subtext. The pump shudders.

the Lady in the dream

2010-02-03T13:27:00.002-06:00

Annaliese the breaths of my days
grow small leafs in a pagan design
symmetrical the constant golden
dramatic skein of another life
leads the season the notes falling
from the flute truth served as best
one can your frail figure the woman
in the wings a candled memory
which is thy truth? The leaves
upon the wind in their dancing
stories telling of the solar river
the lunar catharsis points reached
gates opened poems spoken?
Annaliese you are there unremembered
truly but the song and the wind and
the summer of this life has now passed

the bells

2010-01-20T10:23:00.002-06:00

the angelis
the burst of light
the bells ring
the lives multiply
words are arranged by sound
their meanings
nudging genetic origins

kerouac said life
is pain & resurrection
a dream 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
their own 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 sad angel
with droopy wings

ludicrous, the bad sign

2010-01-05T12:42:00.005-06:00

is it ludicrous the extent
to which I feel detached from
what passes for american
culture is it just normal
now to pass over what passes
for news on the cables listening
only for those words that
inhabit one what does make
it interesting? there was a
time when it might be sexual
the news itself had that
quality of an electrical
charge happening but that
isn't here there's too many
names of people that mean
essentially nothing to one's
life they've no actual worth
just the act of being someone
spoken about thus influencing
who? the young and stupid I
think they think that, the
thinkers that contrive to
witness the culture so what
if they are wrong they
make the record they have
their way with the music
and the average person
I knew it happened in the arts
yet I thought that jeopardy
was where the common culture
leached into actuality
could this be true, not truly
ruling, ruling this, could
this be you and now and now
the panoply is multi-guessed
by ruling classes exposed as ever
to ego's needs and ludicrous
is a black man who makes
blank statements in a rythmic
fashion and spells his name
wrong so it sticks out more like
the mother of eight poor babies like
the senator from nevada like
the daughter of the ex-governor
and her ex-boyfriend all these
once upon a timers still
occupying the newsprint the
airwaves the memories however
flawed of millions of weepy
souls post oprah reality and
who am I to question this
journey this oblique track
into today's mirror? yes the
power is back on charlemagne
yes the river flows right down
the valley someone guesses
about me but they are wrong
as they can be, wrong again,
and wrong in trellised gardened
sensibility—the victorian the
lace and the leather bustier
to these ends march the family's
cast off sins and each member's
memory of their own guilt what
do you think of that sister
diane do you think that's fair
and brother david you are on
the other side of why you
might be there not talking
to each other but just to me
and those lost other souls
the ones with the lucre sitting
in their webs in the passing hours
out in california they bear no
responsibility and have
nothing to do with what was
or could've been I never have
to talk to you again, kathy
and you gregory you're lost
in those decks of cards we
shuffled through over many
a long year so what is left
for me to mark? to call the
angry sadness when remembering
this year? the chances of
return diminish with your every
breath my loving family your
existence is truth disrupted

ii.
and then another day rolls
into sight the snow falling
in the distance beautiful
disturbing the rings clashing
the noises of suburban fear
diametrically arranged from
one sleek highway to the next
and Illinois announces our
spring disruption the note
is shared but not among the
rest of the the people of
this state no they vote the
vote they are told to vote
the primary looms now our
ex-governor the one not yet
in jail lands another tv gig
reality show the blatant
smack in all our faces this
guy ripped me off yesterday
yet the rich man with the
bad hair rewards him with
some air time

today poetry sent back my
submission
I wrote an essay on my early
childhood
there were no emails from my
friends
the fear sat in my belly
ready
to erupt
the falling
dollars are leaves
in the autumn of
this life
today I sent poetry another
submission
I read through my essay on
childhood
I hoped for an email from my
friend
I raked up what leaves
there were into a pile
ready for the final leap

iii.
transitive in the nighttime
the odors in the sequined air
charmed pop music its quest
for sex or memory still absent
in the light of three a.m.
were you there for me?
were you sleeping by me?
was I stroking my guardian
tragic in my memory those
thousands of comes on the
basement stairs at scarritt
can you understand the bright
dream she was you are they were
flesh and perfume the fluids
of the selves neither meat
nor drink the oil coating
the dreams he chances for
his wandering heart he
blames his mother's past
the funeral grace his old
girlfriend now thick with
children and a bad marriage
he held her hand in passing
that day her mother tried
to hook him up she's dead now
and I think of that young girl
on the ferris wheel at joyland
my hand on her bare leg
wondering how far up her
skirt it might go is she
still married to the mad man
as the days begin to wind down
where is the memory
where can we tell ourselves
a story without a tragic
ending is there anywhere in
this current dispensation this
land between histories
do you see what is contained
in this code this mathematics
of heart and come this ghost
of repitition where is her
heart now today this moment
this time he thinks he knows
where he is but that isn't
ever really true the child
has a better idea than he does
the days grasp edges
the nights recall
desire the bonesong is rung
to a brief file on youtube
adieux young friend
shall we go to the Lady's heart
all too soon too soon

fingers and toes

2009-12-08T14:40:00.003-06:00

hands and feet in the silly gallery
humans and creatures of design
alone in a pre-determined universe
that isn't mine hands and feet
darling fingers and toes the knotted
limbs in sultry repose your kisses
gathered by someone's index
and transferred to stars
in a galaxy's far flung open arms
are you careless in love or
were you dreamt in a poem
your hands are unclenched
your feet point to the corners
of this bed the penis in motion
the magic length of things
best left unsaid

deja vu

2009-12-08T13:00:00.006-06:00

art and not art the eye
sees you in the morning
limber yet diffuse with
noises still to make and
little unbroken wings
still to break the fingers
scratch and pinch the
alabaster skin red flesh
the animator of desire to taste
the broken shell your pain
now your desire the candle
burnt wax streaking the
smooth white girl flesh
art and not art what
could be the reason for
these tears your brilliant
eyes so wide the thought
of what must come the sudden
torn flesh at her very
heart her hands
flung up above her head
her heels in the air
her split red swollen
torn apart her tender
bottom rose red ready
to be rent open to the
memory of who had done
this once upon a time the
far country the summer
evening the times you
would've thought it all
went well she twists in
his painful revenge her
body impaled for how long
she wonders the strings
of electric hurt and his
raking fingers slapping
her wondrous pink lips
smacking her bud

will it happen
will it happen
will it happen

the hour is rewound
the life is re-lived
her hands find themselves
the fluids course to the sea
my Boy stirs again
deja vu

the dark seas

2009-12-02T11:20:00.002-06:00

but the turning moments
open Her door and its wet
in the passage I am provoked
to some sort of ending then
so why do I grasp at
a different ideal? Her voice
makes noise a blanket
covering me

i.
can I see you in the dark seas?
will you conserve these words
in another lifetime? all issues
are terminal and apocalyptic
She knows this and I know this
it is what makes being
into something maybe you
can call it art maybe you can
capture it briefly write it down
or whip up a caricature but what
you can't do is scale it back
scale it down what is the actual
point is it is about everything
it is what makes being interesting

ii.
can I see you in the dark seas?
is this what my death will look like?
kimberly's face receding in
steel gray waters surfaces like
convex mirrors the night neither
day nor dawn yet lit with cold
luminescence as I struggle for breath
can I see you in the dark seas
can I find the air again
can the spark of energy
that represents this one organism
find a way to become a sort
of melody in the violence of
actual change the cells closing
shop the fluids of this version
of me drying in the deepening winds
sent by the great dance of entropy
can I feel the heat of this self
without an engine turning?
where are you my sweet darling?
still on land our child still saying
she loves us she loves us the air
a remunerative currency leaving
yet marking this moment this
heart your's mine our's our girl's
can I see you in the dark seas?
can I find our memory in every life?
can your hands reach out to me
past all these alternate scenes
the trees leafless in this time
the snow threatening today
can I see you when I have gone?
I need to know this
I need to believe this
it keeps me from the sudden
rush of water into the lungs

Some days it is hard to understand that utter disconnect between your digits and your conscious mind. I think I type something, but it turns out to be something else. My mind has never been that all-fired sharp. I've always been a fuzzy thinker, and that probably explains many of the innate losses I have suffered over the years. It's all I can do to keep food on the table and the bills paid, never mind planning for a future I might have.

remover of obstacles

2009-11-24T11:37:00.003-06:00

Ganesha rest my hands on your sorrow
the bees are in flight

twice this day has happened
the dream plan the unrehearsed dance

Ganesha diminishes our grief
the child tells me of the Buddha

her hands comfort me
her pupils full of daylight she insists

it is night the bees inhabit the bone cave
she designs the planet

this is the skeleton of the previous self
I change and seek the change

and wonder how I remain the same
no fear nor memory can still this spirit

"there's the rub"

2009-11-19T13:17:00.002-06:00

This endless dream invades the night
Between the bouts of thick sinus
& the frequent urinations as I age ever
So gracefully and shaking off the piss
I crawl back in the bed, holding close
My wife and circling through the mental
Landscape into the many houses I
Have passed through in these dreams

The Rooms are like ideologues impressing
Their nature on my current sensuality
Inevitably there is a ceiling leaking and
Peeling there are walls in faded wallpaper
With plaster chunks distracting me their
Inobvious decay a minor chord in this
Roundelay. I am, I think, searching, for
Something or someone or what I was
Supposed to know by now. The Secret?
The rationale? The key to the locked
Door? Somewhere in an old house, is
This West Hollywood? Or Spokane?

Or did this real estate create its own
Illusive peninsula of dirt & flesh,
Somewhere that cannot be tuned
In by Mapquest? I only know that
Every night there is another room
Another house another broken chair
Or remade parlor and someone always
In the next room, laughing at something
I cannot hear. Or that the sweet air
I breath is my wife’s own soul, as she
Dreams her own extraordinary landscape
Much stranger than my own.

Remade from a poem about four years ago now. Still actively true. I dream in terms of buildings. I understand the rooms are bits, pieces of a life lived, imagined. The rooms stand for concepts, for people I have known, for places I once went or hoped to see before my death. There is always some disrepair, and fairly often people in the next room I cannot quite see or hear that once I knew, or loved, or feared. I begin to think that CG Jung had the right idea, exploring his own dreams (in the mythic Red Book, which has finally been published, but too prohibitively expensive for me to purchase), and writing them down and drawing the pictures from that part of the universe you have to be unconscious to inhabit. I truly believe that writing fiction is a similar adventure. I wish I had the time and space to do that also. For now the dreaming and the poems are the tools I have.

this life spent

2009-10-20T11:51:00.004-05:00

suddenly the light is fading
trumpets serenade the revelers
in the street its as if the
clock had turned to candy and
the seconds seem like sugar burning
among the weeds

and in the harbor
are the vessels; an armada
belonging to the woman's next of kin
the cannons momentarily are silent
through the window the calliope
whistles a funeral tune

is this the story through the evening?
the loss is both sudden and constant
through these years
is this the memory of my honor
finding all these ancient
foot prints across the floor?

still I hear the music
in the foyer
still I see the moonlight
alive upon the sea
somewhere in the world
there is another story
looking for an honest
broker one that's not
as fake as me

alien predator

2009-10-05T13:36:00.000-05:00

along the predatory canyon way
those martyred darlings prance
with candied derrieres displayed
my heart jumps like this cock
with visions of a painful entry
her breath caught in her throat
I can remember how wet she was
that night on scarritt red divan
and how she captured my fingers
in her asshole her tongue a
weapon in my mouth I'd bite
her threatening blood she'd
come at that and ride those
fingers hard I thought they'd
break so who was the predator
in this thorny valley she used
me ran away ran back to him
never knowing where to settle
perhaps not even now

More dream situations. I do see this in metaphorical terms. The woman is the alien here, and the predator, but so is the author. Use and using each other, not even slightly aware of where it might be taking us. This is in fact a good description of how things actually came about at that time, some thirty years ago. There is an interior metaphor then. A discussion of human mating and its emotional content.

taste this

2009-10-05T13:28:00.001-05:00

the filament was thin and strong
but brittle and so the end came
with a flash of megawatts

yes the closet is full of old clothes
the colored threads unraveling
the scattered holes burnt with cigarettes
leaky ink pen stain

a stack of your magazines
accumulates dust—those hoary books
of poems no one ever read

the leaves fall the water in the basement
rises old flashlights bulbless without
batteries float in a box

this one girl she threw me out
this other girl left while I was at work
I managed to get away from that woman

later there were the mannequins,
the ghost stories the girls who weren't
quite in this life—just murmurs

from the occasional french kiss
to the fingers up her asshole the demon
lover who loved me as a demon thick with juice

funny how the house is burning now
the vampire's girlfriend is screaming
in the bedroom there goes that book of poems

and in this hand gleams the razor
of my dreams still hungry still hot with
someone else's blood

A desperate review of internal emotional violence, this time, some twenty years ago now. And now I am if not at peace then at least I am not at war. Her song still playing in my heart, the hours counted and recounted. The end is surely a knife waiting for its place in the action of the story. A dream reviewed.

your death at 58

2009-10-05T11:00:00.000-05:00

58 steps to your death
the topography has changed now
tomorrow is a vessel
filled with your dust
or my anger these 58 stones
cast in that dessicated plain
tomorrow is a nocturne
playing fast and loose
with that which I thought
I knew these plans that
were not made these pleasures
that are not remembered
you walk carefully through
henderson you're now the
champion the wrath has come
to be your solace everything
I thought I knew you took
for granted as a lie
as another lie the 58th
lie of this great dramatic
wheelie your limbs suddenly
free in the air the canyon
below the pattern not there
the nocturne played out
this distinct memory of your
death in front of me
today
the day before

This is my 300th post to this blog. Thanks to those who have read some of these lines. I am grateful.

This poem refers to someone I once loved. That person no longer exists; who she is now is someone I do not know in any meanngful fashion. We all change, though I may claim to have some understanding of what she has become. This poem acts out of a consciousness that is flawed. Still there is truth extent in these statements, whether it is inside or outside of the piece itself. In a certain fashion, these words find her dead, finally. At least the woman I once knew.

shadowed

2009-10-01T10:05:00.000-05:00

no standards set out
in the yard the runner
follows his shadow
to the valley's cleft
macadam man seen ever
taller on the fallen
leaves that sound is his
heart beating back
the silence

i rise i rise
the hours accumulate
sweat is my skin
oxygen in short supply
i rise on the hill
the bobbing figure
before me when
will he disappear?

A meditation on aging and my health, the shadow is that time the spirit lives, perhaps just beyond the end of the run. Who truly knows?

Sister Kathy

2009-09-14T14:01:00.000-05:00

down at the bottom of the sorry sisters
is a bad story figured on my initial appearance
who do you think kept track of these things?
certainly it wasn't you oh sister who-is-not-
my-true-sister, shoe-buyer memory-changer,
she-who-criticizes-my-voice at the very end
of time, the fake intellectual, the soft player
of sorry games, seeking right and left
to find the maximum social success in a
limited definition, crossed by financial success
of an aluminum nature, and keeping me
out of it all, not that it matters: in a year
or three my children's children will still
see me, and she, Sister Kathy,
will be a family story, the antic
aunt no one ever saw, afraid of having her
pockets picked, incapable of even
the mildest thought of someone else,
the subject of Aunt Diane's
jokes at her expense, and Dad's own words
about her folly. The Huntress (Aunt Diane)
pays off her own guilt debt: "She was the first;
Mother's madness was the song she learned."
whereas she, the republican in the mix,
knew Mother was mad, early on and so
avoided the crushing burden of her judgement.
And I adapt it all, the sorry sister's poor
understanding, her critique of the Lovin'
Spoonful: “so ugly”, her first
husband (gay ex-priest) running the coffeehouse,
“since you asked” her wedding song
her inability to be gracious (Jacques Brel
Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris)
wasn’t cheap enough for her (I got it
at cost at Russell's record store), she let
me know. What I hated the most: that
she took Tommy Bezzis’s painting from me
for a wedding gift; not like I had a choice.
She told mother I shouldn’t read Freud
when I was thirteen, like she could
ever really understand what it was like
in me. But I had her diary from high school,
full of prayers and boys she liked
who wouldn’t give her the time of day,
so boxed in she was and still is. So
Republican sister is right about sister Kathy:
She became Mother’s legacy child.
And I am so glad I am not her. A
great gift from the Lady,
and a result of my own choices.

all words are metaphors

2009-09-10T09:24:00.000-05:00

fiery face the angel of my death
stone piled on stone the uncleaned flu
faggots of a life lived random
the flesh consumed I see your charred
memory in these fierce tongues
dancing in the hearth

jambalaya and your poor song
still stirs the pot in the dreamer's
kitchen my feelings salted and seduced
again and again now a bit like jerky
cutup in the stew but less chilis less
fucking more stereo'ed melody
the loss and lariats tossing jumping
over your damn memory your damn
breasts in these damaged hands was
that 1980, the last terrible year of
the loss of you and the loss of you
and the loss of you ...
maiden, mother, crone
(kelly, alison, cynthia)
all specifically arranged
to hold me in my sorrows waiting
for the segue to the kingdom (in
those days I thought it was a kingdom)
now the pot stinks from disuse the
bacon diced and starting to crackle
the rice dumped in so many single
kernels on the calender and me,
is it shrimp or sausage? is it the
buckley sex gene or the pope impotent?
no jalapenos, perhaps serrano, perhaps
ancho, perhaps things new from the
earth a gratitude there is a soil there
are the poems of root & stem I see
Her delight even as it passes me by
I see Her valley many walking through
it in and out the ancient dance the
ceremony starting, living, leaving,
you hold my hand I feel your
lacy hours slipping in the drama
of your lawyer's life the dreams
integument the chalice of your offering
still hidden that little room above
bond street your parenthetical remarks
on this list oh the maiden descended
to hades the crone her breasts missing
now still twirls the lariat proud of
what she doesn't care to understand
no one is a reminder of Who She Is
and everyone is a ghost of what
She Must Be... keep yourself open
in the wind so the stem may grow up
carrying the poem of the species
have a cup of stew
return to the great song you have sung
everything will be said, in truth
everything will be known

Originally published as "Jambalaya" about four years ago, this is an early attempt to deal with the wreckage of my personal life and the weird damage that my relationships did to the feast that is this life. I love the metaphors that come from a lifetime of cooking. The Lady features in this too. A reminder then, of Who She Is. My mother's maiden name was Buckley. My brother, Greg the tax lawyer, once spke about the Buckley sex gene. I was sure he had me in mind, though the subject was other things at that point. This version features more discretion, for what it is worth. That and three dollars will get you an iced coffee these days.

rivets of truth

2009-09-04T12:56:00.001-05:00

so damn you now and forever
that's a liberating thing to say
I hope your house burns down
and whatever you might desire
turns to clay in your bowels
may you be obstructed this time
in this broken circle may your
hands grasp for meaning and find
nothing there may you suffer
in the night time your dreams
now like my dreams the revisions
of self deceit no longer viable
may you awaken each day to
a cold sudden vision of
the coffin you have constructed
may you fake your last orgasm
giving up on the self and the
flesh and the memories and the
remarks once valued or maybe
you will just discover the door
locked again if there ever
even was a door a fibonacci
constant golden rectangle the
path to the actual world implicit
in that shape your own words
aware in just a certain way
of what might be meant by
your dreams you wrote those
poems they strangle you now
you thought to escape
into normalcy you send your
child to catholic school you
live a suburban life and excuse
all that you have done with
your work those hours spent
lost in the driving ribbons
kharman ghia midwestern downpours
desert filigree to raven's
danced past armored hearts
liquored and coked and never
never never trusted now the
flag comes down the errors
always there always at heart
always constricting your true
memory forgetful heart its
pipes clogged with all that
invented to keep the truth
at bay you are a black bird
wounded by wing and by
this deception will you be
able to climb out of this pit
probably not the armor canopic
praise to the rivets
of truth holding the world
together

Triggering the Downpour

2009-08-26T13:11:00.001-05:00

So many words now lose their meaning. I offer no excuses. Many of these pieces are gone into the chance of extinction. Just like any given self. Once again, I am nobody.

arc of life

2009-08-21T12:04:00.000-05:00

for Gary

its truth some days live in a painful
cardboard box out on highway 61 the hammer
grasps its uses slipping off the shelf to
the concrete floor the noises of production
distant now the people I thought I knew
turned blue, turned away, turned toward the
sea we are all going there when the road
runs out and that said I still wander on
my track looking for the right way to stay
considering the method of the orgasm the
tall tale dis-interred in that bedrock
median of leftover garbage of detail and
culture they think may be our subconscious
the "a" horizon is never enough
the "b" and "c" and "d" and endless infinite
jests of time's layers on down through infancy
and some who yell at me and some who carefully
brush the dust from what seems meaningful
yet the story, told in tables, gathered
in diverse opinions like an archaeological
site report reveals almost nothing currently
useful. that is to say, I can't dig myself
out of this box. It assembles its own coffin.
when I go and my poor children look at
loki in his midst, they will chuckle
ruefully and Joel will make fun of me
like he does now and Paige will be confused
at how she feels and Piper will not forgive
me anything. that is pretty much only fair.

thor's hammer, amulet and cross, doorway
to the sacred, my own sweet memory of crossing
through to this lifetime
striking the forge the sparks fly
if there were tinder there'd be a sudden
tower of flame

shantih we all said that girl told
me that back when I was deceiving myself
about her I thought
her sister was the pony in that story
the one trick pony turned out to be
me and arrogant but not enough
to dump this desire and why did I do
any of the things I did?

the hammer grasped its value
never doubted what little that matters
comes from its use these words
this seed the world undiscovered
so mistakes were made
acting too soon or never acting
the door will close soon enough
thor will take me through its oaken panels
into valhalla's candid tapestry
the words will have meaning again
I will rise up in the night sky
a constellation gleaming
rose fires in supernova
you will see me
all of you
what it will mean no longer matters
arc of life
the great prism of requirement
see you on a wednesday
somewhere near the restoration of this
memory

she said maybe

2009-08-19T13:29:00.001-05:00

these words
this patience
makes me sound phony
sweetheart
what really hurts now
is your disappearance
the things we never said
all the intrigue
the bullets of the self
poisoning my blood
I imagined you were the antibody
but you are gone now and this disease
sounds phony 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

The Fiddler

2009-08-19T13:17:00.000-05:00

This inadequacy in my heart, unable
To confront those energies that embody what
I thought existence ought to be about but it
Doesn’t seem to happen and here I am
No wiser in these last ten years than in the first
Ten nothing on hand the ambitions of
Youth burned to a short-ordered perfection
And too few walks in the woods while
The fiddler played an angry lay like most
Of mine and some of your's we walked
Away our sheltered ignorance uncontested
A conservative's world view—ego-driven
And still looking for a likely woman driving
By so very eagles in the fashion of what
Most thought the 70s were truly all about
The days jerk me around
I jerk myself around
The chicken choked
And the jokes recalled
The frizzed armor of the feminist girls
Salting the splashed spilled words
Of this auteur still incompetent
Down this loud dissonant oldtime story.

Mere self evaluation, doing the dance, shuffling the feet with either lack of faith or confident pessimism. You wake up in your thirties and think you've discovered what a self-centered bastard you have been, and then you wake up in your fifties and discover how you've tricked yourself again. Yet at the same time you know you have to discover what it is you value in yourself. This piece is a re-written post from 2005. I think it was actually new at the time. In any case, it is better now, than it was. Oh, and in the mid-1970s all the women I knew who were self-proclaimed feminists were getting their hair done in those frizzy perms. Not good for the tresses, but desirable in an odd fashion. I liked the really really longhaired girls, but even they would frizz the locks.

there are

2009-08-02T18:36:00.000-05:00

those who say
burn the fields clean
start over

those who say
never forget
re-live the acts & words

those who say
not one thing
nor another

its a synthesis
a quilt
threads of color & sound
texture & scent

the clock is papyrii
seconds are pages turning
the hours caught in amphora
sunken to the bottom
of times ocean

there are

those who say
it doesn't matter
meaning floats

those who say
to forget it
drown the lacunae

wither the layers of paint
in the heat of this
investigation

those who say
turn the light off
you are destroying the
historically valuable aspects

air bubbles glug towards
the surface the old clay
seams weaken microscopically
along my usual faults

Another examination of a recorded life. I have too many notebooks, too many pages, not enough time, too many memories, not enough synthesis. The advice I get is all over the map. What is right for me? To look, to ignore. I have done both in exquisite detail and concentration. The act of clearing the mind becomes a struggle through the ocean of all existence. There is that old story about the akashic record: somewhere there is a record of everything that has ever existed, words, deeds, evolution. Somewhere there is a Cecil B. DeMille level of recording that has taken on all atomic being as its premise. Now that's a real finnegan's wake. Wonder if Joyce has run across the author as of yet.

again, the spicy stew

2009-07-17T16:18:00.000-05:00

peace available, ii

2009-07-16T10:12:00.000-05:00

in sleep's moments your hands
find mine the vision is of rooms
with windows in time and curries
smoking the touch breaks open
matter as memory days as shell's
rippled surfaces this page
reloaded your breath on my face
we walk into another room
the window open the young girl
among the flowers sun still
friendly the motes poignant as
we walk comfortable on this shore
your dream my dream our daughter
now in a house of her own

This piece is about Kimberly and myself and our relationship to our daughter Piper. Piper is an AS child and her early childhood has not been at all easy. At the same time Piper is both brilliant and remarkably creative. She can hook different things together in that way that metaphor works and I have found that I learn from her every single day. While I would not wish Asperger's Syndrome on any child, we have worked at dealing with it and have found that Piper is herself both because of and despite the condition. This poem was originally written in 2006. I have learned a lot in the ensuing years. Mostly what I know about life is how grateful I am the Lady brought me together with Kimberly Britton. That is a miracle, something I could never have predicted or even guessed at. She is the most remarkable mother I have ever known. And the very best wife. I've not done that well in the relationship department, but then along came Kimberly. Like Nicholson in that one movie, she always makes me want to be a better man. And I am a better man, now, after these years with her. And I thank the Lady for our daughter, Piper. The greatest gift that life can give you is the opportunity to see the new person discover their self.

bond street memory

2009-06-12T11:25:00.000-05:00

this rhyme flies in the face
of your dark time couched blank
behind the walls of bond
street logic an apparition
your skinny thighs wrapped in
blue silk a violence trapped
my hands capturing all the moments
tears and remarks candles leaking
waxy white streams the breath
itself a storm the weather pre-
figuring the bucking gilded girl
catching herself removing the tears
still languid on this altar
introibo ad altare dea
thor's hammer ends the roman
dias seeks the maiden's startling
orgasm the cross itself trembles
the fingernails transfiguring
pain into sorrow the thick memory
your time behind the camera
your embarrassed wordless poems
were they pleasure were they pain?
typical catholic girl never all in
balancing the idea
she walks a hard path
a granite wall from a father's
account book the desire a decision
the other blood bonds equally
sardonic every night portrayed
as the party of an irish wake
they are all wakes in this world
this girl on bond wrists above
her golden face urging a transition
and just as quickly as peter
denying it three times in as many
decades all short of meaning
thor batters the structure
accomplishing almost nothing

Story House

2009-06-03T10:27:00.000-05:00

chinks in the story
like a house leaking memory
your hands shift the mouse
sort of like in church
at little flower thick
incense in the doorway
kneeling on the hard bench
working for a small comfort
the story in its various
versions exhumes the sad
ghost of those lost intimate
moments another map of a
terrain deliberately forgotten
a tapestry not hung on the wall

so many versions of the version
so many candles burned to the end
so many days disinterred
black saturdays chipped away
your attention turned to
another creature's life and needs
but the house still stands
in the back behind the big weeds
also part of the life you have lived
leaking now bits of the story
falling into the universe on
screens like this one

lost still lost alphabets images
photographs songs situations
relations loves cancers abortions
disasters plane rides endless
miles hours accruing an economic
end your hands struggle the mouse
drags you back to the house
hard to know if it is worth
repairing now the end in sight
hard to contemplate the damage
hard to see the words again
shingles falling from the roof

Struggling to make something out of the fact that other people read these pieces, however sporadically, and that the poems themselves comment on the actions and actual events of more lives than this one that is mine. The house metaphor is a constant in my dream world. Usually the house needs significant repairs, but recently the house has been almost new. Does this mean I am anticipating the end? I have always had significant mortality issues boiling away in me. The subject of the end of individual identity is something I have thought quite about entirely too much. It is sort of Buddhist to understand, to know, that ending a physical existence can mean returning to a consciousness larger than one's self. Yet, here I am, seriously and selfishly clinging to my individual being, though it is horribly flawed, full of error, and marked by an abysmal, almost naive inability to make the right judgement as to action and relationship. If not for Kimberly and Gary I would have never chosen correctly in all those years of thinking I was a deep and constant truthful viewer of the world. It is interesting, wondering what finesses your errors, how they can come to be accepted and used for positive growth, understanding in the larger sense. Can anyone solve this? Why does the mystery metaphor always seem so apt to me? I'd love to have a conversation with someone about it, but no one seems to talk with me this way now, or they back out of the discussion right away. Well, whatever, as they say today.

mare imbrium, ii

2009-05-22T11:44:00.000-05:00

Grandmother Moon hide me in the snowy
blanket of your light, but let me see the
secret life of the woman who walks with golden
candles in this the city
of my discontent. Let me know her stories
& her songs: the girl triumphant in
her monologue, the young woman's careful
choice, the maiden taking account of her
truth, not trusting the slick solutions
of the paranormer players like this
would-be Magus.

Good for you.

Mitred corners enclose me, in this frame,
I look and suddenly, she is there, Eleanor
of Aquitane, that tapestry at the Cloisters,
fair Annalise under the boughs of the holy oak,
Kimberly, smiling that knowing sacred grin
across her desk.

"Later you."

My heart is drumming her lyric self
each cycle greater than the last
the notes describe the melody of this life
Grandmother Moon help me be
worthy of Her song.

This piece was written before Kimberly and myself started living together in late 1996. I was deep in the knowledge of the Lady by then. Graves' The White Goddess rested on my bed table. It had suddenly come to me that Kimb and I knew the same sorts of things about the nature of being, the universe itself. We both had adopted the prism of the Lady in how to approach and live our lives. And, I was totally falling in love with her. That pretty blonde woman in the editor's office, who smiled at me when I walked by. Every day I still strive to be worthy of Her song, the Lady's and Kimb's. This is still the most remarkable event of my life: Kimb's love.

griddlecakes, redux

2009-05-20T11:31:00.000-05:00

Sometimes she is the mirror, bright!
But oh what might lie behind her silvered laughter?
Only the dissolution of the mission,
only the one chance to run from the final
dismembering of who we were originally.
Smells like buttered toast here today.
I yearn for sausages bursting with fat,
surrounded by the pickled cabbage, a strange
bread the manger for this sacrifice. I see
clearly now the way I hid this entire time,
with smoke and bourbon and too much vodka,
too many years. Nothing remains of that
once possible cartographer;
he threw his compass away and watched
the woman's graceless destruction.
Which one you ask, the mirror bright?
No, that version of myself became
someone valuable in her own game
and so divined her place outside
of time and space. Lucky bitch. Or
worse now, living with a child but not
the one that was to be the gate, does
she know the memory of her plan
detailed in dream song the red haired
priestess below the tree and me
screaming as I bleed and burn,
the harvest king returned to her
in the night, where she can still
feel my face and know the minutes
passing? Or, rather, past? And is
that howling the blank recognition
of our banal and ordinary pain?

I think I wrote this in 2005 and put it on the blog somewhere along the way. Slowly turning into a version of Whitman, re-writing the pieces over and over, trying to carve the meaning out more clearly. Still struggling for grace, of course. Of late the darkness of that time is lessened for me, but the way I changed because of these things becomes clearer. So, I see now how I let myself attenuate, if you will, in those years of complacent expectation that this woman would eventually come to me. That simply was a version of everything else I did wrong. It's hard not to simply see my life and choices as being essentially those of a lazy person, afraid to confront his own failure and just accepting of it. Banal and ordinary pain. See you at the checkout line.

Thanks to Jane Morrel for the strange breads and sour pickles images from one of her hospital poems. I seem to miss Jane the most of the writers that I knew in Springfield. And, she has been gone the longest.

desire

2009-05-10T16:04:00.000-05:00

desire is a busted coin
don't kid yourself
you bless the days in a reverie
desire a toy-like candy
waiting for the signal this short
story is over the iron chef
has three quite distinct dishes
none of them a total con
but certainly the sauce
is a k-y special fingering
the source, deep along alignments
you thought you never felt
perhaps it is all a lie
or a memory

secondary memories

2009-04-19T20:00:00.000-05:00

immoderate, barely mentioned
you pass in and out of those old dreams
always refusing to engage me
this life leaks from the balloon
hissing a bit as it goes

I see you were here last night
flipping through the old words
looking for what I cannot tell
that is certainly nothing new

so if you return
to these pages before my death
or your's maybe you'll tell
me what you were thinking
those many years ago

the cat's pissing in the other room
does he want something? is there
a point to these words? the moon rises
with a white face white as a viking
girl in the indecent morning

the sadness never leaves
my friend from those days called
this afternoon, on the road
in the carolinas
we laughed at what this might mean
he is kinder than he should be

there is a mercy in that

Beheaded, Again

2009-03-29T18:37:00.000-05:00

establishing an image
of the skull who speaks truth
that disembodied head
who might tell me what might be mine
the fantastic and the secret
the ways to fortune
or health or sexual conquest

1. the slestak (slee stack) talk
to the illuminated
skulls of their ancestors
who are thought to know more
of the workings of reality
than the current population

2. the knights templar, tortured by the king of france
and the pope, in the name of the inquisition, claimed
their instructions came from disembodied heads
in metal caskets in secret rooms at their monasteries

admittedly they also talked about their anuses,
such is the nature of torture
but still the magic of the maltese falcon
begins to seep through these words

3. there was a mexican horror movie
featuring the severed head of a 16th
century magician, part of cortez group
who stole the golden mayan face
a rancher's son dug him up and the head
spoke to him saying
I will make you happy
but you must be mine

4. and in an ash tree in my dream
the head sat upon the limb
and spoke in aphorisms
and she called to me from the celts
and told me I knew a woman
loved a woman who had the power

and under her pillow the blood appeared
never an explanation
never a narrative voice
but I didn't care
I chose the magic
because the supernatural implies
hope

5. so the talking skull in knoepfle's poem
is the father and the son but it is also
the ghost of my self
and cannot walk away
it only creates specious solutions

the priestess married her disappearance
I do not sleep well
I do not trust my solutions
I am an anagram of the nation this way

we have become disembodied
we have lost our genitals and our assholes
we have no breath nor blood nor bile
nor anything that connects us to the earth
our thoughts flicker on the cave wall

A return trip, prompted by the coming hollywood flic based on the Sid and Marty Kroft show, Land of the Lost, which was a favorite of mine in the 70s/80s, whenever it was on. I loved the insect peoples reliance on the skulls of their ancestors. These skulls glowed and talked to them. Later on I read about the Knights Templars confessions in Holy Blood Holy Grail, the source book for the DaVinci Code.

And John Knoepfle had a disembodied heads riff that ran right through his poetry. I once thought I'd write a monograph on the subject, but that got away from me, and now all that is a mild memory. The specific poem referred to is entitled "An Affair of Culture". I see in the latest Illinois Times that Knoepf has yet another book coming out. Well, he's what 85? Still tossing the lines off. I'm sure there is plenty worthwhile there, including lots of stuff he stole from me and from other students.

I note that I always thought the rock band, the Talking Heads were really kind of overrated. David Byrne was like so many professors I knew, happy with his own intellectual coolness, whether it added up to anything or not. Still, Fear of Music was a great album. This is a re-post with numerous changes of a poem I put in the blog three years ago. Beginning to repeat myself and getting a little murky. Just call me Marge N. O'Error.

mis-carriage

2009-03-18T10:45:00.000-05:00

we talk of what might be real
how brave we are
we can remember, foretell
ourselves, our other selves,
the selves from before
we are children climbing trees
planted in the corpse of that old man's ghost
we are playing on tamsen
donner's broadcloth skirts
on washington street
it's 1979

the sweet rage & the bitter choir
why don't we know each other?
just one story, told over and over
broken, the foetus in the wind

you have carried off
what I imagined as real you
have informed on me
to the authorities the firing
squad is being organized
everything was a disturbing
memory in my mind there
is an unfinished house
falling apart the decorator
called it an abortion
but it was really more
of a miscarriage

the limb broke
under our weight
the kiss interrupted
savage love

becoming white dwarf

2009-03-06T10:55:00.000-06:00

through the mirror
past the reflected self
broken fragments of a life
in a painting silver nitrate
flickering images spun
from the screen now
the plastic flowers into
brown and black gardens

through the glass
casting off the burden
winnowing the information
on the highway of a single
life time chunks of being
rescued from the landfill
deep beneath the A horizon
seeing beyond the single
player deep into the vast
population of stars & planets
organisms and ideas

and on that canvas on the floor
using glue sticks and scissors
the shards of mirror the burnt
celluloid the fragments of a
lifetime's correspondence
dance and decide
what's real and what's not
who they were who I am
what is the song we have sung

the bear's mind becomes white dwarf
ursa minor
not quite pointing to the next
revelation

Recently someone said to me words to the effect that they are tired of my pieces concerning my lovelife. Fair enough. It does question the point of this work in a specific fashion. While not entirely about the romantic forays of this life, most of these pieces arise from what the relationship in question (whichever one) seems to tell me about myself. Perhaps that is the point of it all. I do believe my work offers value, but perhaps only to myself. In any case this piece arises from the images I associate with my journey through my paper. Confronting the self in the mirror, glimpsing other people's lives, running the movies of memory again until they burn on the projector, and finally, searching the web and the work for clues to the ultimate story that we all live: our life. Is it worth it? I have to do it, so for myself it is worth it. There are myriads of stars and other worlds' and only the Lady truly knows how many other consciousnesses share this universe with our species. Probably many. So, I am another grain of sand on the great wonderful beach of being. This does not upset me. We do what we can in this lifetime. Hopefully it is about learning the truth of something or someone. I still seek truth, for what it is worth.

arsonist

2009-02-27T15:38:00.000-06:00

I live in a room of smoke
room of smoke
snake of smoke
the bird cries shit in the evening
Cubs lost both ends of a doubleheader
twi-nighter
sound of a transam outside under
clouds of prophecy, transmissions
of lusts, forgotten ouevres,
a number of fates intertwined
or interspersed or just interpreted
along with the average junk of living
I would know reason
or of a reason
or why no reason
if I were unreasonable
still, a room of smoke
in a house
of smoke
in a dim hour
the walls are hot to the touch
somewhere the fire burns red
in the crawlspace?
in the closet?
in the space between these rooms?

still a partisan

2009-02-26T11:35:00.000-06:00

frequently the nails
are dropped in the night's
sand the hammer falls from
my hand and the dream slips
away frequently the coughing
comes takes my breath fills
the mouth with spit and
chokes the words in their
anger frequently the moments
pause regarding me as not
yet dead but dying those
houses in the next world
semi-repaired not on the
market quite yet but any
day now frequently the jokes
limp into sight the structure
weakened no nails nor bolts
just limbs scattered in
the suicide's wake I feel
myself struggle from sleep
grasping the hammer like
Thor reminding himself
there is work to be done
frequently this makes
enough difference that I
rise and swallow my
medications pulling on
these jeans that shirt
walking out today's door
still hopeful still a partisan
still a partisan

The struggle to live well, to live with purpose, to overcome the robotic rhythms of routine, the closing walls of memory and belief. Thor's hammer of course is essentially a sexual metaphor. I am amused at how infrequently (heh) people recall the dominance of the penis in the life of the male. Perhaps it is because for the female the ruthless domination of genital desire is a different story. In any case, why do you think men are so threatened by gun control? It's a metaphor folks. I admit, in this case, to being a man. Frequently.

the girl in the sand

2009-02-10T18:59:00.001-06:00

can I work through the ancient language
be an interpreter of a lost heart?
can I see those images of the lathe turning
in the dark, revising the serried
outlines of the girl disinterred, fictive
illicit, burnt into the conscience? was
it really my work, my stark dreaming
of the menarchal child destroyed by
someone's confined understanding
in the daily day of here and then?

so I felt responsible
only for thinking it possible
and then it came true and truer
all around me the same story
repeated its details different and
varied yet the girl I met the
girl next door it happened to her
her crippled father wrecking her
very flesh not a murder
but too close to dissolution

we all struggle back from this loss
it is a version not of defeat but of
mourning
she mourned those days gone now
she mourned a different way of
loving her dad
she mourned all this yet I came along
with my story of the dead girl and
nothing was healed nothing really
changed perhaps the face of the
source of loss has been varied
varied and treated to his own loss
everything loss these many years the
girls the women the female being
murdered in nearly every part
of these thousands of days

I am savaged with self knowledge
trusting only to the attempt to live truthfully
the mourning continues doves leaving
the scene are you still out there
Miranda, the girl in the sand?

Autopsy ... Detritus

2009-01-02T21:04:00.000-06:00

Her scattered remains trailblazing a failed journey across
The planet’s surface; no diseases, only the same pale flatness.
It’s subtle red charter a cold glaze of blood from out of time.
Her hand lays gleaming pale disastrous flesh upon the rocks
The great canyon disguises her hair's yellow strands,
Cracks in the legendary strata of this Martian heart. Across
The endless plain archaic tin whistle singing lures the fool
To his forgotten chaos. He waves a wry grin
Disappearing in the tiny-grained sand, its very essence
Her lost bloody child. Hidden, Hidden, Shallow, Numismatic.
Is she ever going to be found? The child in her, the thing that
Stands for something else? Will he wonder where her coffin
Is delivered? Will he walk down Seventh Street, unasked? Will
He … climb out of … the Great Martian Western Sea with
Any piece of her in hand? The yellow man does not know.

Recently discovered another Keye Luke poem, or a poem at least in the genre of the red planet poems. Once again this remarks upon the discovery of the dead girl's corpse in the sand. I note this is an ongoing theme for me: Miranda in Strange Sins, any number of poems about BB discovering her hidden death (sexual abuse) at the hands of her drowned father, that other girl again and again, talking murder and death. What is it with this particular part of my psyche? I have to really wonder. I know the relationship with that girl was particularly destructive. At the time we both had the spectre of her husband's anger and his overt violence (he once tore the guttering off of a house at a rugby party after having gotten quite drunk and become violent and jealous). It is remarkable that he never tried to kill me (well, he did threaten me once, but it was over the phone). As for how she dealt with him, she controlled him. I think that was one of the things she liked about me. Although she could exercise a certain control, there was always that sense of taunting me to do the most extreme things. She liked that extreme, in the physical. That was where we ran that possibility of doing something we both would regret. Do I regret it now? I regret not having gone even farther. I only regret not having called her bluff. Whatever the fuck it was.

the bird in the cage

2008-12-29T12:05:00.004-06:00

her sharp disastrous flesh outlined
in the thin black and white polaroid
the only fragment of her nakedness
the threadbare noise of our carnal
whining well it was that and certainly
not more not the winsome lyric piece
I thought I needed not the dangerous
edgy sadistic sex of catholic desire
though it was that sometimes and
sometimes even more there was
always that intimation of an ending
and not the heart one, never the heart
one, no. the end was violent, the waters
running to the sea the memory of
another life time perhaps in ireland
viking me raping her or was she
always playing me that way? this century
and another? You'd think the slipping
dates, tacky with her juice, would
leave a noise within this room. You'd
think there was somebody else at
the end of time, whistling that sad
bullshit tune. I hunger for the ripping
sound of flesh torn at the viking's
need but all along I always knew she
made it so made it all so clear she
lived this life as a provocation daring
me to force the moment knowing
how this destruction is a communicable
disease the cells infected the thoughts
shading their character into anger
a dark angel a savage bird his beak
hard hungry for her blood why did she
want this? why did she capture
this dark first millenium sailor and
make him this naked man
and now a last small rainstorm
a memory at this point fell upon
her flat bare breasts just before
we left it for good desire another
bad song in the constant performance
this thin existence has become
will there ever be an escape? I thought
I had a plan this time, an inkling of
the thorny anemone grown within
this shallow chest. there had to be
a physical effect of this garnet coupling,
like a bloody crazy argument
in an irish catholic family. would
that seraphim come to be this time?
not a chance. she entertained my
cock purely to effect the possibility
it might work she always knew
she wouldn't take the bait no matter
how I carved the words into her
cunt, no matter how thick and hard
the blade she escaped, her tears
the lubricant of her freedom. & I
am still the bird in the cage, alone
on a thorny palm, plastic in my plan

Perhaps this is an explication of the secret charge of personal crime that lurks in any heart.

nemesis chick

2008-12-29T12:05:00.001-06:00

In early times the representations of Nemesis resembled Aphrodite, who herself sometimes bears the epithet Nemesis. Later, as the maiden goddess of proportion and the avenger of crime, she has as attributes a measuring rod (tally stick), a bridle, scales, a sword and a scourge, and rides in a chariot drawn by griffins.
— Wikipedia entry

her sharp disastrous flesh outlined
in the thin black and white polaroid
the only fragment of her nakedness left me
suffused with the threadbare noise of our
carnal whining well it was that and certainly
not more not the winsome lyric piece
I thought I needed not the dangerous
edgy sadistic sex of catholic desire
though it was that sometimes and
sometimes even more there was
always that intimation of an ending
and not the heart one, never the heart
one, no. the end was violent, the waters
running to the sea the memory of
another life time perhaps in ireland
viking me raping Sligo maiden her or was she
always playing me that way? this century
and another? You'd think the slipping
dates, tacky with her juice, would
leave a noise within this room? You'd
think there was somebody else at
the end of time, whistling that sad
bullshit tune. I hunger for the ripping
sound of flesh tearing at the warrior's
need but all along I always knew she
made it so made it all so clear she
lived this life as a provocation daring
me to force the moment knowing
how this destruction is a communicable
disease the cells infected the thoughts
shading their character into anger
a dark angel a savage bird his beak
hard hungry for her blood why did she
want this? why did she capture
this mythic sailor son and
make him the naked me of now and
then and suddenly that last small
rainstorm a memory at this point fell
upon her flat naked breasts just when
we left it for good desire another
bad song in the constant performance
this thin existence has become
will there ever be an escape? I thought
I had a plan this time, an inkling of
the thorny anemone grown within
this shallow chest. there had to be
a physical effect of this garnet coupling
like a bloody crazy argument
in an irish catholic family, ending
in a kind of relief. Would
that seraphim come to be this time?
Not a chance. She entertained my
cock purely to effect the possibility
it might work she always knew
she wouldn't take the bait no matter
how I carved the words into her
cunt, no matter how thick and hard
the blade. She escaped, her tears
the lubricant of her freedom. & I
am still the bird in the cage, alone
on a thorny palm, plastic in my plan

Perhaps this is an explication of the secret charge of personal crime that lurks in any heart, rejected and abandoned. In any case, it is a fairly sexual piece, deliberately so. Something about aging focuses the details in a sharpening of effect. In me, at least. I can see how the displacment of memory can also cause that fuzziness we associate with a nostalgic past. So, this is the document presented to the self, asking the essential question, is the self all there is? Jolly fun, no?

This woman was a libra. The symbol for libra are those scales that the maiden justice holds. The same scale that Ma'at used to weigh your heart against the feather of truth. That scale that brings all things into that final balance, returned to a valent state.

song of the stoned gambler, revised

2008-11-26T12:26:00.000-06:00

would-be Vallejo
first goattee I knew well
zapata must've had hair like your's
black, shiny, full, hanging down
below your neck
a revolutionary understanding
for a middle class boy
from upstate Illinois (Dixon/Mt. Sterling)
would-be Vallejo
polishing rocks in time's stream
carving moments on your lover's thigh
disappearing from the poker game
eliciting oral sex from my ex-wife
rehearsing hard-edged ambitions borrowed
from your greek twin
who's own fate staggered through
a series of deaths
would-be Vallejo
your Goddess came and changed your definitions
of goats and soups the scrabbled
games of accusation and meaning
you couldn't understand her daughter
your culture cut you off at the knees
down under it there was always
some smoke the words like beetles
crawling through the Aztec mosaic
you made of your brain
what isssssss /it a............llll
about? strange middle class king
of ancient aboriginal cultures
lurking now a thousand years
along the trail of dissonance
some spaniards brought Jesus for the
Virgin of Guadalupe to give birth to...
paranoid, commented, chained
to the bottom of a dinette set seat
every meal casting off dark gases
in the shroud of living and dying
would-be Vallejo you were never
in prison for the love of a beautiful
girl or for revolutionary times
surely you have awakened by now
given up the old story
admitted the rapes of your youth
the failures of your would-be poems
nothing will solve the crossword
except truth, something to choke
on. Her words exist still as mist
in a country of light.

Ric Amezquita turned me onto the peruvian poet, Cesar Vallejo and his great masterwork, Trilce. That book had a profound effect on me, though not the same way it did on Ricardo. Amezquita had a good friend, Tony Kallas, dark, greek, smart, who wrote like Charlie Bukowski. And Ric had first an affair with Becky Bradway, while his longterm girlfriend, Rosie Richmond was trying to make a new life in California. He did like to smoke a lot of pot and play poker. He wasn't very good at it, but like all those Hemingway-esque writers at that time he pretended he knew what was going on. This piece posits Rosie as the Goddess in Ric's life. She was, yet he could never quite accept that and they never successfully lived together for very long. Ah well. I do think this version is much better than the original version, published in this blog in 2005. Tell me what you think, anyone?

folk music, revised

2008-11-14T11:32:00.000-06:00

the redheaded kid
in his banjo'ed rhymes
we met at the apocalypse
or maybe appomattox
one time or the other
brandishing our signs
free willie his bumper sticker read
but his courage was an intricate vessel
shaped by someone else's hands
on the spinning wheel of what he had
betrayed. he left me and the sands
outside of time for the crated
job of rhetorical memory.
all stories inhibit;;; at least
I think that's why
he juiced his last newton,
flailing in the monster world, the
shoggoth's motorcycle betrayal, riding
up and down the beach doing
some pretty disturbed numbers
(he was) rung on the wheel of self deceit
gary adkins, will adkins,
how are you now?
are you dead in the water?
are you lost, without memory?
I found that Madeline
L’Engle book the other day,
with your inscription:
friends forever artists
in America. I see you now,
a snow angel in my memory,
a foggy mountain breakdown
lisping through the Lady's
sacred rhyme, your arms and legs
akimbo, your great goofy smile
reminding me that funny is just
excess fun the catastrophe still pursuing
you around your vodka tonic the ghost
of your unborn child reading through
your manuscripts wondering when
it is their turn
never, I suppose

fucking the dead

2008-10-26T20:20:00.000-05:00

he said you're fucking
the dead, man he said that girl
is cold as ice now your days
have become as brittle as
her kisses now he said
quit fucking that dead
girl man it's sad and sick
and there isn't much left of
either of you. My blood, still
hot, my semen still potent,
I paused in the dark dark night
feeling around in the
underbrush for the memory
of her hot flesh. But he was
right man. I was fucking the
dead and soon I would be dead
too. That's where fucking
the dead leads you. Into
the ground, into the box.

Yet, there is the memory
of the act. Is it just a minor
vision on the road to damascus?
Or does it portend the way
out of this crazy dance?

All about the we of then
the noxious thrum of drum and stem
All about the mark of ink and harm
left cut upon the crispy flesh
All about the one who left
the dream that passed the song
that rhymed the rattling drum
heart loss heart loss the day
has come to fuck the dead
let's fuck the dead

fantasy ass

2008-10-15T20:17:00.000-05:00

fantasy ass come pull my pain
from between these eyes
come turn the seared walls of my throat
into pleasured membrane
liquid with your passed saliva
silver the surfaces seeming to slip
one to the other
the focus in primary and secondary waves
0 fantasy ass that can't exist
make these lists come true
dwell in my disappearance
my summer cold punching buttons:
tablets, cough drops, booze on top
of hot cups of milk and coffee
anywhere but here
pull these eyes to your wondrous
sight, half-dressed, exposed,
hiding in your stockinged breath,
hands describing patterns in the air
anywhere but this place
silvered nails gathering, scraping
my surface, remembered painted lips
soft skin of saliva coating me,
coating me, pulling me out of this pain
this standard pain running colorless and clear
blanketting the milky way like
onan's cloak of nebulae
no understanding necessary
just the peace that has no name

I am guessing the usual suspect, but the business about fantasy ass is certainly a broadening idea. Of course most men have some aspects of this dilemma gathered inside of themselves. The idea of the perfect girl (and I say girl because, let's face it, this is a selfish, immature, stupid idealism that arises from the beginning of puberty. Sad and disturbing. But sensual and interesting for that) exists in one's imagination. And yes it does refer to a specific act of sex and it does posit orgasm as not just release but as catharsis, as a method of achieving knowledge. Knowledge of the self. A spiritual breakthrough.

cold case

2008-10-14T20:01:00.001-05:00

it's all a mystery
who murdered me
who murdered us
the first suspect is the deity
of course, the crime scene
is covered in sticky notes
offers too many clues
but no motive is conceivable
the stories inevitably conflict
everything embraced like
stones in a bracelet tiny
glass databits assembling
in the hooked memory
covering the now-cooling flesh
and the victim, me, hovers
in a fourth dimension, above
the corpse my only question is
why aren't you there also?

This one is current, working out an ancient metaphor. We were always talking about how we would destroy the other. There was always the possibility of *'s husband's violence. I like the image of my spirit self floating over the body, looking down on the sadness of the flesh, carne vale.

Silver, Turning

2008-10-14T19:52:00.000-05:00

Can I tell you something?
That your hands are with me,
the hours passing in vibration,
knowing that I'll always love you
though I cannot sing for you
Across the river on the wires
the words are spinning
like the helix of our lives
never meeting always spiral
bound with rungs of woven air
a ladder to the heavens
whispers in the faroff thunder
of our newly silvered mirror
Am I prophet, no.
Am I river, running
through midwestern grasses
and You the sky
the moon in cirrus clouds
the satellite our telephone
You are silver whispers, silver
laughter, silver voiced
echoing I am wounded by your
breathing: lightening flashes
doubling the pleasure
I am rain and I am falling
I am river, swollen with clear
wine and blood and racing
to the ocean to the end
and your voice is candor but can
you say you love me and does
it matter? Can I tell you something?
That my love goes with you
across the miles of river valley
through the calendar of our days
against the wisdom of other men
this at least is sure
this at least I know

Another poem from 1978 (I think) when things were running hot and cold. AG lived in southern Illinois and we spent a fucking mint on telephone calls. In those days if you called someone and talked for an hour it could cost twenty dollars. And those were dollars in the 70s when I was lucky to find a job making $600 a month. I was hung up on the river valley at that time. The Mississippi is a presence and an actor in this land of ours, and it always will be.

failing to indict at 58

2008-09-21T20:05:00.001-05:00

you didn't know my intentions
I never saw you lose
the daylight sheds my different skins
the river holds your skeleton as
daguerrotype in prehistoric times
we were lover and no one had
the patience for words

I still carry these fingers in a peanut butter jar
the same fingers that once lay in the shallow of
your shoulder blades while I thought about
learning to write (and your eyes stare out at me
from the length of the river always reminding me
that I only claim to be Osiris)

and it's weird the sun keeps coming up
I write the same movie rehearse your face
give you names through the decades
the small death comes and then with wings
leaves me once again like the flickers
of a strobe light or the dawn and the dusk
in the time machine

(are you really Isis? do you really whisper
to me from the river? your eyes penetrate
however many words I put between us and there
is no rock and roll your hands cannot stroke
out of me please not again don't tell me
that I am only idealising you we were once
lovers)

you don't know my intentions (I suspect myself)
I never saw you lose (I often thought I was your loss)
I changed my hands today they were worn
you crossed yourself in the river as I walked past
(you don't really believe it you just do it to bug me)

you know I've suspected you for years
I've the evidence the design
all I lack is the motive

Again another attempt to understand what might have been going on in my personal life. I like the business abut Osiris and Isis, though it switches the story around a bit. But the treating of "hands" as instruments that can be removed and replaced is using metaphor as it should be used. Hands denote the very act of writing these words. Wearing them out means this process has sucked the person dry and he desperately needs to get new hands, do something different.

I've decided that since no one reads this blog (seriously, very very few hits at all) I can pretty much say whatever I want. The chances that someone I know who's emotional reality will be hurt is almost impossible because they would feel constrained to read my poems, and that is a step most human beings will not take. Now perhaps GD will skip to the commentary and read it first. But most people will assume that you need to read the lines to get into the commentary. I am not sure anyone needs to read anything. That is how it is in this universe.

Meanwhile I go through these pieces and clean them up again, and try and find a happy medium between making them comprehensible and keeping that which I find beautiful in them, the lyric aspects of the language and its constructive music.

I particularly like the final lines because they resonate that which was in me at that time. I truly do not understand why * did this to me. Why could she possibly have gotten out of it all? I am sure that GD would say that she wasn't that aware, and that she played the game on a day to day basis. And there would be some truth to that. But I have those hundred odd poems, and there is a great deal more there than can be accounted for. It seems a stupid game from this temporal distance. So, I guess I wasted a significant portion of my life, evaluating it that way. That would be no surprise; in certain terms I am clearly a terrible failure. Yet, I ask the Lady for Her mercy and She brings it to me every day in the hugs and kisses of Kimberly Britton and Piper. Life goes on, despite your confusions. An important lesson and a useful one.

ritual suicide

2008-09-21T20:00:00.001-05:00

come share your sorrow with me
I am looking for the edges of these days
I hear your whisper
your arrowed sadness in this quiet
I dawdle on your precipice with you
but we are both afraid of heights

it's amusing
we two reactionaries
scorched by our own eyes
several times now
I say, always, it will make a poem
or a chapter in a new book
I pass my words on and save the letters
reading them years and days later

and you with your secrets and me
with my secrets and both of us
twining images to surround the melancholy
and the past
the edges of these days
are polished sharper by the poems
it is as if they are the knives
we'd like to throw ourselves upon

The title is a reference to the Japanese, Hari Kari. Ritual Suicide. Usually carried out to save face. I think we always needed to save face, and that certainly kept both of us from delivering and facing the truth of our relationship. I haven't looked at this poem in many years, so it was interesting to encounter it. Yet it sounds like everything else from that period. So, I ask myself, if this relationship made us both unhappy why did we pursue it for so many years? Because, I think, we could make each other laugh, and because the physical intimacy was singular. I never felt that way with any other women. Perhaps Alison did with other men, though she said she didn't. But, what can I trust to be true in all this? Only some of my words, and certainly not many of her's. Oh well. Time to dig in the midden some more and see what other chert and pot shards I can come up with. I worked for archaeologists for a long time, you know.

Elegy

2008-09-09T14:16:00.001-05:00

Bitter lips, for me; you spoke so sweetly
of other men and other times.
Your words cut in stone, your steel bursting
into flame. You could have been this life's rose.

But I remember you where you have never lived.
I could have told you many things, the aegis of your dreams
the child we'll never have, the song we lost that spring.
But denial is its catholic pose, against all natural light.

Alas! The lines I gave you cut me now.
And sometimes well meant lovers never meet.
I cannot understand the figures in the shadows.
You lie in a languid pose I seldom saw,
gold threads of waterfall cast round
those eyes with worlds now locked inside.

But in your many other Queendoms
the flags and roses rise together,
in stories I may know when I am only old
and just remembering.

Give me one last kiss, this lifetime
Darling, on your altar in this photograph
I'll keep. I'll remember you as long
as I can stand it. I'll tell another story
into another cup of wine.

I wrote this quite awhile ago, as an experiment about how I might feel as time went along and I no longer knew Alison, or I might have heard she had passed on. It will eventually happen, of course. AG had a very fine poem in her chapbook, LFNS, which had the line "I might be old and just remembering" in it. She already had a certain horror of aging, and yet an infinity for it. She was good friends with Jane Morrel, who was in her 70s most of the time we knew her. Alison also had a singular relationship with her grandmother. She later wrote quite a good poem based on that, using her grandmother's life as a way to explore age and death. Being a catholic girl Alison had an unnatural interest in death. Not a fearful one, of course. Part of her charm was an insane courage. This poem is nearly classical in its structure. Yet, it feels like it might break free at any moment.

revenge in broken glass

2008-09-09T14:09:00.000-05:00

I remember it now:
your stupid revenge that time in Canada
with the green silk stockings
I was your grotesque for that hour

funny how we march through these pictures
imagining we are in a hall of mirrors
you were never much for telling me names
and I always had a list somewhere

none of it makes any sense
except for your revenge that time
but then, you already know this

I'm living those seven years bad luck
and green silks has turned to gauze
the focus slipping away

An Alison Gaughan poem from the 1970s. The pictures represent memory, and the notion of the hall of mirrors is meant to say we deceive ourselves with our memories, thinking we are still that person. The use of the term "grotesque" is homage to Leonard Cohen ("Avalanche"). The concept is that facing the real situation shatters that mirror of self-image, and the superstition about shattered mirrors is "seven years bad luck". At the end, the focus slipping, refers to the loss of information that aging causes in the brain's information retrieval system. This is another radical re-write of a poem about my relationship with the irish girl.

Damask of Patience

2008-09-09T09:20:00.000-05:00

"There's just some things
I could never understand.
Some of the sick things
that a girl does to a man."

—Mick Jagger, 1966

Astride the beast
Casting cards again
Why must everything imply solution?
The hours pass in the damask of patience
Creating liaisons with stars.
The Queen of Swords, bluejeaned,
Her eyes painted with pessimism,
Her values recovered in time,
Her soul beset with cancer,
She'll have said (something)
You'll have known only too much.
No explanations granted.
No lucky twist of the great wheel.
The Charioteer is just,
Given the hands of blood, the Beast
Is catalyst of this fate.
The shower of many conceptions is
The key turning in locks, blindly but
Purposefully. The World is paradox,
The Shaman is sham.
Science is the child of faith.
Air currents circulate through electrical wire.
Someone starts to explain.

From one of several periods in my life when the cards of the tarot seemed to offer explanation and meaning. Similar in nature to all divinatory systems. Enough symbolic detail that there seems to be some answer or explanation lurking in the pictures. One of the true things I know about using Tarot cards, or the I Ching, is that the subconscious manipulates the imagery and often in ways that are essentially deceitful. This goes along with my idea that the hardest untruths to discover are the ones the self has convinced itself of in the name, usually, of ego. Witness right wing bloggery, and romantic self-appraisal. So this piece is a response to feeling manipulated in a romantic relationship and having had the experience of the tarot encouraging me to stay in the relationship. Undoubtedly the tarot, as interpreted, told me everything would be great after a certain amount of strife. Of course, that was my subconscious desiring what it desired. This would be why I spent fifteen years honking around after the irish girl, through all sorts of scenes and stupid exchanges of poems and conversations. Not to mention a certain amount of intimate behaviours. What a waste, what a waste. My life has been a waste. No one will read these words, but if they do they will know what a fool I have been. It is only now, and only because I have come to the Lady, that I have anything approaching a successful relationship. Without Kimberly I would probably have moved on to a more serious level of self-doubt and dissolution. I would probably drink myself to sleep every night. But, I truly believe the Lady sent Kimberly to keep my head above water. And I am good for her, also. I bring an intelligence and a care to her life and to the life of our child. I guess this is where I will be blogging now.

coffin of ice, deux

2008-08-28T09:24:00.000-05:00

winter's already here
with its sepulchral grasses
still green under the snow
my goddamn mind is full of trunks
& old clothes thick as dead clover
I found your letter
its odd song & that promise
veneered w/a candy I can't
believe in anymore
this winter I'm going to
carve me a coffin of ice
and learn to keep still forever

This version is a significant re-write of this piece. I originally put this on the blog in June of 2007. This is much stronger than the original piece. I note, once again, the association of temperature with emotional status. Looking back on these pieces it is easy to see this relationship always had something to do with mortality in my consciousness. How elizabethan of me, no doubt. John Knoepfle always made light of the womb/tomb relationship in Elizabethan poetry (I took a class with Knoepfle in this, along with Jane Morrel, Alison Gaughan, and Steve Dolgin), but it had some profound effect on my work. Knoepfle always sought to escape things that made him uncomfortable. Especially aspects of sexuality, something Knoepfle was not personally honest about himself. For those not familiar with the Elizabethans (John Donne, Milton, Shakespeare, Andrew Marvell), they had that "small death" thing referring to orgasm. Certainly sex and reproduction are inevitably aspects of mortality. This really isn't rocket science. What follows are the original notes from the previous post of this poem.

Referring to a letter that Alison wrote me, promising a different time in our future. Perhaps she meant it when she wrote it, but it looks more like a manipulation from this distance of years.

deficits

2008-07-31T20:44:00.000-05:00

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

2008-07-31T20:42:00.000-05:00

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

2008-07-31T20:29:00.001-05:00

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.

Stiffie

2008-07-25T09:53:00.000-05:00

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

2008-07-17T15:52:00.001-05:00

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

2008-07-17T15:44:00.000-05:00

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

2008-07-14T19:32:00.000-05:00

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

2008-07-11T15:26:00.001-05:00

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

2008-07-09T16:22:00.001-05:00

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

2008-07-09T15:22:00.001-05:00

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

2008-07-08T19:27:00.000-05:00

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

2008-07-07T20:40:00.000-05:00

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