winter cold, 1977

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

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

she turns sixty in las vegas

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

romance, a thousand years later

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 path home

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

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

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

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

this is the path home

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

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

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

psuedo phoenix

this is automatic piano
this is automatic writing
the tympany in addagio
my own hands holding the eagle
in the fire feathers trailing
plumes yellow and white
the hide on the talons turned
hard

This is a take off from a poem Alison wrote about the flesh of hands turning hard. I think it was in Light from New Steel. Should go look it up.

cottonwood, version one

Tree grows old; gonna die old cottonwood
ancient scenes seem leaves falling
covering up corpses, characters, friends
snow and features just raining now
the seasons changing
the man goes against the wall
drops the pill and the world gets
a double. the patience seems lean,
hungry for breasts uncovered and
the harvest of dying returning him to the womb
Tree gives the man flesh, takes
the humid sheet, shows a skeleton,
watches the sap run in the daughter's mouth,
her corpse exhumed the organs absent like love
and the hollowed shelter of more transient creatures.
In the dying smokes godzilla,
deity of the flickered human time; he'd burn the brittle stems
of cottonwood but his throat is full
of words he doubts. After years the rains destroy
the plastic parts of a a miscellaneous monster god.
the cottonwood spirit sings low baseball
wisdoms in many random songs.
Daughter bears son fights father
loses sight watches child disappear
all seamed shut in a factory
the humans postscript
the life static, the tree
a massive pump worked by the sun.

I have said before that I believe my "relationship" with Alison Gaughan set me up for what happened in 1979. Alison was a very skinny girl who could, at will, make herself into an pretend adolescent girl. She was virtually breastless, but very attractive. She wore her blonde hair nearly to her behind, and it worked for her. Yet at the same time there was really nothing little girl about her. Just a game to play with the boys. She came from a games playing family who did some mighty ouetre things, so it isn't surprising.

Also, I will note that living with Pat I spent a lot of time around her daughter, Keats. Keats was also a beautiful young girl who developed into a woman while I knew her. Somewhere along the line she discovered that she could use her sexuality to get me (and probably her father, Larry, and many other males) to do things for her. I admit that that was true. When she was thirteen, fourteen, she hung around the house, doing her best to get me interested. I never was involved with her, exactly, but it did immediately pre-date 1979. After I figured out what Keats was doing I quit letting myself be manipulated by her and this really pissed her off, so we were ultimately rather like enemies.

The other thing about Keats was that she was desperate to pattern herself after Alison. She saw Alison as the ultimate successful female. And perhaps she was. In any case, there was a strange relationship with the two of them in my life.

And then I met Cheryl's remarkable daughter and ended up making the worst mistake of my life. I will never get over it. This is yet another attempt to try and not excuse myself, yet, once again, I've excused myself, by recounting those aspects of my life that conspired to bring me to that point.

In reality of course, it is my ego, my vision of myself as an artist, capable of "anything" that allowed me to fuck up so bad. Not the only time, either. But surely the one time when I truly hurt someone who was utterly innocent, when it came to my life. I guess I don't really expect it to be over and done with until I have crossed over and accepted the truth of my actions.

I think in my version of the sixties there was often a moral looseness. That is to say, people casually broke the law about smoking pot and taking drugs and it spread to other areas. When I was in high school almost everybody in my class was capable of minor larceny. I shoplifted books when I was fourteen, with my brother. Since that time I have struggled against that looseness. Now I am the kind of person who strives to return the overpayment. I drive the speed limit, stop for stop signs, slow for yellow. Not very American, am I? But, it is all part of trying to make up for the very great mistake I made, nearly thirty years ago.

your words

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

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

the angelis

the angelis
the burst of light
the bells ring
the multiplication of lives
words arranged by sound
their meanings
nudging genetic origins
kerouac said life
is pain & drank too much
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 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 evil angel


So the high point of this meditation is the line about having trouble defining my sins. Later in my life this is less and less of a problem. That is because I spend less intellectual currency pretending an understanding that supports my ego's small goals. This piece also has aspects of my difficult relationship with the entire Scarritt scene that I promoted and kept going for a number of years for no particularly good reason except that I needed to feel important and have some sort of audience for my own work. This piece also references Blake and Kerouac, proving that I have had some sort of actual relationship to actual literature. And again Alison Gaughan is seen as some sort of dark angel who has left me behind in purgatory to pay for these very sins.

the bright ring of yourself

remembering your hundred disappearances
you'd always return, never sure where you had been
another universe? a lateral area?
the occupation of a hundred hands
the swelling of a thousand pricks

your hundred disappearances I was so used to
could even see those times approaching
but knew you'd be back, with the coat turned up
the collar forming a halo rays of light
from several concurrent suns dancing
into the bright ring of yourself

and you knew I knew
for this you came back
tolerated my provincial planetary existence
you came for those words that were not spoken
you came for your history
you watched me chisel your d-n-a
dispersing shadows
making metal rings of light
double spiralled through the histories

you came for your incarnations
for the old woman you wanted to be
and for the girl child who dances
you came for a cinema of your times
and of all times
this was you

I remember those disappearances now
I remember all the places you went and why
I don't mean I understand
no only that I know or knew some details
of what you are

and now you are really gone
I've still my notebooks with your maps
in them
it is all I ever have anyway
but I remember you and your disappearances
no matter where they've taken you

the lunar conquered

the sky is gray lucite, inescapable,
smothering in its cold and filth, the rain
unclean, rank in puddles of bacteria
the morning frightens me

something must happen: the lunar conquered,
the story of the aztecs revealed, the screenplay
sold, the love returned, sun again ...

something must happen:
wounds or discovery
love or murder
this evening birthed by caeserean section

I can see the static clearing
the lunar conquered, the story of the aztecs
revealed, your hands bare in the dusk

settling like snow

wan almond gone away
hands slipped from slick flesh
only scents remain
her coconut white limbs
terribly concealed
her egyptian eyes
darkened with desire
her hard snake tongue
a remembered psalm
again and again
wan almond gone

Tone poem about the physical sensuality of Alison Gaughan.

Answers

What do I want
is it help or assassination?
certainly can't be answers
I've had them
they're like popcorn always
disappearing with the salt

I don't want no phenobarbs
clogging up my clogged up throat
no messy veins slit up a treat
with slick depressing words
in puddles on the floor

I don't want no false hopes
in my prophets no false bottoms
in these boxes I keep taping shut

I don't want no revolutionaries
cutting open my bowels
to prove their fucking truth

I will kill you
I will kill you
I will never write you, never phone
I will not answer the door
I will hide in the attic
I will not see you
I will kill you
and in that dying
I will destroy myself

Sort of a riff on Dorothy Parker's Resume poem. A dismissal of suicide, only to find it in an attempt to get shut of that blonde girl. Well, I was overly dramatic in those days. Probably smoked too many cigarettes. This piece is from 1977, during the period when I removed myself from Alison in an attempt to diminish her importance in my life. I wish I had been stronger and had stayed away from her. It colored far too much of the next decade of my life. Becky Bradway was hard on me, too, but she didn't have talent for the knife that Alison had.

angel of dying

to remember you is to remember rooms
your conversations awaken schizophrenia
I remember the snow, alive, like chaff
separated by your swinging arms

I find myself fallen, on a xmas course
the plurals of cold take my pain
your imprecisions are a code I cannot understand
your words are, at best, knives


I think I published another version of this in the spring. This is the original version. I will have to go through everything and see if this is phantom memory. The poem itself is pretty clear, relating the subject to the snow angel and to homicide.

mis-carrying

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

inside of me:
the sweet rage, & the bitter choir

why don't we understand each other?
there's just the one story, told over
and over, broken, the foetus in the wind

By the time I was living on Washington Street, across from Springfield High, in the house with the hundred plus year old cottonwood that I imagined the Donner party leaving Springfield from (and there is some real possibility of that in the historical record), Alison was carrying on with the greek-american poet, Tony Kallas. Someone I respected, poetry-wise, and someone who was a handsome man. It wasn't surprising, and I have to say I never expected sexual faithfulness from A.(although I think her husband believed she was faithful). Still, it comes out in these lines, the sense of an aborted life. Alison once wrote a poem entitled "stillborn" (published in The Village Magazine, 1979). And there is that strong sense to what happened between us, the sense it was never resolved. The lack of closure. Of course I blamed her, and of course she shirked all responsibility. It was her way in those days. Probably still is. Of course, now she's a lawyer so she's really good at it.

flashing yellow light

ha well I got you rotting
in the grave even though I know you're in
your husband's bed giving him some
of that inept oral sex you thought
was so good
I got bad news
I seen your flesh
all diseased up with mine in the hall
of nazi atrocities
ain't no goddamn difference either
you long lost celtic bitch
you could have had half a hundred
newly dreamed visions
like the children the race eschews in
its selfishness
but you even lost your camera
even lost your voice
even lost your sense of being
numbed out in seventy seven's
cold I didn't come here to insult
you though only came to cry
over that sickly sweet flesh
you thought meant so much
I know, I know, I am just the same
that is true

reparations

she's so alone in her funny funny room
with her postcards and her coitus interruptus
plans but she's known she'll see me soon
catafalqued, bumped by the dark and she'll
remember she would never tell me
what I desperately needed to know

so now she closes all the windows
seeks the space beneath her table
writes no more postcards
makes no more pleasurable noises
takes her football player for masochistic sex
(his angelic fantasies understood)
the memories of that previous life
are fading for her
leprosy striking the heart first
then lops off the fingers
a kindness, a silence


Alison was married most of the time I knew her to a man named JL. I only met him a couple of times along the way. I couldn't describe him to you, though I could tell you a lot about how they got along and what he liked to do. One of his big interests was in playing Rugby. He played with a team who prided themselves on getting thrown out of bars. Alison lied to him pretty much constantly the entire time I was around. She lied to me, too. And probably to everybody who ever knew her. Now that she's a lawyer she can apply this skill professionally.

foolish hyperbole

dear one who leaves me alone:
it's appropriate, the waste that
surrounds you & me
the ephemera of my words
the shadows of your lovers
your bastille stands intact
in southern Illinois
night passes with its
signature of deception
but we are all a version
of that villain
myself with my many words
my explanations that translate
into foolish hyperbole there is
no distinguishable difference
between this one and that one
just the death of children
in your poems, this then an
example of your real fear:
growing old is only a form of dying
but your words never go clear
they are just added, and added,
and added, purchasing a patina
of cool, burying panic's knife
in your unused belly


I think, to this day, that Alison had a special relationship to the children she was destined not to have. Interestingly enough, she did reproduce, though late in her life. In 1993 she had a son. She was 42 that year. In October. The Sixth actually. Today.

Going "clear" is a scientology term that essentially means recovering all your memory. Phil Dick would've loved it, but of course we know the scientologists don't actually do that. Too bad, too.

Tied in the Seventh

should we walk him?
(you & your many words)
what good would it do?
the day is a shower of errors
(I know you in your gray
machine, lessening the distance
between us—don't tell me
this isn't true love)
he grounds out to first
but the runner advances
finally the time ends
no runs scored (somewhere in
the vague lands between this room
and Illinois' southern tip
you are thinking of me)

but still no decision
one to one tie
it's the bottom of the seventh
(when will you be here?)

Interesting use of baseball as a metaphor. I watched the cubs pretty incessantly from 1974-1980. Of course this poem is from the period when Alison lived in southern Illinois outside of Carbondale. Her husband went to school, civil engineering, at SIU-C. She often drove up to Springfield, several hours on the backroads, to the other parts of her life that she kept in town. I believe this poem references a grey fastback type of car, a gremlin, that she had about this time. Later on she acquired a karman ghia. We really had a very weird, fucked up love affair going in those days. I was part of it, and pretty demanding, but she was like a person living many different lives. I think about her sort of as Neal Cassady, carrying on with different people in different rooms at the same time. She once wrote a poem about keeping the pieces of her life in different boxes. No doubt that was true.

Moon's Lady, 1977

Mark me well Moon's Lady
as you sit on your gold throne
wearing your ghost tiara
ovular like your womb
My hands have sharpened the blade
during the passage of a
thousand days
and you may occupy
the turned away face of the lunar
sphere, and I may not understand
what I cannot see
but your murder has come to me
as a sacred act
I only do what I do out of
the love you have misplaced

and though it may not come to you
this way, I know I am
magician/warrior, divine bear,
occupier of these words
discoverer-murderer of
you in your lunar pose


This piece features the first use of "divine bear" in my work. I discovered the phrase while perusing a book of names in Knoepfle's office at SSU one day. I looked in the OED and got the same info there. Of course I told Knoepf about it and he was impressed with the implications. Poets you know. The poem is clearly another round in the Alison/Tim story, the one where we talked about sex as violence, because, as catholics, it certainly was violent for us. I think a lot of people in the D/s world (dominance/submission for you innocents) come from a catholic background. Always trying to figure out how to live in a world where pain is method of achieving grace.

Lunar references are meant to point to the feminine, to the "other" as Simone deBeauvoir writes in the Second Sex, a book that had a profound effect on me. With that in mind, the last line posits a masculine sense for the "victim" here, implying her feminine self was a "pose" which needed to be murdered. Early goddess religion stuff wandering through there, as well. That comes from Alison's repeated dreams about red-headed priestess doing human sacrifice. There is some sense of that in early celtic archeaology. Certainly the celts did sacrifice humans (peat bog people). And it is quite probable they had priestesses doing the sacrificing. The red-headed part is also interesting. Alison herself was a striking blonde in the old days. I'm sure her hair has darkened somewhat, though being a classicly vain woman she probably colors it. Clearly Alison's real roots come through Ireland, but probably, genetically she came from the Vikings that conquered and ruled Ireland and who brought the blue eyed blonde genes into that pool. I've been reading Cadfael's Summer of the Danes, and there is much reference to the blonde nordic viking women from Ireland. No surprise then. AsBjorn is certainly Danish, through northern england (the Danelaw, 850-1060 roughly). So far enough back we probably had ancestral stroking going on. My feelings for Alison seemed to come from deep inside, so I suppose racial memory is a possibility. Or reincarnation. Or some damn thing. I just hope I don't go through this in another lifetime. That's a desperate concept.