COLD THIS WAY

35. COLD THIS WAY:

‘Create a sandy frontier’

Televised time is the only unrealized dimension left and that is true on all counts for outside of it we have exhausted all time and we’ve already had to think of it false tribes hoarding over the deserts they claim bombing to glass the sands they walk on immensely building high the towers and structures they decide to and thus alienating and dissuading others or those native to areas current into staying there with them by placating the evil dwarfs and extinguishing all hope and this is all televised this is made flesh by today’s standards in the work of the world we now live within light and all its attractions branches after branches of benjamins begetting abrahams and leos and rashids whatever as I watch the policeman stop someone from selling AA batteries from a suitcase on wheels threatening to confiscate inventory if he didn’t move along and for sure one needs to ask oneself a few questions in such a place as this Newark’s Penn Station underneath the elevated tracks beneath the faintly granite eagles the only thing left perhaps today of the old Newark soon to be but camera after camera in these parts take batteries like that and discman CD players music set-ups any kind of electronic Newark equipment like the whole entire international world now feeds upon and “I’ve seen that nigger in Ghana in and right there he does the same thing too as he’s doing here selling any old shit in the street but soon there will be a wonderful documentary on TV on just this matter that great life of the streets in Ghana oh the place to be but for now ‘you move your ass this minute or we take it all in’ and even the bridge abutments hereabouts are washed over with slogans of death or hatred or the self-aggrandized advertisements of hip names for gun-slingers wishing to be someone other than who they are ghetto names with colors blaring frontier voices with anger screaming the crowd on the corner watching traffic the few men left in the ancient pool parlor lit low with bluish lights and sad in its own way long after midnight when only a sorrowful rabble of low itinerants stop by to talk and find no one there to play while right across the street kids in droves congregate and stand to music and lights and sports and dance their time away talking and back and forth back and forth the only old ones go until slowly they discover as dead as dying ever was and slowly over time then everything changes time and space beside itself moving but what we wish for tomorrow is sometimes here today already maybe we just don’t know it and like I told the guy in the waiting room ‘I’d love to go back to high school today just as I was then but with today’s mind just to hear what concepts they talked about then no cell phones no computers no games no cassette or CD shit no nothing out of the very ordinary and coarse antennae that so once dotted all this land but where has all that future gone – into our past - so it is that anything imagined has once had its antecedents in dreaming whether paradise or hell whether settlement or compost heap we’re in someone’s way so alleviate the pain and end the suspense and I see the blue and white and bulbous camper riding the streets dodging anything near it a gigantic single vehicle with two men inside and both are as brawny as dereliction and strong probably as oxen too and they drive this thing absconded and alone through the city streets wide and wider and right nearby is the Amato Opera something special and the three girls singing on the curb remind me of the days when I’d spend all night here listening to harpsichord music or great organ fugues of Bach and Morton Feldman himself would come by to lecture on what he claimed to be music or anyway what it all was about and it was too but so many so much time all has passed that I am nothing if not dead or washed away and the sorry fabric which is my life should really be over but there is no one to clean the mess should I go that way no one to whitewash the paint that any ghost would leave behind and who thought of all that and when and where before me ? or in front…?.

“Sometimes I still dream about the feeling of helplessness when my knowledge seems useless against the implacable approach of death the description of frostbitten cattle way out on a Montana ranch with the slow approach of a blizzard the most terrifying portrait of nature’s power their ears and their testicles and tails turned black around the edges as if scorched by fire and their eyes sealed under an inch of milky ice I have had illusions or perhaps you’d call them delusions of grandeur and they have driven me for I see only now that the time is ripe for a conceptual framework to be developed which covers all things and which is in turn based on our fallibility (the web of connections and relationships in turn based and delineated by that fallibility and accounting for success as much as talent or money or anything else) and here right here the apartment holds it seems the entire cold of the night yet we sit here and shiver thinking of warmth and awaiting it too and the next morning you just out of the shower you dry off oblivious while talking to me about whatever some problem perceived or misunderstood some latest absurdity of life or matter something perhaps which hit you in your sleep and you withhold any shiver and slight stammer of flesh as if perhaps to show me that tenderness means nothing to you but YET I do not look away seeking therefrom perhaps a lesson for me for you for which of us ? with songs playing in the background and everything yet still cold the water which beads on your breasts and stomach says nothing back to me nothing and steam on the windows alone makes an opaque stammer my chilled mind too tries to understand – some untranslatable hum of whine and water and doubt and persistence for I know that behind that all somewhere lurks the lurid light of one clear blue day and we are cold yet we are cold this way.”