Autopsy ... Detritus

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.

America Rocks the Red Planet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

the long abandoned self

plumping on the noise,
recognizing her deception; thus it was
a royal screwing and not just the
story so far the fingers of dead
friends twitching in the bad dreams
our confrontations fallen to the wayside
you were the spring, and summer too,
I'm going out to search for you...
my inter-planetary journeys caught up
in the storm of modern disaster
I've been to mars on a
scholarship from a hidden source
left the maps and noise behind
the booty dredged
through sand and wind and I am here
regarded as a clown, no smokey
robinson not beautiful, but envisioned
as he who would finally break
the trunk-lid, discovering his long
abandoned self. Are we all like this?
grown silvered in our coverings the
words just lies a fabric of regard
layering years and meanings into
a shroud meant to deny the only truth
that matters: who am I?

A truly remarkable statement, he says, proud of his ancient self. The quote in mid-poem is from a song done by Joan Baez, "North" on the album entitled "Joan" which originally appeared I believe in 1967. The piece references the Keye Luke poems. The reference to a scholarship from a hidden source merely means that I was living off of Pat Smith at the time. Stealing my writing time from someone else's labor. If I hadn't done that I probably wouldn't have written nearly as many things as I did write. I felt guilty about that and attempted to rectify it by creating as a good a situation as I could for Becky Bradway to write. I know now that this was a mistake. I was stupid to give up the work, but I was overwhelmed by the guilt I had over the fiasco of 1979. And over my guilt for being with Pat but seeing other women. It was the sixties though and we all professed not to be "possessive". As it was most of my regrets about the 70s are about the women I didn't actually have sex with. A typical male evaluation, based on the biological impulse no doubt. In any case, the self that is abandoned in this poem is clearly the writer that I actually am. I may have fucked it up. I may have let it go for too long. But that fact is that writing these poems is a central part of my being and always has been. If in fact it is is essentially a detective story, and I see it that way, then this is the work that I hid in the trunk for all those years. The abandoned self.

But, yes, I don't really understand the first line.